The Heavens by Sandra Newman

Author:Sandra Newman [Newman, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802146830
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

And they were up all night in a deep pit of ghosts where they’d forgotten how to sleep or to abandon anyone and loved this creature who was born among them, who gave them something to be.

Meanwhile (in the parallel world outside of Martin’s house) Ben was laid off from his job. When he thought of it, he pictured a cow’s skull in a trackless desert: the economy. He was living on his savings and applying for everything: jobs he wasn’t qualified for and didn’t want, jobs in Vietnam and jobs in Cleveland, jobs involving moral compromises that made him despise himself for applying.

On nights before job interviews, he stayed alone at the apartment in Queens to sleep, although he didn’t like being there alone. He would end up staring out the window with the television on behind him, wishing he still smoked. Then he wouldn’t sleep. Couldn’t sleep without Kate. After the interview, for a few days he would feel as if he already had that job and be accordingly elated or filled with self loathing. A Schrödinger’s life, he didn’t know what he was. Then he didn’t get the job, and he was nothing.

Kate had another mural gig, a picture of a teddy bears’ picnic for Sabine’s cardiologist’s baby. Ben would visit her at the cardiologist’s house and they would listen to NPR while she worked, then go back to Martin’s together and look after Qued together and sleep together. When Kate wasn’t there, Ben felt unpleasantly exhilarated, freed from some necessary stricture, as if he’d been ineptly launched into space. He needed Kate’s weight or her wild long hair or the prescient movements of her hand when she drew. She went through the world so easily, like a dandelion seed floating on the wind.

In the throes of that need, he asked her to marry him. It was a morning when José had taken Qued to the park and the mail-order brides were sleeping in. Ben and Kate were planting marigolds in Martin’s backyard, and Ben just said it, and he added that he couldn’t buy a ring right now, but he’d get a job soon and then he would. Kate said she didn’t like rings anyway. “They make me feel like I have something on my hand.” Ben laughed and stood up as if everything was settled, and they went straight out to get a marriage license without even changing their clothes.

It was there, at the courthouse—where you had to take a ticket and wait for your number to be called, so it was like a very beautiful DMV; marble floors and polished oak, but at the end of the day, you were waiting with a ticket in your hand—Kate mentioned the dream again.

It began with her asking, “Have you heard of a poet called William Shakespeare?”

Ben was startled from a reverie about getting married and it took him a moment to focus. Then he said, “I don’t think so. Should I have?”

“You haven’t? A sixteenth-century poet?”

“I might have, but I don’t remember.

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