On the PATH train back to New Jersey, Eve’s mind and body wage exhausting war. Her limbs feel too heavy to move, as if she’s been hypnotized, while thoughts crash around in her head, charging and hiding like guerrilla fighters at the crux of a battle. The thoughts wear labels, “wrong” and “right,” but even so she isn’t sure which side they’re on. She feels hunted, her camouflage ripped away. Caught in the crossfire.
When she looked down from that rooftop, Micajah holding her tight onto him, she saw, hundreds of feet below, the Alice in Wonderland garden: the Caterpillar on a mushroom, the Mad Hatter pouring tea. What happened to her was the opposite of what happened to Alice: she had been spirited up to that high place, to a new reality above the trappings and troubles of her life, where she could bask in the rosy, unobstructed sun.
Now, heading home, she feels like she’s being carried toward some monster’s den. A place of torment and silently shrieking souls—hers, and Larry’s too. It’s suddenly clear to her how unhappy he is. And how dead to feeling she had become.
Recently she has begun to think, with the dispassion of a scientist observing a specimen, that she no longer knows what joy feels like—that sense of soaring delight in being alive that is more than mere happiness, which she came to define as merely the absence of sadness, so that she could occasionally claim it and keep her life on its tracks. If she had been asked, she would have said she was content, but now she recognizes that featureless condition for what it is: all sensation blurred into the same narcotic fog. With Micajah, she broke free of it, but here on the train, she feels it creeping over her again. Only extremes penetrate it, and they come as aggressions: so many fellow passengers that she feels as if worms are crawling over her. The platform lights so bright they hurt her eyes. A chilly wind, when she gets off, that blows her nerves to rags. The raucous laughter of a tipsy claque hopped up for a night in the city. As she drives home from the station, cars rage past her on the highway, too fast, too close.
As the garage door closes behind her, a rogue thought snipes into her brain: I could leave the engine on. For some seconds, she searches out the sweet smell of the exhaust. She imagines the atoms of her body pulling apart, the tendons and ligaments unhitching, her very self floating away. A good way to go, she thinks: a vanishing.
She snaps back to herself, clicking off the ignition. Larry’s Acura is in the garage, but that doesn’t mean he’s home; he took a cab to the airport. There are no lights on downstairs, so if he is home he’s already retreated to his room. Good—she will have some breathing space. She needs to put the day away, in a locked drawer. She’ll take it out and fondle it now and then, when she’s alone, but what happened today will not happen again.
She walks through the dark house to the staircase without turning on lights. A day like this should fade out, not assert its presence into the night hours.
Once, in the past, Eve thought of being unfaithful. It was nothing to do with Larry, and not much to do with the other man. It was just that the opportunity presented itself and she allowed herself to entertain the possibility.
It happened nine years ago, when Allan was a teenager. She was working in a client’s garden, and her client’s husband emerged from the house. The spring day was warm and she was wearing a sleeveless top. His hand on her upper arm, as he offered to help her dig, felt firm yet tentative: a seductive combination. The fact that the man was married—his wife and children had gone swimming for the day—was in his favor. This would be no more than a secret flirtation. He had commitments; she had no desire to jeopardize her marriage. Of course, she knew that married men—and married women—abandon their commitments all the time, but that fact seemed irrelevant. She was playing in her imagination. In the real world, it would lead nowhere.
She knew her line of logic was morally suspect, but on that day, that month, that year, she was prepared to give herself the slack. This is how other people live, she thought, people with more exciting lives than mine.
He knelt a little too close to her and allowed his hand to brush hers as they patted the soil into place around the newly planted wisteria. If I turn my face to him now, she thought, he will kiss me and I will fall back and we will be lying on the ground, and that will not be okay. So she finished her patting and quickly stood up, brushing the earth off her hands in a manner she hoped looked professional, standing there to assess her work, which did not need assessing, instead of moving away to fetch the hose. As he got to his feet, she turned to him in a nonchalant fashion, which could easily be explained away as a prelude to conversation—if there would ever be anyone she’d need to explain it to, which in this garden with high hedges there wouldn’t, which was what made this imaginary adventure possible in the first place.
He placed his hands on her upper arms. She allowed it, without protest, but without moving closer herself—keeping her route of excuses clear. As his face neared hers, she shut her eyes and thought, Here it comes. This changes me: from a boring wife into . . . What? Perhaps just a different kind of boring wife, the kind who cheats. But I am not cheating, she insisted silently. I’m just reminding myself what it feels like to be wanted.
The man kissed like a camel. When she thought about it later, she couldn’t help giggling. There was something prehensile about his upper lip. It snuffled at her. Her mind went to the camels in the zoo—when Allan was little, she’d taken him to the Bronx Zoo for four birthdays in a row—the way they scooped up tussocks of hay, their upper lips twisting and curling in a way that had struck her as almost obscene. They always looked mangy, too, with their hair (or was it fur?) falling out in tufts. She’d understood it might be due to the time of year, since Allan’s birthday fell in May, but still she held it against them.
That this man was, in that way, very un-camel-like—perfectly groomed, someone who made the most of every iota of his good looks—didn’t help at all. Clearly, he considered himself an excellent kisser. Maybe other women love this, she thought. She endured it until he stopped to invite her inside for a lunchtime glass of wine, which, she understood well, would be drunk, if drunk at all, naked and horizontal. No, she said, I’m so sorry, I’m running behind schedule already. The rush of walking away from him was more thrilling than the kiss.
Letting the warm water of the shower run over her, she plays back in her mind the quantum leap she took: the beautiful young man, the slow sunset, the gargoyles grinning at them, the hundreds of feet of deadly fall behind her. As the scene takes on shape and detail, it seems to be happening to another woman while she, Eve, watches from above. But she can still feel the imprint of Micajah’s hands on her body, his cells on her skin. She got into the shower to wash them away. They are not going.
Eve used to like the way Larry would get up and shower after sex; she appreciated his cleanliness, and it gave her minutes of solitude, which she came to hold precious. She’d become so used to faking orgasm that she was hardly conscious of doing it anymore: moaning at appropriate intervals, digging her fingers into his back, saying his name, giving a little cry and shuddering when it was all getting long and she hoped he’d finish soon. The act had come to include the acting too. She didn’t think of it as faking—simply as participating, “not just lying there,” convincing herself by these sounds and movements that she did still love Larry. Yet some part of her needed to recover, to reunify her spirit without his energy there to intrude. The sound of the water while she lay in bed helped her bring her split self back together.
Now, she finds it hard to shut off the running water. As long as she stays in the shower, unable to hear the door open or the phone ring, she occupies a lacuna in time, with no demands and no necessity to corral her identity into a user-friendly package. When she turns off the water, she will have to decide who she is: a woman, with all the potential the word suggests, or a wife. She will have to accept that she has cheated on her husband, and that all effects have a cause, and all causes have effects.
I need to have more fun, she thinks aimlessly, as she waits for sleep to take her. Then I would not be so quick to lose my head.
Micajah called it fun, and she agreed. But that’s not what she means, in her drowsy state. What does she mean? Bumper cars? Bridge? Line dancing? When she was twenty-two, before Allan was born, Eve might have described herself as “fun-loving,” if “fun-loving” hadn’t meant being what her mother called loose, an easy lay. Probably nobody uses that term these days; it sounds so quaint and innocent. It must mean “someone who loves fun” again, since there’s no such thing as loose anymore. What used to be loose is normal; it’s called hooking up, friends with benefits, things like that. Eve used to laugh at her mother for dividing girls into “good” and “bad,” but even though the crude moral judgment seemed antiquated, there was still an uneasy distinction between girls who slept around and girls who didn’t. Those who didn’t, like Eve, looked down—with distaste or contempt, envy or frustration—at those who did. Those who did looked down at those who didn’t with pity and maybe contempt—and, Eve realizes now, at least sometimes with envy too.
Eve feels sad for these girls, herself included, all wishing to be what they weren’t. As a teenager Eve longed for a clothes-hanger body, while her flat-chested friends stuffed their bras and later went under the knife. The shy girls longing to be outgoing; the loud girls wishing they could be the hunted rather than the hunters.
Men too. Larry is a sheep who wants to be a wolf. Did I marry a sheep? Eve wonders hazily, and the thought lands like a muffled punch. Certainly she didn’t marry a wolf in disguise. The wolf skin fits Larry awkwardly, but he is determined to grow into it. I need to sleep, she tells herself firmly. Count sheep. Count Larrys. She giggles, punch-drunk. Separate the sheep from the goats. Is goatish better than sheepish? Everything is better than sheepish. Larry is not goatish—that’s what satyrs are: ravening for sex, hairy, dirty. Who, or what, is Larry? He gets more insubstantial by the day. It’s not only that she knows him less, but there seems to be less of him there. As if he’s shape-shifting himself gradually out of existence.
I am shape-shifting too, she thinks. But we can’t both do it. Someone has to hold the fort. If one of us flies out too far, the other has to be the tether. That’s a marriage.
“You have got to be kidding.”
It’s six p.m. Deborah’s store is closed. Deborah herself, skinny and angular, reclines on a curvy Victorianish sofa, her bobbed white-blonde head thrown back against the gold velvet upholstery. A bottle of chardonnay sits on a fake marble column capital beside her. She sips from an antique cut-crystal glass.
“It’s a beautiful decorative object.”
“It’s a catastrophe in a case. Even the case is a catastrophe. What the fuck, Eve?”
“I couldn’t resist. It needed rescuing.”
“Go volunteer at the animal shelter. Or find a therapist.”
“You really don’t think any of your clients would want it?” Eve is enjoying this. And so is Deborah. They both know there was never any question whether Deborah would want this broken thing.
“Honey, my store does not run on mercy bucks. Those decorator queens are flattery-operated. Every one of them wants to be told I kept back something special just for her. And if it’s smashed up, it ain’t special.”
With her left hand she takes a swig of chardonnay, while with her right hand she tops up Eve’s glass—another antique, which doesn’t match Deborah’s.
“Killer score on the birdcage, though.”
Deborah’s shop is schizophrenic. At first glance it’s a conventional mix of grandmotherly furniture, silver and knickknacks, amusing needlepoint, and a riot of cushions. Above head height it is crammed with chandeliers, some antique, some new, and some strange mutations that she creates herself out of pieces of other chandeliers, bed frames, pot racks, old gates, and birdcages, covering them with gold and silver leaf and hanging them with crystal drops, feathers, Christmas ornaments, Mexican tin milagros, and anything glittery she can find. Mostly she sells them online, and to interior designers from New York.
“I think it’s special,” says Eve.
“Well, chiquita, of course you do,” says Deborah, patting her hand in a condescending way.
“Seriously. I went to the New York Public Library and I couldn’t find anything like it.”
“You think it could be one of those million-dollar violins that people murder each other over?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Any bloodstains?”
“None that I can see.”
“Something sure happened, though,” Deborah says with relish. “You need forensics.”
“How do I get them?”
“Auction houses. Best way to get a free valuation. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, whoever does instruments. Google it. I get ten percent when you sell it, for my professional advice. Hell, make it fifteen. I’m worth it.”
“Might only be a cup of coffee.”
“Non-fat triple macchiato with sugar-free vanilla syrup and whipped cream and slivered almonds or some shit on top. Those things add up.”
“Deal.”
Deborah reaches over to clink Eve’s glass. “Five hunting weekends in a row,” she says. “Lucky me.”
Even though it’s summer, and unpleasant weather for junk-shop hunting. Eve should be working in her own garden on weekends—it’s an advertisement for her work, after all—but the numbing fog has killed the enthusiasm she once had for making it beautiful.
“So tell me,” Deborah asks with sly sarcasm, “how’s that animal of a husband of yours?” Deborah laughed herself hoarse when Eve told her about Larry’s discovery of his wolf spirit. She had kept it quiet for months, but one night the chardonnay got the better of her discretion.
“Ow-ow-ow-ow-oooooo!” Deborah howled up at a particularly bright globe chandelier. Her favorite part of the story was that Larry had found his inner wolf not in a dehydrated delirium in a Navajo sweat-lodge, or on top of a wind-blasted peak in South Dakota with blood streaming down his chest, but in a boutique bed and breakfast in New Hampshire.
Eve couldn’t help laughing too, though she felt disloyal. Deborah and Larry never liked each other. He found her crass, and her swearing offended him. Eve’s other friends are decorous and safe, but Eve discovered to her surprise, after meeting Deborah over the years at PTA bake sales, school plays, and graduations, that hanging out with her was a relief from saying what she ought to say and thinking what she ought to think. Having Deborah for a friend is rather like having a pet tiger: you’re never quite sure when and where she will pounce. She can be exhausting sometimes, because it’s hard to have total confidence that the prey she’s stalking isn’t you.
She’s asking about Larry now because her instincts have been pricked by Eve’s abandonment of her garden. She smells blood.
“He’s in Arizona,” Eve says. “He’s supposed to get home today.”
“Supposed?” Deborah repeats. “You mean you don’t know?”
“Actually, he was supposed to get home last night. I don’t think he did.”
Eve slept the sleep of the dead—not because she was sated from sex, but because she was emotionally exhausted by the assaults of the truth. When she woke, she listened for the usual bathroom noises, the blender, the garage door. Had he already come and gone? She might not have known, comatose as she was. Should she be worried? The distance he’s forced between them in the past year has thinned her care for him.
“He didn’t call?”
“No.”
“Dick.”
Coming to see Deborah this evening is Eve’s way of asserting that everything is fine. But she came for a reality check, too. Because with Deborah, that’s what you get.
“Honey, he’s left you. And he’s too much of a coward to tell you to your face.” Deborah snorts. “Inner wolf, my ass. All that man found is his inner pussy.”
“He probably just got delayed. Or there might have been an accident.”
That’s the first time she’s said, or even thought, such a thing. She doesn’t actually believe it, but it’s a way of defending Larry. Despite everything, she cannot let Deborah’s accusation win the day.
“Rental cars,” she adds. “They don’t always check the brakes.”
What began as a feint is taking shape as a horrible possibility. Eve tries to suppress the panic rushing through her veins.
“Bullshit. You’d have heard. It’s not like he doesn’t carry ID. Any signs of an affair? Another woman? Another man?”
You never know whether Deborah is joking or not. Another possibility made real by being voiced. Not a very likely one, but even considering it makes Eve feel unexpected sympathy for Larry, and his flailing attempts to find a place in the world more powerful than suburban husband, middling executive plodding toward retirement, boredom, obscurity, death.
Eve smiles. “No.”
“That’s why I love you, honey. There’s not a mean bone in you, is there.”
“Maybe I just haven’t found it yet.”
Deborah takes Eve’s hand, looks into her eyes. “Don’t call him, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Eyes on the prize, honey. When I left Ted, I knew what was good for Deborah. You need to get on board with what’s good for Eve.”
She pours more chardonnay into Eve’s glass, filling it to the brim.
“Now. Repeat after me: good . . . fucking . . . riddance.”
Eve can’t do it. He’s Allan’s father. He always will be.
Deborah seems to be about to say something, but doesn’t. She takes a hefty swig of chardonnay, and Eve could swear it’s to conceal that her eyes are damp. In a moment, her swagger is back in place.
“Shit, Eve, you’re not going to wait for him like a doormat, are you? Go find yourself a tennis pro and get back into practice!”
“You know I don’t play tennis.”
“I don’t fuck women, chiquita, but that doesn’t stop me fucking a man who does.”
She shouts with laughter when she sees Eve’s face. Eve is tempted to tell her about Micajah. She longs to talk about him to someone, to describe his physical beauty and his spiky, unpredictable sweetness. That would turn the tables in a satisfying way. And Deborah, for all her brassy bravado, is discreet; she’ll spill all her own beans, but not other people’s, and unlike anyone else Eve can think of, Deborah will not judge her badly.
Not today, though. It’s still too raw; the confusion of the Larry situation will leak into what happened with Micajah and mar it. Most of all, she doesn’t want to turn Micajah into a story, even to entertain a close friend who, more than anyone, will cheer her on. If she tells Deborah now, it will be all about sex. Is it—was it, she mentally corrects herself—about more than that? Surely it was. Though that hardly makes it better. Is it worse to be unfaithful in the body, or in the heart and mind?
There has been no phone call from Larry, no reports of accidents on the news or on the website of the Arizona Highway Patrol. No natural disasters, hotel fires, random shootings. If he’d had a heart attack and been taken to the hospital, or been somehow hurt or killed, she’d know by now.
She has willed herself not to worry. Probably just a missed connection, and he’s had to spend a day in Chicago or Kansas City or Atlanta before he could get on another flight. It’s strange he has not told her, but then, these days, much of what he does is strange. She is so habituated to allowing him his moods that she cannot make Deborah’s assumption that this silent absence is the end.
In fact, she’s been enjoying his absence—which is only possible if she believes it to be temporary.
So the following day, at five o’clock, Eve drags on pantyhose. She loathes pantyhose at any time of year, but especially in summer. This purgatorial yearly event demands them.
It’s been on the calendar for months. Larry’s boss, Martin, and his wife, Eleanor, pride themselves on their common touch, and also enjoy showing off the other things they’re proud of to the commoners who make up the tiers of middle management at the pill-coating company. Eve suspects that Eleanor models their summer garden party on those given by the Queen of England. It is absolutely not a pool party, despite the pool that the mingling guests have to be careful not to fall into. Waiters in white gloves interrupt boring chitchat to proffer canapés on silver trays. Some years, a string quartet has played.
Eve has never allowed herself to seriously consider bare legs for the party, just as she has never allowed herself to consider not going at all. It is her job, as Larry’s wife.
The party starts at six-thirty, so there is still time. It’s likely that he’ll rush into the house, do a quick change, and expect her to be ready to go. Or he might take a cab directly from the airport to the party and tell her to meet him there. Five years ago, he would have been more considerate. Eve hopes the current iteration of his persona will soften soon.
While she waits, Eve sits down at her desk to write out a list of low-maintenance plants for the new county courthouse complex. She smiles to herself: at least they don’t want roses.
At six o’clock she checks her email: nothing. She has already left Larry two voicemails; there’s no point in leaving another. As she picks up the phone to call Eleanor, who is punctilious about attendance and will expect an explanation, she notices that she is shaking.
“Eleanor, it’s Eve Federman. I’m just calling to let you know that Larry and I won’t make it tonight. I’m terribly sorry—a sudden illness in the family.”
“Eve Federman?” Eleanor sounds as if this is a name she recognizes only dimly. “You’re calling, why?”
“To let you know that Larry and I won’t be there tonight.”
“I’m not expecting you. Employees who have been terminated do not continue to attend company functions. Even unofficial ones.”
“Terminated?” Eve feels her stomach plummet. Larry was fired, and he didn’t tell her?
“Well, of course, Martin allowed Larry to save face and resign,” Eleanor says into the silence. “Martin is kinder than most. It’s cost him, God knows. Heavens, Eve, did you really not know?” Her queenly condescension evaporates.
Lying might salve Eve’s pride, but she doesn’t feel the need for that. Eleanor has just hurtled into her past; Eve doesn’t care what she thinks. Knowing the truth is what’s urgent.
“No. When did this happen? How long ago?”
“Eve…” Eleanor’s voice gets lower, more intimate, more confiding. “It was at the pre-presentation for Stimitol—fortunately not the meeting with the client, just our own dear CEO! About three or four weeks ago, I’d say. Instead of the PowerPoint the team had worked on, Larry played some video about spirit animals! Said he was helping to release them. And handed out turkey feathers. Can you imagine? Turkey feathers. To all the top management! Everyone was speechless.”
Eve shivers. This is the kind of story you hear about somebody else.
“I’m sure you can see, there was nowhere to go from there but out.” Eleanor delivers the verdict with relish, only partly disguised by a last-minute overlay of pity for the poor, blameless wife. In fact, not quite blameless—in Eleanor’s mind, or in Eve’s. After all, she married him. And maybe somehow she drove him to it.
“Thank you for telling me, Eleanor.” And you should thank me, Eve thinks, for giving you the punchline: And guess what! His wife didn’t know about it for weeks!
“You’re so welcome! Best of luck, Eve.” She hangs up before adding, With a husband like that, you’ll need it.
Eve feels panic rising in her throat. She’s freezing; the air conditioning is set too high. She yanks open the kitchen door and steps into the humidity outside. It’s like hitting a wall of damp cotton wool. She sinks onto the brick steps that lead down into the backyard.
Her garden might as well be a hologram. The trees, the fence, the overgrown flowerbeds, the weedy lawn: all of it, a projection of what is supposed to be her life. Only the spicy scent of lilies has the smack of the here and now.
Eve wraps her arms around her knees. Her own body comforts her: it feels solid and substantial. She runs her hands down the sides of her legs and back up along her shins. The pantyhose feels sticky: the stickiness of frogs. Her fingers stop at the bump of a small scab on her right knee. Did she do it in the junk shop, or on the roof with Micajah? She doesn’t remember it bleeding that day at lunch, when she realized he was looking at her knees; she has no memory of scraping it on the roof. She presses the scab, rubs it. The fine mesh of the nylon starts to ladder. Eve digs her fingers into the hole, pulling it bigger, ripping the fabric away from her skin. Then she attacks the other leg, tearing at it until only shreds remain.
She goes back inside, barefoot, and drops the ripped pantyhose in the kitchen garbage.
This is reality, she thinks grimly. Time to face it.
She climbs the stairs and opens the door of the guest room—only the second time she’s done that since Larry took it over. The first time, she went in to change his sheets and vacuum, and he asked her with cold politeness to please respect his privacy. She could have snooped while he was out, but she was too proud.
The previous night, on her way to bed, she paused at that door, wondering if the room would tell her something about Larry’s absence. She knew in her gut that something was wrong, but still she could put off the moment of reckoning. She calls it ostrich pose: putting your head in the sand, refusing to see what’s there. She chose to hold it for one more day.
The closet door was open that day, barely a year ago, when she entered, revealing a kind of altar, with feathers, rocks, a candle, and objects she couldn’t identify. Now, when she opens the closet, she sees blank space. The altar is gone.
White wall, melamine shelving, shiny clothes rail, a few decrepit wire hangers: the objects surrounding this absence seem disconnected, like objects floating in space.
Eve sits down on the bed and tries to put herself into Larry’s consciousness. What was he thinking, the last night he lay here? Did he have regrets about his intention to leave? Nostalgia? Qualms of any kind? What did he think he would say to Allan when he talked to him next? Would he even contact him? In the past, he’d always expected Eve to be the one in charge of staying in contact, and spoke to his son on cue when she handed him the phone.
What will she say to Allan? It’s obvious that she will have to be the one to tell him that the solid ground of his family has crumbled away.
They were not happy, as she’s finally admitted in the past days. But it never occurred to her that their individual unhappiness might implicate their marriage. The marriage itself wasn’t unhappy. It was . . . She searches for the word. Normal.
Could it be another woman? No. She’s pretty certain, even though certainty seems ridiculous right now. She is the one who has been unfaithful. Yet she had had no intention of being unfaithful before it happened, while he had been planning to leave her for, almost certainly, weeks. He executed his plan with clinical detachment. And all the while, she’d thought nothing was wrong.
Though she knows that more than half of marriages end in divorce, Eve feels abnormal—abandoned, deceived, alone. This should not be happening to her and Larry. She is not flighty, not self-centered, not always looking for something better and leaving collateral damage behind her as women like Deborah do. She married Larry, with his chinos and madras shirts, because he was stable, unadventurous, kindly rather than passionate. She’d seen her parents split up, seen her mother be picked up and put down by a succession of men. Rattled by Bill’s death and feeling only half alive, as if part of her had died with him, Eve was prepared to sacrifice excitement for security. Contentment seemed durable and within her control, whereas joy was transient. She vowed to lie, without complaining, in the bed she’d made.
She wanders from room to room, looking for an anchor. How can the absence of someone who has been functionally absent for so long be so pronounced?
Only one object in the house holds nothing of Larry: the instrument, which has stayed out of sight in its case since it arrived. Averting her eyes from the splintered back, she holds it in various postures: tucked under her chin, propped on her thigh, clasped between her knees. I could be a completely different person, she thinks, someone who knows how to play this. Or someone who knows how to make this. She feels herself blank, a slate wiped clean by the disappearance, physical and spiritual, of the Larry she joined her life to twenty-six years ago.
Still cradling the instrument, she sits on the sofa and stares at the blank TV. The ghost of herself looks back at her from the depths of the black screen. She’s reminded of a Discovery Channel program she once saw, about Indians who looked into obsidian mirrors to learn things.
She flicks it on. The news channel is still not reporting anything that might excuse Larry’s silence, though she knows by now that world events have nothing to do with it. She clicks through the channels. Men with knives. Noisy cars. Zebras on the African savanna. A nighttime rerun of a daytime talk show. Eve has never liked those shows: too much yelling and self-righteousness and exhibitionism.
“I don’t know when it happened,” she imagines herself saying to the host. “He moved into the guest room but we still ate dinner together.”
A young woman grabs a microphone dangling from an overhead wire. “Girlfriend, you are sleepwalking! If this dude had been the Unabomber, you would have just been mashing his potatoes and never even knew it!”
A second woman grabs another microphone. “Do you even know where he is? He could be marrying a man for all you know!”
Eve stares blankly at the TV, where a soft-voiced doctor is, in fact, discussing colonic screening. The studio audience are looking concerned, enlightened, and determined. There are no dangling microphones.
Though she feels a steady, simmering anger at Larry, it’s shot through with glimmers of sympathy. Could he be secretly gay, or transgender? She searches her mind for signs. Whatever the reason for his disappearance, his lying, his lack of communication, the pressure was so intense it caused what might be a psychotic break. Until now, she refused to worry about his mental state, choosing to label his behavior a phase, like the phases Allan went through as a child: tantrummy, clingy, defiant, too grown-up for his age.
There must have been signs, during those years of vague decline. And she missed them.
Until late that night, Eve attempts to compose an email to Larry, telling him she knows he’s lost his job, asking what he plans to do. No combination of words sounds right: too angry, too sympathetic, too whiny, too brisk.
As she rewrites it for the twentieth time, an instant message pops up. She recognizes the phone number: Micajah.
That he should be contacting her tonight, and at two in the morning, seems outrageous. She knows it’s illogical, but she holds him partly responsible for Larry’s departure. It’s too much of a coincidence not to be connected. The only other explanation—just as illogical, and just as unpleasant—is that fate is toying with her.
She clicks the message away. It was a bare link: probably spam, he got hacked. She tries to force her attention back to the email. Twenty-second rephrase. Twenty-third. “Please let me know if our marriage is over. Please let me know what you plan to do about our life together.” She cannot send these. They are absurd.
She retrieves the message, clicks it open. There’s the link, some incomprehensible code. And after it, “xM”.
He let two days pass before he contacted me. Eve tries to summon outrage—anything but desire, tenderness, hunger for his body, the green depths of his eyes . . . thoughts that don’t belong here, in this moment, when she’s trying to throw a line over the abyss to her wayward husband.
If it’s spam, a virus might take out her computer. But she’s lost so much, what would it matter losing more? She trusted Micajah to hold her on that parapet; she will trust him now.
She clicks on the link. A small window pops up, with a “Play” arrow. She clicks again.
Three plaintive notes: a single melody line, played on a low-sounding violin. It’s in waltz time, lilting and yearning. The notes slide together woozily, as if they’re slightly drunk. She imagines Micajah’s long fingers pressing the strings, bent into a caress around the bow, in perfect control of this delirious melody. His eyes are closed, she thinks, as he plays; she longs to see him like that, his face abandoned to her gaze. For nearly four minutes, the music circles and dances, conjures longing and ecstasy.
As the last note, a keening cry, fades away, a title pops up: “Night Blooming Jasmine.” And then the words, “For Eve.”