A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (4 page)

Joyce resumed holding her breath as he disappeared through the doorway. Neither of the cops looked at her. One of them went off. The other turned away and said into his radio something unintelligible that was answered unintelligibly. A new cop came into the hallway and eyed her suspiciously. He left without speaking. Another arrived at last with a handful of surgical masks. He didn’t offer one to Joyce. The air-conditioning was
still
running; they had probably evacuated the only person who knew how to shut it off. She was being bathed in deadly bacteria. After everything that had happened, after all the grief and mortifications of the past year, this would be a fitting end to her life as a woman, wife, and mother.

“Is this your bag, miss? You’ll have to show some ID.”

The FBI man was coming into the hallway. He carried her pocketbook on his shoulder, one hand resting on the clasp. It was a Fendi Baguette, with a beige leather strap and a large buckle. The agent was carrying in the other hand her commuter shoes. One of the cops snorted. Men carrying women’s accessories rarely amused Joyce, but she was stricken now by a terrible seizure that had some of the characteristics of laughter. And this did it: the tears broke through every firewall she had erected against them. She gushed, mascara probably streaking her face, and she was laughing at the same time in all the ways and in the historical sequence in which she had learned to laugh: first a giggle, then an innocent crystalline chuckle; then, from her adolescence, a kind of strangled chuffing sound that she knew was unpleasant and had eliminated from her range of responses long before she left high school; then, a mean snigger; then, a big, chortling guffaw; then, subsiding, an adult
heh-heh
. Her nose was running too. The mascara would ruin her blouse and she didn’t even have a tissue: they were in her bag. The cops and the FBI agent were amazed. They stared, unaware that she had been laughing at all.

MARSHALL WAS ABSENT
when she finally returned home; he left every morning as if he were going to work, despite the destruction of his company’s offices at the World Trade Center, and came back in the early evening. She presumed he had another job somewhere. Her lawyer would find out, eventually. Snuffles bounded across the foyer to greet her. Joyce grabbed
the dog by the collar and pushed it into the children’s bedroom. She closed the door hard. The dog scratched the door and whined. Joyce steeled her heart against the animal: it was Marshall’s pet. Now, if she could ignore the dog’s entreaties for company, she had the apartment to herself until she fetched the kids from day care. She turned on the television and was immediately tuned to a live special report about the suspicious letter that had arrived at her company’s offices. The reporter, who was virtually shouting the news, stood in the middle of Hudson Street, which had been closed to traffic, and behind him Joyce’s building was blocked off by emergency vehicles and ribbons of yellow tape. The report showed film of Anne-Marie being wrestled into the back of the ambulance. When the news went back to the live feed, Joyce looked for colleagues among the onlookers, but they had left. She was disappointed not to see the FBI man or the cops she had met among the people coming in and out of the building.

As if this would wash away the anthrax, she took an extremely long, very hot shower. She washed her hair for the second time that day, deeply massaging her scalp. She let the water hit her full in the face until her skin was raw and puffy. She tried to lose every sense of herself now: the jet would scour away the memory of her sad, constricted daily life.

She usually dressed in the bathroom, away from Marshall, but this afternoon she celebrated her solitude by coming into the living room with her plumpish pinkish body lightly wrapped in a towel. Another towel was wound around her head. The heat of the shower had made her languid and achy. This mood, of course, was precisely conducive to sex. She thought again of Alicia’s fireman. The thought didn’t arouse her, but she believed she could be aroused by it, with a little effort. It had been years since she had been sexually aroused, years since she had even masturbated. She felt the rush of an idea. Almost anything now had the possibility of changing her life for the better.

She arranged the towel on the couch evenly and lay on her stomach. Asking herself whether she really wanted to do this, she worked her hand between her legs and felt for the right place and was surprised by a shudder when she found it. The TV was still on, unfortunately; the breaking news had given way to some soap opera—
One Life to Live,
to be exact—and the dog was whimpering now, its snout at the bottom of the door. She tried to force these sounds from her consciousness. She worked at the place and, sure enough, as if an arcane scientific theory were being practically demonstrated, a once-familiar fluid warmth spread down her thighs and legs. Her behind was bare and still damp from the shower, but the chill on her skin was good, intensifying her reception to the heat swelling around her upper thighs. Use it, she whispered, use it, her mouth tightening as she reached deeper into the place. Her nipples hardened. She felt the towel’s fabric against them. She reminded herself how great her breasts were. She had gained some weight in her legs and tummy, but after nursing two children she still had terrific breasts, exquisitely round and high, probably nicer than Alicia’s. A man would like to touch them. She tried to think of a fireman she might have seen in the street, or in the television reports or newspapers. He was blond and young, his white-and-blue baseball shirt snug against his chest, the outline of his chest muscles…She came down hard against her finger, grinding her pelvis into the couch. The couch squeaked, she heard herself grunt, and Snuffles launched a series of high-pitched yaps. She worked more and it felt like something under there was about to turn over. Turn over, turn
over
. Perhaps the fireman had a mustache. No mustache. Mustache. She had met him on the corner of Charles Street when she fled the building. He had seen that she was lost and terrified. Big arms. Soft hands. She had fallen into him, against his chest, and he had enclosed her with his big arms and soft hands. He took her home (no keys? forget that), to this couch, and they hardly
spoke. He needed her as much as she needed him. But the image shimmered. No mustache. Mustache. Forget his face, don’t look there. But she did look there, and the fireman had Marshall’s face. He had Marshall’s eyes and Marshall’s lips. Look away, she insisted, working her pelvis with greater force, trying to make that thing turn over, reaching harder, grinding harder, as it slid away. Fireman with a mustache. No mustache. She groaned, almost there, not quite there, never there. But now she could see only Marshall’s face, scowling.

Fuck.

She was sick. Sick, sick, sick. She was hopeless.

THE MOOD WAS LOST
; she doubted the mood had ever really been there; it had been an invention, some kind of romance about who she was and what she wanted. She wanted to make love to a fireman? She felt foolish now and wished she had time for another shower. She dressed, went out, and brought Victor and Viola home from preschool. While she was making them dinner, her boss called to tell her that the mysterious white powder that had spilled from the envelope had been tested. It was talc: a hoax. He sounded as if he had been distraught and was now very relieved, even intoxicated. He said the office would be closed for the next several days as the FBI conducted further environmental tests. Also, the FBI wanted the staff to come to the agency’s New York headquarters in Foley Square for interviews the next morning. The agency was desperate in its search for clues that would lead to the source of the real anthrax.

But Joyce wasn’t relieved. If this time the anthrax wasn’t real, then why not the next? She resented her former belief that their lives in America had been secure. Someone had lied to them as shamelessly as a spouse. All over the planet people wanted to kill Americans; here too nutjobs acquired automatic
weapons, deadly bacteria and viruses, nuclear material and explosive fertilizer. How could she have brought her kids into this world, a world even more sinister than her marriage? Their future was chilled by a lethal, indelible shadow.

Marshall arrived while the kids were finishing their dinners. As always he offered the children a fully engaging smile and sweet, tender kisses. He asked them warmly about their day’s trivia, his voice a singsong, and he dispensed the most perfect small presents that he had picked up on his way home. He didn’t once glance in Joyce’s direction. He had it down to a science. Joyce didn’t look his way either, but in her avoidance, she felt, she expended the greater effort. He dropped his attaché in his bedroom and took the dog for a walk.

The door slammed, and at that moment, just as the network news came on, Viola knocked over her milk, a full glass that had never been sipped. The milk streaked across the dining room table toward Joyce’s pocketbook like a tsunami. The little girl giggled. Joyce nearly tripped as she swooped low to save the bag. Milk poured onto a chair, splattering onto the floor. It was then that she realized that Peter Jennings was talking about her office, mentioning her company by name. Joyce went quickly to the kitchen counter to tear off a paper towel, then ran back to get the whole roll and saw from across the room a network news report filmed in front of her building. She hurriedly dabbed at the puddle. Alicia was being interviewed, seen from her size 2 waist up. She smiled demurely and thanked the NYPD for the courage and professionalism with which its officers had evacuated their building. Next a deep-voiced spokesman for the FBI in Washington, standing at a podium before a bouquet of microphones, concluded that the mysterious substance was in fact ordinary baby powder. He showed the camera a picture of the handwritten envelope in which it had been delivered.

Joyce let the milk drip and rushed to the television, the sopping towels in hand.

“Mommy, she hit me,” Victor announced triumphantly.

The envelope was on-screen perhaps fifteen seconds—long enough for Joyce to see and understand and to see again and to reflect on the abruptness with which everything could change, again. The envelope lingered in view, even after the reporter stopped speaking about it. Anne-Marie had made an excruciatingly neat incision with her letter opener. The envelope carried a
LOVE
stamp, and the FBI said the faint, smudged cancellation mark revealed that it had been mailed from near Trenton, New Jersey, as were several of the real anthrax letters. The primitive cursive hand-lettering, which wandered northward across each line of the address, could have been characterized as babyish, or retarded, or lunatic. It was also immediately recognizable. Although every character was distinctive, it was the two lower-case
g
’s in her company’s name that gave away their author. In each
g
the descending loop was an isosceles triangle and the rest of the letter was angular and elongated. The damn thing looked like a mutilated paper clip. No one made
g
’s like that, no one but her husband Marshall.

She knew his hand as well as she knew his dick. In their early courtship, which had taken place long ago, in the pre-Cambrian, Marshall had sent her a lengthy series of importunate and passionate letters handwritten on loose-leaf paper. Even on lined paper, the script had ascended as it flew to the right. Over the years Marshall’s unique penmanship had marked innumerable holiday cards, shopping lists, and telephone messages. And now, when they weren’t communicating through their lawyers, their principal means of communicating with each other, besides shouting, was through handwritten notes, so that copies could be saved for their lawyers. She knew all the distortions in his penmanship that occurred when he was tired or angry, or trying to be extra careful or trying not to be
readable at all. She could even recognize, in her brief glimpse of the envelope on network television, the efforts he had made to disguise his penmanship.

Joyce was elated: now she had him. The Justice Department was investigating anthrax hoaxes as seriously as it was investigating the real anthrax mailings, promising to prosecute them as acts of terrorism. After years of careful, relentless, hard-assed maneuvering, legal and personal, Marshall had blundered catastrophically. Forget Joyce’s wimpy, pearls-and-twin-set, eager-to-be-reasonable divorce lawyer: Marshall could deal with John Ashcroft now. Let them put him in jail. Let them send him to Guantánamo. She would keep the apartment.

She stole a look when he returned with the dog. Marshall turned away, his complexion darkening and his cowlick flopping down around his eyes. He went to his room and shut the door. Joyce almost smiled, but then stopped to wonder if the hoax anthrax could possibly, in actual fact, have been sent by her husband. Was he capable of doing something so wrong and so criminal? She told herself yes, citing all the malicious actions he had taken against her since they had begun getting divorced, and all the deadly infighting and all the lies and slander he had broadcast to the world, but she wasn’t persuaded. Although she hated him with every cell in her body, she didn’t believe he was a bad man, not really. She had loved him once, and the memory was a little traitor sabotaging her every effort to survive this divorce. He had nursed her through a month of meningitis before they were married, bringing her wonton soup and a single red rose every night after work. At Viola’s birth he had gently lifted the girl from the bloody sheet and laid her on Joyce’s chest. But don’t forget the
g
’s—was she living with a dangerous crackpot? It was true that he had always enjoyed practical jokes—the FBI would discover that he had been arrested for a fraternity prank in college—yet he had never done anything as dangerous, or as sick, as this before. Was he suffer
ing from some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome? What had happened to him on September 11? He had never told her or anyone she knew. He had never explained how he had escaped the World Trade Center when his entire office had been destroyed. He had lost friends and colleagues. But he had said nothing. It was bottled up within him, with all the strains of the divorce war, and he had simply lost his mind. If he was capable of sending baby powder to her office as a practical joke (and perhaps he wasn’t, not really), what could he do to her and their children right here in their apartment?