Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  He could feel his wife’s sadness underneath their conversation, but he didn’t ask about it: What more was there to say? He let go of her and stepped back. He went over to one of the bookcases that held his thousands of recordings, LPs, CDs, a few (well, less than three hundred) cassette tapes, mostly made for him by friends. He ran a finger quickly over the spines until he found the case he wanted: Gyongyi Horvath’s recording of Bach’s cello suites.

  “I knew it.” Her moles didn’t show in her pictures; they’d been covered up or airbrushed out.

  Jordana didn’t ask, Knew what? She cupped one elbow with the other hand.

  Gyongyi Horvath’s interpretation, as he remembered, was faster than the Casals recording. Pieter listened to her rendering of the fifth suite and then stopped the recording to play the suite himself. It had a mathematical precision, and yet, buried, there was incredible darkness and beauty. Standing to switch the CD, he realized Jordana had left the room. Sitting again, he played with Casals. He didn’t think about what he was doing but let the music come through him, concentrating only on laying each note alongside Casals’s. It was the first time in years he’d played sustainedly without self-consciousness, without awareness of time. In the final notes of the sixth suite’s gigue, the bow nearly left the string with each note, and with the final note he did lift it off the string.

  His elbow felt as if it were vibrating. The CD player spun down. He staggered to the kitchen and in the wan light of the refrigerator gulped water straight from its pitcher. It was ice-cold. His teeth ached.

  His wife slept naked, but she’d pulled the covers up so that only one bare shoulder showed. In the faint light from the street, her shoulder was smooth and white as marble, and when he touched it its warmth surprised him. He moved his hand until the curve of her shoulder perfectly fit his palm. She didn’t wake. Her dark hair fanned across the pillow.

  Jordana seemed clear to him, vulnerable, her sadness something real and not just a way she kept him out. He lifted the covers and slid into bed, kissing her sleeping mouth. With his tongue, he gently circled her lips, then parted them. She grunted and burrowed into her pillow.

  He ran his hand down the smooth plane of her breastbone. The smallness of her breasts meant that they hadn’t sagged, despite pregnancy and breastfeeding. He pinched her nipple lightly, the way she liked.

  “Sleeping,” she groaned.

  He took her hand, guiding it to his hardening penis. He whispered her name.

  She opened her eyes. “I was asleep.” She gathered the covers to her and flopped onto her other side, facing away.

  Snaking his hand into the sheets, he found her nipple again. She used to make fun of his fascination with her breasts; when the kids were infants and Pieter put his hands under her shirt, inside her nursing bra, she’d laugh and say, “You’re just like Luke.” He twisted his hand down her belly, fighting the tight sheet. He found her pubic hair, and as she started to roll away from him again he used his other hand to grip her hipbone, digging his fingers into her.

  “You’re hurting me,” she said. “Pieter, stop.”

  She was twisting away and he clawed his hand, holding on, middle finger searching. When he thrust his fingers into her, she was dry. She cried out in pain, and he put his hand over her mouth and shoved his fingers into her again.

  Then he pulled out and away, flopping onto his back, covering his eyes with his hands.

  “What was that?” his wife said. “What the hell was that?”

  He pressed down on his eyes, too heartsick for words.

  Jordana put her hands on his; he was grateful. But no, she was trying to pull his hands away from his eyes. “Look at me,” she said. He resisted, pressing tighter, and saw blue. Her fingernail scratched his forehead. Then the energy went out of her and she let go of him. After a moment, he opened his fingers a little, peering out between them. Jordana knelt beside him, hands limp in her lap. She was crying, or something like crying: without tears, soundless and yet deep, her mouth open as though she couldn’t get enough air.

  How had they come to this? He should take his wife in his arms. Her face—gasping, eyes clenched—reminded him, involuntarily, of the way she looked during orgasm, and hating himself, hating them both, he rolled out of bed, stumbling to the bathroom, locking the door behind him.

  The orchestra practiced for two hours in the morning and four in the afternoon. They were having trouble adjusting from Pieter’s phrasing to Gyongyi Horvath’s. Her fame, it seemed to Pieter, was made up of a magical combination of factors. She played beautifully. She was young, striking. She liked to find pieces that weren’t usually performed or that had been written for other instruments. She was ambitious. Her playing, Pieter thought, was accessible, unafflicted by genius.

  He would have liked to say that to his wife: unafflicted by genius.

  Jordana didn’t come to the performance Saturday night. He didn’t believe she was staying away to punish him but because she was too angry to sit through the concert. He admired her, grudgingly. He would have been just the opposite—when he had a grievance, he claimed to be fine, going through his regular motions but refusing to give more than one-word responses, refusing sometimes even to look at her. All at once, he despised his own stinginess. It felt nearly unbearable to be trapped with himself.

  He didn’t feel so different at fifty-eight from the person he’d been at thirty-four, when it had seemed he would be a soloist and his life had been filled with promise. He’d married a girl madly in love with him, a girl who was beautiful and intelligent, vital, as unscathed-seeming as anyone he’d ever met. He had wanted passion in his life, even if it wasn’t his own.

  Angie slumped at her desk playing a computer game. She was wearing the clothes she’d worn for three days: sweatpants from Yale, a sweatshirt from Brown. The overhead light wasn’t on; the room’s only light came from the screen, where an animated figure moved down a gray stone corrider. He went to the window to check that Gyongyi was still in the car. She’d fallen asleep on the way to his house, where they were having dinner that night. “Do you know where your mother is?”

  She shook her head without turning around.

  “She’s supposed to be cooking for eight people!” The room was heaped with clothes, battered magazines, plates smeared with syrup and cigarette ash. Onscreen, the figure glanced around herself. She was elfin, with pointed ears, chain-mail armor pressed tight against round breasts. “Could you please turn that off?”

  Angie hit a key. The character on screen froze, crouching, sword raised. Angie half turned in her seat. “What?”

  “There is a famous cellist in the car. People are due here for dinner in twenty minutes, and your mother isn’t even back? Have you heard from her?”

  Angie shook her head. In the still screen’s trembling light her skin looked terrible, ashy and rashed. Without thinking, he took a step forward and touched her face. “Your meds—”

  She twisted away. “I’m taking them.”

  “I know, I know, that’s not. …” He looked around the room. On the floor by his foot was a bowl, its bottom crusted with milk. He bent down to pick it up.

  Downstairs, the front door opened and closed. Gyongyi Horvath’s voice, uncertain, called, “Hello?”

  He ran out to the head of the stairs. “Hello!”

  She twisted her head up. “I was asleep,” she said, sounding baffled.

  “Do you want a glass of wine? There’s wine in the kitchen. No, wait. Never mind. I’ll come down.” He poked his head back into Angie’s room. Quietly, he said, “Why don’t you get dressed? Come meet Gyongyi Horvath. Have a glass of wine. Just for five minutes.”

  “I can’t have wine. In case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Come down anyway.”

  “Just because you hate being social and Mom’s not here, it doesn’t mean I have to—to do your …”

  He waited to see if she could go on, then said, “I didn’t think that. It’s just—it would be nice for yo
u to leave this room.”

  “It would be nice for you if I cleaned up. If I was a credit to you, if I looked like a nice daughter and not a fat embarrassment.”

  He walked to the closet. Most of the wire hangers were bare, but on one he found a blue skirt and blouse she used to wear. He carried them over to the bed. She held her hands over the keyboard, watching him, her eyebrows raised.

  “Are we done?” she asked.

  He spread his hands apart. Angie turned away and started the game. Onscreen, the sword slashed down. Trying to think what to say, he watched Angie’s character battle a troll. No noise accompanied the blows, only quick, uneven bursts of typing.

  Jordana got home forty minutes later. By then, their guests had arrived; Pieter had gotten them into the living room with wine and was in the kitchen, trying to figure out what the hell they were going to do for dinner.

  She came in carrying paper grocery bags, kissed him quickly on the side of the mouth. She had on her work clothes, a brown shirt and black jeans: not elegant but not scandalously shabby. “Protesters,” she said. “Everything took twice as long all day. How’s Angie?”

  “The same.” She was acting so normally that he was caught off guard, having trouble focusing his anger, though he could feel it inside him, immense. “We have guests in the living room.”

  “You can go be with them. I’ll make dinner.”

  “It’s already almost eight.”

  “I got chicken,” she said, reaching down into one of the bags and pulling out, unbelievably, a plastic container holding a roast chicken.

  “You bought takeout?”

  “I’ll make a salad. There’s good bread. You go be with your guests.”

  “Gyongyi Horvath is here. We have her CDs. We can’t serve chicken from the IGA.”

  Very slowly, his wife said, “It’s just a chicken. They roast it. It will taste like roast chicken.”

  “There isn’t the smell of cooking. It’s going to be obvious we didn’t cook it.”

  “I didn’t cook it, you mean. So what?”

  He hit his fist twice lightly against the counter. Then he smiled. “You were with someone.”

  Immediately he was terrified. He had said the thing he was determined not to. Exposed to air, it would begin to rust, turn corrosive.

  Jordana put her head down on her arms on the counter. When she straightened up again, she looked enormously tired. And something else: old.

  “I worked twelve hours today,” she said. “I spent my lunch hour arguing with the insurance company. Clozaril’s only in their formulary for schizophrenics. Fifteen-year-old girls shouted at me that I’m a murderer. Now I’m putting together dinner for your friends.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you—”

  Jordana had a small, distant smile on her face. “You know I what?”

  “I know you’re—that you’re not going—”

  She kept smiling. Falsely light, she said, “Not going to leave?”

  “Are you going to leave?”

  She was still smiling, but the corner of her mouth began to tremble. She turned away and stepped to the counter, lifting the lid off one of the chickens. A cloud of steam rose into her face. The rich smell made his empty stomach contract painfully. Her back to him, his wife said, “Go be with your important guests.”

  In the living room, Pieter threw himself into the nearest conversation. They argued about people they all seemed to know, Deanna and Jean-Luc. No: they were talking about television characters, Star Trek.

  Fidel, the conductor, said, “Oh, crap.” He’d dropped a glass. It had bounced on the soft Oriental rug, but there was a dark, wet splotch.

  “It’s okay.” Pieter’s voice came hearty and false. “It’s nothing.” Kneeling stiffly to blot the carpet, he remembered gathering the bits of coffee cup after Jordana threw it at him, the moment he had begun to love her back. Later he’d found a bruise, blue and tender, above his left nipple.

  It was hard to stand; he had to grasp at the back of a chair. His hand was ridged with pale veins. He pulled himself up, then took his hand off the chair and turned it over. His heart was beating fast and the pale fingertips trembled, an almost imperceptible vibrato.

  A dip in the conversations told him that someone had entered the room. He turned, thinking, Jordana. Thinking she had softened toward him, at least this much.

  But it was Angie who stood there. She wore the blue skirt and shirt that he’d laid out for her. He remembered now that these had been the clothes she’d worn when interviewing for college. The skirt was tight across her hips, and the shirt gaped between buttons, showing the pale skin of her stomach. On her face was an expression that shocked him: such embarrassment, such longing for acceptance, that he had to look away.

  Part Three

  Thirty-three

  Iowa. The hot night air carried the smell of mown grass and, fainter, of chemicals and manure on the invisible surrounding fields. He and Wendy had been driving since midafternoon, and when Luke got out of the car he found himself stiff and dizzy. Driving, Wendy didn’t like to stop for anything—not to eat, not to shake off some of the road’s hypnosis, not to look at scenery.

  She released her seat belt, opened her door, started to pull things out of the backseat. They were on a short suburban street: Wendy’s father wasn’t a farmer but a bookkeeper for farms. It was nine o’clock, and a few shreds of orange light still clung to the horizon. Luke went to help her with their bags. From all around them came the swishing arc of sprinklers over square and vacant lawns.

  “This is nice of you,” she said. The dimness made her face look white, floating, almost ghostly.

  “I wanted to come.”

  “I know. That’s why it’s nice of you.”

  Her younger sister, Julie, was getting married in a few days. Wendy lifted her pink bridesmaid’s dress out of the car, sweeping her other arm underneath so she carried it the way that bridegrooms carry brides, and started up to the house.

  After she’d fucked that guy at the party, they’d broken up for more than a year. They hadn’t even stayed friends during that time; if they saw each other on campus, they talked awkwardly, and then he was usually in a shitty mood the rest of the day. He knew that Wendy had dated a med student for a while; he’d started seeing a girl, Reina, who lived in one of the co-ops. She was easygoing and pretty and wore tinkling silver anklets from Nepal. He’d been excited about her, had even wondered if he loved her.

  Then, six months ago, his mother had called to say she’d left his father and moved across town. He was surprised to find his eyes filling with tears. He missed Wendy so much, all of a sudden, that he’d had to sit down on the bed.

  The day’s sticky heat was only just now beginning to dissolve, and his T-shirt clung damply to his shoulder blades. Wendy shifted the dress so that she was holding it with her chin. Under the porch light, her freckles stood out, rusty against her pale skin. Fishing in her shorts pocket for the house key, she muttered, “Who would get married in August?”

  “Maybe she’s pregnant.”

  “Maybe,” Wendy said.

  “Really?”

  “No.” She found the key. Of course she would still own, and be able to find, the key to her old house.

  The car was packed with his few things; he would drive home to New Hampshire after Julie’s wedding. He wanted to be closer to Angie, and he wanted Wendy to go with him, but she insisted she couldn’t leave Madison. She and Kim were planning to move into a smaller apartment together. She had a job as a research assistant for her ex-professor—finally, something besides waitressing—that would last into the winter, possibly beyond. He felt, though, that she was wavering; this weekend might help change her mind.

  Wendy had the door open. Air-conditioning, with its peculiar Saranwrap smell, enfolded him. Without looking, she dropped her keys into a bowl on the front hall table. “We’re here!” she called. “We’re home!”

  “In the kitchen!”

  Wendy’s
mother sat in the breakfast nook, pink satin puddled around her. She made a gesture of pushing back from the black horsehead of the sewing machine, but didn’t actually get up. “Guinevere. Lukas.”

  Cammie said, “Mom, it’s Luke.” She half stood, giving Wendy and Luke quick one-armed hugs. “Mom thinks the world is full of people shortening their rightful names.”

  He’d almost forgotten that Wendy’s full name was Guinevere. Julie, the bride, lifted her hands full of ribbon and paper in a gesture to show she couldn’t hug. “Sorry. Programs.” All three sisters had been cheerleaders, but to Luke only Julie—Juliet—looked the part: yellow hair, round breasts, easy smile. Cammie and Wendy were paler and smaller, with fine, slightly pinched features. Cammie had pale red hair, while Wendy’s was much darker, almost maroon. When he’d first met Wendy, she’d looked like a small-town girl, but seeing her with her sisters he realized how she’d changed: hair unpouffed, eyes unlined, legs freckled in cut-off jeans and black fake-Teva sandals. Her sisters wore pleated khaki shorts and white Keds and tennis socks, the kind with a small pastel pom-pom behind the ankle. Mrs. Miles wore the same things. She was a thin woman with ropy tendons in her neck and arms. According to Wendy, she was never not on a diet. Once, for three months, she’d eaten only seafood and vitamin C tablets.

  “Camelia, are the snaps by you?”

  Cammie poked under the programs and magazines until she found a cardboard of snaps, which she handed to their mother.

  Luke had been here once before, for Thanksgiving his junior year. At night, Wendy had come down to the basement den where he was staying. In the laundry room, the part of the house farthest from her parents, they made love against the dryer. Wendy bit his shoulder as she came, and the surprising pain had made him come too, so suddenly and so hard that he felt it all the way up his spine, down his arms, into the small, humming bones of his hands. The next morning, at breakfast, Wendy and her mother and sisters kept jumping up to get napkins or turn the bacon. Their bare feet all had the same square nails, the same high blue arch. The quick patter across the cool clean linoleum had pleased and vaguely aroused him.