That night, after she’s put Sam to bed, after she’s explained to him that no, nothing happened to Dad, he just fell on some ice and after Sam has accepted that explanation, and laughed at it even, because, at seven years old, slipping on ice is a probability—something he can understand though he has never actually seen his father slip—she will find her husband in their bed, remove her clothes, and join him. You understand, she will say, that you cannot get mad at me for this, and he will say of course. He doesn’t know what he’s thinking, of course he’s not mad at her, he’s just infuriated, and hurt, and these feelings have nowhere else to go. What do you need? she will ask him, and when he doesn’t respond, she will complete this thought, and say that she needs him, that is what something like this shows you, that is the important thing, the only good part. They will try at sex but give up almost immediately. She is tender with him; he is lethargic with her. Their normal suture, gone. His eyes, still gone. They are, both of them, still walking back to their car in their minds.
In bed, later, with Charles miraculously asleep, on his back and snoring into the void, Claire will hear her son across the hall and realize she’s been waiting for this, the moment of his waking, and has, in some way mysterious to her, willed it. Recently he has become afraid of everything—the way the wind ruffles the curtains, what the night does to the color of a picture hanging on his wall, loud cars and sirens—and when he is afraid he comes to her. She will hear the instant his eyes snap open, will hear him sit up in bed, whimper softly, and swing his legs to the floor. She knows, as he walks the distance between them, that in one hand he’s carrying his pillow and with the other is dragging his blanket behind him like, Lord help her, this is how she thinks of it, like a bridal train, halfheartedly making his way to a sleepy ceremony. They’ve set up a rule: if he wakes he can come into their room to sleep for the rest of the night, but he cannot sleep in the bed with them; he can bring his blanket and he can sleep on the floor, next to her, so he will know she’s right there, always. But boundaries need to be respected, even by seven-year-olds, perhaps especially by seven-year-olds, perhaps especially by her seven-year-old, who seems capable of accepting every emotion she can imagine, every emotion she pushes in his direction, without filling up. He is a planet-eater. With the exception of tonight, never once has he flinched from an embrace. Never once has he told her to leave him alone. It is a rule, tonight, she’ll consider breaking.
He will wordlessly put his pillow on the floor, wordlessly spread his blanket and lie down. She will reach for him, take his hand, and say dreams? He will squeeze her hand and she will feel an immense gratitude and he will say yeah and then take his hand from hers and return it below his blanket.
“Jesus Christ,” her friend Jill will say the next morning. “Did you call the police?”
“Charles didn’t want to,” Claire will say. She is in the bathroom, on the phone. Phone cord stretching from the kitchen.
“I would’ve called the police.”
“He was crying, Jill.”
Her husband will take the day off from work. The moment to talk about what happened to them, between them, is long past. His mouth is tender; in the mirror it looks sore, like the guy, whoever it was, had taken a fistful of cotton and jammed it in his lip and left it there. To his surprise he is pleased to see his face mildly disfigured, it makes him look not himself, as if a harder face had surfaced in order to give proper shape to the way he is feeling. His gums throb, pulse outward from an epicenter he locates in the middle of his palate. The pain, the mild pain, is radiant, and moves away from him like ripple-waves, bouncing off the bathroom walls, coming back to him never fully absorbed. He’ll spend the morning driving around from hardware store to hardware store, looking for dead bolts, looking for window locks, talking to some kid in an orange apron about home security systems. He’ll return with a sack full of metal, and spread it on the dining room table and stare at the pile, hands on his hips, a picture, to Claire, who is watching him from the kitchen, of someone reading fortune bones. She will walk behind him as he’s sorting the pile, drape her arms around him and feel, at his side, under his lightweight jacket, something hard.
“Hunting knife,” he’ll say.
“You’re wearing it around?” she’ll say.
“I just bought it,” he’ll say.
“Don’t you think that’s a little …”
“What?” he’ll hiss.
She’ll be taken aback. She’ll step away from her husband, and let him come to her. When he doesn’t, she’ll say, “What are you going to do? Get in a knife fight?”
“Did you get punched in the face?”
“He took my purse, remember. I was there too.”
“I know you were there.”
“What’s next, a gun? Do we want that in our house? Are you going to let all of this into our house?”
“I’m protecting our family, Claire. It’s pretty simple. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to install some locks.”
The house, locked, will feel different than before. The creaks louder, the plumbing worse. Every quirk an agitation. Four days after the attack, Saturday night, her husband will spend an entire evening driving around the neighborhood, flashing high beams into unlit corners. He’ll walk back into the house and go straight upstairs. He’ll inspect his lip for half an hour, just looking at himself in the mirror, while Claire reads Sam to bed. This, she’ll remind him, is a night when they should be eating together. He’ll say he had work to do, and she will let it slide. Two mornings later, while Charles is at his office, one of the newly installed locks will fall off the door and hit the ground with a sound like a table collapsing. She’ll inspect the divot left in the wood floor by the falling lock, unsurprised.
“What’d you do?” he’ll say when she reaches him at work to tell him about the lock.
“I didn’t do anything, it just fell off.”
“You did something.”
While he’s at work, she’ll hire someone to switch out the locks. That night, in the kitchen, she’ll tell her husband something’s wrong here and he’ll say nothing’s wrong here and she’ll say you’re not acting like yourself and he’ll say maybe I don’t like myself and she’ll tell him these things happen and maybe he needs to talk to someone about it and he’ll say well, isn’t that just like you to think that and that she has no idea what he’s going through and she’ll say what on earth are you going through and they’ll be interrupted by their son, who has heard them from his bedroom, and who is sending wooden blocks down the stairs to get them to stop arguing.
She’ll reach for him in bed, and he’ll grab her hand and take a shot at flinging it across the room. Don’t you ever do that again she’ll say, and he’ll say I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
On Friday, their son will come home from school, dropped off in front of their house by the bus, by the driver who, most days, is overly friendly, but today will drive away as soon as the doors close behind Sam, as if, she thinks, he’s got more important things to do today than make sure there’s someone around to welcome each weather-bundled child safely inside. She’ll meet him at the door, take his backpack and half-eaten lunch, ask him about Ms. Sabotka, and listen as he lists in chronological order everything he did today, first snack time, then recess, then drawing, then cursive, then choosing the music everyone in the class would listen to, then computers. She’ll ask him then if he still wants to go over to Patrick’s house for a sleepover, Patrick, the son of her friend Jill, who is as loud as Sam is soft, the Patrick who has stolen his toys and was then made by Jill to sheepishly return them, the Patrick forgiven instantaneously by her son, as if his toys meant so much less to him than Patrick himself, since it was Patrick, she was told, who wrestled with an older boy who was taking Sam’s money at school. Of course, Mom he’ll say, and she’ll wonder, on the car ride over, if she was right or wrong in detecting a note of irritation in his voice, in that word, Mom.
Jill will have tea waiting for her. The two
boys will immediately run outside arm in arm, like European kids, she’ll think, like boys still unembarrassed by their own enthusiasm for each other. Jill will ask her how she’s doing, and she’ll say fine, fine and then catch herself on the verge of saying more, but what, exactly, she doesn’t know, except that it feels like something’s been deposited in the back of her throat, and she’s been walking around for most of the day in a dreamy nonawake state, replaying the evening in her head. Oh, honey Jill will say, and reach across the counter for her hand, and then at least he only wanted your purse, you can thank God for that, and also that Charles was there because otherwise who knows? But Charles was there, and it had still happened, and whatever it was that this sort of violet talking had meant, if it meant anything at all, was that he had been unable to do anything to stop it. Which is not to say he should’ve tried, you should always just hand the stuff over, big deal Jill will say, and Claire will hear herself saying I know, I know. But still, it was just one punch and he’d gone down, and did not get back up, and had not chased the guy across the street, and did not act the way she wanted him to act, and had, in fact, left it to her to resolve the altercation. Which she had done. And which, she thinks, she is now being punished for.
She can see the boys through the kitchen window, engaged in some game with obscure rules involving imaginary enemies, the two boys clearly on the same side, lobbing what she assumes are grenades over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. One of them brings his hand to his mouth and bites like he’s holding an apple and then drops it, alerting the other one of the calamity about to befall them inside their own bunker, and the two of them dive into the snow, covering their ears with an oh, no! that’s audible even from where she’s sitting. The tea is warming her hands, and she listens as Jill lists one complaint after another, about her mother-in-law, about uninvited guests, about their dog and how he only seems to shit when he’s sure he’s got the widest audience available, about their heating bill, which, now that Patrick knows how to adjust the thermostat, has become astronomical. She’s heard all of this before. Jill, Claire will know, is just trying to cheer her up. Eventually, Claire will decide to go home. She’ll walk outside as it’s getting dark, and drop a kiss on her son’s cheek that he’ll make a big show out of wiping away. She’ll tell him to remember to brush his teeth, in circles, every tooth, and then, after a final shrug from Sam and a good-bye from Jill, will get in her car and drive the five miles home without turning on the radio.
When she turns onto her street, onto their street, onto the street where all three of them live, and have lived for six years, she’ll see that every light in her house is turned on and blazing, a beacon in the night, so bright there’s a halo effect around the whole place. It looks, she’ll think, like they’ve stolen all the electricity in the city. She will stop and park, walk on the sidewalk and pretend she’s a neighbor, out for a stroll, and that this is not her house, but the house of someone she barely knows, but whom she is friendly with, someone with whom, every third Tuesday, she makes bad, cross-alley recycling jokes, someone who can be counted on to bring KFC to the neighborhood potlucks and sends the kids wild, but that’s it. A good-morning here, a can-you-believe-this-weather there. Nothing more than that. This house, now her neighbor’s house, suddenly feels warm to her.
On the machine, there will be a message from her mother, and her husband will not be home.
“Well, this one was a gentleman, at least,” her mother will say when Claire calls back. They’ve already talked about the mugging. Her mother is past it. No big deal. No one died. That’s the main thrust of her mother’s thinking, that no one died, so what’s the problem?
“What do you mean by gentleman?” Claire will say.
“He opened doors! Car doors. He ordered for me. Swordfish. Which I’m not in the habit of eating, but I told myself: you never eat fish, but maybe you should. And I’m glad I did. They sprinkled nuts on it. He ordered steak for himself.”
“Sounds wonderful?”
“But he’s just so old. They’re all so old. He shouldn’t even be eating steak. I think he was showing off.”
“You’re not old.”
“I’m older than you.”
“That doesn’t make you old. Are you going to see him again?”
“What else would I do? I don’t know. He wants to get married.”
“To you?”
“No, he didn’t propose. But he did say he was in favor of ‘cutting to the chase,’ whatever that means.”
“Gawd. Guard that chastity.”
“And you,” her mother will say. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
This interest, the sudden turn in the conversation, will surprise Claire, and she’ll not know, exactly, what to say. “I’m fine. I didn’t get hit.” That’s where she will start, and then she will tell her mother about the locks, about the driving around, about the knife, about how unacceptable all of it is, about how strange it can be to know someone and then not, but strange is the wrong word, the word she is looking for is more like: unsettling. Or frightening. Like you are strapped in the back of some car you think will stay on the road, but you can’t see the driver’s face in the mirror, or even if the driver is there at all. Or, like your husband is simply not acting like himself, her mother will say. That is true, she will say back. Not himself. And everything I do seems wrong.
“Claire, it was humiliating for him.”
“It was humiliating for me. He’s not handling this well.”
Her mother will say she’s sorry to hear it. And Claire will know she means it. But she’ll also know her mother’s true stance on all of this, because what her mother will come just short of saying is that if Claire is not careful, if she doesn’t lead with sympathy, even at cost to herself, she will end up alone, just like her mother, going on dates, and talking about swordfish with strangers.
“Why are you sticking up for him?” Claire will ask.
“I’m not,” her mother will say. “I’m sticking up for marriage.”
After the conversation is over, after she’s reluctantly hung up the telephone, severed the connection as her father used to say, and left her mother, alone, in the small apartment they helped her rent, Claire will walk the downstairs of her own house, calling for Charles on the off chance he snuck in while she was on the phone. The house, as she wanders through it—though it is bathed in light, or perhaps because it is bathed in light—will feel strangely uninhabited, will feel, and this is the only way she can think of it, like a movie set, with all these rooms just waiting, begging, to be inhabited by actors, and she’ll find herself turning the lights out one by one as she passes through them. She’ll return to the kitchen, and call Jill.
“Not there?” Jill will say.
“Not here. I think he’s out looking for those kids. Or trying to save the neighborhood. Out on patrol.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not ridiculous. He bought a knife, for God’s sake.”
The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories Page 14