Broken Homes & Gardens

by Rebecca Kelley

  This was pathetic—hiding away in her own house, trolling around for a one-night stand. With a sudden sense of purpose, she threw the covers off and jumped onto the floor to make her bed, tightening up the sheets and shoving the edges under the mattress. She tugged at the duvet, eradicated lumps and wrinkles with a firm hand. Most mornings her bed remained unmade, cluttered with cold, crumpled sheets. Now it was eight o’clock at night and the act felt necessary, important.

  With the bed meeting her newly-developed homemaking standards, she directed her attention to her own appearance. In the bathroom, she ran a brush over her hair, made her lips shiny with lip gloss. She flashed herself a determined look in the mirror.

  It was silent in the hallway. Perhaps Malcolm wasn’t home after all. He wasn’t prone to leaving the lights on, but maybe just this once he had forgotten. … She turned to go back into her own room, then pivoted and delivered three firm knocks to his door. “Malcolm?” She let herself in without waiting for a reply.

  He was sitting on his bed, reading, his legs stretched out before him. She walked over to the foot of his bed and stood there, her hands on her hips. He glanced up from his book. Seeing him right in front of her—his hair wet from the shower, wearing jeans and a new white T-shirt—strengthened her resolve. Without taking her eyes from his face, she lifted her shirt over her head and dropped it on the floor. His expression did change then, almost imperceptibly. He widened his eyes, but didn’t put down the book.

  Panic kept her glued to her spot on the floor. She hadn’t planned beyond this moment. Removing the shirt should have been enough, should have ignited a spark of interest in him, prompted him to action, made him throw down the book and leap from the bed. Perhaps he required more assurance. Trembling, she reached behind her back and unclasped her bra, then let it fall to the floor. If he laughed at her, she would never speak to him again. She resisted the temptation to cover her breasts with her hands and let her arms dangle uselessly at her sides.

  She went over to him, but still, he didn’t reach for her. He just held on to that book with both hands, marking his place. It was too late to back out gracefully—hide her chest with her shirt and slink out the door, pretend it was all a joke. He was watching her, waiting to see what she was going to do next. “Put your book down,” she said. She climbed on top of him, facing him. He didn’t react. In his bed, topless, straddling him! Was he planning on sitting there, mute, a bewildered expression plastered on his face, while she had her way with him? Joanna plucked the book from his hands and dropped it over the side of the bed. It landed with a loud thump on the wood floor.

  “Hey!” he said, though he didn’t sound the least bit upset.

  She took him by the shoulders and shook him. “What are you doing to me?” Her voice broke. She made a move to leave, at once determined to march half-naked out of the room if she had to, refusing to humiliate herself further.

  Malcolm latched onto her arm and drew her back to him.

  “Ow,” she said.

  He loosened his grip but didn’t let go. “Don’t go.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s working.”

  “What is?”

  “This.”

  She tried to shake his hold on her arm, but he tightened his grip again, then pulled her in until their foreheads met. He ran his other hand down her bare back.

  For a moment they just looked at each other. She could barely breathe, bracing herself for the possibility he would break the spell, jump up, grab her clothes, and run out the door.

  “Now what?” he said.

  She let a nervous laugh escape her. “I can’t do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Can’t we just … do this? Like normal people?”

  He smiled at her then, his hair falling over his eyes. He pushed her back on the bed, positioning himself on top of her. “Like normal people, huh?” He lowered his head down to hers, so close she could smell his skin. He touched the tip of his nose to hers. She stopped breathing. Then, finally, he brought his mouth down to hers and kissed her, slowly. “Like that?”

  She tilted up her chin so he’d kiss her again, but Malcolm was already reaching under her skirt, tugging at the edges of her underpants. She lifted her hips to help him pull them off. “Like this?” he said, scrunching up the fabric in his hand and throwing her underwear across the room.

  She took hold of him by the shirt and dragged him back up to her. “I think you’re getting the idea.”

  And then their hands and mouths were all over each other, she was pulling him closer, clothes flying, sheets crumpling.

  Afterwards, she lay under a tangle of covers, her hand on his chest, her head nestled in the crook of his arm. She could stay this way for hours, all night, days. Malcolm circled his arms around her and sighed into her hair. “Mm. Your hair smells good.” He took a strand and held it up to his nose. “How do you make it smell like this? Do you spray perfume all over it?”

  “Why would I spray perfume all over my hair?”

  “I don’t know. Part of your seduction plan or something.”

  She laughed. “Right.”

  Malcolm drew her in and squeezed. “God,” he said, “Why haven’t we been doing this all along?”

  She froze at the words; the warm feelings from the moment before flew out the cracks in the windows, carried out by a sudden draft. She twisted her body to free herself from his arms. “Well, I’d better get dressed. We can’t stay here all night.” She couldn’t look at him as she sat up, securing a blanket around herself. “Thanks,” she said as she slipped off the edge of the bed. “It was nice.”

  In her room, she slipped into a pair of yoga pants and a tank top, shaking her head and mumbling responses to Malcolm’s comment. She headed into the kitchen. She would make tea; she needed to calm herself down. What would she do without tea, without this fifteen-minute ritual? Her accomplice in procrastination and avoidance.

  Why weren’t we doing this all along? I don’t know, genius. Maybe because you screwed everything up last time. The kettle began to rattle on the stove, louder and louder, until finally it erupted with steam bursting through the whistle. She let it reach a full piercing wail before lifting it off the burner.

  Joanna shook her head again, loosening the thoughts from her head. What was she doing? She and Malcolm were forging new ground here. She couldn’t get hung up on the past. That’s what this was all about, right? Getting each other out of their systems.

  Malcolm sauntered in, jeans on, loose under his hip bones. He brushed his hair away from his eyes. He seemed to have an infuriating way of knowing exactly what effect this gesture had on her. Joanna got a cup out for him and placed it beside her own.

  “Are you going to tell me what I did?” He was looking at her with slight amusement. He touched her cheek, lightly.

  She concentrated on pouring boiling water into the cups. “Nothing, really. Forget it.”

  “I mean, one minute you’re screaming out my name, then you’re storming out on me …”

  “I said forget it. I already have. And I wasn’t screaming.”

  Malcolm put a finger under her chin, forced her to look up at him. “Well, maybe I need to try harder next time,” he said.

  This coaxed a true smile out of her. She wrapped her arms around his waist and lifted her face so he would kiss her. He did.

  “I made you tea,” she said.

  The next day she found her shucked-off and abandoned clothes, washed and folded, at the end of her perfectly made bed.

  16

  a different life on the inside

  They had been spending the nights in his room. It was bigger, for one thing—an addition to the back of the house sometime in the 1950s, with light coming in from three sides. It had a sliding glass door that went out to the back. Technically, the room didn’t count as a bedroom when Joanna bought the house, with no real closet or heater vents, so she had settled herself in the one official bedroom when she first moved in.


  But now she preferred this room. Malcolm had taken the iron bars off the windows and refinished the floors himself. With his bed, desk, plants, and books—and a space heater—he’d made it the best part of the house. Joanna crept out from under the covers, shivering as her bare skin came into contact with the chilly fall air. Wrapped in a blanket, she curled up on a chair under a window, watching raindrops hit the glass and slide down. She turned back to the bluish light of the room and watched Malcolm sleep.

  “Hey,” he murmured, half-opening his eyes. “What are you doing up? Come back here.” He opened up the covers, inviting her in.

  She climbed back into bed. Malcolm tightened his arms around her, and she burrowed into him, trying to siphon off his warmth. “Mm,” he said. His eyes were closed again.

  “I was just thinking.” She nudged him and waited until he mumbled something to prove he was awake, listening. “If we’re going to keep doing this, shouldn’t we set some ground rules?”

  Malcolm groaned. He opened his eyes. “No.” Then he kissed her and she kissed him back and then he made her forget why that had seemed like such a great idea in the dark of a rainy morning.

  She supposed they were doing just fine without rules, without a plan. The last couple weeks stretched out; it felt like they’d been this way forever. As soon as they walked in the door, they sought each other out, dropped everything to cling together, press their faces against each other, tear off their clothes and fall into bed—where they would stay until one of them would have to leave again, looking up at the clock with surprise, never quite sure what time of day it was—just suddenly realizing one of them or both of them needed to be somewhere, that they had some sort of hazy obligation out there, in the outside world.

  And a few times they ventured out there, together—they walked around the neighborhood or ate out at a restaurant or attended a matinee on a drizzly weekend afternoon. By some unspoken agreement, they didn’t touch each other on those outings. It felt like an elaborate ruse, a trick they were playing on everyone, strangers. The people they passed by on their walks, the restaurant-goers, the teenagers sitting next to them in the movie theater—no one had any idea that Malcolm and Joanna led a different life on the inside. The two of them walked side by side, an inch or more of space between them, they sat across from each other at the restaurant table. Exercises in restraint—a game.

  As soon as they crossed the threshold, locked the door safely behind them, inside again, they turned to each other, fumbled with zippers, with boots and hats, left trails of clothes in wet heaps, clung to each other as if they’d just survived a flood.

  Malcolm had just drizzled honey on her nipples when the blindfold slipped and she caught a glimpse of the clock on the kitchen wall. She tore off the blindfold, which, up until this afternoon, served as a red-checked cloth napkin. “We’re late!” she cried.

  Now that her vision had been restored, she could see Malcolm eyeing her chest with dread. “Too sticky,” he said. “Too sweet.”

  “You don’t have time to lick it off me anyway,” Joanna said, trying to catch the excess drips with her hands. “Ugh! What a mess.”

  They both took a dispirited look around the kitchen. They’d spread an old shower curtain out on the floor, but still, it was difficult staying neat while licking jam, whipped cream and strawberries, and chocolate pudding off each other’s bodies—especially while blindfolded.

  “We can cross this one off the list,” Malcolm said. He took her by the hand and helped her to standing.

  “Way off.”

  The List had started as a joke. It still was a joke almost two weeks later—probably. Now Joanna was not quite so sure. Come here, Joanna had said to him that first morning they woke up next to each other. I still haven’t gotten you out of my system. After that, lying in bed or on the floor, tangled up in blankets, they would look at each other and laugh, and say, that as wonderful as that was, it hadn’t been enough. They still needed more of each other. So what would it take, exactly, to fill them up? What could they do to exhaust themselves of each other? Or were they stuck wanting each other like this, frantic and desperate, eyes glazed over, mouths frothing?

  We could lock ourselves in for a week, Joanna suggested, and do nothing but have sex. No television, no talking. What about eating and sleeping? Malcolm had asked. Joanna thought about it. Only water and protein bars. Four hours’ sleep a night. No, that wouldn’t be the way to do it, Malcolm decided. Locked in the house was no good—they needed to get out. Sex in a public bathroom, for example. Or in an airplane.

  And somehow during these conversations the List became real. They had actually taken out a piece of paper and began working on it, absentmindedly, both drawing or writing in the margins until it looked like a note you’d pass back and forth during a junior high math class. Tiny writing, doodles, no attention to the ruled lines of the paper. Scratched out, re-written.

  The joke was that they would work their way through the list until they were sick of each other: lock themselves up for a week, have sex in a public bathroom and in an airplane, spray whipped cream on each other 9 ½ Weeks’ style, do it in an elevator, on a bridge, in a tree, in a field, in a snow cave, in a movie theater, in the teahouse at the Chinese Gardens.

  The list was growing so big there was no way they could complete it. This thought nagged at Joanna, but then she dismissed it. The List was obviously make-believe. A fantasy. Maybe this was how to do it, how to get each other out of their systems, to imagine it unfolding like this. They were never going to make love on a bed of moss at the end of a rainbow.

  “Let’s get you into the shower. Hose you down,” Malcolm said. Twenty-five minutes later they were seated at the corner of a square table in the middle of a restaurant in the Mount Tabor neighborhood. The restaurant was dark, the periwinkle walls adorned with gilded mirrors and large-faced clocks. Joanna kept losing the thread of the conversation, so intent was she on ignoring Malcolm, his hair falling in front of his eyes in that way she had always found so charming. She watched him as she sipped her drink—some mouth-puckering concoction of chili-infused vodka, coconuts, and lemongrass—and waited for him to lift up a hand, sweep the hair out of his eyes as he always did. “Don’t you think so, Joanna?” her sister was saying.

  “What?” Joanna tried to focus on her sister and Ted, sitting across from them, staring at Joanna expectantly. Apples—they’d been discussing apples for the last several minutes. It had been an excellent apple season, and there were so many different local varieties. Joanna started nodding with enthusiasm. “Yes,” she said. “I am in love with Honeycrisps!”

  Her sister frowned. Laura had been shooting Joanna quizzical looks since they arrived. And she and Ted had been acting strangely, bowing their heads together and whispering. They were on to Malcolm and Joanna!—they must be. Malcolm kicked her under the table.

  “We were talking about the bark beetle infestation,” Ted said. He put his arm around Laura, as if to protect his wife from a descending swarm.

  “Bark beetles?” Her mind went blank. She had absolutely nothing to say about bark beetles.

  But she was saved by the arrival of menus. Laura and Ted were now huddled together over a single menu, murmuring inaudibly. This was the type of behavior that married couples often exhibited that had a way of making single people feel especially sad and alone. This time, however, Joanna was not bothered by it. Ted and Laura could have their mumbled conversations, inside jokes, and flirtatious looks. She had recently figured something out: it was all just an act. Married people had this desperate need to broadcast their choice to the rest of the world. Everyone knew they were bored, unhappy—yet, perversely, they had a sadistic desire to pull all the sexually liberated singles in to join their ranks, as if to validate their own dubious death-do-us-part decision making.

  “Everyone ready to order?” the server asked after reciting the specials and bringing another round of oddly-flavored drinks. The server was perhaps thirty, with s
traightened, blunt-cut bangs and an extremely tight shirt. She leaned in to hear Joanna place her order, making every effort to afford Malcolm an excellent view of her ample cleavage. She turned to Ted and Laura, and Ted ordered for the two of them, explaining that they would split the smoked trout salad and also share the panko-crusted chicken.

  “Maybe you should order a large drink with that,” Joanna said. “Two straws.”

  Everyone ignored her. The server was laughing at something Malcolm was saying. She touched his shoulder as she headed back to the kitchen.

  Joanna caught Malcolm’s eye and Malcolm shrugged, then suppressed a smile. He tapped the side of his head, above his ear, and Joanna’s hand went up to the same spot on her own head. She pulled a strawberry leaf from her hair and discreetly hid it under her napkin.

  Joanna leaned in so Malcolm could hear her above the noise of the restaurant. “Do you know her?”

  “Who?”

  “Our waitress.”

  “No. Why would I?”

  Joanna’s foot found Malcolm’s under the table. “She was into you,” Joanna whispered, so Ted and Laura couldn’t hear. They were still huddled together, anyway, lost in their conversation. “She wanted you.”

  “Hmm,” Malcolm said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  Joanna excused herself to go to the restroom at the end of a narrow hallway. She straightened her hair in the mirror, then washed her hands, splashed her face with cold water, slapped her cheeks to get the color going in them. All this sex over the last couple weeks had created a rather frazzled effect on her—her eyes glassy, her hair tousled, face pale, as if she hadn’t been exposed to daylight, locked away in a vampire’s den. She dried her face with a paper towel and applied some lip gloss.