The Fearsome Particles (19 page)

Gerald glanced over at his clock. Around two in the morning was when Vicki began to show signs of life – he had been jabbed awake enough nights to know – and if a noise or a movement
was ever likely to rouse her, it was then. But his clock told him it was only 12:33, so he knew he had plenty of time.

He stood at the end of the bed, looked down at the twin crags of her duvet-draped feet, and folded back the duvet’s edge. Now the crags were aged cathedral spires hiding beneath protective sheeting of the kind that concealed extensive restoration work, the sandblasting and replastering meant to return great monuments to their former glory. And Gerald, staring at his wife’s spires through the veil of six or seven rotund glasses of very fine Pinot Noir, managed to convince himself, at least partly, that he was about to render a similar service to her.

The sheet came untucked in one smooth tug. He left it draped over her feet, against the slight chance that a cool draft could touch the tender ankles and cause her to stir, because he wanted her toes exactly as they were, upright and accessible. There was a spryness to his step, a vivacity, as he made his way across the cabreuva flooring and into the ensuite. And though the nail clippers weren’t in the drawer they were supposed to be in, that didn’t surprise Gerald in the least. He was used to nothing being as he wanted it to be.

He pressed the door to the ensuite shut and turned on the light, but no amount of rooting in the drawers or in the cabinet behind the mirror could unearth the clippers. There were small zippered makeup bags belonging to Vicki made of the kind of high-tech materials that might once have been vital in aerospace applications and Gerald admired the micro-fibre texture and tensile strength of these bags even as he pawed through the lipsticks and brushes and eye pencil shavings they contained.

When he had exhausted the clipper potential of every drawer and shelf and countertop receptacle in the ensuite, Gerald sat on the edge of the bubble-jet tub and let his mind roam to other options. The clippers were probably at the bottom of one of his wife’s umpteen purses, and for a minute he entertained the thought of finding all umpteen and dumping out their contents onto the duvet beside her, and after finding the clippers, filling the bags back up with indiscriminate handfuls of purse effluvia, to see whether she would even notice. But as engaged as he was by this idea, as delightful as he thought it would be to watch his wife reach into one of her bags expecting to find a certain key or card, only to discover that it had by some mysterious force been misplaced – like so, so many of the things to which he tried to attach permanence and order only to have them redistributed by others like a graceful snowdrift attacked by a gas-fuelled blower and turned into flying smithereens – Gerald couldn’t accept the image of himself as a purse-rooter. So there had to be some other way.

For the next twenty minutes, his search for an alternative to clippers took him through most of the main and lower levels, rummaging through every household-implements drawer he could think of. It became clear to him that his pleas for Rosary to for God’s sake apply some logical order to the implements – to, for instance, centralize the scissors – had had the unintended effect of making the scissors disappear. Somewhere in the house that seemed logical to Rosary, there was a drawer or a box choked with scissors, and he was incapable of finding it. As he made a second pass through the main level of the house, rifling
drawers he had already searched, rescattering the spatulas and spoons, Gerald felt sure that he was entering a period in his life of change and flux in which incapacity would be his only constant. Then he thought of the garage.

In the garage, rejoicing.

Amongst the gardening tools, beneath a coil of rubber hose, he found a small pair of red-handled pruning shears, for cutting grapevines and rosebush stems. The curved blades were coated with black grime but he was able to get most of that off at the kitchen sink with dish soap and paper towelling. When the blades were clean he held them up to the range hood light and snipped the air with approval. To make sure they worked, he tried the shears on his own longish thumbnail and found that, if he positioned the nail at the very crux of the curve in the blades, like the tip of a tongue poking through a smile, he could manage a remarkably precise, if short, cut. There was no gap between the blades, as there often was in regular scissors; it was metal on metal, edge against edge, all the way. It seemed plausible to Gerald that, other than actual nail clippers, there existed no better tool for cutting toenails than a pair of pruning shears like these. He snipped the air again and breathed in with a sense of control he hadn’t felt in months.

In the bedroom, he knelt at the end of the bed and pulled back the sheet. Against the faint light of the street lamp coming through the drapes, Vicki’s toes stood up like short, plump fence posts following the arc of a hill, each crowned by a bit of savagery, like the spiky armaments used to keep pigeons from roosting. He decided to attack the nails of the right foot first, and just to make sure his wife was as deeply asleep as he hoped her to be,
he took the middle toe between his thumb and forefinger and wiggled it. She didn’t move.

Gerald held the shears against the nail of her pinkie toe, but something about the size and vulnerability of the pinkie, next to the severity of the shears, made him hesitate. Better, he thought, to start on the big toe, and work largest to smallest. He got a firm grip of the big toe, his thumb against the fleshy oval pad, and set the blades of the shears against the nail.

He needed more light. There was no sense in taking chances. He got up and opened the bedroom door just wide enough to let the light from the hallway fall across Vicki’s legs, up to her shins. On his way back to the end of the bed, he picked up a chair cushion and placed it on the floor for his knees. Then he went back to work.

His first snip was invisible. He’d been afraid of cutting too deep so he removed the merest sliver, the thickness of a fine pencil line, and even that little took considerable courage. But he realized there was no point to the exercise unless his clipping made some demonstrable difference. He slid the shears down until the blade closest to him was pressed lightly against the soft tip of her toe, where a cut would take off a three-millimetre swath.

That seemed like too much. Being so close to the toe itself meant there was no margin for error, it would be too easy to cut into the quick and then what? Dark images of exactly what flashed through Gerald’s mind and he shuddered. He tried to ease the shears up off the skin of the toe, about a millimetre, but he was finding it difficult to keep the blades steady; he had nothing to brace against and his elbows were hovering in mid-air. His
pulse was also racing more than he’d expected, which made his hand, and therefore the shears, waver. He needed some kind of purchase.

Gerald forearmed the sweat off his face and tried to calm his breathing. Part of the problem, he realized, was attempting to work over two feet at the same time; one was always going to get in the way. He pulled the sheet and the duvet back farther, lifted up Vicki’s right foot by the heel and swung her leg out forty-five degrees.

In this position, she looked like a tightrope walker putting a foot out for balance, which was faintly absurd, and now Gerald found that although he could set his elbows securely on either side of the foot, he was forced into a half-kneeling-on-the-floor, half-lying-on-the-bed position, like someone swinging a leg up to mount a horse, which was far too awkward to manage. He stood up, took Vicki’s left foot by the heel, and swung this limb an equal distance away from centre. Now she looked vaguely wanton, her legs spread for him, which caused Gerald his first twinge of guilt. He’d begun by trying to correct a problem that had gotten out of hand, and here he was debasing his unconscious wife! He quickly pulled her right leg back to its original position.

On his knees once again at the foot of the bed, he glanced over at the clock, cursed himself for having wasted so much time, and looked one last time at Vicki’s serene face. Then he grabbed hold of the toe, positioned the blades of the shears two millimetres down from the top of the nail, and began to cut.

The nail, he found, was incredibly tough. It was like wood. No, not wood, laminate, the kind used for countertops, made to
stand up to the sharpest blades. Whether this was the effect of years of painting the nail with alternating coats of varnish and varnish remover he couldn’t know, but quickly what should have been an easy snip became more like gnawing. Gerald began to have his first doubts about the efficacy of the shears. Somewhere in the garage was a sharpener for blades like this and he realized now he should have used it. Trying out the shears on his thumbnail was one thing, but evidently a woman’s hardened toenail was something else. By the time he’d made it halfway through the nail of Vicki’s big right toe, Gerald was using both hands on the shears.

He paused again to wipe his face and felt the first parasitic tickle of panic. Somehow the great plan of trimming his wife’s ten shabby toenails in the middle of the night while she lay naïve and asleep was starting to lose its allure, much as colonialism, thought Gerald, must have struck General Gordon as a bad idea around the time of the fall of Khartoum. He considered abandoning the whole operation, prying the shears from where they were now wedged, dumping them back into the box in the garage, getting into bed beside Vicki and shutting his eyes as tight as he could. Nothing would have been sweeter. But thanks to him the half-cut nail, its sharp flange sticking out like a tusk, had become more of a weapon than ever, and the idea of having to sleep in proximity to something that threatening made Gerald forge on.

With repeated squeezes on the red-handled shears he made incremental progress across the breadth of Vicki’s big nail. It had been wrong to attempt the big nail before all the others, he saw that now; it was like trying to climb Everest the first time
out. The lesser nails would have given him practice, would have filled in the knowledge gaps. Did you try and land a make-or-break client before you’d learned how to service smaller, less demanding customers? Of course not. What kind of idiot
COO
let himself get sucked into taking on the big boys before all the systems and processes were honed? Gerald would have pounded himself on the forehead, but he still needed two hands on the shears.

As he girded himself for the last push, the final third, when it should have been getting easier, a shadow fell across the bed, near Vicki’s feet, and Gerald saw that opening the bedroom door had let in more than light. On the arm of a stuffed chair that sat near the doorway perched Rumsfeld, its rope-trick tail a twisting silhouette above its head.

“Shoo,” whispered Gerald. He lifted one hand off the shears and waved it feebly in the air between them. “Get lost!”

Except for its tail, which never stopped twirling, Rumsfeld didn’t move. Gerald couldn’t see its face in the dark, couldn’t gauge the cat’s mood, but he took disdainful as a given. He calculated the risk factors and chanced taking his eyes off the cat long enough to give a glance at the digital clock, and he felt his heart freeze at nearly the precise moment Rumsfeld alighted on the edge of the bed. It was 1:52.

“Fuck off,” Gerald wheezed.

The cat nestled in a duvet gorge, out of his reach, bullying him with its presence, apparently fascinated by what was going on at the foot of the bed. And what was going on, Gerald could see now, was lunacy, a breach of the bounds of normalcy so clear-cut he briefly considered the possibility that he was ill.
How short it was, he marvelled, how astonishingly straightforward, the path from cohesion to chaos. Gerald took in the dim-lit scene before him – his wife, asleep; her bare foot, exposed; his hands applying gardening shears to her toe – and with clarity of a sort he supposed unique to damned or married men, he knew that his only hope was to finish the nail off in one clean slice. He leaned into the shears with everything he had.

When he recalled the moment later, Gerald was able to picture the slice of Vicki’s toenail as it flew. The shape of the arc it followed seemed less parabolic than he might have expected, the path it took to its destination more direct than, say, that of a volleyball lobbed over a net. He was able to picture, too, at the edge of this remembered vision, the head of the cat, Rumsfeld, as it turned and, with eyes able to track the darting movements of small birds, followed the flight of the toenail as it sped toward, and lodged in, the corner of Vicki’s sleep-slackened mouth, so that she looked a bit like pictures of that old Hollywood movie star, Edward G. Robinson, sporting a tiny, scythe-shaped cigar.

How he made his body move as quickly as he did is a thing Gerald was never able to fathom. But somehow he managed to spring from where he knelt on the floor toward Vicki’s head and at the same time block Rumsfeld’s apparent attempt to pounce on and kill the toenail fragment. He flicked the nail from between Vicki’s lips in the same motion that he knocked the cat off the bed.

Gerald’s momentum, however, sent him shoulder-first into the still mound that was his wife’s shrouded torso and, in the midst of the tumult, Vicki came to. “What’s happening?” she gasped, her eyes wide and searching in the dark.

“The cat,” said Gerald, as he slid the shears under his pillow and kicked the duvet to cover Vicki’s bare feet. “Fucking cat was on the bed.”

She sat up against her pillows and tried to focus on the cat, which was now bouncing and tumbling on the floor in the light from the hallway.

“What’s it playing with?” she asked.

Gerald made his head move side to side. “I don’t know.”

A
t 6:45 in the morning, real-world time, Gerald forced himself out of bed so that he could meet with Vicki in the breakfast nook before she left for the Lightenham house.

Downstairs, as he sat in a tannic haze thumbing the serrated edges of the news pages, he watched his wife at the counter. He saw her pour the entire contents of the coffeemaker’s utilitarian carafe into a tall porcelain pot decorated with blossoming trees and blue pagodas, then pour coffee from the porcelain pot into his mug and her Wedgwood cup. This was something she had done every morning, so far as he could remember, for the last six or seven years. And whether he was afraid of what the answer might reveal, or the question, he had never been able to ask why.