by Marc Parent
Banks, staring at that stomach, annoyed by it for some reason, is slow to respond.
“Martin,” snaps the doorman. “Twenty-nine-oh-two. That the apartment you asked for, or am I wrong?”
Banks checks his clipboard and nods. He’s suddenly conscious of the weight and contents of the tool belt on his hips: what he’d like to do now is pull his Rowalt cordless drill out of its holster and scare the fat man shitless.
The doorman slams down the phone. “I’m gonna have to take you up myself.”
“It won’t take long,” Banks assures him.
“Better not.” The doorman pulls a belt-loop key ring from his front pocket and walks toward the elevators at the back of the lobby. “I’m the only one on duty. Rodriguez called in sick.”
“Ten minutes, tops,” Banks says, following him into the elevator.
“Rodriguez is sick like I’m a prima fucking ballerina.”
On the twenty-ninth floor, there are no sounds in the long corridor of numbered doors. The doorman tries several keys before finding the right one. Then the door opens and Banks is looking across a living room through a wall of windows, beyond which is Boston, huddled and rising, in light so achingly clear it’s blue.
“Bet you twenty bucks the TV’s in there.” The doorman points to a wood veneer cabinet against the wall. He pulls up a handful of each pant leg and sits down on the leather sofa. “You said ten minutes, right? Think I’ll wait.”
Banks folds back the doors of the media cabinet and squats down. The TV is a twenty-seven-inch Trinitron. A plane of sunlight cuts diagonally across the screen, which suddenly isn’t a window into anything but his own hollowed-out face. He turns on the set with the universal remote. It takes him two seconds to recognize Divorce Court, hazed by static. He switches it off and there’s his own face again like a death mask.
“Hey,” complains the doorman. “Leave it.”
Banks doesn’t turn around. “Where’s the back door?”
“In the back. Where the hell else would it be?”
In the small gray screen, past his own reflection, Banks watches the grinning doorman remove his cap and run a meaty hand over his balding head.
“I need to find the junction box,” Banks says quietly. “I can spend all day looking for it, or you can show me where it is.”
“What you need, buddy, is a sense of humor,” the doorman replies almost sadly, putting both palms on his thighs and pushing himself to his feet.
Banks rises and follows him down a long uncarpeted hallway. The apartment is larger than he’d thought, with rooms leading off of other rooms. The air feels too humid for winter, semitropical, he has no idea why. The doorman, his heels scuffing the parquet floor, starts to whistle tunelessly, and Banks follows him without thinking.
They pass a bedroom on the left, the door open to show drawn blinds, a bare desk, an unmade bed. It makes Banks uncomfortable to look into another person’s private space, but still he looks. He can’t help himself. On one wall there’s a framed poster of a light bulb; on another, a shelf supporting a glass jar filled with shiny black stones.
And then, as they near the end of the hallway, it’s as if they have stepped into shadow, the blue light of day trapped somewhere far behind. Ahead, over the doorman’s shoulder, Banks glimpses the back door with its heavy security lock. He’s thinking that he’ll drill the hole above the door and run the cable straight into the living room; he’ll have to staple-gun it to the wall because there aren’t any moldings.
He almost runs into the other man, who has stopped abruptly.
“You hear that?” whispers the doorman.
“What?”
“That. Listen.”
Banks listens. And above the doorman’s strained breathing he finally hears it: the sound of water trickling into water, coming from a bathroom to the right of the back door, a few feet ahead of where they’re standing.
“Bathroom,” he says. He puts a hand on the doorman’s wide back, feeling the warm sweat soaking through the jacket, and lightly pushes him forward.
“Hey, watchit—”
Banks brushes past him. The bathroom door is open. Next to the sink a nightlight is shining—Banks can see the tiny glowing filament. At first, standing in the doorway, it’s all he sees: on one side, the illuminated plastic shade pleasantly reminding him of a PEZ dispenser; on the other, the mirror above the sink drawing and diffusing the meager light, like a pale sun trembling underwater.
He goes in. The bathtub is against the back wall, a white opaque shower curtain drawn halfway across it. Visible now are the thin stream of water trickling out of the brass faucet, and two bare feet that appear to float to either side.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” says the doorman.
Screened against the shower curtain Banks sees the doorman’s gross, flickering shadow slump down on the toilet seat and put its head in its hands. Then for a moment there’s nothing but the sounds of water trickling into water, like small glass beads falling into a pond, and, every few seconds, the drain sucking for breath.
“Jesus Mother of Christ,” moans the doorman.
“Shut up,” Banks says.
He can barely hear himself through the pounding in his ears. He pulls aside the shower curtain as if ripping off a Band-Aid.
The man’s body is like his feet: it would float if there was room. The torso sits up on the water as if a hand was gently pushing it from below. But Banks stares at the head. It’s inside a white garbage bag tied at the throat, the knot poking up like a fist. He thinks he recognizes the brand of bag he and Janice always get at Star Market. The blue and yellow face is visible where it touches plastic—side of nose, tumescent cheekbone, lips dark as plums.
The doorman is whimpering now. Banks falls to his knees. After a while he begins to shake, his eyes squeezed shut, his forehead pressed against the side of the tub as if he’s bowing to the dead.
“NOBODY’S FAULT, SOMETHING like this,” the policeman tells Banks. “Guy wants to check out, he checks out.”
The cops keep their hats on. The paramedics arrive and fish out the body, put it on a stretcher and cover it with a sheet. They leave the head tied in the garbage bag. Banks sees one of them slip a pill to the doorman, who is sitting on the leather sofa in the living room. The doorman washes down the pill with some Scotch from the dead man’s liquor cabinet and goes on complaining to no one in particular about Rodriguez, how it’s all his fault, the lying stinking son of a bitch, and if he ever sees Rodriguez again he’s going to kill him. He’s still sitting and complaining when Banks leaves.
Outside, the day is warmer, the air blue as a dream. Walking to his car, Banks hears the snow melting, the streets washed clean by the runoff.
He sits with his hands on the steering wheel, the keys in his lap. He is already an hour late for his next job but he makes no move to start the engine. He stays where he is, staring at the photograph on the dashboard.
He is home again, before it all ended: standing beside his father’s ’58 Corvette, his head no higher than the door handle. The red and white beauty in the driveway, the sun on its hood.
An Eye for an Eye
HEY WERE EATING IN A RESTAURANT, Thai food, because that’s what she wanted at this stage. She was a finicky eater when pregnant, and he prided himself on accommodating her sometimes strange but always insistent desires. He was that kind of man; he was helpful and compassionate, at least he tried to be; he took out the trash every Tuesday and did the grocery shopping and picked up at night. Now that she was pregnant he was even more helpful, carrying loads of laundry up- and downstairs, sponging the white tiled countertops. He didn’t mind it. He was that kind of man.
And, being that kind of man, tonight he was taking her out on a good old-fashioned date, this despite the fact that they hadn’t had sex for five months flat, and before that for procreative purposes only. He could admit, to himself, that this was difficult to deal with, his sex drive being so much higher than hers, but that, too, h
e was willing to overlook, or accommodate.
His wife across the table from him had a large belly for her six months, and sometimes he could even see her dress move, like a person trapped under a tent. That was his son in there. His son! She wanted to name him something fey, like Raphael, which sounded to him like a gay hairdresser. “Think of him ten years from now, in the schoolyard,” he said to her as their coconut soup was served, and she said, spooning up the pale broth, “What do you want then?” her eyes bright and pushy, and he said, being collaborative as opposed to competitive, “How about another angel, Gabriel.”
“I once knew a Gabriel,” she said. “In college.”
“So,” he said.
“I can’t name my child Gabriel. That was a guy I went out with.”
“What guy?” he said. “You never told me about him.”
“For like two weeks,” she said.
“Ahh,” he said, picking up a fried spring roll and biting into its crispy flank, “I see,” he said. “Short but passionate, I take it? A lucky man, that Gabriel.”
She looked at him long and hard. “What are you implying?” she said. “Are you implying we’re not passionate?”
“Not at all,” he said, his voice with that maddening, singsong quality.
“Of course you are,” she said. “What do you expect, when you work until three in the morning?”
“Anne, Anne,” he said to her, like she was a child who needed to be soothed.
“What do you expect,” she finally said, her voice low. “I’m six months pregnant. I’m forty years old. My back hurts. You work and then come home and expect we can have sex when we hardly have time to talk. Besides, you try carrying the child. Having a second was your idea anyway.”
“Why are you always so rageful?” he said. “I just want peace. I didn’t mean a thing.”
“Of course you meant something!” she snapped. “The worst thing you can do to me is say you’re being totally benign when in fact you speak in coded messages.”
“Coded messages,” he said, letting the phrase linger there, so it sounded absurd, paranoid, hysterical. He was trying to make her look foolish, as he often did; she wanted to get him back. She was a tempestuous woman with an advanced degree; even as a non gravida she was moody, a trait she considered a strength.
“I’m not paranoid,” she said. “I’m perfectly capable of accurately reading your passive-aggressive postures. And really,” she said, “passive-aggressive is the worst way to be. I’d rather have a man who was capable of straightforward aggression.”
“What do you mean?” he said. “I am aggressive.”
“Of course you are,” she said.
Now he was mad. He spooned up the last of the coconut soup and flicked a shred from his blond beard, a gesture he suddenly saw from outside himself, pathetic, feminine, the little first-finger flick, the tiny piece of pulp.
The waiter came over. He was, of course, a Thai man, with a slender build and a crisp white shirt. Before them he set a platter with a whole fish upon it, its head still attached, its eyes a deep ocean green, its mouth open in an expression of agony. The fish was banked by asparagus and emitted a slight smell of curry. The waiter, brandishing a knife, began to slowly cut around its neck.
“No need,” he said quickly. “Mai tong kan.” He knew a little Thai and was proud of it, having spent a year there after graduate school. “Chan tum ang dai,” he said, meaning, “I can do it myself.” The waiter smiled a surprised smile and gave him the knife. It was silly to feel so totally redeemed, but he did. He felt as though he’d lofted up two notches on the rungs that riddled his life. He could smell sky and sun. He lowered the serrated blade to the crisp fish skin and sliced sideways, ladling onto her plate linen-white pieces of its flesh. She sat there, swollen and looking at him; she was proud of his being bilingual, although really, he had at best a tourist’s grasp of the language. Still, she said thank you each time he layered the meat onto her plate, and each thank you was a puff of peace, a smoke signal, let’s surrender. Then, the knife slipped and he cut his thumb.
“Oh,” he said. The cut was not insignificant. When he held up his hand, bright red blood trembled and welled from the wound, then dropped onto the floor. The waiter rushed forward. She leaned towards him and wrapped his thumb in a napkin. “I’m fine, I’m fine, really,” he said. He felt himself slip down the ladder, into a darker space now. “I’m fine!” he said, pulling his hand away. He got up. Went to the men’s room. Came back. There was the fish on the platter, his impregnated wife, whom he had fed.
“Do you want to see a movie afterwards?” he said.
“We should get home for the sitter,” she said.
“We can call her,” he said, offering an olive branch. “We can call her and tell her we’ll be late. It’s been, like, years since we went on a date.”
“Okay,” she said. She smiled at him. He couldn’t tell if it was a smile of pity, or acquiescence, or real agreement. Lately, it had seemed she’d rather read a book than be with him.
“We can see,” he said, “that movie you’ve always wanted to see. The one about the wedding.”
“Yes,” she said. “It will remind us of our own.”
“We had a great wedding,” he said. And then, before he could stop himself, this slipped out: “It was a great wedding, despite the fact that a number of people had told me not to marry you.”
She froze, the fork poised at the seam of her lips. “What’s that supposed to mean,” she said. She set the fork down. Her voice sounded a bit more wounded than he had intended, but sometimes wounds themselves are soothing. Inside, he smiled and balked, smiled and balked.
“Isn’t it,” he said, chewing off the frilled top of an asparagus, “isn’t it always the case that there’s at least one person who tells you the other’s not good enough for you.”
“Not good enough,” she echoed faintly.
“I mean,” he said, “there’s always at least one person. Surely there was someone from your side who thought I was like, too radical for you.”
She looked straight at him. “No one told me that,” she said. “When will you understand,” she said, her words coming out as hisses now, “when will you understand that all your left-wing ramblings are no more than conventional liberal ideas circa 1960.”
They ate in silence for a while. She slurped on her straw, crudely, he thought. She, too, heard the sound of the slurp, and thought the same thing, and her face turned red.
“Who was it,” she said, finally.
“Who was what?” he said.
“Who was it that told you not to marry me?”
“I could never tell you that, I’ll never let you know that,” he said.
“It’s not fair of you to say it only halfway,” she said. “If you’re going to make these kinds of comments, you have to follow them through.” She felt the baby begin to kick inside her. It was kicking and kicking, and she pictured it, its fetal form, suspended between here and there, this world and that, padded by a thick fluid. She felt that way too, all of a sudden: suspended, weightless, a little bit lost. “My baby,” she thought, trying to ground herself.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a voice that could sound slightly condescending. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“It was your mother,” she said.
“No,” he said.
“Your sister,” she said. “I know it was your sister. You probably told her way back then, even, that your libido was higher than mine.”
“Not my sister,” he said.
“Your father,” she said. She hated herself for guessing, for giving him that much power.
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “I’ll never tell you. Let’s just drop it.”
“Fuck you,” she said softly.
They ate the rest of their dinner without saying a word. Each made an attempt to prove to the other they were cool and collected. To that end, they both ate too much, because cool and collected people have go
od appetites, and they each ate casually, slowly slicing with their knives, almost humming to themselves.
Then they were finished.
They rose to leave. They drove back home in silence. In only three more months the baby would come. They were both thinking that. She was thinking of a statistic she once heard, that couples with two children divorced less frequently than those with one. This both comforted her and contributed to her feeling of entrapment. He, for his part, was thinking that he tried so hard, and she knocked him down so far, and still he tried, practicing compassion and helpfulness, and what did he get for it? He meant her no harm. He thought of the knife, the fish, the silvery scales, the way their teeth closed in around the food.
Back at home, they paid the babysitter, checked in on their sleeping child, and then went to their own bedroom. He pulled off his shirt and pants and climbed between the sheets. She went into the bathroom, not at all unusual, but she stayed there for a long, long time. He heard running water. Then he heard the tap turn off and the sound of her feet slap-sucking the bare tiles. He switched off the bedside-table light and now the room was drenched in darkness. The clock face had an eerie glow, the second hand sailing and sailing around the circle.
“Anne?” he called out at last. His voice sounded small and cracked.
No answer.
“Anne,” he called out more loudly now, and when that summons, too, was not answered, he stood up and walked across the carpeted floor, towards the closed bathroom door. From inside, he heard the clink of small bottles being shifted, the whisper of wood as a drawer opened and closed. Slowly, slowly, he knelt down, like a man about to propose, he thought, but no, like a man who has exhausted himself, he knelt down and peered through the keyhole, and he could see the shimmer of her red robe, the long slow strokes she used to comb out her hair—beautiful hair she had, like corn silk, raw and blond. “Anne,” he whispered; she heard him. Somehow, she heard his tiny plea through the keyhole and she turned towards the sound. “Yes?” she said. Then she walked across the floor and, from her side of the door, put her eye right up next to his. They stayed this way for a long time. She thought there was something beautiful in his eye, the tiny grains of green she could see, the pupil with its halo of color. He thought of a storm he’d once been in, way back in college, a hurricane that had bent the trees back and snapped branches from boughs with a deep cracking sound. Crack. Rain slashing against the window (his wife blinked), and then the eye of the storm, a sudden stillness, bands of brief blue above them.