As far as he could remember, he had never been inside this store, always bought his gas at the BP close to home, did his shopping at the big Americo’s on the edge of town, went there nearly every Saturday morning, he and Claire, on their weekly shopping date, each with a cart or a basket, communicating across the store with their cell phones. How he loved that hour together wandering through the banked displays of fruit and vegetables with the misters erupting every now and then like little fountains while the music of André Previn, John Tesh, or Yanni wafted overhead. The olive bar, the bins of bagels and croissants, the racks of hard-crusted baguettes and artisan breads, the cases of Stilton and Shropshire Blue, the Asiago and fontina, the bûcheron and pecorino. The deli and meat cases, the thirty kinds of seafood on their beds of sparkling ice. And Claire, beautiful Claire, her voice on the cell phone: “These Dungeness crabs are huge!”
He loved the sensuality of it, the anticipation, the sensory assaults from all directions. And when gone came into his head now, all gone, it struck like a hammer blow so vicious and sudden that he fell sideways against a tree and sobbed and whispered “Claire” again and again, his cheek scraping, abrading against the bark…
Time passed…
He breathed…
He could not will his heart to stop.
The convenience store across the road. Cold lights, cold asphalt. He watched the vehicles come and go.
Christ, how he ached for the snuggery of his office, the familiar building. There were vending machines in the basement, a coin changer. This was Tuesday. He could live on crackers and candy bars until Thursday, couldn’t he?
But no, the keys to Campbell Hall were on his key chain and his key chain was hanging from the peg by the kitchen door. And the police, he told himself. They’ll be watching the building, won’t they? And everybody will know, the whole town must know by now.
This is Tuesday, he told himself. It happened Saturday night.
Every time Saturday night came back to him—and it was never far away now, always crouching in the nearby shadows—every time it came back to him, it was worse than a hammer blow, it was alive and ferocious, sprang out like a lion, ripped him to pieces.
For a long time, he stood against the tree and could not move, tried to will his heart to cease. But it would not work, it never worked. So he had to keep going for a while yet. He had to live a while longer.
Get some food, he told himself. Do what you have to do.
He watched the convenience store. A pickup truck at the pumps now.
He wished the numbness would come back, that strange sense of watching himself from a distance. But it had abandoned him for some reason, the two selves coalescing. He knew now that he was not a fictional character clinging to a fictional tree, waiting for his creator to tell him what to do. It was Thomas Huston standing there on the edge of the woods, Thomas Huston dirty and hungry and cold. He had only to look at his hands to confirm it. They were filthy and scratched now, but they were Thomas Huston’s hands, the hands of a writer and professor, callus free, hands made for typing, for wielding a pen or a stick of chalk. Hardly a semester passed that some coed did not say something complimentary about his hands. In response to his question “What did you like most about this course?” on the end-of-semester evaluation form, one of them had written, “Your hands. Your voice. Your butt in tight blue jeans.”
Those hands in front of him now, yes, they were his, but he detested them, wished he could cut them off, wished he had cut them off a week ago. Had they ever really held a pen or had Saturday night erased all that? Had they ever stroked the hair of a sweetly scented woman? Ever traced a circle of desire on her breast, felt the soft rise of her stomach, the slow curve of her thigh? Had this hand ever lay in her velvet cleft of heat, ever felt the undulations of her muscles ripple and tighten around his fingers?
He wanted Claire’s body against him again, wanted her breasts crushed against his chest, wanted his dick in her mouth, wanted to taste her pussy and to feel her body rocking against him wave after wave. He wanted all of it and he would never have any of it ever again. Only a man like Thomas Huston deserved those things. Who he was now, he did not know. And the whimpering noises rising from his throat now, these were not his sounds. He had never heard such sounds before.
Christ, why did you ever leave her bed? he wondered. You and your fucking writing. You and your fucking words.
Again he could not breathe. There was no air. Breathe, he told himself. Inhale. Exhale. Nothing came naturally anymore. Nothing happened of its own accord.
He sagged against the tree, clung to it, pushed hard against the horrible images while he chanted to the bark, She is a dark-haired woman, green eyed and dusky with secrets. Her mouth is sensuous but sad, limbs long and elegant, every movement languid…
Seventeen
Now begins the hard time, DeMarco thought. He had washed and dried his dinner plate, washed and dried his hands, and refilled his glass with four more inches of whiskey. He stood by the kitchen sink now and looked out the window at the small back lawn enshrouded in darkness. When he was a younger man, he used to sit on the porch step on summer evenings, a cold beer or glass of iced tea in hand, and talk to Laraine while she worked in the flower beds bordering the porch. She had especially loved daffodils and lilies and gladioli, tall, stately flowers that required a lot of attention. His own preferences ran to mums and marigolds, black-eyed Susans and sunflowers—showy blasts of exuberant color. But even more than those, he had loved watching Laraine’s elegant hands as they worked the topsoil and peat moss and excised weeds. Back then, he had thought her care merely evidence of a meticulous nature and never guessed the fragility of spirit at its foundation.
But that was all a long time ago, and flowers no longer grew around the house.
It was for her that he had started the brick path from the back porch to the small barnlike garage across the alley. For her he had started converting the second floor of the garage. It was going to be her sewing room, exercise room, reading room, whatever she wanted it to be. “You can use it too,” she had told him. “I don’t want you to think of it as just mine.”
But he had. It was all for her. Now the unfinished path. Now the unfinished room.
DeMarco stared into the darkness and wished he had the energy to return to work. He wished he had the stamina to work twenty hours a day, to push himself to an exhaustion that would reward him with four hours of dreamless sleep. Unfortunately, his body tired and his attention always began to wander before he was ready for sleep. If he dragged himself to bed now, he would end up having to silence his thoughts with an all-night radio talk show. His favorite was a program devoted to the supernatural, to considerations of shadow people, spirits and demons, poltergeists and ghosts. Stories of a happy or purposeful afterlife held his attention, kept him listening for shreds of credibility. Other times he dozed off, only to have the demons and poltergeists ride their radio waves into his brain.
He knew he had at least three hours to kill before he could crawl into bed with any realistic expectation of sleep. He could drink himself into a stupor, but he would pay for it all the next day, and right now he wanted to keep his wits about him, wanted to keep the puzzle of Thomas Huston’s life laid out in distinct pieces to be fitted together eventually, not all jumbled together in a sloppy pile blurred by hangover.
He knew how he was going to kill those three hours but was reluctant to admit it to himself. Only once or twice a month would he give in to the impulse to drive to Erie. The activity always stung him with self-loathing for several days afterward, as if he were a boy who had been caught masturbating to pornography. He knew he would do it again tonight but remained standing at the window for another fifteen minutes. Finally he admitted his weakness, as he always did, and told himself, “Just fucking go, why don’t you?”
The drive from his home to the I-79 on-ramp was less than twenty miles
, just enough time for him to settle into the whiskey-smoothed rhythm of the road. Headed north on the interstate, he listened to a blues station out of Cleveland and occasionally lifted his glass from the cup holder for another sip. The whiskey was warm on his tongue and throat. It carried the old reconciliation into his core, the old surrender to the way of things, and he paid small attention to the familiar landmarks briefly revealed by his headlights, let the muscles in his shoulders and neck release their angry tension, let his grip on the steering wheel give up its vehemence. Sometimes he felt as if the car were doing the driving, making this decision for him. In the morning he would know better, but for now, he indulged himself in the illusion.
The little Cape Cod was dark except for a soft light in the first-floor eastern window. The stove light, he told himself. It was the only light Laraine left burning when she went out for the evening. It would provide just enough illumination to guide her and a companion to the staircase and upstairs into darkness.
He drove past Molly Brannigan’s on State, but Laraine’s white Maxima was not visible anywhere. A car that looked like hers was parked outside the Firehouse on Old French Road, but the number on the license plate was wrong. He continued winding his way through town, following the worn path to Laraine’s favorite nightspots. The car responded as if on autopilot. He set his brain on low idle, tried not to envision anything unpleasant, tried not to imagine the inevitable.
On East Eighteenth Street, just a block from the little theater he and Laraine used to frequent during the first five years of their marriage, the only good years among the past eighteen, he parked facing west, as far from the nearest streetlamp as possible yet within sight of the white Maxima across the street in the Holiday Inn’s elevated lot. She could have parked less conspicuously, he told himself, could have hidden her vehicle from view, but she never did. He acknowledged this fact but chose not to ponder it. Pondering was best reserved for the daylight hours. Too much cerebration at night could lead to harder drugs.
He watched her car and tried not to think about her in the hotel bar, waiting for some man to buy her a drink. Or maybe no longer waiting. Either thought was not a healthy one. So he thought instead about the little studio theater nearby. He wondered if it was still operational. He and Laraine had attended a lot of plays there, had spent many pleasant hours in that small, dark room. Coyote Ugly had been the first one. He smiled when he remembered how shocked Laraine had been when, in the second act, the lead actress walked onstage completely naked.
How quickly things change, he thought.
Then asked himself, But what else did you see? We saw True West there. American Buffalo. Glengarry Glen Ross. The Skin of Our Teeth. Greater Tuna. Children of a Lesser God.
It was Laraine who had introduced him to live theater. Introduced him to poetry and literature too, the magic of words. Now he could quote Rilke or Marquez at the drop of a hat, but now the height of Laraine’s current cultural life consisted of pornographic reruns playing on an endless loop inside her own brain, dulling images of the same scene over and over again. He knew what movie she watched in her head because he often watched it too.
The scene always opened with a long shot of a red pickup truck racing toward them down a dark, rain-slick street, a two-thousand-pound torpedo with one of its headlights out. Laraine had spotted it before he did. He had been staring straight ahead, driving too slowly through the intersection, thinking not about the light turning from yellow to red but about the examination he would take the next day, his possible promotion. “Move!” Laraine had screamed. But he had looked to his right first, saw her hands on the dashboard as she stared out her side window, saw the single headlight bearing down on them, and only then mashed down on the accelerator.
He regained consciousness to the sound of people hammering on his windshield. The Taurus he was driving that night had been rammed across the sidewalk and tight against a clothing store. He remembered turning his head to the left and looking through his shattered window at a mannequin in a bikini looking down at him. It had been a red bikini, fire truck red. The mannequin had had red hair and her nails were painted red and her fiberglass skin was a very pale red too. In fact there had been red everywhere he looked that night. The wetness dripping from the side of his face and from his left eye was red. The drunken driver of the red pickup truck crushed against the Taurus was now lying facedown on the hood of his truck, halfway out his own windshield, and his head was drenched in red. Vehicles were converging on the scene from two different directions, and their flashing lights were red too; their sirens were red, and Laraine’s screams as she struggled against her seat belt were as red as her limp right arm, the side of her yellow summer dress splotched bikini red, siren red, as she wrestled with the seat belt and tried to turn to the rear seat, tried to climb into the back, reaching with her one good arm for Ryan in his car seat behind DeMarco. Until Laraine touched the boy, there was not a drop of red on him anywhere, yet he continued to sleep peacefully, his head canted too far to the side, his wisps of corn silk hair still as yellow as pale sunlight, still as alive as summer except for the wash of color DeMarco saw everywhere he looked each time he blinked another red tear from his eye.
Or maybe that’s only my pornographic movie, DeMarco told himself now. Maybe Laraine doesn’t even see it anymore. Maybe she’s managed to shut it all off.
But he doubted it. Otherwise, she would not have been coming out of the Holiday Inn at nearly midnight in the middle of the week, would not be standing beside her car while a man DeMarco had never seen before rubbed a hand over her breasts, up under her blouse, let his other hand fall between her legs. It always intrigued DeMarco to see the aplomb with which Laraine absorbed these pawings and gropings. Her hands rested lightly atop the man’s shoulders. She stood as still and stately as a gladiola while his hands moved over her.
Five minutes later, Laraine’s car pulled out of the parking lot and was followed by a dark green Hyundai. She would drive home in no hurry now—she always did. DeMarco, on the other hand, sped down familiar side streets so as to reach the Cape Cod before she did. He parked half a block away.
He waited until she had unlocked the front door, until she and her friend for the night were inside. Then he drove forward and parked at the curb in front of the house. He climbed out and walked to the front door and rang the bell.
Laraine opened the door and stood there looking at him. There was no surprise on her face, no anger.
“Do you even know this one?” he asked.
She said nothing. She blinked once but otherwise did not move.
“You’ve got to stop doing this,” he told her. “You don’t know who these guys are, what they might do. Sooner or later, you’re going to get yourself hurt.”
And now she smiled, as if there were an inherent humor to the notion of being hurt.
“I’ll be in my car,” he finally said. “In case you need me.”
Her look was void of any emotion he recognized.
She closed the door and turned the lock, and he returned to his vehicle. He laid the seat back until he was comfortable, then he watched the dark house for a while, and then he didn’t. He listened to the radio for twenty minutes or so, listened to Ry Cooder’s agonized guitar weeping all the way from Texas, listened to Norah Jones, Dinah Washington, Clapton and Raitt and John Lee Hooker. Then he turned the radio off because he did not need a soundtrack for what he was feeling.
He spent the next half hour or so reciting snatches of prose and poetry to himself, phrases first heard aloud when Laraine had read to him in bed. She had loved what she called the music of words, and when she read to him, he heard the music too. Later, when she stopped reading to him and the house was too empty, he would read the same books alone and always hear them in Laraine’s voice, but with a sadness then in both her voice and in his heart because he did not know if she would ever speak to him again.
“My mother
is a fish,” Faulkner had written. “Roosters wear out if you look at them so much,” Marquez had said. He remembered the entire first paragraph from Hemingway’s “In Another Country.” But he could not recall the lines from Rilke’s “The First Elegy” that followed Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of cosmic space invades our frightened faces…
After a while, Laraine’s new friend came sauntering out of the house. At the door he turned to kiss her, but she said good-bye with a smile, stepped back, and closed the door. He stood there perplexed for a few seconds, wondering what he had done wrong. DeMarco sipped the last of his watery whiskey and thought, They are always perplexed.
Finally, the man turned and crossed to his Hyundai, climbed in, and drove away.
A few minutes later, the light blinked on in the upstairs bathroom. She’ll be taking a shower now, DeMarco told himself. Then she would towel dry her hair, brush her teeth, run the blow-dryer for a while. The important thing was that she was safely alone inside her home now and the doors were locked. DeMarco started the engine and turned the radio on again. He was grateful for the company on the drive back home.
Eighteen
Inhale, Thomas Huston told himself. Exhale. Do it again. Do it again.
Nothing came easily anymore. Nothing came naturally.
You need to keep your thoughts straight, man. Get some food. You need to eat.
It was surely midnight now, maybe later. No car had stopped at the convenience store in quite a while.
Go now, he told himself.
He came out of the trees and crossed the street and tried his best to look like a man out for a stroll. He kept his head down, knew there would be security cameras. He looked up only long enough to glance through the window before entering, saw the boy behind the counter. Tall, thin, scraggly, reddish beard. Not one I know, he thought. Not one of mine.
So he pulled open the door, walked inside, and headed straight down the center aisle as if he knew where he was going. What he knew was that the restrooms would be in a rear corner, and there they were, to his right, between the fountain drinks and the milk cooler.
Two Days Gone Page 8