2.

The rest of her morning is calm. She makes a small breakfast of one egg with tofu bacon after she finishes her bagel. She checks her email but does not respond to any of them. She drinks two cups of coffee over the newspaper, moving after the first cup from the kitchen to the living room. Sun falls across her feet and calves. She flits in and out of sleep, the paper slumping down her body to the floor. She dreams lightly that there is a dog bounding down the stairs, nuzzling her hand with its wet nose.

She rouses herself and begins to clean. Dust hangs in the sunny air of the living room. She starts in the corner of the room nearest the kitchen, wiping down David’s bookcase full of art (golf?)history books. She moves systematically across the room, cleaning off table tops, the mantle of the fire place (where there are two pictures of her and David on vacation, one in Hawaii from many years back, and one more recently of them in the Poconos, weighed down in ski gear). She wants to vacuum, but knows it will wake David. So instead she moves to the bathroom, where a thin layer of film, faintly red in color, covers the sink.

This is the bathroom her children always use when they come home. She rarely cleans it, preferring to let them handle their own space. But since they are not home often anymore, it might not be a bad idea to clean it out and convert it to her own space. David’s mess covers most of their bathroom, which is quite small for being a master bath. His various old razors and half used bottles of cologne litters their toilet top and cupboard. Empty prescription bottles have a way of hanging around far longer than need be, too. She stopped throwing his things out long ago. It would be nice to escape his slovenliness. Then again, it would be lonely getting dressed alone after so many years of shared space.

While she is scrubbing the sink, she hears the pitter-patter sound of water above her. The pipes of the house whoosh as they do whenever anyone turns on the hot water. David is awake, finally. She always thought that as you grew older, you were supposed to wake up earlier, as if your body needed as much daylight as possible. Yet it is nearly noon and her husband is just now getting out of bed.

She wants to be frustrated with him, but mostly she is grateful for other human noises in her house. She thinks of him in the shower, the water fogging the window, the grey hair of his chest matted wetly to his skin. Once again, she feels herself being drawn to David. He is older, but in a way that is moving to her, and, she assumes, only to her. She can remember the line of muscle that used to bisect his stomach, and how it has not been seen in decades. She can remember the softness of his hair when she would run her hands through it, whereas now there is only the rough stubble of his shaved, nearly bald, head.

Quietly, she makes her way up the stairs (though there is no way he could hear her in the shower). The door to their bedroom is open, and so, too, is the door to the bathroom. Steam wispily drifts into the bedroom, dancing with the drafty air from the windows. As she steps lightly into the bathroom, she can make out the sound of his voice over the water. She cannot make out any specific words, just the monotone growl of him talking. He is likely narrating to the imaginary crowd he narrates to, which is something she has overheard him do from time to time when he thinks she is not around. She once heard him give a ten minute symposium on the nature of sexuality in Ulysses, beginning with Stephen’s Oedipal obsession with his dead mother. She was impressed with the remarkable amount of thoughts he never shared with her but gave only to the shower. She did not even know he had read Ulysses.

She unties the robe and lets it slip off her shoulders. The air that sneaks in through the bathroom window is frigid. Her body stiffens with goose bumps. Quickly, she slides the shower door aside. David is beneath the shower head, facing away from her. His head is leant back so that water falls over his face. Claire steps in. Warm water puddles around her feet, and then the slight spray from David pricks her body with water so hot it accentuates the cold air.

She slides her hands around David’s stomach. His belly expands sideways, but beneath his skin is the firm tension of his still muscular body. After his heart attack nearly four years before, they joined a gym together, and some days she will stop in for lunch and find him lifting weights with men twenty years his junior, joking around in jocular fashion. But here, he is vulnerable and she has caught him unprepared. He jumps with surprise. Water is still in his eyes, and he cannot open them to see.

“Hey,” she whispers in his ear, water forcing her eyes closed and coursing through her hair, trickling down the back of her neck.

She feels the muscles of his face expand in a smile. “Hey,” he says.

She kisses him on the ear and feels his knees bend. She kisses him again, then traces the rough skin beneath his jaw line down to his neck. Her mouth fills with water. David reclines slightly into her, reaching behind her and slapping her playfully on the butt, his hand echoing moistly. They both laugh. She bites his neck in jest, and he turns his head and kisses her wetly.

Her hands are still on the hard roundness of his belly. She runs them over the length of his chest, which like his stomach, is impressively toned. Still, his age shows in pieces: beneath his armpits, lose skin stretches over his pectorals. She slides her hands back down to his stomach, following the line of his sternum. Then, she toys with the slight indent of his pelvis, making him flinch beneath her. She hesitates for a moment, to render him somewhat uncertain, before she reaches down and finds him.

Gingerly at first, she moves her hands over him. With increasing force, and annoyance, she tries to rouse him. She can feel the rest of his body straighten in effort. He is probably concentrating too hard, she fears. “Relax,” she whispers.

“I am,” he responds, but his voice is tight and she knows, already, that things will not work the way she was hoping. For a few moments more, she pulls at him. When she finally lets go, his weight sags beneath her. She, too, feels deflated, as if the ability to prop herself up has escaped from her being, so she leans into him, turning their bodies against the cold tiling. A thin layer of water is between them, dribbling through the crevices created by the meeting of their un-matching forms. She rests her chin on the soft hollow of his shoulder. His breathing labors, and she clasps her hands together over his stomach.

“Hey,” she says. “These things happen. It’s not like it’s the first time. And it won’t be the last.”

“If you want to wait a bit, I could take a Viagara,” he says, half joking.

She responds with a half laugh.

They stand without moving. For the first time since she stepped in, Claire hears the water pounding on the floor of the shower. She closes her eyes, and it is all she can hear, though the uneven thud of David’s heart is reverberating against her chest like the vibrations of a tuning fork.

Finally, she turns him to face her, pulling his hips around with her hands. She kisses him, and tries to smile sympathetically but reassuringly. Things like this are not a big deal to her, and should not be to him, either. They routinely kid one another about things that he refers to as “old moments.” She merely chalks this up as another old moment, though she knows he takes it more personally.

He tries to return her smile, but instead he looks sad and defeated. There is nothing more for him she can do. She’s held him and reassured him in whatever ways she thought might help, and she isn’t going to stand in the shower for twenty minutes until he feels better about something he shouldn’t be that upset about to begin with. Though he gladly spends half an hour in the shower, she has no such love of water. Her skin dries out, and above all, it wastes time. Unlike David, she does not care to sacrifice thirty minutes a day to idle thought. She kisses him once more, this time without much energy in it, and steps out.

Water splashes out all over the floor (she has forgotten a towel) and she stands shivering, debating whether to use his towel or brave the stinging cold of their bedroom. She wants to use his, but might only upset him more. Petulantly, she waits while her body slowly sheds itself of moisture, a puddle forming at her feet. She needs to get away now, to let him worry himself out. She isn’t going to hang around while he skulks about.

Crossing the bedroom, she leaves a splattering trail to the door. Still naked, she descends the stairs again. No one will be looking through the windows of their dining room. She moves through the kitchen, and makes her way to the downstairs bathroom. There are two towels hanging folded beneath the sink, and she wraps herself in one, and uses the other to wring her hair dry. She can hear two birds chattering just outside the window. Two summers before, there had been a robin’s nest built along the window sill. Perhaps they are back.

Upstairs, the water hisses loudly to a stop. She can hear him lumbering around, probably looking for her. The heavy sound of male foot steps always, even now, reminds Claire of her father barreling upstairs if he heard her or her sister talking, or just moving, later than nine o’clock. He slept so lightly, and believed so strongly in maintaining a rigid schedule every day, that everyone else in the house would adhere to one, too. He would never admonish them verbally on those nights; he would simply open the door, his long, narrow frame silhouetted with candle light, and stand in the doorway for five, maybe ten minutes. Claire and her sister would hold their breath, and often times they would fall asleep from the anticipatory terror (which was never real terror, as his outbursts were always half show).

She kicks the bathroom door closed. She drops the towel used for her hair to the ground, and tries to listen for David. Normally, he walks through the dining room to get to the kitchen. If she times her exit correctly, she can slink back upstairs through the living room without having to talk to him.

He thunks around upstairs for a few minutes longer. Claire hangs up the towel on the floor. She feels as if her skin is slowly cracking in the cold, like a stream bed becoming striated in a winter drought. Finally, there is the unmistakable creak and moan of a body on the staircase. She deftly pushes the door open, and steps lightly into the living room, her be-toweled body half visible in the window. Her translucent form is superimposed on their front yard, the grass wilted and yellow, the brick house across the street drab and unwelcoming beneath the overcast sky.

David turns into the living room. He hesitates, takes one step forward, then stops. He is wearing black sweat pants and a white t-shirt, his stomach protruding healthily against the shirt, stretching it forward in a comforting manner. He looks befuddled, and when she meets his eyes, he glances past her towards the bubbling fish tank they still keep (and for the first time, she is aware of its gurgling, monotonous drone).

“What are you doing?” he asks.

She smiles, then walks forward and brushes past him. “I’m going to get
dressed,” she says from the foyer, letting her voice sweep up the stairs with her, leaving her husband in the living room staring blankly past the open space where she had just been.

In her bedroom, she closes the door tightly and lets the towel fall away. She stands on a small, tattered rug that still has old dog hairs ingrained amongst its fibers. This room has been her home for over two decades now. Its colors seem faded like a painting left too long in the sun. She thinks of the room’s alabaster tilt and how it all looks so damn frail, an organism beginning its long, gradual decline. And now, how remarkable her bedroom can be imperceptibly changed so it carries some foreignness. It is not how she remembers. The autumn light is goldenrod in the way it can only be as the hemisphere fades itself towards infinitum, throwing striated shadows over the bed that jostle with some movement she cannot figure the source of. Somehow, though, between window and bed, the light goes ghastly in hue. How can light possibly lose its substance in two feet when it has held onto its richness across a couple million miles?

Unbroken shade percolates the wooded floor with a cool patina that seems to have accumulated from years of human indifference to its beautiful, wondrous knots. And leading from the bed to the bathroom, a small rutted path has worn like a groove. Here is the one place the room is heartier in essence: this trail is spackled black with the passage of tired feet.

Downstairs, David is rummaging around the kitchen, the sounds of his foraging coming up in muffled strains through the floor. Claire listens to his percussionary movements: a bowl taps counter top, a spoon clinks, a wrapper crinkles between his fingers.

Just like that, with her focus gone from the room, some wind has blown the sun’s waves in a way that has allowed them to acquire their lost depth. Whatever strangeness the bedroom held has vanished, and it looks much as it always has: dirtier than she would like, dust on the top of her vanity, and David’s golfing clothes strewn about the ironing board and floor on his side of the room.

~

David sits at the far end of the table. His arms spread languorously about a crumpled section of newspaper. A bowl of graham crackers and milk sits idly, soggily devolving to a gruelish mush that David intermittently, and with little care, scoops into his mouth, sending rivulets of milk dribbling down his chin. He wipes it away with the back of his forearm. He slumps forward comfortably, blithely unperturbed by what has just happened, or by any of the inaction of his life. He sits with the laconic ease of an accomplished man.

“I’m going over to Erin’s for the afternoon,” Claire says. “We’re going to do some stretching, maybe some pilates.”

David looks up. “And how is Erin?” he asks. “I haven’t seen her in forever it seems like.”

“She’s fine. Busy. It’s getting tougher for her to fit me in.”

“When is she going to settle down? You know, go up to Massachusetts and get married.” He looks up and smiles like a moron. “I really liked Laurie. They were good together. Why’d they break up?”

She looks at him, not terribly amused. “I don’t know.”

“Well I thought she might have said something.”

“No. She didn’t.”

“What the hell do you guys talk about then?” he asks.

“David, fucking stop it.”

He extends his bottom lip in a bemused look, peering over the top of his glasses. He nods his head and pulls his lip back loudly in a whistling sort of sound that she knows he makes when he is uncomfortable. She stands, unwavering, and watches as he pretends to read the paper. After only a few seconds, he looks back.

“You’re pissed about the shower,” he says.

“No. I’m sorry. Really, it’s fine. You know I don’t mind about that. As I
said, it’s certainly not the first time. God knows it wont be the last.”

He does not say anything, and looks at her sideways, looking out at something in their backyard. Then, he loses his composure and he smiles. This causes her to laugh in exasperation.

“Why doesn’t any other part of you stop working, huh? Why is that the one part you have trouble with?” she says. “I’ve never understood that.”

“Evolution, I would imagine. That or God doesn’t want my heart getting too worked up.”

She smiles, and pulls out the chair across from him. She sits with her legs stretched out in front of her, and she tries to bend out to her toes. Years before, when her and Erin were doing ballet, she’d grown so flexible that she could reach four inches beyond her toes. Now, she can barely reach her shins. So much of her body is aging, withering. Most of all, it is in her feet, which forced her to give up the ballet nearly ten years ago. There are days it is hard to step out of bed, or curl her toes. But today, she wishes she could find a pair of shoes and pirouette around the room. She sits up, and David is still watching her, also smiling, and she thinks that one day before she gets too old, she would like to clear out their living room, will her feet into action, and ballet for him. He would probably look at her much as he is now. Which is to say, curiously, as if he is trying to take her measure and decide whether he should someday marry her or not. It is the uncertain look of a man much younger than him. She smiles back. He wouldn’t understand the importance, or think much of it, but perhaps she will dance for him on his next birthday.

Before she can lean back, the phone rings. They look across, momentarily startled, before Claire stands and answers.

“Hello?” she says.

“Hello, Claire.”

Claire hangs her head away from David. “Hey, J.P. How are you?”

“I’m ok I suppose. It’s gonna snow today, they say. First snow of the year. The first snow has always been a bad day for me.”

“Maybe not this year,” Claire says.

“Yeah, well, probably not.”

“I hope it’s a good day, J.P. But here’s David.” She walks around the table and hands the phone to her husband. She stands with her hand on the back of his chair, not sure whether to wait. Muffled against David’s ear, she can make out the sound of J.P.’s voice prattling breathlessly, and drunkenly, about some new crisis in his life. She gently taps David’s cheek, then walks into the living room.

She sits on the couch closest to the kitchen and listens. Mostly, David is silent, and all she can hear is the sound of his spoon tapping his glass. She cannot guess at what he would say, either.

J.P., Jackson Paladin, is David’s best friend from high school. Eight years ago, while J.P. was a professor of Russian history at Lafayette, his wife - a professor of American history at Lafayette - left him for her graduate assistant. Shortly thereafter, she took their kids, too - daughters, who were eight and eleven at the time - and claimed that J.P. had neglected and abused her for years. Eventually, at the behest of the University, J.P. left on paid leave and never came back. His wife still teaches there.

Claire has known J.P. since college. She liked him for many years, and although his interests were always bizarre (he collected baseball cards into his forties, translated science fiction books to and from Russian, and, according to her husband, had a dalliance or two of his own with grad students), she could not imagine him abusing anyone. For his plethora of human frailties, he had always been a man completely deferential to those he loved. It was something she’d always noted, and admired, about J.P. Throughout his marriage, he was a selfless father.

After the divorce, however, J.P. began calling David nearly everyday. Claire thought, in the immediate aftermath, that it would run its course once he got back on his feet. But he never seemed to do that, and has called nearly everyday for almost eight years. A majority of his calls come after a few drinks, and two have been from prison.

Despite the frequency of their conversations, David refuses to discuss anything they talk about, or why he even still bothers with him after so much time. Along with the two arrests, J.P. has tried to kill himself twice in the last three years. In an effort to dissuade any future attempts, David travels, a few times each month, up to Allentown, where J.P. moved after leaving Lafayette. David usually just spends the afternoons there, although once in a while he ends up staying over night. The past spring, David even learned how to play golf - a sport he had spent years decrying as old, bland, and WASPish - so that next summer he can go on a golfing trip to Scotland. He and J.P. spent three months planning the entire trip, which is going to last a mere six days.

Claire spends far more time than she would like trying to convince David to cut his friend lose, a battle she knows is hopeless but feels compelled to wage. She is mystified by his loyalty, and worries quite frequently that eventually, it will end with some harm coming to him. At a certain point, and her husband is well past it with J.P., people have to be let go.

But David is not a person who lets go. She does not want to wait for him to get off the phone. It could be upwards of an hour before J.P. wears himself out. There are many things more appealing than listening to the quiet of her husband and his best friend. Still, and despite the cold, she is in no pain, and is wasting her agility here.

“David,” she interrupts.

“Hold on,” David says into the phone. He looks over his shoulder at Claire.

“I’m leaving.”

“Ok,” he says. “Are you going to be home for dinner?”

“I don’t know. Don’t wait for me to eat, though. I’ll find something on my own.”

“Ok,” he says. “Have fun.”

“Bye,” she says. She hesitates, but taps the door frame and is about to leave.

“Hey,” David says, which freezes her.

“Yeah?” she says, more annoyed than she wants to sound.

“Why don’t you invite Erin over for Thanksgiving.”

“Really?” she says.

“Yeah. Tell her she can bring any significant other of hers, if she wants to.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“All right,” he says. “Love you.”

“You, too.”

She hesitates before turning, and he stops her.

“Hey,” he says. She tries to smile. “Be careful. It’s supposed to snow today, I heard.”

“Ok,” she says. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

She turns away from the door quickly this time. She hears David apologize over the phone, and then go silent again with listening. She feels a momentary regret for leaving him under such circumstances. He is trying to help J.P., even if his efforts are misguided. She might be useful, and give him advice. Though, her husband is not someone who takes advice and puts it to good use. In most areas of his life, he is beyond helping. If she had not married him, would anyone else have been able to stand him?