The street lights were on.
What the hell was this — a power surge, a magnetic storm, some sort of cosmic overload?
Here it was two o’clock in the afternoon and the streetlights were burning and the telephone lines were humming, and Tony Harmon had parked two blocks from the house, hoping he could walk off some nervous energy before he got to the front door — but this walk wasn’t working.
He shifted the birthday presents from one arm to the other.
Was it his imagination or did the women chatting in his driveway drop their voices to hushed whispers when they saw him?
Their daughters (what were their names? Kari? Keeley?) must have already gone inside. Outside, there were only these two half-familiar matrons — one slim and attractive and the other with an ass the size of her minivan’s bumper — talking about something they apparently did not want him to hear.
“Howdy,” he said, and they brightened up as if they hadn’t been watching him and murmuring about him for quite a while already.
“Oh, hi!”
He smiled with his mouth closed and knew instantly, regrettably, that it confirmed something about him to them, confirmed whatever it was they’d heard from Melody already. They glanced at each other, he thought: See?
“Too hot if you ask me!” the fat one exclaimed.
“Yes, it is,” Tony Harmon said. “And these damn telephone lines are humming.”
The matrons looked at him blankly as if they had no idea what he meant. But how could they not? This flat-line of pandemonium going on over their heads, exactly what he imagined it might sound like in the last few seconds before the chainsaw cut straight into your skull. And they couldn’t hear it?
“Have fun!” the attractive one said. “It looked like the girls were already tearing the house up a few minutes ago.”
“Oh well,” Tony said, and stood there, expecting them to say good-bye and head for their vehicles, but they didn’t — and then he realized that they were waiting for him to leave so they could continue their conversation or start a new one.
He wasn’t, after all, the host of this party. It wasn’t his job to see them off. He’d already paused too long, he could tell by the look on their faces, the frozen congeniality. Their smiles began to loosen, a slow fading, to show him that they were waiting. He nodded then, waved with the free fingers of his left hand, and turned his back to them, and walked up to his front door.
His front door.
Had he ever once rung his own doorbell?
It was like a tiny harvest moon or the orange eye of a lit cigarette. He shifted the birthday presents into his right arm, holding one of them steady with his chin, and then inserted his finger into that eye. It might as well have been a gun shot — so loud he could practically feel the reverberation of it moving through the rooms of his house. A burning wind kicked up by that ding-dong. He imagined it knocking Melody’s make-up bottles off her dresser, clearing the kitchen of coffee cups and napkins, blowing the bath towels right off the racks.
Then, the knob turned, slowly and counterclockwise, and a purplish darkness cracked open between the doorjamb and the door and there Melody stood with one hand on her hip (her hip!) and the other still on the knob.
“Hello, Tony,” she said and gave her head a little shake, which sent her earrings swinging in slow arcs between her earlobes and her shoulders. The pit and the pendulum. He couldn’t help but stare. They were gold strands with little pearls at the ends. Where had they come from?
“Can you give me a hand here?” he said to the earrings.
Melody took a package out of his hands, and then turned her back on him, fast.
Jesus, she was gorgeous.
Was there any other thirty-eight-year-old woman on the planet who looked as good as this?
No.
It was beauty born of revenge. Nothing could top it. She’d done it to spite him. Lost some weight. Done up her hair and worn those tight jeans and some kind of exotic looking blouse. An armful of bracelets. Her skin was flawless. Radiant. Maybe she’d actually gone to the trouble of getting some kind of facial or makeover to torment him. And the neck — it was a cliché, he knew it, but his wife’s neck was exactly like a fucking swan’s — and he knew exactly what it would smell like if he buried his face in the corner between her ear and her shoulder, there where the little pendulums were swinging wildly now as she turned toward him again, inhaled, and opened the storm door again just enough for him to stick the toe of his shoe into their house. He butted the door open the rest of the way with his elbow and was hit, then, by a blast of air so cold he thought it might knock him right over, and then he watched his wife walk away, disappear around the corner of their living room so quickly he considered chasing her, tackling her in the hallway.
“Daddy!”
His daughter.
She tossed herself in his direction with such force it made him stumble backward, slipping dangerously for a moment on the ugly mother-in-law rug (an accident waiting to happen, he’d always said: the floors were too slick for a rug without a pad, someone was going to break his neck) before his back was to the wall, and she had flung her arms around his waist, kissing his belly showily, making loud pretend sounds while the other girls watched from the family room.
One child in particular — a dark-haired thing with olive skin — caught and held his eye.
It seemed to him that she wore a disapproving look on her small, triangular face.
“Honey,” Tony said to the top of his daughter’s head, trying to smile, patting her hair with his palm, inching away at the same time as she was still faking the kissing noises loudly, now in the direction of his face.
Was it the light in the hallway, or was she wearing make-up? There was something strangely new and flamboyant about her eyes, batting up at him like a cartoon character.
“Daddy, daddy, daddy,” she said in her phony little-girl voice.
“Hi there, silly,” he said. “Happy birthday.”
“Hi, Mr. Harmon,” the girl with the triangular face said.
“Hello there,” Tony said, wishing he could remember the girl’s name. He knew she’d spent the night in his house more than once, and he had a vague memory of his daughter lying on the floor with this girl, propped up on pillows watching “The Wizard of Oz.”
But after that he drew a blank.
“Time for lunch!” Melody called.
She was in the dining room, from which the smell of something flowery and chemical drifted. Were these children going to eat it? His daughter let go of him and called for her friends to follow. An elbow, a shoulder, a sharp skeletal something bumped into him as they hurried past.
When they were gone, Tony Harmon stood for a few minutes in the entrance to the family room and looked.
Not a thing had been changed, and not a thing was the same. The wedding photos were gone, but they’d been gone a long time. Gone since that first bad fight. What had she done with them after that night? Tossed them in the garbage? Burned them? Crushed them under the heel of her boot?
He’d never asked, just come home after work that evening and noticed they were gone.
The curtains that opened onto the sliding glass doors to the back yard were open, and the sun streamed in and lit up several pillars of dust-motes, which appear to hold up the ceiling with their perpetual motion. From the dining room he could hear Melody asking the girls what they wanted on their hotdogs, and the shouted answers were a grating chorus. Nonsensical. Devilish; ketchmustnothingup.
And then he saw it on the bookshelf.
A new spine among the more familiar spines:
“Best One-Dish Meals,” “The Herbal Doctor,” “Your Child’s Health,” “Dictionary of Quotations,” “Guitar Basics”…
“The Amicable Divorce.”
The Amicable.
Fucking.
Divorce.
Tony Harmon took it off the bookshelf and walked straight out of the house to his car.
Part Two
As soon as he got to his car, he realized he had to go back.
That he couldn’t just drive away from his daughter’s birthday party while she was eating hotdogs.
So he opened his trunk and tossed the book he’d stolen into it, there beside the jack. Just the day before he’d had a goddamned flat tire on the fucking interstate, and hadn’t bothered to tuck the jack back in under the carpet in the trunk of his car. He’d been running late already, of course, with the trucks soaring by him as he knelt in the gravel, leaving him choked in a cloud of diesel fumes — only nine o’clock in the morning and already so hot that he’d soaked straight through his shirt — and he’d been seized with the desire to kill something.
Not a person, although he could have if the person were a threatening person — someone who might hurt his wife, or his daughter, or steal his car. But preferably a dangerous animal. Tony Harmon would have like to have killed a dangerous animal. He would have willed one, if he could have, to come bounding across the barrier between the scuzzy neighborhood over there and the shoulder of the freeway — growling and slobbering and lunging for his major arteries — just so he could beat it to death with the jack, chase it into the garbage-filled ditch down there and lay that solid metal into its skull until he’d completely used up whatever this new source of energy was that had been boiling and building in him for a while, and which could not be exhausted, only refilled, by the conflicts and crises of his pointless job.
He tossed “The Amicable Divorce” right in there next to his weapon of choice.
“My weapon of choice,” he’d said more than once, brandishing a black felt-tipped pen.
“You’re the writer!” Melody would say when she was trying to think of a way to describe someone she’d seen or something that had happened. “Help me out here, Tony, how would you describe…?”
And he’d always come up with the words for her, the ones she seemed to have been searching for all along.
“Exactly!” she’d say.
He always used the same brand and color of pen, and bought his notebooks (black-covered) from a stationary store on campus. Notebook after notebook was filled with outlines and character sketches and plans for his novel, which was experimental. A narrative that moved backward in time. An old man would rise from the gurney on which he’d just died in a hospital emergency room, be taken home in the ambulance that had brought him to the hospital, have the heart attack that killed him, then make breakfast, wake in his bed, then dream, then fall asleep after reading late into the night, and then have dinner.
The novel would end with the old man’s birth in the backseat of a taxi-cab in Paris.
Melody was always very careful not to interrupt him when he was writing in one of those notebooks, whether they were together in the apartment, or out to dinner, or having a picnic in the park.
It was sacred, the novel he was going to write.
Melody never asked when he would finish his novel, but she told her friends and family and even acquaintances for years, “Tony’s working on his novel.”
He knew something had changed forever when she stopped telling anyone that.
When Tony got back to the house, no one had noticed that he’d been gone.
Now, except to stand there in the doorway, glancing at and away from her breasts, he could think of nothing whatsoever to do. He was useless. No little girl was going to ask the awkward hulking father who didn’t live there any more to spoon relish onto her bun. Melody was leaning over the shoulder of a sullen-looking child, cutting the girl’s hotdog in half — and, as she did it, Tony Harmon couldn’t help but notice his wife’s breasts, the shining wealth of them surging inside the exotic blouse he was sure she’d worn for his sake.
Look, asshole, my body still turns you on, and you’ll quite possibly never touch it again.
It was impossible not to notice her breasts, not to think about how, the first time he’d touched them, he’d had to fight his way through two layers of clothes and a padded bra to do so.
Melody, her back against the wall beside his bed. Her perfect dentist-daughter’s teeth gleaming absurdly purple in the weird fever-glow cast by his black-light.
She hadn’t been his first choice, he could admit that now. At that long table in the basement of Pizza Bob’s he’d noticed another girl (woman? — remember the way they’d insisted in those years, only eighteen or nineteen years old, on being referred to as women?) – a history major with what appeared to be a permanently world-weary expression, as if she’d already figured out that everybody within her line of sight was doomed.
He’d tried to talk to that girl, but she wouldn’t look him in the eyes, and she left early. So he’d gone for Melody, who was like a simpler, happier version of the history major. Granola girl. Bit of a hippy. Not, he thought, as sexy as the other girl — but god how he’d fallen for her once he had her to himself. Couldn’t get enough. Could have dived straight into her body at some soft point between her ribs, and lived there.
That semester, he nearly flunked out.
Memorized half a dozen love poems to recite to her.
Spent all the money he made in his job at the library on Joni Mitchell albums to play while they made love.
The first three times they’d slept together, that’s all they’d done — slept. Melody curled into his chest, his arm clasped around her stomach, her dark hair in his face, the smell of it, as if sleep had been made into hair. Or mincemeat. Yes, her tawny brown hair smelled like his mother’s mincemeat pies, some kind of hippy shampoo. Her neck, like milk. She was like milk and mincemeat struck by lightning, come to life in the form of a girl.
A girl who seemed to love him!
After hotdogs, there were games.
“Here,” Melody said, handing him a severed paper-donkey’s tail. “I’ll blindfold one of the girls and you spin her around and hand her this tail.”
Was she joking?
“Me first!” his daughter screamed.
“No,” Melody said. “Let one of the guests go first.”
His daughter stamped her feet then and scrunched up her features into a satire of childish rage.
Had she always been a brat?
They were outside now, in the backyard. It was neatly mown. (Had Melody done it herself? He felt pretty sure she must have — it would not have been like her to hire a neighbor kid to do something she could do herself.) But he could see mole tracks running under it, soft little tunnels crisscrossing the yard.
Shit. How did they do it, those little fuckers? He’d only seen an actual mole once in his life (the neighbor’s dog proudly brought it over and dropped it off on the patio) — a nasty little blackness with fin-like feet and a naked tail — yet here was the evidence of their omnipresence, their unbelievable energy, their insatiable appetite for destruction.
Where the hell were they trying to get to, and why couldn’t they do it above the lawn like everything else in the world?
They’d spent that whole first college winter in bed together, and then summer came, and she had to go off for her annual stint as a counselor at what Tony called Camp Wishy-Washy.
“Why do you have to go?” he asked her, tugging on her wrist, trying to pull her back into the bed beside him.
“Because it’s what I do,” she’d said, “every summer. I don’t want to resent you for keeping me from doing what I’ve always done, do I?”
Had it been an actual question?
Should he have answered?
His daughter stood stiffly with her hands in small balled fists at her sides as he blindfolded someone else’s daughter — a girl more delicate and polite than his own — and spun her around.
The girl groped the air in his direction for the donkey’s tail, which he pressed into her hand, then watched as she walked in the opposite direction of the tree where the donkey itself was tacked up and waiting. Like a drunk, she took tentative and stumbling steps while the other girls laughed at her, and Tony Harmon thought What kind of stupid sadistic game is this?
Well, the world was full of games like this — soccer, hockey, “Jeopardy.”
Match your wits and strength as long as you can, then finally fail.
She hadn’t been gone to Camp Wishy-Washy for two nights before Tony started flipping out — drinking a lot of beer in front of the fuzzy black and white TV in his sublet apartment before going to bed, then waking up feeling as if he’d been punched hard right between his ribs.
The second girl pinned her donkey’s tail exactly at the spot where the poster-donkey lacked a tail. Obviously, she was peeking from beneath her blindfold, but this kid was a born actress, even pretending to walk in completely the wrong direction for six or seven paces, and then pretending to grope the air in the right direction — then, bingo!, she pinned the tail on the donkey.
Tony Harmon’s daughter wasn’t fooled, and shouted, “You cheated!”
“No I didn’t,” the other girl snapped back with what sounded like practiced defensiveness — a girl with a sister, probably older, was Tony Harmon’s guess. How much of his life own life had he spent in such bickering with his own older sister?
“Next girl!” Melody chimed.
Finally, the cheater won the prize.
A little goody-bag.
The only thing Tony Harmon knew that Melody had put, for sure, in the goodie-bag was a whistle, because the cheater started running in circles blowing it so loudly he finally had to put his fingers in his ears.
“Cake!” he heard Melody shouting loudly enough to be heard over it all.
“What are you doing here?” Melody had asked.
It was morning by the time he got down to the cabins. It had only taken an hour or so for him to walk (to run) the rutted dirt road to the Welcome Cabin, but by then the sun was just inching up in green-gold beams of light in the clearing, where an old school bus was parked and empty, and there’d been no one in the cabin to welcome him or to tell him where he might find his girlfriend, who was a counselor at this camp — so he’d started walking down a footpath he’d chosen from three other possible footpaths, and had walked (run) down it for a long time, until it dead-ended at a very small dark lake — all flat surface reflecting a lightening sky, and on which a few rowboats knocked against a weedy dock lazily in a light breeze.
Tony had watched the random knock-knockings of the rowboats for a while, and then he went to the edge of the lake and pissed into it — a bright golden arch, which hit the surface of that darkness and smashed it into jigsaw pieces — and then he started back up the path to the Welcome Cabin again.
The cake was like a horrible mockup of a vagina — all pink at the center surrounded by pinker roses made of frosting, but looking a lot like damp flesh, and a miniature Barbie doing a go-go dance in a bathing suit at the center.
Ten candles and one to grow on.
They weren’t yet lit.
“Can you please go in and get the soda and the ice-bucket?” Melody asked him wearily.
Tony shrugged, as if it were an imposition — but, in truth, he was only too happy to go inside and get whatever she wanted him to get. He’d shrugged reluctantly out of habit, he supposed, and he wasn’t surprised by the look of hateful annoyance it brought to the surface of his wife’s face.
When he came back out with the ice-bucket and sodas, his daughter was doing what looked like some kind of Irish dance on the picnic table bench, and he was struck by how shameless she was — her legs glittering with pale hairs, her knees looking scaly.
But she was undeniably lovely, too. She wouldn’t be a model, or a starlet or a ballerina, but she’d be some college boy’s wet-dream. That boy would be on the make in the basement of a pizza place on a Sunday night two weeks before exams, and there’d be some other princess he had his eyes on — some dark-eyed stranger with a fuck you smirk, some girl/woman he wanted to hold down by the shoulders and screw until they both hurt — but then he’d notice the other one, Tony Harmon’s daughter, and, if that boy was very lucky, she might be looking back.
There should be something you could do to prevent this, Tony thought, watching the loveliness of his daughter.
Those wires they wound around the branches of Bonsai.
Melody took a book of matches out of her jeans and started striking them (too hard) on the little strip of sulfur then. he could smell the near-ignition, but then he’d see her toss the little gray plume of nothing into the grass. He stood back and watched her try to strike it again — three, four — and then he said, “Here,” holding out a hand. Without bothering to look at him, she placed the matchbook in his palm.
“I’m here to see you,” he’d said.
Melody was wearing the cutoffs he loved more than everything else in the world put together. There was a frayed rip right under the left cheek of her ass, and it gave a glimpse of the pink flesh there that made his heart race every time he noticed it again. There were seven or eight sullen looking adolescent girls around her. Every one of them butt-ugly. And Melody, at the center, like a lily in a field of cow-pies.
“Oh,” she said. She started shaking her head. “Oh, my God.”
Part Three
The match leapt into flame. There was one like that, Tony had learned long ago, in every book or box. Dipped into a bit too much sulfur at the factory, it would go up fast and furious and burn your fingertips. You couldn’t tell which one it was by looking at them — unless, he supposed you had a magnifying glass. This one had been one of those, and it practically exploded when he struck it. But he wasn’t about to lose it, not after all those duds, and with Melody waiting impatiently, watching him, judging, so he cupped his hand around it and brought it over the the birthday cake, held it over the candles and lit all eleven of them as fast as he could.
The pain was incredible — just that tiny bit of heat, and it wasn’t even touching his fingers, but if he hadn’t had ten little girls and his estranged wife watching him he’d have sworn and cried out in pain at the burning of it.
He’d have thrown himself onto his back screaming, Ow, Shit, God!
They sang “Happy Birthday,” and his daughter blew all the candles out in one big huff.
“I need to talk to you,” Tony said after the cake was over and she’d gone inside. Her back was to him. She was leaning over the garbage can she’d hauled out from under the kitchen sink, scraping frosting off a fork with a knife. Tony recognized it as one of those hopeless activities, one of the millions of Sisyphian tasks he’d watched his wife perform in the years since she’d become his wife, a mother.
Those tasks were, it seemed clear to him, all pointless, and endless — a bottomless list of chores that would only get done in order to need to be done the next day:
Scrape the dishes, wipe the counters, water the plants, trim the shrubs…
Surely, it was this life of mindless detail that had turned Melody against him, not anything he’d done — not, certainly, a lack of love. For god’s sake, Tony Harmon knew that much about women at least — that they hated housework and blamed men for having to do it. For years he’d been listening to the clerical women in his office carping about their husbands. Slobs. Couch potatoes. Pigs. He’d read “The Women’s Room;” he’d read “The Awakening;” he’d read “The Yellow Wallpaper.” He’d taken Women’s Studies in college — the only male in a room of fifteen students. Except for a few who were lesbians, they’d all loved him. They’d laughed hard at his jokes. He’d gotten an A without ever finishing the cumbersome final portfolio assignment, having intuited early on that success or failure in the course would depend entirely on the manner in which he participated in class discussion.
He could not dominate, but neither could he hang back.
He could not simply agree with all of the opinions expressed (“A time is coming when men will be utterly obsolete…”), but he needed to acknowledge the feelings of his professor and fellow-students.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, trying it again.
She held up a pink frosted fork, and considered it. Again, she said nothing.
“Look,” Tony said, touching Melody’s arm lightly, feeling gratified that at least she didn’t pull away, although she also didn’t stop what she was doing. Outside, he could hear the girls screaming, some kind of whining followed by a shout, and then what sounded like a chant, a nursery rhyme in chorus.
“I don’t think this is a good time to talk,” Melody said.
“When would be?” Tony asked, and felt the features of his face freeze.
She glanced at him, and then looked away.
“I need to know,” he said to the back of her head.
“I don’t know,” she said, and she threw the silverware she’d been scraping into the little basket in the dishwasher. She stood up, facing him. The directness startled him, and he stuttered. “I, I–”
“Mothers are going to start pulling in here to get their girls,” Melody said. “Maybe next week we can…”
“No!” Tony said. His heart was hammering in his left ear, as if a child were hitting him with a mittened fist. “Next week you won’t want to hear it either.” He shook his head, trying to stop the pounding.
Melody looked at him strangely. She inhaled and was about to say something, perhaps say it softly, perhaps make some kind of counteroffer, when the fucking doorbell rang, and she looked in the direction of the door.
“Ignore it!” Tony said, and he grabbed her arm with more force than he’d intended.
“What?” Melody said, narrowing her eyes at his hand on her.
“Just forget it. The door. Don’t hear it!” He tried to chuckle, at the absurdity of what he’d said, as if it were only a suggestion, not a command. And to acknowledge that it had made no sense. “You were about to say something. What were you going to say?”
His wife looked at him closely, at his lips, as if he had spoken to her in an unfamiliar language. “Someone’s at the door,” she said, slowly, in her own language, and turned toward it.
“I’ll get it,” Tony said, smiling, trying to sound accommodating. Flexible!
But this fat matron was the last person on earth Tony Harmon wanted to see, the absolutely last possible human being on the face of the entire fucking world he wanted to talk to, wanted to find standing at his door, having rung his doorbell. She looked surprised, he thought, by the expression on his face, as if he’d sneered at her.
Perhaps, he thought, he was sneering at her.
Through the storm door, he said loudly, “The girls are around back,” and then he shut the door.
When he got back, Melody said, without looking at him, “You could have invited her in.”
She was latching the door to the dishwasher with one hand and the other had found its way to her hip, as a fist.
“Why would I have invited her in?” Tony asked
“Because she’s the mother of one of our daughter’s friends, Tony.”
She whirled around to say this.
“Well,” Tony said — heart pounding hard at the tone of her voice, “excuse the hell out of me.”
She flushed. He could even see the blood splashed on her chest, just above her breasts. And then she clipped past him out the kitchen door, headed, apparently, for the dining room table where the girls’ hotdogs were still half-eaten and moldering on their Barbie Birthday plates.
But Tony Harmon grabbed his wife’s arm she passed him, not realizing how hard he’d grabbed it until he saw the look on her face — the quick surprised flash of pain. “Don’t touch me,” she whispered, loud as a scream. But he couldn’t help it then. He yanked the arm harder, and she stumbled into him. When she tried to pull away, he held on tighter, she whimpered a little, and then went limp. Just like that. It surprised him. He’d had no idea it would be this easy. “I want to talk,” he said, close to her face.
So easy!
She wasn’t struggling in the least. He could have talked to her for hours, now that he had her in this grip. He could have recited every verse of the “Ancient Mariner” if he’d known it. “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” He could have recited the Gettysburg Address. No. That one was short. The U.S. Constitution, with every amendment. He could have kissed her. He could have fucked her!
But he didn’t want to.
Honestly, what he wanted to do was let her go.
And he would have, if he hadn’t known she’d just bolt away from him and he’d never, never get this close to her again.
He hated, actually, that he couldn’t let go! There was a smell females had when they were scared, and she had it. Some kind of feminine adrenaline. He’d smelled it on Melody before — beside him at the doctor’s office when they’d been told that she was pregnant. Once, when they were broadsided by a sportscar at an intersection downtown.
He’d smelled it before that on his mother, on a plane during turbulence, on Amy Malone beside him on the roller coaster at Cedar Point, on Bethany Dobrowski when her father had charged down the stairs and found them half-naked on an old couch in her basement.
And he’d smelled it on his sister when he’d tried to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the Vandermulen’s back lawn the night after their high school graduation.
One minute, she’d been drinking a beer on the sloped roof of the Vandermulen’s house with her boyfriend Mick, and then she was on the lawn.
Someone had his car doors open and stereo blasting “Stairway to Heaven” into the twilight while a low plane’s red eye blinked slowly across the sky above their suburb. There was a breeze that rustled only the very tops of the trees. Tony Harmon was so stoned that the guy he was joking around with on the patio seemed to be speaking to him without moving his mouth, and then someone said, “Hey, man, your sister’s on the roof,” and Tony Harmon had said, “Cool,” and when he looked up he could see that she was rowing her arms in the air.
Wow, he’d thought, his sister was going to fly.
She was going to fucking fly right off the roof.
Cool.
She didn’t die that night.
His mouth-to-mouth had saved her to die a few months later — after a long lingering summer.
“Talk,” Melody said. “Just hurry up and talk.”
But then the doorbell rang again, so loud this time he got flustered and dropped her arm and his wife hurried away from him toward the door. One of the dining room chairs was knocked over on its side when she bumped into it, and it fell with a dull empty sound onto the carpet, hardly a sound at all, and then, without thinking, he was after her.
It wasn’t a tackle, exactly, just one arm around her waist, but Melody had been moving fast, and the force of his blocking her caused her to stumble over his arm, to her knees. When she tried to get to her feet again he had to throw his weight into it to keep her down.
“Let me–!” she yelled, too loudly. They were only yards from the front door, and some girl’s mother was standing just on the other side of it, so Tony put his hand over Melody’s mouth and pushed her into the carpet. “Be quiet,” he said, as soothingly as he could, into her ear.
She did become quiet.
The doorbell didn’t ring again.
They lay like that together for quite a while.
Someone knocked on the door this time, maybe thinking the doorbell was busted, and then he heard voices. It must have been the fat one, returned. “The girls are around back,” someone called outside the window, and then there was the sound of another car pulling into the driveway. He stood up then and pulled his wife to her feet, and when he said, “Get upstairs and wait for me or I’m going to make a scene nobody around here will ever forget,” it almost made him weep, the way she did it, the little slumping resignation of her thin shoulders. One of the earrings had fallen off and it lay near the toe of his shoe on the carpet. He picked it up and handed it to her and said, “I’ll be right up.”
Part Four
The attractive one and the fat one were standing in exactly the same attitude he’d first encountered them — though now they were in his backyard. The girls were still running around on the mole-tunneled lawn in some kind of choreographed chaos that must have been a game, the rules of which they’d each internalized long ago.
“Oh, hi there,” the attractive one said to Tony. “Must have been a good party, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Tony said, nodding and finding himself better able to smile casually than he had been a few hours before. He put his hands in his pockets in what he thought would appear to be a fatherly and ordinary manner. “I think the girls burned off some energy. Ate a lot of cake.”
“Oh, that’s great,” the fat one said. “Thanks for having them.”
“Hey,” he said, “thanks for bringing them. My daughter made out like a bandit.” He nodded in the direction of the laundry basket full of unwrapped presents she’d ripped into before they’d lit the candles on her cake.
“Yeah! Wow,” the attractive one said. “More plastic junk for you!”
At first Tony didn’t know what she meant, but then he realized. The presents. “Yeah. Great,” he said. And then, “Oh, by the way,” as if he’d just remembered something. “You know, I wanted to ask you if it might be possible to send my daughter off for a while with one of yours tonight. Melody and I have some, well–” both women had begun to nod gravely and pleasantly at the same time ” — stuff to iron out, and–”
“Oh, she’s welcome to come home with us,” the attractive one said.
“Well,” the fat one said, “as a matter of fact, we were going to invite any of the girls who wanted–”
“That would be great,” Tony said, shaking his head and sighing, “that would help so much.”
“Well, why doesn’t she just come home with us right now? The girls can take a swim in our pool, and then–”
“If I picked her up about, say, ten o’clock, would that–?”
“Oh, she can just spend the night if she wants to!”
Tony Harmon called his daughter over and told her the plan, its various possibilities, and asked if she thought she’d enjoy that, and her reaction was simply to hop up and down on one foot cheering, sweeping her head from side to side, looking like an animal, or a maniac.
“I’d take that as a yes!” the attractive one said, looking at Tony Harmon’s daughter as if her behavior were completely normal.
“Okay,” Tony said, “I’ll go inside and ask Melody to get a few things for her,” he said. “You know, jammies, toothpaste.”
But he didn’t turn around right away to go into the house to do this, so he would not seem to be in too much of a hurry.
Together, the three of them stood and watched the girls spasm and scream in his yard. When he was sure they weren’t looking, he inspected the faces of the matrons, to see if they looked suspicious, but they were all smiles. After a while, a few more mothers just like them found their ways into the backyard (“Oh, here you are. I rang the doorbell–”) and Tony Harmon shook a couple of hands heartily, then continued to stand around with them and watch the girls dash around madly, shouting words at one another that he couldn’t understand. Beetleblood. Ask me do. All the women commented on the heat, but no one said a word about the high screaming of the power lines that had been going on without cessation since Tony Harmon had stepped out of his car with the birthday presents.
Finally, after enough babble about the weather and the plastic junk and the high spirits of the girls, he insisted that they all stop and listen:
“Listen,” he said, “it’s there, it’s terrible, you’ve just gotten used to it.”
Three or four of the matrons cocked their ears to the sky, and he could see the sound of it register on their faces.
Oh, yes, they agreed, that drilling sound, that high whine, that incessant buzzing — really, it was something, now that you mentioned it.
She was standing on the other side of the bed holding the base of a lamp he’d never seen before in her hands — both hands, like a bat.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
He put his hands up, as if he were being arrested, and just stood there, looking at her, and then, unable to bear the expression of pure hatred on her face, looking around. He hadn’t seen the inside of his own bedroom for weeks.
Still holding the lamp like a bat in his direction, Melody asked, “Where are the girls?”
“They’re gone,” he said.
Melody’s eyes got bigger. “Where’s–?”
“She went home with that dark girl, the one with the fat mother. She’s going to stay over.”
Melody tossed the lamp base on the bed, and Tony looked down at it:
Wooden, and rather plain, but solid-looking. A piece of wood that looked Amish to him — but did the Amish make electric lamps? She’d even gone to the trouble of unscrewing the lightbulb so it wouldn’t break if she had to use this new lamp as a weapon.
And the fact of that made him laugh.
Melody looked furious at that. She bumped her leg on the soft corner of the mattress as she walked around the bed, and she stumbled a little. He could tell she was worked up. Her chest — what was that called, décolletage?–was flushed, that warm mottled thing that happened to her after orgasm, or when she was angry. Her shoulder brushed his, pushing past, and she said, “I’m going to go get Destiny.”
“Destiny’s fine,” Tony said, grabbing his wife’s upper arm.
“I’m going to go get Destiny,” she said again — and it was less the angry, sputtering way she said it than the sound of his daughter’s name that made him push her onto the bed and say, “No you’re not.”
The sound of that ludicrous name on his wife’s lips! — the very fact of it, the fact that he’d let her convince him that Destiny was a perfectly lovely name for a little girl. Not once, in his daughter’s decade of life, had Tony Harmon been able to call her anything but Dezzie or Dez or Tinny without feeling like an utter fool. Even to see the name on her report cards made him wince. It was the kind of name a 12-year-old would give to her stuffed unicorn, not a name for a human being! And he and Melody had been plenty old enough to know better. They had been adults. They’d been older than their own parents had been when they’d become parents. They should have taken it seriously, the job of naming a child, giving a child a name. But they hadn’t. Melody had gone through a book of baby names, then discarded the book, then looked up at Tony, and said, “Destiny.”
Amazing how fragile, really, his wife’s skull was. Could it really have fallen to pieces as easily as that? Like his sister — thirty seconds between the roof and the Vandermulen’s lawn and whatever all that hysterical girly life-force that had animated her all his life had been, it was simply over.
His sister’s mouth, which never once in his life had he ever imagined kissing, had tasted like a cold green apple already, although her heart hadn’t stopped, yet, beating.
What were they made of, after all — females?
Eggshells, blood, dandelion fluff, and screaming?
He’d heard, it seemed to him, about dead weight — that a person weighed, or seemed to weigh, more dead than while alive. It had certainly seemed to be the case with his sister, but how many times, really, had he tried to lift his sister before she fell off that roof?
And Melody, in truth, had always been like a heavy load of feathers in his arms on the occasions he’d found himself carrying her. Up the stairs to the bedroom, once. Over the threshold of their honeymoon hotel room. She’d always looked so light, but in his arms, perfectly alive, she had always been surprisingly heavy — although she could never have weighed more than a hundred and twenty-five pounds.
His wife, a burden of feathers.
His wife, a load of air and light.
The power lines were still screaming when he got outside with her, but, it seemed to Tony — windows unrolled, his sleeves rolled up and one arm on the door, driving north in what was now a bluish darkness beginning to cool — that twilight had hushed them.
It had taken something almighty — the earth rotating heavily on its axis — but they’d finally shut up.
There was not much on the radio — a James Taylor song he used to like, a news story about a war in a country he knew he’d have had a hard time finding on a map — and the farther from the city he got the less of it there was.
Snow, mostly, rattling itself in audible sparks across space.
A thousand words barely thought and, for the most part, unintelligible — a billion words on some subject close to his heart, tossed out lovingly, and culminating in so much colorless noise in a void.
Part Five
Tony and Melody had written their own vows the night before they were married. They’d rowed a canoe out into the middle of Lake Waukeenau, up there at Camp Michi-Wau-Lu-Ka. They’d pushed out from the silty banks, and then followed the wavering reflection of a very full moon on the surface of the water.
It was a deep lake, Melody had told him. Bottomless.
He hadn’t believe her (how, he thought, could a lake be bottomless, unless the world were flat and the lake just poured straight out into space?) but he didn’t want to argue with her. One of the things he loved most about Melody was the way she found the world so fascinating and, at the same time, took it at face value. If somebody told Melody that a lake was bottomless, it was, to Melody, bottomless.
She took out the legal pad and pen they’d brought with them and wrote, Our Vows at the top.
She balanced the flashlight between her knees so she could see, while Tony rowed.
The oar pushed smoothly through the water. The light of the moon broke and dispersed on the dark surface. But there was otherwise so little resistance that he would have hardly noticed that the water was there at all. Tony Harmon was rowing a boat through the air. The stars were shining in the water as well as in the sky — fuzzy, flawed versions of themselves, smeared in the lake, looking like Christmas lights strung on a cyclone fence and driven past quickly.
“So?” Melody said, looking up. The flashlight made a bright stranger’s face out of hers. “Where do we start?”
“Well, I vow to love you forever,” Tony said.
“Oh,” Melody said, “and I’ll love you forever, too, but shouldn’t we promise each other something more … specific?”
“Like what?” Tony said. “What else is there?” he asked.
“Respect,” Melody said. “Acceptance?”
“Well, I vow to respect you and accept you and love your forever, in that case. Write that down.”
Melody wrote it down, but she looked up from the words, the pen still hovering over the paper, a halo of moonlight in her hair, and he could tell she was dissatisfied with it. They were halfway across the lake by now, and the moon had stayed just ahead of them the whole way — an empty dinner plate, the kind they hand you at the foot of the buffet line. Take all you like, But eat all you take. A warm plate, just out of the dishwasher. A damp and heavy plate. A clean plate, but one on which a thousand people had eaten their dinners before you.
“Maybe,” Melody said, “something about helping me stay true to myself, something about helping me honor–”
“I thought this was about us,” Tony said, trying to sound happy, joking,”not you.”
Melody didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and then she said, “Of course it’s about us, but–” She cleared her throat, something she always did when she was pretending not to be upset. “But, without a me, and a you there can’t be–”
“An us,” he finished for her.
“Exactly,” Melody said, as if he were a slow pupil who’d finally, painfully, showed a sign of progress.
“Write whatever you want me to say, in that case,” Tony said. “That’s how I feel about it. I vow to … whatever you said about helping you honor your true–”
“Oh, perfect,” she said, jotting that down. “You always find the perfect words for everything, Tony.”
She spent quite a while writing, without looking up from the page.
Then, they ran aground with a muffled sound.
“Please,” he’d said.
“Please?” Melody had echoed the word back to him as if she’d never heard it before. She was looking at him with such weary contempt it was as if she didn’t notice, at all, that he was a man standing over her with the base of a lamp held above her fragile skull.
“Please what?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Just get out of here,” Melody said. “Go.”
She pointed to the bedroom door, but he knew that she meant for him to go through the door, and then through the front door, and then–
It had not been a bad idea for a novel, had it?
His mistake had been telling anyone about it.
The plot, spoken aloud, had sounded absurd, but terribly original — so perhaps it had simply come as a surprise to Melody when her brother sent her a clipping from his town’s Sunday book section — a review of a book about a man who dies, and then the story of his life, in reverse chronological order.
“What a coincidence!” Melody said, after reading the review aloud to him.
“Great,” Tony said. “That was my novel.”
“Oh, Tony. You’re not going to let this bother you, are you?”
In his imagination, he brought the base of the lamp down hard — and all the rest of it. The eggshell, the fluff, the stain. He’d carried his wife’s dead weight out of the house, stuffed her body in the trunk, blah blah blah. It had all taken place in about one second. Maybe less. And then he’d tossed the base of the lamp down on the bed beside her, and said, “Fuck it. Whatever. You win.”
“Win?” Melody had said. “This isn’t a contest, Tony. This isn’t a game.”
“Right,” Tony said. “Okay. Whatever you say.”
He might as well, he thought, have ripped his testicles off and tossed them down there beside her, too.
She’d have given him the same old sigh, the same tired rolling of her eyes, when that soggy sack of his manhood landed on the mattress beside her with a flump.
“Great,” she would have said.
“Good-bye,” she said as he walked out of the bedroom, down the stairs, out the front door (closing it quietly behind him), down the street, back to his car, shedding years and words and habits and assumptions as he walked.
He got into the car, and headed north — stopping only once, for gas.
When he did, under the sputtering fluorescence of the Texaco sign, he opened his trunk, just to make sure:
Yes.
It was still there.
“The Amicable Divorce.”
Right beside the tire iron.
He picked it up, and opened it to Chapter One.
Some couples feel that a divorce is the end of their relationship. But, considered in a better light, an amicable divorce can be the beginning of an entirely new kind of relationship!
Okay.
You win.
He folded down the corner of the page (a habit Melody’s he’d always hated). He’d come back to it, that very sentence, when he stopped the car again. He would read the book. He’d underline the passages he knew she would want him to remember, to understand. He would read the fucking book with an open mind, and a pen in his hand. From cover to cover. Beginning to end. And then from the end to the beginning again.
He looked up from the page to the sky.
Its silence.
A bottomlessness of silence.
Ahead of them, there had been miles and miles of wilderness, and behind them, somehow, the moon had reversed itself so that it lay flat and calm on the other side of the lake — beckoning or taunting or simply floating there without a mind at all. Tony had cleared his throat. Melody was still writing. She said, reading it off the page but sounding as if she were reciting it from memory, “And I, Melody, vow to cherish you for exactly who you are and to help you become the person you want to be.”
There was a lopsided tiara of starlight in her dark hair which Tony saw through the tears in his eyes.
“I adore you,” he said. And he did.
“I adore you,” she said. And it was true.
He pushed off again, the paddle sinking deeply into the shore when he did, but easily withdrawn from that watery softness, and rowed the boat back into the center of the nebulous surface of that lake — dark, but full of reflected light — that lake, which, Tony Harmon thought in a moment of thrilling hope, might not be bottomless, but might be deep enough.
