by Otto Penzler
“Come on,” Mickey said in a stage whisper, glancing around the bar. “I don’t think we should talk about this here.”
Outside, the sun was like a spear driven through an iron patchwork of cloud, refracted into needles of light in the low-lying haze. The two and a half drinks Marsh had managed to choke down while he was waiting worked in his system, a fire that seemed to sap his extremities of warmth, numbing the tips of his fingers even as it raged in his belly, as if the heat were being drawn inward, sucked violently to his middle, by a bellows. When the wind gusted, it brought tears to his eyes, and at his side the briefcase hung a dead, leaden weight, as if he’d managed to stuff their history, the long and tortured declining curve of their failed marriage, twenty-two years, the bitterness, the venom, rows cataclysmic and inconsequential, in there, along with the banded piles of unmarked, nonconsecutive $20 bills.
He thought the guy was limping, and he was—drawing up short every time he stepped on his left foot. But he was moving quickly, and Marsh had to hurry to keep up.
He trailed at a few dozen paces as the guy walked down Lincoln, waited for a break in traffic, and lumbered across, and they dodged joggers on JFK, now crossing the rolling, windswept green of the park. Down on the grass, a gaggle of children ran screaming after a tennis ball, and a few sunbathers were sprawled on blankets at the edges of the fields, stretched out as if on display. They turned finally onto one of the innumerable hiking trails that webbed the park like capillaries, Marsh straggling now, his face flushed, his sides slick with cold sweat. An enclave of kids were lounging in the bushes alongside the crooked path, passing a bottle, and Marsh caught a whiff of what might have been marijuana smoke, but the wind took it away. Cresting a hill, they clambered through a copse of jack pines, the tops of the trees roiling above them, tossing crazily in the wind. Marsh caught his foot on one of the roots that elbowed up through the topsoil and nearly went sprawling, saving himself at the last minute by catching one of the low branches.
When they finally emerged onto another bright swath of grass, the sounds of the city had receded, a distant hum punctuated now and again by the faraway bleat of a car horn. Variegated bunches of green showed all around, clusters and copses of trees, heather gray and a deep, piney green. All angled spastically in the wind, curling like strange, drunken dancers.
Several trails converged on a duck pond bordered by an asphalt lane. The ducks bobbed uncertainly on the surface of the gray water, as if anticipating some massive upswell. They pitched from side to side as the wind razed through the trees and muted the sound of their chatter. They beat their wings on the water, striking up silvery flares.
A lone bench stood by the water’s edge. The light was an opaque gray wash, as if the whole thing were being shot from some remote vantage and the atmosphere were disturbed between the camera and the action taking place.
Marsh licked his lips. With a trembling hand, he extracted the creased snapshot from his coat pocket and held it, fluttering on the wind. He knew he should be drunk, but he couldn’t feel it anymore at all. Adrenaline, he supposed; he was buzzing with it.
“Your wife,” the guy said, in a way that irritated Marsh, as if he’d seen it a million times, as if the whole thing were something squalid, some oft-repeated tragedy. Mickey sighed. “All right,” he said, looking off at the slight milky haze lowering across the western sky. He looked at Marsh. “What did she do? Is she cheating on you? She’s running around on you and you just can’t take it anymore? What is it?”
Marsh began sputtering, unable to answer.
“No,” he said finally. “Nothing like that.” What was the man doing, trying to talk him out of it? “The car,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Do you think you could spare the car?”
“What?” Mickey loomed over him.
“She drives a Mercury Sable. Last year’s model. I was hoping you could avoid—you know. Damaging the car.”
What happened next happened quickly, and while it was happening the one thing that occurred to Marsh, crowding out all other thoughts or considerations, was that he was being mugged. Mickey told him to drop the briefcase, and when he failed to do this, struck him a resounding blow with a large, pinkish fist that seemed to materialize out of thin air, the row of swollen and meaty knuckles making contact with the bridge of his nose. He heard a sharp crack, a ringing in his ears, and when he came to, he was flat on his back in the mud at the foot of the park bench, and several ducks were honking in his ear and padding about on their webbed feet in the mud not far from his head.
The briefcase, the snapshot, the money—all gone. Even his wallet, and yes, his Rolex. He’d been cleaned out, and his suit, $450 before alterations, was ruined. He felt frantically in his pockets for his keys and found them, thinking at least something had gone right. But forty-five minutes later, when he finally found his way out of the park, he could see the bright orange ticket fluttering under his windshield wiper as he approached the Jag. He screamed, not caring who gawked or shook his head. On 19th Avenue, passersby turned their faces away, as if his particular insanity could be transmitted by no more than eye contact, and he stumbled along in the thickening, dusky light.
2
They had a place in South San Francisco, a two-story walkup that sat in a row of identical walkups in what passed for a quiet neighborhood among the sprawl and the clutter of city life. They were still paying for the house, but they’d bought before the latest boom, and when she heard what the other houses on the block were going for these days, she gasped. Sometimes she thought they should sell, treble their money and get out, but she didn’t want to uproot the kids halfway through their schooling. Her father—the Colonel—had dragged her from Illinois to Taiwan to Corpus Christi, Texas, before she was twelve, and she had sworn above all else that she would not do the same thing to Todd and Jaime.
They had a lawn, a twelve-foot-by-four-foot patch of grass she watered and fertilized and guarded jealously against the neighborhood dogs, who were always doing their business there.
They had a two-and-a-half-car garage, a thing that struck her as funny in a vague way, in the sense that two point five children might have been funny.
She watched him come tramping across the lawn, the shit, in what must have been a state of extreme drunkenness if he thought he was going to get away with it—trampling the hyacinths, tripping over the rhododendron along the brick walk, all but tearing the philodendron bush out by the roots as he stumbled coming up the steps. She’d had the feeling this was coming, though she couldn’t have said just what this was yet. She’d sensed impending calamity, sniffing it on the breeze the way you would a coming storm, bracing herself for impact even as she dug in her heels and refused to let the smallest thing go. A tiny exhilaration blossomed inside her at the foretaste. She would have felt entirely justified stabbing him with the garden shears.
Drunk as a sailor. She pitied the creature she’d married.
“If you think,” she said, bits of hamburger clinging to her fingers, on him before he’d set foot in the door, her voice carrying shrilly across the hall, “if you think you can come in here any goddamn way you please, mister, you’d better think again, because you’ve got another thing coming. I spent three and a half hours out there today, and look, would you just look at what you’ve done to my garden? Henry, goddammit, what the hell do you have to say for yourself?”
Then she saw his face.
His nose seemed to be screwed on sideways, as if it had tried to escape but had become confused and tried to go in two different directions at once. Purple bruises bloomed under his eyes, and wads of spittle clung to the corners of his mouth. He stunk like a barroom, the cheap, lowlife smell of booze and cigarette smoke clinging to his suit and wafting into their home. A sense of shock mitigated her horror, and then the whole thing suddenly became funny, and she collapsed against the wall, covering her mouth with the back of her wrist and giggling, aware even as she did of the cruel edge to her laughter, of the pleas
ure she took in seeing him disgraced.
Jaime had come halfway down the steps and stood there arrested, like a piece of garden statuary. Todd came running from the den, as if he sensed whatever drama was unfolding in the foyer of their home beat out Judge Judy or The People’s Court. He stood in the doorway, elfin, his hair sticking out at the sides. His mouth hung agape, his tongue playing in the space where one of his front teeth had been. He took one look at his father, then he turned and fled.
“Jesus, Dad,” the girl said. She was wearing some witchy, clinging thing that made of her budding curves a shapeless swell and made her entire shape that of a bell. She grinned uncertainly, showing the metal bands around her teeth, taking such obvious delight in her father’s suffering that for the moment she was entirely unselfconscious. “You look like the Elephant Man,” she said.
“Jaime,” Gina remonstrated. She had a feeling her daughter’s guidance counselor was going to hear about this, and she wanted to mitigate whatever damage had already been done, to keep the situation from escalating any further than it already had. She stanched wounds, bandaged knees, commiserated with Jaime over boys; she was all the children had in this world, the sane center of their lives. And someone had to protect them from their father.
“Go to your room,” he said, his voice cracking. “You go to your fucking room right now. You little slut, you’re lucky we even let you out of the house.”
“Mom,” the girl said, her face a shattered window, like someone had pitched a rock through it. “Something’s wrong with Dad,” and she retreated, backing up the stairs.
“You come back down here and there’ll be something wrong with you,” Henry said. “Things are changing around this house, and they’re changing right now. First thing is, you’re going to listen to your father, and if you don’t, by God, you’ll look like this by the time he’s through with you. I will not be treated like an asshole in my own home.”
He balled his fists. His face flamed, a sea of broken capillaries. “And you,” he said, turning on his wife.
It took one well-placed blow with the blunt edge of the paperweight they kept on the end table by the front door to quiet him. She dragged him by the wrists into the tiny bathroom under the stairs and left him there, sprawled out next to the toilet. She could already see the child custody people sweeping down, a SWAT team surrounding the house, helicopters buzzing outside their bedroom window. Principal Dryer would call again on Monday, vague threats lurking as always behind his measured, even tone. Maybe this time he really would report them to CPS. This was bad.
But by the time she called the kids down for pancakes and Hamburger Helper, her thoughts had already turned to the sale starting Saturday at Saks.
“Where’s Dad?” Jaime asked, picking at her food.
“Don’t you worry about your father,” she said. “He’s sick, Jaime. I put him to bed, and all we can do is hope he’ll feel better when he wakes up.”
“I want a hot dog,” Todd said, thrusting his plate away from him. He got up without asking to be excused and left, and a moment later she heard his bedroom door slam at the top of the stairs.
Two days later she noticed the car.
At first she thought she’d imagined it. But twice on Sunday morning and once in the afternoon she saw the beige Pontiac lumbering along like a dinosaur behind her. It kept two or three car lengths back, weaving through traffic, running a red light to follow her when she made an abrupt left without signaling, one headlight winking in the rearview mirror as the sun crept down in the sky and the day stretched on into evening.
It occurred to her, of course, that she should have been scared. She should have been, but strangely, she wasn’t. She’d always known it would happen like this. The sudden appearance of the Pontiac confirmed something. It augured cataclysm, the great upheaval she’d been anticipating all her life. It made real the fear and suspicion she’d been living with since she could remember, drawing the blackout curtains her father insisted on hanging everywhere they lived at night, hiding under the bed in the dark and reading comics guiltily by flashlight, hoping she wouldn’t be the one who got them all killed. The feeling something exceptional was happening to her now braced her immeasurably. She was jealous of the people who went on the talk shows claiming to have been abducted by aliens in New Mexico. She only wished something like that would happen to her, something to blast away every trace of her ordinary experience and make her life a dream. If the bluish shape massed behind the Pontiac’s windscreen was the shape of her destiny, she welcomed it.
It occurred to her, of course, that they might be from CPS, whoever was in the Pontiac, tailing her, waiting for an opportunity to swoop into her life and take her children. But she felt such kinship with that eddying shape, almost a sisterhood, that she dismissed the idea summarily.
The next day, kids in maroon private school uniforms were playing by the bus stop on the corner. One of them was bouncing up and down on a pogo stick, and it made a sawing noise that cut through the afternoon air. You never saw kids playing in the street anymore, and it comforted her, in a vague way.
She watered the rhododendrons under the gunmetal sky, letting the machine take the calls and listening to the messages at her leisure.
“And I think that if this is happening repeatedly, as it seems to be, there may be some cause for alarm,” Principal Dryer said, his altogether too friendly voice carrying through the empty house on Monday afternoon. He cleared his throat. “Habitual truancy often indicates trouble in the home, something the parents may not even be aware of. If you or Mister Marsh could give me a call in my office anytime during the week, I would greatly appreciate it. I’m sure we all want whatever is best for Jaime.”
He hung up.
Deceitful turd, she thought. Cruddy administrators. The lines were being drawn in the sand.
Someone named Reardon called for Hank a few minutes later, and she listened to him speak into the machine, wrote his name down, and erased the message. Hank had disappeared sometime during the night on Friday. Lying awake in their bed, she’d heard the front door ease shut, wondered where he was going, and she had decided that she didn’t care. She found herself hoping she’d killed him when she’d brained him with the paperweight. She thought there must have been something good in him once, but she didn’t know anymore when he had ceased to be her husband, or even a man.
Her life no longer seemed to be happening to her but to someone else.
She ran a bubble bath before the kids got home, luxuriating in the folds of steam, scraping the dead skin from the balls of her feet. The flakes drifted away on the water, softened to opacity. She wondered what her life would seem like if it were on television, what some anonymous viewer in a faraway living room or den would think. She felt alienated from her own experience, atomized, like the molecules of steam rising from the water in the tub.
3
“Sushi?” Karyn said. “I’m impressed, Dad. This isn’t your style at all.”
She was majoring in graphic design at City College, she didn’t wear makeup, and she never seemed to have a boyfriend. But there were men in her life, he was sure there were, and he admired whatever it was that kept her from getting stuck.
She had her mother’s eyes and her mother’s hair. Only the dimple on her chin was his, and it was his favorite feature, incongruous, stamped there like an afterthought. She had her mother’s way about her, the sardonic smile and the jaw that tapered to a point, always disapproving, like someone had pinched it while she was still being formed in the womb. She might have been pretty if she wasn’t so serious. But the steely thing in her, the thing that had enabled her to survive her childhood, it had marked her somehow, and Mickey didn’t know whether to feel sorry for her or happy that she was that much stronger than he’d ever been.
She winked back at him, and she seemed content to let him be her dad for the evening. They assumed their roles, and as long as she assumed hers and let him play his, they’d have a good time. She ev
en laughed at his jokes, and her mother had stopped doing that before the honeymoon was over.
“We were just kids, you know. We had no business having kids of our own.”
“Stop it, Dad.”
She ordered a California roll. She ordered the salmon and the tuna, and the eel for herself. He watched her trying to pronounce the Japanese from the menu, and he could picture her doing her math homework at the table in the kitchen in their apartment on Post Street all those years ago, her legs still too short to touch the floor while she sat in the chair, her hair already that fine shade of black. She’d been too serious even then, committing her multiplication tables to memory while he’d argued with Sue, nearly coming to blows over the balance in the checkbook.
Japanese music lilted from the speakers in the corners of the room, and an aquarium bubbled by the door. He sipped his tea, scalding his upper lip, and cursed, setting the cup down angrily. He thought for the hundredth time that day that all he wanted was a beer, but as he’d discovered the other night, the Kolonopin the court-appointed psychiatrist had given him didn’t mix well with beer. A woman in a kimono brought miso soup, seaweed and tofu afloat in the cloudy broth. She bowed politely at them, demure, self-effacing, made up like a porcelain doll. When she moved away, Mickey realized she’d forgotten to bring spoons.
“Your nose looks better,” Karyn said, and she sipped her soup, which answered that question. She prized out a piece of tofu with her chopsticks. “How’s your side?”