The Other by David Guterson

as a bell rings to start and end the rounds of a boxing match, and I’ve come out with my mouth open. And all the while I’ve privately preferred silence. “The new year’s first snow: / how lucky to remain alone / at my hermitage” is from Basho, who for the most part has bored my World Literature students. That’s a class where we sit on old sofas and discuss, for example, Chinua Achebe. I like these conversations, most of the time, but nevertheless, I often see my life as an effort to thwart dialogue, and just about everything else, so I can be by myself, either by myself or taking, for better or worse, a kind of refuge in Jamie. This may or may not be the best sort of marriage, but it’s partly how ours has unfolded anyway. And I know, because she’s told me, that Jamie takes refuge in me, too, though she doesn’t incline, as I do, toward solitude. If she had her way, our two grown sons would come for dinner every night, and nothing would ever change.
     
     
     
    L AST NIGHT WE BOTH depressed ourselves a little by renting, and watching, a forgettable movie, one we should have turned off after half an hour in favor of doing something else. A movie like this makes you feel you’re wasting your life watching it, and that’s what happened to us. And yet we watched anyway. Then it was over, and we both felt self-conscious about how we’d spent our evening. Jamie said, “Let’s not do that again; if it’s bad, let’s turn it off next time,” and I agreed with her, though we both knew no principle would guide us in the future. I went up to my garret and checked my e-mail—hoping, I confess, to hear from my agent, Ally Krantz—and then sat in an old club chair, napping. It was the kind of napping where you argue with yourself, for a long time, about getting up to go to bed. Images come in curious procession, punctuated by interludes of clarity, like rising to the surface after being underwater. At last I stood up. I keep a few artifacts and totems on my desk: a spoon one of my sons carved for me in a wood-shop class; a figurine of the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys; a fire-drill set—a charred cedar board and a carved yew-wood stick—that was once John William’s; and a postcard of E. B. White at his typewriter in a shed. These, for whatever reason, caught my late-night attention, and I was struck by how little I noticed them for months on end, despite all the time I spend in this room—these things that are there because they have a private meaning or because they’re meant to induce aesthetic pleasure, all of them only inches away but largely ignored.
    I went to bed. But now it was hard to sleep—that’s the problem with late reveries in my club chair—so I thought about the past to pass the time. Around three in the morning, Jamie asked, out of the blue, though it didn’t entirely surprise me, “So what are we going to do with the money?” We talked about that for a long time without deciding. It got light, and after my morning routine—feeding the dog, brewing coffee, stretching a little, and staring out the window—I returned to my garret. At eight, Jamie turned on the water in the shower. I could hear her—even though we were on different floors—hawking spit in the stall and singing with parodic intent. We sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and eating toast. I thought Jamie looked good in her outfit—just a simple cotton V-neck shirt, short-sleeved, with a wrap skirt and sandals. She’s past fifty; even so, I think she moves through the world looking good to other people, too. Until recently, Jamie had a job appraising real estate, which she didn’t particularly like, but we needed the money. The boys were gone, but we still needed her paycheck. One thing: Jamie and I never argued about money. I’m frugal to a fault and so is she.
    Our wedding, twenty-eight years ago, was an agnostic affair, held in a gazebo with our families present and a judge presiding, near formal