“Let me do the talking,” Jay said. He smiled at her, but she thought he looked different, as though his face was broader than she had noticed before, and his face was moist with perspiration. She put on her robe and followed him downstairs. When he opened the door, two policemen stood there. Linda saw behind them another policeman and also a policewoman and, in the driveway, the two white police cars. The policemen were very polite. “Can you show us where the guestroom is? Where you had the guest Yvonne Tuttle staying?”
Jay said, “Of course. Linda, take them down.”
Linda’s mouth was extremely dry as she turned to go down the ramp to the guest area. The bedroom was in darkness, and as Linda started to enter, her hand reaching for the light switch, the policewoman stopped her, saying, “No, please leave everything.” And the policeman said, “Mrs. Peterson, why don’t you go back upstairs now?”
Linda turned quickly, calling out for Jay.
Jay was shaking his head slowly as the policemen stood in the kitchen with their arms at their sides. “We thought she seemed odd from the very beginning, but I’m sure you understand I don’t care to discuss any more of this without speaking to my lawyer. I’m represented by Norm Atwood, and you know what he’ll say. This is outlandish, entirely ridiculous. I don’t imagine the county looks forward to a lawsuit from me.”
One of the policemen said, “Why don’t you ask him to meet us at the station?”
“Honestly.” Jay smiled. “I know you folks pride yourselves on being meticulous, but this is just outrageous.”
“Where’s Yvonne?” Linda suddenly asked, as the men were gathering by the door.
“She’s at the county hospital, ma’am,” said one of the policemen.
“She says I tried to rape her,” Jay added.
“Yvonne? She did? But that’s insane,” Linda said.
“Of course it’s insane,” Jay said calmly. “Honey, I’ll be back soon.”
The policewoman stayed behind with one of the policemen. Linda said, “What are you doing?”
“Have a seat, Mrs. Peterson. We’d like to ask you a few questions.” They were very polite. They asked about Yvonne. What was she like?
“Oh, horrible!” Linda said.
In what way?
“She was rude to us, never spending time with us.” Linda suddenly remembered about the pajamas and blurted that out too. “She accused me of—of stealing her pajamas.” The policewoman nodded sympathetically while the policeman wrote something down.
“And was she rude to your husband as well?”
Too late, Linda realized that she should have said nothing. They were very nice to her when she said she was not going to talk to them anymore. They explained that a search warrant was being obtained for the guestroom, that evidence might be taken, possibly the sheets, pillowcases, things like that.
The next morning, Jay slept heavily in their bedroom. Toward dawn, Norm Atwood had brought him home. Jay had been charged with third-degree battery and released on bond. Norm explained that Jay had most likely been charged because Yvonne was in such a condition of hysteria, running down the road at three A.M. in underpants and a T-shirt, then knocking on a door in town, and that there was a small bruise on her wrist that could conceivably indicate a struggle. Norm said the state would still have difficulty proving it was not an encounter of consent, that it was always hard to prove, with no witnesses, the matter of consent. Now Linda sat motionless in the back garden beside the glaring blue swimming pool. In her pocket her cellphone rang, and she clicked it on.
Her daughter said, “Fuck you, Mom. Just fuck you both. I’m never coming home again.”
Linda rose and went inside to the living room and sat on the far end of the couch. She felt a little bit out-of-body because she had a sensation of being young again, walking down a road on an early summer evening with school girl friends past fields and fields of corn and fields of soybeans, the whole world filled with the bright green of new life, the sun setting so that the entire sky was colored in glorious celebration, the air on her bare arms she recalled too, all freedom, all innocence, the laughter—
Norm Atwood had arranged an appointment for her in the afternoon to drive to Layton to see her own lawyer: She had marital privilege, he explained—she didn’t have to testify against Jay about anything he had told her. But anything she had seen she would be put on the stand to report under oath. Linda tried to understand this as she sat on the couch, but she felt that all parts of her had stopped; she was in neutral. She looked about her. The Hopper painting hung on the wall with an indifference so vast it began to feel personal, as though it had been painted for this moment: Your troubles are huge and meaningless, it seemed to say, there is only the sun on the side of a house. She got up and moved into the dining room, sitting at the long table. A few years earlier, her daughter had found something on her father’s computer, and the girl had screamed and screamed and screamed. Dad screws women right in the house, and you do nothing? You’re more pathetic than he is, Mom, you make me sick.
It had started as a private game, a way of breaking domestic boredom, creating a Linda Peterson-Cornell that seemed daring, provocative, a person her husband appreciated more.
While Linda was growing up in northern Illinois, her father had managed a successful feed corn farm. Her mother, a homemaker, had been a scattered woman, but kind; their last name was Nicely, and Linda and her two sisters were known as the Pretty Nicely Girls. It was a pleasant childhood, and then her mother suddenly, so suddenly it seemed to Linda to happen while she was at school one day, moved out and into a squalid little apartment, and it was the most terrible thing Linda could imagine, worse than if her mother had died. After a few months her mother wanted to return home, but Linda’s father refused to allow it, and the image of her mother living alone in a tiny house—after the squalid apartment—and having given up her friends, all of whom reacted with fear as though her mother’s attempts at freedom might be contagious, terminal, along with the estrangement of her daughters, because their father pulled their loyalty to him; all this was—by far—the strongest event in Linda’s life. The week after Linda graduated from high school she married a local boy named Bill Peterson, then she divorced him one year later, keeping his name. In college in Wisconsin she met Jay, who with his intelligence and vast money seemed to offer a life that might catapult her away from the terrifying and abiding image of her mother alone and ostracized.
—
Now, as Linda sat at the end of the dining room table, the doorbell rang, though at first she wasn’t sure she had heard right. It rang again. She peeked through the curtains and did not see anyone, so she opened the door cautiously and it was skinny Joy Gunterson, saying, “Linda, I just had to come over.”
Linda said, “No you didn’t, no you did not. You have nothing in common with me, do you hear? You have nothing in common with me. Go away.”
“Oh, Linda. But I do—”
“I’m not going to end up living in some trailer, Joy.” It amazed her that she said this, no part of her had any inkling she would say that. It seemed to amaze Joy too. The woman, shorter than Linda, had a look of confusion shift onto her face.
Probably this mutual surprise prevented Linda from closing the door. So Joy had time to shake her head and say, “Oh, but, Linda—see, it doesn’t matter where you live. That’s what you find out. When the person you love more than anyone spends his days in a cell, then you’re in a cell too. It doesn’t matter where you are. You’ll find out who’re your real friends. They won’t be who you think. Trust me on that.”
Linda closed the door and locked it.
She went to the door of Jay’s bedroom, but he was still fast asleep and snoring, lying flat on his back. Without glasses his face seemed naked; she had not seen him sleeping for some time. She closed the door and went back downstairs. She did not know what she would say to this lawyer. Norm had said it also depended on whether or not Yvonne continued to want to press charges. A lot depended
on Yvonne.
Linda walked around the house quietly. She understood that her mind was trying to take in something it could not take in. She thought of Karen-Lucie Toth, who must be with Yvonne right now; the police had come to collect Yvonne’s things and return them to her. Linda had not asked where Yvonne was. In the kitchen sink were two white mugs with coffee stains; Linda couldn’t say who had been drinking coffee, how they’d got into the sink. As she washed them, her legs almost gave way. She pictured jurors sitting in a jury box. She pictured Yvonne, with her too much makeup, on the stand. And then she thought of the cameras; why in the world had she not thought of the cameras? Did you, or did you not, watch women with your husband while they undressed, showered, used the toilet? How long had you been aware that your husband was watching them this way?
Driving toward Layton, Linda stopped at a gas station a few miles outside of town. She felt horribly exposed and so did not pull in to the self-serve dock, but instead had a man fill up her tank. But then she suddenly had to use the bathroom. With her sunglasses on she went into the store, past the rows of cellophane-wrapped doughnuts and cakes and peanuts and candy. The filth of the bathroom appalled her. She could not remember the last time she had used a public restroom this filthy, and she thought: Why should it matter when now nothing matters? Her mind was scrambled like that, so when she walked back through the store and bumped straight into Karen-Lucie Toth they stared at each other with amazement. Karen-Lucie was also wearing sunglasses; she removed them, and her eyes, to Linda, seemed older than Linda would have thought, and sad, and still pretty.
“You scared me,” Linda said.
“Well. You scared me too.”
They moved together down the aisle away from the foot traffic. Tall Karen-Lucie spoke down. “Ma’am, as God’s truth, after my own tragedy a few years back, I feel sometimes that I have compassion for everyone. I do. It’s probably the only blessing that came from that. But your husband scared my friend, he scared her bad.”
“Where is she?”
“I just took her to the airport. She needs to get home and see a proper doctor.”
“Listen,” Linda said. “I have no idea about any of it.”
Karen-Lucie’s pretty eyes got small. “No, now you listen to me. Don’t you go pissing down my back and then tell me it’s raining outside. You have to know somethin’ about your husband, and if Yvie takes this to trial, and I hope to hell she will, you’ll be called to testify, and it is your duty—”
“I don’t know anything about my husband,” Linda said coldly. Through her sunglasses she watched Karen-Lucie look out the window as though looking far into the distance; Linda saw the pretty eyes redden.
Karen-Lucie nodded slowly. Quietly she said, “Oh, child, of course. I am so sorry.” She turned her gaze toward Linda, though her focus still seemed far away. “I am in no position to tell anyone how they ought to be cognizant and aware of what their husband is up to. I have thrown stones in a glass house, and I am sorry.”
—
Almost always it’s a surprise, the passing of permission to enter a place once seen as eternally closed. And this is how it was for a stunned Linda, who stood that day in that convenience store with the sun falling over packages of corn chips and heard those words of compassion—undeserved, for if Karen-Lucie had not known her husband’s state of mind, Linda knew her own husband’s state of mind too well—and sensed in them what would turn out to be true: that Yvonne Tuttle and Karen-Lucie would never return to town, there would be no trial, no mention of cameras, and Linda would live with her husband in a state of freedom, because he would always know, as they watched the news at night, took walks through the countryside, or sat in a restaurant and chatted, that his exemption from trouble was possibly or partly the result of his wife’s discretion, and there would be no more women after that, the guestroom perhaps a sunny study neither would enter, a photograph of Karen-Lucie’s cracked plates on the wall.
The essence of this Linda felt that day. She removed her sunglasses to stare into the eyes of this woman; she wanted to reach for her hand. She even wanted—with a sudden surprising urgency—to caress her cheek, as though Karen-Lucie were the Pretty Nicely Girl who had suffered the blow from behind, who had come home from school and found her mother gone, thinking she had been important, loved all along.
The Hit-Thumb Theory
Waiting for her to arrive, Charlie Macauley watched from the window as twilight began to gather. Along the top of the soot-darkened wall of the parking area, barbed wire lay coiled, as though even the littered and unlovely motel lot posed such threat—or value—that it was immediately at war with the rest of the world. For Charlie, this seemed to prove the futility of the dreams presented in the department store windows he had walked by earlier, in this town they had found together, half an hour outside of Peoria: You could buy a snow blower or a nice wool dress for your wife, but beneath it all people were rats scurrying off to find garbage to eat, another rat to hump, making a nest in broken bricks, and soiling it so sourly that one’s contribution to the world was only more excrement.
But there to the left was the top of a maple tree, the branches holding forth two pinkly yellow leaves with apologetic gentleness, and how had they held on until November? Right behind it was the last of the day’s full light; generously, the colors from the setting sun sprayed upward over the open sky. Charlie put his large hand to the side of his face, remembering—why should this come to him now?—crouching on a small hillside, planting crocus bulbs with Marilyn in the same kind of autumn light. It had been their freshman year at the university. He remembered her eagerness: her eyes large with intent. He had known nothing about planting crocus bulbs, and these, she told him, short-breathed with excitement, would be her first. They had bought a trowel in town that afternoon, and walked up the small hill behind her dormitory to a patch of autumn grass next to the college woods. “Okay, here,” she said, really anxious. He had seen how serious this was for her, planting her first flowers at the age of eighteen, with him, her first love— He had been moved by her eagerness, bundled up as she was in her long woolen coat; they dug the holes, put the bulbs in. “Bye, bye, good luck,” she had said to one bulb. The very stuff that would make him roll his eyes now—her utter foolishness, the useless, nauseating softness that lay at the center of her—had thrilled him quietly that day with a rush of love and protectiveness as the autumn smell of earth filled him, kneeling there with the trowel. Dear, befuddled Marilyn, her face flushed with the excitement of the job done. “Do you think they’ll come up?” she had asked worriedly. The poor thing, always worried. He said they would. And they did. A few did. But he could not remember that part as well. He could only really remember what he had long forgotten until right now: a day of innocence in autumn when they were just kids.
Charlie closed the window blinds. The blinds were plastic slats, dirty with age, and they clicked into place unevenly as he tugged on the cord.
Panic, like a large minnow darting upstream, moved back and forth inside him. He was suddenly as homesick as a child sent to stay with relatives: when the furniture seemed large and dark and strange, and the smell peculiar, each detail assaultive with a differentness that was almost unbearable. I want to go home, he thought. And the desire seemed to squeeze the breath from him, because it was not his home in Carlisle, Illinois, where he lived with Marilyn that he wanted to go home to, his grandchildren right down the street. And it was not his childhood home either, which was in Carlisle as well. Nor was it their first home as newlyweds outside of Madison. He did not know what home it was he longed for, but it seemed to him as he aged that his homesickness would increase, and because he could not tolerate the Marilyn he now lived with—a woman who nevertheless filled his estranged, expatriated heart with pity—he did not know what he would do, and the minnow darting through the stream of his anxiety landed briefly on his current Carlisle home with his grandchildren down the street, swam to the golf course where he did still somet
imes enjoy the expanse of green before him, swam to the woman who might or might not show up here with her head of dark, glossy hair—and not one place seemed stable.
A soft knock came on his motel door.
“Hello, Charlie.” She smiled, her eyes warm, as she walked past him into the room.
He knew instantly. His instincts had been honed in youth and this ability had never left him, the one to detect disaster.
Still, a man needed his dignity. So he nodded, and said, “Tracy.”
She walked farther into the room, and when he saw that she had brought her overnight bag—and why would she not have, really?—he was pathetically and fleetingly gladdened, but then she sat on the bed and smiled at him again and he knew again.
“Take your coat?” he asked.
She shrugged her way out of it.
“Charlie,” she said.
He watched himself. A little bit, it was fascinating. He was an organism about to be dealt a blow, and he used his natural powers to defend himself. This meant that he observed carefully the pitted parts of her upper cheeks, the pores that were jagged shapes indicating an adolescence he already knew had been hard. He noted the scent on the coat that he held, how even in its faintness it was cloying and unsubtle, and he hung the piece of clothing on the back of the desk chair rather than in the closet next to his own. He observed the way her eyes would not look at him directly, and he thought that he hated dishonesty—or lack of courage—more than anything.
He moved as far away from her as the small room would allow, so that he stood leaning against the wall opposite.
Now she looked at him—with a sardonic, apologetic expression. “I need money,” she said. And she sighed deeply, putting her hand on the bedspread. The fingers each had a ring, including her thumb, and it was still surprising to him how his mind was trying to remind him—Charlie, for God’s sake, take note!—how repulsive so many parts of her should be to him and yet were not. The crap of class superiority would protect no man for long. Many lived whole lives and never knew this; Charlie did.