Donald Antrim - The Verificationist

“You fucked her.”

“What do you mean by ‘fuck,’ exactly?” I said, stupidly. This was a defensive move, though not purely defensive. I suppose I had it in mind to act on the principle, controversial among some, that admission of infidelity, more perhaps than the infidelity itself, is a violation of the marriage vows, and that any evasiveness during confrontations over fidelity and trust, however dishonorable this evasiveness might be in theory, can in reality be seen as a generous and noble strategy.

Jane apparently was not in a mood to consider the destructive effects of confessional revelations. “Were we married?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Bullshit.”

“Jane.”

“What?”

“Jane, Jane,” I said that morning as she turned away from me and walked out of the bathroom.

She did not go into our bedroom; she avoided the bedroom and passed barefoot along the upstairs hall toward the stairs. I went after her, whispering, “Jane, Jane.”

She didn’t go downstairs. The room at the head of the stairs was on her left. The cat sat on the stairs, two or three steps down, and I could see the cat’s head and white whiskers and pointed ears above floor level, sticking up. Jane put her hand on the little room’s doorknob, turned the knob, and opened the door. She went in.

I went in.

Next the cat came in.

I left the door open. On second thought, I closed it.

We were all in the room. The windows faced north. Outside was our front yard, cut in half by the drive leading away from the house, winding through trees to the road that takes you across the river to town. Bright light came through the clouds, faded then came again. The room remained dark. Plaster walls showed holes where shelves or pictures hung once. Some other family had, a long time before, used this room for something, then left and taken everything away. Dirt and dead insects were on windowsills and in corners on the floor. Had someone swept the insects into the corners? A moth near the ceiling flew. How had a moth gotten in past locked windows?

The cat saw the moth and focused on it. The cat stayed still, but her head moved, her eyes moved, following the moth’s erratic flight. Dust on the floor was thick and showed paw prints and Jane’s naked footprints leading to the place where Jane stood with her back facing me. The sun broke through the clouds and cobwebs became visible against the windowpanes, silhouetted. The room was full of living and dead things. Jane untied her bathrobe’s sash and, just like that, the robe dropped off her shoulders and down her back into a pile of blue cloth around her feet.

I am a lucky man.

I saw those Winslow Homer moles on Jane’s back. “Hello, baby,” Jane said to the cat near her feet. The cat forgot the moth and rubbed itself against Jane’s legs, and Jane leaned over to pet her head. There was Jane’s ass. The cat located the moth again and leaped to a windowsill to get closer to the ceiling. The cat is female but we call her Larry, after Lawrence Mandelbaum, my analyst and the father of Self / Other Friction Theory. The name Lawrence was my mistake when the cat was a kitten. The kitten turned out to be a girl, but Lawrence stuck and Larry’s her name. She watched her moth until the moth landed on the ceiling and she lost interest and looked at me. Jane, I thought, expected me to know what to do. I didn’t know what to do. Or I should say that I knew some things to do, but not how to begin. Relationships go in phases and there are moments in them that mark the close of one phase and the start of another. Usually these moments are small and pass without anyone realizing, until later, that something momentous was contained in an offhand remark or a shrug, a little laugh maybe, when nothing very funny had been said. The moment passes, but the cool remark, the indifferent gesture, the cryptic laugh has done its transformative work. Most people, I am sure, will know exactly what I am referring to — those small scenes in a marriage or friendship that become, in memory, incidents, reverberant with dark meaning. It is best, in a way, when these moments pass in silence, because they can then be recalled and talked about. But if, in the moment when big changes are taking place, if you are awake to what is happening, then gentle conversation is out of the question.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Shut up,” Jane said.

She was naked, with her back to me. She said, “You still haven’t answered my question.”

There were, at this point, I felt, too many questions, the questions leading to new questions. And of course I had my own questions, and no clear way to ask them.

“Which question, Jane?”

“Please don’t say my name right now. You can’t say my name now. I don’t want you to say my name.”

“Which question?”

“The question about what you want me to do.”

“You should do what you want, I guess.”

“I asked what you want, Tom. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to fuck you?”

“Oh, God.”

“I can do that. I can fuck you with a dildo or I can fuck you with my hand.”

The moth fluttered down from the ceiling and the cat jumped off the windowsill, stalking. She sat on her hind legs and watched, and muscles in her back twitched. Then the moth flew over and Larry sprang up with paws batting the air. The moth was high and she missed. It was a little white moth. Jane said, “Come here.”

Did she mean me or the cat? I did what she said. I moved up behind her. So did the cat. The cat moved this way and that between our legs as, on Jane’s back, the wave shapes rose and fell, tossing the men and spraying mist, Jane’s tiny birthmarks scattered across the skin.

The room with its windows closed felt cold and airless, somewhat like an attic in winter. Sounds outside, the wind through trees and so on, were hardly audible. There was space for a bed and a table, a chest of drawers, not much else. I had goose bumps.

We were sealed in tight. The city and the Institute, and the hospital and the river and the road, and our yard and even other rooms in our house were far away. The world was far away. Or, looked at from another, more imperious, narcissistic perspective, the world was in the room. The cat made a noise and Jane said, “Put your arms around me.”

There was tenderness. I felt, holding Jane, that everything would be all right as long as we remained together in the room — an impossibility, past a certain point, and therefore an entirely sentimental notion. Or maybe not. Relationships are like powerful moods that people share. We can go a little mad in our love relationships. Jane and I have always had what I would call a good love, in that it has been possible to go mad, but never too mad; in other words, we do not, when falling in and out of love, fall too far away from, or too profoundly into, the world.

Now a peculiar, gentle animosity was growing between us. I felt that we loved one another, and peace was in the little room. What waited outside? I held Jane and felt her stomach, the bottom of her rib cage, the skin above her hips. Her hair was in my face. The air was cold and the floor felt cold to the touch. My hands touching Jane were icy; she flinched and pressed her back against my chest.

The cat ran after the moth flying in circles near the ceiling. I watched the moth in flight. The cat rolled on the floor and came up dirty. Jane’s hair was in my mouth. I could hear the wind outside, and Jane’s breathing, and my own. I studied her back and saw freckles dotting Jane’s shoulders like stars above the sea on her hips. Below Jane’s neck, on a place usually hidden beneath her hair, I saw, I think, the Little Dipper.

We pulled each other down onto the floor. The cat got between us and curled up for warmth. I had the beginnings of a cold. Jane, making love, has such poise. We weren’t kissing. In the middle of everything, Jane began talking. She talked and talked, for the longest time, and it was fantastic to hear her. I kept my mouth shut. I breathed and listened. She said, “I used to love you so much, Tom. It was a simple thing, loving you. I didn’t worry about us loving other people. I thought about that, the possibility, but I never worried. I thought I could care for somebody else and still love you. It didn’t seem like a problem. You know? Why wouldn’t we love other people? Loving other people isn’t bad. But it’s wrong to think that everything won’t change. You feel like a different person when you make love with someone new. Falling in love with a new person is a way of becoming a new person. Well, not a new person. A different version of yourself. It’s true. That’s the wonderful part, and it’s the difficulty too, I suppose. I don’t want you to be a new person. I always want you to be the man I fell in love with, but that’s stupid, because I’m not the girl you fell in love with. We’re different people and we haven’t kept track of who we are. That’s why we’re in this room, isn’t it? This is where we can come to find out who we want to be when things change and we feel strange to each other. I think we each have versions of ourselves that we don’t know are in us. Are you scared? Don’t be. You’re a man and I’m not a girl. Do you remember how young we used to be? We were so young in our twenties. We were children. I was riding that enormous, man’s bike I used to have, remember? It was about a million billion sizes too big for me, and I was riding on the sidewalk, which you’re not supposed to do, and then there you were in front of me and I ran into you. Well, I guess I didn’t run into you, did I? You jumped out of the way. What happened? You tripped over that hedge, and that dog came tearing out of the yard on the hill. God. The dog’s owner ran after the dog and yelled at us to leave his dog alone and get the hell off his property. All of a sudden, because of that man and his dog, we were united. We were a couple. Think of the ways people meet! I got off my bike and it felt like, ‘Oh, hello.’ We walked together, and you were sweet and took my bike and walked it for me, and we weren’t paying any attention to where we were going, and the next thing we knew it was nighttime and we were in that scary part of town where the book factory is, so we went into that bar, remember, but we didn’t drink anything, did we? We ordered club soda, and the bartender turned out to be the father of a kid who beat you up in high school, then later got killed in that terrible loading-dock accident. The father wouldn’t stop talking about how death was everywhere, and he got impatient with us for drinking club soda, and we gave him a huge tip, because of his dead son, and just to get out of there. We went right to bed, that night, didn’t we? I was afraid to take off my clothes. You kissed my back and told me it was beautiful, my back. I believed you. Do you ever want to be a different kind of man? Could you be a different man with a different woman if I were the woman? Don’t be hurt, don’t take it personally. Who else did you fuck, anyway? Tom? Actually, do you want me to tell you something? I’m not sure I want you to say. How would you feel about that? Would you think I don’t care? Can you fuck me like I’m all the people you might ever love? Why am I telling you not to be hurt? It’s because I want to fuck like I’m everybody and not just me. Is that a crazy thing to want?”