Chang-Rae Lee - Aloft

"Look, Jerry, look what Pop got!" Daisy said.

"A customer of mine imports these from Japan, and he gave me a nice rate on them. They're just as good as Mikimotos."

"It's not my birthday even," Daisy said, hushed by the glitter in her hands. "This is so nice. This is so pretty."

"Call it a reward, for all the hardship of the last couple of weeks. Ask Nonna over there. It's no picnic, putting up with us Battle men. We're stubborn and prideful and we ask no less than the world of our women. The world. Your husband Jerome here is no different. We all know he can be sullen, but that's because he's always been too serious. Not like Bobby, who knew what real fun was. He was just like you. So you better learn patience, with this one."

Pop tousled my hair, and I let him, because incredulity freezes you, because I was like that back then, because Pop was Pop and I wasn't. Daisy was the one who stopped him, if only because she was hugging him, kissing him on the forehead and cheek, hooting a little, practically vibrating with glee and gratitude. Nonna had already ceased paying further attention to the scene, gone back to the daily calculus of how to make a meal from what was at hand. The kids ran in from outside and Pop had a handful of hard candies for them, as usual, toffees and sours and butterscotches. This was the minor parade my father always finessed for himself, wherever he went: my wife and kids, joyous with the old man. I drifted around the gleeful huddle and asked Nonna if she needed anything.

"I don't think so, honey," she said, never, ever ironical. She was scraping the freezer burn from the ice-hard meat, a little pile of root-beer-colored shavings collecting at the edge of her knife blade. "I think I have everything I need."

I N T H E W E E K S A F T E R Pop came bearing gifts, everything pretty much went to shit. It did, it really did, though not in the manner I thought it would. I figured I'd be the one generating the enmity, the one beaming out the negative vibes, the go-to-hell shine first thing in the morning and stay-on-your-side rays before clicking off the bedside lamp at night. I thought Pop's stunt (which I should have been ready for) and Daisy's giddy celebrations would lend me the pissy high ground, at least for a few days, long enough to keep Daisy on the defensive and not out there spending our future, long enough so I could figure out how to fix the problem without forever placing her under house arrest. But the fact was, Daisy was the one who took further umbrage. She wouldn't speak to me, not a word, her silence made that much more unpleasant by the fact that she seemed livelier and brighter in her dealings with everyone else.

Did the time mark a strange kind of renaissance for her? Was it, in language Theresa might employ, an epochal turn? I really don't know about that. What's clear to me is that Daisy pretty much exploded with life, and our life, as it went, exploded right along with her. Up to then, my basic conception of crazy was still the one I'd held since youth, the picture of a raven-haired Irish girl named Clara who climbed the trees in her pleated Catholic-school skirt not wearing underwear and lobbed Emily Dickinson down to me in a wraithlike voice (I cannot be with You/It would be Life/and Life is over there /Behind the Shelf), my trousers clingy with fear and arousal.

With Daisy, I didn't know, nor did anyone else, for that matter, including Dr. Derricone, the extent of her troubles, the ornate reach and complication. Those initial shopping sprees would in the end seem like the smallest indiscretions, filched candy from the drugstore, a lingering ass pat at a neighborhood cocktail party, nothing you couldn't slough off with a laugh, nothing you couldn't later recall with some fondness even, with wistful rue.

The first thing was, she would hardly sleep. If at all. After Pop venit and vidit and vincit that weekend and she stopped talking to me, Daisy's metabolism went into overdrive. We usually went to bed at 11 or so, after the news for me and maybe a bath for her, but she started getting up at 5 in the morning, and then 4 and 3 and 2, until it got to the point when she didn't even get ready for bed, not bothering to change into a nightgown or brush her teeth or even take a soak. A couple times in the middle of the night I awoke to the plash-plash of water, and I peered through the curtains to see, in lovely silhouette, Daisy paddling around in the pool with the inner tube hooped beneath her arms. She was naked, just going back and forth, back and forth, and I had the thought that I should go out there and keep her company. But I desperately needed my sleep back then(these days it's a different story, as I lie in wait for the muted thwap of the morning paper on the driveway) and rather than get up I know exactly what I did, which was to just fall back into the pillow and scratch at myself half-mast and maybe dream in sentimental hues of gorgeous black swans, who must always swim alone.

After a couple weeks I didn't even notice that Daisy was never in bed. She probably slept a couple of hours while the kids were watching TV, but I can't be sure of that. As for sex, it wasn't happening, and not just because of the fact that she decided not to talk to me. Pure talk was never that important to us anyway, even at the beginning, when it was mostly joking and flirting, for though her English was more than passable it was just rudimentary enough for us to stay clear of in-depth and nu-anced discussions, which suited me fine. The truth was that while I was hungering for her I had an equally keen desire to hold out as long as I could stand, because if she had any power over me it was certainly sexual power, which, most other things being equal, is what all women should easily have over all men.

Daisy could always, please forgive me, float my boat, top my prop, she could always crank up the generators at any moment and make me feel that every last cell in my body was overjuiced and soon-to-be-derelict if not immediately launched toward something warm and soft. In her own way she was a performer, as they say actors can be when they enter a room; something in them switches on and suddenly everybody is pointed right at them, abject with confused misery and love.

And this really happened, mostly while I was slumbering. I don't know how many times she did it, but one night the doorbell rang and roused me from a deep sleep and I trudged tingling in the limbs to the door to find my wife wrapped in a big blue poly tarp with a burly young officer of the local law standing behind her waving a long flashlight.

"Are you the head of this household, sir?" he asked, momentarily blinding me with the beam, and fully waking me up.

"You wanna kill the light, chief?"

"Sorry, sir," he said, slipping the flashlight into his belt. "Are you the head of household?"

"If you mean am I the owner, then yes."

"Is this your wife?"

I looked at Daisy, who just looked glum and down in the mouth, as if this whole thing was yet another chore of her unglamorous life.

"Yes. She's my wife."

"She was at the elementary school, in the playground there.

There was a complaint."

"What? Is it illegal, to be over there?"

"I believe there's a school grounds curfew, sir, but that wasn't the whole problem."

"Oh yeah?"

Daisy then said, "Just cut it out, Jerry. Good night, officer.

Thanks for the ride home." She tippy-toed and pecked him on the cheek, and then stepped inside. "Oh, this is yours."

She peeled the tarp from herself, and handed it to him. She was wearing only sneakers, white Keds with the blue pencil stripe on the rubber. The young cop thanked her and said good night, like it was a goddamned date or something. Daisy disappeared inside.