“You don’t eat anymore,” Bob said.
“No,” said Ethan.
“You should eat something. You should eat food.”
“Okay.” But, when Sally came to take their order, Ethan wanted only coffee. He told Bob, “I’m not sleeping, I can’t sleep.”
“You should sleep,” Bob counseled.
Ethan groaned, and began rubbing his face with his palms. He seemed agitated, even angry; after a long silence, he told Bob, “Say something.” There was an accusatory slant to these words which surprised and confused Bob; it was as though Ethan believed Bob was keeping some crucial truth from him. And Bob wasn’t sure what Ethan actually needed, but decided to tell him about the two children whose conversation he’d overheard at the library that morning: a boy and a girl, seven or eight years old, were sitting side by side in the children’s nook. As Bob was passing by, the boy was proclaiming that something, some event he’d just described, had really and truly occurred — the girl having apparently doubted the tale. The boy’s face was solemn, his voice sincere. “But I swear that’s what happened,” he was saying. “I swear to God it did.” And the girl, without looking up from her book, without raising her voice, told the boy, “Don’t bring God into this.”
Ethan’s laughter in response to the anecdote was loud, true, and weird; their fellow diners all were startled, and Sally came by and said, “Goddamn, Patty, can you spare us a laugh or are you gonna hog it all for yourself?”
“I’m going to hog it,” Ethan said. He walked Bob back to the library; when Bob waved goodbye, Ethan only stared. He looked so hungry, Bob thought. “Eat,” he said, and Ethan waved a hand that he would.
Meanwhile, back at home, Connie was entering into a third phase, another phase of happiness, but this was different from the looking-out-the-window happiness. It was something richer, more like a baseline satisfaction, a thorough confidence. She no longer was cooking for or seducing Bob; she only performed a caretakerish doting over his person, as though he were suffering under some nonfatal yet unenviable impairment.
These days and phases amounted to clues for Bob. The clues came together to form a sense of error in him, and there was a return of the revulsion in crossing the threshold of his front door when he left for work each morning, as though the house itself was telling him, stay.
One day, a Wednesday, and after Ethan stood Bob up for lunch, Bob came home early from the library. He didn’t tell Connie he was coming home early, he just did it. When he pulled into the driveway he saw that the front door was half open, and he wondered what this could mean, and why it made him feel afraid. He walked up the path and into the house, moving from room to room, slowly, stepping softly. He was listening, but there was nothing to listen to. He walked to the living room and saw the back door was open and that Connie was sitting on the bench in the yard, sitting up very straight and staring upward, as one in the grips of a beatitude. She wasn’t smiling but her carriage and expression presented a higher joy, like a religious fanatic filled up by the Spirit. Bob walked over and sat next to her on the bench. He saw that she had a length of fat red string double bow-tied around her wrist, and that she was pinching and petting it. She still was looking away when she said, “Hello.” She was wearing makeup, perfume. She turned to look at Bob.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You seem strange.”
“I’m not.” She rested her face against Bob’s chest. “Your heart’s beating so fast.” She leaned back to make a study of Bob, and for a time she was herself again, in her eyes, in the way she looked at him, worried but also amused — Connie.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
Bob said that it was nothing, just that he’d missed her, and then he kissed her, and she kissed him back but quickly pulled away. She stood up from the bench and asked if Bob was hungry and he said that he wasn’t. She said she was going to make soup for dinner and he said soup was fine. She pulled him up to stand and walked him to the living room. She sat him down on the couch and pressed a book into his hand and brought him a beer in a chubby brown bottle. She returned to the kitchen and Bob was not reading the book or drinking the beer but visualizing Connie’s sounds as he heard them: the clap of the cutting board laid out on the countertop; the knife unsheathed from its block. She began chopping up an onion. Bob could see her movements so clearly in his mind, as if he were standing just beside her.
“What’s that string on your wrist?” he called.
She stopped chopping the onion. “Some string.”
“But who tied it on you?”
“I tied it on myself,” she told him — just like that. Bob didn’t say anything more about it. They hardly spoke through the afternoon or at the dinner table. After they ate, they cleaned the kitchen together, but it felt as if each person was pretending the other wasn’t there. They moved upstairs and Bob undressed and redressed and got into bed while Connie shut herself up in the bathroom and ran a bath. When she came out after, she was wearing her pajamas, and the string wasn’t on her wrist. She got into bed with Bob and they lay there in the dark. After a while, he could hear the sound of Connie sleeping. Bob lay awake for a long time, but eventually he also fell asleep, without meaning to or knowing that he was. He woke up just before five, slipped out of bed and into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the light.
He looked in the trash but the string wasn’t there. He’d wanted it to be there; it was important to him that it was and he felt disappointed to learn that it wasn’t. But where was it? Connie kept an abalone shell in the medicine chest, which was where she put her rings and earrings; the string had been carefully looped and was resting in the shell atop the jewelry. Bob picked out the string and lowered the toilet seat and sat. He lay the string out on the countertop, then set his left hand, knuckles down, over the top of the string, breaking at the line of the wrist. Using his right hand, then, he tried to tie a double bow; but the string wasn’t uniform, its fibers were kinky and sticking out every which way, and he only made a mess. He untangled the string and tried again but found he couldn’t tie even a single bow. He made a third and fourth attempt, a fifth attempt, but he soon understood he could try a hundred times and would never be able to tie a tidy double bow with fat hanging loops the way the string had been on Connie’s wrist. He could never do it and she could never either, and he stood away from the string, watching it, sensing his person in the mirror on the periphery of his vision but feeling unable to look up and meet his reflection. He took the string and left the bathroom and sat on the edge of the mattress. Connie stirred and blinked and looked at him through half-shut eyes. When she saw the string in his hand she began to rise in the bed, as if some force was evenly elevating her, and her eyes were opening wider, and she was watching the string with a sick look on her face. Bob told her, “I don’t see how you could’ve tied that double bow all by yourself. Will you show me how you did it?” He was speaking quietly and not unkindly, and she was nodding agreeably, yes, all right, of course, and took the string away from Bob and set about attempting to tie it to her wrist. When the bow fell apart in her hands, then she tried again, and a third time. When the bow fell apart a fourth time she tilted her face upward, looking at Bob with a puzzlement, as though she didn’t know quite what they were doing, how they had come to find themselves at this obscure intersection. The very beginnings of the new morning were evident in the curtain covering the bedroom window; the room was growing by the first traces of daylight. Connie snapped the string to its full length and draped it across her wrist as if to try again, but now she’d begun to cry, and Bob watched this, watched as she balled the string in her fist and brought her fist up to cover her face, shuddering, crying harder, but silently.