by Cutter Wood
Finally, the last guests are leaving. The Greevys stand wavering just inside the door, a little like apparitions, a little like drunks.
“We’re socialists,” he says.
She swats him on the arm. “Don’t say that. It was lovely to meet you, William.”
Chuck is trying to goad his wife along, but she keeps weaving out from beneath his hands and coming up with something else to say. He wavers over the face of his watch.
“My god, it’s three in the morning, Ellie. Let these poor people sleep.”
“All right, let’s go,” she says. “Where’s my jacket?”
They are on the threshold. Now, suddenly, the husband remembers something he had wanted to mention.
“Really do come by and see us.”
“Four-oh-four Willow,” the wife adds. “Palm trees out front.”
Arm in arm, they march out into the dark and disappear, only to reappear again briefly, as if to threaten one final goodbye, beneath the streetlamp on the corner.
Now Bill closes the door and, thinking of those two final guests, locks it with a flourish. Sabine, lying on the couch beneath a yellow slicker, already almost asleep, her head held up by her hand, calls him.
“Here,” she says.
Out from between the couch cushions she produces a small box wrapped in silver paper and pushes it into his hands.
Inside, sandwiched between two thin layers of polyester wool, is a heavy silver watch. Its face is blank except for twelve very faintly filigreed Roman numerals and, in the center, a word, in German maybe, that he doesn’t recognize. He has never worn a watch, and he needs her help to put it on. He leans dramatically over the watch face.
“My god, it’s three in the morning, Ellie.”
She laughs softly, and softly rests her head on her arm.
Now it has been a long day. They remove their clothes, brush their teeth, wash their faces, moving through the motions as ones lost already to sleep. She takes off her earrings. He runs a hand through his hair. They seem to be following around an image of themselves.
“Did I already say, ‘Welcome home’?” she asks. “Or did I only think it?”
13: The Confidence of Friends
It’s full morning when he wakes. Two weeks have passed, and he wakes not to an alarm but to the beeps of a dump truck backing up on the next street over. With his eyes still closed, the room spins around like a compass needle until it settles into its geography. Some rag of dream pursues him out of sleep, a feeling more than anything, but even as he opens his eyes, it’s already gone.
He lies in a wide blue bed, and turning his head, he finds the still-sleeping profile of Sabine. With her nose up and a soft snore escaping from her parted lips, she seems to him to be scenting the air for news. Beside him, the watch lies on the night table. He feels as though the person who received it was another man in another life. He inspects it closely, this silver watch with the round white face. It’s not yet eight o’clock. For the first time in a while, he feels the natural goodwill and generosity of the well slept. He slips from beneath the sheets and moves away from the bed with stealth and tenderness.
With the money he’d saved up in work release, he’s rented a storage unit halfway down the island and filled it with a rotary saw, a workbench, and a secondhand sander. The room is ten feet by fifteen. He has to heave up the blue metal door with two hands. He always leaves this door open when he works. Across the road, he can see the Gulf. No one uses the other units much. Sometimes a young man comes on the weekend and loads his pickup with large plastic tubs of fishing gear and tackle, but otherwise he has the view to himself.
He’d found a miniature refrigerator that wasn’t being used at the motel, and he keeps this stocked with blue-and-gold cans of malt liquor. The first thing he does when he comes down here, even before flicking on the light, is to reach into the frosted back of the fridge and pull out one of these cans. The first sip cools the air of the storage unit. He leans against the workbench and pushes his sunglasses up on his head, and once he’s finished the first beer, he goes around plugging in the machines and dusting things off.
He doesn’t know how to describe to Sabine the way he feels at these times, the ownership he feels of this space, and the familiarity of it. The screech of the saw and the electrical shocks given him by the sander. The way his cans have a little cuff of yellow sawdust around their bottoms. Drinking is as necessary a part of the operation as is the hammer. It makes him feel calm. The saw spins of its own accord, the fan sends waves of dust spiraling out into the parking lot, and he watches as a bench takes shape beneath his hands.
When Sabine arrives, appearing in the open door, he kisses her and covers her in sawdust.
They talk awhile about nothing in particular. He shows her the things he is working on, and explains the work still to be done. On her way out, she brushes the dust from her jeans and glances into the trash. After that, he begins to put his empties directly in the Dumpster.
One night not long after this, while he’s asleep, she takes all the beer out of the refrigerator and pours it in the sink. In the morning, she lies in bed and listens. He goes to the fridge first, and there’s a long silence after the door opens. Then it closes very softly. He rummages around the apartment, then the refrigerator opens again and closes with a smack, and he begins counting the empties in the recycling. After a while, the apartment goes silent. She lies still in the dark bedroom and listens to a hedge trimmer in the neighbor’s yard, and after a while, she realizes he’s standing in the doorway watching her. She turns over and smiles at him.
“Come back to bed.”
“Very funny.”
In the bathroom at dusk, with two fingers, he picks up a hand towel stained with mascara and tries to remove the specks of flossed-out broccoli from the mirror. A cotton swab lies in the shower water on the floor, a few inches from the wastebasket, but he cannot bring himself to touch it. He dawdles in the bathroom. Everything he does here, he does slowly. He treasures these small privacies. The day has been searing, and the shower seems to break the heat. When she finally arrives from work, she paces outside the door. He’s going to make them late, she reminds him.
He is still running the towel over his head when she bursts in. In the bathroom, she does everything at once. She brushes her teeth in the shower, and rinses her mouth while clipping her nails. The only time she is ever still is when she sits on the toilet; elbows on knees and chin in hands, she is like a bird-watcher or a little child learning about the solar system. He loiters in the doorway. She frowns and waves him away. Even more than his own, he enjoys the privacy of others.
They have a drink before they leave, and he remembers what it is to be in love, to think about a cigarette, watch your beer be poured, swat away a fly. To watch her and have her look up, this is wonderful, but how much more wonderful to watch her without her ever realizing. He feels as though he owns a piece of her that she herself can’t even see. She opens his beer absentmindedly. She sighs, puts the bottle cap in the trash, and grimaces at whatever smell she meets with there. He could say something—he half wishes she would look up—but instead he looks back down at the newspaper and pretends to be reading, but he continues every so often to let his eyes rise above the page and linger on her.
They drive along the Gulf toward Sarasota, past Holmes Beach, Bradenton Beach, Coquina Beach. The road is sinewy at night. The car runs the curves as if on tracks. He drags a hand through the evening air, and little bugs swim up, flash death-white in the headlights, and are gone.
At the restaurant, the valet attendants are clustered in the entryway in polo shirts, and as Bill and Sabine pass through the open door, there is the sound of wineglasses being put away. A piano plays in another room. Bottles of liquor are ranged on shelves behind the bar all the way to the ceiling. The walls are covered in corks. The host wears a tidy blue suit and a mustache. He looks over their heads as though checking to see there is not someone more important behind them.
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br /> “Four,” Bill says.
“Name?”
Bill looks to Sabine.
“Musil-Buehler.”
As they enter the dining room, they see the Greevys already at the table, sitting together quietly, having run out of things to say to each other. In the corner, a blind pianist leans on his cane between sets, asking a busgirl for a ginger ale.
“Don’t you look sharp,” Ellen says to Bill, and Chuck laughs.
Like the corn that so engrosses their native Midwest, the Greevys are dry and rattling husks, but how redeemed are these two by the abracadabra of scotch whiskey. Already as the waiter approaches with two glasses on a tray, Chuck Greevy’s cheeks flush red, and Ellen Greevy lets out a high horsey chuckle at some forgettable remark.
“There is nothing sadder in the whole world than a stray cat that’s gotten itself knocked up,” says Ellen. She has just finished a term as the treasurer of the SPCA.
“It’s terrible,” says Sabine.
“A procedure that costs hardly more than an entrée.”
“My pop,” Bill says, “he just got a bucket of warm water when the cat’s time came.”
Sabine looks at him with her lips pressed together.
“That’s one way,” says Ellen.
“The cat got sneaky, though. She had her last litter in the ceiling.”
“It is astounding, isn’t it?” Chuck says to Bill. “The pure stubborn will of life.”
“My husband has gotten very profound since his last prostate exam.”
Chuck holds up his thumb and forefinger. “This close to becoming a eunuch.”
“A eunuch, sir?”
“Impotent,” says Sabine.
“It can be a very emasculating procedure,” Ellen says to Bill. “Have you had your prostate checked?”
“I believe in a higher power,” says Chuck.
“Well, there has to be something,” Bill says to Sabine. “Otherwise, why did everything begin?”
“I am interested,” Chuck Greevy says, signaling a waiter for another scotch. “I’m interested in the deep correspondences between—”
In a flourish of white sleeves, the appetizers arrive.
Carrots have been cut into diamonds and stacked on top of one another. Bill pushes the pile over with his fork, but there is nothing underneath it.
“Oh, gracious,” says Ellen. After a drink or two, she sometimes adopts this Southern air. “Marcus performs miracles with a vegetable.”
Dinner goes on like this. Sabine, Chuck, and Ellen seem to be having one conversation. Bill is having another. Eventually, he gives up talking and excuses himself to the bar. When he returns, Sabine’s eyes look once at his face. She doesn’t look at him again during dinner.
That night, the stars are out. The ocean is like a great fallow field. He had wanted to drive, but she wouldn’t let him. He looks down the streets as they go by and counts the seconds for no good reason. She steers with the heel of one palm.
At the apartment, she puts on music and opens a bottle of wine. He turns on the air conditioner.
“I’m chilly,” she says, and they pass the rest of the night in silence. Around midnight, he goes out to smoke, and she’s in bed when he comes back in. He washes his hands and gets in beside her, and for a long time neither of them sleeps.
What was it they had expected to find in each other? She is a vegetarian. He eats meat. She has never smoked a cigarette in her life. He smoked one before brushing his teeth that night. They both love French fries, convertibles, Frank Sinatra, lying on the beach, but he can lie all day on the sand and she gets antsy after fifteen minutes. Neither of them is a good swimmer, but only he is afraid of drowning. She reads books, does crosswords, makes lists. Books remind him of prison. Her dreams are vivid and theatrical: limousines that stretch kilometers on end, animals that discourse on topics elaborate and mundane, lavish banquets where all the guests are ugly, rich, and bronze. When his dreams do settle into scenery, it’s usually a familiar place: a certain trailer from his childhood, the room where he has gone to sleep, a windowless cell. The light is always dim, and he feels nervous, as though waiting for the neighbors to begin fighting.
When they wake the next day, whatever it was has passed. An argument, maybe. It’s not worth thinking about. She smiles at him from the across the bed. The morning spills in rapid gold across her pillow. He has a headache, and feeling like a holy man alone on a mountain, he takes two aspirin and is penitent. They kiss, and they know that they were not meant to be unhappy. How could they have forgotten. It’s so simple now that it’s hard to understand how it could ever have been otherwise. He kisses her on the ear.
Out at the beach, he lies on the sand like a dog, and like a dog he is content. She reads the newspaper. His head is in her lap. A seagull’s shadow passes across his closed eyes. The spine of the paper snaps inward in the wind. Some voices drift down to them from a family far off up the beach. She is holding the paper in one hand. The other, without thinking about it, she runs through his hair.
Each day ripens slowly—a few clouds shaped like horses out along the horizon; the smell of charcoal, shrimp, and kerosene; the wheeze of her bicycle behind him; cut grass on a sidewalk; the birds and flowers with names he can’t remember; his tiptoeing while she sleeps; a boy walking home from school with a pack banging at the backs of his knees; breezes bouncing house to house down the street; a dream of sharks; her voice on the telephone in the other room; a vertiginous hovering above a urinal; the ringing of car keys; the rubber smell of her skin after a workout and the blue T-shirt spongy with sweat; rough men with bright hooks, fishing from the pier; the bridge to St. Petersburg just visible across the bay like the skeleton of a dinosaur—till at dusk, in a circling of birds, it all fillips into evening and is gone.
It is the middle of the night. He doesn’t remember waking, but here he is. The windows are open, and a breeze moves the curtains. Maybe half an hour he lies there, wondering if he’ll fall back to sleep. He gets up, uses the bathroom, goes and opens the door to the patio, and stands in the doorway. The sky has not begun to lighten. The island is quiet. The wind picks up, and as if the palms have been trying to tell him something, he realizes it’s going to rain. No sooner does he think it than the first drops arrive, not visibly but as a hush, coming in from the Gulf and bringing in the scent of wet paper, canvas, pavement, lime. The hush gathers itself into a grumble, and at last the rain plangs on the gutters and the leaves, and begins to splotch the patio. The shower gains strength without ever seeming to. The water falls gently but with persistence, sending up a light drumming from the cars in the lot. His feet are flecked with rain, and reaching out beyond the eaves, he rinses his hands. Two months have passed since his release: he has no job, no friends, no money. Looking back, what is there?
They have accustomed to each other, and they go around all day attended by the usual joys and miseries. He waits for her at home, lusting, tidying, and lusting once more, but when she finally arrives, he has no interest in her. They begin to excel at disagreements. It is as though they now occupy two diametrically opposed worlds. If he is hot, she is cold. If he is tired, she is ready to clean the apartment. If he tries to kiss her on a street corner, she turns away.
She’s not at the motel, so he goes looking for her at her house. She answers the door in a dress.
“You can’t be here,” she says.
“What are you all dressed up for?”
“Tom said he’ll call the police if he sees you here.”
He scratches the stubble on his throat and sniffs.
“Bill,” she says. “You have to leave.”
He doesn’t leave, and they end up sitting in the kitchen and talking. He is trying to explain to her about how Tom is coming between them, about the stress.
“What stress?”
“The stress! I got a whole wheelbarrow full of stress!”
At seven, she starts to gather her things, and he watches her and looks out the window. The s
un is setting, and the vacationers across the canal are trying to light their grill.
“You’re not going to invite me along?” he says.
They begin to fall apart on Halloween. The day is warm, breezy. Dolphins are still jumping and shimmering out in the breakers, but bales of straw and pumpkins have been set up outside of the grocery stores. Bill and Sabine wake before ten to the sound of first graders parading down the block: superheroes, princesses, witches, goblins, a sheep, a dog, a zombie, a child who appears to have no costume at all. At the very end comes the gym teacher, in gray running shorts, gathering the dropped tiaras, the vampire teeth, the clown noses, the severed finger.
It is Sabine’s favorite holiday. She is to spend the day decorating the motel.
“What time should I come over?” he says.
“Oh,” she says. “Some other people are helping to set things up. You don’t need to worry about it.”
“Who?” he says.
Karin and Britta are stretching cobwebs around the trunks of the palms that afternoon when Bill shows up holding a pumpkin.
“You’re drunk,” Sabine says.
“Don’t worry,” he says and sits down by the pool. “I’m not going to help. You don’t need my help, so I’m just going to sit here and carve this pumpkin.”
But he never carves the pumpkin. He looks at it for a while, and when Britta passes by, he tells her how good it’s going to be, how they’re going to put a picture of this pumpkin in a magazine when he’s done with it. Then he sits and watches Armando putting up plywood gravestones. When Sabine finally asks if he could give her a hand, he jumps out of his seat.