“I’m drowning,” Grace said, and pushed him away. “There was a waterfall coming off your shoulder. I couldn’t breathe.”
Her smile lost wattage, and he knew she must have understood the irony of her complaint. He cleared wet strands of hair from her face and kissed her forehead.
“This must be so awful for you,” she said. “To feel comfortable with someone. Almost like normal. And to know it’s anything but.” Soapy water trickled into her left eye and she rubbed it. “It does feel like that sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“Normal? Yeah, more-or-less.”
She seemed disappointed by his response.
He put his hands on her waist. “All the craziness that goes on between men and women, ‘normal’ isn’t the word I’d use to describe any relationship.”
She slid past him out of the shower and began to dry herself. He had the feeling that she was upset.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m cold,” she said in a clipped tone, and briskly toweled her hair. Then, her voice muffled: “Are you always so analytical?”
“I try to be. Does it bother you?”
She left off drying and held the towel bunched in front of her breasts. “God knows it shouldn’t. I do understand how hard this…” She broke off and started drying her hair again, less vigorously.
Shellane turned off the water, stepped out of the shower. The linoleum was sticky beneath his feet; his skin pebbled in the cool air. The back of his neck tingled, and he had the feeling they were not alone, that an invisible presence was crammed into the bathroom with them.
“It’s almost over, you know,” Grace said. “One of these times soon, I won’t come back. Or else you’ll leave.”
“We’ve got a while yet.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about what’s happening.”
A noise came from the front of the house—a door closing. He threw open the bathroom door and peered out. Nobody in sight.
“Who is it?” asked Grace from behind him.
“Maybe the wind.”
He wrapped a towel about his waist and went out into the living room. On the table next to his laptop was an envelope and a portable cassette recorder. The envelope was addressed to Grace. She came up beside him, wearing his bathrobe, and he offered the letter to her. She shook her head. He tore open the envelope and read from the enclosed sheet of paper.
“Once again Avery offers his apologies,” he said. “He regrets everything.” He read further. “He claims he wouldn’t have treated you so badly if you weren’t unfaithful.”
“He never changes!” Grace folded her arms and scowled at the letter as if it were a live thing and could register disapproval. “He was unfaithful to me every day…with footwear! And then when I…” She made a spiteful sound. “We hardly ever made love after we got married. I was just so desperate…”
“You don’t have to explain,” he said.
“It’s habit. I used to have to explain it to Avery all the time. He liked hearing me explain it.”
Shellane set the letter on the table and pressed the play button on the recorder. Avery’s voice, tinny and diminished, issued forth over a strummed guitar:
“Beauty, where do you sleep tonight?
In whose avid arms, do you conspire…?”
“Our boy’s waxing Keatsian,” said Shellane.
“Turn it off.”
“…beauty is everywhere they say,
but I just can’t find a beauty like thine…”
“Please!” said Grace.
Shellane switched off the recorder. “Sure sounds like he loves you.”
“I believe he did once. But you can’t tell with Avery. He’s adept at mimicry.”
They stood without speaking for a time, then Grace pressed herself against him. “I shouldn’t have pulled you into this,” she said.
He wanted to reassure her, to tell her that he would not have foregone the experience of being with her. But though he believed this to be true, he no longer was certain of it. That he could accept her to the point that he could dismiss, even dote upon, the symptoms of her strangeness—this fact had, almost without his notice, so shredded the fabric of his emotions, it had grown difficult for him to separate hope from desire.
After she had gone into the bedroom, to become whatever she became without him, he dressed and sat at the table, studying his lists. They revealed no pattern, no truth other than the nonsensical and menacing truth that he was in love with a dead woman. In love, also, with her deathly condition, with her odd glow and the curious behavior of water on her skin. It was a splendid absurdity worthy of an Irish ballad. The trouble with such tunes, though, they tended to neglect the ordinary heart of things, things such as the commonplace mutuality that had developed between them, and that was the matter truly worth commemorating in song. Nobody sat around scratching their ass or discussing the character of an ex-husband in an Irish ballad. They were all grand sadness and exquisite pain. Of course, sadness and pain were likely headed his way, and he had little doubt they would be grand and exquisite. As if anticipation were itself an affliction, his thoughts spun out of control, images and fragments of emotions whirling up and away, prelude to a despair so profound it left him hunched over the table, eyes fixed on the lists, like a troll turned to stone by an enchantment he had been tricked into reading.
The last of the gray light blended with the mist forming above the lake. Shellane stirred himself, went to the stove and heated a can of soup. He leaned against the counter, watching steam rise from the saucepan, remembering an interview he’d seen with a man who had directed a horror movie—the man said his film was optimistic because, though its view of the afterlife was gruesome, that it lent any credence whatsoever to the afterlife was hopeful. Shellane supposed this would be a healthy attitude for him to adopt. But the prospect was so completely daft…It had been a long while since his Catholic schooldays, and the concepts associated with religion—virgin birth, the Assumption, the hierarchies of angels, and so forth—had lost their hold on him. Now he was being forced to confront a concept even less logical, one concerning which his knowledge was so fragmentary, any conjecture he made about it had the feeling of wild speculation.
Once his soup was hot, he went on the Internet, accessed a Roman Catholic dictionary, and looked up Limbo. According to doctrine, Limbo referred to a place in which unbaptized children, souls born before the advent of Christ, and prudent virgins awaited the Second Coming, at which point they would be assumed into Heaven. Grace did not appear to fit any of these categories; thus it followed that the Church was a bit off-base in its comprehension of the afterlife. No surprise there. Yet the idea of a halfway house, an interim place where souls were parked for the duration, for some term pertinent to their lives—this accorded with what Grace had told him. The black house, however, seemed to incorporate an element of punishment, to be less a limbo than a state of purgatory. A kind of boutique hell targeting a select clientele? “Fuck,” he said, switching off the laptop, and stared at his uneaten soup.