My love to all, my thanks, and do, please, smell the roses for me. Maine has become in my imagination even more of a paradise, and you the presiding angel.
With affection,
M.
10
TONY HAD GONE to Sonja and Marshall’s house earlier that morning and returned to pronounce it “fine, except for a little blood. Not weird, no bad vibes.” The night before, he’d driven Sonja and Marshall home from the police station, Marshall’s car still parked at the college, her car in the parking lot outside the real estate office, where she’d left it when the call came from the police. She could remember her own puzzled speculation, her pointless chitchat with Tony, the reassurances that everything would be fine, how they’d taken turns telling each other things would be fine — that from such a brief, essentially one-way conversation on the telephone, little could be known about the events that must have taken place after she and Marshall left their house earlier that morning.
Driving to the police station, she had given Tony only the barest outline — not because she wanted to withhold information, but because the information she had just been given did not quite register. She explained the late-night visit of Marshall’s colleague McCallum; his odd entanglement with a student who was now accusing him of having done terrible things — whatever he’d done to her quite possibly exaggerated, or who knew? Not exaggerated. A long night of talk, a brief conversation with Marshall once they went to bed — Marshall, who had, as she and Tony talked, already arrived at the station. And then when they had both been questioned, instead of their being able to return to their own home after such a terrible day, the house had been sealed off and they had had to go to Tony’s. That was probably just as well, because it allowed them to escape the cars passing by, those incomprehensible people who acted as if, in coasting to a stop in front of the house where something shocking had happened, they could have the same pleasure as turning into a drive-in movie: the place would light up; the movie everybody had been talking about would be magically shown, right in front of their eyes. She agreed with Marshalclass="underline" Wasn’t it true that such things happened every day in America’s cities? All of it happened every day: domestic discord; the pressure gauge going too high; violence. But let it happen in a sleepy town and gossip would spread and people would leave their homes to take a look, expecting some excitement might still be hovering, something they could absorb into their blood like a vaccine, immunizing themselves against personal danger.
Tony had come up with the idea that Sonja and Marshall should avoid the chaos in their house, along with the bother of the ringing phone, by staying as long as they wanted to in the house Tony now stood in with her, which had been put on the market by friends of his, but which, in the absence of buyers, was currently for rent. This morning, after he had dropped Marshall at the parking lot to get his car, after she had read scribbled directions Tony had taken down about how to find his friends’ house, which it seemed, except for briefly viewing it before it was listed, he had never visited, she found herself in a strange house, considering Tony’s suggestion.
The water was on, the electricity worked (though there was only one floor lamp; the ceiling fixtures had been removed, and splayed wires capped with duct tape protruded from holes in the ceiling), and the wall-to-wall carpeting had been cleaned by the same company that was now in her house, cleaning the blood from the carpets. She was frightened, fearing, on some irrational level, that McCallum’s wife might be there, that she might spring out and do to her what she had done to McCallum. Damn: she had never been very bothered by violence in the movies, had not even been inordinately troubled by Psycho, but now she had fanatic-with-a-knife waking nightmares, and as she walked with Tony she took his arm — took it like an old person — because the suspense was too much, the memory … what was she thinking? The description of the attack was very chilling. Imagining what had happened seemed to have changed her perception of graceful, long hallways (not always an advantage), and of plentiful closets (think what could hide there). A real problem, considering her profession. How was she going to act as tour guide in the future, when today she was so oversensitized that the exposed, taped electrical wires seemed a metaphor for the house itself, revealing its vulnerable, underlying nervous system. Marshall would like that, she thought; he’d like the personification of the house; he’d like it that a metaphor suddenly seemed more apt than reality. “I don’t like it,” she heard herself saying quietly, moving ahead of Tony to peek into another near-empty room, and Tony, who had been unnerved by everything that had happened, made an instant decision not to treat her misgivings seriously, becoming an even jollier enthusiast about this house that she knew was not to his personal taste either and that might even be spooking him as much as it was upsetting her on this gray winter morning, with overhead lights that didn’t turn on and the one floor lamp standing in the corner of the living room like a helmeted sentry at his post.
As she walked through the house with Tony, she remembered the way he had chatted with his friends long distance, very upbeat, clearly a man who had a secret to hide, yet how ridiculous: she was his secret — she had listened as he described his “personal friends in distress. Not financial distress. You know: general distress,” Tony had said, as Sonja had sat there hearing herself spoken about as if she weren’t present, missing her comfortable ballet flats, which she’d worn for years now as a kind of security blanket, wrapped in Tony’s robe, unable to shake her gloominess about being displaced, wanting desperately to be in her own house at the same time she dreaded the moment she would have to return. In someone else’s clothes, considering her big, pale feet, she had remembered the awkwardness of being a teenager, felt as humiliated as someone’s unwanted date. She had a closet full of clothes at her house, a husband, a lover, a friend — Tony was both lover and friend — yet there she’d been, twisting her body awkwardly, at one instant feeling that she was an unexpected guest in a stranger’s kitchen, bending forward to hide her breasts, the next moment wanting to shrug off Tony’s robe and be pretty, desirable, anything but the tortured creature she had become as Tony offered his friends a bland account of her current problems. And God: someone lay wounded in the hospital, a man she had just met the night before, a colleague of Marshall’s, and now Marshall had gone to see a lawyer — that was what happened when you were an adult and not a teenager — though she couldn’t understand why, when they were so obviously innocent in this entire affair, Marshall had become progressively more upset about being questioned by the police, after they returned to Tony’s and he fixed them Sleepytime tea and served it to them in the kitchen. The illustration on the tea box, she thought. That must explain her dream of the night before, in which a bear noisily clanged pots while gathering honey, tossing buckets of the stuff at other animals. It had suddenly come to her that the golden honey was like blood. Blood on the walls. It made her shiver, as she had shivered in Tony’s kitchen earlier, thinking about her blood-spattered walls as Tony joked with his friends on the phone, asking how the Versace renovation of some historic apartment building was coming along, inquiring about the street scene outside various cafés in South Beach. She had noticed the way he mentioned “distress” without giving any foundation for it, the way he’d omitted talking about the way violence had entered into his friends’ lives. Though it was probably true: if you wanted a favor, it was better to present your request simply. In general, she thought that men were very good at talking around things — that they communicated with each other in a sort of shorthand, either omitting all specifics or else relying exclusively on them, either way signalling the inherent difficulty of things with a shrug, which was not a gesture women usually made. Ah, yes: the difference between men and women. As if you could generalize. Confused and unhappy, Sonja trailed behind Tony as he toured the house.