The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  “Tell me I’m sick over nothing.”

  “You’re sick over nothing.”

  Louise smiled. It was so goddamn hard to believe. She shut her eyes very tightly.

  “I can’t get over how she touched you.”

  “She touched me. I had no control over that. You might have noticed that I didn’t touch her.”

  “True, true.” What difference did it make? One small touch suggested all kinds of perfidy. “Did you ever make love to her?”

  “Louise.”

  “Did you?”

  Max shook his head emphatically.

  “Would you like to?” Louise asked.

  “Why are you punishing yourself?”

  That isn’t an answer, Max.

  Louise stood up and wandered restlessly around the room. She threw open the doors that led to the sun deck and went outside, staring up at the misanthropic moon. It hung there with a pitiless look. She had a sense of intimacies from which she was excluded—the betrayed wife.

  Max came out on the deck and put his arm around her shoulders.

  Her tone one of forced cheerfulness, she said, “This is not the summer I planned. No way.”

  Max was silent. His arm felt like a lead weight against her.

  She looked at the hangdog moon. She felt her whole family unit had become splintered in this place—a son who enjoyed spending his time with strangers, a father who failed to make true connections with the boy, and a husband tracked by a possibly neurotic female patient all the way upstate, a woman who imagined herself in love with him.

  These were not the prerequisites for a gorgeous summer. Not remotely. She clenched her hands, frustrated. What was she supposed to believe of Max? Was he capable of treachery? If so, where did that leave her after eighteen years of marriage and trust and mutual support?

  She lost herself out there in the depths of the trees, the piebald shadows of the landscape. She had a passing thought of Frog out there someplace—could she go talk to him? Would he understand? Could he help?

  She looked into Max’s eyes and then she turned and walked into the bedroom. She undressed in front of the bedside lamp. From the sun-deck doorway Max studied her. She tried to ignore the way his eyes scrutinized her body. She lay down, pulling a sheet over her.

  Close your eyes. Drift away. Daylight is the great salve.

  Max sat beside her and took her hand, clasping it between his own like a flower pressed between pages of a book. She tried to imagine herself and Max when they were as old as Dick and Charlotte. Would they live that long? More important—would they be together still? Kissing dried lips? Holding decrepit hands?

  35

  Charlotte said to Louise, “The boy’s gone to bed. Guess he was tired.”

  Louise gazed at the old woman a moment. Dick Summer had one arm around his wife’s waist and the old couple leaned together, seeming to fuse, to meld, somewhere in the middle of their bodies. Louise, who had the start of a pounding headache, smiled.

  Dick asked, “Nice time? Good food?”

  “Good food,” Max said. He was standing in the doorway, hands in the pockets of his pants.

  Charlotte fussed with her hair a second. She was wearing a pale blue ribbon. “Any time you need us to sit with the boy, don’t you hesitate.”

  “It’s very good of you,” Louise said. She hoped the Summers weren’t going to linger, hoped they wouldn’t hang around waiting for a nightcap or something—she wanted to go upstairs and sleep. Just sleep. In the morning light everything was going to be different.

  “He’s no problem, that boy,” Charlotte said. She raised one hand again to adjust her ribbon. As she did so her skin reflected the light from the lamp behind her head. A smooth, soft glistening.

  Charlotte’s hand.

  Louise looked away—there was a hammer beating inside her skull. She was back in the restaurant, surrounded by what she saw as the fact of her betrayal. No. Not Max. Not you, Max. She turned back to the sight of Charlotte’s hand. A pulse throbbed in her head, loud and terrifying.

  “Going to be taking a trip soon. Better get going,” Dick said. He moved Charlotte toward the door, where Max stepped aside to let them pass. Louise went out into the corridor after the old people.

  “Thanks again,” she said.

  Dick and Charlotte went out on the porch, where they turned around in unison and looked at the Untermeyers in the hallway. Two couples, Louise thought. The one old, the other … middle-aged. Very middle-aged. Wasn’t that the time of one’s life when betrayal struck? Wasn’t that when it was supposed to happen? Husbands strayed. Found younger women. Wives took up tennis and fucked the club pro. Downhill into forced merriment. Looking impending death and darkness right in the eye.

  She went out onto the porch. The Summers started down the steps. There was a bleak moon, yellowy at the edges, hanging above the pines. The night was filled with small currents of electricity, as if out there in the blind darkness all manner of creatures were humming. Louise watched the Summers move toward the trees. Where could they be taking a trip to?

  “Do you need a flashlight?” she called after them.

  “We know this place like the backs of our hands,” Dick answered.

  They turned once and waved and then they were gone.

  Louise went inside, closing the door. The backs of our hands, she thought—and the image of Charlotte’s hand was barely illuminated in her mind, a puzzle of some kind, like something seen through frosted glass. That hand. The skin.

  Max was watching her in the hallway.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “You have a knack for asking inappropriate questions,” she said.

  “You look pale, Louise.”

  “Connie’s rather pale, too, isn’t she?”

  “Why don’t you leave it alone? Why don’t you drop it?”

  “Because it’s like rancid food, Max. The taste keeps coming back. That’s why.”

  Max sighed. He went to the stairs. “I’m going up,” he said. “I’m very tired.”

  Louise watched him go. Her head was filled with tiny smoking fissures, volcanic in the way they burst open. She heard the bedroom door close at the top of the stairs.

  She moved along the hallway. She stepped inside Dennis’s room. The lamp was on.

  The smell of Dick Summer’s bait filled the air—sickly now, sweet as a rotten apple, still strong and objectionable. Louise walked to the bedside table and gazed at the little jar in which Dennis kept the substance.

  The boy, who lay on the bed with his head turned away from his mother, had left the lid off as usual.

  Louise picked it up, put it on the jar.

  The substance had darkened since she’d last seen it. It had changed from a pale brown to something that resembled a dehydrated liver caked with black blood. Along its surface various cracks had developed. She looked closer, inclining her head as she held her breath.

  Deep within the cracks she thought she saw something move. Glistening, white as decay, it moved as if it were agitated by the overhead light. Louise picked up the top and jammed it down into the jar, then stepped back in disgust.

  The substance in the jar was riddled with maggots. Her stomach turned over. Maggots.

  “Dennis?” she said quietly.

  The boy rolled over on his side and smiled sleepily at her. He looked oddly different in the lamplight, his short hair accentuating the contours of his face. He’s growing up, she thought. A warm sense of love coursed through her. This boy. This lovable boy. She sat on the edge of the bed and laid one hand on his forehead. It was warm to her touch.

  “I love you,” she said. And she knew she was at least uttering the one constant sensation in her life.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said. “I guess I fell asleep.”

  “You okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Nice evening?”

  “Fine,” Dennis said.

  Louise hesitated a second. “I hate to bring thi
s up, but don’t you think it’s time to put that jar outside? It’s literally crawling. One day it’s going to crawl right out of here anyhow.”

  Dennis raised his head and squinted at the jar. “I guess,” he said. “I could store it under the sun deck.”

  “Anywhere you like, as long as it’s outdoors.”

  Louise glanced a moment at the photograph of the younger Summers.

  “What did you do with the Summers?” she asked.

  “Watched TV.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all,” the boy said.

  Louise placed one hand flat against the side of her head. Pounding now. She needed to go find aspirin. She found her gaze drawn back to the jar, where a single white maggot was undulating just beneath the lid, hanging to the inside of the glass. It curled, slipped, fell back into the brown mass. She shut her eyes. An image of Connie Harrison floated through her mind—Connie stuck inside the jar with all the rest of the maggots. Connie Harrison! Forty years old and sagging badly! Like hell!

  Dennis was smiling at her. “They’re only baby flies,” he said. “That’s all. They’re not really disgusting.”

  “Ugh,” Louise said.

  “In South America there are natives who consider larvae a delicacy. They like to eat them live.” Dennis sounded cheerful, as if this picture of Indians pigging out on grubs delighted him in some fashion.

  “Don’t go into details,” Louise said. “Just get the jar out of here, first thing in the morning.”

  Dennis sat up, swiveled his body toward the jar. As he reached out to touch it his pajama jacket rode up his spine a little way, laying his back bare.

  There were small pink crisscrossing lines on the boy’s skin.

  “What have you done to your back?” Louise asked. She leaned closer to her son, laying her hand on the boy’s spine. The marks suggested the scratches of fingernails.

  “What’s wrong with my back?”

  “These marks. How did you get these marks?”

  “What marks?” the boy asked. He attempted to pivot his head around to look.

  Louise touched the slender pink lines. “Don’t they hurt?”

  Dennis shook his head. “I don’t feel anything.”

  “What did you do? Have an argument with a pine tree?”

  Dennis laughed. “It must have been when Dick and Charlotte were horsing around—”

  “Horsing around?” Louise couldn’t imagine the Summers horsing around.

  “We were rolling on the floor and they were tickling me. I guess it happened then.”

  “They were tickling you?”

  “Yeah. It was just their idea of fun.”

  “They got carried away, Denny. Obviously.”

  “I guess so.”

  Louise stood up, smoothing the kid’s pajama top back in place. An unexpected shiver went through her—scratch marks on her son’s back. She couldn’t see the Summers getting so carried away. “Strange games you guys play.”

  “They thought it was funny,” Dennis said.

  “Did you?”

  The boy shrugged. “Kinda.” He had actually been quite frightened by the Summers’ persistent, relentless tickling.

  The Great Communicator, Louise thought. She bent down and kissed the boy on his forehead. “Maybe I ought to put some ointment on your back.”

  “I’m fine. Really. It’s not like they drew blood or anything. Is it? It’s not like I’m going to need a rabies shot.”

  Louise stepped away from the bed. She moved toward the door. Strange games, she thought. She tried to imagine Dick and Charlotte catching Denny and tickling him like that. She couldn’t get the picture in her head.

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Night.”

  Louise went into the hallway, closing the door of the room. She looked up the stairs, up to the darkness at the top. She climbed, hesitating only when she reached the closed door of the bedroom. Max. Max and that girl. She turned impossibilities around in her mind. She played with fractured notions—Max and that girl in bed together. Max and the girl holding each other intimately. Little secrets.

  Not Max, she thought. Not my husband.

  She put a small tense smile on her face and opened the bedroom door. Max was sitting up in bed, a book propped open in front of him. He raised his face and looked at her.

  How do we play this scene? Louise wondered. What do we do to smooth out the wrinkles, the awkward little creases?

  She stepped to the bed, sat on the edge of the mattress, gazed at her husband. What she wished for was infinite understanding, an endless capacity to believe in Max. A whole starry universe of trust. The idea of Max and that girl caused everything to collapse loudly in her mind. Worlds shattered. Mirrors were broken. Everything flew away from a cracked center, like debris flying off into mysterious space.

  She licked her dry lips. “Tell me again, Max.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me I’m sick over nothing.”

  “You’re sick over nothing.”

  Louise smiled. It was so goddamn hard to believe. She shut her eyes very tightly.

  “I can’t get over how she touched you.”

  “She touched me. I had no control over that. You might have noticed that I didn’t touch her.”

  “True, true.” What difference did it make? One small touch suggested all kinds of perfidy. “Did you ever make love to her?”

  “Louise.”

  “Did you?”

  Max shook his head emphatically.

  “Would you like to?” Louise asked.

  “Why are you punishing yourself?”

  That isn’t an answer, Max.

  Louise stood up and wandered restlessly around the room. She threw open the doors that led to the sun deck and went outside, staring up at the misanthropic moon. It hung there with a pitiless look. She had a sense of intimacies from which she was excluded—the betrayed wife.

  Max came out on the deck and put his arm around her shoulders.

  Her tone one of forced cheerfulness, she said, “This is not the summer I planned. No way.”

  Max was silent. His arm felt like a lead weight against her.

  She looked at the hangdog moon. She felt her whole family unit had become splintered in this place—a son who enjoyed spending his time with strangers, a father who failed to make true connections with the boy, and a husband tracked by a possibly neurotic female patient all the way upstate, a woman who imagined herself in love with him.

  These were not the prerequisites for a gorgeous summer. Not remotely. She clenched her hands, frustrated. What was she supposed to believe of Max? Was he capable of treachery? If so, where did that leave her after eighteen years of marriage and trust and mutual support?

  She lost herself out there in the depths of the trees, the piebald shadows of the landscape. She had a passing thought of Frog out there someplace—could she go talk to him? Would he understand? Could he help?

  She looked into Max’s eyes and then she turned and walked into the bedroom. She undressed in front of the bedside lamp. From the sun-deck doorway Max studied her. She tried to ignore the way his eyes scrutinized her body. She lay down, pulling a sheet over her.

  Close your eyes. Drift away. Daylight is the great salve.

  Max sat beside her and took her hand, clasping it between his own like a flower pressed between pages of a book. She tried to imagine herself and Max when they were as old as Dick and Charlotte. Would they live that long? More important—would they be together still? Kissing dried lips? Holding decrepit hands?

  36

  Florence Hann’s house was located close to the railroad that had once been used to haul silver from the mines around Carnarvon. Now the tracks were rusted and grown over with tangled weeds, and the old signals along the lines were nothing more than stumps of weathered wood. Here and there decayed boxcars sat on the rails, their panels splintered, their numerals defaced by both vandalism and the seasons.

&nb
sp; It was a strange neighborhood, a part of Carnarvon the tourists never saw. There were a couple of small bars and corner grocery stores, dimly lit places whose lights barely pecked at the texture of darkness.

  Metger parked his car across the street from a tavern called Frank’s. It was an old-time neighborhood bar where a TV played constantly in the gloom and men sat at stools with their necks craned in the direction of the moving pictures. He walked past the open doorway, moving along the cracked sidewalk toward Florence Hann’s home.

  The house was the color of bleached-out green and sat in the dark like a blind toad. The front yard was high with weeds. Metger moved toward the porch, heard the steps creak beneath his feet. Before he had a chance to knock on the door it was opened from inside and Florence Hann stood there with a pale yellow light coming from a place at her back.

  “I heard you coming,” she said. “I always hear people coming.”

  From a nearby house a baby cried suddenly and then was silent. Metger said, “I know it’s late, but I’d like to talk.”

  Reluctantly, Florence Hann held the door open and Metger stepped into the living room, where three goldfish scuttled back and forth inside a bowl and an old-fashioned radio played big-band music. The room smelled of soap and fried food.

  “I want to talk about Bobby,” he said.

  The quick expression that crossed the woman’s tired, drawn face might have been one of pain. It was extinguished as swiftly as it had arisen. “What about Bobby?”

  Metger realized she wasn’t looking at him. In fact she was gazing straight past him, her attention welded to something just beyond his head.

  “Did Miles Henderson treat Bobby?”

  “You can call it treat if you like,” she said.

  Metger moved slightly. He was uncomfortable in this house. Small, cramped rooms, low ceilings. There was a pressure between the walls of this place, something dense in the very atmosphere. And still Florence Hann wasn’t looking at him. She was addressing the same point beyond his face.

  “What would you call it, Florence?” he asked.

  “Miles Henderson was useless,” she said. “It’s incurable was all he ever said. Rare and incurable. Never anything else but that.” She paused now—she ran the tip of her tongue over her dry lips. She’d pronounced the word “rare” as if there were a film of scum on her tongue. Her eyes glazed over. Metger could see that she had a series of litle retreats built into her system, places where she could go without fear of anyone following her.