Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  The Onion’s stained-glass chandeliers swung low over tables gouged with graffiti. Beneath their table, Ben held Jordana’s knees between his own. The only other customer was an Abenaki woman, sitting at the bar in a lavender sweatsuit. Her cheekbones were sharp, as if hewn by an ax; the rest of her face was blurred with drink. She hit the bottom of her glass with one hand to dislodge the ice. The high, dirty windows strained the afternoon light.

  “Did you know your left eye is bigger than your right?” Ben raised his hands, squinting at her through the rectangle his fingers made. “There are these pictures of Nixon made of two left sides of his face—they printed the left side of the photo, then flipped the negative and printed it again. And then next to it, a face made of two right sides. And they were totally different, like looking at two different people.”

  With Ben, the knot in her chest loosened and she could breathe all the way in. “So you’re saying I look like Nixon.”

  “Right, exactly. No, I’m saying faces are asymmetrical. Yours just more clearly.” Mixed into his brown hair were a few strands of gray; his eyes were yellow-green. He reached across the table, touching one side of her mouth and then the other. His hands still startled her, their softness compared to Pieter’s calluses. “Did you know people don’t like pictures of themselves because they’re used to their mirror image?”

  “I don’t like pictures of myself because I always look like I’ve just stolen something.” She was a little light-headed. “I shouldn’t drink in the afternoon.”

  “A cheap date.” When Jordana frowned, he explained, “You drink one beer. It’s cheap to take you out.”

  “Oh. I thought you meant cheap as in floozy.”

  “Floozy,” Ben said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word in real life.”

  Sometimes, being older—thirty-eight to his thirty-two—made her feel assured and desirable rather than dowdy and staid. She reached across the table for his hand. “Let’s go to your place.”

  “Let’s have another beer first. I’ll tell you my pig joke.”

  “I’m already kind of drunk.”

  Ben got up from the table, and her knees were suddenly cold. Turning, he rocked back on his heels to study her. He tipped his head to one side and raised his wide hands for a moment, framing her again, then dropped them. “You’re nice drunk,” he said.

  Ben was the photographer for The White Mountain Times, but the paper was small enough that, as well as helping with layout and selling ad space, he also wrote some of the articles. Not long after Angie had left school for the farm, he’d come to the clinic to do a story about local response to a recent spate of abortion center bombings across the country. A young guy with unruly hair, corduroys worn to velvet at the knees, two cameras slung bandolier-style across his chest. He’d interviewed a number of protesters as well and—anxious that he might be writing a hostile piece—Jordana had been brusque with him. Okay, she’d been rude. Angie’s state then had been so precarious and frightening that Jordana was mad at everyone. After the article came out, she’d called to apologize.

  She’d never thought of herself as someone who would have an affair. Truthfully, she still didn’t feel that way. “Affair” sounded torrid and agonized and big; being with Ben was easy. She was reminded of Pieter when she was with him, but it didn’t make her feel as guilty as she would have expected, because Ben didn’t threaten that other, real life.

  At the bar, Ben put one foot up on the rail. He wore a black beeper, the kind doctors had, so the paper could reach him. Above his head, the ORDER HERE sign had been graffitied to read DISORDER HERE. She looked away, embarrassed, lust zagging through her stomach.

  “So this guy is driving past a farm.” Ben slid back into the booth. “And he sees a farmer holding up a pig to eat apples off a tree.”

  * * *

  Later, lying tangled in the sheets of Ben’s futon, the room sank so gradually into dusk around them she didn’t even realize it until Ben reached over her to switch on a light. The shapes of things sprang back into focus.

  “It’s late. I should go.” It was hard to feel urgency, though; it seemed impossible that a whole other life awaited her. And when she got home, she knew, that other life would swallow her whole. She would hardly believe Ben existed. She bowed her head quickly, kissing his shoulder, then his neck.

  He said, “I haven’t felt this way before.” He touched her jaw. “Did you know you have a freckle right here? Under your chin? A really dark one.”

  “A freckle?” She tried to sound light, though her breath felt caught in her throat: I haven’t felt this way before.

  “Exactly like a poppy seed.”

  An hour later, she walked into her house, into the tornado of obligations and attachments, lights blazing, the phone cord pulled taut up the stairs and into Luke’s room, bills stuck in the frame of the front-hall mirror along with a scribbled note to buy stamps, her husband shut in the living room with Beethoven’s Ninth crashing around him. She stood for a moment on the threshold, door still open behind her. Then she let the door shut and went into the living room, where Pieter lay on the couch.

  He was so tall, six-foot-five, that his feet hung way over the armrest. He’d been born in the Netherlands: he had almost Asian eyes, slanted and narrow, as though he were squinting or laughing. The white in his hair just made him look blonder.

  He jumped up and changed the record. “I was listening to this just a minute ago.” The needle skated over the outer band of the record and into the first groove. “It’s magnificent, isn’t it?”

  She stole a glance at the cover: Henryk Górecki. “Górecki?”

  “I knew you knew it.” Pieter could hear a piece of music once, and then years later hear it again and know exactly what it was. He could hear a few bars of a recording he’d never heard before and guess the soloist or chamber group. While he recognized that not everyone could do the same, he found it unfathomable that Jordana couldn’t. She’d lived with musicians her whole life. She thought that, to Pieter, recognizing a composer was as natural as recognizing the taste of a lemon or the color green. Because she wanted him to admire their intimacy—their united front in an often-senseless world—she lied about music as much as she dared. She said, “I thought Górecki was sentimental.”

  “He is. Still. When you get to the second movement. …”

  Instead of the wall-to-wall carpeting the last owners had put into the rest of the house, the living room had a hardwood floor, now scarred and gouged by Pieter’s endpin and the endpins of his students. For a moment, she felt the guilt that normally eluded her.

  She pushed off her shoes and crawled onto the couch next to her husband, lying along the edge, holding on to him so she wouldn’t fall off. Closing her eyes, she breathed him in. Pieter didn’t always let her cling to him like this; it distracted him. Part of what she’d fallen in love with when she was fourteen and he was twenty-nine had been Pieter’s reserve, the way he seemed unreadable and self-contained.

  He smelled of soap and resin. Through her shirt, she could feel the calluses on his fingertips where they held her shoulder. “Wait, listen,” he said.

  The orchestra dropped away, leaving the soprano’s voice alone, like a vertical shaft of light. Pieter’s lips moved just slightly, chin lifted. Jordana pulled herself against her husband’s body, holding on to the soft cotton of his button-down shirt. Why did she sometimes let herself forget him?

  Pieter looked down at her. “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing,” she said.

  Three

  At night, Luke’s stereo covered the noise of opening the window. He stepped from the chair to the desktop to the sill and leaned back to turn off the music. Crouching, he stretched one hand out to the scaly bark of the dogwood tree. The branch was just far enough from the window that he couldn’t hold it with both hands before jumping, and every night he had a moment of vertigo—he forgot it immediately afterward, until he was standing here again—when he thought h
e couldn’t jump.

  Then he jumped, left hand sliding down the alligator bark before he got a grip, his body swinging wildly in the air, heart pounding in his chest. The branch jerked and shuddered, blossoms raining to the driveway below. He kicked to get his feet up around the branch and pulled himself on top of it. Crawling backward, he worked his way down. When he got near the heart of the tree, he felt behind him, his foot in empty space and then brushing a low limb, and he inched that foot down, lowering his weight slowly until he was squatting. When finally he let go of the upper branch, his hands ached, from holding on and also from the cold; it was late April, the days bright but not really warm, and the nights still sharp.

  He shuffled back a few inches on the branch until his back hit the trunk, then spent a minute squeezing one hand with the other, uncramping them, before reaching into his pocket for gloves. As he pulled them on—the leather stiff with cold—a light came on behind him.

  Fuck. His heart hopped unpleasantly.

  But the light wasn’t in his room. It was in the empty room next to his, Angie’s. After a moment his mother appeared through the window, fists jammed deep into the front pockets of a pair of too-big paint-splattered jeans. She wandered to Angie’s shelf and pulled down a book, flipped through it, then stuck it back. She wrapped her hand around the swimmer on one of Angie’s trophies. Then she drifted over to the desk chair and sat. Folding her arms on the desk, she rested her cheek on them. From where he crouched in the tree, maybe six feet below her, he couldn’t tell if her eyes were open.

  She can’t see you anyway, he reminded himself. It felt weird, watching someone who didn’t know she was being watched.

  She’d always been younger than his friends’ mothers. Something about her still seemed young, even though she was almost forty. She stood, put both hands into her already-wild hair, and shook them as though shampooing, which she did when she was frustrated. She wheeled around and out of sight; the light in the room winked out.

  He stayed crouched in the tree. If it had been him at the Funny Farm, he couldn’t imagine his mom coming into his room and mooning over his stuff. His parents didn’t even realize they favored Angie; they’d always been more focused on her, even before. It was actually good, because he could pass under the radar without much trouble.

  He jumped the last six feet to the ground. His sweatshirt was covered with bits of bark and dead leaves. Kristin wasn’t there tonight, a relief. Not that he thought she’d tell his parents or anything; he just didn’t want to have to talk to her or else not talk to her. Back in eighth grade they’d been assigned to work together on a social studies project and had spent three weekends in a row in his basement constructing a three-dimensional cardboard model of a Soviet commune. Ten o’clock the night before the project was due, as she’d painted a tiny Young Pioneers emblem on the side of a building, he remembered her asking, “So what exactly is this assignment supposed to prove? We can cut up boxes?” She’d had a crush on him then, but it had seemed to go away after a few months of his not being interested. Then one night last autumn—Angie’d already begun falling out, so it must have been about October—he’d been drunk at a party and apparently had talked to Kristin for hours. After that she’d begun appearing in the yard.

  With his gloved hands, he brushed himself off as well as he could and then, because his heart was still beating fast, he ran the three blocks to Khamisa’s. On Wanderwood he slowed to a walk, getting his breath. Khamisa and her mother lived at the end of the street in a duplex, the right-hand side of an old square house. Standing at the bottom of the porch steps, he could see through both front windows. On the left side, a woman in a nightgown walked with a baby, talking to it and bending her head to eat potato chips from a bag. On the right side, Khamisa and her mom lay on the couch, sharing a blanket. Their faces, unself-conscious, lit blue by the television, looked more similar to each other than to either of their daytime selves. Khamisa had curly—she said frizzy—gold-brown hair. She was pretty but she looked ugly right now, her face slack in the TV’s flickering light. The way she looked made him want to stay outside and also made him want to run up the stairs and knock on the window frame and startle her face out of its looseness.

  At his knock, she jumped up and came to the window smiling. “You’re here,” she said, voice faint through the glass.

  “Are you going to let me in?”

  She shook her head no and put her lips to the window. He leaned down, kissing the glass over her mouth. The pane was cold, and when he drew back a print of his lips stayed there for a moment, white, before fading. Khamisa reached over to the front door—it opened directly into the living room—and undid the locks.

  Khamisa’s mother waved from the couch. “Luke.”

  “Hi.” He was supposed to call her Pam, but it felt too weird, so he usually didn’t call her anything. Pam had had Khamisa at seventeen, even younger than his mom had had Angie. When he’d started dating Khamisa a few months ago, Pam had sat them down to talk about birth control. He and Khamisa hadn’t looked at each other as Pam said to him, about six times, Don’t think with your dick. If he’d met Khamisa’s eyes, he would have started laughing, or else he might have fled the room. Since then, though, Pam had been totally laid back. He couldn’t tell if she was really cool or, like Khamisa said, she was just trying to be cool. Either way, she let him stay over at their house.

  “What’s on TV?”

  “You’ve got sticks in your hair,” Khamisa said, picking one out.

  Pam said, “This movie: A guy breaks into a house and steals a locked box he thinks is going to be like a safe, but it turns out to be full of this woman’s diaries. This married woman’s diaries. And he falls in love with the woman from her diary, and turns himself into her fantasy man, and they have an affair.”

  “Is it good?”

  “Trash,” said Pam. “You two should go to bed, you’ve got school tomorrow.”

  “No, we’ll watch with you,” he said. It wasn’t just to be polite. He liked how Khamisa and her mother did things together, though Khamisa complained they were more like sisters. They shared clothes; Khamisa told her mom gossip from school. Once, when Luke was over, Pam had suggested they get takeout. Khamisa had said, “Do you know how many times we’ve had takeout this week? I wish you’d sometimes cook a fucking meal,” and Pam had slapped Khamisa. Without pause, Khamisa slapped her back. “You cunt,” Khamisa said. They glared at each other, Pam’s hand still raised, and then the corner of Pam’s mouth had tweaked, and Khamisa’d huffed through her nose, and they’d begun laughing.

  He settled into the chair to watch the movie. Khamisa and Pam sat against opposite arms of the small couch, their knees drawn up, feet by each other’s hips. “Did I ever tell you how I got my name?” Khamisa asked now.

  She had, but before he could say so she continued. “This is, like, a perfect illustration of my mother. She was living in Santa Fe, and there’s chamisa brush growing all over there—c-h-a-m-i-s-a.”

  “It’s the sound of it that matters,” Pam said mildly, eyes on the television, eating ice cream from the carton. With her other hand, she pushed Khamisa’s shoulder lightly. “Don’t be a bitch.”

  On television, a man rubbed sun lotion into his bare chest while a woman, presumably the diarist, gulped and looked away guiltily. “She wrote about that in her journal,” Pam said. “It’s her fantasy. The sun lotion and all.”

  “And she doesn’t know he’s the robber?” he asked. “Isn’t that going to make her suspicious?”

  Khamisa rolled her eyes. She wrapped her arm around her mother’s knee, resting her chin there.

  Khamisa’s room was tiny and crammed with stuff. She’d stuck so many photographs into the mirror frame that only a photo-sized scrap of mirror remained; earrings and flimsy scarves and incense ash and dried-out roses, the red petals edged tan with age, and a pack of brown Indonesian cigarettes, and little bottles of scented oil cluttered the top of the bureau. Clothes hung on one wall. Am
id the jumble, her bed an island, narrow and carefully made.

  He liked being here not just because he loved Khamisa but also because escaping his own house was such a relief. He wouldn’t have thought he’d miss Angie, and he didn’t, not exactly. But things were even more fucked up with her gone than they had been with her there. His father, more distracted than usual, might easily forget a whole conversation he’d had with Luke the day before. Luke’s mother plunged into frenzied projects—pulling everything out of the hall closet, for example, to box up donations for Goodwill—and then lost heart. At the moment, their hallway was half blocked by partly filled boxes and an enormous heap of down parkas, mittens, hats, red rubber boots from about kindergarten that still had bread bags inside to make them easier to pull off.

  He picked up a magazine from the floor, flipping through it. Happy teenagers grilling hamburgers in their bathing suits, a quiz that he was glad to see Khamisa hadn’t bothered to fill out, a column called “Was My Face RED!” (I was in line at the bank in front of this really cute guy. When I opened my purse, a tampon fell out—on his shoe!!!)

  “Do you like this?” Khamisa asked, from the other side of the room. She’d taken off her shirt and was holding something small and black in her hands.

  “What is it?”

  “I found it at that thrift store downtown. Seventy-five cents.” She put it on her head—a small velvet hat with an asymmetrical veil. She looked at him over her shoulder. “Do you like it?”

  “When would you wear it?”

  She shook her head. “I just like it.” She put it back on top of the bureau. She was always showing him things she’d bought and wanting him to comment. He took off his sneakers and sat on the side of the bed while she continued fiddling with stuff on the dresser—she brushed her hair, put it up, then took it down again. The straps of her bra shone pink against her shoulder blades.