Fragile (14 page)

“What's wrong with Mom?” The voice from the phone crackles and fades, the voice of his daughter.

“Your mother has decided that she doesn't like me very much.” He tries to soften this, with Laura standing there directly above him. “She's all worked up about selling this house.”

Laura's voice is raised, talking at the phone from a distance. “I don't appreciate your father's
insensitivity
.” Trying to make herself heard from a few feet away, she's virtually shouting now. “I think he must be getting
senile
.”

Did Abbey hear any of this, on the other end of the line? If she did, she gives no indication. “I wanted to see,” she says, her voice clearer now as she has perhaps moved to a better spot for her cell phone's reception, “if you can come out to visit next
month. For Kelsey's birthday. Maybe the last time we have a big party for her. She'll be twelve, can you believe it?”

His granddaughter, turning twelve. He looks to see if Laura is still standing behind him, but she has gone, in search of another drawer to empty, another cabinet to clear. And this turns his mind back to the idea of leaving this house and all its memories behind, all the ghosts of their lives there together, all its cunning custom features they once found to be charming and useful but now merely bullet points on a listing sheet that might add up to a few more dollars on the asking price as calculated by the realtor. Why do they have to go? Why leave one place for another? Perhaps it is the idea of moving on to the next phase of his life that frightens him. Retirement, wide open, staring him in the face like a gaping starless sky. After that, only one final move, into a nursing home or directly into a plush wooden box.

To fight off these thoughts, he holds the phone to his face and speaks. “I don't know if we can make it. I've been on the road a lot, and your mother is having a real panic attack about selling this house. She's like a crazed animal about money right now.”

“Why is she so upset?”

“She's afraid. She wants to get every last cent she can out of the house, and we found out today there are some problems, some things that might prevent us from putting it on the market. At least right away.”

There is a pause on the line, a second of open air filled with the light crackle of the cell phone's intermittent reception. “What kind of problems?”

He doesn't want to go into the details. She doesn't need to be dragged into their problems. She has her own life to live, and they are her parents, the ones who are supposed to take care of her.

“Nothing that can't be fixed.”

Then, in the gap his terse reply has left in its wake, he hears it, a sound beyond the muffled static of Abbey's bad connection: Another person's breath on the line. He can hear her, that shallow breath like the feeling of her eyes on his back, watching him draw, her presence over his shoulder has constantly defined him, the push of her wants and needs constricting him, dictating his actions. Her breath drawn in and released, saying nothing. Listening.

“Your father is getting senile,” the other voice says, finally choosing to speak. “Your father, in his wisdom, decided to cancel the bug treatment for the house a few years ago, without telling me, and now the house is being
destroyed
by termites. Destroyed. And now, of course, when we need it, he can't put his hands on the homeowners insurance policy to see if we're covered.” There is nothing he can say. She can go on like this for hours, ranting, this new liberated incarnation of Laura, telling him all the things he has done wrong in the past, all the things he has made her suffer through, all the things she is going to do to change it.

“I looked it up online, the damage these grotesque things can do. They can nest in the weight-bearing beams of a house and
devour
it. Thousands of dollars of damage. The house may be structurally unsound. This could literally eat up all the equity we have in the house. Our retirement money. We may not even be able to put it on the
market
.”

He envisions the termites eating into the wooden planks two stories below him that support his weight and the weight of the entire house. He sees them writhing in their hive, burrowing, as she put it, deeper into the grain of the wood. A slow process of rotting away. To him and to Laura, the termites forming their colony in the beams of their home is an act of unparalleled destruction. But he can see this, for a brief flashing moment, from the insects' point of view as well. Looked at from their perspective, these small disgusting beings building their hive are creating their own bit of order in the universe, fighting entropy in their own way. All life does that. He has to shake this perverse glimmer of logic from his head in order to speak.

“Laura, that's ridiculous. This house is worth five times as much as we paid for it. The market is so hot here, a few thousand to fix this won't hurt us. And it's probably covered by the insurance. We'll find out Monday when we call the title company.”

“How do
you
know how much the house is worth? It could cost a hundred thousand dollars to repair it.”

“Nonsense.”

“You should have thought of that when you were saving a few bucks by canceling the exterminators.”

There's that word she loves to use: Should. Always thinking about what must happen in order for her plans and her concept of the perfectly ordered world to take place. You should have done that. We should do this. You should get the oil changed in the car. You should clean out the gutters this weekend. You should really think about going to the doctor for that. You should have been here tonight with me again, one last time in this room, in this building where girls laughed, smoke gathered in the lobby, ringing out a sound from across the rooftops it came, the bells of St Monica's ringing out, the laughter raining down from the balconies. This life for you all dead and gone, but I kept you folded here inside me, I kept you locked within my heart, not really you but that one forgotten part of you is with me still, has been with me ever since, a fragment of us that never went away. He holds her adrift, floating, extending as far apart as they will ever be, for a shivering instant he holds her there locked together with his eyes. Why should I have kept myself sanctified for him? I might have had what they have, these two locking their eyes together. I might have had a separate life of my own, with children and grandchildren, and another who cares about me. But I chose to do this, enfolding myself together like a flower that closes against the cold.

But I did have something of a family too myself. He never knew it, but I did have Karl and Dennis those years when they lived with me, Karl so much older, nearly ten years older. His voice booming out across the heads in the pews, black backs of their heads riveted on the words he lashed out.
As for myself,
brethren, when I came to you I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony and evidence or mystery or secret of God.
His voice like a bass drum struck with a mallet, launching itself to the rafters, back from Philadelphia after Jessamine died to preach at St Monica's. I was there every Sunday for years, with the milky soft light through the stained-glass windows pouring down upon his face as the words hurried out like they were not his own, he was just a sounding board for giant strings that had been plucked. Still saying mass in Latin and living with me. Too old to be a brother, he seemed more like an uncle, but also what Tris never knew and I never told a soul, he was also like a husband and Dennis to me so much like a son. Dennis's head, his hair when I touched it, when I tucked the boy into bed; there is nothing so tenuous and innocent as the hair on the back of a young boy's head. I loved him like my own son, cut down without warning they said. His smile in the photograph I still have on the bureau in the back room, the room locked up. I never go there, filled with ghosts and mourning, locked up in the back of the house upstairs, that room where Karl slept each night in a single bed alone. Dennis's photograph, his smile, in his Army uniform.

We ate each meal as a family would, father, mother, and son together. And so, yes I did have a husband and a son, that has not been denied me in that sense. The Sunday after the message came, Karl still said mass, his voice resounding to the highest rafters.
Then He was praying in a certain place, and when He stopped, one of His disciples said to Him, Lord teach us to pray as John taught his disciples. And He said to them, when you pray say, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.
He
said it with a crack in his voice.
Thy will be done.
And the tears came to me and to others, to many others that day because they knew just as well that Dennis had been killed in the war, and the mourning was the end of us together. That booming voice of Karl's, those were the last words he ever preached. He said it that day, but that Sunday was the end of him and the end of us together. He loved his Dennis so much, and the Lord took him so young that Karl in his own way folded himself up in that bed in the back room. He went there and lay down and rarely left it in the months that came after. I fed him, brought him his food and drink, but it broke him, saying mass that day. He should have stepped aside, but he was a stubborn, deliberate man. He lay down in that bed in that room and never left, with Dennis smiling, staring at him. I grew to hate that room and closed it off, the door shut always against the ghost of him, always shut against that bed she calls him to. How can she want to do this now, after all the acrimony between them? Her appetites have become like those of a man as the past few months have aged her, whittled her down to a hardness and ceaseless wanting. She calls him from the closet he has been cleaning, two piles of clothes heaped on the closet floor: one for the storage unit and one for the secondhand store. He knows the tenor of that voice, the way she called his name, lifting, with a question in it that quickly falls away. He sees her standing hunched over the bed naked, the flesh at the back of her thighs as slack as the blanket she lifts and lets fall again, slowly settling down upon a cushion of air between it and the tightly tucked sheets, her buttocks
narrow as a boy's, the folds of loose skin where her belly used to protrude now hanging like a pouch as she stoops over and pulls the blanket taut at the head of the bed, pushing the blanket in between the box springs and the frame to make the bed the way she likes it, perfectly tight, everything sealed in.

Now she pulls the quilted comforter up to the headboard, her small breasts hanging limp as she smoothes out the wrinkles and props two pillows up, intent upon her work. Her nakedness is an indication of her mastery of him. Her focused disregard of his watching her a sign of his weakness. This is but another plan she is executing, an idea most likely conceived some time several days ago, while he was away on his trip, a task that took its place at the end of her long to-do list for this day. He could choose to ignore her, go downstairs and turn on the football game, open a beer. He was never properly fed this evening. A bowl of canned soup and a handful of pretzels have left him hungrier than ever. But this may be a chance to redeem himself, after everything that has happened with the house. He's surprised she would even consider it.

“Why are you making the bed?”

She doesn't look up. Walking to the dresser, she pulls open the drawer where the condoms are kept, confirming that he has guessed correctly. She takes one of the foil packets out of the box and leaves the drawer open, the big box of condoms crowded together with her silky underwear.

“I don't like to sleep on messy sheets, with the blankets all in a wad.” Meaning he does. Implying that this is another failure of his. He can see her mind clicking like gears in a clock. This is
another part of the plan, everything has been thought out: the closet will be cleaned, then we'll have sex, then I'll go to sleep. The sex is merely one step in the process. “It's been a while,” she says—another accusation—marching up to him, naked, her breasts bare before him, so loose and limp that he has to avert his eyes and focus instead on the hand that has cupped itself firmly to the crotch of his jeans. Once she has decided to go through with something, she wants it to happen fast. At times he has to ask her to help him, paying extra attention with her hands or her mouth; he enters each encounter with her with no idea whether he will be up to the task. She pushes up on her toes in an effort to kiss him. Reluctantly, he lets her. She jabs her tongue between his teeth and the chalky taste of toothpaste presses against the remnants of the soup he ate.

Somewhere deep in his brain, a chemical mechanism is tripped: This woman, this hard little woman wants him. She fumbles with his fly and releases his mouth from the kiss. As she bends to her work, his mind lifts away from the presence of her and rises to a place somewhere near the spackled rafters in the ceiling, away from her and outside himself, a place where he has been reduced to pure sensation, a tiny rip in the fabric of time; an opening for everything that ever was him to drain out of. For a long moment he floats there, apart from himself, forever beyond the distant antipathies obtaining a scaffold for his soul. The room is gone and the ceiling, all gone for a moment, then—she is back and he is. She is Laura and he is everything he has ever been once again, tucked inside himself once more and here, in this room they will soon be abandoning.

She tugs on his arm, indicating it is time to join her in bed. He knows what to do now—their routine in these matters has been choreographed quite precisely over the years. As she turns down the sheets of the bed she has just made he must quickly, quickly take off his clothes. In bed now, they assume the accustomed positions, on their sides, her head over his, her mouth searching. “Mmm …” she says. “This is good.”

No, don't talk, he thinks. Talking brings him back to her. He feels himself start to fade, and decides to shift positions. It's now or never. He lets go of her and starts to climb on top.