This Friday evening in May and Rowe was headed home thinking how happy he should be. He’d just given his last lecture of the semester, had stopped by the travel agent and picked up more brochures this time for their honeymoon so more exotic than even the first batch. Maybe they could nestle the night away looking at the pictures and reading the delicious propaganda and narrowing down how they’d spend their first vacation as a married couple. He’d had to rein in his attempts at spontaneity though when Penda said she had to think about the divorce, she had to think about the loss of retirement benefits and their other joint holdings. He’d be patient. Knew Penda wasn’t someone he could rush. What was the urgency anyhow? he asked himself as he walked up the steps to their room burdened down with a widemouthed urn stuffed with two dozen startling red roses. He felt the urgency though. Felt it as a flash of a shadow just outside of his peripheral vision that would sometimes make him turn his head to catch whatever it was that lurked around him, around them now, and wouldn’t allow him to settle down and enjoy their life the way Verdi seemed to be enjoying it.
And she really did seem to be happier than he’d remembered, moodier now too, he reasoned, from the pressures of her new job, but when she smiled lately it was a startling gushing smile that disturbed him because it was tinged with a familiarity that he couldn’t pinpoint. He felt himself stirring as he thought this, and put the urn in the center of the kitchen table and momentarily admired the roses’ velvety perfection.
He wasn’t happy. Headed to sixty with more successes than failures, secure relationship with a pretty, smart principal at a special-needs school who could undress at night and turn into his fantasy. Never wanted children and was never burdened with them, enjoyed academia and scholarly thought and was paid well to indulge his tastes in both. Sought-after lecturer, fairly well published by a modest university press. Good life, exceptionally good life. And he wasn’t happy.
He tried to remember when he’d ever been happy really. Had to go back years, maybe when he and Verdi first kissed, because up until then life had been so burdensome, once he’d escaped the abject poverty of his past, he was always onstage it seemed, needing to be precise and calculating, writing the appropriate papers, getting noticed at the proper places, keeping his past away from his present. But when he’d first moved inside of Verdi that night in her high-rise dormitory he’d experienced a jolt of what he thought happy must be, a sensation of wanting to giggle, or click his heels together, put his hands in soft un-formed clay. He’d made love to Verdi in his imagination many times before he did it in reality. But he’d felt such guilt over the fantasy that he’d go out of his way to do something special for Penda, buy her a pair of those gaudy southwestern-style earrings she insisted on wearing with the matching chokers, some hand-beaded monstrosity as he thought when he’d made such purchases from what he considered a low-life street vendor. But when he touched Verdi for real, the irony was that he felt no guilt. Felt instead a levity, an undoing of the pressure he’d been so accustomed to. He’d never figured out whether it was her youth, or the way she looked up to him, or seemed to need him especially then when she was most vulnerable, all he knew for certain was that once he kissed her, and her mouth parted without resistance welcoming him, he knew he’d had to have her, have that jolt that struck at the pleasure center in his brain over and over again.
He didn’t know why he was thinking about all of this Friday evening as he walked into the bedroom to change, sitting on the cream-colored bedspread and undoing his shoes. Probably because Verdi wasn’t here to open the door for him, his dram of brandy already poured, some light dinner started. But this evening she’d gone to work with her cousin’s child, then to get her hair done, and then to the gym. He’d resisted calling the shop to confirm her appointment the way he’d done from time to time over the years. He couldn’t figure that out either except to attribute it to how he’d embarrassed himself going over to her cousin’s last month. It had been at least ten years since he’d gone over there, and then only because Verdi begged him to share with them in maybe a Thanksgiving dinner, and Kitt would insult him the entire time, introduce him to the neighbors sitting around the table as the big-shot, Republican professor at the university. He reached deep inside for some self-control right now so that he wouldn’t call the shop.
He decided to distract himself by stirring something up so that they could eat when she got in; she was usually famished after her workout. Her closet door was open and he stared into it absentmindedly as he slid his shoes from his feet. Maybe he’d boil some tricolored, vegetable pasta and open a can of tomato paste. He pushed his feet into his slippers and walked out into the dining room and poured himself a dram of brandy and let a drop of it singe against his tongue as he headed into the kitchen to survey what ingredients he had to work with for a meal.
He started a pot of water boiling for the pasta and pulled down a can of sockeye salmon. He hit the remote that controlled the miniature television on the kitchen counter and the opening sounds of the nightly news filled the room. The lid to the tomato paste was stubborn and the can opener kept popping out of the groove and he ended up trying to lift the jagged edge with his finger. His finger got caught just inside of the can opener and when he pulled it out he thought at first that it was just covered with tomato paste but then the sensation of ripped flesh registered in his brain and he realized he was bleeding and he stuck his finger first in the brandy and then in his mouth suppressing the need to cry out. That’s when the phone rang and he hit the speaker button and Penda’a husky voice flooded out Peter Jennings.
“Penda, I hope you’re giving me good news,” he said as soon as he heard her say hello. His words distorted from his finger still in his mouth. He pictured her oversized fish earrings dangling from her lobes.
“Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I’ve decided,” she said, her voice taking over the kitchen so that he hit the down arrow on the volume to the speakerphone. “I’m granting you a divorce, free and clear, all I’m asking is that you give up the title to that property, that’s all, I won’t even lay claim to your retirement benefits.”
Her words caused a burst of excitement to rise up in him as he stood there sucking on his finger as if it were a red-and-white peppermint stick.
“Penda, are you sure? You won’t let proceedings get started and then call a stop to it?” he asked, now hitting the up arrow on the phone to make sure he’d hear her response.
“I said, I’m agreeing to what you’ve wanted all along, legal disentanglement from me. I just want that property, and then I’m leaving the area, maybe for good.”
“Wait a minute, I hope this isn’t about you going up to Portland to live in some commune with some two-bit, washed-out hippie.” He couldn’t restrain himself though he knew it was none of his business, there was always something so natural and ordinary and stable about Penda living so close.
“I thought I told you that you don’t control me, ever, married or not, so I don’t give a shit what you think, you go try to control Verdi. Which reminds me, why I really called, because believe it or not, I didn’t call you to tell you about the divorce, I was going to surprise you and just have the papers served on your sixtieth birthday.” She laughed her husky laugh. “Just that hearing your voice and I couldn’t resist telling you about the divorce myself. Anyhow I really wanted to find out what happened to Verdi’s family over there on Sansom Street?”
“What are you talking about, Penda?”
“You know my niece and her three girls moved over there, lovely block, I must say—”
“Yeah, what about Verdi’s family?” he cut her off.
“Say excuse me, Rowe.”
“Penda, please.”
“Look, you are going to respect me.”
“Excuse me, Penda, now please, what were you saying?”
“I just spoke to my niece and she said something happened in that house, an ambulance took somebody out this evening, not long ago. Justine thinks it was the aunt. Knows it wasn’t Verdi though because she saw her rushing half-hysterically into somebody’s car and taking off behind the ambulance.”
“Whose car?” Rowe’s voice was tight as he exchanged the speakerphone for the cordless attachment and took measured steps into the bedroom, hardly breathing. He’d realized now that he’d seen them when he sat on the bed and looked into her closet, didn’t want his brain to register that he’d seen them there. He was in her closet now, looking at the floor where there should be a bare space, where her gym sneakers sat boldly laughing at him right in his face.
“Sad. I do remember how close they all were,” Penda went on. “And I also remember the aunt actually coming down to visit with me after that whole fiasco of you moving out to say how sorry she was about the way things had turned out with you and Verdi, but that Verdi was a good girl and she hoped I could find peace with the situation as she and her daughter were trying to do because it was all so disturbing to them too. I must say I’ll never forget that. That took a special breed of class.”
Rowe wasn’t hearing any of this, just stood there in Verdi’s closet while her sneakers mocked him. “Penda, please. I asked you about the car, whose car, Penda, I’m being polite, please tell me whose motherfucking car?”
“Rowe, calm down. Why are you losing control like this? I mean can’t the poor woman get in a car with someone and you not know who it is?”
“Penda, please.” Now he was begging, feeling as if his scalp was going to choke the neurons right from his brain, that’s how tight it was right now.
“You really need to get a grip, I guess you must be beside yourself since Johnson’s back in town.”
“What did you say?”
She realized then that he was hearing this news for the very first time. She got quiet then. They both did as they listened to each other’s hard breaths. And though this could have been Penda’s finest moment of revenge, she could have let go a series of racking, convulsive laughs like the evil witch who’d just cast a spell, she didn’t. She just fell silent and Rowe even detected a bit of pity in the silence now.
“I’m sorry, Rowe. Honestly. I thought you knew.” But then she was talking to dead air because he’d hurled the phone across the room, and now he punched into the air, cursing Johnson, Verdi, Kitt, Penda, his depraved sisters, his dead mother; he ran into the kitchen, flung the pot of half-boiled pasta across the room, crashed over the widemouthed urn with the two dozen startling red roses, just stood then and watched the waters mixing, the pasta’s, the roses’, and listened to the beep beep beep of the phone off the hook.
He grabbed his keys. Moved through the house like a derailing train knocking over chairs, books, pictures off the shelves. No wonder she’d been so happy, so moody. She’d been fucking around, with Johnson. With. Johnson. He was out the front door. He’d find him. Find her. How dare they do this to him? He understood now the rage that could propel a man to commit murder with his bare fucking hands. Let that rage take him over as he ran to get to his car.