He’d heard her come in. His body had shuddered and stiffened as though a piece of piano wire had been strung from his head to his groin. In an instant, the room was brightly lit again, electric light beaming into his eyes from the ceiling bulb. He was alone, strung out on the sheetless bed, naked, sweat filming his torso, his breath still coming in gasps. He heard the shift and crunch of bags and thought she was home with groceries. The fact that he hadn’t been shopping in a week—one of his new duties as home-all-day guy—flooded over him just as the world flooded back over him. Max, drawing, groceries, eating, Becca’s dry-cleaning—mice in the attic—and he had jumped, literally, off the bed and grabbed for his pants, pulling them over his legs, jumping comically about, like some rake caught by his lover’s husband. He tumbled, nearly into the door, and flung it open, pausing only long enough to zip up his pants. He almost caught himself in his fly. Then he stepped out into the hall.
There she stood, staring at him with (what seemed to him) utter knowledge.Honey it’s not what you think…
Then he saw the guilty look on her face, saw the bags, the packages and his sheer, perfect world, utter luck.
Tears sprang to his eyes as he leaned over the toilet and a wave of self-pity and loathing struck him hard enough to make him shudder.What’s happening to me? He cried for a minute, standing over the toilet, utterly wretched and afraid.
What the fuck is happening to me?
“I’m done with it,” he said. The sound echoed up at him.
By silent agreement, they went to Vesuvio’s, an old hangout from the early days of their marriage. Dinner was friendly. After his shower Dan had asked her for a truce. She had been on all fours in front of the armoire in the bedroom, stuffing her shoes with tissue. New ones, he guessed, and they certainly looked expensive, but he didn’t say anything.
“Truce,” she said, standing up. She was two inches shorter than he was in bare feet and looked terribly sad when she looked up at him. He’d held his arms out to her and she walked into them, not a word about the fact that he was still wet. No grumble, no admonition to watch her hair, nothing.
“I don’t know what’s happening to us, Bec,” he said into her hair, which smelled clean and fresh. “But let’s stop it, okay? Start fresh, be nice, all that?” She nodded, her chin bobbing on his shoulder. They stood like that, swaying together, her body molding lightly into his, a posture he knew was, if not an invitation, at least a yielding to sex. To lovemaking. He pressed his eyes shut together and tried to will his body into it, but it did not happen. When he broke their embrace, he couldn’t tell if it was relief or disappointment on her face. But the moment passed.
At the bottom of the stairs, ready to go, Dan stopped for a second.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He held up a finger. “One sec, would you just come here for one sec? I have to do something,” and he went down the short hall to the door of the studio. She followed him. He looked at her, wide-eyed, for a moment and then turned the knob and pushed open the door. The room was pitch black without the light. He flicked it on.
He stared into the room for a moment. “I just have to get something. Just stay here,” he said, planting her in front of the open door. Inside, he grabbed two sketchbooks off his drawing board and then held them flat like a tray beside his supplies table. He brushed everything on the surface of the table, pencils, pastels, charcoal, smudgers, erasers onto the flat top. A piece of charcoal rolled off and broke into two on the floor. He looked down at it, alarmed, hands full.
“I’ll get it,” Becca said.
“No!” he said. “Just leave it there. I have lots.” He carried the books flat, the edge pressing against his stomach (and his clean shirt, she did not point out) and all the supplies shifted to that end, in danger of falling over.
“Okay,” he said cheerfully. “Shut out the light, baby.” She flicked the switch and closed the door behind them. As Becca walked toward the front door, Dan stared up the full length of the door, and tugged once more on the knob, making sure it was firmly, resolutely closed.
He took everything upstairs and came back down again, in good spirits.
“Let’s go and get some grub!” he said, and smacked her affectionately on her bum. She squealed, as much from surprise as delight, and they locked up and drove off in the Volvo, Dan at the wheel.
Over plates heaped with spaghetti (by silent agreement once more, both of them had ordered spaghetti, a favorite during those same early years), Dan told Becca about Apex and the meeting. He explained who they were, and when she was unimpressed by their pedigree as publishers ofBrat Boy andTunnel of Time, he told her they were a small publisher of illustrated novels, adding “comic books” at the end of that by way of explanation, who were well thought of in the world where such things are thought of at all. He tried to make light of the opportunity, but she could hear the pride in his voice.
“So this might be a thing, huh?” she said. She twirled spaghetti on her fork and nibbled at the result daintily. She looked a little like a bird when she ate that way.
He shrugged. “I don’t want to get all excited about a meeting,” he said modestly, but he was grinning. “But, yeah, I guess I’m pretty happy about it.” He wanted to tease her. “Not bad for a guy out of work a few weeks, huh? Published.” She made an agreeable murmuring sound, but didn’t say much. She looked pale.
“You’ll be a director soon, I’ll be a famous illustrator. You’ll be rich and I’ll be famous. What a team. Just like we said in college, huh? Brains and talent. Huh? Admit it, it’s all happening now and you’re secretly thrilled.” He laughed, but she didn’t join him.
“What?”
She shook her head and said, without enthusiasm, “I’m very happy for you.”
He let it go. “Tomorrow after we meet with the Apex guy, we’re going to go out and celebrate—hopefully, keep those gorgeous painted fingers crossed—me, Max and Kate. I’ll call you at the office and you can meet us, but we’ll probably get started at Jester’s. What with all the available beer and all—”
She nodded. “Okay.”
Becca stared down at her spaghetti. She felt like there was a moment being offered up to her here, like a life preserver thrown to the guy caught in the swirls of the sea. She could pass on dinner on Monday. Dan was going to bring in some money. They would get by. She could wait and see what the board decided on its own. She could throw herself to the mercy of legitimacy.
Certainly, she could; but even if she was thinking about legitimacy and talent, even if on the surface of her mind she was thinking about doing the right thing, it stopped there. She didn’t want to go that route. She simply wanted the job. The means of getting it were no longer in dispute. She’d made her decision, and she was going with it.
“The painters are coming tomorrow,” she said brightly. “In the morning. I’m sure it will be all right if you just leave them there when you go to your meeting. Just ask them to lock up. I’ll stop in and change before I meet you and make sure everything is cleaned up,” she finished. She took a big bite of the spaghetti off her fork and through it, in unBecca-like fashion, she said, “Tell me all about the first issue ofThe Headhunter. I’m dying to hear the story.”
It was just a tiny dishonesty, and just business. A wall, thin but there, dropped between them and she felt a little as if the hand that had been pressing on her chest all week had let up the pressure just a bit.
“Okay: the scene opens in the Headhunter’s ‘cave’—it’s not really a cave, I’m just calling it that until Max gives me a name for it. Ah, man, fuck! Max thinks of stuff at the last second and then calls me with changes, unbelievable. Ilove working with the guy, Becca. So Headhunter’s in his cave, sitting at the computer. The screen is illuminating his face…”
Dan told the story of Headhunter to Becca, in detail. Somewhere in the course of the evening she dropped in the information that she had a supper meeting on Monday. Somewhere in the course of the night he mention
ed he was going to be working in the other bedroom upstairs for the duration. Neither of them asked for further explanation. Dinner was lively and full of the unsaid.
* * *
The door to the Murphy bedroom did not stay closed long. Some time after Dan Mason pulled the front door to the house on Belisle shut and locked the deadbolt with his key, the pretty porcelain knob on the door to the little room under the stairs turned and freed itself from the restraint of the latch. The door was pulled open by invisible hands. From inside came the regularskritch of a needle on vinyl, the echoing, tinny sound of music recorded long ago.
Elsewhere also, the house awoke.
In the attic, an old resident of the house paced uneasily, sometimes dragging a heavy bundle from one end of the room to the other. In the bathroom, water ran into the tub, over the despondent form of a Mr. Reimer who appeared and disappeared, and even when apparent, seemed not to be whole, and the swirling eddies of the water as it filled the tub could be seen through him.
Behind the small door in the blue room came the distinct and pleasant scent of sweet grass and hay, just cut.
The yellow room was cold. The shadow on the wall, a permanent part of the decor, could not be seen in the dark.
The music faded in and out of one dimension to another from the room with the quaint, old-fashioned Murphy bed. Reenacted again and again, over and under the voice of a generation, was someone’s lonely and horrible end.
The room veritably spun with heated anger.
Under the stairs, the high, sweet voice of the Sweetheart of Columbia Records,circa 1929, Ruth Etting sang her plaintive song. Jazz feeds the soul.
Seven
Dan helped Becca move the few pieces of furniture in the yellow room to the blue room. He set up the desk midway, in line with the window. When she asked him why he was giving up the studio, he mumbled something about needing the light. It was accepted without question. He put his sketchbooks and supplies on the little desk. It was too small, but it would do. He felt a tremendous relief at not having to be back in that room again. Whatever had happened to him in there, he was willing to let it go in exchange for it not happening again.
While his wife ran water into the tub for a soak before bed, Dan opened his sketchbook to the last sketch he’d done in the afternoon. Headhunter scanned the crowd at the subway station for Hanus and Malicia, without success. They could be seen just in the background, through the crowd of midtown commuters. They could not find Headhunter, either. He was in his Supersuit. The scene was full of movement and drama. It was pretty good. Considering.
He’d read a book once by a therapeutic hypnotist who practiced in a city large enough to provide him with plenty of clients. Over the years, he began to notice a group of people suffering for the most part from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Other than the obvious symptoms, there seemed no other connection between them. They were from wildly varying walks of life, differing age groups, socioeco status, and mixed fairly evenly between the sexes. They matched society on sexual orientation, as well, about ten percent.
Clearly, that was what had happened to him. A bizarre and more twisted version of the same story. Stress, the eternal catchall.
Somehow between moving, losing his job, embarking on a new avenue in his career, the insecurity of revisiting a world that he hadn’t even hoped to be able to rejoin withThe Headhunter, the tension between him and Becca, her disappointment in him and withdrawal, all of it had combined somehow and, without his knowing it, had tossed him on his ass.
Post-traumatic stress syndrome. That was all it had been. Hallucinations and daydreams, sleep paralysis inventing a wild but more acceptable story than the truth for him to deal with in order to express his feelings.Which were what? Unimportant.
Why not?
Dan pulled a chair under the small desk in the blue room and flicked on the light. He flipped through the sketches in the book and played around with ideas lazily in his head, without coming to any conclusions, without defining any sort of plan. He and Max would meet with the Apex guy the next day and then he would go from there.
Since it was now discovered to be very important for him to relax, big-time, he went downstairs and out onto the back stoop and had a toke. He stayed out long after the pleasant effects had smoothed the edges of the day and smoked a regular cigarette, watching as the smoke curled up into the air slowly above him, the night darkening on all sides, the air still, the street noises undemanding and easily recognized.
Post-traumatic stress syndrome. Absolutely.Why not? Could happen to anyone. They wrote a whole bloody book about it; it had to be true.
Just the same, when he went back inside the house about an hour later, he bypassed the room under the stairs, and cut through the dining room and the living room to go upstairs instead.
It was too dark in the back-door cloakroom to take note of the door to the room with the Murphy bed. Dan averted his eyes, in any case. It stood wide open, propped uneasily against the wall.
Becca soaked, lying in unrest against the sloping back of the oversized tub. She was indulging herself in examination with the fascination of someone who has found an unknown rival in her midst. She heard Dan go downstairs, and the back screen door squeaking open.Having a cigarette, she thought absently.
Steam rose lazily above her to the ceiling of the bathroom. The mirror had fogged over and the whole room, in fact, was overcome with the mists of her bath. She kept her eyes closed. Her face was in repose, betraying her lack of inner turmoil.
I don’t have to.She repeated it after and throughout certain thoughts, not in hope of assuaging any upset but more as a litmus test for her true feelings. Nearly on the heels of every such thought were practical and dogmatic womanly thoughts, such as the fact that if she abandoned her course of action now, it might well be premature: Dan had nothing so concrete as a contract or even a verbal agreement; what Dan had was only a meeting. Not unlike her meeting of that week, her lunch with Mr. Huff. From her point of view, it was only a starting point and, in fact, was still of no more consequence than her handing him her résumé. Just a small step toward a larger goal. He had a meeting. Big deal. That meant nothing in the scheme of things.
They still, all in all, as the way things were(in this day, in this moment, as of this second) needed a second—or at leastlarger, much larger—income. As of that moment, in spite of what might happen at Dan’s little (she couldn’t help but lower it in her expectations, condescend to it somewhat by addinglittle) meeting, they were exactly at the point they were at the moment Dan lost his job at Clayton and Marks. Nothing had changed.
I don’t have to sleep with Gordon Huff: I can take the chance. I can wait and see. At very least I can put off the…dinner meeting, until I know what is going on with the comic book. Graphic novel. The one with the evil villainess who looks just like me.
I don’t have to rush forward.
And she would. It was confusion to her. She understood, vaguely, that she didn’t have to do what had been almost proposed at all, that she was, in fact, thelogical choice for the director’s job; her résumé was in perfect order and she had the unsettling feeling that Mr. Huff had mentioned Don Geisbrecht only to frighten her into something rash. He still hadn’t even said that Don Geisbrecht had applied for the position—only that he’d expressed “interest.” Such an obvious ploy.Yet I missed it.
Or ignored it.
She swished her legs around in the warm water and slid farther down the back slope of the tub, ducking her shoulders under the water and exposing her knees. The water in the tub was cooling. She opened one eye and, with her toe, nudged on the hot tap. Water rushed out, and to move it around to raise the temperature evenly, she waved her hands under the surface wanly. Steam rose anew and she watched it. The room was quite clouded. When the tub had filled to the point of water running out of the overflow drain, she shut the tap off with her toe and noticed with disgust that the flesh under her natural pedicure was discolored from the week before, wh
en the door to Dan’s studio had slammed shut on her foot. She closed her eyes again. Relishing the heat of the room. Summer was coming and this would soon be an undesirable luxury, like a sauna. She disliked sweating.
It certainly wasn’t the prospect of sex with Gordon Huff that was keeping her from breaking off their dinner meeting. She found she didn’t really like sex.It’s not that exactly: I’m bored with it. It is the same act repeated over and over, it would hardly be any better with someone else. If I don’t enjoy it with my husband, who at least has an interest in keeping me satisfied, how could I like it with a stranger? An old, paunchy stranger.
She dangled her arms at her sides and let the water hold them up. She relaxed her body as much as she could and tried to doze. She tried to imagine sex with Mr. Huff. Unable to prevent it, she felt herself distracted by the decor of the hotel room, hanging curtains, changing fabrics, choosing bedding. Well-appointed furnishings, of course. There would be a full bar instead of the more likely minibar. Not content with just that, she made Gordon Huff a CEO of a large corporation, and much, much more handsome. He gave her a long velvet box. Changed it to a pendant. Then it was a watch. Then it was the bracelet.
They had a drink. Dark amber with ice. Ice tinkled.Miss Mason, is it true you are a director of your company?
We were featured in theAtlanticlast year.
She dozed on this for a while.
Her arms dangled at her sides. Through her reverie, she became aware of a tingling in her hands. They were cold, suddenly, although the water was warm around her. She moved her hands about.
They hurt. She flexed her fingers and found it caused pain and she opened her eyes.
The water was red with blood. She stared gape-mouthed for just a moment and then sat up, fast, her head lightening with it. She stared at the water, swished her hands through it; it was blood. Confusion would have lasted longer—my period?—if not for the sudden sharp pain in both wrists that hit her suddenly, like knowledge. She pulled her hands out of the water and blood rushed down her arms, painting her red from her hands to her elbows.
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