He doesn’t know what “love” means between them any more, though they always say it. For the sake of the children. He can’t remember when he started knocking at her door, or when he stopped considering it his door. When they moved the children into one room together and he took the vacant bed. The vacant bed, she called it then. Now she calls it the extra bed.
He sets the cup of tea down on the night table, beside the clock radio that wakes her every morning with cheerful breakfast news. There’s an ashtray, no butts; why should there be? She doesn’t smoke. Though Chris did.
When Nate slept in this room there were ashes, matches, ringed glasses, pennies from his pockets. They used to save them in a peanut butter jar and buy small gifts with them for each other. Mad money, she called it. Now he still empties the pennies out of his pockets every night; they accumulate like mouse droppings on top of the bureau in his room, his own room. Your own room, she calls it, as if to keep him in there.
She looks up at him, her face leached of color, eyes dark-circled, smile wan. She doesn’t have to try; she always tries.
“Thanks, love,” she says. “I’ll get up in a minute.”
• • •
“I’ll make dinner tonight, if you like,” Nate says, wanting to be helpful, and Elizabeth agrees listlessly. Her listlessness, her lack of encouragement, infuriates him, but he says nothing, turns and closes the door softly behind him. He made the gesture and she acts as if it means nothing.
Nate goes to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator and pokes through it. It’s like rummaging through a drawer of jumbled clothes. Leftovers in jars, bean sprouts gone bad, spinach in a plastic bag starting to decay, giving off that smell of decomposing lawn. No use expecting Elizabeth to clean it. She used to clean it. She will clean other things these days, but not the refrigerator. He’ll tidy it up himself, tomorrow or the next day, when he gets around to it.
Meanwhile he’ll have to improvise dinner. It’s no large trial, he’s often helped with the cooking, but in former times — he thinks of it as the olden days, like a bygone romantic era, like some Disneyland movie about knighthood — there were always supplies. He does most of the grocery shopping himself now, carting a bag or two home in the basket of his bicycle, but he forgets things and gaps are left in the day: no eggs, no toilet paper. Then he has to send the kids to the corner store, where everything is more expensive. Before, before he sold the car, it wasn’t such a problem. He took Elizabeth once a week, on Saturdays, and helped her put the cans and frozen packages away when they got home.
Nate picks the dripping spinach out of the vegetable crisper and carries it to the garbage can; it oozes green liquid. He counts the eggs: not enough for omelettes. He’ll have to make macaroni and cheese again, which is all right since the kids love it. Elizabeth will not love it but she will eat it, she’ll wolf it down absently as if it’s the last thing on her mind, smiling like a slowly grilling martyr, staring past him at the wall.
Nate stirs and grates, stirs and grates. An ash drops from his cigarette, missing the pot. It isn’t his fault Chris blew his head off with a shotgun. A shotgun: this sums up the kind of extravagance, hysteria, he’s always found distasteful in Chris. He himself would have used a pistol. If he were going to do it at all. What gets him is the look she gave him when the call came through: At least he had the guts. At least he was serious. She’s never said it of course, but he’s sure she compares them, judges him unfavorably because he’s still alive. Chickenshit, to be still alive. No balls.
Yet at the same time, still without saying it, he knows she blames him, for the whole thing. If you had only been this or that, done this or that — he doesn’t know what — it wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t have been driven, forced, compelled . . . that’s her view, that he failed her, and this undefined failure of his turned her into a quivering mass of helpless flesh, ready to attach itself like a suction cup to the first crazy man who ambled along and said, You have nice tits. Or whatever it was Chris did say to get her to open the Love Latch on her brassiere. Probably more like, You have nice ramifications. Chess-players are like that. Nate knows: he used to be one himself. Nate can never figure out why women find chess-playing sexy. Some women.
So for a week now, ever since that night, she’s spent the afternoons in there lying on the bed that used to be his, half his, and he’s been bringing her cups of tea, one each afternoon. She accepts them with that dying swan look of hers, the look he can’t stand and can’t resist. It’s your fault, darling, but you may bring me cups of tea. Scant atonement. And an aspirin out of the bathroom and a glass of water. Thank you. Now go away somewhere and feel guilty. He’s a sucker for it. Like a good boy.
And he was the one, not her, not Elizabeth, who had to go and identify the body. As her stricken eyes said, she could hardly be expected to. So dutifully he had gone. Standing in that apartment where he’d been only twice but where she had been at least once every week for the past two years, fighting nausea, nerving himself to look, he’d felt that she was there in the room with them, a curve in space, a watcher. More so than Chris. No head left at all, to speak of. The headless horseman. But recognizable. Chris’s expression had never really been in that heavy flat face of his; not like most people’s. It had been in his body. The head had been a troublemaker, which was probably why Chris had chosen to shoot at it instead of at some other part of himself. He wouldn’t have wanted to mutilate his body.
A floor, a table, a chess set by the bed, a bed with what they called the trunk and limbs lying on it; Nate’s other body, joined to him by that tenuous connection, that hole in space controlled by Elizabeth. Chris had put on a suit and tie, and a white shirt. Nate, thinking of that ceremony — the thick hands knotting the tie, straightening it in the mirror, God, his shoes were shined even — wanted to cry. He put his hands in his jacket pockets; his fingers closed on pennies, the house key.
“Any reason why he left your number on the table?” the second policeman said.
“No,” Nate said. “We were friends of his, I guess.”
“Both of you?” the first policeman said.
“Yes,” said Nate.
• • •
Janet comes into the kitchen as he’s sliding the casserole dish into the oven.
“What’s for dinner?” she asks, adding “Dad,” as if to remind him who he is.
Nate finds this question suddenly so mournful that for a moment he can’t answer. It’s a question from former times, the olden days. His eyes blur. He wants to drop the casserole on the floor and pick her up, hug her, but instead he closes the oven door gently.
“Macaroni and cheese,” he says.
“Yum,” she says, her voice remote, guarded, giving a careful imitation of pleasure. “With tomato sauce?”
“No,” he says, “there wasn’t any.”
Janet runs her thumb across the kitchen table, squeaking it on the wood. She does this twice. “Is Mum resting?” she says.
“Yes,” Nate says. Then, fatuously, “I took her a cup of tea.” He puts one hand behind him, against the kitchen counter. They both know what to avoid.
“Well,” Janet says in the voice of a small adult, “I’ll be seeing you soon.” She turns and goes back through the kitchen door.
Nate wants to do something, perform something, smash his hand through the kitchen window. But on the other side of the glass there’s a screen. That would neutralize him. Whatever he does now will be absurd. What is smashing a window compared with blowing off your head? Cornered. If she’d planned it, she couldn’t have done it better.