“Emergency,” she’d say. “Come in, please.”
—
On the most recent trip, Sam had called his lawyer from a Hot Shoppe on the New Jersey Turnpike. The lawyer told him that Sam’s divorce had become final that morning. This had been Sam’s third marriage. He and Annie had seemed very compatible. They tended to each other realistically, with affection and common sense. Then Annie decided to go back to school. She became interested in animal behaviorism. Books accumulated. She was never at home. She was always on field trips, in thickets or on beaches, or visiting some ornithologist in Barnstable.
“Annie, Annie,” Sam had pleaded. “Let’s have some people over for drinks. Let’s prune the apple tree. Let’s bake the orange cake you always made for my birthday.”
“I have never made an orange cake in my life,” Annie said.
“Annie,” Sam said, “don’t they have courses in seventeenth-century romantic verse or something?”
“You drink too much,” Annie said. “You get quarrelsome every night at nine. Your behavior patterns are severely limited.”
Sam clutched his head with his hands.
“Plus you are reducing my ability to respond to meaningful occurrences, Sam.”
Sam poured himself another Scotch. He lit a cigarette. He applied a mustache with a piece of picnic charcoal.
“I am Captain Blood,” he said. “I want to kiss you.”
“When Errol Flynn died, he had the body of a man of ninety,” Annie said. “His brain was unrealistic from alcohol.”
She had already packed the toast rack and the pewter and rolled up the Oriental rug.
“I am just taking this one Wanda Landowska recording,” she said. “That’s all I’m taking in the way of records.”
Sam, with his charcoal mustache, sat very straight at his end of the table.
“The variations in our life have ceased to be significant,” Annie said.
—
Sam’s house was on a hill overlooking a cove. The cove was turning into a saltwater marsh. Sam liked marshes but he thought he had bought property on a deepwater cove where he could take his boat in and out. He wished that he were not involved in witnessing his cove turning into a marsh. When he had first bought the place, he was so excited about everything that he had a big dinner party at which he served soupe de poisson using only the fish he had caught himself from the cove. He could not, it seems, keep himself from doing this each year. Each year, the soupe de poisson did not seem as nice as it had the year before. About a year before Annie left him, she suggested that they should probably stop having that particular dinner party.
—
When Sam returned to the table in the Hot Shoppe on the New Jersey Turnpike after learning about his divorce, Elizabeth didn’t look at him.
“I have been practicing different expressions, none of which seem appropriate,” Elizabeth said.
“Well,” Sam said.
“I might as well be honest,” Elizabeth said.
Sam looked at his toast. He did not feel lean and young and unencumbered.
“In the following sentence, the same word is used in each of the missing spaces, but pronounced differently.” Elizabeth’s head was bowed. She was reading off the place mat. “Don’t look at yours now, Sam,” she said, “the answer’s on it.” She slid his place mat off the table, accidentally spilling coffee on his cuff. “A prominent _____ and man came into a restaurant at the height of the rush hour. The waitress was _____ to serve him immediately as she had _____.”
Sam looked at her. She smiled. He looked at the child. The child’s eyes were closed and she was hmming. Sam paid the bill. The child went to the bathroom. An hour later, just before the Tappan Zee Bridge, Sam said, “Notable.”
“What?” Elizabeth said.
“Notable. That’s the word that belongs in all three spaces.”
“You looked,” Elizabeth said.
“Goddamn it,” Sam yelled. “I did not look!”
“I knew this would happen,” Elizabeth said. “I knew it was going to be like this.”
—
It is a very hot night. Elizabeth has poison ivy on her wrists. Her wrists are covered with calamine lotion. She has put Saran Wrap over the lotion and secured it with a rubber band. Sam is in love. He smells the wonderfully clean, sun-and-linen smell of Elizabeth and her calamine lotion.
Elizabeth is going to tell a fairy story to the child. Sam tries to convince her that fables are sanctimonious and dully realistic.
“Tell her any one except the ‘Frog King,’ ” Sam whispers.
“Why can’t I tell her that one?” Elizabeth says. She is worried.
“The toad stands for male sexuality,” Sam whispers.
“Oh, Sam,” she says, “that’s so superficial. That’s a very superficial analysis of the animal-bridegroom stories.”
Sam growls, biting her softly on the collarbone.
“Oh, Sam,” she says.
—
Sam’s first wife was very pretty. She had the flattest stomach he had ever seen and very black, very straight hair. He adored her. He was faithful to her. He wrote both their names on the flyleaves of all his books. They went to Europe. They went to Mexico. In Mexico they lived in a grand room in a simple hotel opposite a square. The trees in the square were pruned in the shape of perfect boxes. Each night, hundreds of birds would come home to the trees. Beside the hotel was the shop of a man who made coffins. So many of the coffins seemed small, for children. Sam’s wife grew depressed. She lay in bed for most of the day. She pretended she was dying. She wanted Sam to make love to her and pretend that she was dying. She wanted a baby. She was all mixed up.
Sam suggested that it was the ions in the Mexican air that made her depressed. He kept loving her but it became more and more difficult for them both. She continued to retreat into a landscape of chaos and warring feelings.
Her depression became general. They had been married for almost six years but they were still only twenty-four years old. Often they would go to amusement parks. They liked the bumper cars best. The last time they had gone to the amusement park, Sam had broken his wife’s hand when he crashed head-on into her bumper car. They could probably have gotten over the incident had they not been so bitterly miserable at the time.
—
In the middle of the night, the child rushes down the hall and into Elizabeth and Sam’s bedroom.
“Sam,” the child cries, “the baseball game! I’m missing the baseball game.”
“There is no baseball game,” Sam says.
“What’s the matter? What’s happening!” Elizabeth cries.
“Yes, yes,” the child wails. “I’m late, I’m missing it.”
“Oh, what is it!” Elizabeth cries.
“She’s having an anxiety attack,” Sam says.
The child puts her thumb in her mouth and then takes it out again.
“She’s too young for anxiety attacks,” Elizabeth says. “It’s only a dream.” She takes the child back to her room. When she comes back, Sam is sitting up against the pillows, drinking a glass of Scotch.
“Why do you have your hand over your heart?” Elizabeth asks.
“I think it’s because it hurts,” Sam says.
—
Elizabeth is trying to stuff another fable into the child. She is determined this time. Sam has just returned from setting the mooring for his sailboat. He is sprawled in a hot bath, listening to the radio.
Elizabeth says, “There were two men wrecked on a desert island and one of them pretended he was home while the other admitted—”