Games to Play After Dark

by Sarah Gardner Borden

  “Newspapers,” Colin said, “are written for people like you.”

  THE RAIN STOPPED and Moira decided an outing was best after all, and so they left the house at noon and took the underground to Notting Hill and walked up and down Portobello Road. They stopped at a market on the way home and shopped for dinner. Then Kate and Colin sat at the kitchen table with Moira’s notepaper, light green with a rough texture and ragged edges, and two purple felt-tip pens. Colin wrote their names in a heart. He drew legs on the heart, then a penis. Kate giggled.

  “Don’t waste it, please,” said Moira, from her everlasting stance at the sink.

  Paul lounged in an armchair by the window, reading Colin’s discarded Times. Kate smoothed out the notepaper. Resentment nudged at her, on Moira’s behalf and toward Moira herself. Water ran, the dishwasher chugged, noises Kate associated with Livingston Street and her mother and the kitchen and the fridge and the mnemonics: Bright Stars Far North. Violet Goes Willingly. Eli the Ice Man.

  Colin rolled the pens away and got his favorite fancy ballpoint from his coat. He cracked his knuckles and hunched over the paper, sighing. “Just say how sorry you are,” Kate said. “Et cetera, et cetera.”

  “I know,” Colin said, but his tongue went between his teeth and he filled the page haltingly. Kate checked the wall clock: six-thirty. She waited for someone to offer her a drink and when, by seven, no one had, she opened the fridge and poured herself a glass of wine.

  “There,” he said, and slid the paper and pen across the table, and she began to write out the letter, and he watched her do so, and they carried on like kids copying homework. Then Colin took Liam in his lap and sang a little song to him, about a man who lived in the moon and played on a ladle. It surprised Kate that he knew such a song.

  “He looks like you,” Moira said to Colin. She leaned over Liam and peered at him like a scientist examining the results of a lab test.

  “He doesn’t,” Kate said. “Not at all. He doesn’t look like Colin at all.”

  “Oh, he definitely does!” Moira said.

  “I don’t see it,” Kate said.

  “Well, he is related to me. Let’s hope he doesn’t end up with my hairline.”

  “He has your chin, Colin. Your nose.”

  “Yup. Mom’s chin. Dad’s nose.”

  “And I have the opposite—isn’t that funny.”

  “He looks just like Liza’s kid. They look like cousins.”

  “So great to see those guys at the wedding.”

  “All babies look alike,” Kate said.

  “No, this one is a Doyle. No question.” Moira tickled Liam’s little foot.

  “You, Liza, who else?”

  “You’re next, maybe. And Daniel’s getting married.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I chatted with her. Sweet.”

  “Think his eyes will stay blue?” Colin asked.

  “They will. Paul’s are blue. Blue is recessive.”

  Paul spoke up from behind the paper. “They say blue-eyed men pick blue-eyed women in order to be sure of paternity.”

  Moira looked closely at Kate. “Uh-oh, Colin. Her eyes are brown.”

  “I’m not worried,” Colin said.

  “Your kids will have brown eyes then,” Moira said. “Brown is dominant.”

  “Right.”

  “Are you going to raise them Catholic?”

  “What, our kids?” Colin blew a raspberry on Liam’s cheek.

  “We’re atheists,” Kate said to Moira.

  “Atheists or agnostic?” Paul lowered the paper.

  “We’re not observant. And anyway, Kate is …” Colin looked at her.

  “Episcopalian,” Kate said.

  “You’ll have to send them to me,” Moira said. “For their religious education.”

  Kate stood, gathering her wine and writing supplies. “I think I’m going to go upstairs and finish this.”

  She hoped, expected, that Colin would follow her. That he would take the pen and paper from her and write out the second letter himself. Instead he continued his misplaced worship of Liam.

  “Okay. Later,” she said.

  He glanced up. “Don’t lose that pen.”

  “What?” She stood in the doorway. He passed his nephew back to his sister.

  “It’s my favorite pen.”

  She threw the pen at his head.

  “Jesus! Kate!”

  She ran upstairs. He ran after her. She rushed into their room and slammed the door behind her. He banged it immediately open and followed her in.

  “What the fuck …”

  “I copied that letter for you! And no thank-you, no nothing!”

  “I was going to—”

  “I help you with your homework and you’re too fucking self-righteous and self-important to even thank me; you just assume my entire purpose in life is getting your back; you’re too busy getting a hard-on over your nephew—”

  “Kate!”

  “That kid is ugly, ugly! He doesn’t look one bit like you!”

  He put his hands on her shoulders. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  What was wrong with her? She hated Moira at the sink. She hated herself hunched over the letter.

  “That kid …” she said. How to describe his special ugliness? “Remember that Seinfeld episode? Elaine? And the rabbi? And the baby?”

  He pushed her. She fell backward onto the bed.

  “I should leave you.”

  “Yeah, you probably should.” Behind her sinuses she felt the shameful pressure of tears.

  “Right this minute.”

  “And then who’s going to suck you off? Moira?”

  He slammed the door behind him.

  “Stop slamming the door!” Moira, the patron saint of suffering, called up the stairs.

  Kate wished she could take it back. She regretted everything.

  What had come over her?

  No. She’d meant it, all of it. She would say it again.

  She put on her jacket and slipped down the back stairs into the early dark illuminated strangely at the corners of the sky. She walked to a bus stop. She felt terribly lonely, as if she’d left her soul behind in the warm but horrible house.

  She waited and got on the next bus. She went up the narrow stairs to the upper level. It was wonderful up there. The other passengers seemed civilized and compassionate. She admired their drab skin, their terrible teeth, the unkempt hair and nails of even the fashionable ones. They looked at her as if they recognized her wicked ways and forgave them. She took a seat by the window. Shops and lights passed below. She saw rooftops, gardens lying dormant, smoke lifting from chimneys.

  Once, only once, had her mother protested the division of labor at 123 Livingston Street. United Illuminating had downsized her department, leaving the remaining staff to pick up the slack. Miles was tiny and teething. Dennis was writing a book. A storm had torn a gutter from the northern side of the house. Their city-issued trash bins had disappeared and Public Works had refused to provide replacements unless a case report was filed, in person, at the police station on State Street. The hot-water heater had gone bust and it was February. Kate had been sick with a fever, home from school. Edie had taken a day off from work, then scrambled for sitters. Dennis’s brother and family were scheduled to visit. An argument erupted after dinner one night—raised voices, tears from Edie. Kate sat at the kitchen table making up homework. Activity commenced in the front hallway, the activity of Edie putting on her coat and boots and banging out the front door. Minutes later she returned, for Kate, as it turned out. They got into the car and drove downtown and saw a movie at York Square. Then for a week or two Edie went on strike. The sink filled with dishes. Laundry piled up in bedrooms and hallways and outside the door that led to the basement. Trash accumulated in the kitchen and the Tuesday-morning collectors ignored the loose bags Dennis dragged grouchily out to the street. No dinner, no hot water, no clean underwear.

  Finally Miles�
��s day care called and a roach crawled out of the sink. The same Friday. On Saturday morning Edie gave in and tackled the mess, to everyone’s—even Kate’s—relief.

  Next to Kate on the bus a man ate a Cadbury bar. She asked him, “Is there anything to do on this line?”

  He looked up. “Well, there’s shopping. The mall. Stop after next.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Skating at Marble Arch.”

  She saw the skating rink ringed by light in an odd little park. She ran off the bus and followed the lights. She had to go through the underworld of an underground station to get there, under the avenue, then up into a tent where another helpful Cadbury-wielding Brit pointed her left. She felt drunk—maybe she was. How much wine had she had, and how little had she eaten? Not since lunch and then just a side of chips. In a warm busy carpeted room, boys and girls and men and women occupied upholstered benches, strapping on skates. She pushed a few pounds across the counter and then she was unzipping her boots and hooking up laces. She stashed her things in a locker (briefly, she recalled her old high school) and wobbled toward the rink. She stepped on and tentatively pushed forward. The morning’s rain had pooled on the ice and everyone was falling, but exuberantly. They slid through water and slipped and landed on their sides, backs, knees, and behinds. A father tried to get his son to break his hold on the rail. A small girl windmilled forward, shrieking. Kate tensed her thighs and turned her feet in and out, swizzling, until her muscles loosened and her feet began to know where they were. Rock music blared from giant speakers. Spectators thronged at the edges. Around and around she went, darting, dodging small children, sluicing through puddles. Water soaked the ends of her jeans and the denim flapped heavily around the skates.

  She skated until the rink closed, then found her way home on the bus. Later, in bed, pacified by fellatio, Colin hugged her shoulders and rubbed her back. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry. My chaos, and you, an innocent bystander.”

  He wasn’t, though. They both knew that. He was by no means innocent. Neither was; neither wanted to be. “We’re confused,” they told each other, but they knew; now they knew for sure that each had found in the other an accomplice.

  THEY TOOK A TRAIN from Krakow to Budapest to Prague. It was then that she began to apologize indiscriminately—for talking too much, talking too little, wearing too much makeup or wearing none at all. Colin accepted the apologies, squeezing her shoulders. “It’s okay,” he said. If she shifted and dug her elbow into his side, if she handled him too roughly, if her teeth grazed his skin, then he’d object, wanting another apology, her soft and supplicating voice. But she sensed his uncertainty, a normal touch of uncertainty that had developed, at Moira’s, into something more serious. So she apologized for that too—she apologized for both of them.

  Every night they went out to eat and hear music. He ordered the drinks and picked up the check. She let him do the talking, which meant she seldom got what she wanted. They sat close to each other in banquettes and drank chilled vodka and ate nuts from a bowl. They clinked their glasses together. Under her knit dress Kate wore a pink lace bra and pink lace underpants to match. When she got up to go to the restroom, men examined her. In the mirror over the sink she saw that she was beautiful. She retouched her red lips. She wet her eyelashes. She pinched her cheeks. She pushed her loose hair off her face.

  They finished their drinks. She put a hand on Colin’s thigh, then his crotch. He left money on the table. They stumbled out onto the street, his arm around her hips, and kissed in a doorway. He put his hands under her dress. He pulled down her stockings and pink lace.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this,” she said. “Who does this?”

  “What?”

  “Who gets married?”

  “People get married all the time.”

  “I feel like I’m going to ruin you.”

  “Why would you do a thing like that?”

  “Not on purpose …”

  “I won’t let you.”

  “We could still get this whole business annulled.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  · · ·

  THEY RETURNED to Bridgeport, to the wedding gifts and the packing boxes and the teal blue house. And then, for a while, years and years, in fact, it seemed as though things were going to be all right.

  4

  ATE SWIPED A RAG through the cabinets and put down contact paper and organized the wedding gifts. She wrote thank-you notes and took her wedding dress to the dry cleaner’s. She put a pink lamp in the window and Colin set it with a timer. Together, they hung drapes and venetian blinds. They hung tiny pictures in gilt frames. They disguised their ratty couches and chairs with Indian bedspreads and pillows. They merged her CD collection and his books on tape, her pink ceramic bowls and his Indonesian masks, her novels and his Wall Street Journals. They shopped for towels and sheets and then a bed: a sleigh bed that reminded Kate of the hill in Eastwood Park and how she’d torn up her face once sledding right through a dry bush.

  She found a job in the financial-planning department of Silgan Holdings—manufacturers of metal food containers with a sidebar in cardboard and plastic—and started right after Christmas. Then she and Colin drove to Stamford together weekday mornings in the Jeep, stopping for coffee at the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts. The weekends they spent having sex and going out to eat at a diner in a deserted neighborhood on the other side of the highway, a place Colin claimed was dangerous for a woman to visit alone. That was what they did and that was enough. All Kate knew of where she lived was the apartment, sex, the diner, the feeling of the highway all around. She wore old corduroys and cleaned out the coffeepot with kosher salt. She drove to Home Depot and lost herself in the long aisles, examining nails, bolts, hammers, sandpaper, picture hooks, lumber, pliers, power drills, screwdrivers, levels, clamps, pots of paint and wood glue and polyurethane and spackle. She built shelves in the kitchen with plywood and strips of metal, and she stacked the shelves with cookbooks organized by cuisine, a French wire utensil basket in the shape of a hen, and ceramic flour and sugar jugs that later became infested with moths.

  Colin’s promotion had bestowed upon him a private office. When Kate called him at work, he answered the phone quickly and sounded lonely. To protect him from his solitude, she called him three times a day until he got irritated. She discovered that he was the type of person who faithfully consulted the phonebook and unplugged the toaster and all the lamps when they went away for the weekend. Sometimes when they left the apartment together she had to go inside again for something she’d forgotten, and when she came back out he’d ask her, “Did you reset the alarm? Did you lock the door?” Sometimes Kate found this funny and sometimes she didn’t. He discovered that she was the type of person who forgot a pork chop in the oven for a couple of weeks. When he wasn’t home, she called information and cleaned the CDs with her spit.

  Above, in the second-floor apartment, lived a British journalist and his six-year-old daughter, who stayed with him Wednesday through Sunday. The journalist, Wes, was in a custody battle with his ex, whom he referred to as “the woman who used to be Lucy’s mother.” Kate could hear him fighting with her on the phone, fighting with such bitterness and fury that at first Kate thought he was rehearsing for a play. Wednesday through Sunday she heard Lucy practicing piano: “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Three Blind Mice,” “Für Elise.” In the attic apartment lived Andie and Brice, a twenty-something couple from Colorado. Brice was a forestry student, Andie an artist-slash-masseuse, heavyset and shy around groups of people.

  The landlady, a widow with four teenagers, clearly cared little for the house, which had advantages (the low rent) and disadvantages (broken appliances, unreturned phone calls). Once in a while she had her teenagers come over and mow the yard and the two struggling patches of grass on either side of the front steps.

  In April, Andie knocked on Kate’s door and invited her to help with a garden. They got into the Je
ep and drove to a nursery. “What should we get?” Kate asked, looking around.

  “What works in this climate?”

  “I thought you would know.” She imagined Andie to have intimate knowledge of all things earth-related. “You’re, like, nature girl.”

  Andie shrugged. “We lived in the mountains. Our backyard grows wildflowers.”

  “This looks tough,” Kate said. She pointed to a bush with shiny prickly leaves. “Not so pretty, but—”

  Andie read the information on the plant’s white plastic tag. “Yes. Good.”

  They loaded the back of the Jeep with perennials and impatiens. They scattered the impatiens and lined the larger plants up next to one another in even rows, the plants like people lined up for coffee—the shiny investment banker, the willowy artist, the housewife, the college student. Colin planted new grass in a barren patch of the yard, grass that ended up thriving and making the other grass look bad.

  May nourished the garden with constant rain. Then in June the world opened up, inviting everyone to be a part of it. “I’m bored,” Kate said. They sat on the couch in the living room, watching Seinfeld.

  “Already?”

  “Maybe just with my job.”

  At Silgan, the work itself of little consequence to her, and New York with its mighty relevance removed from her daily life, she had begun to feel some existential angst.

  “What about teaching or something instead?” Colin asked. “All those young minds.”

  “I don’t want to teach!”

  “Whatever makes you happy.”

  “I’m afraid of children.”

  “You won’t be when they’re ours.”

  “Isn’t there anywhere to eat around here besides the diner?”

  “There’s gotta be.”

  “Let’s see a movie tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Nothing artsy.”

  She got up and shook out the local weekly. “How’s this? ‘U.S. Marines take over Alcatraz and threaten San Francisco with biological weapons.’ Nicolas Cage, Sean Connery.”