Interior Design (19 page)

*

Everything around her loosened. The doors in her home vibrated, as if still being ripped from a tree. Even when she spoke long-distance to Hank, who was distracted by some worry he wouldn't name, Linda was unable to resist this giddy new world before her and she watched the water glasses in the cabinets evaporate into their original piles of sand. But soon these pleasures were interrupted when Hank returned home without warning, his car filled with large cardboard boxes. He carried the first one to the door, where Linda met him, and she had to lean across the carton for a kiss. He squeezed past her and walked toward the study. Linda followed and William, just able to walk, wobbled between them.

“Hank, what's the matter?” she asked, but he only grunted.

When he put the box on the floor of the study, he explained that one of his explosions had pulverized a hidden bed of fossils. “The damn company made me keep blasting,” he almost shouted. He stood up. “But I did manage to save some.”

Linda looked down at the thickly taped box. He had brought the explosion home. She imagined the rocks bursting out of the cardboard packing, each small, sharp piece flying against the walls, and she barely heard Hank say, “I'll just have to salvage what I can.” He walked back to the car for another carton, while invisible dust and debris settled over everything.

Because fossils were his first love, Hank explained he had to take a break from energy freelancing. He worked in his study so relentlessly, surrounded by topographical maps, charts spanning millions of years, and boxes filled with jagged rocks, that he might just as well have been away on another field trip. One afternoon, while William was napping, Linda cautiously entered the study. Hank didn't even look up from his desk.

“Let's play Glacial Melt,” she suggested, her hand on the door.

Hank plucked a fossil from a tray. “I don't have time for games now, Linda,” he replied. She left and stood out in the hall, listening to him cleaning fossils with his wire brushes, and she almost wished she was small and hard, so that Hank might hold her too.

At dinner Hank held up the thin, crushed spiral of a gastropod. “Look at this,” he said, pointing it at her, “look at what I destroyed.” Linda couldn't hold his gaze, so instead she watched the table settings transform themselves—the flower patterns growing off the teapot and plates and twisting around the serving dishes. Why did Hank want to pin down hidden points of time when the true beauty of geology was that past, present, and future bled into each other?

That night Linda waited in bed for Hank. When he didn't appear she decided to fetch him, and she passed through the dark house easily by imagining that the lamps were shining. She opened the door to the study and found Hank exhausted at his desk, among his charts and graphs. There were rocks everywhere, and Linda saw them as huge, pulled teeth. Hank was pressing the eraser end of his pencil against his cheeks, pressing so hard he'd made an odd pattern of red splotches that looked like a strange and terrifying rash.

“Come here,” Linda whispered, frightened. Hank looked away without saying a word, but he let her draw him down to the floor, among the clumps of fossils. Her hands stroked his cheeks and forehead and, surrounded by images of extinction, they undressed each other. Her body encircled and accepted him, and at once the succession of small, present moments wasn't enough for Linda to hold on to. She saw the two of them age rapidly into withered shanks and narrow bone, then she saw their limbs grow younger until they were children, wrestling naked on the floor. Finally she saw them all ages at once—pink cheeks above the wrinkled cords of the neck, firm thighs above bony calves, and their pubic hair dark, then gray. Time circled through them as they shuddered and rocked together, the present moment untethered and wildly swinging back and forth.

*

Linda woke early in the morning, Hank sleeping in bed beside her, and she remembered the night before. Proud of her abilities, and yet somehow disturbed by this pride, she turned to Hank and quietly confessed to his still back what she had seen during their lovemaking. Sure he would understand, Linda felt infinitely sad that he was still asleep. But then he stirred, his arm reaching out like a gesture from a dream, and his hand gripped hers and tightened.

“What can you possibly be saying?” he asked. Hank reached across the bed for a rock on the nightstand. He turned and held it before Linda. “Tell me what you see here,” he said.

It was a piece of shale, and embedded in it was a petal-like shape with many feathery arms that seemed to wave, to wave at her, and those motions traveled up Hank's hand, which began to wrinkle, the wrinkles deepening like rivers slowly cutting through shallow hills. She told Hank this, and he looked at the rock as if it had suddenly come alive.

“No,” he then said, speaking carefully. “It's a crinoid, an extinct water lily.” And he still held it in the air, as if forcing them both to see this.

“Oh, it's more than that, it's geology,” Linda replied. She rested her hand over the image in the shale, her fingers touching his.

He frowned. “Geology? C'mon, what are you talking about?”

“What you taught me—that everything changes.” And Hank then proved this to be true, for he hurled the rock at the window, bursting it open, and all the pieces of broken glass contained bits of the world outside that changed as they flew through the air.

They cleaned up the room together. Hank kept apologizing, but Linda laughed at him and picked up a fragment of glass. She twisted it in the light and it framed Hank's anxious face, then their disturbed blankets on the bed, the broken pane, and the scattered glass chips in the rug: Linda's little shard seemed to imagine along with her. “This is wonderful,” she told Hank, “and it's all because of you.” But he turned away from her and reached carefully for a sliver in the rug.

Linda felt sure she could convince him. But in the following days, whenever she tried speaking to Hank of the secret joys of geology, his face transformed before her into something hard and foreign, like a new rock she had never seen before. “Please,
stop
, “he said, interrupting her. Soon his newly salvaged fossils began to appear about the house, on the couch, in the sink, their broken surfaces a solid reproach. About to shower one evening, Linda picked up from the tiled floor of the stall a crooked lump covered with tiny, twisted shells. Linda stared at the patterns until suddenly she was aware of Hank behind her.

“They're dead things, understand?” he said, his voice so oddly unhappy. “They'll
never
come alive.”

Linda crouched naked before Hank, afraid, yet she had to tell him how those spiraled shells were undulating in her hand.

Hank began to spend day and night in the study. Linda was anxious for her husband, surrounded inside by so much carefully preserved failure, and she kept watch outside the door. Afraid to imagine what terrible marks he might be making on his face with his pencil, instead she spoke to Hank through the closed door, telling him how the hallway floorboards around her, as if still part of a living tree, sprouted branches and leaves. Wouldn't he like to come out and see them? She could hear him inside brushing away at his fossils with a destructive fury. So she continued, next recounting their son's creation, feature by feature. “Go away!” he shouted from inside. But Linda tried again, describing how his face would change with age, how he would be a beautiful old man. Then there was a long silence, as if he were sitting still in his chair, barely breathing.

*

One afternoon while playing with her son in the living room, Linda watched William rock a wicker basket back and forth, back and forth, and she joined in his laughter, for the basket was unraveling and she could see the busy, invisible hands behind it all. Happy for another detail that might attract her husband, Linda walked to the study and was surprised to see the door slightly ajar. She hesitated, then looked inside, but he wasn't at his desk. She entered slowly and saw Hank in the open closet, hanging in the air, the folds of skin on his neck horribly creased around a rope. Linda stared at his feet, inches above the carpeted floor.

Before she could scream, or cry, or even believe what she saw, Linda heard an unhappy shout of her son and his urgent, faltering steps down the hallway. She quickly ran outside and shut the door, standing before it just as William cried into her arms, his small hands on his forehead from some fall. Linda checked and found no bruise. She sank to her knees and hugged him, and his small grief seemed briefly to cancel her own, impending and terrible. She hoped he would never stop crying and held him until he had to break away impatiently. He toddled down the hallway, and she listened to his high laughter in the living room.

Her son gone, Linda leaned against the wall across from the study. She stared at the door and tried to imagine another possibility inside. She tried to reverse everything: the still, hanging body rising from the fall, the neck unsnapping, the hands that had tied the rope's knot now untying it, the quiet steps to the closet now tracing themselves backward to the desk, returning until the first suicidal thought that began it all was not yet thought.

Linda finally entered the study again, and her husband's contorted face stared past her. She rushed out to the living room. William had settled behind one of the upholstered chairs, and she listened to his quiet, self-involved chatter. Then she picked up the phone for an ambulance and started to cry into the humming receiver.

*

In the weeks following the funeral, Linda found her home had become a new landscape. Each stone of Hank's collection, eloquent in its silence, gave her pain, and she was shaken by the thought that in all her life with him there had been this hidden future, this secret avalanche waiting to fall. But how could she put even one rock away? It would leave another empty space she wouldn't know how to fill. No friends or family could comfort her, and when William woke at night, confused and crying from some bad dream, she ran to him as much to be held as to hold him.

Linda could have gone back to work, but she didn't want to return to cleaning teeth that she knew would eventually decay and collapse in ancient mouths. Instead she stayed home, though everywhere she looked lacked her husband. The handle of Hank's coffee cup had lost his fingers, the rim his lips. Then everything began to crumble. The label of the soup can on the kitchen counter faded and crinkled until its glue dried, the edges curled, and the can itself rusted. The blue wallpaper began to peel like broad, thin shreds of falling sky. The linoleum cracked, and grass grew up past the window sills. Linda sat in a chair and grew old, her fingernails extending until they snapped off, brittle from age. Exposed wooden beams warped and the walls around her sucked in and fell. Then she decayed. The tall grass swayed through her eye sockets and the spaces between her ribs. Metal fillings glinted in her scattered teeth. But then Linda slowly reassembled herself, the ligaments re-forming, the bone adhering to tissue, the veins rethreading themselves throughout her body.

When she was almost whole again she heard a series of crashes in the living room. She hurried to the open doorway and saw William among a pile of rocks, the shelves empty behind him. Linda scolded him and he ran away, laughing a wild laugh, happy to have her attention. She chased him to his room and he stood before her, suddenly about to cry. But then she saw him change into an awkward young man, pimpled and sullen, and suddenly she realized how frighteningly independent he would become. She could see William leaving home, could imagine his infrequent phone calls and large and small lies, imagine, finally, his denial of her in her old age. Crying herself, Linda held out her arms and William, small again, ran to hug her as she knelt down. But patting his back, squeezing his shoulders, she saw a vision of an older boy turning away, ashamed.

*

Linda grew frightened of her son, his small face a mask insisting itself into her imagination, always about to erupt into the person she feared he would grow to be. When she heard his footsteps now she wanted to run away and at the same time she wanted to run to him, to hide her son's transforming face in her arms. But she was afraid his blonde hair would turn gray beneath the strokes of her hand.

Finally one day Linda found William sneaking up behind her. Strange tremors passed over his face. The curve of his jawline, so much like her own, altered. The furl of nostril that resembled hers erased, and Hank's straight nose pushed forward. She simply vanished from her son's face, while all of Hank's features emerged and twisted themselves older. And then there was her husband, toddling toward her with his arms outstretched, but Linda was already running. She rushed out the front door to the car, ignoring his cries. Shaking in the front seat, she saw Hank in the rearview mirror hurrying down the driveway after her. She started the car, but he slapped at the door again and again, and she had to open it. Her husband stood unhappy before her. She let him in, even though she was fleeing from him.

Hank sniffled and tried to smile, wiping his teary eyes. When Linda leaned across and held his hand he seemed so content that she couldn't imagine now what had ever gone wrong between them. She decided they would take a field trip in the country together and make a new start. Linda drove off, and the immediate sense of escape and the unfolding road were enough to calm her. She turned onto the highway, and with the white lines stretching ahead she felt sure they were both leaving everything terrible behind.

As Linda drove, she pointed, and Hank followed her finger. “Those fields were once a drainage channel, right?” she asked. But Hank played with the straps of his overalls, oddly disinterested. Linda tried again. “How long will it take to erode those hills over there?” Hank only squirmed on the seat beside her, kicking his feet together. Linda gazed off unhappily to the left and saw a runoff ravine in the distance. Though far away, she could make out the crooked trenches of erosion. This would surely interest Hank. She turned off at the first side road, so excited that she swerved sharply at the curve of the exit ramp. Hank abruptly slid across the seat and cried out.