I am afraid, he wrote, that there might be something wrong with her. Mentally. Who the fuck did he think he was? Mr. Fucking Perfect? And I never know who is coming to dinner these days; some nights it is the sexy, sophisticated young woman I fell in love with, other nights it is a bratty, sulking child! And two pages later…I tried talking to her about it—carefully, of course—but she is closed off. She went from being incredibly open to incredibly closed. “You self-righteous prick!” Kerri shouted.
I am so exhausted, I can’t sleep. I don’t know what to do. I can’t leave her if she’s sick; if she needs help, but how can I stay like this? I talked to Graham about it. “She doesn’t sound crazy to me,” he said. “She sounds young. Fickle. Immature. Moody. What’d you expect?”
How could he do that! How could he talk to someone else about her!?
Maybe she is too young…
Kerri screamed and threw the journal against the wall. She shrieked as she tore the blankets from the bed, upending the mattress, pushing over the bookcase and smashing the whiskey glass over it. Pacing through the room, still naked, stumbling over the mess, out of breath, she picked up the journal and read more. The nice things he wrote about her were as awful now as the mean things. It didn’t matter that he second-guessed himself in other passages, that he was questioning his own sanity…
“You are crazy, you motherfucker!” she yelled. “Crazier than I’ll ever be and I’ll prove it to you! We’ll see who’s the crazy one here!”
Blind with rage, she threw herself into the hallway, bouncing off the wall, stumbling forward onto the floor, shrieking until her voice broke into hissing coughs and she fell on to the stairs, climbing them on her hands and knees, stopping only long enough to slam the book repeatedly on the steps.
She wandered through the house, carrying the journal, crying, “I hate you! I hate you!” her mind wild with revenge scenarios. She would trash the whole fucking house and pin the pages of his journal to the mess. Or maybe she would blacken out her name and leave the book in the student lounge at school. Wouldn’t the students just love to read about the sex life of Professor Hotness? With one of his students, no less! And the college administrators? Let’s not forget them. She would make several copies and distribute them throughout the school—throughout the whole damned city. Better yet, put it on the Internet along with his picture, phone number, and address.
She wore herself out, pacing through the house, laughing bitterly, then crying, then screaming. If he was so fucking smart how come he didn’t know that on the eve of the day he met her mother, she’d fucked a man who wouldn’t even give her his real name. That low-life at least didn’t mistake her as girlfriend material…and she didn’t mistake him for her Superman.
She collapsed on the living room floor in a sobbing heap.
The mean voice was chattering away now, mocking her, repeating the lines she’d read over and over again. She cried and cried and when she couldn’t cry anymore, she rolled on to her back and looked at the ceiling. Her throat raw and pulsating, her head throbbing, spinning, she hugged the journal to her chest and curled into the fetal position. “Please don’t go, Seth. Please don’t leave me all alone. You fucking bastard. Please. Please!”
She got off of the floor and went into the kitchen. She tossed the journal on the table and started digging in her purse for the phone. She’d call the son-of-a-bitch at school and demand an explanation. She’d make him own up to what he’d written and then she’d tell him to go to hell!
She was about to press the number when the survivor voice told her to chill the fuck out. Having him know that she’d read his journal and then dumping him was exactly what she didn’t want. She wanted to be with him. She wanted to know that he would never leave her. She put the phone down then and looked at the journal. She realized then that it was the key. It was an uncensored and—if she straightened up and covered her tracks—an ongoing look into his private mind. He’d once told her that he worked his feelings out there, that it was what he thought he believed before he knew what he believed.
If she knew what he believed before he did, she would always be a step ahead and could reroute him without his knowledge. When he suspected a lie, she would be completely honest. When he wrote childish, she would be mature. When he accused her of being disagreeable, she would be compliant. If he took her for granted, she’d make him chase her. If he called her frigid, she’d be hot; distant, she’d cling to him. She would always know what to do. For the first time in her wretched life she would actually know what to do instead of just doing and then regretting.
With this kind of information, she could do damage control when she fucked up, when she got bored or needed to slip off with a “Greg” here and there. She could all but guarantee their future. It wouldn’t even be difficult. Seth wanted to be with her. He wanted to believe that they could make it. He needed to believe. That’s why he was pouring all that junk out in the journal. So he could understand. Even before these past weeks of arguing, he’d sensed her turmoil, tasted her unrest, and kept coming, kept finding good things in her, reasons to stay. He craved her. That was in the journal too. He was mad for her.
Her anger was gone and she was absolutely high on the future. Knowing his most intimate dreams and thoughts and fears and secrets and feelings and doubts and hopes and suspicions, she could make it all but impossible for him to ever leave her. She was the female lead in this drama by God and now could simultaneously be its audience, and when necessary, the all-powerful muse, whispering in the ear of the playwright when and how to change the direction of the script. She would never have to wonder because she could always know.
She began the job of putting the bedroom back together. She put the books back on the shelf and the mattress back on the bed. She picked up the broken glass and vacuumed the floor for stray pieces. A duplicate of the glass was easy to find in Dr. Jarrell’s bar. She poured a little whiskey into the bottom, swirled it around, dumped it down the sink and put the glass on the nightstand where the other one had been. She put the pieces of the broken glass in a double grocery bag and would drop it in a public trash can on the way home. Unless Seth was doing inventory, its absence from the packed cupboard above the bar wouldn’t be noticeable.
The books didn’t seem to be in any particular order and the way they fell gave her a pretty good guess as to their general placement on the shelf. She believed they were mostly Jarrell’s books anyway. She tossed the bath towel she’d used earlier in the dryer. She would take care of the bed when she was ready to leave, but she still had hours before Seth would return and she wanted to do a lot more reading between now and then.
She got the pillows all situated, took a deep breath and once again, looked for the first entry. This time she found it.
January 8: I think I’m in a bit of a pickle…
Kerri snapped awake and the journal hit the floor. Someone was here!
She jumped out of the bed and stood there, naked, confused. She looked at the clock on the nightstand. He wasn’t supposed to be back for an hour or so. Okay, okay. She was…surprising him. She was so sorry about the fight the other night, which was totally my fault, baby. I wanted to make it up to you. I wanted to be here when you got home. I even stopped in to buy flowers and then I thought, hmm, what would he like more than flowers? I guessed a naked chick in his bedroom. Was that a good guess, baby?
But she didn’t hear anything now. She listened. Nothing. But something had woken her. She ran upstairs and peeked out the window. She saw the mailman walking away. She went to the door that connected the house to the garage and opened it a crack. No SUV. She let out a sigh. She couldn’t have been asleep long. She’d read to the end of the journal. It had exhausted her. It was sexy and funny and sad and infuriating. She’d laughed out loud, been turned on, pissed off and by the time she’d reached the end, weeping. It was a lot to take in. A lot to think about. She remembered cradling it to her chest. She must have drifted off for a few minutes.
&n
bsp; Her mind was chattering away now and she had to work to concentrate. She rumpled his side of the bed and smoothed hers out, the way it was when she’d arrived. She took the pen from the nightstand and put it back in the journal after the last entry and slipped it under the blankets where she’d found it.
She got dressed and then she double-checked everything: the bed, the blankets, the glass, and the books on the bookshelf. She made little adjustments until the room looked just like it had when she came in. She took the towel from the dryer, folded it and put it back with the clean ones. Then she checked everything a third time.
Upstairs she put her boots and coat back on and grabbed her purse and the bag of glass. She was about to go out the door when she felt Seth’s watch in her pocket. She looked at it and felt a twinge of sadness, but couldn’t let herself give it anymore thought. She was glad she remembered having it with her. It was time for him to find it. She looked around for a likely place for it to turn up. She knelt next to the end table, kissed the watch, and whispered, “Good things don’t just happen, baby. Someone has to make them happen. This is for us. This is for love.”
She tossed his watch underneath the end table. She went out the door then, making sure to leave it unlocked.
15
Seth was sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor talking on the phone to Kerri while trying to dislodge a sliver of glass from his foot. His head was pounding and his neck was starting to cramp from holding the phone between his shoulder and ear. Both hands were busy, one holding his foot in place and the other using a needle to get at the glass.
“Where did it come from?” Kerri asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Did you break something recently?”
“No.” He slid the needle beneath his skin and moved the tip of it under the piece of glass.
“You must have.”
This made him angry as so many things made him angry these days. He was forgetful lately, yes, and misplacing things, but he would have remembered if he’d broken something. At least he would have the moment he stepped on the fucking glass. “I didn’t,” he said, every tiny movement of the needle sent a little volt of pain up his leg and lit up the steady drum beat in his head.
“Did you drop a glass or—”
“Which part of ‘no, I didn’t’ is giving you trouble?”
“You don’t need to be mean.”
The needle slipped and drove the glass sideways instead of backwards. “Goddamn it!”
“Just leave it alone and come with me to the doctor’s tomorrow. I’m sure she would see you with me.”
“We’ve been over this. I don’t have health insurance and even if I did, I wouldn’t go to a doctor for something I can do myself.”
“You need a checkup. At the very least, something to help you sleep.”
“I’m going to hang up now.”
“Can I tell my mother that you’ll be at the party tomorrow night?”
“For Christ’s sake, Kerri,” he slammed the needle on the nightstand, took the phone in his hand and tried to work the crick out of his neck. “This is not the time to meet your family.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because….we’ve been fighting for weeks.”
“We have not been fighting. You’ve been on edge and grumpy.”
“Okay. Fine. But it still begs the question: why would you pick now to introduce me to the in-laws?”
“I didn’t. It‘s Mother’s idea.”
“Tell her I’m sick.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not? You lie to her about everything else.”
“Why are you being so mean to me?”
“I don’t know, Kerri.” He took the last swallow of Scotch and looked around for the bottle he’d borrowed from Jarrell’s bar. “Honest to God, I don’t.” He sighed. “Look, I’m sorry. Okay. I’ll figure this out. I’ll get through it. It’s just been a horrible few weeks and—”
“Last night wasn’t horrible.”
She’d showed up unannounced with a pizza and a bottle of wine she’d taken from her mother’s private stash. They didn’t fight for a change, which was nice, but she didn’t want to talk about the herd of elephants in the room either. Mostly, she wanted to talk about school and work and how she and the other salesgirls were creeped out by this weirdo who started frequenting the store. Some freak with a red-eyed gargoyle tattooed on the side of his head. “Okay,” Seth said, struggling to his feet, looking for the damned bottle. “Last night was nice.”
“I thought it was great.”
“We didn’t…really solve anything.”
“You mean we didn’t fuck.”
“If that’s what I meant, that’s what I would have said. But no, we didn’t. Again.”
“You go two lousy weeks without getting laid—”
“Three and a half,” he said.
“It has not been that long.”
“It has. The last time we were even close was the day I came over after class and your mother interrupted us.”
“That was two weeks ago, Seth, not three and a half.”
Was it? No. No it was three and a half. But that wasn’t the fucking point! It didn’t matter if it was two weeks or three or five. What mattered was that something was weird; something was off. How could she not feel it? “The sudden shortage of sex is only part of the bullshit going on between us.”
“You know, if you are having second thoughts about me—about us—just say that instead of conjuring up all this supposed ‘bullshit’ that we need to talk about.”
“I’m not conjuring—”
“You are sleep deprived, on edge, and taking it out on me. I feel like you are looking for a reason to get me out of your life!”
He didn’t say anything to this because the first part of that statement was true and he wasn’t sure about the second part of it. He did want to get away from her and yet, at the same time, he longed for her more than ever and needed—actually needed—to fix or at least understand what was so suddenly and inexplicably wrong between them. “I know I’ve been a pain lately, but I don’t like what is happening to us.”
“I’m sorry, Seth, but it’s not us, it’s you.”
“That’s great. Thank you.”
“I’m serious. In the past few weeks, you have accused me of everything from playing mind games with you to sleeping around!”
“In the past few weeks?”
“I said the past two weeks! Stop trying to make me look stupid!” He could hear a hint of tears in her voice.
“If you start bawling, I’m hanging up.” This, of course, made her cry and while he’d been enough of a bastard to say such a thing, he apparently wasn’t enough of one to actually do it. Shit.
“You never treated me like this before, Seth. Never,” she cried. “It’s like you’re a different person.”
He couldn’t argue that. He felt guilty. Confused. Angry. “I’m sorry.”
“You need to talk to someone. A professional.”
He’d see a shrink in a heartbeat if he could scare up enough money to get past the so tell me about yourself stage and into some real therapy because something was wrong with him. Very wrong. “I can’t afford an amateur let alone a professional.”
“Stop being flippant! I know you’re not making much as an adjunct, but I can help out.”
“Do you know what a shrink costs out of pocket? Per hour? You work part-time as a salesgirl, Kerri. I’m not taking your money. Besides, I can get through this. Maybe I need some time alone.”
“Alone?” This made her cry harder. “You told me you loved me. You told me you were ready. You promised you’d be here for me and at the first sign of trouble, you’re running away.”
“I do love you and I’m not running away. I’m just…” He didn’t know what he was. Other than screwed up. He thought of the day he and his mom sat in the car back Wildcat Hollow Road and how she’d insisted that she’d told Gail she
was going for a drive when he knew that she hadn’t. He thought of her tennis shoes: scuffed and wet, out of place in winter. She must have felt something like this. And she must have been thinking, like he was now, that this was exactly how the slow decline into hell began for poor Aunt Rita. She’d started forgetting things, losing things. She’d wanted to be left alone all the time and even more out of character, she’d become bad-tempered and argumentative. When she’d started blaming his mom—of all people—of stealing from her and lying to her and doing things behind her back, they got Rita to the doctor. Her mind had been clear enough then to understand the ghastly and unjust sentence that had been handed down.
“I am worried about you,” Kerri said. “A person can’t go without sleep.”
“This isn’t about me not sleeping.”
“Then what is it about?”
He spotted the bottle of Scotch on top of the bookshelf and limped toward it. “What it’s about is—” His hand stopped in mid-reach for the booze. Something was wrong with the books. They were…wrong. Fiction and textbooks mixed. Some of Jarrell’s books in with his own.
“It’s about?” she asked. “Seth?’
“What?”
“Then what is it about?”
Were the books like that before? No. They weren’t. Or were they?
“Seth?”
“What? What is what about?”
“You don’t remember what you were just saying?”
He grabbed the bottle and hobbled out of the bedroom and up the stairs. He could hear the blood pounding in his head; streaks of pain were shooting up from his foot. “Something’s off between us,” he said repeating what he’d been saying for weeks until he could recall what he’d actually been saying when he was sidetracked by the books. He was so, so tired. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept more than a few minutes without hours of tossing and turning in between. “Something’s off between us,” he said again because whatever point he was trying to make earlier was gone.
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