Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

He didn’t replace the locks. It amused him, to know how easily a stranger could come in off the street. It made him think of baby elephants, how they are tethered to stakes when they are young and weak so that years later, when they are big and strong and could pull the stakes out no problem, they don’t. At some point people in first-world countries had come to accept the idea that all doors to private properties require keys. And Jack’s work was valuable now, more or less. It was of some value. A person could clean up with what was in his studio. It tickled him to walk out onto the street and look at the people passing by and think, if you only knew, you dumb elephant.

The neighborhood, anyway, was changing, back to some earlier version of itself. The methadone clinic across the street had reopened. Maybe he would get a lock. There was that woman again, hanging around outside, chain-smoking in a flowered housedress with snaps. The dress reminded him of his mother-in-law.

On the train ride home he thought of his work the next few days. This was his favorite time, the week leading up to an opening. But the first night at the gallery was also his favorite. Then the interviews, reading the listings, sometimes articles — that would be his favorite, the buzz in his ears for weeks after, until the magazines and newspapers quieted down and the show closed. His least favorite time. Then he began again.

Jack liked to hammer a lot of thoughts out on the train. The hardest part of a marriage — of living with anyone — was those first ten minutes after walking through the door. Questions about his work, his lunch, his trip home, which in his mind had barely ended, and answers to questions he’d not asked, so many words flooding him, and there was the news to discuss, not just U.S. but world news, and then not just that but local news, gossip, about professors Deb knew at school, and not even professors but administrators, sometimes. Administrators, quite frequently.

The impending barrage was on his mind as he flipped through his keys under the building’s hunter-green canopy. Past midnight, Angel had gone home, leaving the lobby locked up behind him. Late nights like these Jack wasted a lot of time under the light of the awning, looking for the right key. He had about a dozen, and they all looked the same. He had the lobby key, the mail key (easy because it was small), the two for upstairs, the building key to the studio, the studio mailbox key (again, small), the ones to the studio’s broken locks, and another series for the old house in Rhode Island where they hadn’t been in years. Every night he thought to take them off the ring, and upstairs every night he forgot.

In the elevator he checked his BlackBerry and lost service, per usual, somewhere between the fourth and seventh floors. Deb would want to know why he hadn’t answered the phone earlier. She’d been slow to believe him about things since Christmas, even though, since Christmas, he’d really done nothing wrong.

The living room lights were on when he let himself in, but she wasn’t on the sofa watching cable news or in the grandma chair, reading and waiting up for him. He listened for her in the kitchen: not there either.

Plates of pasta were still out on the table. Sometimes Deb made noodles too al dente . Jack recognized his daughter’s handiwork, the spaghetti a ball of yarn on the end of her fork. Like a Rosenquist close up. There was something a bit eerie about everything left uneaten, as though they’d had to go somewhere in a hurry. Eerie and irritating, because of the condensation from the soda bottle that was leaving spots on the Biedermeier. Jack licked his thumb and rubbed at them.

Out the window, the Empire State Building was blue-blue-blue. The three tiers of light, in ascending order, had been green-green-green for Saint Patrick’s Day, and red-pink-white for Valentine’s before that. He didn’t know what blue-blue-blue was supposed to mean. When was Rosh Hashanah?

He toed off his shoes and pincered a few strands of pasta, dangled them into his mouth. Cold, but not so hard.

—

The hinges groaned when he put his palm to the bedroom door. The light was on here too, the little Tiffany lamp with amber fireflies that splashed the books half in yellow glow. Deb was on the bed, not in it, on top of the bedspread, head bent to just miss the pillow and wearing all her clothes.

A box sat gaping at him from the edge of the bed. Not much could be read off the flap, the writing sideways and half in shadow, but Jack recognized the hand from the notes she used to take, pages left to collect footprints all around the studio. He knew that annoyingly small print, child’s print, more labored than Kay’s or even Simon’s, whose penmanship, as a boy’s, had been naturally impeded.

Deb was sitting up now. Her dark hair hung thick over either shoulder, like doll’s hair, all of a piece and with that familiar crease in it, testimony to the one bun she’d fastened since childhood. Halolike, especially with the firefly eyes reflected, lighting a crown around her head.

“What’s going on?” He willed himself to ignore the box, as if somehow to keep her from noticing it.

Deb rubbed small circles into her temples and tried looking at him. Jack was halfway between the door and the bed, standing with both arms at his sides and open to her. She was thinking that he’d put on a couple of pounds, and that he’d never been traditionally handsome and still wasn’t but that he was, on the strength of his voice and stature, the declarative bridge of his nose and thick curls, graying now, becoming salt and sand — she was thinking that he was, to women, very much attractive. More now.

Jack noticed not for the first time the dimples around her mouth that deepened whenever she made her worried face. The dimples were girlish, but she’d always have them. And he thought her eyes were on him in that critical way he’d seen more of these last few months. “Tell me what happened,” he said, “so I can—”

“Tell you? I should tell you? No, you tell me. No, I don’t need you to—”

“Have you been drinking?”

“You were so sexy at the gallery this morning,” she read, “teasing me in those boots.” The page she’d whipped out from nowhere, something she’d been sitting on, armed with. “Tomorrow I’m going to bend you over—”

“Deb.”

“—I’m going to bend you over and show you how dirty you really are.”

“Please.”

“ I couldn’t sleep last night, getting hard thinking about what I had for lunch, which was you. I haven’t been drinking, you shit.”

“Now come on now, all that’s over. I ended it.”

“Bravo,” she said as he came closer. “Really, well done!”

“Let me see,” holding out his hand.

“What for? So you should know how much to admit to?” She lunged forward on the bed and swung the box up and to one side, though kneeling as she was he had only to reach farther forward. “Think she left something out? I don’t think so, she’s very— Hey! ”

Hey! because he had the box, and right away she was on her feet and after him. Jack rounded his back at her, her arms flying at him, and he didn’t know what to do. What he needed was to think, and so he spun around into the nearest place, their bathroom, and turned the lock behind him.

“What the hell. ” Deb smacked the door from the other side.

He put the box on the counter and pulled the pages out in heaps, dumping them into the sink.

“Jack!”

It was the dirtiest stuff that worried him. Things he’d forgotten writing that made him feel foreign to himself. i want to cum between your tits next time. Not that they didn’t sound like him.