“No, because he’ll circle the block and come back when I’m not here!”
Gary calmed her down and told her how to approach the house safely when she returned with the boys. He promised to keep his cell phone on and come home early. He refrained from comparing her mental health with his.
Depressed? He was not depressed. Vital signs of the rambunctious American economy streamed numerically across his many-windowed television screen. Orfic Midland up a point and three-eighths for the day. The U.S. dollar laughing at the euro, buggering the yen. Virginia Lin dropped in and proposed selling a block of Exxon at 104. Gary could see out across the river to the floodplain landscape of Camden, New Jersey, whose deep ruination, from this height and distance, gave the impression of a kitchen floor with the linoleum scraped off. The sun was proud in the south, a source of relief; Gary couldn’t stand it when his parents came east and the eastern seaboard’s weather stank. The same sun was shining on their cruise ship now, somewhere north of Maine. In a corner of his TV screen was the talking head of Curly Eberle. Gary upsized the picture and raised the sound as Eberle concluded: “A body-building machine for the brain, that’s not a bad image, Cindy.” The all-business-all-the-time anchors, for whom financial risk was merely the boon companion of upside potential, nodded sagely in response. “Body-building machine for the brain, ho-kay,” the female anchor segued, “and coming up, then, a toy that’s all the rage in Belgium (!) and its maker says this product could be bigger than the Beanie Babies!” Jay Pascoe dropped in to kvetch about the bond market. Jay’s little girls had a new piano teacher now and the same old mother. Gary caught about one word of every three Jay spoke. His nerves were jangling as on the long-ago afternoon before his fifth date with Caroline, when they were so ready to finally be unchaste that each intervening hour was like a granite block to be broken by a shackled prisoner …
He left work at 4:30. In his Swedish sedan he wound his way up Kelly Drive and Lincoln Drive, out of the valley of the Schuylkill and its haze and expressway, its bright flat realities, up through tunnels of shadow and gothic arches of early-autumn leaves along the Wissahickon Creek, and back into the enchanted arboreality of Chestnut Hill.
Caroline’s fevered imaginings notwithstanding, the house appeared to be intact. Gary eased the car up the driveway past the bed of hostas and euonymus from which, just as she’d said, another SECURITY BY NEVEREST sign had been stolen. Since the beginning of the year, Gary had planted and lost five SECURITY BY NEVEREST signs. It galled him to be flooding the market with worthless signage, thereby diluting the value of SECURITY BY NEVEREST as a burglary deterrent. Here in the heart of Chestnut Hill, needless to say, the sheet-metal currency of the Neverest and Western Civil Defense and ProPhilaTex signs in every front yard was backed by the full faith and credit of floodlights and retinal scanners, emergency batteries, buried hot lines, and remotely securable doors; but elsewhere in northwest Philly, down through Mount Airy into Germantown and Nicetown where the sociopaths had their dealings and their dwellings, there existed a class of bleeding-heart homeowners who hated what it might say about their “values” to buy their own home-security systems but whose liberal “values” did not preclude stealing Gary’s SECURITY BY NEVEREST signs on an almost weekly basis and planting them in their own front yards …
In the garage he was overcome by an Alfred-like urge to recline in the car seat and shut his eyes. Turning off the engine, he seemed to switch off something in his brain as well. Where had his lust and energy disappeared to? This, too, was marriage as he knew it.
He made himself leave the car. A constrictive band of tiredness ran from his eyes and sinuses to his brain stem. Even if Caroline was ready to forgive him, even if he and she could somehow slip away from the kids and fool around (and, realistically, there was no way that they could do this), he was probably too tired to perform now anyway. Stretching out ahead of him were five kid-filled hours before he could be alone with her in bed. Simply to regain the energy he’d had until five minutes ago would require sleep — eight hours of it, maybe ten.
The back door was locked and chained. He gave it the firmest, merriest knock he could manage. Through the window he saw Jonah come trotting over in flip-flops and a swimsuit, enter security code, and unbolt and unchain the door.
“Hello there, Dad, I’m making a sauna in the bathroom,” Jonah said as he trotted away again.
The object of Gary’s desire, the tear-softened blond female whom he’d reassured on the phone, was sitting next to Caleb and watching a galactic rerun on the kitchen TV. Earnest humanoids in unisex pajamas.
“Hello!” Gary said. “Looks like everything’s OK here.”
Caroline and Caleb nodded, their eyes on a different planet.
“I guess I’ll go put another sign out,” Gary said.
“You should nail it to a tree,” Caroline said. “Take it off its stick and nail it to a tree.”
Nearly unmanned by disappointed expectation, Gary filled his chest with air and coughed. “The idea, Caroline, is that there be a certain classiness and subtlety to the message we’re projecting? A certain word-to-the-wise quality? When you have to chain your sign to a tree to keep it from getting stolen—”
“I said nail.”
“It’s like announcing to the sociopaths: We’re whipped! Come and get us! Come and get us!”
“I didn’t say chain. I said nail.”
Caleb reached for the remote and raised the TV volume.
Gary went to the basement and from a flat cardboard carton took the last of the six signs that a Neverest representative had sold to him in bulk. Considering the cost of a Neverest home-security system, the signs were unbelievably shoddy. The placards were unevenly painted and attached by fragile aluminum rivets to posts of rolled sheet metal too thin to be hammered into the ground (you had to dig a hole).
Caroline didn’t look up when he returned to the kitchen. He might have wondered if he’d hallucinated her panicked calls to him if there were not a lingering humidity in his boxer shorts and if, during his thirty seconds in the basement, she hadn’t thrown the dead bolt on the back door, engaged the chain, and reset the alarm.
He, of course, was mentally ill, whereas she! She!
“Good Christ,” he said as he punched their wedding date into the numeric keypad.
Leaving the door wide open, he went to the front yard and planted the new Neverest sign in the old sterile hole. When he came back a minute later, the door was locked again. He took his keys out and turned the dead bolt and pushed the door open to the extent the chain permitted, triggering the excuse-me-please alarm inside. He shoved on the door, stressing its hinges. He considered putting his shoulder to it and ripping out the chain. With a grimace and a shout Caroline jumped up and clutched her back and stumbled over to enter code within the thirty-second limit. “Gary,” she said, “just knock.”
“I was in the front yard,” he said. “I was fifty feet away. Why are you setting the alarm?”
“You don’t understand what it was like here today,” she muttered as, limping, she returned to interstellar space. “I’m feeling pretty alone here, Gary. Pretty alone.”
“Here I am, though. Right? I’m home now.”
“Yes. You’re home.”
“Hey, Dad, what’s for dinner?” Caleb said. “Can we have mixed grill?”
“Yes,” Gary said. “I will make dinner and I will do the dishes and I may also trim the hedge, because I, for one, am feeling good! All right, Caroline? Does that sound OK to you?”
“Yes, please, sure, make dinner,” she murmured, staring at the TV.