by Ann Bauer
Carmen, aching, wondered what she could do for her son. “How about goulash tonight?” she suggested. This was the meal he requested each year for his birthday. It was his favorite, and Jobe’s, though she could never get it quite spicy enough for the two of them no matter how much paprika she put in.
“Good,” he said, nodding so dramatically his chin kept hitting his chest.
“We’ll invite Troy,” Carmen said, and again Luca nodded, but more gently this time. Then they sat silently, drinking their coffee, listening to the sound the rain made on the roof.
It was a raucous evening. Not only did Troy show up, but also Michael’s friend, Jeffrey—an undersize boy who adored Luca genuinely and followed him through the house, imitating the way he walked not out of meanness but awe.
There was a crowd of kids around Carmen as she poured oil into a cast-iron pan and set the meat in to sizzle. She distributed cutting boards and they chopped onions and garlic and red and green peppers while she opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a sturdy glass. Once, the house shook with wind, and this was followed by a loud pause and a crack of thunder, then torrents of rain. Jeffrey retreated to the couch in the den—trying to look casual through his terror—and had to be coaxed back into the group by Luca. As Carmen spooned tomato paste into the pan, Troy turned on the kitchen radio and she heard a familiar beat and synthesizer chords, then the sweet, high voice that had threaded through her high school years: Now the mist across the window hides the lines / But nothing hides the color of the lights that shine.
“Oh, my God, turn that up!”
“This?” Troy turned, looking perplexed. “But it’s …”
“Old people music. She knows.” Siena shrugged. “Just indulge her and it’ll be over soon.”
“Indulge me? You used to love this album.” Carmen took a swig of wine and closed her eyes, catching a glimpse of the jaunty, young Jobe dancing in his metronomic way with a blanket-swaddled baby girl in his arms. “We used it to put you to sleep when you were a baby. I always thought I’d play it at your wedding.”
Troy shot Siena a winsome look and Carmen stopped, a box of elbow macaroni poised midair above the bubbling water, to watch. Jobe’s death had done something to her relationship with her seventeen-year-old daughter; it had gone from sweet to fiery in only a matter of days. Carmen pictured Troy and Siena plotting like a pair of Shakespearean characters, texting back and forth, meeting furtively at night, growing their little high school romance into a dramatic life-altering event. Don’t do it! She felt like shaking her daughter. Look at me. I married your father when I was too young to understand the consequences and got stuck for more than two decades. But of course, she couldn’t do that.
“Jeez, making a baby listen to this, that’s like … child abuse,” Troy said. And right in front of Carmen’s eyes, he and her daughter turned back into impertinent teenagers. This thought made her sigh with relief.
They sat in the kitchen, all six of them, almost like a family. Carmen passed the bowls of salad and steaming meat and noodles and got up twice—once for butter and once for more bread. As often happened while she was watching the children, she barely ate herself. They dazzled her with their unexpected opinions and differences. Of course she wouldn’t repudiate these three people for the chance to have had a real life all to herself! The idea of never having them seemed horrific right now: even Luca, especially Luca, who ate neatly and seriously, the way his father had, as if it were a job to be done.
Near the end of the meal, she felt her phone’s text message alert vibrating through the pocket of her sweater. And later, when she checked—while the older children cleaned up together and Michael and Jeffrey played a game of Risk—there was a message from Danny. “Miss U. Call me.”
Typically, she would have taken the phone outside, but the rain continued to pelt down. Carmen looked for a private place on the main floor, wandering from room to room. Siena and Troy were in the kitchen, lingering over the last few dishes. Michael and Jeffrey were sprawled on the rug in the living room. Luca was, by this point, in the den solemnly watching TV. She took the back stairs up but stopped when she got to the threshold of her bedroom. She and Jobe had shared this room—this bed—up until the last few weeks when he could no longer make it up the stairs. Carmen had dreaded nighttime throughout their marriage: They’d become alien to each other, exquisitely careful, lying sealed off, each occupying a separate half of the bed.
But there had been other nights—random, scattered, occurring for small reasons—when the space between them had briefly disappeared. Seven years ago she’d had the stomach flu, for example, and was recovering: weak from a day of throwing up and another of leaving her body empty so she wouldn’t. Jobe had come into the room after tending to the children, then still young, and groaned slightly as he took off his shoes. He lay on top of the covers while she was underneath, anchoring her in a pleasant way. And when he’d reached out that evening to put his hand on her forehead—checking for fever—she had turned toward him and curled like a possum into the space under his chin. If he was surprised after months of feeling only her back in bed, he didn’t let on.
He had reached over her with one long arm to turn off the lamp at her side, but stopped as he was retracting his hand, hesitated, and began stroking back her long hair. He’d made no move to take off his clothes or get under the covers. And somehow being swathed and touched by him in this way felt different, almost as if she were a child and he were anointing her. A holy man.
Standing in the doorway, staring at the flat, empty bed, Carmen considered the memory of that night. The next day, she’d chalked it all up to post-illness euphoria: Her body was healing, her brain swimming from lack of calories and hydration. Within a week, she’d returned to being uncomfortable in Jobe’s presence, bristling at the way he chewed his food rhythmically, or blew his nose three times in a row then looked in the tissue to see what he’d produced. But now, she recalled the way she’d slid into the crevice his body made by pinning down the blankets and sheets. It was snowing that night, tiny, icy flakes that fell at a slant, ticking sharply against the windowpanes. She’d fallen asleep to this sound and to the glowing sensation of Jobe running his fingers along the tops of her ears, her brain empty of everything else.
It felt wrong to sit in that room and talk to her lover about the easy life now that her husband was dead, the children were hers alone, and she didn’t have to explain to anyone where she was going on Tuesday or why she sometimes came back damp with her hair smelling of hotel shampoo. Carmen took one last look at the bed, a flat plane without even the faint impression of Jobe’s body. It was, she thought, as if he’d never been.
Something about this made her angry as she climbed the stairs to the attic. Her husband had left with so little fanfare, just as he’d lived, quietly writing his papers and talking to students, trying to solve the Riemann hypothesis though he and everyone else knew it was impossible to do in one lifetime—especially Jobe’s, short as it was.
Carmen had to duck when she emerged from the narrow stairwell, the way Jobe had once needed to downstairs. But after she had crawled up the last few steps and walked to the center of the peaked room, she could stand and reach her hands all the way up without touching the ceiling. In some ways, the attic was typical, with dancing dust motes and small windows and a faint, ghostly, gingerbread smell.
Carmen knew from the previous owner’s daughter that the family that had lived there for half a century before them used to keep their Christmas cookies on the attic stairs. It was dry and cool there, the woman had explained. She was a portly little peanut of a person with snow-white hair and soft, latticed cheeks. She told Carmen that none of the seven children in their family would touch the cookie tins once they were stacked on the wooden steps. I don’t know why, she had said and laughed. It wasn’t that we couldn’t, of course. But there was something special about the attic. It somehow wasn’t a real part of the house.
Carmen knew what she
meant. Coming up here felt like ascending through a tunnel and entering a different world. This was an attic with eaves, which went completely against type. The way it was furnished added to this feeling. It was the furniture from their first five years of marriage, which had been Carmen’s—and Jobe’s, because he tended back then to go along with what she wanted—modern phase. There were teak tables, blond and sleek and low to the ground; geometrically patterned rugs; and a sectional couch made up of twelve different pieces that could be combined in a nearly infinite number of ways, like children’s blocks. They were the exact opposite of the hinged trunks and rocking chairs one might expect to find in an attic, and Carmen had arranged the set as if for company. But she was the only person who ever went up there—mostly to be alone during the period before Jobe’s diagnosis when he seemed always to be in her way, expecting some pseudo-wifely act.
She sat and stared at the phone in her hand. But at the edge of her mind, crouching, was the memory of Jobe lying against her, his hand in her hair, chin grazing the top of her head. It had been years since she’d thought about the way he took care of her that night. The moments she tended to recall from their marriage were the ones in which she’d felt nothing except that void between two people that was worse than being alone. Reading in a chair and feeling the air change, his presence intruding on its molecules, when he sat on a has-sock that he’d pulled to within a few inches of her feet; trying to come up with a trip for their twentieth anniversary, which she was afraid would be a week of painful small talk and the question every night about whether or not they would make love.
They didn’t throughout the whole trip, which turned out to be to Bermuda. And Carmen was relieved but also hurt. She’d spent her days in a low-cut, black bathing suit, with a gauzy skirt pulled over it and a pair of sandals for when they walked into town. Yet her husband no longer even tried to put his hands on her. He got into bed each night like a brother, sometimes patting her hip before turning to face the wall. Sex between them had never been quite natural, but now it seemed like something hopelessly complicated that required physical contortions they’d both forgotten—a gymnastics move, which had been difficult yet possible when younger but now was completely out of reach.
There was sex with Danny, of course. But that was easy. Anyone could have sex with Danny, she often thought. In fact, anyone had. When she met him, he’d admitted to her that theirs was his fourth affair; he was good at this. And he had a reasonable excuse, because his wife was far less interested in sex than she was in food, which she sometimes wouldn’t eat at all and other times consumed in huge quantities then purged from her body in various ways. They had an entire plastic bin full of different kinds of laxatives, Danny told Carmen, because she had to switch brands whenever her body became used to one and refused to budge. She vomited only once or twice a week—as a last resort.
Danny couldn’t touch Mega’s body without her shuddering and moving his hand, complaining about the roll of fat on her thighs or her stomach or wherever else he happened to land. This decimated his erection every time, he told Carmen, who had tried to smile as if it were perfectly normal to think about him getting hard with someone else, even his wife. Carmen had never come right out and told Danny how infrequently she and Jobe had sex, but as her husband grew more skeletal it seemed obvious. While Danny’s wife wanted to waste away but couldn’t, Jobe’s skin was becoming pulled tight around his bones, like Saran Wrap.
Raindrops danced just a couple of feet over her head as she dialed Danny’s number. “Hey,” he answered immediately. She could tell that he was smoking from the wet, rubbly quality of his voice.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Shed,” he answered. “I’m going to burn this thing down some day.”
“That would be hard to do in this rain.” She watched drops ooze like tears down the small, pointed windows. “It looks like it might never stop.”
“Carmen’s Ark?” Danny laughed. “Do you think God is angry, wiping the world free of sinners?”
“If he were, we’d hardly be the ones he’d save,” she said, and Danny laughed again, though she hadn’t meant to be funny.
“I’d ask if you want to meet me, but I don’t know where we’d go in this storm.” He seemed suddenly to crouch closer to the phone. “It would be nice to touch you. I’d lick you and make you come, then leave right away. Run away through the rain.”
Carmen slid one hand up along her thigh. Danny electrified her with his dirty talk, and his habit of sometimes doing exactly as he said: working her up quickly, bringing her to climax, and disappearing before she’d even had time to open her eyes. The first time they were together she’d felt as if he were an incubus or a spirit, something she’d conjured up for the purposes of satisfying her the way her husband did not and allowed to dematerialize as soon as she’d gotten what she wanted. But that only made her want him more.
“Speaking of places to go.” Danny cleared his throat. “I’m a little short this week. Mega’s been on another spending spree. I know it’s my turn, but do you think you can cover the hotel on Tuesday?”
“Oh, we can just …” Carmen paused. She’d been about to say come here, but now she was trying to imagine the two of them in her house, Jobe’s absence looming over them, a tangle of bodies but where? On the kitchen table? The couch in the den where Luca sat to watch TV? In the bed she had shared with her husband for nearly twenty-one years? “Yeah, I guess I can cover it. I’m expecting a big insurance payment.”
“Really?” She heard the flare of his lighter and the indrawn breath of another cigarette. “How big?”
The answer was $5 million. She saw the numbers flash in her head, all the zeros lined up. Jobe had insisted on buying the policy back when Luca was three or four. Their son would always need care, Jobe reasoned, and if he were to die before his parents—before coming into his inheritance—Carmen would need money. From the beginning, it seemed, Jobe had been planning for this.
When he was first diagnosed, Carmen had thought about the life insurance and wondered how much Jobe had known about what was to come. Lymphoma was a cancer of the entire body. It may have been starting, cells mutating in small, random corners: his left shoulder, lower abdomen, big toe. Perhaps he had even felt it taking hold. Then, when it looked as if Jobe had survived both the disease and its treatment, getting to within two months of the five-year cure mark, she’d decided this was nonsense. Not only had her husband been making payments on a useless policy—one that would pay off only about one-tenth of his net worth once both his parents were dead—he was going to battle his way through the surgeries, chemo, and radiation, only to end up thin and tired but healthy after all. Then the leukemia set in.
“Um, you know, the standard University payout,” she said, before even realizing she’d decided not to tell Danny the truth. “Five hundred thousand.”
“Mmm.” The sound came from low in his throat. “That’s not so much. You’ll need it.”
“Yeah, I suppose.” Carmen squirmed; now she was lying to her lover about her husband. Would this never stop? “But I could spring for a whole night somewhere nice. That wouldn’t cost much and it would be nice to sleep in. You can tell Mega you’re going to a conference or something.”
“I’d love that, babe, but the only conferences I’ve ever gone to happen in fall. Modern Library and the Poe Association. I think she might catch on.”
“So?” Carmen knew she was being petulant but for the first time since that eerie spring in London when she was still nearly a child, she was afraid to be alone at night. Getting away and pretending there was something normal between her and Danny was the only way that she could think of to make the strange, random memories from her life stop. “You’ve told me a hundred times she knows you have relationships with other women. What does it matter if she knows?”
“My going to some cheap, hourly-rate hotel with someone while she’s having a pedicure, that’s one thing,” Danny said. “She’s probably
glad, it takes the pressure off her. But going somewhere she might like … you know, taking a real trip … that crosses her lines. Believe me. I’ve tried it before.”
He’d tried it before. Carmen forced herself to think about this: Danny with other women, in other cities, other hotels. Muttering his hot, dirty talk.
“Besides, I don’t want you spending your insurance money on something for us.” His voice became suddenly the one from the library: reliable, grave, concerned. “Half a million isn’t going to go that far. Especially with the kids and … everything.”
“You’re right.” Heat swept through Carmen as it occurred to her that she had a habit of misjudging every man in her life, dead and alive. Now was not the time to remind her lover—who seemed, unbelievably, to have forgotten—that in addition to the insurance, Jobe’s family was rich. “So I’ll see you Tuesday.”
After they set a time and Carmen promised to text him with the name of the hotel when she booked something, Danny said good-bye and Carmen flipped her phone closed, letting it fall to the smooth surface of the cushion where it lay looking out of place, like an artifact from a different time. Back when they bought this furniture, cell phones were enormous flesh-colored appliances carried only by real estate agents and brokers—successful ones whose need to get in touch with their clients was so urgent, they were willing to haul around the clunky dumbbell-shaped objects that got reception only on the tops of buildings and hills.
She’d read a book once about a man who lived in an ancient Central Park apartment looking out onto a stretch of New York that was left untouched by the previous century. He wore clothes from the 1880s, used an icebox, and shaved with a straight razor. Eventually the man in the book had faded back in time, an initially hazy process, she remembered, that began as a dreamlike state but became over the course of weeks so concrete that he was able to walk out his own front door into a New York of horses pulling wagons and ladies in long skirts carrying parasols.
