Interior Design

by Philip Graham

  “Close the windows!” Linda laughed, and they quickly turned the handles.

  “Look at that fish,” Hank said, pointing out at the road. “Pure Devonian.”

  “Where?” Linda asked. Hank described the heavy, fishy jaw, the glittering, silvered armor of the fish he said floated alongside them, and she too began to see it through the watery murk, glad that the ancient fish swam outside. They were driving through a deep valley with trees of thick green, and Linda imagined the branches swaying beautifully like anemone. But it was a hot summer day, and with the windows up they began to sweat. “What will this valley be in the future?” Linda asked.

  “A flat plain, most likely, with alluvial deposits you could sink your teeth into.”

  “How lovely.” Feeling a wet trickle under her shirt from underarm to waist, she added, “Let’s open the windows for a better view.”

  The suck of the rushing wind from the descending glass sounded like the air nozzle at the dentist’s office. Not wishing to be reminded of work, Linda sang out, “Foraminifera! Orthohombic, amphibole, cephalopod!” and her lips enjoyed the motions of these new words Hank had taught her.

  “Hey,” he said, “you really do like this stuff, don’t you?”

  She nodded, and they continued to drive through familiar landscapes that Hank transformed before her eyes. This river, those hills wouldn’t be there in twenty million years. That field was once a shoreline. Linda couldn’t hear enough of these strange upheavals.

  After their day of driving, Hank came up to her apartment and demonstrated exfoliation. Explaining how natural forces could peel off slabs of rock from exposed surfaces, he put his hand under her blouse. Linda closed her eyes and could feel his fingers against her belly, the bottoms of her breasts. “Alternating temperature changes,” he whispered, “can loosen large flakes of rock.” He began to undo buttons, adding, “Then, with the release of pressure, they slip off, revealing another level.” The hooks of her bra released, and his hands moved down to her skirt.

  *

  Linda’s long days as a dental hygienist would never be the same. Now that Hank had shown her the world was a vast collection of secrets that could be revealed, the dry sameness and stillness of the office was gone. Each mouth before her was now a landscape of change. A child’s new, small teeth had once been only pink gums, ready to push open; a plaque-covered molar, ripe for decay, would eventually be pulled. She found herself so taken with these possible futures and pasts that she flooded one patient’s mouth with the water nozzle, scraped another’s raw nerve with her wandering pick, and Dr. Peale twice criticized her for preparing filling paste incorrectly. Still, Linda was proud that she too could see the invisible.

  Once they drove through a long cluster of hills on the way to see a glacial lake. One of the hills had been blasted open for the highway to pass through, and each sheer side was an exposed face of rock, angled in crazy contours from past cataclysms. “We call this a road cut,” Hank said, pulling off to the side. “Millions of years are uncovered here.” He took a small hammer from the glove compartment and grinned. “We are now in geologist’s paradise.”

  Linda looked up at the straight, high face of rock, so beautiful and exposed, yet it all seemed oddly twisted and about to fall upon them in solid waves. Her face was pressed against the window and, though frightened, when she turned to Hank she said nothing. He hesitated, then put his hammer away. “Well, maybe next time,” he murmured, and started the car. Linda was surprised by his understanding, and she wondered if he could also see how much was revealed in the simple gesture of her hand resting on his shoulder as they drove along.

  *

  The wedding was a small affair. Hank’s mother and father weren’t invited—the few times he ever mentioned his parents he called them The Scene of the Crime. Linda’s distant parents didn’t manage to show up, though they did call to congratulate her and complain of their many small ailments. They even promised to visit someday. But Linda couldn’t quite imagine them in her new, small house, so extensively decorated with Hank’s collection of rocks.

  She was so happy in these rooms where Hank playfully stalked her, where chunks of trilobite-encrusted shale, polished granite that was once burning magma, and hollow geodes lined with crystals faced out from glass cabinets and shelves. At night they played Lava Flow. Hank illustrated this geologic phenomenon with his tongue, beginning at Linda’s toes. Once, under his moist advance, Linda suddenly remembered how, a week before during a routine teeth cleaning, a middle-aged patient had licked her gloved and probing fingers. She had paused, startled, and as the man stared up at her, the tip of his tongue still stroking her fingertips, she quickly found a small cavity and pressed on it with her metal pick. He stopped. Neither of them spoke, and after he left, she had washed his saliva from her gloves with great deliberation before throwing them away. Wanting to forget this now, Linda pushed toward her husband, her head against the pillows, and Hank extended his hands to the curve of her spine. “Your back,” he said, grinning between licks, “is as beautiful as any sedimentary anticline.” She arched her back, pretending she was buried strata urging upward.

  Three months later Linda was pregnant. At work, as she stood in the dentist’s office watching the leaves in the landscape print turn autumnal colors before her, she contemplated with quiet relief her coming leave of absence. Her own body was now a new landscape, her nipples darkening, her uterus expanding with small tremors, and at home she read books on fetal development, eager to anticipate each hidden transformation. Turning the pages, Linda secretly believed that all of evolution was inside her: an amoeba-like speck was slowly developing appendages until it would finally curl, fantastically, into a human being.

  In Linda’s sixth month, Hank reluctantly went on an extended field trip in the West, where he was put in charge of explosives. He called to tell Linda how safe it really was to set off little artificial earthquakes and then track the shock waves to find hidden oil deposits. She assured Hank how relieved she was, but a sudden, sharp kick inside frightened Linda so much she almost dropped the receiver. When Hank’s distant voice spoke to her of reservoir rocks and permeable beds, Linda closed her eyes and, because she had learned from geology that everything unseen can ultimately be recovered, she imagined him home, his slim frame appearing in the middle of an opened doorway.

  But Hank didn’t return early. One afternoon, as she sat snug with her wide belly in a living room chair, about to open Hank’s latest letter, Linda suddenly felt she was waiting in a dentist’s reception room for a long-delayed appointment. Anxious for her husband’s return, she began imagining his features through their unborn child. She spent hours plotting the bulge of a small eyelid, or the extension of a nose from two small holes to a graceful rise of flesh. Then, as if their features had fused inside her when she and Hank lay locked together, she combined in a tiny face his fine nose with her large eyes, his stark cheekbones above her rounded jaw. And when Linda was done she saw she had fully imagined a son.

  Hank finally returned, with happy news: while searching for oil deposits he had found in his spare time a fossil fragment of what was possibly a hitherto-unknown branch of ostracoderms, primitive jawless fish. Hank seemed revived by his triumph. He often sat beside her in the evenings, his hands on her belly, attempting to chart unseen growth from a kick, a turn, or a short, insistent pressure, and Linda liked to think that he, too, was conducting an invisible improvisation of their unborn child.

  A month later, Linda gave birth and it was a terrible, tearing convulsion—how unnerving that her body could so painfully erupt. And yet now she had a chubby, clutching infant named William. Hank called him Mr. Squeeze and wagged playful fingers above the bassinet, and Linda stared with delight at William’s blue eyes, downy hair, and attempted smiles. He was exactly as she had imagined him, her secret thoughts now before her, round and pink and squalling. She could anticipate the smallest flicker of his limbs, she felt his call before he cried. Because of this Lind
a didn’t like to leave her son alone, for if she couldn’t see him she sometimes doubted whether he was still there, and she sat by the crib and gorged herself on his quiet breathing.

  *

  Hank’s skill at uncovering energy deposits and his growing desire to fill gaps in the fossil record continued to take him from home, far away from diaper changes and ear infections, though he insisted he only accepted the most important projects. Lonely while he was gone, Linda tired of the daily rearranging of dust. She felt she was a child again, cooped up in the house because her parents were too worried to let her out where she might catch god knows what. A few of the neighbors on the block kept Linda company while her husband was away, cooing over the baby, offering tips on how to catch up on much-needed sleep, and admiring the large and accumulating display of rocks and fossils. Hank had always returned from each field trip with another new and marvelous rock for Linda: glassy olivine, speckled breccia. But now she saw these gifts as rivals, her rooms decorated with a collection of his geologic infidelities.

  Once Hank came home and gave her a simple chunk of gray granite. However, embedded in the middle of one smooth surface was an odd, white smear of quartz that resembled a strange footprint, or perhaps some fleeing thing, or even the ghost of an extinct creature. Linda sat at the kitchen table and stared at her gift, while across from her Hank announced he was Accelerating Soil Creep and nosed their laughing baby across the waxed and slippery floor. But during dinner he was oddly quiet.

  As they lay in bed together that night, Hank confessed his fear that while he searched for oil, the fossils he really cared for—some perhaps the last of their kind—were eroding away somewhere beyond recognition or were being crushed underground by tectonic forces. Linda in turn confessed her own unhappiness.

  “Why should you be jealous of carbonized graptolites?” Hank said smiling, stroking her forehead, but Linda suddenly felt buried by invisible depths of earth. Hank sat up, and when he pulled the blankets off her slowly, carefully, Linda imagined she was a prize fossil being uncovered. She allowed him to turn and twist her into odd shapes. She shook her hair, pretending that the blonde strands fell into the shape of a brachiopod’s patterned ribs or the many watery arms of a nautiloid, while he entered her again and again. That night Linda dreamt about the ghostly image in the center of Hank’s latest gift: it grew larger and larger, until she saw it was one of Hank’s teeth, and he was smiling with a mouth so wide that she found she was falling inside, past his perfect teeth, falling.

  *

  Then Hank was away again, and Linda’s days were filled with the insistent claims of her child, which echoed her own anxious needs. She often found herself gazing out the window, yet again at a nearby field that was once ancient forest, at a distant hill that was no longer mountain. How could the marvelous have become so routine? Bored with the familiar, malleable earth, Linda stared at a bare elm across the street. She found herself slowly extending the branches, and then twisting them—why not?—into the intricate plumbing of an invisible house. Hesitant at first, she further imagined antique, embossed doors and steep gables. This was another form of geology, she thought: she could hold the invisible like a fossil.

  Hearing William crying, Linda hurried to his room. Though she usually liked to stand there by his crib and separate his features, picking out what was Hank’s and imagining her husband was half home, she quickly scooped up William and brought him back with her. While nursing him she tried to re-create her apparition, but it had already erased itself. Linda quietly stroked her son’s forehead, frustrated, and she wondered if there were other unseen territories waiting for her.

  Sated, William squirmed in her lap, and Linda looked down at his restless, excited face. She stuck her tongue out and he laughed. She did it again, her eyes closed tightly, and she suddenly saw return the shady, encircling porch of the vanished house. William’s tiny hands tickled her, and the finely crafted scrollwork on the window shutters etched themselves before her. When his fists pounded aimlessly against her thighs, the house rose up story by story. She held William and bounced him on her knees, happy that this child she had imagined helped her imagine another world.

  *

  Everything around her loosened. The doors in her home vibrated, as if still being ripped from a tree. Even when she spoke long-distance to Hank, who was distracted by some worry he wouldn’t name, Linda was unable to resist this giddy new world before her and she watched the water glasses in the cabinets evaporate into their original piles of sand. But soon these pleasures were interrupted when Hank returned home without warning, his car filled with large cardboard boxes. He carried the first one to the door, where Linda met him, and she had to lean across the carton for a kiss. He squeezed past her and walked toward the study. Linda followed and William, just able to walk, wobbled between them.

  “Hank, what’s the matter?” she asked, but he only grunted.

  When he put the box on the floor of the study, he explained that one of his explosions had pulverized a hidden bed of fossils. “The damn company made me keep blasting,” he almost shouted. He stood up. “But I did manage to save some.”

  Linda looked down at the thickly taped box. He had brought the explosion home. She imagined the rocks bursting out of the cardboard packing, each small, sharp piece flying against the walls, and she barely heard Hank say, “I’ll just have to salvage what I can.” He walked back to the car for another carton, while invisible dust and debris settled over everything.

  Because fossils were his first love, Hank explained he had to take a break from energy freelancing. He worked in his study so relentlessly, surrounded by topographical maps, charts spanning millions of years, and boxes filled with jagged rocks, that he might just as well have been away on another field trip. One afternoon, while William was napping, Linda cautiously entered the study. Hank didn’t even look up from his desk.

  “Let’s play Glacial Melt,” she suggested, her hand on the door.

  Hank plucked a fossil from a tray. “I don’t have time for games now, Linda,” he replied. She left and stood out in the hall, listening to him cleaning fossils with his wire brushes, and she almost wished she was small and hard, so that Hank might hold her too.

  At dinner Hank held up the thin, crushed spiral of a gastropod. “Look at this,” he said, pointing it at her, “look at what I destroyed.” Linda couldn’t hold his gaze, so instead she watched the table settings transform themselves—the flower patterns growing off the teapot and plates and twisting around the serving dishes. Why did Hank want to pin down hidden points of time when the true beauty of geology was that past, present, and future bled into each other?

  That night Linda waited in bed for Hank. When he didn’t appear she decided to fetch him, and she passed through the dark house easily by imagining that the lamps were shining. She opened the door to the study and found Hank exhausted at his desk, among his charts and graphs. There were rocks everywhere, and Linda saw them as huge, pulled teeth. Hank was pressing the eraser end of his pencil against his cheeks, pressing so hard he’d made an odd pattern of red splotches that looked like a strange and terrifying rash.

  “Come here,” Linda whispered, frightened. Hank looked away without saying a word, but he let her draw him down to the floor, among the clumps of fossils. Her hands stroked his cheeks and forehead and, surrounded by images of extinction, they undressed each other. Her body encircled and accepted him, and at once the succession of small, present moments wasn’t enough for Linda to hold on to. She saw the two of them age rapidly into withered shanks and narrow bone, then she saw their limbs grow younger until they were children, wrestling naked on the floor. Finally she saw them all ages at once—pink cheeks above the wrinkled cords of the neck, firm thighs above bony calves, and their pubic hair dark, then gray. Time circled through them as they shuddered and rocked together, the present moment untethered and wildly swinging back and forth.

  *

  Linda woke early in the morning, Hank sleeping
in bed beside her, and she remembered the night before. Proud of her abilities, and yet somehow disturbed by this pride, she turned to Hank and quietly confessed to his still back what she had seen during their lovemaking. Sure he would understand, Linda felt infinitely sad that he was still asleep. But then he stirred, his arm reaching out like a gesture from a dream, and his hand gripped hers and tightened.

  “What can you possibly be saying?” he asked. Hank reached across the bed for a rock on the nightstand. He turned and held it before Linda. “Tell me what you see here,” he said.

  It was a piece of shale, and embedded in it was a petal-like shape with many feathery arms that seemed to wave, to wave at her, and those motions traveled up Hank’s hand, which began to wrinkle, the wrinkles deepening like rivers slowly cutting through shallow hills. She told Hank this, and he looked at the rock as if it had suddenly come alive.

  “No,” he then said, speaking carefully. “It’s a crinoid, an extinct water lily.” And he still held it in the air, as if forcing them both to see this.

  “Oh, it’s more than that, it’s geology,” Linda replied. She rested her hand over the image in the shale, her fingers touching his.

  He frowned. “Geology? C’mon, what are you talking about?”

  “What you taught me—that everything changes.” And Hank then proved this to be true, for he hurled the rock at the window, bursting it open, and all the pieces of broken glass contained bits of the world outside that changed as they flew through the air.

  They cleaned up the room together. Hank kept apologizing, but Linda laughed at him and picked up a fragment of glass. She twisted it in the light and it framed Hank’s anxious face, then their disturbed blankets on the bed, the broken pane, and the scattered glass chips in the rug: Linda’s little shard seemed to imagine along with her. “This is wonderful,” she told Hank, “and it’s all because of you.” But he turned away from her and reached carefully for a sliver in the rug.