Want Not (46 page)

His own sudden movement—striking the tabletop with the heels of his hands as he threw himself back into his chair, red-faced and erect—startled her, and her left hand flipped upward in instinctual fright, like the tails of the deer. “You don’t pay attention to
either of us!
” he thundered.

From the recoiling expression on his face she could tell that he’d startled himself as much as her. He glanced down at his hands and flexed them. In his wheezy shock she sensed a vulnerability, some underlayment of resentment he hadn’t meant to expose, and drawing a cold and livid conclusion she said, “Oh, right. I get it. We’re back to your blowjob deficit.”

His shoulders went limp. “I didn’t say anything about blowjobs.”

“But you were thinking it.”

“Right, fucking guilty.” His own sarcasm came close to drawing a vinegary laugh from him. “Because my chances right now, they’re about as good as ever, aren’t they?”

“So we’re here again. The same old fight? How should we play it this time, Dave?”

“Actually, no. You’re the one who steered us here. I think the word I said was—
attention.
”

“Is that your code word for it?”

“Lexi,” he said calmly, pushing down the air in front of him. This was clearly a gesture rehearsed over the course of a thousand business meetings:
Guys, let’s stick to the issues here.
“If you remember, we were talking about Lexi.”

She spluttered, “Who—”

Spluttering over her he said, “Who excuse me for saying so could use a little more attention to things besides her—besides her grades, and her future earning capacity, and the size of her fucking ass.”

“Oh no. That is
my
daughter and—”

“Did you even know she had a boyfriend?”

Sara’s rage stalled. In her mind she went rifling through a cache of half-remembered glimpses of Alexis’s Facebook page, looking for missed clues. “What boyfriend?” she finally said.

“Name’s Miguel. Or Pedro. No, Miguel. He’s Pedro’s kid.”

“Who’s Pedro?”

“The Mexi?” Dave said, indicting her with a raised eyebrow. “Does our landscaping?”

The landscaper’s son? Their—landscaper? (The landscapers always worked in teams of three or four, indistinguishable in their quick and wordless efficiency: unloading their machines from the trailer, launching a rapidfire assault on the lawn and plantings, disappearing in a puff of single-stroke engine smoke.) None of this made any sense to Sara, and her expression must’ve reflected that; bewilderment often brought a sneer to her face, incomprehension disguising itself as contempt.

Dave nodded at her, his lips pursed in disappointment. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably why she never told you.”

She ignored this, concentrating instead on the sudden gush of relief she was experiencing. The weight gain, the schlumpiness, the woe-is-me demeanor, the unfathomable yin to the yang of her graduation and preparations for college: It was all just puppy love, off-the-rack teen heartbreak. Finally it made sense. “So is that what all the crying is about up there?” she said, too lightly. “They broke up?”

“What crying?”

“She’s up in her room sobbing her guts out.”

“No.” He knotted his face. “They broke up—I don’t know, four or five months ago.”

An extreme case of puppy love, then. It happened: the cancer of desire, or in this case the flu. She’d deal with it. In the meantime she glared at Dave and scolded, “You could’ve made things a helluva lot better around here if you’d just
told
me.”

“Told you?”

“Told me. You know, talking? About other things besides your blue balls and your creepy work innovations?”

Something snapped inside him as he rose toward her and with looming and vaguely sexual menace roared, “You could’ve fucking
paid attention!
”

She leapt back from the table, fearing he might come swimming across it in order to—to what? For the first time in her marriage—maybe in her life—she felt physically threatened; not acutely enough to cower, but enough for his offense to revolt her, and for that revulsion to transform itself into a cold bionic alloy inside her. With that steel girding her voice she said, “Yeah, right. I don’t think we’re talking about Alexis anymore.”

He was panting now, upright out of his chair, and with a wince he reached his right hand to his left shoulder, as if in the early throes of a heart attack. Sara felt a bubble of cruelty rise within her as it occurred to her that she might not attempt a rescue if he was—she might, but hard deliberation would preface any action or inaction. He didn’t look threatening now, but pathetic instead, like one of those cable-news blowhards he was so fond of watching whose argument has just been decimated, whose slimy lobbyist’s motives have just been exposed. That rage she’d once found so compelling: It
had
been absurd, and in its later manifestations even more absurd, a bratty, petulant response to life refusing to pay him the exorbitant amount he demanded. In a crumpled gesture he waved a hand toward all the paperwork between them and said, “I’m getting sued.”

Perhaps this was his oblique way of apologizing or explaining, she didn’t know. Or even care, she realized. She watched him in skeptical, predatory silence.

“Fred says they might try to smash us with fines, make an example out of us,” he said.

“Serves you right,” she hissed, and with the satisfaction of a withering last word she turned from the table and walked out of the kitchen, the clicks of her heels on the polished terrazzo floor throwing spiteful echoes against the walls. In the living room she slipped off those shoes and flung them to the carpet. She stood there for a while, thinking how she wanted a cigarette right now even though she’d never smoked, except briefly onstage for a role, and how preposterous that would be, to smoke one now, to blow dragon plumes of smoke into her goddamn living room which the decorator had said would evoke 1920s Manhattan but with its eighty-two-inch flat-screen and Dave-inspired Italianate kitsch instead just evoked twenty-first-century New Jersey. She dropped onto the couch, abruptly exhausted and longing for her wine but not nearly enough to go fetch it with Dave in the kitchen. So Alexis had a boyfriend, and Sara’s ignorance of this fact was grounds for—what? Dave had delivered that revelation as a power ploy, had brandished it against her like a club. Because everything was power to him. As in the collections racket (“the
acquisitions
business,” she could hear him protest), information was the ultimate weapon; you lorded it over people, you battered them with it, you twisted their own facts and histories against them, their families too if it would help your extraction, and if lying was further ammunition (Mandy), you did that too. Because everything was power to him, she repeated to herself. Sex included: the extraction of her body, the settlement of his pig-grunt finish. After a while Dave passed through the living room muttering goodnight; Sara turned her head. She listened to his footsteps up the stairs, disgusted that he would or could sleep right now, then differently disgusted when she heard the chiming startup of the computer in his upstairs office. She knew what he did in there some nights. Unless he had a chronic sinus condition triggered only by his office’s atmosphere, the wadded Kleenex in the trash bin confided all she needed to know.

Only after she’d turned on the TV did her tidal surge of anger begin to recede, exposing scoured stretches of sadness. Drifting through the cable channels, she was stung by the sense that something had ended tonight, or rather had begun to end—not her marriage, though that seemed possible, and also not her shaky grasp on motherhood, though for a moment, before she’d figured out (months too late, because of Dave’s strategic information-hoarding) that Alexis’s problem was run-of-the-mill heartbreak, she had thought that imperiled. No, it was something blurrier, more shapeless, and now, she supposed, less fixed: her sense of self. Who she was, and who she’d thought she was supposed to be—or play. The role of Sara Tetwick Tooney Masoli: question mark. Even the television seemed to affirm this uncertainty as she went scrolling through the channels, yearning for anything that might speak to her, distract her, entertain her, fulfill her for even half an hour, from channel 100 through channel 1195 and then back through again, through wedding disasters and shark attacks and old movies (there went
Casablanca
) and political partisans wagging fingers at the screen and faith healers setting hands and bombs strewing body parts across Middle East markets and other kinds of markets tracking up or tracking down and batters hitting baseballs and the arctic ice shelf melting violently into the sea and on and on and on. How obscene and astonishing it was, she thought, that amidst all this digital plenty, there could still be nothing.

T
HE FIRST SATURDAY
after schools let out for the summer, in New Jersey, is yard sale day. This designation is unofficial but adhered to just the same. The hand-lettered posters start sprouting on tree trunks and signposts at least a week before, and by that Friday they’re clogging every corner, thick as campaign signs. Then, on Saturday morning, the earlybirds having already cased the block in their low poky sedans, out onto driveways, lawns, and curbs comes the stuff: the unjacketed books and the high-density polyethylene yard-toys and the outmoded VCRs and boomboxes and printers and floppy disks and the crib mattresses and the souvenir shotglasses and the rued leather pants and the puckered deflated basketballs along with the power tools, waterbed components, Bundt pans, stationary bikes, encyclopedias, telescopes, toaster ovens, silk flowers, fishing reels, vacuums, puzzles, folding chairs, Ping-Pong tables, and often out back the mildew-speckled trampoline, free for the taking, buddy, if you’ve got a way to haul it.

Elwin’s intention was to obey this tradition, in order to rid himself of what he’d come to see as his glut of postmarital excess, but he quite literally couldn’t get his shit together. Formal blame went to a late-May meeting of the Waste Isolation Project Markers panel, where he’d been appointed co-author (with Sharon) of the Warning Message text, as well as to the increasing demands of his father’s decreasing condition, but these were wan excuses and he knew it: the pablum of procrastination. On more than one night—more than a dozen, actually—he’d stared down all the boxes and bric-a-brac marked for disposal, with their demand to be sorted, assessed, adjudicated, and priced, and shook his head
no
or rather shook his head
later,
which he understood to be the same sentiment dolled up with lipstick. Yet he had to do it; this much was clear to him. The surplus alone wasn’t the problem, although Christopher’s remark that Elwin didn’t qualify as a bona fide hoarder because “you can still walk through the house” suggested, at the very least, an underlying issue. No, the problem, as Elwin diagnosed it, was that he was living in another man’s house: the man he’d been before Maura had marked
him
for disposal. If he truly was
done,
as he’d concluded that awful morning when he’d slammed Big Jerry against his porch post and inadvertently adopted one of Jerry’s sons, then he felt he had no choice but to reboot—to remake himself in a new and frankly alien image. The first step, he figured, was ecological: remaking his own environment by purging from it all these mementoes of failure and indulgence and failed indulgence. The upright piano he’d bought Maura for her fortieth birthday, for instance, after she’d been citing her lack of hobbies as a source of malaise in conjunction with a remembered decree from a piano teacher, from when she was twelve, that hers was an “extraordinary talent”: This wasn’t merely a five-hundred-pound oddment, sucking space from the living room. It was an emotional bloodstain, a big red reminder of who he’d been or had failed to be. For him to become someone else, it had to go.

And so, forgoing the traditional yard-sale option, onto Craigslist he went, with a barrage of digital advertisements.

First he checked in with Maura about some of the stuff—the shared-custody debris, like the piano, that’d once been theirs but now seemed to be his. He felt he needed Maura’s blessing, which she gave—but reluctantly, and only after she’d asked him to itemize the inventory for her. This reluctance both pleased and displeased Elwin: pleased, because her wavering (about a shabby-chic vanity table, circa 1995, she’d said nostalgically, “Oh God, do you remember buying that?”—which he did, but differently than Maura did; what she remembered was the black teenaged warehouse worker who after cracking the vanity mirror while loading their car begged them, with genuine tears in his eyes, not to tell the store manager, while what Elwin remembered was the surprise sex they’d had later that afternoon, after hauling the damaged table into their bedroom, the way Maura had tugged him down onto the bed by his belt, as if high on the opium fumes of commerce and minor-league charity) seemed to show some remnant of emotional attachment to their former life, and thereby him; but displeased, too, for the very same reason, because if that attachment remained—even partly, barely—then why had it come to all this? What the hell had he done—the old self-pitying question, on a permanent orbit ’round his mind—to deserve all
this?

All
this,
indeed: Elwin clicking off the phone and setting down his clipboard and then setting down himself in a room piled high with his own spurned history, his brain struggling to uncouple the familiar comfort of Maura’s voice from the still-novel sting of it. He sat there, oblivious to the NPR newscast drifting from the kitchen radio, to all the complicated traumas and vital global dramas floating across the airwaves, and then the traffic report, the buildup at the Bayonne Bridge, the three-car accident on the Goethals Bridge, the car fire on the Garden State, the disabled linguist at the Morristown house. How much easier it would be, he thought, if people were merely good or bad, as in comic books and television dramas, instead of suspended in the hoary in-between, goodbad creatures swerving from acts of valiant decency to craven negligence in the very same day/hour/minute. How much easier it would be, that is, for him to
hate
Maura. To regret their years together as a bitter miscalculation, a foul wrong turn. To chuck all the physical residue of their marriage into a rented dumpster upon which he could climb late one night in order to piss on everything, her ghost-memory included, his dick in one hand and a half-drained bottle of something macho in the other. To be able to deem her a “bitch,” as Christopher did. Yet that wasn’t Elwin. And that wasn’t Maura, despite everything she’d done or hadn’t done. “Free to good home,” he began many of his advertisements, because a good home was what all this stuff had been meant for—himself, perhaps, included.