Into Thin Air (27 page)

His heart wasn't hammering. His breathing was even. He felt calm, as if someone had been holding him close, rocking him gently all night long. He sat up and reached for the phone.

“I don't know if this is such a good idea,” Lila told him. She leaned along the cool white of her kitchen wall, holding on to the phone, trying to still her jumpy pulse.

“We'll have a good time,” he promised.

She looked across her empty kitchen. She had a frozen lamb chop she could eat. She had a book about physics, written for the layperson, that she wanted to read. Quasars, she thought. Quarks and nanoseconds.

“Come on, come on, come on,” he said. “What the hell.”

“Lucky for you I love restaurants,” she said finally.

This time dinner was different. She was surprised to see he was wearing a jacket and that he had slicked back his fine blond hair and put on some kind of lime-smelling after-shave. He looked hopeful and friendly, and he took her arm and helped her into his car. She was startled too at just how nice the restaurant he chose was. It was called Island and was quietly decorated all in deep blues and greens, with violet nets stretched across the walls. As soon as Lila walked in, she wished she had worn her blue dress instead of an old skirt. She wished she had put on her lavender-and-silver earrings. They sat at a small table in the corner, with a single gold candle glowing shadows across the white tablecloth.

She braced herself, but he didn't mention Lee at all. She suspected, though, that Lee was there in the way he clenched his hands about the soup spoon, that Lee was there in the stiff way he held his head, as if any moment it would start swiveling around like radar, searching for his wife.

He told her about the supermarket where he had learned how to tell the difference between a sweet melon and a sour one, where he had learned to bag so expertly that he still did his own in the markets. “I annoy all the baggers,” he said proudly. He showed her pictures of Joanna and asked her about nursing.

He insisted she order dessert, though she had eaten so much she felt vaguely ill. “No, have the chocolate mud pie,” he said, waving over the waiter. The cake, as black as tar, with clouds of cream on either side, sat in the center of the table. She made delicate pinpoints in the frosting with her fork. “Eat some,” he said, and she lifted a spoonful, sticky and sweet, to her mouth.

He didn't seem to want the evening to end. He let his coffee get cool, and then he ordered another and let it cool off, too. He ordered a walnut liqueur he barely touched, and then he ordered one for her, too. And when the check finally came, he took so long paying it that the waiter came meaningfully over. “Anything else, sir?” he said, dipping faintly toward the table.

“No, we're fine,” Jim said.

He sat talking to her for another half hour, and then, finally, he stretched. “Well,” he said. “I guess we should go.”

He drove her home. He was about to turn down her street when suddenly he slowed the car. “Would you like to see Joanna?” he said.

She looked at him.

“She never goes to sleep when I go out.” He flexed the rearview mirror. “She's really beautiful.”

“I remember she was a pretty baby,” Lila said. “Sure. All right.”

“Good,” he said. He didn't say much to her while he was driving, and then suddenly he was swerving into a drive and the front door was suddenly opening. Maureen. Lila recognized her from the hospital, only now Maureen was in blue jeans and a black sweater, and her hair was longer, tied back in a sloppy braid.

“Well, hello,” Maureen called. She left the front door open and came out onto the steps. “I know you, don't I?”

“Think white,” Lila said, stepping out of the car. Maureen furrowed her brow in concentration. “Think thermometers,” said Lila, and then Maureen laughed. “Of course. The little nurse.”

“Not so little,” said Lila.

“Joanna's asleep,” Maureen said. “We played six games of throw the playing cards up in the air and two games of hide the spoon. Then she was finally pooped.”

Maureen might have been talking to Jim, but the whole time Lila felt she was looking at her. Lila slicked her hair from her face, She shifted from one foot to another and noticed how scuffed her pumps were, how her blouse had a faint chocolate stain from dinner.

“Thanks, Maureen,” Jim said.

“Thanks yourself. I love Joanna. Though I could do without hide the spoon.” She glanced next door. “Well, I better tend to my own garden now.” She smiled at Lila. “Nice to see you out of a hospital,” she said.

“Come in anyway,” Jim said to Lila. “You can look at Joanna asleep.” He smiled at her uncertainly.

She didn't know why, but she half expected that the inside of Jim's house might be a kind of shrine to Lee, with photographs of her lining the walls. Instead there were only a few framed photographs. On the mantel was a small picture of Lee and Jim. She tried not to peer too closely. She pretended she was admiring a Chinese vase perched on the edge of the mantel. She could see how young they both looked. They were both in blue jeans, both in jeans jackets and boots, posed like outlaws in mean rangy stances, their hips jutting out. Jim was looking at Lee in a kind of dizzy rapture. Somehow that one photo upset her more than if the whole mantel had been crammed with them. She glanced over at Jim, but he was leaning along the far wall, studying her.

“What?” she said, but he just shrugged and smiled.

He gave her a slow, careful tour. He showed her Joanna sleeping. He squired her through his too small, too clean kitchen, his tiny bath and messy dining room, crammed with books and newspapers. His bedroom had nothing in it but a large double bed with a blue chenille bedspread across it. The alarm clock was on the floor, and beside the bed was a colored photograph of Lee, her hair blown across her face. She was staring into the camera, half smiling and mysterious, and as soon as Lila saw that smile, she felt ill. This time Jim followed her stare. “Lee,” he said. He picked up the photograph, carefully fingering the surface as if he were reading it like braille. “She's pretty, isn't she,” he said.

“Could I have some water?” Lila said. The cake she had eaten was now making her queasy. He led her to the kitchen, where he fitted a cold cup of water into her hand.

“I should get going,” she said, putting down the glass, but before she had turned he had bent and gently kissed her. Startled, she flinched back.

He started to reach for her again. He had his fingers threaded through her hair, tilting her face toward a kiss.

She pulled back a bit. “All those drugs you work with,” she said. “Can't you concoct one to take care of this?” She laid her head in the crook of his neck.

“This?” he said, suddenly swaying her into a dance. “Why would you want a drug to stop this?”

“No, not this,” she said awkwardly.

“No, what?” he said.

“Oh, you know.” She blinked at him. “Just last week you were scoping out every person in the diner thinking they might be Lee.”

“Did I do that tonight?”

“No. Not tonight.”

“She's my wife,” he said finally.

She stepped back from Jim. “I guess I don't know what to do with that.”

He was silent for a moment. “I guess I don't, either,” he said. He rolled her from one arm to the other. “Look, just stay. Talk to me. If you like, you can just sleep here. We don't have to do anything.”

“I can't just sleep.”

He looked at her, his face uncertain. “I have sleeping pills,” he said abruptly.

She started to laugh. “Sleeping pills?” she said. “Are we having a double suicide here?”

He laughed. “Over the counter. Safe as aspirin.”

“No, I don't want them,” she said.

“Let me put a movie on, then,” he said. “If you want to go home afterward, you can.”

He started for the living room. “I have forties' melodramas, I have science fiction, I have classics,” he said. She trailed after him. He was on the floor, pulling out tapes from a shelf under the TV, scattering them on the floor. “Come on,” he said. “Please. Don't go.”

“All right, a movie,” she said.

He put on a horror film,
Mars Needs Women
. She couldn't concentrate on it, She was too aware of Jim sitting beside her, his arms crossed across his chest. He had set aside three different movies, as if he expected they might watch all three. He kept changing positions, always with the edge of his body touching hers, connecting with a kind of warmth. They didn't talk much during the film, and the last scene Lila remembered, before she fell asleep beside him, there was a woman dressed in a gleaming black space suit, climbing a ladder into a shivering silver ship pointed toward the very middle of the sky.

When he woke in the morning, his head clouded, she was gone, and he felt a cold surge of fear. The TV was gray static fizz. He didn't remember falling asleep in his clothes, and he didn't remember her leaving. He felt the couch beside him as if there might be some of her warmth left there. He couldn't remember what he had dreamed, couldn't remember anything except that he had slept more deeply on his hardwood floor than he had ever slept on his Serta mattress. Six o'clock. Joanna wouldn't be up for another half hour. When he stood up, his back cramped.

He hadn't really expected to bring Lila back to the house with him. He had just wanted a nice dinner and some good conversation, and yet once she was inside the house, he was somehow afraid to let her leave. He kept making these lame excuses why she should stay. The worst was when he suggested sleeping pills. Jesus, what a fool. He shouldn't call her; he should just leave her alone, but instead he reached for the phone and called her home, and when she answered, his heart calmed. “I was worried,” he said.

“About what?” she said.

“There was no note. I just woke up and you were gone.”

“Oh. Well. Sorry,” she said.

There was silence. “Let's have dinner tonight,” he said.

She pushed out a breath, “I don't know,” she said.

He was quiet for a moment. “What about a movie?”

He swore he could hear her breathing through the wires.

“All right,” she said finally. “But I get to pick it.”

Every time Jim was with Lila, he felt somehow calmer, but Lila felt that she was going insane. She didn't quite trust the way she felt about him. The whole situation confounded her. When she wasn't with him, she worried the situation like an animal with a scrap bone. Was it having an affair with a married man if his wife had disappeared? Was it courting pain to know that all Lee had to do was reappear and Lila would be as invisible to him as if she were the one who had vanished? Reluctantly she'd agree to see him again, and then there she'd be, sitting beside him watching some stupid movie she didn't even care about, and then his scent would be so pervasive, she felt she couldn't breathe the air. She was dizzy from wanting him, dizzier from resisting.

The first time he made love to her, he seemed to do it as if from a distance. Afterward, he helped her up from the bed, but he didn't look at her. He was distracted. She kept moving in front of him. She began making noise, scraping her feet, banging a chair, until Joanna woke up with small bleating cries. “Oh, Lord,” Jim said. His face looked lined with exhaustion. A pang went through her.

He went into Joanna's room, coming out with her balanced sleepily on his hip. When she saw Lila, her damp mouth opened. “Look who's here,” he said to each of them. Joanna gave a groggy stare, Lila lifted her hand weakly. “Hi,” she said.

That morning Joanna was a kind of buffer. Jim talked to his daughter or about her all during breakfast, never quite making eye contact with Lila. He planted too many kisses on Joanna's downy cheeks. When Lila got up to get water, he gave her too wide a berth. He hummed and whistled to his daughter. He snapped jauntily about the sunny kitchen, all the time with Joanna balanced on his hip, and Lila suddenly knew that making love had been a mistake. She was never going to see him again.

She took up her routine again, working extra shifts, working out at the gym so hard that it was all she could do not to collapse back at home. Her feelings for Jim had passed before; they would pass again. She convinced herself her desire was growing fainter and fainter, and then one week later Jim called, shy and happy and so oblivious of her distress that she thought she might have dreamed it.

They didn't do much that night. They walked around the city, saw a movie, ate hot dogs from a vendor, and then he took her back to her place. When they began to make love, he started off just as distant as before. It was the oddest sensation. She was usually calmer in lovemaking, but with Jim she suddenly began to make herself known. She bit the hands he stroked across her. She repeated his name like an incantation. Her left leg was crushed beneath his, but she fought to make him somehow see her. She kept sitting up, changing position and shape, forcing him to follow her. She trailed her hair across his shoulders, into his face, making him see and feel how straight it was, how unlike Lee's frizzled tangle. She was taller than Lee, so she stretched her legs against his, drawing him face to face. She forced him to interact. “Tell me what you want,” she said. “You like this? You like that?”

Afterward, they were both vaguely startled. “Are you all right?” he said. He pointed to the bruises along her arm. “Jesus. I'm a marked woman,” she said.

She was happy sometimes. He became suddenly affectionate, always holding her hand, stroking her back, sometimes just lifting up a strand of hair. He sat with her out in his backyard until three in the morning, the two of them talking about everything except Lee. Sometimes she reminded herself that she was with a man who still wore his wedding band. If Lee came back, she would be gone. She told herself to take things for what they were. She played party games with herself. If she knew for certain Lee would be back within the year, would she give any of this up? And the answer, no matter how bruised and bottomless her despair that day, was always no.