here with books, quietly reading, each lost in a separate fiction, yet as intimate as if they had been holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes.
Now her legs were drawn up on the chair, and she was turned slightly to her left, sans book. She sat quite still, in a languid attitude, which must have looked like the posture of serenity, when in fact she was not so much serene as emotionally exhausted.
In the other chair, Dusty tried to settle back in an assumption of calm consideration and analysis, but he slid repeatedly to the edge of his seat.
Occasionally halted by embarrassment, more often silenced because she couldn’t help pausing to marvel at the weird details of her own demented behavior, Martie recounted her ordeal in short installments, resuming her story when Dusty gently encouraged her with questions.
The very sight of Dusty calmed her and gave her hope, but Martie sometimes could not meet his eyes. She gazed into the cold fireplace as if hypnotic flames licked the ceramic logs.
Surprisingly, the decorative set of brass fireplace tools didn’t alarm her. A small shovel. Pointed tongs. A poker. Only a short while ago, the sight of the poker alone would have plucked arpeggios of terror from her harp- string nerves.
Embers of anxiety remained aglow in her, but right now she was more afraid of another crippling panic attack than of her potential to do violence.
Although she recounted the attack in all its gaudy detail, she couldn’t convey how it
From time to time, Dusty noisily rattled the ice in his Scotch to get her attention. When she looked at him, he raised his drink, reminding her to sample her serving. She’d been reluctant to accept the Scotch, fearful of losing control of herself again. Ounce by ounce, however, Johnny Walker Red Label was proving to be effective therapy.
Good Valet lay by her chair, rising now and then to rest his chin on her bent legs, submitting to a smoothing hand on his head, commiseration in his soulful eyes.
Twice she gave the dog small cubes of ice from her drink. He crunched them with a strangely solemn pleasure.
When Martie finished her account, Dusty said, “What now?”
“Dr. Closterman, in the morning. I made an appointment today, coming back from Susan’s, even before things got really bad for me.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“I want a full physical. Complete blood workup. A brain scan, in case maybe there’s a tumor.”
“There’s no tumor,” Dusty said with a conviction based solely on hope. “There’s nothing serious wrong with you.”
“There’s something.”
“No.” The thought of her being ill, perhaps terminal, caused Dusty such dread that he could not conceal it.
Martie treasured every line of anguish in his face, because more than all the love talk in the world, it revealed how much he cherished her.
“I’d accept a brain tumor,” she said.
“Accept?”
“If the alternative is mental illness. They can cut out the tumor, and there’s a chance of being what you were.”
“It’s not that, either,” he said, and the lines in his face grew deeper. “It’s not mental.”
“It’s something,” she insisted.
Sitting in bed, Susan ate pepperoni pizza and drank Merlot. This was the most delicious dinner she had ever known.
She was sufficiently perceptive and self-aware to realize that the ingredients of the simple meal had little or nothing to do with its special succulence and flavor. Sausage, cheese, and well-browned crust were not as tasty as the prospect of justice.
Freed from her peculiar spell of timidness and helplessness, she was in fact less hungry for justice than for a thick cold slice of vengeance. She had no illusions about her primitive capacity to take delight in retribution. After all, her teeth, like those of every human being, included four canines and four incisors, the better to rip and tear.
Remembering how she’d defended Eric to Martie, Susan bit off a mouthful of pizza and chewed it with fierce pleasure.
If she had developed agoraphobia as an insulating response to the pain of Eric’s adultery, then perhaps he deserved some payback for that. But if he were her phantom visitor, mercilessly screwing with her mind and her body, he was a far different man from the one she’d thought he’d been when she married him. Not a man at all, in fact, but a creature, a hateful thing. A serpent. With evidence, she would use the law to chop him, as a woodsman might use an ax on a rattlesnake.
As she ate, Susan studied the bedroom, seeking the best place in which to secrete the camcorder.
Martie sat at the kitchen table, watching as Dusty cleaned up the mess that she had made.
When he dragged the trash can off the porch, into the kitchen, the contents rattled and chimed like the tools in a knacker’s bag.
Martie held her second glass of Scotch with both hands as she raised it to her lips.
After closing the door, Dusty loaded the knives, forks, and other eating utensils into the dishwasher.
The sight of the sharp blades and pointed tines, the clink and steely scrape of them against one another, did not alarm Martie. Her throat thickened, however, and the warm Scotch trickled slowly down, as though melting through a clog in her esophagus.
Dusty returned the Chardonnay and Chablis to the refrigerator. Those bottles would still make effective bludgeons, lacerating scalp and cracking skull bone, but Martie’s mind was no longer acrawl with the temptation to heft them, swing them.
After he slid the emptied drawers into the cabinets and put away those items that didn’t need to be washed, Dusty said, “The stuff in the garage can wait till morning.”
She nodded but said nothing, in part because she didn’t trust herself to speak. Here at the scene of her bizarre seizure, memories of madness floated upon the air, like poisonous spores, and she half expected to be recontaminated by them, whereupon she might open her mouth only to hear herself spouting lunacies.
When Dusty suggested dinner, Martie pleaded no appetite, but he insisted she must eat.
In the refrigerator was a casserole with enough leftover lasagna for two. Dusty heated it in the microwave.
He cleaned and sliced some fresh mushrooms.
The knife looked harmless in his hands.
As Dusty sauteed the mushrooms with butter and diced onion, then stirred them into a pot with a package of sugar snap peas, Valet sat in front of the microwave, dreamy-eyed, deeply inhaling the aroma of cooking lasagna.
In light of what Martie had done here a short time ago, this cozy domesticity struck her as surreal. Like wandering across vast burning fields of sulfur and coming upon a doughnut shop in Hell.
When Dusty served dinner, Martie wondered if earlier she might have poisoned the leftover lasagna.
She couldn’t recall committing such treachery. But she still suspected that she suffered fugues: spasms of time during which she functioned as if conscious, though nothing stuck in her memory.
Certain that Dusty would eat the lasagna just to prove his trust in her, Martie restrained herself and didn’t caution him. To guard against the dismal prospect of surviving dinner alone, she overcame her lack of appetite to eat most of what he had put on her plate.
She refused a fork, however, and ate with a spoon.
