A Town of Empty Rooms (33 page)

“Dan,” she said, looking at his face, “he's a jerk. I told you — ”

She looked at his face again; there was a great strain within it, a reddening, a hardening of his jaw, the sense that he was struggling terribly against something. He looked away.

“I'm going out,” he said.

“Where?” she said.

He bit his lip. “Out,” he said.

He picked up his jacket. The night seemed so bent and wrong that she imagined doing something impetuous — taking the children to a late movie, running them through a toy store, all of them packed into the car and rushing into the night. But he was not waiting for them. He hurtled out the door. There was ice in her throat. She stood at the door and watched him drive off. The children were looking at her. She waved at the car, to seem normal.

“Where did he go?” her daughter asked.

 

 

 

HE DROVE. HE HAD NO idea where he was going — he just could not be around anyone he knew. His father headed out of the garage with that woman thirty-five years ago; Dan and Harold had watched their father's car move through the shadows and through the garage's electric door, outside; he had wanted to jump into that car with him, put his hands on that woman's shoulders, push her out, and take the seat beside his father as the car rumbled away.

Now Dan's car moved down the wide streets. It was seven, the rush-hour congestion had cleared, and Waring's main drag was a long, dark strip, the headlights cutting luminous paths into the darkness. Dan gripped the steering wheel, opening and closing his fingers, like an anemone, as they began to ache. The cars felt too close to him in the adjoining lanes — he did not want anyone near him. He drove through the milky light to the darkness of the exurbs, circled them, took the interstate briefly, headed north.

 

 

 

SERENA DID NOT KNOW WHERE Dan had gone. She moved through the actions of the evening — the bathing, dressing, story reading — as though this were any night. The children were oddly obedient. The strange events of the evening, the adults shouting in the living room, had made them feel they had to move gently, carefully, through
the rest of the night. Serena pressed the sheets around their faces when they went to sleep. As she tucked in Zeb, he reached forward and grabbed her wrist. His grip was hard. His eyes were closed, and he did not speak.

“Are you all right?” she asked him. She sat with him, his hand holding her arm, for a long time until he fell back asleep.

There was no call. Nine PM. Ten PM. She listened for the wheels in the driveway. There were sounds of others coming home from work, from parties, car doors slamming, but not his. He did not answer his phone. Serena lay in bed, listened, got up, checked the children, went back to bed. She got up and looked out the window at Forrest's house; the windows glowed yellow, and his sidewalk was clean, swept of leaves. She locked the door and placed a chair in front of it. Perched on the living room couch, she stared into the dark.

 

 

 

IT WAS 11:00 PM AND Dan was getting tired; his spine was stiff against the vinyl seat, his neck ached, and he had to urinate. He picked up his cell phone to call Serena, but he could not bring himself to punch in the numbers. His palms made wet streaks on the rubber steering wheel. The brake lights of the other cars glowed in front of him, bright red lozenges. What had Forrest said to him? What had he said? Dan's mind was empty. It was something about “the Jews.” Forrest thought he had cheated. Guess what? He had wanted to. He sat by that timer and tried to figure out how to favor Zeb — just as, he imagined, all those fathers had done, too. But Dan had not known how to rig the machine. Dan had thought they were part of this group. He had felt pretty good in those meetings, liked the feel of the stiff cotton uniform against his skin, liked the sensation that he and his son were, with the others, flowing down a current to a hopeful place. He had liked the way Zeb ran around with the other Cubs; he even liked the way they stole sugar from the kitchen — how free and careless they seemed. What would Zeb remember from this? Would he remember the night he won, that lightness, or would he remember the scout leader coming by to tell them they were not welcome at meetings anymore? Harold stood, ten years
old, wearing that uniform, looking at himself in the mirror. The world was made of paper; you could push your finger against it, and it would tear. On the other side of it was nothing.

Dan drove on.

He didn't know where he was going, only that he had to move; he listened to the vibrations of the car on the road, the thin shriek of wind when he cracked the window; he was focused on the sensation of his hands around the wheel, his back against the seat, the long ribbon of blackness in front of him, and he wanted to be rid of himself; for a pure, strange moment, he thought he understood his father.

At about midnight, he swung his car into a Wachovia bank parking lot, shut off the ignition, locked the doors, and closed his eyes.

 

 

 

THE CHILDREN TOOK A LONG time waking up and then were full of demands: to eat cereal on the floor in bowls, to have several cookies as dessert; Serena allowed all of it, which delighted them.

“Where's Dad?” Zeb asked.

“At work,” she said, quickly, lightly; she thought she fooled them. Then she took them to their schools. Rachel hurried into her playgroup, but Zeb clutched his mother's hand as they walked into the classroom with the same intensity he had gripped her as he fell asleep. The classroom was its general, pleasant chaos of backpacks being put away and children settling into their chairs, but the tasks, in their regimentation, were strangely beautiful.

Serena got into her car. Her face was slack with fatigue. She sat in front of the steering wheel. The interior of the car felt like an icebox. She drove around their neighborhood, down to his office. Nothing; she stopped at a Waffle House that he liked, ran inside, stared at the strangers in the orange-punch-bright plastic booths. She was a woman looking for her husband in the morning at a Waffle House; she was now one of those sorts of wives. How quickly this had happened.

The cashier at Waffle House was looking at her with curiosity. “Do you want a seat?” she asked, and Serena ran out.

Driving by Zeb's school, the third time, she saw her husband's car.

Dan was standing beside the school playground, the low wire fence that surrounded the jungle gym. He was watching the children. Zeb was running along with a cloud of children, absurdly innocent to the turmoil of his father. A janitor was raking some leaves and eyeing Dan with an alert expression. Serena slammed on the brakes, jumped out of the car, and ran toward him.

“Dan,” she called.

He was wearing the same clothes as he had been the night before, exhaustion blue under his eyes.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi?” she said.

He glanced at her briefly, then away.

“Dan. Dammit. Where were you? My god. I was up all night — ”

“Look at them,” he said.

He was watching their son run. The grass was silver, slick with dew. There was the thunder of sneakers across the pale, dusty yard. The children were, with great excitement, chasing a flat volleyball.

She stood beside him. His fingers gripped the wire fence as though he wanted to hurl himself over it. His hands were red; she put one of her hands over one of his, and his hand was cold.

“So?” she said.

“Look at them.”

She watched him. Her skin felt papery and thin.

“I want to know nothing,” he said.

She stared at him. He could tell that she noticed only that he had driven away for the night. But he did not know how to tell her that he did not know what to do with that enormous burning inside him; it felt as though it might subsume him.

“Let's go home,” she said, quietly. He peeled himself off the fence. His palms had red lines where he had clutched the wire.

“Let's go,” she said. She held his arm, and they walked slowly to the car.

He got in. They were together, sitting in the unclean car, quivering. What now? She did not know where to drive them. A coffee shop? A hospital? She was unschooled in this particular chaos. Starting the engine, she decided to pretend normality; she headed home.

The car rumbled down the gray streets, the bare branches now etching the sky.

“Where were you?” she asked. “I was afraid something had happened — ”

“I just drove,” he said. “I couldn't stay in that house. I didn't want the kids to see me.”

“Why?”

“I just wanted him to be happy,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

“What did he say?” he said. “Forrest. What the hell happened?”

“I don't know,” she said.

“And then they thought I was a goddamn Jew.”

Somehow, this made her laugh.

“Look,” she said. “He's an idiot. Trouble. I tried to tell you, over and over — remember the dogs! You didn't believe me — ”

“Okay,” he said, slowly, rubbing his forehead. “Okay.”

It struck her how she had been walking through a faint and endless roar her whole life. It was as though the world were an enormous, empty room, and everything she heard echoed through this; in this room there was a roar in which she could never hear anything clearly, and in which no one was able to hear her. It was as though everyone wandered through their own empty rooms shouting, and the sounds that they heard were the sounds of everyone's trying to simply listen to themselves. She believed she could truly hear nothing; she heard the roar that came as she tried to interpret other people's shouting directed at her, and when she spoke to anyone — her parents, her sister, her husband, the rabbi — they heard their own roars in their own rooms. And she understood, then, the profundity and the beauty of the next step — what did it take to actually hear the words of another person, to stop and perceive the pure clarity of another person's voice?

They were home. She parked the car. They walked into the house, and he turned to her as though he had suddenly come to an understanding.

“Why did you do it? Why did you steal? The necklaces, the bracelets, at Saks?”

They had not seemed like bracelets; they had been panic, they had been a way out. She had barely been aware of them as jewelry.

“Everything felt dangerous,” she said. “Nothing seemed real. I wanted to go somewhere else.”

“What do I get,” he said, “by doing what I'm supposed to do? Anything? Does anyone ever notice?” He looked around as though to a ghostly audience. “What do I do but drag myself out of bed every morning? Does anyone ever listen to me? Does anyone want to do anything but wander the house in the middle of the night, running off to that Temple to cure god knows what?”

She did not know what he was trying to see when he looked at her.

“I get up because I can't sleep,” she said, softly.

“I'm awake,” he said. “Waiting.”

“For what?”

“For what,” he said, and looked at her. “For what. Waiting to feel like I'm part of a family. Waiting for my wife to come back to the bed. Waiting. Waiting. Waitingwaitingwaiting!” He paused; his voice was raw. “I can't wait anymore.”

Her skin was cold; she wrapped her arms around herself.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

He looked at her. “Why?”

“For using those credit cards,” she said. “That I did all of that.” She was; it was a terrible, bludgeoning weight, shame, and she didn't want it, did not want to feel her limbs heavy with it, but she looked at him, standing there, and she saw, for the first time, how he had been hurt. “I'm sorry.”

“Okay,” he said. He sat down, heavily, on the couch. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes.

“I didn't know who you were,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “But you could have tried to talk to me.” The feeling of separateness she had had the last few months filled her, and she stared at him. “Why didn't you try?”

She waited. The roaring was in everyone's head. She did not know if her husband could hear beyond it. Finally, he looked up at her; she needed him to say something else.

“I was right about Forrest,” she said. “All these weeks. The dogs. The tree. Tell me.”

He rubbed his face. “Yes,” he said. “I'm sorry. I thought he was — How could he be — ”

He knew. He knew how someone could be not who he seemed.

“But he
was,
” she said. “You can't pretend, Dan. My god, you have to see what's actually in front of you. Here.”

They were quiet for a moment. How did anyone hear, see, anyone else with clarity — was the ability to do that, to accept another, love?

“You know, I never thanked Harold,” he said. “He was the only one who did anything for me. I never thanked him.” He paused. He could not look at her; his hands trembled. “What the hell do you do with all this?” he said, holding out his empty hands, to nothing, to everything. “I don't know how to do it.”

She put her arms around him. She pressed her hands to his back, large, muscled, the illusion of his adult body.

“I know,” she said.

He grabbed her and held her to himself. She wanted to feel his lips against hers, that wetness, crushing. They wanted to love each other. They were imperfect berths, these bodies, and there was a roar in her ears, and she fell upon him, feeling his muscles in her hands, older muscles but still strong. He rose up and spread himself over her. She tasted his mouth, the salty, coffee taste, and she wanted that taste, she wanted the pressure of his lips, the longing to belong and the history of their belonging to each other. They handled each other with the hardness and delicacy of couples who have injured each other. She fell upon him, breathless, the two of them wrestling each other, as though diving through some other substance — water, air — and they rose and fell, naked, turned over, flesh damp, slapped, grasped, trying to grab onto the part of each other that would make them feel aware of their precarious standing on earth, and it was that falling, that ease of falling into him, and into her, that understanding, that made her love him, that made her feel she was tumbling out of herself. There was his hand on her nipple and her hand on his thigh, and there was the roaring in their ears, and there was the dampness of their skin, the long, slick walls that they tried to conquer. Was that not what anyone wanted, that moment of tumbling out of one's body, the permission, the legs wrapped around
each other, but the invisible tumbling, the pressing out of her own skin? She loved him; she loved the feeling of him around, inside, her. It was his eyes and his soft breath and the way he gripped her, tightly, the attempt to enter each other's bodies again and again. That was love, that journey, the effort to climb into another, that permission to try it one more time.