At the Bottom of Everything(21)
I’d never before—not when my mom had fainted in an elevator at Hecht’s, not when I’d almost biked directly off a hiking trail into a ravine—felt horror anything like what I felt in that instant of hearing the scream of brakes and, half a heartbeat later, the scream of a woman.
There’s a moment just after breaking something (the glass slips from your fingertips, your elbow catches the vase) in which it feels like if you stand there, absolutely still, baring your teeth, you should be able to suck time backward like an indrawn breath. Your hand hangs there in the air, your eyes fall shut, you’re like someone playing a children’s game with a whistle and a voice that shouts, “Freeze!”
I was still in that moment when Thomas, who’d been standing beside me, started down toward our car, which had rolled to a stop half a lane into Connecticut and was sitting there untouched (only now did I register that among the things I heard hadn’t been the crunch of metal or glass). I must have walked some ways down the block too, although I don’t remember deciding to move, because I remember seeing the back of the man who’d been driving the SUV; he was bald-headed and wearing a white shirt, kneeling in the road, facing away from us. I remember seeing that our car sat in a puddle of dark between streetlights. And I remember thinking: The cops aren’t here yet; no one’s come out of their houses yet; this won’t last.
It was Thomas who slipped into the Volvo, quick as a mouse disappearing into a crack in the wall, and it was him who reversed, more smoothly than either of us had ever driven before: an indrawn breath. But it was me who ran after him, who guided the car into the driveway, who, trembling afterward in Thomas’s bedroom, trying not to hear the faraway sirens, agreed: not a word, not a word, not a word.
Anna and I were lying together on the bath mat in their guest bathroom one afternoon that May. This bathroom had an enormous claw-foot tub, which we’d been in and were now outside of, listening as it slurpily drained, and I said, thinking I sounded so casual that it couldn’t possibly be a problem, “What was that Max guy’s last name again?”
“Is that what this is about?”
“What?”
“The way you’re being. You’re one of those jealous people! I told you!”
“One of what jealous people? I just couldn’t remember if—”
“Jesus Christ, this is idiotic.” She wrapped herself in a towel and left me lying on the floor, looking at the underside of the sink, my back stuck to cold porcelain, surrounded by the smell of blown-out candles.
We had one of our only bad fights that afternoon, storming around the house in our towels, unable to wave our arms. She said that if I was calling her a slut then I should just go ahead and say it, and I said that if she was looking for some dumb Texan fuck buddy then she should find somebody else, because that wasn’t who—
“How do you know he’s Texan?”
“You said.”
“No, I didn’t.”
On most days my strategy was less direct, if not any more successful. I’d started doing push-ups (which required clearing a space on the floor of my room and waiting for Joel to leave for work in the morning, so he wouldn’t ask me what I was doing). Whenever I sat around I squeezed a tennis ball, switching hands every couple of minutes. I tried, when Anna and I were together, to cultivate an air of … mysterious masculinity. Sensitive cowboy-hood. I let stubble grow on my cheeks. I carried her up the stairs and laid her on the bed as gently as if I were launching a raft. I let her know that I was thinking of spending a month this summer driving across the country alone.
I should never have tried. My appeal, what appeal I had, was of a different type—tousled and sandy haired and slightly soft around the edges. Women wanted to mother me, not be ravaged by me. I’d known that at various points, but in my state that spring I’d forgotten it. And so I was on a campaign to ravage; like a caveman assailant I dragged her to the floor in that gloomy front room. I lifted her up onto the workbench in the basement. And on the hot night in May when everything ended, I led her, kissing and shedding clothes and stumbling, directly from the front door where she met me to the kitchen in the back of the house, where, in only my socks, I swept aside a bagful of junk mail and laid her on the same small table where we’d sat drinking tea four months earlier.
In my defense, it was a Sunday, which was one of the nights that Peter had the boys, and it was eight o’clock, which meant that it was too dark outside for neighbors to see in. I’d thought about these things, which is probably an argument against my being the sort of person who should have his way with people on kitchen tables.