“You’re afraid I’m going to become an asshole,” Remington surmised. “But, my darling wife, and I say this as affectionately as one can: you’re the asshole.”
“Well! I’m not sure one can say that affectionately, darling husband.”
“Regular, vigorous exercise helps to maintain a healthy weight. It can put type two diabetes into remission, reduces the likelihood of cancer, and may even help diseases like Parkinson’s. It improves your sleep. It promotes longevity and mental acuity, and it’s often more effective than medication for treating depression—”
“So you’re one of the readers driving all those articles to the Number One slot.”
“Not to mention,” he continued, “that you might find a husband’s better toned body more attractive. But your reaction to your compatriots becoming more active is despair. You want to hog all the benefits of your lifelong habits to yourself. When you do something, it’s a wise, considered discipline, and when everyone else does the same thing, it’s a disgusting fad. So: you’re the asshole.”
Serenata laughed. “Fine, I’m an asshole. Except it doesn’t matter how I feel. I can sit there stewing in silent rage that all these other cyclists are suddenly glomming around me at intersections. Not a single one of them will forgo the healthful benefits of cycling and throw the contraption back in the cellar—all because they picked up strange, terrifying waves of hostility emanating from a crazed-looking older woman gripping her handlebars with white knuckles. Emotions, like opinions, are entertainment. If I celebrated this athletic revolution instead, would a single extra American pick up a barbell? No. And I’m not the rah-rah type. So it amuses me to be resentful instead.”
“But it does matter,” Remington said with sudden seriousness, placing a dishwatery hand on her cheek, “how you feel about me.”
In January, Serenata acted on the theory that it was especially after the holidays when old people got lonely. Relatives could be tempted to use having been doting at Christmas as an excuse to skate for a while.
Surveying the streets on the short walk over, she speculated what it was about Hudson that conveyed the impression that the town wasn’t exactly flourishing. All the chain-link fences weren’t rusted, but some of them were. On a given block, only one building might be boarded, but that created an economic and aesthetic ambiance in considerable contrast to a block on which none of the buildings was boarded. Several businesses along Warren Street were perky and new—often given to wince-inducing wordplay, like Flower Kraut, or Mane Street Hair Styles—but their aura of optimism seemed of the delusional sort. Most instilled a powerful inkling that they weren’t going to make it. Church windows were masked with protective sheets of plexiglass, making the stained glass look black, as well as a little hostile, as if ill-behaved local youth with poor prospects might throw rocks. More than one church having been deconsecrated and repurposed planted the suspicion that the congregations of those that remained were on the elderly side and dwindling.
The small town of six thousand people or so was holding up better than most in the region. If you kept abreast of which perky cafés were still open, you could sit down to a decent cappuccino. There were properly up-market restaurants for a passable meal. The train station was on the Hudson Line, which ran directly to the city on a picturesque journey along the river; thus the town benefitted from a range of weekenders and wealthy New Yorkers with summer houses and their visitors, who might linger for a drink or a poke around the antique stores before escaping to scenic verandas in the Berkshires. Nevertheless, as a place to remain rather than pass through, Hudson had a beleaguered feel, as did anywhere whose underlying economy was too dependent on a hospital.
Remington had grown up here. The tendency with small hometowns was to either revile them and flee, or romanticize them—having fled. Her husband had made the mistake of doing both. Confiningly provincial only became charmingly provincial from a distance. Even in his teens, he’d leaped at any excuse to streak south to civilization. When they’d needed to leave Albany if only for its associations, Hudson had beckoned as a safe, comfortingly familiar bolt-hole for the licking of wounds. Perhaps it was predictable in retrospect that Remington was already going stir-crazy. Having sampled the gamut of her country’s geography, Serenata never much cared where she was; she was her own location. But anyone ending up precisely where he started couldn’t help but fear that in the interim he had gone nowhere. She wished her husband were able to infer that the same experience of stasis and even of doom was bound to issue from running a marathon, once his heart rate settled and his exorbitant sneakers had lost their noxious smell. Lo, there you were, where you’d begun, and nothing had changed.
“Please don’t get up!” Serenata shouted through the front door. “You know I’ve got a key. I only ring the bell to give you fair warning.”
The remonstration was wasted. Griff Alabaster had still not relinquished the protocols of hospitality—not that he’d ever been that polite, but he didn’t want to be treated like an invalid. By the time she entered from the foyer, he’d struggled to a stand, and was negotiating the obstacle course of his cluttered living room. Refusing the indignity of a walker, her father-in-law planted his cane before him and pulled. Wavering with the instability of the high seas, he traversed the floorboards as if poling a boat.
“Just you today, sugar?”
“Yes, I’m afraid you’re stuck with just me,” she said with a smile, removing the shepherd’s pie from her tote. She wondered if he didn’t prefer it when she visited alone. He’d long been sweet on her, embarrassingly so. His wife, Margaret, had been industrious but unassuming. She’d only been to secretarial school (she’d picked up her younger son’s distinguished-sounding Christian name from the typewriter company); before the industry in Hudson collapsed, she abetted the family’s meager income by cleaning fish. When the dowdy, compulsively self-deprecating woman was still alive, her trim, arty daughter-in-law had made Margaret jealous.
“I swear, I saw that boy more often when you folks lived in Albany,” Griff said, “’stead of six blocks east.”
“Well, you know how seriously he’s preparing for that marathon in April!” she said, trying to convey chirpy enthusiasm as she carried the casserole to the kitchen. She’d paid Tommy to clean the place a couple of days before, and the counters were filthy again.
This whole house wasn’t exactly messy, but it never changed, except in that steady, inexorable way that you didn’t notice when witnessing the decay day by day. The faded floral curtains were often drawn during the daytime to skip the bother of opening and closing them again. Cheap reproductions of Old Masters in homemade wooden frames had light-bleached, until the oils looked like watercolors. It would never have occurred to Griff to buy new throw pillows, much less new furniture, but all the paddings had flattened and exuded cough-inducing dust if you plumped them up. The heavy leather coat he’d worn to work in cold weather was still on its hook in the catchall utility room off the kitchen, but the garment had stiffened into a kind of mounted hunting trophy. The living room walls were darkened by years of an open fire; the kitchen was mottled with stains in corners that Tommy found hard to reach. Though the trinkets littering every available surface weren’t likely to Griff’s taste—china figurines of milkmaids—they’d been chosen by his late wife, and perhaps more importantly had always occupied a precise location, where they would therefore remain for eternity. Griff gave Tommy no end of grief if while dusting she returned the empty milk-glass candy dish two inches from its appointed perch.