“How is your case? The case you’re working on?”
“Fine. It’s fine,” Robert says, in the voice that he uses when he doesn’t want to talk about something.
Robert and Viola stare out the window, imagining some place beyond what they can see, where the cars and parking lot asphalt and trees and people might suddenly, terrifyingly stop.
~ ~ ~
“Do you want to try having sex again?” Viola asks Robert.
“Okay.” Viola kneads Robert’s erection through his boxers. Robert massages Viola’s breast through the t-shirt that she wears to bed. Viola takes Robert’s hand and puts it between her legs.
Robert decides to remodel the house.
“The whole house?” Viola asks. “Just like that?”
“No of course not, not the whole house,” Robert says. “Something small. I was thinking maybe the downstairs bathroom, just the countertops and the sinks, actually.”
Robert pictures the joy of working with his hands. He imagines the satisfaction of starting a job and finishing it and knowing, once he had, that it was finished. At the hardware store, there to examine different kinds of faucets, he finds himself instead wandering off to the lumber aisle and breathing in the smell of untreated wood. The possibilities of newness are overwhelming.
“Black marble,” Robert says. “The countertops. Kitchen and bathroom. What do you think about black marble?”
Viola gives it some thought. She is trying to be supportive. “I think it might be a little ostentatious,” she says. “I feel like it’s something that’s very fashionable right now but will very possibly look dated in a few years.”
“Ostentatious,” Robert says, screwing up his face. Robert scrutinizes the kitchen isle.
“I’m not even sure I wanted a kid,” Viola says to her aunt, on the telephone. “Robert, he definitely wanted a kid.”
“You’d be a great parent,” her aunt says.
“I’d be terrible. I’m pretty sure this is a sign. Like, I’d be watching a movie or just getting to the really good part of a book or something, and that’s when the terrible thing would happen. The kid would find the matches or stick something in a socket or drown in the bathtub. This is God saying: Viola, honey, you and I both know that you’d let the poor thing drown in the bathtub.”
Viola’s aunt laughs, a great hacking laugh.
Viola considers the possibilities of opening a bottle of wine at ten-thirty a.m. on a Thursday. The arguments against opening the bottle of wine, for the most part, have to do with antiquated cultural norms, Viola thinks.
“Do you believe that life is the most important gift that one human being can give another?” Viola asks her friend Tabitha, who has come over for coffee.
“What else is there?” Tabitha asks.
“We don’t generally consider it to be taking something away from someone if we don’t give life to someone who was never alive in the first place,” Viola says. “Outside of certain fundamentalist religions, there is no commonly recognized onus on people of childbearing age to bear children.”
“I think you would be a really good mother,” Tabitha says.
“That’s not the point.”
On television, commercials herald end-of-the-world survival courses: it’s a franchise deal, with the local version being taught in a nearly abandoned mall on Lafayette Street. Such courses rose to prominence just before the new millennium, in response to Y2K fears, and have persisted, fed on a steady occurrence of new signs and dates: the fall of the twin towers, the evangelical minister Harold Camping’s predictions of the Rapture, the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. A survivalist, interviewed by a local news station, recommends an “end times emergency kit,” consisting of a compass, a canteen, waterproof matches, iodine tablets, a fixed-blade knife with a full tang, a hatchet, a sewing kit, waterproof bags, maps (local and national).
“Condoms actually work quite well as watertight containers for smaller objects,” the end-times survivalist says. “It’s worth keeping in mind that life without electricity and running water and heat is a very different kind of life than what we’re used to here in America.”
Viola and Tabitha look through the paper at the weekend events. Now they are drinking wine. “What do you think about the shootings downtown?” Tabitha asks.
“I haven’t really been paying attention,” Viola admits.
“Doesn’t Robert work for that pharmaceutical company?”
“He doesn’t work for them. He works for a law firm, and they are a client of his firm.”
Viola reads: “This discovery (alienation) of conditions takes place through the interruption of happenings. The most primitive example would be a family scene. Suddenly a stranger enters. The mother was just about to seize a bronze bust and hurl it at her daughter; the father was in the act of opening the window in order to call a policeman. At that moment the stranger appears in the doorway. This means that the stranger is confronted with the situation as with a startling picture: troubled faces, an open window, the furniture in disarray. But there are eyes to which even more ordinary scenes of middle-class life look almost equally startling.”
Viola folds over the edge of the page and puts the book down on the coffee table and looks at a small statuette, a replica Rodin, sitting under a lamp on a small table beside the bookshelf.
“It’s possible that I may not be in love with you anymore,” Viola says carefully, lying next to Robert that night. Robert is quiet in a way that makes Viola think that he maybe already knew.
“Do you want to stay married?” he says, finally.
~ ~ ~
In the morning, Robert takes stock of their house. It has a large living room connected to an open kitchen, with a kitchen island forming a sort of border between the two. The downstairs contains as well a dining room, a guest bedroom, and a half bath. A set of stairs leads from the living room to an “open”-style second floor, with a wrap-around hallway leading to the bedroom, full bath, and an office that looks out on the street. The walls could use repainting, he thinks. Something darker, more serious. It is true that white walls open a place up, but they scuff so easily. Robert walks around the house, examining scuffs in the off-white walls. It’s the default choice, Robert thinks, white walls. There’s no particular cause for it. They don’t mean anything. Robert pictures the walls in new colors: burgundy, beige, a light but stately blue.
~ ~ ~
At the library, the FBI agent presents Viola with a National Security Letter. “I am in love with you, desperately,” he says, handing over the order. “Your very resistance to the secret law that I serve has won my heart. You are hereby forbidden as per section 520 of the secret law from discussing any aspect of our interactions, or for that matter so much as acknowledging the existence of said interactions. I will be emailing you with a series of questions, pertinent to an ongoing investigation, that you are to answer precisely and in full. Failure to comply with this order incurs the severest penalties of the secret law, up to and including disappearance.”
“But this is ridiculous,” Viola says, staring down at the order. “People have seen us interacting. Everyone at the library knows that you’re here.”
“The secret law makes no distinction between the known and the ought-to-be-known. You are to comply with the order exactly as it is written.”
Viola goes to get after-work martinis with Elizabeth, from circulation. It’s the first time that they’ve gotten after-work martinis since Viola came back. “Those flowers on your desk,” Elizabeth says. “All those roses. Are they from Robert? Is he trying to make up for something?”