The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,59

with the full, furious strength a man in his early forties could muster, a half-defensive shove that had sent her sprawling backward into the coffee table.

For an instant before she lost her balance he felt a strange and childlike gratification. At last! When she hit the table—such a fragile construction, that piece of Mexican craftwork—and Araceli entered the room, it all disappeared. Now a hollow numbness occupied the space between his eyes. Maureen had violated a trust by spending that money, she had damaged their family, but of course he had lost the moral high ground when he pushed her. Would she ever forgive him for her fall, see the full picture of events, and apologize for what she had done and said? There is a less than fifty percent probability. Or would she believe that her fall and the broken table had absolved her of any need to acknowledge how vicious she had been? The much more likely outcome. If she’d managed to get a full night’s sleep she might feel something other than the outraged sense of victimhood of the night before, when he feared, for a moment, that she would call the police. By the feminist calculus that followed these events, he was an abuser, a male inflictor of bodily harm, and therefore would be permanently expelled from the garden of family love, into the purgatory inhabited by the alcoholics, the goons, and the serial adulterers. Perhaps, after the erasures a few hours of sleep could bring, Maureen would see the crash and fall for what they really were: an accident, an act of mutual stupidity and clumsiness, like a pratfall in a comedy skit. This is what happens, he would tell her, when two middle-aged people push their sleep-deprived bodies to raise small children, a task we should leave for twentysomething decath-letes, ballerinas, and other spry and limber people.

Scott would tell her these things in due time, but after just a few minutes awake, he had decided that for the moment a full retreat was in order, an escape from his wife’s sense of entitlement, from her new fascination with rare desert fauna, which appeared to have replaced earlier fascinations with rustic Italian furniture and abstract California art. Let her figure it out on her own: or rather, with Araceli, who did the bulk of the work, who kept the house livable and the children fed and gave Maureen time to dream up schemes that would empty their bank accounts—now, as many times before, he thought of Araceli as a kind of subtraction from his wife. In Maine’s “Down East,” where his mother was from, and in the unknown Mexican places his father had lived, they understood about respect and responsibility. He was still the son of scrappers and survivors.

I have to get the hell out of here. It was what he told himself those last days at MindWare, when he longed to work with adults again. Living with Maureen was looking like the final act at his roller-coaster start-up, when the Big Man spent an extravagance on five-star hotels, dinners at restaurants on the Strip, and a thousand dollars in golf lessons in a quixotic campaign to seduce the venture capitalists, raise cash, and fend off the board. At some point you had to say, Stop, it’s over. Suddenly, those old sayings of his Mexican father didn’t sound so silly and quaint: Live cheap and smell sweet. Never hang your hat where you can’t reach it. After grabbing a few clothes, he was out the door and in his car, gliding down toward the ocean with only the red eye of Scorpio watching him.

Such was the domestic discipline in the home on Paseo Linda Bonita that several hours passed before either Araceli or the two boys noticed that Maureen and Scott were gone. Having been conditioned by a half summer’s worth of their mother’s anti-television, anti-computer exhortations, Brandon and Keenan began their day with appropriately mind-nurturing and solitary activities. It was a quiet, sisterless morning, and through the open summer windows and the screens the house filled with the squeaky chee-deep chee-deep of the tree swallows that were acquainting themselves with the ocotillo in the backyard. Saman-tha’s usual prespeech utterances and screams were not there to ring in the ears of her brothers, though the boys were not yet conscious of her absence. The boys did not know that their sister was already halfway to the Sonoran Desert with their mother just as they were