“All right,” I say. I catch my breath.
“Everything’s all right here, too. Yes indeed. Roast rack of lamb. Friend of Nicole’s who’s going to Key West tomorrow had too much to drink and got depressed because he thought it was raining in Key West, and I said I’d go in my study and call the National Weather Service. Hello, Weather Service. How are you?”
J.D. comes down from upstairs with two Band-Aids and stands beside me, unwrapping one. I want to say to Johnny, “I’m cut. I’m bleeding. It’s no joke.”
It’s all right to talk in front of J.D., but I don’t know who else might overhear me.
“I’d say they made the delivery about four this afternoon,” I say.
“This is the church, this is the steeple. Open the door, and see all the people,” Johnny says. “Take care of yourself. I’ll hang up and find out if it’s raining in Key West.”
“Late in the afternoon,” I say. “Everything is fine.”
“Nothing is fine,” Johnny says. “Take care of yourself.”
He hangs up. I put the phone down, and realize that I’m still having trouble focusing, the sight of my cut finger made me so light-headed. I don’t look at the finger again as J.D. undoes the towel and wraps the Band-Aids around my finger.
“What’s going on in here?” Frank says, coming into the dining room.
“I cut my finger,” I say. “It’s O.K.”
“You did?” he says. He looks woozy — a little drunk. “Who keeps calling?”
“Marilyn. Mark changed his mind about staying all night. She was going to bring him home, but her battery’s dead. You’ll have to get him. Or I will.”
“Who called the second time?” he says.
“The oil company. They wanted to know if we got our delivery today.”
He nods. “I’ll go get him, if you want,” he says. He lowers his voice. “Tucker’s probably going to whirl himself into a tornado for an encore,” he says, nodding toward the living room. “I’ll take him with me.”
“Do you want me to go get him?” J.D. says.
“I don’t mind getting some air,” Frank says. “Thanks, though. Why don’t you go in the living room and eat your dinner?”
“You forgive me?” J.D. says.
“Sure,” I say. “It wasn’t your fault. Where did you get that mask?”
“I found it on top of a Goodwill box in Manchester. There was also a beautiful old birdcage — solid brass.”
The phone rings again. I pick it up. “Wouldn’t I love to be in Key West with you,” Johnny says. He makes a sound as though he’s kissing me and hangs up.
“Wrong number,” I say.
Frank feels in his pants pocket for the car keys.
J.D. knows about Johnny. He introduced me, in the faculty lounge, where J.D. and I had gone to get a cup of coffee after I registered for classes. After being gone for nearly two years, J.D. still gets mail at the department — he said he had to stop by for the mail anyway, so he’d drive me to campus and point me toward the registrar’s. J.D. taught English; now he does nothing. J.D. is glad that I’ve gone back to college to study art again, now that Mark is in school. I’m six credits away from an M.A. in art history. He wants me to think about myself, instead of thinking about Mark all the time. He talks as though I could roll Mark out on a string and let him fly off, high above me. J.D.’s wife and son died in a car crash. His son was Mark’s age. “I wasn’t prepared,” J.D. said when we were driving over that day. He always says this when he talks about it. “How could you be prepared for such a thing?” I asked him. “I am now,” he said. Then, realizing he was acting very hardboiled, made fun of himself. “Go on,” he said, “punch me in the stomach. Hit me as hard as you can.” We both knew he wasn’t prepared for anything. When he couldn’t find a parking place that day, his hands were wrapped around the wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
Johnny came in as we were drinking coffee. J.D. was looking at his junk mail — publishers wanting him to order anthologies, ways to get free dictionaries.
“You are so lucky to be out of it,” Johnny said, by way of greeting. “What do you do when you’ve spent two weeks on Hamlet and the student writes about Hamlet’s good friend Horchow?”
He threw a blue book into J.D.’s lap. J.D. sailed it back.
“Johnny,” he said, “this is Amy.”
“Hi, Amy,” Johnny said.
“You remember when Frank Wayne was in graduate school here? Amy’s Frank’s wife.”
“Hi, Amy,” Johnny said.
J.D. told me he knew it the instant Johnny walked into the room — he knew that second that he should introduce me as somebody’s wife. He could have predicted it all from the way Johnny looked at me.
For a long time J.D. gloated that he had been prepared for what happened next — that Johnny and I were going to get together. It took me to disturb his pleasure in himself — me, crying hysterically on the phone last month, not knowing what to do, what move to make next.
“Don’t do anything for a while. I guess that’s my advice,” J.D. said. “But you probably shouldn’t listen to me. All I can do myself is run away, hide out. I’m not the learned professor. You know what I believe. I believe all that wicked fairy-tale crap: your heart will break, your house will burn.”
Tonight, because he doesn’t have a garage at his farm, J.D. has come to leave his car in the empty half of our two-car garage while he’s in France. I look out the window and see his old Saab, glowing in the moonlight. J.D. has brought his favorite book, A Vision, to read on the plane. He says his suitcase contains only a spare pair of jeans, cigarettes, and underwear. He is going to buy a leather jacket in France, at a store where he almost bought a leather jacket two years ago.
In our bedroom there are about twenty small glass prisms hung with fishing line from one of the exposed beams; they catch the morning light, and we stare at them like a cat eyeing catnip held above its head. Just now, it is 2 A.M. At six-thirty, they will be filled with dazzling color. At four or five, Mark will come into the bedroom and get in bed with us. Sam will wake up, stretch, and shake, and the tags on his collar will clink, and he will yawn and shake again and go downstairs, where J.D. is asleep in his sleeping bag and Tucker is asleep on the sofa, and get a drink of water from his dish. Mark has been coming into our bedroom for about a year. He gets onto the bed by climbing up on a footstool that horrified me when I first saw it — a gift from Frank’s mother: a footstool that says “Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life” in needlepoint. I kept it in a closet for years, but it occurred to me that it would help Mark get up onto the bed, so he would not have to make a little leap and possibly skin his shin again. Now Mark does not disturb us when he comes into the bedroom, except that it bothers me that he has reverted to sucking his thumb. Sometimes he lies in bed with his cold feet against my leg. Sometimes, small as he is, he snores.
Somebody is playing a record downstairs. It’s the Velvet Underground — Lou Reed, in a dream or swoon, singing “Sunday Morning.” I can barely hear the whispering and tinkling of the record. I can only follow it because I’ve heard it a hundred times.
I am lying in bed, waiting for Frank to get out of the bathroom. My cut finger throbs. Things are going on in the house even though I have gone to bed; water runs, the record plays. Sam is still downstairs, so there must be some action.
I have known everybody in the house for years, and as time goes by I know them all less and less. J.D. was Frank’s adviser in college. Frank was his best student, and they started to see each other outside of class. They played handball. J.D. and his family came to dinner. We went there. That summer — the summer Frank decided to go to graduate school in business instead of English — J.D.’s wife and son deserted him in a more horrible way, in that car crash. J.D. has quit his job. He has been to Las Vegas, to Colorado, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Paris twice; he tapes post cards to the walls of his living room. A lot of the time, on the weekends, he shows up at our house with his sleeping bag. Sometimes he brings a girl. Lately, not. Years ago, Tucker was in Frank’s therapy group in New York, and ended up hiring Frank to work as the accountant for his gallery. Tucker was in therapy at the time because he was obsessed with foreigners. Now he is also obsessed with homosexuals. He gives fashionable parties to which he invites many foreigners and homosexuals. Before the parties he does TM and yoga, and during the parties he does Seconals and isometrics. When I first met him, he was living for the summer in his sister’s house in Vermont while she was in Europe, and he called us one night, in New York, in a real panic because there were wasps all over. They were “hatching,” he said — big, sleepy wasps that were everywhere. We said we’d come; we drove all through the night to get to Brattleboro. It was true: there were wasps on the undersides of plates, in the plants, in the folds of curtains. Tucker was so upset that he was out behind the house, in the cold Vermont morning, wrapped like an Indian in a blanket, with only his pajamas on underneath. He was sitting in a lawn chair, hiding behind a bush, waiting for us to come.