“Shit,” he said. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it around himself quickly. “What are you doing in here?”
“The door was unlocked,” Jennifer said. “Hope you don’t mind.”
He looked at her. She was once again dressed in her workout clothes: skintight purple this time. Black shorts over tan thighs. “What’s going on?” he said.
“What’s going on?” she repeated.
He was silent, staring at her. “You’re in my bedroom,” he said at last.
“You’re right.”
“Is there a reason?”
“Not really. Just thought I’d come by to say hello.”
“OK,” he said.
“I saw you talking to Walt,” she said.
“Yeah, Walt,” he said. “You might have mentioned him.”
“I might have mentioned Walt?”
“Yeah, it would have been good to know.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t know you were married.”
She laughed. “Oh don’t be so dramatic. It’s not like you’re divorced.”
“You knew exactly what was happening,” he said. “And you lied to me.”
“I did not,” she said. Her hands were on her hips.
“You did, Jennifer. It’s not right,” he said. He realized just how absurd he probably looked, standing there in the steaming bathroom, gesturing with one hand while his other gripped the hem of the towel he had wrapped around his waist.
“You didn’t seem to mind,” she said.
“That’s not the point,” he said.
“Really? I thought that was exactly the point.”
“I’m going to get dressed now.”
“Don’t let me stop you, Astronaut,” she said.
He shook his head and as he did so a lump of pain rolled back and forth, sloshing against the sides of his skull. What was he doing? What was happening? Who was this woman and why did he know her at all?
“Look, I’m sorry you found out about Walt so … abruptly,” she said. “But, hey, it’s fun, right? It’s not like we have something serious.”
“It seems more serious now,” he said. He opened the chest of drawers and pulled out a T-shirt and underwear and then pulled the underwear on under his towel.
If Jennifer had some response to his statement she did not acknowledge it. Instead she looked around the room and clicked her tongue against her teeth. “She really did clean you out,” she said. “The furniture, I mean.”
“That’s not what we’re talking about.” He let the towel drop and pulled the T-shirt on over his head.
“I don’t know why you’re so mad,” she said. “It’s just for fun, you know?”
“I’m not mad. But you’re acting like this isn’t something important and you’re wrong. It is important. My wife had an affair. I know what that feels like.”
“So do I,” Jennifer said.
He was quiet for a moment, standing there in his T-shirt and underwear, staring at her. Then he said, “I don’t understand why you’d want to do that to someone else, then.”
“Yeah? How do you think I know what that feels like?”
He did not respond.
“And guess who he was having an affair with?”
“I have no idea,” he said.
“Your fucking wife.”
He looked at her, frozen now, his slack-jawed disbelief replaced by belief and then disbelief and belief again and then finally an exhaling of breath as if the wind had been knocked out of him and the same question that seemed to ride with him always in the empty house in the cul-de-sac under the pressure of a gravity that would not release him: Why? Why marry someone if this was what it would be? Walter Jensen. And right across the street. He wondered if Quinn had known about it. The thought made him feel sick, the whining buzzsaw of his impending migraine rising all at once. He needed to get to his medication. He needed to get to it without delay.
“Christ,” he said. Just that one word. He did not move.
“Yeah,” she said. “And then she moves out and a couple of weeks later he’s out on business for a month? Am I stupid? Does he think I’m an idiot? I know what’s going on. He’s off with that whore in Atlanta. He’s not even good at hiding it either. He’ll just pay for hotel rooms and dinners on the same credit card bill that comes right to the house. Get a post office box at least.” Her eyes glassy with tears, her voice a thin monotone that rose in volume and intensity at random moments, as if she was very nearly unable to keep control at all.
There was silence in the room. He wondered if he should step into the closet and get a shirt and his jeans and then thought better of it. He wanted to pull the blinds and get into bed and hide. His mind and its thin wire of buzzing, the painkillers doing nothing to stop the onslaught now, the tide of his pain lapping up the beach. What time was it? Wasn’t there something happening today? “I don’t know what to say, Jennifer,” he said at last. “I’m sorry that happened.”
“No shit,” she said. “Walt never did anything like that. He’s not that kind of guy. He wouldn’t do that unless she just shook it in his face, you know?”
“OK,” he said.
“OK? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s not supposed to mean anything,” he said and when she said nothing in response he said, “I’m getting a shirt.”
He stepped backwards into the closet and pulled a short-sleeved button shirt from the rack and a pair of khaki pants and then stepped back into the room and put on the shirt and then stood buttoning it slowly, the pants draped over his arm. He looked at her, this beautiful woman whose husband had betrayed her. Indeed, they were more similar than he thought, not Jennifer and Barb but Jennifer and him.
“Look at me,” she said abruptly. “I’m actually tearing up over that asshole.” She closed the gap between them and embraced him and set her head lightly on his chest and was quiet. He put his arms around her, just as lightly, out of a fundamental instinct that was humanity itself.
“It’s OK,” he said.
She did not speak for a long time. Then she lifted her head from his chest.
“It’s fun, you and me, isn’t it?” she said.
It was an odd question but he answered it: “Yes.”
“We can keep it going,” she said. She kissed his neck. “Not at my house but maybe we can find a nice place to go to. A nice hotel or something.” She slid her hands up his shirt so that her warm palms moved lightly against his stomach. “Maybe not even in this town but somewhere else. We can go away for weekends sometimes.”
“I don’t think I’m up for that, Jennifer.”
“Really? Feels like you’re up for it,” she said.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“Complicated?” she said. “How complicated is it, really? I like you. You like me. We get together. We have some fun. Then we go home. That doesn’t sound very complicated.” As she said this she dropped to her knees. In one fluid motion she pulled down his underwear and took him into her mouth. It was so fast that he barely had time to mutter a faint, weak, “Wait,” an utterance that was more abstract sound than word. He wanted to say, “I have a headache,” but the sentence sounded so absurd that he managed to hold his tongue and besides, with her own tongue on him all possible sentences faded quickly from his mind.
She paused only for a moment, to look up at him from where she knelt and to say: “Does it still seem that complicated?” Then she was at it again.
Keith closed his eyes. He knew that he should be telling her to stop but his mind was already blank and empty of anything—even his pain—and he looked down at her, the top of her head, her lips where they covered him, where they pulled him into and out of her mouth. Then he closed his eyes again. His migraine was a dull rumble somewhere far away.
And it was exactly at this moment that Sally Erler entered the room, the young couple to which she was showing the house just behind her. Keith heard her voice just a moment before she appear
ed in the doorway, heard it as part of the sharp and distant buzzing of his oncoming migraine, as an annoyance. She was saying something about “potential” as she turned into the opening and Keith looked over at her, without speed, without concern, and she took three clear steps into the room before she stopped and at last understood that there were already people in the room and what they were doing.
Then she screamed.
Twelve
“Let’s not talk about what happened,” Sally Erler said over the phone. “Let’s just say I happened in on something. In the real estate business you hear stories about things like that. I’ve never … it’s never happened to me before … but let’s just say I happened in on something and we’ll leave it at that.”
“OK,” he said. “Let’s leave it at that.”
“I just don’t know what happened. I wasn’t early was I? Was I early? Maybe I was early.”
“I don’t know,” Keith said. “Does it matter?”
“No, I guess not,” she said. “Maybe it does. I don’t know. No, I guess not.”
It was later in the day now, cresting toward evening. He had not been surprised when his mobile phone rang and it was Sally Erler on the line. He assumed that she was calling to remove her name from the house but she had been talking for some time and no such stoppage of services had occurred; instead, a constant affirmation that she would not talk about what she had stumbled in on and then talking incessantly around the occurrence despite her various statements to the contrary.
It might have seemed comical had he not been so terribly embarrassed. Sally Erler had screamed and then had turned immediately and had herded her two clients out the door, down the stairs, and out of the house like some crazed farmer frantically trying to direct a flock of chickens away from a predator. Jennifer had only laughed—indeed it was as if she had wanted to be caught in the act—and, before he could even so much as say her name, had returned to him with a gusto that had finished him off inside of a minute, leaning away from him in the moment of release so that his seed spilled onto the carpeted bedroom floor. Then she leaned in, took him in her mouth one last time and returned his now red and pulsing member to his underwear, snapping his waistband as she did so.
“That doesn’t really seem all that complicated. Does it, Astronaut?” she said, rising to her feet.
“Christ, Jennifer,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “I’ll call you and let you know where we can meet.”
He retrieved his pants from where he had dropped them onto the floor and slid them over his legs awkwardly, tottering, and then he sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re really something,” he said. He could think of nothing else to say.
“You’re right about that, Astronaut,” she said.
He sat looking at her. Then he said, “We can’t keep doing this.”
“Oh really?” she said. Her voice was quiet but there was instantly an edge to it, the edge that had been present when she had dismissed him from her home earlier in the week, and Keith knew that this could easily devolve into an argument, which he simply did not have the strength for. The distant whining was well established now and already in the deep core of his mind there was a singular white arc of pain.
He wanted to ask her if she was embarrassed at being walked in on but it was obvious that this was not the case. He felt ashamed somehow but could think of no words to articulate that condition either and so he said the only thing he could think of: “You’re married, Jennifer.”
“So what? I’m married. You’re married. Who cares?”
“I’m not willing to do that. It doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re overthinking the whole thing,” she said.
“I’m not overthinking anything,” he said. “I’m just not doing it.”
She stood and looked at him, hands on hips. “You’ve just been using me,” she said at last.
“I’ve been using you?”
“Yes, you’ve been using me.”
“I didn’t ask you to come over here.”
“Is it a game to you? Do you think I’m stupid?”
“No, I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“That’s how you’re acting. Like you have all the answers and I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“OK,” he said.
“You don’t think so?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
It was silent and she shook her head. Her face was flushed. “All you men are exactly the same,” she said at last. “You’re all a bunch of … fucking faggots.” She stood there for a moment longer, her face moving from carefully controlled rage to disgust to simple disappointment and at last she said, “Fuck you,” and then turned on her heel and walked out of the room.
“Jennifer,” he said, but the room was empty. He could briefly hear her on the stairs and then the opening and closing of the front door signaled her exit.
That was it, then. He sat on the bed, looking at the white pearls of fluid on the carpet, thinking that he should probably get a towel and clean them up but making no move to do so. He listened for further movement in the house but all was silent and after a time he stood and buttoned his pants and finally took the Imitrex tablet and then walked downstairs, hoping more than anything that the silence was real and that Sally Erler had left the house and had driven away and that he would not have to speak to her about what she had seen.
Indeed the downstairs was as empty as it had been when he had first returned to the cul-de-sac those weeks ago, or even emptier now that the sofa was gone.
“She made it worse when she came outside,” Sally Erler said now over the phone. When he asked her what she meant, she told him that Jennifer appeared on the sidewalk when the realtor was trying to placate the young couple and that she had said “some very negative things” about him, said them directly to the potential buyers and then had stormed off across the street and back into her own house, a house that Sally Erler had acted as selling agent on three years before, a point she made with no small sense of irony.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.
“Let’s just call it water under the bridge,” she said. “So there’s good news. That’s why I’m calling. It’s a good-news call.”
“Good news?”
“Yep, yep, good news,” she said. “You’re not going to believe this. It’s unbelievable but it’s true. They made an offer anyway.”
“Those same people who were here in the morning?”
“Those same people. They made an offer and it’s right in line with what we talked about so it looks like it’s a go.”
He was at the little kitchen table. They discussed the dollar figures and it turned out he would break even on the sale, an almost astounding concept as he was certain that, given the crashing of the economy, he would lose money. He was smiling now despite the whining and the distant pain. Every day the newspaper had more statistics on local foreclosures and yet someone wanted to buy the house. It was possible that happening in on the blow job had been a good selling point after all. Perhaps realtors should hire prostitutes and porn stars and astronauts to perform sex acts for viewing by potential buyers as an industry-wide standard. Once again, he had beaten the odds. And the painting had never been completed. Nor the cleaning. The place was a pigsty; there was no denying it. Fresh stains on the bedroom carpet and yet there had been an offer. Incredible. There was still magic, even if small and inconsequential.
He verbally accepted. There would be paperwork to sign, after which the house would be in escrow for sixty days. Two months to figure out what to do and where to go. There would be time enough for that. Right now he could not even begin to work on such an equation. Instead he closed his eyes and rubbed absently at his temples. He had managed to get through the blazing sun of midday by closing all the blinds in the house and was relieved that if the migraine was going to hit him, it would do so in the relative cool and dark of the ev
ening. If he could just get through the next hour or so of daylight he could cocoon himself in his bed, turn the air conditioner temperature down and hide in the darkness. He knew it would still be a terrible ordeal but there was some relief in a quiet room, in his bed, in the cool of the humming air conditioner.
He managed to take a short nap. When he woke he padded immediately to the bathroom and swallowed yet another painkiller, the fat white tablet resting in the palm of his hand for a brief interval before he popped it into his mouth, took a brief swig of water, and swallowed. How many had that been? Four? Five? An Imitrex in the morning and another a few hours ago. A man whose life was numbers and he could not recall the count. He thought of calling the flight surgeon but he did not do so. What would it matter now?
When the doorbell rang, he was still standing at the sink, leaning against it, and he continued to stand there for a long time, hoping that whoever was ringing would give up and go away but as the bell rang a third and then a fourth time he opened his eyes and moved out to the entryway and looked through the peephole. He could see no one and then a moment later Nicole appeared in the window to the side of the door, peering through the glass, her face cupped in her hands. She was in much the same position as when he had first seen her at the sliding door and as she saw him she pulled one hand away from her face and waved. The motion reminded him again of Quinn but there was no longer any sense of shock or surprise; instead, that reaction had been replaced by a sense of vague and nostalgic beauty that floated just out of reach and would ever continue to do so.
He pulled the door open slowly and stood there, his eyes squinting, head whining steadily and with increasing violence. “Hey,” he said.
“Hi, Captain Keith,” she said, looking up at him. Her body had a faint glowing halo around it, an effect of the oncoming migraine and certainly not a positive indicator of his immediate future. “What are you doing?”
The Infinite Tides Page 22
