David Gates - Preston Falls

The bedroom's cold and the sheets are filthy She drags an oil-filled electric radiator out of the closet and plugs it in on Willis's side of the bed, where the outlet is. Now, are there any clean sheets? Well, there's that garish flowered set of her mother's. She strips the bed and puts the dirty sheets and pillowcases in the hamper. Along with his dirty clothes from the floor.

While the bedroom's warming up, she goes back into his study and plays girl detective. She opens a little plastic Tandy box and finds unlabeled diskettes, still with plastic over them, and one with a label marked BACKUP. She clicks the mouse to see what documents are on his C drive:

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SALEBILL, MEMOS, SHITBULL, MEM07, SPORTY, 27734, MENSONG, LIED-JOUR, MEM06, 2MARTY, BULLSHIT, TWADDLE, SPINDOC. She opens MENSONG, which turns out to have nothing to do with music; it's a press release about some blind taste test of Sportif against Gatorade. She closes MENSONG, reaches up to bat away a spiderweb hanging from the ceiling, then changes her mind. This is hopeless. She shuts the computer down and goes back into the bedroom, where it already feels warmer. She starts opening drawers, but turns up only clothes. In the closet she finds his Air Jordans and his cowboy boots. Therefore: last seen wearing Timberlands.

She goes downstairs to find something to read. In the front hall she picks up book after book; what are these things? Willis is forever snapping them up at tag sales and junk shops and then reading nothing but the same obsessive stuff he's already read a hundred times. Look at all this. Fear Strikes Out, by Jimmy Piersall with Al Hirshberg — some baseball player, apparently. Five Acres and Independence, by M. G. Kains, which figures. A worn-out edition of Pilgrim's Progress with this crude picture on the cover of a man in helmet and armor and another with long hair and a red tunic, hands clasped in prayer as waves rise around them. Not your world's greatest illo, but the lettering's nifty: tall, sort of shaky-looking, all caps — they did upper case simply by making the same letters taller — obviously hand done by somebody just making it up as they went. Still, it's nicely consistent from letter to letter, and it might be fun to have on hand. You'd have to extrapolate the rest of the alphabet, but it looks doable. You've got all the vowels — thank God for that U in Bunyan — and the R would give you the D, the E, the F. . definitely doable. Right, and she's the only hack graphic designer in New York who ever fantasized about doing a children's book someday.

So he was having some kind of religious crisis? Is that what she's to gather? Pilgrim's Progress, for God's sake. Reverting to some ancestral Puritan caca? The Willises themselves hadn't come over on the Mayflower, but somebody had, back on his father's mother's side or something. Willis always talked about it— talks about it — with such contempt, at the same time making good and sure you know. Well, probably he was just showing off by reading something old and unreadable, though God knows who he was showing off to. Even when he's absolutely by himself he's still doing his Mr. Everything number: out with his chainsaw, or "sweating joints" or putting up sheetrock, which he now seems to call "drywall," and at night reading Pilgrim's Progress.

PRESTON FALLS

Or whenever he does his reading now; maybe he gets up and squeezes in a canto or two before breakfast.

Then, halfway down a stack of paperbacks, she finds Emma, with its orange spine and the portrait on the cover of some woman who looks nothing like how you picture Emma and in fact is some actual person. But which Jean likes because it's so wrong that the image doesn't get in your way. Marcia Fox, by Sir William Beechey. Whoever they were. Jean brings Emma into the kitchen, sits down in front of the heater and takes a sip from the mug — completely cold and poisonous-tasting. She wants especially to read the part where Mr. Knightley says, "You have been no friend to Harriet Smith, Emma." But she also wants to take her time getting there, so she starts in where Emma's doing the watercolor of Harriet and Mr. Knightley says, "You have made her too tall, Emma," and Emma knows he's right but won't admit it. Jean wouldn't mind being cared for and condescended to by Mr. Knightley. When they start making the collection of riddles, Jean remembers that she'd better call Carol; as soon as she finishes this chapter. But as Emma begins walking stupid Harriet through the riddle about the word courtship — Jean always feels stupid too when she reads this part, because she didn't get it the first time either — the phone rings.

"Hi," says Carol. "I hope I didn't wake you up, but since I hadn't heard…"

"No no, not at all. I was just reading."

"So did you get hold of his mother?"

"Left a message. I didn't hear back." Jean takes another awful-tasting sip. "Did Mel try to call her?"

"No, she just went up to her room. When I put Roger to bed, I looked in and she was asleep in her clothes."

"She must be exhausted," says Jean. Less what she thinks than what she wants to think. "Did you help her into her pj's?"

"I thought I should just let her be."

"But you covered her up, right?"

"Yes, Mother," says Carol. "So now what?"

"I thought I'd set the alarm for five and just drive straight into the city."

"But wouldn't it be easier to deal with this up there?"

"Carol, I have 2ijob. I have to be at work.''

"That's totally crackers," Carol says. "You have to get some good sleep, really rest yourself. Then call your office in the morning, say

you've got a family emergency, get hold of the police and just start dealing."

"But what if that takes all day? I can't not be there for Halloween." "I think they'll survive," says Carol. "Let me worry about this end, okay? If you get tied up, I'll tell the kids you had like a plumbing emergency or something. Aren't you always having trouble with the plumbing up there? Look, I guarantee they won't ask for a lot of details. Like I thought it was very interesting with Mel tonight, where she started asking you stuff and then didn't follow up? I think the spirit tells the mind how much can be processed at a given time."

"Right," says Jean. "Listen, I should probably go." "You know, I have an idea about this. That you might think is kind of off the wall, but there's this—"

"Carol, could you tell me this later? I'm pretty tired." "I know, and I'm keeping you up. We'll talk when you get back, God, and I've still got dishes. Sleep, okay?"

Jean drinks off that last little bit, puts the mug in the sink and goes upstairs. She's never actually stayed here by herself, in all this time. The bedroom's almost comfortable now. She takes off her shoes, gets in bed with her clothes on and pulls the covers up around her — a waste of clean sheets, really. The alarm clock's second hand is twitching away, so the battery must be good. Ten of eleven; that seems about right. She sets the alarm for seven-thirty instead of five, picks up Emma, then remembers about the time change. So it's really what? Spring ahead, fall back: ten of ten. Which now seems pretty early to be going to bed. But she's whipped. She resets the clock, picks up Emma again and fixes the covers so only her face, hands and shoulders are out in the air. Her nose is cold. Kitty, a fair but frozen maid. She's at the part where Emma thinks Mr. Elton's in love with Harriet, but he's actually hitting on her. At some point she realizes her eyes have been closed for a while: she's still sort of thinking about Mr. Elton and that whole problem, but she's also weighing the risk of disrupting this delicate state of not-quite-sleep by reaching over and turning out the light.

The alarm goes off— deetdeetdeetdeetdeet — and she shoots out her hand. Too hot and bright in here: her mouth is dry, and apparently she went to sleep with all her clothes on. Out the window, the sky's a cold cerulean blue. And it's so quiet. Then she remembers what she's doing here.