And months later, when she could not possibly endure such an outing, how Richard would ask her to dress as if she were going, just so he could see her that way.
Now it was dark and wet outside. Martin could envision them wandering through the night, but he couldn’t tell whether they were flinching and hunched or relaxed and untouched or brazen and reckless. He couldn’t tell whether they were holding hands. They were so close together, they seemed to disappear into one another at the elbow. They were alone together in the wet dark.
“So you’re saying you really don’t know when he’ll be back.”
Lauren nodded her head and winced. “It’s a weird situation. He needs to be over there.”
“I can see that,” Ruben said, clutching his beard. “I can certainly see that. It’s not like I don’t understand. But there’s a lot of shit going on right now, and this is just one more—”
“I think he’ll be back soon,” Lauren said.
“That’s not the impression you just gave me. I mean, what’s soon, Lauren? Is soon next week? Is soon next semester?”
“I think soon,” she repeated.
“You know, I’ve got a lot of shit going on in my life, too. I’m sure if we turned all our rocks over at the same time, there’d be more worm-filled crap than we’d know what to do with. What’s the difference between him sitting over there waiting for her and him sitting over here? That’s what I don’t get. I want to be reasonable. I’m glad you’re meeting his classes. But for everyone’s sake he should come home.”
“Right,” Lauren said.
“Did you know that Julia is in rehab again? Did you know that I had to take every fucking pill bottle and hide it? Did you know I can’t even have aspirin in my own home? Did you know that we’re in our forty-first year of marriage, and if rehab doesn’t take this time it’s going to be all over for us? And that fucking jerk David Lazlo is just abandoning his wife for a twenty-eight-year-old with two kids? I mean there’s a lot of fucking shit going on, Lauren.”
“I hear you,” she said evenly.
“Maybe I’m just jealous because David and your husband are out there at least getting to deal with their shit full-time!”
“Martin isn’t.” Lauren felt herself blushing. “We’re still here. We’re part of it.”
“Oh, yeah. Right. Sorry.”
“Anyway, I’ve got to prep.”
“Well.” He turned in the doorway. “Good to talk to you. Keep me posted.”
“I will. I will.”
She watched the door slowly shut. The last few e-mails from Lazlo—from Kansas or wherever he was supposedly doing research, she could never tell which—always began with My enemies are against me. Of course, she kept replying, that’s why they’re called enemies. I worry that Cindy is turning all my friends against me, too. That she never bothered to respond to. The poor woman was in the midst of deciding on a hip replacement, and he was doing a twenty-eight-year-old? The whole department was now calling anything like it Going to Kansas. I heard David Lazlo went to Kansas. You think Ruben might go to Kansas? A few years back Chuck from Computer Science went to Kansas.
She wondered if Martin had ever considered going to Kansas.
Martin’s family thought Richard had gone to Kansas.
Fifty percent of all marriages ended up in Kansas. Or had that dropped to forty? Or was that actually only divorce, and not definitely Kansas?
Her father said her mother had gone to Kansas. Her mother wouldn’t talk about it. That was twenty-five years ago. It was hard to believe they still stirred it, poked at it, prodded it to keep it burning. They’d been perfect for each other, really. Same materialistic instincts, same compelling surfaces, same personality flaws. David Lazlo was smooth, but Cindy made him smoother. How could he have failed to see that?
Midlife crisis, they muttered around the department. Poor guy has a full weight room in his basement, drives that stupid Miata—you could see it coming from half a lifetime away. She knew people wrote him scolding emails, but at least all his lowly behavior was one form of being in charge of his own destiny. David Lazlo might be a jerk, but he was also a creature of desperation. That didn’t make him evil. It just made him irresponsible, slightly unpredictable, and yet ultimately so transparent he seemed even more pathetic than usual. He had a half dozen of his own books on the shelf and a daughter who ran a New York ad agency and a red sports car and sabbatical every six years and one of the longest tenures at the college, and still he was pathetic. She knew he wanted to be noble. He was farther from it now than he had ever been. He must know that.
“Did you see it?”
It was Jane Doyle, their reclamation project, standing wryly in the door. Wryness was as close as she ever got to enthusiasm.
“What?”
“CNN. They’re on the steps of White Hall. Doing something on ‘The State of the American College.’ The dead baby. Now the suicide. We’re anthropological!”
Lauren rose, in either curiosity or dread, she couldn’t tell which, and ventured to the window. Just one camera, just one reporter. Would they find out how weak everyone was? Wasn’t everyone weak everywhere?
“Well,” she said, turning to Jane and meeting her irony, “I guess that’s something.”
“Martin would love this,” Jane said.
Now what? Martin was thinking. Now what. It was the next day, and he was still in bed trying not to hear the hammering and sawing that evidently was going on down in the kitchen.
He tried to move. It was amazing how one screaming hand could make everything else seem so impossible. Imagine when his time came. He wouldn’t be able to go anywhere. He’d be just pinned to the bed, waiting for whatever it was to finish him.
In the kitchen was the neighbor.
“You see?” he said, pointing with his saw as he knelt on the floor. “It’s custom glass. The whole bloody door is custom-made. All I’m about doing is making up the missing panel with wood.”
“Thank you,” Martin said.
“You feeling all right? You look a little under it.”
“Just fine,” Martin said.
“There’s the lad.”
There were planks of wood on the kitchen floor with nails sticking up from them, as if the neighbor had been practicing. On the counter were plastic packets of bacon and ham, a tin of mackerel, a dozen eggs, and a liter of the kind of milk that didn’t need to be refrigerated.
“Help yourself,” the neighbor said. “I’ll only be a minute here.”
“Thank you,” Martin said again.
The guy seemed to be sawing away at Martin’s own stomach. At last he stopped and held up a perfect square and whistled. “That’s the stuff,” he said.
“Cheers,” Martin said.
“Now the installation,” the neighbor said, rising to eye the empty panel. “That’s going to be tender business.”
“Maybe we should—”
“Almost done,” the neighbor said. He grabbed up some sandpaper from the counter and started in on the perfect square of wood. On the kitchen table were drills and bevels and a two-foot-long tool case so deeply gashed it looked like it had been through some kind of exploratory surgery. “It’s not a big job,” he said. “I just want to make sure, is all.”
“Right,” Martin agreed. He picked up a loaf of white bread, set it on a cutting board, and began to slice it with his left hand.
“Now, now.” The neighbor dropped the sandpaper and wood and rushed over, took up the knife and loaf in his two meaty, sawdusty hands, and began to cut perfect one-inch slices. “This is the least I can do.”
And then, in what seemed like a floury haze, he finished with the door, packed up his tools, and organized his lumber.
“You found a key, right?” he said.
“Yes.” Martin blushed.
“Well, let me know if there’s anything else you need help with.”
“I will,” Martin lied. “I will.”
“I’m sure they’ll turn up soon,
” the neighbor said.
When he’d gone, Martin sat at the empty kitchen table, letting the gratitude erode into general annoyance and then a soothing clarity. He was alone. He could think.
Maybe they would turn up soon. Maybe he was just being a fool.
Later, while it was still too early to really do anything, he found himself staring at the wall that separated him from the neighbor. There he lived and Martin had never seen him before, and it was easy to imagine he might not see him again. How many hundreds of times had Martin walked the street and never even known. The man’s dignity. His courtesy. His humor. And he was gone to him again. There was comfort in that. And also something that made him feel dazed and uneasy, something mysterious, something mortal. Another guy with his own sufferings, his own life, his own nothingness.
Why the hell had he stayed? There was absolutely nothing he could do.
He couldn’t bear to leave. It would be over if he left. He was just another guy sticking around at a crash site. They weren’t ever coming back. His own sister. He just knew it. On top of everything else that he knew or could imagine, she was one of those stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off types of people. Years ago he used to tease her that she wanted her life to be like a beer commercial. That got under her skin. When they were kids hoping for snow on New Year’s Eve, she’d point out the window at the big flakes and say, Soon we’ll be out there sledding with champagne. He’d never in his whole life sledded with champagne. When he was nineteen she took him tubing once on the Delaware. We’ll rig up the beer in its own inner tube, she’d promised, and we’ll just be drifting down the Delaware having our party. But the tubing service prohibited alcohol. For their honeymoon she and Richard had climbed glaciers in New Zealand, helicoptered, parasailed. She wasn’t going to put up with this. She wasn’t going to accept this. Who the hell should?
OUT OF CONTROL
There were bills for the computer desk and the repainting of the study in “golden laughter,” bills for ball therapy and cases of dozens of different vitamins, bills for wheatgrass deliveries and monthly colonics. Taped to the gold walls were index cards transcribed with what he took to be a guru’s advice. Straighten out your inner state. Clean the mirror of your heart. Focus on the purpose of your life. Believe in love. On the shelves were books about how to get pregnant, how to get well, how to achieve balance, how to think. E-mails clinked in at a slow clip—they hadn’t bothered to wall it off with a password—from strangers who didn’t seem to suspect absence and from names dimly recognizable to him: Elizabeth’s old high school friend whom he once had a crush on, a guy they had been in a car accident with twenty-five years ago on their way to Baskin-Robbin’s in a rainstorm, a distant cousin who happened to be a nurse. Whenever the phone rang it was about a missed booking at this or that therapist, or a request that Richard or Elizabeth come pick up dry cleaning or a new wall hanging. Not an inkling from anyone that they might be gone. He sat on the swivel chair at the custom-built, three-thousand-dollar desk and swiveled as if one turn could take him around for a peek in India, Holland, upstate New York, California, and the time-share on Ibiza that they’d mentioned frequently. There were people whom he should call—Richard’s parents and straitlaced sister, Richard’s office. Instead, on the phone he spent time filling in holes for other people—her doctor, their mother, his wife—even though it was all one big hole to him. He’d been here now three or four days past the disappearance, and he had nothing new to report. The mail came. The gas-meter reader came.
It was too obvious, as Martin’s mother conjectured, to think they were booked in with something as communal as the ashram or Epiphany. And maybe it was too naive, as he himself thought, to imagine that they would never come back. Oh, they’ll come back, Martha and Lauren said. You should let them be.
He felt no instinct or pull that she needed to be rescued, that she wanted to be rescued, that rescue was possible. He felt only trapped by a void. Inside it he knew was just emptiness. But if he left, it would only grow larger and larger until he wouldn’t even be able to define it again.
“It’s pretty simple what you do,” his mother said, once she had attained a reasonable calm. “You wait a month, and then you see what’s on their credit card bills. Once they start having to charge stuff, we’ll be able to find things out.”
“They might have a lot of cash,” Martin said.
“We could hire a detective.”
“Don’t you see my point?” he said.
“I am not losing my mind over this,” his mother said.
“How’s Dad?” he reminded himself to ask.
“He’s good, he’s good. He’s doing great with the rehab. But it’s hard getting used to—”
“The cancer?”
“No. The age,” she said sadly, “just the age. The fact that he’s seventy-three.”
When he hung up, the phone rang again.
“Hey, kiddo.”
It was Martha, her voice pitched to sympathy.
“Hey,” he said.
“Don’t you think you should just come home?”
“Not yet,” he said.
“What exactly are you doing there anyway? I mean, are you calling around after them? What?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“You know, Martin, all of us are dealing with something. It’s not just Elizabeth.”
To that he had nothing to say.
“Your wife thinks you should come home.”
“She’s okay with it.”
“Not really.” She paused. “Think of your job. Think of your family.”
He was going to try some calls to various authorities, he was going to visit Richard’s office, he was going to call Richard’s sister, he was going to get aggressive. Sometimes it hit him that if they wanted to be found they wouldn’t be lost, and he felt the mire of inertia and doubt. He ought to go home. He ought to just get the fuck out of here. He ought to—
The phone.
“Hello,” he said cautiously.
“Is that you, Martin?”
Although the voice wasn’t all that familiar, he knew who it was.
“Oh, hello!” he said, digging for the enthusiasm. “I was going to call you.”
“Of course you were,” Richard’s mother said. “But thank goodness your mother found the time. So it’s true? They’re off somewhere? He’s gone from work?”
“Yes. He’s taken indefinite leave. Compassionate leave, is what they said. He left Dunkers Green as the contact number.”
“You’ve called the time-share?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ring the ashram in Bridgetown?”
“Of course.”
“How odd,” she said. She was almost eighty, hard to ruffle. “And yet not terribly, when one thinks about it. It’s going on four days, isn’t it?”
“Exactly,” he said.
“I think we need to give them a week or two before we demonstrate our concern,” she said.
“Yes,” Martin said.
“But you’re concerned, aren’t you? You’re one of the closest to them; I know that.”
“You yourself said it was odd,” he said.
“I did. One moment please.” He heard her cover the mouthpiece, the rich murmur of her voice when words were indistinguishable. “I think we’d like to come down there. Justin and I. Would that be all right?”
“Absolutely,” Martin said.
“Good then, it’s settled. We have a key. It’s a delicate situation, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“Good-bye, then.”
“Good-bye.”
“He tried to turn their daughter against her,” Ruben whispered stagily as he stood yet again in the open doorway. He seemed, these days, almost always to be standing there, a fixture or a ghost. If only she could believe in ghosts. “But Cindy told Jenny everything. I say good for her.”
“Ruben,” she said wearily, “I’ve got class in five mi
nutes. Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know. Entertainment. Gossip. I thought you’d want to know.”
“I don’t want to know anything,” Lauren said.
“Julia’s in rehab again.”
“You told me.”
“I was lying. This time she’s really in. I dropped her off this morning.”
“Oh.”
“You think I’m being a drama king? I’m just giving you the facts. Maybe that way, when we begin the slow lynching of your absent husband, you’ll have something to fight with.”
“That’s not—” She stopped herself and stared at his wizened face, his straggly beard. It was hard to believe he and Lazlo were the same age. It was hard to believe they’d been friends for thirty years. “Whatever,” she said. “I’ve got to run.”
“Am I harassing you?” Ruben said, as she gathered her things and pushed herself and him out of the office.
“Not yet,” she said.
“Well,” Richard’s mother was saying as she smoothed the lap of her dress for what must have been the tenth time, “I do think it would be a bit intrusive to be poking about at his work.”
“I agree,” Martin said.
“It’s all terribly tricky,” Richard’s father said, his voice husky from exhaustion and age. “I’m not sure what it is we’re about here. I’m not even sure why we are here.”
“Well, it isn’t an emergency,” Richard’s mother said.
“Of course not,” Martin said.
They all sat in the living room with their shoes lined neatly in the hall, as the owners preferred it. They must have been sitting there for ten minutes, but was it really only that long?
“Richard is a good boy,” Richard’s mother said.
“An excellent young man,” Richard’s father said.
“I’m afraid it’s a little unnerving, is all. I mean, the notion that you can stop the world and get off,” she smiled, repeating what Martin had conjectured, “it does seem to be like them. They’re adventurous. They want to live. I admire them both tremendously.”
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