“I looked it up online, the damage these grotesque things can do. They can nest in the weight-bearing beams of a house and devour it. Thousands of dollars of damage. The house may be structurally unsound. This could literally eat up all the equity we have in the house. Our retirement money. We may not even be able to put it on the market.”
He envisions the termites eating into the wooden planks two stories below him that support his weight and the weight of the entire house. He sees them writhing in their hive, burrowing, as she put it, deeper into the grain of the wood. A slow process of rotting away. To him and to Laura, the termites forming their colony in the beams of their home is an act of unparalleled destruction. But he can see this, for a brief flashing moment, from the insects’ point of view as well. Looked at from their perspective, these small disgusting beings building their hive are creating their own bit of order in the universe, fighting entropy in their own way. All life does that. He has to shake this perverse glimmer of logic from his head in order to speak.
“Laura, that’s ridiculous. This house is worth five times as much as we paid for it. The market is so hot here, a few thousand to fix this won’t hurt us. And it’s probably covered by the insurance. We’ll find out Monday when we call the title company.”
“How do you know how much the house is worth? It could cost a hundred thousand dollars to repair it.”
“Nonsense.”
“You should have thought of that when you were saving a few bucks by canceling the exterminators.”
There’s that word she loves to use: Should. Always thinking about what must happen in order for her plans and her concept of the perfectly ordered world to take place. You should have done that. We should do this. You should get the oil changed in the car. You should clean out the gutters this weekend. You should really think about going to the doctor for that. You should have been here tonight with me again, one last time in this room, in this building where girls laughed, smoke gathered in the lobby, ringing out a sound from across the rooftops it came, the bells of St Monica’s ringing out, the laughter raining down from the balconies. This life for you all dead and gone, but I kept you folded here inside me, I kept you locked within my heart, not really you but that one forgotten part of you is with me still, has been with me ever since, a fragment of us that never went away. He holds her adrift, floating, extending as far apart as they will ever be, for a shivering instant he holds her there locked together with his eyes. Why should I have kept myself sanctified for him? I might have had what they have, these two locking their eyes together. I might have had a separate life of my own, with children and grandchildren, and another who cares about me. But I chose to do this, enfolding myself together like a flower that closes against the cold.
But I did have something of a family too myself. He never knew it, but I did have Karl and Dennis those years when they lived with me, Karl so much older, nearly ten years older. His voice booming out across the heads in the pews, black backs of their heads riveted on the words he lashed out. As for myself, brethren, when I came to you I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony and evidence or mystery or secret of God. His voice like a bass drum struck with a mallet, launching itself to the rafters, back from Philadelphia after Jessamine died to preach at St Monica’s. I was there every Sunday for years, with the milky soft light through the stained-glass windows pouring down upon his face as the words hurried out like they were not his own, he was just a sounding board for giant strings that had been plucked. Still saying mass in Latin and living with me. Too old to be a brother, he seemed more like an uncle, but also what Tris never knew and I never told a soul, he was also like a husband and Dennis to me so much like a son. Dennis’s head, his hair when I touched it, when I tucked the boy into bed; there is nothing so tenuous and innocent as the hair on the back of a young boy’s head. I loved him like my own son, cut down without warning they said. His smile in the photograph I still have on the bureau in the back room, the room locked up. I never go there, filled with ghosts and mourning, locked up in the back of the house upstairs, that room where Karl slept each night in a single bed alone. Dennis’s photograph, his smile, in his Army uniform.
We ate each meal as a family would, father, mother, and son together. And so, yes I did have a husband and a son, that has not been denied me in that sense. The Sunday after the message came, Karl still said mass, his voice resounding to the highest rafters. Then He was praying in a certain place, and when He stopped, one of His disciples said to Him, Lord teach us to pray as John taught his disciples. And He said to them, when you pray say, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done. He said it with a crack in his voice. Thy will be done. And the tears came to me and to others, to many others that day because they knew just as well that Dennis had been killed in the war, and the mourning was the end of us together. That booming voice of Karl’s, those were the last words he ever preached. He said it that day, but that Sunday was the end of him and the end of us together. He loved his Dennis so much, and the Lord took him so young that Karl in his own way folded himself up in that bed in the back room. He went there and lay down and rarely left it in the months that came after. I fed him, brought him his food and drink, but it broke him, saying mass that day. He should have stepped aside, but he was a stubborn, deliberate man. He lay down in that bed in that room and never left, with Dennis smiling, staring at him. I grew to hate that room and closed it off, the door shut always against the ghost of him, always shut against that bed she calls him to. How can she want to do this now, after all the acrimony between them? Her appetites have become like those of a man as the past few months have aged her, whittled her down to a hardness and ceaseless wanting. She calls him from the closet he has been cleaning, two piles of clothes heaped on the closet floor: one for the storage unit and one for the secondhand store. He knows the tenor of that voice, the way she called his name, lifting, with a question in it that quickly falls away. He sees her standing hunched over the bed naked, the flesh at the back of her thighs as slack as the blanket she lifts and lets fall again, slowly settling down upon a cushion of air between it and the tightly tucked sheets, her buttocks narrow as a boy’s, the folds of loose skin where her belly used to protrude now hanging like a pouch as she stoops over and pulls the blanket taut at the head of the bed, pushing the blanket in between the box springs and the frame to make the bed the way she likes it, perfectly tight, everything sealed in.
Now she pulls the quilted comforter up to the headboard, her small breasts hanging limp as she smoothes out the wrinkles and props two pillows up, intent upon her work. Her nakedness is an indication of her mastery of him. Her focused disregard of his watching her a sign of his weakness. This is but another plan she is executing, an idea most likely conceived some time several days ago, while he was away on his trip, a task that took its place at the end of her long to-do list for this day. He could choose to ignore her, go downstairs and turn on the football game, open a beer. He was never properly fed this evening. A bowl of canned soup and a handful of pretzels have left him hungrier than ever. But this may be a chance to redeem himself, after everything that has happened with the house. He’s surprised she would even consider it.
“Why are you making the bed?”
She doesn’t look up. Walking to the dresser, she pulls open the drawer where the condoms are kept, confirming that he has guessed correctly. She takes one of the foil packets out of the box and leaves the drawer open, the big box of condoms crowded together with her silky underwear.
“I don’t like to sleep on messy sheets, with the blankets all in a wad.” Meaning he does. Implying that this is another failure of his. He can see her mind clicking like gears in a clock. This is another part of the plan, everything has been thought out: the closet will be cleaned, then we’ll have sex, then I’ll go to sleep. The sex is merely one step in the process. “It’s been a while,” she says—another accusation—marching up to him, naked, her breasts bar
e before him, so loose and limp that he has to avert his eyes and focus instead on the hand that has cupped itself firmly to the crotch of his jeans. Once she has decided to go through with something, she wants it to happen fast. At times he has to ask her to help him, paying extra attention with her hands or her mouth; he enters each encounter with her with no idea whether he will be up to the task. She pushes up on her toes in an effort to kiss him. Reluctantly, he lets her. She jabs her tongue between his teeth and the chalky taste of toothpaste presses against the remnants of the soup he ate.
Somewhere deep in his brain, a chemical mechanism is tripped: This woman, this hard little woman wants him. She fumbles with his fly and releases his mouth from the kiss. As she bends to her work, his mind lifts away from the presence of her and rises to a place somewhere near the spackled rafters in the ceiling, away from her and outside himself, a place where he has been reduced to pure sensation, a tiny rip in the fabric of time; an opening for everything that ever was him to drain out of. For a long moment he floats there, apart from himself, forever beyond the distant antipathies obtaining a scaffold for his soul. The room is gone and the ceiling, all gone for a moment, then—she is back and he is. She is Laura and he is everything he has ever been once again, tucked inside himself once more and here, in this room they will soon be abandoning.
She tugs on his arm, indicating it is time to join her in bed. He knows what to do now—their routine in these matters has been choreographed quite precisely over the years. As she turns down the sheets of the bed she has just made he must quickly, quickly take off his clothes. In bed now, they assume the accustomed positions, on their sides, her head over his, her mouth searching. “Mmm …” she says. “This is good.”
No, don’t talk, he thinks. Talking brings him back to her. He feels himself start to fade, and decides to shift positions. It’s now or never. He lets go of her and starts to climb on top.
“Not so fast.” She knows exactly what her next move will be, and so does he. She tears and uncrinkles the silver foil wrapper of the condom and subjects him to the indignity of rolling it on, her hands tugging expertly at the rolled rubber end. This is another one of her new proclamations, the condom, after years of lovely unrestricted sex courtesy of the pill, she has declared that she will no longer soak her body in unhealthy, unnatural chemicals for him—she claims that she very well may have given herself some kind of cancer, just so he can have an extra measure of feeling. So, despite her dwindling post-menopausal body, she has insisted that he use “protection.” Protection from what? He couldn’t get her pregnant if he tried. Maybe she suspects him of being unfaithful, all those long lonely nights on the road. It’s a valid concern. But he has come to believe that it is more a matter of her staking a claim to her body, delineating a territory that he no longer owns. This is mine once again—once and for all. You can visit me here, but only on my terms.
He can hardly blame her for this. He has scorned her for considering this act to be merely one more chore on her list, but it is, indeed, work. When she first surprised him by bringing home the big box of condoms with the shadowy forms of two lovers silhouetted on the flat golden lid, he marveled that she had the guts to even carry such a thing to the checkout lane of the drugstore, and he noted that this particular brand advertised in large clinical lettering that the condoms are RIBBED, FOR HER PLEASURE. As she tugs the rubber tight, he can discern the tiny notched bumps that constitute the “ribs,” and he doubts they give her any pleasure at all. Finishing, her eyes momentarily flash up at him. For an instant, he sees her there, a person inside those two dark holes; a person who must eat and sleep and dream each day just as he does, the person who all those many years ago cast her lot with him and has had to endure his many faults and shortcomings. For a moment, he sees the person there, behind those tawny eyes, who clings to hopes and cringes in fear of imagined catastrophes, who goes about each day with her own familiar will to live and carry on, and he cannot help but love her, as he always has, for being the one whom he somehow convinced to join him and never leave his side of the room is nearly empty, a lot of the people over towards the bar now that the band has been playing a while, only the die-hard dancers still out there, the rest of them standing in twos and threes with drinks in their hands, talking, waving tumblers of whisky or gin or rum in the air. Tris would be taller than most, his head towering over the others, easy to spot. His high forehead, cropped dark hair. I think of him as he was and not as he might be or must be now. I think of him as that young boy really in the hammock with me, or the one who dashed across the lobby, eyes lit up with laughter, always laughing about some joke he just heard, always making up something to smile about. But maybe there wouldn’t even be any hair any more, maybe glasses or some other change I wouldn’t even recognize, somebody altogether new. An arm, a hand brushes against my sleeve. Is it him? Turning, expecting to see him there, his dark hair and eyes like gimlet shimmers of blue. He must be, but no, this is someone I never have met before, touching my sleeve.
“Would you care to dance?” The voice dry and cracking, breaking away at the soft last sound of the word, but the hand stays there still, fingertips pressed through the fabric, pressing against my skin. How long has it been since any man touched me? There is no answer, no sound I can make. Now his hand takes my hand and holds it, leading me to the center of the floor like Elmer leading me across the street against the danger of traffic, or me leading that girl, and now his arms, his arms around me, his hand touching, testing the small of my back, guiding me. The people, their faces hanging suspended, floating this way and that, turning aside and swishing.
“I bet you don’t remember me.” Sound of the trumpets flaring against the cry of the hollow clarinets.
“No, I must say I’m sorry, I don’t.”
He smiles and the cheeks tipped with red rise up.
“I knew you wouldn’t. We hardly knew each other then, but here we are fifty years on. Jimmy Boyle,” he says, letting me drift farther apart, releasing me, maybe to get a better look. “I used to do the paper route on Dearborn Street, all around St Monica’s.” And his face transposes into another, into a boy with a short-billed cap sprinting across the two-tiered stubby lawns of the street, flipping the rolled-up paper onto the porch with a slap. Sometimes Father would curse him for hitting the milk box or missing the porch entirely.
“I do remember you. You used to be so shy with your black leather collection book, especially when Louise came to the door. I remember once you tripped on the milkbox and nearly broke your neck down those stairs, backing away and staring at her.” Should I tell him I still live in the very same place? Probably the only one in this building who still lives in the house they grew up in.
“We all stared at her. My God, she was a knockout.”
“Yes, she was, wasn’t she?” And she knew it, and made sure everyone else did too. He lets me drift a bit farther away, as if to get a better look at me, appraising. No one has looked at me like this in forty years.
“Well, none of us are knockouts any more.” He draws me in closer, pressing his beery breath against my cheek. “Even Louise must be old and gray I imagine.”
Yes, I want to say. Yes, she is. She lives in an old farmhouse, dingy and dark and just as alone as I am. I may have had a lonely life, but mine was never as sad and tangled up in tears as hers. All of her husbands and children, what a mess she made of it. Her good looks nothing more than a beacon calling shipwrecks towards her.
“She’s doing very well, a writer living near Bremerton. A lovely little place she has out in the woods near the state park.” He brings me closer, still pressing the hard starched collar of his shirt against my chin. His mouth, his lips are close, close, maybe he thinks I’m her. Or maybe just pressing himself against a relation of hers is enough for him, his arms clasping him to her, he feels himself open up into pure sensation again, his self falling away, floating upwards into nothingness, a big open hole ripped from the fabric of the sky, her arms pulling h
im down into a pit that never ends, a space as loamy and wide as the earth itself, smooth and distended, plunging to the horizon and beyond. But she has shielded herself from touching him, he can feel himself in her but cannot feel her, it is the same as having her watch him draw, she will not let him feel his hands but not just his hands, his fingertips touching me, and not just touching me, caressing me, exploring my back. I shrink down, I close myself. When Louise told Father that we were to meet under the clock that day, when she told him that we were together in that way, she ripped you apart from me forever, she did the cruelest thing a person ever could. Her jealousy of me and of you came full circle after years of hating us and what we had together. She could have had anyone she wanted, yet she could not stand the thought of us together. When she told him that we were together so young, too young, she ripped you apart from me forever. But we were not really, that’s what I told Father that evening when I arrived home after you didn’t show, and Father screamed, my God, he never raised his voice to us but that night he screamed and scared Mother so she drove him from the house. And then he used that word, he said it to Mother when it never really was that. We never did that together, but he said it, screamed it for all the house to hear, and from that moment on I folded into myself, I renounced you and any other, folded into myself to keep it from ever happening. When he screamed that word and Mother shoved him out the back door screaming, I said to myself at that moment never, never again will I let someone touch him there, she does this sometimes to tweak him, to get an extra rise out of him, one of her tricks, but the thought has entered his head that she will not let him feel and thinking this thought or any thought for that matter other than pure loose and otherworldly feeling has sent him back into his head, his self and her self, separate and apart and vexed by the acrimony of earlier this evening so he must think of another woman; he can feel himself failing. The woman from the television news darts into his head, her lips moving slowly, mechanically, pronouncing her words of doom. She is perfect, too perfect, her face and hair an abstraction, she talks, and the crazy nonsense letters scroll across the screen beneath her, and the child trapped pinned beneath the rubble, she is too perfect, she is death. He keeps going but has to shift positions, move his arm a bit to get the blood moving; it was starting to tingle. He twists his head across her shoulder beneath him and opens his eyes again and sees the yellow wall gleaming beyond the edge of the bed, the yellow wall that she once painted of the house they will be leaving soon.
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