“I think we’re both under too much pressure,” Tony said. “I would suggest that the solution might lie in our being in bed. Elsewhere. After lunch and something to drink.”
He picked up their coats from the sofa in the living room and held hers by the tips of its shoulders. Looking over her shoulder at him, she thought about the way Evie had handled her wet wash, years ago, when she still lived in her townhouse, lifting it from the washtub and holding it delicately pinched until she could transport the dripping clothing into the dryer. Tony was holding the coat — her dry coat — for her to back into. He slung his own coat over his shoulder and switched off the lamp and opened the front door, turning to lock it behind them.
She sat in the car like a patient, or at least like a patient passenger, replaying scenes from two nights ago. It had all been strange and unexpected, perplexing but manageable. And then, the next morning, after she had dressed and brushed her hair and sprayed perfume underneath her hair, so she could feel the downy hair underneath tingling, she had bent over the bed, intending to tell Marshall that she thought she loved someone else. She had shivered, slightly, with an almost irresistible impulse to speak, in spite of Evie’s having urged her to remain silent, but just as quickly the desire had passed. He had looked at her fondly and the desire had passed. They had both left their house, with McCallum still sleeping, and his wife had come after him and tried to kill him.
She was so lost in her thoughts, it took her some while to realize Tony had been speaking to her. “That new motel. How do I go?” He was asking her for directions, but as he asked the question she remembered the brief blip of a nursery rhyme: how does your garden grow? She could remember the singsong rhyme, but not the words, except that the poem ended with the words “all in a row.” Everything neat. All lined up. She imagined old-fashioned flowers drawn by some illustrator’s pen in the pages of a children’s book: a pop-up book, the moving boxes she had just seen in the backyard metamorphosed into a cardboard flip-up garden, hollyhocks and peonies, roses and delphiniums springing to life. Which would certainly be a beautiful sight on such an overcast winter day. Which would be wonderfully magical, no less astonishing because it was not real.
Today’s sky was evenly gray, cloudless, so flat in color it provided little incentive to remember the sun. Missing its warmth, she superimposed an imaginary sun on the blank screen of sky as Tony drove: her pretty projection, her analogue to the recently invented pop-up book, the red dots floating in front of her as she rubbed her aching, closed eyes, a burst of rosy suns: her nonsense world. With her eyes closed, it was a nonsense world — virtual reality as observed by the not so virtuous. Eyes open, the suns became the spots of blood on her walls. She turned and looked at Tony, whose face was frozen in concentration: the attempt to remember not a sunny day, but what turn to make; activating the windshield wipers to clear the gritty mist of rain and road dirt that splashed in front of them.
Without too much trouble, Tony found the motel. Moments later, on this odd, odd day that had followed the calamitous day that had gone before, they lay curled together in the king-size bed, candle glowing on the night table, watching a Bruce Lee movie on TV. Sonja drew her feet higher, under the blankets. He felt her stirring and put a hand on her hip. He was sick of talking about her wrecked home, about McCallum, and about the two of them. He was engrossed in watching Bruce Lee.
“The blood wasn’t all that bad?” she said, trying to get his attention.
“I lied. It freaked me out. It was very upsetting.”
“So why tell me now?”
Bruce Lee’s foot connected with a man’s ribs, and the man went over backward.
“Because it was wrong of me to mislead you. Your house is a mess. Furthermore, you can live with me, if you want. You can live with me without Marshall, that would be the best idea. Then I could save on motel bills.”
“Is all of this a sick joke, or was some of it what you really think?” she said, yanking the covers over her back.
His hand returned to pat her hip. He touched her with the same rhythm, the same intensity, people use when they’re in a hurry, drumming their fingers on a tabletop. Bruce Lee was doing very well for himself. Tony was spellbound.
“You know, I almost told Marshall yesterday morning,” she said. “Diligent Marshall, suddenly finding out he’s been living with someone who’s stopped being … diligent.”
He looked at her. “Are you going to tell him or keep this a secret?”
“Keep it a secret,” she said. She waited for his response, but there was none. A commercial for cat food came on, an aging movie actress whose name she couldn’t remember stooping to shower crunchy stars into a cat’s bowl. The cat sprouted wings and flew to the food. The woman sprouted wings and disappeared through the ceiling.
Tony was propped on one elbow, still watching TV. “Doesn’t something horrible like this make you realize that life is short and that, I don’t know, maybe nothing good comes of hiding your feelings? I mean, we can’t all be as extroverted as Susan McCallum, but it seems quite possible that if any good is to come out of something like this, maybe it’s to make the people on the sidelines introspective. What I mean is, maybe you should think about telling him.”
“You’re not afraid of what he’d do?”
There was a long silence, during which she decided he wasn’t going to answer. In another room, she heard someone flipping through the channels, getting mostly static, as she and Tony had earlier.
“No,” he said.
“Why?” she said.
“Because he likes me well enough.”
“Likes you? I don’t think he gives you a moment’s thought.”
Another long pause. “Well, you said he hardly knew McCallum either,” Tony said.
“Tony,” she said, “what are we talking about?”
“A teeny, tiny bit of cowardice that might exist on your husband’s part,” he said.
“You think he wouldn’t do anything?”
“Well, what are you saying?” Tony said. “That I couldn’t stand someone’s angry words?” He turned toward her. “You’re mad at me for stating something that you already understand completely, which is that Marshall wouldn’t be an insurmountable problem.”
“What would you have him do?” she said.
“Sonja, don’t blame me for his disposition. I would have him do just what he would do: complain, or lecture us, or just go off and lick his wounds, I don’t know.”
“I can’t believe it. You don’t think he’d care.”
“When did I say that?”
“You want him to come on like Bruce Lee.”
“There’s been enough violence.”
“Tony—”
“ ‘Tony,’ nothing. You like it that I don’t mind being adversarial. In this case, though, I’m only pointing out the obvious. I’m not saying he’s a lily-livered coward. I mean, in his place, what would I do myself?”
She had pulled herself up in bed and was feeling the full extent of her discomfort: the wrinkled sheets, cold seeping underneath from where Tony’d pulled them out from under the mattress, the stiff pillow impossible to pound into a comfortable headrest. Here she was in a motel with her lover, with whom she found herself in frivolous fights all too often, listening to him as if he had a great psychic ability to see the future. His expression implied a kind of superiority: the raised eyebrows letting her know he found her slightly ridiculous; his jutting chin set belligerently, as if whatever position he took was the only possible way to think about something. As he turned away from her to rest on his hip again, exasperated, looking once more at Bruce Lee, it dawned on her that he might have said everything he’d said to provoke her. To provoke her not into telling Marshall about their affair, but to ensure that she wouldn’t. Her intuition told her she was right. Wasn’t it possible Tony was trying to be disagreeable so she would like him less, so she would measure him against Marshall, conventional, diligent Marshall, and find Tony lacking … which would mean that if she chose her husband, instead of him, he could come out of their affair feeling self-righteous, superior to her by making it seem she’d opted for the status quo?