“Yes?” Bernie closes his eyes.
“I remove it. You should do jeans for a while, T-shirts. Downscale. Lose the Porsche.” Chloe takes a silver sandaled step toward the front door.
“You don’t love me?” Bernie is confused and chaotic and finds the combination not entirely unpleasant. His trepidation has been replaced by an erratic turbulent energy.
He is blocking the door, with its thick carved oak panels and intricate squares of stained glass implanted in the center and along the edges. Her decorator no doubt looted that from a church, too. And he is not going to let her walk out to the driveway.
“Love you? I’m all dried up in that department. One marriage, 2 children, and the full liturgy of soccer. The 100 unique ornaments I was designated curator for. The secret acts of mediation. Messenger services. Currency exchange. Frankly, specific love isn’t even on my radar screen.” Chloe seems resigned.
“What do you want? I can give it to you.” Bernie is desperate.
“Solitude. Drift. I’ll travel. Maybe pen a mediocre verse here or there. It requires a climate you can’t provide. You can’t survive the altitude I’m looking for, believe me,” Chloe says. “And no more question and answer quizzes. No more multiple-choice tests. No more essays.”
“Will you take this?” He extends the agate. “You said swallows and constellations of stars were inside. The mysteries of oceans. Metamorphosis and mythology. Take it.”
“No more homework. School’s out, Bernie. School’s out forever.” Chloe sings the phrase, twice.
He thinks it might be an Aerosmith song. Or, perhaps and worse, Alice Cooper. Once he settles the suitcase problem, he’s going to play Coltrane on the house speakers at full volume. Dizzy and Monk. Parker and Miles. It’s going to be jazz week. Jazz month.
Bernie stands directly in front of his wife. Her suitcases are near the door. She is holding her car keys. Still, Bernie is beginning to get his bearings. There is a machinery in the periphery. He is starting to hear it hum and pump. There are mechanisms. Barter? Deduction is a gift. It becomes a skill experience polishes into a tool. The most fiercely reckless intuitions often prove accurate. And he can see the schematics now. There are blueprints and diagrams and there is nothing subtle about them.
“You don’t visit the hospital anymore,” Bernie notes. “You used to come for lunch. We had our special noon appointment.”
“I couldn’t stand all the doors opening to those discreet pastel alcoves. The rooms where women who still have eggs sit. Women with babies in their wombs. I could hear them devising names for infants. They do it alphabetically. Amy. Beatrice. Clarissa. Devra. Erica. Francine. Gabrielle.” Chloe glares at him.
“That’s a lie,” Bernie says, shocked. He wants to slap her across the face.
“Back away,” Chloe orders. Her voice is high and thin. It wavers, hangs in the air and loses its sense of direction and purpose. He considers fireworks, how they explode, tattooing the sky with a passionate conviction that quickly dissipates. Then she says, “Do you want the police here?”
Bernie Roth envisions the La Jolla police; two or three freshly painted vehicles parked in the circular cobblestone driveway, each officer tanned and uncertain. He imagines them standing in the marble entranceway below the oasis of stately 60-foot palm trees. The fronds cast unusually vertical shadows like arrows and darts. From certain angles, the house looks like Malta. He once suggested mounting an antique cannon in the turret. And domestic complaints are a gray area. He is, after all, the senior doctor at the hospital. Alternatively, he imagines chasing her car, positioning himself at the end of the driveway, his back against the wrought iron gate, his arms spread wide. She might impale him.
What are his options, precisely? He can shut off the master switch on his computer, of course, locking the garage and gates. Chloe refused to learn how to manipulate the systems. She said she wasn’t intelligent enough for such smart appliances. He often worried what she would do in an emergency power failure. Or he could call Ron Klein. Ron is running the psychiatric unit now. A wife with a menopausal psychotic break requiring hospitalization. It happens all the time. Ron owes him a few favors. But favors are a limited resource and he needs to ration them.
“I’m delirious,” Bernie realizes. “ I need to take something.”
The green in his wife’s eyes intensifies. It is like observing a river coming out of a mist. Or emeralds just professionally cleaned by sonic wave devices in a jewelry store.
“You’re going to open the cookie jar?” Chloe asks. “But you’re under suspicion. You swore no more until Christmas.”
“That’s nine months away. Isn’t that unnecessarily punitive and arbitrary?”
Bernie wanders into his study.
This is the only area of the house he has been allotted. He designed it himself in one weekend. He didn’t need a decorator. He ordered over the Internet. The walls are mahogany and the bookshelves contain his medical library, computer files and jazz discs. The lamps are solid brass. The sofa is brown leather like oak leaves in mid-October. The floor is red maple. Chloe disparaged his aesthetics and dismissed his study as aggressively masculine. But she is following him now.
Bernie Roth has always possessed the capacity for strategic action. It might be time to retire now, after all. Empty nest syndrome demands attention. Menopause is problematic. They can build something new, on a beach in Costa Rica or Mexico, perhaps. Grivin can help with the construction. Maybe he can get extra credit course points. And Nat. She can bring her girlfriend. They’re probably both good with hammers.
Bernie walks directly to the wall safe and unlocks it. The safe contains one blue canvas duffle all-purpose sports bag wedged against the metal. It fills the entire safe and Bernie has to yank it out. Chloe watches him unzip the bag. Bernie extracts a handful of glass vials. He removes a box of syringes.
The agate from Isla Negra is in his pocket. Later, Chloe will tell him about Neruda, the poet she was enthralled with when they first met. When she recited stanzas about volcanoes and poppies, he didn’t hear the words precisely, but rather followed the narrative through her mouth and eyes. It was medical school and he was stupefied with exhaustion. He heard the phrases she offered as a music that was visual. It was a sequence of facial expressions, a tapestry of geometries composed from flesh. Trajectories formed on her lips, which were rivers and bays with bridges, and exited through her eyes, which were green wells and portals that could foretell the future.
Tell me what the stones know, he will command later. I want to be initiated into the language of agates. Show me how they form bodies like infants and feed themselves from stars. And Chloe will comply. She will find the capacity for jazz. It’s simple. Saxophones mean spread your legs. Later, she’ll laugh at his WMD joke. Her throat will emit sounds that look like strings of rubies and sapphires. She will fall down on her knees and explain everything. She will invent and improvise. He’ll help her remember why she has a mouth.
“The usual?” Bernie asks, glass vials in his hand. He prepares a mixture that is two parts morphine, one part cocaine. He prefers the reverse. He taps the air bubbles out of the syringes. “We’ll celebrate the birth of god early this year. Take a few weeks off. Reassess our position.”
Chloe apparently agrees. She has removed her beige dress with the thin shoulder straps. She isn’t wearing underwear. She curls on her side on the leather sofa like a fawn at dusk. Bernie Roth reaches for his wife. She extends her right arm, the one with the good veins. He injects her first. Then he injects himself.
WOMEN OF THE PORTS