“I think my wife is going to leave me,” he said.
He saw Mallory blink once, very hard. He saw when she opened her eyes that they were not wet.
“Well, golly. You must feel pretty bad,” she said.
Ethan realized that his glass was empty. He lifted it anyway.
“I feel like whatever I feel now is going to get worse.”
She reached up with her right hand and touched one of her earrings. They were crystal baubles, Viking replicas, and were, as far as he knew, the only earrings she owned. They sold them uptown, at the Cloisters, the Medieval art museum where she worked and where she met Ethan when he came there to do a brochure shoot.
“You never told me her name,” Mallory said. “Not once. And it’s too bad because I like names.”
“Samantha,” he said, and tipped the ice from his glass into his mouth. It made a sound like teeth cracking as he bit it. Samantha. He tried to imagine her now. Samantha slinking through the city with her head down and her shoulders rounded, her arms crossed in front of her body, hugging her chest like a little girl walking home in the rain; or Samantha slouching over a bar, tossing her hair out of her face as she looked up toward the ceiling at the frail benediction of the lights there and smiled for a moment for nobody at all; Samantha stepping out of a cab and into some man’s apartment building, winking at the doorman and disappearing behind a closing door of smoked glass. Samantha, after a year of marriage, a cipher still; Samantha whom he knew he could still love, but wouldn’t; Samantha, now, certainly, inevitably, anything but alone.
The year’s jealousy flared in his chest like a lit match. He wanted another drink but there was no server and he was sure that if he went downstairs to the bar Mallory would be gone by the time he came back. The curtain behind the stage slid open and a man in a tuxedo stepped into the spotlight. He was short, a dwarf, and perhaps because Ethan and Mallory were the only ones in the bar he angled his body out of the direct light and looked up toward their table. Under the slanting spot-glow, his black mustache seemed to droop away from his lip like paint smeared into an elongated frown. He began to sing.
“I tried to take her picture today,” Ethan said. “As she left the apartment. I don’t know why I did that.”
Mallory turned, finally, from the window. He looked for disdain or anger in her eyes, but they simply seemed tired, unable to focus.
“You’re a photographer, Ethan. Where’s the fucking mystery?”
“It’s just not something I do,” he said.
And it wasn’t. It was one of the myriad little weirdnesses in their relationship that suggested the larger dysfunction. He was a photographer and he photographed her so rarely—so rarely, anyway, did she allow candid shots. He could probably count them on one hand. There had been a few times during their courtship before he knew better, and once in Key West when he caught her by surprise. Early on, she let him bring his camera to bed as a sort of game, but he realized later that those moments were posed for him: Samantha from behind with her hand braced against the headboard and the flash shadowing the muscles in her arm, throwing the sweat between her arched shoulders into a rainbow of broken glass, or Samantha kneeling between his legs with her hair tied back and her eyes open and wide and staring straight up at the camera. A moment manufactured as carefully as the advertisements she developed. Nothing beyond her control.
“Do you think the monks drew grotesques and monsters into the margins of their Bibles to represent the terrors of the fallen world?” Mallory asked. “Or were they just mean and celibate and bored?”
Her eyes would not focus properly. There was something familiar about the dwarf’s song, but the words were in Spanish and Ethan did not know any Spanish songs. The dwarf still faced their table, crooning up at them.
“Let me buy you another drink,” Ethan said. “Tell me about the dissertation.”
“Not likely. No one wants to talk about their dissertation. Not to you.”
The dwarf’s tone had changed. He was snarling the words, singing as if in a rage, and Ethan recognized the song now. It was “As Time Goes By” sung in Spanish. There was no piano. The dwarf sang and sang and stared up at them. The light leant his grimacing aspect the stilted, static look of a weeping clown mask. Ethan turned away. Outside, it had begun to rain in icy sheets, but still the red light hung over the city.
“What’s with this light?” he said.
Mallory made a dismissive gesture in the air with her hands. She seemed barely able to lift them.
“The pigs are lurking about the crib,” she said.
“Are you on drugs? Or is that Chaucer?”
“Ethan, are you relieved that your wife is leaving you?”
The song had not ended. Hail tapped at the window now. The dwarf barked the Spanish refrain over and over and the bartender made no move to stop him. Clearly, the singer was crying.
“It’s a simple question, Ethan. It’s not some trick. Are you relieved?”
The dwarf’s expression was like something he woke to in the middle of the night, Samantha’s face withered into dream. “Yes,” Ethan said.
His cell phone began to ring and at first he didn’t recognize the sound. It rang and rang on the table before them though he had no memory of putting it there and Mallory shook her head and looked out the window at the lit storm. She stood.
“I think you’re in trouble, boy,” she said. “I think you’re about out of luck.”
BY THE TIME ETHAN GOT HOME the police were in the lobby. He saw them when he entered: two of them, in uniform, sitting on the green leather couches and talking to the doorman. One of them said something and the doorman laughed and shrugged and made a motion as if to spit on the floor. There was something sinister in the gesture, definitively cruel, and Ethan didn’t like the way the police laughed along with him. He saw their heads turn as he entered, saw the doorman’s smile harden into a toothy rictus; he saw the doorman nod toward him. He reached the open elevator, stepped inside, pressed the button and waited, facing outward, for the doors to close. The police, of course, were standing now, coming toward him, shoulder to shoulder with their wet galoshes squeaking in synchronized parody on the marble floor. They spoke his name, he looked away, and the doors slid silently closed. The elevator began to rise.
He wakes to this: Samantha woken, but not awake, in the dark. Samantha striking him, scratching. Almost no sound. Her breath comes fast and shallow. She moans as she struggles, like a sleepwalker—a guttural, grunting sound issuing from the other side of dream.
He knows by now how this will go. It’s hard because he’s holding her and in her dream she’s fighting someone who’s holding her, but if he didn’t, he doesn’t know what damage she might do. When she settles, when she wakes, when she says his name back to him, he lets her go. Then he’s up and into the bathroom getting the warm washcloth and then sitting again in bed. He dabs her forehead, he kisses her, he turns on the bedside lamp. Its light is thin and white as watery milk. On the nightstand, under the bottle of vodka, there’s a pile of books he bought on trauma. She has never touched them. He places the vodka on the floor. He picks up the first book, opens it, closes it, puts it down.
“Samantha,” he says.
He looks to where her nails draw blood on his arm.
“Samantha.”
Her breath still comes fast and shallow, like a dog’s after a long game of fetch. Sweat beads on her forehead as soon as he wipes it dry.
“Samantha. Sweetheart. Look at me.”
She does. Eyes snap open, hard and sudden as a door slammed by wind. All pupil. By now he knows that this is just the flipside of catatonia. He needs to talk to her while he still can, as the flood of mania recedes, but before it is gone entirely.
“You see now that you are safe,” he says. He’s memorized this from the booklet, from the one workshop they attended together. “You are safe in your apartment, in your bed, in my arms.”
He takes a breath, waits, speaks again.
Her expression doesn’t change. He can’t meet her eyes anymore and he looks down, at anything else. The underside of her top lip is chewed raw. Red as a torn strawberry.
He knows she’s supposed to say it, to repeat his words back into the world and let her speech repattern her fear responses. But he can’t make her. It doesn’t seem right to force her to do anything.
The therapist had said, You seem to find two primary impulses: a dissociative state which serves as a protection mechanism, and a state of panic, flashback, induced repetition.
He dabs her forehead again. Kisses her again. This next part is hard. Everyone, the therapist, the books, the trauma counselor tell him that she needs to address what happened, reconstruct the narrative, exert mastery over it, control.
“Samantha,” he says, his voice as cool and level as he can make it. “Tell me what happened that night.”
Her fingers loosen on his arm and instinctively, maybe, he pulls his arm away. He sees his blood already drying on the sheets. When she speaks, in the moment of her first syllable, the monotone dial-tone hum of it, the voice uttered out of a locked room, he knows this will be no different than any of the other times.
“There was a girl alone in the forest,” she says.
“No, Samantha. That’s not real. You know that’s not real.”
He’s thinking: she stepped out of the shower, she sat at the table and then stood at the door. It closed.
He has said to her, a hundred times, a thousand: “This is not your fault, this is not your fault, this is not your fault.”
He had stood at the window, he had sat at the table, he watched the door close.
Now it’s too late. He knows she won’t say anything, but he’s talking just to talk, to hear her voice while he still can. “Tell me,” he says. “I’m here. It’s Ethan. I’m here.”
He wants to hear her say his name. He wants to hear it on her lips. But the time for that, like everything else, is long past.
“There was a girl,” she’s saying, affect shutting down, hands unclenching. “There was a girl alone in the forest, and the forest was full of wolves.”
Later, in the sick orange light of the motel room, Ethan examined Doyle’s postcard. It was, he assumed, from somewhere in Central America. Copal, probably. The address was blacked out in heavy marker and he had no idea how Brendan Doyle, his only friend who never moved to New York, had gotten it to him. The postcard was crazy in its way; it was thick and old, the photograph must have been taken with a Kodak 110 sometime in the eighties. It was an impossible postcard from an impossible source. Doyle had disappeared two years ago after rumors of a shootout with the Copalan police and Ethan did not expect to see him again. A fugitive gone native. Kurtz in the American tropics. Now, after everything, Ethan thought he could use Doyle’s company very much. He put the postcard back in his suitcase.
Outside, something shattered and he peered through the window into the parking lot. Scraps of trash skittered on the wind like crabs out of a whale carcass, a junkyard hound dog roamed between cars, and black prostitutes lounged at each end of the U-shaped curve of rooms and smoked crack. Ethan raised his camera to the window and snapped the shutter. He had traveled the world somewhat, he was not entirely cloistered from its realities, but he had never seen anyone smoking crack before. He zoomed in and held the prostitute in the shutter’s eye. He snapped and snapped.
He stepped back into the middle of the room and photographed the window itself with its shade pulled open and the glass holding his blurred, unrecognizable image. He closed the shades, he turned to the room. He shot the bathtub he would never use, the shit-stained carpet and the semen-crusted bedcover. He shot the placard above the dresser that read in black stenciling ALAMO LODGE, SAN ANTONIO. He held the camera to the mirror and watched himself through its cropped eye. Through you, truth, he thought. Through you, the beefy decay of the recognizable world. He sat on the bed and wiped the memory card. Why would he want this truth? The filthy light of this room that recalled that other light to which he had abandoned Sam-antha. That other light and that other room. That other room with its white walls and its soft, rounded, padded furniture. The nausea of it, the orange and blue floral bedspread, the horrible neon light. The nurses with their Zoloft smiles and the feel of the chief resident’s hand on his shoulder. The hill in the country and the grand, gabled estate—a place they should be picnicking, not a realm to which he should send her like a disgraced queen to a nunnery. The light of this room recalled all that. The drowsy reek of suppressed nightmare, the sopor that informed the place. He found himself wanting to scream. Now he wanted panic, chaos, the broken world boogieing in its own broken light. He picked up his camera and opened the door.
The junkyard dog, luckily, was nowhere to be seen, but Ethan heard, as he crossed the parking lot, a wild scrambling of rats in the strewn trash. The night overhead moved cloudlessly on and lights from cars on the overpass glanced off the windshields in the lot. It was not late and several miles away tourists probably walked under the shadow of the Alamo, strolled along the green lit waters of the San Antonio riverwalk. Ethan watched as a man wandered out from under the overpass and up to one of the prostitutes’ rooms that bookended the motel. He saw her step off her stool in a cloud of rising crack smoke and strut into her room. He saw the man follow her. He raised his camera and shot the empty stool, the cloud of hanging smoke. A dog barked, somewhere, at the flash.
“Hey, man,” a voice called. “You trying to get yourself killed?”
He turned toward the voice. Beyond the chain-link fence separating the parking lot from the street, the motel swimming pool lay filthy and abandoned. A woman sat on the diving board. He could not see her face and body for the shadowings of the overpass, but the underwater lights marbled her legs with turquoise as she kicked them in the air. Ethan opened the gate and walked toward her. The pool, he saw when he reached it, squirmed with midges and other water bugs. A film of grease and oil rainbow-slicked its surface. Beneath it, the water was the impossible green of a tropical sea.
“This is a terrible pool,” Ethan said.
“Hey, honey,” the woman purred. “You get what you paid for, and you didn’t pay for this.”
Behind him he heard the gate clatter shut. He reached down to touch the pool and the water was soupy and warm beneath the layer of floating scum.
“You don’t swim in here, do you?”
She kicked her legs. She had not stopped kicking them since she called out to him. In a new arrangement of water or wind the rocking turquoise illumination now played on the underside of her chin, the right side of her jaw. Her hair was braided into thick black coils. The weird waiting woman lurking between the ravage of the overpass and the trippy pool light aroused in him some feeling of the oracular. It was that kind of evening.
“You’re not a cop,” she said.
He shook his head.
“Then why you snooping around with that camera?”
“I wasn’t snooping. I’m a photographer.”
“Like for the papers?”
“Not really,” he said. “Not at all.”
“Then what for?”
He had no answer, not since he had quit his job. He felt perhaps that he should account for himself here. He could not.
“For myself, I guess. Like a journal or a travel log.”
She laughed a smoker’s laugh that recalled the old men on the stoops in Little Italy.
“Like an explorer,” she said. “Like a man with a golden hat.”
A current of sudden wind tunneled and gusted through the overpass. The pool light rocked on the fence like a disco ball.
“Like Columbus,” she continued. “Like the man with a goat for a head.”
Some tinny music started up far behind them in one of the motel rooms. A man began to scream. Ethan turned toward the noise and when he turned back she had pulled her legs up out of the light and into her b
ody. She held her knees and rocked like she was about to roll off the diving board in a sad little cannonball.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“New York.”
She gave a squeal of delight.
“Oh, wow! I’ve always wanted to go to New York,” she said like she was imagining Tahiti. “What did you do there?”
“I was married there.”
“I’ve never been married,” she said solemnly. “But I’m not really old enough.”
She nodded her head toward the highway, toward the passing trucks and the rebounding blare of tinny music. He saw her braided hair flop out of her face, saw the thick curl of her mouth, some wet humor in her eyes. He wanted to photograph her.
“How old are you?”
She didn’t pause. “Fourteen. I’m just a kid.”
He fingered his camera. By any gracious measuring she was at least twice that, but he felt taken by the certainty in the statement. Like the one lucid moment when Samantha had insisted on her institutionalization and the dissolution of their marriage. No, love, he had said, we can make it through this. I can help you. He had said it and said it and been wrong.
He found himself raising his camera. He wanted to hold and frame her in his shutter’s eye. He wanted to be able to gaze at this truth, too, and then erase it.
She covered her face with her hands.
“No,” she said through her splayed fingers. “Don’t bother with me. I won’t show up on that thing.”
The music from the motel was growing louder. It was some rap synched over an electronic Chopin sampling. His mother, in one of her episodes, once spent a month playing Chopin for eight hours a day. He remembered his relief when Samantha told him, their first night together, that she had quit piano lessons at twelve—as if that in itself served as some surety of sanity. He clicked the shutter again and again. The woman seemed to writhe under his flash.
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