'Huh?'
'Who's Millie? You talked about last.' She laughed. 'Tell Millie not to buy until the divorce comes through. It's going to get very messy.—
He laughed too. 'Sounds like I was trading,' he said. He worked the floor of the Stock Exchange. He guessed he was dreaming about that.
Though he had no idea what a divorce would have to do with it. And he didn't know any Millie.
Annie shook her head. 'You're really something,' she said. 'It was mostly as clear as a bell. 'Tell Millie not to buy.''
'Hope she took my advice,' he said.
Some nights it was funny and some nights — when Annie needed her sleep and he'd wake her shouting 'Mail it!' — it was annoying. But nothing more than that.
What was really annoying was the snoring.
The first time she elbowed him in bed he was mortified.
'You were snoring,' she said.
'I was not.'
He glanced at himself in the mirror. His eyes looked puffy, saggy. Usually he got up feeling pretty good.
'I was not.'
He couldn't believe it — wouldn't believe it. Snoring was something old people do. It was impossible. He was forty.
His father had snored and you could hear it through every room in the house. There was nothing at all funny about that. It was repulsive. It was so…
…out of control.
If there was one thing Bill Dumont couldn't stand it was lack of control. That was exactly why he'd left Laura — and his son Philip too for that matter. Without looking back, without a twinge of guilt.
They hadn't the foggiest notion of control.
Laura, chronically late, forgetting appointments, forgetting to put gas in the car for godsakes, scattered.
Philip constantly losing things at school — his lunchbox, his gloves, his new down jacket. So what if he was only five years old? That's what Laura kept telling him: 'Bill, he's only five!' So what? Did that mean you automatically had to yell for a glass of milk every time the Jets were on the five-yard line?
Everybody had excuses. Laura's mother had cancer. It was on her mind. Of course it was. He knew that. And Philip, according to the counselors at school, had a mild learning disability which he would eventually learn to cope with quite nicely. Eventually.
In his book none of that mattered. You either had control of things — of yourself — or you didn't.
He'd stood it for five years. Then he dumped them. Three months later he found Annie sitting on a barstool in the Allstate. You could do that if you were in control. Make your life over on a dime.
He was living proof.
That was two months ago now and he'd managed to talk Annie into moving in with him and everything was fine.
But now this…
…indignity.
Snoring.
He tried everything. Sleeping on his back. On his left side, on his right, on his belly.
Finally Annie bought earplugs too.
And every morning he'd wake up angry. Because he knew what he'd done the night before. There were nights he even woke himself — it was that loud.
Snoring. Like an old man. Like an old sick man who was failing, losing control. He was starting to look lousy mornings too. Tired. Slack. There was too much hair coming out on his comb.
It didn't work out that way exactly.
Next he woke on the street in front of his apartment in pyjamas and a raincoat, and he was kicking some old man's poodle and the poodle was trying to bite him through the pyjama bottoms and doing a pretty good job of it and the old man was shouting.
He went to work with a tic in his upper lip that just wouldn't quit. His eyes red-rimmed and swollen.
And next morning woke up with his hands around Annie's throat.
Squeezing.
It was a bright sunny morning, breeze wafting through his twenty-third-floor window, everything perfectly normal except that he was on top of her, choking her, so far into it she was already way beyond screaming. His eyes flashed open and he felt her fingernails claw his cheek, looked down into a face already turning blue with the tongue like brown meat, protruding like a fat, wriggling slug and heard himself bellowing, roaring, glanced up into the dresser mirror across from their bed and saw another face that was not any face he knew exactly red-eyed and gloating over her, gloating over his kill-to-be.
Then the phone rang.
He let go.
And for a moment just stared down at her shocked disbelieving eyes while she tried to fill her lungs again, her right hand fluttering to the deep red imprints on her neck.
He rolled off and answered it.
His voice sounded thick, strange, bubbling up through a film of mucus.
'Hello?'
'It's final,' said Laura, icy calm on the other end. 'As of Friday. They'll be serving you the papers. You're a free man. I just wanted you to know.'
'How much.'
'What?'
'What's it costing me?'
She sighed. 'You really are slime, you know that? Are you at all aware that you missed Philip's birthday three days ago?'
'How much.'
Click.
Well, he wasn't doing too well anyway.
But then neither was she.
She didn't know it yet but he'd taken out a $500,000 loan six months ago, a second mortgage on the house, neatly forging her name. Now that the divorce was final the house was hers. And according to New York State law so was half the debt. Collection time was going to break her and the kid completely. Surprise, surprise.
Annie was in the bathroom. He could hear the water running. He could hear her coughing. Deep. Lung- coughing.
He looked at himself in the mirror again. Same old face, all right — but there was something gone soft about it, a slight, almost imperceptible jowling effect at the edges of the chin, a puffiness to the cheeks. If you hadn't shaved it every morning for twenty-five years you'd never have noticed. But he did.
He didn't like it.
It scared him.
It had happened overnight.
By the time Annie came out of the bathroom in her robe and slippers he'd started to shake.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I don't know what the hell…'
'I'm packing,' said Annie.
'Come on.'
She turned on him, angry.
'Look, I don't know what that was about and I don't want to know. You could have killed me. You're crazy or
