Shelter in Place (23 page)

“Good night, Tess, good night, Boyfriend.”

I don't remember how long it went on. Our visits. Those walks. How many times we saw the house dark, or saw Anna smiling, or stood idle behind the white picket fence listening to the fighting through the thump and squeak of the trampoline.

There were many nights I wouldn't walk. Nights Tess went off without me. Nights I'd sit on the porch and worry about her until she came home to take her place next to me and pour herself a glass saying nothing to my nothing.

We were moving toward something. You have to see that it was inevitable. I'm sure you believe in responsibility, in free will, in making decisions. Even as you spend your life sliding back and forth on that train, in that truck, rising up and down on that elevator. Even as you do the same things day after day. Even as you murder your time while the same dull people say the same dull things about changing your same dull life.

And all the while saying, I can do what I want, I can do what I want, I can do what I want.

There was a moment when the great boulder began to roll, and nothing was to be done about it. A time when there was no more freedom, no more choice. We were a simple single fact, one foregone conclusion, the two of us, one thing, hurtling forward.

A
nd then one night there was a black figure in a black mask standing at our bedroom window. Two eyes and a mouth. And I thought, Sam Young has come to kill us. I will have to fight. I was moving, rising toward him, sick with adrenaline, wide awake, determined and committed. But I stopped when the figure crossed from the window to the door.

I said, “What the fuck, Tess?”

And maybe she hadn't heard because of the mask, or maybe she was trying to frighten me. But whatever the case she didn't turn, and she didn't speak.

I stood naked at the window watching her walk away from the house until she vanished from view.

I
suppose I'm a kind of a Quaker now myself. Sitting here at my father's table looking out over the clearing.

What is this if not waiting worship?

What is the difference between Tess and God? And even you?

These are silent services. These days facing the woods are long prayers. These words, this quiet.

The television is gone, and now the telephones.

Yesterday afternoon I found my father's .45.

It was in the garage wrapped in a yellow chamois at the bottom of the dented army ammo box along with his dog tags and a carton of bullets. I sat out there at the workbench and broke down the pistol the way he'd taught me. More or less, anyway. It was a struggle to remember all the steps. I cleaned and oiled it as best I could and put it back together, which took a long time. I don't think I'd even held the thing since I was fifteen. I fed the clip, thinking of a Donald Duck Pez dispenser my sister used to love.

You wouldn't approve, Claire, would you? Of this isolation. Of my mind. Loading Dad's gun.

Get in the car and drive, right? Burn the fucking house down already. Cut and run. To hell with Tess, that selfish bitch. How can my brother have become so weak? Live your damn life. You'll be dead soon enough. Go get drunk. Get laid, for Christ's sake. Find that fine little farmer.

I can hear you yelling. I see your neck all flushed.

But what about you, Claire? Are you really living your life out there? Are you so happy with your new name, your new money? Are you so much better without us?

I laid the computer on an empty lawn bag in the clearing and shot it to pieces. Emptied the whole clip. I still feel the bursting recoil in my hand.

When it was done I tied the bag and dumped it in the trash.

The .45 is back in its box on a shelf in the garage.

But I've refilled the clip, left one in the chamber.

So the computer is gone, the TV and the telephones, the satellite dish, the radios. And with them all their chatter.

I think I'll abandon spoken language. I prefer to wait with you in silence for whatever it is that's coming.

The talons and the tar, or the other thing beyond language.

You or Tess or God.

T
he Owl on a booming Saturday night. A week after my lunatic girlfriend scared the shit out of me and then went off into the White Pine night dressed like a cut-rate assassin.

We went about our business. The trampoline kept making its wretched music, and that piece of shit kept throwing his wife into walls.

And yes, we called the police. Three times we called. Once they came. Once nothing was done. No charges. No complaint filed.

How do we know?

Seymour Strout, to whom we will shortly return.

Seymour Strout knows all.

It was the usual farce, the usual terror. We keep out of domestic affairs. We are reluctant to get involved in the private matters of the home. Private matters between husband and wife, a wife who refuses to make a complaint, who refuses to explain her injuries. A daughter who shows no sign of abuse, who claims to know nothing of her mother's bruised face, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Is there a single person left alive who doesn't know this story?

The gruesome machine. Its grinding horror. For and by men. So the police were reluctant to get involved, as are we all. Tess, on the other hand, had a different attitude altogether. As you may have gathered by now, Tess had a different attitude entirely. So back to a Friday not long before we dove headlong into the darkness.

We are at The Owl. Tess out on the floor, Seymour running his door, and me, I'm working my bar. It's crowded with students, this the night before spring break begins. An Emerson tradition, one last party before the party, before flying off to Mexico or Florida or Texas or wherever else they went each spring. Nights like this I have a barback. I can't quite see him now, but I know he's there, marrying bottles, bringing buckets of ice. He's a blur. Some local kid, a townie, who nearly by definition despises the students he's serving. He's someone talented, or he wouldn't be there. The job pays too well. We can afford to be selective. I can't see his face, but I have some vague sense that he had unruly hair. I may be confusing him with someone else from another time. So many bars in my life. But who gives a fuck, right? Let's just say he's a tall, thin kid with wild curls. Let's say his name is Matt or Craig and that Seymour brought him in as a favor to the kid's father who's a guard out at The Pine. So around nine the place is humming and all of us are on. It's that feeling when all the planets are aligned. A rare and lovely thing.

I'm on the upswing. Then and now.

There is no grime obscuring my eyes. I'm calm and fast. The orders come in over the bar, and from the waitresses, Tess among them. I see all the drinks before they're made. There is no math too complicated, the world a perfectly ordered place, all systems pure.

Let's say dead center you've got two long-haired idiots who think they're both Eddie Vedder. One of them keeps raising his hand saying, “Yo, bro, yo, bro, yo.”

And then you've got three guys you like on one end, who tip well, and some girls whose order you already know on the other. And Tess is coming in at the service side and she's waiting for two vodka tonics, one Jack and Coke, and three Cuervo shots. The guys you like are Coronas with Cuervo shots back and it's all coming in at once. Nights like this your filters are flawless. Nights like this you're some kind of prodigious performer, some magical dancer. You see each glass before its even on the runner and then there they are all in a line and you can't even remember doing it, setting them up: six shot, three rocks.

Ice, ice, ice.

Lime, lime.

Straw, straw.

The right hand is moving the vodka bottle on the two count from glass to glass to glass. You start the Jack pour with the other in time with the second vodka.

Vodka back to the well, Jack to the first shelf behind you.

Always return bottles to their place. There must never be disorder.

Your thumb on the gun goes, tonic, tonic, Coke.

You sail that Cuervo bottle over the shot glasses and split three from the six.

Tess gets her drinks first.

Always.

She looks at me with an expression I can't parse. It is not part of our repertoire, our silent language of the workplace. There's the smallest pause, the briefest slowing, and then she pivots and glides away.

Now the rubber runner is free for two martini glasses. Fill them with water and ice, because you have style despite the place. You pop three Coronas, the opener as easy in your hand as brass knuckles.

You deliver it all and follow with a plate of limes and salt. You smile at the guys. You remember their names. You say something funny about Florida.

They say, “Keep the change, Joey.”

You mix the Cosmos in a shaker. You think Kamikaze plus cranberry. You think, very tricky landing.

Vodka, triple sec, lime.

Very. Tricky. Landing.

Because a thousand years ago that's how you learned it and every single time the order comes, for an instant, in a flash of film, you see one of those planes, one of those Zeros in black and white tearing out of the sky.

Then the vodka is a two count three times in one hand, so six. And the triple sec in the other. Then there's the Rose's. Then there's the cranberry. You dump the chilling glasses. You cap the shaker and go one hard snap. More than that is meaningless theater and you don't need that bullshit.

Now look at the girls. Look right at them and smile to say,
these are yours
. To say,
even if I'll never fuck you, we can pretend
. Because when you are like this, when you are fearless and deadly, when you have the fleeting maniac confidence, the electric rise that brought you to Tess in the very first place, then you know there isn't a woman alive who wouldn't take you to bed. And as if to prove your point, as if to prove your own invincible brilliance, you fly the shaker across each glass and there is just enough, down to a single violet drop, there is just enough to fill those three full to their brims.

They say, “Thanks, Joey,” and they smile up at you because you are elevated, because you are impervious even to gravity, and they say in their secondary language, “We would do anything for you, Joey March, anything at all.”

This is what it feels like out there at The Owl on a Friday night in April with the love of your life speaking strange with her eyes, when all the world is a land of perfect logic, when there is no downturn and Seymour Strout smiles at you from the door, gives you a certain nod that says he knows too that this night is a good one, that there is a secret rhythm, a secret chord, and all of us are inside of it, all of us are infected. And this good night goes on and this crowd is another single thing, which swells and deflates, swells and deflates.

Tess returns amidst some lull or another. She glides in on one of those shifts in pressure, a disturbance in the atmosphere, and she arrives with the same look, speaking that same silent phrase I can't yet decode.

I go to her and incline my head.

She brings her mouth to my ear.

It is a sublime and extraordinary privacy.

We drop below the water line. Down here the noise is muted, the crowd retreats.

She says, “The bathroom,” and I follow.

This is an order I've never been given, not here, not by Tess. I abandon my post. I give the bar to the back.

There's a narrow bathroom out by the storeroom—facilities for the labor.

When I open the door she's standing, leaning against the small sink, her shoulder blades to the mirror.

“Close it,” she says, giving a sharp little nod. I fall back. There's a quiet click sealing us in, and the bar noise loses its treble.

Here her expression is familiar. Lust.

Though there is something else to it I still can't translate.

Maybe it is the degree.

“Hey, Tess.” Just to say her name.

The clock has started.

The ice is melting.

A towel is folded over the sink divider.

A cap is loose on a bottle of olives.

We're low on cherries.

The bar is a savage animal I've left untended.

Tess is looking at me in her new way. Or the old way multiplied and laced with some new thing.

“Joey,” she says.

There's a single dim bulb hanging from the ceiling.

There's no tenderness in her face.

What I love is when she narrows her eyes, tilts her head just an inch to the left, and smiles at me with her lips closed. An uncanny expression, which contains both desire and sympathy.

This is not that.

This contains a foreign and faraway thing.

A flake of malice.

She draws her hands up the outsides of her thighs, beneath her black skirt, and bends at the waist. Her face is replaced by my own. For a moment I look at my eyes in the mirror. Then down to the curve of Tess's back.

She is upright again.

She winds her panties around her right fist like she's taping for a fight.

She reaches again and pulls her skirt up.

Not slowly.

She widens her stance. “Come here,” she says.

There's no singsong in her voice. No girlish theater. “Come here.”

I take the space between us. A single step. I'm looking down at her. If I were to look up, I'd see myself. I can sense that dark figure.

She moves her fingers around the back of my head and squeezes.

She looks right into my eyes.

“Suck it,” she says. Stretching the s, stressing the k, making it all one angry word: SssuKit.

She pulls, but I resist. She raises her other hand, my ears now between her wrists.

She pulls and I go down.

I'm squatting but she wants me on my knees.

She pulls and I come forward off my heels.

She presses her feet against my shoulders and lifts herself onto the sink. She's still pulling. I'm too far away. I have to inch along the filthy floor.