The first papery whispers of the night wind stirred the mesquite, the bright gold flowers of the rabbit bush, and nocturnal animals — badgers, foxes, peccaries, coyotes, hooded skunks — ventured tentatively from their lairs in search of food and water. Bats and horned owls filled the rapidly cooling air with the flutter of wings.
Darkness hooded the land in a black cloak, and the wind grew chill as the sharp and enigmatic reversal of desert temperature manifested itself. A pale gold moon appeared suddenly in the star-pricked velvet of the sky, as if it had been launched from some immense catapult, casting ghostly white shine across the silent landscape.
Night was full-born.
Another day had perished into infinity.
The Second Day...
One
I stand on the porch, supporting myself with my left hand on the stucco wall, and with my right I keep slapping the wood paneling of the door. Open up in there, damn you, I know you’re in there, Phyllis. Open this goddamn door!
And the door opens and she looks out at me with that patronizing, superior expression curling her soft mouth — how could I ever have loved her, how could I ever have thought she was beautiful? Her silver-streaked blond hair is freshly coiffed, even though it is past ten o’clock at night; and the floor-length blue peignoir she wears has fur at the throat and on the sleeves. I know it is expensive, I have never seen it before, she bought it with my money — and she keeps looking at me that way, her eyes reducing me to a pile of soft odorous shit and I feel the rage burning down low in my groin, the flames of it already fanned by the liquor I’ve drunk since the court hearing.
I want to hit her. I want to slap that look away. I’ve never hit her before — any woman before — but God! I want to hit her now...
“Oh, it’s you,” she says with clear distaste. “I might have known it. What do you want, Jack?”
“Want to talk to you.”
“There’s nothing more to be said.”
“Goddamn right there is, goddamn right!”
“You’re drunk,” she says, and starts to close the door.
I lean away from the wall and wedge my shoulder against the wood. She frowns, nothing more. A sculpture fashioned of glacial ice. I push the door wide, moving her backward, and stagger inside, near falling, catching myself on the table in the hall, turning. She has gone out of focus. I shake my head and rub splayed fingers over my face, the nails digging harshly into the skin, and she shimmers, three of her into two into one.
“You’re drunk,” she says again.
“Who has a better right to be drunk, you tell me that.”
“Jack, I don’t want you in my house. Now say what you came to say and get out.”
“Your house! You bitch, your house!”
“That’s right. You heard what the judge said, didn’t you?”
So sweet, so contemptuous, and I think of all the nights with her lying beneath me, warm, whispering, and inside nothing, despising me, playing out a not particularly demanding role while I burst in every way with love for her.
“It’s my house!” I shout at her. “I built this goddamn house with my money!”
“Jack, what’s the point of going over it again and again? It’s settled now. We’re divorced, the judge made a fair evaluation—”
“Fair! Oh my God, fair! He gave you everything, he gave you my guts, he made me a goddamn indentured servant!”
“You’re being melodramatic, Jack,” she says with that cold, empty rationality. “You always were childishly ineffective under stress.”
“You frigging slut!”
“Jack, Jack, I’ve heard all the words before and they don’t mean anything to me. Now please, won’t you leave? If you don’t, I’ll have to call the police, and I really don’t want to do that. Go home and go to bed. You shouldn’t drink, either, you know.”
I grow cunning. I take a step forward, with the room tilting slightly, and I point a finger at her as if it is the blade of a dagger, aiming squarely between the heavy white mounds of her breasts. “I’m not going to pay the alimony, Phyllis,” I say softly, and I smile at her with the only side of my mouth which seems to respond.
“Oh, don’t be absurd.”
“I’m not going to pay it.”
“If you don’t, you’ll go to jail.”
“They have to catch me first.”
“And just what is that supposed to imply?”
“What the hell do you think it implies, huh? I’m leaving town, I’m getting out of this state, I’m going as far away from you as I can go.”
“I don’t believe you. You won’t quit your job, your precious job. Being Humber Realty’s star salesman has always been your one shining ambition.”
“I’ve already quit it,” I say slyly. “I quit it at four this afternoon. Call Ed Humber if you want confirmation. Go ahead, call him.”
She frowns again, and there is a faint touch of incredulity to the set of her mouth. Good! I’m getting through to her now, I’m getting to the core of her.
“I’ll put the police on you if you do a silly thing like going away,” she says coldly. “I’ll have you brought back and thrown in jail.”
“You think the police care about nonpayment of alimony? You think they’ll make much of an effort to find me?”
“I won’t let you deprive me of what’s rightfully mine, Jack.”
“No? How you going to stop me?”
“I’ll stop you.”
“No,” I say, “no, you won’t, Phyllis,” and I feel exultant. I’ve won! I’ve finally won! There are fissures in the ice shell now, I’ve penetrated, I’ve done what I came to do. I move forward, and a kind of loose, liquid laughter finds its way out of my throat, a strident, ecstatic mirth. Her face contorts, mottles, I’ve put it into you and broken it off, Phyllis, you bitch, and I reach out to put my hand on the doorknob.
She slaps me.
She brings her right hand around, palm open, and cracks it across my face with the stinging force of a whip. The sound reverberates through the house, bouncing off walls, coming back like a boomerang to pierce the soft buzzing in my ears. I jerk up convulsively, staring at her, at the cold fiat mask of her face, the hatred in her eyes.
And she stops me again.
I shake my head, and the momentary confusion within gives way to a rebirth of the burning rage which has sustained me all that day. I feel myself shaking, my hands curling into fists, and I open my mouth to tell her not to do it another time, but the words are stillborn in my throat because she slaps me again, and again and again, her hand whipping back and forth across my face like an arcing metronome. The fires consume all reason that the alcohol has not and I know what I’m going to do but I can’t stop it, I bring my right fist up and I watch myself do so as if I have somehow shed the husk of my body, watch the fist come up as if in slow motion and join her face between the aristocratic tilt of her nose and the soft curve of her mouth, watch the lip split, the nose expand, watch blood spurt out to cover my hand, and then she is falling backward, crumpling against the wall by the door, her hands rushing up to cover her red-white face.