Passing one to Angie, she asked, “How’s Trevor?” trying to keep that she wished Angie weren’t with him out of her voice. Luke rolled onto his stomach and picked at something in the grass.
Angie said, “They started him on a new med. It just came on the market. They have to crush them up in applesauce so he doesn’t cheek them.”
“You mean he doesn’t know he’s taking it.”
“Right. Twice a day they just say, ‘Time for your special snack, Trevor.’” Angie reached for an egg. “No, of course they’ve told him.”
Her hair fell forward into her face, silky, blond with sun. Another tick on the getting-better side of the list: she wasn’t too depressed or too medicated to shower. Angie was temping, she saw her therapist two mornings a week. Four or five would have been better, but even with a sliding scale they couldn’t afford it. Just the lab bills for Angie’s blood-work were sixty dollars a week.
Wendy returned, her arms laden with coats. She handed them out, then sat, and they made awkward conversation. Wendy was waitressing at a fancy French restaurant called Temps Perdu.
“I loved that book,” Jordana said.
“Book?” said Wendy blankly.
“À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust.”
“Oh.”
Cutting himself more cheese, Luke raised his eyebrows without looking at Jordana, as though she’d deliberately tried to show Wendy up.
Why had Luke chosen her? Wendy was pretty, and apparently she was smart—Jordana knew she’d graduated summa cum laude—but she was so self-contained that no personality leaked through. Maybe she was different when they were alone. Luke’s other girlfriends had been drastic and messy—sexy girls who got their clothes at thrift stores and called in the middle of the night, drunk and apologizing but could they talk to Luke please? With them, Luke had always seemed to be sitting back, lazy and contented as a cat, while with Wendy he was focused, touching her constantly: her hair, her knee.
“Do you miss Iowa?” Jordana asked. “Or Madison?”
“I’ve lived out there all my life. The Midwest.”
Did that mean she missed it or didn’t miss it? Luke stood abruptly, reaching his hand down to Wendy. “Do you want to check out the pond?”
She glanced at Jordana, who said, “Go ahead, it’s fine.”
Hand in hand, Luke and Wendy made their way back across the weedy field.
“Does she make you feel about ten?” Angie whispered.
Relieved, Jordana said, “More like five.”
She leaned back on her elbows and a grasshopper rose up, clacking, from the dry yellow grass. Luke and Wendy had taken off their shoes and were wading at the edge of the pond. Luke tripped, stumbling a few feet, and grabbed for Wendy. Their laughter floated across the high grass.
“He’s going to marry her,” said Angie.
Jordana’s heart seized for a second. “Did he say something?”
Angie shook her head, still watching her brother. “Just guessing.”
For the first time since moving into the house, Jordana felt lonely. A new moon had already risen, pale in the afternoon sky. An arrow of geese barked as they crossed overhead, chasing the last of summer south.
Thirty-six
The business district of Cort had red brick office buildings from the 1930s—each window with its eyebrow of lighter brick—and two or three taller, newer buildings. For the last three weeks, Angie had temped in one of these buildings’ management offices. The regular secretary was out on maternity leave, which people talked about as though she were doing something particularly indulgent and childish that they were being particularly generous in allowing. Cort’s most hard-core businesses were in this building: branches of Dean Witter and Merrill Lynch, a publisher specializing in companies’ year-end reports, a real-estate office that sold vacation homes to out-of-staters.
The job Angie inherited was mostly answering phone calls. If a toilet was stopped up on the sixth floor, she was supposed to say, “I’ll send an engineer right away”; then she went up with the plunger. A burnt-out lightbulb on the third floor? She’d send the engineer. Could someone run out for nondairy creamer? She’d send the engineer.
How did you meet people if you weren’t in school, if you could have done your job with both eyes bandaged shut? She saw Trevor; she saw Luke and Wendy. Wendy only half counted as a friend, because she had to be nice to Angie. Wendy turned out to have a mode other than perfect composure; she had a tendency to blurt things out. Once she’d told Angie that she sometimes imagined meeting someone just like herself.
“‘What’s your name?’” Angie had said, then jumped left. “‘Why, Wendy Miles, what’s yours?’” Jumping right again: “‘Hey! My name’s Wendy Miles too!’”
Wendy had laughed. It made Angie like Wendy more, that she could laugh at herself. And Angie liked that she and Luke always touched. At the same time, it made Angie need to tackle Luke, tickling him, messing up his hair.
The Xerox machine was out of toner. More had been ordered but hadn’t yet arrived. When Angie copied documents, she could only do two pages before the copier stopped and complained in a halting voice that slurred, as if drunk, “I am out of toe-nurr.” Then Angie had to open the front of the machine, remove the toner cartridge, and put it back in. She closed the copier and it hummed, warming up happily, thinking it had new toner. It would do two more pages, sometimes three, before realizing it had been tricked. She was copying a long memo for the building’s tenants; it was going to take her all afternoon. Leaning her hips against the machine, she stared at its lid. Flash. Flash. A hesitation, then flash. Before the voice could begin, she bent down to undo the front latches.
After work—it wasn’t one of her therapy days, and she didn’t want to go home—she drove down to see Trevor, who still lived at the halfway house in Manchester. On his bureau was a pink slip; she asked, “You got another write-up?”
“Like it matters. They call my mom, and all she wants to know is that I’m not being sent home. Anyway, I’m full-paying. They’re not going to kick me out for being antisocial if being antisocial’s the whole reason I’m in.”
“That and attempted self-immolation.”
“Right, and that.” Trevor laughed, and she felt a wave of affection for him. She could talk some to Luke about being sick, but Trevor was the only person who got that it could be funny.
They were lying side by side on his bed. Feeling the shift in her, he put his hand on her ribs, just below her breast. She stiffened, then slid away. Sex, the effort and nakedness of it, seemed impossible. Crossing the room, she pushed the window open farther, then lit a cigarette.
His roommate, Kurt—a slow-moving man of about forty with wide, cracked hands—wasn’t home yet from his day-treatment job in a mayonnaise factory, where he checked the lids on jars. Kurt’s side of the room was decorated like a high school locker with pictures neatly torn from magazines. A sports car, baseball players, a woman in a low-necked dress, ads for computers. Trevor’s walls were bare except for two photographs of Angie thumbtacked above the brown-painted dresser. Although he’d lived here more than two years, Trevor’s things were still packed in cardboard boxes labeled SHIRTS, PANTS, TAPES, SHOES, PAPERS. The house rules required he do laundry once a week; afterward, he folded the clothes up and put them back in their boxes.
“You know what Kurt used to do? He used to cut himself with an electric carving knife. This is when he was a kid, like seven or eight.”
“Jesus.”
“I know.”
“What’s he on?”
“Klonopin and Thorazine, I think.”
“Klonopin made me feel like I weighed about four hundred pounds.” She blew smoke at the ceiling light, watching the smoke tear as it rose. “Isobel was in some kind of protest this weekend. She lay down in front of the hospital.”
“What was she protesting?”
“I don’t know. Isobel probably doesn’t know. Probably she saw people lying on the sidewalk a
nd recognized her chance. She loves getting arrested.”
“She got arrested again?”
“Yeah. Bradley bailed her out. I think she’s already using the experience to craft her essays for grad school.”
“When am I going to meet these famous housemates?”
She picked up the empty True package and peered inside, as though a cigarette might be hidden there. “They’re not around much.”
Trevor winced. “What, I embarrass you?”
“It’s not like they’re so great or anything. They’re just regular people.”
He shrugged and looked away. “You’re the only regular person I know.”
Thirty-seven
Moving out, she’d left dozens of small things. Pieter threw out lists in her handwriting, a tin barrette in the shape of a fish. He threw out the dish soap she liked, Earth—the name was supposed to sound clean but didn’t—and the green felt-tipped pens she used. He grimaced as he threw away sneakers shucked off on the basement stairs, a book forgotten on the kitchen windowsill, a Hank Williams tape left in the stereo. Like the other objects, the tape seemed stubbornly complete, something whose existence he couldn’t erase even as he buried it deep in the trash among juice cartons and the gone-slimy remains of a tomato.
After a week or so, he came upon her things less and less frequently. Her mail continued to arrive: political newsletters, notes from friends who didn’t know she was gone. Reaching for aspirin from the glove compartment as he drove home one afternoon from practice, his hand closed around her hairbrush. It was blue plastic, with black and gray hair tangled in the bristles. He pulled to the side of the road, rolled down the window, threw the brush out. It bounced down a small hill and came to rest.
He jerked the parking brake on, feeling his movements become stiff, his face going blank with injury, just as when he and Jordana fought. Leaving the car running, he picked his way down the hill. At the bottom, he bent with difficulty and then chucked the brush farther, into a copse of small ash trees.
Wendy was ironing her clothes for work when Pieter came in the back door. He’d forgotten to take aspirin, and his head pounded dully.
“Let me move this stuff.” She unplugged the iron, setting it on the counter.
“No, it’s fine. It’s fine.”
Ignoring him, she folded a pair of ironed black pants carefully over the back of a chair, then picked up the ironing board and resettled it in the corner. She lifted a wrinkled white shirt, snapped it in the air, and arranged it over the board.
Filling the kettle for tea, he asked if she’d like some, knowing she’d say no. She’d turned down every cup of tea he’d offered in the two months she and Luke had been here. Her consideration was so thorough it almost bent backward under its own weight into a form of rudeness.
So strange to live with a woman who wasn’t Jordana. He didn’t find Wendy particularly beautiful or alluring, but sometimes he caught himself looking at her body. The situation seemed to suggest it. How could he hear water in the pipes when she showered and not think of the fact that she was naked? He never heard the slightest noise of Wendy and Luke having sex, which forced him to imagine their being quiet so he wouldn’t hear.
“How’s work?” he asked.
“Last night, a woman ordered rosé and then dumped three Sweet ’n Lows into it. The sommelier almost had a fit.”
Pieter made himself chuckle. Jordana found Wendy uptight and controlling, which made him protective of the girl. He thought her abruptness came mostly from being shy. He poured water over the tea leaves and said, “Well. Lessons.”
He carried the cup with him into the front room. He wouldn’t start teaching for another twenty minutes, but making conversation was more than he could handle right now.
He taught two adults and then Adam, a twelve-year-old small for his age. Today Adam wore a T-shirt of consummate ugliness, a shaggy cartoon character thrusting forth its middle finger.
“Handsome shirt,” Pieter said, sitting in the chair opposite. He leaned forward, thumbs on temples, fingers across forehead, as though shading his eyes from the sun.
Adam was working on Bach’s unaccompanied suites. His playing was fluent but one-dimensional. When Pieter stopped him, Adam flinched. He practiced three hours a day, at his parents’ insistence. Pieter had no idea—he suspected the boy himself had no idea—whether he liked anything about the cello.
Pieter spent the last five minutes showing Adam how to tune his A string down to a G for the fifth suite. “It takes awhile to get used to not having an open A. Play G on the D string, as normal; don’t use open G.”
Adam nodded. At the end of each lesson, his sense of freedom was visible. Pieter felt the boy’s relief so strongly that he almost experienced it as his own, at the same time that he knew Adam’s liberation was from Pieter himself.
Adam’s father, who waited for them out in the hall, was slight, dressed in khakis and round glasses. “What happened in there?” he asked. With two fingers, he flicked his son on the temple, hard. “You know that piece.”
Pieter put on a Brahms Mass to get the thin, ashy taste of lessons out of his mouth. In the kitchen, he ran the hottest water he could and washed the dishes. Bean wove around his ankles. He shoved her away with one foot; he had no patience for her these days. When the phone rang, he let the machine get it. Suddenly, his wife’s voice filled the room.
Hello, she said. You’ve reached the Voorsters. Neither of us is here right now. …
He felt weak with wanting her back. He opened the cabinets, but she’d taken her coffee mug, the black and red one that said keep your laws off my body. Without her, their kitchen was reduced to the shabbiness of its elements: the brown linoleum floor, the white metal cabinets scabbed with rust. Gone from the dark living room were her few CDs, all her books, the small needlepoint pillow she used to put behind her neck. (A patient at two-hospitals-ago had left the project behind, half-finished, and Angie had completed it in boredom and despair: A HOUSE is made of brick and stone, a HOME is made of love.) He needed to find a piece of her. He went upstairs to the bedroom, their bed a raft on the terrible green carpet. Spiny wire hangers jangled when he opened her closet door and reached for the light cord. The ill-fitting clothes he’d teased her about were gone, the boy’s dungarees and sweaters unraveling at the hem, along with the two or three dark good dresses he’d chosen. Their absence shocked him every time. It was unfathomable that the clothes would continue on but not for him.
Finally he found a shoe under the bed. Lying on his side, he pulled it out from among the gray dustballs: a pump, black, something Jordana wore resentfully and only when she felt she had to. She would have kicked this shoe off at the end of the night, with enough force that it skipped across the green carpet before disappearing. Still on his side—shirtsleeve furred gray from reaching under the bed—he put his hand into the shoe, where sweat had left pale gray outlines of her sole and toes.
When Jordana wanted something, she went after it. The reason she had been able to convince him to move away from New York, to have a child and then another, was not because he loved her, though he did, but because her absolute surety so outweighed his flimsy indecision. He pressed his fingers against the shoe lining, the ghostly imprint of his wife’s foot.
The house where Jordana was living turned out to be very small, a wooden place out in the middle of nowhere with a listing porch. The brown grass was so tall that at first the house appeared to be floating a few feet above the ground. It reminded him of something, and he closed his eyes until it came: a house half underwater that he’d seen the day he left Holland. In an attempt to hold back the invasion, the dikes had been opened, flooding the fields. Water pushed softly against the downstairs windows, so that the house had appeared to bob, unanchored.
All the lights in Jordana’s house were on. They’d always been careful about electricity, and now he tried to think back to whether he’d been the one who’d started conserving. He couldn’t remember; for so long t
hey’d just done it.
He turned off the car and stared at the building. After a while, he realized how cold he was, a chill that reached his bones. He shivered. He stepped out of the car, shutting it quietly. He trod softly on the house’s front steps—each had a low dip in the center, wood worn velvety soft—and looked in through the front window.
Jordana sat on the couch, legs outstretched. A glass of wine was next to her on the floor. She was reading a book, running the thumb of her other hand over her lips, over and over. It was a scene he had seen hundreds, thousands, of times in their own house. She’d left him for this? Country music wailed faintly.
He lowered to a squat, knees creaking. Being with a younger woman had somehow muted his awareness of his own aging, rather than heightening it. He’d almost used Jordana in place of a mirror: she had gray hair woven through the black, fine spiderwebs of lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, definitely age but nothing alarming. But these last few months, without her, he’d become conscious of the way his shoulders stooped, of the thick purple veins in his hands. His mind exaggerated his own frailty: He imagined his grip palsied though it was steady; saw himself shuffle forward with grinding slowness when his walk was still brisk.
He clamped his teeth together to stop their chattering. The phone rang, a faint burble through the glass. She put down the book, and in the first minute, while her back was toward him, he had time to imagine her lover. Had Jordana left him for someone after all, despite her insistences? She might now be arranging to meet, might be inviting someone to come over, to drive up and park behind Pieter’s old Volvo. He would bound up the stairs, pass Pieter without seeing him, enter the house.
Then she turned, and on her face was a mixture of love and anxiety he recognized. Just Angie then, checking in. Pieter felt odd disappointment. It cleared his head enough to see himself, an aging man crouched in the cold. What if Jordana found him here? He backed down the porch steps. Then, abandoning caution, he ran to his car.
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