The Tell (26 page)

The room's silence buoyed him. It was like a childhood night on the pond, when his solitude felt almost like confidence. None of those dead Thrashers, their cells and touch all around him, approved of what their daughter was up to either. They were on his side. The lights of a passing car swept over the drawing of Mira as a girl, and then she was gone. He would have liked to know what she saw when she looked at herself these days and if she noticed the new tiny grains of deception that were popping up on her forehead like pimples. Anguish had thinned the skin under his own eyes, revealing his muscles at feverish work, as if he spent all day watching ants crisscross the room. His students looked at him like he was a corpse and he was about as animated as one. He knew someone should fire him, but no one was paying any attention. He had just turned forty, and he was less defined in all ways. If he were to turn on the lamp, he would catch himself in the act of aging, the skin loosening when he flexed his fingers, bagging where his joints recessed. Decay was speeding up now. It was only when he made a fist that youth came back.

An animal—an opossum, a dog, a coyote—rummaged in the blue recycling bin at the side of the house. Its paws tapped the ice in a rapacious code. Mira might run over the scavenger when she pulled into the driveway. She might feel the explosion under her front wheel and detect the life of something extinguished rising in the night air, but she wouldn't know anything until the morning when she saw the pulpy evidence on the snow. And then she might pause to think about how it was that she hadn't noticed. He moved into the other front room to sit in a deeper armchair. He was a man somewhere out of television's panorama of domestic life, part of a cast of characters, grinning politicians, tight-assed teachers, sexpot secretaries, class clowns, office dumbbells, greedy landlords, demented grannies. He was the sitcom, a sweatered Pops waiting for his child to come in, post-curfew—the son with beer on his breath, the daughter with her shirt buttoned up wrong. The light would go on with an unmistakable tsk, and his line, delivered with all the serenity of a saint would be, “Do you know what time it is?” By which he would really mean, “Do you have any fucking idea what it's like to sit here while you're out there? How could you have left me to get old and worried like this?” All those concerned, fuming fathers in their upholstered perches—wasn't the true story that they were just angry about their own captivity, their life slipping away?

He touched the brocade of the armchair, raised like burns, and extracted a long hair from between the cushions. A few days earlier, a hair had floated down from nowhere when he'd been in the kitchen, and yesterday when he'd been looking in a back linen closet for—well, he couldn't recall now what he'd been looking for, except some part of Mira that led him to places he'd never explored before—a hair had fallen across his forearm. It had spooked him. He'd been slipping his hands between the piles of expertly folded, chilled sheets that hadn't been used in decades. He'd touched the ancient crumbling bars of Cashmere Bouquet soap someone had hoarded. There were pillowcases stitched with initials in such baroque script that he couldn't make out the letters. He'd found himself standing there when the copper filament of hair appeared. He'd gripped a pillowcase and pressed it to his mouth with the kind of whimper that belonged only to the cheated on, the abandoned, the betrayed, the lovelorn. All of which he was.

He heard Mira's car turn down the driveway and the engine roar before it went quiet. Owen pictured Mira and Wilton sitting in that stunned silence that always met you at the end of a long drive. What appeared in a flash before the headlights went off was the burgled carriage house with its dipping double doors, its clapboards picking up a more innocent white from the snow. What Owen wanted to hear was two car doors opening and closing. That brilliant moment of return. There was only one, though, and then the melancholy shuffle of Wilton making his way home on the ice. Soon, Wilton would catch his own reruns. Every night was a reunion for him.

From the window Owen watched Mira in the car staring ahead. He followed her as she got out and walked to the back door, then turned around and walked to the front. Owen froze in the hall by the stairs, his hand on the sculpted post. He backed up. Should he ambush her now like a thug or move back to his chair like the father? He was neither of those things. His heart flip-flopped. Her key slipped into the lock and she stepped into the darkness. He sat on the stairs.

Mira turned on the Merchanti lamp. No
tsk
but some fumbling and
shit
. She'd dropped her keys. He was feet from her and said her name.

Alarmed, she turned to see him. “O! What are you doing?”

His eyes stung. “Turn it off.”

“But then I can't see anything.”

“Turn off the light, Mira.” His words were low and deliberate.

She did, and when she came to the stairs and raised her face to him, it appeared to be swimming out of the black, a body rising to the surface. She would go on acting as if she didn't feel his anger, and went into the front room, forcing him to follow. She plopped down in the armchair, which hissed under her.

“You were sitting here, weren't you,” she said, patting the seat beneath her. “It's still warm. I can feel you. Nice.”

“I've been waiting for you.”

“I'm not late,” she said, as if tardiness were the sole crime of the night. She evaded him expertly. “In fact, I'm earlier than I said I'd be. I was cleaning up the studio. It was a mess, but I'd had enough. I'm exhausted. And hungry. Is there any dinner?”

“No Joy to help you?”

“This is too weird, talking in the dark like this. I can't see you.”

He didn't want her to see him. He wanted to press himself into her body but stayed away. “I know Joy doesn't work for you anymore,” he said.

A car sighed in passing. “Right, because I told you.”

“You don't tell me anything.”

“I did tell you. She was stagnating at Brindle. I've been saying it for years, haven't I? I love her, but it was time for her to leave and do something different. She should have
some
ambition. She would have stayed forever if I hadn't made her go.”

“She told me you laid her off because you couldn't pay her anymore.”

“That's just not true. Can I go now?” she asked, but didn't move.

“She said you take Brindle's money to play the slot machines. That you've taken it all, in fact. There's nothing left.”

She let out a long, exasperated groan. “Please tell me she didn't say that. What a totally shitty thing for her to do. She must be incredibly angry at me.” When she stood, he told her to sit.

“Is it true?” he asked.

“Jesus. Of course not.”

“How can you do it?”

“Do what?”

“How can you look at me and lie like that?” He stood behind her now, his hands tight on her shoulders. “Why is it so easy for you?”

“Look at you, O? I can't even see you.”

“How do you do it?” He paced the room. His eyes throbbed, his face was hot, his hands were cold. He picked up a round paperweight from a table behind the couch. In the dark, it looked black with a thousand air bubbles like stars glowing inside. It had the satisfying heft of a strongman's baseball and he threw it against the fireplace. A chip sparked off, but the thing didn't break. It rolled, imperfect now, onto the rug. Mira didn't react, so he picked up a bowl with a glaze like blue ice, another vain and pointless object, and it exploded against the wall. He felt the deep pleasure of destruction. When he pulled his arm back to throw a vase, Mira was up and caught him by wrist.

“Don't,” she hissed. “Don't you dare. That's enough. I get it.”

Her small hand was nothing on him, and he broke her grasp. “Why shouldn't I?” He threw the vase and it burst in a thousand musical pieces. “I mean, what's the worst that can happen? I'll get in trouble? You'll become a fucking liar? An addict?”

“I don't know what you're doing, but please, O, just stop.”

“I don't know what you're doing either. But I'm not nearly done. There's so much more, and this is so gratifying. A whole house to destroy.” He stood over her and used his size against her. “What I'd like to do, Mira, is throw
you
against the wall.”

“You're scaring me.” Her shoulders drew in protectively.

“Too bad.” He punted a porcelain dog he'd always hated. The house had never heard so much noise, including Mira's indignant and helpless cry for him to stop. “Go ahead, throw something, break something yourself,” he screamed. “See how good it feels. Let's break everything so we can get out of this terrible house.”

Mira huddled on the couch, her knees to her chin, her hands covering her face. For a while, Owen didn't move, and then he straddled her. His knees sunk into the soft cushions around her.

“Make love to me,” she said, her face still hidden.

He didn't answer, or move, and felt her humiliation sinking under him. He wanted to shame and break her. Her smell was heartbreakingly familiar.

“Then get off me,” she said, but he wouldn't. She struggled uselessly for only a second. He felt how weak she was against him.

“I've asked myself what's going on in your head when you look at me and lie to me. But that's the wrong question, because you don't see me at all. Is that how it feels to you? That I'm not even real? I don't want to do this anymore. You're killing me.”

He could recount to her every untruth, every evasion, every assurance and mollifying gesture of goodwill, everything she'd kept from him, but what did it all come to?

“If you ever go again,” he said, “I'll leave you. I swear I will.”

He hadn't known he was going to say it. He hadn't even known it was a fully formed idea until it came out of his mouth. The most violent threat of all. He watched his words float like a bright spot after a flash, and he knew Mira, still trying to hide herself under him, was trying to follow his threat, see where it landed and what it was made of.

H
e passed the front desk of Extended Stay with his head down. He'd had enough of the staff welcoming their dogged guests with chocolate chip cookies in greasy brown paper sleeves, molten from hours under a 60-watt bulb. Since moving out of the house three days before, he'd eaten too many, and they'd begun to collect in his gut. There was a dispiriting burned-sugar smell in the lobby, partially masked by the disinfectant an employee applied to the furniture and door handles as if dejection were contagious. Owen couldn't tell the men on business from the men in marital limbo because they all had that same disoriented look. He had it, too, like someone who's discovered he's gotten off at the wrong exit and can only wait it out so he can turn around again. He was one of many who'd driven by Extended Stay a hundred times on benign domestic errands without ever imagining he'd be living here, slipping a plastic key into a lock that opened the door to his new home. Owen had seen only one woman in the place, a flash of heel and tapered ankle.

At night, he heard the highway running east and west behind the building. On one side of Extended Stay was Ocean Wave Dental Associates, and on the other was the mysterious American Arbitration Association. People entering either place looked scared. Over dinner at Tokyo Joe's, he told Mike Levi, his only friend it seemed, that Extended Stay was somewhere between root canal and a forced compromise. Both places left you feeling totally fucked with.

Mike took a sip of beer and again offered the converted bedroom in his basement that over the years had served as refuge from the marital frontlines for a number of people, including himself once or twice. Owen thanked him, but said the prospect of sleeping in someone's basement hideout was too depressing.

“Like that place isn't?” Mike said, pointing to Extended Stay. His fingers were greasy from dumplings. He'd thrown his brown tie over his shoulder like a leash.

“It's supposed to be depressing,” Owen said. “But the worst thing would be to die there. The endless extended stay.”

“Who's talking about dying? Lighten up, for Christ's sake. This is all going to blow over. Come on, eat something. You look terrible, by the way.”