It (9 page)

Stanley wanted kids.
She
wanted kids. They were as compatible on that subject as they were on their enjoyment of Woody Allen's films, their more or less regular attendance at synagogue, their political leanings, their dislike of marijuana, a hundred other things both great and small. There had been an extra room in the Traynor house, which they had split evenly down the middle. On the left he had a desk for working and a chair for reading; on the right she had a sewing machine and a cardtable where she did jigsaw puzzles. There had been an agreement between them about that room so strong they rarely spoke of it—it was simply there, like their noses or the wedding rings on their left hands. Someday that room would belong to Andy or to Jenny. But where was that child? The sewing machine and the baskets of fabric and the cardtable and the desk and the La-Z-Boy all kept their places, seeming each month to solidify their holds on their respective positions in the room and to further establish their legitimacy. So she thought, although she never could quite crystallize the thought; like the word
pornographic,
it was a concept that danced just beyond her ability to quantify. But she did remember one time when she got her period, sliding open the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get a sanitary napkin; she remembered looking at the box of Stayfree pads and thinking that the box looked almost smug, seemed almost to be saying:
Hello, Patty! We are your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry. Nurse us. Nurse us on blood.

In 1976, three years after she had thrown away the last cycle of Ovral tablets, they saw a doctor named Harkavay in Atlanta. “We want to know if there is something wrong,” Stanley said, “and we want to know if we can do anything about it if there is.”

They took the tests. They showed that Stanley's sperm was perky, that Patty's eggs were fertile, that all the channels that were
supposed
to be open
were
open.

Harkavay, who wore no wedding ring and who had the open, pleasant, ruddy face of a college grad student just back from a midterm skiing vacation in Colorado, told them that maybe it was just nerves. He told them that such a problem was by no means uncommon. He told them that there seemed to be a psychological correlative in such cases that was in some ways similar to sexual impotency—the more you wanted to, the less you could. They would have to relax. They ought, if they could, to forget all about procreation when they had sex.

Stan was grumpy on the way home. Patty asked him why.

“I
never
do,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Think of procreation
during.”

She began to giggle, even though she was by then feeling a bit lonesome and frightened. And that night, lying in bed, long after she believed that Stanley must be asleep,
he
had frightened her by speaking out of the dark. His voice was flat but nevertheless choked with tears. “It's me,” he said. “It's my fault.”

She rolled toward him, groped for him, held him.

“Don't be a stupid,” she said. But her heart was beating fast—much too fast. It wasn't just that he had startled her; it was as if he had looked into her mind and read a secret conviction she held there but of which she had not known until this minute. With no rhyme, no reason, she felt—
knew—
that he was right. There was something wrong, and it wasn't her. It was him. Something in him.

“Don't be such a klutz,” she whispered fiercely against his shoulder. He was sweating lightly and she became suddenly aware that he was afraid. The fear was coming off him in cold waves; lying naked with him was suddenly like lying naked in front of an open refrigerator.

“I'm not a klutz and I'm not being stupid,” he said in that same voice, which was simultaneously flat and choked with emotion, “and you know it. It's me. But I don't know
why.”

“You can't know any such thing.” Her voice was harsh, scolding—her
mother's voice when her mother was afraid. And even as she scolded him a shudder ran through her body, twisting it like a whip. Stanley felt it and his arms tightened around her.

“Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes I think I know why. Sometimes I have a dream, a bad dream, and I wake up and I think, ‘I know now. I know what's wrong.' Not just you not catching pregnant—everything. Everything that's wrong with my life.”

“Stanley,
nothing's
wrong with your life!”

“I don't mean from inside,” he said. “From inside is fine. I'm talking about
outside.
Something that should be over and isn't. I wake up from these dreams and think, ‘My whole pleasant life has been nothing but the eye of some storm I don't understand.' I'm afraid. But then it just . . . fades. The way dreams do.”

She knew that he sometimes dreamed uneasily. On half a dozen occasions he had awakened her, thrashing and moaning. Probably there had been other times when she had slept through his dark interludes. Whenever she reached for him, asked him, he said the same thing:
I can't remember.
Then he would reach for his cigarettes and smoke sitting up in bed, waiting for the residue of the dream to pass through his pores like bad sweat.

No kids. On the night of May 28th, 1985—the night of the bath—their assorted in-laws were still waiting to be grandparents. The extra room was still an extra room; the Stayfree Maxis and Stayfree Minis still occupied their accustomed places in the cupboard under the bathroom sink; the cardinal still paid its monthly visit. Her mother, who was much occupied with her own affairs but not entirely oblivious to her daughter's pain, had stopped asking in her letters and when Stanley and Patty made their twice-yearly trips back to New York. There were no more humorous remarks about whether or not they were taking their vitamin E. Stanley had also stopped mentioning babies, but sometimes, when she didn't know he was looking, she saw a shadow on his face. Some shadow. As if he were trying desperately to remember something.

Other than that one cloud, their lives were pleasant enough until the phone rang during the middle of
Family Feud
on the night of May 28th. Patty had six of Stan's shirts, two of her blouses, her sewing kit, and her odd-button box; Stan had the new William Denbrough novel, not even out in paperback yet, in his hands. There was a snarling
beast on the front of this book. On the back was a bald man wearing glasses.

Stan was sitting nearer the phone. He picked it up and said, “Hello—Uris residence.”

He listened, and a frown line delved between his eyebrows.
“Who
did you say?”

Patty felt an instant of fright. Later, shame would cause her to lie and tell her parents that she had known something was wrong from the instant the telephone had rung, but in reality there had only been that one instant, that one quick look up from her sewing. But maybe that was all right. Maybe they had both suspected that something was coming long before that phone call, something that didn't fit with the nice house set tastefully back behind the low yew hedges, something so much a given that it really didn't need much of an acknowledgment . . . that one sharp instant of fright, like the stab of a quickly withdrawn icepick, was enough.

Is it Mom?
she mouthed at him in that instant, thinking that perhaps her father, twenty pounds overweight and prone to what he called “the bellyache” since his early forties, had had a heart attack.

Stan shook his head at her, and then smiled a bit at something the voice on the phone was saying. “You . . .
you!
Well, I'll be goddamned! Mike! How did y—”

He fell silent again, listening. As his smile faded she recognized—or thought she did—his analytic expression, the one which said someone was unfolding a problem or explaining a sudden change in an ongoing situation or telling him something strange and interesting. This last was probably the case, she gathered. A new client? An old friend? Perhaps. She turned her attention back to the TV, where a woman was flinging her arms around Richard Dawson and kissing him madly. She thought that Richard Dawson must get kissed even more than the Blarney stone. She
also
thought she wouldn't mind kissing him herself.

As she began searching for a black button to match the ones on Stanley's blue denim shirt, Patty was vaguely aware that the conversation was settling into a smoother groove—Stanley grunted occasionally, and once he asked: “Are you sure, Mike?” Finally, after a very long pause, he said, “All right, I understand. Yes, I . . . Yes. Yes, everything. I have the picture. I . . . what? . . . No, I can't absolutely
promise
that, but I'll consider it carefully. You know that . . . oh? . . . He did? . . . Well, you bet! Of course I do. Yes . . . sure . . . thank you . . . yes. Bye-bye.” He hung up.

Patty glanced at him and saw him staring blankly into space over the TV set. On her show, the audience was applauding the Ryan family, which had just scored two hundred and eighty points, most of them by guessing that the audience survey would answer “math” in response to the question “What class will people say Junior hates most in school?” The Ryans were jumping up and down and screaming joyfully. Stanley, however, was frowning. She would later tell her parents she thought Stanley's face had looked a little off-color, and so she did, but she neglected to tell them she had dismissed it at the time as only a trick of the table-lamp, with its green glass shade.

“Who was that, Stan?”

“Hmmmm?” He looked around at her. She thought the look on his face was one of gentle abstraction, perhaps mixed with minor annoyance. It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black.

“Who was that on the
phone?”

“No one,” he said. “No one, really. I think I'll take a bath.” He stood up.

“What, at seven o'clock?”

He didn't answer, only left the room. She might have asked him if something was wrong, might even have gone after him and asked him if he was sick to his stomach—he was sexually uninhibited, but he could be oddly prim about other things, and it wouldn't be at all unlike him to say he was going to take a bath when what he really had to do was whoops something which hadn't agreed with him. But now a new family, the Piscapos, were being introduced, and Patty just
knew
Richard Dawson would find something funny to say about that name, and besides, she was having the devil's own time finding a black button, although she knew there were loads of them in the button box. They hid, of course; that was the only explanation. . . .

So she let him go and did not think of him again until the credit-crawl,
when she looked up and saw his empty chair. She had heard the water running into the tub upstairs and had heard it stop five or ten minutes later . . . but now she realized she had never heard the fridge door open and close, and that meant he was up there without a can of beer. Someone had called him up and dropped a big fat problem in his lap, and had she offered him a single word of commiseration? No. Tried to draw him out a little about it? No. Even noticed that something was wrong? For the third time, no. All because of that stupid TV show—she couldn't even really blame the buttons; they were only an excuse.

Okay—she'd take him up a can of Dixie, and sit beside him on the edge of the tub, scrub his back, play Geisha and wash his hair if he wanted her to, and find out just what the problem was . . . or
who
it was.

She got a can of beer out of the fridge and went upstairs with it. The first real disquiet stirred in her when she saw that the bathroom door was shut. Not just part-way closed but shut tight. Stanley
never
closed the door when he was taking a bath. It was something of a joke between them—the closed door meant he was doing something his mother had taught him, the open door meant he would not be averse to doing something the teaching of which his mother had quite properly left to others.

Patty tapped on the door with her nails, suddenly aware, too aware, of the reptilian clicking sound they made on the wood. And surely tapping on the bathroom door, knocking like a guest, was something she had never done before in her married life—not here, not on any other door in the house.

The disquiet suddenly grew strong in her, and she thought of Carson Lake, where she had gone swimming often as a girl. By the first of August the lake was as warm as a tub . . . but then you'd hit a cold pocket that would shiver you with surprise and delight. One minute you were warm; the next moment it felt as if the temperature had plummeted twenty degrees below your hips. Minus the delight, that was how she felt now—as if she had just struck a cold pocket. Only this cold pocket was not below her hips, chilling her long teenager's legs in the black depths of Carson Lake.

This one was around her heart.

“Stanley? Stan?”

This time she did more than tap with her nails. She rapped on the door. When there was still no answer, she hammered on it.

“Stanley?”

Her heart. Her heart wasn't in her chest anymore. It was beating in her throat, making it hard to breathe.

“Stanley!”

In the silence following her shout (and just the sound of herself shouting up here, less than thirty feet from the place where she laid her head down and went to sleep each night, frightened her even more), she heard a sound which brought panic up from the belowstairs part of her mind like an unwelcome guest. Such a small sound, really. It was only the sound of dripping water.
Plink
 . . . pause.
Plink
 . . . pause.
Plink
 . . . pause.
Plink . . .