Envy (9 page)

“Bunch of times. Nothing works. I've used that bitter stuff that tastes, like, bad enough to make you puke, but I bit them anyway. Tried keeping gloves on all the time, and chewed through them. Behavior mod, where every time I went after a nail I was supposed to snap myself with this, um, punishment thing—this strap around my wrist like a big rubber band—snap it really hard, so it hurt, but no. All three at once, still no good.” She shrugs. “Another problem to work on.”

Will looks at his watch.

“Okay,” she says, quick to pick up on the visual cue. “Same time next week?”

“If you're interested in continuing.”

“I guess. I mean, can I just see how it goes?” She stands and pulls on her coat, picks up her backpack. “What about the fee?” she asks. “Do you . . . I read on your policy sheet that you have a, like, sliding fee scale. That for students it can be adjusted, um, down.” She settles her backpack into place by flexing and quickly straightening her knees to give it a little bounce. “Because my insurance is student health, and it doesn't cover psychotherapy outside of the university. I'm entitled to ten sessions a year from student mental health, no charge. After that, it's, I don't know, maybe twenty-five an hour. But the therapists are dorks. I mean, worse than. Useless.”

“How much can you afford?” Will asks.

“You're asking me what the bill is?” She tips her head to one side and frowns. Her puzzlement makes her look much younger, almost like a child.

“Yes,” he says.

“Uh. Could it be . . . how about, um, like, fifty? Forty?”

“All right,” he agrees. She digs her right hand into her pocket.

“Here,” she says. She puts two twenty-dollar bills on the blotter. He doesn't touch them.

“It's customary to pay with a check,” he says. “I send you a monthly statement, you mail me a check.”

“Yeah, well, I'm sort of between apartments right now, trying to simplify the whole mail thing. I don't, like, have a forwarding address. Not yet.”

Will nods. “All right,” he says.

This is the moment when, ordinarily, he would stand and extend his hand to shake hers, but he can't. He doesn't have to look down to know that this isn't the kind of hard-on he can hide with a notebook, at least not subtly enough to risk it. He leans forward, hands folded on his desk, trying to appear as if this is his usual manner of concluding a session. “Next week?” he says.

She steps a few feet back from his desk, her hands shoved in the pockets of her brown suede coat. Around each is a dark ring of what appears to be grease, as if she were in the habit of keeping French fries in her pockets. The stained coat; the unkempt hair; the bitten fingernails; the soles of her boots, past repair: all these conspire to make her look like an orphan, a girl who has been not so much brought up as “dragged up,” to use a favorite expression of his mother's. Hers is an unexpectedly sexy squalor, though; it makes her seem as if she's not so particular that she wouldn't be game for . . . well, for almost anything.

“Next week?” he asks again as she's walking toward the door.

“Okay,” she says without turning.

8

It's 2:17 in the morning, 2:12, actually, because the digital clock on the dresser is five minutes fast. Will listens to the sound of water running on the other side of the bathroom door, water from the bathtub's faucet, not the sink's, because it's too loud for the sink's. Probably his wife is sitting in the empty bathtub, using her hands to direct water from the faucet to rinse soap from between her legs. “It's not you I'm washing off,” she's told him, and he believes her. He thinks he does. She just doesn't like to get up in the morning smelling of stale sex. He gropes around for his pajama bottoms while he waits for her to come back to bed.

“Here's what I do, Will,” Carole says when she's next to him under the covers. “What I do is, I don't think about myself. I think about you and Sam and my clients, and about Luke. But not in a way that makes me sad. Because lately what I've been thinking is this. We—and I don't mean us particularly, I don't mean you and me, but people in general—we are so fixated on this idea of a life span, that everyone should live a certain number of years. And it's maybe helpful to try to focus on something different, like that Luke had a good life, a happy life, when you think about it. Nothing much went wrong for him. He liked school. He had friends. He was a healthy, happy boy. He was. And maybe that's a thing we can be grateful for—that even if it was just ten years, they were these ten nearly perfect years, and, my God, Will, there is so much suffering—we see it all the time. You do, and I do, too. For much of their lives people are not happy. And, well”—Carole sighs here, a long and almost groaning noise— “Luke was. He was. Think how much worse it would have been if he'd died after struggling with some terrible illness. After years of enduring pain or . . .”

Carole stops speaking. Will keeps beginning a sentence in his head, a sentence that begins
But
and goes no further. If he looks into the darkest corner of the bedroom, where the streetlight doesn't penetrate, the blackness there seems to pulse, as if with a pressure like that of blood, something that shoves the blackness up against his eyes. Carole always assumes that in his wakefulness Will is obsessively returning to the accident, punishing himself by reviewing it over and over, but in fact he'd been thinking about his brother. While he hadn't allowed himself to admit this—not consciously—if he didn't really expect Mitch to come to the reunion before he'd seen the class book, once he'd found that his brother had contributed a bio to it, he was sure he would see him there.

It's odd, but ever since their estrangement, Will's thoughts of Mitch have tended to summon a particular scene from Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey,
a movie the two of them had watched together every afternoon they could for as long as it played in Ravena's one theater, spending all the allowance they'd saved, searching between sofa cushions and under car seats for stray change. It's the opening scene that Will continues to revisit, as if it might hold some means of understanding his relationship with his missing brother. In it, a community of apes—hairy, upright animals that have yet to evolve into
Homo sapiens
—are disturbed by the sudden appearance of a monolith, and it's this monolith itself that compels and sometimes even upsets Will.

More than once during his insomniac rambles he's found himself picturing, almost seeing, the looming slab in their bedroom, not against a wall or pushed back into a corner but smack in the middle of the braided rag rug Carole bought from an antiques shop upstate. Perfect in its blankness, its refusal of feature or detail, the sinister metal slab stands where it is bound to get in their way, to interrupt, block, and impede them. What can it mean, this fantasy? Will assumes the slab, in its inscrutable quality, represents his brother, Mitch's disappearance having become an emotional stumbling block, one right in front of their marriage bed, so large that it doesn't just stumble but blinds, ruining the view. Or maybe the thing is a kind of clock, a massive chunk of a plutonium-like element whose half-life divides and divides the hours, not so much displaying as emitting time: informing them with time, implanting the correct and true time within them. Aligning their mortal coils with its infinite and inexorable measurement. Maybe it's one of Will's clumsy attempts to represent God—a god, at least—who reigns over everyone, as deaf to one petition as to another. If Will can't always believe in God, he can't not believe in Time.

A car passes. Its headlights slide through the windows and over the furniture, the armchair and dresser, the desk piled with clutter: magazines; professional journals; catalogs; a picture of a house made from dried beans glued on blue construction paper; instructions for the assembly of toys long lost or broken.

“When I think of myself at all,” Carole says, after what has transcended an awkward silence to become a more pure kind of quiet, the in-out sounds of their breathing joining and then diverging. “When I do think of myself,” she says, her voice low and measured, “it's in a little boat on a wide sea. I'm sitting in the boat—I picture myself from high above—and I have to keep my balance. I have to stay right in the center of the boat so I don't tip.” She inhales, exhales, an audible, deep exchange of air. “All the things I do, the district work, seeing clients, taking care of Samantha and the house and you, seeing friends, making dinner, weeding the garden, going to yoga, folding laundry, remembering birthdays, calling your parents—all of it, every piece of my life, is about staying there in the center of my little boat.”

“But,” Will can't help protesting, “but there is such a thing as a life span. An expected life span.”

“I know,” Carole says. “I know that.”

“So your . . . your choice to focus on, well, let's call it the quality rather than quantity of his years—is this one of your ways of remaining in the middle of your boat?”

Carole says nothing. At the foot of their bed, the monolith on the rug fills the room with time, time too big to be contained by their bodies lying small under the sheet, time that is silent and unbearable, time that is a clock too accurate to tick.

“Did you say a river or the sea?” Will asks.

“Did I say what?”

“Your boat, it's on—”

“Oh, the sea, the ocean. Wherever I am, it's all water. There isn't any shore.”

Carole turns from her back to her side, facing the window. “Do you remember when we went to see the Edward Hopper show?” she asks. “The retrospective? It was a while ago, at the Whitney. Maybe in 'ninety-eight. There was a painting I kept coming back to, with a woman standing naked in a room. She's that model Hopper used over and over, the woman with straight, thick hair that falls down her back, past her shoulders. A sort of auburn color, almost red. She has a strong, fit body. Muscular in a way that qualifies her nakedness— makes her less naked, I mean. As if she's clothed by her musculature. You know how I mean? Like women at the health club. I see them in the sauna, and they're not naked. Not really. Their clothes are off, but they've created a kind of uniform out of their bodies. They're so aggressively trained and toned that they've conformed to an established, standard shape.

“Anyway, I got off track. There's a door in the room, an open door in front of the naked woman—we see her in profile—and outside the door is the sea. Water, anyway, but it seems endless, there isn't any shore. Blue, flat but not glassy flat, little whitecaps all over. The water fills the doorframe. It's surreal. No context. No path to the beach. No transition. Nothing. Just water.

“We argued about that painting. You said it gave you the creeps, and I understood what you meant. I assumed Hopper probably meant it to be a painting of, I don't know, something existential. Dread, I guess. Like Sartre's moments—crises—of nausea, the times when he apprehends
thing
ness, or whatever he called it. Our material and therefore decaying presence. But this wasn't so . . . it wasn't so stark as that. It was scary but softer. More eternal.” She stops.

“Go on,” Will says to her back.

“Oh, yeah, I almost forgot—here's the weird part. A while ago I tried to look up the painting in a catalog. I wanted to see it. And you know what?”

“What?”

“It doesn't exist.”

“What do you mean?”

“I made it up. Not on purpose, obviously, since I didn't know I had, but in my head I put two paintings together—one of a naked woman standing in a room with an unmade bed and an open window, and a different painting of an empty room with the doorway filled by the sea. I don't know if they were maybe hung next to each other or if I just . . . if I joined them in my head, the woman and the water. Because I needed them together like that.”

“I'm not sure I get what you mean,” Will says. “Sorry. Am I being dumb?”

“Maybe just that the image—the one I invented—explains something to me, represents something I don't have words for. All I'm trying to say is that when I'm in the little boat, my boat, I'm on the water from that painting.”

“Are you the woman?” Will asks her. “The woman who isn't naked when she's naked?” Carole makes an ambiguous noise, one that might be taken as assent.
Please can't you just admit you're angry
with me?
he's about to say when another thought stops him.

“That's the reason why—that's why you don't let me touch you anymore, right? Because you have to be alone. Alone in your little boat. The mistress of your own pleasure. You have to mete it out, just so, know when they're coming, your orgasms, so they don't capsize you. Tip you out. That way you won't feel more than you can handle. Because if it were my hand instead of yours, my finger, my tongue, then you'd be taken off guard.” Carole doesn't answer. “Right?” Will prompts when the silence has grown long enough to make him anxious.

“I don't know,” Carole says to the window.

“But you're not willing—you won't go back to the way we were, the way we were before?”

“No.” She shakes her head against the pillow. “Not . . . not now.”

“Why?”

“I can't.”

“But why? Why, if it's not on account of your little boat?”

“Oh, Will,” she says. “Does it really matter why? Or matter that much?”

He sighs loudly in the way that irritates her, one of what she calls his accusatory sighs. “It matters to me, Carole,” he says.

“I can't right now.” Carole turns onto her back and aligns herself on the mattress. She takes the duvet and gives it a smart shake so that it flies up and then settles slowly and evenly over their two bodies. “Not right now, Will,” she says.

“But ‘right now'—what does ‘right now' mean? It's been three years.”

“I know. I know.”

“You're angry with me. You don't trust me.”

“No.”

“Then it's about intimacy. About your wanting to maintain some kind of boundary between us. A kind of sexual cordon sanitaire, invisible, inviolable.” Will is speaking with his eyes closed. “You don't want me to get that close to you,” Will says. “Close enough to engage you.”

“No,” Carole says. “I don't know.”

“Why not?” he asks. “Why don't you know? We're talking about you, after all. If you'd just admit you're angry, then maybe we could get through this.”

“It was an accident, Will.”

“But feelings aren't rational. By definition they're irrational. So it doesn't matter whether or not it was an accident.”

“It does to me.” Carole turns to look at him. “Will?” she says. “If you're going to lie awake, why not remember happy things? Like all the Little League stuff you and Luke did together. Even when you weren't coaching, I don't think you missed one game. Or that summer you taught him to bodysurf, remember how excited he was? And that fort thing you guys made. Or the time—”

“You know what?” Will says. “Before, when I still hadn't fallen asleep, I wasn't even thinking about Luke. You always assume that when I can't sleep it's because I'm thinking about him, but I'm not, not all the time. Not one time in ten. I think about work. Sex. The stuff around the house that I never get to, like the rain gutters. I think about the old wiring upstairs in the apartment and how I have to call an electrician to bring it up to code. And about getting the tree surgeon to come back and take down that maple before it comes down and breaks some windows. Tonight, before we made out, I was thinking about the reunion.”

“What about it?”

“I don't know. It was strange. Self-conscious. Uncomfortable, I guess.”

Carole makes a told-you-so sound, expelling air from her nostrils in something that isn't, quite, a snort. “Of course it was strange and uncomfortable,” she says.

“I guess I really expected—a part of me expected Mitch would be there. Did you think he'd show?”

“No,” she says after a moment. Carole yawns and turns in his arms. “Will?” she says. “Can we stop talking?”

Will pulls her body into his, burying his face in the damp nape of her neck, inhaling that smell that, only an hour after they've made love, gets him instantly hard: part shampoo, part sweat, part whatever chemical recipe of pheromones and God knows what add up to his wife. He kisses her, and her skin tastes salty. “We could do it again,” he says. “How about making out again?”