“Sure,” said Stella. “It’s beautiful around here.” He glanced over at her, and this time there was a definite curl to her smile, a gradual invitation to wickedness. He stayed on the smaller roads, following her directions, and when she suggested pulling into a clearing along a lonely wooded lane, the familiar spike of guilt was quashed by a roar of rushing blood in his ears.
* * *
—
By the time Rachel came home at seven, he had showered and put the chicken in the oven with some carrots, onions, and new potatoes. He’d almost made a Waldorf salad until he remembered that elaborate cooking was a sure giveaway of a crap writing day.
They sat across from each other. The food was bland by Owen’s standards, and probably Rachel’s, too, but she complimented it anyway, deploying positive reinforcement like any skilled parent or trainer. Ever since he’d begged off teaching freshman creative writing to all the would-be poetic geniuses at Lansdowne last year, Rachel had deemed it only fair that he take on a greater share of the household chores. It was a reallocation made with ironclad logic, but the iron aspect had stoked his eagerness about as much as a pair of manacles.
“How’s the novel?” she asked.
The novel was nothing. The novel was a non-starter. There were thirty-seven pages and twelve of them were nothing but dialogue.
“It’s okay,” said Owen.
“Just okay?” she said.
“Well, it’s coming along.”
“That’s wonderful.” Her whole face transformed with her enthusiasm, and Owen felt sickened at how incapable she was of discerning even his most obvious lies. “Are you going to be able to send Andy a draft soon?”
Andy was his agent, at least on paper. Owen was hesitant to contact him in case the only thing that was preventing him from being dropped was the fact that Andy had forgotten about him.
“No, not soon exactly.”
“Did you turn the corner on that problem you were having?”
“What problem was that?”
“Of David’s father?” David was Owen’s stand-in for Chanoch. “The fight they were going to have on the telephone as soon as he arrived in Chicago?”
“Right.” He’d forgotten he’d mentioned that much about it. The story had petered out as soon as his protagonist had reached Chicago and discovered his violin had been stolen. “I haven’t figured that part out yet,” he said.
The truth was that in the past few months he had not done much more than move things around. He had changed everything from first-person to third-person and back again. He had spent time looking at porn and online reviews of his earlier novels, and he had priced Caribbean vacations even though they did not really have the money to go anywhere. He had also looked up the fertility chances of a thirty-seven-year-old woman. The chances were, unfortunately, still quite good. But not for much longer.
“You will,” said Rachel. Her confidence in him was singular and terrible, a constant balm as well as a reproach. “Now, what do you say to some dessert?”
Owen had noticed the new container of peach sorbet in the freezer when he’d gone searching for ice cubes for an afternoon scotch.
He stood up. “I think I’d better get back to work.”
* * *
—
Sitting on the overstuffed armchair in the corner of his office, his back to the shuttered window, Owen angled the lamp to illuminate the gathering dust on the piles of books on his desk. He tore open an envelope that had arrived a week ago, which he already knew contained a royalty statement from his publisher, a statement that was several hundred dollars into the negative. It was demoralizing how many copies of his second novel, Blue Virginia, were still coming back from bookstores a full three years after its release. Surely there ought to be a cut-off for how long the stores were allowed to return them.
The new novel was stagnant. His protagonist, aimless. He could scarcely bring himself to describe the Rachel character, let alone muster the prose to steer David towards her. What he needed was a crisis that would throw everything into upheaval. Owen envied those writers who set novels during wartime, though he had never felt the urge to do so himself. The Second World War had been rendered so many times in fiction that it ran the danger of seeming more like a symbol than a tragic set of real human actions and consequences. A symbol of ignorance and hate, and an opportunity to showcase the human spirit in the face of adversity. It was terrible, really, the way one could start thinking about catastrophe.
And then he was thinking about catastrophe. The pressure it would force upon his characters. There was no reason it had to be a war. No reason it had to be in the past, even. His thoughts drifted to the real story of Chanoch and the unexpected pneumonia that had killed him so far from home.
Owen stood up and stretched his legs, cracking his knuckles behind his back. Then he sat down again, with an excitement he had not felt in months.
* * *
—
At four in the morning, he lay down on the couch in his office and napped for two and a half hours before getting up to put on the coffee. Without waking Rachel, who slept like the innocent, he stripped off his sweatpants, showered, dressed, and returned to his computer.
At eight, he saved the file, then emailed it to himself and printed out a hard copy to be safe.
“You look happy,” said Rachel, knocking as she entered his study. She was putting up her hair in an elaborate chignon, something she always amazed Owen by doing without a mirror. And then she noticed his clothes. “And, oh my goodness, you’ve gotten dressed.” She was teasing him, smiling as her gaze met his eyes and travelled down the cut of his shirt and his trousers.
“I have,” said Owen, standing up. He felt a charge on his skin, and he wanted to turn her over the back of the couch, dig his hands into the sides of her skirt and yank it up to expose her pale, slim thighs and her firm white ass. But there was the smell of that musky perfume he liked, and along with it, the whiff of a trap. She had been on the pill, but her doctor had recommended stopping after she’d suffered some recent migraines. There was no way to know anymore if her desire was for him or a baby.
Owen shoved his hands in his pockets, which felt like the only safe place for them. “Have you thought any more about what we talked about?” he asked.
Rachel’s eyes widened. “Sort of. Have you?”
“No. I mean, I haven’t changed my mind. It’s just—”
“What?” Cutting him off, she shook her head as something seemed to close down in her expression.
“I want you, Rachel.” Fuck, his cock was practically tingling with his need for her. Sometimes he tuned in to nature programming during the day, just to be reminded of the extent to which animals would go to propagate the species. Really, it was a miracle he ever managed to get anything done at all. And even more astounding was what one good writing day could do for his libido where his wife was concerned. “But I don’t know…” He was trying very hard not to say what he was feeling. But I don’t trust you. It was terrible, the way she was searching his eyes again. “I don’t know if we have any condoms.”
* * *
—
Without meaning to, he agreed to go buy some. The two of them hadn’t used condoms together in years, not since Rachel had gone on the pill. But thinking of buying them made his cock stiffen again in his jeans, as though he was orchestrating some secret tryst. He usually bought condoms somewhere far from home, always in cash and never at the same place twice. He only allowed himself to keep a few in his car, in a compartment obscure enough to offer plausible deniability by implicating the previous owner.
From habit, he’d grabbed a cloth bag before heading out as if he were picking up groceries. But he ought to have grabbed an umbrella. A light drizzle was intensifying into a shower, and he turned up the collar of his jacket to keep the raindrops off the back of his neck. Two twenty-somet
hing girls huddling under an umbrella passed him, hurrying in the other direction. The one with dark hair like Rachel squealed as her foot splashed into a puddle. Her friend, a redhead, kept pulling her along by the wrist, with a laugh crescendoing into a shriek. He turned around to look at them as they moved away from him, half thinking one of them would turn around, too, but neither did.
The closest place to stop was the drugstore, which was one of those franchises he used to hate—the big corporate chain that had put two small family pharmacies out of business. But the convenience of it was undeniable. They had a grocery section and two snack aisles. Even a couple of shelves of DVDS. More than once, he’d run out in a hurry before Rachel came home, to pick up a frozen lasagna for dinner.
The condoms were displayed at the end of a rack at the back of the store, facing the pharmacist’s counter. He took down a box of the ultra-thins and headed straight to the cash. Two registers over, he noticed a woman in line who had the demure sultriness of Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, buying a carton of milk and some Tylenol. She was wearing a khaki trench coat over a low-cut black dress, and her blond hair was swept back in a clip.
He gazed at her with intent, and a few seconds later she raised her eyes to his as though she could sense him watching. Owen gave what he knew was the barest crinkle of a smile—a twitch at the corner of his mouth and a slight crook of his left eyebrow. The woman smiled back at him, but her gaze was distracted and vaguely curious. Then, without warning, she bent down so her head was hidden from view by the aisle. When she arose, she was carrying a toddler on her hip. The child seemed to be a boy, based on the little red and black sneakers and the truck on his T-shirt. His long blond curls fell over his ears, and his luscious lips pouted as he caught sight of Owen.
As the cashier rung up her purchases, the woman pulled out an apple from her purse and took a bite before holding it out to the boy, who sucked in his lips, shaking his head until, coaxing, she brought it right up to his mouth. As she held out the fruit to him, he took a small bite, and then she took another before passing it back. Their eyes never left each other as they traded bites, but though they said nothing, they amused one another. Then the boy let loose a delighted laugh, and a bit of apple fell from his mouth and landed on his chin. His mother flicked out her tongue and lapped it up.
Owen looked away as the woman in front of him in line asked for cigarettes. She was a heavy-set black woman with a huge bosom that intrigued him as his eyes passed over it.
“Sorry this is so slow,” she said, as the cashier took a key from the register and headed for the glass cabinet behind the customer service desk.
Owen waved her off. “I’m in no hurry,” he said, returning the courtesy. She had kind, watchful eyes. “Don’t worry about it.”
When he looked back to the blond woman in the other lineup, she was already picking up her bag. She smiled over her shoulder at him, but her ear was bent to her son. The cashier in Owen’s aisle returned with a king-size package of Marlboros. The woman in front of him said, “You smoke?”
“No,” he said, wondering what would happen if he said yes. “Thanks, though.”
As the cashier counted out her change, he pocketed his wallet, left the condoms on the counter, and headed for the exit.
* * *
—
“So?”
“They were out.” Owen let the lie come out flat. He hung up the empty cloth bag on the coat rack inside the front door. “Can you believe it?”
Rachel blinked at him. Her mouth opened as though she was going to say something, but then she turned her back on him and went into the kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” he called. “I’ll be in my study.”
Even with his office door closed at the top of the landing, he could hear her washing the dishes. There was recrimination in the sound, in the almost indistinguishable clatter of plate on plate. The water running into the sink might as well be a bucket of tears.
He turned on his computer and opened a couple of the sites he’d bookmarked the night before: the National Centre for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. If the novel was going to be as gripping and frightening as he imagined it, he had to get the details right about the risks of contagion and the safest way to avoid infection during a global pandemic. He jotted down some facts and some phone numbers, too, for when he was further along.
He wrote in a concentrated burst for forty-five minutes, until his shoulders started aching. Standing up, he paced from one end of the room to the other, swinging his arms back and forth in a stretch. He knew he was on to something with this imagined disaster in the near future. It was liberating to free himself from the constraints of the past, the historical record. He sat back down at the computer and scanned through the pages he’d written.
Midway through his reread, the door to his study swung open without a knock.
“Can we talk later? At length?” The question cut through the room like a command. Rachel rarely got angry, and even more rarely at him, but when she did it brought a strangled precision into her voice. And for reasons he didn’t quite understand, her anger, no matter the cause, always provoked his own.
“About what?”
“About this dismissal of my idea of having kids,” said Rachel. “And what it means for us, and the future.” She paused and let the threat hang over them. “It’s too big for you to shut down with a word.”
He gave a curt nod, and, with a tight face, his wife stepped back and pulled the door shut.
It was impossible, what Rachel was doing to him. It wasn’t fair. No matter which way he looked at it, he was the bad guy, and yet somehow, in spite of everything, he was the one who had kept faith with what they had promised one another. It didn’t matter how many women he’d slept with here or there since they’d been married. They had promised the rest of their lives to each other alone. She was the cheater.
Now Rachel wanted a different future, and without a baby, he wasn’t in it. He could already see how it would go. For her, the future was children. But children would be the end of their relationship, the end of his writing, the end of his days alone. Children were like a plague upon the Earth, eating up everybody’s time and freedom.
And then he knew what was going to happen in the novel.
* * *
Owen had always thought lust was the most powerful fuel he’d ever find for his writing, but it turned out that anger at Rachel left everything else in its wake. Once he’d started with the new direction for his story, his fingers could hardly keep pace with his ideas. The ire that had kindled the plot burned itself up in an ecstasy of absorption, as all his old distractions receded. He was pleased with what he’d accomplished, so pleased that after days of working almost non-stop, almost without thinking about the rest of his life, he’d brought the first section of his new novel to Rachel to read with a bursting kind of pride and excitement.
She accepted the pages with a show of reluctance that reminded him they were in a fight. “So this is why you’ve been too busy to talk,” she said.
“I guess you could say that.” He hadn’t been putting her off so much as forgetting about her in an all-consuming creative fog. In the meantime, she’d been spending more evenings out with friends and, when she was home, having long phone calls with old confidantes from out-of-town. But if she’d wanted him to notice or comment on her new independence, he’d disappointed her.
She sat on the couch with a frown of forbearance and told him to go do something else. “I don’t want you to watch me,” she said. “I’m not in the mood to explain my every fleeting thought.”
Owen grabbed his keys, but though he had energy to burn, he was too impatient to drive to the rowing club. Instead, he went outside and paced the streets near their home, wondering and worrying what Rachel’s keen intellect would make of his newest project.
He came back just as she was turning o
ver the last page of what he’d given her, everything he’d written in the past week. She tapped the pages against the coffee table, shuffling the edges flat.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “And horrible.”
“Horrible?” He tried to read her expression. The new story was already more sprawling with characters and less ornate in its prose than his other books, but he’d expected her—his best and most faithful cheerleader—to be excited by the sheer drama and ambition of its plot.
“Well, I suppose this is your way of telling me you’re not going to change your mind,” she said. “Millions of kids dying in a pandemic.” She pressed her lips together and then sighed. Her fingers with their pale pink polish drummed against the table.
Owen put a hand to his forehead, grimacing. He felt like a cardboard cut-out of a man. He’d lost himself in the story somewhere along the way, which he supposed was both a good thing and a bad thing. “You’re much smarter than I am, Rachel.”
She brushed past the concession with nothing more than a raised eyebrow. “I know.” She lowered her face, which was starting to flush. He thought it was possible she was about to cry, and he wondered with a sudden panic if this was going to be the moment when everything changed. The moment when he truly failed her—the final treachery after a hundred smaller betrayals.
He reached out and put both of his hands on hers, even though the romance of the gesture was something he found faintly galling. It was a gesture reserved for one’s wife. “It’s not that I don’t want a child with you, Rachel. I don’t want one with anyone. That’s just not something I can do, remember? We’re talking nuclear fallout. It’s impossible.”
“I understand.” Rachel was just a curtain of hair across the table from him, her chin dropped down almost to her chest.
Songs for the End of the World Page 5
