Another You (21 page)

She was so lost in her thoughts, it took her some while to realize Tony had been speaking to her. “That new motel. How do I go?” He was asking her for directions, but as he asked the question she remembered the brief blip of a nursery rhyme:
how does your garden grow?
She could remember the singsong rhyme, but not the words, except that the poem ended with the words “all in a row.” Everything neat. All lined up. She imagined old-fashioned flowers drawn by some illustrator’s pen in the pages of a children’s book: a pop-up book, the moving boxes she had just seen in the backyard metamorphosed into a cardboard flip-up garden, hollyhocks and peonies, roses and delphiniums springing to life. Which would certainly be a beautiful sight on such an overcast winter day. Which would be wonderfully magical, no less astonishing because it was not real.

Today’s sky was evenly gray, cloudless, so flat in color it provided little incentive to remember the sun. Missing its warmth, she superimposed an imaginary sun on the blank screen of sky as Tony drove: her pretty projection, her analogue to the recently invented pop-up book, the red dots floating in front of her as she rubbed her aching, closed eyes, a burst of rosy suns: her nonsense world. With her eyes closed, it was a nonsense world—virtual reality as observed by the not so
virtuous. Eyes open, the suns became the spots of blood on her walls. She turned and looked at Tony, whose face was frozen in concentration: the attempt to remember not a sunny day, but what turn to make; activating the windshield wipers to clear the gritty mist of rain and road dirt that splashed in front of them.

Without too much trouble, Tony found the motel. Moments later, on this odd, odd day that had followed the calamitous day that had gone before, they lay curled together in the king-size bed, candle glowing on the night table, watching a Bruce Lee movie on TV. Sonja drew her feet higher, under the blankets. He felt her stirring and put a hand on her hip. He was sick of talking about her wrecked home, about McCallum, and about the two of them. He was engrossed in watching Bruce Lee.

“The blood wasn’t all that bad?” she said, trying to get his attention.

“I lied. It freaked me out. It was very upsetting.”

“So why tell me now?”

Bruce Lee’s foot connected with a man’s ribs, and the man went over backward.

“Because it was wrong of me to mislead you. Your house is a mess. Furthermore, you can live with me, if you want. You can live with me without Marshall, that would be the best idea. Then I could save on motel bills.”

“Is all of this a sick joke, or was some of it what you really think?” she said, yanking the covers over her back.

His hand returned to pat her hip. He touched her with the same rhythm, the same intensity, people use when they’re in a hurry, drumming their fingers on a tabletop. Bruce Lee was doing very well for himself. Tony was spellbound.

“You know, I almost told Marshall yesterday morning,” she said. “Diligent Marshall, suddenly finding out he’s been living with someone who’s stopped being … diligent.”

He looked at her. “Are you going to tell him or keep this a secret?”

“Keep it a secret,” she said. She waited for his response, but there was none. A commercial for cat food came on, an aging movie actress whose name she couldn’t remember stooping to shower crunchy stars
into a cat’s bowl. The cat sprouted wings and flew to the food. The woman sprouted wings and disappeared through the ceiling.

Tony was propped on one elbow, still watching TV. “Doesn’t something horrible like this make you realize that life is short and that, I don’t know, maybe nothing good comes of hiding your feelings? I mean, we can’t all be as extroverted as Susan McCallum, but it seems quite possible that if any good is to come out of something like this, maybe it’s to make the people on the sidelines introspective. What I mean is, maybe you should think about telling him.”

“You’re not afraid of what he’d do?”

There was a long silence, during which she decided he wasn’t going to answer. In another room, she heard someone flipping through the channels, getting mostly static, as she and Tony had earlier.

“No,” he said.

“Why?” she said.

“Because he likes me well enough.”

“Likes you? I don’t think he gives you a moment’s thought.”

Another long pause. “Well, you said he hardly knew McCallum either,” Tony said.

“Tony,” she said, “what are we talking about?”

“A teeny, tiny bit of cowardice that might exist on your husband’s part,” he said.

“You think he wouldn’t do
anything?
”

“Well, what are you saying?” Tony said. “That I couldn’t stand someone’s angry words?” He turned toward her. “You’re mad at me for stating something that you already understand completely, which is that Marshall wouldn’t be an insurmountable problem.”

“What would you have him do?” she said.

“Sonja, don’t blame me for his disposition. I would have him do just what he would do: complain, or lecture us, or just go off and lick his wounds, I don’t know.”

“I can’t believe it. You don’t think he’d care.”

“When did I say that?”

“You want him to come on like Bruce Lee.”

“There’s been enough violence.”

“Tony—”

“ ‘Tony,’ nothing. You like it that I don’t mind being adversarial. In this case, though, I’m only pointing out the obvious. I’m not saying
he’s a lily-livered coward. I mean, in his place, what would I do myself?”

She had pulled herself up in bed and was feeling the full extent of her discomfort: the wrinkled sheets, cold seeping underneath from where Tony’d pulled them out from under the mattress, the stiff pillow impossible to pound into a comfortable headrest. Here she was in a motel with her lover, with whom she found herself in frivolous fights all too often, listening to him as if he had a great psychic ability to see the future. His expression implied a kind of superiority: the raised eyebrows letting her know he found her slightly ridiculous; his jutting chin set belligerently, as if whatever position he took was the only possible way to think about something. As he turned away from her to rest on his hip again, exasperated, looking once more at Bruce Lee, it dawned on her that he might have said everything he’d said to provoke her. To provoke her not into telling Marshall about their affair, but to ensure that she wouldn’t. Her intuition told her she was right. Wasn’t it possible Tony was trying to be disagreeable so she would like him less, so she would measure him against Marshall, conventional, diligent Marshall, and find Tony lacking … which would mean that if she chose her husband, instead of him, he could come out of their affair feeling self-righteous, superior to her by making it seem she’d opted for the status quo?

“I’m getting bad vibes,” Tony said. “I’m feeling that you’re put out with me.”

“Isn’t that what you intended?”

“Look at me,” he said, turning toward her. “That is not what I want. I admit I’m in a little over my head. It’s made me feel guilty, having him in the house, relating to him like he’s my friend. I know it’s not my business to tell you what to do about your marriage, but what I am definitely not telling you is to write me off.”

She couldn’t tell, for sure; looking straight at him, she couldn’t tell whether she’d been subsumed by paranoia, or whether there was at least some truth to her suspicions, until he cleared his throat and said that he’d been thinking he needed some time to sort through his feelings. All he was talking about was a few days in the Bahamas. With his mother, no less. So: Tony was the coward, not Marshall. Tony was the one who wasn’t standing up to the sudden changes very well.

“Why did you do it?” she said. “Why did you wait for us at the police station?”

“Because I was concerned about you, what the hell do you think?”

“But you knew he’d be there too, didn’t you?”

“Why am I being cross-examined about a good deed? I didn’t see what else to do; I’d dropped you there, and it seemed only decent to wait to round you up. Yes, I figured he’d be there. I never really encountered him before, except in passing. I didn’t expect to like him. To feel sorry for him. It made me feel guilty. I just told you that.”

“Which way did you really feel, Tony? That you liked him, or that you felt sorry for him?”

“Both. He’s a likeable person. I don’t know why he doesn’t have any friends. You say he doesn’t. McCallum apparently feels he’s his friend, but he tells me, and you tell me, that isn’t so. I don’t have many friends myself. I let people drift away. I didn’t extend myself those times I might have. At the very least, you’ve got to be my friend. I don’t ever want to lose you.”

My God: he was telling her he just wanted to be friends. That was what he was telling her.

“Why are you looking at me that way?” he said. “Have I asked for something so impossible?”

“Let me get this straight,” she said, but this time she was sure she already had it straight. “You’re going to go away from me for a few days, and when you come back, you want us to be friends.”

“Well, I want us to be friends. Good friends. Yes.”

When she didn’t answer, he lay rigidly in the bed, turned away from her. He faced the television, but she knew he wasn’t watching: it had become sound and images for Tony as well as for her, any meaning that was there had disappeared, the plot had vanished.

Tony’s words hung in the air. Even he wasn’t going to pretend any longer that her intuition hadn’t been working; he was still registering his own words, and they were false enough to make him grow a wooden nose. He sniffed, testing. He sniffed because he was trying to sniff back tears. Because what the hell: he hadn’t intended to lie to her, but suddenly it had seemed he had no room to maneuver. It didn’t even seem that he could move an inch forward or backward on the big bed, because the lie had paralyzed him. It really had. He couldn’t
move at all. He was trying, and he couldn’t. He was immobilized, his eyes straight ahead, where Bruce Lee began spinning faster and faster, his raised leg sending masked bad guys flying.

Somehow they got out of the room. He remembered it happening in slow motion, as if Bruce Lee’s pace were the norm and they were two zombies, dragging the floor for their clothes, avoiding each other’s eyes. Every word she didn’t speak brought him closer to tears, so he kept in motion, laboriously slow motion, trying to distract himself so he wouldn’t do something horrible and unforgivable, such as falling at the feet of a woman he didn’t love, to declare, through tears, that he loved her. Though some of what he’d said to her had been true. It was true he’d let his friends slip away, or true he’d lost them in more painful ways, like fooling around with one friend’s wife and getting caught, and getting drunk and offending another friend whom he actually thought very highly of, though that particular night he’d been jealous of him, caused a scene, never managed to be forgiven. He could still patch that up. All it would take was a phone call. He’d moved once because of a lost friendship between him and a woman he’d loved, he really had loved her, and then she’d wanted to marry and have a family and he hadn’t, so she had gotten together with someone else, and a few times the three of them had eaten together, or gone to the movies, but he’d begun to loathe her fiancé, for no good reason except jealousy, and he’d ruined what might have been his friendship with the woman by begging her to come back, by saying he’d marry her, that they could have children—all of this a few days before her wedding. Mistake, mistake. And with Sonja? He had pursued her just for the hell of it. Always conscientious about her work, husband’s photograph on the desk, the day she sadly confided in him that she had had so many miscarriages she didn’t have the heart to try any longer to conceive a child. She wasn’t his type, so he thought he might see what it was like to try to fall in love with someone who wasn’t his type. To instigate games with her, act differently from the way he usually acted, which was to try to win a woman’s love through a combination of the tried and true, flowers and expensive candlelit meals, and the unexpected: a gift of two dozen windup Godzillas with shiny red hearts stuck to their chests. That had been Sonja’s valentine: twenty-four of them lined up in the top drawer of her desk, which he had completely emptied of all other contents. But all that
had happened was that he liked her. He liked her, and he enjoyed her pleased surprise, her sometimes-impulsive girlishness. The truth was, he would rather be her coconspirator in shrugging off adulthood than try to express romantic love for her. He could see her as a sister, or even as someone else’s perfectly nice wife whom he was entertaining and being entertained by. When they made love, he tried to think that she was on his wavelength, that she was entertaining him, not falling in love with him. Though maybe she hadn’t been in love with him. Maybe she hadn’t. If she had, would that love disappear because of one conversation, would it disappear during a Bruce Lee movie?

He looked over his shoulder at the room and marvelled at how ordinary it was: the messy bed; the generic big-flower curtains; the TV. Then he remembered the scene inside Sonja’s house, the blood. Next he superimposed that ghastly sight on the anonymous motel room and shuddered—shuddered as much at what his own imagination could produce as at the memory of the scene of McCallum’s stabbing. Because deep inside … how to explain? It was as if something small and hard—a marble, say—seemed sometimes to begin rolling in his chest, winding down through his rib cage and giving him a small, sharp thrill as it dropped. As with a pinball game, his fingers would flip up and down his ribs, moving before he realized they were, fingertips trying to track the course of the marble, the little nervous nugget that signalled something had to happen, right away, soon, out of his control, something tickling him inside, shooting up and dropping down, his mood rising and sinking as he tried to track it. Looking at the room, he felt the marble start to form—just the smallest tingle, like the first flick that registers with the oyster when the little grain of sand embeds itself.
Yes!
he thought.
Let’s feel something starting, let’s really be in love with Sonja, let’s run after her and shoot that marble directly into the brain, let’s have the lights light up, set off bells, keep it in play, win this game
. But the tingle disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving him again aware of the emptiness inside him.