He went into the living room and stood looking around. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his forearms lightly slicked with sweat. Now things could be admitted. How he had wanted to kill her when she called him a son of a bitch, her spittle spraying on his face. How he had wanted to kill her for making him feel old and scared and not able to keep on top of the situation any more. The letter had been something, but the letter hadn't been enough.
To his right, knickknacks stood on a series of glass shelves. He turned and gave the bottom shelf a sudden hard kick. It disintegrated. The frame tottered and then fell over, spraying glass, spraying little china figurines of cats and shepherds and all that happy bourgeois horseshit. A pulse throbbed in the center of his forehead. He was grimacing, unaware of the fact. He walked carefully over the unbroken figurines, crushing them into powder. He pulled a family portrait from the wall, looked curiously at the smiling face of Vic Trenton for a moment (Tad was sitting on his lap, and his arm was around Donna's waist), and then he dropped the picture to the floor and stamped down hard on the glass.
He looked around, breathing hard, as if he had just run a race. And suddenly he went after the room as if it were something alive, something that had hurt him badly and needed to be punished, as if it were the room that had caused his pain. He pushed over Vic's La-Z-Boy recliner. He upended the couch. It stood on end for a moment, rocking uneasily, and then went down with a crash, breaking the back of the coffee table which had stood in front of it*. He pulled all the books out of the bookcases, cursing the shitty taste of the people who had bought them under his breath as he did it. He picked up the magazine stand and threw it overhand at the mirror over the mantelpiece, shattering it. Big pieces of blackbacked mirror fell onto the floor like chunks of a jigsaw puzzle. He was snorting now, like a bull in heat. His thin cheeks were almost purple with color.
He went into the kitchen by way of the small dining room. As he walked past the dining-room table Donna's parents had bought them as a housewarming present, he extended his arm straight out and swept everything off onto the floor - the lazy Susan with its complement of spices, the cut-glass vase Donna had gotten for a dollar and a quarter at the Emporium Galorium in Bridgton the summer previous, Vic's graduation beer stein. The ceramic salt and pepper shakers shattered like bombs. His erection was back now, raging. Thoughts of caution, of possible discovery, had departed his mind. He was somewhere inside. He was down a dark hole. In the kitchen he yanked the bottom drawer of the stove out to its stop and threw pots and pans everywhere. They made a dreadful clatter, but there was no satisfaction in mere clatter. A rank of cupboards ran around three of the room's four sides. He pulled them open one after the other. He grabbed plates by the double handful and threw them on the floor. Crockery jingled musically. He swept the glasses out and grunted as they broke. Among them was a set of eight delicate long- stemmed wine glasses that Donna had had since she was twelve years old. She had read about 'hope chests' in some magazine or other and had determined to have such a chest of her own. As it turned out, the wine glasses were the only thing she had actually put in hers before losing interest (her original grand intention had been to lay by enough to completely furnish her bridal house or flat), but she had had them for more than half her life, and they were treasured.
The gravy boat went. The big serving platter. The Sears radioltape player went on the floor with a heavy crunch. Steve Kemp danced on it; he boogied on it. His penis, hard as stone, throbbed inside his pants. The vein in the center of his forehead throbbed in counterpoint. He discovered booze under the small chromium sink in the corner. He yanked out half- and three-quarters-full bottles by the armload and then flung them at the closed door of the kitchen closet one by one, throwing them overhand as hard as he could; the next day his right arm would be so stiff and sore he would barely be able to lift it to shoulder level. Soon the blue closet door was running with Gilbey's Pi, jack Daniel's, J & B whisky, sticky green creme de menthe, the amaretto that had been a Christmas present from Roger and Althea Breakstone. Glass twinkled benignly in the hot afternoon sunlight pouring through the windows over the sink.
Steve tore into the laundry room, where he found boxes of bleach, Spic 'n Span, Downy fabric softener in a large blue plastic bottle, Lestoil, Top job, and three kinds of powdered detergent. He ran back and forth pouring these cleaning potions everywhere. He had just emptied the last carton - when he saw the message scrawled on the noteminder in Donna's unmistakable spiky handwriting: Tad & I
That brought him back to the realities of the situation with a bang. He had already been here half an hour at least, maybe longer. The time had passed in a red blur, and it was hard to peg it any more closely than that. How Iong had she been gone when he came in? Who had the note been Ieft for?
Anybody who might pop in, or someone specific? He had to get out of here ... but there was one other thing he had to do first.
He erased the message on the noteminder with one swipe of his sleeve and wrote in large block letters:
He took the stairs two by two and came into their bedroom, which was to the left of the second-floor landing. He felt terribly pressed now, almost positive that the doorbell was going to ring or someone - another happy housewife, most likely - would poke her head in the back door and call (as he had), Hi! Anybody home?'
But, perversely, that added the final spice of excitement to this mad happening. He unbuckled his belt, jerked his fly down, and let his jeans drop down around his knees. He wasn't wearing underpants; he rarely did. His cock stood out stiffly from a mass of reddish-gold pubic hair. It didn't take long; he was too excited. Two or three quick jerks through his closed fist and orgasm came, immediate and savage. He spat semen onto the bedspread in a convulsion.
He yanked his jeans back up, raked the zipper closed (almost catching the head of his penis in the zipper's small teeth - that would have been a laugh, all right), and ran or the door, buckling his belt again. He would meet someone as he was going out. Yes. He felt positive of it, as if it were preordained. Some happy housewife who would take one look at his flushed face, his bulging eyes, his tented jeans, and scream her head off.
He tried to prepare himself for it as he opened the back door and went out. In retrospect it seemed that he had made enough noise to wake the dead ... those pans! Why had he thrown those fucking pans around? What had he been thinking of? Everyone in the neighborhood must have heard.
But there was no one in the yard or in the driveway. The peace of the afternoon was undisturbed. Across the street, a lawn sprinkler twirled unconcernedly. A kid went by on roller skates. Straight ahead was a high hedge which separated the Trentons' house lot from the next one over. Looking to the left from the back stoop was a view of the town nestled at the bottom of the hill. Steve could see the intersection of Route 117 and High Street quite dearly, the Town Common nestled in one of the angles made by the crossing of the two roads. He stood there on the stoop, trying to get his shit back together. His breath slowed a little at a time back into a more normal inhale- exhale pattern. He found a pleasant afternoon face and put it on. All this happened in the length of time it took for the traffic light on the corner to cycle from red to amber to green and back to red again.
That got him going again. He'd left his calling card; he didn't need any hassle from her on top of it. There was no way she could do a thing anyway, unless she called the cops, and he didn't think she'd do that. There were too many things he could tell: The Sex Life of the Great American Happy Housewife in Its Natural Habitat. It had been a crazy scene, though. Best to put miles between himself and CastIe Rock. Maybe later he would give her a call. Ask her how she had liked his work. That might be sort of fun.
He walked down the driveway, turned left, and went back to his van. He wasn't stopped. Nobody took any undue
