The branch manager asks if he can speak with Viola in his office. “Are you okay?” he says.
“Yes. I’m fine. Thank you for your concern.”
“You can take more time off if you need to.”
“I’m fine.”
“You can’t just be fine,” Viola’s friend Elizabeth says, later, in the break room. They are waiting for the coffee machine to finish brewing. Like the library that surrounds it, it is an ancient coffee machine, without automatic shutoff, and takes forever to brew.
“Yes, I can. I’m over it,” Viola says. “I decided.”
“Aren’t there stages?”
“Stages have been discredited by the most recent theoretical models,” Viola says. “The most recent theoretical models tend to view over-it-ness as a negotiation, by and large.”
Viola pictures herself saying the meanest thing she can think of to Elizabeth, for no reason. She pictures Elizabeth crying and asking her, Viola, why she would say such a thing. Viola would shrug and say, No reason.
You are completely unloved, Viola would say. Even your father who lives with you and your two dogs view you primarily as a convenience.
The FBI agent finds Viola while she’s smoking a cigarette by the dumpsters behind the library. Viola quickly stubs out the cigarette.
“I don’t really smoke,” she says, feeling suddenly guilty, for no good reason she can think of.
“You know, I actually really admire what you’re doing,” the FBI agent says, taking a packet of cigarettes from his inside jacket pocket. He’s olive-skinned and black-haired, with lips that pout like an Italian model’s. He’s a couple of years younger than her, at least. “Though we are approaching it from opposite directions, both of us, I feel, are acting out of love for the principles of freedom.”
“What are you doing here?” Viola asks. “This isn’t even the main branch in Indianapolis.”
“I am a messenger of the secret law,” the FBI agent says. “The secret law operates on the periphery every bit as much as the center. The secret law, in fact, recognizes no such center. The secret law is infinite, stretching in all directions.” He squeezes off the glowing tip of his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, puts the ash out with the sole of his gleaming black shoe before heading back inside.
Across the street from the ancient neighborhood library, a gang of African-American bikers hang out in the parking lot of a liquor store, attempting to stare down a group of young hoodlums who have begun to hang out in the empty lot next to the liquor store. Occasionally one of the bikers revs his motorcycle, as if in warning. The bikers sometimes come into the library to use the bathroom, because there’s no bathroom in the liquor store. They are always faultlessly polite when they do.
“Is Dude your new boyfriend?” one of the bikers asks Viola.
“Who?”
“That dude who was just out here. Keeps giving you those looks.”
“No, I’m married,” Viola says.
“Well anyway I’d watch out for him. That dude has some bad mojo.”
“Ricky’s always concerned about the mojo of things,” says one of the other bikers.
“You can tell a lot about a person by their mojo,” says Ricky, sounding defensive.
“The fascist told me that he admired me,” Viola says to Robert, that night. “Can you fucking believe that? Like maybe I’d swoon because some fascist tool told me that he admired my principles?”
“Are you doing okay?” Robert asks.
“I’m sad, of course,” Viola says. “I’m allowed to be sad.”
“Well sure. Of course. I’m sad too.”
Viola has an image of the two of them, her and Robert, clinging together, moving from room to room like that, making sandwiches, washing dishes, etcetera. “But I feel like the thing to be done’s get back to life as normal,” she says.
~ ~ ~
viola pushes robert down onto their bed and straddles him. She is dressed in a blue t-shirt. Robert is still wearing his boxers, tugged down now to just below his cock. He can feel Viola push him inside of her, she is rocking back and forth. There is a moment where neither of them is thinking. Viola slaps Robert, grabs at his arms, slaps him again. Robert pushes her off and stares at her.
“That wasn’t working for you?”
“No,” Robert says. “You slapped me. I mean — you fucking slapped me.”
“It just occurred to me. Like maybe you’d like it.”
“No, I don’t like it. It fucking hurt.”
“I thought maybe you’d slap me back,” says Viola, in a small hurt voice that grates more than a little on Robert’s nerves.
“We’ve tried that. You said you wanted me to hit you, and I tried it, and you said you didn’t like it after all.”
“You just seemed so…uncomfortable, that time. I thought maybe it would come more naturally if I hit you first.”
“Well it didn’t,” says Robert, folding his penis back into his underwear and stalking off to the bathroom. When he returns, Viola has disappeared. He sits on the couch breathing steadily for a while, and then goes to look for her. She’s in the upstairs bathroom, with the door locked.
“Viola,” says Robert.
“What.”
“Viola.”
“I’m embarrassed,” Viola says, from the other side of the locked bathroom door.
“Look, I’m more than willing to try things,” Robert says. “You know that. We’ve talked about it. But I like to be given a heads-up, that’s all. That seems fair, doesn’t it?”
“I think I’m going to stay in here for a little while,” Viola says. “I’m not mad at you.”
She doesn’t sound embarrassed, Robert thinks. She sounds upset. Robert can feel himself getting angry again, a rising motion, angrier and angrier.
Robert, as a rule, is not used to being angry. He’s used to being level-headed. This thing that has been happening, where he feels like he’s put in a situation where he gets angrier and angrier and has nothing whatsoever that he can do about it, is a new situation, one that he is unfamiliar with.
Robert considers the possibilities: He could break down the damn door. Breaking down the damn door could, to a certain manner of thinking, be seen as acting out of concern for his wife.
“I’m considering breaking down the door,” Robert says. “I feel like that could be seen as acting out of concern for you. Would you see that as acting out of concern for you?”
“No.”
Robert goes to bed, alone. Robert buys new two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar running shoes.
There’s a pattern to it, Robert thinks. He is running along 38th street. He passes the Indianapolis Museum of Art and then he is running on the sidewalk that follows the edge of Crown Hill Cemetery, final resting place of Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States; “Indiana poet” James Whitcomb Riley; Howard Garns, the inventor of Sudoku; seven vice presidents; and Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun. Also of course infamous criminal John Dillinger, whose grave is nearly impossible to find without a map.
She gets upset, Robert thinks. And it’s like I can tell she’s about to get upset before she even realizes it’s happening, maybe even before I realize it’s happening. Muscle-memory, Robert thinks. My organism recognizes the particular signs of her organism getting upset. So much of what we know is purely physical, Robert thinks: we know so much in our bodies before we know it consciously. Well, it makes sense. We’ve lived together for what, four years now. And then before that knowing each other in Ann Arbor, another year or so. It is an almost Pavlovian response, Robert thinks. She gets upset and it puts me in this defensive crouch, where I am doing everything I can to calm her down, to make her less upset. And then when the situation is over, I get angrier and angrier.