“Gregor—”
Gregor put the receiver back into the cradle. It wasn’t true that David’s car had just pulled into the garage—and even if it had, Gregor couldn’t have heard it from the living room. David Sandler’s garage wasn’t attached to the house, because state environmental regulations said that you couldn’t park a car directly on the beach. David kept his car in the lot near the boardwalk. Gregor put the phone back on the end table. His head hurt.
No matter what Bennis thought, it wasn’t true that there was something wrong with him. He was a little tired, but that was perfectly natural. Then again, he had been thinking about Elizabeth a lot, too much maybe, more than he had for years. If that was a symptom of something, Gregor didn’t know of what. He got up and poured himself another glass of wine from the bottle he had left on the coffee table. It was some sort of red something that David had told him was supposed to be served at room temperature. After the glass was full, Gregor took a sip off the top of it—necessary, to keep it from spilling; why had he poured it so high?—and then went back out on the deck to look at the moon again.
When he and Elizabeth had first been married, when they had both been very young, they had talked often about owning a house near the sea, a place where they could go and simply be together. That was before they had realized that Elizabeth would never be able to have children. They had imagined themselves with a family, toddlers filling buckets with thick wet sand, ten-year-olds running through the kitchen to pick up a glass of milk on their way to do important goofing off in the upstairs bedrooms. Gregor sometimes wondered how different he would have been, how different Elizabeth would have been, if there had been children in their lives. He tried not to think about the possibility that she might not have died when she did if she had given birth at least once. The kind of cancer Elizabeth died of was far more prevalent in women who had never had children.
The moon kept drifting behind clouds that made it look as if it were twisting and writhing. In the first year after Elizabeth died, there had been times when Gregor had thought that he could hear Elizabeth’s voice, calling to him from other rooms. Now her voice sang to him from out across the water. He could see her as clearly as if she were standing beside him. “Elizabeth,” he said to her, out loud, and she answered him with music. Then the breeze got chilly and his body went all over cold, and he knew that he was alone.
After a few more minutes, he went back into the house and then into the guest room where he was supposed to sleep. He closed the door without turning on the light.
Since there was nothing he wanted to see, he didn’t need the light to see it by.
2
NOW IT WAS MORNING, and Gregor was standing in the kitchen, turning David Sandler’s refrigerator note over and over in his hands. David was home, and asleep. Gregor knew that because David slept in an open loft on the house’s minimal second floor, and he snored. Gregor got orange juice out of the refrigerator and poured himself a glass. In the bright sunshine of this morning, it didn’t seem possible to Gregor that he had been hearing Elizabeth’s voice on the water in the dark. He never heard Elizabeth’s voice anymore. It had left him when he moved back to Cavanaugh Street and started to live his life again. Gregor put his glass of juice down on the counter and fumbled around among the equipment there, looking for the means to make coffee. David had a formidable aluminum coffee machine, but as far as Gregor could tell, he had never used it. It was as shiny and clean inside as the day it had been brought from the store. Gregor poked around in the cabinets and came up with a large jar of instant, fortunately not Taster’s Choice. If there was one thing Gregor truly couldn’t stand, it was those silly commercials with the British woman and the American man. He put the kettle on to boil and dumped instant coffee into the bottom of a large white mug. When the water boiled, he poured it over the coffee and stirred more vigorously than he needed to. He had too much energy this morning. He was restless and jittery, eager for someplace to go. He thought about calling Clayton Hall, and decided against it. He wasn’t ready for Clayton Hall yet. He finished his orange juice, rinsed the glass out in the sink, and left the glass to dry in the white plastic drainer. David was still snoring away upstairs. Gregor thought it was a good thing that David had never married. With a snore like that, he would have been kicked out of the marriage bed and down the hall to the study in a week.
Gregor got his coffee half finished, and made up his mind. The loft was reached by a spiral staircase. Gregor had never understood the attraction of spiral staircases. They showed up everywhere people had the money to pay for them, but they were damned hard to climb. Gregor climbed this one very carefully, holding on to the rail with one hand and his coffee with the other. When he got to the top, he made himself walk a full foot onto the platform before he looked back and down. Looking down didn’t make him feel as sick as he thought it would, which he found somehow reassuring. There was a big bookcase that served as the headboard of David’s bed on one side and as a shield from the living room on the other. Gregor went around it and found David sleeping in a T-shirt, wound into the sheets as if he had tried to braid himself into the bed. Gregor pulled up the small armchair that was resting against the bureau and sat down. Then he cleared his throat as loudly as he could. It didn’t make a dent in the noise. It would have taken a freight train to make a dent in the noise.