“I literally don’t understand,” Julia said, and mixed in with her confusion now was anger. She hated surprises, hated to have her feet swept out from under her.
“I know.” He couldn’t explain; he couldn’t build a case. William was a fake, a liar, a pretender. He pushed his chair away from the table, walked into the bedroom, and pulled down an over-the-shoulder bag from the closet shelf. He considered putting his manuscript inside but didn’t. He grabbed a sweater, with the thought, I might be cold. He opened his dresser drawer and took the old wallet from the back. He removed the check from the wallet and scrawled For Julia Waters on the blank side. He wrote a few sentences on a piece of paper from the pad Julia kept bedside. He was careful not to think about what he was writing and careful not to reread the text once it was finished.
He walked into the living room and handed the check to his wife.
“What is this?” she said, her eyes on her husband’s face. “What’s happening?” When William didn’t respond, Julia looked down at the check. “Ten thousand dollars. From your father? Your father gave this to you?”
“You should deposit it,” he said. “It’s for you.” Then he handed her the folded piece of paper and walked out of the apartment. Later, it would occur to him that he didn’t look at Alice in her bassinet, didn’t think of her before walking out. Julia called after him, but he kept a steady pace down the stairs.
Time worked strangely for him that night. He started walking and eventually found himself on the shore of Lake Michigan. The lake had always been a presence—spotted from between trees or from the windows of some campus buildings—but William never went there deliberately. The lake reminded him of Boston, of the choppy ocean that sat alongside his home city. The fact that this enormous expanse of water was a lake, even though it had no end in sight, felt like a mistake. Surely this flat, seemingly endless basin deserved a different designation than lake, the kind of thing that you could jog around in thirty minutes.
The lakeside path suited William tonight, though. He was able to walk in a line, and when he was too tired to go on, there were benches. He could rest his eyes on the black water. He slept sitting up a few times, buffeted by the soft summer wind. Drunk or homeless men were sprawled across some of the benches, and William spotted dark forms curled beneath a few trees. He alternated between walking and sitting in this night world. On his final bench, before the sun began to climb back into the sky, he wondered how far he could walk into the lake before he would be entirely covered by water.
With the arrival of the new day, William’s brain restarted, as if fueled by the light. But the engine was made of remnant parts. He didn’t know what to do. He would never return to the apartment he’d called home. Julia and Alice deserved the best possible husband and father, and they were better off without him. He couldn’t go to Northwestern—he’d been pretending to be a graduate student all along, and surely they had figured that out. He shouldn’t have been accepted into the program in the first place; he imagined that they’d already offered his teaching-assistant position to someone else. It felt meaningful too that his own pretend teaching career and his life with Julia had expired with the ancient professor. William had met Julia in the old man’s class, before the professor’s skin became translucent and his eyes watery. The true teacher had died and, like a wave crashing against the beach, wiped away all of William’s measly efforts at a life. The university gym was harder for him to attach his attention to. Thinking about Arash and the sinking of balls through nets felt like putting his hand on a hot stove. Not painful, exactly, but searing, and designed to keep William and his thoughts away.
He had the sensation that he had cut himself out of his own life, the way a child cuts a figure out of a blank piece of paper. The sun glared from a cloudless sky, while William wandered through unfamiliar sections of Chicago. A part of his brain kept working on the same question: What would the cool lake water feel like, rising over his skin? William crossed the river and canals, passed thumping factories, traversed neighborhoods that would have frightened him in the past because everyone was poor and outside in the summer heat. No one said anything to him that day, though, not even about his height. He was either disappearing or he looked too dangerous—too other—to engage. Later, he would think, No one wants to be near someone who’s that close to gone.
In the dark center of the night, he saw Charlie standing in a doorway. His father-in-law met William’s eyes and offered his warmest smile. William was able to see the pain in Charlie, the same way he’d seen it in the college basketball players, the way he’d seen it in Sylvie on the bench. His overtaxed liver, his unsatisfying work, his broken heart: William saw it all and said, “I’m glad to see you,” because he was. But by the time the words left his mouth, Charlie had disappeared. William stared at the empty space his father-in-law had occupied, and then continued to walk.
Julia
August 1983
William left the apartment just before eight at night. The dinner dishes were still on the table. Julia looked at the check he’d handed her. She studied her father-in-law’s signature. She’d never seen the man’s handwriting before; his name looked scratched onto the paper, as if it had been dashed off as quickly as possible. Ten thousand dollars seemed like an impossible amount of money to be lodged behind this handwriting. Her father-in-law had apparently sent the check to her husband sixteen months earlier, and William had never told her.
Julia found it hard to wrap her mind around this fact. The previous fall, when she was pregnant and William had asked to be excused from his teaching position, her financial anxiety would have been lifted entirely if she’d known they had this extra money. Instead, the worry about how much she could afford to give Cecelia and spend on food plus her father’s death had braided themselves together inside her, and she’d had a constant headache.