Praying for Sleep (32 page)

Now, ensconced in his luxurious black car, he once again sang it and he sang it loud.

"Hard tack, horseback, the Capital's asleep. The soldier boys are crying. Somewhere a woman weeps.

Hard tack, the moon's back, and bloody in the sky. I'm going to the graveyard, where the body lies..."

Michael points the black nose of the car down a long hill and feels the gradual, smooth acceleration of the engine. Unexpectedly though, despite the glory of newfound speed, despite his immense pride at mastering this machine that a year ago would have paralyzed him with terror, Michael Hrubek begins to cry.

He gulps hot air into his lungs, fueling the sobbing, and feds the moisture on his wide cheeks. His throat stings.

Why am I crying? Michael wonders, barely conscious that he is crying.

He really has no idea. But somewhere deep in his mind is the answer that he cries for man's genius in making this exquisite automobile. He cries for all the miles he's traveled tonight. And for the vague memory of a woman wearing a very unfashionable hat on her otherwise perfect head...
 For the past dead and for those soon to be.

And he cries for what is surely sitting above the thickening storm clouds over his car right now — a moon blood red.

I'm going to the graveyard, where the body lies...

20

Lis was taping the top row of windows in the greenhouse when the storm finally hit.

Her face was inches from the glass as she was reaching out to lay a strip on a hard-to-reach pane. Suddenly a slash of rain cracked against the window. She twisted away, dropping the tape, thinking for an instant that someone had flung a handful of gravel at the panes. She nearly tumbled backwards off the ladder.

She climbed down and retrieved the masking tape, surveying the sky. Worried that a window might shatter into her face if she continued to tape, Lis again considered leaving — now. But the north windows, those facing the storm, were still to be done.

Ten minutes, she decided. She'd allow herself that.

Climbing up once again she thought about Kohler's advising her to leave. Yet she felt no extreme urgency. He hadn't seemed particularly concerned on her behalf. Besides, she reasoned, the Ridgeton sheriff would certainly have called if he'd learned that Hrubek was headed for town.

As she laid the X's on the squares of glass, her eyes fell on the lake and the forest. Beyond them, barely visible in the rain, was a huge expanse of countryside — a muddy horizon of fields and woods and rocks disappearing into the black windy sky. The sweep of terrain seemed so limitless, so perfectly able to contain the infection of Michael Hrubek, that it was foolish to think that he might even get close to Ridgeton. The vastness of the landscape would protect her husband too; how could either man possibly find the other?

And where was Owen at this moment? In her heart she believed he'd be back soon. Perhaps even before she and Portia left for the Inn. Returning empty-handed, angry and frustrated — because he'd missed his chance to play soldier.

And because he had lost an opportunity to do penance. Oh, Lis had understood that from the start. She knew that his errand tonight had a tacit purpose. It was part of a complicated debt he seemed to feel he owed his wife.

And perhaps he did, she reflected. For Owen had spent much of last year in the company of another woman.

He'd met her at a legal continuing-education conference. She was a trust-and-estates lawyer, thirty-seven years old, divorced with two children. He offered these facts as proof of the virtue of his infidelity; no young, gum-snapping bimbo for him. Yale-educated. Cum laude.

"Do you think I give a fuck about her credentials?" Lis had shouted.

When she'd first seen a MasterCard receipt for a hotel in Atlantic City, dated the weekend he was supposed to be in Ohio on business, she was devastated. Never before a victim of adultery, Lis hadn't realized that illicit sex is only a part of the infidelity game. There's illicit affection too, and she wasn't sure which hurt the worst.

Why, bedding the bitch in Trump's Palace, her highly educated thighs squeezing Owen's, flicking tongues, shared spit, exposed nipples and cock and cleft... Those were enough. But Lis was almost more stung by the thought of their joined palms, romantic walks on the turbulent Jersey beach, the two of them sitting on a bench and Owen sharing his most private thoughts. Stern Owen! Her quiet Owen. Owen from whose mouth
she
had to pry words. Much of this was speculation of course (he'd learned his lesson and volunteered nothing more after blurting out the woman's CV). But the thought alone of an intimacy deeper than sex was horrifying to Lis and her fury at their furtive conversations and entwined fingers grew beyond all reasonable proportion. For weeks after his confession she was racked by a sensation that she might at any moment erupt in madness anytime, anywhere.

By the time she confronted him, the affair was over, he said. He'd taken his wife's head in his long hands, stroking her hair, jiggling the earrings he'd given her (during the height of his infidelity, Lis had noted with ire, and that night pitched the jewelry out). The woman had asked him to leave Lis, Owen said, and marry her. He refused, they fought and the affair ended bitterly.

After the initial, cataclysmic weeks following this confession, after the long nights of silence, after those funereal Sunday mornings, after an intolerable Thanksgiving, they began to discuss the matter as couples do — tactically, then obliquely, then reasonably. Lis now had only vague memories of the conversations. You're too demanding. You're too strict. You're too quiet. You're too reclusive. You're not interested in what I do. You have to loosen up sexually. You come on like a rapist. You never complained... Yes but you scare me sometimes I can't tell what you're thinking yes but you're so stubborn yes but...

The second-person pronoun occurs never so often as in the aftermath of infidelity.

Finally they decided to consider divorce and went their separate ways for a time. During this period Lis finally admitted to herself that the affair was no surprise. Not really. Owen's having an attorney for a lover, well, that was a shock, yes. He didn't fare well with strong women. To hear him tell it, his best relationship prior to Lis had been with a young Vietnamese woman in Saigon during the war. He was tactfully reluctant to go into many details but he described her glowingly as sensitive and demure. It took Lis some translating, and prying, to figure out that this meant she was subservient and complacent and she spoke very little English.

That's a relationship? she wondered, unnerved to find that this was the sort of woman her husband had sought out. Still, there seemed to be something more to the liaison. Something dark. Owen wouldn't go into the details and Lis was left to speculate. Maybe he had accidentally wounded her and stayed with her out of loyalty, slipping her stolen rations and medicines and nursing her to health. Maybe her father was a Viet Cong whom Owen had killed. Plagued with guilt, he'd offered some reparation and fallen in love.

This all seemed far too romantic, operatic even, for Owen Atcheson, and she ultimately attributed the affair to youthful lust, and his fond memories of it to the revisionist ego of a middle-aged man. But there was no denying that a servile young thing had a certain appeal to him. The greatest friction between them — and his worst flares of temper — arose when she opposed him. She could rattle off a hundred examples — buying the nursery, urging him to be more of a sexual partner, suggesting they see a therapist when the marriage hit rough spots, traveling less.

And yet, ironically, his domineering side did have a certain appeal to Lis. As troubling as this was, she couldn't deny it. She still recalled seeing him for the first time. She was in her mid-thirties, an age at which most Ridgeton women were sensible mothers several times over. Lis had attended a town-council meeting, where Owen was representing a building developer seeking a P&Z variance. Stern and unyielding, Owen Atcheson stood at the podium and comfortably withstood the assault of wrathful citizens. Lis stayed long after her own minor ministerial proceeding and watched him play the king's knight. She was captivated by his cold articulation and, watching him grip the podium with his large hands, actually found herself aroused.

She engineered a chance meeting in the parking lot afterwards, suggesting they exchange phone numbers. "Who knows? Maybe I'll need a good lawyer someday."

One week later he asked her to dinner and she accepted at once.

On the first date he showed up scrubbed and trimmed, wearing a blue blazer and khaki slacks, carrying a dozen roses. Owen ordered for her, picked up the check discreetly, held open every door she walked through and capped the evening with a chaste kiss after escorting her to the door.

He did everything by the book and she felt absolutely nothing for him.

He didn't call her afterwards and — despite a brief sting to the ego — she decided she was relieved not to hear from him. She went out with several other men casually, thinking no more about the austere Owen Atcheson. Then one Saturday, six months later, they ran into each other in a store on Main Street. He claimed he'd been meaning to call but had been traveling extensively. Why, Lis had wondered, did men think this made you feel better, explaining how much they'd wanted to call but had not?

As she and Owen stood awkwardly at the counter of Ace Hardware, he glanced down at the white plastic tubing she was buying. It was for her garden, she explained. Did she need any help installing it? When she hesitated he looked into her eyes and said he didn't have many talents but there were a few things he was very good at. Plumbing was one.

"All right," she said.

They returned to the small bungalow she was renting. With Owen supervising, together they hooked up the irrigation system in half an hour. When the work was finished, he walked to the spigot, beckoning her to follow. He took her hand and placed it on the knob then enfolded her fingers with his. "Shall we?" he asked, and turned the faucet on full as he lifted her chin with his free hand and kissed her hard on the mouth.

They spent the rest of the afternoon in Lis's brass bed, not even bothering to climb beneath the blue gingham covers, their dirty work-clothes strewn about them on the stairs and floor.

They were married eight months later.

Throughout their six years together Lis had frequent doubts about their future yet she'd never thought that infidelity would end the marriage; more likely, she believed, one of them would just pack and leave — maybe after, in a fit of temper, he finally delivered one of the slaps he'd come close to inflicting on her in the past. Or after she'd insisted, no, no compromises, that he choose between her and another weekend at the office.

So his affair was a sobering event. She was, at first, fully ready to divorce him and start life on her own. Initially this had a great appeal to her. But Lis Atcheson was not at heart an angry woman and as the weeks went by she found she needed to remind herself to be indignant about the affair. This equilibrium made the idea of living alone again less attractive. Besides, he was excruciatingly contrite, which gave her a curious power over him — the only upper hand she'd ever attained in the marriage.

A practical matter too: Ruth L'Auberget, who'd been ill with cancer throughout this time, finally passed away, and the daughters were heirs to a complicated estate. Lis, with no interest in financial matters, found herself relying more and more on Owen. Business and money were, after all, aspects of his profession and as he became involved in managing the estate the couple grew close once again.

Their life became easier. Lis bought the 4x4. As agreed among the sisters and Ruth L'Auberget, Lis and Owen moved into the Ridgeton house with its dream greenhouse and Portia received the co-op. Owen bought suits from Brooks Brothers and fancy shotguns. He went deep-sea fishing in Florida and hunting in Canada. And he continued to take business trips, often overnight. But Lis believed his pledge of fidelity. Besides, she reasoned, Owen clearly liked being wealthy, and the money, stock and house were all in Lis's name.

So when, tonight — after they'd learned of Hrubek's escape — Owen had stood before her, armed with his black guns, Lis had looked past his grim mouth and the consuming hunt lust in his eyes and had seen a husband trying the only way he could to fix a love altered by his own carelessness.

Well, bless you, Owen, for your errand tonight, Lis thought, taping the last of the windows. Your efforts are appreciated. But hurry home now, won't you?

The wind was rising. It drove a whip of rain across the roof and north side of the greenhouse with such a clatter that Lis gasped.

It was time to leave.

"Portia! Let's go."

"I've got a couple more to do," she called from upstairs.

"Leave 'em."

The woman appeared a minute later. Lis studied her for a moment and was surprised to see that in these country clothes, so atypical of Portia, the sisters looked very much alike.

"What?" Portia asked, noting Lis's gaze.

"Nothing. You ready?" Lis handed her a yellow rain slicker and pulled her own on.

Portia slung her backpack over one shoulder. Lifting her small Crouch & Fitzgerald suitcase Lis nodded toward the door. They walked outside into the rain that now was falling steadily. A sudden gust ripped the baseball cap from Portia's head. She shouted in surprise and ran to retrieve the hat while her sister double-locked the back door, and they stepped along the soggy path to the edge of the parking area.

Lis turned to look back at the house. With the windows barred by X's of tape, and the old, warping shingles, the colonial had a battle-weary air, as if it squatted in the middle of a no-man's-land. Her eyes were on the greenhouse when she heard her sister ask, "What is that?"

Lis spun around. "My God."

Spreading out before them was a field of mud and water, nearly a foot deep, covering much of the driveway and filling the garage.