“Yes, do you want?”
“No, not for me.” The idea seemed absurd and he actually laughed at the thought. “Does your wife know that’s what you’re doing out here?”
“Not really,” Peter said. “Maybe. She knows more than she tells me sometimes, I think. You do not approve?”
“No, I don’t care. It’s just funny, that’s all.”
“Funny how?”
“I don’t know. Just funny.” There was a pause and then he added: “I could use a beer. And I need to sit down. Seeing you smoke makes me want to sit down and have a beer.” He was silent again and then he had the solution: “Wait. Wait a minute,” he said. “I have an idea. Will you help me with something?”
“Of course,” Peter said.
“Good, let’s do it before you get too stoned. Come with me.” He stepped back toward the light now, back to the cul-de-sac and its ring of concrete, his feet crunching the dry thistle and dead grass and chunks of dirt and gravel and he could hear Peter’s footsteps behind him. “What is this?” Peter said.
“I need you to help me move something,” Keith said.
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
“OK,” Peter said. “Wait, I will go put down pipe.” He disappeared into the darkness for a moment, his footfalls at a slow jog, and then returned and they walked in silence for a few moments, the houses in the cul-de-sac silent and watchful, the vacant lots still vacant, the only difference a black sedan parked in front of Jennifer’s house. Had the car been there before? Would he have noticed? He was not sure. Perhaps she had another date tonight. Perhaps that’s who she was.
He had left the door unlocked and opened it now and they both passed through.
“She took everything,” Peter said.
“I told you she did,” Keith said.
“You said furniture. There’s more to home than furniture. She took everything. She left nothing at all.”
“True,” Keith said.
“I cannot believe,” Peter said. “I cannot believe she would take all this away from you.”
“Well,” Keith said. He moved to the far side of the couch, next to its overstuffed leather arm. Then he said, “Let’s take this outside.”
“This?” Peter said, his voice incredulous. “This is nice sofa. Leather too, yes?”
“Yes, it’s leather.”
“It is all furniture you have, though,” Peter said. “What she left.”
“I hate this sofa,” Keith said. “She left it because I hate it. It’s like a bad joke that it’s still here.”
Peter looked at him. “Too good to be outside maybe.”
“No, it’s perfect. It’s the perfect sofa to be outside.”
Peter looked simultaneously sad and excited. “OK,” he said at last.
“It’s heavy.”
“I am sure.”
“No,” Keith said. “It’s heavy like you wouldn’t believe.”
“You are a man who brings good times.”
“Tell me that when we’re done with this,” Keith said. “If we can’t get it out the door we’ll saw it in half and take it out in sections.”
“Too nice for that. We will get sofa outside.”
“Let’s do this.” He counted to three and a moment later they held the sofa aloft and were moving toward the entryway.
They managed to get the sofa partially through the door with a fair amount of grunting and groaning, the living room and entryway behind them littered with the fallen cushions that marked their path. The process was not unlike turning an overstuffed key in a huge, oddly shaped lock and there was a moment where Keith thought it might be impossible to go farther, the sofa wedged at some odd angle where he could not move it forward or back, but then Peter rotated his end slightly, saying nothing, neither of them saying a single word, and the whole thing slid through the aperture at last, Keith stumbling forward as Peter pulled both him and the sofa through the doorway.
They tried to set it down in the driveway and ended up dropping it with an awkward clunk and both leaned against the arms and panted wordlessly for a long moment in the yellow glow of the streetlights. The front door to the house was open and one cushion had been kicked through the doorway and now lay like some odd welcome mat placed upon the threshold. Keith was exhausted by the effort but he was also smiling, and when he looked over at Peter he saw that the Ukrainian was grinning as well.
They lifted the sofa again and moved down the sidewalk and were once again panting heavily as they stepped, one leg at a time, over the chain and began to crunch through the thistle, the path irrelevant to their aching arms and slowly slipping grip. “Watch out for telescope,” Peter said, the only words spoken during their walk from the house to the field until at last they crashed the sofa to the ground in the thistle and dirt and once again stood out of breath, leaning on the gray stuffed arms.
“Heavy,” Peter said.
“I told you it was.”
“It is maybe too nice to be left out in field.”
“You want to pick it up and take it back into the house?”
“Not so much.”
“It’s better out here. Let it rot.”
“You have very sharp tongue tonight.”
“I’ve had a weird day.”
“Weird day made you angry.”
“I guess so.”
They walked back to the house and collected the cushions and Keith pulled a six-pack of beer out from the refrigerator and tucked it under his arm. Then they moved wordlessly out into the field again.
They returned the cushions to their proper places and then both sat and Keith cracked open a can of beer and handed it over to Peter, who nodded and mumbled a brief thanks, and then opened another and sipped it, settling into the cushions and closing his eyes for a long moment in the darkness.
The flick of a lighter. A moment later the scent of smoke drifted over from Peter’s side of the couch, and then his voice came: “It is good to sit.”
“Yes,” Keith said. “Yes, it is.” He sipped at his beer.
“Sometimes I bring folding chair here. This is much better than folding chair.”
“True,” Keith said. It was silent for a long moment. Then Keith said, “I’ve been having headaches. Migraines.”
“Migraines? How bad?”
“Pretty bad.”
Silence for a moment. Then Peter: “You have headaches but no smoking?”
“No,” Keith said. “I probably should, though. I’ve heard it works for some people.”
“You want?”
He thought about it. “I think I should stick with the beer,” he said. “I have painkillers for the headaches.”
“This is probably better,” Peter said.
“Probably true.”
Peter offered him the pipe and Keith looked at it for a long moment, held in the Ukrainian’s outstretched hand. Then he took it and put it to his lips and sucked in the smoke. The feeling of burning was immediate and he exploded into a series of choking coughs.
“Easy there,” Peter said.
“Whoa,” Keith said, still choking. He handed the pipe back. “Maybe I’ll stick with the beer.”
They sat in silence for a long time, Keith sipping on his beer, finishing it, opening another. The stars luminous above the giant leather sofa, the two men slumped upon it like discarded manikins. Like crash test dummies.
Then Peter’s voice: “Hey, your girlfriend over there is looking for you, I think.”
Keith opened his eyes and looked up toward Jennifer’s house. Indeed the window curtains were pulled open and Jennifer’s body was framed within its rectangle. Whether she was looking out into the field or not he could not tell and indeed he knew that she could not have seen him in the darkness; the vacant lot would be, from her perspective, simply an empty place beyond the ring of concrete and streetlights. Her silhouette was an apparition in the window, as if floating above Earth in a coffin of light. A moment later another silhouette app
eared behind her and then the curtains closed, the only remainder a thin thread of light that wavered and then disappeared entirely.
He downed the beer in just a few swallows. Peter smoked quietly beside him. “This is a comfortable sofa,” Peter said.
Keith said nothing. After a time, he let his head loll back onto the cushions, his face pointing straight up into space. There were so many stars and to him they remained entirely nameless, a fact that, at least for the moment, did not seem to matter at all.
Eleven
He had just returned from his morning run when he heard Walter Jensen’s voice for the first time, a calm, friendly sound that called to him from the opposite side of the street: “Hey there, neighbor.”
Keith glanced toward the sound in confusion, hands on hips, still sweating and breathing hard as he walked back and forth on the sidewalk. The speaker was a man in a gray suit who stood in front of Jennifer’s house by the open door of the black sedan. Neighbor? Had he called him his neighbor?
He nodded in the man’s direction, saying nothing, still recovering his breath, still feeling the weight of the run upon him. When he turned back toward his house he was surprised to see the man walking briskly across the street toward him, his charcoal tie wagging like an oddly placed tail. For a brief moment, Keith wondered if he could act as if he had not seen the man, could simply return to the house as if oblivious but instead he stood there in his worn nylon running shorts and tennis shoes and waited, squinting in the white blaze of morning light. The man was smiling.
“Walter Jensen,” the man said when he reached the sidewalk, his hand extended.
Keith stepped toward him and extended his own hand and they shook. The man might have been in his mid-fifties, although his unnaturally tight face suggested some amount of money spent on plastic surgery of various sorts. Everything about him was immaculately groomed: hair dyed a somewhat unnatural light brown with a few strategic lines of gray at the temples, gray suit pressed to perfection as if constructed of metal, black shoes polished into dark mirrors. Shaking his hand was like shaking a bucket of Cool Whip, so smooth and devoid of texture was the sensation. He smiled. His teeth were a perfect white line.
“I don’t think we’ve yet met,” Walter Jensen said. Across the street, Nicole appeared from the house and waved.
“No, I guess not,” Keith said. He waved to the little girl.
Walter Jensen glanced over his shoulder. “Go ahead and get in the car, sweetie,” he called. She smiled, waved again, and then climbed into the black sedan. “I guess you know my daughter.”
“Sure,” Keith said, his sudden confusion mixed now with something else, a feeling of nausea.
“She’s a pistol, isn’t she? Just like her mom.”
“Sure is.”
“Well, I’ve been away on business and then you’ve been away on your business.” Walter Jensen offered a faint, ambiguous laugh. “Anyway, it’s good to run into you.”
“OK,” Keith said. “Likewise.”
“Listen, I don’t … uh …” He paused a moment as if at a loss for words and then said, “Well, let me just come out and say it. I’m awful sorry to hear about your daughter. If there’s anything we can do over here just let us know, all right?”
Keith stood in silence, soaked through with sweat, squinting and blinking in the early-morning sunlight. The entire situation seemed unreal to him, impossible. And yet here was his neighbor, apparently Jennifer’s husband, certainly Nicole’s father, Walter Jensen, with a false look of concern clouding his face. “Uh … yeah, thanks,” Keith said and when his neighbor did not immediately respond he added, “I think I have it under control.”
“Sorry to bring that up,” Walter Jensen said.
“That’s OK.”
“So the house is up for sale?”
Keith nodded.
“But you’re staying here right now?”
“For now.”
“That’s good. Save the money while you can. I get that.”
Keith looked at him.
“You know,” Walter Jensen said, “my wife Jennifer said you were lacking in the furniture department.”
“Lacking?”
Walter Jensen waved his hands in the air, an action that reminded Keith of Peter. “Look, I know you’re selling and all but you still have to live, right? Jennifer and I have some extra stuff we’ve just been hanging on to. A dresser and a pullout sofa and some tables and chairs. You’re welcome to it. That’s what neighbors should do for each other.”
Keith did not know what to say in response. He stood there, staring at this man. Jesus Christ. Really? Really? He stood there on the concrete next to the steaming grass and blinked silently at Walter Jensen before stammering, “That’s really not necessary,” and then backing away slowly as if from an angry dog.
“Ah, you’ll see,” the man said. “It’ll work out fine.”
“Well, then,” Keith said, still retreating.
“Anyway, I have a meeting to get to so I’ll see you around.”
Walter Jensen half waved at him and then trotted back across the street, into the black sedan, and was gone around the corner in seconds. Keith stood in silence next to the rental car, watching the empty street where the man had been, the house across the street that he had appeared from.
My wife Jennifer? Really?
Around him, faint curls of steam extended upward from every visible surface: the closely shorn lawns, the asphalt and concrete, the streetlamp post at the end of the cul-de-sac. In the near distance, past the houses, the visible horizon was ringed with a faint blaze of dark green trees and the rooflines of an older and more distant subdivision, all of which had been cast flat and shadowless by the slantlight of early morning.
He knew that the information about Jennifer should not have surprised him but it had nonetheless. He was having an affair with a married woman. Someone with a daughter no less. The irony was not lost on him. How could it be? Nor was the sense that he had been, and continued to be, a fool, although how the vector upon which he had always envisioned himself had become so entangled remained impossible for him to understand.
Sally Erler called soon after he returned to the cool interior of the house to tell him that she had lined up a potential buyer for the late morning. He nodded, although she obviously could not see him, and repeated “That’s fine, that’s fine,” not even hearing her now, not even really understanding that the call had ended, instead thinking of the last time he had shared Jennifer’s bed—a bed she shared with her husband, as it turned out—and the abruptness with which he had been asked to leave. She was married. He was not. He tried to make this into a kind of justification but he could trace no such argument.
On the counter before him rested the paperwork the process server had delivered to him the previous day. A quick knock on the door just after noon and he had been handed a few sheets of paper and had signed his name in receipt and the man told him to have a good day and was gone. The paperwork that facilitated his divorce. It had been as simple as that. A voice-mail message and a few sheets of paper that denoted the end. Now he did not know who she was to him. His wife? Hoffmann had called her his ex-wife, although that still did not feel true. Someone between states of being, in some interstitial zone. Perhaps that.
He ate his breakfast cereal and when he was finished he pulled the sheet of plastic clear of the sink, tearing it free of its blue-taped edges, and wadded it up and then stood looking at the gap it had made. Then he reached up and began pulling the plastic from the nearest cabinets in a kind of frustration, throwing each scrap into the living room where the sofa’s footprints were still apparent on the carpet. When the cabinets were clear he removed the plastic from the kitchen island and then knelt and peeled back the masking tape that ringed the linoleum and the various strips that still clung to wall, window, and cabinet edge, moving without any clear thought or purpose other than his own anger and frustration.
The stepladder had been folded against the
far wall of the living room and he retrieved it to pull the loose strips of masking tape from the tops of the cabinetry and the edge of the ceiling, wadding it into a series of sticky balls and tossing them in the general direction of the increasingly large pile of refuse. How carefully he had placed each line of tape, following the bound coordinates of clear precise points he had charted to keep his mind occupied with something tangible. How futile that project seemed to him now. He had not even completed the job. There was a single coat of paint here and if he looked carefully he could see the blotchy yellow of the original color where it soaked through the eggshell like fresh yolk but he just did not care now, nor could he imagine caring in the future.
It took him an hour to remove all the tape and plastic sheeting and when he was finished the loose pile of trash in the living room seemed much larger than was possible, given the compact stack of supplies it had been generated from. He thought for a moment that he might simply leave it there, a strange replacement for the sofa he and Peter had moved out to the field, but the thought was just as soon gone and he scooped up an armload of plastic and tape and walked to the door, opening it awkwardly and then stepping outside into the sunlight, his eyes clamping shut against the blazing light of the morning and the sudden onslaught of heat.
By the time he was in the shower the whining sound had come again and this time it was more present than it had been in all the weeks he had spent in the cul-de-sac, a long and endless and shrill sine wave moving toward him from some distant place. He had hoped that the migraines were gone altogether, that he had been miraculously cured of whatever medical mystery had beset him, and yet here again was the sound of his mind in its tinny unraveling. He would take another pill, thinking—praying even—that if he took one quickly enough it might be sufficient to stop what already felt like an inevitability, the whine, the sine wave, already bearing down on him from some initial point he was ever unable to locate.
The shower had been hot and he turned the water off in a fog of steam that had covered every surface of the bathroom and when her voice came out of that fog—“Hey there, neighbor!”—he turned abruptly enough to bang the shower door closed with a crash.
The Infinite Tides Page 21