For the second night in a row I woke, this time from the sound of furniture—specifically the rickety mudroom table that nearly everyone knocked into—crashing to the ground, followed by the cursing of a low, rumbling voice I could tell was not Vladimir’s and hands patting the wall to find the light switch.
Any rural area in the USA has its own River Styx of addicts, meth or opioids, half-souls floating amid the currents of daily life. They sit skinny on the stoops of general stores looking spent and expectant. They take their grandmother food shopping, or to the beach. They are sweet and thieving and skittering and fearful. We’d never had a break-in, but I had heard about several incidents of burglary happening in nearby lake houses. The vacation homes were assumed to belong to people who had money, and who left their properties unattended for months at a time. If my computer hadn’t been in the living room I might have lain in my bed and let the thief take what he wanted. He needed it more than I did.
But my computer was there, sitting in full view on the table, the only existing copy of my novel saved as a file on the desktop. I cursed my stupidity—why had I not thought to save it to a flash drive or email it to myself? I thought about waking Vladimir, but I was afraid that the thief might hear our voices and run, my laptop in his arms. And so as quietly as I could, I took a large umbrella from the floor of the closet. I knew it was laughable, but I figured I could stab the trespasser if he tried to lunge at me, or open the umbrella to confound him. I walked lightly and slowly down the hall into the living room and flicked on the overhead light.
The refrigerator door was open, and the intruder was crouching in a way that blocked them from my view. I called out, loud, and he rose and hit his head on the bottom of the freezer door.
“Jesus Christ, woman,” said my husband of almost thirty years, and I dropped my umbrella to the ground.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” John said, after I had yelped, cried a little, thoroughly berated him for the fright he’d given me, and fixed him a plate of leftover frittata and salad and a glass of wine.
“We have to move that table from the front,” he said, rubbing his shins to signal he was injured. I sat down on the far side of the couch. I imagined Vladimir still behind me, his arms gripping me.
“What are you doing here?” I tried to ask the question kindly, with a smile.
“I wanted to see you. I didn’t know if you were here or not, but I thought I’d try.”
He said he missed me. That he’d been going over resigning with Sid and Alexis when he’d felt a gut punch of longing. The college was where we’d come together to start our mutual careers. We were a partnership, and his resignation didn’t feel like a decision he should make on his own. He knew we were so distant these days, but he believed what we had was salvageable. He proposed we leave the college as a team. He could try and figure out some sort of consulting career—in advertising or corporate communications—some field in which nobody knew who he was. We could sell both houses and move to a small apartment in a city where we could spend the days going to museums, readings, theater. I could write if I wanted, or get another teaching position wherever we landed. Or we could relocate to Mexico, where our dollars would last forever, and live that yellow-dusted expatriate life, wearing linen and hats and crisping in the sun. We didn’t need to stay shackled to this town of prudes and hypocrites.
I nodded, humoring him. He was addled and loud and uncharacteristically chatty. It felt like a matter of time until Vlad would hear the commotion and come into the living room and I didn’t know how any of us would react. The more he spoke the more frustrated I became. It was so like John to come in with solutions without taking the time to see what I wanted or how I was feeling. He didn’t ask, during his monologue, or even entertain the thought that I might want to stay at the college. He didn’t ask how I wanted to live out my retirement, and if I might want to do it with him. It was assumption, always assumption that he could sweep in with some solution and I would simply go along with it.
I rose to pour myself some bourbon, then sat back down beside him as he went on about the cancerous strains of fascism that were infecting the academic campus. In the middle of his rant he interrupted himself. “I want you,” he said, and lurched toward me, trying to kiss me with a wide, spread mouth.
I blocked him and turned away. “Stop it,” I said. “You show up in the middle of the night, unannounced, what do you think you’re doing?” He sat primly for a moment and apologized, but there was a slight bit of mirth in the way he sat, in the lift around his eyes. After everything, he was still funny, and I gave him a pursed-lip smile. He leaned toward me, and using the top of his head and the bristles of his hair, he rubbed up and down against my bared skin like an animal might, tickling and murmuring in a gravelly, playful baby voice he hadn’t used with me for years. When he heard my breath catch he started using his hands, pinching and grabbing at parts of me he knew would make me shriek upon contact. I wriggled, leaning back on the couch. He took this as a sign of encouragement and began to pull up my nightgown. But no, I didn’t want that, it was all too fast, I had not replaced my underwear after Vlad. I recoiled and yelled, louder than I intended.
I heard movement from the small bedroom and kneed John away from me, just as Vladimir Vladinski, junior professor and distinguished author of negligible generalities, emerged naked holding a lamp. After being kneed, John rose to his feet and stood there bemused, looking from Vlad to me for several seconds, until he sat down in the beer-hall chair (the chain still pooled on the floor around its feet) and began to laugh.
“Jesus,” Vlad said, and immediately left the room. John kept laughing, putting on a big show with gasps and heaving breaths as I finished my bourbon, smoothed my skirt, patted at my hair, licked my fingers and ran them under my eyes in case of mascara drips. Vladimir returned wearing his T-shirt and the pair of John’s pajama bottoms.
“Are those my pants?” John was wheezing and clutching his stomach. “I was wondering where those went. Sorry,” he said, and started breathing as though to calm himself.
The whole display was so cynical. “Enough,” I said. “Get it together.” He pressed his palm to his sternum, closed his eyes and shook his head, then opened them and nodded at me with an artificial look of appreciation. “Nice work,” he said, and to my surprise I glimpsed a trace of hurt in his expression.
Then he turned to Vladimir and said, “What’s up, man?”
I intervened before he could reply. “Vladimir’s in the guest room, John. He needed some space. We both did.”
“Oh, okay,” John said, nodding. “That explains it. I mean, it doesn’t explain why you smell like another man’s jizz—”
He could be so crass. I blushed to my forehead. Vladimir looked wounded.
“I do not—” I protested.
“Please.” John gestured to interrupt me and smiled. “Who am I to judge.”
“I didn’t know you were here, Vlad,” he continued. “It’s truly a surprise. I love it, actually. I’m very infrequently surprised.” His face was screwed up and mean.
I told him it was only fair. I felt unexpectedly moved, resentment swirling in my chest.
“Only fair?” He crossed his legs and leaned on his hand like Rodin’s Thinker. God, he was so bellicose and pompous. “What do you mean?”
“You and Cynthia.” Tears were hot against my eyes and I didn’t understand why.
“Cynthia and me?” he said, and began laughing again, then repeated it several times in different intonations—“Cynthia and me, Me and Cynthia.” He bobbled his head around, his double chin as bulbous as a frog’s.
I snapped at him to stop. I felt like taking the chain from the floor and wrapping it around his fat neck.
“I saw you together.” He wouldn’t do this to me—shrug me off like a hysterical woman. He wouldn’t turn me into the paranoid wife. I wouldn’t let him.
“Oh, my friends,” he said, dropping into a solemn register, “let me reassure you. Cynthia is far too far above my pay grade.”
“No, I saw you.” My face contorted, I leaned so far off the couch I was nearly standing.
“We’re complicit, don’t get me wrong. But not in a physical manner. Honestly.” He held his hands up like a nabbed bandit. “Honestly.”
Vladimir looked from me to John and back. “I thought you saw them ‘in flagrante delicto.’ ”
“I don’t know,” I said, shrinking back in the couch, my bottom lip heavy.
“We write together,” John said.
“You’re writing?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, snapping. “You’re not the only one who writes.”
“Writing what?” I was being cruel but I didn’t care, for once I didn’t feel an obligation to protect him.
“I don’t like your tone.”
“I don’t like you.” He was infuriating, talking to me like I was his child.
John stood and lurched from the room. “Where are you going?” I called after him.
“I have to piss,” he said over his shoulder, and slammed the door to the bathroom.
Vladimir watched him go, then turned toward me. “I thought you caught them in something.”
I assured him that I thought that I had. I explained to him what I had seen, and how surely he would have come to the same conclusion.
“You lied to me.” He looked wounded, like a little boy who had been left out of a game.
“I thought it didn’t matter to you, whether it was true or not.” I was shivering. Ever since childhood, whenever I “got in trouble,” my body would respond by dropping in temperature. I moved from the couch, turned on both space heaters, faced them toward each other, and crouched between them. Vladimir rose and stood over me.
“But I believed you. I wouldn’t have—”
“How do you know that he’s not lying?” I was vibrating with cold, my teeth were chattering. I turned both heaters up to full blast, they roared.
“I’m not lying,” John said, emerging from the bathroom, wiping his wet hands on his pants. “I’m writing an epic poem and Cynthia’s working on her memoir. We have a writing club. We do drugs, then we write. It’s fun.”
I think I looked to Vladimir to try and offer some words of peacekeeping or explanation, but before anyone could say anything, he lunged at John, tackling him to the ground, my husband falling like a scarecrow stuffed with wet sand. It was unfortunate, really, how mismatched they were. John barely struggled; he simply attempted to pull himself into the fetal position, trying to cover his face with his hands. My eyes rested on a scratched message on the medieval chair: “Death to Yuppies,” written in script decorated with thorns. I found myself thinking about a time when yuppies were a thing we despised. What was a yuppie other than a young professional? What made them so objectionable? They were selfish, they had money, they were blind to societal ills. They liked nouveau cuisine and fitness. Was that it?
“You fuck,” Vlad kept repeating, until he had John flattened out on the ground with two shins on his upper thighs and his hands pressed on John’s biceps. I couldn’t help but feel slightly stirred at the sight of Vlad on top of my husband, his knees spread wide, the fabric of his pants stretched against his rear.
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Vlad said, seething and trembling. “You give her drugs? Do you have any idea how fucked-up she could get? She’s a mother. I have a kid. You might as well give her gasoline to light herself on fire.”
He pounded on John’s chest with his hands, more a shove than a blow, then rolled off and lay on the ground, staring at the ceiling.
“I don’t give her drugs, son,” John said in a weary voice. “She gives them to me.” And he glanced at me to let me know this was true.
Vladimir sat up from the floor and twisted in my direction. “You have to take me home,” he told me. “Right now.”
Once again I felt annoyed at his paternalism. The whiff of the New England preacher that I had sensed early on in our acquaintance returned. His wife was a writer, entitled to her own process and troubles. If she wanted to do drugs (I assumed an amphetamine, possibly Adderall, though I wasn’t sure), didn’t that simply place her in the ranks of so many other writers, with complicated relationships to substances and work? Even if she was at risk, she was her own person, not his child. Didn’t Sontag write all her books on speed, and Kerouac, and so many others? Coleridge? Sartre? Graham Greene? Just like a man to believe a woman had to keep her behavior in line while also churning out a work of genius.
“I’ve been drinking,” I told him. “I can’t drive you. We’ll have to wait for the morning.”
“She’s probably on a bender right now,” he said, rising to stand. “My child is not safe.”
“She’s not on a bender,” John said. “I keep the drugs locked in my safe. She does a very little. She doesn’t trust herself with more.
“She’s trying,” John added, and I saw that he cared for her, and was touched.
“She’s an addict,” Vlad said. He was now pacing back and forth. “You don’t know. You said she gives you the drugs.”
“She gets them from a student.”
“So how do you know she doesn’t have more?”
John rolled onto all fours, then used the arm of the couch to help himself upright, one heavy, trembling leg after another. “Because we talk. Because I know that all she wants is to get this book done so you can move out of that fucking condo and it can stop being about you all the time.”
Vladimir stopped pacing, inhaled, and shook his head. John must have channeled something about Cynthia that he recognized, because the tension wilted from his body.
“When in my life has it ever been about me,” he said softly. He looked away from us and mouthed something, some retort to Cynthia, I imagined. Then, head down, he held out his hand. “Gimme a cigarette.”
“They’re there,” I told him, and pointed to the windowsill. He walked to them, looking hunched and beaten, put one between his lips and another behind his ear, and stood still, staring at the window for a long time. Eventually I realized he was looking at John and me, reflected in the glass. He lifted the lighter to the cigarette in his mouth.
“You can’t smoke in here,” I said quickly, and without acknowledging me he put the lighter in his pocket.
He moved toward the sliding door that led to the porch. Facing away from us, he said, “What is wrong with you guys,” and shook his head. He struggled to pull the door open, then yanked it clear off the track so that it hung from the frame on a diagonal. John and I exchanged a look, and I put my hand up to stop him from saying anything, like Vlad was an angry teenager whose behavior we were trying to ignore.
We watched his back on the deck, his arm lifting and lowering the cigarette. When he finished he put it out in the coffee can full of water we’d been using as an ashtray (plip, in the silence) and walked to the lake. We heard the scraping of the gravel beach against the bottom of the kayak, then the splash and give of the water as he launched the boat.
“Wear a life jacket,” John shouted toward his direction.
“You should go out and stop him. He shouldn’t kayak at night.” I went to the door and peered out, but I couldn’t see past six feet in the dark.
“He’s fine. What could happen?” John waved my concern away, then raised his eyebrows for a joke. “Ominous, no?”
I batted at his chest, telling him to hush. He reached his arm around me and I folded my head like a swan against his chest. We stood there for a while. He brushed my hair with his large hand.
John tinkered with the radio dial until he found the jazz station, which played something light and melodic as I cleaned the plates from the living room and tidied some refuse from dinner that I had been too tired to deal with earlier that evening. I made us chamomile tea, which we drank at the kitchen table. A comfortable, melancholic fatigue washed over us both, and when, in a recognition of nodding off, I jerked my head awake, I saw John, cheek on the table, asleep.
I crept into the bedroom, pulled back the wool camp blankets and the comforter, and stripped the linens, cold and sodden from the evening’s earlier activities. I replaced them with an old set of flannel sheets printed with large sketched cats that Sid had loved when she was little. I remember walking into her room one night and finding her passionately wiping her face back and forth against one of the cat’s faces—a seven-year-old’s version of romance.
I woke John gently. “I can sleep out here,” he said, but I told him I was too tired to bother with the pullout sofa, and he should just come to bed with me.
It was freezing in the bedroom, and the only way we could get warm was to wrap ourselves in and around each other, limb intersecting with limb. He rested his chin on top of my head and I nestled mine in the soft part of his neck.
Entwined, I saw from the bedside clock that it was after four in the morning.
“Are you going back to the college for the hearing tomorrow?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Do you want me to set an alarm?”
“No.”
He was emanating a kind of heat that calmed me at the core of my nervous system. Security some men call the suburbs of hell.
I was nearly gone when I remembered. “What’s your poem about?”
“What?”
“The epic poem you’re writing. What’s it about?”
“Oh,” he murmured. “It’s about a modern-day Don Quixote. An old man who refuses to see the world as it is.”
And huddled together like the babes in the wood, innocent and abandoned, we fell asleep.