“What the hell?” she says.
“Go home,” Butterfield says. “Both of you. Please.”
“What’s happened?” Fiona wants to know. “What the hell are they doing? What the hell are you doing? Are you—Have you been crying?
Where’s Elizabeth?”
“Bed,” says Butterfield. It’s all he can muster. “Please.”
“You want these people to leave? Because I’ll get them to leave.”
“Just—please—go now. I’ll handle it. Please.”
“Will,” his mother says. “For God’s sake.”
The music stops—is cut off suddenly. Elizabeth has pulled the plug on the stereo. “Go home,” she says. “Both of you. Get the hell out.”
There are mutterings, the specifics of which no one quite hears—
harrumphs and rumblings of insult and umbrage. The two neighbors file out the door and on across the lawn, unsteadily, arm-in-arm. “Good night,” Ariana calls. “Everybody sleep well, because I will.”
It’s like a challenge. Fiona and Holly are quiet, standing in the light of the stoop, staring after them. Butterfield has gained control of himself enough to say, “You all, too. Go home. Please.”
Inside, Elizabeth is moving through the rooms, putting things in place with an emphasis, sniffling. Then she comes to the foyer and, without looking at them standing in the open doorway, she goes upstairs.
“I was tired and wanted to go straight home,” Fiona says.
“What is this, Will?” Holly asks.
“Please, Mom. Please go home now. I have to talk to her.”
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Fiona leans in and takes hold of his arm. “If you need us, call.”
“Come on,” Holly says. “They want to be alone.”
“I was just saying we’re here if they need us. You always do that. You always make it seem like I’m being inconsiderate.”
“All the time,” says Holly. “Every single minute of every day.
That’s me.”
They go on to the car, muttering back and forth at each other. They get in, and Fiona drives them away.
Butterfield walks into the house and takes the phone off the hook.
He hears his wife up there, moving around, closets opening, dresser drawers. She’s packing. An icy wind blows through the heart of him; everything’s crashing. He closes the front door and leans his forehead against it, listening. A silence now. His own breathing, the little hectic beep of the telephone off the hook. His mind presents him with an image of Elizabeth’s face, only a year ago, at Wrightsville Beach, where they had gone for a brief vacation. She’s closing the door of the bathroom, laughing at something he’s said, her dark hair framing her lovely face, an easy, happy pass, her happiness in him. It rakes through him.
“Jesus Christ,” he says. Then he gathers himself and climbs the stairs.
7.
She stops for a moment over her open suitcase, sits on the bed, and begins to cry. But when she hears him on the stairs, she rises, rubs the tears away, and goes back to work. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him come to the entrance of the room.
“Fiona and Holly,” he begins. “Arguing.”
She doesn’t answer, moving to the closet and bringing out a row of dresses, work clothes. She folds them and puts them in, presses them down. Work. The idea of going there again weighs her down like a thousand years. She feels as if she can’t even lift her hands to her face now.
“Please,” he says. “Baby—don’t. Don’t go.”
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resisting his embrace, throwing it off. He stands before her while she covers her face in her hands and wails. It’s as if all the sorrows of her life are playing out of her now, unfolding from the deepest well inside: the lonely years in her parents’ fortress of a house, the bad year of the first marriage, the deaths of her parents and the troublesome time attempting to adjust to Will’s children, who missed their mother and wanted nothing to do with another one, younger, a usurper in their eyes. Everything, up to and including the complications of this summer with the Crazies, and her present unhappiness, which is, in its terrible way, harder now than everything else: her husband’s unfaithfulness. It all keeps breaking over her, like an inner tidal wave, and he’s standing right here.
“I swear—” he begins.
But she can’t listen to it. She can’t bring herself to sit still. She rises and goes on with her packing. He says nothing for a time—a minute, ten minutes. She doesn’t know. It seems long; she can’t be sure. She packs, crying, trying in her pain to think clearly about where she might go, whom she might stay with.
He asks the question: “Where’ll you go, baby?”
And she lets herself down on the bed again, sobbing. “Somewhere—”
she manages to sputter. “Away—from—you.”
“No,” he says. “Please. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.” He sits next to her and puts his arms around her. This time, she doesn’t shake him off but puts her head down on his shoulder and sobs. A sound comes from her—it doesn’t seem human—that he hasn’t ever heard before, anywhere in his life.
“It wasn’t—it didn’t mean anything,” he says.
“Please,” she says. “Please. Please please please shut up.”
So he does, holding tight, while she continues to cry. At length, she gains control of herself and moves from him. The suitcase is open on the bed, with its cargo stuffed in it. There’s still so much to pack. She lifts one of the dresses and then puts it back.
“Don’t go,” he says.
She looks at him, and it comes to her in a rush, what she’ll say. “Oh, I’m not going. You are.”
He says nothing for a moment.
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“You go. Get a room somewhere. I don’t want to live with you anymore.”
“Don’t say that, baby. Please.” He stands. “I’ll do anything. Please.
Anything you say.”
“I know you will,” she tells him. “And I just said it. I want you out of here.”
Now he’s crying again, following her around the room while she puts her clothes back. In her determination—and her rage—she’s found a sort of hurting, cold calm.
“Baby, one indiscretion. One failure. Please. I’ll make up for it. I will. It’ll never happen again. Please.”
She can hear the livid, composed, steely evenness of her own voice.
“She lives next door. Next door. No. This is over. We’re over. Please leave me alone now.”
“Tell me you’ll think about it, Elizabeth,” he sobs. “I’ve been a good husband, haven’t I, a little?”
“I don’t want to talk about it now. Please,” she says. She’s almost thrilled by her own determination.
They end up lying quite still in their bed, far apart and sleepless.
Restless, silent hours in the dark, in the faint glow of light from the next-door house. Sometime after midnight, a pulsing of bright emergency lights commences on the ghostly shapes of the trees in the yard.
Will and Elizabeth rise, separately, without speaking, and go to different windows to look out. An ambulance has arrived, sirenless, parked half on the lawn; the quiet gives an ominous force to the spilled light.
Two men go into the house with a stretcher, and, for a while, there’s only the sinister pulse on the trees and street. The Butterfields watch in silence. Finally, the men emerge, with Ariana on the stretcher. Shostakovich walks beside them, holding his wife’s hand. The men put the stretcher in, Shostakovich climbs in after them, and, in a little while, the ambulance pulls away. It looks as if the front door of the house has been left open, so, without saying anything to Elizabeth, whose silence seems only to express her wakefulness, he goes downstairs and out into the chilly night to look.
No, it’s just the ligh
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locked. He waits a moment. His nerves are unraveling. The whole night is a dome of fright. The few leaves left in the trees make a susurration like the whispering of gathered witnesses. The sky has that rinsed look of a sky after storms; leaves litter the street and the sidewalk. The night sighs around him in the cold sparkle of stars beyond the roof, out of the glaze of light coming from the house. He has been a man who could make himself laugh riding along in a car, remembering. He has been a man who laughed in his sleep, and Elizabeth would wake him and ask him what he was dreaming, and he could never remember, except that it was funny, entirely and sweetly funny.
Back in his own house, he makes his way upstairs and finds her sitting on their bed. He walks over and very gingerly puts his arms around her and, for an instant, she relaxes into them. But then she shakes free with a small sound, almost of alarm, except that there’s something wounded in it, too, a quality of injured rage, a creature caught and helpless in a trap. She moves to the other side of the bed and gets under the blankets, turning her back to him.
He’s quiet, looking at the light on the walls of the room. When Shostakovich comes home from wherever they have taken his wife, what will he have to say and what will he want to do? What will he know, if he knows anything at all? Butterfield has an image of him coming to talk about whatever’s happened—sees him sitting in the downstairs room, seeking to find commiseration. Perhaps it’s something harmless—some household accident. But the way they went out of the house and the way they looked, it’s clear that this was no small thing. Butterfield breathes an anxious sigh, lets it out almost without sound.
His wife isn’t sleeping and is intolerably still next to him in the bed.
Their bed. He can’t believe any of this. He wants to say so, wants to find anything to say. He feels it as she stirs very slightly and is still again. A terror opens inside him, so powerful that he’s sick, and has to rise and go into the bathroom. He runs water into his hands and lavishes it over his face, avoiding his own reflection in the mirror.
At last, after another hour of trying to drift off, he pads soundlessly downstairs, pours himself a tall whiskey, drinks it neat, and then pours 312
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himself another, standing at the kitchen counter; he drinks that one, too, to no effect. Except that it burns so badly all the way down. He takes the bottle and the glass outside. The chill shakes him. It’s a moist cold. Sitting on the stoop, he pours still another drink for himself and swallows it, gasping. Then he gets up and starts over to the Temporary Road house. It’s a kind of aimlessness, though he realizes there is something of the pull of his mother, too, and how strange, at this time in his life, with these troubles.
Shostakovich is sitting wrapped in a blanket on his own front stoop, smoking. Butterfield doesn’t see him until he takes a draw on his cigarette: the little coal glows suddenly bright, and Butterfield nearly cries out from startlement.
“Hell of a thing,” Shostakovich says.
Butterfield stops out on the sidewalk but says nothing.
“Late,” Shostakovich says.
Butterfield recovers something of the resolve to keep up appearances.
He walks toward the other, trying to look casual. “Not a good thing to be sitting out in this cold,” he says.
“I took a cab back,” Shostakovich says. “What’re you drinking?”
“Nothing fancy. Old Crow.”
“I like Old Crow.” Shostakovich draws on the cigarette again.
Butterfield offers him the bottle. He takes a pull from it, then hands it back. Butterfield pours more in the glass, then sets the bottle within reach of the other. “I was going for a walk.”
“Yeah,” Shostakovich says. “I was sitting here shivering. But I didn’t want to go inside. You know how it is.”
“Restless,” Butterfield gets out.
“You must’ve seen the ambulance.”
“Yes.”
“I took a cab back,” Shostakovich says, as if for the first time. He’s been drinking, too. “Ariana’s had another—episode, we call them. Little trouble of hers that comes up. I guess I spoke about it.”
Neither of them says anything for a moment. The night is as still as death now. Nothing stirring anywhere.
Shostakovich offers him a cigarette, simply holding the pack out.
Butterfield declines.
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“This my second pack.”
“I didn’t know you smoke,” Butterfield tells him.
“Started again tonight. This my second pack.”
“I’m sorry.”
Shostakovich shakes his head and sighs, then seems to gather himself. “She’s batshit, you know. Completely cuckoo. Unstable, we politely call it. Has been, too, long as I’ve known her. I don’t know what gets into her.”
Butterfield toes the ground and then becomes aware that he’s doing it and stops. The other is smoking, sighing the smoke.
“I don’t know, this time—don’t know how much longer it can keep going on. You see, she—well, she—her illness usually manifests itself in the way of sex.” Shostakovich looks at him and then looks away, drawing on the cigarette.
“Geoff,” Butterfield says.
But the other man has begun speaking again. “I’ve lived with it so long. She gets it into her head that she has to have somebody. The other night I thought she might be starting on you, you know.”
“No,” Butterfield says, scarcely able to draw the breath for any kind of sound.
“Well—wouldn’t surprise me. She gets this way. It’s tough. It’s been tough. She goes after people, and it’s usually somebody not inclined to go along, even as beautiful as she is. She appalls people, you know?
Sometimes I can catch it before it goes too far. But this time it went in a different direction. I mean she started painting the walls in the living room tonight. We were dancing here, or she was dancing. I know we looked crazy as hell. Nutty. I know. But I was just riding it, going along. Hoping it wasn’t what I’d begun to think it was.” He flicks the cigarette off in the grass, and lights another. “I took a cab home. Lonely in a cab after a thing like that. Wife sedated, sick that way. Absolutely the most exciting woman alive when she’s okay. Then she takes it into her mind that she wants to go off all her meds, and pretty soon we’re back to square one again.”
“I’m sorry,” Butterfield says, meaning it as completely as he has ever meant anything. He desires to find a way to express it adequately, and feels banked at the limit of the words. He needs another language alto-314
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gether. He’s sweating, even in this chill.
“She tried to hurt me this time. Threw things. Said things—nuts.
Quite mad. Accused me of sleeping around on her. I’ve never slept around on her. Never wanted anbody else.”
Butterfield remains silent.
The other man smokes, thinking or remembering, staring off. A small sound rises from the back of his throat, but he seems to shake this off. Then: “Hell,” he says gruffly, “she’ll get back on the medicine and be herself and we’ll have another wild old ride for a while. I signed on for this, you know? I knew all about it when I met her. She’s crazy as a bedbug and completely unreadable and God knows what she’ll do next—but it’s a sweet ride when she’s herself, and I’m no prize, as you might’ve noticed.”
“I guess none of us is so much of a prize,” Butterfield tells him.
“You know the odd thing?” Shostakovich says. “She is. She’s a hell of a prize. Even painting the goddamn living-room walls.”
Again, they’re silent for a time. Shostakovich stares at him. “You all right? You’re sweating like a fever or something. Look at you.”
“It’s the whiskey,” Butterfield tells him, shuddering. He’s sick to his stomach now, too. He waits a moment,
wanting to find something reassuring to tell the other man. But there’s nothing. There’s the chill, and the sweating, and the fact of betrayal. Even so, Shostakovich has already been through the worst of his predicament as he understands it; he seems philosophical now, and Butterfield almost envies him: Shostakovich’s wife isn’t leaving him, at least not presently. In a way, it’s clear that she needs him now more than ever. But then the whole sadness of it all comes through Butterfield in a storm, and he does reach out and pat the other’s shoulder.
Shostakovich says, “You don’t know anybody who’d like to sublet a house, do you?”
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8.
After Holly and Fiona leave, Alison and Stanley sit on the couch in the living room and look through some photographs of the children when they were younger. This is Stanley’s idea. He’s plainly nervous, drinking another beer. Alison thinks of Oliver and his drinking, and it cools her sense of expectation a little. “You say you don’t do that very well,” she tells him.
He smiles. “I’m already a little dizzy. I won’t have any more after this. I’m good for two, really.” He takes a small sip, and then puts it away from himself.
Alison brings it back to where it was. “It’s fine,” she says. “Forgive me.”
“Well, you’re just thinking of me,” he tells her, still smiling. “You don’t want me to wind up in jail again.”
This brings Oliver to mind for them both in a light that makes for uneasiness. They sit, gazing at the pictures, and Alison turns the pages very slowly, saying only the practical things for a time, where and when photos were taken and who is in them. This goes on for ten minutes or so, and then Jonathan wanders in, sleepwalking again. She leads him back to his bed, and, from the entrance of her own room, sees, to her dismay, that her own bed is occupied: Kalie crawled in and is curled there, asleep. Alison goes in and lifts her, and takes her back to her room.
“Don’t wanna sleep here,” Kalie says sleepily.
“Mom?” says Jonathan from his room.
She kisses the side of Kalie’s face and says, “Good night, honey.
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