Acquainted with the Night (30 page)

All right. It was going to stay for a while. He would accept it. Be reasonable. He tried to lie still, though his skin stung with frustration. He would think it through. The mote must be more than a mote. It must be a symbol. It represented something about himself that he refused to face. That was how it worked: you buried something, and it came back to haunt you in strange ways. He loathed self-examination. He really didn’t believe the meanings behind things mattered very much. Action mattered, not motives. He supposed he was rather obtuse that way, at least Linda said so. But women in general were better at that sort of thing; it was their upbringing.

Still, maybe there was some awful secret about himself that he didn’t know. A friend of theirs, telling them the sad account of her recent divorce, had presented the theory that everyone had a secret, a secret secret they didn’t even know themselves. Her husband’s secret, she said bitterly, was that he hated women. “Ron is a latent homosexual,” she murmured. He and Linda had been shocked. Alexander was willing to accept that Ron hated women, but did this make him a latent homosexual? It didn’t seem logical. “Linda”—he spoke quietly into the dark—“do I have a secret?” She slept on. He hadn’t really meant to wake her.

Maybe he was a latent homosexual, Alexander thought. Anything was possible. He was willing to accept it if his acceptance would make the spot go away. He thought of several men he knew and juxtaposed them alongside the idea of his own possible latent homosexuality. Nothing happened. Did he secretly crave their hands stroking his body? He tried to imagine it, and felt neither disgust nor excitement. Lack of interest. “Linda,” he said again. No, he could not ask her that. She was sleeping, and if by chance she heard she would surely laugh or else think he had gone out of his mind. He dismissed the idea of latent homosexuality. What next?

He thought of all the bad things he had ever done in his life and never confessed to. Once he had accepted a three-thousand-dollar bribe and distorted some figures in order to get a contract. He would not do it again today, but eighteen years ago they were hungry. He did not think, even now, that it was so terrible. He had done an excellent piece of work on the job, better than anything the competing firms would have turned out. Alexander searched on. He had not paid enough attention to his parents in their old age. He had been very busy at the time, getting the business on its feet and raising the children with Linda. He had let the distance between him and his parents grow until when they died it was almost as if he were burying strangers and had buried his real parents long ago, little by little, without ceremony. Yes, all right, that was bad, but they were dead now, in any case. He was sorry. Before that, when he was in college, a girl he slept with three times begged him for money for an abortion. He was poor and gave her all he could get together, seventy-five dollars. He didn’t think he was the father; she had a reputation for sleeping around. For days she phoned him, weeping, begging for more money, afraid to tell her parents or anyone at school. Finally in disgust he shouted at her, “It’s not even my fucking kid. Leave me alone and get it somewhere else. From what I hear you have plenty of contacts.” Was that so bad? She had indeed found the money elsewhere. Alexander felt he had a pretty good case. He rubbed his eyes; the mote bloomed astonishingly, then retreated to its familiar size, a speck, a seed. He shouldn’t have said, “From what I hear you have plenty of contacts.” That was gratuitous. I’m sorry, he screamed inside. For Christ’s sake, it was ages ago. He had two more children now, grown. He had raised and cared for two children. Wasn’t that enough? Now go away. But it didn’t go away. It bobbed, like the little white spots used to bob along the lyrics of songs flashed on the movie screen years ago.

Once when his daughter, Sandy, was five years old he flew into a rage because she defied him, refused to pick up her toys from the floor, and he hit her hard all over, face, shoulders, arms, back. He stopped himself when her screams finally penetrated to him. No one else was home. He was alone in the house and abusing a child. How could that happen? It was something he read about in the papers with horror. He stopped and cried, “Oh my God,” and held her in his arms, weeping, and apologized. It was agonizing. That was the only time he ever hit her. But was that so terrible, in perspective? Didn’t many men hit their children, more often, and did they suffer for it fifteen years later? It was very unjust. Sandy probably didn’t even remember. He could ask her next time she was home from college, but he was sure she wouldn’t remember.

He had slept with a number of women during his twenty-one years of marriage, mostly when Linda was in the final months of pregnancy and the early months of motherhood—that was understandable—but at other times too. He met them in bars or at parties, saw them once and never called again. He wasn’t proud of it, but he had never thought it was so terrible. Nobody was hurt. Linda never knew. It was simply a need he had at the time, he didn’t do it anymore. All right, the women were hurt, he admitted. They were decent women, not whores. He always said he would call them and never did. As he was leaving he would say, “I’ll give you a call in a few days.” An easy way of saying goodbye. The words made him wince. “I’ll give you a call in a few days.” All right, that was pretty bad. It made him feel pretty low, remembering. But on the other hand, he had to be fair to himself, he never hurt them. Physically, that is. He knew that lots of times when a man picked someone up in a bar and got her home he used the opportunity to do awful, cruel things, really atrocious things. He had the chance, but never did anything like that. He was very nice with them in bed. He was as nice as he would have been with his own wife. Didn’t that count?

The spot did not relent, even as Alexander dredged up all these things from the past that he never thought about anymore. It swirled in zigzag patterns, mocking, torturing. His body ached from tossing. Confessing his sins was no help. He felt more depressed than guilty. What was the use of dwelling on his own ugliness? So he was a worm, all right. Wasn’t everyone? He was no worse than the next man. If everyone were to confess everything we’d all be in jail. Adultery, he thought, is a crime in this state. Possibly he could go to jail for it. He could also go to jail for child abuse, accepting a bribe, being an accomplice in an abortion. As a kid he and his friends used to steal miniature cars from Woolworth’s. Theft too? This was becoming absurd. He pictured himself in jail, wearing a striped suit and cap, lining up with a tin bowl for nauseating meals, hacking away with a pick in a rock quarry, and he gave a small laugh in the dark because his image of jail came from old James Cagney movies. The man in the next cell would tap out a message in code on the wall, asking what he was in for, and Alexander would tap back, “Adultery.” The other inmates would laugh at him. Would the mote follow him to jail too? Sleepless nights on a hard cot, watching a speck dance on the concrete walls of his cell. It would feel pretty much the same as now, except the bed here was soft and the room was large and well-furnished. Yes, he thought, he was a good provider. He had provided his own cell and not made himself a burden to the state.

God, he moaned, help me! When Jack and Sandy came home from college at Thanksgiving they would find their father a changed man, aged, weak, fragile, and delirious. His children. Tears leaped to his eyes. The mote shimmered. He crushed the pillow between his fists.

There was one thing he had neglected to mention. All right, all right. For a year he had been madly in love with a girl named April. She was an art historian who worked at a museum, and he met her at the opening of a friend’s show. He had remembered her afterwards only because he thought it was a ridiculous name. Then he met her on the street. They had a drink. And so on. He came to adore the name. After they made love he would sing her to sleep with all the songs he could think of that had April in them. April in Paris. April in Portugal. April Showers. He hadn’t seen her in six years. The month of April was still a torment to him, though, writing the date all the time. He usually wrote “4” instead. No, he really must not think about her or he would go mad. Just the thought of her name in the dark filled him with sudden craving. Lord, what was a man, at the mercy of a name. He looked over at Linda. He could wake her. You miserable bastard, he told himself. If you could do that ... Hadn’t he done enough already?

He remembered how Linda had confronted him with it. It was all over him, how could she miss it? They talked for a long time at the kitchen table late at night, rationally, considerately, about what they could do and what this meant in their lives. There was an air of unreality over their talk.

“It’s not that I don’t love you,” Alexander was repeating calmly after an hour. “Don’t misunderstand. These things happen.”

“Yes,” she said. “I can understand that.”

She got up, took a pair of shears from a drawer, and cut off a great hank of her long dark hair.

“Linda!” Alexander stood up.

“It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t worry,” she said. “Sit down.”

She put the hair in an iron pot and poured vinegar over it. It smelled foul and ugly. Then she lit a wooden kitchen match and set fire to the hair. Alexander could not speak or move. Civilized English had left him. He felt they were living before civilization began. This was a primitive rite that made him paralyzed and mute with awe. The hair sparked and crackled and soon the kitchen was filled with a hideous acrid smell that brought him to his senses.

“Linda ...”

“Shh.” And she smiled with her lips closed, and blinked her glinting eyes at him. “When it’s all done I’m going to eat it.”

He leaped up and shook her hard by the shoulders. “Stop!” he yelled. Her head wobbled back and forth. She looked terrifying, with half of her hair tossing and the shorn side jagged. “Stop!” he yelled again. He grabbed the sizzling pot and ran cold water in it. Dark hair overflowed into the sink.

She sat down quietly at the table. “You’re sending my beautiful hair down the drain.”

“Shut up.”

“You’re going to clog the drain and we have no Drano.”

He cleaned up the mess and threw it in the garbage. Then he sat at the table opposite her again.

“Don’t look so alarmed, Alex. It was only a passing thing. Everyone’s entitled to a little temporary insanity.” She seemed fine now, except for the hair. She chuckled, and touched the shorn side of her head. “I guess I’ll have to wear it short for a while. I’ve been trying to decide for weeks whether to cut it. Do you think I’d look good with bangs?”

“Linda, do you want to hit me or something? Go ahead. You have a right.”

“No. I just want to ask you a question.”

“Anything.”

“What did you do with her?”

“What?”

“What did you do with her? You know. I mean, the same things you do with me? Tell me what. I want to imagine it.”

“Linda, really.”

Her voice rose, querulous. “Well, you said I could ask you anything, so I’m asking you this. Did you ... Did you ...” She tried three times to name something, but she couldn’t. Then her shoulders stiffened, she turned her face away, bit her lips, and began to weep.

He stopped seeing April. Once he called simply to ask how she was and she hung up.

He had meant no harm. Only trying to live. Everyone else was just as bad. He knew cases. ... People were bad from the moment they were born. From the moment they reach consciousness they start hurting other people, in their efforts to live.

“Please,” he cried out hoarsely. “Let me live!” Linda stirred. But the mote was merciless. It would never go away. The time was 5:35. Maybe he would die soon. He felt limp enough to die.

Maybe he had never loved anyone enough, and that was his sin. Not his parents, not Linda, not Jack or Sandy, not even April, not even himself. He honestly didn’t know. What was enough? Enough for what? That was too easy a solution, too glib, saying he had never loved anybody enough. He was an ordinary man. He could honestly say that he loved his wife and children as much as the next man. It was something more, something beyond everything he had thought of, cosmic, even. But what? What? Light seeped in the window. It was dawn. Surprisingly fast, the room filled with light. As it filled, the mote faded and abruptly disappeared. The air around his bed became less dense. Alexander slept.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Portions of this work originally appeared in
Banquet
,
Dark Horse
,
First Annual Fiction Supplement of the San Francisco Review of Books, Forthcoming, The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, The Ontario Review, Penmaen Press Chapbook 2, Ploughshares, Redbook, The Real Paper, The Smith,
and
The Transatlantic Review.

“The Wrath-bearing Tree” and “Sound Is Second Sight” were syndicated by
Fiction Network
.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint:

Portions of “Terence, this is stupid stuff” from “A Shropshire Lad”—Authorised Edition—from
The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman
, copyright 1939, 1940, © 1965 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Copyright © 1967, 1968 by Robert E. Symons. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers; The Society of Authors as the literary representative of the Estate of A. E. Housman; and Jonathan Cape Ltd, publishers of A. E. Housman’s
Collected Poems
.