doesn’t know it. She kept coming.
In the studio now, he tried not to think of her, but it was hard, the number of times he’d had her there. He tried at least not to think of her by name.
His first marriage had been fucked from the start, but this time, with Deb, he’d married the right woman. He had.
Marrying Deb, having the kids, all that was right. It was he who’d gone wrong, or the world. He’d felt it these last few years. Something to do with the Internet and jihad and all the natural disasters they’d been having: There was a buzz in the air that made it harder to move forward, a feeling that they were living in a time with no future. And then there had been that girl, in her see-through blouses with the breasts under them, soft and pointed up like curious things. With her full lips and full ass, and how did she stay so full when everything else every day was being depleted, when—
Listen, look:
It’s not like I killed anybody.
That was it. Jack did not really, in the end, believe he’d done anything so wrong. With the girl he’d been careful to make no promises. He’d encouraged her to date. Deb would need time and patience to forgive him, but here, alone with his tools, he could feel he was forgiving himself already.
True, it was hard on the kids, but that was why he wanted to explain to them, explain how much it was not about them. Maybe that was the painful part, that not everything in their parents’ lives could be.
The girl was a channel that let him be a better man at home. Like a soldier, I do on the outside what I need to keep the inside safe. That was the truth of how he felt, something to be kept down and buried deep.
(But what stays buried? Even heavy things have that way about them, of always coming to the surface—
especially
heavy things do—and when it did happen, when it did all come out, that Jack had been sleeping with a woman who was not his wife, not once but many times, a woman who loved him or thought she loved him, everyone knew. Deb, the kids, their grandmother. Even the building knew, because of something Simon said in the elevator, when a neighbor woman from the top floor had asked how is everything, and Simon, who was meant to make his answer about school, Model UN or SAT prep work, had said that his parents were getting divorced and that probably they would be moving.
Actually it was not so bad as that. Worse too, but also not so bad, in that it hadn’t been totally Simon’s fault. Because there, on the elevator bulletin board, where the co-op posted its newsletters and petitions against nearby construction sites, where tenants pinned lost socks from the laundry room, tacked
there,
for all to see, was a piece of paper, slightly creased.
Across the top, in red pen, like a bad mark from a teacher, the words:
PLEASE do NOT drop TRASH into the SHAFT.
Simon didn’t know how the page got wherever it had been, or who had found it, but he knew what it said, approximately. Approximately, he knew the words.
So he hadn’t had to look at it very carefully, not like the mom from 16B, who’d smiled at him before leaning close to the board and squinting to read. She bent further forward in the stretchy pants she always wore, purple and made of something like crushed velvet, gloving her body in a way that embarrassed him.
Simon hung back against the wall, squeezing the elevator rail behind him, and watched as her features crowded together in the middle of her face. Her size and her boy’s haircut made her elfish. He thought of a
Peter Pan
they’d seen one summer on a family trip to the Berkshires.
“God,” she said. “Gosh, that’s horrible. They shouldn’t have that up in here.” She sucked the air between her teeth and tried to share a cringe with him.
Simon stared blankly back and watched her become awkward about the words they’d been confined with, she and this person who was still more boy than man. Her eyes clocked the door, though it was closed, had been
In the studio now, he tried not to think of her, but it was hard, the number of times he’d had her there. He tried at least not to think of her by name.
His first marriage had been fucked from the start, but this time, with Deb, he’d married the right woman. He had.
Marrying Deb, having the kids, all that was right. It was he who’d gone wrong, or the world. He’d felt it these last few years. Something to do with the Internet and jihad and all the natural disasters they’d been having: There was a buzz in the air that made it harder to move forward, a feeling that they were living in a time with no future. And then there had been that girl, in her see-through blouses with the breasts under them, soft and pointed up like curious things. With her full lips and full ass, and how did she stay so full when everything else every day was being depleted, when—
Listen, look:
It’s not like I killed anybody.
That was it. Jack did not really, in the end, believe he’d done anything so wrong. With the girl he’d been careful to make no promises. He’d encouraged her to date. Deb would need time and patience to forgive him, but here, alone with his tools, he could feel he was forgiving himself already.
True, it was hard on the kids, but that was why he wanted to explain to them, explain how much it was not about them. Maybe that was the painful part, that not everything in their parents’ lives could be.
The girl was a channel that let him be a better man at home. Like a soldier, I do on the outside what I need to keep the inside safe. That was the truth of how he felt, something to be kept down and buried deep.
(But what stays buried? Even heavy things have that way about them, of always coming to the surface—
especially
heavy things do—and when it did happen, when it did all come out, that Jack had been sleeping with a woman who was not his wife, not once but many times, a woman who loved him or thought she loved him, everyone knew. Deb, the kids, their grandmother. Even the building knew, because of something Simon said in the elevator, when a neighbor woman from the top floor had asked how is everything, and Simon, who was meant to make his answer about school, Model UN or SAT prep work, had said that his parents were getting divorced and that probably they would be moving.
Actually it was not so bad as that. Worse too, but also not so bad, in that it hadn’t been totally Simon’s fault. Because there, on the elevator bulletin board, where the co-op posted its newsletters and petitions against nearby construction sites, where tenants pinned lost socks from the laundry room, tacked
there,
for all to see, was a piece of paper, slightly creased.
Across the top, in red pen, like a bad mark from a teacher, the words:
PLEASE do NOT drop TRASH into the SHAFT.
Simon didn’t know how the page got wherever it had been, or who had found it, but he knew what it said, approximately. Approximately, he knew the words.
So he hadn’t had to look at it very carefully, not like the mom from 16B, who’d smiled at him before leaning close to the board and squinting to read. She bent further forward in the stretchy pants she always wore, purple and made of something like crushed velvet, gloving her body in a way that embarrassed him.
Simon hung back against the wall, squeezing the elevator rail behind him, and watched as her features crowded together in the middle of her face. Her size and her boy’s haircut made her elfish. He thought of a
Peter Pan
they’d seen one summer on a family trip to the Berkshires.
“God,” she said. “Gosh, that’s horrible. They shouldn’t have that up in here.” She sucked the air between her teeth and tried to share a cringe with him.
Simon stared blankly back and watched her become awkward about the words they’d been confined with, she and this person who was still more boy than man. Her eyes clocked the door, though it was closed, had been
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