Several trails converged on a duck pond bordered by an asphalt lane. The ducks bobbed uncertainly on the surface of the gray water, as if anticipating some massive upswell. They pitched from side to side as the wind razed through the trees and muted the sound of their chatter. They beat their wings on the water, striking up silvery flares.
A lone bench stood by the water’s edge. The light was an opaque gray wash, as if the whole thing were being shot from some remote vantage and the atmosphere were disturbed between the camera and the action taking place.
Marsh licked his lips. With a trembling hand, he extracted the creased snapshot from his coat pocket and held it, fluttering on the wind. He knew he should be drunk, but he couldn’t feel it anymore at all. Adrenaline, he supposed; he was buzzing with it.
“Your wife,” the guy said, in a way that irritated Marsh, as if he’d seen it a million times, as if the whole thing were something squalid, some oft-repeated tragedy. Mickey sighed. “All right,” he said, looking off at the slight milky haze lowering across the western sky. He looked at Marsh. “What did she do? Is she cheating on you? She’s running around on you and you just can’t take it anymore? What is it?”
Marsh began sputtering, unable to answer.
“No,” he said finally. “Nothing like that.” What was the man doing, trying to talk him out of it? “The car,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Do you think you could spare the car?”
“What?” Mickey loomed over him.
“She drives a Mercury Sable. Last year’s model. I was hoping you could avoid-you know. Damaging the car.”
What happened next happened quickly, and while it was happening the one thing that occurred to Marsh, crowding out all other thoughts or considerations, was that he was being mugged. Mickey told him to drop the briefcase, and when he failed to do this, struck him a resounding blow with a large, pinkish fist that seemed to materialize out of thin air, the row of swollen and meaty knuckles making contact with the bridge of his nose. He heard a sharp crack, a ringing in his ears, and when he came to, he was flat on his back in the mud at the foot of the park bench, and several ducks were honking in his ear and padding about on their webbed feet in the mud not far from his head.
The briefcase, the snapshot, the money-all gone. Even his wallet, and yes, his Rolex. He’d been cleaned out, and his suit, $450 before alterations, was ruined. He felt frantically in his pockets for his keys and found them, thinking at least something had gone right. But forty-five minutes later, when he finally found his way out of the park, he could see the bright orange ticket fluttering under his windshield wiper as he approached the Jag. He screamed, not caring who gawked or shook his head. On 19th Avenue, passersby turned their faces away, as if his particular insanity could be transmitted by no more than eye contact, and he stumbled along in the thickening, dusky light.
2
They had a place in South San Francisco, a two-story walkup that sat in a row of identical walkups in what passed for a quiet neighborhood among the sprawl and the clutter of city life. They were still paying for the house, but they’d bought before the latest boom, and when she heard what the other houses on the block were going for these days, she gasped. Sometimes she thought they should sell, treble their money and get out, but she didn’t want to uproot the kids halfway through their schooling. Her father-the Colonel-had dragged her from Illinois to Taiwan to Corpus Christi, Texas, before she was twelve, and she had sworn above all else that she would not do the same thing to Todd and Jaime.
They had a lawn, a twelve-foot-by-four-foot patch of grass she watered and fertilized and guarded jealously against the neighborhood dogs, who were always doing their business there.
They had a two-and-a-half-car garage, a thing that struck her as funny in a vague way, in the sense that two point five children might have been funny.
She watched him come tramping across the lawn, the shit, in what must have been a state of extreme drunkenness if he thought he was going to get away with it-trampling the hyacinths, tripping over the rhododendron along the brick walk, all but tearing the philodendron bush out by the roots as he stumbled coming up the steps. She’d had the feeling this was coming, though she couldn’t have said just what this was yet. She’d sensed impending calamity, sniffing it on the breeze the way you would a coming storm, bracing herself for impact even as she dug in her heels and refused to let the smallest thing go. A tiny exhilaration blossomed inside her at the foretaste. She would have felt entirely justified stabbing him with the garden shears.
Drunk as a sailor. She pitied the creature she’d married.
“If you think,” she said, bits of hamburger clinging to her fingers, on him before he’d set foot in the door, her voice carrying shrilly across the hall, “if you think you can come in here any goddamn way you please, mister, you’d better think again, because you’ve got another thing coming. I spent three and a half hours out there today, and look, would you just look at what you’ve done to my garden? Henry, goddammit, what the hell do you have to say for yourself?”
Then she saw his face.
His nose seemed to be screwed on sideways, as if it had tried to escape but had become confused and tried to go in two different directions at once. Purple bruises bloomed under his eyes, and wads of spittle clung to the corners of his mouth. He stunk like a barroom, the cheap, lowlife smell of booze and cigarette smoke clinging to his suit and wafting into their home. A sense of shock mitigated her horror, and then the whole thing suddenly became funny, and she collapsed against the wall, covering her mouth with the back of her wrist and giggling, aware even as she did of the cruel edge to her laughter, of the pleasure she took in seeing him disgraced.
Jaime had come halfway down the steps and stood there arrested, like a piece of garden statuary. Todd came running from the den, as if he sensed whatever drama was unfolding in the foyer of their home beat out Judge Judy or The People’s Court. He stood in the doorway, elfin, his hair sticking out at the sides. His mouth hung agape, his tongue playing in the space where one of his front teeth had been. He took one look at his father, then he turned and fled.
“Jesus, Dad,” the girl said. She was wearing some witchy, clinging thing that made of her budding curves a shapeless swell and made her entire shape that of a bell. She grinned uncertainly, showing the metal bands around her teeth, taking such obvious delight in her father’s suffering that for the moment she was entirely unselfconscious. “You look like the Elephant Man,” she said.
“Jaime,” Gina remonstrated. She had a feeling her daughter’s guidance counselor was going to hear about this, and she wanted to mitigate whatever damage had already been done, to keep the situation from escalating any further than it already had. She stanched wounds, bandaged knees, commiserated with Jaime over boys; she was all the children had in this world, the sane center of their lives. And someone had to protect them from their father.
“Go to your room,” he said, his voice cracking. “You go to your fucking room right now. You little slut, you’re lucky we even let you out of the house.”
“Mom,” the girl said, her face a shattered window, like someone had pitched a rock through it. “Something’s wrong with Dad,” and she retreated, backing up the stairs.
“You come back down here and there’ll be something wrong with you,” Henry said. “Things are changing around this house, and they’re changing right now. First thing is, you’re going to listen to your father, and if you don’t, by God, you’ll look like this by the time he’s through with you. I will not be treated like an asshole in my own home.”