The two women go on into the kitchen, and the two men are left alone. Geoffrey seems to brood a moment, sipping his wine. Butterfield breathes out with difficulty, unable to believe the badness of the situation. He tries to hear what the women are talking about in the kitchen, and can’t. Shostakovich, the cuckold, smiles and nods, as if he’s just told himself a joke.
“You usually do the dishes around here?” he asks.
“I do, yeah.”
“Me, too, at home. Ariana’s inclined to dark moods when she doesn’t get her way.”
They say nothing for a beat. Butterfield can’t look at him. He stares into his wine.
“Do the cooking, too,” Shostakovich says. “Most of it.”
“I do some,” Butterfield says.
“Pisser id’n it?”
He experiences an abrupt need to contradict the other man, as if being too agreeable might make him suspicious. “I like it, actually.”
Shostakovich shrugs. “I like what I get out of it. Or for it.”
Sex again. Butterfield wants to excuse himself and go upstairs and crawl under the blankets of his bed and bury his face in the dark of his 228
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own folded hands.
“You ever been around anyone who had a nervous breakdown?”
Shostakovich asks suddenly, quietly, leaning forward.
There’s a brief, awful silence.
“No.” Butterfield waits.
“Makes you watchful.”
Now the quiet seems to expand.
“You know what I’m saying?”
Nodding, he thinks of the other man spying on Ariana, following her, or having her followed, to The Heart’s Ease bookstore, the parking lot by the train station. His mind races.
“Ariana’s capable of some pretty zany shit,” Shostakovich murmurs.
Then: “I guess all of them are.” Now it’s as if he’s seeking some sort of reassurance.
Butterfield can’t supply it, and another bad silence ensues. The women are talking in the kitchen about the economics of running a house, specifically leftovers and how they preserve and use them. A perfectly practical conversation between two polite strangers. Wives.
“There’s a price,” Shostakovich says under his breath. “For all that high-strung sex.”
Now Butterfield feels directly challenged, as if the other is indeed referring to the episodes that glare with lurid clarity in his mind. He feels the impulse to stand suddenly and deny that anything happened. But then he realizes that Shostakovich is drunkenly complaining about his own personal life with the woman on the other side of the wall. Now, the poor man drains his glass and picks up the empty wine bottle as if to be sure it is indeed empty.
Butterfield rises quickly and goes into the dining room for another.
Elizabeth catches his eye and frowns, and he gives her a shrug.
Back in the living room, Shostakovich is looking through the CDs.
Butterfield opens the new bottle and pours two glasses, then asks the women if they want more. Ariana says she does, and Elizabeth, after a hesitation, says she’ll have some, too. Butterfield pours the other glasses, then puts the bottle on the coffee table and sits down. Shostakovich is still looking through the CDs.
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“See anything?” Butterfield asks him.
“You got any Led Zeppelin?”
“Somewhere.”
“Ariana’s messy, too.”
The women are finished putting the food away, and they come back into the living room, where the men are drinking. They drink their wine, too, and, abruptly, the evening seems about to die. Elizabeth settles next to Butterfield and gives his wrist a small, caressive pat, which slices through him, then sits back and lets her hands lie open in her lap. It’s the posture of someone for whom the evening is winding down, and there’s even something pointed about it, so Butterfield glances at the other two, wondering if they’ll take the hint. He sees Ariana gazing at Elizabeth, and he has the sickening realization that the woman must be having the same thoughts about Elizabeth that he has been having about Shostakovich, who now starts talking about catastrophic experiences in college, his bad early twenties, when life seemed so laden with anxiety and despair. Again he relates the story of when he met Ariana, and she interrupts him: “You’re repeating yourself.”
“I was gonna tell about my Brando experience, sweetie.”
“Don’t,” she says.
But he goes on. Ariana had a flirtation with some kind of Buddhist feminism in her senior year, he tells them, and locked herself away in a house with two other women who were helping her seek Nirvana by renouncing all things male. She told Shostakovich that she wanted nothing to do with him anymore, and spent days and weeks in a big bed with these two women, who were, according to Shostakovich, heavy, large, and gross. They lived in this old house with a mansard roof and an ivy-covered wall. It was like a castle. One night, Shostakovich stood out on the lawn and called her name, like Brando in Streetcar, he says, over and over, until she got thrown out of the house by the two women.
They made love that night, he and Ariana, in the downstairs closet of the fraternity house where he had been staying. “Ever make love in a closet?” he asks Butterfield with a wink.
“Not me,” Butterfield says, trying not to allow into his field of vision the stare that Ariana sends his way. He can almost hear her say, “How 230
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about on the floor behind the counter of a bookstore? How about in the back seat of a car?” But her husband is going on with his story, how they were discovered in the morning, and how a wild fight broke out between Shostakovich and his housemates, with Ariana in the middle of it, swinging a frying pan she’d gotten from the kitchen sink. “I got beat up,” he says. But it was worth it, for the eroticism of that closet all night. You get the smells coming right up at you, because it’s such a closed-in space. Very romantic.”
“You’ve got a pretty strange idea about what’s romantic,” Elizabeth says.
“Erotic, romantic. One.”
“But they’re different things, aren’t they? Though I guess you can have them together. But for romantic, I like calm, and candlelight.”
“How about you?” Ariana asks Butterfield.
“Calm and candlelight,” he says as evenly as he can under the circumstances. Again, he hears Not in a car, while snow covers the windows?
A moment later, Ariana does speak, announcing that she has the munchies, so Butterfield hurries unsteadily into the kitchen to prepare more crackers and cheese, wondering if they’ll stay all night. In his pe-ripheral vision, he’s startled to see the tall shape in the black dress. She’s taken off her shoes, and he didn’t hear her come in. It’s as if she’s a spirit, standing there. She takes a cracker from the plate and bites the edge off of it. “What was that?”
“Pardon?” he says.
“You looked at me funny. Don’t do that. Everything’s fine, you know.
Nothing’s changed.”
He can’t speak. Shostakovich is talking to Elizabeth in the other room about having seen Bonnie Raitt in concert two years ago.
“We could meet here while they’re at work,” Ariana murmurs, one exquisite eyebrow raised.
Butterfield drops the knife he has just taken from the silverware drawer, bends to pick it up, then sets it down and rests his hands on the counter, feeling the need to support himself. She takes a look at the doorway, then reaches over and pulls him toward herself by taking hold of his belt. He almost falls into her.
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“I’m drunk,” he gets out.
“I want you, bad,” she whispers. “I’ve been thinking about you all day.” Then she quickly steps back, folding her arms and checking the doorway again. “All day.”
“We’re almost out of cheese,” he says, and his voice cracks like an adolescent’s, one ridiculous falsetto note on t
he word cheese. He’s holding on to the counter again. “Damn.”
“That’s all you can say? You’re out of cheese?” She makes her own voice do what his has done. He understands that she’s making fun of him. It’s weirdly arousing. “Don’t you want to play some more?” she says softly, staring at him, grinning.
“Jesus Christ,” he says. “Don’t do this.”
“Are you turned on?”
No word rises to his mind. His own ribcage seems to be collapsing.
“I’m right next door,” she says. “They both work all day.”
“Will you please—” He stops. Then he picks up the knife, looks at it, no cheese to cut with it. He sets it down again and moves unsteadily to the refrigerator. He remembers Shostakovich’s strange question: “You ever been around anyone who had a nervous breakdown?” Ariana sighs, then hums something indistinguishable but sultry-sounding, almost studiedly so. It’s as if she’s performing for him. In the other room, the talk is animated—all about different concerts, Elizabeth talking of having seen Arlo Guthrie in nineteen-ninety. Butterfield stares into the confusion of foods in his own refrigerator, and there isn’t any cheese that he can see.
“Somewhere,” he says. “Cheese. Where the fuck do we keep the—”
Ariana steps too close and puts one hand on his hip while leaning in to bring out a brick of feta. “How about this?”
“Okay, yeah—there. Thanks,” he says, and takes it from her. She closes the refrigerator and walks with him back to the counter. He begins cutting slices of the cheese. She’s standing so near; he looks at his own hands, trembling.
“Mmm,” she murmurs. “Life just got pretty again.” She leans in and kisses his ear, then reaches to wipe away any lipstick as he steps back from her.
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“Here,” he gasps, holding up a small slice of the cheese, looking at her as if at some primal force coming toward him. She takes his wrist and puts the slice in her mouth, licking his fingers. Butterfield has to move to sit down at the table. He does so, holding his hands to his head.
“I’m so drunk,” he says. “Leave me here, will you?”
“No,” she says. “And I’m sober.”
“Dizzy,” he says. “Jeez. I can’t stand up.”
“Don’t pay any attention to Geoffrey,” she says louder. “He’s stoned.
He gets that way.” She strolls to the other side of the room, to his right and in front of him. It’s a sort of parading. He can hear Shostakovich going on in the other room, and then realizes, to his horror, that it’s not speech. Shostakovich is singing. Ariana’s looking at Butterfield, arms folded. “Christ,” she says. “Here we go.”
2.
Elizabeth sits staring at him, while he bellows the song, an old Sinatra standard, “One for My Baby.” He’s trying to use Sinatra’s intonations and phrasings, and he’s butchering it. It’s terrible, not even close to being in tune. He wanders through several different keys, and she steals a glance at the entrance of the room, hoping for Will to show there, with Ariana.
It’s as if she’s being punished.
The squawk goes on from Shostakovich, and she stares, realizing that Will has indeed come to the entrance of the room, with Ariana just at his shoulder. They look like a couple. Ariana stands too close to him, gazing at him. And the expression on her face gives everything away. It’s all there. Elizabeth believes it wholly in the instant that she attempts to reject it, telling herself without words that it’s impossible, it can’t be.
She feels the nerves lining her abdomen. The nerves seem to be tearing apart. Her headache returns like a wave of illness.
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Ariana walks around Will and into the room, crossing to stand before her husband, arms folded, one leg slightly extended. Someone impatiently awaiting an outcome, an answer.
Shostakovich slows and stops. “That’s my favorite song.”
“You murdered it,” Ariana says. “Like all the other times.”
“I’m stoned.”
She turns to Will. “He thinks that excuses what he just did.”
“I wasn’t that bad,” says Shostakovich.
“You were worse than bad.” Again, she looks at Will. “We can go to the moon, we can send a rover to fucking Mars. You’d think we could invent a little implant for the ear that would sense the alcohol level in the blood and start emitting a little voice: ‘That’s not as funny as you think it is. You’ve already said that four times. You are not meant to sing this song, ever in your life, not even alone, and not even in the shower.’ You know?”
Shostakovich looks around her at Elizabeth. “Was I that bad?” he says.
Elizabeth manages to say, “I’m tone deaf.”
“So’s Geoffrey,” says Ariana. “I think we should go.”
Geoffrey holds his hands out in a gesture of helplessness. “You guys just made some crackers and cheese, right?”
So, the four of them sit down again, like people in the middle of some shock, who can’t find the strength to do anything at all. Will pours more wine. But no one has any, and no one touches the cheese, either. Ariana nibbles at a cracker. Her husband’s talking about how he came to admire the artistry of Frank Sinatra. Elizabeth watches Ariana’s face and works to imagine the Italian hillside where the grapes grew for this wine. There’s a little illustration of the place on the label of the bottle. She places herself there, sunlight on vines, pristine blue sky. She has always believed that one manufactures at least again as many doubts and fears as are warranted in life, and she wants to dismiss everything she’s presently feeling as the product of anxiety, the stress of the last few weeks. She watches Ariana turn the hair just above her husband’s ear with her index finger and thumb, an easy, affectionate gesture. It’s all been a mistake, Elizabeth thinks, all the product of anxiety, something 234
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she imagined out of the pressure of this evening she didn’t want.
The talk has grown animated again, Shostakovich rattling on about how progressive jazz bores him, and Will agreeing with him about it all, in his strangely agitated state. He’s not himself. But it’s just that these people are essentially strangers, and the night is wearing thin.
She surfaces from these thoughts to hear Shostakovich say, “No shit, man I play the sax.”
“I said only when he’s drunk,” Ariana says. “Right Geoff ?”
He shakes his head. “You’re confusing my sax playing with those times when I think you’re interesting, sweetie.”
Will looks at Elizabeth. “I’m drunk and tired.” She can’t read his face.
“Just kidding,” says Shostakovich. “I’ll be right back.”
He rises and heads for the door. His wife watches him go. He closes the front door carefully, and, in the quiet that follows, Ariana sighs—
luxuriantly, it seems—stretching her long legs and arms, lying back, gazing at the ceiling. The gesture is stunning in context; Elizabeth stares at her, half-expecting her to disrobe.
“I’m sorry about this,” Ariana says. The little mound of her sex shows through the liquid cloth of the dress where it lies over her outstretched legs.
Elizabeth quickly looks at her husband, who seems also aware of the sight, and is busy staring at his hands. “It’s so late,” she manages.
“Do you have any aspirin?” Ariana asks, still gazing at the ceiling.
“I’ll get it,” says Will.
While he’s gone, Elizabeth sits forward and takes the last of her wine, trying not to look at the other woman.
“Men,” Ariana says. “If only they had their own vaginas.”
“What?” Elizabeth says.
The other woman sits up. “You never heard that? I can’t remember who said it. It’s a bad joke, I guess. But Geoffrey’s so transparent.”
Will comes back with a glass of water and two aspirin tablets.
Ariana takes them,
and drinks the water. “Thanks,” she says, and smiles.
Elizabeth watches him leave the room with the empty glass.
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“I shouldn’t drink wine,” Ariana says. “I’ll be wide awake all night.
This whole thing now is ridiculous. We should’ve left an hour ago. I’m so terribly sorry, really.”
The door opens, and Shostakovich enters, carrying a leather case, where his saxophone is sheathed in blue velvet. He has a CD with him.
A recording of Coltrane’s. He gives it to Will and asks him to put it in the player on track five. And he stands there in the middle of the floor, getting ready to play. Ariana’s still lying back on the couch, eyes closed now, hands folded over her lower abdomen. “Bill Clinton, jazzman,” she says. “Christ.” The music starts, a saxophone—Coltrane’s—and a piano.
Shostakovich joins in. It’s surprisingly good at first, if louder than the recording.
Elizabeth’s headache is far worse now. She realizes that she’s drunk, too. Drunk and stoned. And, she thinks, in some way, corrupt. She has a strange moment of sensing herself to be, on some profound level, a prevarication, a falseness. It’s scary. As if her soul were drifting away from her body. She looks at Shostakovich fingering the valves on his saxophone, his eyes shut tight, the muscles of his face contorted, and then she turns to her husband, who’s sitting with his head in his hands. Ariana hasn’t moved; she might even be asleep.
The fears about this woman and Will are pharmaceutical, Elizabeth decides; it’s all part of the paranoia of drugs. They’ve all gone over some line. Shostakovich plays on, faltering only a little, and, finally, the song ends. That is, the recording ends. But Shostakovich keeps playing, building to a terrible crescendo, losing everything, the notes failing, becoming an ear-splitting scratching. Track six starts, and this brings him, at last, to a halt, though at first he makes a stuttering effort to play along with that track, too. The tempo is too fast, the rhythms too erratic. He puts the sax down in the blue velvet of the open case, and sits, with an exhausted suddenness, on the sofa next to his immobile wife.
“Damn,” he says. “It’s been a long time. I fucked it all up. I’m sorry.”
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