As we drove from the auction those wooden John Waynes rattled in their box on the backseat, and I kept trying to believe that this woman I’d pursued wasn’t another of my mistakes.
“Yes, I was deceptive,” Sylvia said, answering my unspoken accusation. “But I’ve been fooling myself too, trying to pretend I’m not married.”
Pretending. “But you are,” I replied.
Sylvia rested a hand on my arm. “Look, Michael, you just bid for that statue because you liked its story. Would you like to hear mine?”
Shamed, I nodded, then turned onto the entrance ramp for the highway. We drove a few miles before she began, “I’ve been floundering for months. Last weekend I cranked up an old Stones song—’Gimme Shelter’—and blasted it out the window. There’s this moment when a backup singer takes up the melody and her voice seems to split in two, and I feel like something inside me is splitting too. I played the damn song over and over, hoping somebody passing by would see me in the window and know right away that cracked voice said something about me.”
I imagined Sylvia’s sad face peering out through a screen window, the tight wire mesh like pixels on a television screen. Again my face was pressed close to her image during that weather broadcast, with little shocks of static electricity surging across my skin, and I almost forgot to turn off the highway for the exit back to the diner.
“Anyway,” Sylvia said, “not one taker.”
She picked up the atomizer and fingered its tassel. We passed a few more stands of trees, then the first strip mall. The diner was just ahead. I pulled into the nearly empty lot and parked beside Sylvia’s car. Too soon, too soon. With the engine idling, I turned to her with a wary glance and waited. Then Sylvia said, “So, my husband, he works for a map company. He’s been off on a field survey, checking the accuracy of a new map. His favorite part of the job, though, is working in the office, making trap streets.”
“Trap streets?”
“Mapmaking is pretty competitive—what isn’t, I suppose. Sometimes rival companies copy each other’s maps but don’t give credit, so they don’t have to pay any royalties. That’s why Richard adds a false road, maybe two, on each map.”
“What’s that?”
“A street that doesn’t exist. If it appears on a pirated map, then there’s clear proof of copyright infringement. That’s the trap.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, unhappy with the finality of trap, the constriction of its single syllable. “Didn’t you call them something else?”
“False roads?”
“That’s a better description. You took a wrong turn somewhere.”
*
We straddled the wet spot on my bed until Sylvia inched closer, whispering, “This time it’s your turn to talk.” She clasped my hand, pulled at a finger until a knuckle popped, a little tug that offered release. This woman wanted to be found, and she wanted to find me, and so I confessed the secret knot I’d formed with my brother and sister in the face of our mother’s performances. Sylvia tugged again, setting free my mother’s giddy escapade on the roof, her collapse in the bowling alley, our reflection in her eyes as she lay dead on the lawn. All the stories Kate had refused to hear.
Sylvia listened in silence, her eyes filled with a strange recognition. “My parents played parts too. Every reaction had to be operatic. If Mom burnt the toast, it was a forest fire. For my dad, finding a lucky penny was like breaking into Fort Knox. I remember when I learned how to tie my shoes, they acted as if I was miraculously fluent in Sanskrit. But they enjoyed their acting, enjoyed it so much that I did too—each day was a kind of show, and I think you would have loved them. I miss them.”
“Do you mean—”
“A car crash. With a truck on some icy road, my second year of college.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“It’s taken me a long time to appreciate the irony of such a melodramatic exit, because sometimes … I wonder if it really was ice that caused the crash, or if they were in the middle of one of their B-movie scenes and … Anyway, I’ll never know, will I?” She offered a brittle smile and sighed. “If only they’d been around on my awful wedding day.”
“Awful?” I repeated, my voice a frail echo of itself.
“It’s difficult to talk about.”
I couldn’t reply, still shocked.
“We’d just cut the cake,” Sylvia began. “Richard picked up the fork, flicked it in an odd way I couldn’t help noticing, and then he speared a piece of cake for me. When I opened my mouth his hand slipped and the tines scraped the roof of my mouth. I nearly gagged, but stupidly enough, all I could think was, Don’t throw up, don’t spit out the wedding cake, and somehow I managed to choke down the taste of my own blood. Richard acted as if nothing had happened, I managed to smile and everyone applauded.”
I groaned at Sylvia’s words but I was far from her, standing on a dais with Kate, champagne glasses tinkling all about us. Kate flinching as I searched her eyes, violated by her own husband before our guests. “My God,” I heard my distant voice asking Sylvia, “What did you do?”
She let out a slow breath, stared at the white ceiling. “We danced. Richard threw my garter belt to the grooms, I threw the bouquet to the girls. Then we left in the car for the hotel and I worked up enough shouting and crying to rival my parents—and Richard kept insisting he hadn’t meant to hurt me, he’d just slipped, and then he’d been too embarrassed to say anything in front of everyone. I wanted to believe him. When we first met, he was resisting his family’s tough guy ideal, and I was attracted to his struggle. I think I missed my parents’ melodramas. But now I think he’s fighting a losing battle.
“If we’re having an argument and really going at it, he makes this little gesture, this little offhand flick. Maybe it’s unconscious, maybe not. I can’t tell. But it reminds me of the way he shook that fork, and I can’t help myself, I just have to give in. And I hate myself for that.”
Sylvia’s face so filled with uncertainty that once again I saw her on the TV screen, surrounded by flashing weather maps and longing for ambiguity’s antidote. I reached out to stroke her hair, but she held my hand and again chose a finger to pull. I heard the soft pop of the joint, felt its pleasurable loosening, and I told her of my father’s stony facade and the unexpected tenderness I’d heard in his voice when he fired me. She pulled another finger and I described his battles with Laurie, then another and I told her of my courtship with Kate. Then I finally confessed my own wedding day.
When I finished she lay quietly beside me, offering no comment.
“I know I should have protected her better,” I said, “but I failed her.”
Sylvia’s hand reached out again. “You hurt her. You did, even if you didn’t try to. But if it was intimacy you wanted, she should have given that right from the beginning.”
*
Sylvia’s confidence grew before the camera, and then one evening she stood with a sly smile before a new display of color graphics: a flutter of tiny wings in one corner of the screen rippled into a bank of cumulus clouds, which swirled into a tornado that dissipated into clear skies.
With a flourish of her pointer, she announced, “Tonight I’m beginning a new feature for the weather report: Sylvia’s Mea Culpa Corner.”
She paused. “You may remember that we had scattered showers throughout the region this morning, then two straight hours of rain in the afternoon. Perhaps you also remember that last night I predicted sunny weather. I was wrong about the temperature too—by eight degrees. And the rain completely blew my humidity count. So I’d like to apologize to anyone caught without an umbrella, to any family that had a picnic spoiled. Mea culpa! Unfortunately, there’s not much any meteorologist can do about it. Let me tell you about the Butterfly Effect.”
While Sylvia described chaos theory for the viewing audience, behind her the satellite video of the curve of the globe thickened with clouds. She snapped her fingers and those weather patterns began gliding across the continental United States and Canada, then flipped back to the beginning and kept repeating at unlikely intervals as if affected by Sylvia’s words. That same dizziness I’d felt when I’d first watched her forecast returned, not because of the computer graphics but because Sylvia had found her solution, asking forgiveness for mistakes large and small. I felt certain that her viewers would grant her absolution.
Sylvia turned and waved her pointer at the clouds like a wand and the sky cleared, presaging sunny days, rain arriving only at welcome intervals. “Even though I try to look like I’m in charge, I still goof up. So tomorrow, I’m going to tell you just how well tonight’s prediction went.” She paused, the camera moving in as she said, “And on Friday, I’m going to give you my win-loss percentages for the week. I challenge my competition to do the same.” Then Sylvia rattled off the numbers for the next day with a modest authority that somehow redeemed the limits of her predictive powers.
*
Sylvia’s ratings rose enough for her to be featured in the local paper and a radio call-in show, and then she received invitations to give speeches at the Elks and Rotary Clubs, a high school science class, the Women’s Business Council, and even the Mood Disorder Association. We met when we could, brief moments that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, and her weather reports served as a substitute: knowing I was home and watching, she added a new nightly feature offering a tidbit of meteorology for her audience that was also a secret aside for me. With her face in giddy close-up she explained how air pressure is caused by the bouncing of uncountable molecules, creating “a microscopic tingling against our bodies”; she revealed how clouds warm up the night.
She had forgiven me for Kate. I could try to do the same for her, help her forgive Richard his own wedding day disaster. Then we might go our separate ways, and perhaps that’s why we had met. But I didn’t want that. Here was a woman who could read a sunset, who loved to tell a story, a woman who’d heard what Kate hadn’t in that tape recording. So I hid my relief when Sylvia told me her recurring dream: she stood beside Richard on a windy boardwalk, waiting on a long line to what seemed to be a bakery in the distance, and he caressed her shoulder gently until his touch turned into a sharp ache, like the stab of a fork.
The dream began to insinuate itself into Sylvia’s weather report, and doubt returned to her voice while announcing barometric pressures. Then one morning she called and I lifted the receiver to a breathless tumble of words. “Michael, I had that dream again last night, but this time it woke me up and my skin was tingling right at the spot where Richard touched me in the dream, like he really had been working at my shoulder while I was asleep. But he was lying there in the dark, sleeping. Or maybe he was only pretending, because—”
“Wait, slow down. Do you mean—”
“I swear he must have touched me, it felt so—”
“Was there any mark?”
“I, I didn’t think to check. I just lay there, afraid to let him know I’d woken up. Then the tingling faded away. Am I imagining this? Maybe I’m making too much of nothing.”
We both fell silent, until Sylvia cut in, “I can’t talk any more. Richard wants to go to that new mall, and he’ll be here any minute. I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Okay,” I replied to the dial tone buzz, and before replacing the receiver I decided to drive to the mall too, see them together, and judge Richard for myself.
I worried the gas pedal through traffic and minutes later I sat at a pizza concession at the corner of the mail’s huge main thoroughfare, aptly dubbed The Sprawl. My back to the passing crowds, I stared at a wall mirror and hoped I could catch sight of Richard and Sylvia passing by.
Nursing a diet Coke and a gooey calzone, I did my best to take in the throngs of shoppers. I might have missed Sylvia if I hadn’t heard a burst of her laughter. Yet wasn’t it tinged with a hint of falsity? Her sleek image passed across the mirror too quickly for me to get more than a glimpse of the wiry man beside her, the sheen of his dark hair. I eased from my booth and followed the back of their heads.
The crowds thinned and I kept my distance. Richard reached for Sylvia’s hand as she lingered before a storefront, to tug her away. A man who couldn’t control his impatience. She shook off his grip and I tried to draw closer, waiting for Richard to make that flicking gesture that so undid his wife, but too many people passed between us—a clutch of hard-eyed teenage girls, a weary couple pushing at a stroller, an array of boys with baseball caps on backward—and then, whatever had passed between them, Richard and Sylvia continued along too.
They approached the entrance to a video arcade, where a crowd circled a demonstration of a virtual reality game: six or seven people stood in their own railed-in pods, harnessed to wired gloves, a helmet with opaque goggles, and a futuristic gun connected to various tubes. I stopped beside a snack shop’s canisters of caramel popcorn while Sylvia and Richard watched those strange warriors squirming and twitching as they aimed their weapons at invisible targets.
Richard stood in line for the game, and Sylvia walked off to a nearby fashion outlet. He took in her slow, careful weaving among the racks of dresses and skirts until two teenage attendants fit him with the game’s unwieldy paraphernalia. Once those dark goggles were in place he aimed the gun, and his body hunched and dodged and sidestepped enemies only he could see. He pointed here, he pointed there at only the air, clicking the trigger again and again. Who knew what target he was stalking in that virtual world? But I wouldn’t fall prey to Sylvia’s uncertainty. I chose who Richard must be, and I let myself track every ominous move he made.
*
The following morning I parked five doors down the street from Sylvia’s home, a small colonial bounded by neat evergreen shrubs, its bright blue shingles gleaming and strangely heightened in the early summer sun. I unwrapped a sticky bran muffin and settled back in the front seat. Inside my shirt pocket nestled the hollow, quiet presence of a gift shop trinket I’d bought at the mall for this occasion: a scallop shell, both sides glued together and painted a glossy black, a shell that had no story. With luck, it would have one soon enough.
The front door opened and Richard sauntered down the brick steps in his slippers for the newspaper. He idly slapped the morning edition against his hips, surely a gesture of something coiled inside him, not merely some nervous tic. He turned back to the house, and before long the garage door opened and Richard backed a blue sports car down the driveway and pulled away from the curb.
I waited until he nearly turned the corner before following and kept a car or two behind, just as I’d seen in countless TV dramas. Each time I pressed the accelerator or flipped a turn signal I felt that, if I wasn’t traveling on my own false road, I was far off any map I’d ever imagined for myself.
Instead of heading for work, Richard skirted downtown and drove along a road lined with strip malls and fast food franchises. After much start-and-stop traffic he pulled into the parking lot of the same mall he and Sylvia had visited the day before.
I cruised slowly, one lane away, until he parked his car. He made his way to the entrance. No need to follow, I was sure he’d returned for another try at that virtual reality game. When the glass doors closed I continued down the lane, still not sure how to approach him, or even if I should. I neared Richard’s parked car, the rear lights and trunk framed by my windshield as if I faced my own video screen, and I was not merely following him but actually chasing him, about to smash into his car as he tried to escape. That was when my foot pressed on the gas pedal, and with a terrible there’s-no-turning-back twist of my arms I spun the wheel to the left and my car tore into his, the bumper shattering his brake lights.
Red plastic shards broke into the air. My shaking hands thrummed against the steering wheel and I remembered in quick succession Mother slamming the broken glass into a cantaloupe, Laurie flinging the inkwell at a mirror. Was this violence the secret place where I’d been heading?
Somehow I managed to put the car in reverse, and in the rearview mirror I saw a white-haired woman, her hand waving like a flag in distress. She’d seen everything. With a sleepwalker’s muted energy, I waved back, pointed to a nearby parking space and eased in.
Stepping from the car, I turned to the woman and exclaimed, “Can’t understand it! The engine just revved up and took off—it’s never done that before.” And this lie slipped from me so suddenly that I surely did appear shaken, for the woman nodded, seemingly convinced.
Encouraged, I continued, “I feel so bad about this,” and then stopped: I couldn’t possibly let anyone else know what I’d just done. Quickly I added, “But I’ve got to … rush home. So I’ll just leave my name and address here on the dashboard. Could I borrow a piece of paper, a pen?”
She nodded again, this time with less enthusiasm, as if she already suspected that I was about to write down anything that came into my head. Yet she drew what I needed from her purse.
“Thanks,” I said, affecting gratitude, and I leaned against the hood of Richard’s trunk, wishing this woman who hovered too close to me would finally say something. Distracted, I scribbled away with nervous energy and then stared in surprise at the notepad: out of habit I’d written “Michael Kirby,” and the beginnings of my real address. But with an eerie calmness I thought, Why not use this to my advantage?
“Here,” I said, turning to my skeptical witness, “why don’t you make sure all this is correct?”
“I’d be glad to,” she replied. She compared my note and driver’s license for any subtle discrepancy, her hands softly working at the paper, and then I knew she wanted to believe me.
“I’d appreciate it,” I said, adding a worried twinge in my voice, “if you’d leave your name and address too. You never know, this person might try to claim more damages than we got here.”
Her last suspicions withered away with these words. She took back her pen and through the invisible armor of my performance I watched the thin lips of her pinched mouth, the slight flare of nostrils as she worked out a spidery handwriting. Yet she also seemed utterly far away—if I reached out to touch her, my arm would have to stretch for miles. Was this oddly intimate distance what my mother and Laurie had grown addicted to?
The woman’s small script filled up the bottom of the page so slowly that I was afraid Richard might return before she finished. My eyes were on the mall entrance when she finally handed me the notepaper. “If more people were like you,” she said sadly, “the newspaper would be such a bore to read.”
I’d actually disappointed her. Without waiting for a reply, she turned and walked off to the mall, and I crumpled the incriminating note and stuffed it into my pocket.
Then I examined Richard’s damaged car with practiced eyes: this minor accident wouldn’t top the usual deductible. He’d have to pay for all the repair work, a small enough price for the gnawing anxiety he’d instilled in his wife. I jangled the keys in my pocket and considered making a long jagged scar down the length of his car, a little road he wouldn’t find on any map.
A strange tickling at the back of my neck made me glance up at Richard returning, only a few cars away and his eyes already on me. I wanted to kick at the red plastic pieces on the ground—why had I lingered here? Now it was too late to slip away. If only I could become someone else, and then that eerie sense of intimate isolation took hold again. I shook my head in disbelief at the shattered rear light, and as Richard drew near I asked, “Excuse me, are you the owner of this car?” Scowling at the damage, Richard muttered, “What next what next what next?” He kicked at the broken pieces, and though I cringed inside at this echo of my own impulse, I also saw it as a proof of the character I wanted him to be.
“Well, I saw the whole thing,” I offered, trying to calm him. “By the way, my name’s Tom Gibbons.”
Richard’s hand reached out and slipped through the air so quickly I pulled back, as if Sylvia’s dread ran through me. Was that a twitch of amusement that crossed his lips? If so, it was gone at once. We shook hands.
“I got a pretty good look at the car that backed into you,” I announced with a folksy touch to my voice, and I kept talking, afraid to lose it. “A red Chevy compact. I got some of the license plate, but not all of it, I’m sorry to tell you. G 56, and then after that maybe an 11, or a 17.”
“Thank you,” Richard replied, “thanks for all your trouble, really.”
“Or it could have been a 77,” I continued, warming to my character’s single-mindedness. “Or a 71, now that I think on it. I’ll guess the police know to figure out the combinations.”
“That’s okay, I’m sure my insurance will take care of this,” he mumbled. He took his keys out, ready to leave.
I wasn’t going to let him do that, not yet. “You’re right,” I said, stalling, “small bad luck is no bad luck at all.”
Richard wanted to slip past me to the car door, but I ignored his impatience. “That reminds me of my, my Uncle Henry. He knew all about bad luck.”
Richard sighed—he was going to have to hear this odd bird out. “How so?”
“All because of a little shell a man gave him.”
“A shell,” Richard repeated coolly, though his eyes revealed budding curiosity. He was suggestible.
“That’s right,” I said, stalling, for I really had no story to offer. Yet as I clutched that shell in my pocket, the smooth ridges seemed to speak to me. “It was a little shell, painted shiny black and glued together like something inside shouldn’t get out. He won it in a poker game, from an old man who had nothing left to gamble with. My uncle used to bet on anything, and after he won this shell, the old man let him in on a secret. The shell wasn’t ordinary, it could keep him from misfortune or rain it down on him, depending. The depending was this: if something went wrong in his life, Uncle Henry should accept it or it’d just get worse. Only if he learned to accept the trouble would his life ever get straight again.”
Richard kept nodding, urging me to the end of my peculiar story, but there was little hesitation in my voice—ideas were leaping over each other, a game of interior hopscotch. “My uncle threw that thing away his first chance, in the town dump on the way home. But that night he burned his finger lighting a cigarette, and even though all he did was put on a band-aid, the next day he started a fire with another cigarette on the arm of his easy chair. Of course he had to put that fire out. Then he remembered the shell, and he ran back to the trash heap and got himself a nasty cut on the hand before he finally found it. But he’d learned that old man’s lesson—he just let that cut fester and stink until it finally healed on its own.”
“This is all very interesting,” Richard broke in, “but you’ll have to excuse me. Thanks again for your help.” Sliding past me, he opened the car door and settled behind the wheel.
Determined to appear as hopelessly ineffectual as possible, I pointed to the dashboard and said, “Say, maybe that fellow hit you harder than I thought. What’s that flashing light mean?”
“It means I haven’t been given the opportunity to connect my seat belt.” He tapped at the steering wheel with an exasperated huff and I flicked my shell onto the backseat. It bounced lightly against a briefcase, the dull ping masked by the ignition turning over.
He drove off, down a false road I’d just given him—maybe he’d find it longer than any street he’d ever made up. I returned to my own car and rode away, still unsettled by the frightening ease with which I’d disguised myself, and I kept glancing in the rearview mirror, as if followed by my own inventions.
*
Sylvia sat beside me in a corner coffee shop, her hand groping for mine. The door to the coffee shop jangled open and she lifted her head sharply, but only two young women in identical black dresses had made their entrance.
She turned back to me, her lips tight. “Last night I had that dream again. We were at the movies this time, something noisy and violent. His hand was stroking my shoulder, and the more people on the screen that screamed and died, the more my shoulder hurt, it hurt until I felt like screaming—and I woke up. My shoulder throbbed, and I got out of bed to check in the bathroom mirror. I had to twist a little, and the pain had faded, but right where I still felt tender, I’m sure there was this faint pink line, like the imprint of a fingernail.”
Sylvia hesitated. “But maybe it was a, a rash? It could’ve been …”
She hedged and reconsidered and though I said nothing to contradict her, by now I knew how possible it was for anyone to be overtaken by a fierce and frightening urge. I kept to myself my spying and the easy violence I’d discovered within me, or Sylvia might find me as suspect as her husband. To chase this thought, with the same ease that I’d slipped into someone else’s voice at the mall parking lot, I assumed the inflections of another me and asked, “Can’t you just leave him?”
Sylvia crumpled her paper coffee cup. “I’ve got to go, the bus’ll be here in a minute.”
“Bus?”
“Richard’s borrowing my car while his is in the shop.” She tossed the cup in a wastebasket. “Somebody backed into him, or something.”
So her husband had heard no warning in that story about the black shell. My face a casual mask, I kissed her good-bye.
That night I parked near Sylvia’s house, prepared to wait out the night, telling myself my presence might somehow prevent trouble. Before an hour passed, Richard tramped down the brick steps and drove off in Sylvia’s red compact. Was she all right? Ready to leave my car, I caught a glimpse of her slim figure passing by the living room window, so I sped after Richard, now nearly two blocks away.
I expected to be led back to the mall, but after a few miles he cruised down the center of our small city’s modest downtown, slowly exploring block after block for a parking space. Since Richard knew what I looked like I kept as far back as I dared, and when he managed to find a space on a dark side street I quickly drove past, my face averted.
I circled the block, returning to Main Street just in time to see him open the door to Tammy’s Tavern and vanish inside. I smiled. If he’d taken to haunting a bar, maybe he wasn’t so sure he could manage whatever trouble came his way. I could even imagine he’d found the shell and kept it hidden in a drawer, a secret waiting to reveal itself.
Again and again I rode around the block, waiting for Richard to settle into his first drink, and each slow circuit echoed that distant carousel ride with Kate when we’d both realized just how relentlessly I’d been pursuing her. One last time I turned down the side street where Richard had parked and I idled a few yards away from the red compact. I hated the thought of ramming into Sylvia’s car, but how else could I fulfill the prophecy of the mysterious shell, show her husband what kind of trouble could be had when you ignored the warning signs? Richard needed to feel singled out by fate even more.
Twisting my front wheels carefully and using all my experience as an insurance agent, I gauged exactly how I might do the most damage. The driver’s side door should collapse, and the window glass shatter to sharp rain. The side mirror should easily shear off from the impact, and already I could feel its untethering. Was this another secret poetry of my profession, an intimate familiarity with wreckage and ruin?
I scanned the rearview mirrors for any passersby. With only the empty street as my audience, I gunned the engine and tore into the little import. It groaned and crumpled and I urged against the seat belt that held me in place. I sat there a moment, utterly calm, even satisfied—Good, let Richard consider what could have happened to him if he’d been in the car. The ease of this thought so shocked me that I almost forgot to escape. But I managed to back up and speed away, searching for the safest, most deserted route home.
*
I turned from one side of the bed to the other, haunted by that battered car: I’d disfigured my love for Sylvia while trying to release her from her husband. And if he didn’t take this latest warning, what was I prepared to do next? Something had begun within me, something that might not stop. I pressed my hands against my closed eyes, afraid of any further escalation, yet still it faced me: Richard’s car forced off the road and upended in a ditch, its dark wheels slowly spinning, like a carousel, spinning until elusive sleep slowly offered me an escape.
It was no escape at all. I dreamt I was that damaged John Wayne statue, my glued pieces coming undone—first an arm, a shoulder, then the bottom of my legs lopped off, and I divided at the waist and tumbled to the ground. I tried to reach out and repair myself, but my body was wooden, and my unblinking eyes could only stare at the sky.
I rose to the alarm’s grating buzz and faced the familiar bedroom walls, frightened by what I’d done and might still do. This crazy knight-to-the-rescue spiral had to stop, and I reached for the phone and dialed Sylvia’s number, prepared to confess everything.
She answered in the middle of the first ring, as if she’d been waiting for my call.
“Sylvia, I have to tell you—”
“Michael? You wouldn’t believe—it’s … so strange—”
“What?” I rasped out.
“I don’t know how to describe—”
“Richard?”
“He came home last night with a tow truck. My car was so messed up, and his breath … but he swore he hadn’t been driving and drinking. He told another story about some hit-and-run with the parked car. But he was subdued about it. And then this morning, after he called a car rental he rang up the repair shop and told them to stop work on his car—”
“Stop work?” I repeated, not sure I’d merely heard what I wanted to hear.
“He told them to quit working on his brake light. But he didn’t stop there, then he told me not to bother fixing my car and I said, What do you mean, how am I going to get around, and he screamed at me that the car was totaled, we’d just have to live with it, and then he flicked his hand in that way and I thought he was going to … but he stopped. He looked terrified, scared of himself.”
I clutched the receiver, its dangling cord a weak tether. Somehow my foolish risks had succeeded, and now, before I could reconsider, I took one more. “Sylvia, now’s the time to ask for—”
“Oh Michael.”
“No, listen, if he seems scared of himself, don’t wait for something else to happen.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with the horoscope, does it?” Sylvia replied and I knew she was nearly ready, if only I’d keep at her.
“Look,” I said, “tell him somewhere public, like a restaurant, where he can’t give you any trouble.”
Sylvia said nothing. She wanted to hear more.
“I can wait nearby if you need help,” I said, pacing along the edge of my bed. “Call him now.”
*
I set my glass down again, adding another weak ring to the spirals on the counter, slowly working my way through this ale that grew more sour with each sip. The morning’s exhilaration now lost, I stared in the mirror at the reflection of the restaurant’s front door, directly behind me, and waited.
They were late. Perhaps Sylvia had resigned herself to living with the ambiguity of Richard’s intentions. I took another sip and considered the bleak possibilities even if she were able to leave him. How could I tell her what I’d done—for all Sylvia’s fear of her husband, he’d never accomplished the sort of violence I’d proved myself capable of. Yet if I didn’t confess, I’d have to remain a stranger to Sylvia, my secret transforming our intimacies into a sham.
I heard the door behind me open and I glanced up at the mirror again. An elderly couple made their way to the hostess’ table. I turned back to my reflection, at those calculating eyes, and there, clearer than ever, was the family resemblance to Mother and Laurie. Playacting had brought me to this, and now I understood their great loneliness, the isolation created by the stories they’d woven around themselves.
Again the door opened and Sylvia and Richard walked in. With a nervous sweep of her eyes she located me at the bar, and I stared down at my drink. If Richard followed her gaze and noticed me, everything would be ruined. Yet perhaps that’s what some part of me wanted.
When I looked up again I easily found their reflection in the mirror: an ordinary couple, sitting at a table near the window. Richard kept working away at something buried in his jacket pocket, and I knew he turned that little black shell over and over in his hand, miles down that false road. And what of all the other objects I’d given to people, or allowed Preston to sell at his gallery? I’d been so certain they’d be a comfort, but some of them might have proved to be delayed explosions, shards slowly working themselves into the lives of their new owners.
As we’d planned, Sylvia sat facing me. I took in through the mirror the tense lines of her distant mouth moving silently, her voice lost among the nearby conversations and the sound of food served and enjoyed. Richard nodded, following whatever it was she said, those words that were about to change her life, and his, and mine.