The other thing Tom Marshall did once everything was wonderful was have an affair with a silkscreen artist who also rented space in the artists’ co-op — a woman much younger than Nancy, named Crystal Blue, whose silkscreen operation was called “Crystal Blue’s Creations,” and who Nancy had been nice to on the occasions she visited Tom’s space to view his new projects.
Crystal was a pretty little airhead with no personality of any sort, who printed Maxfield Parrish — like female profiles in diaphanous dresses, using garish, metallic colors. These she peddled out of an electric blue van with her likeness on the side, usually to bikers and amphetamine addicts at fourth-rate craft fairs in West Virginia and southern Pennsylvania. Nancy realized Crystal would naturally be drawn to Tom, who was a stand-up, handsome, wide-eyed guy — the opposite of Crystal. And Tom might be naturally attracted to Crystal’s cheapness, which posed as a lack of inhibition. Though only up to a point, she assumed — the point being when Tom stopped to notice there was nothing there to be interested in. Another encounter, of course. But along with that would quickly come boredom, the annoyance of managing small-change deceptions, and the silly look Crystal kept on her large, too-Italian mouth, which would inevitably become irritating. Plus the more weighty issues of betrayal and the risk of doing irreparable damage to something valuable in his — and Nancy’s — life.
Tom, however, managed to look beyond these impediments, and to fuck Crystal in her silkscreen studio on an almost daily basis for months, until her boyfriend figured it out and called Nancy at her office and blew Tom’s cover by saying in a nasal, West Virginia accent, “Well, what’re we gonna do with our two artistic lovebirds?”
When Nancy confronted Tom — at dinner in an Asian restaurant down the street from the public defender’s office — with a recounting of the boyfriend’s phone conversation, he became very grave and fixed his gaze on the tablecloth and laced his large bony fingers around a salad fork.
It was true, he admitted, and he was sorry. He said he thought fucking Crystal was a “reaction” to suddenly being off the force after half his life, and being depressed about his line-of-duty injury, which still caused him discomfort when it rained. But it was also a result of pure exhilaration about his new life, something he needed to celebrate on his own and in his own way — a “universe feeling” he called it, wherein acts took place outside the boundaries of convention, obligation, the past and even good sense (just as events occurred in the universe). This new life, he said, he wanted to spend entirely with Nancy, who’d sat composed and said little, though she wasn’t thinking about Crystal, or Tom, or Crystal’s boyfriend or even about herself. While Tom was talking (he seemed to go on and on and on), she was actually experiencing a peculiar sense of weightlessness and near disembodiment, as though she could see herself listening to Tom from a comfortable but slightly dizzying position high up around the red, scrolly, Chinese-looking crown molding. The more Tom talked, the less present, the less substantial, the less anything she felt. If Tom could’ve gone on talking — recounting his problems, his anxieties, his age-related feelings of underachievement, his dwindling sense of self-esteem since he quit chasing robbers with a gun — Nancy realized she might just have disappeared entirely. So that the problem (if that’s what all this was — a problem) might simply be solved: no more Crystal Blue; no more morbid, regretful Tom; no more humiliating, dismal disclosures implying your life was even more like every other life than you were prepared to concede — all of it gone in the breath of her own dematerialization.
She heard Tom say — his long, hairy-topped fingers turning the ugly, institutional salad fork over and over like a prayer totem, his solemn gaze fastened on it — that it was absolutely over with Crystal now. Her hillbilly boyfriend had apparently set the phone down from talking to Nancy, driven to Crystal’s studio and kicked it to pieces, then knocked her around a little, after which the two of them got in his Corvette and drove to Myrtle Beach to patch things up. Tom said he would find another space for his work; that Crystal would be out of his life as of today (not that she’d ever really been in his life), and that he was sorry and ashamed. But if Nancy would forgive him and not leave him, he could promise her that such as this would never happen again.
Tom brought his large blue cop’s eyes up off the table and sought hers. His face — always to Nancy a craggy, handsome face, a face with large cheek bones, deep eye sockets, a thick chin and overlarge white teeth — looked at that moment more like a skull, a death’s head. Not really, of course; she didn’t see an actual death’s head like on a pirate flag. But it was the thought she experienced, and the words: “Tom’s face is a death’s head.” And though she was sure she wasn’t obsessive or compulsive or a believer in omens or symbols as sources of illumination, she had thought the words — Tom’s face is a death’s head — and pictured them as a motto on the lintel of a door to a mythical courtroom that was something out of Dante. One way or another, this, the idea of a death’s head, had to be somewhere in what she believed.
When Tom was finished apologizing, Nancy told him without anger that changing studios shouldn’t be necessary if he could stay away from Crystal when she came back from Myrtle Beach. She said she had perhaps misjudged some things, and that trouble in a marriage, especially a long marriage, always came about at the instigation of both partners, and that trouble like this was just a symptom and not terribly important per se. And that while she didn’t care for what he’d done, and had thought that very afternoon about divorcing him simply so she wouldn’t have to think about it anymore, she actually didn’t believe his acts were directed at her, for the obvious reason that she hadn’t done anything to deserve them. She believed, she said, that what he’d done was related to the issues he’d just been talking about, and that her intention was to forgive him and try to see if the two of them couldn’t weather adversity with a greater-than-ever intimacy.
“Why don’t you just fuck me tonight?” she said to him right at the table. The word fuck was provocative, but also, she realized, slightly pathetic as an address to your husband. “We haven’t done that in a while.” Though of course you’ve been doing it every day with your retarded girlfriend were the words she’d thought but didn’t like thinking.
“Yes,” Tom said, too gravely. Then, “No.”
His large hands were clasped, forkless, on the white tablecloth not far from hers. Neither moved as though to effect a touch.
“I’m so sorry,” Tom said for the third or fourth time, and she knew he was. Tom wasn’t a man distanced from what he felt. He didn’t say something and then start thinking what it could mean now that he’d said it, finally concluding it didn’t mean anything. He was a good, sincere man, qualities that had made him an exemplary robbery detective, a superb interrogator of felons. Tom meant things. “I hope I haven’t ruined our life,” he added sadly.