JANE SURPRISED JOHN BECAUSE SHE WAS AWAKE WHEN HE came into the bedroom, sitting up in the bed reading a novel by the light of the lamp on her nightstand. She usually didn’t outlast the kids by more than an hour, and they had been asleep for at least three. She took off her glasses and set her book—Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant—down on her lap.
“I was waiting up for you.” They were the first words she’d spoken to him in four days.
Jane rarely spoke to him at all. When she and the kids left in the morning, she might send one of them in to give him the time she expected to be home. Occasionally, she’d call it out over her shoulder. They never discussed why this happened, but John understood. On nights when Jane’s expected time was later than seven, John ate dinner with the children. On nights she was home early enough to eat, John went for a “long walk”—actually short walks to the bar around the corner. Jane’s effort and concentration in maintaining the silence was impressive. John thought that there would be cracks eventually, a slow melting, but each time he thought that something she said might be it (“John, can you pick up cereal and eggs today?”), there would be another gap of days or a week before she spoke to him again, usually while passing through the room (“The kids and I are going to dinner with the Rameshes.”). One afternoon, after four more days of Jane living her life alongside him as if he were invisible, John stood in the kitchen contemplating which food to throw in the trash so she would notice and ask him to buy some. Would she notice if eight eggs were suddenly gone? A half gallon of milk? Four apples? He missed the trial, when she would sometimes speak to Harris about him when they would debrief after each trial day: “You did a good job reminding the jury today that John is a real person.” Ironic, because John didn’t feel all that real at the time and certainly not after months of being treated like a ghost.
“What for?” he asked. He picked up the pajama bottoms he typically slept in.
“We need to talk about what you’re going to do for work.”
“I’m working on it.”
“We only have a couple more months before we’re through our savings.”
“How is that possible?” They lived—even after each of them made partner—well within their means and saved aggressively.
She answered in a voice as flat and brittle as a pane of glass. “The kids’ tuition. The nanny. We paid a ton to Harris. Insurance. We had to get the car fixed last month. The mortgage, food, electricity. We’re bleeding—it’s slow, but it’s not stopping.”
“But the stocks and investments—”
“Are for the kids’ college tuitions!” she snapped. Then, calmer, “Our retirements.”
“We can use it though, until I can get a fair payment from my firm.”
Jane shook her head. She swung her legs out from beneath the covers so she could sit on the edge of the bed. Her gaze intensified. She was courtroom ready, despite the nightgown. John stood near the closet door, pajamas in hand.
“Jane, they owe me—”
“They are not going to pay you, John, and if you don’t take the money soon, they’ll end up giving you nothing.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Walter called me.”
“Fuck Walter.”
“John, he’s trying to help you. Same as me.”
“I need time to think of something. They need me to leave quietly.”
“Yes, they want you to leave quietly, and your only leverage is that you may end up making a spectacle of it. Their leverage is that you’re not making any money until this is resolved. They can wait you out—which is why they’ve been doing that. It costs them nothing to starve you. But they have no reason to give you more than their offer, because the only action you can take defeats the point of you taking it.”
“Their offer is bullshit.”
“Yes. But Walter told me the number you gave them. You’re not thinking right. They’ll never give you that much. They’re not going to give you half of that.”
“It’s what they owe me.”
“You slept with an associate.”
John’s hands closed into fists. “They do, too!”
“Yours was murdered.”
Jane looked to the bedroom door as if she could tell whether the kids were awake two rooms away. John’s indignation drained from him in a violent flush, leaving a thick film of regret. Jane looked back, surprised that he hadn’t started shouting. That was where these things usually ended.
“What if I got a job? To help float us until I can think of something?”
Jane bit on her lower lip—a habit she had when she was trying to restrain herself. When she spoke, the shape of her exasperation was apparent: “It would be a conflict.”
“I know that. I mean something else—not a legal job. If I waited tables or something? Some places, waiters can make good money. It’s all cash. It buys us some more time while I think of something.”
“John, you’ve had months. You haven’t thought of anything that will work. Neither have I, for that matter. Or Harris. You want to get into restaurants, fine, but get your payment from your firm first.”
John shook his head but said, “Let me think about it some more.”
“Fine. But stop dragging it out.”
She sat back up into bed and picked up her glasses. John didn’t move.
“But what then?” he asked.
“What?”
“About us, Jane. What do we do about us?”
“One thing at a time, John.”
“Do you want me to stay?”
“I want to read my book and then go to sleep.” She flipped the book back open.
“What are we doing, Jane?”
“I’m trying to end this conversation.”
“Are you trying to end our marriage?”
John expected the goading to force her to bring her eyes back to his with another snappy comeback to put the discussion to rest, but instead she turned her book over onto her lap and stared at its cover.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Her equivocation was worse than her telling him that she did want to end things. Jane was decisive in every aspect of her life and personality. Despite months of being frozen out, the fact that she never asked him to leave gave him a reason to salvage something from the shredded shambles he brought them to. Jane must have had a plan, seen some solution worth keeping him around for. But maybe it was for the money—probably the last dollars he would make as a lawyer.
“Is that why you care about the money?”
She stared hard at him. “I care about you finishing the shit with your firm so you can start getting on with your life. As a lawyer? Not a lawyer? With me? Without me? I don’t know. But if you stay like this, you won’t be anything, and it will be without me and without the children.”
John tossed the pajamas he had been wringing in his hands into a corner of the room, pulled a pair of socks out of a drawer, and sat on the edge of the bed to put them on.
#
Jess had sat down on the edge of the bed facing away from him, as if she were looking out the window of the small hotel room, except the maroon curtains were drawn. Even if they’d been open, the only thing to see would be the dark windows of the building across the street. John, already mostly clothed, watched Jess slide her underwear on, then her skirt, and so on. It made him want to take it all off her again.
“Can you stay a little longer?”
“Nobody’s looking for me.”
“Not even your husband?”
“Especially not my husband.”
“So why don’t we stay awhile? The room’s ours all night.”
“You’ll have to go home eventually,” she said. The acid in her voice was pungent as vinegar. She grew still on the edge of the bed. Her eyes were cast down to where the dark blue carpet met the cream baseboard.
John swung his legs over so he could sit next to her. He wanted a drink.
“You look like you need a drink,” he said. “Should we run downstairs and get one? Have room service bring one up?”
“I don’t want a drink.”
He slid his hand over to hers. She didn’t pull her hand away, but it hummed underneath his like a trapped bird, heart racing.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“What are we doing?” she replied.
John walked around the bed to the small desk chair where his tie and jacket hung. He didn’t want to have this discussion again. Over the past couple of months now, that question ran like a deep ocean current underneath every coffee or drink they shared, or when she carefully unknotted his tie, or he slid his fingers around to the back zipper of her skirt, or she kissed the side of his lips, or he buried his face in her neck, or she ran her thigh across his, or he entered her. Each time, regardless of who asked the question, there was no answer. It was a suspended chord, hanging, demanding resolution, leaving them in a dissatisfied silence.
“What are you doing?” she asked as he draped his tie around his neck to begin knotting it.
“Getting ready to leave.”
She rolled her head back, eyes flicking toward the ceiling, the movement the frustrated doppelgänger of one she made ten minutes earlier as she came on top of him. In the earlier moment, John placed his hand gently on her neck in the way he discovered she liked, holding her down on him, moving deeper inside her even as her body tried to levitate off him. In this moment, he wanted to wrap his hand around her throat and press her into the bed so they could stop repeating this song.
“You just asked me to stay,” she said.
John’s fingers fumbled trying to pull the fat end of the tie through the loop. He knew it would be too short when he finished. He huffed and started pulling the knot apart.
“Are we going to fight about this? We just had a nice time. We both know this is all we can have.”
She blinked her eyes and tilted her head back again, this time so he wouldn’t see her cry.
“I’m going home to an empty house,” she said. “Yeah, Mark’s there. But we wave as we pass each other in the living room the same way I wave to Walter in the hall at work. How do I go there from here?”
“It’s no different for me.”
“Then why are we going back?”
“Because we have to. I have to. I have kids waiting for me. Maybe Jane isn’t, but they are.”
Jessica shook her head. He started back on his tie.
“We told each other that we wouldn’t do this,” he said, yanking the end of the tie around itself and his fingers, knowing that the silk weave wouldn’t give if he knotted it right, if he pressed it up against his throat, under his trachea, and pulled on the short end as hard as he could until it was longer than the fat end, understanding he’d feel the pressure on his jugular veins first, before his throat closed. He’d panic eventually, but first he’d experience the savage glee of destroying something he hated. Didn’t she know that he didn’t want to go home either? That he didn’t want to put his pants on and go sit in meetings where Geoff and his fucking minions expected him to be grateful that they had let his yellow face and slanted eyes into their club so he could sit in a corner quietly and only speak to congratulate them for being so smart? Yet, there he was, every morning at eight forty-five, at his desk like some dog who carried the paper in each day for its master.
John’s fingers dug at the knot in the tie, but there was no give in it. The knot stopped sliding on itself, intractably stuck in a misshapen lump. He kept working the tip of a finger into a fold, but his nails were too short and his fingers too thick to find purchase.
“Do you need help?”
“No.”
She walked over and reached for his tie. “Don’t,” he said, “you’ll make it worse.”
She aimed for a wrinkle, her fingers passing his, obstructing him just as he felt a slight give in the fabric, a loosening. She wedged one of her nails into the knot. The tension she created pulled the knot tight again, and his fingers slipped back on the silk. John grunted in frustration and swiped her hand away, but her nail was stuck in the knot and it broke—something John felt in a vibration through the tie, his collar, translating into a tingle in his neck, running like electricity up through his scalp. Jess pulled her hand into her chest and sucked in a surprised gasp of pain.
She opened her fist to inspect the nail, shorn in a jagged edge close to the nail bed. Blood seeped from underneath it.
John reached out for her hand to inspect it, but she jerked it back, coiling tightly around it, only to uncoil and slap him with her uninjured left hand.
Heat flared in his cheek like a match lit too close to his face. His right fist flew up, demanding release. It was a biological imperative—the tension the same as in those moments before an orgasm when nothing could stop him from finishing. Jess didn’t flinch. She wasn’t yielding to the violence, she wanted it—rain for the fields of misery inside her.
The restraints in his mind frayed and broke, and John stepped back with his left leg, pivoting so when his fist started in motion, he spun and drove it an inch past Jessica’s face and into the wall behind him. It was at the extreme range of his reach, which slowed his hand enough so that when his knuckles slammed into the wall with a hollow thud, he didn’t break any bones—although it would be swollen and stiff for a week. As his fist rebounded off the wall, John allowed his momentum to carry him forward and around the corner of the bed away from Jess.
He stopped near the head, diagonal from Jess at the foot. Her hands balled into fists.
“What are we doing?” she repeated.
The sheets, still bunched into a careless pile during the sex they finished not even fifteen minutes earlier, lay between them like a tangled answer.
“We should stop doing it. Whatever it is,” he said.
It started like an ambush. The first few tears and hitched breaths were upon him before he knew what was happening. Despite his brief, disorganized resistance, he choked off a sob. Jess took a step toward him, but John held up his hand, which he could barely open.
He backed away until he bumped against the nightstand next to the bed. He wiped the tears off his cheeks with his good hand. He felt the salt in them grinding into his skin. He wanted to smash his hand back into his face, to erase everything that was there, to pull at the flesh like it was a mask he could peel from his skull.
Jessica wiped a mascara-stained tear across her cheek, leaving a mark like a bruise.
“So this is it?” she asked. “If it is, say it. Don’t make me say it.”
He turned, like a coward, to the drawn curtains, and didn’t look back as Jessica picked up her purse and her shoes, walked around the bed to the door, and left.
After the door clicked shut, John tore at the tie around his neck, now hopelessly tangled, before ripping it over his head like removing a noose.
#
John stepped into the bar followed by the cold night air. He passed at least three others closer to the apartment with too many people or too much light. A peek through the window of this particular shithole revealed that it was the Goldilocks of dead-end joints. The only other patrons were an old couple at the end of the bar farthest from the door, sitting shoulder to shoulder as they periodically raised bottles of Bud to their mouths. They didn’t speak. John sat near the door and ordered whiskey. A double. And then another.
John didn’t believe in fate or karma or some master plan. If there was a God in Heaven, His only plan was entropy. Any order in the universe was illusory—the whirlpool created by a blender. But John didn’t subscribe to free will either. What were the choices of mosquitoes in a tornado?
Jane was right—he had no choice but to accept Geoff’s pissant offer. He lived his whole life to avoid living like his father—an endless hustle to scrounge enough money to barely keep the electricity on, the rent paid, food on the table, and some clothes on their backs. He thought he rose above that struggle when all he had done was delay the day when he had to put an apron on and scrub dishes or fetch Geoff more butter for his toast. Taking the firm’s money wouldn’t make his marriage any happier than his parents’, nor his children’s lives better than his.
He slid off the barstool. His legs swayed. He didn’t realize how unstable he was until he had to hold himself upright.
There was a pay phone in the back of the bar near the restrooms. He slid a couple of dimes into it and dialed Walter’s home. The phone rang seven or eight times before Walter answered, slumber draped over his voice like a warm comforter. Must be nice, John thought.
“It’s me.”
“Fuck you, John. It’s two in the morning.”
“Tell Geoff I’ll take the deal.”