The Life Before Her Eyes (12 page)

Paul stood up when he saw her. He had his hands in the pockets of his khaki pants, and he was chewing on a corner of his mustache, looking worriedly from his brown shoes to Diana. She knew he'd seen that something was wrong, but rather than looking concerned or curious, he looked ... what? Guilty? Fearful? Diana wasn't sure.

"Is everything okay?" Paul asked.

He was looking shyly at Diana, one shoulder raised as if (could it be?) he expected to be slapped, as if he were protecting his face.

Diana looked at him—the expression, the posture—for a moment before she spoke. Then she cleared her throat of the pollen—that sweet and poisonous flower dust—and said, "Something's wrong with Emma. She had ... I don't know ... a temper tantrum in the car."

Perhaps Paul looked relieved. In any case the shoulder dropped and he met Diana's eyes. He furrowed his brow,
stroked his gray beard, and said like an actor comfortable with his lines, "I'll talk to her."

Diana nodded, still regarding him carefully. After so many years she still found him attractive. More than once while driving downtown near campus, maybe on her way to meet him for lunch, maybe on some other errand, she'd caught a glimpse of a man walking down the sidewalk, briefcase in one hand, the other tucked casually into his pants pocket, and she'd felt an instant tug of physical attraction, a desire to look more closely, before she realized who it was—the stranger she wanted to look at more closely was her husband.

The gray in his hair and beard hadn't changed anything. And he was still slim. His eyes were pale and blue—the mild eyes of a professor, though his features were chiseled. Ruggedly handsome, she liked to think. He had the face of a man who might have found himself in a younger incarnation out West—climbing mountains, white-water rafting, rustling cattle—if he hadn't been in graduate school.

Still, as he stepped through the front door of the house they shared, as Diana watched him cross the threshold into the dream house they'd shared for fifteen years, she heard it again...

Fool.

She almost looked over her shoulder to see where the word had come from.

The daisies?

The lawn?

It had come from outside of herself. She touched the side of her face, feeling a bit dizzy, but then the dizziness passed and she was left with nothing but the sensation of having been spoken to by someone she couldn't see.

Only once in her life, more than two decades before, had
she heard a voice in the way she imagined people
heard voices.
And it had terrified her then, because the voice—as with this word—had been so clear. It had seemed to come from beyond her, entering her mind from her
ear...
a girl's voice, hollow and familiar—though all it had said was her name:

Diana.

She was fifteen at the time, lying in her lover's bed. He'd taken her that afternoon to a clinic downtown where she'd had an abortion. The clinic had been very clean. It smelled like floral-scented tissues. There were pastel watercolors on the walls and flutey music piped in from the ceiling. She'd been nauseated for weeks, and the paintings and the music made the back of her neck trickle with cold sweat.

Her lover, Marcus, held her hand in the waiting room. He had rough hands, the backs of which were covered with coarse black hair, and those hands in that room full of flute and pale pink flowers and sails had seemed obscenely out of place. They had seemed to be the reason for her nausea, that this masculine ugliness had entered and taken root inside her. She wanted it out. It never crossed her mind for one minute to have a baby, or that what had happened to her could possibly end in motherhood.

She let Marcus hold her hand, but she hated it, hated him, vowed that after this was over and he'd paid the receptionist for what they were going to do to her, she would never speak to him again.

Marcus was in his thirties. He kept exotic pets in his aluminum-sided house at the end of a street in a bad neighborhood outside of Briar Hill—a lynx in the garage, a panther in a cage behind his house. He had a dog, too, that lived peacefully enough inside, lapping up water and dog food right under the kitchen table, but that dog was almost pure wolf. Its eyes were
icy. Sometimes for no apparent reason the dog would lift its head to the water-stained ceiling tile in the bedroom, while Marcus and Diana made love, and howl—a sound full of primitive warning and horror.

"She's harmless," Marcus always said.

But he also said this of the panther, who would throw itself snarling against the bars of its cage when Diana so much as looked in its direction. Its teeth were so white against its blackness that they seemed to be made of light.

The lynx, however, she had only glimpsed through the window of the garage. It was leashed to a beam, and it was pacing, head down, back and forth, back and forth, though Diana could see the crazy tufts of hair near its ears that made it look like no cat she'd ever seen.

A devil cat.

A cat that had risen from its ninth life terribly altered.

Marcus himself had piercingly blue eyes. They were gorgeous eyes and always made more dazzling by the blue work shirts he wore and by the black stubble of his beard against his pale skin. She'd met him at a party, where he was selling marijuana to some boys she knew. After the first time they made love, Marcus said, "I like young girls, but you're the only one I've ever met who isn't afraid."

It had never occurred to her to be afraid.

Marcus was the one who'd given Diana Timmy, the cat. Timmy, who lived to be twenty and slept at the foot of Diana's bed for years after Marcus was only the vaguest memory of a beast's hand.

The procedure had been quick, and the only pain had been a dull cramping, and afterward, when they helped her up from the paper-covered table she'd been lying on, she realized that
the nausea was gone. It was as if it had been wiped away with a washcloth. She was so relieved, she wept.

But afterward, the bleeding went on and on.

The blood was thick and clotted, and when they called the clinic to ask them if this much bleeding was normal, they had said it probably was, and to lie down, and if it got worse to go straight to the emergency room.

Diana lay down in Marcus's bed. The ceiling above her was cracked right down the middle, and she stared at the crack, imagining herself slipping into it, disappearing.

Marcus went to the kitchen to get her a glass of water, and that's when she heard it.

The voice.

Right up close to her ear.

So close she could feel the breath of it enter her with the word...

Diana.

She sat up in bed, gasping, just as Marcus came back with a coffee cup full of water for her.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said.

"Should we go to the emergency room now?"

Diana just shook her head and lay back down.

Eventually the bleeding stopped, but by then Marcus's sheets had been soaked with it. Before he drove her back to her mother's apartment, Marcus had asked her sheepishly if she could please clean it up. He didn't think he could do it himself. He felt very squeamish about blood.

Marcus, with his wild animals.

Marcus, with his hairy hands.

Diana had torn the sheets off the bed and stuffed them into the trash bag for him, and he'd been pathetically grateful to her for it.

Fool.

She followed Paul into the house.

The ice cream is heavy with cold sweetness.
It takes the boy behind the glass counter a long time to dig it up with his silver scoop. He's a thin boy, maybe seventeen, with a red rash and a purple-black hickey on his neck.

Mint chocolate chip in a cup. Vanilla in a sugar cone. They pay him and take their ice cream outside, where they sit on a bench under a tree at the edge of the sidewalk.

On a bench across from theirs, a little girl is sitting so close to her father it looks as if the two of them are glued to each other. The father is young and handsome, and his daughter has blond pigtails. She's taking tiny nibbles of the blue ice cream in her cone while the father looks at her admiringly, urging her on, his eyes narrowed in the bright light of the summer afternoon and his own adoration.

The little girl's attention is entirely on her Blue Moon, but her father's physical presence beside her does not seem taken for granted. When he shifts his weight on the bench and his body moves centimeters from hers, the little girl scoots over until she is securely next to him again.

The ice cream is dense but formless. It has no center, no structure, no bones. Its sweetness slips into them easily, and before long it's gone. They rise from the bench and start the walk home, passing on their way the little girl, whose Blue Moon has
begun to melt and is dripping onto her father's jeans in bright splashes. He hasn't noticed.

A
FTER
P
AUL HAD GONE UPSTAIRS TO SPEAK TO
E
MMA,
Diana went to the kitchen and looked in the freezer....

Maybe she would simply make hamburgers for dinner. It was something Emma usually liked. And frozen French fries. Lots of ketchup in a puddle on her plate.

But what Diana really had a craving for was steak.

A bloody one.

Charbroiled.

The taste of carbon and salt. A rib eye, or a T-bone.

But she'd have had to go to the grocery store, and it was getting too late now. She was, she realized, hungry. Famished. They'd have to eat soon.

Diana took the hamburger out of the meat drawer in the refrigerator. It was fresh in its shrink-wrapped package. Very red, though flecked with fat. She cut a slit in the package with a sharp knife and peeled the edges away.

The smell of it was sweet. It made her mouth water.

She set the package on the Formica countertop and pulled the plastic bag of frozen fries out of the freezer, then turned the broiler on and shook the fries onto a cookie sheet.

They were stiff, furred with frost, and the cold of them burned her hand as she spread them out on the sheet. Then she took the skillet down from where she kept it on a hook over the stove and turned on the gas.

The blue bracelet sputtered up from the place where it had been waiting.

The hamburger was cold between her palms, though not as cold as the fries had been, as she clapped it into patties. It left a waxy film on her hands ... the fat; it was always hard to wash away. She'd have to rub her hands under hot water and scrub with soap.

When the pan was hot Diana slapped all but one of the four hamburger patties (two for Paul) into the skillet. There was the usual angry sizzle when the raw meat hit the hot cast iron.

The pattie she hadn't tossed into the pan, she picked up. She brought it close to her nose, and breathed it in....

Diana could hardly ever remember being so hungry, so hungry that this raw meat seemed too delicious, too tempting, not to taste.

She knew it wasn't a healthy thing, eating raw meat....

Bacteria. Parasites. Mad Cow Disease.

But the meat was so fresh. She knew there were restaurants where they served raw beef, countries in which it was a delicacy. How much different than sushi, which Diana loved and ate frequently, could it be?

She tasted just the edge.

It was even better than she'd imagined.

Cold and delicate.

If not for the tangy rust of blood, it would have been almost tasteless.

She considered salting it but thought then that it was precisely this vagueness, this mildness, that made the taste so satisfying. That and the texture, which was as smooth as anything she'd ever eaten. As smooth as pudding, as smooth as ice cream or guacamole, but so much denser. This was, after all, the smoothness of flesh. Before she heard Emma and Paul on the stairs, she'd eaten all of it.

"A
REN'T YOU HAVING A HAMBURGER?
" P
AUL ASKED.

They were sitting around the dining room table as they always did, though Emma wouldn't look up from her plate.

"I already ate," Diana said, and shrugged, "while you were upstairs. I was famished. I'll just have fries."

She looked from Paul to Emma, then raised her eyebrows ... a question.

Paul just shrugged, shook his head, and raised his shoulders ... an answer.

They could have communicated with one another this way forever, Diana thought, and the idea of that pleased her. The idea of marriage. Of the level of intimacy she shared with her husband, a level at which there was no need for language.

Her own parents had never had it. They'd stayed married for ten years, but they'd never seemed married, to Diana. She
was eight when they separated, but the word
separate
already defined them. She had almost no childhood memories of her mother and father in a room together. They ate at different hours, watched different television shows in different rooms in the evenings. They slept in the same bed, but asleep in it they might as well have been on different continents, drifting—his was a hot steamy continent, hers was sanded clean by a cool breeze.

It wasn't until much later, when Diana began to get in trouble and her parents had been divorced for years, that they seemed to meet somewhere in the middle of a bridge. The bridge of parenthood. She could still remember the strange warmth that spread through her chest when she saw her mother, weeping, throw herself into her father's arms at the police station one blue-black winter morning, and the calm familiarity with which her father had patted her mother's back.

They'd created her, that embrace seemed to say.

If it hadn't been for the two of them, despite how much they'd grown to dislike one another, where would she have been? Who?

That embrace admitted it:

She
wouldn't have
been.

But the warmth of that embrace turned cold when it hit the air. Her mother had picked her father up to bring him to the police station because his car was in the shop, and when she pressed him for details about his car trouble, he grew silent and slouched in the passenger seat Then they began to bicker about Diana, who was slouched behind them just as her father was slouched beside her mother—chastened, hoping only that the subject at hand would pass. As they snapped at one another about what to do concerning their daughter and who deserved
the blame, Diana watched Briar Hill slip around outside the car window.