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, it seemed that someone else had found it and erased it unequivocally. Everything was in order, the way it had always been, as though during the night, fearing discovery by my wary eye, whoever or whatever had shifted things had come and shifted them back, sighing with relief over the closeness of the call, determined never to try to sneak anything past me again. The elevator disgorged several women from Marketing onto three, a janitor got off on four, and I was alone and feeling fine up to seven. I looked down at my tie, which was, coincidentally, the same tie I had worn in Marcie’s picture. I was straightening it in the shiny brass reflection of the elevator keypad just as the bell for seven rang. I reached down for my briefcase, and when I looked up, I was staring straight into the blank and pitiless face of the manager.
My heart stopped—I really believe it did—for just a second, and then it began to move about wildly in my chest like some sort of little swamp mammal trapped in an underwater tree trunk. The manager was a bit taller than I, and he looked down at me with baggy, red-rimmed, jaundiced eyes that registered nothing about who I was or what I might be doing there in the elevator, much less attempting to get off on his floor. I was so riveted with fear that until I was shoved aside by them, I didn’t even notice the IC security guards at the manager’s elbows, accompanying him like escorts at a pageant or a dance. They moved by me and brought the manager into the elevator. I turned, still looking into the yellow sclera of the manager’s eyes, our gazes locked, until one of the guards said, “Getting off, Mr. Perkins?”
Hearing my name snapped the spell the old man had on me. I looked back and forth quickly at the two other men to ascertain which of them had said it, which of them knew who I was, although it could hardly matter. If one of them knew me, the other did, too, and everyone else on seven as well, and everyone in the entire IC, and that meant that this otherwise unremarkable Tuesday was to be, no doubt, my last in the employ of this prestigious concern, and that tonight, instead of patching things up with Marcie, I would spend the evening updating my résumé, making phone calls, and trying to figure out how to keep paying our mortgage on nothing more than an unemployment check.
I moved from the elevator, down the hall to the main room of the floor, and toward my desk in the corner near the window. It seemed to take forever to get there, as if this morning I were the one with feet of clay, but the time it took me to get there allowed me to notice a rather strange thing. Everyone on the floor was looking out from behind their cubicle partitions as I passed. At first, I figured this was the natural instinct to watch a dead man walking, but this was not the case—some of my coworkers winked, others smiled and gave a thumbs-up, still others nodded in that sharp, professional manner that young executives must spend hours practicing in their mirrors at home.
Much about this, obviously, struck me as rather strange: (1) that I had seen the manager being led away in the traditional manner of dismissal, a dismissal of which I believed myself and my poor performance in Contracts to be the direct cause; (2) that, because I wanted to avoid scrutiny, I was usually among the first employees at my desk each morning—and had in fact come in even earlier than usual, owing to my night on the couch and my fitful otter dreams—but today everyone else was already there, as if they were waiting for me; (3) that they all seemed to know something I didn’t, something
