Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  She was cooking a grilled cheese sandwich for breakfast. She didn’t like cereal: too soggy. Pointing with her spatula, she asked, “Want one?”

  “Sure.” He wanted to tell her about the car but found himself nervous about it, suddenly sure he’d made a mistake. Going to the window, he peered out toward the driveway but could only see the edge of the front bumper.

  He turned, watching Wendy cook. He liked the way she did things without wasted motion, with matter-of-fact grace and precision. She lifted out the sandwich with a spatula, sliced it in half diagonally, and handed it to Luke on a plate. Buttering two more slices, she arranged them carefully in the pan.

  He bit into the sandwich, Swiss cheese and thinly sliced tomato. The bread was almost burnt, the way he liked it. Wendy said, “Oh, look at this.” She stretched out one arm to where her purse hung over the back of chair and pulled out a tract: Your Ticket to Eternal Salvation. “Someone left this last night instead of a tip.”

  “So, hey. I bought a car.”

  Wendy froze. “You did?”

  “Want to see it?”

  Clicking the stove off, she brushed past him toward the front door. He followed her, nervous, the car deforming in his imagination into something twisted and scabrous. When he saw the actual car, he didn’t recognize it for a second: shiny, compact, with only a freckling of rust along the bumper. He’d been right to buy it.

  Wendy walked around it. “How much was this?”

  “Five hundred dollars,” he lied. “Do you like it?”

  “Are you sure it even runs?”

  “I’ll take you for a drive.” She didn’t have to be at work until late afternoon; he didn’t work on Saturdays.

  She opened the door. “What is this? Cardboard?”

  “It’s fine. It’s nothing. The floor’s a little rusty.”

  “Did you get underneath the car?” She looked at his face. “Oh, Luke. The whole underside could be about to go.”

  “It’s fine. I looked at all the records.” She looked doubtful and he said, more harshly than he’d meant, “Wen, forget it, it’s fine.”

  Only a few miles north of Madison was farmland. Lush green fields surrounded the road. The barns looked like the Fisher-Price barn he’d had as a child: red, with wide doors and perfect silos. The air smelled plush and wet. “Isn’t this great?” He motioned with his arm. “We should come out here more.”

  Wendy shrugged, unimpressed. She’d grown up in a farming town in Iowa. “You see that?” she asked, pointing. “That big brown thing? That’s a cow.”

  “No way.” He put his hand on her knee, then had to take it off to downshift. “Hey, can you drive stick?”

  She nodded. Of course she could. She could walk on her hands, beat him in pool, fix a clogged pipe. When he’d first seen her, she’d been waitressing, pouring two coffees simultaneously, barely glancing down at the cups.

  She pointed past him to a field. “That black-and-white thing?”

  “Don’t tell me that’s a cow too.”

  “I’m afraid so.” She turned on the radio, which spat and hissed like a cat. A song came faintly through the static. Taking off her shoes, she put her feet up on the dashboard, in the sun.

  It was a beautiful day. Luke rolled down the window, the sun warming his bare arm. He loved driving. It felt great to be out of Madison. Up on the road ahead was an Amish buggy, black with a reflective orange triangle on the back. Luke slowed down and passed carefully. As he braked, the devil’s eyes lit up red. Wendy said, “Oh, my heck.”

  “Isn’t that great?”

  “Who’d you buy this from?”

  “A little old lady. She said she only drove it on Sundays, to church.”

  Wendy threw back her head and laughed. He loved the way that she never pretended to find something funny just to be nice; laughter always seemed to take her by surprise.

  The girls he’d dated his freshman year, before Wendy, had been hip and pretty. They were from Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. They listened to obscure bands and took photography classes and talked about the inner-city kids they’d tutored during high school. Dating them somehow seemed easy. It wasn’t that they were undemanding, exactly; just that he’d always known how to act and approximately how they’d react.

  Wendy had worked places like McDonald’s during high school; she’d been a cheerleader and got straight A’s. When they were alone, she could be warm, almost heartbreakingly sweet. Other times, she was prickly and easily annoyed. They might be lying in bed after making love, happy and whispering; he’d get up to go to the bathroom, and when he returned Wendy would be already dressed and saying she had to get to the library, shrugging away when he tried to hold her. If he’d thought she was playing games, it would have turned him off, but her stubborn self-sufficiency was compelling. That she didn’t try to accommodate or impress him somehow made her seem whole in a way other people weren’t.

  They passed a store advertising Amish-baked pie; glancing into his rearview mirror, he made a squealing U-turn. “Let’s get a pie,” he said. He still wanted to try and make this feel like a holiday. He pulled into the parking lot of the store. Wendy started to speak but he broke in quickly. “I’ll pay. I owe you money.”

  “From what?”

  “From when you bought aspirin the other week.” He came around to her side of the car, opening the door, then dropped to a squat, retrieving her sneakers from the floor. “Here, give me your foot.”

  She said, “That aspirin was about two dollars.”

  “Not with interest.” He hated the way she still couldn’t accept things from him. She paid her own rent and tuition, things his parents covered for him; she was always broke.

  She reached down to retie the shoelace he’d just done. “I’ll pay. You bought gas.”

  He turned his head and kissed her knee.

  “What?”

  “I can’t stand when we go out and I know it’s killing you, I can see the gears in your head, thinking how you’re going to eat rice all week or something to make up for being bad.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Wen, come on, it is. You don’t let me do anything.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You can buy the pie.”

  “Hooray.”

  “I thought that’s what you wanted—”

  “It is,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry. It’s good.”

  Inside, they picked out a blueberry pie, still warm in its box. They ate it from the center, sitting outside on a grassy hillock. The thick yellow air felt like it had grown ten degrees hotter in the ten minutes they’d been inside the store.

  The pie was delicious, crust flaky with butter. “Your teeth are purple,” he said.

  She ran her tongue along them, under closed lips. “There was this rule in my high school,” she said. “I mean, not a rule, but the popular girls didn’t eat in front of their boyfriends. If they came into McDonald’s, they’d just get a Coke.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “I wasn’t that popular.” With her fingers, she broke off another bite of pie. “What do you need a car for?”

  “We can go places. It will be fun. We could go to Chicago.”

  “I hate to break this to you: I don’t think that car’s going to make it to Chicago.”

  “It could. I don’t know, Wen, grocery shopping. We can go to movies.” He stood up, nodding at the phone at the edge of the parking lot. “I want to try calling Angie. I couldn’t reach her before.”

  Wendy looked at her watch. “I have to be at work by four.”

  “It’s two.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  He walked across the tar—springy in the heat—and shut himself in the little booth. The phone’s silver surface was cloudy and scratched. He dialed the long string of familiar numbers: first the access code for AT&T, then his calling card number, then the halfway house.

  This time the phone rang twelve times and a woman picked up. She had the slow, heavy voice Luke had
come to associate with taking antipsychotics, and when he asked for Angie there was a long pause before she said she’d get her.

  Through the glass of the booth, the car shimmered with heat, crouching over its parking space. His sister said, “Luke?”

  “I’m on a pay phone. I just wanted to check in.”

  “I’m fine. I think this thing might work.” Her doctor had decided to wean her off lithium and onto a new med. “I feel … I really feel pretty good. I’m sorry, I know I’m boring about this.”

  “No, no, it’s great.” In truth, though he was glad the Depakote seemed to be working, she was a little boring about it, so anxious for it to succeed that she tracked every hiccup in mood. “I bought a car. It’s really cool. I mean old, but cool.”

  “You bought a car!” she cried.

  “I did. I can see it from here.” He looked out at his car and laughed aloud.

  Fifteen

  Their bedroom, with the shades drawn, was cottony gray. It wasn’t quite seven in the morning, though Pieter had been up nearly three hours, practicing. Quietly, he pulled off his shirt, dropping it into the hamper. He felt creaky with fatigue. Because he was about to leave on a week-long tour with the orchestra, he’d stayed up late the night before, packing, talking to Angie on the phone.

  Jordana slept in their bed, but as he sat gingerly on the edge of the mattress to ease off his shoes, she turned and rolled toward him. “Be close to me,” she said sleepily. She put her arms around his waist and her cheek on his back.

  Gently, he unhooked her arms from around him and stood. “I need to get ready to go.” He began pulling clothes from the dresser. “It’s six hours to Clementine.”

  Jordana flopped onto her back, staring at the ceiling. “Why won’t you touch me?”

  “You’re exaggerating.” They made love almost as much as they used to. It did feel far more loaded to him, though. Sometimes, he wouldn’t initiate sex because he needed her to want him. Other times it was the opposite, and the knowledgeable, insinuating stroke of her hand—its assumption that he was just available to her—sickened him.

  “What is it then? Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

  He needed her to say that she loved him. That she wouldn’t leave, that she wasn’t thinking about leaving.

  She had said all those things; if he asked her to say them again she would. She’d be exasperated but also relieved, pleased, amused, reassured. How easily the power could tip back to her. How easily she could feel sure of him, and therefore bored, and therefore all the more susceptible to an affair.

  “Did you even hear me?” said his wife.

  “Of course I heard you.” Leaning against the open bureau drawer, he pressed his fingers to his eyes, exhausted. He didn’t want to go on with this talk, but he couldn’t make himself move toward the shower.

  “Listen,” Jordana said. “If you can’t touch me, what about this? What if you hold me and I touch myself?”

  He couldn’t think of anything more terrible. He shook his head.

  “What, then?” she said.

  When he didn’t answer, she sat up in bed and pulled off her nightgown. Beneath her arm, the smudge of stubble. “Okay,” she said, and closed her eyes, running her hand across her small breast and down her stomach.

  He’d seen her touch herself before, if he was behind her during sex; it had aroused him then.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  She opened her eyes. Her expression was almost fierce. He looked back, hating her, thinking his glare would shame her into stopping. But she went on. She went on and on and on, rubbing and working. The blue morning light showed waxy wrinkles around her eyes.

  How had Clementine, Maine, come up with the money to bring the orchestra there? Most of the cost of their trips around New England came out of the states’ arts funding and the orchestra’s own budget, but a town still had to find nearly fifteen hundred dollars a day. Nor could he imagine why Clementine—population seven thousand—believed that enough people would attend concerts to warrant having the orchestra for two days of its tour.

  In small towns, the orchestra was usually put up in people’s homes. Pieter didn’t mind cost-cutting, but he minded the way Jean, the orchestra’s manager, always presented financial decisions as being about something else—in this case as “building a community’s connection to the arts that goes beyond the usual one-sided relationship of audience to artist.”

  Pieter and Vladimir Andronovich, the orchestra’s timpanist, were staying with the Stevenson family: Vlad in the guest room, Pieter in the master bedroom. Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson themselves had taken the basement rec room’s pull-out couch. The Stevensons were in their sixties. They were almost the same height, and both had short gray hair and sweatshirts—his black, hers red with a quilted snowman.

  “We thought we’d have an aperitif on the veranda,” Mrs. Stevenson said. She led them into a sunroom off the kitchen, where a bottle of white wine sat next to a platter of complicated-looking hors d’oeuvres: folds of ham on little toasts, topped with sour cream and pennants of pimento. The sunroom was carpeted with green synthetic grass that scrinched underfoot.

  “We so love classical music,” Mrs. Stevenson said. She was the designated talker of the two. An old couple, Pieter thought, and then: I’ll be sixty in three years. It seemed impossible. Why had Jordana chosen this morning for a fight? Things had been good between them recently. Angie’s going on a new med had felt like watching together as she tried to cross a high, rickety bridge. Each day that she got a little farther out, the bridge still holding, he and Jordana had relaxed a tiny bit.

  Turning to Pieter, Mrs. Stevenson put her fingertip to her cheek. “Now, how did you decide to become a cellist?”

  He was touched by the effort they’d gone to and by their evident nervousness. At the same time he just wanted to escape upstairs to the bedroom and not have to perform. He said something quickly about his uncle, who had taught him the basics of playing on an old cello. He could see he was disappointing them. He might have gone on to talk about the degree to which he’d taught himself, the music-store owner who had let him copy sheet music by hand when he didn’t have the fifty cents to buy it. They would probably have loved those stories, but they embarrassed Pieter; they seemed melodramatic.

  And—something he tried to keep secret even to himself—he was hoarding these stories in case he ever became famous. It wasn’t going to happen, and yet he’d gotten into the habit of saving up for imaginary interviews, not letting the stories wear shiny with handling.

  Anyway, Vlad fulfilled the role of storyteller. He was doing his parents now: “They said—in Russian, of course—‘The drums? Vee come to the U.S. so you can boom, boom, boom?’”

  Pieter hung the garment bag with his tuxedos—he had two regular ones and a third faintly grayed by age, as though covered in a light film of dust, that he had to include on longer trips. Vlad knocked at the half-open bedroom door and walked in. He was short and muscular, with a black mustache and beard. Across his forehead and cheeks he had acne scars, craters the size of olive pits. “That tree is something else, no?”

  “Tree?”

  Vlad threw himself down on the bed. Pieter was annoyed, then amused by his annoyance; he’d already begun thinking of the bed as his.

  Vlad wiggled his back, getting comfortable. “In the living room? You step in, a little ficus tree lights up and Mozart starts. You step back out, poof, gone.” Vlad had been born in the States; Pieter wasn’t sure whether the very slight accent and sometimes-stilted grammar were affectation or genuine remnants of growing up with immigrant parents.

  The bed was so enormous that there was nowhere else in the bedroom to sit, so Pieter crossed his arms and leaned against the closet doors. He realized he had no idea what to say. Vlad had rolled onto one hip, though, and was working something out of his pants’ pocket. “So. I have this.” A small enameled box that Pieter knew held cocaine. Vlad shook it, raising his eyebrows questioningly at Pi
eter, who shrugged: sure.

  Pieter had done cocaine a few times, always when the orchestra was traveling, with Vlad or a group containing Vlad. They sat on the edge of the wide sink top in the master bath. Pieter went first, an order he’d noticed Vlad always adhered to: funny that something as seedy as using drugs in their hosts’ bathroom would have strict etiquette. The cocaine made his throat dry and itchy. There was a mirror opposite the sink as well as the one over it, and so the two of them were reflected, over and over, infinitely but growing smaller and smaller, like an echo bouncing between canyon walls.

  Vlad leaned back and held his finger under the faucet, then tipped his head back, dripping water into each nostril. “Here is my theory,” he said. “Every person has one drug that is their perfect match. Your job is to go out into the universe and find it.”

  Pieter let his feet kick gently against the below-sink cabinets. “You sound like you’re talking about a soul mate.” Before he’d first tried cocaine, he’d imagined it would make him feel euphoric, transformed. The actual effect was less artificial and so, in its own way, even more seductive. He felt the way he did when skating: bright. Certain. Happy.

  “It’s much harder to find your soul mate, though,” Vlad said. “Drugs there are only—what? Fifty?”

  “You believe there’s one person in the world you’re supposed to find and be with?”

  Vlad spread his hands and shrugged, a very Slavic gesture for sure, of course, his lower lip jutting out. Pieter didn’t actually much like Vlad, who was boisterous, sarcastic, a womanizer. Jordana said Vlad reminded her of a sperm—all blind aggression.

  “What if you never find her?”

  “I’ve already found her. I fucked it up.” Vlad’s accent and stilted grammar were gone. He turned his attention to the soaps, shaped like teddy bears. He picked up a pale blue one, the color of cue chalk, and turned on the faucet again.

  “I don’t think those are supposed to be used.”

  “Oh, they’re definitely not supposed to be used.” As Vlad washed his hands, the bear’s features flattened. Then he carefully replaced the soap in the dish, its face buried in another bear’s crotch.