“Funny,” Penelope said with no trace of humor.
“How about you guys?” Tina asked.
Penelope moved her free hand so that she was clutching the glass with both. That thin smile returned. “I’m thinking about divorce.”
It had been said so pleasantly that Tina thought she must have misheard, but Penelope’s smile faded, and she knew she hadn’t. “Since when?”
“Who knows? You never know when these things start. But it’s become more serious these last couple of months.”
“Since the department closed down.”
Penelope nodded, then looked into her empty glass. “You have any more of this?”
It was the same delay tactic Tina had used a moment before, and she couldn’t argue with that. She went to the kitchen, and, as she worked on another bottle of Beaujolais, Stephanie appeared in her pink pajamas, clutching the PlayStation Portable that Milo had irrationally bought her a week before. “What is it, Little Miss?”
Stephanie looked surprised, then she glanced behind herself toward the living room. “Is there . . .”
“What, hon?”
It took another moment to get the question out, and Stephanie’s tendency to block up when speaking seemed to be an aftereffect of seeing her father shot.
Whatever you do
, the therapist had said,
don’t draw attention to it
. Finally, Stephanie said, “What’s wrong with Pen?”
“Nothing. What are you doing up?”
“I’m thirsty. What’s wrong with her?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s crying.”
Tina turned to her daughter, whom she sometimes worried had seen too much during her six years of life. “Crying?”
“I think so.” A pause. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry about her. She’s just got some problems.”
“You’ll help her out?”
“Yeah, Little Miss. I’m here to help her out. You said you were hungry?”
“Thirsty.”
“So that’s why you’re awake?”
“Yeah.”
“And that PlayStation just happened to be in your hand when you woke?”
Stephanie turned it over, examining the machine as if its presence were a surprise. The gears in her brain worked. “I just woke up and there it was!”
Tina set her up with a glass of water and sent her back to bed, then brought out the Beaujolais. There was no evidence of weeping on Penelope’s delicate, sensual face, just an occasional twitch at the corner of her lips. “I think I scared Stephanie.”
“She’s seen me cry often enough,” Tina said as she refilled their glasses. She placed the bottle on the coffee table, then decided to sit next to her on the couch. “Go ahead.”
“With what?” Penelope asked. “All I can say is it’s gotten worse. Men are . . . well, they
are
their jobs, aren’t they? Is that sexist?”
“Don’t think so. Patronizing, maybe.”
“What I mean is, you’re a librarian. But is that
who
you are?”
“No, I get your point.”
Penelope drank, whispered, “Mmm, this is good,” then looked directly at Tina with a newfound intensity. “Anyway, the job disappeared, and he became a different person. Starts smoking. Exercises like mad. When he drinks, he does it stupidly. He starts fights for no reason. He’s acting like some washed-up jarhead, which I suppose is what he is. He—and this sounds weird—he spends the longest time in the
bathroom
. Goes off to take a crap, and I don’t know when I’ll see him again. And no, it’s not medical—not self-abuse either. When he’s not shitting he barricades himself in his office. It’s like he can’t stand to be in the same room with me.”
As Penelope spoke, Tina instinctively compared these observations to how Milo had become since his unemployment. Since getting shot. She wanted to find similar things in him so that she could hold them up and say,
See? They all do it
, but she came up short. “What does he say?”
“He says there’s nothing wrong. Just distracted. He’s working on a project. What kind of project? Sorry—it’s top-secret stuff. I point out that he doesn’t work on top-secret stuff anymore, and he backtracks and says it’s for friends.”
“Friends like Milo?”
Penelope shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him yourself.”
They let that sit between them, Tina wondering if Milo was, despite his insistence that that kind of work was behind him, helping Alan with some lingering projects from the Department of Tourism. “Is it really that bad?” she asked. “Sounds like a phase to me—divorce is permanent.”
Penelope raised the glass to her lips but before drinking let three words slip out. “He hit me.”
“
What?
”
She finished her drink and set down the glass. “Few days ago. Just once. During an argument. Right here.” She tapped her left cheekbone, just under her eye, and that was when Tina noticed the extra layer of makeup on that spot. “He apologized, of course. Cried. But that was when it really came together for me.”
“Okay,” Tina said. “Now I get it. When a man hits you it’s time to go.”
“No.” Penelope shook her head. “You
don’t
get it. I’m not worried about getting beat up—despite the signs, that’s not the kind of man he is. It was afterward, when he was there on the floor, crying. Begging me not to leave him. That’s when I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That I didn’t love him anymore. It wasn’t him striking me. It was the miserable mess he’d become. I realized that I didn’t care if he drowned in beer and ended up living on the street. I didn’t care if he had a heart attack and died right there. No—it wasn’t anger. It was apathy. It was the complete lack of all those feelings I’d had when we got married.”
Again, silence came between them. Tina was thinking of the few times in their marriage that she’d thought the same thing—that she had no love for Milo anymore. Those moments had occurred, but always as a question rather than a statement:
Do
I love him anymore? Just as she was preparing to ask Penelope if, perhaps, she was asking herself a question rather than answering it, she was drawn to nine weeks ago, when Milo was shot on the steps of this very building. When it occurred, all she could think was that she wanted him to be okay. She’d even lost track of Stephanie during those brutal minutes. If anything had convinced her that their marital troubles could be worked through, it had been that event. That, maybe, was the thing she had that Penelope didn’t have.
Finally, Tina said, “I don’t really know anything, but if you’re asking, I’d guess that you’re trying to convince yourself that the marriage is dead, when it isn’t.”
“What makes you think that?” Penelope asked, the signs of real interest in her face.
“You’re still with him, and you came here to tell me about it. You’re looking for a way out of this mess.”
Penelope didn’t answer, only stared at her, and that thin, sad smile returned. Tina really had no idea who this woman was. Then the door opened and the men came in.
Each pair was acutely preoccupied by its own silence, and both silences were so painfully self-conscious that not even Françoise Hardy’s breathy singing could hide them. So they all went to it at once, four awkward voices laughing and muttering banalities. They just wanted to fill the living room with noise. Any noise; it didn’t matter.
2
While Xin Zhu lived without dreams, or at least lost them by the time he woke each morning, Milo had been plagued over the last month by a repeating nightmare. Unlike Alan Drummond’s dream of spots on a computer screen changing color as people died, it bore no obvious connection to recent events.
It took place in a park that, from one angle, looked like Prospect Park, but from another resembled the area around Lake Devin in Oxford, North Carolina, where he grew up. He was with Stephanie, who in his dream was two years old, maybe three, and they were discussing the film of
The Wizard of Oz
. The foliage around them thickened, and an approaching man gave Milo a raised eyebrow and a hand signal—three flat fingers over his heart—as he passed. Milo knew that sign, knew that it was telling him to do something, but he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do. He reached for Stephanie’s hand as she said, “You no leave me, Daddy?” and he tried to hurry her up, but she buckled her legs, sliding to the dusty ground beside a park bench, and laughed, playing with him. Her act of rebellion terrified and enraged him, because now he remembered what he was supposed to do. So he scooped her up and ran with her through the trees, trying to cut through the park to the exit, but every time they emerged from the low hedges they were on the same length of trail, and each time a different man sat on the bench. The men always wore oversized trench coats, but the objects in their hands changed. One read a newspaper, the next talked on a cell phone, and the last peeled an apple with a knife. Though they said nothing, they were all demanding the same thing—three fingers rose to their hearts—and time was running out. The unspoken threat was that if he didn’t do as they demanded, neither he nor Stephanie would leave the park alive.
The hedges on either side of the trail formed a low wall, and he caught his breath behind one, squatting and setting Stephanie down. He was crying by then, doing everything to hide it from her, but knew he wasn’t succeeding. Still, she pretended that everything was all right. She asked a question about Dorothy’s clothes, but he couldn’t figure out what she was asking. He said, “Daddy has to go somewhere, Little Miss.” She repeated her question about Dorothy, the sentence streaming on with awkward pauses and unexpected half-words, so that he still didn’t understand it. Choking on his tears, he said, “You wait right here. I’ll be back soon.” She nodded, wide-eyed, trusting him absolutely. He kissed her in a frantic way until she pushed him away, laughing. As he stood, towering over her, he saw movement in the shrubbery, but the bench on the trail was empty. He whispered, “Stay here, okay, Little Miss?” She blew him a kiss with her fat-fingered hand.
He stepped around the shrubs to the trail and headed for the bench, but changed his mind and returned to the hedge, squatting on his side so that were he to reach through the impenetrable branches, he would touch Stephanie. He waited, hands pressed to his face. He heard, “Daddy?”—a light whisper. Then with concern, “Daddy?”
Movement. Heavy feet. Whispers in an indecipherable language that sounded like Latin with a Slavic accent.
“Daddy?”
He was weeping uncontrollably now, hearing and feeling the men converge on her, and her single repeated word grew louder and more hysterical, melting into a high wail of fear or pain that, until he broke, grew exponentially. He always broke in this dream, crashing back through the hedge, cutting himself on thorns and falling onto wet ground. Her imprint remained in the bent grass, but he was alone, writhing uncontrollably, tugging at his own chest and stomach, trying to excise himself of every organ.
He woke from these dreams to wet pillows, sometimes to Tina—who, irritated, would ask why he was waking her up. He’d mutter some excuse and wander to the kitchen and pour a glass of water, but he was seldom able to get back to sleep. Instead, he found himself picking apart the dream, trying to uncover the basic question of it:
Why
was he giving up his daughter to nameless thugs in the park? He understood that the alternative was death for them both, but why did they want her in the first place? He was asking for logic from his dream, and no matter how many times the dream recurred, a logical answer remained far away.
The more appropriate question was:
Why am I dreaming this?
He had a pretty good idea. Back in December, while still working as a Tourist, he’d been ordered to kill a Moldovan girl, fifteen years old, and had balked. He’d instead tried to save her but had failed. When, nine weeks ago, the dead girl’s father put a bullet in him, Milo had felt no sense of injustice. He might not have killed the girl, but if people like him didn’t exist, she would have lived—that was the undeniable truth. Milo was as guilty as the man who had actually broken her neck, and in his dream, the men whose language resembled Moldovan were exacting proper revenge. It was his eye for that eye, and no matter how much he despised the dream he knew it would probably visit him for the rest of his life.
A week after their dinner, on Friday the thirteenth, Penelope left a message on Tina’s phone. Alan wasn’t in town, and she was canceling dinner at their apartment. When Tina called back, Penelope didn’t pick up, so Milo called Alan’s cell. His old boss answered sounding unnerved, like a man desperate to hide his anxiety. “Where are you?” Milo asked.
“Well, I’m not in Manhattan. Don’t tell me you guys are that hard up for a meal.”
“Overseas?”
“You didn’t want any part of it, remember?”
“I don’t,” Milo said, but he had a sudden urge to know what, exactly, Drummond was up to. He hadn’t liked the man he’d talked to on his roof last week, hadn’t trusted that he could keep himself out of trouble, and the things Tina had told him about the Drummonds’ disintegrating marriage had just sharpened his worry. Alan Drummond was bound to rush things; he was bound to make a mistake. “Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right.”
“How about next week?”
“Why don’t you guys invite Pen over? I’m not . . . well, we’re not together anymore.”
“Since when?”
“It’s nothing. As soon as I’ve taken care of some things we’ll see if we can’t patch it up.”
Though Tina had prepared him for such a turn of events, he was still surprised. “When did this happen?”
“Couple days after your place.”
“And?”
“And I’m not talking about my marital life on an open line. Got it? Just ask Pen. She’s already told your wife all about it.”
“I want to hear your side,” Milo said, because it wasn’t surprise he felt; it was fear. He’d seen how marital troubles could run like dominoes through social circles, bringing out the hidden fault lines in each friend’s marriage.
“How’d the interview go?” Alan asked. He wasn’t going to share.
“What?”
“You were about to join the ranks of the employed.”