(Is that a noise in the hallway? A footstep? She listens, listens with her entire being, willing her body to act as a microphone, to pick up the slightest vibration coming from the floor outside the room. This is ridiculous, she tells herself, ridiculous. The sound is not repeated.)
In this regard, when the ring arrived, it was a good thing, the addition of it to George’s wardrobe granting the clothes a theatrical aspect, making them sit easier on him, as if he were the host of one of those Saturday-night horror features from when they were kids, Creature Feature or Chiller Theater. Though Joyce was repulsed by the feel of it, George claimed not to notice what she was describing, which she found difficult to believe, but for once she could not tell if he was lying, and so allowed her reaction might be caused by some form of an allergy. At first, he kept the ring from his finger until the moment he was sitting down at the computer for a webcast, or on his way out the door to a reading or convention. The rest of the time, he kept it in the square wooden box it came in, on the nightstand on his side of the bed, next to the pile of books he’s forever making his way down, and while it’s melodramatic, she’s come to regard the unfinished blond cube as a coffin for the thing (the creature) that over the past two months has spent more and more time on her husband’s finger, as he has changed in ways small and large, which gradually made her nervous for him, and now afraid of him.
His turtlenecks, for example. George has never liked turtlenecks, has declared in no uncertain terms his inability to tolerate the feel of the collar around his throat, as if he’s being strangled (for much the same reason, he’s been reluctant to wear a scarf in all but the coldest weather, and never for long, tugging it from his neck as soon as he’s inside a car or building). Joyce doesn’t share his phobia, but she respects it, and she’s always made sure to remind all of her family members asking what to buy her husband for his birthday or Christmas to steer clear of turtlenecks (scarves, too). And then, maybe a month ago, when George stopped in the living room to kiss her goodbye on his way for a reading down in Providence, he was dressed in a gray turtleneck. So startled was she by the sight, words deserted her; honestly, had he been shirtless, bare-chested, she would have been only slightly more surprised. Not least among the questions which crowded her brain after his departure was a practical one: how had he had time to shop for new clothing? Between his teaching (and its attendant grading and meetings of one kind or another), driving Lawrence to basketball and SAT prep and writing (and its attendant activities, such as driving to the Brown University Bookstore to be part of a reading with a couple of his friends), George’s plate had been beyond full, it was buried under extra helpings of meat and potatoes, vegetables tumbling off the sides, gravy spilling over its rim to stain the tablecloth. Of course he could have ordered it online, which he’s done for half the T-shirts folded in his dresser, but she hadn’t noticed any packages arriving in the last couple of days, nor had she noticed any clothing-related charges the last time she looked over the credit card accounts. The turtleneck had been joined by four more, in charcoal, navy, black, and maroon, which together became his default choice for writing events, then for teaching, and more recently, for wearing around the house. Upon his return from Providence, Joyce asked about the shirt. But his reply, a shrugged, “I decided it was time for a change,” was as unsatisfying as it was banal. There was no way she could see, however, of pursuing the matter that wouldn’t sound just the slightest bit unhinged. After all, it was only a shirt. Yet exactly such small changes in someone’s behavior signaled greater shifts far beneath the surface of their psyches, the wobbles in the seismograph’s needle indicating tectonic shifts miles underground. Joyce would like to say she’s grown accustomed to the turtlenecks, except she hasn’t. With each passing day, she’s had a mounting suspicion that the high collars surrounding George’s throat conceal something—a horrible wound or wounds to his neck, long gouges and tears running up the soft skin, muscle raw and red visible and bloody, as if an animal, a dog or wolf, savaged his throat.
A nonsensical idea, yes, though when was the last time she saw her husband’s neck uncovered? He’s been staying up past her bedtime, rising before her in the morning, a schedule he’s attributed to the new book he’s started (whose plot, a father and son who may be the last vampires living [undead?] on the run cross-country from the men hunting them, has likely influenced her fantasy about his throat). Even the times they’ve had sex, it’s been in the dark—not a new thing, but one George has gently insisted on, saying it’s more romantic. While she can’t recall noticing anything different about the contours of his neck with the lights out, the last couple of times she’s avoided kissing the skin there, afraid of what her lips might touch, or her tongue taste. At least he’s removed the ring before slipping under the covers with her (or so he’s assured her—though certainly she would have noticed if he hadn’t [wouldn’t she?]).
Were it not for the trio of incidents following his switch to turtlenecks, which have left her lying here in (her) bed, terror rendering her immobile, Joyce might be able to write off her reactions to the change in George’s clothing as silly, a case of her imagination not just running wild, but belting and buckling itself into a race car and roaring around the inside of her skull at two hundred miles an hour. This trinity has reinforced her intuition, her conviction, of the shirts signaling an ongoing (and sinister) transformation in her husband.
The first took place during Elizabeth, the storm the week after Thanksgiving, which knocked out power to the house for a day and a half—inconvenient, but not as bad as it could have been. The night the lights went off, George was restless, full of nervous energy, roaming the house, engaging in brief, fragmentary exchanges with her and Lawrence in the living room, where they were playing Stratego, and with Julia in the kitchen, where she was doing her homework. He skated over the hardwood floors in his socks, broke out in funny little dances to the music blaring from the speaker synced to his phone (the music another weird detail, big-band-style stuff, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, pleasant tenor vocals riding melodies comprised of horns and piano, one of the [many] musical styles George has done nothing to conceal his disdain for, condemning it as sentimental, inauthentic—yet here he was, not only shuffling his feet to it, but singing along to most of the lyrics). His behavior was typical of the way he became in the run-up to a major event, his birthday, or Christmas, or a concert he was looking forward to, so full of energy he might as well have been throwing off sparks; albeit, there was a certain degree of tension mixed in with his restlessness, as there was the day before an important review of one of his novels was set to drop. He wasn’t exactly bad-tempered, but his normal reactions to things were heightened. As far as Joyce knew, there was no review of his books imminent, which made her attribute his mood to the storm whipping the trees outside. This weather made him anxious, and when the power failed, and the house went dark, and he shouted, “Perfect!” she took his exclamation as a further form of (over)compensation. For a moment, she and Lawrence sat in blackness, the game board with its thinning ranks of rectangular blue and red pieces vanished, Frank Sinatra singing, “I’ve got you under my skin,” filling the lightless air. “Hang on,” Lawrence said, “I’ll get my phone,” but, “Save it,” she told him, “Dad’s lighting the candles,” which he was, small tongues of yellow and orange flame flaring to life and settling atop the thick candles George had positioned throughout the kitchen. In their gradually spreading glow, Joyce saw her husband continuing his amateur dancing, slipping over the floor from one candle to the next, a lit match before him in his outstretched hand.
Afterward, she would think she had registered something off about George from the moment the first candle returned him to view, but it would take the addition of another few candles for her to identify what it was: the feet gliding across the kitchen’s hardwood surface were hovering six inches above it. Her double take prompted a laugh from Lawrence, who did not s
ee what was happening at the other end of the hallway separating living room from kitchen. Their son’s laughter brought a glance from George, who saw Joyce seeing him, seeing him performing this impossible—the word that occurred was unreasonable—act, and skated out of view, into the dining room, still half a foot from the floor. It was such a bizarre (unreasonable) experience, she did not know how to respond, to process it. Neither of the kids witnessed anything, which of course they wouldn’t have, couldn’t have, because there was no way it could have happened, what she had seen was a variety of hallucination, there was no other tolerable explanation, even if had lasted for what felt like several seconds, far in excess of the usual tricks of perception that transformed the coat rack at the front door into a tall man standing in the corner. Maybe she would not have felt quite as unsettled by what she had(n’t) watched if she could have spoken to George about it, but when she had broached the topic (once the power was safely returned [why did she wait till then, why had she put off approaching him until every light in the house was shining and the TV on besides?]) he had met her incipient remark with a smile whose joy had unnerved her almost as much as the sight of his feet resting in the air. He knew, George’s expression said, he knew what she was going to ask him, had been waiting for her to do so, because she had to, it was part of the game, and the answer was yes, she had seen exactly what she thought she had, and it was the start of something…(unreasonable)…for which she was not sure of the word, something connected to the turtlenecks and the ring, yes, the prop once clinging to the fingers of actors whose greatest fame had come from playing versions of the same character. Confronted by his smile, Joyce decided on the spot she did not want to be made privy to whatever secret was powering it, and had switched her question to who was picking up Lawrence from basketball tomorrow. Absent her invitation, George had not offered any information of his own. (Marriage, she has come to realize, is as much about what you don’t need to know about your spouse as it is the opposite; though this case has steered the principle into dangerously uncharted waters.)
The second incident took place a couple of weeks later, on a Tuesday night in the midst of Christmas season, when Lawrence was struck by a nasty stomach bug which confined him to one of the living room’s couches, where he had access to the PlayStation and the large-screen TV and was five running steps from the downstairs toilet. In what her father would have called the wee small hours of the night, Joyce had awakened, pushed from sleep by the urging of a bladder whose resilience had not been the same since the birth of her second child, and after relieving herself in the master bathroom, decided to check on Lawrence, whom sickness reduced from aspiring adult to helpless child (a younger version of her son whom she appreciated the opportunity to visit, however much she hated to see his cheeks flushed, his eyes glassy with fever). She padded down the cold stairs and through the dining room to the kitchen, from which she could see the bright rectangle of the TV at the far end of the darkened living room, hear the soundtrack of whatever game he was playing, an electronic melody whose notes ran through the same progression over and over again. As she walked toward the couch on which her son lay, she grew aware of another sound beneath the game’s music, a liquid, messy noise, as of someone slurping soup from a bowl. She hadn’t noticed an open can of Campbell’s on the counter beside the microwave, but neither had she been looking for one, and it was a good sign if Lawrence had regained enough appetite to seek out sustenance more substantial than the Gatorade he had subsisted on the past twenty-four hours. There were grunts mixed in with the slurping, animal noises of hunger. Since she couldn’t see Lawrence’s head above the back of the couch, she assumed he was lying almost completely on his back, his shoulder wedged into the leftmost corner of the couch while he spooned soup into his mouth from the bowl balanced on his chest, his game controller on the carpet next to him. It was his preferred position for using the TV for gaming or watching movies (or to consume food while engaged in those activities) and though she was positive it couldn’t be as comfortable as he swore it was, she had learned which battles to pick, and this was not among them.
When she peered over the back of the couch, however, the sight to greet her was not what she had expected. For one thing, Lawrence was lying with his enormous (size 13) feet where she had thought his head would be, on his side, wrapped in the Patriots blanket whose home was the bathroom closet until someone in the family was sick and shivering and needed its well-washed comfort. For another, he was asleep—or she thought he was, because George was bent over him, his arms propped on the cushion to either side, his head inclined to his son’s neck. The instant she saw the two of them, George looked up, lifting his right hand from the cushions, fingers down. Backlit by the TV, his face was obscure, unreadable, the length of Lawrence’s exposed neck draped in the shadow cast by George’s left arm. “Just checking on him,” George said, the words seeming to originate to either side of Joyce, in the shadows clustered in the room’s corners. George maintained his position—his pose, she would later think it—for sufficient time for it to engrave itself on her brain’s folds, ensuring her memory of it would remain vivid and the memory stir another, one she could not retrieve on her own and so had employed the assistance of a Google image search to locate. After eight minutes of refining her terms, the search engine turned up the picture George’s pose had suggested, a still from one of the classics of silent film, Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, the vampire, Count Orlok, tilting his long white face from the neck of his final victim, his pale right hand held talons-down. Much was different about the scene: unlike the actor, her husband had a full head of curling hair, his ears did not rise to points, and there were no fangs taking the place of his incisors, not to mention, the figure over whom George was leaning was his son, whereas Count Orlok loomed above the young woman who had sacrificed herself to assure his destruction. More fundamentally, where the image of George was dark, the vampire’s was light; where the TV shone behind her husband, the rising sun cast its light behind the Count. It was as if the memory of George were the negative of the one from the movie, or maybe vice versa, she couldn’t decide. Of course it wasn’t necessary, but Joyce checked Lawrence’s neck after George rose to go upstairs to bed, only to find (of course) it marked by nothing more serious than a couple of days’ stubble.
Despite the evidence of her eyes, her fingertips, she has been plagued by the suspicion, the dread, of having missed something directly in front of her. When she’s asked herself what this could have been, she’s experienced a brief, startling vision of George’s mouth smeared with blood, his nose and cheeks wet with blood, bits and pieces of flesh clinging to his bloody mustache and beard, Lawrence’s throat chewed open below him, blood soaking the cushion under her son. It’s an image contradicted by Lawrence pushing past her in the morning to retrieve the orange juice from the fridge, by him leaving his sneakers at the foot of the stairs, instead of neatly on the mat with the other shoes, by him lying on the living room couch playing Outlast and talking to one of his friends on his phone. Still Joyce has not been able to shake the feeling, the conviction that there’s something she’s missing. She’s reminded of a series of books popular when she was a teenager, the ones whose pages appeared to be full of random geometric shapes until you held the book a certain distance from your face and allowed your eyes’ focus to relax, which brought a picture—usually a face—forward from what had been chaos. The problem is, the face promising to reveal itself is her husband’s, grown (monstrous) different and she is afraid to discover it.
(Is someone standing in the corner of her room? She isn’t sure.)
In fact, were it not for what has just happened on the stairs, the third incident, the worst yet, Joyce might very well let the sleeping bear lie (a favorite misquote of her father’s, one which has never seemed so appropriate—except “bear” could be swapped out for another animal even more outlandish, an ogre, maybe, or a dragon). Funny, it used to be, whenever she would read abou
t a woman remaining in a bad situation, a relationship or marriage grown toxic, she would think, Why didn’t you leave? You didn’t have to do anything dramatic, just get in the car and go somewhere, anywhere. In all fairness, the solution had been so simplistic, so self-evident that she had immediately recognized she was missing something important, a factor she has become familiar with these last several months, since the ring migrated from the movie screens of decades past to her husband’s finger. It’s a kind of inertia generated by her combined attachment to her family and her doubt of herself, her daylit skepticism about (over)reacting to turtlenecks, for God’s sake, of freaking out over what was likely a trick of the light, a self-generated special effect, of assuming George was imitating a scene from a silent movie when it was probably a case of his knees being stiff. No matter a part of her brain so ancient it warned her ancestors of the approach of saber-toothed tigers and cave bears has been murmuring, then saying, now screaming that she is under the same roof as something similar, a predator wearing her husband’s face and playing a sinister game with her, the kind of sport cats have with the mice they’re planning to kill and devour, it hasn’t been enough to prompt her to any action beyond what just took place on the stairs.
The same cluster of cells tucked deep within the folds of her brain had propelled her from a deep sleep, the kind of descent into unconsciousness she rarely experiences anymore, a consequence of who can count how many nights listening for sounds of distress from one child or the other. In a moment, her feet were on the floor and she was throwing open the bedroom door, traces of the dream she had been immersed in clinging to her, leaving her half thinking she was rushing through the labyrinthine house (in New Orleans?) her subconscious had plunged her into, the photos on the wall to her left windows to another place, a dream beyond her dream. The handful of footsteps it took her to reach the top of the stairs pulled her loose from the last of the fantasy, which meant the tall figure standing on the landing with its back against the wall was no further figment of her imagination, but an actual person, an intruder on his (its) way to the bedrooms, and even as she was thinking that this must have been what dragged her from sleep, her perception of this stranger in the house, she recognized him (it) as George, pressed against the wall he had convinced her to paint black, which in the darkness appeared one end of a great emptiness, an opening to a space of endless night. If asked, she would have described the rictus stretching his lips as a smile, but it could as easily have been the expression of someone in fantastic agony as of someone transported by joy. His hands were crossed over his heart in the position of a corpse laid out in its coffin, the ring on the middle finger of his right hand swollen, as if it were an oversize tick engorged with his blood. She wanted to flip the switch for the chandelier hanging to her left, bathe the scene in brilliant white light, but doing so would have required abandoning her post at the head of the stairs, which would have left access to the second floor open to the half-dozen steps it would have taken George to reach it, and Joyce was certain, she had never been as sure of anything, ever, she did not want this happen, the prospect filled her with dread so pronounced it was nauseating. The atmosphere of the stairwell was curiously thin, as if they were standing at the peak of a high mountain. She had no time to analyze her reaction: George was moving forward from the black wall, almost gliding over the carpet (she couldn’t say, exactly, the darkness was especially thick around him, draping his shoulders and wrapping his legs like a cape). Mouth dry, she said, “George.” The grin distorting his face did not shift, his eyes did not register her, but his advance halted. “No,” she said. “No. You can’t come up here. You have to—you have to go. Now.”
Final Cuts Page 38
