Stillwater, if he is to keep his lovely wife, Paige, and his daughters and his new destiny, which is slipping, slipping, slipping through his fingers, his one chance at happiness swiftly evaporating, because they are against him, all of them, the whole world, set against him, determined to keep him alone and confused. And why?
—with a shriek of rage, he slams his fist through the dark screen of the computer, striking out at his own fierce reflection almost as much as at the machine and all that it represents. The sound of shattering glass is loud in the silent house, and the vacuum inside the monitor pops simultaneously with a brief hiss of invading air.
He withdraws his hand from the ruins even as fragments of glass are still clinking onto the keyboard, and he stares at his bright blood. Sharp slivers bristle from the webs between his fingers and from a couple of knuckles. An elliptical shard is embedded in the meat of his palm.
Although he is still angry, he is gradually regaining control of himself. Violence sometimes soothes.
He swivels the chair away from the computer to face the opposite side of the U-shaped work area, where he leans forward to examine his wounds in the light of the stained-glass lamp. The glass thorns in his flesh sparkle like jewels.
He is experiencing only mild pain, and he knows it will soon pass. He is tough and resilient; he enjoys splendid recuperative powers.
Some of the fragments of the screen have not pierced his hand deeply, and he is able to pry them out with his fingernails. But others are firmly wedged in the flesh.
He pushes the chair away from the desk, gets to his feet, and heads for the master bathroom. He will need tweezers to extract the more stubborn splinters.
Although he bled freely at first, already the flow is subsiding. Nevertheless he holds his arm in the air, his hand straight up, so the blood will trickle down his wrist and under the sleeve of his shirt rather than drip on the carpet.
After he has plucked out the glass, perhaps he will telephone Paige at work again.
He was so excited when he found her office number on the Rolodex in his study, and he was thrilled to speak with her. She sounded intelligent, self-assured, gentle. Her voice had a slightly throaty timbre that he found sexy.
It will be a wonderful bonus if she is sexy. Tonight, they will share a bed. He will take her more than once. Recalling the face in the photograph and the husky voice on the phone, he is confident that she will satisfy his needs as they have never been satisfied before, that she will not leave him unfulfilled and frustrated as have so many other women.
He hopes she matches or exceeds his expectations. He hopes there will be no reason to hurt her.
In the master bathroom, he locates a pair of tweezers in the drawer where Paige keeps her makeup, cuticle scissors, nail files, emery boards, and other grooming aids.
At the sink, he holds his hand over the basin. Although he has already stopped bleeding, the flow starts again at each point from which he works loose a piece of glass. He turns on the hot water so the dripping blood will be sluiced down the drain.
Maybe tonight, after sex, he will talk with Paige about his writer’s block. If he has been blocked before, she might remember what steps he took on other occasions to break the creative impasse. Indeed, he is sure she will know the solution.
Pleasantly surprised and with a sense of relief, he realizes that he no longer has to deal with his problems alone. As a married man, he has a devoted partner with whom to share the many troubles of the day.
Raising his head, looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the sink, he grins and says, “I have a wife now.”
He notices a spot of blood on his right cheek, another on the side of his nose.
Laughing softly, he says, “You’re such a slob, Marty. You’ve got to clean up your act. You have a wife now. Wives like their husbands to be neat.”
He returns his attention to his hand and, with the tweezers, picks at the last of the prickling glass.
In an increasingly good mood, he laughs again and says, “Gonna have to go out and buy a new computer monitor first thing tomorrow.”
He shakes his head, amazed by his own childish behavior.
“You’re something else, Marty,” he says. “But I guess writers are
After easing the final splinter of glass from the web between two fingers, he puts down the tweezers and holds his wounded hand under the hot water.
“Can’t carry on like this anymore. Not anymore. You’ll scare the bejesus out of little Emily and Charlotte.”
He looks in the mirror again, shakes his head, grinning. “You nut,” he says to himself, as if speaking with affection to a friend whose foibles he finds charming. “What a nut.”
Life is good.
The leaden sky settled lower under its own weight. According to a radio report, rain would fall by dusk, ensuring rush-hour commuter jam-ups that would make Hell preferable to the San Diego Freeway.
Marty should have gone directly home from Guthridge’s office. He was close to finishing his current novel, and in the final throes of a story, he usually spent as much time as possible at work because distractions were ruinous to the narrative momentum.
Besides, he was uncharacteristically apprehensive about driving. When he thought back, he could account for the time minute by minute since he’d left the doctor and was sure he hadn’t called Paige while in a fugue behind the wheel of the Ford. Of course, a fugue victim had no memory of being afflicted, so even a meticulous reconstruction of the past hour might not reveal the truth. Researching
Nevertheless, instead of going home, he went to the Mission Viejo Mall. Much of the workday was already shot. And he was too restless to read or watch TV until Paige and the girls got home.
When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping, so he browsed for books and records, buying a novel by Ed McBain and a CD by Alan Jackson, hoping that such mundane activities would help him forget his troubles. He strolled past the cookie shop twice, coveting the big ones with chocolate chips and pecans but finding the will power to resist their allure.
The world is a better place, he thought, if you’re ignorant of good nutrition.
When he left the mall, sprinkles of cold rain were painting camouflage patterns on the concrete sidewalk. Lightning flashed as he ran for the Ford, caissons of thunder rolled across the embattled sky, and the sprinkles became heavy volleys just as he pulled the door shut and settled behind the steering wheel.
Driving home, Marty took considerable pleasure in the glimmer of rain-silvered streets, the burbling splash of the tires churning through deep puddles—and the sight of swaying palm fronds, which seemed to be combing the gray tresses of the stormy sky and which reminded him of certain Somerset Maugham stories and an old Bogart film. Because rain was an infrequent visitor to drought-stricken California, the benefit and novelty outweighed the inconvenience.
He parked in the garage and entered the house by the connecting door to the kitchen, enjoying the damp heaviness of the air and the scent of ozone that always accompanied the start of a storm.
In the shadowy kitchen, the luminous green display of the electronic clock on the stove read 4:10. Paige and the girls might be home in twenty minutes.
He switched on lamps and sconces as he moved from room to room. The house never felt homier than when it was warm and well lighted while rain drummed on the roof and the gray pall of a storm veiled the world beyond every window. He decided to start the gas-log fire in the family-room fireplace and to lay out all of the fixings for hot chocolate so it could be made immediately after Paige and the girls arrived.
