It had been said so pleasantly that Tina thought she must have misheard, but Penelope’s smile faded, and she knew she hadn’t. “Since when?”
“Who knows? You never know when these things start. But it’s become more serious these last couple of months.”
“Since the department closed down.”
Penelope nodded, then looked into her empty glass. “You have any more of this?”
It was the same delay tactic Tina had used a moment before, and she couldn’t argue with that. She went to the kitchen, and, as she worked on another bottle of Beaujolais, Stephanie appeared in her pink pajamas, clutching the PlayStation Portable that Milo had irrationally bought her a week before. “What is it, Little Miss?”
Stephanie looked surprised, then she glanced behind herself toward the living room. “Is there…”
“What, hon?”
It took another moment to get the question out, and Stephanie’s tendency to block up when speaking seemed to be an aftereffect of seeing her father shot. Whatever you do, the therapist had said, don’t draw attention to it. Finally, Stephanie said, “What’s wrong with Pen?”
“Nothing. What are you doing up?”
“I’m thirsty. What’s wrong with her?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s crying.”
Tina turned to her daughter, whom she sometimes worried had seen too much during her six years of life. “Crying?”
“I think so.” A pause. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry about her. She’s just got some problems.”
“You’ll help her out?”
“Yeah, Little Miss. I’m here to help her out. You said you were hungry?”
“Thirsty.”
“So that’s why you’re awake?”
“Yeah.”
“And that PlayStation just happened to be in your hand when you woke?”
Stephanie turned it over, examining the machine as if its presence were a surprise. The gears in her brain worked. “I just woke up and there it was!”
Tina set her up with a glass of water and sent her back to bed, then brought out the Beaujolais. There was no evidence of weeping on Penelope’s delicate, sensual face, just an occasional twitch at the corner of her lips. “I think I scared Stephanie.”
“She’s seen me cry often enough,” Tina said as she refilled their glasses. She placed the bottle on the coffee table, then decided to sit next to her on the couch. “Go ahead.”
“With what?” Penelope asked. “All I can say is it’s gotten worse. Men are… well, they are their jobs, aren’t they? Is that sexist?”
“Don’t think so. Patronizing, maybe.”
“What I mean is, you’re a librarian. But is that who you are?”
“No, I get your point.”
Penelope drank, whispered, “Mmm, this is good,” then looked directly at Tina with a newfound intensity. “Anyway, the job disappeared, and he became a different person. Starts smoking. Exercises like mad. When he drinks, he does it stupidly. He starts fights for no reason. He’s acting like some washed-up jarhead, which I suppose is what he is. He-and this sounds weird-he spends the longest time in the bathroom. Goes off to take a crap, and I don’t know when I’ll see him again. And no, it’s not medical-not self-abuse either. When he’s not shitting he barricades himself in his office. It’s like he can’t stand to be in the same room with me.”
As Penelope spoke, Tina instinctively compared these observations to how Milo had become since his unemployment. Since getting shot. She wanted to find similar things in him so that she could hold them up and say, See? They all do it, but she came up short. “What does he say?”
“He says there’s nothing wrong. Just distracted. He’s working on a project. What kind of project? Sorry-it’s top-secret stuff. I point out that he doesn’t work on top-secret stuff anymore, and he backtracks and says it’s for friends.”
“Friends like Milo?”
Penelope shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him yourself.”
They let that sit between them, Tina wondering if Milo was, despite his insistence that that kind of work was behind him, helping Alan with some lingering projects from the Department of Tourism. “Is it really that bad?” she asked. “Sounds like a phase to me-divorce is permanent.”
Penelope raised the glass to her lips but before drinking let three words slip out. “He hit me.”
“ What? ”
She finished her drink and set down the glass. “Few days ago. Just once. During an argument. Right here.” She tapped her left cheekbone, just under her eye, and that was when Tina noticed the extra layer of makeup on that spot. “He apologized, of course. Cried. But that was when it really came together for me.”
“Okay,” Tina said. “Now I get it. When a man hits you it’s time to go.”
“No.” Penelope shook her head. “You don’t get it. I’m not worried about getting beat up-despite the signs, that’s not the kind of man he is. It was afterward, when he was there on the floor, crying. Begging me not to leave him. That’s when I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That I didn’t love him anymore. It wasn’t him striking me. It was the miserable mess he’d become. I realized that I didn’t care if he drowned in beer and ended up living on the street. I didn’t care if he had a heart attack and died right there. No-it wasn’t anger. It was apathy. It was the complete lack of all those feelings I’d had when we got married.”
Again, silence came between them. Tina was thinking of the few times in their marriage that she’d thought the same thing-that she had no love for Milo anymore. Those moments had occurred, but always as a question rather than a statement: Do I love him anymore? Just as she was preparing to ask Penelope if, perhaps, she was asking herself a question rather than answering it, she was drawn to nine weeks ago, when Milo was shot on the steps of this very building. When it occurred, all she could think was that she wanted him to be okay. She’d even lost track of Stephanie during those brutal minutes. If anything had convinced her that their marital troubles could be worked through, it had been that event. That, maybe, was the thing she had that Penelope didn’t have.
Finally, Tina said, “I don’t really know anything, but if you’re asking, I’d guess that you’re trying to convince yourself that the marriage is dead, when it isn’t.”
“What makes you think that?” Penelope asked, the signs of real interest in her face.
“You’re still with him, and you came here to tell me about it. You’re looking for a way out of this mess.”
Penelope didn’t answer, only stared at her, and that thin, sad smile returned. Tina really had no idea who this woman was. Then the door opened and the men came in.
Each pair was acutely preoccupied by its own silence, and both silences were so painfully self-conscious that not even Francoise Hardy’s breathy singing could hide them. So they all went to it at once, four awkward voices laughing and muttering banalities. They just wanted to fill the living room with noise. Any noise; it didn’t matter.
2
While Xin Zhu lived without dreams, or at least lost them by the time he woke each morning, Milo had been plagued over the last month by a repeating nightmare. Unlike Alan Drummond’s dream of spots on a computer screen changing color as people died, it bore no obvious connection to recent events.
It took place in a park that, from one angle, looked like Prospect Park, but from another resembled the area around Lake Devin in Oxford, North Carolina, where he grew up. He was with Stephanie, who in his dream was two years old, maybe three, and they were discussing the film of The Wizard of Oz. The foliage around them thickened,
