by Amy Hempel
I listened to them often. I hooked up the camera to the computer when I was at home alone. For two hundred dollars I’d bought a hidden surveillance camera that was fitted into a book. I did not expect it to work. I left it next to the clock on the nightstand. I did not pay the additional seventy-five dollars that would have showed them to me in color. But the ninety-degree field of view was adequate for our bedroom, and sound came in from up to seven hundred feet. Had this not worked so well, I would have stood in line for the camera that came hidden in a ceiling-mounted smoke detector.
Usually the things they said were exchanges of unforeseen delight, and riffs of gratitude. But the last time I listened to them, my husband said something clever. Mrs. Greed sounded oddly winsome, said she sometimes wished the two of them had “waited.” My husband told her they could still wait—they could wait a day, a week, a month—“It just won’t be the first time,” he said.
How she laughed.
I said to myself, “I am a better person!” I am a speech therapist who works with children. Parents say I change their lives. But men don’t care about a better person. You can’t photograph virtue.
I found the collection of photographs he had tried to hide. I liked that the photos of herself she brought to him were photos from so long ago. Decades ago. She wears old-fashioned bathing suits aboard sailboats with islands in the faded background. Let her note that the photographs of me that my husband took himself were taken in this bed.
Together, they lacked fear, I thought, to the extent that she told him to bring me to dinner at her house. With her husband. Really, this was the most startling thing I had heard on playback. Just before the invitation, she told him she would not go to bed with the two of us. My husband was the one to suggest it. As though the two of us had talked it over, as if this were something I wanted. I heard her say, “I have to be the queen bee.” Saw her say it.
She would not go to bed with us, but she would play hostess at dinner in her home.
I looked inside my closet, as though I might actually go. What does one wear for such an occasion? The corset dress? Something off the shoulder? Something to make me look older? But no dress existed for me to wear to this dinner. The dress had to do too much. It had to say: I am the sexy wife, and I will outlast you. It had to say: You are no threat to my happiness, and I will outlive you.
*
Down the street from our house, a car waited for Mrs. Greed. I knew, because I had taken note before, that a driver brought her to see my husband when I visited clients out of town. Was there a bar in the back of this car? I couldn’t tell—the windows had a tint. Maybe she would not normally drink, but because there was a decanter of Scotch and she was being driven some distance at dusk, maybe she poured herself a glass and toasted her good luck?
This last thought reassured me. How was it this felt normal to me, to think of her being driven home after a tumble with my husband? I guess it depends on what you are used to. I knew a man who found Army boot camp “touching,” the attention he received from the drill sergeant, the way the Army fed him daily. It was a comfort to him to know what each day would bring.
I felt there could be no compensation for being apart from my husband. Not for me, and not for her.
I knew I was supposed to be angry with him, not with her. She was not the first. She was the first he would not give up. But I could not summon the feelings pointed in the right direction. I even thought that killing her might be the form my self-destruction took. Had to take that chance. I tried to go cold for a time—when I thought of him, when I thought of her. But there was a heat and richness to what I conceived that made me think of times I was late to visit a place that my friends had already seen. When you discover something long after others have known it, there is a heady contentment that comes.
What I heard on the tapes after that: their contentment, their conversation one that we had not been having. Watching them on camera I thought: What if I’m doing just what I’m supposed to be doing? And then I thought: I am.
*
The boys said they would give me a sign.
It was money well spent. With what I saved not needing to film in color, and knowing I would not need the standard two-year warranty, I had enough to pay the thuggish teens a client’s son hung out with. The kid with the stutter had hinted he needed m-m-money. I will even give them a bonus—I will let them keep the surveillance camera hidden in the book after they send me the final tape.
Mrs. Greed does not live so far away that I will miss the ambulance siren.
And what to make of this? The apples my husband “bought,” the green ones from the Italian market that does not carry green apples—I ate one on the front steps of our house and threw the core into pachysandra. The next morning the core I had thrown was on the top step where I had been sitting when I ate it. I threw it again, this time farther out, so it lodged in pine needles alongside the road in front of our house. The morning after that, today, the core was back in place on the top step.
Boys.
I thought: Let’s see what happens next.
We have so many apples left.
Fort Bedd
The second “d” is silent.
We agreed on that, if not on much else.
In a darkened apartment on the west side of the park, when things went wrong, I thought about trees. I wanted lilacs and chestnuts, an Onward pear. Dogwood and silver maple. A copper beech so old that the bench built around it is splintered and gray. Trees take root, and I thought I could too—if I had enough trees to learn from.
“You’ll tell me,” he said, “if I start to talk crazy.
“If I do something crazy, you’ll tell me,” he said.
He was incurable; old age can’t be cured. We clung to each other for safety in the only safe place we knew. In the dark back bedroom, Fort Bedd the temperature of skin and air, we propped ourselves up on feather-filled pillows, and the wagons circled, but the wagons were pillows too, so Fort Bedd changed its borders with every move we made.
The dark apartment rustled in the dark, and it was dark in the day as well.
There would have been light if the curtains were opened. But they were his curtains to open, and he chose to keep them closed. Sometimes when we had kicked off the pillows and he was asleep, I would walk to the window and yank back the drapes the way an amateur diver might surface too quickly: bubbles in the blood, pain in the joints, then the hyperbaric chamber of Fort Bedd.
If we were going to get through this, I would need trees. The next day, or any day, I could slip away and drive to a nursery, pick out a tree—balled and burlapped—and put it in my car and take it to the edge of a field where no one would see me dig with the shovel I brought along. I could visit the tree I planted, bring water if it needed water. If there was dogwood blight that season, I could plant Pendulum spruce instead.
Plant windbreak, woods, a forest, a glen.
Four Calls in the Last Half Hour
The relaxed relentlessness, the air of impersonal intimacy, that sense they create of having just been with you despite not having been with you for quite a while; of resuming a rolling conversation that you have not, in fact, been having, that was broken off rather dramatically, actually, by definitive pledges by both parties. They know this, surely, but maybe they’re so lonely they don’t care—and so grandiose that they think if they don’t, you won’t. Either that or they’re living in another dimension, a dimension you thought that you could live in too, once. Just take me there. Just teach me the rules. You adore them for having a hundred percent of something that you have only sixty-five of, but see that most people have even less of, which is why most people don’t interest you much. If the one hundred percent you’re transfixed by will sacrifice a fraction of his endowment and you can add a little bit to yours, you’ll both be at a formidable ninety percent—approximately equally exalted, since you’ll be further than average folks can ever dream of being. You’ll be set then. The reigning couple in a pri
vate cosmos that’s the best little private cosmos out there, because it’s yours, all yours, and the humor there is all yours, as well as the sex, the talk, the everything. But the one with one hundred percent won’t compromise and soon the eager apprentice just gives up, haunted by images of what could have been if the other had just been flexible. Which he can’t be, because he’s inflexible and doesn’t have to be, because he feels he has it all already and doesn’t get lonely the way we do, so why trade self-sufficiency for company. But he does get a little bored sometimes, especially on chilly weekend nights. So he picks up the phone to call one he denied. He picks up the phone again.
The Correct Grip
A few days after the attack, the wife of the stranger who attacked me called me on the phone. She wanted to know if I was serious about her husband. She said he told her he was having an affair with me. She said she got my number from Student Services.
“Your husband broke into my apartment,” I said, in the uninflected voice that had taken me this far. “He threatened me with a knife.”
“Did he use it?” his wife asked.
“He used it to threaten me,” I said.
“Because he used it on me once,” she said conversationally. “I have a scar on my forehead like a quarter moon.
“What do you look like?” she asked.
I told her! I played down my looks, but not so far that she would think that was what I was doing.
“You could be describing me,” she said, sounding pleased.
She said, “I guess why I’m calling you is to see if I should stay and try to make it work.”
I told her I could not possibly advise her, and gave her instead the number of a women’s shelter in case he gave her more trouble. I reminded her what her husband had done to me.
She said, “Would you like to have lunch sometime anyway? My treat.”
I told her I was moving out the next week. Saying so, I meant it.
I hung up and looked for my dog’s new leash.
The phone call I got before the attacker’s wife was from a friend who had stumbled on an exposed tree root the day before, had fallen and broken her ankle.
This was in the woods near her house, she said. She told me she had unleashed her retriever and sent him to get help. The dog had returned with a neighbor who called for an ambulance on his cell phone.
I told her that my dog would have done the same thing for me, only stopping first to knock over trash cans and try to get laid.
I was dismayed by my impulse to make fun of rescue. But there is something so convenient about rescue. Yet would I not have been spared if the man who attacked me had been made to drop the knife because my dog had been with me and had pinned him to the ground?
I found the new leash, and set out to walk my dog. In the correct grip, the right thumb goes through the loop in the leather before the right hand doubles over to clutch the extra length. This ensures maximum control and should obviate the need to use the left hand. The correct grip causes the dye in the leather to rub off in the creases of the hand. It strengthens the hand when you form a fist for when the proverbial pendulum swings the hell back.
The Second Seating
The three of us were taken with the vodka fizz made with elderflower and basil so we stayed on and had the raw kale salad and heirloom tomatoes with medallions of halloumi. These were such that we ordered the scallops, and then the frozen chocolate crème brûlée. We had had to arrive early and flag a table outside to get to order anything at all, so by the time we had finished dinner, the sun was still showing through trees near the bay. The day before had been rain all day, so we were satisfied to stay in our seats and take in the scents from the well-tended garden surrounding the lodge.
Bob, dying, had made us promise we would have dinner there without him in the same way he’d told his wife to go ahead with plans to add a screened porch to their house—so there would be one room not filled with memories of him.
We had already missed the last ferry to the mainland. We had nowhere else to be. A couple approached our waitress for a table. She told them the second seating had already filled. We could have given up our seats and paid our bill. But we said to the waitress that we wanted to start over. Then we ordered more drinks, and later the cod.
Moonbow
People are getting away with murder, but I can’t get away with having a glass of water in bed. I trade sides with my dog, who won’t feel what I spilled anyway.
From this side of the bed, I see the moon through the window. It’s a full moon with . . . something extra. I’ve heard about this, but not in upstate New York—in Africa, where the mist from Victoria Falls on the night of a full moon can cause a rainbow to form, a white one—a moonbow. People book vacations to see it.
I head downstairs, and out to the small backyard. Who else is seeing this? And then I see who else: a small brown bear, or maybe it’s black. I freeze, trying not to look scared because that’s when they attack, I’m told. A bear is moving calmly from the neighbor’s yard into mine. He looks up at the moon; we look at it together. The bear drops to the ground and then stands up pawing a ball. It belonged to my dog, the other one, who died the month before. The bear sees the dog’s water bowl I’ve kept filled from habit or hope, and helps himself to a drink. He wraps himself in the rope from the old tie-out. He swipes at the gone dog’s favorite plush toy, a damp, matted lamb with the squeaker torn out.
The bear rolls on his back under the freakish white rainbow, his feet like those of one other creature I knew. “Logan?” I ask, moving a step closer. “It’s all right.”
I tell him what has happened since I lost him, and assure him that I approved of his valedictory bite, that awful deliveryman who had it coming. I tell him that the deli has gone up for sale, that another antiques store has opened, that I hate my haircut, that I have not thrown anything away, that the water in the kitchen has developed a metallic aftertaste.
And then the bear is leaving. On his feet, and moving to the back of the yard, he stops by the old rope swing. I think he’s going to put his legs through the tire and push off toward the moon, but then I see he’s got the rope between his teeth. He chews and shakes his head until he has chewed through the rope and the tire falls to the ground, where the bear kicks it out of his way as he tears off through the woods.
Equivalent
The former owner was supposed to fix the door. Instead, he left behind a pool-cleaning robot. He said it was equivalent to fixing the front door, though the house had no pool. It had once had a pool, but the seller’s wife had been the swimmer, and when she died four years earlier, he filled in the pool.
At the closing, the buyer’s attorney pointed out that the repair of the door was contractually bound. She brought out the contract and showed him. He said you just had to put some shoulder to it. The buyer wanted the house, so she was the one both sides knew would give in.
Every couple of months, the seller arrived unannounced to pick up something he had left behind: a wall phone in the den, canoe mounts in the shed. The buyer allowed him to take what he wanted, then asked for help with a difficult chore. She asked him to turn the mower on its side to drain the oil. And double-check the basement’s radon remediator. Each favor she asked extended the time until the seller’s next visit. The weeds in the garden—the buyer bets that this will be enough to keep the seller from coming back to get the child’s blackboard in an upstairs bedroom, the child’s name formed by animals carved in the wooden frame.
The Quiet Car
That reminds me of when I knew a romance was over. I had not seen this fellow in a while, but he suggested we meet up at the train station and take the Acela somewhere, so I thought we’d have several hours to catch up. And then at the station, we boarded and he led me to our seats in the Quiet Car.
I was glad to have the rented falling-down house through the summer. It was a bicycle ride from the beach, and the owner had let me paint the bedroom a grayish green from the Benjamin Moore Seren
ity Collection. The floors were sandy even before I went to the beach. There was no pool, but I still might buy the raft that is a giant vinyl slice of watermelon.
The snowbirds are back as of this holiday weekend, not that they are the ones hurling M-80s. The president would have us believe the hurlers of M-80s are members of MS-13; supposedly this little hamlet is their base. But I have been here nearly a year, and have seen no one threatening. I’m the almost retiree who does not go south for the winter. On the mantel, though the fireplace doesn’t work, I’ve propped the housewarming present from a friend: a small painting of a house that is on fire. It’s a good painting.
It’s fancy camping here, with a refrigerator that freezes food as quickly as the freezer compartment. It can’t be fixed, said the repairman who tried on four occasions and then refused to let me pay him. My brother, who owns a bakery in the city, is going to visit next week during a convention. I found that the vegetable drawer is the one part of the refrigerator that will chill instead of freeze, so I will instruct him to keep his butter and cream there. He will examine the failed appliance and ask me if I’d thought to “run the adapter for the RL247 through the Omega conductor or the AcuRite barometer.” It’s a running gag, that he understands the work of an electrician. I’ll say, “Yeah, the first one.”
On this holiday weekend, there is a sale on large appliances at Home Depot. I cut the ad out of a circular and sent it to the owner of the house. I bought packets of wildflower and zinnia seeds, and sprinkled them around the falling-down house. Maybe the rain we can expect tonight will do something about it.
