When Margaret woke up in the Alps, the air was so clear she blinked. Driving on the winding road, toward Italy, toward a whole new land of new wines and new paintings and new beds to share with her new fiancé, she stared ahead at the narrow, climbing vine of a road, and her heart pounded with disbelieving pleasure. Edward, in the mountains, was required by nature to recite Romantic poetry. He recited poetry as habitually as other people cleared their throats. Verse was preverbal: a preparation for speech, an ordering of one's thoughts and feelings, an exquisite sketch, a graceful, generous, gratefully borrowed vision. Margaret understood this and listened to his voice, as clear as the air, as self-consciously grand as the surrounding peaks, as happy as a child's, and then she drove off the mountain. Not all the way off the mountain, she noticed. Just aiming off the mountain, really.
"Shortcut, darling?"
Margaret never forgot driving off the mountain, and she never forgot how Edward pretended she wasn't shaking, how he made quiet jokes that guided her back to the road and back to the world where cars were aimed at Turin rather than at a heavily wooded abyss.
She drove slowly, with determination, ecstatic that she had not rolled hideously to a foreign death, and for a moment she felt about the world the way she thought Edward always felt about it, for thirty honking cars trailed irritably behind her, and, glancing in the rearview mirror, all she noticed about them was how brightly they sparkled in the mountain sunlight.
BEHIND THEIR LIVES stood Edward's schedule, a firm yet supple structure that gave to each day a thousand opportunities. If there were only twenty-four hours, then let them begin! Edward rose not only with the sun, but as if he were the sun. I am here, he seemed to be saying. The day may, indeed must, begin. He ate the same breakfast each morning, but what a breakfast—kippered herring and pumpernickel bread, bacon and eggs, fried tomatoes and mushrooms, Cheerios and sliced bananas, toast and jam and muffins, too. It was a labor-intensive meal, which was perhaps how he could stay so thin and eat so much. He presided over this ecumenical array of bowls, dishes, pots, and pans with smooth efficiency, then, finished, turned to his coffee and his newspapers, sometimes reading aloud to Margaret, unless she objected, which, foul-tempered and puffy-eyed, she often did.
"I don't care, Edward. I don't care about the Czech Philharmonic just yet."
"Margaret, one of the things I love about you, and there are so many it fills my soul with joy, but one of the most endearing qualities you have is how sincere you become in petulance." He smiled.
Margaret, her senses blunted by fatigue and the rich potpourri of breakfast odors, would nevertheless experience his presence then, acutely and pleasantly—the look of him and his touch, without looking or touching—and she would feel rising within her the familiar tide of gratitude and astonishment that she had come to recognize as love.
Margaret put her hand out and touched his across the table. Far away in Prague, the Czech Philharmonic was actively participating in a democratic revolution. In New York, she was happy and married to Edward. Both of these occurrences seemed equally improbable to Margaret and nearly miraculous. Edward was right: the world was a marvelous place.
"You really don't mind me," she said. "You like me."
"Our marriage is a putrid sink of festering lies; a vile, infested prison house into which we have been flung by a careless and callous fate."
Edward had married Margaret and moved to New York, to Columbia's Comp. Lit. Department, adapting as enthusiastically as the English sparrow, shifting effortlessly from an ancient, orderly university town to the great noise of urban decay. An Americanophile, Edward was a scholar of (of all people and against all academic fashion) Walt Whitman, and he adored the home of his poet.