Robert Lennon - Familiar

Hand on the doorknob, Elisa has a sudden memory of Silas at fourteen, in his room in Madison, music emanating from the walls, filling the house: ludicrously repetitive heavy metal songs ( progressive metal, Silas would correct her), some of them more than ten minutes long, interrupted only by, alternately, the mumbling and shouting of a crazed lead singer. This is the music he did his homework to. It drove her nuts. How could anyone concentrate to that? (Derek: “Let us be glad he is doing homework. ”) He listened at high volume, on vinyl records, sometimes for hours on end, transferred the records to recordable CDs and listened to those in the car or on headphones while he was walking around town or, presumably, the halls of his high school.

Elisa had learned to tune it out, mostly anyway, while she was preparing dinner or trying to read, but one afternoon something about it was bothering her: the song that was playing had been playing too long, the words and chords repeating with uncanny precision. She stepped into the hall and concentrated. There: a hiccup in the progression, a missed beat. The record was skipping. It had been skipping for twenty minutes.

“Silas!” She was banging on the door, but either he couldn’t hear or was ignoring her. Two singers, engaged in an incomprehensible conversation: Ah mutter-mutter-mutter. Ah mutter-mutter-mutter? Ah mutter. Ah mutter. Ah screaaaam! Ah screaaa— Ah mutter-mutter-mutter. Ah mutter-mutter-mutter? Ah mutter. Ah mutter. Ah screaaaam! Ah screaaa—

“Silas!!”

The door was flung open, the music belched out its full spectrum of loud, she could feel her teeth itch. He got right up in her face. “What!!”

“Your! Record! Is skipping!” Elisa screamed now, to match his screaming, to overwhelm the singer’s.

He appeared for a moment as though he might explode in anger at her, for criticizing, for daring to interrupt. But then his face went slack, his head tilted, his eyes unfocused, and he blinked. The record skipped.

Silas almost smiled. It was funny, it really was. But something held him back. The eyes found her face, locked on, and his mouth tightened and he said, “Maybe I like it that way!” before slamming the door and, with a little scrape, lifting the music out of its closed loop.

Something there that she missed. Some opportunity. She doesn’t know how she might have played it differently. Surely there was a way: they might have ended laughing.

She opens the door and turns on the light.

It’s a home office. There is a computer desk and a laptop and a small radio. Derek’s diploma is on the wall. The only boxes are sitting open on the floor, and they’re filled with files. A bookcase is lined with law books, Derek’s.

In the old life, Derek doesn’t work at home. He stays late at work.

Elisa backs out, turns off the light, closes the door. She goes to the other room, Sam’s room, and it isn’t Sam’s room, it’s a guest room. It is even tidier here than the rest of the house. There’s a brass bed and a caramel-colored bureau and signed prints of sentimental rural clichés: a basket, a barn, an owl. A large vase of dried flowers occupies a corner. The room bears the marks of Lorraine’s taste. So — in this life, Elisa has allowed Lorraine to decorate a room in her house. She can’t decide what this says about her — that she has no integrity, or that she has so much that she can allow such things without feeling insulted.

Or maybe this Elisa likes Lorraine. Maybe they’re friends.

She stands in the hallway for some time, just breathing and feeling her body against the nightshirt. Her feet are cold but the rest of her is warm from the shower and from the agitation of her mind. She has to face Derek, has to explain what just happened — the bathroom, the interruption of their lovemaking, the hospital, the non-stroke — and she is trying to determine how to do it.

Eventually she walks down the stairs. Derek is there, on the sofa, and he smiles at her. He must have sneaked into their bedroom to change while she showered, because he’s wearing his pajama pants and bedroom slippers. There’s a beer on the table beside him and a law journal is open on his lap.

“Are you all right?”

She can hear, in his voice, the old irritation and doubt. He thinks she is hysterical, that nothing is wrong with her, that they went to the hospital for no reason. All these things may be more or less true.

“I think so.”

“Haven’t seen that in a while,” he says. He means the nightshirt.

She sits down on the other end of the sofa and Derek closes the book and sets it on the table. He folds his hands together and faces her squarely, his eyes locked with hers. This gesture — this readiness to listen — is unfamiliar. And it occurs to her that he has to have learned it somewhere. Therapy? He has had therapy, or they have had it together.

She says, “I need you to tell me our story.”

He looks at her. He says, “Something happened at the conference.”

“No.”

“You’re not the same.”

“I’ll try to explain. Maybe not right away. But first I need to hear everything up until now. From you.”

He appears confused. “Everything since you came home?”

“No. No. Everything. Our story. Since we met.”

A kind of fear ripples across his face. He sighs, looks out the window, and it appears to be an effort for him to turn his head back to her. “‘Need.’”

“What?”

“It’s disturbing that you are coming back here and saying you need things from me. That you’re just asking for this and expect to get it.”

She is eager to respond, to defend the request, but of course she can’t. She gazes at her own tightly folded hands in her lap and waits.

“It’s your tone, Lisa. Making this demand. This weird demand.”

“I’m sorry.”

He grunts, shifts his body. He doesn’t like the apology, either.

But he says, “Okay. Our story. From when we met, that’s what you want?”

She nods, puts her hand on his knee, withdraws it.

He begins talking. Grudgingly at first, and not without sarcasm. But then he warms to it. It’s good to hear his voice. It’s like it was back when they met, hearing him late at night, talking about his family, trying to tell her everything. To fill her in, so that it would seem they’d always been together. Those first months, they barely slept. Friends mocked their tired eyes, made sexual jokes, but it was mostly talking, talking, talking that kept them awake. He’s telling her this now, and of course he is talking now the way he talked then, methodically, linearly, with the kind of confidence that renders editorializing as incontrovertible fact. He’s good. She doesn’t understand why he didn’t become a trial lawyer; he could convince anyone of anything. When they were young, this was bracing for her — the antidote to her parents’ equivocation and moral relativism. He said things he believed were true, as though they were true, and she accepted them. Then, in bed with him, listening, she laughed, thinking of her mother’s recurring admonishment: “Accept what is offered.” The trouble with that world was that nothing offered was ever any good: a ratty paperback book, marred by some anonymous fool’s notations; a flavorless stew; a heavily qualified compliment (“Good work, but don’t get a big head about it”). Well, she accepted what Derek had to offer. Strong opinions, a strong body, a strong will. She opened herself up completely and let him pour in whatever he liked.

He is enjoying himself now. “You were into me,” he is saying. “We were into each other.” And though he is deep in the past, and is not, she thinks, referring to the way things have changed, she understands that it is no longer so, that they are not into each other now. It isn’t merely the inevitable passing of desperate infatuation, the settling and hardening of love, it’s that they no longer dominate one another’s frame of reference. They are not the most interesting thing in each other’s lives.