Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

Instead of telling Shelby, he called her father and told him some of this. He did not seemed surprised to hear it. He hardly reacted, and when Ray pressed him for an opinion, the man said, “I can’t help you.”

Ray said, “She’s like a stranger.”

“That’s my Shelby,” the man said, and hung up.

Shelby still worked with him. Her father’s abruptness (he had also seemed grimly amused) had rattled him, and so he said to her, “You are everything to me now. Those women are all gone and forgotten.”

This was in the office. There was a knock, the receptionist saying, “We have a new patient.”

Ray went cold when he saw her tilted back in the chair, awaiting his examination. She did not even have to say, “Remember me?” He remembered her. He remembered his mistake. She was Sharon, from the cleaning company, and he was surprised that someone so young — no more than eighteen or so — was doing this menial job. Why wasn’t she in school? He’d asked her that. “I hate school,” she said. “I want to make some money.” She seemed to linger in her work, and one evening when they were alone, Ray had surprised her in her mopping, and kissed her, hoping for more. But she’d pushed him away, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and never came back. That same year Shelby had become his hygienist, so she knew nothing of Sharon. He’d never seen Sharon again, nor thought of her — it was only a foolish, impulsive, hopeful kiss! — until now.

She stared at him with implacable eyes; her very lack of expression seemed accusatory. She lay canted back in the chair as Shelby hooked on her earpieces and adjusted the protective goggles. Sharon’s mouth was prominent and her cold eyes were blurred by the plastic. She seemed weirdly masked, with an upside-down face, from where Ray stood, slightly behind her with Shelby. Her mouth began to move, the bite of the teeth reversed.

“You got yourself a hot assistant now,” Sharon said. “Bet you kiss her when no one’s looking. Like you did to me.”

“This is my wife,” Ray said, hating the way Sharon spoke. “Now open wide and let me have a look.”

“I can’t do this,” Shelby said. She gathered the loops of the suction device and tossed them into the sink.

“Shel,” he said, then, seeing it was hopeless, that Shelby had closed the door behind her, he attended to Sharon, his fingers in her mouth, gagging her. He wanted to pull out her tongue.

When he finished the cleaning he said, “You’ve never been here before as a patient. I haven’t seen you for years. You don’t need any serious work. Why did you come?”

“Just a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Sharon said. “Hey, you probably think that kissing me and touching me was something I’d forget.”

He sighed, he was going to shout, but he forced himself to speak calmly. “I’m done. I’ve knocked some barnacles off your teeth. Don’t come back. If you do, I will refuse to see you.”

Now Sharon’s goggles were off and she was upright, blinking like a squirrel. She licked a smear of toothpaste from her lips and said, “I won’t be back. I don’t have to. I’ve done what I needed to do.”

“What was that?”

“Make you remember.”

But it would be a new memory. He had not recalled her as so plain, so fierce-faced. She had been young, attractive, in a T-shirt and shorts, with a long-handled mop in her hands, and now she’d accused him of forgetting her. But he had not forgotten — he remembered her as a girl, alone in the corridor of his office, holding the sudden promise of pleasure. The shock to him on her return was that she had aged, that she was raw-boned and resentful and no longer attractive.

Before going home to Shelby that day he saw himself in the bathroom mirror and hated his face. He hated what time had done to it, he hated what time had done to these women. He had flirted and pawed these old women. They all look like you. He hated the sight of his hands. I sometimes think they are you. Each person in our past is an aspect of us. You need to know that.

Shelby treated him as though he was dangerous and tricky. She seemed afraid to be with him because of who might show up, to remind him of what he’d done and who he was, an old beast they haunted because they could not forgive him.

Shelby and he lived separately in the house, took turns in the kitchen, ate their meals apart, more like hostile roommates than a married couple — a reenactment of his last months with Angie.

He called Angie again, but this time her number had been disconnected. Then he found out why. A patient said casually, just as he’d finished putting on a crown, “Sorry about Angie.”

Misunderstanding, Ray began to explain, and then realized that the patient was telling him that Angie had died.

It had happened two weeks before. He found the details online, on the Medford Transcript website. Collapsed and died after a short illness. Instead of going home, he drove the seventy-five miles to the cemetery and knelt at her grave. A metal marker with her name, courtesy of the funeral home, had been inserted in the rug-like cover of new sod. He told himself that he was sorrowful, but he did not feel it: he was relieved, he felt lighter, he blamed Angie for the swarm of old lovers. This feeling scared him in the dampness of the cemetery, where he suspected he was being watched. It was then, looking around, that he saw that Angie was buried next to her mother, a reunion of sorts.

He told Shelby that Angie had died—“It’s a turning point!”—that they could start all over again.

“You actually seem glad that Angie’s dead,” Shelby said. “Poor Angie.”

Shelby stopped coming to work. She didn’t want to stay at home either, as though fearing a woman would appear unbidden, a hag from the past, to confront Ray, to humiliate her. She seemed to regard him as the monster he believed himself to be in his worst moments, the embodiment of everything he’d done, and now, from the return of these offended women, she knew every one of his reckless transgressions.

With the death of Angie, the visitations ceased. But, demoralized, humiliated, Shelby left him. She did not divorce him at once. She demanded a house, and he provided it. She asked for severance pay at the office, and got it. And by degrees they separated. They spoke through lawyers until it was final, and he was alone.

Ray is not surprised when, one night, he is awoken by a clatter, as of someone hurrying in darkness. It is a familiar sound. He awaits the visitation, hoping it might make him less lonely. Perhaps it is Angie, who has come to mock him. He hopes to beg her forgiveness. No, it is not Angie’s voice. It is Shelby’s, and it is triumphant. But the body, the hag’s face, is his own.

“YOU’LL HAVE TO excuse us,” the young woman said at the rounded pulpit-like curve of the gleaming bar. She wore a low-cut blouse and had been listening intently, as though taking an order from the man beside her, who turned away to speak on his cell phone. “We just got married. Plus, we’re new here.”

Her sudden blurted candor silenced the drinkers. There was only the low bubbling sound of the TV. The woman’s face was pink-blotched and hot with exertion. She repeated what she’d said to a smiling man in a camouflage jacket and cap by the cash register, who had also been talking on a cell phone. He said “Doesn’t that call for a drink?” to the barman next to him ringing up a sale.

“Just a Coke for me,” the woman said. “I found out today I’m expecting.”

A bottle of beer and a shot of whiskey were set before the man next to her. He smiled past his phone and nodded his thanks.

“It’s Leon’s girlfriend. I don’t care — can I call you Sarge?” She tugged at her blouse, shaking her breasts loose at the barman. “I’m Beanie.”