A postcard’s gaudy colors showed through the slits of our apartment mailbox, and though I should have been rushing off to an economics lecture, I stopped and pulled out a view of a cityscape with an impressive backdrop of mountains. I turned it over to read my first news of Laurie since she’d quit school months ago: “I’m absolutely flourishing with a bit part here and there, and waiting—on tables, and for my big break.”
No return address. I sighed and slipped the card into my backpack. My sister had done the opposite of what I’d advised, yet I couldn’t help envying her brave escape, even if her refuge was a bit part or some measly two line walk-on. All the hard work I poured into my lackluster slate of business courses gave me nothing in return, except the sort of grades my father would be proud of, if only he’d notice.
When I arrived in class the professor was already striding back and forth across the lecture hall’s stage, flaunting his usual agenda. I flipped open my notebook and jotted down his opinions, knowing they were more important than his charts and fact sheets. Then he paused to pass out a few copies of what he labeled “a sterling example of overregulation”: a government booklet on consumer safety that listed thousands of accidents involving ordinary household objects.
His narrow, well tailored frame entirely still under the glow of fluorescent lights, the professor asked, “What good could such a pamphlet possibly do for the economy?” He paused as if waiting for a reply, but no one spoke up. We all knew this question was rhetorical.
“None at all,” he resumed with a satisfied chuckle. “Unless one considers the increase on insurance policy premiums across the country a salubrious effect.”
One of the booklets finally came my way, and I paged through the suspect report idly at first, then with more care. I read of eight thousand accidents a year caused by tie racks, and that dishwashers, toothpicks, and household scissors were responsible for the same number. Improbably enough, twice as many accidents were caused by vacuum cleaners. Even more by waste baskets. The list went on and on. Yet these mishaps weren’t minor: the safety commission came by its figures from the records of hospital emergency wards across the country.
Frustrated that the booklet included no details of these mysterious accidents, I found myself imagining a light bulb shattering into slivers while being unscrewed; an electric blanket shorting out in the middle of someone’s peaceful dream; a teakettle melting onto the stove after its whistle failed. Whether insurance premiums rose or not, what could be wrong with protecting people from such domestic betrayals?
“Hey buddy,” the fellow closest to me said, “you gonna keep that? Pass it over.”
“It’s yours,” I muttered, tossing it but sorry to see it go. I returned to my notebook, trying to follow the lecture but unable to shake the thought of a toaster shorting into flames; or one of Kate’s drawings loosening from the wall, then drifting to the floor and the path of an unsuspecting foot.
After class I hurried back to the apartment and tugged gently at Kate’s pictures, making sure each was firmly taped. As I made my way along her gallery, the shadings of the sketches themselves hinted at hidden trouble. The sheen she’d given a leather couch might be seething with fury; that glistening drinking glass could easily be delicate enough to crack in one’s hand, given a little pressure; and her close detail of a water fountain suggested something clinical, ominous: its gray metallic curves offered a space where a face could effectively, forcefully be fit.
Unwilling to take in another picture I sat, unnerved that such possibilities might be in Kate’s work. They were self-portraits, after all, and what of the childhood she wouldn’t tell me about—couldn’t at least some secret memories have found their way into these unsettling details? I wished Kate were beside me, assuring me that what I now saw wasn’t actually there.
As if she’d somehow heard me, there she stood framed in the doorway, keys in hand, taking in my pallid face with one of her sideways glances that I always loved: Kate trying me on at a different angle. Then she said, “Michael?” in such a tiny, concerned voice that my name sounded tentative, a word that didn’t necessarily fit me.
“Oh, I’m just a little tired,” I replied, afraid to voice my fears. With a troubled look, Kate kissed me lightly on the forehead. Then she set down her books and made her way to the kitchen, humming a quiet melody meant to dispel my dark mood. Ashamed that I hadn’t spoken, I looked up at Kate’s drawings again—she’d always let me give words to what she couldn’t. Perhaps if I tested the limits of what we might express together, then Kate would finally reveal more of her past.
That evening she offered me her new drawing—an ordinary paring knife, the beautiful convolutions of its wooden handle’s grain a twisted world unto itself. But the gleam of its sharp edge appeared almost deliberately menacing, and my caption let the blade murmur, Stare out that kitchen window; forget you’re using me.
Kate accepted these words without complaint, but her silence only urged me on. The next week, when she presented me with a sketch of a can of hairspray, I could imagine it spreading a mist over waves of hair, encrusting what was wild into place. Instead I let that can whisper Set me down by the radiator, please. I searched Kate’s face as she read my caption, but caught nothing more than a slight quivering of her eyelids. So the following week I pushed further and made a shining paper clip croon, Come here, baby, swallow me.
“Oh, Michael,” she murmured. Kate’s questioning eyes met mine, and I said nothing, hoping to draw more from her, hoping she’d come out of herself to a new and more intimate level, the same way she had at her parents’ home. She set her drawing aside on the table and turned away.
The next evening, during our preparations for a quick meal, Kate washed the rice while I took on the job of chopping the vegetables. But I couldn’t find any knife whose blade wasn’t hopelessly blunt.
I said nothing and struggled away with a butter knife, thinking about that paring knife Kate had recently drawn and that I’d so darkly captioned. Where had it disappeared to? Yet instead of searching for the knife after dinner, on a hunch I checked my desk drawer and discovered that my little box of paper clips was gone. I explored further, through all the other drawers, the bookshelves, even piles of paper, then in the other rooms. There wasn’t a single stray clip anywhere in the apartment. I hadn’t expected to find any: Kate must have removed the things whose hidden danger had been broached.
My recent captions had affected her more than I’d suspected. I stretched out on our ratty couch with budding remorse. Didn’t my words reveal as much about me as her? Those captions had become my own kind of domestic betrayal—I’d unfairly tried to provoke confessions from someone I loved.
Kate’s next drawing was the gentlest of rebukes: a cotton ball’s white haze. I resisted the impulse to find a secret threat in this most innocuous of objects, and instead presented her with a caption that was an apology: If only I were weightless, I’d float to whoever needed me.
*
The candle on our table cast flickers of orange light across Kate’s face as we sat together in a spaghetti shop. Waiting for our meal to arrive, we indulged in our little game of sharing a single glass of white wine, alternating sip after sip. Whenever a trace of wine seeped onto my tongue with a warming tingle, I savored it even more, knowing that when Kate lifted the glass to her lips she’d enjoy the same sensation.
Approaching the bottom of the glass, we took smaller sips, hoping to let the game linger, each trying to allow the other the last drop. With only a tiny cone of wine swirling at the bottom, I tilted the glass for a faint touch, leaving just enough for Kate.
“Yours,” I said.
With an appreciative nod she emptied the glass, then examined its surface, cloudy from our lips, our fingerprints. If she was planning a sketch I already had a caption: How many more lips will I meet?
Our eggplant parmesan finally arrived, steaming and gooey with cheese. We ate and spoke of our classes, of a rock concert coming to the local amphitheater, of the glories of Indian summer in this otherwise chilly autumn, and we avoided any talk of what awaited us at the end of next semester—graduation. I knew Kate wanted to someday exhibit her work, but we rarely spoke of this, or my plans, and perhaps our shyness hid a far more tender subject. What would we do, together, once school was done?
Before long we were quiet, with nothing and everything left to say. Wouldn’t one of us ever begin? Kate cut her meal into careful squares, her mouth deftly taking in each neat piece, and the sight filled me with so much love and somehow sadness that I found myself saying, “You know, we’ve never talked, or talked much, about graduation, I mean, what are you, are you still …”
Kate paused, fork in hand, her eyes alert to the territory I’d just opened. “The art world awaits,” she said with a laugh, protecting her ambition by making light of it. “In the meantime, some dull dull commercial illustration job should see me through. I guess I should start sending out my resumé,” she added. “What about you?”
I sat back in my chair and glanced away. Ever since paging through that government booklet on accidents, I’d been reading up on the subject of insurance—homeowner and life policies, major medical and collision coverage. The whole idea seemed so ordinary, but it was all I had to offer, and so I offered, “Maybe insurance.” I looked down at my plate and the dregs of tomato sauce.
“Insurance?”
“You know, as a … career,” I said, now alert for any sign of amusement on her face. Instead, her eyes took on a faraway look.
“Why not? You’re a kind of poet.”
“Me?” I said, blushing with pleasure at Kate’s compliment—was that how she saw me?
“Sure.”
I thought of the strange, airy feeling that sometimes swept through me, frightening and exhilarating both, when I found words for her drawings. Was this poetry, somehow? “But,” I said, confused, “what’s that got to do with—”
“Oh, poets, composers, they like to do that sort of thing.”
“Who? Do what?”
“Oh, Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives …uh, Kafka, too. They all worked for insurance companies.”
“Really?” I said, but when she explained further, I realized with disappointment that their jobs had been merely the source of a paycheck. Still, I remembered reading a few poems by Stevens in an English class, how they flowed with a kind of liquid music that made me go back to them again and again. If I were somehow a poet, wouldn’t it be possible—even if right now I hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about it—to make a kind of poetry with insurance?
The check arrived, yet we lingered at our table, perhaps needing time to broach the still unspoken subject of us. Outside, people sauntered by and the steady stream of couples hand in hand, arm in arm on their way to somewhere else in town, seemed to pull us from our seats, as if, in joining them, we might find a destination too.
So we ambled down the sidewalks, and the reflection of our faces in the storefront windows hovered over kitchenware, antiques, floral arrangements—all of them domestic scenes, cluttered interiors that seemed to welcome us, but we passed them by. Then, at the corner before an intersection, Kate stopped at an art store display: sets of colored pencils arranged in circles like a series of pinwheels. She lingered there so long I felt forgotten.
“Kate?” I asked, tugging lightly at her elbow.
“Okay,” she said, but didn’t move, not yet ready to leave.
What held her so? I looked at the art display again and saw Kate’s entranced, nearly transparent features in the window. She seemed to me a spirit, floating over those instruments of her inspiration. Then behind us two cars hurtled across the intersection at each other, across the reflection our shocked faces.
Tires squealed, followed by a horrible, grating crunch of metal. We turned to see the two cars twisted at odd angles, steam rising from their mangled hoods, a dark splotch against one of the shattered windshields. A door groaned open and a woman lurched out, clutching a purse, her blond hair already puddled with blood. Dark streams rippled from her mouth, which was somehow loose. She fell, and her purse emptied onto the pavement.
“Do, what do we do?” Kate asked, her voice raw with horror. I gulped, and gulped again, unable to answer.
The woman lay there, her face hidden by a red mop of hair. I approached but was afraid to touch her, so I knelt before her possessions strewn like litter across the road: a lipstick tube, a paperback mystery novel, a rectangular, lime-colored eraser, a foil condom packet, a hairbrush, a tattered train schedule, a small plastic bag of pistachio nuts, all of it ordinary evidence of a life now in danger. This scattering seemed so wrong, so terribly wrong, and I couldn’t help myself, I began grabbing without looking, sweeping it all back into her purse and then snapping the clasp shut, as if that would somehow help her.
Kate stood beside me, sobbing, “My god my god my god,” and I managed to say, “We have to, to, to call an ambulance.”
A crowd had gathered by now and a man repeated, “Call an ambulance!” A grim-faced woman, her short hair streaked with gray, shouldered her way through the gawkers and began administering some sort of first aid.
Kate pulled me away, and we huddled together on the sidewalk across the street, listening to the drawn-out wail of approaching sirens. Less than a minute’s difference, I thought: if I’d managed to lure Kate from the shop window we might have walked into that accident. But what if I’d lazed in bed a little longer this morning, trying to remember a dream; what if we’d dawdled longer at the restaurant—couldn’t any slight change have altered our fate as easily?
Those pale faces of the crowd milling about the crushed cars, were they too tallying the day’s events and what might have been? Perhaps we’d all walk home haunted by the fear that every day was a gauntlet of possible disasters.
By now paramedics rushed about and police directed traffic. The ambulance strobe lights cast an eerie, skittish dance of light and shadow over the intersection, reminding me of that bat’s shivering wings on its predatory flight, how it swooped down without warning. I held Kate, as she held me, and I kept repeating, “Don’t worry, it’s going to be all right, all right.” She turned to me, eyes softening with the need to believe, and at that moment I glimpsed a secret that the jargon of insurance texts had promised and yet disguised: we all longed for refuge, for a private sanctuary. Was this something of the poetry I hoped to discover? If so, I wanted to always bestow this sort of comfort on Kate, and not only on her, but on myself as well, and every frightened face around us.
*
Kate and I sat stiffly at the center of a curved dais, facing the round tables of guests, a long table piled with presents, an open bar, and I couldn’t help thinking of our farewell cartoon in the student newspaper: her drawing of a wedding gown and tuxedo hanging together in a closet, with my caption, Someday we’ll dance, we’ll unbutton, we’ll slip to the floor. While a quartet of potbellied rockers cluttered the small bandstand and checked their sound system, Kate picked daintily at the catered plate of roast beef and sculpted mashed potatoes. I hadn’t yet touched a knife or fork, hadn’t even placed the cloth napkin on my lap, still amazed that merely a month after graduation we were married and about to begin a new life. Already the vows we’d exchanged in a nearby church, my nervous shoe tapping during the minister’s short homily, her father’s chronic coughing in the front pew, Kate’s hand trembling as I awkwardly slipped on the ring, already they seemed like the intense memories of some distant event.
A delicate clinking now began. Spoons tapping against half-filled champagne glasses, the guests invoked us to stand and display our now official union with a kiss. Kate and I obeyed, bending our faces gently to each other, lips touching lightly, so much like that first, stunningly familiar kiss at the end of the wedding ceremony.
This time Kate whispered, “I love you, Michael,” intimate words that were rarely easy for her to offer. I accepted them with a goofy grin of joy at what I felt was the first golden moment of our marriage, and our audience clapped with real warmth, as if they understood just what my wife and I had exchanged.
We sat down, and the tables settled back into their individual circles of chatter, with the exception of one pocket of mutual unease—the table just below us, where Father and Dan sat together with Kate’s parents. I couldn’t imagine her father or mother had much to say beyond their already voiced disapproval over my upcoming job as an independent insurance agent in a minor, distant city, or Kate’s too modest starting salary at an ad agency just a little too small in that same minor, distant city. Their eyes kept to the table of presents—quietly counting, perhaps, or considering what disappointing gifts might lay hidden within.
Next to them sat Father, stiff and stoical, a sentinel with knife and fork before the meal on his plate. Beside him sat Dan, who had indeed taken on more of Father’s restraint—having already disposed of the main course he seemed to hope, with a cautious glance here and there at passing waiters, for the arrival of seconds. I found it hard to believe that this grown brother of mine now worked full-time at the nursery and still lived at the same home where years ago he used to shake the rungs of the banister like prison bars.
The chiming of glasses started again. Kate and I dutifully stood and kissed, and when with patient smiles we ended our clinch, I saw Laurie framed in the faraway double doorway. She’d actually appeared. Fresh from a world of low-rent theater productions, she’d certainly prepared for a dramatic entrance, with a long, dark dress and brightly patterned shawl, and her hair dyed a shocking red. Her eyes searched the room, and then with determined steps she made her way through the maze of tables toward Father and Dan.
But it wasn’t her table. Much woe had passed between Father and me about this. Still furious at Laurie’s quitting school mid-semester, he’d declared she wasn’t to sit with him. He wouldn’t attend the wedding otherwise, and out of one last, ignoble hope of healing my own rift with him, I’d finally given in, sure that Laurie would never show up.
Before I could rise and head her off, try to explain, Dan stood to greet her. Laurie grinned flamboyantly, certainly aware of the stares from the nearby tables as she approached. But Father gazed past his own daughter, as if she wore a disguise he refused to see through. He actually leaned over to my new mother-in-law and attempted a bit of chat, managing to elicit a few monosyllables from that tight-lipped woman. Laurie stood across from them, her face for a moment surprisingly defeated. But that unguarded look hardened when she saw that there was no place for her at the table.
Dan’s face at least filled with shame, mirroring my own, and I waited for Laurie to make a scene. Instead she accepted Dan’s offered arm and he led her to a remote table featuring an aging Aunt Myrna and a clutch of Kate’s distant cousins. I turned to my wife, relieved that I’d kept the misery of these table arrangements a secret from her. She stopped picking at her scalloped potatoes, looked up at me and smiled, unaware of the family drama below.
Settled at her table, Laurie drained her champagne glass and waved for a refill, exuding a sharp sadness that I knew too well. She wouldn’t look my way, and why should she? My sister knew that she couldn’t have been banished without my compliance.
The glasses began clinking, and once more Kate and I stood and kissed. We’d barely sat down before that insistent tinkling began again. With a weary sigh, Kate rose to embrace me.
“Don’t worry,” I murmured in her ear, “dinner’ll be over soon. Then we’ll all be dancing.”
But every minute or two that silly ritual repeated. The requests became a giddy, collective joke, much enjoyed by our college friends who, rowdy with drink, couldn’t resist the impulse to tease us. With each clinch Kate grew increasingly grim-faced, until finally she turned her back to the crowd. I peered over her shoulder at the tables and saw my sister beaming drunkenly. Our eyes met, and with a flourish of her spoon Laurie tapped her glass, starting up another round of chiming. She was the ringleader of this prank, this was her revenge: she was trying to goad my wife to finally come out onstage and reveal herself.
When Kate and I kissed again, I tasted tears on her lips and understood that for her my tuxedo and her bridal gown might as well have been invisible—we were naked to everyone’s eyes. Yet I couldn’t resist the temptation of searching Kate’s face for whatever stood poised within her, any hint I might find of what she kept hidden. But her moist eyes remained a blue sky obscured by strange gray clouds and she shuddered at the sight of my probing face, the opportunism of my tenderness.
Once again Laurie didn’t allow us to sit down, and our guests’ celebratory glasses echoed through the room, a tinkling that now resembled the sound of shattering. I bent to kiss Kate but she crumpled into my embrace. Chastened, I stroked her back, tried to maneuver her weeping face away from our audience. Everyone lapsed into an embarrassed silence, the room so still that they might have heard me whispering urgently what I wanted my wife so much to believe, that everything was all right, all right, and that I would always, always protect her. But Kate pulled away from these reassurances, and my reflection in her wide eyes seemed so small, as if, having run far away, she’d turned back, briefly, to regard me.