Laura went into the bedroom and lay down. She was still not yet entirely well. She still had headaches and weak spells. She saw how it was going to be, how everyone would keep their distance now, how she would be a part of Gabe’s feud because she was a part of Gabe.
It was different for him, he hadn’t grown up here. He’d come to the university from one of the prosperous Chicago suburbs. Everyone here was a chapter in his life, not the whole of it, even she, Laura, was a chapter, a portion. But Laura had known some of these now-discarded friends for longer than she had her husband. Knew their brothers and sisters, knew what they’d looked like in the seventh grade and who had been the first to get their driver’s license. It wasn’t as if she wouldn’t see them anymore. They would just turn away and go on without her.
Gabe came into the room then and lay down next to her on the bed, fitting his front to her back. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired.”
“Yeah, that flu kicked our butts.”
They were quiet for a while. Laura wanted to go to sleep and wake up and leave all the wrong, stupid, and complicated parts of what had happened behind. Gabe said, “It’s OK. It’s OK if it’s just you and me.”
But it wasn’t, and it wouldn’t be. There would always be other people, you couldn’t shut yourself in or shut them out. Gabe was the smartest person she’d ever known. He knew so much about things like computers, chemistry, electronics, hard, complicated, brainy things. She thought that his being so smart was what made him stubborn. She said, “Let’s let a little time go by. Give everybody a chance to calm down.”
“I’m perfectly calm. Do I seem not calm to you?” Laura felt him shift his weight and roll away from her. Now he would be sulky and she would have to talk him out of it. But she didn’t mind that part because after all, everyone said you had to work at a marriage, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, and wasn’t this what they meant? He had chosen her, out of everyone else in the entire world, and she had chosen him. Now it was time to make all the words mean something. There was a thrilling, adult quality to it all.
They had been so very young.
Laura was part of a volunteer group that did fund-raising and work projects for the public library. She liked that it was a responsible, public-interest, good-citizen thing to do, and she also liked the library itself, which she’d been visiting since she was a child. The library was one of the Carnegie buildings, with a temple-like front entrance up a flight of limestone steps. Inside, the lobby had high, vaulted ceilings. People spoke in hushed, echoing voices that always seemed to Laura like the cool and orderly sound of all that collected and transmitted knowledge.
One of the other volunteers was a woman named Jeanine, who was the girlfriend of Ian, the man Gabe had wrestled with. The group had a meeting scheduled a few days after she’d had her unsatisfactory talk with Gabe. She’d see Jeanine there; maybe there would be a chance to set things right.
She got to the meeting early, hoping to have a chance to talk, but Jeanine got there late. She found a seat at the big table at the far end from Laura and didn’t look over at her, but then, there was the meeting itself to pay attention to. Jeanine wasn’t a friend, exactly; she was too cool and self-contained, one of those head-turning girls who are always conscious of their own value. Laura was only another hopeful girl trying to get someone to notice her. She had not had a notably successful adolescence. But she and Jeanine had known each other since high school, knew everyone each other knew. Jeanine and Ian were the ones who had the parties, the ones who kept the ball rolling. Laura didn’t want to stay on their bad side.
The meeting was over. Jeanine was out of her chair and through the door before Laura could get to her. Laura caught up with her in the parking lot. “Jeanine! Wait up.”
Jeanine stopped and opened her handbag to find her keys. She had a small leather bag on a chain, the kind that was expensive for no good reason. “Hey, can I talk to you?” Laura said once she’d reached her.
“I have to be somewhere,” Jeanine said, managing to sound both bored and impatient. She had short, dyed black hair that she wore in bangs across her forehead, like a 1920s movie star. And Laura should have stopped right there, backpedaled, said sure, some other time. But she was in a rush to get things settled, and to demonstrate her own blamelessness.
“It’ll just take a sec. I’m sorry about the other night, I don’t know what Gabe was thinking.”
“Maybe you should ask him.”
“I guess he wasn’t really thinking, you know, it was one of those crazy times when everybody’s drinking too much—”
“He said that Ian had the political smarts of a third-grader. And that third-graders were actually smarter.”
“Oh, well, that’s . . .”
“He said a lot more. All of it nasty.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. I’m sorry.”
“In Ian’s own house. Then he throws a punch while Ian’s back is turned. Which is so classy.”
“I guess . . . Gabe has a problem.”
“You know who else has a problem? You do, if you go along with his bullshit.” Laura started to say that she didn’t, she didn’t go along with it at all, but Jeanine was still running hot. “Why are you following around after him, apologizing? Why isn’t he apologizing? Huh?”
“I’m hoping he will. Apologize. Men, you know.” A sisterly appeal. They all knew what was wrong with men, didn’t they? If Gabe had won the fight, or at least landed some good punches he could brag about, Laura was pretty sure he’d be magnanimous and willing to forget the whole thing.
Jeanine wasn’t buying any of it. She said, “I really do have to go now. I’m meeting my mom, we have some shopping to do.”
“Sure, say hi to her. Maybe you can talk to Ian . . .”
“And say what? You’re sorry your husband’s a big jerk? We should feel bad for you? I don’t. You were always so impressed by the smart guys. So-called smart. It should have been by your picture in the yearbook, ‘Most Likely to Marry an Asshole.’ ”
“That’s not fair, Jeanine.”
“So he acts like a prick and we’re supposed to give him a pass because, what, he’s such a superior being? Him and his computer talk. I never heard anything so boring. There’s something really wrong with you.”
Laura turned and fled. She reached her own car and it was as if she had never driven before, had to think through the pedals and the steering.
She couldn’t remember a time when she’d been attacked in such a way. It left what felt like a bruise on her heart, something that would darken and stay sore for a long time. She thought Jeanine was probably right about her. Other people were always right about her, saw her mistakes and flaws more clearly than she did herself.
But right about Gabe? No. They didn’t know him as she did, the caring part of him, the goofy, funny part, the times he made her laugh like crazy over nothing at all. He was an outsider, he didn’t bother to hide his intelligence, he had his prickly, sarcastic moments, and they resented all that.
She cried a little, which was another stupid thing. What had she done that was so awful, besides try and smooth things over? Was she really such a terrible person?
She couldn’t tell Gabe about any of it. He’d just start in again about everything that was wrong with everybody else.
Three days later she got a call from one of the librarians. This was not a usual thing. “Hi Shelly, what’s up?” Trying to sound brisk and cheerful, although Shelly was neither of these things herself. Shelly wasn’t one of the nice librarians, who smiled and helped little kids find books. She was more the kind who told them to go blow their nose and then wash their hands.
“Laura, I’m sure you know why I’m calling.”
“Not really.” No clue.
“It’s about the magazines. The ones that rotate out of the displays.”
“Yes,” Laura said, switching her tone to one of mild impatience, although she knew now what was happening, and wh
y. She felt the cold touch of disaster.
“Those magazines are meant for prisons and the county nursing home. It has been reported that you’re taking them for your personal use.”
It has been reported. By which mean-mouthed, black-dyed bitch? Laura said, “I didn’t think . . .”
She’d scooped up a few of the ones without covers, with wadded-up or torn pages. A few of them, a few times. Jeanine had seen her and had stored it up to humiliate her at this later date.
She said, “They were damaged. No one would want them.” She would have been embarrassed to give them away as charity.
“Laura, that’s for the librarians to determine. If you still have any of the magazines, I’m going to have to ask you to return them. And in the future, do not remove any library property.”
“I’m sorry. I already threw them out.” Thank God Gabe wasn’t home to overhear this.
“Because any further such incidents—”
Laura hung up the phone. She didn’t go back to the library again for years. Years and years.
It was the start of one of the most unhappy times of her life. Their routine, hers and Gabe’s, went on pretty much as before, except that they either went out alone or stayed home. Gabe kept a lid on his drinking. There were days, whole weeks, when he did not drink at all. This was to demonstrate how little its hold was on him. He would do this from time to time over the coming years, and it was successful, except for those times when it was not.
They were pleasant and mannerly with each other. Laura supposed that as far as Gabe was concerned, everything was working out well. They had separated themselves from the people he did not wish to see and they were fine, weren’t they? He’d been right about that. He would keep on being right about things and they would keep on being fine.
Laura was bewildered by the turn her life had taken. She missed her friends, or the people who she had thought were her friends. Maybe they had always felt a secret contempt for her. If she caught a glimpse of any of them in a grocery store parking lot or picking up the dry cleaning, she hurried to turn her face away and retreat. She lived in dread of people finding out about the humiliating episode with the library, small-scale and farcical as it was—that she had been accused of stealing something, even a worthless something, that the library staff had seen fit to intervene! For all she knew, it was now a topic of general conversation and people were having a good laugh over it. For all she knew, no one and none of them had ever wished her well.
She told Gabe she didn’t have time for the library group anymore, she’d burned out on it. She didn’t want to tell him the whole story and have him say it was no big deal and she should rise above it, get over it. Advice he probably wouldn’t have taken himself. But even if he was right, there would have been no comfort in it.
One night she said she thought they should get some counseling. “Counseling?” He was genuinely surprised. “Why do you think we need to do that?”
She had rehearsed this part. “To help us identify our issues. Our goals. So we can communicate. Communicate better, I mean.”
“Sweetie, what’s this about?” He was working at the computer. It was difficult to find a time when he was not at the computer, or watching television. But now he turned it off and swung his chair around to face her. “Are you mad about something? Unhappy?”
“No.” She was going to have to find some way of saying yes. “But I think it would make some things easier if we talked them out with a third party.”
“Huh.” He frowned, as if considering it. He didn’t want to do it and was looking for reasons. “I have to tell you, a third party is the last thing I want to have snooping around in our business. I don’t trust most of them anyway, I mean, what, they have a certificate or something? What does that mean?”
“They have training. Experience. People go to them all the time, they can help.”
“Help.” It was a trick he had, repeating something so that it turned into irony and was undercut.
“Never mind,” Laura said. “Forget I brought it up.”
“No, hey, I expect they help some people. The really bad-off ones. Believe me, if we were anything like my parents, I’d be dragging us in to a counselor. A lawyer too.”
Gabe’s parents had been famously unhappy and combative before they divorced. Afterward too, he said. Laura wouldn’t know. She’d only met them once, at the wedding. Each of them had attended with a new companion and had made a number of amusing, vicious remarks about the other.
“I mean,” he went on, “I know I spend too much time working, I know you resent it. But I’m busting my ass for you. For us. You know that, right?”
She nodded. She wasn’t sure if she knew it or not.
“I’ll try not to be so wrapped up in it. I’ll schedule some breaks. That’s what you want, right? Me to pay more attention to you?”
“You make me sound like a dog that wants somebody to throw the ball.”
“You’re still mad about that thing with Ian, aren’t you? You think it was all my fault.”
“I don’t know whose fault it was.”
“I tried to fit into your old gang. I tried for your sake.”
“They aren’t my gang, Gabe, I don’t have a gang. And there are some people we met together.”
He raised a hand, both to concede the point and to wave it away. “You know what would be great sometime? If you were on my side. Totally. Like married people are supposed to be.”
“Of course I’m on your side, you’re being ridiculous.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t feel that way.”
“Ridiculous,” she said again, but Gabe had gone silent. He turned the computer on and waited for the screen to brighten. She could keep talking if she wished. She could have pointed out that this was exactly the kind of issue that a counselor could help you sort out. But there was no way she could make herself heard.
Now she felt guilty, as he had no doubt intended. Because he wasn’t entirely wrong. She’d coaxed him into friendships with the people she knew, spent time explaining them and telling him stories. She thought he’d wanted to know things about her, as Laura wanted to know everything about him, everything she’d missed before they met. She’d wanted Gabe to like the people she liked and get along with them, why wouldn’t she? She’d thought he did, but now there was this drawing back, and it seemed she had gone about everything wrong.
She was lonely without them. She was lonely in her marriage. What if that never changed? What if your life sneaked up behind you, tapped you on the shoulder, and said, Guess what, I’m already here.
* * *
Laura took the car in for an oil change to a new garage, a franchise that had sent out coupons. She sat in the waiting room as other customers came and went. A television mounted up high in a corner was tuned to a soap opera, nothing she ever watched, and it was restful to watch the pretend people getting so worked up about their pretend problems. Different mechanics came in to discuss air filters and synthetic oil with car owners and to ring up the charges. When her name was called, Laura presented her credit card and signed the receipt. The man at the register said, “You don’t remember me, do you?”
He had blond hair curling around his ears and over his collar, the way guys who worked in garages wore it long. Wide-set blue eyes and a high-bridged nose and wide, curving mouth. His shirt was embroidered with his name, Bob. Laura said, “I’m sorry, I guess I don’t.”
“I went to school with Mark.”
“Oh, sure.” She still couldn’t place him. Everybody had known Mark. He’d played football and run track and spread himself around. “Bob . . .”
“Bob Malloy.”
Laura nodded, running through her mental files. Bob, Bob, there had been any number of them.
“I ran cross-country,” he said, and maybe she did remember him. A tall, skinny kid with legs like a heron’s, though she couldn’t recall one thing about him or one thing he might have said. But it was enough to claim acquaintance
ship.
“So what’s old Mark up to these days?”
“Law school. He’s at University of Pennsylvania.”
“Well, he always was a smart guy,” Bob Malloy said, stapling her receipts together and handing them to her. Laura didn’t ask him what he was up to these days, since it was all around them. He indicated Laura’s hand with its freight of rings. “You got married.”
“Yes, almost two years now.”
“Any kids?”
“Not yet.” Another customer came in behind her and needed his attention, and besides, Laura was done with announcing the headlines of her life, the way you did on such occasions. “I’ll tell Mark I saw you.”
“Yeah. Law school.” He made an owlish face of mock amazement. “Tell him I bet I can still dust him in the eight K.”
Laura said that she would. A few weeks later, when the car developed a shimmy at high speeds, she took it back to the same garage. Gabe was too tied up at school and it was easier for her to run such errands.
“The dreaded shimmy,” Bob Malloy said. “Leave it here, we’ll take a look at it. You need a ride to work?”
He drove an old Pontiac with patches of Bondo along the hood and one fender. Laura guessed you wouldn’t trust a mechanic who drove a new car. You wanted the guy who could keep a wreck going for a long time. He asked her what her job was and she told him and she could see him chewing it over, trying to figure out exactly what it was she did. “What line of work is your husband in? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“He’s getting his master’s degree in computer science. He’s doing a little work for a software company.”
“Now, there’s something I couldn’t know less about,” Bob Malloy said cheerfully. “Computers. If you can’t fix it with a wrench, I’m out of my depth.”
Laura might have told him that Gabe wasn’t the best at wrench work—really, he didn’t do household repairs—but that would have seemed disloyal.
He said he’d call her once they knew what the problem was, and Laura said she hoped it wasn’t anything expensive, and he said it might be a tire problem, or front-end alignment, or well, those were the easiest things. It felt funny, comical, to be getting out of such an old, beat-up car and she wondered whether anybody she knew was watching, and wondering who Bob was.
A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Page 9
