Vacation (4 page)

One day she had called his office to say she’d be late. That’s how it all started. He’d had a different job back then, a worse one, one that never required he stay late, and she’d had an even worse one, one that didn’t require her at all. So when she said, I’m going to be late, it was surprise that her job needed her that made him say, Do you have to?

It’s work, I’m working. I’m sorry. Order without me.

Order. He and his wife ate items that answered to a call, that were called for, items that arrived in foil with a plastic hat on top, the entire assembly placed into kraft paper, stapled for security, and then put inside an additional thin plastic bag tied at the top.

On that particular day, he forgot to ask which item she wished to find at the bottom of all the protective coverings. His mind that day was distracted, frayed from the longstanding understanding he had with walls, billboards, disembodied voices. No parking here to corner. Close-out deals now. Don’t forget your lotto. Stand clear of the closing doors, please. He called back. She didn’t answer her office phone or her cell. At the front desk they said she’d left an hour before.

The truth was, he could imagine a scenario where he would have to confess each time he followed her, one by one, would have to produce the date, hour, coordinates, trajectory. She would also confess her end of it, which was substantial. They would take turns, reciting sites and times, alphabetically or chronologically, marking them off one by one or deleting them from an electronic file.

She came home late that night, had something else in her or on her, a mussed appearance, a healthy ruddy complexion, not the dried tired look of someone with an evening of input and printout behind her. She had a callous glow.

Where were you?

I told you. Work.

Considering at that point she had never lied to him before, he didn’t think.

I’ll be late again, sorry. This was her calling again the next day.

If you say so.

I have to stay and work.

Duty gums the shoe, as they say.

What?

I’m just saying.

The slate of his brown desk, the planes and circles scattered over his screen, the uncoil of the phone cord. He rose, walked fourteen blocks in winter sun. Stood outside the building that did not but was supposed to contain her, stood beside a fountain of cement. He looked up, saw nothing, saw lit and darkened windows. The moral grid of steel spired up the side.

That, a hard man would count as the first night he followed her.

That time, of course, he didn’t get very far and he didn’t see her.

What could he do that night other than not sleep, wake dull, proceed as expected outwardly?

So she had lied and sneaked, a fact he could hardly get his head around.

Reasons not to confront her: (he couldn’t think of any).

Reasons not to confront her: he couldn’t believe it.

So she had lied about staying late at work. And she lied again when she came home. And she lied again the next day, and once more when she came home.

She hadn’t been raised by warm people. Her father had a phony laugh. Her mother was prim, airtight, walked around looking cheated. The two of them appeared every other season, perched on their seats as if slightly offended by their surroundings and who was in them, and then melted back into the Midwest. Myers thought sadly of his wife as a little girl being raised among these people and forgave her own distanced, lonely air.

She called again. Would be late.

He ran the fourteen blocks, five of them long, nine short, because no way, wherever she thought she was going, she wasn’t. He ran, sifting through the baby carriages, the shoppers, pushing if he had to, because what is worse, to knock someone over or miss the chance to stop her flat?

These were the sky-white winter days of inventory-clearance, streetside flea markets, sidewalk racks.

(It was the only time he had to run. After that he strolled, arrived early. In the spring, which fell upon them grimly with its hellish green, he ate a hot dog and waited for her to come down. She had dispensed with the calls to his office by that time, in any case.)

But that day he ran, pushing people out of the way. Let them fall over. Let them arrest him. Put him away. This disregard for the safety and comfort of others may be shocking but it was not as much of a shock as what he got just as he came tearing into the plaza—

She emerged from the building, walked right by.

In the past week they’d talked over meals and at bedtime about couch sizes, store names, power strips…

She didn’t see him, didn’t look his way at all. He froze, could not move. In the air, a border scratched between them.

…trivia (origin of the beanbag, sea-foam features, name of the world’s greatest dolphin trainer), summer trips (beach, forest, falls?).

Her bag swung by her side. The light didn’t light up anything special, didn’t pick her out of the crowd. It lit what was there without expression, without distinguishing itself in any way other than the obstinacy of its own existence. Even the metal buckle on her bag, holding it all together so the mess didn’t tumble out, the sunlight didn’t shine on it that Myers could see, and he could see a lot from where he stood that day. He really could.

She was just a woman walking up the street.

He did not go after her, did not run down the long shadow of the side-walk, swing her around by the arm. He stepped back, watched. People got around each other and into the space between them. The woman who lied walked away, did not yet know she’d been caught.

That he counted as the second day he followed her.

Other seconds: helpings, hands, rates, but mostly having to do with time, the time it took for one thought to follow another, and other followings, such as heartbeats, blinks, steps. Many of them added together or separated. He felt them. Not the minutes, mind you, but the seconds.

The next time, he was there and he followed. She went off. The background blurred in his eye. She stopped, sat on a bench on the loudest corner the earth had ever known. A catastrophe of buses and drillings, the dash of the taxi, the rush and halt, the tamping down of the cement, the suck of air in, the press of it out, the slow sink of the city, the spread of tar, the lifting of it, the footsteps going through, the out and out of breaths. He watched. In front of him two children knocked around a construction cone.

Who the hell did she think she was, sitting there like that?

She jumped up and was off again, walking over the invisible shake of the train, through the lines of cars standing at traffic lights. She turned into a restaurant. He followed her in, had to do some sidestepping to get in there around the sizing-up going on. A place as bland as anywhere—some sort of cheap, meaningless theme of boats or vegetables or body parts on the walls, their tin representations glowing and flaking. A tune pumped in. Food descending onto tables. People much like himself and herself in suit get-ups and in various conversational postures—lovey, feigning, shrill. He couldn’t find her. He pushed through the hands reaching and retracting.

He found her. She was alone at a small round table. She sipped something from a mug. She sat for an hour, doing nothing. Staring.

If she was meeting someone here, he was late.

If she was meeting someone here, he wasn’t meeting her.

She stood up at last. Myers bowed into the bathroom to avoid her. He went out to the street and she was gone.

This was so early in their marriage that they still had packing materials around, half-empty boxes, silver in sleeves, Styrofoam noodles. The apartment felt huge when she wasn’t there, too white. It was so early in their marriage he still believed he knew her, that he could. He still believed in that—knowing.

She complained about work. The meetings were long and tedious, she said. She fell asleep in her chair, she said. She nearly fell out the window she was so bored. She nearly leapt, that’s how bad it was, you can’t imagine. She would have welcomed an earthquake.

All the extra work they were giving her, she said. Unpaid hours, late meetings, she hadn’t eaten dinner, her feet were sore, her eyes, her very head was vacant, depleted of thought, canceled, zeroed out. That’s how tired she was.

His rage was a saw, going back and forth, cutting through arteries, hers. They had a dinner of steam-table vegetables, ate quietly across from one another. They slept. Or rather, she slept. Or acted like she did.

Reasons not to confront her: Clearly the woman was not in the mood to tell him the truth about any subject larger than a button. And he himself had no intention of showing his shapes too soon.

He followed her. For weeks this went on. Sometimes he managed to track her all the way home and then he had to make up excuses, dissimulate (because he never actually lied, he was sure), invent where he’d been. She met no one, spoke to no one, maybe a word to a server or cashier. Her movements were random, jumpy. One minute sitting, staring into a mass of tables, the next rising, heading for the door, a few dollars down for the bill. He couldn’t understand it. She didn’t read or write or eat. She drank tea or coffee. Or just stood outside, often the same nondescript building flung up in front of her, her bag slouching her shoulder. She lied like an adolescent when she came home. What could he say? He knew she was going for walks? He wasn’t saying a thing until he found out just what she thought she was getting away with.

Was she getting crazy, perhaps? Crazier?

Reasons not to confront her: who was she now?

He wrote her letters, rewrote, revised, tore them up.

1stly I saw you exit the building and turn right.

2ndly I saw you go four blocks.

3rdly I saw you on the next corner stop in front of a store window and not look into it, a store you adore. As your husband, I know.

4thly I saw you cross the street, stop, then cross back again.

5thly why did you do that? There was nothing ahead and nothing behind. Coming darkness, filled avenues.

6thly I saw you walk east again.

7thly I saw you pass the spot of original departure and continue.

8thly I saw you turn left onto Broadway and pass through a heavy crowd of tourists.

9thly why did you do that? You hate that.

10thly why didn’t you turn at any point and see me? You never even looked left or right.

11thly what happened to you after that? I lost you.

12thly what’s the matter with you?

13thly I saw you keep moving but I couldn’t get through.

14thly when did you stop?

About the lights: He knew about the lights, that they had become an issue, in place of The Issue, that the lights had become a stand-in or substitute, as they are for sunlight or moonlight. He knew they had this additional function, they obscured as well as brightened, were a deflecting glare where before there had been none, only voices, cool rooms, he knew he and she had achieved this when one day he came home and said, Why are all these lights on?

(Question: who cares?)

She was sitting on the couch, watching TV. She looked up and said, There are three lights on.

She named them: 1. the kitchen, 2. the hallway, 3. the living room.

Why do you need the one on in the kitchen?

To get a drink.

And the hallway?

To walk to get a drink.

You need a light on for that?

Yes, I do.

And in here? (After all, she had the goddamn TV.)

To sit in the spot where the drink will be drunk.

It wasn’t only the lights that acted as a detour. Other subjects and objects did as well. There was the tea and the issue about that. There was the garbage and all of that. The laundry, her laundry, and what she did with it, and his laundry and what he did with it. And all the other items that got scuffed or hung up or needed dealing with, floors and hangers and checkbooks. There was her slow-moving tone and his, slowly moving from loving to harsh, the slow movement of them moving away from each other on the bed.