The Night In Question (15 page)

She frowned.

Red’s the perfect color for this. No offense, but white is the worst choice you could make.

But the house is white.

Exactly
, Gilbert said. So are the houses next door. You put a white fence here, what you end up with is complete boredom. It’s like being in a hospital, you know what I mean?

I don’t know. I guess it is a lot of white.

What the red will do, the red will give some contrast and pick up the bricks in the walk. It’s just what you want here.

Well, maybe. The thing is, I don’t think I should. Not this time. Next time, maybe, if my dad wants to.

Look, Mary Ann. What your dad wants is for you to use your own head.

Mary Ann squinted at the fence.

You have to trust me on this, okay?

She sucked in her lower lip, then nodded. Okay. If you’re sure.

Gilbert dipped his brush. The world’s bland enough already, right? Everyone’s always talking about the banality of evil—what about the evil of banality?

They painted through the morning and into the afternoon. Every now and then Mary Ann would back off a few steps and take in what they’d done. At first she kept her
thoughts to herself. The more they painted, the more she had to say. Toward the end she went out into the street and stood there with her hands on her hips. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Really different. I see what you mean about picking up the bricks. It’s pretty red, though.

It’s perfect.

Think my dad’ll like it?

Your dad? He’ll be crazy about it.

Think so? Gilbert? Really?

Wait till you see his face.

I
t began while she was at work. At the first pang her breath caught and her eyes went wide open. Then it subsided, leaving a faint pressure at the back of her neck. Joyce put her hands on either side of the keyboard and waited. From the cubicles around her she heard the steady click of other keyboards. She knew what was happening to her, knew so well that when the next wave came she felt it not as pain but as dread for what was still to come. Joyce closed down the terminal, then gathered the lab reports and put them in a folder.

She stopped in the doorway of her supervisor’s office to say that she was leaving early. Her supervisor made a sympathetic face and offered to call a cab if Joyce didn’t feel up to the drive; she could pay for it out of petty cash. “That’s what it’s there for,” she said.

“I’ll manage,” Joyce told her. She added: “You don’t have to whisper.”

Joyce did not drive home. Instead she called a taxi from the lobby of the building, as she had intended to do all along. Her supervisor might think that she was giving the money freely, but it wouldn’t work out that way.
Whatever people gave you from their overflowing hearts they remembered, and expected you to remember, forever. In Joyce’s experience there was no such thing as petty cash.

When she got home she found two cardboard boxes in the living room, filled with her roommate’s few belongings. Joyce and Dina had quarreled again, and now Dina was taking the final step in their agreement that she should move out. Joyce looked at the boxes. She considered searching through them, then rejected the idea as beneath her. It was the kind of thing she used to do but had taught herself, with difficulty, to stop doing. She closed her eyes for a moment, swaying slightly from side to side, then crossed the room and turned the television on. A screaming host in a yellow blazer was trying to make himself heard over the delirium of his audience as a big clock ticked away the seconds. Joyce turned the volume off and went into the kitchen to boil some water for tea.

The newspaper was strewn over the countertop, its edges fluttering in the breeze. Dina had left the window open again. Though Joyce kept after her, she refused to take ordinary precautions and shrugged off her carelessness as the unimportant, even lovable consequence of being a free spirit with no material hangups. But Joyce saw through her; she understood that by playing this part Dina had forced the opposite role on her, that of the grasping neurotic. Joyce caught herself acting like this sometimes. But not anymore. All that was over now.

Joyce started the water and went to the window. She rested her elbows on the sill and held her face in her hands, kneading her temples with her fingertips. She pressed harder and harder as the pulse quickened. At the worst moment she went suddenly deaf, as if someone had pushed her head underwater. Then it passed. Joyce heard her own
ragged breathing. She heard the scrabble of pigeons’ feet on the tile roof and children’s voices from the playground of a nearby school, a jackhammer far enough away that its sound was bearable, even companionable, like the distant sound of marching bands in the college town where she had grown up.

Joyce let the breeze cool the sweat from her face. Then she closed the window and began to fill her brewing spoon with chamomile, tilia, and spearmint.

Joyce’s eyes were scratchy. Her skin felt damp, and her blouse clung coldly where it had soaked through. She carried the tea to her bedroom and left it steeping on the nightstand while she undressed and sat on the edge of her bed. The room was a mess. Clothes everywhere, hanging from hooks and knobs and bunched on the floor. Newspapers. Suitcases still packed for a visit to Dina’s parents, which they’d never made because Joyce got sick. She bent to pick up a shoe, then dropped it and rocked forward onto her feet. She wrapped herself in a terry bathrobe and went to the living room, where, propped up on the sofa, she sipped her tea and watched the silent television.

The tea helped. Not much, really, but it gave Joyce the only influence she had over what was happening to her. Except for Dina’s massages, nothing else worked at all. Joyce had taken medicinal baths. She’d gotten drunk and she’d gotten stoned. She had tried every remedy she’d ever heard of, barring the obviously useless ones like breathing through a scuba diver’s tank. That suggestion appeared in a newsletter Dina had forced her to subscribe to until Joyce decided that reading about the problem all the time was making it worse instead of better. Also she despised the self-pitying tone of the newsletter, and its spurious implication that readers were not alone in their suffering.

Because they were alone. In fact everyone was alone all
the time, but when you got sick you knew it, and that was a lot of what suffering was—knowing.

Joyce drank off the last of her tea. She set the mug down on the floor and stared at Dina’s boxes. Almadén: Dina must have brought them from the liquor store. The tops were open. A white mohair sweater lay on top of one box, a jumble of bottles and tubes on top of the other. Joyce leaned back. Even with her eyes closed she could sense the flickering of the television as the camera jumped from host to contestants, contestants to host. The apartment was profoundly quiet.

It was good to be alone. Really alone, without other people around to let you imagine that your life had mingled with theirs. That never was true. Even together, people were as solitary as cows in a field chewing their own cud.

You couldn’t enter the life of another person even when you wanted to. Back in August Joyce and Dina had a friend over for dinner, and in the course of the evening she told a story about a couple they all knew who’d recently been injured in a peculiar accident. A waterbed with a fat guy on it had crashed through their ceiling while they were watching TV and landed right on top of them. It was a miracle they weren’t killed—not that this view of the episode would comfort them much, considering the hurts they did end up with: a broken collarbone for one, a sprained neck and concussion for the other. Joyce and Dina shook their heads when their friend came to the end of this story. They looked down at their plates. Joyce managed to keep her jaw clenched until Dina began snorting, and then all three of them let go. They howled. They couldn’t stop. Joyce got so short of breath she had to push her chair back and lower her head between her knees.

And yet she had known these women. Their pain should have meant something to her. But even now, in pain
herself, she couldn’t feel theirs, or come any closer than thinking that she ought to feel it. And the same would be true if the waterbed had fallen on her and Dina instead of on them. Even if it had killed her they would have laughed, then afterward regretted their laughter as she had regretted hers. They’d have gone on about their business, remembering her less and less often, and always with a sudden helpless smile like the one she felt on her own lips right now.

The effects of the tea were wearing off. Joyce raised her head from the pillows and slowly sat up. She stared at the boxes again, then looked at the television. A man was smiling steadfastly while the woman next to him emptied a container of white goo over his head.

Joyce pushed herself up. She went to the kitchen and filled the kettle with fresh water, then leaned against the counter. The pulse was getting stronger again; each time it struck she dipped her head slightly, as if she were nodding off. She entered another period of deafness. When she came out of it the kettle-top was rattling; beads of water rolled down the sides, hissing against the burner. Joyce refilled the brewing spoon, poured water into her cup, and carried it back to the living room. She knelt between Dina’s boxes and began searching through the one with the sweater on top.

Beneath the sweater were some photographs that Dina had kept in her vanity mirror, stuck between the glass and the frame. A whole series of her brother and his family, the two daughters getting taller from picture to picture, their sweet round faces growing thin and wary. A formal portrait of Dina’s parents. Several snapshots of Joyce. Joyce glanced through these pictures and put them aside. She sat back on her heels. She drew a deep, purposeful breath and held her head erect, the very picture of a woman who has just managed to get the better of herself after a moment’s weakness. The refrigerator motor kicked on. Joyce could hear bottles
tinkling against each other. Joyce took another breath, then leaned forward again and continued to unpack the box.

Clothes. Shoes. A blow-dryer. Finally, at the bottom, Dina’s books:
Chariots of the Gods, The Inner Game of Tennis, Many Mansions, In Search of Bigfoot, The No-Sweat Workout
, and
The Bhagavad-Gita
. Joyce opened
In Search of Bigfoot
and flipped through the illustrations. These included a voice-graph taken from a hidden microphone, the plaster cast of a large foot with surprisingly thin, fingerlike toes, and a blurry picture of the monster itself walking across a clearing with its arms swinging casually at its sides. Joyce repacked the box. No wonder her brain was eroding. Dina had so much junk in her head that just having a conversation with her was like being sandblasted.

Once Dina moved out, Joyce was going to get her mind back in shape. She had a list of books she intended to read. She was going to keep a journal and take some night classes in philosophy. Joyce had done well in her philosophy survey course back in college, so well that when her professor returned the final paper he attached a note of thanks to Joyce for helping to make the class such a pleasure to teach.

Not that Joyce thought of becoming a professional philosopher. But she felt alive when she talked about ideas, and she still remembered the calm certainty with which her professor stalked the beliefs of his students down to their origins in superstition and hearsay and mere emotion. He was famous for making people cry. Joyce became adept at this kind of argument herself. She had moments of the purest clarity when she could feel herself striking closer and closer to the truth, while observing with amused detachment the panic of some classmate in danger of forfeiting an illusion. Joyce had not felt so clear about anything since, because she had been involved with other people, and other people muddied the water. What with their
needs and their demands and their feelings, their almighty anxieties to be tended to eight or nine times a day, you ended up telling so many lies that in time you forgot what the truth sounded like. But Joyce wasn’t that far gone—not yet. Alone, she could begin to read again, to think, to see things as they were. Alone, she could be as cold and hard as the truth demanded. No more false cheer. No pretense of intimacy. No lies.

Another thing. No more TV. Joyce had bought it only as a way of keeping Dina quiet, but that would no longer be necessary. She picked up the remote control, watched the rest of a commercial for pickup trucks, then turned the set off. The blank screen made her uncomfortable. Jumpy, almost as if it were watching her. Joyce put the remote control back on the coffee table and began to unpack the other box.

Halfway down, between two towels, she found what she was looking for. A pair of scissors, fine German scissors that belonged to her. Joyce hadn’t known she was looking for them, but when her fingers touched the blades she almost laughed out loud. Dina had taken her scissors. Deliberately. There was no chance of a mistake, because these scissors were unique. They had cunning brass handles that formed the outline of a duck’s head when closed, and the blades were engraved with German words that meant “For my dear Karin from her loving father.” Joyce had found the scissors at an antique store on Post Street, and from the moment she brought them home Dina had been fascinated by them. She borrowed them so often that Joyce suspected her of inventing work just to have an excuse to use them. And now she’d stolen them.

Joyce held the scissors above the box and snicked them open and shut several times. Wasn’t this an eye-opener, though. Little Miss Free Spirit, Miss Unencumbered by Worldly Goods would rather steal than live without a pair of scissors. She was a thief—a hypocrite and a thief.

Joyce put the scissors down beside the remote control. She pushed the heel of her hand hard against her forehead. For the first time that day she felt tired. With luck she might even be able to sleep for a while.

Joyce slid the scissors back between the towels and repacked the box. Dina could have them. There was no point in saying anything to her—she’d only feign surprise and say it was an accident—and no way for Joyce to mention the scissors without revealing that she had searched the boxes. Dina could keep the damn things, and as time went by it would begin to dawn on her, so many months, so many years later, that Joyce must know she’d stolen them; but still Joyce would not mention them, not in her Christmas cards or the friendly calls she’d make on Dina’s birthday or the postcards she’d send from the various countries she planned to visit. In the end Dina would know that Joyce had pardoned her and made a gift of the scissors, and then, for the first time, she would begin to understand the kind of person Joyce really was, and how wrong she had been about her—how blind and unfeeling. At last she would know what she had lost.