After a couple weeks I didn't even notice that Daisy was never in bed. She probably slept a couple of hours while the kids were watching TV, but I can't be sure of that. As for sex, it wasn't happening, and not just because of the fact that she decided not to talk to me. Pure talk was never that important to us anyway, even at the beginning, when it was mostly joking and flirting, for though her English was more than passable it was just rudimentary enough for us to stay clear of in-depth and nu-anced discussions, which suited me fine. The truth was that while I was hungering for her I had an equally keen desire to hold out as long as I could stand, because if she had any power over me it was certainly sexual power, which, most other things being equal, is what all women should easily have over all men.
Daisy could always, please forgive me, float my boat, top my prop, she could always crank up the generators at any moment and make me feel that every last cell in my body was overjuiced and soon-to-be-derelict if not immediately launched toward something warm and soft. In her own way she was a performer, as they say actors can be when they enter a room; something in them switches on and suddenly everybody is pointed right at them, abject with confused misery and love.
And this really happened, mostly while I was slumbering. I don't know how many times she did it, but one night the doorbell rang and roused me from a deep sleep and I trudged tingling in the limbs to the door to find my wife wrapped in a big blue poly tarp with a burly young officer of the local law standing behind her waving a long flashlight.
"Are you the head of this household, sir?" he asked, momentarily blinding me with the beam, and fully waking me up.
"You wanna kill the light, chief?"
"Sorry, sir," he said, slipping the flashlight into his belt. "Are you the head of household?"
"If you mean am I the owner, then yes."
"Is this your wife?"
I looked at Daisy, who just looked glum and down in the mouth, as if this whole thing was yet another chore of her unglamorous life.
"Yes. She's my wife."
"She was at the elementary school, in the playground there.
There was a complaint."
"What? Is it illegal, to be over there?"
"I believe there's a school grounds curfew, sir, but that wasn't the whole problem."
"Oh yeah?"
Daisy then said, "Just cut it out, Jerry. Good night, officer.
Thanks for the ride home." She tippy-toed and pecked him on the cheek, and then stepped inside. "Oh, this is yours."
She peeled the tarp from herself, and handed it to him. She was wearing only sneakers, white Keds with the blue pencil stripe on the rubber. The young cop thanked her and said good night, like it was a goddamned date or something. Daisy disappeared inside.
The cop said, "Sir, if you could please tell your wife 1'11 have to cite her the next time."
"There's not going to be a goddamn next time!"
"I'm just saying. ."
"Good night," I said, and I slammed the door.
I found Daisy in the kitchen, making tuna-and-egg salad for a sandwich. She had the eggs going at furious boil in the stockpot, the bread in the toaster, she had the jars of mayonnaise and mus-tard and sweet pickle relish out on the counter, she had the celery and carrot and onion on the cutting board, and she had the ice blue German chef's knife in her hand, the one Pop had given her at Christmas. But the strange thing was that she did it all so casually, as if a nude woman in sneakers chopping vegetables at three in the morning after a neighborhood police sweep was de rigueur around here, our customary midsummer night's dream.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"I'm hungry. You want to eat, too?"
"No, I don't."
"You have trouble sleeping?"
"What do you think, Daisy?"
She didn't answer, engrossed as she was in the julienned stalks of carrot and celery. She was working carefully but fast, making perfect dices as she went, the crisp chock-chock-chock of the blade on the cutting board undoubtedly keeping time with her ever-quickening synaptic pulses. I didn't want to disturb her, I was going to wait until she was done, but maybe it was my state of angry half-sleep or the searingly bright fluorescent kitchen lights or the notion of my supple-bodied immigrant wife tooling around in a squad car with a wide-eyed cop, that I had to holler, "This is total shill"
She looked around with unfeigned gravity and said, "Go back to sleep, Jerry."
"This is going to stop," I said. "You're going to see Dr. Derricone tomorrow. I'll go with you."
"Go to sleep, Jerry."
"You're going to see him about this, and I mean it this time.
No more ranting at him. No more threats. No more scenes with his receptionist."
"He's a complete fool," she said, with a perfect, and faintly English, accent, as though she'd heard some actress say the phrase in a TV movie or soap. Daisy was a talented mimic, when she got the feeling. "They are all complete and utterfools."
"I don't care if you think he's the King of Siam. Dr. Derricone has been around a long time and you'll show him respect.
He's seen it all and he's going to help you. I made him promise, and though you treat him like dirt he's not giving up."
"I don't want help from him, or nobody?" she cried, confusingly, though of course I knew what she meant.
"That's it, now, Daisy? I mean it. I've had enough!"
"Me too!" she shouted, in fact really screamed, and I thought about the kids for a second, how they'd wake up to their mother's distressed cry and probably think 1 was doing something horrible to her, like flicking a backhand at her or grabbing at her throat, which I never, ever did. But the whole truth be told, in those days I let myself think about such things every now and then, I too easily imagined picking her petite body up and flinging her onto the bed like you might a cat, mostly because you thought she could handle it, and that the ugly pleasurable surge would somehow satisfy the moment and make everything good and right. Spoken like a veritable wife beater, I realize, and I really can't defend myself, except to say that Daisy was never a completely passive or feckless party in our troubles, she being ever ready to say or do whatever it took to make me feel the afflictions settled so insolvently within her.
"Quiet down," I told her. "You'll wake up the kids."
"I don't care!" she cried, and then that's when it happened.
She lunged at me, in her splendid nakedness, knife and all, her eyes dull with dark no-method, with the chill of empty space.
And I will tell you that I froze, not so much with fear (of which there was plenty) as with a kind of abstention, for the horror of what was happening was too realistic to even begin to consider; it was actually enough to make me say, I must depart, I must depart (perhaps this the seed of my eventual interest in flight), and not mind whatever the rest. And the significant detail (of the rest) is not that Daisy missed my throat with the chef's knife by a mere thumb's-width, jabbing the point into the door of the refrigerator a good two inches beneath the vinyl skin (the perfect slit is still there, rusty around the pushed-in edges), but that when we both fully returned to the moment, our faces almost touching, we each saw in the other the same amazing wish that she'd not flinched and hit her mark.
Not that I didn't want to live.
I did want to live, just not that way.