SO HE’D BEEN GONE FOR FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. IT MEANT he’d stopped to smoke. It meant he’d stopped for groceries. Amanda: What, me worry?
Ruth put a bowl of cherries, more black than red, onto the table. It had the air of ceremony.
“Thank you.” Amanda didn’t know why she was thanking the woman. Hadn’t she spent eleven dollars on these cherries?
A cloud, one of those soft, cottony ones, all curves like a child’s drawing, seeped across the sky. The change was severe enough that G. H. shivered. “I could almost use a minute in the hot tub.”
Amanda took this for an invitation. She left the table, sank into the froth beside the strange man. The water made you buoyant, and so it made it hard to sit. Amanda leaned forward to look toward the trees. She could not see the children any longer.
“They’re fine, I expect.” George understood. You had a child and were forever vigilant. “There’s nothing back there but more trees.”
Ruth looked at the two of them. Wine with lunch had made her drowsy. “I might make some coffee then.”
“That would be nice, love, thank you.”
Amanda smiled. “Can I do anything?”
“You relax.” Ruth went back into the house.
“The pool. The hot tub. They cost a fortune in electric bills. We’re going to have solar panels put up. I didn’t want to do it during the season, when we use the house. I’m waiting until September, October. My contractor told me he generates enough that he sells power back to the grid. More people should do that.” G. H. was almost beginning to enjoy this woman’s company. He liked an audience.
“Clean energy. Should save the planet. Should be a law.” Sometimes at the movie theater or on the sidewalk Amanda would see wind energy proselytizers with pamphlets and free buttons, but it always seemed like a scam. “How did you get into your line of work?” More small talk.
“I had a mentor, in college. It was him who made me—I mean, I didn’t know what people did for a living. My mother ran a hair salon.” His tone conveyed his respect for his mother’s work. She died of cancer—liver, stomach, pancreas—probably from handling the chemicals women like her used to make their hair respectable. “Stephen Johnson. Gone now, but what a life.”
“I guess it’s like having a green thumb. Or being good at doing the Rubik’s cube. Some people can make money, some people can’t.” She knew who she and Clay were.
This was one of G. H.’s hobbyhorses. “That’s the conventional wisdom. You have to ask yourself why that is. Who wants you to believe that it’s not possible to get, if not rich, at least comfortable? It’s a skill. You can be taught. It’s just about information. You have to read the paper. You have to listen to what is happening in the world.” Of course, he thought you had to be smart, but he considered that a given.
“I read the paper.” She was a woman of the world, she believed. She wanted to say something about her work, but there was little to say.
“You only have to understand the patterns that govern the world. Did you ever hear about that guy who beat the game show Press Your Luck?” G. H. looked down at her over the rims of his Ray-Bans. He wanted a newspaper now. He thought of the numbers. He wondered what had moved.
“Whammy? No Whammy?”
“All he did was pay attention and learn that the Whammy wasn’t random at all. It always appeared in a certain sequence. That information was just there, but no one had ever bothered to look for it.” Rich people didn’t have a moral authority. They just knew where the Whammy was.
“That’s interesting,” she said, indicating that she did not find it so at all. Where were the kids? “I’m glad to be away from my work, for the moment. Don’t get me wrong—it’s interesting, to me, anyway, helping people tell the stories of their companies, helping them find consumers, make that connection. But it’s a lot of diplomacy. It gets tiring.”
George went on. “My mentor was one of the first black men at a Wall Street firm. We had lunch one afternoon—lunch! I was twenty-one.” How to communicate that he’d never previously considered eating lunch at a restaurant, never mind one like that, carpeted, mirrored, brass ashtrays and solicitous uniformed girls in ponytails? He’d showed up without a tie, and Stephen Johnson took him to Bloomingdale’s, bought him four from Ralph Lauren. G. H. hadn’t known how to put them on; the ones he’d worn at Christmas were clip-on.
“I’ve always thought that women need to stick together in the workforce. Or maybe everywhere. I’d be nowhere without my mentors.” This was not entirely true. Amanda had worked for women, but secretly preferred working with men. Their motivations were so simple.
“He said to me, ‘We’re all machines.’ That’s it. You get to choose the nature of the machine you are. We’re all machines, but some of us are smart enough that we get to determine our programming.” What he’d said: Fools believe rebellion is possible. Capital determines everything. You can either calibrate yourself to that or think you’ve rejected it. But the latter, Stephen Johnson said, was a delusion. You were either going to get rich or not. You only had to choose. Stephen Johnson and he were the same kind of person. He was who he was—patriarch, intellect, husband, collector of fine watches, first-class traveler—because he’d chosen to be.
Amanda was lost. They were talking around each other, not to each other. “You must love what you do.”
Did he care about it, or had he come to care about it, as the spouses in an arranged marriage find, over time, a transaction settled into something like affection? “I’m a lucky man.”
The heat was clarifying in the way of orgasm, akin to blowing your nose. The hot sun, the hot water, but still this energy: she could have run around the block, or taken a nap, or done pull-ups. She was waiting for Clay to drive up the road. It had been an hour, right? She listened for the sound of the car.
They should leave. If they timed it right, they’d be home for dinner. They could treat themselves to one of the neighborhood restaurants that was just slightly too expensive to be a regular haunt. She didn’t know, of course, that Clay had the same thought. She didn’t know this bespoke how well suited to each other they were.
The yard was quiet but for the steamy undulation of the tub. She looked at the woods, and she thought she saw something moving but couldn’t pick out their bodies. She thought a mother should be able to do that, once upon a time, but then she’d actually taken the toddlers to the playground and lost them immediately, a sea of small humanity that had nothing to do with her. She was happy the children had each other, were still children enough to get lost in their games, tromping through the woods like she imagined country kids did.
She was sitting there, not doing anything more, when it happened, when there was something. A noise, but that didn’t cover it. Noise was an insufficient noun, or maybe noise was always impossible to describe in words. What was music but noise; could words get at Beethoven? This was a noise, yes, but one so loud that it was almost a physical presence, so sudden because of course there was no precedent. There was nothing (real life!), and then there was a noise. Of course they’d never heard a noise like that before. You didn’t hear such a noise; you experienced it, endured it, survived it, witnessed it. You could fairly say that their lives could be divided into two: the period before they’d heard that noise and the period after. It was a noise, but it was a transformation. It was a noise, but it was a confirmation. Something had happened, something was happening, it was ongoing, the noise was confirmation even as the noise was mystery.
Understanding came after the fact. That was how life worked: I’m being hit by a car, I’m having a heart attack, that purple-gray thing emerging from between my legs is the head of our child. Epiphanies. They were the end of a chain of events invisible until that epiphany had been reached. You had to walk backward and try to make sense. That’s what people did, that’s how people learned. Yes. So. The thing was a noise.
Not a bang, not a clap. More than thunder, more than an explosion; none of them had never heard an explosion. Explosions seemed common because films so often depicted them, but explosions were rare, or they’d all been lucky to be spared proximity to explosions. All that could be said, in the moment, was that it was noise, big enough to alter forever their working definitions of noise. You’d cry if you weren’t so scared, surprised, or affected in some way impossible to understand. You might cry even so.
The noise was quick, maybe, but the air buzzed with it for what seemed like a long time. What was the noise, and what was the noise’s aftereffect? One of those unanswerable questions. Amanda stood up. Behind them, the glass pane of the door between the bedroom and the deck cracked, a fine but long crack, beautiful and mathematical and something no one would notice for a while yet. The noise was loud enough to make a man fall to his knees. That’s what Archie did, distant, in the woods: fell to his bare knees. A noise that could make a person fall to their knees was only nominally a noise. It was something else for which there was no noun necessary, because how often would one use such a word?
“What the fuck?” This was, maybe, the only proper response. Amanda was not talking to George. She was not talking to anyone. “What the fuck?” She said it a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time, it didn’t matter. She kept saying it, and it was unanswered, as a prayer.
Amanda was trembling. Not shaken but shaking, vibrating. She went quiet. A noise so big, how could you meet it but with silence? She thought what she was doing was screaming. The feeling of a scream, the emotion of a scream, but in fact she gasped, like a fish flipped out of its pond, the noise deaf-mutes make in moments of passion, the shadow, the silhouette, of speech. Amanda was angry.
“What—” She didn’t feel any particular need to finish her sentence because she was talking to herself. “What. What. What.”
George had leaped from the tub, didn’t even cover his body with a towel. Everything in the world was quiet, except, maybe, that sense of afterglow, the void where the noise had only just been. Perhaps her ears were damaged, and it was an illusion. Perhaps her brain was damaged. There had been that story, about consular employees in Havana who developed neurological symptoms believed to be linked to noise. It had never occurred to Amanda that a weapon could be sonic, had never occurred to her that a noise might be something to fear. You told kids and pets not to worry during thunderstorms.
Amanda was shaking. There was a sharp taste, like she had a Kennedy half dollar sitting on top of her tongue. If she moved, the noise might recur. If it did, she was not sure she would be able to bear it. She never wanted to hear it again. “What was that?” This was more to herself than anything. Was it localized—inside the house, within the perimeter—or was it something related to the weather or interstellar or the parting of the heavens to herald the arrival of God himself? As she asked, she knew that the noise would never be satisfactorily explained. It was past logic, or explanation, at least.
It was very slow at first. She walked and then leaped down the steps. She had just been looking out at the trees. She tried to find their bodies in all that green and brown. She should call for them, and it seemed like she did, but she did not. Her voice did not work, or couldn’t catch up to her body. She just moved. Slow, then fast, jog then run, Amanda went down past the pool, shoving open the gate, and into the grass. Her children, their perfect faces, their flawless bodies, were there, somewhere. She could see only the single mass of the landscape. It looked to her as it might had she been nearsighted and without her glasses, indistinct, bright, impossible.
She ran farther. The yard was not so big, there was not so much to run into. Still she did not call, only ran. There was a little shed in the shadows. She pulled open the door and it was empty. All in one movement—she didn’t truly stop running—she continued to the edge of the yard, soft dirt and dry leaves. The noise was over, but there was still a noise, her blood in her veins, her heart resilient enough. She needed her children’s bodies against her own.
Amanda leaped over a stick, small enough that she could have stepped over it, and her feet were in the carpet of humus, here catching a pebble, pointed bark, a thorn, something wet and unpleasant. She should call out to them but didn’t want to drown out their voices should they be calling to her, urgent Moms, as convicts were said to utter upon their executions.
The kids, where were her kids? The trees barely seemed to move. They just stood, indifferent to her. Amanda sank to the ground. The touch of leaves, bark, dirt, was almost a comfort. The mud on her pink knees was almost a balm. The clean soles of her feet were blackened and pocked but not painful. At last she found herself. She intended to call out for the children, to call out the names they’d chosen so lovingly, but instead of “Archie” and “Rosie” (for the diminutive would surely have emerged, love and longing), Amanda only screamed, a terrible, animal scream, the second most shocking noise she had ever heard.