Before I Wake (12 page)

I rolled over to face her. My eyes were dazzled by her skin, glowing in the darkness. “What?” As if I either hadn't heard or hadn't really understood.

“Are you ever sorry you're here?” she repeated, her voice small.

“Why would I be sorry to be here?” I curled my arm around her, shocked to find her cool despite the temperature of the apartment.

“Well, I feel…sometimes I feel like I stole you from your wife…” Her voice dropped even lower.

“There were problems between Karen and I before I met you.”

“Yes, but if it weren't for me—”

“If it weren't for you, I'd be very unhappy right now.”

“And with me?”

“With you I'm very happy.”

Her eyes lit up, and after that she fell asleep quickly, but I knew that wasn't the end of it. Occasionally she would look at me and almost speak, but then she'd change her mind.

The reactions at the office hadn't helped. If anything, the tension had built, not eased. Everyone was still civil to my face, but it was different for Mary. People treated her like she wasn't even there. Sheila wouldn't acknowledge her presence. If she brought files or records to us while we were working, she would hand me everything I needed, but leave Mary's materials on the table or desk out of reach. She would bring me coffee without bringing anything for Mary. She would ask if I wanted her to order lunch for me, ignoring Mary entirely.

I spoke to Sheila about it a couple of times, and she assured me that I was mistaken, that it had been an oversight, that it wouldn't happen again. That was, of course, a lie, and we both knew it.

“How's Karen holding up?” Sheila would ask.

Karen.

I had picked up the phone half a dozen times in the forty-eight hours since the fight, punching in what used to be my home number, disconnecting each time before the phone had a chance to ring. What would I say?

I would apologize.

But I hadn't done anything wrong.

What was I thinking? Hadn't done anything wrong?

I might as well have rubbed salt in her eyes, kicked her while she was down.

Mary had been quite concerned when I told her that I wasn't going over to visit Sherry the morning after the fight.

“The doctor's going to be there.”

“Well, shouldn't you be there too?”

“Karen'll let me know what he has to say.” I cleared my throat. “Sometimes the doctor and I don't see quite eye to eye. It's best if I just give him the space to do his job.”

She seemed to accept that as a valid reason, and didn't pursue it any further. That afternoon I deliberately let a meeting run well past five, the time I normally left to see Sherry.

“Are you still going to stop by the house?” Mary asked after the client had left.

I pretended to think about it, then shook my head. “No, I don't think so. I don't want to disturb Karen at dinnertime. Besides, I really feel like a long run tonight.”

She eyed me strangely. “Don't you want to hear what the doctor said?”

Caught in my own lie. “I'll call her later.”

Mary didn't say anything more, and we drove home together in silence.

The next day's excuses were even weaker.

And then it was 1:42 a.m., according to the red digits of the clock radio. Mary's breath was as regular as a metronome, and I had lain awake for almost three hours, watching the soundless changing of the numbers, listening to the distanced, muffled noises from the other tenants.

Mary shifted a little in her sleep and moaned softly.

Without disturbing her, I slid out from under the covers. By the light from the windows, I navigated out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind me before I turned on one of
the table lamps in the living room.

I looked around in the low amber glow. I had been living with Mary for months, but I didn't seem to have made much of an impression. There were a few of my books stacked on the floor next to her bookshelves, but all of the art in the room was hers—reproductions of a Lichtenstein comic panel, a blue Matisse
Jazz
figure, a Navajo-style blanket. There was a small stack of my CDs on top of the stereo cabinet, but the stereo itself, the television, the furniture, the apartment, were hers. Sometimes, it was as if I was not even here. As if I were no more than a guest in her home.

I crossed the room to the CD rack. There were almost no artists that I recognized among Mary's CDs. The rack was filled with groups with names like The Orb, Prodigy, Blur, Moist and Sloan.

Each time I looked, it brought home the fact that an entire generation separated us. Although I preferred the classics, I had once taken a great deal of pride in my knowledge of music, and kept up to the minute on all the latest artists and trends, even if I didn't listen to much of it. Not to recognize any of these performers? Old.

Sighing, I turned to the stack of CDs I had bought over the last couple of months, comforted by their spines. Van Morrison. Bob Dylan. Neil Young. The Grateful Dead.

“What's that?” Mary had asked in the record store when she saw what I was carrying.

I showed her the CDs—
American Beauty. Blood on the Tracks. Astral Weeks.

“That's all fogey music,” she complained good-naturedly.

“Get outta here.”

“No kidding. I mean, how old do you think you are? Fifty? This music was old when you were my age. This is the stuff my grandparents used to listen to.”

Exaggeration aside, she did have a point. I had never really gotten into the music my friends liked when I was younger.
My collection resembled that of a forty-year-old—a hip forty-year-old—not the twenty-year-old student I was.

I slipped a Sinead O'Connor CD into the player, plugging in the headphones before pressing Play. This was one of the first CDs I had ever bought, when I began to make the transition to digital after Karen bought me a player for my thirtieth birthday.

The sound was immediate and true, insinuating itself directly into the middle of my cranium, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”

Good choice.

I found myself thinking, for the first time in a very long time, about my guitar. It was a cheap little acoustic, but I had spent hours playing it as an undergrad, building calluses on my fingers, irritating Karen to no end with countless renditions of “Tangled Up in Blue.” I found my fingers unconsciously curling into chords, sliding along imagined strings with a beautiful, steely rasp as I listened to the CD. Why had I stopped playing? When was the last time I had even seen the guitar, which had once stood so proudly in the corner of our tiny, book-lined living room in its battered black case?

I wished I had it now and could cradle the comforting, familiar weight of its body in my arms. Strange how things slip away.

The album was almost an hour of betrayal, of loss, and aching strength, but also understanding, great sadness and acceptance. As I listened, I became inescapably, deeply aware of two truths, beyond words, beyond the capacity of rational thought, beyond any possibility of reconciliation.

I was in love with Mary. This wasn't the silly, midlife infatuation that everyone seemed to think it was. She pulled me out of my accustomed form in ways that I hadn't thought possible. With her, I felt a sense of possibility, of potential, that I hadn't felt in years.

But that recognition was made almost unbearable by my second, simultaneous realization.

I loved Karen. Still. After everything I had done, the problems we had and everything I had subjected her to, I loved her.

I loved her, and I couldn't stand myself for hurting her. I knew I was too far gone to ever go back, but I couldn't bear to lose her.

I couldn't bear to lose her…

The trouble was, these words were equally true of both Karen and Mary.

I sat, in the silence of the headphones after the music ended, until the barest light of dawn began to touch the world outside the window.

HENRY

A cold hand fell on my shoulder. “Jesus Christ!” I yelped and jumped out of my chair, dropping my book, spinning to face…

Tim, who grinned at my distress.

“You scared the hell out of me,” I mumbled, trying to recover a little dignity.

“I would have cleared my throat or something, but that seems like such a cliché.”

I was pleased with myself. A month before I would have had no idea what a “cliché” was.

He pulled out the chair next to mine and sat down, gesturing for me to do the same. Leaning over, he picked up the book I had dropped and studied the cover. “
Tao Te Ching,
” he muttered. “However did you end up at that?”

I had to think for a moment. “Well, I started off with Salinger, which sent me to…”

He waved my words away, as if he hadn't really meant for me to answer. “What do you think of it?”

“I don't know if I really get it. I mean, I understand the
words and everything, but they just don't seem to pull together.”

“That's the thing with the Oriental philosophies,” he explained. “Zen, all the schools of Buddhism, Taoism…it all makes sense when someone else processes it for you, like Salinger. But when you go back to the sources,” he gestured at the book in my hand, “you realize how very foreign, how very different the cultural framework is. And that makes the ideas really difficult for the Western mind to wrap itself around. We don't have a common vocabulary.”

I nodded, mostly understanding him.

“It's good you're prepared to tackle it, but you might want to try something a little closer to home. Some Western philosophy. The Bible, perhaps.”

I felt a small surge of pride at the way he was talking to me.

“Is it just the books that are keeping you down here?” he asked, his voice dropping a bit. “Or is it something else?”

“What?” I asked, pretending not to understand.

“We haven't seen too much of you,” he said. “You seem to spend most of your time down here.”

“Well, I've been…” I stammered, gesturing at the books piled on the table in front of me.

How could I explain?

I killed a little girl. Well, I didn't kill her exactly: I put her into a coma that she'll never wake up from. I tried to kill myself, but I can't seem to die. There's no way I deserve to be with other people.

I couldn't bring myself to say the words.

“I guess I'm just a slow learner,” I said.

He nodded. “You'll find that a lot of us are. That's why we're here.”

“Maybe in a little while.”

“Whenever you're ready. No pressure. No rush.” He rose to his feet, started to turn away, then changed his mind.

“It's not so bad, you know,” he said.

“What?”

“What you've done. Whatever you've done. Whatever you think is so bad that you shouldn't be allowed to associate with people. It's not as bad as you think.” His smile seemed more sad than happy. “It's probably not nearly as bad as some.”

Without waiting for me to answer, he disappeared into the shadows of the library, leaving me to puzzle over his words.

MARY

Something was going on.

Simon had been preoccupied and secretive for days, as if there was something on his mind that he didn't want to tell me about. And he was behaving strangely, changing plans at the last minute. Not visiting with Sherry. Not sleeping. One night, I woke up at about four and he wasn't in bed. The bedroom door was closed, but I could see a splinter of light under it from the living room.

I got up and opened the door, just a crack, to look out into the living room. He was sitting naked on the floor next to the stereo, leaning against the wall with his knees up to his chest. The headphones were over his ears, his eyes closed.

I wanted to go to him, but thought somehow that I shouldn't. I stood in the doorway for several minutes. Then I went back to bed, hugging his cold pillow against me.

Just after five I woke up again. He had come into the bedroom, grabbed a pair of shorts and a shirt off the dresser, and ducked back out. A few minutes later, the front door clicked shut.

What was going on?

I stared at the white, textured ceiling. How had I ended up living with a man who had a wife and a daughter across town? I got up too and showered, mindlessly soaping, shampooing, rinsing, then got dressed and made myself a cup of coffee.

If it had been something with Karen, or anything wrong with Sherry, he would have told me. Wouldn't he? He hadn't said anything. So what had I done?

Goddamn this self-pitying crap.

I just about called Brian. If anyone could cut through the BS and help me figure out what was going on, it was Brian. But I hadn't spoken to him—to any of my friends—since Simon had moved in. How pathetic. Was I really turning into one of
those
women, the sort whose lives revolve around their men, their fucked-up relationships?

A couple of mornings later, Sunday, I was sitting in the living room, coffee cup on the table in front of me, glancing through the
New Sentinel,
when the doorknob rattled and he came in. He was wet from another solitary run, his shirt plastered to his body, his face red, his breath harsh. I wondered how far he'd gone, how hard he'd pushed himself without me.

I wondered how much I held him back.

“Good run?” I asked.

“What are you doing up?” He glanced at his watch. “I was just coming to wake you.”

I shrugged, as casually as I could fake. “I woke up when you left. Couldn't go back to sleep.”

“I'm sorry. I tried to be quiet. I wanted to blow out the cobwebs. I'm having problems sleeping.”

“I noticed. Are you going to tell me what's going on?”

He looked at a loss for words. It was a state I don't think I had ever seen him in before. I didn't like it very much.

“Everything's fine,” he finally said.