The Hollowed

by Jay Caselberg

  “So, Chris,” said her father, holding his saucer in one hand and gently resting his cup on it as he spoke. “You work at the university.”

  “Yes. Well, part-time. Teaching. I’m working towards my postgrad degree at the moment. Once I’m fully qualified, I intend to get a more permanent post there.”

  Stase’s father nodded. “Hmm, it’s a good job to have. A nice life if you can get it.”

  “Yes, I like to think so,” said Chris. “And you, Mr. Robins?”

  “Call me Alex,” he said. “No need to be so formal. Me, I’m a laborer.” He laughed. Chris must have shown traces of his surprise. “I push paper for a living,” he said. “No, seriously—middle management for a retail chain, but I’m surprised Anastasia hasn’t already told you that. Frances here works at the local hospital in administration. Both of us are hidden away in offices.”

  Chris nodded slowly. He glanced over at Stase, but she refused to meet his eyes.

  “So, have you been here long?” he asked. “I mean, here, in this house.”

  It was her mother’s turn to answer. “Oh, we’ve had this place about twenty years now. It’s a good house. Probably getting a little big for us now, with the children moving on, but you become attached, don’t you?”

  Chris knew that Stase had an older brother, but she didn’t talk about him. All he knew was that he was married with kids of his own. He guessed he’d meet him in due course as well. He nodded again and took a sip of his coffee. It was pleasant. They were pleasant. The whole thing was simply pleasant.

  Stase’s father, Alex, leaned forward in his chair, placing his cup and saucer gently down on the table.

  “So, do you love my daughter, Chris?” he said, folding his hands together in front of him.

  “Dad!” It was the first thing Stase had said since they’d entered the room.

  Chris looked at her, at what he presumed was feigned shock on her face, then looked back at Alex and smiled.

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “Very much.”

  Alex leaned back in his chair nodding.

  “Would you like some more coffee, Chris?” said her mother. “Perhaps you’d like one of those pastries now.”

  The whole thing had been completely untraumatic. It was nothing like the expectation that Stase had built in him. After the polite conversation petered out, Stase announced that they were going for a drive together to drop Chris back at his place and she’d be back in a while. They bid their farewells and headed out to the car. As they pulled away from the simple, comfortable house, Chris turned to Stase, a look of slight puzzlement on his face.

  “Okay, now that wasn’t so bad,” he said. “God, they were nothing like you led me to imagine. I was expecting something scary. They seem like really nice people.”

  Stase just shook her head. “Well, at least that’s done,” she said. “We can get on with planning what we have to do.”

  They were at an intersection, and he had to concentrate on the traffic for a moment before pulling out. “Wait,” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, that’s the whole meet-the-parents thing over and done with. We don’t have to do that again.”

  “I can’t see what your problem was,” Chris told her. “Why the big mystery? Why has it taken so long for this to happen?”

  “Simple,” she said. “Their life has nothing to do with what we’re going to do together. It’s my life, not theirs. It just wasn’t relevant to us, Chris. And now we can get on with things.”

  He chewed that over for a while in silence as they drove along. He still couldn’t quite fathom what it was, what had driven her to keep that whole part of her life away from him. Sure, it was a simple uncomplicated background with parents to match, and perhaps that was part of it. It was probably nothing like the image that Stase wanted to project to the world, about herself, about her life. It still felt uncomfortable though. This was the woman he was going to marry, and she was not only projecting something to the world, but she was projecting something other than the reality of her own life to him, her intended partner, as well.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A Narrow Path

  Of course, they spoke about the wedding in more detail. There were plans, things to arrange and organize, guest lists to deal with. When it came down to it, there was actually not that much for Chris to do. Stase took control of the whole thing with a firm hand. No expense would be spared. Anastasia was going to have a fuck off wedding at the best place available and the best photographer and the best string quartet and the best reception.

  She was going to impress the hell out of her family and friends and anyone else who cared to look. She was going to show them that she was somebody, and she told him so in no uncertain terms. She also told her parents, but most of those conversations happened in the privacy of her family home while Chris was elsewhere. This was Stase’s wedding and she didn’t want anything to interfere with her plans, not even Chris.

  As the planning progressed, Chris still being kept somewhat on the sidelines, Stase started making other gentle suggestions. At least, they were gentle at first. If they were going to have a proper life together, they had to be able to get a house and furniture and all the other things that went with being married. His part-time work at the university wasn’t going to sustain that. He had to think about what he was doing, assess what he really wanted. The frequency of the hints and subtle suggestions grew. Chris had to get a proper job. He protested that he had a proper job, a future, though inside he knew he was just really spinning his wheels. He argued that there was nothing wrong with university life. It wasn’t enough for Anastasia. She needed more from him. Chris didn’t have time to think about it. Events and Anastasia’s plans were sweeping him away. At the same time, they were also sweeping with them the bits and pieces of what Chris had imagined for himself.

  The marriage finally came and went in a blur that was almost too much to remember. Everything was happening too quickly: a sea of faces he didn’t know, introductions, being on show every moment with barely space to breathe. Chris spent half the wedding night hunched over a toilet bowl, his best man’s hand on his shoulder, unable to eat, unable to do little more than stand as the whole night swirled around him, watching and feeling as if he wasn’t even really there. Chris had a small selection of friends and his mother at the wedding, but his side was far outweighed by the friends and family that Anastasia owned. And as she owned them, they in turn owned the entire evening.

  They spent their wedding night in one of the top-class hotels with Chris staring at the ceiling wondering what the hell he had done. They didn’t make love; he just felt too ill. But then marriage wasn’t what it was before. There was no first night, not in the traditional sense. They’d had their first night over three years before and the wedding night was little more than a rubber stamp of what had already been and become.

  Chris was out in the real world now. He’d made the transition from academic life, looking for something that he could use to find a place in industry. His teaching experience held him in good stead, and the English actually added value. Eventually he found a job doing marketing in a small systems company. It may have been commission based, but Stase approved. It had the potential to generate the income stream they’d need. They found a house—ideal for the first home buyer—a small cottage that was enough to start, borrowing from both her parents and his mother to have enough funds to be able to make the purchase.

  Gradually, Chris made the transition from friend to boyfriend to husband. There’s a progression there. Boyfriend or partner, to husband, and then back to partner again. Partly, it was a reflection of the way changes occurred around them—the acceptable labels applied by society, but it was more than that. It was a mark of Anastasia’s own transition as she moved out into the world and wanted to establish her identity properly as an individual, an identity of her own rather than one bound to Chris or to her family as it had been. He didn’t realize then that there was another transit
ion yet to make. Life itself got in the way of subjecting the real future to true scrutiny. Suddenly, there was just too much to do and most of it was guided by Anastasia’s formative vision of where they were going to be. First thing was buying the house. It wasn’t going to be perfect, she knew, but it would be a launch platform to what they really wanted, and Anastasia had already decided what they really wanted.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Confidence

  One of the things about being a man is you can’t talk about stuff. You’re trained to it from the point where you first start being socialized. It doesn’t matter what generation you’re from, there’s still that socialization aspect, regardless of the trends that come and go. New Men aren’t much different from Old Men when it comes down to it. That social schooling is definitely a man thing as opposed to a woman thing. Women seem to be able to talk about anything with each other, the most detailed intimate particulars.

  Stase had told Chris a couple of times about things she had talked about with her girlfriends and he’d been horrified. Not only horrified; it had also left him feeling naked and exposed. The thought of revealing the sorts of details that Stase and her girlfriends seemed to discuss with ease just filled him with chill blankness. Chris had his own conception of what constituted privacy, and most of that stuff just didn’t fit within those boundaries.

  Stase seemed to have eased off on the whole seminar thing, so that was a partial relief, but some things still concerned him: her new circle of friends, the people who kept calling, the succession of parties. None of it included him and he could feel the void between them starting to expand. Once or twice over the past few weeks, Stase had talked about joint counseling sessions. The mere prospect filled Chris with another form of dread. He wanted nothing to do with some know-it-all social worker or psychologist who would fill the pair of them with a succession of platitudes. To his mind, counseling was a band-aid. It didn’t do anything to get to the real root of the problem. It was like the counseling sessions Stase herself had undertaken since the operation. He was convinced that they were more likely a cause of her new attitude than a source of any real help to her.

  When he thought about it, her seemingly desperate need to put something new in her life, whether confidence, self-esteem, or a new social circle, was a reaction to what had been taken away from her. Her dreams had been unfulfilled when the initial planning proposal was denied, and then the whole cancer thing had swept over her; then, shortly after, her dreams and plans had been dashed once more when their appeal was lost. Though she’d had a surgical excision, they hadn’t really solved the real problem within her. He wondered if perhaps the cancer had been some perverse joke, trying to fill her with something where she had been left hollowed by what the world had thrown at her. When they’d taken that away, she’d been left uncomfortably void without being able to explain it. Chris, distanced as he was from her, was unable to fill that void. Sometimes, the universe conspires within us and without us in weird ways.

  Intellectually, rationally, Chris could cope with being the target of Stase’s resentment, but every time he tried to do something that he thought might help her and thereby help their relationship, he was seen as the aggressor. Yet, at the same time, she sought out complete strangers to help her. After all, he was the one who lived with her, spent time with her, had shared things for years, who knew her. He thought that perhaps she could more easily shape the perceptions of virtual strangers to her version of her own perceived truth.

  Not long after she’d made her real recovery from her radiation therapy, Stase announced that she wanted to go off to a health spa and undergo a detox program. Chris didn’t think that was a very good idea at all. To go away to a country house and live on a diet of cabbage soup didn’t seem very smart for someone whose metabolism relied upon a finely balanced chemical input that Chris wasn’t sure was right in the first place. He was still wary about discussing that, but made his best efforts to bring up the subject and address the wisdom of what she was planning. She didn’t listen, wouldn’t listen, and within days, the whole thing was booked and paid for. He had no idea whether she’d informed them about her medication and really couldn’t ask. He drove her out to the place in the new car, an old country house set in its own grounds. A discrete sign sat at the edge of the highway, pointing to a small dirt road leading back over the hills. Chris nearly drove past it on the way up. As they negotiated what looked like a private road, eased through the narrow inner farm gate and headed up a long tree-lined drive leading to a graveled parking lot inset with a fountain, Chris cast a doubtful and speculative gaze over the whole place. He was put strangely in mind of country retreats for celebrities, the sorts of places where stars went to dry out.

  Inside, the place was just what he expected of a converted country house, except for the Laura Ashley wallpaper and the Scandinavian furnishings. The workers all wore white coats as if they were medical staff, but whether they were or not, Chris didn’t know. More likely, they were dieticians and massage therapists and group activity coordinators and all that sort of thing. He looked at it all with jaundiced eye. He knew precisely what they were there for, to milk as much as they could out of the prospective returning client. This was like the weekly visit to the day spa gone mad.

  He accompanied Stase to her room and helped her get settled in. It was a small room with the same floral wallpaper that stretched throughout the facility, but the tall single bed and the lounge chair beside it looked comfortable enough. Stase had brought a stack of magazines with her and there was a television on a bracket on the wall, enough to keep her relatively amused for the time she was there. Still skeptical, but reconciled to letting her get on with it, he said his goodbyes, headed out and got back in the car for the long drive back home.

  As the miles of highway slipped past beneath him, he thought about the way she was reacting to him. All of it was starting to weigh heavily: the resentment, the refusal to listen to anything he had to say, her determined commitment to reach out and beyond anything that seemed entirely reasonable in what she wanted and what she wanted to own. It was as much owning as anything else, and more and more, Chris was becoming convinced that he himself was like an object, a possession rather than a partner. He was certainly no longer a confidante. And clearly, she no longer trusted him other than as a place to rest the culpability. The way she was shutting him out seemed like he was no different from an old toy that had somehow become broken and was still around more because of familiarity than anything else.

  The worst thing was, that as a man, as was his proper station in life, he had no one with whom he could really discuss it. Even if he had had any real remaining friends, he couldn’t really talk to them about this stuff. It just wasn’t right.

  By the time he pulled up into his street he was tired from the long drive, but he’d come to a decision. As soon as he got in the door, he headed for the telephone. There was one person he could still talk to, but then he guessed that’s what mothers were for.

  He called her, slightly relieved that she was there to take the call.

  It was a hesitant, halting conversation, one in which he was forced to ask her not to say that she had told him so more than once. When he was all talked out, the conversation trailed off into a succession of long pauses punctuated with innocuous statements that meant absolutely nothing.

  “So, what are you going to do?” his mother asked eventually after another dragging silence.

  “I don’t know,” said, Chris. “I wish I did.”

  “Well, whatever you do decide,” she said. “You know you will have my support. Just be careful. I’m worried about you, Chris. You’ve been through a lot over the last few months.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’m worried about me too.”

  “Well, you take care of yourself and let me know if you decide to do anything.”

  “Yeah, Ma, I will. Thanks.”

  As he put the phone down, he knew he hadn’t really achieved an
ything or moved any closer to a solution, but the unburdening had made him at least feel a little better.

  When the phone rang two days later, he thought it might have been his mother again to check up on how he was doing. Instead, it was the retreat.

  “Mr. Baron?” said the woman at the other end of the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “We need you to come and get your wife.”

  “Huh?” said Chris, blinking a couple of times. “What’s happened?”

  “We don’t want you to worry, but she’s had a bit of a collapse.”

  “What do you mean ‘a bit of a collapse?’ What’s that supposed to mean?” His head was racing with possibilities.

  “She’s okay. She just went a little too far with the detox diet. She became a little dehydrated and fainted. We think it’s better if you take her home and she doesn’t finish the program at this stage.”

  “Jesus,” said Chris. Talk about I told you so.

  “Can you come and collect her, Mr. Baron, or should we try and make other arrangements?”

  “No, no. That’s fine. I’ll be up in a couple of hours.”

  He was shaking his head as he grabbed his car keys and headed for the door. Once again, Stase’s utter determination had led her to places that she wasn’t really ready to be.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  On a Sea Becalmed

  On the ride home, Chris didn’t say ‘I told you so.’” He didn’t say very much at all, just the passing query as to whether she was all right. He helped Stase into the house in silence, got her bags out of the car and set her up on the couch with a cup of tea. He stood watching her from the doorway, the only noise the sound of the television washing over their mutual silence.