Want Not (22 page)

That’s when she noticed, in the furthest reaches of her peripheral vision, the stink bug, staggering out from behind the corner of the dresser. Flopping itself forward on Raid-slackened legs, it was slowly—painfully slowly—heading her way. “Jesus,” she whispered. She tried to ignore it, sinking deeper into her pillows and foundering in the awfulness of her loveless solitude, but she couldn’t help monitoring, with equal measures scorn and admiration, its creaky, gasping progress across the beige carpet.
Bug NOT dead
went through her mind: the imaginary text message to this boy whom she wanted so badly and stupidly to be in love with her. She closed her eyes, but even in that blindness she could see the stink bug coming, could somehow feel its advancement on her skin. Finally she propped herself up onto her elbows, and, with a sigh, slid off the bed. The stink bug halted, seeming to groggily sense her shadow as she stood looming above it. A shoe-sole would finish the job, but she was barefooted, and anyway . . .

Alexis ripped a page from the school notepad on her nightstand, and slipping it under the stink bug, which tumbled into the semicircular tube she’d made, she carried it to her window and dumped it, gently, onto the sill.

F
OR THE LONG CRAMPED FLIGHT
to San Francisco to attend his first meeting of the Waste Isolation Project Markers panel, back in January, Dr. Elwin Cross Jr. stuffed his carry-on bag with a half pound of homemade venison jerky; a tin of Altoids to counteract any close-quarters social effects of the jerky; his laptop and BlackBerry and their tangled black contrails of charger cords; seven amber vials containing his Metformin (for metabolic syndrome), Lipitor (cholesterol reduction), Avapro (hypertension), Colcrys (gout), Meloxicam (bursitis), Elidel (eczema), and Clonazepam (anxiety), plus a squat little bottle of baby aspirin and a pack of lozenges said to prevent snoring; a thick packet of background information, dressed in staid government-issue binders, that he’d been sent for meeting prep; and four books:
The Half Way to Healthy! How to Shed Pounds and Feel Great with One Simple Fraction,
by Simon Levine, MD;
Alzheimer’s Essentials: A Practical Guide for Caregivers;
a fiercely underlined copy of
Surviving Infidelity: A Man’s Guide
pressed upon Elwin by Fritz during one of their increasingly squirmy conversations (how he missed the old boring Fritz! Heartbreak had liberated Fritz in the worst way, unleashing years of pent-up testosterone. “The keisters around here!” he’d say after a walk through campus. “You just want to . . . bite them!”); and an oil-splotched edition of the
Haynes Jeep Cherokee Repair Manual 1984–2001,
which Elwin considered the most pleasant if least comprehensible of the four books.

The Haynes manual, in fact, was what Elwin fetched first, after wedging himself into a window seat and reciting a plaintive little prayer that the center seat would go unoccupied. His thighs needed that overflow space. He usually booked two seats, if a Business Class seat wasn’t available, but this time around he’d been too embarrassed to ask the government travel coordinator for two. The current political mood, he’d calculated, probably ruled out this sort of taxpayer-funded largesse; merely imagining the coordinator’s apologies was humiliation enough.

The congressional temperament was playing an unexpectedly large role in the Waste Isolation Project. Bill Owens, the project administrator from Attero Laboratories who’d recruited Elwin for the panel just before Thanksgiving, had confessed a measure of anxiety about whether Attero’s contract with the Department of Energy would be renewed; from what Elwin could surmise, the company’d lost its primary benefactor when the Senate Energy Committee’s chairman lost his Senate seat, in a much-ballyhooed upset, to a right-wing candidate who wanted to abolish the Department of Energy because the word “energy” was nowhere to be found in the Constitution. “So we’re fast-tracking this,” Owens said, with much apology for the bimonthly meetings this would entail. Only later did the irony of fast-tracking a ten-thousand-year mission occur to Elwin.

He flipped open the Haynes manual randomly, to the chapter on brakes. Along with a pair of Banks TorqueTube headers, K&N filter, Flowmaster Cat-Back exhaust package, Alpine stereo system plus Rockford Fosgate subwoofers, and whatever else added up to $1,387.62, the Haynes manual had come into his possession via Christopher, who’d made a seductive case for a “massive upgrade” of the Jeep after guiding Elwin through a satisfying round of bodywork repairs. Overwhelmed by the purchase options (“On the headers, you want ceramic-coated or stainless steel?”), Elwin had surrendered his credit card and dispatched Christopher to the AutoZone with tongue-in-cheek instructions to “go crazy.” The subwoofers alone were proof that Christopher had taken him literally. Though stung by the gone-crazy receipt (visibly enough for Christopher to posit a quavery, item-by-item defense, which merciful Elwin, sensing another failure being inked onto Christopher’s record, stopped midstream), Elwin was nonetheless enjoying the after-hours camaraderie in the garage: the banter, the loud cruddy rock ’n’ roll, the soul-tickling way a can of cheap beer tastes when plucked fresh from a cooler. Twice Christopher had dragged Elwin with him to McGuinn’s tavern, where Elwin had felt like a folk hero after besting the all-time high score on the video trivia game (“That’s my
neighbor,
motherfuckers!” Christopher shouted) and where a bartender dressed in a striking if unseasonable miniskirt had three times called him “big cutie,” which he dismissed on a rational level and yet, on another, fudgier level, savored like a perfect potato chip.

There was something soothing about the Haynes manual, Elwin had discovered: the way its schematics and enumerated instructions offered wrenchable solutions to just about every predicament, the way it broke down the mysteries of combustion and locomotion and made everything—even the grand opera of engine replacement—seem so elementary and doable, so one-two-three
possible.
He’d even taken to reading it in bed, as a sleep aid; it seemed to ease those terrible minutes between turning off the light and falling asleep when one is so profoundly naked before the truth of one’s circumstances. Why weren’t such manuals written for life, he wondered.
(Haynes Linguist Repair Manual, 1958–.)
For marital tension, he imagined: “Remove the tensioner mounting bolt (see illustration). Use a drivebelt tool to turn the tensioner clockwise for belt removal. Replace the belt.” For ennui: “Add 12 oz. octane booster to the fuel tank.” That sort of thing. He assessed the trio of other repair guides in his carry-on—how to repair marriage, obesity, the dissolution of his father’s mind, all of them loaded with obtuse directions to “try to let go,” or to “re-envision yourself,” or to mollify the stress of an afflicted parent by “taking time to focus on
you
”—and found them all flaccid and useless in comparison. Where, he wanted to know, were the
real
instructions he needed: what socket to use, what fluids to check, what nozzle to clean, which fuses controlled what and how to replace them? Oh, to be a machine: diagnosable, restorable, upgradeable,
functional.

“Dr. Cross?”

Elwin looked up. A tall narrow man, roughly his own age with a rectangular gray band of a mustache and shaky blue eyes, was leaning toward him with his hand extended. “Rick Carrollton, from Columbia,” he said. “They said they’d put us together on the flight out. I’m there in the, uh, middle.”

“Of course,” Elwin said. (Carrollton? Columbia? He drew a blank. The middle! Yet another prayer spurned.)

“So pleased to meet you,” said Carrollton, as Elwin, in 13A, was unsuccessfully attempting to reduce his spillover presence in 13B by tilting his buttocks toward the window. “I’m a big admirer of your work with linear optimality theory.”

Emptily, Elwin said, “Oh, why thank you,” at the same time chiding himself for neglecting the information packets which would have supplied him the material for a polite retort. As a younger, more ambitious (and skinnier, more married) man, he’d have digested the whole packet weeks beforehand, thereby equipping himself with bouquets of flattery to distribute to his colleagues. But that’s what flights were for, he’d decided this time—cramming. The open Haynes manual on the seatback tray, he realized, suggested a slackness even deeper than he wished to admit.

“And I see you’re a mechanic as well,” Carrollton said, with a chin-nod toward the manual.

“Amateur.”

“Boy oh boy, I don’t think I’ve cracked the hood of a car in twenty, thirty years. Used to love it as a kid though. My old man had a ’68 Pontiac Tempest, you remember those?”

Elwin didn’t, but nodded anyway. It was already clear he wouldn’t be reading anything on this flight.

“We’d fiddle with that darn thing every weekend,” Carrollton went on, a honeyed tone of nostalgia seeping into his voice. “Safe to say that car was the love of my life back then. I’d drive it to school and pop the hood at lunchtime like everyone else, you know, stand there waiting to be complimented. Or wait for some girl to be impressed, but, jeez, I don’t remember that ever actually happening, right?” A chuckle and a head wag, aimed at his former self. “You got kids?”

“No,” Elwin said.

“I’ve got a boy in high school, he’s a senior now. I don’t think he could change the oil on his car at gunpoint.” At this he sighed and went silent, suggesting to Elwin that there might be other, more troubling incompetencies worth noting about his son. Then he snorted and said, “Heck, I don’t know that I could change my
own
oil anymore.” As if to buttress his point, Carrollton splayed out the fingers of both hands, obliging Elwin to appraise them along with their owner. They were unsmirched, soft-looking, Westchester County hands, like you’d see in an advertisement for a high-end wristwatch. “Don’t get much honest labor, these hands,” he said. “Good for flicking a mouse around, that’s about it.” Another chuckle and a head wag, aimed this time at his current self. “Ahhhhh,” he said, lowering his hands to rub his knees as if a bout of poly-cotton scuffing might restore their old integrity.

In the long pause that followed—one of those unnerving in-flight lulls during which one is tempted to crack open a book or magazine but fears the rude signal it might send—Elwin found himself studying his own hands, remembering in passing the way his father’s hand had seemed so fragile and avian in comparison. His were soft-looking, too, but in a different, more upholstered way than Carrollton’s. Squishy, doughy-looking hands, with gnawed fingernails and cartoonish dimples. Good for grabbing a cheeseburger, that’s about it. He noted his gold wedding band, which had been resized so many times through the ever-swelling years that by now it was scarcely thicker than tinfoil. He hadn’t had the heart to abandon it yet, though by this time stubbornness was as much to blame as sentiment. He wasn’t sure if Maura had noticed it when she’d stopped by just before Christmas, but he hoped so. Maybe he’d wear it forever, like some sadsack from a George Jones ballad, and exact his posthumous revenge when Maura would spy it gleaming upon his refrigerated finger at his funeral and break into how-could-I-have-hurt-him-so sobs. Or, more likely, he’d finally wriggle it off his finger when Maura cut it out with all the “autonomy” crap and decided whether she was divorcing Elwin for the chef or coming back home. But then what would happen to it if she finally
did
pull the trigger? The question suddenly chilled him: What did people
do
with their wedding bands after a divorce? Tuck them away in rarely opened drawers, pawn them, sell them on eBay, have them melted down into tiny, bitter ingots? What
happened
to all those rings? And—what had Maura done with hers?

Her pre-Christmas visit had been a pity stop, he knew that. She’d claimed she’d left some shoes in the closet, but since the closet offered up no shoes but his own, he suspected it was a ruse. Elwin had been on his way down to the garage to meet Christopher when the front door shivered with timid little knocks. He was dressed in his (amateur) mechanic’s uniform: oily Marasmus State t-shirt, jeans, a knit skullcap. He looked like a hobo, whereas Maura looked as if she’d made a detour on her way to the city for dinner; she was dressed for foie gras. He fixed her a cup of tea, and then, after deciding that the beer he was craving would only intensify the hobo impression, fixed a wan cup for himself. Their conversation was civil but stilted, like that of opposing generals forced to make small talk while their aides type up drafts of a surrender agreement. Aside from real estate, mostly they’d talked about his father: an easy neutral ground.

“You’ll like this,” he said. “Dad says last week that he’s thinking about divorcing my mom. He’s upset that she never calls.”

“Oh God,” she said, directing a tragic-looking smile into her teacup. Then she looked up frowning. “Why’d you say I’d like that?”

“I don’t know,” Elwin said, cutting his eyes sideways. Because what he’d meant, semi-consciously anyway, was:
You’d
no doubt like the idea of divorcing a corpse. Abandoning a helpless being, blaming someone else for your own unhappiness.

He said, “It’s a figure of speech.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Anyway, I told him I had plenty of advice to give him on
that
subject.” Wincing, he realized too late that he’d overemphasized the word
“that”
—had in fact almost growled it. He’d set the exposure setting all wrong; what was meant to be light, or half-light anyway, had instead come out terribly dark.

He wasn’t alone in noticing. “You see, there you go, El,” Maura said with a sigh. “You don’t need the little jabs. Is that really what you want—a divorce? I know this has been—painful. Okay? I know.”

Did she know? Here was a woman, the former-and-perhaps-yet-again Maura Crandall, who’d awakened him at 3:30
A.M.
on a Tuesday to announce she’d been having an affair with one of her publicity clients, a chef with the appallingly daytime-soapy name of Fernando, and that after much “terrible” consideration—not to mention sixteen years of marriage—she was moving in with the chef. She wasn’t “leaving” Elwin, per se. She didn’t want a divorce, didn’t want to “lose” Elwin; no, what she wanted, more than anything else, was “autonomy.” Nothing is more lonely, she said, than living with the wrong person, but before Elwin could sink his chin all the way into his chest she said she didn’t think he
was
the wrong person—just “half the right person.” He was simply, she said, “not enough.” Just like that: short flat staccato sentences, rehearsed so many times that she’d worn the inflections off of them. And then she’d left, before Elwin had even grunted himself into a fully seated position on the bed. He’d always prized her directness, but—this was too much. Subsequent counseling sessions daubed in some context—a lukewarm array of resentments ranging from their childlessness (the fault of his clinically sluggish sperm) to his weight, from their nonexistent sex life to (startlingly) his habit of peeing while sitting down “like a girl,” and to all the cool calm academic success he’d enjoyed while she’d pinballed through careers as a political pollster, grants administrator, bookstore manager, interior design consultant, and finally restaurant publicist—and yet, context or no context, Elwin felt sure he’d never recover from the brutality of that announcement, that 3:30
A.M.
pickaxe to his chest.