“Dinner in ten minutes,” she shouted into the living room.
Again the phone rang. She could never figure out how to turn the ringer off—they’d lost the instructions as soon as they’d opened the box. She turned her back to the ringing and stirred the pasta. Finally it stopped, but the machine didn’t pick up. Max had.
“Max!” she said. “We’re going to eat soon.”
He chatted away as if he couldn’t hear her. He was talking about TV and Daddy being in London and today was fine and he was great. Then he strayed over to her and handed her the phone.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hey, sweetie, just thought I’d check in.”
Her mother. She gripped the big spoon as if she might thrash it against the stove top. Why couldn’t she ever tell these people that now wasn’t a good time? “Hi,” she said. “How are you?”
“Martin?”
He heard it, but he was in the dark, his feet up, descending, they hadn’t landed yet, he didn’t need to quite wake yet, and then customs and the guy with the hired car, and the long, clogged ride into Dunkers Green and missing Jane Wilson’s funeral. He didn’t have to open his eyes quite yet.
“Martin?”
He moved his feet, felt his shoulders swell into the chair back, still landing. No, they weren’t moving. They’d landed.
“Are we here?” he said.
“We slept a long time.”
“Oh.”
“I haven’t slept that long in ages.”
“Uh-huh.” There was a dim lamp lit on the bedside table. She was standing, stretching herself out, wincing, looking at him. “What time is it?”
“two”
“Two?”He looked at his feet stretched out on the bed. “I slept in a chair.”
“You probably thought you were still on the plane.”
“I did. I did.” He wasn’t even sure he could move.
“Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must be. Come on.”
He unfolded himself from the chair, and she turned on lights as she made her way downstairs. Two o’clock. Nine there—post-bedtime. He ought to wait another hour. He and Elizabeth would probably be up all night anyway.
He had one of Richard’s beers and tried to help, but he didn’t know the kitchen and he kept bumping into her as he banged around the drawers and cabinets looking for the right pan, the right packet of rice. Finally they sat at the table while the meal cooked on the stove top. He was almost awake.
“I think he’s got a little hash somewhere, if you like,” she said.
“I’m all right.”
“It’s probably where he went…”
“Amsterdam?” Now he was awake.
“Oh yeah.” She smiled. “Saunas. Coffee bars.”
“Sounds like he’d be easy to find.”
“You’re just looking for an excuse,” she teased him.
He drained his beer and got up and headed toward the fridge. “Just another way I could wreck things,” he said.
“It wasn’t you.”
“It’s never anybody.” He found the last beer and brought it back to the table.
“The weird thing is I thought we were getting so much better. He was a lot better.” She glanced around the kitchen. “He cooked. He cleaned. He was much more present.”
She couldn’t look back at Martin.
“Oh shit,” she said.
He was over pretty quickly, he thought, holding her, hugging her. She gasped as she cried. She hadn’t ever cried that much with him, he thought. He had an essential coldness that somehow made her keep it together. Maybe he was at heart just cold. Maybe that’s why Jane Wilson had never come to talk with him.
“Easy,” he said. “Easy.”
“I could find him,” he said.
“Please don’t.”
But in her tumble she couldn’t tell whether he heard her, or even whether she meant it.
“I mean it,” she said. She reached for something, and he saw it was the Kleenex and he tore one out and handed it to her.
“I’m tougher than this,” she said.
“I know.”
The food got cooked and they ate. She was silent and sober. He knew if it were him and not her, he’d probably be getting stoned all the time—or at least a lot—just to get himself out of his body and out of his mind and out of the world, to find the sensation of just what that meant. Too bad there wasn’t another beer in the fridge. He’d love to get stoned. But if she didn’t, he shouldn’t. He was thirty-eight, for god’s sake. But maybe he was just slowly killing himself. Maybe the next time Dowler drilled up his asshole he’d find what they were all waiting for. Maybe it was already there, and getting stoned or not getting stoned didn’t matter. Maybe in his stomach. Or, like his dead uncle whom he never knew, in his brain. Sometimes he wanted to live and sometimes he just wanted to die. There was a lot of pleasure in life, but once you were really sick you couldn’t find it anymore.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
He stumbled up and cleared the table. At the sink he washed the dishes. She was gone. Probably into that little room to meditate. Or in the living room doing her chi-gong. He spied into the living room. She was there, in an old pink T-shirt and baggy green sweats, standing, moving as if underwater, doing stuff. That was a good sign. They ought to go out and find her a nice sweat suit. Good stuff might make her feel better. Maybe their next outing she’d wear the sweater he’d bought. Maybe—
The door was rattling as if someone was sticking a key in it. He stared at it. Wasn’t it three or four o’clock?
“Elizabeth,” he whispered.
She was still chi-gonging, unable or unwilling to hear him.
“Elizabeth!”
Reluctantly she came out into the foyer, her face a neutral mask. The door clicked and opened.
“Richard?” she said.
“Hey, sweets,” he said, dragging in a bag over his shoulder. He hugged her, took in Martin. “I didn’t know you were coming. What are you guys doing up anyway?”
They stared at him.
Martin said, “Where’d you go?”
“Didn’t you get the flowers?” Richard asked, touching Elizabeth on the wrist. “Bloody hell. I’m sure they charged me for them.”
“What flow—”
He opened the door and looked out on the stoop, then slammed it shut. “Maybe …,” he said, and strode through the kitchen and out into the living room. They just stood there as the back door opened and they could hear him leave and he came back as quickly as he left and wagged a bulkily wrapped vase at them. “Here they are! They were left out back. Now, why the hell do you suppose they did that?”
She tore them open and read the card, passed it to Martin. Had to get out for a few days, Sweets. Back by Sunday. Richard.
“I was in Amsterdam,” he said.
“She knew that.” Martin smiled. But there was something a little off—no date on the card, just the ease of it all. It didn’t smell right.
“I guessed it,” Elizabeth managed. “But I thought—”
“I’d left?” He nuzzled her and grinned. “Not this boy.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m knackered, though. Should we get some sleep?”
“Let’s,” she said.
They started up the stairs.
“Oh, and Martin,” he said back over his shoulder, “I brought back some really good stuff.”
“That’s great,” Martin said. “I can’t wait.”
He sat in the living room with one lamp lit, trying to remember. Hadn’t he been out back with trash or recyclables? Hadn’t he seen that gate? It was hard for him to believe they’d stood there for three days, unnoticed. Had it rained? Had it been too cold? In the kitchen he peered at them. They looked pretty damn good for being out in the March weather. But he couldn’t have picked them up this late. Unless he’d carried them back from Holland. That probably wasn
’t allowed, was it? It was hard to believe that she’d had no sense of this particular possibility, that he hadn’t brought himself to at least call, that he could look so damn smug and prepared at four in the fucking morning, that he could so blithely sense their shock.
And why had he come back—why would anyone come back—to this? Was he just another guy who needed to get out and have a little fun before returning to the relentlessness? There was something else, something vague and yet certain. He’d come back as if he’d never really left; but he’d gone, all right. He’d always had a quality of separateness about him, and he’d separated himself. It was something beyond his Britishness, his yoga and course work. An innate and eerie distance. Had Martin ever seen him close? He doubted it.
On his way to his own room, he stood for an instant—an eye blink—at their door. They were talking in low, soothing voices to each other. What did he know anyway? He really didn’t know what anything was like between them, how often—or if—they could have sex, what they talked about when no one else could hear, what—or if—they thought when they chanted, what they thought about all this. Everybody died. But what went on between now and then—all the entanglements and annoyances and deprivations and enjoyments and inspirations and despair and redemption—you could never really know unless it was you or the person came right out and told you, and even in the telling there’d have to be a shift between what it was and what language made it sound like it was. Could nothing be shared? He wished he were back in his own bed with his own screaming thoughts and fears and dreams. He wished he were younger, he wished he were older. He wished that his wife could tell him everything she ever thought, and he wished that he’d be interested by all of it. He wished he didn’t ache for a hundred different women. He wished that his kids would stop growing up, and he wished that they were already grown up and done and safe and out of the house. He wished that his father were dead, and he wished that his father were once again young enough that he could actually talk with him. Had he ever really talked with his father? And what the hell did that mean—really talk?. Did anyone really talk? Did anyone really listen?
As he lay in bed, he heard the click of doors and got up and peeked out into the hall. The bathroom light was on, the door cracked open. He stepped lightly along the carpet. She was standing at the mirror, her face so close it looked like she was trying to see inside herself. He noticed how narrow and delicate her shoulder blades were, how thin her waist was, how the hollows above her calf muscles at the backs of her knees seemed slightly more indented, slightly more defined. Her bare elbows reminded him of how they used to tear and gouge at each other when they were kids, banging into cabinets, slamming into the refrigerator and nearly toppling it. Once they had a race from the bottom of the driveway up to the garage and inside it to the glass storm door of the kitchen, and he’d been so desperate to win that he’d gone through the kitchen door, glass exploding around him. At first she’d cried and then, when she saw he was unmarked, she’d laughed until she couldn’t breathe.
Now he waited for her to turn, but she was putting so much pressure on herself that she could sense nothing else. He felt it in his own chest, how hard she was trying, he felt it the way he felt all the weaknesses and traps of his own body whenever he thought of hers. Elizabeth, I’m here, he wanted to say. But he turned from the door.
In the morning or around noon or whenever it was when he woke, the house sounded empty. Vacated. Stilled.
“Hello,” he called cautiously from his bed.
He couldn’t hear anything. The room was terribly bright. He’d forgotten to close the window dressing. He’d forgotten to shut the door. He’d forgotten that when he woke he’d still be here. His chest wasn’t as tight as the night before, but it was still pretty damn tight. He got out tentatively and rested his feet on the floor. Odd how one set of toenails was clear and crisp, and the other set looked like it had been dipped in yellow chalkdust. He’d been falling apart for years. He had to get home.
As far as he could tell, their convertible was missing from the street. Downstairs was only the blank kitchen—not even a note, not even a dirty glass or a piece of silverware in the sink. He dug out the phone book and called the airline. They kept him on hold for forty-five minutes. Forty-six. Forty-seven. Incredible. He’d already missed the day’s flights. Finally they let him on the first one tomorrow.
He hunted for his copy of the house key. It wasn’t where he swore he’d left it. Fucking Richard probably took it. Where the hell was that coming from? He was sorry he had to make the damn trip again. He felt like he was always the one being pulled by a string. He was sorry about that, too.
In the backyard he stared up at their patch of clouds and listened for noise from other backyards, but there was only the emptiness of everyone off at work or out to lunch. Beyond walls a cat growled, and soon he saw it stepping along the top of Richard’s latticework. He stared at the cat and the cat stared at him.
What was he so unhappy about? He loved his wife, his kids; he was still alive; there was nothing he knew of that was wrong with him or them. He hadn’t known Jane Wilson. He couldn’t protect Elizabeth from whatever she was enduring. He could only be with her, and if she would rightly rather be with Richard, then wasn’t he finally cut loose from all this? But he loved her.
In the study he started up the computer. He could occupy himself. Eventually she would call or come back. And tomorrow he would, for a moment, get to leave. He had more balance than he knew.
She cooked Sarah breakfast while Max spent one of his TV tickets, then she made his breakfast while Sarah dressed, and she got Max dressed while Sarah whined about her hair, and by quarter to nine she had them both out the door, ferried the girl across the street to school, strapped Max in the car seat and hauled him to Stepping Stones. At nine o’clock she was in her office. So far so good. She had to teach Martin’s three classes between ten and two-thirty, and then pick up Sarah by three-fifteen. She could do it. She was doing it.
The e-mails to Martin that he asked her to check were all cautionary, professional, and legalistic. He was not to speak about Jane Wilson, period. With the infanticide there had been phases of secrecy and interrogation, but even if Martin had sensed the student’s depression, who was he anyway? He was just an anthropology professor. Some schools didn’t even have anthropology.
She stiffened herself for the first class. He’d told her what the last one had been like. Yesterday she had been out raking the lawn, and their neighbor had stopped over, a college alum in his seventies who had returned, almost salmonlike, to this town to retire. Now he was bereft. “We didn’t have this when we were their age,” he said, his face mottled with sorrow. “This self-confidence problem or whatever you call it.” Self-esteem, she suggested. “Yeah, well, whatever. We didn’t kill ourselves back then.” She had stepped back and looked at him calmly, the children out of earshot in a pile of leaves. “People have always been killing themselves,” she said. “Well, don’t you two people go getting depressed or anything,” the neighbor said, his face rosaceous. “It’s not worth it.”
“Lauren?”
It was Ruben. “Hi,” she said.
“Isn’t Martin in today?”
She told him, as tersely as she could, Martin’s situation while he lounged in the doorway and kept pulling out a cigarette from a nearly crumpled pack and shoving it back in again.
“Well, do you have a phone number for him? They’re going to have to talk to him.”
She gave it to him. “Anything else?”
“Nope,” he said. He shut the door.
She was lifting the phone to call him when it rang in her hand. The vibration made her drop it. It rang again. All right.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hey.” It was him.
“Ruben’s going to call you. They need to talk with you some more.”
“Richard came back,” he said.
“What?”
“Last night. Very late. Weird.
And now the car is gone and neither of them are here.”
“When you coming home?”
“Tomorrow.”
She sighed happily. “Hey, that’s great!”
He told her again which disks had the assignments. “So, how are you anyway?” he asked.
“How are you?”
“I can’t wait to get home.”
“Me, too.”
He paused. “Their call waiting. I’ve got to take it.”
“Call us.”
“I will.”
She set the phone on the hook. What a relief that Richard had returned. She hadn’t thought he’d stay away for long, but it was impossible to know. She couldn’t blame him. After all this she never wanted to blame anybody for anything, she wanted to move forward. She knew that was naive. She liked naiveté. It made her feel restful. Or rested.
She printed out the assignments and was about to make the necessary photocopies when the phone rang again.
“Yes?” she said.
“That wasn’t Ruben, it was Elizabeth,” Martin said, his voice tense. “They’ll be home so late they don’t know whether they’ll see me, and I should just wake them in the morning to say good-bye.”
“Maybe they just need the time alone,” she said gently.
“Maybe I just get the fuck out of here today.”
“You can’t.”
“I know. I know.”
He was silent while she watched the minutes evaporate before his class.
“I’ve really got to do these copies,” she said.
“All right. I’ll call you.”
Annka stood in the hall right outside Lauren’s office door, as if she’d been lurking.
“Is everything all right?” she asked daintily. “Is Martin upset?”
Lauren stared at her. “Everything is fine.”
At least she’d told him where the key was. He had it now as he walked up the street toward the tube stop. Almost half the day left. He tried to lift himself. London. He could do anything! He kicked at a chunk of broken beer bottle and gave a whistle. The air was cold, the sky was clearing. London!
The high street clattered and chinked with traffic and trash. He bought a day pass from one of the machines and headed into town. Hamley’s was in the middle of another refurbishment, and he had a terrible time finding the right aisles and once in them finding anything suitable. It was always easier at the airport, when he had only a few minutes and the stores offered only a few choices. He bought Sarah a set of special drawing pencils that she probably already had, and he found for Max what must have been his seventeenth or eighteenth tractor. Twenty pounds spent, just like that.
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