by Ben Greenman
William walked across the street. Emma was still outside, shoving something from the pathway to the lawn with her foot. “Look,” she said. “Some of these roof tiles fell off. That guy who sold it to us said he’d just gotten the roof redone.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” William said.
“Obviously,” she said. “But Stevie didn’t bother checking. He’s such an operator at work, but get him out of the office and there’s no one more gullible.” Inside, there was a masonry of boxes against the dining room wall; the place looked like a set under construction. “Task at hand,” she said. “It’s a husband’s job, you’d think, but he’s too busy working on his song. Did I tell you the title? ‘I Stand (For America).’ With parentheses and everything.”
She brought him water and he stood at the kitchen counter and drank it. Emma’s house was like his own—the floor plan was the same, bedrooms off to the right along a narrow hallway—and so he didn’t need to ask where the bathroom was or search for the niche with the garbage can in the kitchen. The differences came down to the accents: the fixtures in the guest bathroom (hers were better) or the sliding glass door that led outside (he won here).
“William,” Emma said from the bedroom. “Will you bring the big box in here?”
He went into the back of the house, turned left. “In here?” he said. He slid the box against the wall. The book she had been reading when she came to the door was on a table near the bed, title covered this time by a pair of sunglasses. He turned to find Emma blocking the door. She took his hand, put it on the center of her chest, and slid it down across her belly. A fact broke through the afternoon. “Go to the bed,” Emma said. He did, and watched as she swiftly popped the snaps on her shirt and unclasped her bra. The cups sat loose on the swell of her belly; her breasts were not much larger than he remembered, but they were darker at the nipples, harder to dispute. “Is there a reason you’re still dressed?” It was the same voice as in Chicago, but thinner; it was as if it had been stretched from there.
“I don’t have anything,” he said. “You know.” He made a circle with his thumb and middle finger.
“Haven’t you been paying attention? You can’t get pregnant on top of pregnant.” She covered the distance between them, eyes beginning to go liquid as she reached the bed. William had trusted her in Chicago, without any reason but her beauty. He had distrusted her at Gloria Fitch’s party for the same reason. That afternoon, in her house, he tried to make his peace with what he saw, buttons all undone, but it was too much for him; he was unable to do more than peel the fabric back to the hips and trace what was beneath. It worked for her but not for him, which worked for him.
Breaths weren’t words. They were more. He turned toward her when he heard them stop. “Shit,” she said, and he felt a surge of terror. “It’s two. We need to get my car.”
She dressed again, quickly, forgoing her bra, and he even sped a little on the way to the lot. They couldn’t find her car at first (“That’s because it’s beyond anonymous,” she said. “I don’t even know the plate number yet”) but she identified it by the rear passenger window, where there was a doll of a bear cub with suction cups on all four limbs. “It’s waving good-bye to you,” she said. “Go.”
William made it home in time for a quick shower, after which he put his work clothes back on and went to get Louisa. While he waited for her outside her office, he thought back, with some effort, to the first time they had met. The guys at the paper had talked about the new writer who’d been hired from a Dallas magazine, a woman who specialized in restaurants but had also done good work on municipal corruption. They had her name as Louise, and that made William imagine someone older, to the point where he didn’t even think to connect it to the tall brunette who was standing out in front of the building, squinting at the name plates, as he went out. He assumed she was there for the temp agency that shared the building and was surprised and a little embarrassed to return from lunch and find her in the small front lobby of the newspaper, filling out new-employee forms. What stayed with him most specifically was how she had folded her frame into one of the small uncomfortable lobby chairs and failed to meet his eye. Later, she claimed nerves, though nerves couldn’t explain the smile she directed down into her paperwork: sly, knowing, waiting him out.
“Funny that you were thinking of that,” Louisa said after she got into the car and asked him why he looked like he was a million miles away. “Guess who called me today?”
“Me, but from the past?”
“Now that’s a long-distance call,” she said. She folded and unfolded her hands brightly. “No. It was Jim. He’s going to be in town in a few weeks. The usual drill: business, one night off, wanted to know if we could meet him and his wife for dinner or drinks.”
“Sure,” he said. “I don’t see why not. Just tell me when.”
They passed a fire truck going the other way, and when he turned onto their street he jerked his head up to signal that he had just recovered a recent memory. “Oh,” he said. “I talked to our new neighbor today. She was getting into her car. She looked like she was expecting. Or maybe fat.”
“That’s nice,” Louisa said.
“Is it?” he said. “That’s all we need: another kid in the neighborhood.” She turned away in hurt. Her injury was his protection.
FIVE
William was loading dry cleaning into the back seat of his car when he noticed Tom’s Charger parked alongside a sagging Cadillac. A chunk of Tom’s grille hung like a loose tooth. William peeked into windows. He didn’t see Tom in the barbershop or the grocery. He was about to give up when he heard a tapping noise that summoned him to the Chinese restaurant in the corner of the mall. He pressed a hand to the window for shade. Tom tapped the window again with his chopsticks and motioned William inside.
A chair was already pulled out. “Sit,” Tom said. He was unshaven, or at least unevenly shaven. On the table in front of him there was a bowl of white rice, a pair of empty beer bottles, and a plate with the remnants of something glutinous. “Chicken, I think,” Tom said when he saw William looking. “Pork? Whatever it was, it wasn’t very good.” He shoveled rice into his mouth like he was stoking a coal car.
William hung his jacket on the back of a chair. “They asked for you at the Fitches’.”
“Like I said, busy.” Tom tugged on his own ear. Giving the sign to steal, William and Louisa used to joke when they saw someone gesturing like that.
“I keep waiting for you to call in that favor.”
“Keep waiting.” He slashed a finger across his throat. William wasn’t sure what he was killing. “Something else is hatching. A woman, the mother of one of my students, called me. She went with her daughter to the show and she wanted to meet me.”
“She’s a groupie?”
“No,” he said. “A publisher. She wants to do a book of the graphs.” He scowled on the nouns.
“Sounds terrible,” William said. “Someone likes what you do. I feel for you.”
“That’s not it at all,” Tom said. Grains of rice plummeted from his chopsticks. “I don’t know if I want my work in a book. It’s like a sealed cube with mirrors on the inside.”
“People open books up. They read them.”
“Maybe I’m wrong to be fixating on the book. Maybe it’s more about this woman. You should have heard the tone of her voice, like she’d just found the thing of value that was going to move her forward in her career.”
“Maybe she did,” William said. “Why is that a problem if you’re the thing of value?”
“You understand even if you say you don’t,” Tom said. “She’s just doing what all ants do, which is to go on up the anthill. You can’t stop them. You shouldn’t even try. What you can do is prevent yourself from wondering what a man should never wonder, which is whether you’ve already gone up the anthill and come back down.” Outside the window, a car alarm began to chirp. “Damn it,” Tom said, pounding the table hard enough to rattle the
beer bottles. “That thing’s been going off every ten minutes for the last two hours.”
“How long have you been sitting here?” William said.
Tom wasn’t listening. “What about these fires, Billy Boy? People are whispering that they’re being set on purpose. We were right there. We could have seen the perpetrator stealing away.”
“I heard a report on the radio yesterday where they said they don’t think Birch Mutual was linked to the rest.”
“Think about fire, though. There’s this absurd idea that it needs people to set it. It’s so much older than we are, so much more basic to the planet. We have our human creativity, but it pales in comparison to what fire does. It destroys other things and creates more of itself. We just move along in our boring lives, boring office jobs.”
“Yeah,” William said. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Tom jerked his head up. “How do you mean?”
“I don’t have a job like that. Not anymore. I punched my boss.” He had Tom’s attention now. “The other day, one thing led to another. Isn’t that always how it goes?”
“Until it gets back to the Prime Mover,” Tom said. “That’s the thing that causes movement but is itself unmoved. But none of us is that. We receive one stimulus and produce another, and eventually it all adds up to life, or what people like to call life.” He seemed to feel the vanity of what he was saying and caught himself. “Does Louisa know?”
“Not yet. Officially I’m on leave. I’m waiting to hear my fate.”
“Well, she won’t hear it from me. But you know what they say. Amor tussisque non celantur.”
William took a stab at it. “Love and fighting can’t be hidden?”
“Love and a cough,” Tom said. “It’s Ovid. I think what he means is that wives have a way of finding out. Though it sounds like she’s a little inward these days, with all those thoughts of new houses dancing in her head. How long’s it been, a month?”
“Less.”
“In the course of a life, a month is nothing.” Tom produced a pen and started scribbling on a place mat: arcs, lines, loops. “Figure you live until seventy. That’s more than eight hundred months. If you graphed your life, you wouldn’t even see this. No one would. So don’t worry that it’s so consequential. Contextualization is the leading cause of endurance.”
“Makes sense,” William said. It didn’t, exactly. He didn’t know whether Tom was advising him to tell Louisa or not.
Tom folded the place mat and pushed it toward William. “Do you know how I got into graphing in the first place?”
William sensed something large about to surface. “I have to go,” he said.
Tom reached out for William’s shoulder. His hand held William in place. “I need something,” Tom said. “From you. A favor.”
“Is this the one from the barbecue?”
Tom blinked and then brightened. “Right,” Tom said. “That act of kindness has become a likelihood again. And this time I can tell you more. I need for you to be my wheelman.”
“For what?” William said. “Are we pulling off a heist?”
Tom didn’t answer. He was bent over his place mat again, scribbling madly. “There are three main shapes in a life,” he said. “The bell, the L, the whale’s tail.” William left him there, still scribbling.
When he got home Louisa was watching TV, and he watched with her, a decorating show where they scraped sticky wallpaper off a baby’s room and repainted it a pale green that even William had to admit was a huge improvement. “They said there are only seventeen kinds of patterns that can repeat,” Louisa said, and William, feeling a weight in his chest, didn’t answer. She got up to make them dinner, and he noticed that there was a red-brown hair on the sleeve of his shirt. He trapped it with a fingertip. It was human, but it wasn’t Tom’s or Louisa’s or Emma’s or anyone else’s he knew. It was proof of a world beyond him, of questions he would never be asked, and the thought of that allowed him, suddenly, to breathe.
SIX
There had been a few brief periods of unemployment in William’s life, but only one that had resulted directly from his actions. He had been a copywriter in a small advertising agency where he had a boss only a few years older than him, a slick former athlete named Frank who was married with kids and also running around with a redheaded secretary. (William couldn’t remember her name; Jessica?) Frank talked about “isolating what is wanted” and “finding the center of a product,” but mostly he just dumped his own work on William’s desk along with unreasonable deadlines. William accepted the situation with good enough humor at first, but one night he saw his boss and the secretary fighting in the parking lot. She was crying. Jenny. He reported the incident to the head of the company, and a week later Frank fired William. “I don’t know what you were thinking, guy,” he said. William felt he had struck a blow for truth or morality or fairness or something like that, and it took about six weeks before it all drained out of him and he saw that he’d been a damned fool. This time it was even quicker. The sense of righteousness he had felt as he squared his feet and shifted his weight had gone out of him the second he landed the blow on Hollister.
Instead, he was fidgety, angry at himself and at everyone else, too. He couldn’t tell Louisa yet, or at least didn’t want to, and her manner was discouraging him even further. After the party she said she was coming down with a cold, and she was, but even after recovering she remained in a state of steady insensibility. She was a thick gray brush overpainting all other colors. After a week in the gray he needed something brighter, and that need bloomed into flesh and blood in the form of Karla.
She was at lunch first, as always. This time she was unusually casual, in a T-shirt and a brown wraparound skirt.
“Sorry I was late,” he said.
“It happens,” she said. “It’s more or less the only thing that happens.” She didn’t seem angry. “Look,” she said, flashing her fingers in front of him. “I got my nails done. Aren’t you proud of me? It’s because I have a date.”
“That’s nice,” he said.
“I suppose it is. It never hurts to know that things are about to start happening again.”
“Who’s the guy?”
“A historian. He has a specialty.” A newly done finger went to her mouth to help her retrieve it. “He studies why there’s an uneven pace of scientific discovery across the history of civilization. I don’t think much will come of it, honestly, but I can probably get in a good six weeks before I realize that. And how about you?”
“How about me what?”
“Well, the house, for starters. Are you building?”
“Not yet. Louisa thinks I’m stalling. And I think she might be right.”
“That can’t go on forever.”
“I don’t need forever. I need forty years, probably. Then it’s moot.”
“What are you waiting for?”
William drew a breath and then lobbed his confession into the conversation. “I lost my job,” he said, “or I’ve set the wheels in motion, anyway. And I’m sleeping with the woman across the street.”
Karla’s eyes widened at the first and narrowed at the second. “Superstar,” she said, nodding on the first syllable. “Tell me more.” He pulled down the screen and started the projector. Certain scenes were edited; he didn’t mention, for example, that Emma was pregnant. Others were reframed for close-up. Hollister’s nose, he said, almost shouted with blood; he opened his fingers wide on both hands to re-create the effect. “I don’t want to say I regret anything, exactly,” William said. “The guy at work is impossible. She’s beautiful. This is the natural conclusion for both. But I’ll probably be back at work next week. And Emma and I are ending things. Things are winding down.”
A little smile rippled across her lips. “Right.”
“Do you remember once, when we were going out, you said something about how wrong choices were like water that’s so deep you can’t find the bottom?”
“Come on,
” Karla said. A hard shadow crossed her forehead. “I said that? Was I high?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, I didn’t know what I was talking about. Don’t worry about stage-managing things. If they end, they end.”
William looked at the damp patches on his napkin, which were making shapes he didn’t understand. There was a woman across the table from him, giving him advice on intimate matters, though the two of them had long since discovered that their philosophies on such matters overlapped only slightly, and only temporarily. And yet he was hanging on her every word. How had it come to this? There was so much that was unknown to him. “That’s it?” William said. “If they end, they end?”
“I guess my point is that they do end. The other morning I was in bed and I heard cabinets opening and closing and a spoon clinking against a plate. It was Christopher, getting up and getting himself breakfast. It was such a wonderful feeling, but it also made me a little wistful. Time goes.” Sadness crossed her face. “But don’t tell Louisa. Please. People always think honesty is the best policy, but in a case like this, it can be a kind of attack. Full truthfulness isn’t always called for.”
“Like I said,” he said. “It’s winding down.”
William wasn’t ready for home. He owed Emma a phone call, but he wasn’t ready for that either. He drove to the coffee shop, failed to buy coffee, stood in front of the news rack, where magazines hung like dead game. He had nowhere to settle his eye: garish letters obscured beautiful faces. There was a women’s magazine about hot new colors. He learned that one was white.