Listen to Me (7 page)

Maggie nodded. “I agree,” she said. “You were right. We'll need a hotel.”

“I should have let you find us one online,” he said. “You'd have gotten us a deal.”

“A smoking deal,” she said. It was a phrase Mark's parents used indiscriminately, on anything from a Parisian hotel room to a bundle of asparagus purchased at the local farmer's market.

Maggie put a hand on Mark's knee, and he, without a moment's hesitation, reached down and squeezed her fingers.

See? That was just the thing. The thing that kept them together. He understood her. He, too, recognized that though they might approach their opinions—say, of Ohio or even the GPS for that matter—from different directions, ultimately those directions landed them in the same place, with the same result. Each knew that the other was theirs. Two brains thinking one thought. Two brains following one final wave of logic. She felt a nearly animalistic sense of intimacy at that moment.

It was true, regrettably so, that in the last few weeks Maggie's brain had been going out of its way to seek out extra tangents, to explore other prospects—darker, more disturbing possibilities—but that was her
brain.
That wasn't her. And her brain was beyond her control.
You can do what you will, but you can't will what you will,
another aphorism she'd been taught by her therapist.

But therapists and aphorisms aside, the takeaway was this: Mark was hers and she was his, and everything, ultimately, in one way or another, would always work out between them.

The radio went silent. There was another crack of lightning in the distance. Then there was static. Then, with no formality or warning, the radio issued several long low beeps. A tornado watch was underway in southeast Ohio.

In 1840 the Great Natchez tornado killed 317 people in Natchez, Mississippi. In 1925 the Tri-State tornado ran a path of 219 miles for nearly four hours, from Missouri to Illinois to Indiana. More than 600 people died. In 1989 roughly 1,300 people were killed by the Daulatpur-Saturia tornado in Bangladesh. Twelve thousand people were injured. Eighty thousand were left homeless.

The tornado—that funnel-shaped weapon capable of moving at nearly 70 miles an hour with internal rotational winds of sometimes 250—is no laughing matter.

          Maggie pulled the car into a small Shell station. They were somewhere in New Lebanon—population 4,000—a place where US-35 felt more like a side street than a highway. Squat ranchers, secondhand shops, the occasional empty bank.

Next to the station, thankfully, there was an overgrown field of grass. Maggie had only just turned on the windshield wipers. The rain wasn't too bad yet.

“I'll walk him,” said Mark. “Unless you want to and then I'll top up the tank instead.”

“Your choice,” she said.

Gerome was standing with his front paws on the center console. He was whining, asking a question—
whu, whu, whu
—whose end he couldn't achieve. Gerome hated to get rained on probably as much if not more than Mark. They had that in common.
Smart boy,
thought Mark.

“Smart boy,” said Mark, massaging the dog's chin. “You think this is shit, too, eh?” He turned in his seat, dug around in the floorboard behind him, and found Gerome's leash. The dog continued his plea.

To Maggie, he said, “I'll do it.” Mark's knees were cramping; a short walk would do him good.

Maggie got out and started the pump. After a second, she ducked her head back inside the car where Mark was still fidgeting with the leash. “You want anything? The card reader's not working. I have to go in to pay.”

“Coffee?” Mark said. “If it's hot?”

“You got it.” She trotted off across the parking lot toward the store, the wind pushing her ponytail, her shirt, the hem of her shorts to the side. It seemed her clothes, the pieces of her, were aligned with the earth and not Maggie.

Mark pulled down his baseball cap and coaxed Gerome from the backseat.

“Come on, guy,” Mark said. “We're in this together.”

Gerome put his tail between his legs and emitted a bleat of objection, but he hopped down from the car without a struggle.

The little field to the side of the station was already soggy. Mark walked Gerome the length of it so that he, Mark, could stay on the concrete and Gerome could walk on the grass. But Gerome wasn't having it. Instead, he balanced his paws along the concrete perimeter, looking up at Mark every now and then as if to say, “If you don't have to, I don't have to.”

Meanwhile Maggie was taking her time in the store. The parking lot was empty except for a beat-up pickup, which probably belonged to whatever sad sack was working inside. There couldn't have been other customers. Mark imagined Maggie in the women's restroom, pulling little pieces of toilet paper from the roll and arranging them daintily around the seat. Then, out of nowhere, he thought of Elizabeth, her severe short hair, her lithe little body. She'd played volleyball as an undergrad at some small liberal arts school in the Northeast, something she'd mentioned as a throwaway as they outlined his upcoming chapters. She hadn't yet told him she was dropping out of the program. “It's not merely about the body,” she'd said. “It's about discipline. It's about pushing the brain.” She spoke with authority about everything, with an air of privilege and a sense of too much self-importance. He'd liked it. Her entitlement was a bulletproof jacket, and she'd clearly been making her way through life as if nothing would ever thwart her.

Now he imagined Elizabeth in the stall next to Maggie. He gave her a skirt, which was hiked unceremoniously to her waist, and panties pushed just to the knee. Above the toilet, she maintained a perfect athletic squat, never once letting the skin of her thighs touch the porcelain.

Mark's glutes flexed instinctively. There was a tingling in his hamstrings from his knees to his pelvis. Gerome pulled at the leash. That afternoon when Elizabeth had told him about volleyball was more than a year ago. Now she was elsewhere, in some West Coast town probably dating some West Coast asshole. In their correspondence, Mark never wrote explicitly about desire, and normally she didn't either. But in an e-mail she'd sent just that week—in fact, on the very day Mark had discovered the switchblade and then decided without discussion that they would leave Chicago ahead of schedule—Elizabeth had broached the subject point-blank.

Hiya—

So I've been thinking about sex.

Mark had gotten up from his chair and closed his office door before continuing. The muscles in his buttocks tightened as he sat back down, and he was reminded of a day from childhood when Gwen had explained why horses so often relieved themselves before fleeing. “They're lightening their load,” she'd told him. His father had said, “In other words, they've had the crap scared out of them.”

Hiya—

So I've been thinking about sex. And I've been thinking about your book. It would be incomplete, you know, if you didn't also address what's happening in the world of sex vis-à-vis anonymity. Like, did you know there's a whole section on Craigslist about conference meet-ups? You name it; they have it. Think about it: the world's most intimate act becomes anonymous by way of the Internet. Brilliant! These are real-life hookups, real-life liaisons. But when they're over, they're over, and nobody knows anyone else's name. Husbands, wives, the people back home—they never find out. You just get on a plane and get out of Dodge. So my question is this—

The e-mail had gone on, but he couldn't think about that right now. Gerome still hadn't peed and the rain was picking up, and Mark was determined not to get back in the car until the dog had done something. He didn't want a repeat of the morning. The two times Gerome squatted—he almost never lifted his leg—a car drove by and the rainwater splashing up under its tires distracted him.

Mark could feel himself getting rankled. He knew being mad at a dog was irrational. You can't reason with an animal. But he couldn't help it. He was peeved. “Come on, man,” he said. “Come on.”

Finally, just as Maggie emerged from the little store, Gerome squatted and peed.

“You took forever,” Mark called from across the parking lot. His shoulders were wet from the rain, the tops of his shoes damp.

Maggie shrugged. She had a coffee in each hand and a little plastic bag hooked around her wrist. “Yeah, but Gerome's just now doing his business,” she said. “So what does it matter?”

The coffee, like Mark knew it would be, was lukewarm.

“This is bad,” he said.

“I'll drink it,” Maggie said.

But that wasn't the point. Mark wanted coffee. He needed the caffeine.

Maggie pulled the car back onto 35. Gerome was standing in the backseat. He was drooling—something he did when he was nervous. It drove Mark nuts that they had a neurotic dog. Neurotic people had neurotic dogs, and Mark was not a neurotic person. And Maggie was a vet, for Christ's sake. It made no sense that Gerome wasn't a more natural animal.

“I swear to god, your dog is going to kill me if he doesn't sit down,” Mark said.

Maggie was ignoring him. Or, rather, she was ignoring his pessimism. Or what she'd call his pessimism. Which was an imprecise term for his current state of mind. What she
meant
by pessimism—even though she hadn't said anything, but what she meant in her thoughts, which right now Mark could've read a mile away—was, in fact, his current
dissatisfaction.
That's what she was actually ignoring. She didn't like it when he complained about more than one thing at a time: the coffee, the dog.

Well, tough luck. Sometimes the cookie crumbled in an unforgiving way, and sometimes Mark just needed to spout off about it. Sometimes it felt dishonest to keep his grievances to himself, which was what Maggie would have preferred.

He took another sip of coffee and grimaced deliberately, even though he knew Maggie was looking at the road and not at him. It felt good to grimace. It felt good to indulge in a physical manifestation of his dissatisfaction. He grimaced again. He felt like a man.
A man's man,
he thought.
A dog's dog and a man's man.
But Gerome was not a dog's dog. Where had that thought even come from? He shook it off.

Maggie switched the wipers to a higher speed. Outside, the air was glossy. Cotton ball clouds gathered overhead—milk blue at the bottom but rich green high up where the red sun hit the rounding peaks. In the distance, above a blinking streetlight, there were multiple cracks of sepia lightning.

“They were running on a generator,” Maggie said after a moment. “The gas station.”

“A generator?” said Mark. “I guess you don't need power to pump gas, huh? Or maybe you do. I hadn't thought about it.”

“The guy said all the houses on his side of the street lost power. All the houses on the other side”—she pointed out Mark's window—“still have it.”

For a moment, he watched the houses, one after the other. Some with cars in the driveway, most empty. Some with tidily mown lawns, most not. In almost every yard, there was a child's abandoned toy—a car, a castle, a shovel. If they'd had a kid, Mark would have avoided the brightly colored plastics, the neon yellows and greens that were geared more toward safety than fun. Not just for ecological reasons would he eschew the plastics, but for sentimental ones. Like so many others of his generation, he'd grown up with a classic red metal wagon: first he'd been carted around in it by his parents, and then, later, when he was big enough to pull it himself, he'd used it to tow the pots and pans and wooden spatulas Gwen had given him as playthings. He used his imagination to color in the fantasies, to brighten those hours of magical aloneness he spent outdoors. If they'd ever had a child, Mark would have raised him the same way. But, of course, they didn't. There was no one to be raised in or out of his image, which was simply the fact of the matter.

“In ten more years, towns like this won't exist,” Mark said. “Did you see all those For Sale signs? Everything is empty. It's just not cost-effective to live in the middle of nowhere. It's irresponsible.”

“Your parents live in the middle of nowhere,” she said.

“It's different. They live off the grid.”

“No,” she said. “They don't. They aren't farmers. They're retirees. They couldn't live without access to the city.”

“My father still teaches.”

“He's emeritus. He teaches once a year,” she said. Then, after a beat: “When he feels like it.”

Mark didn't understand why she was being so aggressive, perhaps because he'd been finicky about the coffee. “You love my parents,” he said.

“I do love your parents,” she said. “I love them more than my own. I don't know what I'd do without them in my life.”

Other wives made similar avowals to their husbands and they didn't mean a single word. But something Mark loved about Maggie—something he was genuinely thankful for—was that she did love his parents. And they loved her. They'd taken her in so keenly, so dearly. Maggie had a way of bringing out the best in Robert and Gwen. Around her, their eccentricities fell away. His mother especially seemed to understand, without ever being explicitly told, that Maggie's childhood had been—to put it kindly—subpar. Maggie was the first girl with whom his mother hadn't tried to compete. Instead, Gwen—like Mark, like Robert—had fallen quite quickly in love with Maggie.

“I only meant,” he said, “that if they wanted, they could live without access to the city. But they don't want to.”

Maggie nodded. “I know,” she said. “I'm sorry. I know exactly what you meant. I'm being snippy. My mind is somewhere else.”