They were close enough to walk home, through city streets full of people shouting for no particular reason, into phones, at each other, at cabs roaring past.
“I need to go in here,” said James, under the glow of the 24-hour drugstore sign.
“Can it wait until tomorrow? I’m so tired,” said Ana, realizing how true that was, how she felt that her skin had separated from her flesh. Inside, the aisles were painfully bright, but quiet. Ana followed James silently.
“Here,” he said, pulling a small brown stuffed dog from a rack of animals. “What kid doesn’t want a dog?”
“That’s what we came in here for? It’s two in the morning.”
“We’re a block from home,” said James, paying in a great clattering shower of coins.
“Yes, but I’m tired,” said Ana, the drink thickening her voice. Back outside in the cloud of yelling youth, she added: “And where the hell did you go anyway? I was waiting for you. Your little girlfriend looked crushed that you left her.”
James gripped the dog tightly by the neck. “What girlfriend?”
“Ruth. Why, is there another one?” Ana laughed, and the arrogance of James’s question seemed to distract her from her irritation. She put an arm through James’s as they turned on to their block, toward the brothel house, where candlelight flickered in an upstairs window. As they got closer, Ana realized it wasn’t candlelight, but the blue flutter of a television set.
“It’s nice you got him that dog,” she said. “You’re a good doggy. A good daddy, I mean.” And she was laughing like a lunatic again when James unlocked the door of the house. There was Ethel sleeping on the living room couch, a magazine and a green throw blanket covering her body, and the quiet hum of a house in order singing along beneath his wife’s drunken laughter.
* * *
Ana felt the burn move down from her head to her fingers where she clutched the car door handle. She closed her eyes as if to keep every possible orifice sealed, afraid of what might escape.
“I’m sick,” she moaned.
“You’re just hungover,” said James.
“Ana sick?” asked Finn from the backseat. The high pitch of his voice felt like a letter opener inserted into Ana’s ear, cleanly slicing her head in two.
“No, I have a fever,” she said. James placed a hand on her forehead, which was slick, warm.
“Yeah, maybe,” he said. Then, to Finn: “It’s when you don’t feel good because you drank too much.”
“Does he need to hear that?” asked Ana.
“Drink juice?” asked Finn.
“Grown-up juice. Ana’s sick today.” He beeped the horn. “Isn’t that what Michael Jackson called it, when he drugged those kids? Grown-up juice?”
Ana swallowed; steel wool taste.
“Jesus Juice!” said James. “Jesus Juice! Can you imagine? Bringing Jesus into that shit?”
They were in the very center of the highway, surrounded on all sides by cars, lane after lane of indistinguishable noise and speed. The scenery beyond the cars repeated: mall, massive concrete industrial building with a parking lot as big as the building, then another mall. There were no mountains, no sign of water. Any trees they passed were as trim and contained as if they had been unwrapped from cellophane yesterday. The highway continued like this, without a rise or a curve, on and on for almost an hour.
James had considered his actions, all through the night, his drunken sleep broken by waves of possibilities. What shape would he lend to this transgression? He composed a partial confession in his head, a general unburdening without detaiclass="underline" “Something happened last night. I stopped it before it went too far.” He couldn’t imagine Ana seeking more information. She was not a woman who needed to know. And how would it make him feel, what would it relieve him of, really, this rubbery admission? And then there was the possibility of silence, which was sitting with him this morning like a gray, furry egg in the pit of his stomach. In exactly the way of love songs, he found himself unable to look at his wife. He could not meet her eye.
Well, the truth, then: “A girl gave me a blow job last night.” What could Ana possibly say? In all the scenarios he played out in his head, she did what she did best—she left.
Right after James moved into Ana’s apartment, when she was amassing a wardrobe of blazers and carrying around a gigantic black leather Filofax, James had run into an old girlfriend in a bar. That night Ana had stayed home to get up early for work, but James was barely working then, teaching just one unpopular class, on Aristotle. The small, dark club had no chairs and a band, two guys, one on bass, one on guitar. It sounded awful, and drinking more didn’t alter that fact. Then Catherine appeared, oh Catherine with the baby bangs and the cigarette tongue, and the T-shirt spilling over with flesh right along the pink scoop neck. As a girlfriend, she had been dumb but untroubled, up for anything in bed. She was a type of girl that James was always meeting, with a clerical job in an art gallery and ideas the size of peas, which she reiterated up against the bar: “I’m doing these paintings about the body, uh, about how men were always painting the body but now, like, I’m a woman painting the body …” He had nodded and imagined peeling off her T-shirt, getting her to bend this way and that. A few more beers and she was running her hand along the inside of his thigh (Did she remember how that killed him, or was it a generic move, available to all? He decided not to be bothered either way.), and then they were upon each other in the bathroom. He was actually fucking in a bathroom stall! The thrill of fulfilling this cinematic objective lasted for about eighteen seconds, and then he began to question the initiator. Only an artist as bad as Catherine would fail to recognize this event for the creative cliché it was. And also, in fact, uncomfortable—she was a little tall for him—and when he glanced down and saw the cigarette butt floating in the yellow water of the toilet, James had to close his eyes to finish.
When he got home, Ana was asleep. James was wearing the paramedic shirt he always wore in those days. He buried it at the bottom of the laundry basket.
After a long, scrubbing shower, he emerged and stood naked above his new girlfriend asleep on the mattress, the first real bed he had bought in his adult life, after years on futons on floors. And she had helped him achieve this milestone. He took in the exposed brick walls of the loft and Ana’s briefcase leaning by the door, her red leather gloves across the top, the empty fingers flopping gently. He could feel in that moment that they had already begun their ascent, that they were unmoored and lifting toward adulthood, and she had chosen him to accompany her, he who would have stayed on the ground, in the filth, forever. She had chosen him, and he had rewarded her with this, the crassest kind of betrayal, one involving toilet paper and an unsigned band.
And so he woke her, and confessed every detail, and wept and wept, naked on the bed. Ana lay frozen, nodding from time to time. He told her he was filled with shame, that he had always been filled with shame, and that he needed her to remind him to be good. Ana lay there, expressionless, asking only one, unanswerable thing: “What do you mean?”
The sun broke through, and Ana rose for her shower. When she came out of the bathroom, she was already fully dressed and made up.
“If it matters to hear me say it, I would never do it again,” said James from under the duvet, as Ana gathered her keys, put on her jacket. She thought of her mother, of the weeping. She had no memory of her father leaving, just her mother flailing in his wake.
She turned to James.
“Okay,” she said.
Because it seemed appropriate, James nodded fiercely.
He spent the next days trying to revive Ana. Her eyes flattened, and she would go for hours without talking, even as they continued their routine as if nothing had happened. From the moment they awoke, James talked. He talked through her silence at breakfast, her quiet sips of wine at the pub after work. “You picked the wrong guy if you think I’m going to run out of things to say,” said James, folding laundry and talking about baseball, C. S. Lewis, Rodney King. He thought she was weighing whether or not her “Okay” was sincere, and that was when he knew that he could not have a life without her, that such a future would be entirely without purpose. So he talked, hoping some of his words would hook and reel her in.