How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (5 page)

“It's beautiful,” she said. “You're so thoughtful.”

“It comes with strings attached,” Russell said.

She looked up warily.

“Give me a cigarette, for Christ's sake, before I die.” He smoked it in her cubicle, and they talked about her courses for the fall. Russell wished he were going back to college, wished that he were embarking on some open-ended adventure, as he savored what he told himself would be his last cigarette.

One morning toward the end of August, Corrine woke up at five a.m. in a terrible state. She'd had a dream: The apartment had gone up in flames. Her breath was short, and she was trembling. At first she wanted to stay home from work, and wanted Russell to stay with her, but Russell pointed out that if the fire was in the apartment building, they were both better off in their offices.

She called after lunch to see if he was okay. As he was leaving the office, he called to remind her about a cocktail party that night. The theme was
La Mort d'Été;
for some reason, all the parties had themes that year, as if conviviality were no longer its own reward.

“I won't be able to make it,” she said. “You should go.”

“Got a previous engagement?” Russell suggested.

“Don't be an idiot, okay? It's been a bitch of a day already.”

“What should I wear,” Russell asked.

“Wear a tie. They won't recognize you.”

“Remind me what you look like, so I'll recognize you when you get home tonight.”

“I'll be the girl with dark circles under her eyes.”

After a moment, Russell said. “How's old Dow Jones?”

“The market's up four points.”

“I mean the stiff with the starched boxer shorts.”

“Duane is very busy, like the rest of us.”

“I don't hear you denying my surmise about his undershorts.”

“Would you like me to check?”

“No, that's okay.”

“I'll see you when I get home. And no smoking.”

Russell planned to make a quick appearance, but after two hours the party was just hitting optimal cruise altitude. The invitation had said
Cocktails six to eight
, but food and booze were plentiful and everyone was canceling dinner reservations. Rick Cohen had some blow that he let Russell in on. By ten, Russell had bummed three cigarettes. He felt guilty about the first. The second came after he visited the bathroom with Rick, and obviously that didn't count. Smoking the third, he decided that he was glad Corrine wasn't with him: He could be weak without spoiling her resolution.

Nancy Tanner arrived wearing one of her strapless dresses. She was flashy in a way that reminded him of stewardesses—a stylized, overly wrought femininity that he associated with the service sector. Her obviousness made him feel virtuous. If Nancy were a film, she'd be
Superman II
. Corrine was, say,
Hiroshima Mon Amour
.

Nancy spotted Russell and winked, then caught up with him at the bar. “Behaving yourself?” she asked.

“Trying.”

“Haven't seen you since … you remember.”

For a moment he thought she meant the dream. “How's your step father?” he said.

“My stepfather?” She looked baffled for a moment. “Oh, he's fine. He's better. Where's Corrine?” she asked, much as one asks after a tagalong sibling who has finally been given the slip. He felt that if he didn't challenge her tone, he'd be implicated in a developing conspiracy.

“Working,” he said.

“All work and no play …” She arched her eyebrows and then escaped before he could register his indignation. That was going a little too far. He got a drink and plunged back into the crowd.

“We were just wondering what happened to Dino Signorelli,” Rick said when Russell joined his circle.

“Last I heard, he was selling seeds in South Dakota.”

“Spilling seed, you mean,” Tom Dalton said.

“That guy could fake a guard like nobody's business.”

“He could bend an elbow, too,” Russell observed.

Russell was listening to Skip Blackman's girlfriend—who had never looked so good—talk about her incredibly boring job when Nancy touched his shoulder.

“Got a cigarette?”

Russell was about to say he'd quit, but he deftly turned the reflex into a negative monosyllable.

“Let's find some,” she said, her sparkling eyes seeming to make this simple notion witty and daring.

She took his hand and he followed her, feeling crisp and purposeful in his movements, negotiating the tight throng of bodies and the carpeted floor like an expert skier rounding the poles of a hazardous slalom course.

“I think I've got some in my coat,” she said, leading him into one of the bedrooms. She closed the door behind them. He reached for her and drew her face to his, his feeling of precision and control dissolving, the ski slope giving way to a free fall through the clouds.

Shortly before midnight, Russell reeled toward home. His legs were wobbly, but this was a transparent defensive strategy, a white lie on the part of the body on behalf of the guilty mind. It didn't work. His head was utterly clear, an acoustically perfect amphitheater for the voices of accusation. He told himself that it could have been worse; they hadn't closed the deal, those few minutes in the bedroom. But they might have. They were well en route when somebody came in looking for a coat.

He took off his shoes in the hallway, eased the keys into the locks. The apartment was dark. He crept to the bedroom, which was empty. He tried to feel relief, told himself he had a second chance. He couldn't have faced Corrine tonight. She would have seen right through him.

Russell was in bed when he heard the stealthy tick of keys and tumblers. With one eye half-open, he watched the door of the bedroom. The hallway remained dark. Eventually he heard her tiptoe into the bedroom; accustomed to the dark, he could see that she was carrying her shoes.

He pretended to be asleep as she undressed and slipped into bed beside him. He wanted to take her in his arms.

Corrine lay very still beside him. He waited for her rapid breathing to resolve itself into the rhythm of sleep; she could fall asleep on a dime. Instead, her breath became shorter, more irregular, until he realized that she was crying. Somehow she knew. Russell cursed himself for violating this intimacy, which over the years had become so finely tuned that she was able, even in the silent dark, to sense a change in pitch. Then he decided that was absurd. He began to wonder where she'd been all night.

“Oh, Russell,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

He lifted himself on an elbow and tried to see her face in the dark.

“What do you mean, you're sorry?”

She began to sob. Her back was heaving. She was trying to say something, but her words were muffled by the pillow.

“What?” he said.

When she finally spoke, it was in a dull, featureless voice that he had never heard before. “Tonight,” she said, “tonight I had a couple cigarettes.…”

She said more, but the sound of her voice was already fading away as Russell lay back on his own pillow, feeling the chill blast of the air conditioner on his face, imagining himself henceforth as a wanderer of frozen landscapes, and in searching for a suitably tragic picture of himself, he came at length, unexpectedly, upon the image of Dino Signorelli, standing alone on a treeless prairie, hatless, leaning into the cold wind.

Invisible Fences

So I come in the front door about one in the morning, after stopping to get some beer and cigarettes, and I hear these sounds from the living room. Two kinds, a low guttural growl that doesn't even sound human and a high-pitched chirping that some kind of distressed tropical bird might make but which I recognize as the love song of my wife, Susan.

“Honey?” I call.

I walk into the living room and this is what I see: Susan naked on the floor, entwined with an equally naked stranger.

“Jesus, Susan.”

The man lifts his head from between her legs and regards me with mild alarm.

“You could've waited till I got back,” I say.

“I'm sorry,” she says breathlessly. “I guess I got carried away.”

Meanwhile, the man—I think he said his name was Marvin—puts his hand on the back of her head and directs her back to her task.

Trying to get over my pique, I kneel down on the floor beside them.

“You get those Newport Lights,” he asks, thrusting his hips into Susan's face.

Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.

It's amazing what human beings get accustomed to—how quickly the bizarre, the absurd and the perverse can become routine. People have become accustomed to torture, or so I've read, bonded with their tormentors, the wielders of pliers and electricity.

It happens gradually. Maybe one day you get high with another couple and there's a certain amount of joking and talk, and the next thing you know, the guy's making out with your wife and you're kind of freaked-out about it. You and his wife go at it a little, and when you look up, he's massaging your wife's breast. At that point you break it up. Enough is enough. But later you find yourself thinking about the man's hand on your wife's breast. I don't know—could you imagine something like that? I'm just throwing it out as a hypothetical. A possible scenario.

The thing is, I consider myself a pretty normal guy. I manage the bookstore in the Sunset Mall. My parents are still married. My wife, Susan, is a lawyer who works for the city. We have two kids, Cara and Bucky, both of them baptized at the First Episcopal, and while I can't say we go to church every Sunday, we're there for the big holy days. We live in a place where people ask on first meeting what church you go to, a city that has far more churches than saloons. Most of the Bibles in the country are published here, and so are most of the country songs. We also have more strip clubs and massage parlors and adult bookstores than you'd think possible, all tucked away downtown, just off the cloverleaf where the interstate hits the bypass. Locals will tell you it's all out-of-towners at those places, but I'm not convinced. You might even make a case for some kind of correlation between all the pay sex and all these churches, though I wouldn't make it in public, since there's also a hell of a lot of guns around here. I myself have a .38 revolver between the mattress and the box spring and a twelve-gauge Remington pump in the gun cabinet, which would be considered about average. So far I haven't used the .38 for anything, but it makes me feel safer knowing it's there, even though the statistics tell me otherwise. I use the twelve-gauge for ducks; every winter I go with some college buddies down to Reelfoot Lake. We spend four days drinking and shooting, bitching about our wives and our jobs, talking about fish we've caught, and others we should've caught, and occasionally about the girls we've nailed, but more often about the ones who got away.

Sometimes, deep into the sour mash after a morning of freezing in the duck blind, things can get pretty confessional. But in my experience, men are more circumspect when it comes to their sex lives than women are. Susan once let me hide in the closet while she threw a baby shower for her friend Genevra, and all I can say is, it scared me, the shit they were saying. Length and width and how many times. Not that it didn't turn me on, especially when Susan started bragging on me. I'm sitting there next to the dusty-smelling vacuum cleaner with a hard-on. But these women were just, I don't know, clinical, whereas men speak in generalities and hypotheticals. Like,
Hey, tell you what. I'd love to fuck that waitress down at the Trace
. Or,
What about that Penélope Cruz, whooee! I could wear her out
. As for me, I've never been so shitfaced as to share any intimate love details with the boys. Not that I haven't fantasized and even talked with Susan about sharing more than the details with my buddies. Susan gets it—she thinks it's sexy. But there's fantasy and there's reality. Even when you're pushing the frontier between them—especially when you're pushing it—it's important to know where the one leaves off and the other begins. I may be a pervert, but I'm not an idiot. I can't help wondering, though, what happens late at night on their living room floors.

So anyway, on Friday nights Susan's mom takes the kids and we head out on the town. We go different places, often hitting three or four spots in a night. Susan dresses up, puts on makeup and her finest lingerie. Usually I buy the lingerie, or we pick it together out of the Victoria's Secret catalog. “Do you like the pink, or the black and white,” she'll ask, standing in front of the mirror. She has a superb little body. Petite but voluptuous—and I don't mean fat. I mean five four, with curves like Daytona. I still can't look at her breasts without my breath catching in my throat. Sometimes I get faint seeing them suddenly. I mean, really. A few of the girls at work have asked her if she has implants, not that they're so big—she sort of fluctuates between B and C—but because they just seem a little too good to be true. Sometimes I can't believe they're mine, so to speak. It must be kind of like marrying money. You think, Whoa, what did I do to deserve these? When I saw guys looking at them, it made me proud. Maybe that was the beginning of something. Sometimes the guys look in a lecherous way, but more often they're secretive and pained, like dogs trying to sneak up on a garbage can. It's like, God, what I wouldn't give to get a good look at those, to stroke them, to put my mouth on those nipples. I admit it: I encourage her to wear tops that show her off, buy her tight little low-cut things.

So, on Friday nights I get home as quick as I can. I'm usually at the house by six, but on this particular night I'm a few minutes late. Darlene, the baby-sitter, is hovering by the front door with her jacket on, all antsy to smoke a cigarette and drive over to her boyfriend's house. My friend Hal always talks about how hot she is and how he'd be happy to drive her home sometime, but I don't know, it's not my thing. She has unnaturally yellow hair and a deep cavernous navel that she displays at all times, winter and summer, beneath short little T-shirts and halters. Sometimes I can't believe I entrust my kids to this little tramp, but so far they haven't broken any bones, collected any tattoos or ingested anything too terribly toxic on her watch. On the other hand, why is Cara lying on the floor, sobbing?

“Bongo saw another dog and he chased it,” Darlene says. “I tried to catch him, but he got away.”

Appearing in the doorway, trailing her blanket, Cara confirms this. “Bongo run away.”

“He'll come back,” I say.

Every once in a while he gets so worked up by some dog in the street that he forgets about the Invisible Fence that encircles the property. Getting zapped as he crosses the line makes him even crazier. Fucking Bongo.

“Darlene says he'll get smooshed by a car.”

“Where's your brother?”

“Darlene says dogs can't go to heaven.”

“Honey, Darlene's no expert on heaven,” I say.

Susan's still at work, so I fire up a box of Kraft mac and cheese for the kids, the leftovers of which I eat myself, then pack them up for their big night at grandma's, Bucky with his Game Boy, his Pokémon cards and figures, his SpongeBob pajamas, two pairs of jeans, two T-shirts and two sweatshirts, one that says Vanderbilt and the other UT, equal time for Susan's alma mater and mine. Cara packs her own Hello Kitty backpack: Barbie nightgown, Barbie and Chrissie dolls, the usual stuff.

“Come on, come on,” I say.

“I don't want to go to Grammy's,” Bucky says.

“Sure you do,” I say. “You always have fun at Grammy's.”

“Her house smells funny.”

“What about Bongo?” Cara whines.

I've forgotten about that. “Okay, let's go find Bongo.”

We walk out front and look up and down the street, though I don't really expect to see the crazy mutt—the last time he ran off, we got a call two days later from the next town over. Bongo's a wanderer. He's also a biter, which is why we always make sure he's out in the backyard before we bring anybody over on Friday nights.

“I'm sure Bongo will come home soon,” I say, but Cara's still weepy when I drive them over to Susan's mother's house.

“What have you kids got planned for tonight,” Susan's mother asks me after we have planted the kids in front of the TV.

“Just going to have a bite and hit the town.”

“I think it's great the way you two have your together time. It's important to keep the romance alive. Some couples, the kids come along, they just let the spark go out.” I'm afraid she's going to start talking about her ex, Susan's dad, an epic horndog who has achieved sainthood since he succumbed to lung cancer a few years back.

“We're trying to keep it fresh,” I say.

“It takes work,” she says. “You can't just take it for granted. Buck and I, we had our problems, Lord knows. But every Saturday night he'd take me to dinner at the club.”

If I were her, I wouldn't bring up the club; there's a famous story about my father-in-law and one of the waitresses. “He was a hell of a guy, old Buck,” I say.

“I'm not saying he was perfect.”

She's getting misty-eyed, now, and it's absolutely imperative to change the subject before I get the full-blown eulogy. “He was smart enough to marry you at least.”

“I have my faults, too. Believe me, I know.”

“Not in my book.” I give her a big hug, being careful not to crush her prominent calcium-deficient bones. “You've been great to us.”

“I'm only glad I can be here to help.”

“You know how grateful we are,” I say. “And the kids love it, too.”

As if to disprove this assertion, Bucky intercepts me on the front step and attaches himself to my leg, and it takes a good ten minutes to get him settled down again.

Back at the house, Susan is tweaking herself in front of her vanity.

“Turn around.”

She puts her arms down and stares at herself in the mirror.

“Susan? Let me see.”

She's wearing a low-cut white cotton halter with low-rider Diesel jeans. Sexy without being theatrical. Her makeup seems subdued. I feel like she could go heavier on the eyeliner. Finally, she stands up and walks to the closet.

“What's the matter?”

She stands at the closet door. “Nothing,” she says. “Long day. I'm a little tired.”

“We can take care of that,” I say, showing her the gram vial I copped at lunchtime.

“Maybe later,” she says. She's still standing there, looking into the closet as if at some profound vista.

I walk over behind her, put my hands on her shoulders and rub her neck and her delts. There's nothing to see in the closet except two rows of hanging clothes, hers and mine. “Sure you don't want a little pick-me-up?”

“What the hell,” she says, turning around and flashing a wan smile. I tap some onto the fleshy part between her thumb and forefinger. She huffs it up and holds out the other hand. “Have you seen Bongo,” she asks.

“He broke out,” I say, generously anointing her other hand. “Remind me to turn off the fence so he can get back in.”

By the time we get to the Corral, a sprawling C & W dance hall about ten miles west on the interstate, Susan seems to have shaken her funk. We order a couple of platinum margaritas and survey the crowd. We haven't been here in four or five months. Last time, Susan picked up a guy who was a lineman for the phone company, but he was shitfaced by the time she got him out of there and ended up puking in the parking lot, which is where we left him, sprawled over the hood of his truck, drooling on his snakeskin Justins. Earlier, he'd been telling Susan all about the boots, which he'd just bought that afternoon at the outlet in Gallatin.

“Lone Ranger at four o'clock,” I shout over Tim McGraw's “Cowboy in Me,” indicating a guy down the bar in a shiny orange leather jacket who's been checking her out.

“Let's dance,” she says.

“Okay.” I finish my drink and lead her out to the floor. We shimmy to Carrie Underwood's “Before He Cheats,” or rather, she shimmies and I sway. I look around to see if Susan's got an audience, and sure enough, Mr. Leather Jacket is standing at the edge of the dance floor, watching. At the end of the song, I lean over and whisper in her ear. “Keep dancing,” I say. I turn and walk away, heading to the men's room, even though I don't really have to go. I linger there and fix my hair in the mirror, then go back to the bar and order another margarita, forcing myself not to look over to the dance floor until I've paid for my drink and taken a long swallow. Sure enough, now he's dancing with Susan, grinding up against her while Alison Krauss sings “Simple Love.” I feel a tingling buzz that's like the first wave of a coke rush.

What can I say. It turns me on watching Susan turn other men on. Is that so hard to understand?

I settle in at a table where I can occasionally glimpse them through the crowd. Susan eventually spots me and maneuvers her partner closer so I have a better view, then starts making out with him. I mean really sucking face. This guy can't believe his luck. Which is, strangely enough, just how I feel.

But then, just to torture me, she drifts back into the sea of bodies until I can't see either one of them anymore. It's making me crazy. I wait a few minutes, then circle the place, but I can't see them anywhere. What the hell? I look everywhere. Did she take him out to the parking lot? On a sudden inspiration I bolt for the men's room. Sometimes she trash-talks about doing some guy in the men's room because she knows it's a turn-on in theory, but in real life that's a taboo, one of the boundaries we've established. When you're playing outside the regular borders, it's important to have rules and boundaries. We've learned that the hard way.