Night on Hobby road. Once more I keep my lonely vigil from the front window. I do not know what I am looking for. Around eleven, I imagine that I see a man across the street in the darkness, watching the house, a very tall man who could be black, although the shadows make it hard to tell: Foreman? Perhaps a hallucination, because, when I look again, he is gone. Half an hour later, a pickup truck jolts down the street, and I fantasize a detailed story of surveillance, alternating vehicles, legions of watchers.
Silly, of course, but I really did get beaten up a few nights ago, and somebody really did call and tell me not to worry, that everything was taken care of.
So stop worrying!
I have tried to talk to Kimmer about what has been happening, but she still refuses to listen beyond wanting to make sure I really believe we are all safe. I cannot seem to breach the wall that has arisen between us. It is as though, by being assaulted, I have become hard evidence of what my wife, still hoping for judicial office, prefers to pretend is not true: that something is going on, and that dropping it, letting it die, is no longer an option.
I shake my head. I log on to the Internet Chess Club and play four quick games with somebody from Denmark, losing three. And still I have the sense, with me now for weeks, that my efforts to reason my way through are like chewing on cotton: I chomp and chomp and chomp, but I make no progress.
Sleep is suddenly very attractive.
I hurry upstairs and look in on Bentley, whose bedroom is decorated principally with various Disneyesque images of Hercules, who was, it seems, a smiling blond Aryan with the world’s largest teeth. Herkes is our son’s word for his favorite hero. I adjust his Herkes blankets by the light of the streetlamp, check his Herkes nightlight, kiss his warm forehead, and then head down the hall to join my slumbering wife in the master bedroom at the back of the house. I undress in the bathroom, remembering with some pain the days when Kimmer and I used to leave each other little notes, and sometimes a flower, atop the vanity; WAKE ME, we would write in amorous invitation. I do not remember when we stopped, but I do know that Kimmer ignored my notes for several weeks before I realized that she wasn’t leaving them any more. I wonder whether my father, in his last years, had anybody to leave him a flower or a note at bedtime, and it occurs to me that I know nothing of his romantic life, if he even had one after my mother died. Alma implied that the Judge was lonely, and, looking back, I can see that he probably was. Now and then he would show up at an important dinner or theater opening, some famous conservative woman on his arm, invariably a citizen of the paler nation, but he always managed to convey the impression that these were mutually useful escortings, nothing romantic or sexual. I am aware of no girlfriend: if he had one, he kept her well hidden.
I decide that I do not want to know.
The notes: nowadays, Kimmer leaves on my pillow only articles torn from popular magazines, offering assistance in dealing with the death of a loved one, for she believes I have grieved insufficiently, or perhaps incorrectly. There is no serious scientific evidence that grieving in fact possesses the famous five stages, but an entire industry of counselors makes a fortune insisting that it is so.
“Go to bed,” I remind myself, lest I forget why I came upstairs.
I glance out the bathroom window into the yard. All seems to be at peace. At last I return to the bedroom and crawl between the sheets. I am so, so sorry, I whisper to my sleeping wife, but only in my mind. I didn’t mean it to go this way. I lie still, I say my prayers, and then I gaze at the ceiling in the darkness, sensing more than feeling my wife a few feet away, not daring to reach out to her for the comfort I crave to give, and to get. My mind refuses to settle into sleep, still besieging itself with all the guilt I can heap on my own head, which is quite a bit. I turn toward Kimmer again. Where did you go for three hours this afternoon? I ask her in my mind: for she was not at her office and did not answer her cell phone. It has happened before. It will happen again. How did we get here, darling?
I try another position, but sleep refuses to come, and the answers I crave remain as elusive as ever. I am doing little work. My reputation is crumbling around me. I am becoming known as the mad law professor who skips classes, makes nutty accusations, and gets beaten up in the middle of the Quad.
And no human being, certainly no wife, to comfort me in my depression and distress.
Ah, Kimmer, Kimmer! Why do you do… what you do? Again I remember, uneasily, our relationship in its youth, when opening my eyes each morning to Kimmer’s smiling face was all I asked of the world. I hear the rumbling of a train passing, but it is only the blood pounding in my head. I open my eyes, but my wife’s face is hidden. The bed is suddenly too vast, the distance from Kimmer too great. I turn onto one side, then the other, then back again, as my wife rolls over and mumbles something unintelligible. I wish I could believe she was telling me, in her half-sleep, that she loves me. I wish I dared reach out to her for comfort. I wish I knew why I have the sense that I have been played for a fool by forces larger than myself.
You and your family are perfectly safe.
Well, he said nothing about humiliation or the ruin of my career.
Longing for my wife’s unyielding body, I know the despair of the stateless refugee, praying that he might, against all expectations, reach once more his war-torn home, a cold, unfriendly territory from which he has been excluded. But out there in the darkness, I sense the forbidding barricades I cannot see. When one of my feet touches one of hers, Kimmer stirs and shifts her leg away, even in sleep rejecting my presence. For a long moment, I consider waking her, to argue my way back to my homeland, or perhaps to beg. Instead, I turn away from the border of the lush and sensuous land that once welcomed me, close my eyes, and hope not to dream.