As She Climbed Across the Table

I leaned in to her window. “You look terrible,” I said.

Alice nodded. She pulled her lips together, fighting tears.

“You must be worried about Evan and Garth,” I said.

She let her hands come away from the wheel, and crossed them in her lap, the wounded one resting on top.

“You’re going to your parents’ place?”

“I think so,” she said. “I have to get farther away.”

“From Lack, you mean.”

“And you.”

I was surprised. Alice blinked up at me, weakly defiant.

“You cut yourself,” I said. When we spoke it was still in a lover’s clipped code, tips standing in for icebergs.

“I made a mistake,” she said.

“You gave part of yourself to Lack.” It came out practically a whisper.

“A small part. I tried.”

“He didn’t take it, you mean.”

She nodded.

I squinted up at the winter sky. It was a beautiful day. I felt dirty, unshaven, and hopeless.

Suddenly, idiotically, I realized I’d been counting on spending Christmas with Alice. A chink in my heart’s pill-bug armor. I’d be hurt by her going away.

“You don’t have to go,” I said.

“I do.”

“I understand,” I said. “You feel bad about Evan and Garth. And everything that happened, your hand, me. But it doesn’t mean you have to run away.”

“For a while, Philip. I’m sorry.”

I struggled for words. “You still love Lack, I guess.”

She nodded.

A cold wind swept over the roof of the car, into my face. I coughed into my fist, and felt my stubbly chin and chapped lips against my hand.

“What you did down there is crazy, you know.”

She nodded again, and ran her good right hand through her short hair, front to back. She had new mannerisms to go with her short hair.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“It bleeds a lot,” she said.

“Did you disinfect it?”

“Yes.”

We fell silent. I wanted her bandage to come undone, her wound to bleed, so that she would need my help. I could carry her from the car, then come back, turn her key back out of the ignition, and pocket it.

“What should I tell Soft?” I said. I was stalling.

“About what?”

“I can’t keep covering for you. It’s too much. Questions are being asked. Soft said it looked like a murder. That’s just one example. There’s also Evan and Garth. You’re dropping everything in my lap.”

Alice looked at me sharply. “There is no more Evan and Garth,” she said. “Nothing in your lap.”

“Listen to you, you’re jealous. Lack took someone else. That’s what’s behind these suicidal gestures, these elegiac departures. Jealousy.”

“Don’t, Philip.”

“I just don’t understand—”

How you can leave me, I almost finished. But I caught myself. Her car was running, and the chances were that in a minute or two I’d have to face myself, alone. So I put together another end for my sentence, one safely shallow and bitter.

“I don’t understand why I go on making this so easy for you. Why I’m such a—what’s it called? A doormat, that’s it. Or doorman. Good morning, Ms. Coombs, watch your step, here’s the void. When one word from me and the jig, as they say, is up. No more Alice and Lack.”

That did it. Alice gripped the steering wheel, obviously fighting pain, and shifted the car into reverse. She pulsed her foot on the brake so the car rolled an inch away, as warning, then looked up at me one last time.

“Do what you have to do,” she said.

She accelerated backward in a lurch out of the driveway, then shifted and sped away, leaving me standing there, less doormat or doorman than door, slammed.

33

I went inside and called Soft. I told him that I’d found Alice, that she was fine, and that she’d only accidentally cut herself in the chamber. I spread apologies like margarine. Soft seemed mollified. I hung up and went into the bathroom to shower and shave, to reorganize a presentable, inhabitable self. By the time I was done it was five-thirty. The day had leaked away. I heated a can of bean-and-bacon soup on the stove and ate it in silence, my mind vacant like a chewing cow’s.

Then I found a dusty bottle of scotch, and poured myself a glass.

Two hours later I knocked on the door of the Melinda Fenderman Memorial Guest Apartment, where Braxia was staying. Students were partying in anarchic clusters, and the campus was like a darkened landscape lit by tribal bonfires.

Braxia opened the door.

“May I come in?” I said.

“Of course,” said Braxia.

The Apartment was clean. The walls were all oak paneling, with a row of plaques noting the previous occupants. Braxia’s was surely in preparation. His baggage was heaped in the foyer. I smelled bleach. The Italian physicist must have been scrubbing the fixtures when I knocked.

“I was just walking, and I saw the light on,” I said.

“Welcome,” he said.

Braxia was dressed in a white shirt, and black suit pants. The jacket was draped over the back of a chair in the living room. Every light in the apartment was on. Suddenly he looked like Manhattan Project newsreel footage. I saw him in black and white.

“You’re packed,” I said stupidly.

“My plane is tonight.”

“What? You’re missing the Christmas party?”

“I suppose. You? Or have you been there already?”

Did my breath stink of the scotch I’d been drinking? “I don’t know if I’ll go, actually. I was just out walking. The last night, you know. I like to feel it. Soak it up. And I wanted to talk to you.”

Braxia smiled to himself, and led me into the middle of the tiny apartment. He sat on the couch and crossed his legs. I stood leaning against the back of an easy chair. The room was so bare I wondered if Braxia had packed up a few of the furnishings.

“Talk,” said Braxia.

“You can’t just go, like this,” I said, surprising myself. “Soft isn’t man enough to call you on it, but I am. What did you learn? Why are you leaving early? I’ll pay your cab to wait while you talk to me. But I’m not leaving without some answers.”

“About Lack. You think I have some answers for you.”

“Yes.”