Don't Make Me Stop Now (11 page)

“All set?” said B. R. Something in his voice suggested he'd overheard her phone conversation. She passed him on the landing and led him into the guest room closet from which a staircase led to the attic. They stood among the piles of boxes and suitcases, the framed diplomas and the guitar cases.

“For someone who doesn't have an attic, yours is in bad need of cleaning.”

“You know, you might want to think about branching out.” She felt she still held the phone in her hand, her every nerve poised for its shrill trembling.

He looked blankly her way.

“You're kind of overly specialized, don't you think?”

“You trying to tell me attics don't need cleaning?”

“Seems like the kind of thing most people would want to do for themselves.”

“Kind of personal, hey?”

She looked around at the junk. Mostly Christopher's. She didn't like B. R. Bradshaw's tone, which suggested he knew more than he let on.

“Hey, look, doesn't matter to me what it is. I'm not cataloging, I'm toting.”

She laughed. The word
tote
always made her laugh. “So tote that barge lift that bail,” she said.

“Tell me which one to lift and which to tote and I'm there.”

She pointed to a set of free weights, told him to take them down to the garage. It was a three-trip job, and while he was gone she went about organizing piles of Christopher's belongings she wanted out of the house. Almost all of it was his, and
though he'd taken his clothes, he'd left most of his stuff here and she wanted him to, for it meant that once he tired of the girl named Sydney he would be back. I'm not leaving you for her, he'd told her time and again, and every time she'd asked him why he was with her, he'd said, I'm not
with
her. I see her sometimes, but it's not like you think. Nothing's like I think, she thought. The world is not what I think, it's what you think and always has been, your reality was the one we moved around in and now you have a new one and it's not some place I'm dying to visit. He'd wanted to see her, to have dinner a couple times a week and go to movies and even take an occasional trip together, springing for separate rooms but holding hands in the car, on walks at the beach.
The only thing that has changed is that I just can't be with you right now. I need to be by myself. I love you as much as I ever have, baby, I just can't be with you right now.

“You have no idea how much you've hurt me,” she said to herself as he lugged his mother's hook rug to the pile.

“What's that?” said B. R.

She hadn't heard him come up.

“What does B. R. stand for?” she asked.

“Ben Randolph.”

“Not Benjamin Randolph?”

“Just Ben.”

“Why not go by Ben?”

“Just never have,” he said. He seemed shy now. She saw that he'd rather ask questions than answer them.

“Would you like something to drink?” she asked.

“That would be nice,” he said. “But I ought to get all this down first.” He pointed to the piles. The garage had no door and she knew she should not leave Christopher's stuff out in the open, since they'd been broken into before, and even if nothing was stolen a storm could blow rain in and ruin everything. Yet she'd already started this attic cleaning. She'd hired herself an attic cleaner.

When he finished she heard his knock at the back door. She offered him a beer.

“No thanks.Never touch it.”

“Never?” She didn't know what she'd do without a drink at the end of the day. She knew she was drinking too much in the eyes of, say, her grandmother or her family doctor, but she never had a hangover and never drank before six and she felt she had full license to, if not drown her misery, bathe it a bit each night.

“Oh, I used to.”

She felt bad for pushing, but he didn't seem at all bothered. In fact, it seemed he wanted to talk, despite his earlier reserve when she'd asked about his name.

“I quit going on seven months ago. Six months, twenty three days in fact.”

She got him a Coke from the refrigerator and tried to change the subject, for it seemed too much like her job, listening to the testimonies of the recently rehabbed. He was talking about his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and though she considered herself a compassionate person, she had an unwarranted and unfair distrust of self-help of any kind, especially those groups that seemed to her Sunday school dressed up in street clothes. She half-listened as he described his home group, how often he attended meetings, his sponsor who was helping him now with step 9.

“What's step 9?” She didn't want to be rude. It was hard to enjoy the beer she'd poured into a fluted schooner, but she could not simply ignore him.

“Step 9's about making restitution to the ones you've hurt.”

“And who are you making restitution to?” Before the words were across the table she realized how nosy she sounded. She had the childish urge to put her hand over her mouth. She thought so constantly and obsessively of Christopher now that communion with others, on any other topic, felt impossible.

“You,” he said.

She put down her beer. “No, really,” she said, and he interrupted her to say, “I'm serious, Miss . . .” and in the silence she realized he was waiting for her to say her name, which she did not want to say even though she would write him a check soon enough and he would know.

“What are you talking about?”

“You had a break-in back a couple years ago.”

As she felt the blood rush to her face, Laura put her hand around the glass of beer.

“That was you?”

He tried to look penitent, which made her even angrier.

“Get out,” she said.

He held up his hands. “I'm not here to . . .”

“I don't care what you're here to do. You're not here to clean my attic, that's for sure.”

“Really, if you'll tell me your name so I won't have to keep calling you ma'am.”

“You stole my husband's checks. You know my name.”

“That was a long time ago. Maybe you kept your name when you married him. For all I know you're not even married anymore.”

She stood and reached for the phone. “I'm calling the police.”

“Won't you at least let me apologize? I just came here to make amends, I wasn't planning on charging you for . . .”

“Oh, so you're going to make up the price of the stuff you took? Let's see, some silver, a CD player, a VCR, a television, my husband's checkbook. What about the less tangible things you took from us? The safety, the peace of mind, the happiness. You think you can pay that back also?”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “You're crying, don't cry.”

She started dialing. He was gone by the time the 911 operator came on.

“Just forget it,” she said, and hung up.

She drank the rest of her beer in a swallow and poured another, took it into the living room. Drinking, she remembered the night of the break-in, the party they'd gone to, one of Christopher's coworkers, an obligatory affair with all the canned laughter and dead silences and salted peanuts of office parties. She'd drunk too much jug wine. She barely remembered the ride home, tense and stiff, as if she'd carried the forced conviviality away on her clothes. In the car she criticized a woman Christopher worked with for no better reason than her cocktail chitchat was tedious. As if her own at these affairs was quotable. Christopher had started in on her then, her ambiguous statements interpreted, her judgments examined.

They'd fought their way inside and carried on their fight in the kitchen and the creepiest part of that night was this: they
did not realize someone had been there until the next morning. They'd gone to bed still angry, Christopher turning away from her to read, she too tipsy to read curling wine-groggy and anxious into a fitful night's tossing. The next morning, when Christopher went down to make coffee, he'd noticed the spaces where their possessions had been, discovered the missing CD player, the silver pilfered from a bottom cabinet, a week or two later his checks missing from a file cabinet in his study. She did not care in the least about losing these things; what bothered her was how they could have settled down to their miserable sleep in a house violated, how they could have ignored it, not felt it, another presence in the sanctity they'd managed to preserve during the roughest of times. She realized later that despite the tension of that night, the way they'd both gone to sleep still angry, they — at least she — had pretended an invincibility no longer possible. She'd assumed it would all be fine in the morning. In memory the burglary seemed the beginning of the end.

The day after she ran B. R. Bradshaw off, Laura had an alarm system installed. It took the better part of the week, as she opted for the type that activated each window, the most expensive system available. She called her lawyer to see if there was some way Christopher might share the cost of this extravagance, as it was his defection that made the purchase necessary.

“I'm good, Laura, but I'm not that good.”

“It's his fault,” she said.

“Maybe you should have checked with me before you had it installed.”

“I still need it whether he pays or not,” she said. She thought of telling her lawyer the story of B. R. Bradshaw, but so far she had told no one, which was strange — she remembered half-hoping he might hit on her that first day so that she might use his advance to garner sympathy from her pity-depleted friends. But it did not feel right, sharing this secret with anyone else. And it seemed more powerful if kept a secret, even from Christopher, though the thought had occurred to her that if he knew he might even come home. Perhaps this incident would remind him of the vow he took. She'd never thought to take it seriously herself when they were content, but now it seemed a monumental promise. Love, honor, protect. If the greatest of these was love, she'd settle for the least of these, the last.

Twice during the next week she set off the alarm accidentally and had to apologize to the sullen dispatcher at the police department. The junk from the attic remained in the garage, a reminder of many things — the return of the burglar to the scene of the crime, Christopher's leaving, a cleaner attic, the coming of spring. She liked looking at it out the
kitchen window at dusk, a bourbon warming her stomach, fueling her indignation at the way things were.

On Saturday evening she heard a noise at the back porch. Immediately afterward the alarm went off, and she grabbed the phone and ran to the kitchen to find Christopher at the door, his keys in hand, his face screwed into a wince at the bleating of the alarm. She tried not to smile as she held up her hand to signal for him to wait, called the police department to explain that it was an accident, switched the alarm off, and stepped out on the back porch.

“Jesus, Laura.”

Laura shrugged. She looked behind him to the shiny Volkswagen Jetta in the drive. Christopher wore gym clothes, and was sweating. Before he left the most exercise he managed was a walk around the block.

“New image, new car?”

“It's Sydney's. Mine's in the shop. Speaking of new toys.”

“You forget we were broken into. I live here by myself. I need to feel safe.”

She regretted saying this, as it suggested to him that she'd felt safe when he was around, but he seemed too flustered at setting off the alarm to pay much attention.

“I came to get some things out of the attic.”

“You might have called.”

“I did, remember? You told me to fuck off and hung up on me.”

“I had it cleaned,” she said, and when he looked confused she added, “The attic.”

“What do you mean you had it cleaned?”

She didn't answer, for she thought she had given it away, her secret, her attic cleaner.

“I mean I cleaned out the attic.”

“You got rid of my things?”

She crossed her arms and nodded at the garage.

“Oh great,” he said. “You get an alarm for your stuff and you leave mine out for the taking.”

“You want it, take it. I don't think anything's missing.”

“I'll have to rent a truck.”

“I know a guy who has a truck. He'll deliver it. He's pretty cheap.”

“Who?”

“You don't know him.”

“I don't think that's such a good idea, do you? I don't send Sydney over here to pick up my mail.”

She couldn't decide whether to laugh or slap him. It amused her, Christopher assuming the housebreaker was her Sydney, and it infuriated her that he thought her capable of replacing him in a few weeks' time with some guy who owned a truck.

“Some of us find it hard to go from one lover to the next without even stopping to take a shower.”

Christopher said, “Well, who is he then?”

She thought she heard a bit of jealousy in his voice. Maybe I should have played along, she thought, but what's the point of stooping? Besides, she wouldn't exactly win when Ben Randolph showed up in his janitor pants. Christopher would only feel sorry for her. She wouldn't mind pity from her friends, but she was strong enough suddenly not to need it from him.

“He's just some workman. I hired him to do some yard-work.”

Christopher looked around the yard.

“He hasn't started yet,” she said.

He sighed and turned to look at the garage. “Okay,” he said. “When?”

“Next Saturday.”

“You're going to leave it out here for a whole week?”

“Take what you can. Unless Sydney's particular about her car.”

“Why do you insist on making this harder?”

“Because you do?” she said, and she left him there on the porch. From the kitchen window she watched him haul a few boxes to the trunk of the Volkswagen before giving up
and driving off. Before he'd even backed out of the drive she was on the phone to B. R. She felt oddly elated calling him, as if it could not wait another second, and was disappointed when the monotonal British lady came on to ask her to leave a message.