Another You (31 page)

He looked at the floor and was surprised to see how bright the colors in the rug appeared in the firelight: the large, worn Oriental they had gotten years before, in Boston, that had once had to be folded over at one end because their room had been too small. It had been like a big, colorful wave, rolling over. That first apartment came back to him in startling detail: the drop-leaf table that now sat beside Sonja’s chair, with the leaves down, formerly their kitchen table. The chrome chairs they’d found at curbside on Boylston Street with the red plastic seats were gone, but the ceramic planter, now containing a large fern, sat a few feet from the fireplace. The underside of the leaves glowed silver in the firelight, so that it seemed a magic plant, a plant you would read about in a fairy tale. Perhaps that was what McCallum needed in the hospital: not serious literature, but picture books—photography, or an illustrated book of fables. His thoughts hovered around McCallum, and he remembered with a shiver McCallum’s blood on the walls. Was it possible, because of the colors within
colors, that some blood might still be on the rug, indistinguishable in the complex geometric pattern? He was looking at the rug as if he held a great magnifying glass to his eye, yet the harder he stared, the more the details appeared fuzzily out of focus. He was quite certain that he should speak, say something immediately, yet it would of course be incredibly inappropriate to ask a question about the rug—an unanswerable question under any circumstances, how would Sonja know? Sonja. Her name made him realize her presence: she was slouched deep in the chair, biting her bottom lip, her hands tightly clasped on top of the tangled afghan. The fingers of her right hand, laced through the fingers of the left, nearly covered her wedding band. He looked at his own hand. He had never worn a wedding band. Did that mean anything, he wondered, though who should know the answer if not him? He looked again at the rug, thought the phrase:
Rug pulled out from under
. That was certainly what had happened to McCallum, and now it had just happened to him. Imagine McCallum’s horror when he realized his own wife was intent upon killing him. Imagine the things wives could do, the power they had. Sonja had just changed everything. He smiled a halfhearted smile, certain that she was both friend and enemy, and also hoping she’d understand his thoughts had been drifting. He felt paralyzed by stupidity. What could he say?

“Did you think you were in love with Tony?” he said.

“No,” she said. “It was a game. I realize that’s terrible. I had started to think of myself as so, you know, programmatic.”

“Programmatic?” he said, though he had silently resolved not to reveal the full extent of his stupidity by echoing her words. The words he had been most tempted to echo had been “Tony” and “over.” He thought the name. It didn’t have any good connotations. He remembered Tony had waited for them outside the police station, then had stood in the entranceway to the living room with him when the place was filled with police. But wait: What if they moved? What about leaving the rug behind? What if the two of them were cut free from the ordinariness of their lives—what if they
really
left the scene of the crime? Who knew how many times she had slept with Tony? Sane, stable Sonja. Sonja who had had an affair with her boss, whom she now hated, thank God, and it had happened because she’d felt programmatic.

“It’s okay,” he heard himself say.

Sonja’s frown deepened. “It is?”

“I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad—” What was he glad about? Nothing he could imagine. He finished the sentence: “I’m sorry you felt the way you did. I don’t think this has been a very good year for either one of us.”

“That’s all you’re going to say?”

“It does occur to me that it was rather odd you’d imply that I’d had an affair with Cheryl, while you didn’t rush to volunteer you’d been fooling around yourself.”

“I wasn’t any more sure of the timing than you were. I almost blurted it out the morning after McCallum spent the night. That would have made for an interesting day, wouldn’t it?”

“Do you think we could talk about this tomorrow?” he said. “I’m awfully confused. I didn’t expect to hear what I just heard. If there were clues, I didn’t pick up on them. I always thought he was an odd duck, so I guess on some level nothing he’s done could really surprise me. Did you think you were in love with him?”

“You already asked me that. I didn’t think that. We’d go into houses, houses that were for sale, empty houses, ugly houses, walking around with our checklist, I don’t know. I mean, of course that was my job, but it began to seem like we were inspecting tombs, or something. Caves. Big houses with the pipes drained and no heat, and no signs of life. Or at least it wasn’t recognizable life. They were like shells left behind when reptiles molted. It was the emptiness that started to get to me.”

“Why did it end?” he said. He had gotten up. He’d walked halfway across the floor.

“It couldn’t have gone on any longer,” she said. An evasive answer, but he preferred to think that Sonja had simply come to her senses.

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” he said.

“Do we have to?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t you think this is the sort of thing we might talk about for more than a few minutes?”

“He said you wouldn’t care,” Sonja said.

“Well, I do care, but I’m in a state of shock.”

“It was stupid, wasn’t it? I could have thrown all this away. You might have stormed out of the house for good. You seem to be going to bed.”

“I am going to bed,” he said.

“You would have cared if I’d thrown it all away, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “But you’re telling me that was never your intention.”

“But if I had,” she said.

“Sonja,” he said, “I don’t think it’s fair that you’re asking for reassurance from me after hitting me over the head. Do you know what I mean?”

No answer.

He said, over his shoulder, as he walked out of the room, “Come to bed. We can talk about this tomorrow.”

When he left, she was a little in shock herself. Evie had advised her against saying anything. Evie’s reason for urging her not to confide in Marshall had come as something of a surprise, but she hadn’t been wrong. Evie had worried that Marshall wouldn’t be sufficiently enraged or jealous; basically, Evie had thought that he would insult her by not caring enough, which meant that Evie thought essentially what Tony thought. “Unemotive,” Evie had called him. Once out of childhood, it was the way he had always been. Evie accepted that—what did Evie not accept, once it was an established fact?—but also Marshall had been lucky. He had been raised by a woman who thought everyone made mistakes, and who included herself when she said that. How strange to think of Evie involved in physical passion—and with a person as cold as Marshall’s father had apparently been. In the nursing home he had lived in before he died, she had found out that his nickname was the Emperor. A man given to haughtiness and self-righteous pronouncements … who could imagine being in his arms? Then again, who would look at Tony Hembley, who was short and nervous and not very good looking, and decide to slip off her pants under her dress, pull the dress over her head, stand there, having quickly unfastened her bra, so that when he turned around from peering in a refrigerator where something spoiled seemed to be moldering, permeating the room with a sudden, ghastly odor—who would think anyone would respond so impulsively to Tony Hembley? That look on his face. He had flirted with her, but the quick strip had been her idea. She had almost told Evie exactly what she’d done, but now she was glad she’d held some things back. Evie had died thinking that although it was inadvisable to tell Marshall about Tony, he could nevertheless be expected to forgive her if she did say something, and
that was what he seemed to be doing. And Evie had been right, too, about his drawing inward. There had been no professions of love, no pleading that she stay.

She could hear him in the bedroom, opening a dresser drawer, and she could imagine the rest: his standing at the sink in his pajamas, brushing his teeth, a towel draped around his neck. The fire was still burning, but she didn’t have Marshall’s fear of going to bed before a fire had burned down. It was like being afraid of airplanes or enclosed places: if you weren’t afraid, you weren’t afraid. Still, she stood in front of the fire, which warmed her front as her back grew progressively colder. She picked up Evie’s afghan and slung it over her shoulders Marshall style, looking through the flames to the andirons: two lions, paws raised, their blackened manes rivulets of ash.

As she expected, he was in the bathroom. The door was open, and he stood at the sink by the glow of the night-light, leaning forward, hands gripping the edge of the sink, the toothbrush replaced or not yet used. He heard her enter the bedroom but didn’t turn toward her. Neither did he move away from the sink. He was thinking, again, about McCallum; how desolate he must have felt, with his life out of his control: the hyperactive son; the unwanted baby; a wife who loathed him—she must have loathed him to stab him. It was terribly sad. McCallum was terribly sad.

As she undressed, she looked quickly over her shoulder, twice, to see if he had moved, and the second time she looked he had and was standing with the towel pressed against his face.

“I don’t blame you for hating me,” she said, walking to the open door.

He shook his head no. That, or he was rubbing his face back and forth beneath the towel.

He was crying out of sympathy for McCallum. He finally felt a real connection between McCallum and himself.

The Flamboyant Tree

16

“ ’
S WONNERFUL
, ’s mah-vel-lous, that you should care fooooooor meeeeeee,” McCallum sang.

McCallum was in charge of the tape selection. So far, they had been through both sides of Bobby Short, one side of Maria Muldaur, and ten or fifteen minutes of a Jean-Michel Jarre tape Marshall had ejected, because it was impossible to listen without speeding. They were on day two of their journey, instigated and largely bankrolled by McCallum, who sat in the passenger’s seat padded with down-filled pillows: one behind him, one wedged between seat belt and door, another under his knees. In anticipation of their ultimate destination, McCallum was wearing black kneesocks, khaki Bermuda shorts, running shoes, a baseball cap he’d turned backward, and thermal underwear under a denim workshirt. “Wonnerful,” McCallum sang, though that verse had ended several minutes before.

“You’re grouchy because you’re doing all the driving,” McCallum said. “How is the doctor going to know I’m taking a turn at the wheel? You’re also supposed to not cross the street on a red light. How much advice can anybody afford to pay attention to? Who’s going to see me doing a little driving? It’ll make me feel less like an invalid.”

“I’d see you,” Marshall said.

“Well, I wish you’d been my guardian angel when you-know-who was trying to kill me.”

“I wish I had, too.” He was thinking not only of the possibility of McCallum’s having escaped physical harm, but how much better he
would feel if his house had remained the pleasant, undisturbed environment it once had been. Sonja was there now, as he and McCallum drove south during Benson College’s spring break. He had wanted her to come, and initially he had taken it as a bad sign that she hadn’t wanted to. Though she’d assured him it was over, he’d begun to feel that her affair with Tony was the new subtext for everything—every new recipe she prepared, every silly, old romantic movie she wanted to watch on TV. If McCallum hadn’t gotten so excited by the idea of getting some sun, he probably would not have left Sonja’s side he was so worried she would pick up again with Tony. He felt ambivalent about seeing Gordon and Beth, and he was worried that McCallum might be—because suddenly this was getting to be the story of McCallum’s life—an unwanted guest. None of which he had said to McCallum, because the last time Marshall had visited him in the hospital he had become as excited as a child at the prospect of getting out of town.

Already, he missed Sonja. He wanted to be angry at her, but he couldn’t sustain his anger. She had at least acted on her desires—and, much to his relief, she had selected a slightly ludicrous lover. Still, how boring the house must seem, after her antics with Tony. She had considered going somewhere warm herself to “think things over,” but then she had decided to stay where she was.

Between McCallum’s ejecting one tape and plugging in another, the radio cut in with the theme from
Midnight Cowboy
, a movie that had greatly impressed Marshall when he’d first seen it. The song also immediately caught McCallum’s attention, though it was frizzed with static, as well as fading in and out as if they were driving through a series of invisible tunnels. Marshall could have done without hearing it; the song conjured up the movie’s ending—Ratso wearing his palm tree shirt, dead on the bus bound for Florida.

Florida was where the two of them were headed, after the stopover they would make first in the small town of Buena Vista, where McCallum, for reasons Marshall still could not comprehend, felt that he must, for once and for all, explain himself to Cheryl Lanier so that his soul might begin to heal along with his bodily wounds. McCallum had also tried to find out where Livan herself was, to no avail; if McCallum had been intent on contacting her, the best he could probably do would be to send a letter to Livan Baker, Planet Earth. To the
extent he’d been involved with Cheryl himself, Marshall could hardly refuse to stop on their way to visit Gordon in the Keys. Though she hadn’t responded to the note he sent her along with the clipping about Livan Baker—vanished, it seemed; or at least, in a follow-up article in the paper, the U.S. government claimed to be interested in finding out her whereabouts—Cheryl had phoned McCallum in response to whatever letter he’d sent her.