The Apple Trees at Olema Read Online Free PDF Page A

returned from a visit to the town
    where he had lived for many years
    with the wife and in the marriage he was leaving.
    His task was to walk through the house
    and mark things of his for the movers
    (he ’d taken a job in another town)
    and those of their common possessions
    they had agreed he would take with him
    into the new life. His wife had said,
    â€œTake what you want,” and he understood
    that she meant by this to say to him
    that things were not the cause of her anger
    or her hurt. His son, who was a senior
    in high school, was also angry
    and protective of his mother, who was,
    after all, the one being abandoned.
    L. understood that. He even thought
    that his son’s loyalty to his mother
    was a good thing up to a point. The son,
    when he’d heard the news, had acted as if
    he’d been kicked in the stomach, then flared
    and accused his father of selfishness,
    of breaking up the family over personal feelings,
    but he had also, like young men of his generation,
    been raised a feminist and he had made himself
    face the fact that, if his mother had a right
    to her own life, like Nora in the Ibsen play
    his drama class had performed the year before,
    so did his father, and that he had to tell him so,
    which he did, a week later, and on the phone,
    a call L. would also associate with the unreal blue
    of the mounded snow outside his new office
    with its weather of another world. He arrived
    on a Friday afternoon and stayed at a hotel
    in the center of town. It was an odd sensation,
    and not unpleasant, like the lightness
    he had been feeling intermittently since
    he’d left some months before, alongside
    the heavy & incessant grief. He spent an hour
    in his old gym, watching Iraqi women
    in black shawls howling over their dead
    on TV while he ran between two young women
    on treadmills, and thought, as he often thought
    those days, of the incommensurability
    of kinds of suffering, and afterward,
    he walked across the street to a shop
    where he ’d sometimes found interesting objects.
    There was an old red Chinese dragon
    in the window, spangled with yellow
    and green, the paint chipped but unfaded,
    some kind of water god, he thought,
    or river god that saved you from drowning
    or caused you to drown, he couldn’t
    remember which. on its face there was
    an expression of glee, ferocious glee.
    He considered buying it as a gift
    for his son and decided it was not
    a time to touch symbolism he didn’t
    understand. That night, as planned, he saw his son
    in The Tempest . He ’d sat alone near the back
    of the theater and tried not to feel anything
    except pleasure in the children and the play,
    in which his son’s girlfriend had the part of Miranda
    to his Prospero. She was a gamin-faced girl,
    wide-browed with ash blond hair, who more than a little
    resembled L.’s wife (something they had both remarked,
    amused, a year before) and who brought the house down
    with Miranda’s line. The audience, L. thought,
    in a university town mostly knew it was coming,
    but when she stood, flower-bedecked, center stage,
    and lifted herself on tiptoe as she said it
    in a slightly hoarse and boyish voice, the audience
    howled with delight. Afterward they also murmured
    audibly when his son, also center stage, adorable
    and a little ludicrous in his wispy wizard’s beard,
    intoned his line, held out a wooden wand between his hands,
    and broke it with a loud snap to abjure the magic.
    L.’s wife sat in the middle of the second row.
    He watched her greet many of their casual friends,
    colleagues, parents of their son’s friends
    he’d sat in the back to avoid having to greet.
    He’d brought flowers, and seeing that his wife had, too,
    he decided to leave his under his seat. He waved
    at his son, unbearded now and milling on stage
    with the rest of the cast, gave him a thumbs up,
    and drove his rental car back to the hotel.
    In the morning, at ten, they’d gone through