I can’t stand the thought of him touching you. It makes me crazy.
You remembered the weight of secrets. And once or twice, when going about your chores at work or at home, when you’d stopped absolutely still, transfixed with wanting. And in the fever and hurry of wanting and secrets, it had come to seem that kissing touching fucking—might as well say the word—a man who was not your husband was the same as any other betrayal.
All you have to do is leave the side door to the garage open. And then go to spend the evening at your sister’s. The house backed on a forest preserve and it was possible to get in and out without people noticing. It was possible to enter and wait in the garage until Howell Wolfe came out to watch the portable television he kept on his workbench, something he did every night. There were two full-sized televisions in the house but he liked sitting in the garage. It was a big garage and he had it fixed up with a lawn chair and an electric heater for cold weather.
Janice said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe the devil is just the absence of God’s love.”
Janice looked tired. Well of course you’d get tired, trying to beat the Bible into heads like these. Janice craned her neck delicately within her turtleneck. The faintest sign that she might be feeling the heat. In a little while she would pack up her Bible and go home to her minister husband and fix dinner and pray some more over it. What did Janice pray for? She was already full of charitable deeds and holy thoughts. Oh Lord we thank thee. For her harmless, holy life. Because Janice had never let anyone talk her into anything. Had never wished to be talked into anything, or maybe she had, but nobody was interested, and so she was not going to hell. Like you were. And while you were waiting around for hell to happen, you lived in an obscene barnyard where the animals were made to line up, count off, squat during strip searches so their labia could be inspected, eat with plastic spoons, answer to their last names only, even if that name belonged to a dead man.
All this time, you had been what they called a model prisoner.
If I do what I mean to do, I’ll leave the front door standing open. Then when you come back, don’t go inside. Go to the neighbor’s and call the police.
He had not wanted you to see the body. But the police, who had not been fooled for a minute, showed you the photographs of Howell Wolfe’s liquid, flattened face. They asked you about the state of your marriage. It seemed there had been some gossip already.
I know everything you ever done.
“Let us pray,” sighed Janice.
That was the signal that the session was over, and you stood up and held hands in a prayer circle. Oh no. You’d been careless. Usually you arranged things so you held hands with Janice and maybe Bunny, but today you reached out and here was Jameelah on your left and Crystal on your right. Jameelah’s hand was curled over, ready to fist, and you looked at each other sideways, because even though your eyes were supposed to be closed in prayer, it would be bad judgment to be that unwary. Jameelah’s face was full of thunder, and her black eyes moved back and forth beneath her lashes, some kind of skitter Morse code: Hurt/Don’thurt/me/you/me/you. Janice had closed her eyes. So had Crystal, on your right—you made sure of this with a glance—and Crystal had your hand locked in her strangler’s grip, and maybe that was what sent the electricity in Crystal’s brain right through you.
One minute you were pretending to follow along with the prayer, even as the monster inside you hooted and sneered. Then there was something just below the threshold of sound. A vibration. Bees in a hive. A wind gathering itself.
Your right hand sizzled. Crystal jerked and flopped and pulled you over on top of her. Crystal’s mouth was inventing new obscene words, a whole new alphabet of spit. Her eyes were hard-boiled eggs. She squealed, a purely mechanical sound. Her heels drummed the floor and there was a smell, metallic and urinous both, as if all of Crystal’s fluids had been superheated. A commotion of voices, but it only reached you dimly, because Crystal’s electricity was surging and snapping through you, blue and yellow brain fireworks. She had you so tight that your eyelashes tangled together, and when one of Crystal’s eyes opened—opened normally, that is, as if there might be seeing involved—it was like looking straight through a telescope at the universe in miniature, otherwise known as heaven.
And you saw in that instant how all the mathematics in the world might be erased, so that three might indeed become the same as eight, and how one particular, burning day would stop lasting twenty-five years or forever.
And then Crystal’s grip loosened and you were raised to your feet. Incredibly, your left hand was still in Jameelah’s and had been all the while. Guards were running in and talking importantly on their radios, and Crystal moaned at the center of a circle, people telling her to do this or that, calm down, sit up, speak or don’t speak.
No one seemed to notice Jameelah, crying and crying, bawling really, butting her inky head against your breasts, soaking your shirt with her tears.
Oh sweet baby girl, don’t cry, don’t cry. But you were crying too. Who would have believed such a thing? That here was your child, arrived at last, and it was true what they’d said all along. Love was the only way back into heaven.
Treehouse
Garrison lived in one Chicago suburb and worked in another, so that the freeway between the two was as familiar to him as his own face in the mirror. He knew its moods, its good days and bad, its haggard mornings and tired nights. In summer, veils of heat haze and pollution draped across the sky. Sunlight reflected in blinding metal smears. In winter, the windshield wipers dragged through layers of churned-up brown slush, and taillights lit the early dusk. If Garrison was lucky the drive took forty-five minutes. If luck was against him it was an hour or more. On the drive to work the skyline of downtown Chicago was fastened to his windshield, its impossibly massive towers rendered light and floating by distance. Of course there were occasions when he went into the city for one reason or another, but it was hard to connect the pretty mirage he saw while driving with the actual place.
He drove a ten-year-old Lexus, built back before they began loading them up with too many overcomplicated features. He maintained it immaculately, changed the oil himself and took the car into the dealer at the first sign of vibration or imbalance. The Lexus had an excellent sound system. He carried with him a variety of music, jazz and classic rock and, for days when he had to muscle through fast-moving traffic, opera. He had all manner of equipment designed for his comfort and safety: a compass mounted on the dashboard, a cupholder for his coffee, and a hi-tech insulated mug his daughter gave him for Christmas. There was a special stand for charging his cell phone and a sheepskin seat cover to ease his back. The trip could be measured out in miles, minutes, landmarks, other people’s bad driving, fatigue. He was used to it and didn’t complain overmuch, since complaining never got you anywhere.
One evening in early spring, Garrison drove home aware of a dangerous lack of concentration, an extra effort required to keep his eyes and hands and reflexes focused. It had been a bad and numbing day at work. He was a division head for one of the large health insurance companies, or, in the preferred terminology, a health care provider. The first two floors of the building were taken up by the call center, at least what was left of it after much of the work had been routed to a group of Indian subcontractors specially trained in colloquial American speech. The rooms contained dozens of computer screens, each of them glowing with the blue of aquariums, another mirage that momentarily distracted him.
An elevator took him past the actuarial and payment processing departments and up through the corporate layers, auditing and human resources and support staff, until he arrived at his own precincts. Garrison’s division oversaw the financials from three different regions. Garrison reported to a vice president for national revenues, and the vice president to the CEO. In this way money traveled upward, against gravity, like water forced through pipes.
Garrison was good at his job, which was different than enjoying it. At one t
ime he would have said he enjoyed it, found it challenging, relished the problem solving he had to do and his small and large successes. But in the last year or so, the minor annoyances, things he had previously ignored or shrugged off, had begun to catch at all his worn-down spots. He found it an effort to maintain the jokiness and small civilities the office required. More often than not he would have preferred to be left alone.
The corporation, like all corporations, was relentless in its need for more and more of everything: income, productivity, growth, happy stockbrokers. More and constant pressure on the money-carrying pipes. Aside from the ritual congratulations to those who had met this or that benchmark (designed to make those who had not done so anxious), there was seldom any sense of a job well done, or even completed. This was the nature of the beast, it was what it was, and any staleness or exasperation Garrison willed away through sustained and diligent bouts of work. He was a believer in the virtue of work itself, of activity and honest effort, which would pull you through a bad patch when nothing else could.
This day’s routine had been disrupted by a meeting involving two of the assistant managers who were at war with each other. One of them was a woman who had worked there longer than Garrison but had never advanced beyond this first managerial rung. Garrison knew she believed this to be due to sex, and now age, discrimination. Garrison couldn’t honestly say she was wrong, even though she had been told by Human Resources, and presumably by other people, that her complaints were not actionable. There was a certain type of female personality, fussbudget, Garrison labeled it, which overreacted and over-personalized, took offense too easily, nursed grudges. She would have been fine running an antique shop or bookstore, somewhere she could bully a couple of employees and wallow in gossip. Here she undermined herself at every turn. There had never been any reason to promote her, nor any real reason to let her go, except for her own unhappiness. She’d hung on all this time and seemed determined to end her days here, mostly out of spite.
She was already seated alone in the conference room when Garrison came in. He felt a familiar fatigue, measuring out the effort it would take him to handle her. “Good morning Loretta, how are you?”
“Fine. Thanks.” She spoke as if she had dipped a bucket into some vast reservoir of hurt feelings, meaning to convey that she wasn’t at all fine, and this was in some way Garrison’s fault, but she hardly expected him to care. In this, at least, she was right.
Garrison said, “Let’s see, we still need Rob, Mindy, Chris, and Derek.” Loretta made a particular face at Derek’s name. She should try not to do such things. Garrison couldn’t recall why or how she and Derek had started feuding. Probably one of them had broken the other’s crayons.
He asked her a question about one of the report sections, to draw her attention to the matter at hand. She bent over her files, and Garrison saw that she had a bald spot the size of a fifty-cent piece at the top of her head, and that the hair along her part was thinning.
She found the section Garrison needed and looked up. “What?”
“Nothing.”
Loretta opened her purse and extracted a tin of mints, shaking it at Garrison to offer him one. He said no thank you. She popped a couple in her mouth and crunched them. “Got to have something. I still get the cravings. Smoking,” she explained, since Garrison wasn’t getting it.
“Ah.” He was pretty sure she’d told him before about quitting smoking, and he hadn’t remembered it. He wished the others would get here.
Loretta said, “Look, maybe I shouldn’t say anything . . .”
You shouldn’t, Garrison thought. Don’t.
“… but I’m having problems getting Derek to respond to my emails. He just ignores them. Then I find out that when he sends his updates, he copies everyone but me. It means that some things just aren’t getting done right.”
“What does Rob say?” Rob was their immediate supervisor. It was not a happy job.
Loretta’s mouth had deep, hinged lines on both sides, like a marionette’s. “Oh, he thinks Derek can do no wrong. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“I’m sure that Rob wants everyone to do their best work.” She didn’t really expect him to say anything different, did she?
The marionette jaw worked up and down, then quivered. “I know everybody around here thinks I’m old and whiny and don’t have to be taken seriously. But every day I come into this office, I give it a hundred and ten percent. I bust my poor old whiny ass.” She tried to offer this last in a humorous, self-mocking tone, which made it even worse.
“Of course you do, Loretta. People respect your effort.”
“Oh do they? It’s hard to tell, what with all the eye rolling.”
The others came in then, milling around with coffee mugs and making their cheery noise. “I brought doughnuts for everyone,” said Derek, holding the box aloft. It was such a Derek thing to do. Garrison didn’t like Derek any better than he did Loretta. He just found Derek easier to deal with. Derek was sleek and well-barbered, all transparency and ambition. Derek was the one you could count on to salute the flag once it was run up the flagpole, laugh at jokes when laughing was required, fetch the stick when it was thrown. Garrison could never decide if he was a smart person playing dumb or if dumb came naturally to him. Derek would go far, but never as far as he’d think he deserved.
Loretta had retreated into abrupt, curdled silence. Derek stopped presiding over the doughnuts and gave her a searching look. “Hey, did you do something different to your hair?”
The day wore on. An irritated sensibility grew in him and he couldn’t settle into his usual working pace. He was losing some capacity for simple human response. It wasn’t just Loretta. Other people too launched themselves at him, demanding his attention, sympathy, response, active interest, and it all dropped away from him as if he were a wall. He wished he could fall asleep where he sat.
A little before five he gave up on accomplishing anything of substance and headed home, tired from doing nothing. The freeway was already moving slowly and he resigned himself to a long trip. He’d only managed a couple of miles when his wife called, asking if he’d run into the bad weather yet. He said, “What weather?” just as he looked up at the looming sky.
This was March and early for tornadoes, but that was his first thought when he saw the strange banded clouds extending the length of the western horizon. He told his wife he had to go, and hung up to attend to his driving. The sky was still bright above him but that wouldn’t last. A front was moving through, visibly demarcated with strips of clear and dark sky. Garrison calculated that they were moving toward each other on a direct heading, although it was hard to tell just where they would intersect. The cars coming at him on the other side of the highway had their headlights on but no windshield wipers. He switched on the all-news radio station and waited through a restaurant review and an advertisement for used photocopiers. There was a severe thunderstorm warning, a storm moving in from the northwest. Cautions about floods and damaging winds, nothing about tornadoes, at least not yet.
He’d never seen such a sky. He kept resting his eyes on it, then jerking them back to the roadway, the kind of driving he cursed in other people. The leading edge of the front was the color of soot, and the layer behind that was steel, and the body of the storm a bulging purple. As he and the front drew closer together, he saw whorls of clouds embedded throughout it, places where some upper-level vortex swirled. They looked exactly like the clouds in science fiction movies that billowed and boiled and disgorged alien spacecraft.
By the time he reached his exit he was entirely beneath the purple canopy. Buildings glowed, luridly backlit. The rain itself held off until he was a few blocks from home, then it came hammering down. In a few moments the gutters turned to shallow lakes and the wind pushed waves across their surfaces. The same wind strove against him head-on. He slowed to keep control of the steering and to avoid the worst of the standing water. He didn’t want to wash out his brakes. At the same time he h
ad to keep up enough momentum, without hydroplaning, so he wouldn’t stall out.
Garrison made the turn into his own driveway and the automatic garage door opened to receive him. He’d never doubted that he’d make it home safely, so it wasn’t nerves, the aftermath of nerves, that caused him to sit in his car for a long minute once he turned the engine off. He was trying to remember the exact way the sky had looked, fix it in his mind’s eye.
Garrison’s wife was waiting for him in the kitchen. She reached up to give him a quick, hard hug and asked him if he’d had the rain all the way and he said he hadn’t. She said there were power lines down in scattered places, she was worried he might run into a downed line, and he said she shouldn’t worry about things like that. She got a beer from the refrigerator for him and told him it would be just a little while longer until dinner, and would he go check the battery on the backup sump pump?
Garrison stood in the den, drinking his beer and looking out the patio doors to the backyard. The rain was still sheeting, driving sideways, but already the worst had passed and the wind had slackened. The yard was deep and extended beyond the patio and his wife’s dormant flowerbeds to a clear space raggedly edged with shrubs and then to some full-sized trees along the lot line. If he’d been there alone, he would have gone outside and let the rain soak him to the skin. He put his fingers to the glass and they hummed with the small vibration. His wife called him for dinner and he turned away, feeling heavy-headed.
His daughter was away at her expensive college but his son still lived at home, and so it was the three of them who sat down at the table. There was a casserole of ground beef and rice and a salad with bottled dressing and the frozen potatoes that his son ate at almost every meal. His wife said that the television news was all about the storm, flooded streets and power outages and planes at O’Hare dodging lightning strikes, mass transit delays and people stranded. She said that they’d been lucky here so far but tomorrow she was going out and stocking up on batteries, lanterns, bottled water, all the things you were meant to have on hand in an emergency.
Do Not Deny Me Page 20