paper. It was impossible for anyone to console her, and yet at first Susan tried, until she gave up and was willing not to try anymore. She had no choice beyond the effort of endurance—it was all you could do, lie with misery till it waned. She made the gesture, she yielded up her resistance to the forward pull of time, but the gesture had no content.
After Casey fell asleep Susan tucked her in as though her daughter were eight again, the covers up around her small sharp chin, and walked through the quiet rooms with a ringing in her ears. Aimless, she found a place to sit—on the edge of the couch in the living room, still, cupping both hands around the coolness of her beer bottle. She felt herself moving, in the inward hollow, between resentment and desolation. For a while she stared at the chair across from her, at the mantelpiece, a branch in a red vase, a small, enameled wooden box. She closed her eyes. But the eyelids were no help: what could she see from here? A black and burned-out place, an empty lot stretching ahead.
She realized she’d been convinced, in a deep unconscious presumption, that they were safe now—sure they were off the field, confident lightning would not strike again. The steep hills were supposed to be behind them, the rest a slow coast, the rest a relief. A feeling of security had descended once the worst was over, covering them both, her and Hal, once they recovered from the hit. There had been a plateau, a level of shelter. Now the roof was off, the shelter was gone.
Still, when she drove away from Casey’s apartment in T.’s company car, she was wide awake. It was dark out, dark for hours now. She saw young couples staggering and falling on each other on the sidewalk, laughing as they righted themselves. It reminded her of sex and drinking. She picked up the car phone and dialed.
Robert answered, groggy.
“Come to my place,” she said. “OK? And bring me Camel Lights and something strong to drink.”
“But you don’t smoke, Susie.”
“I do at times like this.”
“Like what?”
Susie was not her name. No one had ever called her that; no one had been invited to, though Hal had fondly called her Suze, on occasion. She had been planning to stop seeing Robert since even before Hal found out, kept meaning to—the breakup was like an item on a grocery list, something to cross out, but then she kept forgetting it and pushing it back the way you’d forget to buy something and tell yourself: big deal, no cereal this week. But now she needed someone neutral, someone unimportant. She needed someone who had no ties to Hal, whose feelings were irrelevant. It was insulting to Hal that the very least of her encounters, the most purely trivial of them all, was the one that killed him. Because Robert was a lightweight, a person almost completely devoid of substance. The guy played fantasy baseball, and worse, lacked the discernment to kid about the subject.
Play fantasy baseball: fine. But at least have the wit to make a joke out of it.
His selling points were a taut, muscular stomach and well-built shoulders. Also he was submissive in a way that was almost dutiful, as though he was honoring an obligation—civic or military. There was something twisted in his simplicity.
“Times of mourning,” she said.
•
When she told him, in the entryway of the house, he was mildly surprised. Not floored even. At this lackluster response a part of her was incredulous. And then, as the moment expanded quietly between them, infuriated. Apparently he was too insensitive to be shocked even by sudden death. A human block of wood. On the other hand, he was easy to shock with sex. The news of Hal’s death barely moved him, but when she indicated that they could proceed from that sound bite to having sex he was uncomfortable. She relished his discomfort. She led the dog into the backyard and closed the door behind it.
A dog was not sexy. Also it was T.’s dog, which she and Hal had been taking care of after T. disappeared—practically a proxy for T. and thus also for Hal, for both of them conflated.
Then, in the dining room, she made Robert remove his clothes while she took a cigarette from the pack he’d brought in, lit it and poured herself a drink. He wore a half-wary expression and she knew exactly