The Judas Glass (3 page)

“I know who you've been with,” she said.

I didn't like this, Connie referring to a woman she had never met, someone she could never imagine, let alone understand. I kept my temper. It was 12:13
A
.
M
. and I felt fresh. If Connie wanted the truth she could have it. Here it was, the little chat that would blow up my marriage, one of those wobbly buildings too dangerous to leave standing.

One light wasn't enough. I steadied a pole lamp as I bumped into it. I struggled with the button until it came on.

Connie's laptop was folded shut. A box of paperclips had spilled, glittering metal clamps on the carpet. There were folders in a file at her feet, a white box with black wheels. I was always stumbling over rolling files in the bedroom, the library, white bookshelves of Etruscan matrons and Hopi fetishes.

“You turned off the light when you heard the car,” I said.

“Did you see the light go out?”

I didn't answer, but she saw my eyes flicker to the invoice from Afri-art,
two fertility figurines, ebony
. She didn't sit here under blackout conditions writing checks.

“There're two kinds of people,” said Connie, pretty in her dressing gown, something expensive, padded shoulders, lavender. She was wearing fresh makeup. “People who sit on the back porch looking in, and people who sit on the front porch, looking out.”

Connie was making a mistake. If she wanted an honest talk she should stick to issues of truth. If she began to argue she would be playing a game I was good at, even though it was a talent I did not much appreciate. “Meaning what?” I asked pleasantly.

“You're one of those back porch people, Richard. You don't see the view.” Her blond pageboy hair and bright lipstick made her look smart, and she gazed at me in a way that made me realize how important it is to be able to see, how if you couldn't use your eyes there was so much you would have to guess about the world.

But I could see Connie's uncertainty: she was caught up in her own rhetorical device. Even now she couldn't stay mad, not wanting to deceive herself but doing it anyway. She wasn't sure.

“You sat here in the dark,” I said casually, “working up that figure of speech?”

“You're so dumb,” she said. But the power was fading from her voice. She was slipping into the accent of her family, Arkansas poultry ranchers who moved to California. They had gambled their future on Swanson's pioneer frozen dinner, turkey with mashed potato. They were rich.

“Sometimes you look so wonderful, Connie. Cool, professional. Like you deserve all those cute little reviews you tape to the shop window. And other times you sound like the girl from Turlock, Turkey Capital of the World.”

She shocked me. I should have expected it, but I didn't. “Please be nice enough to deceive me, Richard. Go ahead. That's what I want.” She was in tears.

“Don't be upset,” I said. I meant it. I couldn't talk to a crying woman.

“I
am
upset. I sit here in this house—in our house—and I know. I know you are fooling around out there, Richard!” This was said with tears, anguish, everything she could throw into it, her words bent out of shape into that hillbilly accent she was ashamed of and never used except when she was unthinkingly sincere.

She won. She didn't win the truth, but she beat me at whatever contest we were in. I stood there and my mind emptied. I told her I had been unpacking with Matilda, that the office was a mess, half the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling flashed like strobes, it almost gave me a petit mal just trying to set my California real estate code in the right order.

I should have confronted her about her unfaithfulness. I never had. She left evidence on her desk, notes in handwriting I didn't recognize and told myself not to read, masculine writing I registered subliminally,
Until Tuesday night
.
This is to replace the one I tore
. I could only guess what garment that referred to, what sex-pot scarlet panties, what see-through negligee. Different handwriting each time.

She had that way of fitting her thumbnail into the line where her front teeth met. It made her look both calculating and defenseless, and with tears on her cheeks I knew there was no way I could hurt her, not tonight.

“I couldn't get Matilda at home,” she said. She sighed, not a conversational sigh, but a real one, painful to hear. “I'll pretend everything's all right,” she said.

But she didn't pretend. She wept. I had never seen her like this. After four years of marriage you assume you know your spouse, but here she was, grieving over my unfaithfulness. I had that only partly unpleasant insight—she really loved me, after a fashion. She had trashed our marriage, left it out under the wind and rain for some two years, but now that it was over she did what was, for Connie, the logical thing. She wanted it back.

I shouldn't have mentioned Turlock. “We can't have a lamp like this in the house,” I said, fingering a cloth wire that led from the greenish-brown base of the lamp to the wall socket. What looked like Bakelite, an early, virtually archaeological plastic, was crumbling around the two prongs. “It's dangerous.”

“Solid brass,” said Connie.

I worked the switch but the lamp would not turn off. I jumped back as a spark bit me and, at the same time, the room went black.

I didn't mind the dark if she didn't. I was suddenly very tired, and I had the bad feeling that Connie half-expected our discussion to be consummated in our marriage bed, the way so many of our fights had ended early in our relationship. I had the briefest image of Connie in her passion, and the image gave me neither pleasure nor hope. The only message I felt from my genitals was a mild, post-coital pain.

I worked the plug loose from the wall socket, and heard the whisper of her dressing gown as she approached me. When I stood she took me in her arms.

And she guessed my thoughts. “Richard,” she said at last. I didn't like the way my name sounded, spoken with such feeling. “You mean so much to me.”

Round One was over. I had not done well. I groped in the kitchen and found the circuit breakers, a metal door that opens to metal switches. I fumbled for the switch and when I found it light showed dimly from the living room. It's one of the modest but real pleasures of life, fixing a simple technical problem. I leaned against the sink, trying to tell my inner voice what I would tell Connie tomorrow, after I had given it some thought.

I gave a quick left jab to the inflated plastic figure on the breakfast counter. He reeled backward, and just as quickly came back to his upright position. Popeye. He was one of my favorite cultural icons, nostalgia blended with my own desire to have a secret weapon, a can of spinach somewhere on my person at all times. I had a shelf of Popeye videos, the great ones, the ones Max Fleisher produced. I had a rare almost-virgin celluloid of the fifteen-minute cartoon of Popeye as Sinbad the Sailor.

Larkin was in his exercise wheel, but ran across the cedar chips to climb into my hand. The white hamster looked up at me as though he knew exactly what was wrong with my life. A few good Vitapellets and maybe a piece of celery would fix me up. I had bought Larkin at a pet store the week before. His cage had sat next to an albino python, and it didn't take much imagination to see that Larkin should either change careers or write a will.

I took a quick shower, yucca blossom shampoo and a big, new loofah. I wiped the condensation off the mirror. I looked good, just a little sunburn. There was a faded scar on my forehead, a ghostly smile. You could only see it in very bright light. At the age of six, in my family's vacation cottage, I had run full speed into a wall mirror, shattering it.

There is a process to going to bed, to losing ourselves for the night. As much as we want sleep, it is a challenge, an emptiness. My habit was to finish with the fussy details, washing, flossing, and then wander down into the kitchen for a small drink of brandy. Sometimes the habit changed, almost without my willing it, and I switched to port, or stopped having even this small taste of alcohol and found myself preferring a glass of ice water.

Whatever the liquid, the act of drinking meant that I could let go of my world for another night, that today had sustained me and so would the coming morning.

On this night I went though my step-by-step preparation for bed knowing that an honest man would leave now, pack a bag and phone a hotel. Feeling bruised and dishonest, when I settled under the covers I hoped she was already asleep. Instead I heard her say, “I thought you said those reviews looked great.”

The newspaper clippings she stuck in the window, she meant, turned into oversized reproductions by the photocopy shop down the street. What had been a few inches of type blared at passersby on Solano Avenue.
Sierra Imports—A Feats for the Eyes
. That typo was a particular standout. Many a pedestrian had tried to insert the
s
in the right place, but the reviews were on the inside of the glass. The volunteer copyeditors' corrections were washed away every two weeks by the window cleaning service.

To change the subject I said, “Do you realize what a burglar could do to this place? Even this room—look at all those glass lamps.”

“I hide the most valuable stuff,” she said.

“You mean that crawl space in the attic? That's the first place burglars look. They don't look for wall safes. They march right up into the attic, brush all the rock wool off the heirlooms and leave everything else. It's months before people know what's missing.”

She said, “You know I would kill to keep you, Richard. If you needed a kidney or a lung out of my body, it would be yours. You know that.”

This gave me no joy. She might give me a kidney, but I would pay an impossible price for it. Yet this was what I had loved about Connie, once. This liveliness, this shallow expectation that she could pretend the past had never happened, that the present wasn't the way it really was, had won me. She had a grip on life.

I tried to convince myself that what I felt was respect, companionship bordering on a fraternal regard. So it was a kind of love. But I didn't lie, and I didn't say anything further to cause her pain. I couldn't tell her that although I still felt a stony affection for her, now I knew what love was. Tomorrow morning I would tell her I was leaving her, and then I would make plans to move my things out. Maybe it would not be so difficult. Maybe I should tell her now.

But I felt sorry for her. Her breath was slow, even. She was asleep. There was a creaking, squeaking persistence from a distant corner of the house, Larkin in his exercise wheel. I could not interrupt her slumber. I couldn't shake her awake to tell her that I was going.

There were extra suitcases in the attic. I would pack those.

I told myself I couldn't sleep, but I did, skimming in and out of dreams, checking the digital clock on the nightstand as though it helped to know how much longer it would be until daylight. I lay on top of the blankets, sharing the bed with Connie out of habit, but not really
in
bed with her. We had slept like this many times before.

The light, when it came, was dull gray. I looked perky in the mirror, my appearance a lie. I have always been fascinated by mirrors. My first science project was on the history of the looking glass, polished tin Egyptian mirrors, all the way down to the refracting telescope on Mount Palomar. Family lore explained my collison with the mirror by emphasizing my fondness for looking at myself.
He thought it was a room with a cute little boy, and ran right into it
. The right hand that lifts the comb to the hair is the left hand of the Other. A book held up to a looking glass shows each letter reversed, the sequence of symbols from right to left, but the order of the lines, from top to bottom, is not changed. The world is answered with an image so faithful it is unintelligible.

I was putting on a new shirt with labels still attached, telling me that my garment was “born of unequalled quality.” The label was wound around a button, and I had to use a pair of toenail scissors to cut the string. I tucked the shirttail into my trousers as the phone rang.

It was a whisper, one of those sounds that carry harder than screams.

4

“There's somebody here!” I could hear Rebecca turning to listen, her nightgown rustling, her breath a soft thunder into the receiver. “There's someone in the house!”

Call the police, I began to say. Why did you call me first, why didn't you punch 911? I didn't have to ask. I knew why—I knew in my heart how much I meant to her. But before I could tell her what to do the connection went dead.

“What is it?” asked Connie, rising on one elbow. “Is it Dad?”

“No, it's a client.”

“It's not Dad?” she asked again, still half-asleep. Her father had suffered heart trouble a few years before, and a phone call at a strange hour made both of us fear bad news.

“Some kind of emergency,” I said. I stabbed numbers into the phone, 911, that magic code. I got that one-two-three ascending tune the phone company plays when you have misdialed. I tried again and got it wrong once more, my fingers working so fast I pushed two numbers at once. “A client having trouble with a prowler.”

“Which client?” Connie was asking. “Richard, tell me what's happening.”

“Nobody you know,” I said, steadying myself to try it again.

“It's too early for anything to go wrong,” said Connie. She knew better. There were phone calls at odd hours. Once a landslide took a just-finished house halfway down a hill while my client rode the floor screaming, pulling on his pants. An attempted suicide in the midst of an eviction process, an ex-wife who wouldn't vacant the Stinson Beach weekend retreat—there were emergencies even in my prosaic practice.

I did it carefully this time, a stiff-fingered caricature of a man making sure he got it right. The phone company took its time.