Clean Slate

by Harley Crowley

Chapter 27

  Carrie's Sabbath had its own personal rules and rituals to observe. They boiled down to a big breakfast, reading for pleasure, avoiding anything to do with work, and a big pot of soup so no one went hungry for the rest of the day.

  "It sounds nice," he said.

  "I have to do it to keep me sane. Even when I'm caught up on student papers the dissertation is always there, hanging over my head. This way I'm supposed to feel sacrilegious if I even pick it up to look at it. It works."

  "I guess I could think that I'm taking a Sabbath myself, now. I'm completely free from work for the time being. That part of this being crazy thing feels good. It's an enforced extended Sabbath. Maybe I'm taking a sabbatical."

  He had a second thought. "I do feel sorry for the people at the office though, working all weekend to rescue the contract I was in the middle of. I feel guilty, even though there's nothing I can do." Of course it was hard not to feel guilty, though not about work. Right now he couldn't care less about work.

  After they finished breakfast, Brian cleared the table and rinsed the dishes and Carrie started chopping up potatoes and onions and whatever she could find in the refrigerator and cupboards to put in the Sunday soup.

  Brian wandered through the house aimlessly, into his bedroom and then his study. He turned on the laptop computer on his desk. The image on the screen was a photograph that looked like the Italian countryside, a rolling yellow landscape complete with a flock of sheep, and an ancient looking walled city on a hill in the distance. It must have been from their trip they took together. Fa bello. Some time soon he would explore the other pieces of his life that resided on this machine.

  Back in the living room, Carrie was curled up in one of the big chairs under the light of the lamp, with a book open on the arm. The house was warm and he could smell the soup from the kitchen. He realized it felt like his house now, with his wife in it. Warmth filled him inside too. This was worth protecting. This was what he wanted, the life he wanted.

  She looked up and smiled absently, then dropped her head back to her book, and was lost in it again before he stopped looking at her.

  Having a day with nothing he had to do was just what he needed, since there really was nothing he knew to do. The past three days had been so full of confusion. First lost, then found but still lost to himself. Trying to get his bearings with work and his marriage. And most problematic, the thing with Katherine. The thing. The feeling of something, someone out of control and capable of blowing up the life he was trying to reconstruct before it could be fully formed and made solid somehow. He'd come to a quiet spot, a reprieve, for the day at least.

  He began looking at the bookshelf to see what appealed to him. There was trade paperback fiction and memoir, biography, essay collections, politics and history. Also poetry.

  "We have a lot of books," he said, rather pointlessly. He turned and looked over his shoulder at Carrie. "Did you say this is where the travel books are?"

  She held up a finger and made a little grunting noise, and then placed the finger on her page to mark her place and looked up. "Huh?"

  "The travel guides you said we had. I thought I'd look at them." She pointed at a lower shelf and was immediately back in her book. Well, she'd warned him about the way she read.

  "I'll be quiet," he said, "Starting right now." There was a little assenting "Hmmph" from her direction. Brian grinned to himself. So this was marriage.

  He found and pulled out the slim guide to Italian monasteries, and then ran a finger along the spines of the other books, looking for inspiration. He brought several books to the coffee table. He realized the big compendium of American poetry was meant more to impress her than anything else, in the event she ever looked up from her own book. Had he been insecure with girls when he was young, taking postures he thought might catch their attention? There was a Bill Bryson book about hiking the Appalachian Trail that looked entertaining, and a history book about the Mayflower. Not quite ready to settle down, he went to the kitchen and started the fire under the kettle for tea. He went back to get Carrie's cup, sitting cold next to her, to make her a refill. She looked up with a vague smile and nodded thanks. While he was in the kitchen he took the lid off the soup pot and sniffed its steamy savor. It was bubbling along at a slow simmer. He gave it a stir with the wooden spoon on the counter, and replaced the lid.

  Once he had his tea on the table in front of him, he tried to concentrate on his choices. He thumbed through the poetry volume first, thinking it was not at all what he wanted, but he kept getting caught by the first lines, reading further only a few lines until compulsively moving on to another page.

  I'll come back to this, he thought, and then wondered if he really would. He looked briefly at the history book and didn't feel like starting from the beginning, and the middle parts seemed to require information from the first parts so he gave that up. He started the Bryson book and read for a while, then set it aside for his bedside table. He got back up and returned the poetry book and the history book to the shelf and scanned again. Maybe if he read all these books he could fill his empty mind back up. Maybe it would be more valuable content than what he had lost. Maybe he didn't need those lost things any more. Finally he chose a fiction book at random and began reading. A few pages in he was caught up in the story and the morning slid by.

  Carrie stirred, and closed her book. Ah, she was back. She returned the book to the shelf. "The soup should be ready. Are you?"

  "Did you finish? What were you reading?"

  "The Turn of the Screw. Henry James. Remember we saw the old movie with Deborah Kerr. I like to re-read it every few years. It's a ghost story."

  He didn't remember the movie, and didn't remember reading the book either. But then that wasn't a surprise anymore.

  They ate at the kitchen table again, which he liked, because it felt friendly. The dining room seemed to be reserved for company. In the kitchen he could believe he was in his own home. In the rest of the house he still felt like a visitor. Maybe it was because he had helped cook, claimed the territory of householder. He smiled, remembering the easy familiarity he felt cooking the omelets for them, Carrie's appreciation and reference to "you used to . . ." providing some continuity between then and now, before and after. Carrie had another book with her, not reading yet, but thumbing through it in preparation.

  The soup was rich and savory, mostly vegetables, onions and greens and potatoes, with a bit of spicy chicken sausage added. Brian grated more Parmesan on top from the chunk that sat on a plate with a little grater. For a while he ate silently, simply indulged himself in the taste, the smell and the heat of it. When Carrie put her book aside and got serious about her soup, he looked up from his meal.

  "What do I usually do on your Sabbath? I'm guessing I'm not a voracious reader. Do I take an afternoon nap? I feel a little at loose ends." He didn't want her to think he was complaining, expecting her to provide something for him to do or entertain him, that she should be paying attention to him. He added, "Not that it's your problem!"

  "Mostly you go in your study and fool around on your computer, unless you've brought work home, and then you work on your computer."

  He grimaced. "You mean I stay out of your way. Am I distracting you by staying in the living room?"

  "No, of course not. It doesn't bother me at all."

  Brian thought that could mean that she was comfortable with him, or that she was indifferent to his presence, that he was part of the furniture. It was funny how closely he was following every nuance of her response to him. He guessed he was trying to find out where he stood with her. To see if they stood together on solid ground, in spite of the separate bedrooms. If their relationship was still moving, or if it was at a standstill, or worse, finished.

  Carrie looked up at him over her spoon. "Have you found anything interesting on the bookshelf? Do the books seem familiar to you?"

  "There are a lot of choices, I found it hard to settle on one. Nothing has sp
arked a memory, though. Are they yours, mine or ours?"

  "Well, we combined our libraries when we first moved in together. I've probably bought most of the newer ones, but I think most of the history and political books are your contribution. We've talked about thinning it out and seeing what we can sell back to the bookstore for credit. Make room for more."

  "I guess I will go look at my study. It's a whole other category of life to get familiar with. Career. Why am I so uninterested in that?"

  "I don't know. Maybe you're just not ready to deal with it." That's the way it felt to him, too.

  After lunch Carrie settled herself back in her chair and dove into her next book. Brian went to his study. So far he'd only walked into the middle of the room and stood there blankly, and turned on the computer. Now he surveyed the room, hoping to be inspired.

  The desk was a modern one, blond wood top, with darker walnut stained drawer fronts, one of them a big file drawer. The laptop sat in the center, with a tidy little printer next to it. There was a file box sitting on a back corner, with a few unpaid bills and a checkbook. Besides the desk chair, there was a leather recliner and footstool and a modern gooseneck reading lamp. One wall was filled with waist-high bookcases, and the bottom shelves had magazine cases all along them, mostly with law journals, some with little Post-it Note bookmarks sticking out the top. The larger books were on the law, probably texts from law school. There was also a shelf devoted to paperbacks, and a couple of stacks of magazines.

  He pulled a few books from the textbook section and stood at the desk thumbing through them. Much of what he read looked familiar. Perhaps he would be able to get this back. Maybe it wasn't even gone at all, just not germane right now. Soon he would have to try to find out where he stood in relation to his job.

  He thought again about the peculiar state of his memory. The biggest gaps were the parts where people should be, and his own identity and biography. And yet he could get along socially, look normal, understand how things worked. This knowledge, the theoretical knowledge in these books, seemed dusty but part of him still. But the application of it in real life? He didn't know that yet. It would be interesting to find out if he could just drop back into the current and swim.

  It was the missing people that bothered him the most, especially at work. Andrea and Lou, his assistant Jason, his secretary-what was her name? Jenna. And Katherine. All blank faces. That would be the case with clients as well, he assumed. They wouldn't have much confidence in the firm if they had to be introduced to him all over again. He wondered how much he actually dealt with individuals in his job, or if he was a behind-the-scenes guy.

  He pulled open the center desk drawer. It was as neat as the desktop, pencils and pens and paperclips in their own slots in the drawer organizer. Stapler, staple remover, everything was in easy reach. A neat desk is the sign of a sick mind. Where did that come from? It was a messy person's humorous self-justification, but in his case it seemed to play out like a version of the truth.

  He didn't feel sick so much as having the sense of bobbing in the middle of a vast sea in a very small boat, checking regularly to identify the leaks in his craft.

  He returned the heavy books to the bookcase and looked at the paperbacks. Most of them were detective fiction, and some John Grisham thrillers, almost all with "New York Times Bestseller" banners on their covers. There were a few sea adventure stories too. No wonder he felt like a stranger when he was standing at the living room bookshelves. Here was his natural bent, throwaway books that were continually replaceable as new titles came out. This is more likely what he read on a Sunday afternoon while Carrie covered the literary scene.

  He opened the file drawer of the desk and found neatly labeled files that looked like household finances and records. This and the checkbook and bills made it obvious that he was the family accountant and record keeper. That made sense, considering what looked like his systematic nature, and the potential for chaos in Carrie's study upstairs. It wasn't that it was messy, because it wasn't, but it was crammed full of stacks of loose paper. Too much chance of things being lost in the shuffle.

  Deserting the room he took two of the paperbacks back to the living room. Carrie actually looked up and focused her eyes on him. He thought she must be at a stopping place in the book, for him to be so lucky. It felt lucky, to have her looking at him, her hair in its natural tousled state and her blue eyes framed by the dark lashes and brows. She looked like a beautiful child in her oversize pajamas. He could see that she was already a quarter of the way into her book. He held up his find, the books from the study.

  "I just discovered how shallow I am," he joked, although he wondered if it was really such a joke. "I have treasure trove of escapism in there."

  "You know," she said, half-seriously. "You're really not shallow. You're just a smart guy who rests his mind reading shallow stuff."

  "That's a relief. I think I'll take your word for it." It made him feel good that she didn't seem to look down on his choices. The paperbacks were probably relegated to the study because they weren't that attractive on the handsome living room shelves, not because she was embarrassed by their content.

  He went back to his previous spot on the couch and plumped up a pillow for his head, and lay down so that the light from the front windows illuminated his page. He opened one of the mysteries that looked brand new, and adjusted his body so comfortably that he fell asleep with the book on his chest within five minutes.