A slight, sweet smell rose from the hole. The air felt cool on her face.
Lauren went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of mint tea and took a spoonful of liquid magnesium supplement—she’d read in a magazine that this was a natural cure for insomnia. She flipped through the business section of the previous day’s paper. Then she went back to bed. Suddenly chilled, she slid under the covers and pressed herself against her husband’s body.
The next morning, Steve switched off the lamp that Lauren had left on. (He was better at turning off lights and reusing Ziploc bags, and he never let the water run while brushing his teeth.) He didn’t say anything about the coffee table, still pushed aside, or the hole, which had continued to grow. As Lauren watched her husband stride across the living room, she worried he might trip and tumble into it. She imagined a strange, abrupt widowhood. The bouquets and gift baskets that would arrive.
In six years of marriage, Lauren had never imagined life without her husband. She had not indulged anxious thoughts (what if he died? got sick? what if he left her?) because there was no point in worrying about possibilities that might never occur. Steve had told her that some scientists believed the universe was infinite, or maybe there were infinite universes, and every possibility was being played out in every moment. So in one universe, Steve was slipping through the hole. In another, he was leaving her because he’d fallen in love with Amanda. In yet another, they were all dead.
This was exactly why she avoided that kind of thinking. It wasn’t healthy.
Steve calmly walked into the kitchen. He didn’t root around for his tape measure to assess the damage. He didn’t mention stopping by Home Depot to buy materials and make repairs. But it was Monday, and he was always distracted and tense on Mondays—he still got nervous about being in front of a class. Lauren didn’t want to bug him by bringing up the abyss in the living room. Besides, it wasn’t a big deal. They planned to install hardwood anyway.
Over the next week, Lauren sneaked down to the living room each night. The cool air emanating from the hole reminded her of the basement in her childhood house, where her parents had stored the camping gear, the tools, the boxes of clothes and books they planned to get rid of but never did. Sometimes she played amid the junk: paint samples, an old hide-a-bed, a crushed top hat and broken wand from when her older brother was into magic. Sometimes the basement flooded, tepid water seeping from the cracks in the walls, and the whole family spent hours down there with buckets and mops and rubber boots. These floods had been some of the best days of Lauren’s childhood—there’d been a sense of absurdity and family togetherness—and she was quietly disappointed when her father installed a sump pump.
Then one afternoon she came home from school and heard sounds coming from the basement. Her parents weren’t home yet. She pressed her ear to one of the heating vents and heard a girl’s nervous giggle and her brother’s soft, insistent, coaxing voice—noises that made her feel sick to her stomach. She never played in the basement again.
But now something like gravity pulled her toward the hole. She could peer into that nothingness forever, hours slipping by without her knowledge. She felt full of fear and a dark desire. She could jump. Into what? She imagined a still, bottomless lake. Or a windless field of tall, unmoving grass. She imagined that her parents’ bones were down there, heaped and rotting. She waited for something to appear from the hole: a swarm of flies, a crow, a dove. Nothing came.
But the smell grew stronger—like some tropical fruit (what did they grow in Honduras?) beginning to soften. And the hole continued to grow. After a few weeks, she and Steve had to step gingerly around it when they walked through the living room or settled on the couch to watch their shows. (They liked reality programs about home decor and fashion design, though Steve had sworn Lauren to secrecy about this.) And when Amanda and Quinn came over for dinner, they skirted the hole’s edges, pressing their backs to the wall as they passed through to the deck.
Against her better intentions, Lauren drank too much wine that night. She laughed too loudly and told the same story twice—about the time she and Steve saw a black bear on the side of the highway, and Steve thought it was just a really big raccoon. Their friends didn’t stay late, and when Lauren went to hug Amanda goodbye, she nearly pulled them both to the floor.
“I gotcha.” Steve put his arm around her in an embarrassed, apologetic way. “There we go.”
Later, after Lauren made her unsteady way upstairs (they could do the dishes in the morning), she looked in the bathroom mirror and saw that her wine-stained mouth was a dark hollow in her face. She opened it wide, closed it, opened it again. She started to cry.
Steve (she hadn’t even heard him come in) put his hand on her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
Lauren turned away from him, hid her face, but he pulled her to his chest. “You’re just drunk, sweetheart.”
“Don’t you see it?” She took his hand, led him downstairs, pointed to the hole in the floor. “Don’t you see that?”
“What?” Steve turned to her and cocked his head in his guileless way. “You mean that hole?”
Lauren was crying—weeping, really, which was a dramatic word, the kind they used in the novels she read in her book club. She was weeping so hard that she couldn’t speak.
“Of course I see it,” he said, using that patient and patronizing teacher-voice. “What do you want me to say?”
He tried to put his arms around her and she pushed him—not hard, just a nudge. He nearly lost his balance and a small scream caught in her throat. She thought for a second he would fall in, or fall out—just fall.
She grabbed his arm.
“Sweetheart?” His mouth was stained too. As he spoke, blackness stretched across his face. “What do you want me to do?”
“We should go down there. We should see what’s down there.”
“Really?” Steve looked at her like she was one of his students, a child who meant well but needed to be corrected. “Is that really what you want to do?”
Yes. That’s what she wanted to do.
“Lauren? Honey? I’m not sure it’s the best idea.”
The temperature in the room had dropped a few degrees, and a cool breath drifted over her skin. She stepped to the edge, her stocking feet over the hole’s crumbling lip.
“Lauren?”
She remembered being six years old, at her first swimming lesson. Taking one step down the pool’s ladder, then another. The water a cold shock at her ankles, her knees, her thighs.
“Let’s go up to bed.” Steve took her hand, held it so tight it hurt. “I think you’re just tired.”
She’d ended up in the deep end, flailing, choking.
“You’re right.” She let him pull her back. She wiped her eyes, though the tears wouldn’t stop. “I’m sure you’re right.”
Steve gathered her in his arms and carried her upstairs, the way he’d done on their wedding night. (That had been a joke, of course, to carry her over the threshold—a way of both embracing and repudiating tradition, done in the same spirit as when they’d hyphenated their names.) He laid her on the bed, peeled off her T-shirt and jeans, and they made love under the warm sheets.
She woke the next morning hung over and worn from weeping. Steve was still asleep—he was so tired since starting at that school—and she went downstairs to get a glass of water.
In the kitchen, she washed last night’s dishes, then made pumpkin-millet waffles and a pot of coffee. When Steve came downstairs, he kissed the back of her head and lingered to smell her hair. “This looks great, babe.”
She handed him a plate with two buttered waffles. She wasn’t hungry, but he ate happily, and she admired him for it. He looked at the news on his laptop, and told her what was happening in Tunisia, or maybe it was Syria. He got another waffle. She sipped her coffee.
Behind them, a black mouth opened wider and wider. Steve and Lauren held hands across the table, and the morning—one of many mornings, infinite m
ornings—passed in its sweet and usual way.
The Watch
Steve first met Jennifer before class in the staff room, while he made himself a cup of Earl Grey tea.
“Are you boiling water?” she asked. “Is there enough for another cup?”
There was only enough for one cup, but he insisted she have it. She drank a kind of sweetened coffee that came in a small tin and was probably full of chemicals. His wife would have been appalled, but Steve found this disregard for good health—and even good taste—to be novel and charming. While he boiled himself more water, he introduced himself as the guy who teaches science, and Jennifer Walton said she’d recently been hired to teach math and Spanish. She was blond and had an athletic build that gave her a robust, all-American look, though she was from Vernon, British Columbia. He noticed her strong arms and wrists as she sipped her frothy drink. She was so different from Lauren, a petite, nervous brunette, with delicate bones and a fluttery manner.
“I’ve never taught at a middle school before,” she said. “The grade nines scare me already. You can smell their hormones when you walk in the door.”
He assured her that you get used to the smell.
She laughed. “Good to know. See you at lunch?”
He nodded and glanced at the time—he had his morning routine down to a science—and saw that his watch had stopped. That had never happened before. The watch had belonged to his father, and was as sturdy and well built as the old man had been. Recently, Lauren had replaced the stiff leather with a silver strap more suited to Steve, and presented it to him a couple of days after their twelfth anniversary, which had passed with little fanfare. The gift was one of his favorites, combining Lauren’s care for him—she understood how much he missed his dad—with her aesthetic talent.
Steve shook his wrist, and that solved it. Time started up again.
At a staff meeting a month later, when Jennifer sat beside him (she smelled crisp and fresh like the outdoors, probably because she cycled to work each morning from her rented apartment in Fairfield), his watch stopped again.
And it happened the following day when she asked him to join her for lunch at the Mediterranean deli near the school. This was where the staff went to buy lunch—the students stuck to the school cafeteria or the nearby Wendy’s.
Lunch on a Tuesday. That was innocent enough. Plenty of people have lunch together; Steve had eaten lunches with people he didn’t even like. So he agreed, and they sat at a table near the back and ordered a dish of hummus and baba ghanoush to share, a plate of warmed pita, and two Greek salads. He encouraged her to try the Turkish coffee.
“I’ve always wanted to see Istanbul, haven’t you?” she said. He hadn’t. But in her company, the idea of traveling to an enormous foreign city didn’t seem intimidating—it seemed exciting.
“Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”
He asked what she would do with her two months off during the summer, which was still eight months away. She had another job lined up as a guide in the Parliament buildings, showing tourists around the grand rooms and staircases. She wouldn’t take more than a couple weeks of actual vacation because she was saving to buy a condo.
Steve, by contrast, hoped to do very little. “I like to garden and do yard work. Take my kids camping,” he said. “That must sound boring.”
“Not at all.” She rested her chin on her hand. “That sounds lovely.”
“I go for runs.” Steve said this to impress her, though it must be obvious he’d let himself go lately. It had been a busy year. Lauren had started a new business as a real-estate stager; she talked almost nonstop about curtains and lampshades, and made repeated trips to IKEA in Vancouver, leaving him to deal with the kids. Ruby and Cameron were five and three, respectively, and had so much energy that Steve sometimes shunted them outside, where they literally ran circles around the backyard. Cam, the youngest, once did so until he threw up. On top of this, Steve’s father had died this year, and Steve had spent hours sorting through his dad’s possessions and acting as the executor of his will. Steve hadn’t found time to grieve yet, though he had the sense that he ought to.
When he thought about the summer, he mostly looked forward to sleeping.
“I’d like to take the kayak out too,” he said. “Do a few hikes.”
They heard, distantly, the first end-of-recess bell. Steve looked at the time, hardly believing that fifty-five minutes had passed so quickly, and saw that his watch had stopped. He would have to take it to be repaired.
“We should get going.” Jennifer zipped up her sweatshirt—she dressed like a gym teacher, but made jeans and T-shirts, hoodies and ponytails, look appealing. “I don’t think I can finish this coffee. Do you want some?”
It occurred to him that sharing a cup with a woman who was not his wife—putting his lips to the same rim as she put hers—was something he hadn’t done in a long time. “Are you sure?”
“I’m a caffeine addict who can’t drink real coffee.” She laughed. “It’s embarrassing. Usually I stick to Coke.”
He picked up the small clay cup. She had stirred in several packages of sugar, and the liquid inside was thick and dark and sweet.
Tuesday lunch became their routine. He learned that she had a boyfriend in Calgary, a two-and-a-half-year, long-distance relationship. She encouraged him to tell her about Lauren and the kids, and never seemed bored by his reports of the insanity, delight, exhaustion, and terror of fatherhood. He asked where she’d learned Spanish, and she told him about her exchange in Madrid. She asked him for advice on how to deal with Tyson Mapplebee, a fourteen-year-old who’d made remarks about her body in front of the class. She cried when she told Steve about it, sitting at that small, flimsy table in the deli. “I sent him out of the room, but by then I’d completely lost control. You know how kids get. They were staring at me. Waiting for me to freak out.”
“Tyson probably has a crush on you,” said Steve. “Not that it makes it okay.”
He reached across the table and touched her arm in a way he hoped was light, comforting, friendly. She looked down at his hand and frowned, so he withdrew it. But she just wiped her eyes and said, “Your watch is wrong.”
He shook his wrist. “I don’t get it. I just had the battery changed.”
“I’m sorry about this. I’m sorry to be so emotional.” She laughed at herself, then looked around the deli. “I guess we’re lucky no one else is here.” She meant any of the school staff. Other teachers sometimes joined them for lunch, which was always a disappointment to Steve. “What would they think if they saw us sitting at a table together,” she said, “and me in tears?”
For months, he didn’t tell anyone about the fact that his watch stopped working every time he saw Jennifer Walton. Not his wife, of course, but not Jennifer either.
It wasn’t until December, right before Christmas break, that he mentioned it. He and Jennifer were both looking forward to the time off work, but were also apprehensive about the holiday. She was going to Calgary to see her boyfriend, to finally make up her mind about him. And Steve would be celebrating his first Christmas without his dad, who (he told Jennifer, and she listened with that look of thoughtful interest that he adored) gave extravagant gifts, sang old love songs in a deep baritone, and spent most holidays with a glass of scotch in his hand. Steve felt enormous loneliness when he thought about Christmas without his dad, and felt the same thing when he thought about two and a half weeks without Jennifer. So he suggested something out of the ordinary.
He told his wife about an end-of-term dinner—though from his vague explanation, Lauren probably understood he was going out with several colleagues—and met Jennifer at a small Indian restaurant across the bridge, at the other end of town. They ate butter chicken, rice with raisins and coconut, and spinach daal. They drank beer, felt celebratory—school’s out!—and then, by accident, as though by tripping and falling into it, acknowledged their feelings for each other.
“What do we do now?” said
Jen.
They held hands across the table—relieved, exhilarated, full of expectation—and Steve told her about the watch. He explained that every time he saw her—like clockwork, he said, feeling witty—it stopped.
She shook her head, amazed. She didn’t laugh, or question it. “That’s exactly how I feel,” she said.
In that moment, he felt sure that his dad would have liked her. His father had loved Lauren, of course, but he wouldn’t disapprove of Jennifer either.
Steve marveled at his luck to be sitting across from her, to be holding her hand. Then he marveled at that watch: its simplicity, its complexity, its longevity. He marveled that someone had invented a mechanism that could tell time, that could guide him through his day. And the fact that it could be worn on your wrist was almost a miracle!
But if there were ways to gauge time and space and gravity, why was there nothing to help him now? No scale to measure competing, worldly joys: the weight of duty, the tidal force of desire.
Jen undid the watch’s clasp and slid it off his wrist. “It’s beautiful,” she said, and ran one finger over its face. She knew it had been a gift from his wife, and she held it carefully. He liked this about her—she was a discreet, gentle person. A person you could trust. Which was good, because so was he. He didn’t want to leave Lauren. He didn’t want to wreck his life. And his kids, my god. The previous night, Ruby had announced that she planned to change her name to Nouille, the French word for “noodle.” He couldn’t hurt those kids.
The Dark and Other Love Stories Page 20