disorder. But he said, “I know myself.” He said, “I’m not in control, Jane.” His mind was intact, his mind was unimpeachable. If he could not gain dominion over his body, that was not “his” doing. Not an occult possession but a hijacking of some obscure order of the body, the frightened soul inside the runaway train of mindless matter, peering out from the conductor’s car in horror. That was him. That was her husband. She reached out in the darkness and touched his breathing body.
7
The next day she brokered negotiations in a half daze. She accepted offers and arranged showings for later in the week. She tried calling him at work. When he picked up, he picked up on the first ring; the secretary waited until the third ring. That gave Jane the second ring to hang up and try him again later. She came to the second ring again and again, and then she quickly put the phone down. She didn’t want to push through to the secretary. She didn’t want to know if he’d left the office. If she didn’t know, she could still picture him in a climate-controlled conference room with his associates arrayed around him in their decorous business attire, drinking civilized lattes and assessing the other side’s evidence. It was what he wanted, this corporate pastoral. What the glove box had given its life for: the perpetuation, inherently a kind of celebration, of uneventful everyday life. Long live the mundane.
In early evening she tried him again but again he didn’t pick up. He didn’t pick up because he was walking through the front door of the realty office. She looked up from the telephone and there he was, with flowers.
“I’m sorry about the other morning,” he said. “The boxing match with the car.” He handed her the flowers, and they went to dinner.
It wasn’t the Italian you could get in the city but the food was better than most. The private lighting of the place lent itself to both proposals of marriage and requests for divorce. They sat in back in a dimly lit booth, dipping bread into an olive tapenade, a wine-red rococo carpet underfoot. Outside a new snow had started to fall over the old, adding a pristine frost to the winter’s blackening palimpsest.
They had agreed that the alpine pack could remain in the car.
“Five o’clock,” she said. “And with flowers. I didn’t think that would happen until I announced I had cancer.”
He stared at her intensely, as if this were a visit monitored by guards who would soon break them apart and return him to captivity, while she would walk through the parking lot to weep in the car. His expression was earnest enough to appear before God and she expected an apology for something: the late nights, the missed opportunities, the lacunae born of married days. But instead he smiled and picked up his wine and said, “It’s not coming back.”
“What’s not coming back?”
“I’ve gone two entire days,” he said. “It’s not coming back.”
The waiter appeared. Tim sat back to allow him to move in with the plate. Ordinarily after the food arrived she tucked her hair behind her ears and picked up her silverware. Now she pushed the plate away and leaned into the table on her elbows and looked at him.
“It’s happened twice already, Tim.”
“You should have seen me today.”
“I found you in the woods just yesterday morning, remember?”
“Sitting at my desk. I wasn’t going anywhere.”
“You know and I know that two times—”
“Are you going to eat?”
She looked down at her plate. “No,” she said.
“Why did we come here if you’re not going to eat?”
She didn’t want to fight. She picked up her fork. He took his first bite.
“Can we just assume?” She didn’t know how to continue. “What if it is back? What if?”
He took another bite. “Then I will buy a gun,” he said, swallowing, picking up his wineglass again, “and blow my head off.”
He drank. She removed her elbows from the table and sat back. Did she just hear him right? He continued to eat his penne. Was he that far gone? She entered a blinded moment. Kill himself? He was the only one in the body. Everyone else was locked out. But this misfortune was not his and his alone! She left the booth.
In the movies they throw cash down on the table but he didn’t have any cash so he stood quickly, instantly aware that he had provoked the response he’d wanted and