Criminals (14 page)

“So tell me what kind of person you are,” I said.

“Oh, God. I'm . . . I'm . . .” She resisted the temptation to go on. Paul thought she was intelligent and maybe he was right. Her face grew intent. She had on black pants and a discreet blue-gray turtleneck, with a big necklace of hand-painted beads lying between her breasts. I could picture her without the makeup and the jewelry, at home like anybody, with her family.

“Tell me about your house,” I said.

She swallowed, and then she laughed. “Oh, God. Why not. This is going to be a strange day. I knew you would be like this.” This produced Paul, hovering as if she had passed her hand over a lamp, telling her all about me the way he told me about her. What would he say?
This is my wife's year of sadness
,
of strangeness
.
Of energy feeding out of ordinary life into her as it always has, but being turned into stasis, as if cries were being converted into print, or chords into notation, or dances into diagrams on the floor, and backward from there into just thought, thought, thought, so that she, my wife,
says Paul, slapping his forehead with the realization of what has happened to me,
does not do anything this year.

And she is not like that, not passive, he would say, I hope he would say. Not a victim.

“My house,” she said, leaning forward and waving her hand through the vapor of Paul's image. She was actually going to say something about the remodeling, I thought. Fortunately she said only, “It has come to a stop since Jenny got hurt.” It's the worst irony that we gave our daughters the same name, but at least I know the thing didn't get its start until after she had Jenny.

Now her Jenny has what they call deficits. Jenny is not going to grow up to do anything like what either of her parents does for a living. She is not going to do much more than the basic things. Sophie is worried about who marries the kind of woman she will be. “
Mawwaige
,” I said when Paul told me this. We always liked to say it the way Peter Cook does in
The Princess Bride
, at the wedding of the maiden to the vile prince. Paul grimaced. “She means who will take care of Jenny,” he said hoarsely. He takes responsibility for the fall out the door, the ruined brain. “Let's face it, you may have to provide her with a dowry,” I said. I could say anything. He knew how I felt about what happened to a child. He knew I would not draw the line at hurting him, though, and would in fact try as hard as I could to make his feelings of wretchedness more intense, until he would have to come closer in—because he always had to talk everything over, the worst, the most unassimilable things—closer, to be comforted. He let it go.

Talking of her child, Sophie had momentarily let go of whatever held the proud tension in her skin, her thoroughbred look. She mottled and sagged. Her nose reddened and her eyes clouded, and she took her white hands off the table.

“Let's be done with all this. I want to make a bet with you.”

“What is it?” Sophie said, raising her chin with a determination not to be surprised.

“I want to tell you about us. I don't want you to interpret what I'm saying. I just want you to see the two people, the five people, you wandered in on. And then, I'm not asking for anything. But I'll make a bet with you that you'll get out of it. Because something that has been set going and gone for years, that is on its own course, something like
this
, something
made
—” Here I ran out of breath.

Sophie knew not to be friendly now or to supply me with words. She looked sick. We paused to look at all the men and women in groups having lunch meetings, with their personal lives set aside.

“Why are you asking me this now? I haven't seen him, we haven't seen each other, it's been—”

“But that's not your choice, is it? I'm asking you now because of a thought I had last week. I thought, I wish I could just shoot her, the way I could in a French movie. I did. That's when I decided to call you.” I said this in a rush, though quietly. I had gone into a pawnshop because somebody told me that was where you should get the guitar for your child's first lessons, because they all wanted to be rock stars and yours might not be serious about the guitar for long. While the man was showing me a very expensive guitar a musician had pawned, I looked down and saw in the display case, nestled among the ring trays, a small pearl-handled revolver.

“Are you threatening me?” Sophie was cool, though her skin was muddy.

“I just wanted to meet with you.” That sounded so professional, as if we could share ideas for a project.

“All right. All right. Have you been so happy,” she said slowly, “that you think telling me about it is going to change my feelings?”

“I don't know about your feelings,” I said. “What does happiness have to do with it?” Of course she knew how we have fought all these years. I moved and she jumped. What if I had the little gun?

“I do want to hear,” she said. “I'll listen.”

“And don't listen as if you're going to counsel me,” I said. “I'm not your patient.”

She drew herself up. “When you're finished, do I get to tell you my side? My story?” she said. “I realize I am in the role of the bimbo who appeared in Paul's life and deflected the—the chariot of your marriage.” She went rosy at this turn of phrase, with the excitement of speaking more sharply than she usually did. She was used to other people being the ones who got excited. “And furthermore,” she said, breathing unevenly, “people fall in love with the, the
spouses
”—she expelled this word like a pit—“of their
best friends
. So they know all
there is to know, and furthermore they like or they even love their friend, and in some cases that doesn't make any difference at all to what has happened to them, what has happened is beyond their control.” Her voice broke.

She's going to cry,
I thought.
That's all right.
I kept still.

“You can't always control life,” she said plaintively.

“No.”

In the silence, she gasped. She gasped again and bent forward. “I'm having the most awful cramps,” she said against her hands holding the table.

“I see you are.” I felt a thrill of pleasure. Oh, I had heard about these cramps of hers. But she gave a groan.

“Oh God,” she said. “I was afraid this would happen. All morning I was—” She pushed her chair back and got herself into a folded position, breasts against knees. She stayed like that and people looked over at us.

This is not really fair, I thought. It's a way of taking over. Though I did not doubt that she was in pain, because she had no embarrassment about the position she was sitting in. Now the people in the restaurant were going to some lengths not to watch us. The waitress with the earrings gave me a questioning look.

“Oh! Oh no!”

“What?”

“Oh no. I'm bleeding.” She started to stand up and then crouched back onto her chair. “Oh no. Oh no. I can't stand up. I mean this—I'm hemorrhaging.”

“Well, let's go to the ladies' room,” I said, picking up her limp blue arm.

“I can't. Listen. This is not just my period. This is something else. This happened once before. There's blood thumping out of me. Oh God. I have to get to a hospital.” The waitress heard the word “thumping” and ran to the phone. People began pushing back their chairs and heading toward us.

When the aid car arrived, a woman wheeled in the gurney with a casual speed. The sight of her settled everyone down. She gave the rest of us in the room a small gesture that said to get out of the way.
Sophie wept and grabbed the woman's hand on one side of the trolley and mine on the other. It was true, her chair had blood on it, though not a lot.

In the emergency room they gave her something that stopped the bleeding and made her silly. She lay holding my hand. She gave the doctor a weak wave of her other hand. “There's something so funny. This woman wanted to shoot me.” Even in this condition she had her effect; the doctor stood there smiling down at her. “But you weren't going to, were you?” she said sweetly to me.

“No. I don't have a gun.” The doctor gave me a stern look. “I would never buy a gun,” I told him.

“I didn't think so,” Sophie said. She craned her neck on the paper pillow and said to the doctor, “You look tired.”

“But you never know,” I said.

Sophie said, “I want to tell you something. Come here. I want to whisper.” I bent down. “This is not a miscarriage,” she said. “Don't think that. This is something else. I've had it happen before.” I didn't answer. She pressed my hand.

I had never thought of that. I had never thought that could happen. That she and Paul could have a child. It had never, never before this, come into my mind.

I told Paul. I told him the same day, about everything, the pawnshop, the stupid book Sophie was reading, my plan to explain our life, the EMTs with the gurney and the shock pads. As I talked his face became slack and his eyes faraway. I told him how Sophie wanted to tell her side. How she had spoken of her children but not her husband. How a scene had come to me in the ambulance, in which Paul, summoned by her husband Stan for a talk, would not speak of me. The two of them would talk as if Paul had risen out of the sea and laid hold of Sophie. I told him how it all came to nothing with Sophie, nothing, because we had not even begun our talk when she did this. I said, why didn't I delay her rescue and just let her bleed to death? There was a moment when I might have pulled out the gun if I had had it. I didn't say what the moment was.

“I don't think so,” Paul said.

“Women do. You think I liked her!”

Paul didn't smile. He would not let me joke with him. He would not let Sophie come into the realm of things that were ours. Ordinarily I could have said, “Turn around, talk, goddamn it. Don't stand there with your back to me thinking about when you can call her!” But the children came in from outside, not thinking about us.

Late in the first movement the cello broke a string. It was a particular seventeenth-century cello, according to the program. Crack! The sound echoed in the hall as if the bridge on the cello had snapped, but it was just a string. The three limped to a stop, all grinning, not as in Schubert's time, when surely humiliation and ruin hovered lower, in greater readiness to descend on one, than they do now. The most awful things happen now, but no one will call it ruin.

The gallant cellist, who had a thin humorous face and a little beard, left the stage to restring. The others got up and walked after him. Loud rumbling talk began in the hall. I had been in Schubert's world and I didn't want to come out. In the lapsed tension I had a desire to cry heartbrokenly. Paul had the armrest now and had propped his cheek on his fingers, hiding his face from me. “Are you crying?” I whispered very softly.

It would mean he knew, he had heard in the music, that he and Sophie had finished.

He dropped his hand and glared at me. He was not crying. That was not what he had heard in the music. “What?” he said haughtily.

I said aloud, “I meant about Sophie.”

“I'm going to cry about Sophie at a concert?” he said, not so much angry as alert, now that her name had been mentioned.

It must be one of the strangest inklings afforded us in life to feel, momentarily, the coursing through the one we love of love for someone else. “It's the music,” I said weakly. “It makes me want to cry about all of it, everything.”

He said, “Everything. So you've been attacking me all night because of Sophie?”

“I haven't been attacking you,” I said. “You always say that when we fight, so I'll think I'm a bitch and not fight.”

“You are a bitch,” he said. But he smiled. Our eyes met. He put his hand on the armrest as if he knew the sight of it, with its distended veins, would make me cover it with my own.

I didn't know whether he had talked to Sophie or not, and I didn't know how to find out. I didn't know what to do next. What would come next? I knew nothing, really. Nothing about how life could be conducted so that one did not have to go swimming with one arm like this, trying to hold onto someone in the current. It was not as if I were saving him. He wanted to swim away.

Many statements, rapid and theatrical, suggested themselves to me. They crowded up from the past, the kind of things I used to say when my beloved all through high school broke up with me to go out with girls who were new in school or girls his friends had broken up with.
Go see how you like her,
I would say. At the height of it there was half a year without him.
I thought I would die, at Christmas, when everyone was happy. I thought I was going to die, without you
.

The year I thought I would die,
for love of that boy in high school, while somehow seeing at the same time a future in which he had utterly disappeared. In the vision—this was before I had decided against marriage—I was married to a man I can only describe as Paul.

Everyone in the concert hall seemed to be in a noisy, elated state. The cellist walked back onstage with his instrument held up and out like a puppy in disgrace. The applause that greeted him was a tremendous crowd sound, with whistles and cheers. Everything about this entrance was filled, for all of us in the auditorium, with inexplicable happiness.

The musicians settled themselves, lifted their arms, and went back to the beginning.

During the music my mind cleared somewhat, though the past had not receded and indeed it came closer, summoned by certain passages. I thought about how, when I went to the county high school, where students from all the little towns converged in the eighth
grade, I looked for the boy I had loved in grade school. The bad boy. I longed to see him but he was not there. No one except the few who had gone to my grade school had ever heard of him, and it was hard to bring up his name and hear what they remembered of him.