Donald Antrim - The Verificationist

Time to wipe. Jane smiled down at me in familiar, indulgent pity. As usual, she regarded my casual theorizing as a flight, a defense of fragile intellect against vital emotions, the male versus the female principle; as an attempt, in other words, to block or at least circumvent the kind of deep and destabilizing encounter that feels like, for want of a better word, connection. With one hand she fiddled with her bathrobe’s sash, its bowed knot. I, done on the toilet, reached back to flip the lever and flush. Was Jane, discussing sexuality in the bathroom while her husband shat, expressing libidinous wishes? I tugged up boxers. The smell of shit, that warm bathroom smell, was in the air. It was too cold outside to open a window. I am not, as a rule, a morning-sex enthusiast, though on this morning I felt, suddenly, great hopefulness and a new sense of life’s splendid possibilities. The sun’s rays came through high clouds to light the world outside. Humidity was low. It was Saturday, the weekend, and it occurred to me that all my problems at the Institute were inconsequential, ephemeral. Those annoying child psychologists, Peter Konwicki and his gang, those psychosocial bureaucrats couldn’t pester me about my Young Women of Strength program. I never hear Peter and his merry men contributing brilliant insights at the Young Women of Strength outreach meetings. They lean back in their chairs and they cross their legs, and every now and again one will pipe up, “Tom, how do you plan to explain to Sheryl Babcock’s mother that Sheryl has left home on your advice to pursue a tap-dancing career?” or “Tom, do you think it’s a good idea to make ‘Famous Hippies and Visionary Dropouts’ the theme of the next social?”

Jane was not leaving her place beside the sink. This meant I had to wash my hands. If I walked out of the bathroom without washing, Jane might become distressed. It would be interesting to do a study on bathroom hand-washing patterns among couples at different stages in their marriages. I padded over, stood before the sink, gazed in the mirror at my skinny body wearing underwear, and felt sad. I don’t have much hair left, except on my extremities and, lightly here and there, on my stomach and chest. The hair on my head looks awful, spare and patchy, like some weeds left standing in a field after a bad winter. Tiny gray hairs stick out from my ears. When in the recent years did these begin to show? And a number of new moles had appeared— when? when did my body begin to transform itself into an old man’s body? — various dark spots scattered high and low, my own miniature pointillist seascape, the body’s self-made tattoos taking shape across chest and shoulders.

Mostly I regret not exercising more regularly. Jane says I look sweet. But my eyes, as I grow older, look as if they have sunk; they’re ringed with dark, unbecoming circles, and are often bloodshot.

Jane, in repose against the sink, turned her head and faced the mirror. Our eyes peered into the glass. It was unsettling to see Jane this way, in profile and so close, my Jane and the Jane reflected in the medicine cabinet mirror, the touchable woman looking away and her image looking toward me, watching me watch myself watching her and her reflection. Jane’s head was tilted. Her face wore a smile, though not much of one. Jane’s eyes looked, actually, as if they were staring at something behind me — at trees and the clouds outside our bathroom window? Her expression was one you might describe, because of its stillness, as a meaningful absence of expression, as expressive inexpressiveness, and it meant, I thought, that Jane was waiting for me to tell her what I wanted in bed. I reached for soap in its dish and this brought my hand close to Jane’s hip propped against the sink rim. I picked up the soap and turned on the tap and began scrubbing madly. Jane and I and our two reflections paid attention. I put on a display of getting clean. This may or may not have been in response to Jane’s seductiveness. The bathroom in morning light, tiled white all around, seemed like a large area, though it is not. The sink is beside the doorway, and Jane, stationed beside the sink, blocked the door.

“What do you want from me?” I scoured my hands. I did not intend my question to sound threatening or suspicious. I looked into the mirror and could see, along with Jane’s eyes there, bathroom walls and a section of window behind me. Sun, a faint yellow light, broke through the clouds; immediately the room brightened and the mirror took on glare, a halo around Jane’s reflected face. Outside, clouds raced above the treetops — in, then out of, the bathroom window’s frame, in, then out of, the mirror’s glass. Morning light came and went, obscuring Jane’s reflected smile.

“Relax, Tom.”

“I’m relaxed.” Water from the tap ran hot and I saw that my hands were red from heat and excessive washing. I turned up the cold, and Jane said, “You don’t look relaxed.”

“You’re right.”

“What can I do?” Jane asked me. In this way we came full circle to her original question. Jane’s voice sounded full of caring and tenderness. But, as we all know, people wishing to extract intimate intelligence will often adopt a gentle demeanor. Jane is expert at inviting and permitting, in another person, the kinds of mood states required for disclosure and confession of even the most galling, humiliating experiences and feelings. There is nothing more seductive — and dangerous — than being listened to.

I dried my hands on a towel. My hands felt chapped and raw. The floor was cold. I said, “I need a cup of coffee. If you want, we can talk about painting the little room.”

“Oh, Tom.”

“I mean it. We’ll go through the color samples and make preliminary choices. I’ll drive to the hardware store later and get spackling compound. We’ll need lots, I guess.”

Was I crazy? Why bring this up? What might happen to me and Jane, how might our lives change forever, if we fixed up the room at the head of the stairs? Or, to ask this question differently, what are the possible uses, in a childless house, of an empty room? Let’s assume, for discussion purposes, that the room remains unused, its door unopened, its broken walls unpainted and the unclean windows securely locked. Nothing gets put in the room, and nothing can come out. The room functions symbolically as a container for anything that is imagined, hoped for, dreamed about. If the room is a baby’s room, then it is a baby’s room missing a baby, and this of course is another way of saying that the room contains loss. The room is not empty, exactly; something unseen lives inside.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” asked Jane.

“I thought you wanted to.”

“I did.”

“You did?”

“I just don’t know if there’s any point, Tom.”

“There’s no reason to leave the room empty forever,” I said; and realized, saying this, that there were any number of good and less good reasons to do exactly that. Jane, I felt, understood this. Hatred was in the look she gave me when she turned away from the bathroom mirror. She pulled her robe tightly around her.

“What?” I said.

“Are you sleeping with Maria?”

“Sleeping with Maria?”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Did you ever?”

“Why are you asking me this, Jane?” And I thought, then, of Manuel. Was Jane asking about Maria because she had begun sleeping with Escobar, because she needed, in order not to part from me, an even playing field, the impression of symmetry between us?

“Does that mean yes?” she asked.

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Can you answer the question?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, you can answer the question, or yes, you made love to Maria?”

“I didn’t make love to Maria.”