“You can’t forgive me, that’s obvious, but they haven’t done anything to anyone, and now we have to go.”
“No, you don’t—”
“Yes,” she said. “We’re going to Des Moines. My studio’s still there, Joseph hasn’t changed a thing. It’s a big house. You’ll come and see them.”
“Jessica,” I said. “Jessie.”
“Maybe you can stay with Rocky and Lillian for a while. It’ll take me a week to pack. To arrange things.”
She was still under the covers. I tried to get beneath them too. She wouldn’t let me. I lifted one of her arms.
“Mose,” she said, “I can’t.”
I could feel her hand trying to make up its mind. She hadn’t opened her eyes. I stared at her, trying to will her to look at me. She had something gray caught in her hair, and I brushed it out with the tips of my fingers. She had stopped crying, and I was about to start. “Where did you find a cobweb?” I asked.
She gave a swallowing smile. “Before I was in bed, I was under it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I thought it would make me feel better. All day long I crawl into places, beneath the sofa cushions, under your desk. There isn’t a closet in the house small enough. I can’t bear to live here and I can’t bear to leave and everywhere I go I turn around and see myself and pretty soon I’m going to try to sleep in dresser drawers or in the sink and it’s time to go.”
I held her one hand in my two hands. “Things will get better!”
“Sweetheart, if I believed that for a moment, would I feel this way? You think I don’t miss her.”
“I never said that.”
“I don’t do anything else. I love her. And I love Jacob and Nathan. I love them all the same, still, and I can’t do anything for her. And I can’t do anything for you, the way you hate me now.”
“I don’t—”
That’s when she finally turned her head and opened her eyes. “Go to Rocky and Lil’s,” she said. “I’ll call you when we get settled.”
I did. She’d already packed me a little suitcase.
First, though, I drove around in my car. Should I go back? There had to be something I could say, even though I now understood the whole past year from her point of view: she’d been waiting for me to say something to her forever. I laughed, thinking that Rock had told me years before that I should come to him if I wanted divorce advice. You’ll fuck around, he’d said, and I hadn’t. I’d figured that was the only rule.
I drove past our house again. What should I do? I could go back in and put my foot down, You will not leave me, you will not take my sons, but that was what had gotten me into this trouble in the first place. I could cry, but I already had. I could plead, but I’d done that too. My fault, I told myself, my fault, and every time I tried to split the blame between me and someone else — Jessica or God or even Rocky, who’d told me that work would solve my problems — I realized again it was my fault.
In the morning I would know what to do.
The Lodger
Lillian and Rock took me in right away; Jessica had called them ahead of time. They moved me into a guest room that overlooked the swimming pool. I crawled into bed. The sheets were still warm from the iron.
That whole week might have been comic, if I had been in a laughing mood. Actually, that first day I often laughed, inappropriately. Every time I saw her, Lillian was wearing one cosmetic mask or another, blue or brown or surgical white. Her vanity in such things was double, I think: she wanted to improve her complexion, but she also knew that for some reason those masks suited her. They highlighted her two best features — large light brown eyes, and lovely full lips — and minimized her puggish nose and her wide wrinkled forehead. In fact, she always looked quite beautiful that way, a strange apparition bringing me tomato soup, tomato juice, pitchers of lemon-clogged ice water.
I felt pretty bad that first day, but I believed I would live. In the morning I realized I was one of those people who’d been kicked in the head and managed to get up and walk around for twelve hours, rubbing his noggin and saying, A little headache, that’s all, only to wake up an invalid.
“You want to call her?” Rocky asked.
I shook my head.
“We’ll call her.” He sat on a chair by the bed, his knees up against the nightstand. The phone was a confection that Lillian had installed, all gold scroll and black inlay, better suited for a pinup to hold to her ear, saucily shocked at her caller. The receiver looked too small in Rocky’s hand. “No answer,” he said.
“Didn’t think so.”
“Buddy,” he told me, “you need to do something.”
Our radio show was on summer replacements — our bandleader, West Thompson, had taken over — and we weren’t shooting a picture.
“We’ll go out,” he said.
I shook my head. Actually, I did nothing so athletic, I just stirred the air in front of my face lightly with my nose.
“Say the word,” Rock said. He stood up to leave.
I said, “Thanks.”
She’d been under the bed. I understood. Back when I boarded in other people’s homes, I often had the same dream: I’d been out of the house, and when I returned, there was some guy — sometimes more than one — sleeping in my bed or reading the paper in my chair. Excuse me, I’d say, wrong door, but then it turned out that I’d been sharing my quarters all along: we’d just never happened to be in the same room at the same time.
I wanted to do that now. I wanted to haunt the house, so that I could be around my family without them ever noticing. Couldn’t we live together that way? I’d sleep under the bed and only get up in the middle of the night, make my rounds, look at my boys sleeping, maybe lay out their clothes for the morning, fill the front room with flowers, stick handfuls of candy in their empty shoes. That way, I couldn’t hurt them. I got under Rocky’s guest bed to test. Apparently his maids were more thorough: no cobwebs here. Light came through the sheer bedskirt, and I put my hands up and felt the slats of the bedframe, and then the flimsier slats of the box spring, and I tried to imagine the sweet outline of Jessica over me, the princess and the pea in reverse: a small shape layers and layers above whose tiniest edge lacerated me, from the knot in her sneakers to the buckle on her watchband.
Mostly, though, I spent my time on the sleeping side of the bed, like my wife, fully dressed and half paralyzed. I kept my back straight, my elbows tucked in at my sides, as though I’d been dropped into a swimming pool again, but this time I wasn’t going to fight, this time I wanted to sink to the bottom, I swear I had bruises at my waist from my elbows digging in, my toes were pointed, my hands in a ball at my stomach, but no matter how heavy I tried to make myself, I was buoyant, I was buoyant, something was letting me breathe when I only longed to be drowned. How could I make myself sinkable? Keep your eyes closed. Keep your toes pointed. Keep your mouth shut.
Rocky knocked on the door. “Do you want anything?”
I’d just been picturing somebody — not Rocky, someone in better shape, and without a face — snatching me out of bed and throwing me through the window (not made of sugar in this vision, unlike the panes of glass Carter and Sharp dove through in the movies) and into the swimming pool.
I didn’t think I could ask for that, though.
I said, “I don’t want to die, but I wouldn’t turn down a coma.”
A few hours later — or the next day, or the day after that — I thought, After the baby died, I could move, but now I can’t, and that means I miss Jessica more than I miss the baby, and I ran to the window I’d imagined sailing through and opened it and spent the next five minutes vomiting and then doing a painful impression of vomiting. The recent contents of my stomach (tomato juice, ice water) ran down the pitched roof onto — must be the kitchen, if I remembered the floor plan right. Someone should clean that up. If I’d been drinking, this would be a story we’d tell, the night I got sick and clogged the gutters.