Koko

He wondered how many times in the past four years he had, with increasing tentativeness and foreknowledge of failure, tried to have sexual intercourse with that body. Maybe a hundred times—not at all in the past year. Judy snatched up her nightgown and slipped it unceremoniously over her head. She slammed the bedroom door.

Michael heard her stamping across her dressing room. The chair creaked beneath her. She dialed a local number on her telephone. Then she slammed the receiver down so forcefully that the telephone clanged like a bell. Michael’s body began to relax and became his own body again. Judy dialed a local number again, presumably the same one. He heard her inhale, and knew that her face was rigid as a mask. The receiver clanged down once more. He heard her say “Shit.” Then she dialed a nine-digit number, probably Pat Caldwell’s. After a few suspended seconds, she began to speak in a low, choked, barely recognizable whisper.

Michael picked up the James novel and found that he could not read it—the words seemed to have come alive, and to squirm around on the page. Michael wiped his eyes and the page cleared.

Strether was at a party in the city garden of a sculptor named Gloriani. Brilliant beautiful people drifted through the garden, lanterns glowed. Strether was talking to a young American named Little Bilham, whom he rather cherished. Michael wished he were there in the garden, holding a glass of champagne beside Little Bilham, listening to Strether. Had other people read this book in this way, or was it just him? “What one loses, one loses, make no mistake about that,” Strether said. He could hear Judy muttering and mumbling, and her voice was that of some destructive ghost.

He realized what he was thinking just as Judy hung up the telephone and padded across the dressing room, opened the door, and flashed through again, her head turned away from him. She went out into the upstairs hall. He heard her descending the stairs. A series of taps and rattles came from the kitchen. Whatever had happened, Poole was back in his real life. His body felt like his own real body again, not an actor’s. He closed his book and got out of bed.

In Judy’s little dressing room, the telephone rang. Michael thought to pick it up; then he remembered that the answering machine would get it. He moved to the door of the dressing room. Then a male voice spoke.

“The world goes backward and forward at the same time, and is there any sorrow like unto my sorrow? I will wait, I am waiting now. I need your help. The narrow path vanishes beneath my feet.”

This voice too, it struck Michael, was the voice of a ghost.

When he walked into the kitchen Judy backed away from the stove, where a kettle had been put on to boil, and stood with her back against the window and her arms dangling at her sides. She stared at him as if he were a savage animal who might attack her.

If she had smiled or said anything conventional, he would at once have felt again like an actor in a role, but she did not smile or speak.

Michael circled around the butcher block counter and leaned on its far side. Judy seemed smaller and older than the fierce wild-eyed woman who had hit him.

“Your crazy man called.”

Judy shook her head and walked back to the stove.

“Seems he can’t find his way. I know what he means.”

“Stop it.” She raised her fists.

The kettle began to whistle. Judy put her fists down and poured hot water over instant coffee. She stirred it with short choppy strokes.

Finally she said, “I’m not going to lose everything I have. You might have lost your mind, but I don’t have to give up everything I care about. Pat says I should just calm down, but then Pat never had to worry about anything, did she?”

“Didn’t she?”

“You know she didn’t.” She sipped her coffee and made a face. “I’m surprised you managed to put down your stupid book.”

“If you thought it was stupid, why did you give it to me?”

Her eyes flew sideways, like those of a child caught in a lie. “You give books to your little girlfriend all the time. Somebody gave that one to me. I thought it might help you settle down again.”

He leaned on the butcher block counter and looked at her.

“I’m not leaving this house,” she said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m not going to do without anything just because you’re sick.” Her whole face blazed at him for a moment, then shrank back into itself. “Pat was telling me about Harry the other day. She said he repelled her—she couldn’t stand the thought of his touching her. You’re that way about me.”

“It’s the other way around. You feel that way about me.”

“We’ve been married for fourteen years, I ought to know how I feel.”

“I should too,” he said. “I’d tell you how I feel, how you make me feel, but you wouldn’t believe it.”

“You should never have gone on that crazy trip,” she said. “We should have stayed at home instead of going up to Milburn with Harry. That just made things worse.”

“You never want me to go anywhere,” he said. “You think I killed Robbie, and you want me to stay here and keep on paying for it.”

“Forget Robbie!” she shrieked. “Forget him! He’s dead!”

“I’ll go into therapy with you,” he said. “Are you listening to this? Both of us. Together.”

“You know who should have therapy! You! You’re the sick one! Not me! Our marriage was fine before you went away.”

“Went away where?” Michael turned away, left the room, and went up the stairs in silence.

He lay in bed a long time, listening in the dark. Chinks and rattles and the opening and closing of cabinets came from the kitchen. Eventually Judy came up the stairs. To Michael’s surprise, her footsteps came toward the bedroom door. She leaned in. “I just want to say this even though I know you won’t believe it. I wanted this day to be special for you. I wanted to make it special for you.”

“I know.”

Even in the darkness he could see rage, disgust, and a kind of disbelief go through her body.

“I’m going to sleep in the guest room. I’m not sure we’re married anymore, Michael.”

Michael lay awake with his eyes closed another half hour, then gave up, switched on his light, and picked up the Henry James novel. The book was a perfect little garden glimpsed far down at the bottom of a landfill. Seagulls screeched over the landfill’s great mountains of garbage, rats prowled through it, and right at the bottom, safe within the page, men and women clothed in an intellectual radiance moved in a beautiful, inexorable dance. Poole went cautiously down the hills of garbage toward the perfect garden, but it receded backward with every step he took.

5

He woke to the sounds of Judy showering. A few minutes later she came into the bedroom wrapped in a long pink towel. “Well,” she said, “I have to go to work. Are you still going to insist on going to New York this morning?”

“I have to,” he said.

She took a dress from the closet and shook her head, as if at some hopeless case. “I imagine that you won’t have time to go to either your office or the hospital this morning, then.”

“I might drop in at the hospital.”

“You might drop in at the hospital and then drive to New York.”

“That’s right.”

“I hope you remember what I said last night.” She tore the dress off the hanger and slammed through the door to the dressing room.

Michael got out of bed. He felt tired and depressed, but he did not feel like an actor or that he had been placed in an unfamiliar body. Both the body and the unhappiness were his own. He decided to bring Stacy Talbot another book, and searched his shelves until he found an old underlined copy of Wuthering Heights.

Before he left home he went down into his basement to open a trunk where he had placed a few things after