Among the Ten Thousand Things (3 page)

That time the girl let herself into the studio, took off all her clothes, and got down on the floor, Jack was two hours late getting there. And when he did arrive, he couldn’t get in because the girl, in one of her moods, had fastened the last remaining lock, a chain he busted his shoulder getting through, charging the door like a ram. He found her at the sink, washing her hair. Bare from the waist up, that was why she’d used the lock,
for
peace of mind,
and the running water was why she couldn’t hear him shouting.

So instead of fucking on the floor, he was on the couch, on his stomach, enduring the girl’s crude massage.
You couldn’t relocate a shoulder if it hit you over the head
.
What are you trying to do, kill me?
He left her there, in almost tears, to go home to his wife, with her years of physical therapy, who knew how to touch what felt broken.

But all that was, what, last fall? The pain in his shoulder had gone mostly away, though there were still no locks on his studio door. Especially risky because he’d found already, the time he forgot his building key, that by squatting he could unlock the downstairs without it, hooking his arm up and through the poorly engineered wrought iron.

He didn’t replace the locks. It amused him, to know how easily a stranger could come in off the street. It made him think of baby elephants, how they are tethered to stakes when they are young and weak so that years later, when they are big and strong and could pull the stakes out no problem, they don’t. At some point people in first-world countries had come to accept the idea that all doors to private properties require keys. And Jack’s work was valuable now, more or less. It was of some value. A person could clean up with what was in his studio. It tickled him to walk out onto the street and look at the people passing by and think, if you only knew, you dumb elephant.

The neighborhood, anyway, was changing, back to some earlier version of itself. The methadone clinic across the street had reopened. Maybe he
would
get a lock. There was that woman again, hanging around outside, chain-smoking in a flowered housedress with snaps. The dress reminded him of his mother-in-law.

On the train ride home he thought of his work the next few days. This was his favorite time, the week leading up to an opening. But the first night at the gallery was also his favorite. Then the interviews, reading the listings, sometimes articles—that would be his favorite, the buzz in his ears for weeks after, until the magazines and newspapers quieted down and the show closed. His least favorite time. Then he began again.

Jack liked to hammer a lot of thoughts out on the train. The hardest part of a marriage—of living with anyone—was those first ten minutes after walking through the door. Questions about his work, his lunch, his trip home, which in his mind had barely ended, and answers to questions he’d not asked, so many words flooding him, and there was the news to discuss, not just U.S. but world news, and then not just that but local news, gossip, about professors Deb knew at school, and not even professors but administrators, sometimes. Administrators, quite frequently.

The impending barrage was on his mind as he flipped through his keys under the building’s hunter-green canopy. Past midnight, Angel had gone home, leaving the lobby locked up behind him. Late nights like these Jack wasted a lot of time under the light of the awning, looking for the right key. He had about a dozen, and they all looked the same. He had the lobby key, the mail key (easy because it was small), the two for upstairs, the building key to the studio, the studio mailbox key (again, small), the ones to the studio’s broken locks, and another series for the old house in Rhode Island where they hadn’t been in years. Every night he thought to take them off the ring, and upstairs every night he forgot.

In the elevator he checked his BlackBerry and lost service, per usual, somewhere between the fourth and seventh floors. Deb would want to know why he hadn’t answered the phone earlier. She’d been slow to believe him about things since Christmas, even though, since Christmas, he’d really done nothing wrong.

The living room lights were on when he let himself in, but she wasn’t on the sofa watching cable news or in the grandma chair, reading and waiting up for him. He listened for her in the kitchen: not there either.

Plates of pasta were still out on the table. Sometimes Deb made noodles too
al dente
. Jack recognized his daughter’s handiwork, the spaghetti a ball of yarn on the end of her fork. Like a Rosenquist close up. There was something a bit eerie about everything left uneaten, as though they’d had to go somewhere in a hurry. Eerie and irritating, because of the condensation from the soda bottle that was leaving spots on the Biedermeier. Jack licked his thumb and rubbed at them.

Out the window, the Empire State Building was blue-blue-blue. The three tiers of light, in ascending order, had been green-green-green for Saint Patrick’s Day, and red-pink-white for Valentine’s before that. He didn’t know what blue-blue-blue was supposed to mean. When was Rosh Hashanah?

He toed off his shoes and pincered a few strands of pasta, dangled them into his mouth. Cold, but not so hard.

The hinges groaned when he put his palm to the bedroom door. The light was on here too, the little Tiffany lamp with amber fireflies that splashed the books half in yellow glow. Deb was on the bed, not in it, on top of the bedspread, head bent to just miss the pillow and wearing all her clothes.

A box sat gaping at him from the edge of the bed. Not much could be read off the flap, the writing sideways and half in shadow, but Jack recognized the hand from the notes she used to take, pages left to collect footprints all around the studio. He knew that annoyingly small print, child’s print, more labored than Kay’s or even Simon’s, whose penmanship, as a boy’s, had been naturally impeded.

Deb was sitting up now. Her dark hair hung thick over either shoulder, like doll’s hair, all of a piece and with that familiar crease in it, testimony to the one bun she’d fastened since childhood. Halolike, especially with the firefly eyes reflected, lighting a crown around her head.

“What’s going on?” He willed himself to ignore the box, as if somehow to keep her from noticing it.

Deb rubbed small circles into her temples and tried looking at him. Jack was halfway between the door and the bed, standing with both arms at his sides and open to her. She was thinking that he’d put on a couple of pounds, and that he’d never been traditionally handsome and still wasn’t but that he was, on the strength of his voice and stature, the declarative bridge of his nose and thick curls, graying now, becoming salt and sand—she was thinking that he was, to women, very much attractive. More now.

Jack noticed not for the first time the dimples around her mouth that deepened whenever she made her worried face. The dimples were girlish, but she’d always have them. And he thought her eyes were on him in that critical way he’d seen more of these last few months. “Tell me what happened,” he said, “so I can—”

“Tell you? I should tell you? No, you tell me. No, I don’t need you to—”

“Have you been drinking?”

“You were so sexy at the gallery this morning,”
she read,
“teasing me in those boots.”
The page she’d whipped out from nowhere, something she’d been sitting on, armed with.
“Tomorrow I’m going to bend you over—”

“Deb.”

“—I’m going to bend you over and show you how dirty you really are.”

“Please.”

“
I couldn’t sleep last night, getting hard thinking about what I had for lunch, which was you.
I haven’t been drinking, you shit.”

“Now come on now, all that’s over. I ended it.”

“Bravo,” she said as he came closer. “Really, well done!”

“Let me see,” holding out his hand.

“What for? So you should know how much to admit to?” She lunged forward on the bed and swung the box up and to one side, though kneeling as she was he had only to reach farther forward. “Think she left something out? I don’t think so, she’s very—
Hey!
”

Hey!
because he had the box, and right away she was on her feet and after him. Jack rounded his back at her, her arms flying at him, and he didn’t know what to do. What he needed was to think, and so he spun around into the nearest place, their bathroom, and turned the lock behind him.

“What the
hell.
” Deb smacked the door from the other side.

He put the box on the counter and pulled the pages out in heaps, dumping them into the sink.

“Jack!”

It was the dirtiest stuff that worried him. Things he’d forgotten writing that made him feel foreign to himself.
i want to cum between your tits next time.
Not that they didn’t sound like him.

“Open the goddamn door.”

He wanted more than anything to make them go away. The girl was crazier than he’d thought, and it was impossible to talk to Deb with this between them, this prop. But there was only the wastebasket, which was small and from which they’d be retrievable, and the toilet, which would clog the pipes. They should have kept matches. Instead he pulled open the small window that looked out over the gravel courtyard, the building’s glorified air shaft. An illogical thing to do, holding handfuls of paper out the window and letting go. He watched the pages fall and catch the air, wafting white into the dark blue, flitting and flipping acrobatically, one or two sailing into open windows.

In the current, the sheets turned as though someone were reading them. That he could hear them turning, flapping against the updraft, made him realize that Deb, in the bedroom, had gone quiet.

When he opened the door again, there was only Travolta, the cat, just wandered in, touching her nose lightly to the corner of bedsheet that had wilted toward the floor.

Jack carried the empty box out to the living room, where the dishes had been stacked and the spaghetti scraped onto a single hulking plate. Deb was standing in the middle of the room, running the charm at her neck taut along its silver chain and watching the time under the television. 12:44. 12:44. 12:44. 12:45.

“Hey,” he said. There was a streak of pasta sauce bloodying her neck. He tried to pull her into a hug, to squeeze her arms that way he did when a fight was over, that way that said, It’s me, remember? Never forget it’s me. I want to hold you, and you want me to. He squeezed her arms, reminding her that she had arms, and a body, and what had happened to her body?

“Don’t.” She pushed him off. It was exactly the only way she hadn’t wanted to let him touch her. She felt her arms shaking and thought, Good, let him see me shake. She wanted the whole room to shake and for him to know it was from something he had done. He saw her see into the box, with only a page stuck at the bottom. “Find the prize inside?”

“It’s history, Debby. Ancient.” He waved the box as he spoke, and the last sheet fluttered out like a final gesture. “Over.”

“You have no clue.”

“It’s
been
over.”

“You sad shit.” She spoke softly, but her teeth were sharp at him. “You know who gave it to me?
They
did.”

Jack bent over to collect the escaped page. “Who’s they?”

“ ‘Who’s they?’ People you barely know. Your children.”

He stayed stooping, face to floor, the paper in his hand. When he stood, things would be different. Or, things were different already, but this was pause, this space of floor, this page.
Maybe bring some food on your way so we won’t have to go out.
The girl had shown up with a can of Pringles and a watermelon, like she’d never bought lunch before, never heard of sandwiches. He’d laughed about it at the time, though he’d been annoyed, and she had laughed too, though he could tell she’d been embarrassed and might have cried if he hadn’t then taken two of the chips and stuck them half into his mouth so they made a duck’s beak. That was a long time ago, when watermelon was in season. It was about to be in season again. Year-old melon and a thing of chips: how he would pay for them now, the moment that he stood.

“Don’t act like you don’t hear.”

“I’m not.” He stood. He hadn’t made the decision to, only it was a reflex, to answer her, and now here he was. “Who told them to open it? Was it addressed to them?”

“How does that matter?” She pushed past him and carried the stack of plates to the kitchen. Dark in there, but she knew her way around. At the sink she ran the water. On low the faucet made a shrill sound like a whistle or a soft scream.

Jack switched on the light over the counter where they let mail pile up. “What’d they say?” She squeezed green soap wheezy out of the plastic bottle. Her answer was too quiet for him to hear. “What?”

“They don’t want to talk to you.”

“I can’t hear you,” though that time he could.

“I said they don’t want to talk to you.” She was scrubbing a pot.

“Christ—could you not do that now? I mean are you kidding, doing that now?”

She stopped the water and retreated to the bedroom, flicking drops from her fingers as she went. He thought she might have been about to cry, from how she’d kept him from seeing her face.

Travolta trotted out as they came in, the loose of her belly swinging side to side. Deb looked all around the room. “What did you do with it?” She looked into the bathroom and saw the window open. “You did
not.
”

“I didn’t know what else to do. I don’t know what to do.”

“Go clean it up. Someone will find them.”

He told her he didn’t care who found them, the idiots in this building.

“
I
care. I see these people every day. I ride elevators with these people, I see them at the goddamn supermarket.”

“Okay, all right. I’ll get the pages, and I’ll—I’ll throw them away.”

“It doesn’t matter what you do with them. They won’t ever go away.”

I hope that’s not true, he wanted to answer, but it seemed better not to say anything. “I’ll be back. Deb? I’ll be right back.”

She sat on the bed with her head bent and would not show that she’d heard.