Liam said, “Surely, though-”
“Oh, why do you always, always take her side against me?” Barbara demanded.
“When have I taken her side against you?”
“You don’t even know what happened! You just jump on in with both feet!”
“All I said was-”
“Do you have a grocery bag?” Kitty asked him. “I’ve got way too much stuff.”
She made it sound as if he were somehow to blame for that. In fact he felt blamed by both of them. He went over to a kitchen cupboard and pulled out a flattened paper bag and handed it to her in silence.
As soon as Kitty left the room, he turned to Barbara and said, “Shall we sit down?”
“I’m really pressed for time,” Barbara said. But she followed him into the living room and settled in the rocker. He sat across from her. He laced his fingers together and smiled at her.
“So!” he said. Then, after a pause, “You’re looking well.”
She was, Saturday clothes or no. She had that fair, clean skin that showed to best advantage without makeup, and her serenely folded hands-the nails cut sensibly short and lacking any sort of polish-struck him as restful. Reassuring. He went on smiling at her, but she had her mind elsewhere. She said, “I’m getting too old for this.”
“Pardon?”
“For dealing with teenage girls.”
“Well, yes, you are a little old,” Liam said.
This caused Barbara to give a short laugh, but he was only speaking the truth. (She’d had Kitty at age forty-five.)
“It wasn’t so bad with Louise,” she said. “Say what you will about the born-again thing; at least it made her an easy adolescent. And Xanthe I don’t even count. Xanthe was such a good girl.”
Thank heaven for that much, Liam thought, since Xanthe wasn’t her own. Wouldn’t he have felt guilty if Xanthe had given Barbara any trouble! But she had been so docile-a quiet, obedient three-year-old when Barbara first met her. He’d brought her along to work one morning when his child-care fell through, and the two of them had hit it off at once. Barbara hadn’t fussed over her or used that fake, high, cooing voice that other women used or expected Xanthe to rise to any particular level of enthusiasm. She seemed to understand that this child had a low-key nature. And she’d already known that about Liam. She certainly knew he was low-key.
So why did she want more than that after they were married? Why did she prod him, and drag him to counseling, and at last, in the end, give up on him?
Women had this element of treachery, Liam had discovered. They entered your life under false pretenses and then they changed the rules. Underneath, Barbara had turned out to be just like all the others.
Take today, for instance. Look at her sitting in his rocking chair. Although she had started out so calm-hands folded in her lap-she grew more restless by the minute. First she picked up an issue of Philosophy Now from the floor beside her and examined the cover. Then she set it down and looked around the room, knitting her eyebrows in such a way that Liam felt himself becoming defensive. He sat up straighter. She turned her gaze on him and said, “Liam, I wonder if you might perhaps be a little bit depressed.”
“Why on earth would you say that?” Liam asked.
Why did she feel she had the right to say it, was what he meant. But she misread the question. She said, “Because you’re narrowing your world so. Haven’t you noticed? You’re taking up a smaller and smaller space. You don’t have a separate kitchen anymore or a fireplace or a view from your window. You seem to be… retreating.”
Luckily, Kitty came into the room just then. She was lugging not just the grocery bag but a pillowcase stuffed with clothing-the pillowcase from Liam’s bed, which she hadn’t asked permission to take. “Here,” she told her mother, and she dropped the pillowcase in Barbara’s lap and then bent to pick up her duffel bag.
“What is all this?” Barbara asked as she struggled to her feet. “How did you end up with so many belongings?”
“It’s not my fault! You’re the one who sent me here!”
“Did I tell you to bring your whole closet? Where did all this come from?”
“I had to buy a couple of extra things,” Kitty said.
“What? With what money?” Barbara demanded.
Meanwhile they were limping toward the door, hampered by their burdens, yawping at each other like two blue jays. Liam saw them out with a feeling of relief. After they were gone he returned to his chair and sank into it. The silence was so deep it almost echoed. He was alone again.
Monday morning his stitches were removed. A patch of thin gray fuzz hid the scar now. He went to the barber the following day and had his hair cut even shorter than usual, and after that the patch was nearly unnoticeable.
On his palm, the stitches left puckers. They turned the deepest of the creases there into a sort of ruffle. He wondered if this would be permanent. He sat in his rocker staring down at his palm for minutes on end.
He had too much time to fill; that was the truth of the matter. For a brief while, the fuss of moving in had entertained him-arranging and rearranging his books, scouring three different kitchen stores for the exact type of wall-mounted can opener he was used to in the old place. But that couldn’t last forever. And with no summer school now, no papers to grade, no ten-year-old boys in despair over the inconsistencies of i-before-e… well, face it, he was bored. He could sit and read for only so many hours. He could take only so many walks. Of course he could always listen to classical music on his clock radio, but it seemed to him that the station kept playing the same pieces, and most of the pieces sounded like the music they played at the circus. Besides: just sitting, just listening, just staring straight ahead with his hands resting on his kneecaps, was not enough to use up the day.
Nobody called to ask how he was. Not Barbara, not his sister, not any of his daughters. Here he thought he and Kitty had gotten on so well, but he didn’t hear a word from her.
The hospital sent him a bill for expenses not covered by his health insurance. They charged him rent for a phone in his room, and he was able to consume quite a large chunk of one morning on a protest call to Accounting.
“Not that I wouldn’t have liked a phone in my room,” he said. “I certainly asked for one. I had no way of getting in touch with my family and letting them know where I was. Everybody was needlessly worried.”
The woman at the other end of the line allowed a silence to develop after each one of his statements. He hoped this meant she was writing down his words, but he suspected she was not. “Hello?” he said. “Are you there?”
Another silence. Then, “Mmhmm.”
“Also,” he said, “this bill was for three days. For June tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. But I was unconscious on the tenth! How do they think I was able to order a phone when I was unconscious?”
“A visitor could have ordered it,” she said after another pause.
“I didn’t have any visitors.”
“How do you know that, if you were unconscious?”
This last remark came lickety-split, no pause at all, triumphantly. He sighed. He said, “I don’t think I had even made it into my room on the tenth. I think I was still in emergency. And meanwhile my family was completely in the dark, wondering what had become of me.”
It almost seemed like the truth. He imagined relatives all over town wringing their hands and calling around and checking with the police.
But the woman in Accounting was unimpressed. She told him they would get back to him later. Her tone of voice implied that it wasn’t going to be uppermost on anyone’s agenda.
At nighttime he slept poorly, no doubt because he wasn’t tired. He was bothered by the faint scent of Kitty’s shampoo even though he had changed the sheets, and a neighbor’s TV was so loud that percussive thumping noises vibrated one wall. When he did finally sleep, he dreamed dreams that exhausted him-complicated narratives that he had to work to keep track of. He dreamed he was a pharmacist advising a customer about her medications, but while he was talking he absentmindedly, unintentionally ate every one of her pills. He dreamed he was leading a policewoman through his apartment-not the woman who had visited in real life but another one, old and crabby-and while they were in the bedroom they heard a sound from the window. “There!” Liam said. “Didn’t I tell you?” He was pleased, because in the dream there seemed to be some suspicion that he had made the intruder up. Then he woke, and for an instant he thought that the sound from the window had been real. His heart seemed to stop; he felt suddenly cold, although it was a warm night. But almost immediately, he understood that he had imagined it. The only sounds were the meep-meep of tree frogs, the neighbor’s TV, the distant rush of traffic on the Beltway. He was surprised that he’d felt such terror. Why should he be afraid? Everybody dies sometime. In fact he was almost waiting to die. But evidently his body had other ideas.