Fatherhood

by Thomas H. Cook

  “He was a bartender when I met him,” she said as she swept into the kitchen. “Now he sells software.” She lifted an impossibly long and graceful right arm to the cabinet at her side, opened its plain wooden doors and retrieved two decidedly ordinary glasses, which she placed squarely on the plain Formica counter before turning to face me. “From the beginning, I was always completely comfortable with Douglas,” she said.

  She could not have said it more clearly. Douglas was the man she had chosen to marry because he possessed whatever characteristics she required to feel absolutely at home when she was at home, utterly herself when she was with him. If there had been some great love in her life, she had chosen Douglas over him because with Douglas she could live without change or alteration, without applying makeup to her soul. Because of that, I suddenly found myself feeling vaguely envious of this squat little man, of the peace he gave her, the way she could no doubt rest in the crook of his arm, breathing slowly, falling asleep.

  “He seems … nice,” I said.

  Veronica gave no indication that she’d heard me. “You take it straight,” she said, referring to the way I took my drink, which was clearly something she’d noticed in the bar.

  I nodded.

  “Me, too.”

  She poured our drinks and directed me into the living room. The curtains were drawn tightly together and looked a bit dusty. The furniture had been chosen for comfort rather than style. There were a few potted plants, most of them brown at the edges. You could almost hear them begging for water. No dogs. No cats. No goldfish or hamsters or snakes or white mice. When Douglas was away, it appeared, Veronica lived alone.

  Except for books, but they were everywhere. They filled shelf after towering shelf, or lay stacked to the point of toppling along the room’s four walls. The authors ran the gamut, from the oldest classics to the most recent bestsellers. Stendahl and Dostoyevsky rested shoulder to shoulder with Anne Rice and Michael Crichton. A few of my own stark titles were lined up between Robert Stone and Patrick O’Brian. There was no history or social science in her collection, and no poetry. It was all fiction, as Veronica herself seemed to be, a character she’d made up and was determined to play to the end. What she offered, I believed at that moment, was a well-rounded performance of a New York eccentric.

  She touched her glass to mine, her eyes very still. “To what we’re going to do,” she said.

  “Are we still talking about committing suicide together?” I scoffed as I lowered my glass without drinking. “What is this, Veronica? Some kind of Sweet November rewrite?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  “You know, that stupid movie where the dying girl takes this guy and lives with him for a month and—”

  “I would never live with you,” Veronica interrupted.

  “That’s not my point.”

  “And I’m not dying,” Veronica added. She took a quick sip of vodka, placed her glass onto the small table beside the sofa, then, as if suddenly called by an invisible voice, offered her hand to me. “Time for bed,” she said.

  “Just like that?” my friend asked.

  “Just like that.”

  He looked at me warily. “This is a fantasy, right?” he asked. “This is something you made up.”

  “What happened next no one could make up.”

  “And what was that?”

  She led me to the bedroom. We undressed silently. She crawled beneath the single sheet and patted the mattress. “This side is yours.”

  “Until Douglas gets back,” I said as I drew in beside her.

  “Douglas isn’t coming back,” she said, then leaned over and kissed me very softly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s dead,” she answered lightly. “He’s been dead for over three years.”

  And thus I learned of her husband’s slow decline, the cancer that began in his intestines and migrated to his liver and pancreas. It had taken six months, and each day Veronica had attended him. She would look in on him on her way to work every morning, then return to him at night, stay at his bedside until she was sure he would not awaken, then, at last, return here, to this very bed, to sleep for an hour or two, three at the most, before beginning the routine again.

  “Six months,” I said. “That’s a long time.”

  “A dying person is a lot of work,” she said.

  “Yes, I know,” I told her. “I was with my father when he died. I was exhausted by the time he finally went.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that,” she said. “The physical part. The lack of sleep. That wasn’t the hardest part when it came to Douglas.”

  “What was?”

  “Making him believe I loved him.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No,” she said, then kissed me again, a kiss that lingered a bit longer than the first, and gave me time to remember that just a few minutes before she’d told me that Douglas was currently selling software.

  “Software,” I said, drawing my lips from hers. “You said he sold software now.”

  She nodded. “Yes, he does.”

  “To other dead people?” I lifted myself up and propped my head in my hand. “I can’t wait for an explanation.”

  “There is no explanation,” she said. “Douglas always wanted to sell software. So, instead of saying that he’s in the ground or in heaven, I just say he’s selling software.”

  “So you give death a cute name,” I said. “And that way you don’t have to face it.”

  “I say he’s selling software because I don’t want the conversation that would follow if I told you he was dead,” Veronica said sharply. “I hate consolation.”

  “Then why did you tell me at all?”

  “Because you need to know that I’m like you,” she answered. “Alone. That no one will mourn.”

  “So we’re back to suicide again,” I said. “Do you always circle back to death?”

  She smiled. “Do you know what La Rochefoucauld said about death?”

  “It’s not on the tip of my tongue, no.”

  “He said that it was like the sun. You couldn’t look at it for very long without going blind.” She shrugged. “But I think that if you look at it all the time, measure it against living, then you can choose.”

  I drew her into my arms. “You’re a bit quirky, Veronica,” I said playfully.

  She shook her head, her voice self-assured. “No,” she insisted. “I’m the sanest person you’ve ever met.”

  “And she was,” I told my friend.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she offered more than anyone I’d ever known.”

  “What did she offer?”

  That night she offered the cool, sweet luxury of her flesh, a kiss that so brimmed with feeling I thought her lips would give off sparks.

  We made love for a time then, suddenly, she stopped and pulled away. “Time to chat,” she said, then walked to the kitchen and returned with another two glasses of vodka.

  “Time to chat?” I asked, still disconcerted with how abruptly she’d drawn away from me.

  “I don’t have all night,” she said as she offered me the glass.

  I took the drink from her hand. “So we’re not going to toast the dawn together?”

  She sat on the bed, cross-legged and naked, her body sleek and smooth in the blue light. “You’re glib,” she said as she clinked her glass to mine. “So am I.” She leaned forward slightly, her eyes glowing in the dark. “Here is the deal,” she added. “If you’re glib, you finally get to the end of what you can say. There are no words left for anything important. Just sleek words. Clever. Glib. That’s when you know you’ve gone as far as you can go, that you have nothing left to offer but smooth talk.”

  “That’s rather harsh, don’t you think?” I took a sip of vodka. “And besides, what’s the alternative to talking?”

  “Silence,” Veronica answered.

  I laughed. “Veronica, you are hardly silent.”r />
  “Most of the time, I am,” she said.

  “And what does this silence conceal?”

  “Anger,” she answered without the slightest hesitation, “Fury.”

  Her face grew taut, and I thought the rage I suddenly glimpsed within her would set her hair ablaze.

  “Of course you can get to silence in other ways,” she said. She took a quick, brutal drink from her glass. “Douglas got there, but not by being glib.”

  “How then?”

  “By suffering.”

  I looked for her lip to tremble, but it didn’t. I looked for moisture in her eyes, but they were dry and still.

  “By being terrified,” she added. She glanced toward the window, let her gaze linger there for a moment, then returned to me. “The last week he didn’t say a word,” she said. “That’s when I knew it was time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “Time for Douglas to get a new job.”

  I felt my heart stop dead. “In … software?” I asked.

  She lit a candle, placed it on the narrow shelf above us, then yanked open the top drawer of the small table that sat beside her bed, retrieved a plastic pill case and shook it so that I could hear the pills rattling dryly inside it.

  “I’d planned to give him these,” she said, “but there wasn’t time.”

  “What do you mean, there wasn’t time?”

  “I saw it in his face,” she answered. “He was living like someone already in the ground. Someone buried and waiting for the air to give out. That kind of suffering, terror. I knew that one additional minute would be too long.”

  She placed the pills on the table, then grabbed the pillow upon which her head had rested, fluffed it gently, pressed it down upon my face, then lifted it again in a way that made me feel strangely returned to life. “It was all I had left to offer him,” she said quietly, then took a long, slow pull on the vodka. “We have so little to offer.”

  And I thought with sudden, devastating clarity, Her darkness is real; mine is just a pose.

  “What did you do?” my friend asked.

  “I touched her face.”

  “And what did she do?”

  She pulled my hand away almost violently. “This isn’t about me,” she said.

  “Right now, everything is about you,” I told her.

  She grimaced. “Bullshit.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Which only makes it worse,” she said sourly. Her eyes rolled upward, then came down again, dark and steely, like the twin barrels of a shotgun. “This is about you,” she said crisply. “And I won’t be cheated of it.”

  I shrugged. “All life is a cheat, Veronica.”

  Her eyes tensed. “That isn’t true and you know it,” she said, her voice almost a hiss. “And because of that you are a liar, and all your books are lies.” Her voice was so firm, so hard and unrelenting, I felt it like a wind. “Here’s the deal,” she said. “If you really felt the way you write, you’d kill yourself. If all that feeling was really in you, down deep in you, you wouldn’t be able to live a single day.” She dared me to contradict her, and when I didn’t, she said, “You see everything but yourself. And here’s what you don’t see about yourself, Jack. You don’t see that you’re happy.”

  “Happy?” I asked.

  “You are happy,” Veronica insisted. “You won’t admit it, but you are. And you should be.”

  Then she offered the elements of my happiness, the sheer good fortune I had enjoyed, health, adequate money, work I loved, little dollops of achievement.

  “Compared to you, Douglas had nothing,” she said.

  “He had you,” I said cautiously.

  Her face soured again. “If you make it about me,” she warned, “you’ll have to leave.”

  She was serious, and I knew it. So I said, “What do you want from me, Veronica?”

  Without hesitation she said, “I want you to stay.”

  “Stay?”

  “While I take the pills.”

  I remembered the line she’d said just outside the bar only a few hours before, I could do it with you, you know.

  I had taken this to mean that we would do it together, but now I knew that she had never included me. There was no pact. There was only Veronica.

  “Will you do it?” she asked somberly.

  “When?” I asked quietly.

  She took the pills and poured them into her hand. “Now,” she said.

  “No,” I blurted, and started to rise.

  She pressed me down hard, her gaze relentlessly determined, so that I knew that she would do what she intended, that there was no way to stop her.

  “I want out of this noise,” she said, pressing her one empty hand to her right ear. “Everything is so loud.”

  In the fierceness of those words I glimpsed the full measure of her torment, all she no longer wished to hear, the clanging daily vanities and thudding repetitions, the catcalls of the inferior, the trumpeting mediocrities, all of which lifted to a soul-searing roar the unbearable clatter of the wheel. She wanted an end to all of that, a silence she would not be denied.

  “Will you stay?” she asked quietly.

  I knew that any argument would strike her as just more noise she could not bear. It would clang like cymbals, only add to the mindless cacophony she was so desperate to escape.

  And so I said, “All right.”

  With no further word, she swallowed the pills two at a time, washing them down with quick sips of vodka.

  “I don’t know what to say to you, Veronica,” I told her when she took the last of them and put down the glass.

  She curled under my arm. “Say what I said to Douglas,” she told me. “In the end it’s all anyone can offer.”

  “What did you say to him?” I asked softly.

  “I’m here.”

  I drew my arm tightly around her. “I’m here,” I said.

  She snuggled in more closely. “Yes.”

  “And so you stayed?” my friend asked.

  I nodded.

  “And she …”

  “In about an hour,” I told him. “Then I dressed and walked the streets until I finally came here.”

  “So right now she’s …”

  “Gone,” I said quickly, and suddenly imagined her sitting in the park across from the bar, still and silent.

  “You couldn’t stop her?”

  “With what?” I asked. “I had nothing to offer.” I glanced out the front window of the bar. “And besides,” I added, “for a truly dangerous woman, a man is never the answer. That’s what makes her dangerous. At least, to us.”

  My friend looked at me oddly. “So what are you going to do now?” he asked.

  At the far end of the park a young couple was screaming at each other, the woman’s fist in the air, the man shaking his head in violent confusion. I could imagine Veronica turning from them, walking silently away.

  “I’m going to keep quiet,” I answered. “For a very long time.”

  Then I got to my feet and walked out into the whirling city. The usual dissonance engulfed me, all the chaos and disarray, but I felt no need to add my own inchoate discord to the rest.

  It was a strangely sweet feeling, I realized as I turned and headed home, embracing silence.

  From deep within her enveloping calm, Veronica offered me her final words.

  I know.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Thomas H. Cook

  Interior design by Maria Fernandez

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