James Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown

Two years have passed since that night and Otis still seeks explanations. Thelma’s attackers were never caught, and Otis doubts they ever will be. Psychiatrists and therapists and the minister from Otis’s church have done little good in Thelma’s recovery, if “recovery” is the word. He wakes in the middle of the night and sits by himself in the den, determined that his wife will not discover the level of torment in his soul.

More important, perhaps, he refuses to be embittered or to join ranks with his neighbors who comprised part of the forty percent of the electorate that voted for the former Klansman and Nazi David Duke in a gubernatorial runoff.

He makes a cheese, lettuce, and mayonnaise sandwich, places it on a tray with a can of soda and a long-stemmed rose, and carries the tray up to Thelma’s room. She is bent over her desk, dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans with big brass brads on them, earphones clamped on her head. He has no idea what she is listening to. Sometimes she is enthralled by recordings of birdsong or waterfalls; other times she listens to heavy-metal bands that make Otis wish he had been born deaf.

“I thought you might want a snack,” he says.

Her mouth is painted with purple lipstick, her hair dark and freshly shampooed and clipped in bangs so that it looks like a helmet. Her face wears a perpetual pie-plate expression that makes others feel the problem in communicating with her is theirs, not hers. She vacillates between bouts of anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia. By normal standards, she would not be considered a likable person. But why should she be? Otis asks himself. How many young girls were psychologically prepared to deal with the damage these men had inflicted upon her?

She begins eating the sandwich without removing the earphones or speaking to him. He reaches down and lifts the foam-rubber pads from her head.

“Can’t you say hello to your old man?” he asks.

“Hi, Daddy,” she says.

“Want to help me latch the shutters when you’re finished?”

She looks up at him. An intense thought, like a dark bird with a hooked beak, seems to hide behind her eyes. “A civil defense guy said it’s going to be awful.”

“It could be. But we’re tough guys.”

He tries to read her expression. It’s not one of fear or apprehension. In fact, he wonders if it isn’t one of fulfilled expectation. She’s a reader of Nostradamus and is drawn to prophecies of destruction and death, as though she wishes to see the unhappiness in her own life transferred into the lives of others.

“The insurance companies are going to screw the city, aren’t they? Does your company write exceptions for water damage?” she says.

“That’s silly.”

“Not if you’re one of the people about to get screwed.”

He leaves the room and closes the door behind him, repressing the anger that blooms in his chest.

Downstairs his wife is dropping thirty-pound bags of crushed ice into the Deepfreeze. Her name is Melanie and she insists that he not call her “Mel,” even though that was the affectionate nickname he gave her when they first courted.

“Why are you doing that?” he asks.

“So we’ll have a way to preserve our food if we have a total outage,” she replies, a cloud of escaped cold air rising into her face.

He starts to explain that he’s already covered that possibility with his installation of gasoline-operated generators, that in effect she’s displacing the room in the freezer that should be used for all the perishables they can pack into it.

But he doesn’t argue. He was a widower when he met her five years ago on a beach in the Bahamas. She was a divorcée, deeply tanned and gold-haired and beautiful, much younger than he, a strong woman physically, bold in her look, her brown eyes wide-set and unblinking, her laughter suggesting disregard for convention and perhaps a degree of sexual adventurism. She was the kind of woman who could be a friend as well as a lover.

Otis was fifty-three at the time, prematurely bald but proud of the power in his hands and shoulders and not ashamed of his libido or the profuse way he sweated when he worked or the scent of testosterone his clothes sometimes carried. He was what he was and didn’t pretend otherwise. Obviously Melanie, or “Mel,” did not find him an unattractive man.

They were opposites in many ways, but each seemed to possess a set of qualities that compensated for a deficiency in the other, she with her urban sophistication and degree in finance from the University of Chicago, he with his work ethic and his common sense in dealing with people.

They said good-bye in the Bahamas without consummating their brief courtship but continued to talk long-distance to each other and exchange presents and e-mails. Two months passed, and on a summer night when the light was high in the sky and he could no longer stand his loneliness, Otis asked Melanie to meet him at the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta. He was surprised at her aggressiveness in bed and the fact she came three times their first night together, something no other woman had ever done for him. He proposed one week later.

His friends thought he was impetuous and that perhaps he was being taken advantage of by a woman twenty years his junior. But what did he have to lose? he told them. His daughter needed a mother; Otis needed a wife; and let’s face it, he said, women with Melanie’s looks didn’t come his way every day.

After the first year he began to realize he had married a complex if not mercurial woman. Her attitudes were often inflexible, although the issue involved was usually insignificant. She canceled the cable service because the technician tracked mud into the foyer. She accused Otis of overtipping waiters and allowing the gardeners to get by with sloppy work. She seemed to carry a reservoir of anger with her as she would a social bludgeon, and selectively utilized it to cause embarrassment in public places and ultimately get her way.

An acquaintance in Chicago has told him that Melanie’s former husband was an alcoholic. The friend’s offer of information about Melanie’s past has only made Otis more confused. Melanie is rigidly abstemious, and Otis does not understand how her former husband’s behavior could account for her unpredictable mood swings today.

But the transformation in Melanie that was most difficult for Otis to accept took place after the attack upon Thelma. Each evening she began to show fatigue and complained of nausea and insisted on talking about nonexistent problems with their finances. He could feel her back constrict when he touched her in bed. On Saturday and Sunday mornings she awoke an hour earlier than he and went downstairs and into her day’s schedule, effectively neutralizing any romantic overture on his part.

On one occasion, unbeknown to her, he glimpsed her picking his clothes off the back of a chair, smelling them, then flinging them with disgust into a dirty clothes hamper.

Now, as the worst storm in Louisiana ’s history approaches the city, he wonders if she blames him for the assault upon his daughter. Is that the reason behind her irritability and her implicit criticism of whatever he does? Does she no longer think of him as protector of his family?

“I’m going to the club for a workout. Want to come?” he says.

“Now? Are you serious?”

“My daddy used to always say, ‘Respect Mother Nature, but nail down the shutters and don’t let her scare you.’”

She can hardly hide her ennui at his mention of his sawmill-employee father who went to the ninth grade. “Take Thelma with you,” she says.

“She doesn’t like the club.”

Melanie makes no reply and begins pulling dishes from the dishwasher and putting them away loudly in the cabinets.