“I’m just going out for a quick drink with some friends,” I shouted into my lap as Smith began a rightward move across traffic, some quarter mile ahead of me.
“Friends?” Marcie’s voice came from the phone, dubiously.
“Some of the guys from work.”
“I wish you’d come home,” she said. “I have something incredible to show you.”
I saw Smith exit onto Dunleavy. I swerved, said to Marcie, “I won’t be late,” then flipped the phone closed while executing a nifty move between a school bus full of band members and an SUV. I had to hurry, or Smith would get lost in side streets.
When I got to the top of the exit onto Dunleavy, I saw Smith’s car turn into a strip mall six blocks down the road. At least he wasn’t going home yet. As badly as I wanted some answers, I wanted no part of Smith’s home life. There are things in this world you just can’t get out of your head, and Smith’s house, I knew, would be one of them.
His car was parked in front of a Walgreens, so I parked nearby and went inside. I could imagine catching Smith in an aisle where you’d rather not be caught, perhaps foot care or fungicides or protective undergarments. But a fairly good look around the place brought no sign of Smith. I was approached by a retarded boy in a blue smock who asked me if he could help me find anything. When I told him no, he moved on to someone else, a woman who said, “Yes, cough syrup,” at which point the retarded boy called someone to help the woman find cough syrup.
I left Walgreens thinking Smith must be in another of the shops in the strip mall. But when I got to the parking lot, the gray Saturn was gone.
Not knowing what else to do, I went home. On the way, now driving with the last of the sun at my back, I thought about how silly all of this was. That I would go chasing after Smith like some sort of madman, as if Smith had any answers, as if the incident I had witnessed even merited answers. I realized now that Schmelling’s antics in the parking lot were nothing more than that, antics, some sort of frat prank that he and his acolytes never outgrew, a symbolic thumbing of the nose at the IC and the conformity it bred, and if Smith and some of the others were a bit carried away by the whole thing, that was their problem, not mine.
When I got home, Marcie was again very glad to see me. She met me at the door, already unclothed, and the next thing I knew, she was on her knees in front of me. When she finished, as I hung there, leaning against the front door to support my shaky legs, she took me by my limpening member and led me to the studio. There was the sketch, but now a full painting, finished and beautiful, maybe her best work yet. My face and white shirt were colored by the setting sun through the glass of the window, which she had somehow portrayed without showing any glass at all. My tie was an iridescent stripe of blues and greens and reds woven together to produce an effect of color the likes of which I’d never seen. My hand against the windowpane was the picture’s most stunning feature. I seemed from one angle to be waving; from another, I held up my hand as if to say, Stop! From still another, I was a startled man bracing himself against the glass, which, as I’ve said, was both there and not there at once, which led to an even more eerie effect, that of a man trying not to fall as the building behind him leaned. I was completely carried away by the painting, so much so that I hadn’t noticed Marcie’s hand moving on me, working me back to a state of arousal. Before I could speak, Marcie dragged me to the ground and climbed on top of me, inserting me into her as I became fully hard again. This may have been the single—or double, or triple, I lost count—greatest sexual experience of our marriage, and by the time we were done, even the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet were tender from pushing against the canvas drop cloths.
After, lying together on the floor beneath the easel, beneath the painting that could very well be the best American portrait since Whistler’s Mother, I told her about Schmelling, that today, instead of crawling, he crabwalked, told her I’d figured it all out, that he was some poor midlevel schmuck who was never going anywhere and that his way of rebelling was to put on this weird act in the parking lot every so often. I wanted to tell her about following Smith, about the way things seemed out of place at the IC that day, about having to avoid the manager, about the retarded boy at Walgreens, but I never got the chance. As soon as I got it out about Schmelling and the crabwalk, she leaped to her feet as if someone had poked her with a cattle prod. I tried to call for her, but she was already gone from the room. She’d run into our bedroom and locked the door, and standing there in the hallway, naked and cold and covered with the sticky, drying liquids of our love, I could hear her crying.
After trying the door and calling for her a couple of times, I, not knowing what else to do, went to the guest bathroom to take a shower. While I was in there, lathering and rinsing and trying to guess what in the world I’d done wrong, I could hear her stomping about outside in the hall between our bedroom and the studio. I wasn’t that alarmed, really, at least not as alarmed as I realize now I should have been. I mean, I lived with Marcie, she was my wife, and she was temperamental, and much more of a believer, or at least much more receptive, to the things in life that float beneath the surface (which, as I said before, we create for ourselves as need be). Marcie was the artist, the woman of moods and funks and elations, and I was the calm, levelheaded one who kept us grounded in the world and made the work she did possible. It was the perfect arrangement, it seemed to me, each of us using our own skills and bents and frames of mind to make our marriage a true union, to make up one body that was prepared to meet the world on whatever terms it asked of us. I still had no idea what I’d done wrong, but I decided it didn’t matter—I’d get out of the shower, towel off, and then go to her and hold her until she calmed down, and I’d say I’m sorry and I’m sorry and I’m sorry again, for whatever I’d done to upset her. And then the door opened, and she flung back the shower curtain and threw in the painting in six neatly razored, beautifully colored strips.
I jumped quickly to dodge the initial burst of whatever she was throwing at me, but when I saw it was the painting and that it was being ruined by the water, I tried to pick it up somehow. She stood there, tiny and furious, wreathed by steam.
“Just leave it,” Marcie said. “You’re the one who killed it.”
“Marcie, what are you talking about? I thought—”
“No, you didn’t think, you son of a bitch. You didn’t think at all.”
“What are you . . . why did you do this?”
“I could ask you the same thing, couldn’t I?” She was really screaming now, trying to talk through the kind of tears that should be saved for those two or three times in your life when unless you cry like that there’s no way to go on living, the kind of tears that leave you completely at their mercy, when you can’t even control your arms and legs and spine anymore, so you flail around in some kind of rhythm that only your sobbing knows. “You . . . murderer!”
When I stepped out of the shower, she got control of herself enough to run from the bathroom. She returned to the bedroom and locked the door and stayed in there and cried all night long. I lay on the couch and watched a show on Animal Planet about otters and their lives until I fell asleep. When I awoke the next morning, early, she was already in the studio, with that door locked as well. I figured it would be best to leave things be for a while, to go on in to work and give her some peace, and then, when we’d had a chance to clear our heads, talk about it tonight.
So I got dressed and drove to the office. As I started down the access road, I looked about to try to see the thing that had bothered me the day before, the missed chalk mark. But I couldn’t find it again, and as I approached the IC, as I pulled into my parking space, as I went through the huge glass doors and across the marble-floored lobby past PR and into the elevator,