Be Mine Page 18

  Now, he was lying on his back on Jon's side of the bed. Looking up at the ceiling, he said, "So, what are we going to do about this, Sherry?"

  I was relieved, I realized—a weight rising from my chest, as if a large bird had been perched there—hearing him say something that had to do with what was happening between us, the little door it opened into the possibility that this was wrong, that it had to end. In that crack of light I thought I could still see myself in my old life—maybe carrying a basket of laundry up the stairs. Going for a slow walk with Jon through a park, holding hands, growing older, placing a plate of sliced beef and onions on a table between my husband and my son. I said, "Oh, Bram, you're right. This can't go on."

  He said, "I want you to leave this motherfucker, baby. I want you to be mine."

  I couldn't move.

  I couldn't breathe.

  The word mine seemed to echo around the bedroom, peeling itself down to the essentials of hard consonants and the single bright vowel (eye eye eye) bouncing from one white wall to the other—while, outside, what had sounded like thousands and thousands of spring birds making noises about their territory, about their fears, about their plans for the future in the trees, went completely silent.

  I sat up.

  What was I doing here, with this stranger, in my marital bed? Whether Jon had wanted it or not, it was a completé betrayal, and I'd done it simply out of vanity, hadn't I? It hadn't been for Jon. I couldn't even pretend to myself that it had been. It had been for me:

  See, Bram. I am a woman with a lovely home. I am a woman with things, and people, and—

  No.

  It had been for Sue.

  See? No one needed to spice up my life.

  It had been for all of them. It had been for Beth at her computer, playing solitaire, watching me out of the corner of her eye. Amanda Stefanski in her orange dress, telling me what a wonderful mentor I was. Robert Z, who wasn't gay at all, but who still had no interest in me. My student Merienne with her misspelled name and plunging neckline. Derek Heng. What's the point of reading Hamlet if we don't understand it? My mother, who'd died when she was my age. My brother, who'd gone to a Holiday Inn in Houston to shoot himself in the head and never even left a note. I'd done it for them.

  But, in doing it, I realized now, listening to Bram breathe on Jon's side of the bed, staring at the ceiling, I had plucked out my own eye. I had taken a knife to my own hand.

  "We have to go," I said to Bram, and got out of the bed.

  He got out of bed more slowly than I, but he did get out, and as he pulled his clothes back on behind me I brushed the pillowcases and the sheets with the palms of my hands. There was nothing there, but I brushed anyway. Skin cells. Molecules. The dust and detritus of us. My hands were shaking. I made the bed, pulled the sheets up, tucked them in—and the white comforter, heartbreakingly familiar and plain, a blank page upon which I'd written all of this, I pulled that up, too, smoothed out the creases, sweeping the surface, patting it down until it looked exactly as it had—although, I knew, stepping back, that it was no longer the same bed in which Jon and I had slept the night before, and the night before that, and all the nights remembered and forgotten stretching behind me, through time. It had been changed, forever—the subtle alteration having taken place, it seemed, at the level of its atomic structure, a few rearranged particles that had turned it into another bed entirely, the bed of a couple I'd never met, a couple I would not have recognized, passing them on the street. A couple I would have failed to recognize mainly because the woman, passing by me with her husband, would have borne such an uncanny resemblance to me.

  "Are we going, babe," Bram asked, "or are we going to stand here staring at the bed?"

  I didn't turn to look at him.

  I couldn't tear myself away.

  I was stunned, frozen in time, over my own bed. There was something, I thought, that I needed to remember about this bed—but then Bram, behind me, cleared his throat impatiently, and I turned away from the bed, while, under it, the tape recorder continued its digital whispering, which either I didn't hear, or I chose not to hear.

  BRAM drove my car back into the city. We'd left his red Thunderbird in the parking lot of the college, ostensibly so that my husband, who was supposed to be out of town, wouldn't hear from the neighbors about another man's car parked in our driveway.

  Being beside him in a car was a lot like being with him in bed. He knew what he was doing. He was absorbed completely in the task of doing it, the mechanics of it.

  But I felt strangely shier beside him here in my car than I had been even the first time with him in bed—self-consciously pulling my seat belt across my chest, awkwardly adjusting the visor so that the sun, which had begun to slide out of the sky already into the west, wasn't in my eyes.

  I crossed my ankles on the floorboard, and, when that seemed matronly, I crossed my legs.

  Bram looked down at them, put his hand briefly on one of my knees—the one that still bore a deep blue bruise and a patch of raw skin from my fall in the cafeteria—and then put both hands back on the steering wheel as we merged onto the freeway.

  As he drove, I watched the side of his face. In profile, driving, he looked, I thought, like a man who loved nothing, no one, more than a complicated engine, and the stab of terror I'd felt beside him in bed—no. He was passionate, yes, but he was, surely, a reasonable man. When I told him that the affair had to end, he would be understanding, and discreet. He would be polite when he saw me in the hallway at the college. He would slip politely out of my life, as quietly as he'd slipped into it. What Bram Smith really loved was just this—a car, driving it, completely absorbed, utterly lost in the world on the other side of it, while, at the same time, completely attentive to the network of belts and cogs and oiled steel that was the motor of the thing he drove, which was, at this moment, my car.

  I could see that in his eyes, and felt relieved that he was looking into the windshield, not at me, with that intensity.

  Then, listening to something, Bram said, "This car's sprung too tight. These Jap cars—"

  He shook his head. He suggested that I get something (the timing belt?) checked. He said there was a clicking sound when the gears shifted, a bit of grinding, and the car pulled a little to the left. How long since I'd had my tires rotated?

  I told him I had no idea. Was I supposed to have my tires rotated?

  He snorted, nodded. He said, "Doesn't your fucking husband know anything about cars?"

  No, I told him. My husband knew about computers, he designed software, important—

  "Software" Bram said. "Pussy."

  I inhaled at the word, and my mouth stayed open, waiting for the breath to return from inside of me to the world—shocked at how sharp it had felt, hearing that word, meaning Jon. It was as if I'd been slapped on the top of my hand with something thin, but solid. Defensively, I said, "He shoots, too. He hunts..." but I let it trail off, picturing Jon outside the house in his orange coat, taking aim at a squirrel on the roof.

  "Well," Bram said, "he ought to be taking better care of his wife's vehicle." He touched my knee again and looked over. "Not to mention some of his wife's other needs."

  ***

  MILES passed before we spoke again.

  It was a parody of a late spring afternoon. Stone-blue sky. All the flowering trees in bloom. The grass was emerald green. I unrolled my window a few inches and could smell damp clay, new leaves. Even along the freeway, daffodils and narcissi were holding up their sugary torches in the ditches—their proof of the triumph of beauty over decay, their perfumed suggestion that, under the earth all winter, something had remade them, turned their deaths into something frivolous, lighthearted, and sent them back into the world wearing it.

  We passed the place where I'd hit the doe, but when I looked into the median, I saw nothing there.

  Had the grass simply, finally, consumed her—nature washing her out of this world, reabsorbing her, the fur and the blood and the bon
es, bringing her back into the earth? Or had someone come along with a truck, a pitchfork, and, in an orange suit and plastic gloves, disposed of the evidence?

  Did it matter?

  She was gone.

  We were close to the exit we needed to take to get to the college, and I wasn't sure if Bram had ever approached it from this direction, and I was about to point it out when he cleared his throat and said, "I had a word with our friend Garrett."

  I turned to look at him.

  His mouth was open. His nostrils were flared. Both of his hands were on the steering wheel, holding it more tightly than he needed to hold it. I said, "What?"

  "I told Garrett that if he continues to bother you in any way, there will be serious consequences."

  "Oh my god," I said. "Bram," I said. I put a hand over my mouth. In only the span of a few heartbeats, I'd broken into a sweat. I could feel a cool droplet of it run from the back of my neck straight down my spine. I said from behind my hand, "You shouldn't have said anything to Garrett. I—"

  "That's between me and Garrett," Bram said, passing our exit. "I don't want to talk about it. I just thought you ought to know."

  I took my hand from my mouth and looked down at my lap. My hands felt loose, distant—like parts of me that could easily slip off, be lost. I could feel my heart beating behind my ears, a low voice coming from my blood, insisting (was was was), and opened my mouth to try to say something, but before I could, Bram looked around :ind said, "Where the hell are we? Fuck. Did we miss our exit?"

  I managed to tell him that we had, that we needed to take the next one, go back, turn around.

  The traffic had thinned to nothing—just one wobbly truck in the driving lane, which Bram passed smoothly. Before he did, I saw the stenciling on the side of it (TWO MEN AND A TRUCK) and caught a glimpse of the young man behind the wheel, who was either singing or talking to himself. Chad flashed in front of me then as Bram made his way to our actual exit:

  Chad, in the photograph in his baseball uniform.

  Chad, eleven, unblinking, uncensored, pure enthusiasm looking into a camera.

  The pounding of my blood behind my ears softened and grew more insistent at the same time.

  It was Chad's little-boy voice now.

  Ma ma ma.

  DRIVING back home, I remembered it:

  The tape recorder.

  I'd never put it under the bed, but I'd also never checked to see if Jon had put it there.

  A heavy rain had come out of the east, carried across the sky in a single massive blue-black cloud, and the windshield wipers made the sound of heavy, congested breathing as they cleared the torrents of it from the glass. I pulled into the driveway, turned the engine off, and sat, trying to prepare myself—for the rain, for the run to the house, for Jon.

  No, I thought.

  It could not have been under the bed.

  Surely, after our argument, Jon had taken it back to Best Buy, or put it away in a drawer.

  And, even if he'd put it under the bed, even if he'd switched it on, in the morning, himself, it would have run out of tape long before Bram and I had gotten into the bed.

  But, I also thought, what if it had been there, what if it had recorded everything?

  Would Jon have heard what he'd wanted?

  The sound of me fucking another man.

  And what about I want you to leave this motherfucker, baby? I want you to be mine.

  What about that?

  What if the machine had recorded that?

  I remembered Bethany Stout, in class on Thursday, raising her hand as we labored through a final discussion of Hamlet. "Mrs. Seymour, isn't this business, when Hamlet gets kidnapped by pirates, a really good example of deus ex machina? I mean"—she tossed up her hands here as if she'd completely had it with Shakespeare—"give me a break."

  Where, I wondered, had she learned the term?

  Deus ex machina.

  This was the same girl who, earlier in the semester, had asked why I couldn't have assigned a more recent translation of the play.

  I opened my own hands, then, as if to catch what she had tossed up, and Todd Wrigley said, "What the hell is day us Mackinac?"

  Bethany turned in her seat to address him directly. "It means," she said, '"god comes from the machine,'" and, despite her own shaky translation, she went on to explain the literary concept to Todd Wrigley far better than I could have.

  No.

  There had been no machine.

  And, even if there had been, I was ready, I thought, to go inside, to see Jon, to explain to him, as simply as Bethany Stout had explained herself to Todd Wrigley, what we had let happen, and why we had to make it stop. I was ready to get out of the car, to walk up the steps of my house, to sit down with Jon, to talk. I really was—but there was also so much rain pounding on the roof of my car and the ground around my car that it sounded like a herd of deer, stampeding, close by, their delicate hooves thundering in unison, in panic, hurrying past the house, tearing up the yard, altering forever the very landscape upon which we walked. I sat behind the wheel of my car for a long time, listening. In a trance of listening. I might have sat there, like that, in the driveway, for a few minutes, or for many hours, staring straight ahead, listening to those hooves. When I finally got out of the car, ran through the rain, stepped drenched onto the porch, Jon was standing in the doorway.

  I could see that he'd been crying.

  "Were you just going to stay in your fucking car all night, Sherry? Were you afraid to come in here and talk to me?"

  "HOW COULD you do it, Sherry? How could you cheat on me, lie to me? How could you bring another man here? How could you fuck him in our bed?"

  "What?" I said.

  I put my purse on the floor, slowly. There was a puddle of rain already at my feet. My dress was running with water, and my hair. Jon's hands were in fists and he was holding them up against his chest like a prizefighter getting ready to punch. I stepped backward.

  "The tape recorder, Sherry. It was under the bed. I heard everything. I heard it all. You can't tell me you faked that ?"

  "Faked what, Jon?" I said, as gently, as quietly, as I could, trying not to startle him into any kind of action. I said, "Jon, why would I fake anything?"

  His mouth opened, as if in astonishment, and he let the fists fall then, in slow motion, in front of him. Sudden and enormous tears fell out of his eyes, onto the floor at his feet. They looked like cartoon tears. Illustrated tears. How could real tears be so large, fall so quickly? He said, as if he'd been completely defeated, "Sherry. Do you hate me that much? Do you really hate me that much?"

  I stepped toward him carefully. I put my hand on his arm. I tried to caress it. I tried to look up into his face, but then he yanked away, snapped to attention, and glared at me.

  Again, I stepped backward, away.

  "You fucking cunt," he growled, and I put a hand to my throat. "You sick bitch," he hissed.

  "Jon!" I said, holding my hands out to him. I said, "Jon, why are you acting like this?" I said, "Okay, okay, the tape. You heard it. You heard it all. But this isn't something you didn't already know. This isn't something you didn't tell me over and over to do."

  Jon sprang at me then, pushed me with the palms of his hands on my chest, and I stumbled backward onto the love seat with my mouth open in surprise, and he shouted—loud enough, I thought, for the Henslins to hear all the way down the road—"You bitch! You lying bitch! Don't you blame this on me! That was a fantasy, and you know it. I never told you to do anything. What kind of husband do you think I am? What kind of a fucking monster do you think I am}"

  I continued to watch him with my mouth open.

  The roped veins in his neck.

  The terrible burning flush on his face.

  The baffled, wild rage.

  His eyes—pure black, but flashing.

  "Jon," I said—and I felt it, again, as I had in the hallway with Sue: that telescoping. Back this time through the weeks, the sex, the whispere
d insistences—was it possible? Had it all really been a game? Had he somehow never known? Had he thought—?

  No.

  "Jon," I said. "What did you think, then? What did you think would be on the tape: recorder if—"

  "I thought you would invent something, Sherry. I thought you would play along. Like: the bite marks. I thought you'd fake something. For the fantasy. I thought you'd—"

  He stopped talking, sank to his knees, began to sob—horribly, inconsolably—into his hands. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the sudden, total silence out there was startling, disorienting, maddening. I put my hands to the side of my head to cover my ears, to block it out.

  CHAD at the airport:

  I saw him from the back, first, watching the baggage carousel.

  When he was little, I could scan a room full of children, or the pool, or the park, and find him instantly.

  It had nothing to do with what he was wearing, or any of the details of him—haircut, height. It was everything, all of it, all at once—the whole of him set absolutely apart from all other children. My gaze could pass over a hundred others in a blur, land on him with perfect accuracy (mine) and with a swiftness that never failed to surprise me.

  But this young man at the baggage carousel, with his head bowed, watching its slow revolutions, could have been any young man. My gaze slipped past him the first time and settled mistakenly on a laughing boy with a bag of golf clubs, and then an older man with Chad's build, and then a little boy—ten? eleven?—before I saw him, my son, watching the luggage traveling past him, waiting for his. I had to catch Jon's arm to steady myself, seeing our son—a wash of fear moving through me so swiftly it felt like something that had been injected directly into my veins.

  Did he know?

  Could he know?

  Could Garrett have told him?

  A phone call? An e-mail? (Your mother's lover threatened my life)

  Or were there, perhaps, others who knew, who might have told him—out of spite, or concern, or self-interest?

  Sue? Beth? Bram?