The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (16 page)

Bruce didn’t return home until dusk the next day. Cora was at work, the house was empty, and, in the aftermath of his affair, it looked different to him. Always spic and span, now it seemed uninhabited: a model home in a development shown to buyers. Feeling suffocated by it, he rushed out to the patio and was inhaling deeply the chlorinated air rising from the swimming pool, when the front door opened.

Bruce wheeled around. Cora was coming in, dressed in her best business suit, carrying a computer case. Watery light shot shadows on his face, concealing his expression (apprehension), but living room lamps exposed what Cora felt: relief and sorrow, immediately covered by rage.

“Where the
hell
have you been?”

“Driving around.” Bruce flicked his cigarette far into the backyard, sure that it would start no blaze on their fire-resistant lawn. Then he closed the sliding door, caught his fingers for a second and cursed, as if preparing himself for greater pain that was to come.

“And that’s all you’ve got to say?”

“Yes.”

“I think I’m entitled to more of an explanation. I mean—all night!”

“I don’t feel like talking about it right now.”

“Really? Well, maybe that’s not good enough.”

And on they predictably went, as if repeating dialogue from a marital argument program they had downloaded online. Yet if their voices had been muted, an astute observer would have seen in their faces what they meant: they were guilty about what they’d done over the years and afraid of what lay ahead.

“Don’t turn your back on me, Bruce. You’re not a child!”

“Well, don’t give me orders, Cora. You’re not at work!”

Bruce walked past Cora toward the stairs, noticing with curiosity that she didn’t follow; she was instead staring at the coffee table on which he had dropped his keys. Turning away, he caught a last glimpse of his wife reaching down to pick something up from it.

Bruce was halfway to the second floor when he heard her steps behind him. Running in bare feet, her heels left near the front door, Cora caught up and clawed at his shoulder to turn him around.

“Is this where you went?” she said, her voice more shrill than he had ever heard it. “Is it?”

Bruce turned: her hand was so close to his face that he had to recoil to identify the object she was holding and read the title on its front. Then she flung the bar matchbook down to the floor from which they’d risen.

“I hope you’re proud of yourself!” she screamed. “Bringing filth like that into our home!”

Bruce suddenly felt like having no secrets. There was no point in lying (I only had a drink; nothing untoward happened; you sound crazy, you know that?). He knew that if he promised to give up Jane, Cora would forgive him; they would continue in the same cycle of encouragement and failure literally until the world ceased to spin. Suddenly, he wished to know something better for a shorter period of time, even if it would end in great sorrow, and soon.

“Not proud,” he said, “but not ashamed.”

Cora’s hand, now empty, came back to his face—again, she didn’t quite hit him but this time grabbed at his skin, as if trying to mould him into what she could not make him be. All of her nails, not just one, dug into him and hurt; he pushed back. She lost her balance, and he encircled her with his arms to save her. Like that, they rolled down the stairs together, turning over and over like boulders in an avalanche that moves a mountain undisturbed for centuries. It had only been chance that Cora’s head hit the floor so hard and not his.

“. . . this is the sentencing phase of. . . .”

Now the crucial phrase snapped Bruce back—forward—in time. But instead of watching the person with authority to decide his fate—who still wiggled in his seat, as if uncomfortable with the responsibility—he glanced around the courtroom.

It was crowded; these types of trials always were, since violence was a rare and avoidable end to unending lives. A plea of accidental death had not convinced the jury, not after an unwilling witness had been called to the stand. From a passing car, one of Cora’s clients had seen Bruce leave the bar with a huddling Jane. On the stand, she had had no strategic sense and simply admitted that, yes, she might love him; stranger things had happened.

Now Bruce stopped his pan of the spectators, seeing her. Jane wore a wig—the media had made much of her near-baldness—but its bright blonde colour seemed either defiant or indifferent. She stared back at him and her red eyes seemed to ask, “Why is the world the way it is?” Since he didn’t know, all Bruce could do was smile.

He turned back to hear the judge explain his “reasoning process”: how he had taken into account Cora’s financial position and Bruce’s passivity, how the jury believed he had attempted to make an accident of a murder that let him enjoy his wife’s riches with a new mistress—a low-caste mortal woman, disdain for whom the judge could not keep from his sneering face. How long would he keep the two apart? Fiddling the most ever that morning in his chair, the judge seemed to enjoy the irony as he sentenced the defendant.

“Life imprisonment.” He brought the gavel down.

Bruce didn’t hear it; the room was suddenly as silent as something dropped down a hole that has no earth at its end. He realized—though he would not remember it—that this was what it meant to faint dead away.

There were not many others in jails: Bruce had his own comfortable cell, which he didn’t bother to decorate. For the first few years, he simply stared at its white walls and thought he could see something in their emptiness; then he stopped deceiving himself. He who had once chosen stasis now had it forced upon him. Mostly, he just waited for the weekly visitors’ day.

Jane would always arrive on time, or a few minutes early, though the guards were never lenient. The two had exactly sixty minutes to say what they had to say—for her to say and for him to listen, for he was doing nothing, not even the little he would have been able to do inside. He realized that, as she had once made him feel as if he were dying, too, now Jane was the thing that made him feel alive.

“This is
my
happy hour,” he said.

Seeing her so often should have masked the signs of her ageing, yet he saw them anyway. When Jane let her hair grow, at first she didn’t conceal the flecks of grey; after it threatened to take over, she splashed her head with red. Her features were framed differently by the style, and he noticed anew the fine feline structure of her features, as well as the start of slackening skin and lines around her eyes.

“When I was young,” she said, over the phone, through the glass, “I used to believe that ageing made people more beautiful. But that’s because I was young. And, I guess, afraid.”

“You’re still beautiful,” he said and meant it.

Jane began waitressing at the bar and eventually took over its management. A rock was thrown once through the window, which was expensive to replace; otherwise, things went smoothly. Soon Bruce realized that Jane had passed him in age, his own metabolism moving so differently from hers.

One day, she was strangely silent, which made Bruce fill the gap, self-consciously, with stories of prison life—most of them made up. At last, she interrupted.

“Look,” she said, “I’m getting married.”

She spoke in a rush, as if escaping what she had done and how it might hurt him. “He’s like me, of course. He’s our sous-chef, and about the same age. He’s a nice guy. But I want you to know that I’ll never stop coming, no matter what.”

Bruce thought he was okay with it; what sense would it make not to be? Yet he did have one evening of irrational weeping and banging his fist upon his bunk, until another prisoner yelled for him to “Shut the hell up!” One of the few times he had ever heard from anybody else on his cellblock. He swore that he would kill himself if Jane stopped coming, and he began sharpening a toothpick that had fallen from a guard’s pocket for this purpose.

But Jane kept her word. Eventually, she showed him pictures of a baby she named Bruce and then of a little boy. Her weight began to rise and her hair, which she had once kept intentionally close to her head, now began to thin on its own.

Bruce initially recorded the years on the wall of his cell, in little armies of vertical and horizontal lines. After a while, he stopped seeing the point and gave up, or maybe he saw the point too well. At any rate, one week, Jane didn’t arrive, and she had always come even when ill, overworked, or when there had been a storm.

A week later, someone else showed up. It was a young man of about seventeen, gawky but with the beginning of a lank handsomeness. He spoke nervously, clearly trying to fulfil an adult responsibility that had been pressed upon him.

“It was my mother’s last wish,” he said, “that I keep coming.”

Bruce felt all the air fall out of him and he inhaled sharply, as if to keep at least some of it from escaping. He closed his eyes, afraid that he might faint for the first time since his trial. He told himself he could not bear it, that he would bash his brains out as he had accidentally bashed Cora’s.

Then he found the courage to look at his visitor. The younger Bruce had his own spiky hair, probably a tribute to his late mother. It made him look like a wholly masculine version of the youthful hoyden Jane.

“She showed me your pictures,” Bruce said.

Then the two sat there, saying nothing (it would be two weeks before their exchanges grew longer and more relaxed). The younger fidgeted, the elder was still; the time was frozen, one man an example of urgency and expectation, the other of languor and squandered opportunity; one of the temporary, the other the eternal, a moment preserved forever—as Bruce himself was—inside the prison walls.

Hands, so many hands of other travellers were hanging beside her own, lined up like winter coats in a closet or fish in a school under the sea—or like trains themselves, waiting to take off, trains stopped in their tracks, that was it. Except one hand, his hand, more disobedient than the rest, moving up her thigh then gently beneath her skirt, the fingers cool and slightly chapped even though it was summer.

Allie was trembling but so was everyone else: trembling and rocking back and forth and sometimes lurching forward as if pushed from behind. Allie was aware that her reaction to riding the subway was like someone’s in 1904—the year the system started, an overhead sign informed her—but she was, after all, innocent of the experience, never having done it before.

And it was twice as terrifying today, she knew, despite the unclean conditions then, the—she could only guess—cholera and diphtheria and the TB, that was the other one, at the turn of the century. It was so much more treacherous today that she never would have agreed to come if not for—and now she thought of nothing other than his hand, because his fingers had found and were touching the little raised flower stitched on her underwear between her legs. His was like a blind man’s hand and so she closed her eyes to be like him and only know what it was like to feel and never see, never in a crucial way to know anything but what you felt. Doing this—only feeling, in the dark—she went into a new tunnel, one that led back to the blackness of her sleep that morning, a tunnel she had exited by opening her eyes.

Allie had been angry those few hours earlier; she was a punitive girl, punishing, which was surprising, for she was short and blonde and pale and pretty, and others in their shallowness assumed that she was sweet. She’d been angry because she had not wanted to come, had spent eighteen perfectly pleasant years without going down to the city, which was ninety miles south of the town where she was and had been born. Why should she add to her “experience” in such an arbitrary way, like those people who fly private planes without expertise or jump into gorilla cages just for the “rush” and end up in frozen pieces on foggy mountaintops or as bloody stumps in fake zoo streams, their last startled sense being pain, their final feeling regret (or who were so drunk that they were dead already before being blown or torn to bits). She had no sympathy for these people who asked for what they got—and since she was unlike them, was sensible and not stupid and heedless, she was angriest with herself for agreeing to go. She had been weak—being guilty was a way of being weak—and that especially irked her.

But Dan Stabler was an old family friend and had offered her a job in his store for the summer, right after she graduated from high school. Loafin’ was the town’s most popular bakery and café, and while Allie hated the store’s stupid name and having to wear the apron with the smiling slice of bread on it—a logo other people liked, apparently, though how many over the age of four Allie couldn’t imagine—she had accepted. Allie hadn’t gotten into Picard, the local college, and so would have to wait to apply again next year. She didn’t want to go any farther from home—and why should she when there was a perfectly good school within driving distance? She could even keep her old room; it was pretentious and phony to want to “see the world”—wasn’t this the world right here? Of course it was.

Her parents hadn’t been as happy as she thought they’d be when she said that she’d be staying put, had never really understood her only applying to one place, and had gone behind her back to ask Dan if he had something—anything—for her to do. When he came up with the job, invented it out of thin air by adding another counterman, woman, or whatever, her parents made it plain there would be no saying no.

Allie thought they’d be glad to still have her around, but the job seemed like a punishment for what they felt was her bad idea. (Allie’s scolding sensibility was a direct inheritance from them, but she didn’t make the connection, for she always felt totally justified in her harsh and severe judgments of others.) So how could she refuse when Dan asked her to do more, to work the stand in the Farmers’ Market down in the city that day, because someone else had gotten sick?

That meant getting up at five to take the trip, sitting beside Dan on the lumpy front seat of his bread truck while he listened to the radio repeat the same exact weather report (sunny and hot, sunny and hot—what did he expect, it was summer?!), depressing news stories from overseas (we’re here, aren’t we? We’re here, we’re not there!) and songs from the seventies, a time when apparently all people had lank and dirty hair, took too many drugs, and sang songs that made absolutely no sense at all (well, why don’t you give your horse a name? Then your horse would have a name!).

Dan, who still looked like someone from that era, actually remembered the words well enough to repeat them in a flat, horrible voice that sounded like the world’s worst walrus singer. Allie had never had an opinion of Dan—he was like a hundred years old and so hardly even alive to her—but today she disliked how he dwelled on the radio’s news reports about the city, the threats to the city, and actually turned it up to catch every last disgusting detail.

This was, of course, another reason Allie had not wanted to go and for her to condemn anyone reckless enough to live there. She had no doubt the threats were real and that the government people communicating them were sincere. This was just the sort of thing you’d expect to happen in such a place, and what was wrong with warning people? She herself would want to be warned (which wouldn’t be necessary, because she wouldn’t be living there) and she would heed those warnings. Even now, as Dan changed channels to hear the same information from a different source, she said, “Maybe we should just turn around and go back.”

The remark unnerved Dan enough to make him snap off the radio altogether. He considered being concerned enough to lose a day’s profit, and it was clear it was a new idea and not one he was at ease with.

“It’ll be okay,” was the best he could come up with; then, after additional thought, “Why let our enemies win? It’s our country.”

Stymied, Allie didn’t say anything, just looked out the window at the highway, increasingly crowded and unclean as it approached New York. Roadkill was being replaced by potholes, as if nature itself had ceased to exist and great gaps were now appearing as evidence of a new nightmare world, and all would soon collapse as a result. She bet Dan thought that worry would protect him, when turning back (or not even going) was the only action that made sense. But that would take guts, and Dan was too greedy.

“I had a piece of the walnut loaf this morning,” she said petulantly, to punish him. “I almost broke a tooth.”

Dan didn’t answer right away, then said, quietly, “Then you should talk to your parents about orthodontia.”

Referring to her parents had the desired effect—she felt young and diminished and guilty again about her aimless summer, which she had been sure her Mom and Dad would want to share with her, and why hadn’t they?—and took the focus off his bread, which truth to tell, wasn’t bad, and she had never even tried the walnut. Dan seemed to be getting sneakier as they hit the bridge that brought them into town, as if he were absorbing a big city character through the automatic traffic pass Velcroed to his windshield that let him be billed later. (And that was another modern idea she couldn’t abide: you ought to pay then and there.) Allie pulled upon her chest the sweater her mother had insisted she bring, as if it were a lead apron to prevent her being filled with the same flaws now entering Dan. Then she saw him peel off the pass and place it in the glove compartment, which he locked; he never had to do those things at home.

Allie looked at the big buildings, the suffocating crowds, the water that surrounded it all—everything made vulnerable to attack because of its decadence, irresponsibility, and excess. She found herself getting angrier and angrier, the way she always did when—and her parents knew this even if she didn’t and she absolutely did not—she was utterly, unbearably, and to her unforgivably afraid.

The Farmers’ Market was held at Union Square, on what looked to Allie like a big concrete slab that probably used to be a parking lot. It scalded in the morning sun, and not even the stand’s awning provided any relief. Allie started sweating the minute she left the truck, and large dark rings appeared on her white track team T-shirt that looked like those potholes in the road. Now she was marked, damaged, too, by “progress.”

A never-ending parade of people filed by, some obviously on their way to work, looking self-important yet also stifled and suffering in overpriced suits, others obviously wasting their lives riding rollerblades on the way to nowhere. The people who bought bread from her were stingy young executives who forfeited fifty cents for tiny raisin buns not big enough to feed a baby or demanding yuppie mothers who acted entitled to stop traffic with their strollers and didn’t say “thank you” when Allie handed them their loaves. She felt like a hick serving at the pleasure of sophisticates, and she bet she was better read than any of them. (Who had gotten through the whole
Dune
cycle last summer? Certainly not that young business boy whose hair goop couldn’t hide his hair loss and who bought a tiny bun.)

Throughout the morning, Dan acted pleasant and didn’t even seem to feel the heat. He told her, “Acting surly never sold a scone,” but she pretended not to hear and walked disgustedly back to the truck for more bread.

Dan had parked in an allotted area behind their stand, right near a rope that cordoned off the lot. She thought it looked like a carnie van in a circus convoy she’d seen once in a movie: at day’s end, they’d pull up stakes and go someplace else where people made fun of freaks. She was carrying out a new supply of
miche
—and leave it to New Yorkers to buy the bread with the phony Frenchiest name—when she was stopped by someone’s voice.

“Hey.”

Allie looked up and over the rope that separated the market from the rest of the metropolis, the only thing that lay between her and its awfulness—a protective ring she hadn’t realized was a comfort until she looked up and over. A skinny boy her own age was resting on the rope, oblivious it appeared to cars flying by, hardly making the effort not to hit him.

His face was dark, darker than any in her own town—he was Spanish or Italian or Jewish, it was all the same to Allie—and his hair wasn’t even brown but so black it seemed to have been coloured, but it couldn’t have been, could it, he was a boy. Still, it was a pleasant face, the face of an orphan in a bombed-out Italian town during World War II (she’d seen in a documentary once in school), and his voice had the innocence of a child when he asked, above the street sounds, “What’s it, bread?”

Allie, of course, had been taught not to speak to strangers, so she didn’t respond right away. But the question was so open, direct, and benign—and the questioner so seemingly guileless—that after a second she said, with much less hostility than she’d intended, which surprised her, “Well, what does it look like?”

The boy took the question as he heard it—not as rhetorical or sarcastic but as sincere—and answered, “Bread.”

Was he kidding, this kid? He didn’t seem to be—and he wasn’t flirting, either, not in the usual way, which is what Allie had figured at first.
A weak
wind made her belly feel cool and she remembered that her shirt was sweated through; he could clearly see the flower pattern on her bra, but the boy didn’t look there, didn’t direct one guilty glance, engaged her eyes the whole time, which was a first—since she was fifteen—with men and boys of any age. (Allie wasn’t a virgin but her experience was limited to one encounter with an ex-boyfriend, which didn’t even last as long as the commercial break on the TV not muted opposite them. Since then, she spoke in a worldly and dismissive way about men and love-making, unable to admit that hers was a subjective observation based on one unpleasant event and not an objective wisdom that put all others in the shade. In truth, she wished simply to put off doing it again for as long as possible.)