City of Strangers (17 page)

She murmurs something he can't hear. He rolls onto his back. A flash of white billows into his peripheral vision. Beth has removed her robe, and wears nothing underneath. He watches her by a slight angle of his head: she is sitting with one knee hoisted up onto the bed, her skin still pink from the shower. She hides her eyes from him; they are looking down at herself. He can see the profile of one of her breasts, which have always been full but which the decades have made increasingly pendulous. When he senses melancholy or distress, he normally reaches out to touch his wife, but he finds he cannot.

He asks, 'You aren't wearing your pajamas tonight?'

Beth sits there as she releases a long, powerful breath, more than a sigh, and then draws back the covers on her side of the bed. She slides underneath them as if just now conscious of her nudity. 'I'm hot,' she says, rolling away to face the other side of the room, and Ben is suddenly wide awake, alert to his thoughts but unable to arrange them; he can't clear away the confusion of what has seemed like a very rapid shift in the marital weather. Ben dangles between thought and speech, suddenly in the fierce grip of an unfamiliar longing for the things he already has. He hears his wife's voice again.

'I'm tired. Will you please just put out the light?'

Moments pass. They do not move. Paul's arms make imperceptible adjustments as they find the old places: his body is remembering how to hold hers. In the weak light he can't read the titles on the bookshelf but recognizes most of the spines, their colors and dimensions, the white splinters of distress on the fatter paperbacks; the avulsion of his books from hers, after they'd lived in uncontroversial confusion for the better part of four years, had been one of the most arduous episodes of the divorce. After a while Paul's leg falls asleep. He delays, then unbends it, upsetting their pose on the sofa. Claire blinks, as if coming out of a long nap, and stands. She takes off her coat, underneath which she is wearing a flattering black dress, and Paul tenses at the sight of her bare arms, the delicate camber along each of her sides, the plush suggestion of her breasts. Was she on a date? He feels guilty for doing so, given all that has happened, but it is impossible not to stare. Without a word she crosses the room to the kitchen. The sound of the tap running. There he finds her, still trancelike, ruminating upon the broken bottle on the floor, perhaps unable to force away thoughts of how else the night might have ended. With her toe she pushes a piece of glass.

'Don't,' says Paul. 'Let me clean it up.'

He has taken control of the situation, it seems, but his confidence quickly shrinks after checking the two cabinets beneath the sink, then the closet next to the refrigerator, without finding so much as a dustpan. He looks around helplessly; Claire is unable to make words or even to look at him. Finally he asks: 'Is there a broom?' She sticks out her chin, in the direction of the living room, a vaguely pugilistic facial gesture that isn't usually part of her physical vocabulary. The closet there is carelessly full of the things that fit nowhere else. He takes the broom and returns to the kitchen, where he stoops to clear the glass; heat pours into his lower back until he can't maintain the position and, with an exhausted, half-dizzy swoon, falls to his knees to finish.

Paul feels himself go slack. At first he assumes it's the last dregs of fear evaporating. Because Claire doesn't speak, and because he has nothing to say, he can dwell within the silence of himself and more carefully palpate the emotion, testing its shape. It is hardly relief, but rather disappointment. His nerves are tight wires, anticipating combat, a mortal test – not broomwork. Paul didn't get the chance to prove himself. To save Claire's life. His arms shake a little. The smallest shards resist the clumsy bristles and impatiently he corrals them with the open edge of his hand. He's aware of Claire's presence above him, but she isn't quite there; she's more a nimbus than a person. He sweeps the remaining bits into the pan and in doing so presses down with his full hand, running it the wrong way over an innocuous-seeming pebble of glass. It draws blood. Only a drop, but at the sight of red Claire's senses return.

'It isn't serious,' says Paul. He shows her the cut.

'Let me get a bandage.'

'I don't need one.'

Claire takes his hand. The glass punctured the meaty ridge below his thumb; she presses down around the cut until a bright bead of blood wriggles out.

'See? It's nothing.'

'Still.'

He expects her to release his hand, but she doesn't. The air between them shrinks, he greedily breathes in the familiar scent of her hair, and his heart obliges: it is the response common to sex and danger – at once he can feel the movement of all the blood in his body, he's aware of every drop in his veins, a warm, weeping sensation cascading through him. He puts his hands on her arms, and they slide up to touch the cool, dry skin of her shoulders – it is almost painful how soft they are, and he's filled with delirious possessiveness. He holds her cheeks. Her eyes close, her lips drift apart.

They press together. A fumble of mouths. He touches her stomach but avoids her hip, where he knows she is ticklish. The kiss has no true pleasure in it, nothing sensual or passionate – only a shared desperation. Bursting with heat, sex, and terror, he murmurs the old three words, and at this Claire's fingers, which have been dragging at his face, relax, brushing him now with an almost maternal tenderness. He's kissing her without being kissed in return. He withdraws. It doesn't mean for her what it does for him: for her the kiss is only a necessary comfort, an uxorial reflex. They pull apart. She sits at the kitchen table, then stands and picks up the other chair. 'It doesn't belong there,' she says without quite addressing him. She places it on the opposite side of the table. 'He moved it when he sat down.'

On the white of her cheek is a fleck of red where he touched her. Paul sits, resisting the urge to reach across and wipe it away, recalling that Terence's hand was already there tonight. Without looking at Paul, she says his name, her voice faint and mildly scolding. Then: 'You still haven't told me. That man said he knew you.'

He gives her a puzzled look: he's forgotten that Claire knows nothing of the past week, knows nothing of the reason this man chose her apartment to burst into. She is suddenly very distant. The kiss they just shared could have been a month ago, a year. He offers an explanation of events, telling her what happened after he left her apartment on Sunday night, and describes Terence's intervening appearances. Claire struggles to restrain an expression of outrage. By his involvement, albeit accidental, in so awful an episode, Paul admits culpability for the man who just invaded her home; she watches him as if studying a stranger. At some point she interrupts: 'And you didn't call the police?' Paul chafes at her tone; it is disapproving to the point of condescension. He explains that in fact he did call the police, that it accomplished nothing and in his opinion calling again would have done as little good. When he finishes, she gets up to refill her glass. He's aware of the process at work within her, an attempt to restore an inner balance, her orientation in the world. Claire asks if he wants something to drink, then fills a glass for him without waiting for an answer.

'I'm sorry,' Paul says. 'I had no idea—'

She shakes her head. 'There's no point. We shouldn't.'

'Shouldn't?'

Again she shakes her head. Light bounces around the glass of water on the table. She slides away her hand when he reaches for it.

'Shouldn't what? Shouldn't kiss?'

Claire makes no reply.

'Shouldn't talk about us, then?'

'We weren't talking about us, Paul. There is no us.'

'Why did you invite me in last week?'

'God. Must you?'

'You expect me to pretend it didn't happen?'

'That would be easier, I think.'

'You're saying you regret it.'

'I'm not saying anything. Forget it. It doesn't matter.'

He wants Claire to meet his gaze. She doesn't. An impulse strikes him to reach over and lift his wife's chin, manually to fix her eyes to meet his. Instead, he stands.

'Are you leaving?'

'Are you asking me not to?'

She sucks in a long breath. Then she methodically collects the remaining open bottle, empties it in the sink, and returns it to the brown paper bag Terence brought. 'Please take that with you.' Paul's arm sags slightly as he accepts it. When he moves, the sound seems to come not from under his foot but from the other room. He looks at Claire, whose eyes are alive with dread. They speak in whispers.

'Didn't you lock the door when you came in?'

'I thought so.'

'Maybe I imagined it.'

Another sound comes from the living room. It isn't the imagination. Claire, operating evidently by instinct, a childlike part of herself taking over in the face of terror, reaches quickly to switch off the light – as if they can simply be made invisible – and plunges everything around them into darkness.

Paul moves first. But this initial act – a footstep – doesn't immediately suggest a next course of action. It compels him only to take a second step, and then a third, toward the black rectangle of the door, the threshold of the other room, in which the darkness thickens with unwelcome possibility. He looks back, trying to see Claire, but his eyes haven't adjusted to the sudden absence of light, and he makes the next step blind.

For a single, suspended moment, nothing happens. Then, bursting out of the darkness, a scribble of kinetic energy, Terence appears and grabs Paul by the jacket, throwing him halfway across the room with a twisting, apelike improvisation. Paul – lifted, light, a projectile – lands awkwardly on a low wooden table. Terence is quickly upon him: a blow across his face, followed promptly by another; high on his cheekbone the flesh immediately starts to swell, a concentrated purse of pain.

The pain means he is conscious. Throwing a punch feels cramped and hurried, but he lashes out with his fists, firing wildly in Terence's direction. It has the desired effect – Terence backs off – and, emboldened, he tries a kick. The weight of his shoe at the end of his leg feels promising, but as it pushes through air it meets no resistance: he misses. Hands lock onto his leg, below the knee, and drag him from the table in a single, gliding motion that ends with the back of his head on the hardwood floor.

'Don't you wish you hadn't fucked with me? Don't you, Paul?'

Terence stands over him, an outline, his face unevenly slashed across by shadows: his mouth emerges most prominently, a tense rictus above the white shelf of his chin. A second shape moves behind him. Terence turns before Claire can react, and Paul cries out in helpless anguish.

Terence strikes at her with an open hand. The motion is rash and imprecise, meant to deflect rather than injure Claire. She is hurled back against the far wall and Paul hears a crash of glass. When he looks he sees her slumped on the ground and, as if carried up by unseen hands, he stands, lowering his shoulder and leaning into the blow, driving this man away from Claire. They fall across the sofa; his legs go out from under him as he tries to keep a grip on Terence, to use this surge of anger. Paul is hit once, then twice. A mustardy odor fills his nose. He's prepared now for the sensation, the fat pulse of pain, and is able to answer in kind, aiming for the face, the bridge of the nose, places he has heard are especially susceptible to harm. It is difficult to move – they are pressed belly to belly, the cushions sliding and bucking beneath them as they struggle – and to concentrate on delivering blows while also avoiding them. He grabs Terence and plants his left foot on the floor for leverage; then, in a single action, he stands while pulling his opponent to the ground, flipping him in the process, so that Terence lands in a prostrate position. But Paul hasn't got a clear sense of how to use this unexpected advantage, the set of instincts that would allow him to bring the moment to its resolution. When Terence tries to rise, he sits on him.

Below him the man twists and gropes around – a ghastly sensation of aggrieved, writhing muscle – as he tries to find some piece of Paul, a point of immediate vulnerability. He becomes aware of a tingling on his inner thigh, revolting because of its familiarity, its connotation of pleasure. Terence has wormed a hand around and now it slithers up Paul's leg, grazing the tightly bunched, ultrasensitive nerves there; in another second or two those fingers will have hold of his balls. Something crackles in his blood. Without thinking, he grabs Terence's head with both hands and lifts it up, allowing the spring of the neck to smash it back into the floorboards; he repeats the action, feeling a wild thrill of power, a freedom from consequence. He thinks once more of Claire: he draws up Terence's face again, this time simply by gripping the back of his head, and again delivers it in a stroke against the wood. By now he's ceased to struggle.

It's a temporary solution. Paul can still feel the gruesome heave of air going in and out. A single thought seizes him – the decisive thing. The knife. It would shift the balance of power, eliminating Terence's advantages in muscle, youth, temperament. By degrees he lifts himself off Terence, testing the response: the body below doesn't stir. He goes to the kitchen where it still sits on the counter. When he returns he sees Claire, fallen in a posture of incidental rest, and drops to his knees beside her, pressing his fingers into her neck. She has a pulse: firm spasms in the skin, one after another, like a series of tiny gulps. A flutter of consciousness agitates her eyelids.

This dreamy little pause is a luxury Paul can't afford. He has a fleeting awareness of the hostile presence above him and then is lifted, as if rocked by a wave, hurtling backward, until the wall stops him. He's pinioned there under the angled, inflexible slats of Terence's forearms. Hands grasp at his face, each with autonomous ferocity, and he shuts his eyes; sparks flare and dissolve against the black. The powerful thumbs knead his cheeks, pressing against the softest part, and inside his mouth he feels his own spongy flesh squeeze between his teeth. The thumbs begin to scale the bony ridge below his eyes. The pressure of a scream mounts in Paul's throat, and at its point of release, as he twists his neck in an effort to free his face, he makes two tight jabs with his right hand, the hand that holds the knife, which Terence couldn't have known he had.