Nine Inches (11 page)

Th
is feeling of optimism lasted only long enough for his vision to adjust to the darkness, at which point his wife’s face came slowly into focus. Her eyes were wide-open, and she was staring up at him with an expression of such profound sadness that Gus felt all the air go out of him.

“Martha,” he said. “Honey?”

She started at the sound of his voice, as if she’d forgotten he was there.

“Is this okay?”

“Yeah,” she muttered in an unconvincing voice. “It’s
fi
ne.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s
fi
ne,” she repeated, in the clipped, slightly annoyed tone she would have used if a waitress had spilled a drink in her lap. “Don’t worry about it.”

Confused, but trying to make the best of it, Gus pressed on to the
fi
nish. Martha kissed him on the cheek — he was grateful for the kindness — then immediately turned onto her side, facing away from him. He wanted to say something, to get some reassurance about what had just happened, but he didn’t know where to start, and she wasn’t helping him. He lay beside her for a long time, until her breathing turned so
ft
and regular, then got up and shu
ffl
ed across the hall to his son Mark’s old room, where he’d been sleeping for the past several years. He felt pretty downhearted at
fi
rst, but upon re
fl
ection, he decided that they’d taken a real step forward. It was foolish to imagine that they could
fi
x their marriage in one night.
Th
ey’d probably have to work at it for a while. But at least the pill had done its job, and they were o
ffi
cially unstuck from their rut.

Th
eir anniversary was coming in a few weeks; that would be a good time to try again.
Th
is time he would do it right —
fl
owers, a nicer restaurant, and then at home, so
ft
music and champagne.
Th
ey could dance a little beforehand; that had always gotten Martha in the mood.

One step at a time.

In the morning he went down to the TV room to look for the old album she loved so much, the one they used to play sometimes when the kids were asleep. But he couldn’t
fi
nd it, despite the fact that all the LPs were neatly alphabetized, everything in its place.
Th
e absence of this one particular record disturbed him, as if it were a symbol of all the romance that had vanished from their marriage.

“Honey,” he said at breakfast, “have you seen
Bouquet
?”

“Bouquet?”

“
Th
e Percy Faith record?
Th
e one with ‘Tenderly’ on it?”

“Not recently,” she said, not even glancing up from
Th
e Star-Ledger
. “Why?”

A
ft
er a brief hesitation, he spelled out his plans for their anniversary, and how the Percy Faith record might
fi
t into them.

“I want it to be a special night,” he said. “I feel like I haven’t been trying hard enough.”

Martha put down the paper.
Th
ere was a tenderness in her gaze that he hadn’t seen for a long time. She reached across the table and took his hand.

“You know what?” she said. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea.”

•••

THE LONGER
Gus contemplated the album cover, the more puzzled he became.
Th
ere must have been some kind of reasonable explanation for how it migrated from his TV room to Lonny’s garage, but for the life of him, Gus couldn’t imagine what it might be.

One thing was certain: there was no way Lonny had purchased his own copy of
Bouquet.
From the beginning, he had mocked Gus’s fuddy-duddy taste in “elevator music” with every bit as much disdain as Gus’s own children had. No, Lonny must have borrowed the Percy Faith album at some point in the misty past, but when? And why? And even if he had — which in itself seemed pretty unlikely — why hadn’t he returned it? Why was it sitting out on a table in the garage, along with a bunch of country-and-western records?

While he pondered these questions, Gus tipped the album cover, letting the record come sliding partway out of its sleeve, as if the grooved black vinyl might o
ff
er some helpful clues. But something else fell out as he did so, a Polaroid that landed faceup on the table, an image so utterly unexpected that Gus barked a harsh chuckle of amazement at the sight of it.

In the photo, Martha had been surprised in the act of clipping a pink rose from a bush in their backyard. She looked radiant, but this e
ff
ect wasn’t a product of youth (she appeared to be around
fift
y in the picture) or beauty (though she’d aged well, Martha had never been the kind of woman a stranger would have described as “pretty”) but of surprise itself. Her eyes were bright with pleasure and her mouth was slightly open. Gus could almost hear her saying
Hey!
in a playfully scolding tone.

You could see the chain-link fence in front of her and Gus’s toolshed in the back, which meant that the picture had to have been taken from the Simmonses’ backyard. Gus’s hands trembled as he turned the photo over. What he saw on the
fl
ip side was somehow even harder to fathom than what was on front: a simple invitation in his wife’s graceful Catholic-school cursive, the same handwriting he saw when she sent him to the store to buy broccoli,
fl
ank steak, Grape-Nuts, Lysol.

Gimpy,
she had written.
Will you dance with me?

He studied the photograph for a long time, absorbing the unpleasant truth in his wife’s joyfully startled expression. Once again his mind was forced back
fift
een years, to that tense, awkward summer when Martha had lost her job and Lonny had undergone surgery for a torn ligament. It was humiliating to think that the betrayal was already under way on those nights when Gus had bared his soul in the garage, but even more awful, in a way, to think that it wasn’t, that “Gimpy” had made overtures to Martha only
a
ft
er
learning of Gus’s inability to perform in the bedroom.

But if that was when it started, when had it ended?

Th
ey must have broken it o
ff
at some point before the oak-tree dispute, he thought, because Martha had stood by his side through the whole ordeal. If anything, she’d seemed angrier at the Simmonses than he had.
Th
e memory of Lonny’s death was still fresh in Gus’s mind, and he had no recollection of Martha’s reacting like a heartbroken lover. She’d been shocked and saddened by the news of their neighbor’s passing, but not excessively, and no more than Gus had.
Th
ey had decided, as a couple, not to attend the wake and had instead written a polite note of condolence to Peggy. It was Gus — not Martha — who had woken up on the morning of the funeral overcome by feelings of guilt and sadness. At breakfast he told her they really should go to the cemetery to pay their respects.

“It’s the least we can do,” he said. “He was our friend for a long time.”

“You go ahead,” she told him. “I just don’t feel like I’m welcome there.”

Gus considered making an appearance on his own, but in the end he stayed away, haunted all day by the feeling that he was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. He burst into tears twice, once in the shower, and again at CVS, while waiting for a prescription to be
fi
lled. Martha, on the other hand, seemed strangely composed, as if it were a day like any other. Gus had felt almost relieved that evening, stepping into the house a
ft
er his ritual two-mile walk around the high school track, to
fi
nd her sobbing like a lost child at the kitchen table, a half-peeled potato in her hand. He tried to embrace her and tell her it was okay, but she asked him not to touch her.

“I’m
fi
ne,” she said. “Please just leave me alone.”

THE RAIN
was coming down full force now, battering the garage from all sides, as if someone were spraying a
fi
re hose against the walls and dropping bucketloads of gravel on the roof. He’d been so distracted by the Polaroid that he’d forgotten all about the kiddie pool, which was still lying outside the garage, awaiting in
fl
ation. He opened the door, startled by the force of the storm, and began hauling it in,
fl
apping the plastic to drain the rainwater that had puddled on its surface. It seemed amazing to him now — amazing and pathetic — that all he’d wanted from this night was to
fi
ll the damn thing with air while no one was looking.

He folded the liner as carefully as if it were a
fl
ag, then laid it back in its box, thinking as he did so that what really got to him wasn’t that he’d been cheated on by his wife — that could happen to anyone. What really bothered him was that he could have spent so much time on earth — he was sixty-eight years old, for God’s sake — and understood almost nothing about his own life and the lives of the people he was closest to. It was as if he were still a child, a little boy sitting at the big table, listening to the grown-ups talk in their loud voices, laughing whenever they did, without having the vaguest idea of what was supposed to be so funny.

Well, at least now he knew the right questions to ask. All he had to do was go home and wait for Martha to wake up and come downstairs. He could show her the picture and demand that she tell him everything, the whole sorry history of her deception. But the thought of doing that just then — of leaving the garage and trudging back across Lonny’s yard in the pouring rain to have a conversation that was going to break his heart — suddenly seemed impossible, way beyond his strength. It was close to
fi
ve in the morning, and he was just too tired.

Instead of going home, he turned o
ff
the light and climbed into the sofa bed.
Th
e mattress was thin and lumpy, but it felt good to be o
ff
his feet. He didn’t mind that this was the bed on which Lonny had died, the bed his wife had shared with another man. Right now, it was just a place to rest. He drew the sheet up to his chin, closed his eyes, and waited for sleep to come.

Everything would have been
fi
ne if it weren’t for the oak tree rustling and scraping overhead, groaning as though in pain. A few times Gus thought he heard a distinct cracking sound, as if one of the big limbs were splitting o
ff
from the trunk, about to come crashing down through the roof. He pulled the sheet all the way over his head and began humming to drown out the noise. It wasn’t a song, just a random succession of notes —
hum dee dum dee dee dee do
— and he couldn’t help wondering if Lonny had done something similar near the end of his own life, on those nights he’d spent in the garage. Because he was an old man, and he was scared. Because he was alone out here, and no one was coming to comfort him.

NINE INCHES

ETHAN DIDN’T WANT TO GO TO THE MIDDLE SCHOOL
dance, but the vice principal twisted his arm. He said it was like jury duty: the system only made sense if everybody stepped up and nobody got special treatment. Besides, he added, you might as well do it now, get it over with before the new baby comes and things get even crazier.

Ethan saw the logic in this, but it didn’t make him feel any less guilty about leaving the house on Friday evening with the dishes unwashed and Fiona just getting started on her nightly meltdown — apparently her busy-toddler day wasn’t complete unless she spent an hour or two shrieking her head o
ff
before bedtime. Donna smiled coldly at him from the couch, as if he’d volunteered to be a chaperone out of spite, just to make her life that much more di
ffi
cult.

“Don’t worry about us,” she called out as he buttoned his coat. “We’ll be
fi
ne.”

She had to speak in a louder-than-normal voice to make herself heard over Fiona, who was standing in the middle of the living room in yellow Dr. Denton’s, her
fi
sts balled and her face smeared with a familiar glaze of snot, tears, and unquenchable fury.

“No, Daddy!” she bellowed. “You stay home!”

“I’m sorry,” Ethan said, not quite sure if he was apologizing to his wife or his child. “I tried to get out of it.”

Donna sco
ff
ed, as if this were a likely story. She was usually a more understanding person, but this pregnancy wasn’t bringing out the best in her. Only
fi
ve months along, she had already begun groaning like a martyr every time she hoisted herself out of a chair or bent down to tie her shoe. She was also sweating a lot, and her face had taken on a permanent pink
fl
ush, as if she were embarrassed by her entire life. Ethan couldn’t say he was looking forward to the next several months. Or the next several years, for that matter.