Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

Keith glanced toward the sound in confusion, hands on hips, still sweating and breathing hard as he walked back and forth on the sidewalk. The speaker was a man in a gray suit who stood in front of Jennifer’s house by the open door of the black sedan. Neighbor? Had he called him his neighbor?

He nodded in the man’s direction, saying nothing, still recovering his breath, still feeling the weight of the run upon him. When he turned back toward his house he was surprised to see the man walking briskly across the street toward him, his charcoal tie wagging like an oddly placed tail. For a brief moment, Keith wondered if he could act as if he had not seen the man, could simply return to the house as if oblivious but instead he stood there in his worn nylon running shorts and tennis shoes and waited, squinting in the white blaze of morning light. The man was smiling.

“Walter Jensen,” the man said when he reached the sidewalk, his hand extended.

Keith stepped toward him and extended his own hand and they shook. The man might have been in his mid-fifties, although his unnaturally tight face suggested some amount of money spent on plastic surgery of various sorts. Everything about him was immaculately groomed: hair dyed a somewhat unnatural light brown with a few strategic lines of gray at the temples, gray suit pressed to perfection as if constructed of metal, black shoes polished into dark mirrors. Shaking his hand was like shaking a bucket of Cool Whip, so smooth and devoid of texture was the sensation. He smiled. His teeth were a perfect white line.

“I don’t think we’ve yet met,” Walter Jensen said. Across the street, Nicole appeared from the house and waved.

“No, I guess not,” Keith said. He waved to the little girl.

Walter Jensen glanced over his shoulder. “Go ahead and get in the car, sweetie,” he called. She smiled, waved again, and then climbed into the black sedan. “I guess you know my daughter.”

“Sure,” Keith said, his sudden confusion mixed now with something else, a feeling of nausea.

“She’s a pistol, isn’t she? Just like her mom.”

“Sure is.”

“Well, I’ve been away on business and then you’ve been away on your business.” Walter Jensen offered a faint, ambiguous laugh. “Anyway, it’s good to run into you.”

“OK,” Keith said. “Likewise.”

“Listen, I don’t … uh …” He paused a moment as if at a loss for words and then said, “Well, let me just come out and say it. I’m awful sorry to hear about your daughter. If there’s anything we can do over here just let us know, all right?”

Keith stood in silence, soaked through with sweat, squinting and blinking in the early-morning sunlight. The entire situation seemed unreal to him, impossible. And yet here was his neighbor, apparently Jennifer’s husband, certainly Nicole’s father, Walter Jensen, with a false look of concern clouding his face. “Uh … yeah, thanks,” Keith said and when his neighbor did not immediately respond he added, “I think I have it under control.”

“Sorry to bring that up,” Walter Jensen said.

“That’s OK.”

“So the house is up for sale?”

Keith nodded.

“But you’re staying here right now?”

“For now.”

“That’s good. Save the money while you can. I get that.”

Keith looked at him.

“You know,” Walter Jensen said, “my wife Jennifer said you were lacking in the furniture department.”

“Lacking?”

Walter Jensen waved his hands in the air, an action that reminded Keith of Peter. “Look, I know you’re selling and all but you still have to live, right? Jennifer and I have some extra stuff we’ve just been hanging on to. A dresser and a pullout sofa and some tables and chairs. You’re welcome to it. That’s what neighbors should do for each other.”

Keith did not know what to say in response. He stood there, staring at this man. Jesus Christ. Really? Really? He stood there on the concrete next to the steaming grass and blinked silently at Walter Jensen before stammering, “That’s really not necessary,” and then backing away slowly as if from an angry dog.

“Ah, you’ll see,” the man said. “It’ll work out fine.”

“Well, then,” Keith said, still retreating.

“Anyway, I have a meeting to get to so I’ll see you around.”

Walter Jensen half waved at him and then trotted back across the street, into the black sedan, and was gone around the corner in seconds. Keith stood in silence next to the rental car, watching the empty street where the man had been, the house across the street that he had appeared from.

My wife Jennifer? Really?

Around him, faint curls of steam extended upward from every visible surface: the closely shorn lawns, the asphalt and concrete, the streetlamp post at the end of the cul-de-sac. In the near distance, past the houses, the visible horizon was ringed with a faint blaze of dark green trees and the rooflines of an older and more distant subdivision, all of which had been cast flat and shadowless by the slantlight of early morning.

He knew that the information about Jennifer should not have surprised him but it had nonetheless. He was having an affair with a married woman. Someone with a daughter no less. The irony was not lost on him. How could it be? Nor was the sense that he had been, and continued to be, a fool, although how the vector upon which he had always envisioned himself had become so entangled remained impossible for him to understand.

Sally Erler called soon after he returned to the cool interior of the house to tell him that she had lined up a potential buyer for the late morning. He nodded, although she obviously could not see him, and repeated “That’s fine, that’s fine,” not even hearing her now, not even really understanding that the call had ended, instead thinking of the last time he had shared Jennifer’s bed — a bed she shared with her husband, as it turned out — and the abruptness with which he had been asked to leave. She was married. He was not. He tried to make this into a kind of justification but he could trace no such argument.

On the counter before him rested the paperwork the process server had delivered to him the previous day. A quick knock on the door just after noon and he had been handed a few sheets of paper and had signed his name in receipt and the man told him to have a good day and was gone. The paperwork that facilitated his divorce. It had been as simple as that. A voice-mail message and a few sheets of paper that denoted the end. Now he did not know who she was to him. His wife? Hoffmann had called her his ex-wife, although that still did not feel true. Someone between states of being, in some interstitial zone. Perhaps that.

He ate his breakfast cereal and when he was finished he pulled the sheet of plastic clear of the sink, tearing it free of its blue-taped edges, and wadded it up and then stood looking at the gap it had made. Then he reached up and began pulling the plastic from the nearest cabinets in a kind of frustration, throwing each scrap into the living room where the sofa’s footprints were still apparent on the carpet. When the cabinets were clear he removed the plastic from the kitchen island and then knelt and peeled back the masking tape that ringed the linoleum and the various strips that still clung to wall, window, and cabinet edge, moving without any clear thought or purpose other than his own anger and frustration.

The stepladder had been folded against the far wall of the living room and he retrieved it to pull the loose strips of masking tape from the tops of the cabinetry and the edge of the ceiling, wadding it into a series of sticky balls and tossing them in the general direction of the increasingly large pile of refuse. How carefully he had placed each line of tape, following the bound coordinates of clear precise points he had charted to keep his mind occupied with something tangible. How futile that project seemed to him now. He had not even completed the job. There was a single coat of paint here and if he looked carefully he could see the blotchy yellow of the original color where it soaked through the eggshell like fresh yolk but he just did not care now, nor could he imagine caring in the future.