Nine Inches

by Tom Perrotta

  Damn, they’ll say. Where’d he come from?

  This fantasy keeps me occupied all the way to Grapevine Road, right up to the moment when I turn the corner and see the wall of brown bags arranged in front of Mrs. Scotto’s house. It’s such a strange and upsetting sight, I can’t help crossing the street for a closer look.

  There are twenty-eight bags in all, lined up along the curb like headless, limbless soldiers, stretching the entire length of her property. It must’ve taken her all night to drag them out here. They’re not light, either. I give one of them an experimental kick, and my foot barely makes a dent, as if the bag is packed with sand instead of YARD WASTE. I kick it harder the second time, and that does the trick: the toe of my sneaker breaks the skin, leaving a neat little puncture wound that gets bigger with each successive blow until the whole thing just splits open, and all the guts come spilling out, way more leaves than you can imagine from looking at it.

  I pause for a second, a little freaked-out by what I’ve done. I don’t know why I’m breathing so hard, why my face feels so hot and my heart so jumpy. I don’t know why I’m still standing here, why I don’t just turn around and run.

  Son, I think, right before I go ballistic on the second bag, you better pull yourself together.

  IT’S THANKSGIVING Day, and the sun’s barely up, but Mrs. Scotto doesn’t seem all that surprised to see me crossing the street with a rake in my hand. She’s in her robe, standing in the middle of the mess I made, the disaster area that used to be her perfect lawn.

  “Clay?” she says. “Did you do this?”

  I take a moment to survey the damage, a season’s worth of dead leaves scattered on the grass, along with the carcasses of so many broken bags. Some of the leaves are relatively fresh, bright flashes of red and yellow and orange; others are dark and slimy, fragrant with decay. They’re distributed unevenly across the yard, shallow drifts and rounded clumps marking the spots where bags got overturned, once I got tired of kicking them. I can’t understand why I didn’t get caught, why nobody stopped me or called the police.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I had a really bad night.”

  She considers this and gives a little nod, as if she knows this is as good an explanation as she’s ever going to get. Then she bends down and scoops up a handful of leaves, which she deposits in a brand-new YARD WASTE bag. There’s a big stack of them on the front stoop.

  “Well, I must say, you did a very thorough job.” Her voice is croaky and frail, but not as angry as I expected. “I thought I was dreaming when I looked out the window.”

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I’m gonna help you clean it up.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “That would be nice.”

  I use the rake at first, but it doesn’t feel right, so I put it down and follow Mrs. Scotto’s example, stooping and snatching up the leaves with my bare hands. It’s a little gross at first, but pretty soon it starts to feel normal.

  “My nephew’s supposed to pick me up at noon,” she tells me. “I’m invited to his house for Thanksgiving dinner. But I guess I’ll have to cancel.”

  “You go ahead,” I tell her. “I can finish up on my own.”

  “That’s okay.” Mrs. Scotto’s face looks younger when she smiles. “I don’t like my nephew very much.”

  “We’re going to my uncle’s,” I say. “But not until four o’clock.”

  “Isn’t there a football game today?” she asks.

  I nod and leave it at that. There’s a game, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me. The sun gets brighter and warmer as we work. My back starts to hurt, but I do my best to ignore the discomfort. I try not to think about anything but the leaves on the ground, and the slow progress we’re making, me and Mrs. Scotto, getting everything back to the way it’s supposed to be.

  ONE-FOUR-FIVE

  IN THE TURBULENT, LONELY MONTHS that followed the collapse of his marriage, Dr. Rick Sims became obsessed with the blues. It started simply enough; he was driving home from work, half-listening to one of the classic-rock stations preset into the SiriusXM unit on the Audi A4 he was pretty sure he could no longer afford, when a song snagged his attention — “Born Under a Bad Sign,” not the original and far superior Albert King version that he would later come to love, but the white-bread cover by Cream. Its main riff sliced through the fog of his guilt and shame, a simple, plodding phrase that repeated itself with slight variations throughout the song:

  Ba-DA-da-DA-da-DA/ba-da-da-DA-da . . .

  Hey, he thought, though he hadn’t picked up a guitar in years. I bet I could play that.

  When he got home — home being the grim condo he’d rented after Jackie had evicted him from their comfortable, five-bedroom house on Finnamore Drive — he unearthed his old Yamaha acoustic from its dusty case, tuned it as best he could, and started fooling around on the low strings, trying to re-create the riff from memory. Something wasn’t right, so he turned to the Web for assistance, discovering a treasure trove of helpful links: tablature sites, free lessons on YouTube, and a vast archive of live-performance videos, not just King and Clapton and Hendrix tearing it up, but a bunch of random dudes playing along with the record in their bedroom or basement. Some of these amateurs were dishearteningly good, but others could barely play a note. It was like some weird form of masochism, the way they flaunted their ineptitude, inviting the cruelty of anonymous commentators:

  no offense but you suck ass

  Worst. Guitar. Player. Ever.

  Hey not bad for a deaf retard

  Holy S**t that was AWFUL!!!

  Jimi just choked on his vomit again.

  Sims hated to admit it, but he took a shameful pleasure in the abuse, watching the poor saps take their punishment. Better you than me, brother. It was a tough world out there, and you were a fool to reveal your weakness. He wondered if maybe these losers were so desperate for human contact that insults from total strangers seemed like a step in the right direction, an upgrade from complete invisibility. In any case, it was oddly encouraging to see the whole spectrum of human talent laid out like that, to discover that, even now, rusty as he was, he was nowhere near being the worst guitar player in the world.

  It was after ten o’clock when he closed the laptop and stowed away the Yamaha, which meant that he’d been working on that one simple song for almost three hours. His fingertips hurt and his mind was buzzing, but it was a healthy change of pace, doing something constructive instead of pining for his kids, or dozing off in front of some lame TV show, or masturbating to obscure fetish porn that made him feel dirty and hollow when he was finished. He ate a sandwich, watched the news for a bit, and then went to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Sims usually had trouble sleeping in the condo — the mattress was too soft, and he could hear the traffic on Route 27 — but that night he drifted off right away, a weary blues riff echoing in his head like a lullaby.

  JUST A few weeks earlier, Sims had been an enviable man, a proverbial pillar of the community — husband, father, homeowner, soccer coach, churchgoer, Audi driver, pediatrician. And now he was something else — an outcast, an adulterer, an absentee dad, the costar of a sordid workplace scandal. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d devoted his entire life to constructing the first identity; it had been erased overnight, on account of a single, inexplicable transgression. He wanted to say it wasn’t fair, but he’d stopped believing in fairness a long time ago. As far as he could tell, it didn’t matter who deserved what: people got what they got and they pretty much had to take it.

  On the morning of his life-altering fuck-up, Sims had attended the funeral of a former patient, a five-year-old chatterbox named Kayla Ferguson, who’d been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer — diffuse pontine glioma, to be exact — at the ripe old age of three and a half. Over the course of her illness — long after he’d referred the case to a pediatric neuro-oncologist — Sims had stayed in close touch with Kayla’s mother, fielding her distraught calls at all hours of the day and night
. He hadn’t just briefed Heather Ferguson on her daughter’s increasingly dire prognosis, translating Dr. Mehta’s dense (and heavily accented) medical jargon into plain English, he’d become her friend and advisor, listening patiently to marathon rants about her worthless ex-boyfriend, her heartless boss, and her implacable insurance company, offering sympathy and encouragement when he could, doing his best to keep her spirits up through the long and punishing ordeal. Toward the end, she called so frequently that Sims’s wife started to get annoyed, and even a bit jealous, suggesting more than once that he might not have been quite so attentive if Heather Ferguson had been a forty-year-old in roomy mom jeans rather than a twenty-three-year-old single mother who just happened to be “cute like a cheerleader,” which was how Sims had described her in a regrettable moment of candor.

  “She’s upset,” he would say. “The least I can do is listen.”

  “At two in the morning?”

  “Come on, Jackie. Her daughter’s dying.”

  Her daughter’s dying. That was his trump card and he played it for all it was worth. Because it was true, of course, but also because Jackie was right: Sims was smitten. He was having all kinds of crazy feelings for Heather Ferguson — he wanted to cook her dinner and pay her medical bills and take her to a luxury spa for a weekend of pampering. He wanted to drive to her house in the middle of the night and make love to her — slowly and tenderly, to distract her from her pain — and then hold her while she cried, and he needed to remind himself every chance he got that it was impossible, because he was a doctor and her daughter was dying. It hadn’t been easy — one night she’d called from her bathtub at three in the morning, midway through her second bottle of wine — but Sims had kept his urges in check, always conducting himself in a professional and ethically responsible manner.

  So his conscience was clear when he arrived at the funeral home and made his way into the viewing room, which was packed with people who must have been Heather’s relatives, coworkers, and former classmates, far more of them than he’d expected, given her frequent laments about being alone in the world. Sims took a seat in the last row of folding chairs, relieved to see that the little white coffin was closed. It appeared to be floating on a bed of flowers and stuffed animals; a framed photo of Kayla was resting on the lid, taken before she got sick, a little girl smiling sweetly at the world, waiting in vain for the world to smile back. The memorial service was mercifully short, just a gut-wrenching slide show followed by a generic eulogy, a young minister gamely theorizing that Kayla was an angel now, sitting on a heavenly throne beside a God who loved her so much he couldn’t bear to be apart from her for another day.

  When it was over, Sims waited on line to pay his respects to the family. Heather was stationed in front of the coffin, greeting each mourner with a brave, heavily medicated smile, nodding intently at whatever the person said to her, as if she were memorizing a series of secret messages. She was sharing the place of honor with Kayla’s father, a hard-partying roofer who was two years behind on his child support. Sims moved quickly past the deadbeat dad, shaking his hand and offering a few mechanical words of condolence before turning to Heather, his throat constricting with emotion. She looked lovely in her black dress, almost radiant, though her face was dazed and slack with grief.

  “Oh, God,” he said, opening his arms. “I am so sorry.”

  He stepped forward for the hug — there was no doubt that they would hug, not after everything they’d been through — but instead of accepting the embrace, she shoved him in the chest, an angry, two-handed thrust that made him grunt with surprise.

  “Don’t you touch me!” Her voice was shrill and indignant, trembling on the edge of hysteria. “Don’t you dare fucking touch me!”

  Sims was too shocked to speak. He wondered if she’d mistaken him for someone else, an old boyfriend, maybe, a jerk who’d hurt her in some unforgivable way.

  It’s me, he wanted to tell her. It’s Rick. Dr. Sims.

  “You asshole!” She shoved him again, harder than the first time, like a schoolboy starting a fight. She looked almost feral, her face contorted with rage and revulsion. “Why’d you let her die?”

  “I didn’t — ” Sims began, but he had no idea how to finish. “We did everything we could.”

  “Oh, yeah.” She nodded in bitter agreement. “You did a great job.”

  Heather turned toward the coffin, that adorable picture of Kayla, and lost her train of thought for a second or two. When she finally spoke, her voice was softer, more bewildered than angry.

  “Really fucking awesome, Dr. Sims. Thanks for all your help.”

  “Heather, please . . .” But by then he was already being led away by an apologetic man in a dark suit, an employee of the funeral home, who escorted him to the front door and ejected him, politely, from the premises.

  THAT SAME evening, Sims attended a retirement party for Irene Pollard at the Old Colonial Inn. It was an anomaly — he rarely socialized with the admin staff and wasn’t all that friendly with the guest of honor, a grandmotherly receptionist whose incompetence was legendary around the Health Plan. But he was still a bit shaken by the incident at the funeral home and thought a drink or two might help wash away the bitter taste in his mouth.

  The party broke up early, but Sims was detained on his way out by Eduardo Saenz, a gay physical therapist who’d helped him with a shoulder problem a couple of years earlier. Eduardo greeted him with boozy enthusiasm and invited him to share a pitcher of margaritas with some colleagues who’d relocated to a booth in the back room. Sims accepted without hesitation — he still wasn’t ready to go home — and was delighted to discover that the colleagues in question were Olga Kochenko and Kelly Foley, two of his most attractive coworkers. Sims didn’t know either of them very well, but they welcomed him like an old buddy, skipping right past the small talk and inviting him into their conversation.

  “We were just talking about threeways,” Kelly informed him from across the table. She was an athletic, short-haired blonde, a nurse practitioner from Cardiology. “There’s a little difference of opinion.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Sims nodded sagely, as though he were an expert on the subject. “What’s the problem?”

  “Kelly doesn’t like them,” said Olga, a pharmacist whose short skirts and ridiculously high heels made her a frequent topic of lunchtime conversation among the male doctors of Sims’s acquaintance. “She thinks they’re tacky.”

  “I never used that word,” Kelly protested. She had the planet Saturn tattooed on the inside of her right forearm, and a pink star outlined in black on the back of her left hand. “I’m just over it, you know? There’s too much to keep track of.”

  “Girl, you gotta learn to multitask,” Eduardo told her.

  “I can walk and chew gum,” Kelly assured him. “It’s the other people I’m worried about. All those arms and legs flailing around. I’m sick of getting kicked in the face.”

  “I’ll tell you what I hate,” Olga volunteered. She was sitting next to Sims, wearing a low-cut peasant blouse that revealed a hint of cleavage, just enough that he felt gallant for averting his gaze. “When you never even signed up for a threeway? Like a few weeks ago, I went home with this hot girl from my Zumba class? We’re in her bedroom, just getting started, and the next thing you know there’s this naked bodybuilder dude standing in the doorway, stroking his dick and filming us with his iPhone. I’m like, Hello? Who the fuck are you? And she’s like, Oh, that’s Benjamin. I hope you don’t mind if he joins us.”

  Kelly rolled her eyes and said she’d been there, more than once. Eduardo wanted to hear a little more about Benjamin, but Olga turned her attention to Sims, sizing him up with a playful expression. She had a cute, slightly doughy face that she spiced up with dramatic eye shadow and long fake lashes.

  “What about you, Doctor? What’s your professional opinion?”

  “About threeways?” Sims made a slow motorboat noise with his lips. “You’re asking the wrong guy. I
’m married with six-year-old twins. These days it’s pretty much a miracle if I get a two-way.”

  Olga laughed and touched her glass to his. “You’re funny.”

  Sims figured they’d move on to a different subject, but they were just getting started. Kelly said she’d had her first threesome back in high school, when she got seduced by a couple whose toddler she was babysitting, which meant that she actually got paid for it. Olga claimed that she’d once started making out with her dental hygienist right in the middle of a cleaning, and that the dentist eventually wandered in and joined the fun. Sims kept saying, Come on, that didn’t happen, but what did he know? Just because he’d washed up on a sexual desert island, that didn’t mean everybody else was stranded, too, doomed to a lifelong diet of coconuts. Some people were living it up on the party boat, enjoying the big buffet.

  “You did one together, right?” Eduardo asked.

  “Oh, God.” Kelly hid her face in her hands. “That was a disaster.”

  “You were fine,” Olga said. “It was totally my fault.”

  “She got the giggles,” Kelly told Sims. “And then I got them, too, and we just couldn’t go through with it. The guy got so mad.”

  “Who was he?” Sims wanted to know.

  Kelly shrugged, like the guy was just an extra in their movie. “Some asshole we met on vacation. Really full of himself.”

  “It’s weird,” Olga observed. “I thought it would be nice, ’cause we know each other so well. But when push came to shove, it was like, Yeah, she’s my best friend, but there is no way I’m gonna eat her pussy.”

  “Your loss,” Kelly said, and they all laughed.

  Sims’s phone buzzed, delivering yet another text from his wife asking when he planned on coming home. Soon, he responded for the third time, grateful for the elasticity of the word, the way it renewed its promise with each passing moment, even as the thought of actually going home grew more and more oppressive. He could picture his arrival, the humiliating interrogation at the door, the way he’d have to account for his whereabouts and grovel for forgiveness, like a teenager who’d broken curfew. It was just too boring to contemplate, such a soul-killing exercise, and it made him wonder if Jackie felt as trapped as he did, as if they’d been cast in a bad play they’d never even auditioned for.