Lawrence tries the front doors, but they will not open. He works hard to pry his knees from under the steering wheel, rotating his old body toward the backseat. As he frees himself, Lawrence feels he is crawling toward some elusive surface, like an animal in tar. He pauses, panting, on all fours on the front bench seat, before continuing, limb over limb, into the back, where he gives out, on top of his suitcase, a carcass washed ashore.
His suitcase is packed the way his father taught him to pack: in neat, necessary squares of shirts and briefs, handkerchiefs and pajamas. He thinks of this as he tries not to think of the horse, up and over the car. Again and again. The horse up and over the car. Three mammoth thumps. The first, on the windshield, the loudest. The second, on the rear of the car, invisible. The third, behind him, the end. The groan of pain and metal. Lawrence presses himself against the suitcase as the horse rewinds and replays. Up and over the car, squares of shirts and briefs. Up and over the car, handkerchiefs stacked like white envelopes.
After his mother’s funeral, Lawrence and his father had gone home alone. His father did not turn on a single light in the house, and in the silent dusk they went from room to room, drawer to drawer, shelf to shelf, still dressed in their black suits, and put like things with like things. Yellow pencils bound with rubber bands like firewood, bars of soap stacked like marble slabs, soup cans lined like steel barrels. “Order,” his father said, as they worked, “is all we have now, Lawrence.” When they were done, his father went and lay down on top of his made bed, still wearing his shined oxfords, and Lawrence went upstairs to his room alone and opened his top bureau drawer. In the night, by touch, he rolled his white socks into unhatched eggs, then lined them up, all in a row, some light in the dark.
Lawrence, at last, rises on the backseat. He wipes his forehead. He collects his green banana, his thermos, his small suitcase. He tries a rear door and opens it. He climbs out into the heat. He can feel death, like a low voice calling to him, before he even sees the horse.
Lawrence stands in his kitchen, unsure. If Anne were here, she would get the small red cooler from its place in the basement and pack it with egg salad sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and jumbo pickles rolled in aluminum foil. She’d line the cooler bottom with chilled bottles of water to keep things cold without smashing the bread. She would pack her purse with aspirin and antacids, a book of crosswords, bifocal clip-ons, moist towelettes. She would bring along two pillows because Susan’s were always too soft, and two blankets because Susan’s were always too thin, and a roll of toilet paper for her and a roll of toilet paper for Lawrence, because that was what decent people did.
But Lawrence ruins a dozen eggs in his attempts to boil them and peel them and make something resembling egg salad. He is out of waxed paper. He cannot find the moist towelettes. Bottled water will only increase the likelihood of thermos usage. Lawrence remembers what Susan said: Don’t bring a gift. Just yourself. So he quits. He places the thermos on the counter for tomorrow’s trip, alongside a single green banana and his car keys. The eggs smell strong in the kitchen garbage, so he takes the bag to the curb, to the metal trash can, then returns to the house and washes his hands. He does not look in the mirror at his long jowls and long nose and long ivory teeth, at his face that has not resisted but has just let life have its way. Instead, he puts on his pale blue pajamas and crawls into his cold side of the bed.
In the dark, he stares up at the green light of the smoke detector. He imagines a house fire, burned flesh, a victim’s shiny, noseless face with two black holes for breathing. He imagines raccoons at the trash can, chittering and smart, peeling the eggs like he was unable to peel the eggs. He sees them rifle through his junk mail, past the egg carton and down to a baggie holding a foreskin, which they remove with their tiny black gorilla thumbs and hold up to the moon before dropping it in the middle of the street.
Anne had been the picture of modesty and discretion. A woman who gave off no signs of impropriety, perspiration, menstruation. Lawrence had sensed this when he’d first seen her in the dentist’s waiting room, her ankles crossed, her skirt pleated, her eyes focused on her word find. On their first date, she folded her napkin on her chair seat before going to freshen her lipstick. On their second date, at the end, she offered her powdered cheek to Lawrence. On their third date, Lawrence, bewildered and disordered by wanting more of Anne, was relieved by Anne’s prudence. Back at her place, upright on her sofa, she placed his hands where they were to go and when. It was as ordered as a recipe, a math formula. When they were finished, she put Lawrence’s hands back where they belonged with two concluding pats. This Anne did every time afterward, with the clinical precision of a surgeon. In this way, she ordered Lawrence’s inner world, his latent, perplexing wants, just as his father had ordered his shelves. Anne showed Lawrence how to file lust next to pencils, how to stack his desire like soaps. For Lawrence, this compartmentalization was synonymous with love. He knew he could not live without her.
At some point, the green light of the smoke detector fades away, and Lawrence falls asleep. All night he is fitful, dreaming that he and Anne are horizontal on a sofa that isn’t hers, making out like they never made out, his hand up her skirt like his hand had never been up her skirt, reaching into her, over and over and over again, in a way that is foreign, as if he is reaching behind the couch to retrieve a dropped peach, reaching behind the couch to retrieve a dropped peach, reaching behind the couch to retrieve a dropped peach. In the morning, he wakes exhausted. He hasn’t slept at all. When he goes to rub his eyes, he thinks for a moment his hand smells of fruit.
The highway to Merona is empty and hot. The sky is the color of gauze. Alongside the pecan farms, there are no signs for pecans but there are signs for boiled peanuts and roasted peanuts and ones warning of Jesus’ return. He Is Risen, they say. He Lives, they warn. He Is Already Here. Near the border, Lawrence passes more billboards he does not want to read but cannot resist reading: No-Needle Vasectomy. Divorce $89.99. Orchid Spa: Truck Parking.
“You know what those spas are, right, Lawrence?” a fellow CPA once said. “You go in for a massage and they give you five minutes of a back rub before they tell you to flip over. You don’t even get a choice. You have to do it. Then they give you a hand job and you give them a Jackson.”
Lawrence had pretended to already know this. He had pretended that it didn’t bother him. He pretended, when he went home that night and watched Anne iron his shirts, that he wasn’t imagining her naked while a masseuse stood behind her, her tongue at Anne’s earlobe, her hands over Anne’s breasts, her fingers spread apart just enough to show Anne’s nipples. Instead, he took his ironed shirts and hung them in the closet the way they were meant to be hung. Blue shirts by blue shirts, white shirts by white.
When Lawrence learned of Anne’s diagnosis, he’d gone home and made eggs of his socks. When she began her descent, he shined his shoes. When Anne was no longer herself, in those weeks of madness, when she turned ugly and crass and defiant, when she lost all control of her faculties, both physical and mental, and walked the house naked and relieved herself in the yard and called Lawrence names he did not know she knew, Lawrence spent his days putting things back in the drawers that Anne had dumped out. He put forks with forks. He filed his disgust next to despair. In the end, Susan came to help. She took Anne someplace else. To a place that knew what to do with her, where like went with like. Susan relieved him. And Lawrence had been relieved.