Another pause. “But you’re the three-thirty—”
“Yeah, I know, but something’s come up. I’m sick. All of a sudden, and I—” The car beside him started up, the long gleaming tube of the chassis sliding back and away from him, and there was the lawn, there were the palm trees, but all he could see was Laurie, the way her fingers stiffened on the sheets and her eyes went on gazing into the camera but didn’t register a thing.
“Our policy is for a twenty-four hour cancellation or else we have no choice but to charge you.”
“I’m sick. I told you.”
“I’m sorry.”
The moment burst on him like one of those rogue waves at the beach and he came within a hair of shouting an obscenity into the receiver but he caught himself. “I’m sorry too,” he said.
At home, he found he was shaking so hard he could barely get the key in the door, and though he didn’t want to, though it wasn’t even four yet, he went straight to the kitchen and poured himself a shot of the tequila they kept on hand for margaritas when people came over. He didn’t bother with salt or lime but just threw it back neat and if this was the cliché—your wife has sex with another man and you go straight for the sauce — then so be it. The tequila tasted like soap. No matter. He poured another, downed it, and still he was trembling. Then he sat down at the kitchen table, opened the laptop, clicked on Rob’s e-mail and watched the video all the way through.
This time the blow was even harsher, a quick hot jolt that seared his eyes and shot through him from his fingertips to his groin. The whole thing lasted less than sixty seconds, in medias res, and what had preceded it — disrobing, a kiss, foreplay — remained hidden. The act itself was straightforward as far as it went, no acrobatics, no oral sex, just him behind her and the rhythmic swaying that was as earnest and inevitable as when any two mammals went at it. Dogs. Apes. Husbands and wives. At the moment of release, she looked back at the guy doing it to her and as if at a signal rolled over and here were his knees in the frame now and his torso looming as he covered her with his own body and they kissed, their two heads bobbing briefly in the foreground before the screen went dark. The second time through, details began to emerge. The setting, for one thing. Clearly, it was a dorm room — there was the generic desk to the left of the bed, a stack of books, the swivel chair with the ghosts of their uninhabited clothes thrown over it, Levi’s, a belt buckle, the silken sheen of her panties. And Laurie. This was Laurie before she’d cut her hair, before her implants, before he’d even met her. Laurie in college. Fucking.
The tequila burned in his stomach. There was no sound but for the hum of the refrigerator as it started up and clicked off again. Very gradually, the light began to swell round him as the sun searched through the haze to fill the kitchen and infuse the walls with color — a cheery daffodil yellow, the shade she’d picked out when they bought the condo two years ago on her twenty-ninth birthday. “This is the best birthday present I ever had,” she’d said, her voice soft and steady, and she’d leaned in to kiss him in the lifeless office where the escrow woman sat behind her block-like desk and took their signatures on one form after another as if she’d been made of steel and they’d run out of movable parts.
They’d celebrated that night with a bottle of champagne and dinner out and sex in their old apartment on their old bed that had come from Goodwill in a time when neither of them had a steady job. He looked round the room now — the most familiar room in the world, the place where they had breakfast together and dinner most nights, sharing the cooking and the TV news and a bottle of wine — and it seemed alien to him, as if he’d been snatched out of his life and set down here in this over-bright echoing space with its view of blacktop and wires and the inescapable palm with its ascending pineapple ridges and ragged wind-blown fronds.
The next thing he knew it was five o’clock and he heard her key turn in the lock and the faint sigh of the door as she pushed it shut behind her and then the drumbeat of her heels on the glazed Saltillo tile in the front hall. “Todd?” she called. “Todd, you home?” He felt his jaws clench. He didn’t answer. Her footsteps came down the hall, beating, beating. “Todd?”
He liked her in heels. Had liked her in heels, that is. She was a surgical nurse, working for a pair of plastic surgeons who’d partnered to open the San Roque Aesthetics Institute five years back, and she changed to flats while assisting at surgery but otherwise wore heels to show off her legs beneath the short skirts and calibrated tops she wore when consulting with prospective patients. “Advertising,” she called it. The breast implants — about which he’d been very vocal and very pleased — had come at a discount.
He was still at the table when she walked into the kitchen, the bottle on the counter, the shot glass beside him, the laptop just barely cracked. “What’s this?” she said, lifting the bottle from the counter and giving it a shake. “You’re drinking?” She came across the room to him, laid a hand on his shoulder and ran it up the back of his neck, then bent forward to lift the empty glass to her nose and take a theatrical sniff.
“Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t lift his eyes.
“That’s not like you. Tough day?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Well, if you’re partying”—and here her voice fluted above him, light and facetious, as if the world were still on its track and nothing had changed—“then I hope you won’t mind if I pour myself a glass of wine. Do we have any wine left?” Her hand dropped away and he felt a chill on the back of his neck where her palm had been. He heard her heels tapping like typewriter keys, then the wheeze of the vacuum seal on the refrigerator door, the cabinet working on its hinges, the sharp clink as the base of the wine glass came into contact with the granite counter, and finally the raucous celebratory splash of the wine. Still he didn’t look up. Her attitude — this sunniness, this self-possession, this blindness and blandness and business-as-usual crap — savaged him. Didn’t she know what was coming? Couldn’t she feel it the way animals do just before an earthquake strikes?
“That guy you used to date in college,” he said, his voice choked in his throat, “what was his name?”
He looked up now and she was poised there at the counter, leaning back into it, the glass of wine — sauvignon blanc, filled to the top — glowing with reflected light. She let out a little laugh. “What brought that up?”
“What color hair did he have? Was it short, long, what?”
“Jared,” she said, her eyes gone distant a moment. “Jared Reed. From New Joisey.” She lifted the glass to her lips, took a sip, the gold chain she wore at her throat picking up the light now too. She was wearing a blue silk blouse open to the third button down. She put a hand there, to her collarbone. Sipped again. “I don’t know,” she said. “Brown. Black maybe? He wore it short, like Justin Timberlake. But why? Don’t tell me you’re jealous”—the facetious note again when all he could think of was leaping up from the table and slapping every shred of facetiousness out of her—“after all these years? Is that it? I mean, what do you care?”
“Rob sent me a video today.”
“Rob?”
“My brother. Remember my brother? Rob?” His voice got away from him. He hadn’t meant to shout, hadn’t meant to be accusatory or confrontational — he just wanted answers, that was all.
She said nothing. Her face was cold, her eyes colder still.
“Maybe”—and here he flipped open the laptop—“maybe you ought to have a look at it and then you tell me what it is.” He was up out of the chair now, the tequila pitching him forward, and he didn’t care about the look on her face or the way she cradled the wine and held out her hands to him and he didn’t touch her — wouldn’t touch her, wouldn’t touch her ever again. The kitchen door was a slab of nothing, but it slammed behind him and the whole house shook under the weight of it.