came to the balcony door – now, although it was a Saturday, the traffic had begun again thickening and slowing in the westbound lanes. He hoped that Boggs hadn’t come and gone.
‘I was a little afraid you’d send me away,’ Heather said. She laughed. Without leaving the bed she was pulling on clothes.
‘That’s why you didn’t you tell me you were coming?’ he asked. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
‘Everyone loves a surprise?’ she said.
He laughed. ‘I don’t care.’
She went into the bathroom, and he heard the water running. He opened the balcony door and stepped out. A couple of crows hopped in the grass between the highway and the motel. He heard her emerge from the bathroom. ‘Is John out there?’ she called.
‘Nope.’
A few seconds passed. ‘Hey,’ she said.
He turned from the highway to look at her. She sat on the foot of the bed, and she seemed to be looking at the highway behind him. He glanced over to see if something were happening there.
She said, ‘I’ll go if you want.’
‘No, no.’ He hesitated, then moved into the room to stand in front of her. He knew enough to wait for her to go on.
‘What are we doing?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean?’ It had been a mistake, apparently, to go onto the balcony. But she knew why he was here. ‘We’re in a motel room, talking.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
Her gaze collapsed to the floor. ‘Could you possibly stop calculating what you say to the decimal place?’ She gripped the edge of the bed with her hands, then straightened and stood and moved and touched the bed, the wallpaper, the TV.
He said, ‘I’m sorry -’
‘Don’t,’ she said. Her face blushed, splotching white in the scars. ‘I just sometimes keep wondering,’ she said, ‘if there’s anything more between us than shared disasters. What are we doing? What kind of fucked-up catastrophe of circumstance are we?’ She laughed, not happily.
His breath shook. ‘We’re just two people in a room.’
‘You’re the brother of my dead boyfriend. You work for my husband, and you’re his friend, and he’s gone insane. It’s not a good situation. It’s a very complicated, very awkward and very bad situation.’
By now a liquid and opaque dread had filled him. His glance strayed between the tension in her neck, the highway, the sword-fish. ‘You drove out here to break up with me?’
‘We’re just bonded by trauma,’ she said.
‘I didn’t even like Christopher,’ he said. ‘If you think that’s all I have invested in this -’
A diesel went by with jake brakes thundering. He glanced toward it, and she said, ‘OK, go. Go. Go look for your buddy.’
‘I’m here to watch for Boggs.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Go ahead.’
He went onto the balcony and sat. He locked his gaze onto the roadway.
Some minutes passed.
In the room, something crashed.
He went back in as she pulled over the two bedside tables, then the desk. She pushed over a desk chair and then yanked the bedclothes to the floor. She turned and stood before him, gasping, her face strained.
‘Calm down,’ he said.
‘Stop that! I haven’t slept in days. I don’t know what’s happened to my life. I can’t stop crying. I don’t know what anyone wants. And you say calm down.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Don’t say that.’
Then he didn’t know what to say.
In the silence, she reached up with curious gentleness, as if grasping at a butterfly. He braced for her to strike him. But she brought her hand to her own face, gripped her cheek, and pulled down, clawing, nails trailing blood.
In surprise he shouted and lunged, and they fell together onto the bed. ‘I hate you,’ she said, while he fumbled to restrain her arms. A small woman, but strong. Finally he pinned her, and she said, ‘I hate everything.’
He panted. Blood trickled from her face. ‘Stop this,’ he said. ‘Stop this.’ She only stared at him, and he cried, ‘Stop this! I didn’t ask you to come here.’
‘No, you didn’t.’ But the resistance had gone from her arms.
He discovered he was squeezing her harder than he needed. He rolled away, stood flexing his hands. She lay unmoving except to breathe irregularly, staring at the ceiling, eyes streaming. His body shook, bright and hot. He sat on the floor. ‘You’re OK?’
She said nothing, went into the bathroom. When she came out, holding a washcloth to her face, his adrenalin had drained off, leaving him sagging. She sat beside him.
His heartbeat slowed.
She touched his hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Let’s not use that word.’
She giggled a little, weakly, or nervously. He shook his head. Then, in a loss of control, he, too, laughed.
‘Go watch for John,’ she said. ‘I’ll join you in a minute.’ He sat moving his fingers experimentally before he stood and went onto the balcony. Time passed, and when he looked back into the room, all the furniture had been set upright again, and she was gone.
To find a clear thought was difficult. He’d never seen her do anything like this before, and he couldn’t guess what she might do now.
He sat, then stood again, and tried to analyse, to review the variables of the problem. Now, particularly, when everything and everyone had turned strange, it seemed important to be exact. Heather had been his half-brother’s girlfriend. She had liked his half-brother. Ellis, however, had not liked his half-brother. This difference had been shrouded behind the fact of his half-brother’s death. Then, she had led Ellis to his job, and thus to his boss and friend Boggs. He liked Boggs. Heather, who was married to Boggs, did not like Boggs; or, at least, she did not love him. Not any more. And now, having learned of the affair between his subordinate and his wife, Boggs threatened suicide. The shape of the relationships was not a triangle but a square bisected along a diagonal:
But this failed to adequately capture the problem, because it also had a temporal aspect, which extended along a third dimension. He tried to visualise a graphical shape for the events on that axis, but it eluded him.
But the situation was not a technical problem. Perhaps to try to understand it as such would only lead to insanity. How then to understand? To see each other clearly? How to prevent everything from being contaminated with guilt, doubt, resentment, anger? Was that why she was gone? Was she gone?
A half-hour later, she knocked on the door and came into the room with two cold bottles of Chardonnay and a package of plastic cups. She offered one to him.
He took the cup, but set it aside and rubbed his face with his hands. ‘Was that you?’ he asked. ‘Before?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’ The marks on her cheek amounted to three small scratches, in the place where the fire had scarred her years before. ‘This has been hard.’
‘It made me feel like I didn’t know you.’
‘It’s over.’ She fidgeted with the wine bottle. ‘Water under the bridge?’ she said. ‘Or did I burn it?’
‘No, you didn’t burn it,’ he said. ‘But you really scared it.’ He held out his plastic cup. They sat with their wine, watching the road. After some minutes he said, ‘I figure he won’t come here after dark, when he can’t see anything.’
She refilled his cup.
They drank the two bottles of wine.
Into the evening they talked about inconsequentials and trivia, and he found himself laughing hysterically as the
