The Blue Hour - Softcover

When your daughter Zoë was five, she was sick with pneumonia, and as you held her fevered body, she whispered, I feel like a tooth that's dangling by one lousy thread.

You think of that now, because you're thinking that sometimes it is your job to orchestrate the last yank.

Anya, you tell your wife, when you stomp your feet at the door to your bedroom, knocking off snow in the square patterns found on the soles of your work boots, I'm so sorry, but I am no longer in love with life, and I am no longer in love with you. I need to leave. But before I go, I'd like to get down on my knees (and here, you get down on your knee, as you did when you proposed to her), and you say, Anya, I'd like to bow to your more complex, passionate, and authentic original, which I know is in there somewhere. And I'd like to ask you to remember my truest and best version too.

She has turned from the laundry to look down at you kneeling among chunks of patterned snow, a quiet expression on her face. Quit laughing, Sy. It's not funny. Nothing about this is funny.

I'm sorry, Anya. I don't mean to be cruel. Look at this snow, melting. I'm getting everything all wet.

She crouches beside you and takes your cold hands. She says, Get up, Sy. I realize you don't love me, Sy. You're not capable of it at this point in time. But you could be. Sy, you have two children. Don't you forget that. Please stop laughing. The kids will hear you.

While she's talking, you notice, out of the corner of your eye, the purple-blue blur, like sheer fabric that is dancing. This dancing creature—sent from whatever God is out there—has been following you for about a month now. Every time you see her, she whispers in your ear. She says: There are many ways for love to end.

The creature is floating above you now, and she reaches out her wings to help you rise to your feet. She is a bit like a firefly and she is murmuring phrases about the blue moon, the rose moon, the hungry moon, the harvest moon.

You bring your wife into focus. She is standing in front of you, only inches away, tucking her short blond hair behind her ear. In the past, she has been angry with you, angry with your selfishness, angry at your supposed mental illness, angry with your physical body and its pains, and she has also showed signs of pity and compassion and fear. In the process, she grieved your loss, she has had an affair. Now you are dead to each other, only she refuses to participate in the final yank.

You used to love her, of this you are certain. Then she became the receptacle of all your talk, saliva, sperm, slights. She has become ugly from it.

Anya, you say, let me just try to explain. You tell her you recall things, such as dates and events, the tie you wore to your wedding, you recall Zoë and her tooth, you recall the birth of your son, Michael, you recall finishing vet school, you recall touching hundreds of animals, you recall fixing the throat of a chicken who had its neck slashed open by a fox and you recall that the chicken lived. Then you tell her that you cannot, despite your best efforts, catch what any of that felt like.

There are many ways for love to end. You know it's gone for sure when you tuck your chin, look down at your own chest, and squint. It seems to be snowing in there and the snow has drifted into every watershed of your heart.

Above you, the creature floats and laughs at your amazement, and her laugh is more of a golden sigh. She watches as you and your wife find yourselves on the bed, amid the laundry, and she sees how you glide your head between your wife's legs and slide your tongue into her as deep as it will go, how you hum and lick, how you hold your wife down, one palm to stomach, so that she cannot escape you until she comes. The purple-blue creature watches your wife climb on her hands and knees and you slide inside her, and when you become too gentle, how your wife rocks back into you, hard, how you both finish with a gasp and a ducking of the head, as if in fervent prayer.

Anya, you whisper in her ear, when you are resting, I chose you. I didn't fall for you, or find you, or fall in love. I flew into it. It was so sweet and simple. I could trust what I felt. I knew my mind.

Shhhh, Sy, shhhhh, she says.

Enough, she says. That bear earlier today scared me, she says.

That bear could have killed our children. It's a good thing Gretchen saved them. I know you only worry about the mountain lions, but there was a bear,and it was big . . . and she starts to cry.

Outside, the coyotes yip, their cries sparkling through the air. You look up at the purple-blue creature floating above you and you ask her, Please? But she shakes her head. A golden purr escapes her mouth, like the beginning of a song.

Sy, we all get that way, as if we can't feel. Sometimes. Have you been taking your meds? Please tell me you've been taking your meds.

You tell her you have not.

Oh, Sy, she says, rolling away from you.

You tell her you wanted to feel again.

Oh, Sy, she says. For how long?

You tilt her chin toward you with your finger. Anya, you say, there are many ways for love to end, and I want to do it right.

I can't keep you, she says. You can't make someone stay. The quiet rhythm of her voice reminds you that she has learned to soothe you through calm inflection of voice. You also know that you have given her one other great gift, which is the courage to seek love. You have just discovered that she is having an affair with Sergio, for she rightly needed some form of love in her life, and since you were not able to give it, she found the strength to embrace it elsewhere. You gave her infidelity, you gave her that strength.

You can't make someone stay, she repeats, but I love you. The bear, Sy.

You nod.

I do love you, Sy, she says again. Sy, you can leave me later. You can divorce me when you're well. I wish you were taking your meds, she says, and again she is crying. We need to stay together for the kids. There's no such thing as a good divorce for a kid. There are bears. She hiccups with this last phrase, unable now to speak.

Anya, you say loudly, in the years that I was married to you, whenever I asked what you were thinking, your answer was never about death or the human condition or fear or joy or sorrow; it was about kids or house items or people on this mountain. Anya, I choose to believe you were lying to me. You never gazed into my eyes, or discussed your dreams. I used to think it was because you were not that kind of woman, but I choose now to believe I was simply the wrong man to do the asking.

Sy, she says, I do think of those things.

What a waste then, you say quite loudly, and even the purple-blue creature buzzes to the corner of the room, afraid. You should have tried to tell me! Did you think life would be more than this? I knew it wouldn't last, but I did think it would be bigger, that it would simply be more joyful.

The children, your wife says. They're a big thing. What are you looking at?

You are sitting up now, staring at the blur. Anya, you say, Anya, listen, I need to tell you this. At first, you think, I am out of love with life, but such thoughts are anomalies, quickly dispersed. Bad day, week, season. Or you notice the spiral of mountain mahogany seeds or the way a doe flicks her tail and picks up her hind leg at the exact same moment. Or the meadow beneath Blue Moon Mountain. Such information causes interference for a while. But the thoughts become more frequent until they are in your mind every day.

In fact, you realize, you are now thinking of this failed love as often as you used to think of love. You used to want to feel and see it all! You wanted to bury your nose in the fur of an animal you had just saved, you wanted to kiss your wife for a very long time, you wanted to see how light flies off water. But then one evening, such as this evening, you and your wife will tuck your kids into bed and it will be cold out, and just starting to snow, the season's first snow, the day after Halloween, and your wife sends you outside to watch the sky and then she makes herself tea in a blue mug and she goes to finish the laundry.

And during this time you will simply decide to tell the truth. You are thinking clearly tonight. Clear as the stars. You love the sky at this time of night. You are in the l'huere bleue of your life, the blue hour, the hour of dusk, the hour when everything changes. And you know you are out of love, in the quietest sort of way.