Dirty Love (2 page)

“I made you do it.” He was still breathing hard, one hand resting on the kitchen’s tiled peninsula. At his fingertips was a pool of water and bits of broken glass. Behind him three chairs lay in various pieces on the floor, the heavy birch table on its side, one of its legs gone. Above him, the light fixture was swinging slowly back and forth, its glass face undamaged, the bulbs inside unbroken, though it was hanging by its wires and there was a gouge in the ceiling where the chair he’d swung over his head had scraped the sheetrock before hitting the light, then the floor. This was a detail he would not notice for hours, but he would remember her screaming face and how the light, swinging slowly overhead like that, made her appear as if she were on a night train heading somewhere away from here, away from him, her contorted, raging face so lovely in its betrayal.

She had called ninety minutes earlier. The sun was low in the trees behind their house, and Mark let the phone ring until the machine picked up. His fingers were steady as he turned up the volume and listened.

Hey, it’s me. I had a late showing and now I’m off to the gym. There’s leftover lasagna in the fridge. Be home soon.

Mark played the message back three times. What struck him were four things. One, she referred to herself only as
me
, as if no one else could be calling him, as if she were rightfully the only other
me
in his life. Two, she ended her message with no subject:
Be Home Soon
. By using no
I
or
will
, she was removing herself from whatever would precede her returning home, which meant that when she called she was heading to be with Frank Harrison Jr., for that was the bald man’s name, and maybe she was even sitting in his white two-door import—a 2009 Audi TT coupe—about to unzip his pants. Or, maybe they were driving to that Marriott on the highway two towns over, the one Mark had seen in the second video, Laura and Harrison holding hands as they walked in, then—forty-three minutes later—walked out, their arms around each other’s waists. Maybe Frank Harrison Jr. was driving with one hand on her knee while she called her husband, and what did he feel when she advised Mark on what there was to eat? Did he
hear
that? That people cooked for each other over here? Ate with one another? Did he hear the word
home
?

Three, her voice. It was high in her chest, the way it had sounded both times she’d walked into the living room, her pregnant belly stretching the cotton of her nightgown, and said, “Honey, I think it’s coming.” Both times it had happened like that, late at night, her walking in to announce to him in front of the television that he needed to help her go do something momentous. Four, her choice of words:
There’s leftover lasagna in the fridge.
Be home soon
. Work with me, honey. Sit down and eat and believe I’m in Pilates class at the gym. Help me do this thing I must do.

Thirty minutes after dark her Civic pulled into the driveway, the security light switching on as if this were any other night. Maybe that night, a cold Wednesday in March, she and Frank Harrison Jr. had driven to the Marriott down the highway, and afterward, in the hotel bathroom, she’d had to sit on the toilet and let the bald man’s semen drain from her, for she was fifty-five years old and birth control was no longer an issue and so there would have been no need for a condom. There were diseases to think about, but would she consider this? Mark didn’t think so.

He had stood at the darkened living room window and watched her rise up out of the Civic, slinging her gym bag over her left shoulder, her pocketbook over her right. Her keys were clutched in her fingers. There had been a few moments, an hour or two after staring at those videos, when he’d considered changing the locks, barring her from this house they’d shared and maintained since their early thirties. She would try the front door, then the rear, maybe a panic rising in her before she climbed the side stairs of the garage to his mother’s apartment. But Mark couldn’t have that. Not then at least. He would not have his mother involved in this in any way. There was something else too; to kick her out would be to send her into the arms of Frank Harrison Jr.

So he’d left the locks as they were, and he’d stood in the center of the darkened living room and listened to her walk into the kitchen and set her gym bag and pocketbook down. There was the clank of her keys beside them, then a quiet stillness, something missing. Usually, after a long day at the realty office or out showing properties, then a strenuous workout at the gym, after she’d stepped inside and relieved herself of whatever she was carrying, there would come an exhalation of air from her, a sigh—part exhaustion, part relief. But that night she seemed to be standing in the bright kitchen holding her breath.

Maybe she could sense him out there, the TV remote in his hand, the DVD cued just to where he wanted it. He could feel his heart beating in his tongue, and he wished he’d been in the kitchen when she walked in. That’s where he’d usually be, waiting for her as eager and ignorant as a half-blind dog, dinner on the stove or in the oven because he got home before she did. No, that wasn’t quite true. Many nights he would wait for her to cook, and he’d be in the living room on the sectional, his work computer open on his lap, CNN on the television, slickly packaged semi-intellectuals speaking earnestly into the camera. She’d walk in and he’d glance up at her over the rim of his glasses, pucker his lips for a kiss which she’d lean down and give him, just a brush of lips really. So it was the dark quiet living room that had probably stopped her. “Mark?
Honey?
”

Honey. How nice.

“In here.” His voice had felt old and unused. When he leaned to switch on the lamp the room tilted a moment before righting itself, Laura walking in. She was in her nylon running suit and white Nikes with the pink stripes. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, and it looked like she’d applied fresh blush to her cheeks. Her eyes appeared a bit sunken, though, those slight bags beneath them that never went away.

“Did you fall asleep?”

The word
no
was in his throat, but it wouldn’t come out, and Mark, like the athlete he’d been in high school, the fast and reckless wide receiver, the diving shortstop, aimed the remote under his arm at the TV behind him and watched her face as the image lit up the screen. At first, there was nothing. She was simply watching her silent husband turn on the TV behind him, his back to it. She was watching and waiting to see just what was happening before her. Then there was the gray light of the television on her face and it took only a few seconds; it was as if she’d been burned; her eyes widened and her lower lip twitched and she turned and stepped quickly toward the kitchen.

Mark’s movement was a thing he would never remember, only the feel of her arms and ribs and belly as he picked her up and pulled her back and swung her around to watch the show. There were her kicking feet, and there were her screams—fear there, and desperation, and hatred. Yes, hatred. Her hair had fallen to each side of her face and she was looking only at the floor so her husband had no choice but to place his palm against her forehead and pull back till she saw it, Frank Harrison Jr. and her in the white Audi coupe, his profile sinking out of sight, but she twisted away, his always fit and physically strong wife, and she was shrieking, “I can’t believe you! I can’t fucking
believe
you!”

Then she was past him in the kitchen and what could he do but follow? What could he do but race ahead of her and block the doorway? What could he do but flip the table into the air? What could he do but stomp off its closest leg and start swinging chairs over his head down to the tiled floor, six of those tiles still cracked now eleven weeks and four days later, the three chairs still splintered and left in the garage, the three-legged table upside down in the corner of the kitchen so Laura had to eat at the peninsula, or maybe off her lap in the living room while she watched shows of families being devastated by one of their own.

M
ARK DOES NOT MAKE COFFEE.
He has taken two Motrin for his Bacardi headache, and he needs something cold and sweet to drink. A Coke. He has none left, but there may be some in the fridge of the main house. He peers out the side window overlooking the pool. Normally on a July Saturday afternoon, Laura would be lying in her bikini on a chaise longue on the concrete soaking in the rays that by September left her darker than any of their friends. Mark would sometimes warn her about the weakened ozone layer, the increased likelihood of skin cancer, but she would half smile at him behind her sunglasses and say, “You worry too much, Mark.”

It’s true. He does. He always has. But what’s a senior project manager to do if not to anticipate threats and opportunities, to manage risk, to deliver the finished project on time?

The poolside is empty, the sun too bright off the concrete pad. Mark steps to his mother’s hall closet, the one she has cleared out for him, and he undresses, then pulls on shorts and a shirt and walks to the front window overlooking the driveway and street. There is only his BMW sedan. Laura’s space is empty beside it, which means she’s with tall, bald Frank Harrison Jr., a man Mark now knows many things about: he knows that Harrison is fifty-three years old, his fifty-fourth birthday coming in August. He knows that at six foot one he weighs two hundred and eleven pounds and was a wrestler at Boston College, undefeated in his weight class his senior year. Mark knows that Harrison has nagging sciatica for which he sees an acupuncturist every Tuesday afternoon at 4:45 p.m., and that he lives in a three-story white Federalist with his oblivious wife on High Street in Newburyport, that town nine miles east that at one time was an abandoned cluster of tannery mills and shipyards at the mouth of the Merrimack River, but for years now has been so gentrified that tourists travel to its downtown boutiques and restaurants, its coffee shops and pubs and bookstores, its waterfront theater with a view of pleasure boats moored on the water or cruising east under the bridge. It’s the town where Frank Harrison Jr. will stroll with his wife of twenty-three years on a Saturday evening, and they will dine either at a lobster place on the marina, or eat Italian or Thai in the square of clothiers and day spas that used to manufacture leather.

Mark knows that Anna Harrison is a narrow-hipped, large-breasted woman with an automatic smile. That she works part-time as a legal secretary in a law office six blocks from their Federalist, and she usually walks there and back, her sandy hair shoulder-length and pinned away from her face, a face Mark would consider still attractive were it not for that smile and her eyes that, glancing up from the sidewalk in front of her, appear to him weary and slightly dumbfounded and a bit frightened too, as if to do anything other than what she does every day might invite catastrophe. Or perhaps he’s wrong about that. Maybe she’s just constantly thinking of their children who are no longer under her daily care: Frank III, Thomas, and Gayle, the younger two in college—the boy a hockey player at Bates, the girl at the University of Florida at Gainesville, Frank III following his father into the banking business, though not at Providential where Frank Harrison Jr. is a commercial loan officer, a well-groomed fleecer of the public who arrives at work between 8:13 and 8:17 a.m., who parks his white coupe in front of the concrete river wall behind the bank in this upriver town where, just two miles east, there’s the gym Laura has been a member of for twelve years. It’s where she stretches, lifts light dumbbells, takes classes in yoga and Pilates. It’s where she does all this, then goes running after for she never lets anything come between her and running. Even when she was pregnant with Mary Ann and Kevin, she ran into their third trimesters. It’s a habit she developed as a withdrawn child growing up in central New Hampshire, a solitary activity that matched her solitary nature.

That’s how she’d always explained it to Mark anyway, that she needed time to herself, that she never should have gone into real estate because it’s a job that forces her to talk to people, but that’s also why, Mark would tell her, she’s been so successful at it; prospective buyers can sense just how little she cares whether they like the property or not, that what she really wants to do is be done with this walk-through, pull on her sweats and Nikes, and run away from them all; this is the softest sell possible and so she sells more than most, her lack of charm a quality Mark had come to trust for he always knew where he stood with her. Other women, women like Anna Harrison, seemed to smile on reflex, as if this were something they were taught to do as young girls—be nice, be pretty, nice
is
pretty—and so you never knew if a woman was genuinely pleased with something you’d said or done, or not. But Laura only smiled when she felt like it, her eyes turning down at the corners, so it was a gift to them all when she did, a gift to Frank Harrison Jr. too, who must have charmed her into doing that at the gym, the place he drove his Audi coupe to every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, pulling out behind the bank between 4:33 and 4:39 each time, driving through town along the river, past the brick post office and the old Whittier Hotel, past the music shop and Pedro Diego’s Mexican restaurant and the insurance office above Valhouli’s Barbers that has been there since Mark’s father was a boy and he would go there for a nickel haircut and years later, when he was husband to Dorothy and father to Claire and young Mark, he’d own two of the abandoned mills near Lafayette Square, one he sold for a profit, the other he lost so much money on he spent fewer and fewer nights at home, going instead to the bars of Railroad Square till he was hardly ever home at all. After a while, only a year or two, it seemed, he was no longer Bill Welch, property owner and entrepreneur, but Welchy, who drank boilermakers with off-duty cops and men from the mills, Welchy who bought dawn breakfasts for old waitresses and young runaways, Welchy who ran up tabs he couldn’t pay and who died on a moonless night in February in the backseat of a ’63 Impala that belonged to a man who had gone through the dead drunk’s pockets and called the Welches’ house at two-fifteen in the morning. Mark Welch was still a boy then, but he remembers his mother’s voice on the phone in the hallway outside his bedroom. He remembers the crack of light beneath his door like some unnatural fire he would never escape. “Are you sure?
William
Welch?” There was some kind of wire being pulled through her words, one that was about to snap. But then she said, “Thank you. Thank you very much for calling.” And Mark could hear the phone being set carefully into its cradle. He heard little else. Only his own heartbeat; for the first time it was no longer in his chest but in his head, something steady he listened to between his ears even as the police car pulled in front of the house, even as the front door opened and closed twice, even as he began to hear the nearly calm voice of his mother telling Mrs. Steinberg from next door to let them sleep until they wake up, let the poor children sleep.