Richard House - The Kills

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘Listen. I need a vacation. OK? I — need — a — break.’

Rem understood the distinction: her disagreement wasn’t about the event, per se, it was about the timing. And hadn’t he felt wrong-headed all day? Besides, it wasn’t about the beer, it wasn’t about getting drunk, but some continuing aggravation set against him: a bad curve to the day of nothing being in place, of everything beginning to prickle. Another Gunnersen self-detonation

‘You — Rem Gunnersen — need — to — work.’

Cathy Gunnersen could wrastle a problem until it became unbearable. Formerly these situations were managed with sex. Rem would just unbuckle and they’d have at each other. These days, right now, that possibility was spoiled by her habit of closing conversations with a monumental sulk, which demonstrated nothing but disappointment. Most times she walked off in less and less of an act.

‘Get over this,’ she said. ‘Start over.’

Rem held his tongue. It’s always the people who don’t have to start over who speak like this.

* * *

The wedding party had ended badly. It wasn’t that Rem disliked his sister-in-law’s partner — a fashion buyer for a high street chain Rem could never remember — he just couldn’t stop needling the man ( Don’t worry, you’ll always be her first husband ). In return the groom preened at the news from Cathy about Rem’s business not doing so well. Everything was headshakingly ‘too bad’. But times were tough for everyone, right? At least Rem still had a business, right? However diminished. And he could always go back — where was it now — to I-raq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, wherever it was he’d gone that first time, and earn some more? Right?

Cathy wouldn’t hear of it.

Rem’s speech, volunteered without request, included a joke about men who design women’s clothes and another about sodomy. A couple, newly-wed, come into the doctor’s office, and after a thorough examination the doctor finds the woman to be a virgin, despite her husband’s claim that he ‘puts it to her’ every night …

Cathy repeated Rem’s jokes to Maggie at work. She specified the targets, punch by punch, the blows levelled at the groom’s faith, his occupation, his sexual prowess (about which, she had to admit, her sister never expressed enthusiasm). It wasn’t embarrassment or humiliation she’d felt as Rem slowly pumped his hips in demonstration: this crudity, these dim thrusts meant nothing. Cathy drew a picture of Rem looming acute over a long table loaded with plates and glasses and lit candles, a table dressed with flowers and napkins, with creams and fleshy pinks — and this she found inexcusable. Rem, top heavy, ox-like, boxy, overburdened, ready to topple, slake off and hammer down like some great hunk of glacial ice. It was this: his pure force, his size against the delicacy of the table which she found humiliating, and how the entire room remained silent for the duration of his speech, listening to his Continental English, aching for him to hit the deck and take out the cake.

As it happened, Cathy was the one to fall over. Not one drop of drink in her, she flopped to the floor. Couldn’t remember catching a heel in the carpet, but one moment upright, the next, prone, knees spread, and a feeling afterward of indigestion, a low-grade bellyache stuck to the gut that lasted too long.

* * *

Rem slept with his head on one arm, the other tucked under the pillow. Cathy spoke to the back of his head. The vacation became a simple matter. She didn’t want to go anywhere, she wanted to stay home, in any case she couldn’t leave, not with her work. They could spare her, sure, but her last break had resulted in Maggie receiving the promotion to shift-supervisor — and wasn’t that the start of everything going wrong? No, this vacation would come under a different arrangement. Rem, who wasn’t doing much except a whole lot of moping around, would have to find a real job that paid real money, and send the money back. He could use this time to consider his drinking, his attitude, his habit of grinding people down, of riding someone’s back until they were just plain tired of carrying him. Better than sun beds, a Mexican beach, an ocean of mojitos, this vacation would cost her no effort and no expense. Which is exactly what made it perfect.

Rem sat up and turned on the light — which improved nothing.

Cathy drew herself to her elbows. Looked about ready to say something she’d been saving.

‘This isn’t a discussion.’ As Rem left the room he felt it drag after him. Nut followed in a sympathetic sulk.

Maybe going someplace else was a good idea. He looked out the window at Clark. A subterranean night, yellow and dim. The changing stoplights. The lack of traffic. The taqueria, open and empty.

Nut settled half-on, half-off the rug, raised his head and huffed. A heaviness to the sound that Rem could appreciate.

* * *

Cathy’s stubborn disconnection outlasted any other bad mood, and through the weekend it became obvious that things weren’t going to settle in their usual way. Rem knew when to stay clear, and Cathy took on double shifts at the Happy Shopper, took anything extra that Maggie could offer.

Cathy blamed Rem for the dog. He never locked the doors. Never checked they were locked. Despite Rem’s claims, she didn’t find it strange, just sad, and didn’t blame a third party for the dog’s disappearance. Once again, this all came down to Rem.

‘The doors, Rem. See for yourself. They aren’t forced.’

Rem kept the payment to the Colemans to himself, along with his certainty that Nut’s disappearance was related. He took a two-day job refurbishing a dentist’s office at 5 North Wabash, and for two days lost himself to the sticky swipe of a roller, to the soft spray of white emulsion, the thrum of the El as the trains scudded the corners on the raised tracks. While he painted he boiled with plans of revenge. He spoke with Mike, who said he’d be up for anything, if Rem could devise a workable plan. Rem realized that neither of them were graced with SEAL-like stealth or had any kind of smarts for housebreaking. He couldn’t see them storming the Coleman compound, then roving SWAT-like through the apartment to find the dog, expose the Colemans, then fuck them up. Mike’s ideas involved juvenile desecrations, urinating on beds, crapping on dinner plates, and they agreed that in all likelihood Coleman had driven the dog someplace and just let him loose.

He abandoned himself to the dream of being elsewhere. Cathy’s idea of a vacation wasn’t so extreme. With the business on hold he could return to Holland, spend time with his brothers, maybe even go back to his family’s roots and see his sister in Norway. While he was away he could canvass for work, reimagine the business, and return with energy. His enthusiasm soon failed him. Could he even call Halsteren home after so many years away? And did he really want to go back now that his mother was dead? And would this really be the best time to set the business aside? Aren’t you supposed to work through the tough periods? Persist?

At the end of the second day Rem found himself disinclined to return home: hours festering over stale possibilities had fed a bad mood. He understood Cathy’s proposal for what it was — a failure on multiple fronts. Home. Business. Wife. Work.

Unwilling to drink at the Wabash Inn where he might meet people he knew, he chose the cubby-hole bar at the Palmer House Hotel.

Rem sat with his back to the counter and looked over an area divided into zones by arrangements of furniture and potted palms. He lost an hour to watching men in suits amble from the elevators to the lobby to the bar with unengaged distraction — then realized, just as he was watching the businessmen, that one man, seated in an armchair close to the bar, was watching him.