Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

Their anniversary was coming in a few weeks; that would be a good time to try again. This time he would do it right — flowers, a nicer restaurant, and then at home, soft music and champagne. They could dance a little beforehand; that had always gotten Martha in the mood.

One step at a time.

In the morning he went down to the TV room to look for the old album she loved so much, the one they used to play sometimes when the kids were asleep. But he couldn’t find it, despite the fact that all the LPs were neatly alphabetized, everything in its place. The absence of this one particu­lar record disturbed him, as if it were a symbol of all the romance that had vanished from their marriage.

“Honey,” he said at breakfast, “have you seen Bouquet ?”

“Bouquet?”

“The Percy Faith record? The one with ‘Tenderly’ on it?”

“Not recently,” she said, not even glancing up from The Star-Ledger . “Why?”

After a brief hesitation, he spelled out his plans for their anniversary, and how the Percy Faith record might fit into them.

“I want it to be a special night,” he said. “I feel like I haven’t been trying hard enough.”

Martha put down the paper. There was a tenderness in her gaze that he hadn’t seen for a long time. She reached across the table and took his hand.

“You know what?” she said. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea.”

THE LONGER Gus contemplated the album cover, the more puzzled he became. There must have been some kind of reasonable explanation for how it migrated from his TV room to Lonny’s garage, but for the life of him, Gus couldn’t imagine what it might be.

One thing was certain: there was no way Lonny had purchased his own copy of Bouquet. From the beginning, he had mocked Gus’s fuddy-duddy taste in “elevator music” with every bit as much disdain as Gus’s own children had. No, Lonny must have borrowed the Percy Faith album at some point in the misty past, but when? And why? And even if he had — which in itself seemed pretty unlikely — why hadn’t he returned it? Why was it sitting out on a table in the garage, along with a bunch of country-and-western records?

While he pondered these questions, Gus tipped the album cover, letting the record come sliding partway out of its sleeve, as if the grooved black vinyl might offer some helpful clues. But something else fell out as he did so, a Polaroid that landed faceup on the table, an image so utterly unexpected that Gus barked a harsh chuckle of amazement at the sight of it.

In the photo, Martha had been surprised in the act of clipping a pink rose from a bush in their backyard. She looked radiant, but this effect wasn’t a product of youth (she appeared to be around fifty in the picture) or beauty (though she’d aged well, Martha had never been the kind of woman a stranger would have described as “pretty”) but of surprise itself. Her eyes were bright with pleasure and her mouth was slightly open. Gus could almost hear her saying Hey! in a playfully scolding tone.

You could see the chain-link fence in front of her and Gus’s toolshed in the back, which meant that the picture had to have been taken from the Simmonses’ backyard. Gus’s hands trembled as he turned the photo over. What he saw on the flip side was somehow even harder to fathom than what was on front: a simple invitation in his wife’s graceful Catholic-school cursive, the same handwriting he saw when she sent him to the store to buy broccoli, flank steak, Grape-Nuts, Lysol.

Gimpy, she had written. Will you dance with me?

He studied the photograph for a long time, absorbing the unpleasant truth in his wife’s joyfully startled expression. Once again his mind was forced back fifteen years, to that tense, awkward summer when Martha had lost her job and Lonny had undergone surgery for a torn ligament. It was humiliating to think that the betrayal was already under way on those nights when Gus had bared his soul in the garage, but even more awful, in a way, to think that it wasn’t, that “Gimpy” had made overtures to Martha only after learning of Gus’s inability to perform in the bedroom.

But if that was when it started, when had it ended?

They must have broken it off at some point before the oak-tree dispute, he thought, because Martha had stood by his side through the whole ordeal. If anything, she’d seemed angrier at the Simmonses than he had. The memory of Lonny’s death was still fresh in Gus’s mind, and he had no recollection of Martha’s reacting like a heartbroken lover. She’d been shocked and saddened by the news of their neighbor’s passing, but not excessively, and no more than Gus had. They had decided, as a couple, not to attend the wake and had instead written a polite note of condolence to Peggy. It was Gus — not Martha — who had woken up on the morning of the funeral overcome by feelings of guilt and sadness. At breakfast he told her they really should go to the cemetery to pay their respects.

“It’s the least we can do,” he said. “He was our friend for a long time.”

“You go ahead,” she told him. “I just don’t feel like I’m welcome there.”

Gus considered making an appearance on his own, but in the end he stayed away, haunted all day by the feeling that he was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. He burst into tears twice, once in the shower, and again at CVS, while waiting for a prescription to be filled. Martha, on the other hand, seemed strangely composed, as if it were a day like any other. Gus had felt almost relieved that evening, stepping into the house after his ritual two-mile walk around the high school track, to find her sobbing like a lost child at the kitchen table, a half-peeled potato in her hand. He tried to embrace her and tell her it was okay, but she asked him not to touch her.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Please just leave me alone.”

THE RAIN was coming down full force now, battering the garage from all sides, as if someone were spraying a fire hose against the walls and dropping bucketloads of gravel on the roof. He’d been so distracted by the Polaroid that he’d forgotten all about the kiddie pool, which was still lying outside the garage, awaiting inflation. He opened the door, startled by the force of the storm, and began hauling it in, flapping the plastic to drain the rainwater that had puddled on its surface. It seemed amazing to him now — amazing and pathetic — that all he’d wanted from this night was to fill the damn thing with air while no one was looking.

He folded the liner as carefully as if it were a flag, then laid it back in its box, thinking as he did so that what really got to him wasn’t that he’d been cheated on by his wife — that could happen to anyone. What really bothered him was that he could have spent so much time on earth — he was sixty-eight years old, for God’s sake — and understood almost nothing about his own life and the lives of the people he was closest to. It was as if he were still a child, a little boy sitting at the big table, listening to the grown-ups talk in their loud voices, laughing whenever they did, without having the vaguest idea of what was supposed to be so funny.

Well, at least now he knew the right questions to ask. All he had to do was go home and wait for Martha to wake up and come downstairs. He could show her the picture and demand that she tell him everything, the whole sorry history of her deception. But the thought of doing that just then — of leaving the garage and trudging back across Lonny’s yard in the pouring rain to have a conversation that was going to break his heart — suddenly seemed impossible, way beyond his strength. It was close to five in the morning, and he was just too tired.