Wilderness

CHAPTER 7.

Newman woke in the morning uneasy and feeling guilt. As always after he'd been drinking he ran back in his mind to see if he'd done anything bad. He felt hot with embarrassment that he'd tried to swagger with Chris about being a bouncer in his pub.

The air conditioner was humming, Janet was still asleep, her back to him, her hair up, a blue scarf tied around it. There was an old maple tree in the front yard. Its trunk was four feet in diameter. The thick healthy green leaves moved gently against the sky outside the bedroom window. He felt the stab of fear as he thought of Adolph Karl.

Two cops had called him a psychopath. He'd talked with such conviction last night about killing him.

He slid under the covers over against Janet. His pelvis pressed against her buttocks. He put his left arm over her and put his hand on her breast. She was wearing a bra. Like armor, he thought. Always a bra, underpants, pj's, socks, no matter how hot it is. Must be security or something. Sometimes a fucking bathrobe. She rolled over onto her stomach away from his hand.

"I gather," he said, "you don't care for a little nooky?"

"Un-unh," she murmured, still half-asleep.

He rolled back over to his own side of the bed and lay on his back. His throat felt tight and again his eyes stung but no tears came. He thought of her as he had seen her on the bed the night before. Naked and helpless. Couldn't even spit. Desire buzzed in his stomach. He looked at her beside him. She was on her stomach, her face turned away. Except for the slight rise and fall of her back as she breathed she was inert. One of her hair rollers had come loose and was half hanging out from her blue scarf.

"You want me to kill some guy for you," he said.

She moved slightly, still asleep, and said, "Ummm."

He laughed without humor, or sound, and got up. He slept naked. In the bathroom mirror he looked at himself. He had the weight lifter's mass. Pectoral muscles, deltoids, triceps, all over-developed. But there was fat, too, a roll around his waist that thickened his whole body, flesh that softened and sagged his chest over the big pectoral muscles. His upper eyelids had sagged so that the top round of his eye was covered, and the flesh under his chin was loose so that if he tucked his chin back at all his neck disappeared.

He flexed at the mirror. He looked better when he flexed. What seemed soft was suddenly revealed as hard, what might have been fat was in fact shown to be muscle. Not bad for forty-six. If I could only drop twenty pounds I'd be splendid for forty-six.

In the shower he thought about Adolph Karl. But would it be right, he thought. Do I have the right to take the law into my own hands.

Christ" I sound like a comic strip. Who was that masked man anyway?

But do I? But if I don't, how can I stand being dishonored so? "I could not love thee half so much loved I not honor more." I wonder if Robert Lovelace was married. Was he just worrying about the ethics of it to avoid doing it? Was he simply scared?

He lathered his hair with apple-scented shampoo and let the hot water run over him rinsing the shampoo away. Let's look at the problem of scared. He tried to examine himself, to study his spiritual condition the way one might examine a painting. But his spiritual condition was evasive. It wouldn't stay in frame, it shifted. Like looking at an electron, he thought. The act of observation changes its behavior.

Yes. I'm scared, but is that why I'm hesitating on this thing? Chris wouldn't hesitate. Chris would go right to it. Ah, but I'm not Chris, nor was meant to be.

He shut off the water and stepped out of the shower. The world is out of joint. He toweled dry and went back upstairs to the bedroom to dress. He never used the upstairs bathroom. She used it to get dressed for work. A steamy shower would ruin her hair.

The bedroom was empty. She was in the bathroom getting ready for work.

He dressed and made the bed, tightening the sheets, making careful hospital corners, smoothing the quilt over the pillows. She never made the bed right, she simply rolled the quilt up over sheets and pillows so there was a sense of lumpiness under the quilt, and when you got in at night the sheets were wrinkly.

He had breakfast on the table when she came into the kitchen. As he heard her step on the back stairs he poured the coffee, and everything was ready when she sat down. There were melon slices arranged on a plate, and toasted oatmeal bread, and strawberry jam, and coffee.

Almost never did either of them eat the melon, but he liked the look of it on the table.

She'd spent more than an hour making up and getting her hair organized.

She wore a white muslin shirt with loose sleeves and a slotted neck, and high-wasted apricot colored pants with a draw waist and tapered legs over high heels. She smelled of perfume.

"Christ," he said, "aren't you beautiful." She said, "Thank you."

"You come to any conclusion about what we were saying last night?"

She looked at him over a triangle of toast. "Have you?"

"No."

"Why don't you talk with Chris?"

"How can he help?"

"He's decisive," she said, "and he seems to have some understanding of some male hang-up you may have, which I don't seem to."

"Like honor?"

She gestured with her toast and shrugged.

"Talk to him."

"You want it done, don't you? You want it done and you figure Chris will talk me into it."

"Whatever he did, Chris would do it and have it done," she said.

"Like that drunk last night, a couple of quiet words, the guy doesn't respond and vap in the kidneys and out the door. You like that?"

"I don't like uncertainty. I don't like having someone walking around who might, anytime, decide to degrade me or kill me. And I have no say in the matter."

"I won't let him touch you again."

"So how will you stop it. Follow me everywhere with a gun? Hire bodyguards? There's only one way to control this situation."

"So why don't you do it? You're the big fucking feminist. You want Karl shot why don't you shoot him?"

"While you're doing what? Lifting weights and looking at yourself in the mirror? Home baking a cake? I've never fired a gun in my life.

I'm tough but I'm not physically strong. You're big and strong. Aren't you?"

He felt trapped and confused. He swayed his head back and forth, staring at the tabletop. "Why don't you leave me the fuck alone," he said. His voice was thick and shaky.

"Why do you persist in seeing this as something I'm doing to you," she said. "Why do you want to see yourself attacked."

"Don't give me that encounter-group bullshit. Use your assertiveness jargon someplace else. I don't want to see myself attacked. You are pushing and pushing. You want something done you don't let up. You keep on and keep on. I'm not talking about it anymore. Now that's it.

You insensitive son of a bitch."

The lines at the corners of her eyes deepened and her perfectly made-up face darkened slightly. She looked at the kitchen clock.

"Jesus Christ," she said, "I'm late. Aaron, you've got to deal with this. We've got to be able to talk about it. I was involved in this problem myself. Remember?"

He brought his open hand down hard on the tabletop. Coffee spilled.

"I said I wouldn't talk about it. You want to keep grinding it into me? You want to keep reminding me what some guy did to my wife and I haven't lifted a finger?" He raised his hand again, clenched it into a fist, and brought it back down on the table, twisting his shoulder and neck as if he were trying to hammer a hole through the tabletop.

"I gotta go," Janet said. "I'm late. I gotta go. But I won't give up. We've got to talk about this."

Newman hit the table again. His wife picked up her briefcase and her book bag, tan with a green design, and her purse and went out the kitchen door to her car.