So after I said, as I always said, that I knew my husband didn’t mean to scream and choke me in his sleep (except without saying the words scream or choke because hearing those words was almost worse than him actually doing those things) we’d lie awake awhile, each pretending to be asleep or almost asleep but we’d always stay up, slipping in and out of sleep for all those hours, each of us moving as little as possible, trying to breathe like we were deeply content, like it would be easy to go back to sleep as soon as we were truly ready, as soon as we were prepared to will ourselves back into the shut-lid place where those terrors lived. But we always avoided talking about these things — difficult things — and I wondered if that meant we’d be a little uncomfortable with or disappointed by each other for the rest of our lives.
Then there was that night when we were arguing about something that didn’t matter, something that can be summarized as I Believe You Are a Little More Despicable Than Me, and my husband wasn’t listening to me and I wasn’t listening to my husband but we were making our arguments at the same time in low voices, and I picked up the glass of neat bourbon that he’d bought for me like this was a date instead of what it was: a married couple’s attempt to pretend to be in a marriage that was the kind of marriage where we went out on things like dates, but instead became a married couple’s chance to argue, as discreetly as possible, in public, and I picked up that glass of bourbon that he’d bought for me and I started to lift it to my mouth before I thought of splashing it into my husband’s face, but I didn’t want to do that — I didn’t want to give or do anything to my husband because I didn’t want to acknowledge that my husband was even a person in my life, so I poured the glass of bourbon onto the table and when I poured it onto the table I didn’t mean to say that it wasn’t nice of him to have bought it for me and I didn’t mean to say that it didn’t taste good or that I was already drunk enough; what I meant was I am a liquid and he is a solid and the universe is expanding and here we go flying away from each other like matter always does, spinning and spilling off the edge of our table and onto our laps.
This put an end to whatever we were fighting about.
We stared into the puddle of nice bourbon, a round, amber shimmer, and we looked up and around the bar to see if anyone had seen me do this and we tried to laugh a little about it and I told my husband that I would write this into one of the episodes of the soap opera someday and he kept laughing for a beat but then he stopped laughing—
You would do that?
I thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he’d like to become part of a story, any story.
Yeah, of course.
You would take something of ours and turn it into a scene?
I’d exaggerate it, of course. It wouldn’t be the same.
What do you mean?
It would have to be so much more dramatic to make it onto the show. I mean, to those characters a twelve-dollar glass of bourbon is nothing — someone would have to pour a really good bottle of Scotch on the table. Something rare.
I guess so, he said.
As we walked home that night smelling like the bourbon that had drizzled onto our knees, I knew that my husband was a song that I had forgotten the words to and I was a fuzzy photograph of someone he used to love and I also knew that the song that my husband was, the song I had forgotten, was not only forgotten but no longer existed, that there had only been one record of it and it had been melted down and turned into something else and only one person knew how to sing it and that person was long since dead. My husband and I were no longer the people that fit easily into each other’s life, but we suggested those people, and this was why I would often catch him looking at me as if I merely looked familiar to him. We did not exist, the we we thought we’d always be.
24
On the ferry back to the North Island I sat at the bar because the tender tender was there and I tried to not be disappointed that she didn’t seem to remember me. I read Mrs. Bridge again, or, rather, just moved my eyes over the words and wondered where I was going or what I should do now or how I was going to find a way to disappear my wildebeest. I thought of the first time I saw the tender tender and remembered the halo of the inaudible noise I heard back then and I felt compelled by it, but also suspicious of it, and there was a dissonance, between the inaudible noise and the suspicion, a long chord in a minor key. I didn’t know if I would call Jaye or not call Jaye, if going to Napier would be worth the trouble, if anywhere was worth the trouble. I watched the tender tender moving around, pouring pints and prying caps until she leaned down on the bar, head propped in hands, to watch a staticky TV. A police rendering of a woman was on the screen, then a second and a third version, each with slight variations, the different ways that witnesses had remembered her. Her eyes slightly larger in this one; a longer nose in that. There were no photographs of her, the television said — this woman had avoided photographs her whole life.
You know what she did, don’t you?
She kill somebody? the man said.
Tried to, the tender tender said. Tried to kill her husband. Killed her little girl’s pet rabbit and set the neighbor’s house on fire.
She did, did she?
Aye, she did. She left her husband tied up and covered with rabbit blood.
Someone said once that they’d never heard of a crime they couldn’t imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing the rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing. And smearing a husband with the blood wasn’t such a far step after that if you had a desire to smear your husband with blood and smearing someone with blood was something I could imagine a situation calling for because there were at least a few people in this world that I wouldn’t not like to see smeared with blood — one person being Werner for fucking my plans, for sending me back out into a life with my wildebeest, to figure out a way to live here and I didn’t want to do that and I didn’t know how to do that and I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that—