Lydia Millet: Ghost Lights

“Have you met my daughter?” asked Hal, aware this was a non sequitur. When he hit the curb something had jarred him — he thought the shock of the crumpling fender had torqued his neck, possibly. Suddenly he was feeling lightheaded.

“Casey? Sure. Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. .,” said Hal vaguely, and all at once they were awkward. “Anyway. Good luck with the job search.”

Inside he heard the shower running. A sealed manila envelope lay on the dining room table, along with the mail. The dog must be upstairs with Susan. But climbing to the second floor, he shivered with a passing chill — the house felt wrong. He and Susan needed to go away somewhere, he thought: since the accident they never traveled much, fearing Casey would suddenly need them.

“Susan?” he called, and the dog came galumphing out of the bedroom.

“In here,” came her voice, and he went into the bathroom, where the mirrors were steamed.

“Ran into Robert on his way out,” he said to the shower curtain.

“Uh huh? What are you doing home, honey?”

“Car accident.”

She pulled back the shower curtain. Her face was flushed; she looked lovely.

“You OK?”

“Maybe a little headache. No big deal. But I have a rental.”

“No one was hurt though?”

“Zero casualties.” He reached out and kissed her. “You smell so good.”

“It’s the shampoo.”

He wanted to go to bed with her. He held her and kissed her more, water falling on both of them.

“Oh, Hal, not this second,” she said. “I’m all wet.”

“That’s fine with me.”

“Later. I promise.”

He let her go and stepped back, his hair plastered.

“You look cute,” she said, and swatted the wet mat of it before she pulled the curtain closed again. He gazed at the blur of her form through the blue plastic, which was covered in raised dots. He could barely tell what she was doing. One of her arms stretched up and back again. Had she put a hand up to adjust the nozzle? Her movements were shrouded. Equally she could have been reaching for a razor. She could be anyone, seen through this filter, doing almost anything. She was unknown to him.

“So what happened, exactly?” she asked through the curtain.

“I swerved to avoid a pedestrian.”

He turned around and went into the bedroom, sat down on his side of the bed. The stillness from outside was with him here, ongoing. In the doorway stood the dog, watching. Their bed linens were still wrinkled and mounded from the morning; the triangle of sheet he sat on was warm. She must have been napping. But then, when Robert arrived, she would have risen. Why was it still warm now?

Maybe the dog had been sleeping there.

Hal’s stomach felt nervous.

In a minor panic he pulled back the coverlet, checked the sheets. Nothing, of course. Paranoid.

Usually — only on weekends of course — she took a brief afternoon nap on her own side of the bed, just as they kept to their own sides at nighttime, but it was warm on his side today. Still, it was a trivial anomaly. A young man coming out of his house at midday and for this he was suspicious? He had turned into a middle-aged cliché. Suddenly a blip in the routine had become a conjugal violation.

He stood and began to straighten the blankets, unthinking. The dog lay down, head on paws, in the hallway. He finished with the coverlet and the pillows, hospital corners because he kept on perfecting them mechanically, at the same time struck by the phrase: cuckold . But someone had to do it. The bed had to be made. A bed unmade in the afternoon seemed decadent, even ugly.

When it was accomplished he turned toward his nightstand. The alarm clock had fallen on its face; he set it upright again. Otherwise the order was usual — all of it familiar except for, wait, a very small piece of plastic.

It was minuscule, a triangle maybe three millimeters long with a couple of scallops along the edge, and shiny black or maybe even dark green. It could be anything. He thought about this, his heart racing. He held the dark piece of plastic between thumb and forefinger. A small scallop, a small serration.

He was paranoid. He should seek help.

In the meantime, it was an itch that had to be scratched.

With difficulty he deposited the fragment on the nightstand again, careful not to drop it on the carpet and thereby lose it, and went back to the bathroom, to the nearest trash can. Susan had the shower radio on — a song about coming to a window, which he seemed to recall was sung by an annoying yet strangely popular lesbian.

The air was hot and moist and heavy and he couldn’t see even her blur through the curtain now. Good, for his purposes.

Quickly and furtively he pulled the can from beneath the counter and looked inside. Balled-up tissue, mostly; a Q-tip was visible. To stick his hands in the trash can would be openly desperate. Yet he did so.

Nothing hidden in the wads of tissue but an empty aspirin bottle. He put it down and washed his hands, let his breath out softly.

Still.

He went back to the bedside table and carefully picked up the fragment. He did not let it go.

“Going out for a soda, back in five,” he called out.

He stepped over the dog and took the stairs two at a time. There was a drugstore on Wilshire. He kept the fragment pressed between the pads of his fingers, pressing it hard even as he grabbed his keys with the other hand, strode out the front door and got into the rental car. He pressed it hard all the way there, strode purposefully to the back and was face-to-face with a wall of condoms.

But his findings were inconclusive. The piece was small, its color indeterminate. It might be one brand with certain specifications or it might be another. He held it up next to the packages and leaned in close, squinting despite the fluorescents in the hope of seeing more precisely. It might be none of them. Plainly. Abruptly he smelled something familiar from antiquity — what was it? Yes: benzoyl peroxide.

A pimply boy leaned past him and grabbed a single Trojan.

Science, he scolded irritably as he made his way up the aisle, could easily discern the answer, with a microscope and maybe one or two more instruments. Science could plumb the mystery, could discern, for example, whether this had been part of a foil packet or simply plastic.

He was not a scientist, unfortunately.

What other form of packaging would there likely have been, in that location on the nightstand? Kleenex? It was not a piece of a Kleenex packet, though. Too thick, too solid. Crackers? No. Also no. The fact that she had been taking a shower right then, the warmth of the sheets. . he could ask her himself, but regardless of the answer it would be humiliating. Even the suspicion was destructive. He knew this. Better simply, on his own recognizance, to know. One way or the other. Robert: maybe he would test him. Go into the office tomorrow. Find a pretext to discuss marriage? Casually, in passing. Few specifics. Confide in Robert, ostensibly, about the pluses and minuses of marriage? The costs and benefits it might bring? On Robert’s face, as he listened, he would catch any sign of shame.

But this would not happen.

When he first met Susan, he remembered, stepping through the metal detectors and out into the parking lot, she was almost a hippie. The year was 1966. She was a teacher back then. Though she did not engage in politics much or smoke marijuana she had honey-colored long hair, wore all-natural fabrics and believed in free love. Shortly after they met she announced a plan to move into an intentional community called “The Eden Project” up in Mendocino. He had to work hard to dissuade her. She was young and idealistic and more than that she was romantically inclined, with a tableau in her mind of fresh air and fields of strawberries. A pure life, etc. He was idealistic too, but wary of stereotype and quite certain of what he wanted, namely for her not to move into an intentional community with a lute player named Rom.