by Ben Greenman
In his car, with his hand. In her car, with her mouth. In her house, a second time, with added urgency, as if Stevie might come home any minute, though he was out of town. Things were not winding down.
After the second time in her house they were too afraid to stay still, for fear that one or both would fall asleep, and so she asked him a battery of questions. Had he been inside the house when the Johnsons had lived there? Yes. Had he ever been in the bedroom? No. Had he ever had a fling with anyone else in the neighborhood? None of your business, but no. Did he have any recurring dreams? “What?” he said. “I tell you, and you look inside my head and know what I really want?”
“No,” she said. “I want to tell you about mine.” She was younger, maybe just a girl, and she was standing in front of a tree with a large hive in the fork of a low branch. Honey massed thick at the base, a drop in delay. As she stood there, bees emerged, flew around the base of the hive, just a few at first and then dozens, a small cloud, and then the cloud was a tornado. There were soon so many bees, she said, that they were a kind of smoke; she covered herself, preparing for the worst, but they just passed across her. “Then I wake up,” she said. “Usually with my hands on my face.”
“Do that now,” he said. “Cover your eyes and don’t uncover them until I say so. That’s the game.” He made a buzzing noise as he approached the hive.
A few days later, he was out on his front lawn pruning bushes. He liked the feel of the clippers when they first encountered a branch, the resistance a brief moment of conscience. Emma came out to her driveway and squinted up at the roof. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she said. “Taking the day off?”
“Working from home,” he said.
“Listen,” she said. “I have a question for you.” She came slowly across the street. “How does recycling work here?” They were on the side of the house, hidden from view, and William began to explain the principles of separation: paper, plastic, glass. “Come on,” she said. “Are you serious? I wasn’t.” They went into the garage and she put her arms around him and they leaned up against a stack of boxes. “You are more and less careful than other men, and one of those things, I like,” she said. They sat on the workout bench he used for guitar and he ran his hands back and forth along the outsides of her thighs. “I’m so sorry I ended up here,” she said.
“Stevie’s job,” William said. “You don’t control that.”
“It’s only partly that,” she said. “Last summer I had a thing with another guy. When that ended, I was inconsolable. Stevie felt like we needed a fresh start.”
“He knew about the guy?”
“No. But he knew that the longer we were there, the more I was slipping away. It was impossible for him not to know. I was like a picture getting fainter.”
“You didn’t tell me any of this in Chicago.”
“You say that like you deserve to know,” she said. But she moved closer and kissed him, not quite on the mouth, and he put his hand at the small of her back. “I have to go,” she said. “But maybe you can come by one of these days.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No. And not the day after.”
The day after that, he carried a spare recycling bin across the street, one neighbor helping another, and Emma met him at the door. An hour later, she propped herself up on an elbow, scissored a pillow between her legs, and started to talk. At six, she said, she had loved everything: pets, the weather, music, hats, her sister Helen, the color red, the way light flattened itself against the inside of a lampshade, poems about how children loved everything. By eight, though, she was keeping a notebook of the exceptions to this rule (“Amanda’s shoes make her look like a monster”), and by ten, the notebook was filled. Twelve was the year she learned the secret: not to love everything (because it stretched your heart out of shape), not to keep a record of the things you hated (because it shrank it), but to write about the things you wanted to move past love and hate, into a place of understanding. So she composed a paragraph about the way her mother looked when she laughed. She tried to capture the way her sister’s straight lines were turning like a melody into curves. “One night,” she told William, “I was playing with some neighborhood kids and tore open the tip of my index finger on a stray end of barbed wire.” She watched as blood blossomed from the cut. It was red, one of the things she loved. She had just started getting her period two months before, and this whole business of bleeding seemed like a paradox. How could it be that when things came out of her, she felt larger? “I wrote that down and showed it to my sister and she didn’t laugh at me, which was shocking,” Emma said. She put her book next to her bed before she turned the lights out, and she was happy it was there when she slept. Twenty years later there was no book anymore; it was a faint memory fading fast.
“Why are you telling me this?” William said.
“Because you’ll listen,” she said.
He showered at her place, opened her medicine cabinet afterward: there were vials for sleep and anxiety, along with some others whose labels he couldn’t decipher. “Come on out,” she said, and he did, and she rewarded him for his obedience. It wasn’t until he was home that he saw he’d missed a handful of calls: Fitch, Louisa, Baker. Baker’s message was uncharacteristically short and impossible to misunderstand: “You’re wanted at the lawyer’s office in the city. Monday at eleven.” His voice was flat and William lay on the couch in imitation of it. He unbuttoned his pants. He buttoned them back up. He turned on the TV but couldn’t find anything that held his attention. He washed his hands twice, once in the bathroom and again in the kitchen sink before dinner. He felt a new hostility to clues.
Louisa brought dinner home from a new chicken place near her office, and then they went out to the deck and William listened in vain for his favorite bird and Louisa scratched Blondie’s ear. When Louisa looked at him, he looked away. When she looked elsewhere he felt a sense of loss. The difference was spreading.
SEVEN
The southbound platform was mostly in shadows and the digital sign announcing train times was covered, from William’s vantage, by a tall man in lean tweeds and a hat. William stood beside a three-person bench, the rightmost seat occupied by an older woman with headphones, the middle seat by her backpack. Closest to William was a young woman reading a magazine, a redhead with tiny perfect features wearing one of the worst outfits he had ever seen: an orange leather jacket that looked like it belonged to a crossing guard, a short gray skirt, gray tights with a floral pattern, and thick platform shoes. It was like five kinds of music were being played at once, none well, but truly beautiful girls weren’t undone by bad fashion. They triumphed over it. “Do you want me to have her move her bag?” she said, gesturing at the older woman.
“No,” William said. “I’m conducting an experiment to see how entitled and oblivious people are.” The young woman laughed. The older woman pinched the bulge on the cord of her headphones, to either change the volume or take a call.
“Off to the office,” said a man passing by, to no one, but William was not going to the office. He was headed into the city, to Hollister’s lawyers, to meet his maker. He moved off to a quiet spot to call Louisa. “Hi,” he said. “Busy day so far. Everyone wants to meet.”
“Don’t be too late tonight,” she said. “Tonight’s the night we’re supposed to meet Jim and his wife for a drink.”
“Right,” he said, though he had no recollection of making the plan.
“I said around eight,” she said. “So let’s leave here at quarter of. Though if you’re running late, tell me, and we can just meet there.”
“Right,” he said again.
When the train came, he packed on with the crowd and took a seat next to the young woman, careful to hide his Hollister employee handbook in his shoulder bag. He got her name, which was Georgina, and this little show: first, her driver’s license photograph, which she dismissed as terrible but which was far from it; then an expedition into the deeper reache
s of her purse for the business card of the modeling agency she was visiting. William thought he saw a condom in there, next to a tube of lipstick. “This must be thrilling for you,” she said.
“It is,” he said, affecting a bored tone to cover his excitement. They talked about his work, and mostly he lied. “I’m going to see a guy from the office whose wife had a stroke,” he said. “Their son just went off to college. Good kid. Interned with us last year. He’s offered to skip a semester but none of us want that, so we’re pitching in. I figure that by helping out Al, I’m helping out the team.”
“That’s a nice idea,” she said.
“He’s been out of the office for two weeks,” he said. “I spoke to him on the phone and he’s going a little stir-crazy. His wife was that kind of person, even before the stroke: won’t let them have a television, doesn’t go out to eat very much. They had a dinner party once, and the conversation was all about whether we deserve the things we have in life, any of us. She said no.”
“Austere,” Georgina said. It wasn’t a word he expected. She told him about her boyfriend, who she wanted to marry her, but who she suspected would never ask. “He has to be scared into it,” she said. “That’s what my mother says, that he needs a wake-up call.” As the train pulled in, she jotted down her phone number on the back of the agency card. She had seen his wedding ring but had not remarked upon it. Did she figure him for a wake-up call?
The lawyer’s office, three blocks from the station, had a poorly lit waiting room with a quartet of round brown club chairs. William had been there once before, to secure advice on a threatened suit by a freelance editor; then, like now, he’d spent most of his time leafing through fitness magazines and counting the starbursts around the edge of the rug on the floor. Across a plastic partition, a woman with big hair and small glasses tapped violently on a keyboard.
A man came into the room. He was taller than any man William knew; though he was old and stooped, he was still nearly six and a half feet. “Mr. Day,” he said.
William stood. “Mr. Reeser,” he said.
“Call me Marshall,” the man said, as he had every time, never meaning it. Walking with practiced significance, Reeser ushered him into a room. “We have associates with bigger offices, but I started in an office this size and I will die in an office this size. Though hopefully not today.” It was the same line he had used during their last meeting, but William laughed charitably. Reeser squeezed in between the desk and the chair.
“Now, listen,” he said. He put his hands palms up in what seemed like supplication. “We’ve known each other for a long time, William.”
“We have.” Reeser was Hollister’s head counsel and had been the kingliest presence in the company for years.
“And in all that time, have you ever known me to be anything but a straight shooter?”
“I have not.”
“Well, then, let’s get down to cases. We have a problem here. You struck a man. Scratch that. You struck an upper-level executive, the nephew of the founders.”
William raised a palm to slow Reeser, or identify himself. “I don’t know if I can explain, really. It seems trivial. But he wasn’t telling the truth. It was unimportant, I realize. But doesn’t it matter that he was lying?”
“I can understand,” Reeser said. “I’ve met George. But you know: breaking a wheel for a spoke.” He placed both hands on the desk. On a credenza against the wall there was a picture of Reeser, younger, with Hollister’s uncle Leon, a tired old small-faced man of extreme competence. “The fact remains that the two of you can no longer work together, and another fact remains as well: he is in charge of your department.” He made a flourish with the pen: more sprezzatura. “So look. Listen. Specifics here don’t matter. The general picture, as painted, is bleak. He’s a made man at this company, and that means that you’re out.”
“Out of Domesta?”
Reeser’s eyes crinkled and it looked as though he might leap out from behind his desk and clap William on the back. “Can you believe it?” he said. “Domesta. Thirty years as Leon’s lawyer and I’ve never heard anything so stupid. Yes, out of Domesta. But not just that. Out of the whole thing, I’m afraid. Gone from Hollister. Cashiered.” Reeser pressed a button on his telephone and a young woman in a white skirt appeared with a slim sheaf of papers clipped together at the corner. “Read to yourself as I read aloud,” Reeser said. “‘This letter will confirm our discussions to resign your present position with Hollister, effective June 1. In light of your many years of service to the company, Hollister is prepared to offer you a severance payment equivalent to one year’s salary, and to carry your full benefits for that same term. Confidential information, as defined below, shall not be disclosed for the term of two years, upon penalty of forfeit both of severance and benefits. In entering into this Agreement, the parties have intended that this be a full and final settlement of all matters, and that all related disputes be hereby dissolved. This letter will confirm our offer. Please take some time to review and consult with counsel or advisers of your choice.’” Reeser looked up. “Do you have counsel or advisers?”
“Let me understand,” William said. “You’re paying me because I hit George Hollister?”
“It’s not just that,” Reeser said. “There are matters that you might be privy to that we want to keep under wraps.”
“Like what?”
“Like anything. Business strategies. Things you’ve heard. Anything. Everything.” He lowered his eyes to the paper again and continued to read. “‘If this proposal is acceptable, please indicate your acceptance by signing and returning the duplicate copy of this letter and the accompanying legal release.’”
William reached for the pen. Reeser got there first, held it out like a baton in a relay. “Counsel?” he said. “Advisers?”
“I think I’ve heard plenty,” William said. He signed his name with as much ink as possible.
William had not thought of Emma most of the morning, but he thought of little else once he was out of Reeser’s office, sitting in the park, watching the squirrels watch him. A girl in a blue dress fed ducks as her mother looked on with a mix of adoration and disapproval. The mother had a piece of paper folded on her lap. She was slim, pale. The girl was darker. She had the mother’s large eyes and a scar on one cheek, along with something else: a focus. She looked at the ducks as if she were learning them. She tossed a few more crumbs onto the ground. The ducks rushed toward the scatter and the girl followed after them. The mother took out a cigarette, thought better of it, returned it to the pack.
William remembered back to the first afternoon in Emma’s house. She had a cigarette then, in bed, and pretended to light it. “Isn’t this what people do in stories?” she said.
He corrected her. “I think you mean it’s what people do in movies,” he said. “In stories there’s usually just a break after the sex.”
She propped herself up on her left forearm. He ran a finger from one shoulder blade to another. “Do it in the shape of a wave,” she said.
“When you do a wave, how high and how low should you go?” he said. “I should ask Tom.”
“Tom?”
“My brother-in-law. That’s what he does for a living.”
“Oh,” she said. “Don’t. I’m one of those girls who thinks three’s a crowd.”
“You mean four,” he said, patting her stomach.
That froze her, and when she thawed, she moved without ease. He flipped her onto her back and began to trace another plot with his finger. She was cheered when the graph dipped too low.
Now, in the city, William watched the daughter, the mother, two teenagers playing cards, a gardener placidly dropping grass seed in a brown patch of the park. He came out from the canopy of trees and went to the station. Normalcy had been restored, in the sense that William was once again immersed in the mix of obligation and randomness that dominated his days and the days of nearly everyone he knew. He opened his phone to find the envelope icon bl
inking, read a text from Louisa reminding him of their plans, consulted the train schedule on a terminal, watched a few minutes of television in the bar, double-checked the schedule on the big board: rectangles of increasing size. The volume on the television was off, but the images were loud enough without any sound, a vulgar clutter of ugliness and beauty. There was no way to put it together faster than it was all coming apart.
“Hello,” Louisa said when he came through the door. She was at the kitchen table with a mug that said FULL OR ELSE. “How was your day?”
“Got a raise, sort of,” he said.
“Great,” she said.
“Good enough,” he said. “I got your message about Jim. We’re still on?”
“No,” she said. “He called to cancel. He said his wife didn’t feel well.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I asked him what the matter was and he said he wasn’t sure, a stomachache or something. We had a plan and everything. Who cancels a plan two hours before it’s supposed to happen?”
“Lots of people,” William said. “People with sick wives. We’ll catch them the next time.”
“Okay,” she said. “You’re right. I’m making too much of it.”
In bed, he couldn’t sleep, and he watched her. Her eyes were closed and her fingers worked the air, untying something he could not see. He put his hands near hers and was surprised, as always, to find that they were not very much larger. He stretched a finger until it tickled the crease of her wrist and watched her eyes, which did not open. Maybe she was genuinely asleep. He didn’t need any rest anymore, only a clear path out of the fog, and he was determined to stay up all night looking if that was what it took.