Trouble

by Jesse Kellerman

  “I’m coming out tonight.”

  George sneezed. “What was that?”

  “I’ll see you soon,” Jonah said. “I’m coming on the nine forty-nine.”

  “It’s Friday. I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.”

  “I wasn’t. Change of plans.”

  “I wish you’d told me earlier, I could’ve called Louise. Now it’s too late.”

  Jonah said, “Meet me at the station.”

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2004.

  The guest-room mattress was potholed and unsupportive, and when he awoke from a restless night, his back hurt. His sleeves bunched in his armpits; one pajama leg twisted around like a French pastry; the air stale with the effluvia of nightmares.

  He came up from the basement and crossed the darkened living room, interrupting shafts of light busy with migrating cat hair. Outside, snow blew from the hedges. Aside from the imprint of The New York Times, the front yard was unbroken, bubble-bath white.

  He washed his face and neck in the second-floor bathroom. He could hear Hannah talking in her sleep, something she’d always done, even in her well days. She would sleep on her stomach, her head wrenched sideways, laughing at untold jokes until he stroked her naked back to quiet her down.

  Six months ago he might have gone in and done the same; but standing at the sink, he resisted the urge to perform an intimacy no longer called for.

  At nine thirty-nine George galumphed downstairs, stopping at the liquor cabinet before running outside to snatch up the paper. He shook snow from his slippers and cleared a space at the kitchen table to scavenge the remains of Jonah’s breakfast.

  “How’d you sleep? Did you let the cat out?”

  “Yeah.”

  George bit down on a piece of bacon. “I didn’t know we had this in the fridge.”

  “It was there.”

  “I’ll be darned…You want the sports?”

  While glancing at the basketball scores, Jonah noticed that George hadn’t shaved. Cultivating stubble for the Week of Romance?

  Jonah made a list of provisions on a notepad with a floral pattern. He’d bought this notepad for them; now he couldn’t remember why. He’d thought Hannah would like the flowers? Hoped that a designated “to-do” list would increase overall household organization? “I’m heading into town.”

  George killed his drink and reached for his checkbook. “You want a ride?”

  “I’ll walk.” Then, before he could stop himself: “Need anything?”

  George started to reply, shook his head.

  “What,” Jonah said.

  “I’ll get it myself. Never mind.”

  “I’m there already.” Stem, you servile twat. He needed to leave before he made some new unreasonable offer: to shave the lint from George’s skivvies or scrub out the raingutters with a toothbrush and elderberry jam. He stood abruptly. “I’ll be back soon.”

  As he went into the entry hall, George appeared behind him, waving a page torn from the notepad. “Since you’re there already.”

  Jonah took the note.

  3 pk Trojan reg lubricated

  “Car’s coming at four fifteen,” George said. “Try’n be back before then.”

  PLOWS HAD BUILT up great glittering snowbanks; he walked in the middle of the street. Men clearing driveways stopped mid-heave, shielding their eyes from the glare to see who was coming. Sons unwillingly roused to help leaned sullenly on their shovels. A girl used two green bottlecaps to give sight to a snowman. Her mother, visible in the bay window, cupped a mug and cradled the cordless: a speech he could easily imagine.

  Yes I can see her right now you won’t believe how big she’s gotten she’ll be taller than Nate soon can I bring anything a salad well if you insist how about renting a movie we can all watch together that’d be so June Cleaver I suppose that’s where we’re at

  At the supermarket he loaded up on nonperishables. The checker rolled her eyes when he asked for a delivery slip. “Might take a while,” she said.

  He said, “I got nothing but time.”

  Unready to face the music, he strolled around Great Neck Plaza, watching his breath rise and vanish. He got a haircut. He bought a collection of photos of 1920s dancers and had it wrapped for Hannah. He bought himself a new shirt and, on a whim, found the hunting counter at the sporting-goods store.

  “Six months,” said the clerk when he asked about the waiting period on a handgun. “State law. They need to check you out, make sure you’re not prone to shoot, y’know, someone.”

  AS GEORGE FLIPPED his suitcase into the trunk of the cab, the back of his parka rode up, disclosing a florid Hawaiian shirt. Jonah stood on the threshold, feeling the house’s warm air rubbing at his nape and, on his face, the cold, setting sun.

  “The emergency numbers,” George said, coming back up the front walk.

  “Yes.”

  “And the cash.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll call from Miami. If there’s a problem with the flight, I’ll call from the airport.” George stared over Jonah’s shoulder at the house. Hannah had refused to say good-bye. “Tell her I love her.”

  “I will.”

  “Tell her I love her, though. Tell her I still think about her mother all the time.”

  Jonah said, “I’ll tell her you love her.”

  George leaned toward the porch, as though negotiating the bow of a tilting ship, as though he intended to go inside, go to his daughter and apologize for having his own life; for Wendy; for being short of patience; for drinking. Some of this history warranted an apology; some of it did not; and, unable to differentiate, he had left it all to rot.

  He turned and went.

  The tires spun in place until the tread caught and the car lurched into a U that expanded, by virtue of the Lincoln’s long snout, into a three-point turn. The squeaks and crunches of vulcanized rubber on snow. Jonah watched them drive up the block, signal, and pull away. He lingered, listening to nothing. Then he went inside to deal with dinner.

  The pizza place they normally ordered from wouldn’t come out in the snow; he got the same answer from the Chinese place, the Mexican place, the Thai place. He scrambled eggs. It was going to be a cholesterol-heavy week.

  The smell of frying onions brought Hannah downstairs. She sat on a kitchen chair, tucking her feet beneath her nightgown, her sleepgear of choice when she got around to taking off her jeans and bathrobe. In college she’d eschewed the standard baggy flannels and boxer shorts in favor of a frilly Victorian number that made her look like the ghost of Ophelia.

  “Hey there,” he said, and smiled.

  She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear.

  “I can give you some eggs.”

  “Okay.”

  She didn’t eat, though, watching him as he shoveled down his food.

  “You want something else? Soup?”

  She prodded her plate, said nothing.

  He left the dishes in the sink.

  Without George’s ego to fill it, the house felt submerged, isolated, like a space capsule or a Siberian yurt. Jonah promised himself that if the roads cleared they would go to the movies. They tried to play Scrabble but Hannah kept getting distracted. She babbled about the future, a loose goulash of numerology and astrology she’d picked up from a TV show about psychics. He began to worry about her having a major episode. If that happened—in this weather—

  They abandoned the game halfway through. He gathered the tiles and Hannah stretched out in the back room, positioned toward the Zenith, as though bowing to the shrine of her mother.

  “How you feeling?” he asked. He saw her fighting to subdue the wrong thoughts and let out the right ones. In the end she gave up and shrugged.

  He walked to the mantel and removed a photo of Wendy carrying Hannah in a slinglike thing. In the upper-left corner of the frame was George’s contribution to the scene: a finger obstructing the lens.

  Behind him, Hannah said sleepily, “I love you.”
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br />   He said nothing. He heard her begin to snore.

  He braced himself and carried her upstairs.

  In her closet was a deep cardboard box, stamped SYLVANIA, in which Hannah had thrown two decades’ worth of letters, birthday cards, ticket stubs: the paper trail of youth. Summer camp infatuations, whose mystique and epistolary stamina failed six weeks into the school year. Recruitment offers from softball programs scattered across the United States. Why hadn’t she gone to USC, he wondered. Or anyplace warmer than Ann Arbor. A postcard (BRUXELLES) from George that he hadn’t seen before.

  6–22–71 Dear Wendy Europe is hot, we’re staying at a hotel near the train station

  Sitting crosslegged, he restacked the box’s contents in reverse order on the floor. Hannah turned over in bed, snorted, went still.

  At the bottom of the box he found a book.

  The Giving Tree

  He opened to the inside cover.

  For my HANNAH on her twentieth birthday.

  I love you because you are good. Always be this simple.

  Your Jonah

  It was dark but he shifted around until he caught a ray of moonlight, and then read the whole thing straight through. The tree, plucked and dismembered and skinned and engraved and, at last, brought low, all in the name of love. He found the story disturbing, not at all the uplifting one of his childhood. When he’d given it to her, he’d meant well, to extoll her selflessness, a point moving along a line.

  He sat in the moonlight, remembering her.

  Columbus Day, junior year. They spend the weekend alone in a Lake Huron cabin owned by her teammate’s parents. The small town with its deserted shops. She enthusiastically peruses second-rate antiques; he plays at being middle-aged. She buys him an old cigar box; he buys her a piece of costume jewelry. They talk to the shopkeeper, who tells them that it is off-season. The fellow who gives walking tours of the forest has that very day decamped for Boca. From the general store they obtain groceries and a pamphlet entitled Flora and Fauna of the Upper Peninsula. They take the car inland, passing an unwooded patch purported to be an old Indian cemetery. Hannah derives great pleasure from using the pamphlet to identify trees. Firs and aspens, birch and white cedars. He pulls over and they tramp around in search of wild blueberries. She tells him to watch for poison oak; she used to be a Girl Scout. He hadn’t known; he is delighted. Every new detail is a gift.

  That night Hannah poaches a salmon, one of the three dishes she knows how to make. They consume half a bottle of cheap white wine. Making love in front of the fireplace sounds romantic but the floor is hard and hasn’t been swept in months, and they both start to sneeze. They give up and go to the bedroom instead, returning to the fireside to finish the wine and play Scrabble.

  He makes void; she makes mud. He makes meaty; she makes yarggh. He points out that that’s not a word. She says It’s a sound. What sound he asks. Yarggh she says.

  They go out on the balcony. It’s cloudy but there’s so much starlight. He crunches his toes inside his slippers and says What’re you thinking.

  She says My mom.

  They are quiet.

  He says Do you ever think about getting married?

  She nods.

  He says Well?

  It’s so pretty out here she says. Thank you for taking me here.

  He smiles. It was your idea.

  She smiles back, and he wonders if that is supposed to answer his question. Then she says I know.

  They watch the slowly shifting heavens.

  People liked to pretend that accidents were choices, and vice versa. To praise your feet for great leaps; to blame your skinned knees on a hastily spinning earth.

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2004.

  Toward the end of his first full day on the job, solitude started to take its toll. He could only watch so much television, read so many pages; look at Hannah for so long. Snow—huge swooping flocks of it—jammed the windowsills, leaving the house murky at midday; what scant daylight squeaked through had started to wane by early afternoon. The heat didn’t work well; he walked around in socks and a sweater. Hannah wore a blanket, thrown over her shoulders like a superhero cape.

  The cat scratched at his ankle.

  He could hear the air.

  He felt, briefly, a pang for ever having said no to George. About anything. This was an anti-life. Although he had to remember that George’s loneliness was self-imposed; he was the one who refused to institutionalize Hannah. If he wanted, he could put down the Old Overholt and take up jogging and vegetarianism. The sleeping till noon, the listlessness, all of it had started earlier, with Wendy’s death.

  It embarrassed Hannah. During breaks and summer vacation, she’d always come to Scarsdale, even though—as Jonah told her a billion times—it took him the same amount of time to drive over to her. I’ll get on the Hutch, I’ll be there in an hour.

  No, my dad’s not feeling well.

  After she got sick, of course, she no longer cared. One of schizophrenia’s many contradictions was how it replaced one’s normal self-consciousness with an irrational one. The world conspired against you because of your importance—not because you were parading naked up the sidewalk.

  By five he was going stir-crazy. A long time seemed to have passed since that morning, and for the sake of hearing his own voice he called people. First his mother, which he quickly understood as a bad move.

  “I’m coming out there right now,” she declared when he told her that he’d been eating eggs for twenty-four hours. “I’ll take the two of you to dinner.”

  “We’re fine, Mom, I’d rather be alone.”

  “But you were just complaining about being alone.”

  “That’s why I’m calling you,” he said. “To complain.”

  “But I can come to see you in person, wouldn’t that be better?”

  He called Lance at his mother’s Amagansett manse.

  “I’m wearing a nine-hundred-dollar shirt.”

  Jonah laughed. “Good for you.”

  “It’s not mine,” Lance said. “I left all my clothes at our place, so I’ve been borrowing from the Count. He gave me presents, it’s like I’m six. Do you think it’s weird that he bought me herb?”

  “No weirder than what you’re used to.”

  “I get the idea,” Lance said, “that he was one of those guys who did a lot of coke in the early eighties. Dissolved septum, etcetera. He’s had a nosejob, that much I can tell.”

  “Your mom must be in heaven.”

  “Dude, I think he might pop the question.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m getting that vibe. My mom is having third-finger seizures. Like she needs something heavy to hold it down.”

  “Congratulations?”

  “Can you see me as the fuckin ring boy? And get this: he brought his personal chef. Tonight we’re having a formal dinner, black tie and waiters. It’s gonna be like this all week. My mom invited all these friends of hers. They’re like the fuckin undead, dude, with a capital dead. The materialism makes me want to puke, except they have nice cars. They’re all in real estate except for one lady, my mom’s oldest friend, who teaches gender studies at Sarah Lawrence and is raising her son to wear thong panties. I pity the fool. Her girlfriend is a producer. I’m going to try and sell her on the selfumentary installments one and two.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks. That’s me, fighting the good fight since 1977. How’s life at the asylum?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Cool. When can we go back to our apartment?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You sent the cops the clip.”

  “They talked to Eve.”

  “And?”

  “And they won’t…Tell you the truth, I’m not sure what it’d take. She might have to kill me first.”

  “That’s not funny. Are you safe?”

  “I don’t think there’s any way she could know where I am,” Jonah said. “It’s one thing
to follow somebody around the City. But here, no way.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Yeah,” he said limply. “We’ll go back after break. We’ll put another lock on.”

  He called his sister; called Vik, who didn’t answer. He and Deanna were probably up in the mountains, their reception hampered by miles of pines. Jonah left a message wishing them a fun time.

  The house felt quieter than ever, at once vast and shrinking.

  He checked on Hannah, singing to herself as she watched TV. She twirled her hair and tormented her cuticles, and did not answer when he said her name.

  Around eight, he stepped onto the front porch. Theirs was the darkest house: lights along the front walk had all burnt out, and they had no decorations up. By comparison, the split-level across the way looked like a funhouse, its gable lit up, Dancing Santa patrolling the lawn. Shivering, Jonah counted stars; hummed carols he didn’t know the words to; listened to owls.

  He had begun to relax when a loud crash sent him scampering inside. After bringing his nervous system back into line he checked the eyehole.

  Nothing.

  He fetched a thick glass candlestick. As he opened the door and stepped outside he saw the wind dump a clump of snow into the skeletal shrubs, which sagged and broke under the weight. He chastised himself for being nuts and went back inside.

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2004.

  “I can’t talk long,” George said. “It’s four dollars a minute. Everything okay?”

  “We’re all set,” Jonah said. “Bored, but—”

  “Hang on.” The phone dropped away and a woman laughed. Said stop it. Georgie, stop! Jonah paced the den, running his fingers along the piano that had been turned into a repository for unreadable books. For someone concerned about the expense, Georgie-Porgie didn’t seem averse to a two minute, eight dollar tickle-war.

  At least he was having a good time. Jonah goddamn well expected Georgie-Porgie to have the goddamned time of his goddamned life.

  “So it’s good, everything is good?”

  “Listen—what time is the nurse coming on Friday? I’m—”