Ladies' Night (4 page)

The double doors opened and they stepped inside. Tom hit number 2. Susan leaned heavily against the wall. No one spoke. The elevator slid seamlessly down the twenty stories to their floor and stopped.

They stepped out into the long, dimly-lit hallway.

~ * ~

Outside, it was not yet dark.

There was no escaping the voices once they started.

Some nights he'd lie here with a pillow over his head but it didn't help, he kept listening, despite himself —
trying
to hear, almost, which was weird because he sure didn't want to — and even if most of it was just a muffled blur, things still got through, especially his name, especially that, especially when they said
Andy
. And his name came up a lot.

His Walkman was busted and he'd lost his TV and Sega Genesis privileges for a week over that shouting-in-class thing (
how come it was okay for them to shout but not for him?
) so that left reading. Sometimes he could pick up a book or an old copy of
Eerie
or
Creepy
or
Vampirella
and read until their voices were just a dull droning in his head, until the stories got, to him. Maybe he could do that now.

He was at the part in
The Island of Dr. Moreau
where
Pendrick
goes to the Beast People and hears the Saying of the Law. Maybe that would do it.

He could hear them in the living room yelling about Lizzy. He heard her name. Elizabeth this. Elizabeth that. Something about his dad and women. He didn't know if his dad went out with other women though he knew he did go out alone nights sometimes — but what Lizzy would have to do with that he didn't know and didn't like to think about.

Lizzy was okay. He liked Lizzy a lot. He didn't care what his mom was saying. She treated him like a person, not like some stupid kid. She hardly ever yelled. She didn't like horror movies much but she did like movies, even the action stuff. They'd pick up stuff at Tower Video together and never argued about what to rent. Lizzy wasn't just a sitter, she was a friend.

He wondered what would happen if he just walked in there and told them to please shut up.

He thought he knew what the answer to that would be.

So if you couldn't do that then what
did
you do?

You sat there. You sat there in your room wishing they were happier, wishing they didn't have to fight so much or that even if they did fight you didn't have to hear it and feel bad for some dumb reason, as though it were your fault, as though they'd been happy before you came along and screwed things up for them. His dad said they were
always
happy at first. Did that mean they'd started to get mad at one another before they had him or only after?

He'd wondered that a lot. But he couldn't really ask them. Because what if they said
after
? Nobody was going to say,
you rotten kid, it's your fault
. No matter what the truth was they'd try to make it sound like he had nothing to do with it. But he'd know. He'd know and then what would he do?

He rolled over on his back and stared up at the ceiling.

He was glad he'd be going to camp in a week or two. He had all his gear ready in the closet — canteen, scout knife, and a forty-pound bow with a quiver full of target arrows. His mom hadn't liked the bow and arrows but his dad had had one as a kid and sided with him for a change. Camp was probably stupid basically and it wasn't that he loved the woods — in fact he was a little scared of sleeping out there — but at least he'd be out of this place, away from this awful aching worrying and caring and this anger whenever they got to doing this.

He reached for his copy of
The Island of Dr. Moreau
and started reading.

"
Are we not men?
" said the Swine Men and the Leopard Men.

Misshapen and forlorn, they ambled him through the dark island forest.

She was almost finished stacking the dishwasher when the phone rang in the hall. Her headache was a killer. The sound of running water, clattering plates, and now the telephone, didn't help any.

"Tom? Can you get it, please?"

Tension and cheap wine
, she thought.
I ought to know better
. The phone continued ringing.

She could hear CNN in the living room.

He wasn't moving.

She turned off the water, grabbed a hand towel and walked into the living room. Tom was sitting in the easy chair scowling at the TV screen. She walked past him to the hall and the phone rang again as she reached for the receiver.

"Hello?"

No one answered.

Now what the hell was this? One of his goddamn girlfriends? She did hear breathing. Only it wasn't the usual obscene-caller breathing. It was lighter, softer.

Like a woman's.

"Who is this?"

When the woman spoke she could barely hear her.

"Saint Luke's hospital? I need . . . I need . . ."

My god. That again
, she thought. The woman was one digit off. It was a six instead of a seven in the fifth number you dialed. Once when they'd been living over on 72nd Street it had been the
Ginko
Gardens. A Chinese restaurant. That was one digit off in the seventh number. She didn't know which was worse, people phoning for take-out or the sad, troubled voices that sometimes called for the hospital.

Like this one.

The woman sounded bad.

"Sorry, you've got the wrong number. You want 397-0644.”

“. . . could you, please . . ."

Pleading with her.

"I'm sorry."

She hung up.

It wasn't nice to do that just like that but the headache was describing intricate whirls of pain inside her skull and there was a misery in the woman's voice, almost a panic, that she simply couldn't handle.
Let her dial it again
, she thought.
She'll get through
.

She walked back into the living room.

"Thanks," she said.

He didn't even look at her.

It was always this way after a fight. One or the other of them simply stopped talking. She was as bad as he was.

It hadn't always been this way.

There was a time they'd talked things through. Before the affairs started. Before he started drinking. Before he'd quit his job at the agency with the ridiculous idea that he could write a novel.

The ridiculous idea that he could
sell
a novel. Because he'd written one, all right.
 
A
literary
novel.
 
It went on and on for about hundred pages. Taking the high road to nowhere.

A novel just wasn't in him.

So he'd gone back to work as an editor, hating it. Hating himself for that matter — she knew that — but unlike her he refused to try therapy, which was what he really needed.

The drinking was compulsive.

He didn't realize it but Tom was on the run from her. And from Andy. He had been for a while now. Ties to home and family were not so much ties as a long leash. He tugged at it constantly.

And unless things changed it was only a matter of time before he left them altogether.

There was nothing she could do about it.

She had come to realize that with a growing sadness.

She started back to the kitchen.

"I'm going out," he said.

She thought,
now why doesn't that surprise me?

She wanted to cry. The headache was raging.

"All right."

She stood there a moment in case there was more.

There wasn't.

She decided to let the dishes go for a while. She needed to lie down. The Tylenol with codeine hadn't kicked in. The headache was growing roots in her head. Maybe some aspirin.

On the way to the bathroom she passed Andy's room and thought,
thank god you'll be in camp soon
. At first she'd been against his going. For purely selfish reasons. She knew how much she'd miss him.

But Andy didn't need this constant tension. It seemed to her that sending him to camp was yet another turning point in their relations, a kind of surrender.
We can't quite accommodate you, Andy,
it seemed to say
, not the way we are now. We've tried to but we can't. I love you with all my heart but this has got to be worked out between us once and for all. So go off and at least for now, have a good time, have some fun — and maybe we'll screw you up that much less
.

She closed the bathroom door behind her and looked at herself in the mirror.

You look like hell
, she thought. There was a redness in her eyes as though she'd been crying. Her skin looked blotchy.

She opened the cabinet and reached for the aspirin. Behind the bottle she noticed Tom's old, stained, tortoise-shell straight razor. The razor had belonged to his father. Tom never used it and she'd have liked to throw it away especially with a child around but Tom had insisted. She couldn't argue. He had precious little left of his father.

She opened the bottle.

She heard the front door to their apartment open and then close again.

Not even a goodbye
, she thought.

What the hell's happened to us?

She shook out two aspirin and swallowed them dry, recapped the bottle and returned it to the shelf. She closed the cabinet door and looked at herself again in the mirror.

I look old
, she thought.
I look old and tired and tense and
. . .

. . .
oh
god I look ugly
.

Suddenly and without warning she felt an overwhelming sadness and pressed her hands over her face to stifle the sob so that Andy wouldn't hear. There was a pressure in her chest that seemed at once to oppress her and flood her with adrenaline. It wrenched at her muscles and filled her eyes with tears. She felt dizzy and light-headed, then thrust her hand out to steady herself and heard the mirror crack.

She looked up in surprise and drew her hand away. She saw that she'd been lucky — she wasn't cut. But the mirror was shattered, a silvery, crystalline spider web that seemed to buckle inward.

My god
, she thought.
There's a quarter inch of glass on that mirror, backed with stainless steel
.

She opened it carefully so as not to jar loose the broken glass and stared, barely comprehending. There was a dent the size of a baseball in the steel backing.

How could she be capable of that kind of impact?

She felt the urge to cry again.

God! get to bed
, she thought. She carefully closed the cabinet door.

Weaving and unsteady she walked across the hall to the bedroom and slid into bed.
 
She was frightened. It had come on so suddenly. From headache to . . . this. If she'd known where Tom was going, she'd have called him.

Help. Just this once
.

She closed her eyes and tried to relax into the pillow, to block everything out, all the events of the day that may have caused this sudden panic. But the tears kept coming, more quietly but unstoppable, and there was still this strange feeling inside her and this surging adrenaline.

She felt a slim thread of anger connect and tense the muscles of her body. It was alloyed with fear. The anger was specific, its focus Tom and Andy. At Tom for leaving her alone again. At Andy for being the locus and nexus of her guilt. The fear was more diffuse. It rose partly out of the anger, because she did not really know why the anger should be there. Certainly not when it came to Andy.

She loved Andy.

She could never hurt him.

But the thought was insistent.

She could crack them
. Both of them. As easily as she'd cracked the mirror.

No!

Pressure bore down upon her like rough hands. She opened her eyes in apprehension, struggling for control. She felt a clutching between her legs, an ache, demanding. It connected somehow to Tom and Andy. Her eyes squinted shut and for a moment it was better that way. The empty darkness.

Then she saw that summer by the shore when she was a little girl.  Her mother had coaxed her into water that was too deep and her father was dying of cancer.  In addition, she saw faces of friends she had lost touch with years ago, in college, in high school for god's sake, and heard their voices accuse her of faithlessness, of never having loved them. She saw the moment of Andy's birth.

What in god's name is happening to me?

She was dying
.

This was supposed to happen when you died, wasn't it? In the seconds before. Faces, a life remembered. But she knew she wasn't dying. She felt a deep, dreamlike restlessness — like a fever-dream, wakefulness and a kind of
hypnogenetic
sleep driving one another like a mingling of poison kisses. And now she was the object of hate and scorn, the scorn of complete strangers, people and shadow-images chasing her through a bright empty landscape as she ran from them with all her power.
Open your eyes
, she thought.