by Cutter Wood
He’s beneath the stairs putting in some screws when Sabine goes to clean the room on the second floor, and without thinking, he glances up as she passes overhead. Flickering in the open spaces between the treads, he sees her two legs stretching up above him, soft and white from the calves to the tightened tendons in her knees and continuing on for the briefest of moments to a terminus that he feels obliged to turn away from. On occasions such as this, he finds Britta in the laundry hut and narrates for her such portions of his feelings as make her cross herself.
“Hopeless,” she says, pulling a towel from his hands.
“Britta.” He pats her on the knee. “Don’t pretend you haven’t done it.”
“Go.” She pushes him out of the seat and sets to refolding the towel he has rumpled.
Toward the end of the day, it seems like he’s alone at the motel. Sabine has disappeared into one of the rooms with a package of lightbulbs. Tom is nowhere to be seen, and Britta has finished her laundry. All the guests have jet-skied off to the deserted fort on the next island over, or they’ve headed up to watch the manatees rolling around in the hot-water runoff at the power plant. It’s just he and Tess, who is delicately picking her nose in the office. As the hour draws near when he must return to his cell, he imagines what the motel must look like at dawn or dusk, by the pool with a can of beer, and the clouds blocking out the stars. The blueness of evening, how all that is white is swayed to blue, the sand, the stucco, the sidewalk and mortar, the sun-bleached phone poles, and the sheets hung out to dry by the widow next door. How the sea turns from gold to silver, and the eye of the heron dilates hungrily. How the road goes quiet, and the deputy in the church lot puts the car in park and rests his eyes. The great freshness in the air at night as a rainstorm approaches, the concentration of smells, of gasoline and oleander. All that he has seen, all that he has done, is dissolved into the thought of that which remains beyond his reach, as if the things he imagines are more durable, more real, than those that stand before him.
10: Ballad of the Estranged Husband
Tom has lived in Florida a few decades, meaning he is as close as most people get to being a local. He would know then, I suppose, the quickest way from one place to another and where not to get your hair cut, and he probably remembers what the bridge to Longboat Key looked like before they put in the new concrete pilings. Whenever a recent transplant complains about the tourists, Tom is careful not to take sides. He remembers what it was like when he first came to Anna Maria, how empty the beach feels sometimes. “Nobody has it easy,” his father used to say, and when a woman cuts him off in traffic, he tries to imagine what life looks like from her point of view, just as I am trying to imagine what life looks like from his. He is one of the rare locals who doesn’t in the least resent the tourist and the newcomer, perhaps because he tries to make his living off them.
He has a compact build, and when he stands still, he stands with his feet set a little wide. But he does not stand still often, and he is usually rushing from the office to the laundry machine or from the beach to the bank. When he speaks, his hands move swiftly before him, as if unsure where to settle. His face is handsome but coarse—thick lips, a snub nose—and he is always rubbing a hand across his mouth or over his eyes, as though beneath them were a finer set of features. He walks quickly, as well, and his thoughts come on with such rapidity that he can never bring the words out fast enough.
Had he been able to focus his tremendous energy on one task at a time, he might have accomplished feats to awe the world, but instead it seems it is the energy itself that, through sheer quantity and force, has undermined many of his endeavors even as they were beginning. When he arrives at the bank, he is sure to have forgotten the deposit slip at home, and returning for the second time to the same teller, a patient young woman, he has now misplaced the checks he’d meant to deposit. Much of each day he spends like this, moving from place to place, beginning a thousand projects. “Slow down,” Sabine tells him. “You need to slow down.” But he’s already thinking about what he needs to do next. For some time, his hammer has been sitting on the roof of the motel.
Like many businessmen, he has sued and been sued, has satisfied and not satisfied his mortgages, has declared bankruptcy, and has signed those innumerable pieces of paper, deeds, bank documents, and certificates of satisfaction that compose a life. With so much paperwork, he must have a lawyer, in an office maybe on Manatee Avenue in Bradenton, a few rooms in what had once been a carriage house. The parking lot needs to be repainted, and this lawyer, a long-suffering man who bears his clients’ deficiencies as though they were his own, rubs his nose as Tom enters the room. Tom has ushered three marriages into this office, and the belongings he has thus far forfeited amount to more than either of them can bear to itemize, let alone total, though the lawyer keeps an informal tally. “A Buddhist, no?” he says, looking over his glasses. “Worldly things mean nothing to you?”
Tom is not confounded by most women. Though he had not been lucky in his previous marriages, he could see the reasons why. But he is confounded by Sabine. With Sabine, no sooner had they met than they were married, and no sooner were they married than their love began to cool. One day, she simply divided the house in two and asked that he stay on his side. What confuses him is that she still cares for him. She still makes him dinner every night; he makes her breakfast each morning. They’ve slept in separate bedrooms for years, and he has recently begun to date, but still he feels when he comes home and finds her dozing on the couch with the news on, when she wakes and looks up at him with half-closed eyes, still he feels she looks on him as her husband.
Tom remembers the day Bill Cumber was arrested at the motel, and he remembers the day the man returned alongside Sabine in the convertible. He was an enthusiastic man who responded to most questions with a nod and a smile. Now whenever there is a project that requires both men—a room needs to be repainted, a new air conditioner has to be installed—Tom tries his best to be pleasant and civil, and Bill is always more than happy to help. But Tom does sometimes watch carefully from the shade, running his hands over his sun-browned scalp, as the younger man seats himself in a patch of sunlight by the pool and shakes the sawdust from his hair.
The lover who suspects his beloved of being unfaithful is always making a case for a thing he is unable to believe is true, and so at the same time as Tom accumulates his suspicions, he denies what it is that they amount to. While he worries over the tone of Sabine’s voice or the hours she spends away from the motel, he also manages somehow not to register the rumors that cross his path. He hears from Chuck Greevy that a man named Bill was out on the beach with Sabine, or Tess mentions that they went out for lunch together. He notices one day that Bill is not working at all but lying by the pool with cotton balls between his toes. He doesn’t say anything or ask any questions. It’s hard enough to stay focused without pursuing these avenues of thought. He puts the whole thing out of his mind, and begins looking for his tape measure.
At noon, Bill has to call and check in with his corrections officer. He does this from the old white landline in the office, flipping through the Far Side calendar while Tom, on the other side of the desk, swings side to side in the swivel chair.
“Cumber,” he says. “William. Number oh-two-nine-one-two.”
There is no hold music. The thunder out on the Gulf sounds like cargo shifting in the belly of a big ship. While Bill waits, Tom watches as the shadows outside fade and disappear and the cars begin to go by with their headlights on. The palms shake their heads, and with the first raindrops, Tess shows up holding a bag of takeout with a boy from high school behind her, the rain beading on his spiked hair. Only when the rain is falling in straight lines and frothing on the road does Sabine appear, plunging into the room in a soaked pair of overalls. It is not a large office. On the one side of the desk, Tom and Tess and the boyfriend are packed together. Bill and Sabine are on the other side.
In some way, despite his efforts, the
possibility has crept into Tom’s mind that something untoward has begun to occur. When the storm passes, and everyone else leaves the office, he remains standing by the open door, and without even realizing, he begins to consider offhandedly how much he despises Bill.
11: Explicable Phenomena
We treat the tides as commonplace. We send monkeys into space as simply as if we were sending flowers to our mother. We fertilize our strawberries with the bones of ancient sharks and light our bathrooms by perturbing an isotope of uranium. We carry on unwondering in a world of explicable phenomena, and in this state of mind, how do we approach the subject of love?
Sabine ignores it. She has plenty to do and to think about, and the man she picks up on Saturday mornings and drops off on Saturday evenings is only one part of the day’s many obligations. She fills up the convertible with unleaded, reads her horoscope between bites of cereal, buys and returns a redder shade of lipstick, and generally goes about her life as though nothing has changed. She and Bill continue to exchange letters, and she writes out her replies in the same careful, considerate hand that she uses for all her other business. When he disappears back into the prison, she makes a point of not dallying in the parking lot. She is a woman with six credit cards, and she has things to do.
It’s on her ride home, however, that she finds herself subject to a not-yet-conscious heightening of the senses. It is spring, the time of year in that part of Florida when for weeks on end the air is precisely the temperature of the skin, and as she drives back to Anna Maria a little before dusk, the streetlamps pop on, and the world feels to her like the set of a movie where all your neighbors like you and want you to do well. She can’t help noticing things that before she’d never given her attention—the boys using oranges for baseballs in an empty corner lot, the woman leaning against the bathroom door at the gas station, the ads for swimming lessons on the bus benches—and by the time she returns home from dropping him off, she already has three things she’d like to put in her next letter. She thinks that she should write them down before she forgets, and sitting in the driveway with the dash light on, she turns to one of the blank pages at the back of her checkbook and discovers that it’s already full of notes.
For a long time she has been meaning to get back in shape, and on a Wednesday afternoon, her day off from work, she drives to Sarasota to meet with a personal trainer named Armando. He speaks with a faint Cuban lisp, his cheeks are dark, despite the closeness of his shave, and his sleeveless shirt hangs like a curtain from the muscles on his chest.
“How many times a week, baby?”
“What do you think?”
“Let’s see your tummy.” He looks over his clipboard as she hesitates. “Oh, honey, you’re a woman. Have some pride.”
He looks her over quickly. “Three times a week.”
She takes out her checkbook.
“Cash only, but don’t you worry. Get me next time.” He smiles. “I never asked you: What’s his name?”
“Who?”
So Sabine Musil-Buehler finds herself on the trajectory of love and discovers that the path is well-worn. On Saturday mornings at the prison, she’s one of many women there to sign out a man for furlough. There is a group of older women who seem to have known one another for years. They sit in the waiting room together, arguing in English and Spanish—about glucosamine tablets, the warden, the governor, their children, who are raising their grandchildren the wrong way—and when a name is called, they gather their things and nod to the rest of the group. Here and there, a few young women sit with their legs crossed, pulling down their skirts every so often. The rest, like Sabine, are somewhere in between. They look blurred, as though there were a gap between what they thought their lives would be and what they have become, and the discrepancy has kept them from fully solidifying. A few bring children; most step outside to have a cigarette while they wait. Sabine cannot find much to sympathize with in these women, who all seem to her to suffer from some deep deficiency, and when Bill appears in the doorway, she is already on her feet.
Her stomach is so sore from her workout that she can hardly turn to look at him in the car. She feels like there’s an iron rod running up the middle of her spine, and she can’t raise her arms above the level of her shoulders. But this aching feels akin to elation.
It is still early, and the sky is flakked with high, translucent clouds. The roads are empty, and the sound of the engine dissipates across the wide lawns. They drive for a long while beneath that sky, listening to nothing but the wind in their ears, and just as morning seems to have returned the world to a past age, so Sabine also feels the presence of Bill has allowed her to return to some earlier and more expectant time of her life. In her fourteen years in Florida, she has grown skilled at seeing only the things she’s seen a thousand times before: the spinning racks of sunglasses and the taillights of the cars in front of her. But the world on these mornings seems to have been composed of a different substance than the rest. She is aware of the dazzle of shattered glass on the side of the road, the white needlelike masts of sailboats rocking in their slips, the gentle banking of the highway that shifts her slightly in her seat, inclining her body toward his. Everything has been charged with the possibility of being noticed, and she feels the world has been favored with a forgotten lightness. When they crest the apex of the bridge, her stomach rises slightly.
“You know,” he says, “the second I saw this car . . .”
“What?”
“I said, ‘She’s all right.’ ”
“ ‘All right’ is good?”
“I mean it’s pretty cool for a lady like you to have a car like this.”
“A lady like me?”
He scooches around in his seat.
“I guess I thought you’d be a little stuck on yourself, hoity-toity. I never hung out with a woman of quality, you know.”
“Hung out.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Hanging out.”
“How did you hang out”—she changes lanes—“with other women?”
“Well, it’s a fluid concept.”
She looks over at him, and he smiles and looks out the window.
“Hey,” he says. “You ever see how fast this thing can go?”
They stop for breakfast at a strip-mall diner east of Bradenton. It sits in a narrow space between a gym and a nail salon, and above the plate-glass windows, a sign shows a cartoon of an old man flipping pancakes. Inside, the air is cool and smells of burned potatoes and nail-polish remover. The hostess wears a purple bow in her hair and waves two menus at them as she walks off toward a booth along the back wall. They pass a white-haired man staring out a window with a grape skewered on the end of his fork. Through a long opening in the wall, Sabine sees the chef at the kitchen sink testing his blood sugar.
The waitress arrives with two empty mugs and two carafes.
“Decaf or regular?”
The coffee smells like the vinyl on the seats and tastes like cigarettes.
Bill’s appetite is stunning: three eggs, home fries, sausage, bacon, toast, an omelet, an order of pancakes, two glasses of juice. His elbows out to his sides, he eats rapidly but without method, seeming to fork food at random from the jumble on his plate. He drinks the coffee like it’s water. The tabletop is littered with empty cream containers.
“So what do you want to do when you get out?”
“I’ve got some friends in North Carolina still,” he says. “Depends on where I can get work.”
“Would you miss it here?”
“Not the cops.”
“Well.” She finds a napkin and brushes it across her lips. “You’re always welcome to put me as a reference. Tom or me.”
“I can tell you one thing,” he says. “I’m sure not going back to prison—I’ll tell you that much.”
He runs the last bites of his pancake through the yolk on his plate.
“I have an idea,” she says finally. “I think you should marry Britta.”
H
e stops chewing and looks up at her. “She needs to stay in the country,” Sabine says. “There’s nothing wrong with it. People do it all the time.”
“I can’t marry Britta,” he says. “She’s not my type.”
“Your type. What does that matter? She’s nice.” Sabine crosses her arms. “What is your type?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Someone like you.”
When he excuses himself to go to the bathroom, the sounds swell to life in a clattering of crockery and voices. At the table beside her, a group of elderly women are having a conversation as though it were an argument.
“If Deborah says it’s Waterford, it’s Waterford.”
“This food is too salty.”
“Well, if everything’s too salty, why are you eating it?”
“I just said everything’s salty, and who says Deborah is the expert.”
All that day, without meaning to, she puts herself in his way, and by that miracle of small intent, they run into each other continually. The plumber is coming, and this is enough reason for her to wait around, and to invite Bill to take a break with her. It would be silly not to on such a nice day. She decides to finally replace the leaking air conditioner in room 9, and in the parking lot of the hardware store, she follows Bill as he carries the enormous box to her car. Afterward, she is so embarrassed by the transparency of her affection that she avoids him the rest of the day. The trip back to the prison they spend in strained, amiable silence, driving with the top down so there’s no obligation to speak.
The moment she drops Bill off, it’s as though the world snaps back into focus. The dusk glows more pinkly, the B-minor chord strikes more deeply, the cold is more bracing, and the melon tastes more like melon. She wonders if he is lying on the cot in his cell or holding out a hand in the exercise yard to see if it’s raining. Is there still a stain on his shirt where she tried to clean off the maple syrup? Is he laughing at something someone said? These intervals of separation are the most crucial moments, when the figure sprouts in the mind, grows its loveliness like leaves.
