Tom Marshall turned off the light in the tiny bathroom and came and stood just behind her, wearing blue pajama bottoms. He touched her shoulders, stood closer to her until she could feel him aroused.
“I know why the store’s open ’til one o’clock,” Nancy said, “but I don’t know why all the people come.” Something about his conspicuous warm presence made her feel a chill. She covered her breasts, which were near the window glass. She imagined he was smiling.
“I guess they love it,” Tom said. She could feel him properly — very stiff now. “This is what Maine means. A visit to Bean’s after midnight. It’s the global culture. They’re probably on their way to Atlantic City.”
“Okay,” Nancy said. Because she was cold, she let herself be pulled to him. This was all right. She was exhausted. His cock fit between her legs — just there. She liked it. It felt familiar. “I asked the wrong question.” There was no reflection in the glass of her or him behind her, inching into her. She stood perfectly still.
“What would the right question be?” Tom pushed flush against her, bending his knees just a fraction to find her. He was smiling.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe the question is, what do they know that we don’t? What are we doing over here on this side of the street? Clearly the action’s over there.”
She heard him exhale, then he moved away. She had been about to open her legs, lean forward a little. “Not that.” She looked around for him. “I don’t mean that.” She put her hand between her legs just to touch, her fingers covering herself. She looked back at the street. The two bus drivers she believed could not see through the shadowy trees were both looking right at her. She didn’t move. “I didn’t mean that,” she said to Tom faintly.
“Tomorrow we’ll see some things we’ll like,” he said cheerfully. He was already in bed. That fast.
“Good.” She didn’t care if two creeps saw her naked; it was exactly the same as her seeing them clothed. She was forty-five. Not so slender, but tall, willowy. Let them look. “That’s good,” she said again. “I’m glad we came.”
“I’m sorry?” Tom said sleepily. He was almost gone, the cop’s blessed gift to be asleep the moment his head touched the pillow.
“Nothing,” she said, at the window, being watched. “I didn’t say anything.”
He was silent, breathing. The two drivers began shaking their heads, looking down now. One flipped a cigarette into the street. They both looked up again, then stepped out of sight behind their idling buses.
Tom Marshall had been a policeman for twenty-two years. They had lived in Harlingen, Maryland, the entire time. He had worked robberies and made detective before anyone. Nancy was an attorney in the Potomac County public defender’s office and did women’s cases, family defense, disabled rights, children at risk. They had met in college at Macalester, in Minnesota. Tom had hoped to be a lawyer, expected to do environmental or civil rights, but had interviewed for the police job because they’d suddenly produced a child. He found, however, that he liked police work. Liked robberies. They were biblical (though he wasn’t religious), but not as bad as murders. Nancy had started law school before their son, Anthony, graduated. She hadn’t wanted to get trapped with too little to do when the house suddenly became empty. The reversal in their careers seemed ironic but insignificant.
In his twenty-first year, though, two and a half years ago, Tom Marshall had been involved in a shooting inside a Herman’s sporting goods, where he’d gone to question a man. The officer he partnered with had been killed, and Tom had been shot in the leg. The thief was never caught. When his medical leave was over, he went back to work with a medal for valor and a new assignment as an inspector of detectives, but that had proved unsatisfying. And over the course of six months he became first bored by his office routine, then alienated, then had experienced “emotional issues”—mostly moodiness — which engendered bad morale consequences for the men he was expected to lead. So that by Christmas he retired, took his pension at forty-three and began a period of at-home retooling, which after a lot of reading led him to the idea of inventing children’s toys and actually making them himself in a small work-space he rented in an old wire factory converted to an artists’ co-op in the nearby town of Brunswick, on the Potomac.
Tom Marshall, as Nancy observed, had never been truly “cop-ish.” He was not silent or cynical or unbending or self-justifying or given to explosive, terrifying violence. He was, instead, a tall bean-poley, smilingly handsome man with long arms, big bony hands and feet, a shock of coarse black hair and a generally happy disposition. He was more like a high-school science teacher, which Nancy thought he should’ve been, though he was happy to have been a cop once he was gone from the job. He liked to read Victorian novels, hike in the woods, watch birds, study the stars. And he could fix and build anything — food processors, lamps, locks — could fashion bird and boat replicas, invent ingenious furniture items. He had the disposition of a true artisan, and Nancy had never figured out why he’d stayed a cop so long except that he’d never thought his life was his own when he was young, but rather that he was a married man with responsibilities. Her most pleasing vision of her married self was standing someplace, anyplace, alongside some typical Saturday-morning project of Tom’s — building a teak inlaid dictionary stand, fine-tuning a home-built go-cart for Anthony, rigging a timed sprinkling system for the yard — and simply watching him admiringly, raptly, almost mystically, as if to say “how marvelous and strange and lucky to be married to such a man.” Marrying Tom Marshall, she believed, had allowed her to learn the ordinary acts of devotion, love, attentiveness, and the acceptance of another — acts she’d never practiced when she was younger because, she felt, she’d been too selfish. A daddy’s girl.
Tom had gotten immediately and enthusiastically behind the prospect of Nancy earning a law degree. He came home on flextime to be with Anthony during his last year of high school. He postponed vacations so she could study, and never talked about his own law school aspirations. He’d rented a hall, staged a graduation party and driven her to her bar exam in the back of a police car, then staged another party when she passed. He applauded her decision to become a public defender, and didn’t gripe about the low pay and long hours, which he said were the costs of important satisfactions and of making a contribution.
For a brief period then, after Tom took his retirement and began work at the co-op, and Anthony had been accepted at Goucher and was interning for the summer in D.C., and Nancy had gotten on her feet with the county, their life on earth seemed as perfect as ever could be imagined. Nancy began to win more cases than she lost. Anthony was offered a job for whenever he graduated. And Tom dreamed up and actually fabricated two toy sculptures for four-year-olds that he surprisingly sold to France, Finland and to Neiman Marcus.
One of these toys was a ludicrously simple dog shape that Tom cut out on a jigsaw, dyed yellow, red and green and drew on dog features. But he cut the shape in a way to effectively make six dogs that fitted together, one on the other, so that the sculpture could be taken apart and reassembled endlessly by its child owner. Tom called it Wagner-the-Dog, and made twenty thousand dollars off of it and had French interest for any new ideas. The other sculpture was a lighthouse made of balsam, which also fitted together in a way you could dismantle but was, he felt, too intricate. It sold only in Finland and didn’t make any money. Maine Lighthouse he called it, and didn’t think it was very original. He was planning a website.