Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  She and Ben had been supposed to meet the day after they’d last seen each other. She hadn’t gone, of course. She hadn’t called, either, to tell him she wouldn’t be there. Just the thought of dialing his number had filled her with guilt.

  Let him wait. Let some small part of the consequences be his.

  Ben called her at the clinic the next day. When she said her husband had found out about them, he’d said quietly, “Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry? That’s all you can say?”

  “I don’t know what to say. Jordana—”

  If he hadn’t had his stupid date, if he hadn’t said that thing about a fuck-fix, she wouldn’t have torn out of the house in the middle of the night. And why was he seeing a married woman anyway? Because she wasn’t a threat to his look-at-me-I’m-so-bohemian lifestyle. She’d hung up on him, breathless with rage.

  A man with a gray ponytail stopped next to her and Beth. He wore a studded leather collar and a pinstriped suit over a leather vest. He asked Jordana, “Who are you?”

  “Jordana Voorster.”

  “Who are you supposed to be? Are you a pioneer?”

  Jordana had nearly forgotten she was wearing a costume. She looked down at the baggy calico. “It’s half of a painting,” she said. With Pieter, her costume had seemed funny, but now she felt frumpy. Looking around the party, she realized most of the couples had dressed as other couples: the dish who ran away with the spoon, Han Solo and Princess Leia. Stephen had on black-rimmed eyeglasses and a bow tie, Woody Allen to Beth’s scarves-and-fedora Annie Hall. There was something claustrophobic about it, everyone so paired that they stayed that way even when pretending to be someone else. Princess Di and Prince Charles—a younger couple Jordana didn’t know—wore crowns from Burger King.

  “What are you?” she asked.

  The man stepped back from her, holding open the sides of his suit jacket, sticking out his chest. The leather vest had two holes through which his nipples showed, flat and putty-colored. She shook her head.

  “Stocks and bondage,” he said.

  “Clever.”

  It actually was clever, so why was she being a bitch? Not that he’d noticed. He seemed to be the kind of person too satisfied—

  You’re always doing that, Ben’s voice said in her mind. Saying “the kind of person who.”

  Fine. This man seemed like the kind of person who would hardly notice irony. And indeed, he had launched into a description of his corporate job. So there, Ben.

  She’d accused him, during another post-discovery phone call, of getting out scot-free.

  “Is that what you think?” Ben had said.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “You tell me. You know everything.”

  Her anger at him had held her together, these last weeks. She bit harder on her lip. Stocks-and-Bondage talked on. The gestures of active listening were so ingrained in Jordana from the clinic that she could hum and nod and lift her eyebrows without having to hear a thing. From her lip, she tasted the faint acidity of blood.

  Playing the same music every night depressed Pieter, as did the corps of anorexic ballet students dressed as snowflakes, a different Clara each year, the same Snow Queen and Sugar Plum Fairy two or three years running. How thin the girls were, skin so translucent you could see the shape of their skulls, the knobs of their cheekbones. On this tracing-paper skin, they painted splotches of color: blue eyeshadow, fuchsia lipstick.

  This year’s Sugar Plum Fairy was a twenty-year-old named Lisa. Most of the third act she spent sitting between Clara and the Nutcracker Prince to watch the Russian Dance, the Tea Dance, the Waltz of the Flowers, a tight smile on her face. She had a knee injury, not disabling but so painful that she collapsed backstage after every show. She’d showed the younger dancers how to fill the toes of their slippers with Super Glue, then zag more Super Glue across the shoe’s arch, to reinforce it. This way, she could make a pair of slippers last two days of rehearsal instead of one. The younger dancers’ respect for her advice was mixed with condescension that came of being sure they would go farther than she had. Pieter recognized the mix of respect and disdain from himself, back when he’d been sure he’d be a soloist, the orchestra rising behind him as he carried his cello into the hall. Back then, he’d written and rewritten in his head the biography he imagined would someday appear in program notes: Pieter Voorster stunned the music world in 1973 with his recordings of …

  After the performance, Pieter packed his cello, a 1880 Trapani. From his vantage in the orchestra pit, two young couples lingering together in the aisle appeared foreshortened. One of the women was beautiful, with dark hair brushed smoothly back from a wide brow and a fur coat just a shade lighter than her hair. The husband held a little girl, maybe three years old, in a green velvet dress and white tights. Pieter remembered those tights from Angie’s childhood: the way they snagged, small balls of thread roughening the knees and seat. He saw himself kneeling to buckle his daughter’s patent leather shoes, his forehead resting against her leg.

  Angie. His stomach ached. He tried to hide his anxiety from her—if she saw that he pitied her, she’d only feel worse—and it seemed to have taken up permanent residence in his gut instead.

  “No more ’rinas for a year,” said Nita, the concertmaster. She called the dancers ’rinas when she was feeling charitable, bunheads when she wasn’t. She loosened her bow with two quick twists of her wrist.

  “What are your plans now?”

  “Home and bed,” said Nita. “I have a wedding in the morning.”

  “I had one this afternoon.”

  “Did they have lots of metaphors about the new year?”

  “Yes. But tomorrow, your bride and groom will also be hung over.”

  Nita snapped shut the violin case. “I can’t wait.”

  He and Nita often played at weddings together as part of a quartet. She was given to elaborately sequined clothing and had a raft of small pimples on her chin, where it rested against the violin. They’d known each other for nine years without ever quite crossing the line into friendship. These last few weeks, he’d realized sharply that he didn’t really have friends. His last real friendship had been with Jordana’s father, and that had ended bitterly when Pieter fell in love with his daughter. There were couples they saw together, and the men were sometimes referred to as “his friends,” the women as Jordana’s. Stephen, for example, Beth’s husband, though Pieter’s conversations with Stephen were generally halting and superficial. After a night with Beth and Stephen, he and Jordana would talk lazily on the ride home, along the dark winding road that followed the curves of Morrill River. She would take his hand from the stick shift, putting it onto her knee. She kept her hand on his, even when he had to shift gears. He’d thought he knew his own life; she’d robbed him of that.

  Nita was looking at him strangely. He realized he’d paused in the middle of strapping the Trapani into its case.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been—”

  He bent to snap shut the clasps of the heavy black case. “The other thing about the wedding today was that everything was in Christmas colors. The bride had a red bow tie for me to wear, and there were children dressed as elves.” It worked: Nita smiled and began to tell him about a wedding where the first view of the bride had been as she stood on a pedestal at the back of the church, her back to the congregation. Then the pedestal, mechanized, had rotated slowly, until the bride faced the aisle.

  To grin and nod was so painful he wanted to drop to his hands and knees.

  “And she beams like Miss America—” Nita said. Pieter smiled and made a humming noise of sympathy and assent.

  “Your sister’s here,” said Cole.

  Luke looked down the Burnt House stairs to the wide foyer, where silver beer cans piled like snowdrifts in the corners. Angie was wrapped in the long wool coat of their dad’s that she’d started wearing this year. Underneath, the Yale sweatshirt. She was with Tris Wu and Jes
s Salter, back from UNC and Bates.

  Luke said, “All month she’s been like, ‘I have to finish my applications.’ Tonight, I go in and she hasn’t even started them.”

  Cole had a beer in one hand; the other he rubbed across his chest. He had begun dressing recently like a fifties hood: white T-shirt, zip-front jacket, dark blue jeans turned up at the cuffs to show white socks. On his right hand, a grooved brass ring, once part of a faucet. Everyone else at school wore rugby shirts. Luke would never in a million years be as cool as Cole. Last summer, Cole’s parents, both doctors, had wanted to buy him a Jeep, but instead he’d gotten a silver ’62 Volvo station wagon, stick-shift. It was so old it had a starter button instead of an ignition key. Bubble-faced dials lined the dashboard. Luke had been disappointed the first time he saw the Volvo, and then gradually he’d realized it was the perfect car. He had fantasies of Cole tiring of the car and selling it to him, and one fantasy—guilty but honed—in which Cole died and his parents gave the car to Luke.

  Angie and her friends started up the stairs. Jess said, “Luke, hey!” and peeled off toward him. Angie didn’t glance up. She trailed after Tris, toward the beer.

  Jess gave him a hard one-armed hug while he said, “Hey, wow, hi.”

  “Long time no see.”

  “Yeah.” Not like Jess’d ever talked to him when she was still in high school. Jess had a crew cut now, and she kept running her palm over the top of her head.

  He drank some beer. Jess looked down over the railing at the people in the front hall. The house was way out in the woods and a few years ago, when a grease fire had started in the kitchen, the fire department had gotten there in time to save only part of the house. The right side remained more or less intact, but on the left just an outline remained, blackened framework that showed where the walls had been, the pitch of the roof.

  Downstairs, someone had made a pipe out of a green apple, the murky smell of marijuana smoke rising. No west wall, so moonlight flooded in. On that side, nearest where the house ended, the ceiling was bumpy and blackened, like alligator hide. Over Jess’s shoulder, Cole pointed at the stairs and started down. “High school parties,” Jess said. “Wait till you get to college.”

  The thought of going away made Luke light-headed with relief. Cole and Warren were going to UNH. Luke had been planning to go there too, but he’d given in to his mother and applied other places also, Wisconsin and Maryland. Now he said, “I might be going to UW. If I get in.”

  Jess seemed to find this ambition unremarkable, which was good because it made UW seem within reach. She said, “Madison’s supposed to be cool.”

  Tris Wu walked up to them, handing Jess a beer. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a bouncy ponytail. He liked Tris, the least overachieving of Angie’s friends.

  Luke asked, “Where’s Angie?”

  Tris shrugged and held Jess’s gaze around Luke, the way teenagers communicated when there was a parent there. Then she smiled at Luke. “How’s it going?”

  “Good, good. How’s North Carolina?”

  “‘Go Tarbacks!’” said Tris. “Everyone’s in a stupid frat.”

  Uneasiness about Angie was trying to jiggle free in his head. “Are you going to transfer?”

  She shook her head, lifting her cup to her mouth. “God, the beer’s even worse there than here at a high school party.”

  “Where’s Angie?” he asked again.

  “Abe dragged her off to talk.”

  For some reason, he couldn’t lose himself in the party. When he had conversations, he felt like he was watching himself talk. Khamisa wanted him to do tequila shots with her and he did a couple, thinking they’d make him less self-conscious. It didn’t work; everything he said sounded stupid and loud.

  The dining room had a heavy table, scorched at one end, and long shredded drapes that might have once been red. He crawled out the window—the house no longer had a back door—to the back porch. Halfway out, he saw that Abe sat on the back steps. He started to pull back, but too late: Abe had turned and seen him. Reluctantly, Luke pulled himself the rest of the way through the window.

  “What is going on with your sister?” Abe tore a long splinter off the porch railing and hurled it toward the woods. “I try to talk to her and it’s like there’s soundproof glass there or something.” He ripped off another piece of the railing. The air was no colder on the porch than inside, but the smell of pine for some reason was stronger.

  “She can be kind of a bitch,” Luke said.

  Abe twisted around on the porch step. “Kind of a bitch? My God. It’s like she’s dying right in front of us.”

  Luke felt something like a drop in barometric pressure, subtle and heavy. But Angie had doctors and his parents, monitoring her. “You guys broke up. Why do you even care?”

  “Why do I care?” The sentence started out sarcastic, but by the end Abe seemed to be asking himself. He lifted his chin toward the party. “You just want to get back in there, don’t you?”

  Even though he’d been unhappy inside, now he wanted nothing more than to get back in there. He lifted his hand, tilting it back and forth: sort of.

  “What’s stopping you, then?”

  “Nothing’s stopping me.”

  “All right, then,” Abe said. “Nothing’s stopping you.”

  * * *

  At Beth and Stephen’s, Pieter lifted his cello case carefully from its seat, jutting his right hip to meet it. In his left hand he had a pitchfork—borrowed from a French Hornist whose wife kept some horses—and the duffel bag with his costume. The night was dark and icy, and he picked his way carefully along the sidewalk, the cello’s familiar weight against his right hip. He slipped once and caught himself, the instrument banging his thigh hard. The pain felt ridiculously personal: an affront, a betrayal.

  Coming into the party, he looked automatically for his wife. She stood with a woman dressed in a toga. It was clear to him that Jordana was bored, but the woman talked on. He thought of Jordana’s emotions as transparent, but maybe he just knew her too well.

  He touched her shoulder. She turned, her face lighting. “You’re here. Your costume—”

  Why had he come over to her? “I’ll put it on upstairs.”

  “No, use the guest room. I’m glad to see you.”

  Her lower lip looked strange, swollen, almost like she’d been kissing someone. He lifted the cello. “I need to put this down.” He just wanted to be away from her. It had returned to him that, for all her transparency, she’d deceived him for months. Once a week? Every day? He wanted to ask and didn’t want to ask. Answers were like junk food: after each bite, he felt vertiginous satisfaction and then was immediately hungry again.

  “I’ll come with you—”

  He frowned, shaking his head sharply.

  In the first-floor guest bedroom, an orgy of coats covered the bed. He closed the door behind him, not bothering to turn on the lights. Through the door, the noise and laughter of the party came faintly from down the hall. He pulled on the faded overalls and collarless shirt Jordana had found for him at Goodwill and got his rimless reading glasses from the inside pocket of his tux. Moving toward the door, his reflection moved with him in the mirror above the dresser. He stopped, then found the light and switched it on.

  He’d tried on the costume once before and had been, despite himself, impressed with Jordana’s ingenuity. But now he saw how stooped he looked, how old. No wonder—

  He shook his head to block out the thought and switched the light back off.

  For so long, he had depended on Jordana to help him interpret the world. It had been she who pointed out the contradiction between Nita’s restrained demeanor and her look-at-me clothes. She had told him that Fidel, the conductor, couldn’t stand the orchestra’s artistic director, and he’d immediately seen that she was right, though he’d watched them interact for years. If asked what his children were like, Pieter fumbled: They’re swimmers or Angie’s a straight-A student. Once, asked the same
question, Jordana had said, “Angie engages with everything. She rides out into battle. Luke’s happier just taking things as they come.”

  Of course that was who his children were. He never could have articulated it. And Jordana had told Pieter about himself. He hadn’t realized his own tendency to get very quiet when he disagreed, rather than arguing. He hadn’t known that sometimes he stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at nothing. Nor had he known that when he laughed it sounded rich and astonished, and that people would glance over, smiling themselves. In some way, Jordana carried his identity more than he did. What happened to that enormous part he’d given over to her if she thought so little of it she could want someone else?

  He opened the door to the hallway. From the party a woman’s voice rose above the mutter of conversation. “A black-eyed pea!” she cried. “A black-eyed pea!”

  He’d come to this party because he didn’t want people to see that anything was wrong—it would have seemed strange if he hadn’t been with his wife on New Year’s—but now he found he couldn’t make himself go out into that babble. There were chairs around the TV, near the door; he went and sank down in one. The television reflected him bulbously, swelling hip and shoulder and cheek, his feet and profile shrunken and tight. In the hall behind him, one and then several people lined up for the bathroom. They were so close Pieter could have turned and grabbed at their pant legs; in the television their reflections were large and distinct. A woman in a pinafore, a man in a Burger King crown.

  “That’s the thing,” Crown was saying to Pinafore. “You are the Buddha. Each one of us is the Buddha.”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”

  Pieter pulled his knees farther in to his chest, resting his cheek on them. In the dark screen of the TV, he looked faint and unfamiliar, and for a moment he left his body. There was a roar like traffic, the metallic taste of nausea. Then he felt his weight again, the cushions beneath him, the faint persistent twinge in his back that lingered from breaking Luke’s door.