Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“I can’t fit her riding helmet in my suitcase,” he’d said, and the iciness in his voice had surprised him. Where had that come from?

“The helmet’s hollow. Stuff it with your socks and underwear. Then it’ll fit.”

“And the boots?”

“The boots are small.”

“And covered with dirt and manure.”

“They aren’t.”

“I took her last. Remember?”

“Of course I do. You do it so rarely.”

Suddenly they sounded like his parents in one of their habitual, second-scotch skirmishes. Except it was the morning and he and Catherine hadn’t been drinking. “My point is that I know exactly the condition of the stable in the park. It’s filthy. And so the boots are filthy,” he told her.

“Why didn’t you clean them off then? Or ask her to?”

“I did clean them. I didn’t disinfect them. It never crossed my mind they’d have to share close quarters with my clothes.”

“Fine, I’ll put them in a plastic bag in my suitcase. You take the helmet.”

And so he had removed his shirts and his pants-khakis and shorts and even a pair of golf slacks-from his suitcase, stuffed the helmet with his underwear and socks, and then wedged everything back inside his very well-traveled American Tourister twenty-inch Cabin Carry-On. It wasn’t nearly as neat as it had been, and so he’d spent the rest of the morning seething-more at himself than at her because he knew he had overreacted. But the end result was the same: a tense and wearisome silence. He retreated into the quiet of their two cats, pulling a dining room chair over to the living room couch on which they were dozing in the sun and noiselessly running his fingers over their fur. Then he reread for the third time the note they would be leaving for the teenage girl on their floor who was going to feed the animals and change their litter box. It was a complicated set of instructions, because it wasn’t easy to keep a cat vegan.

There was no dog in their life and he wished that there were. Unfortunately, once in a mood of self-righteous obstinacy, he’d proclaimed their apartment was too small for one. He’d insisted it would be cruel to coop one up for a whole day there. He no longer believed that (had he ever?), but he was, he knew, disablingly-perhaps self-destructively-stubborn.

Now on the plane he resolved he would behave better. He reached across the aisle to feel (at once so like and unlike that of a cat) the soft down on Catherine’s wrist and her arm, bare even in the chill of this claustrophobic passenger cabin. Lightly he stroked the skin just above her thumb and along the back of her hand. Though the house in New Hampshire belonged to Mrs. Seton, he had been coming here for two decades, and it was as close to a familial motherland as he had: a place with memories and roots that transcended the itinerant nature of his own suburban upbringing. He loved the house, he believed, more than did his wife and his brother-in-law, who had known it their entire lives and now took it for granted, and at least as much as his mother-in-law, who slipped into a life there each summer with the same blissful sigh she’d exhale when she’d plunge into the crisp waters of Echo Lake.

He gave Catherine’s hand a small squeeze, but she continued to read. She was still angry with him. Once they were on the ground and he wouldn’t have to shout, he would apologize to her for being a… a jerk. Yes, that was right. A jerk.

From the intercom speaker above them he heard a series of scratchy, incomprehensible prerecorded syllables-there was no flight attendant on this route-and he knew it was the message reminding them to have their tray tables locked in their upright positions and their seats fully forward, because they were about to land.

AT THE RENT-A-CAR COUNTER, while a good-natured wisp of a teen girl printed out the forms for the vehicle they were taking for the next week and a half-a minivan almost (but not quite) large enough for the extended family and their golf clubs-Catherine Seton-McCullough used her cell phone to leave a message on her mother’s answering machine. She wanted to let her know that they had landed and would be at the house in about ninety minutes. Five o’clock at the latest. No doubt everyone was still at the club, taking whatever lessons Mother had lined up.

Spencer had apologized and she was grateful. But only to an extent. She still wasn’t exactly sure what she should say because she was filled with a nauseating, almost debilitating sense of dread that her marriage was… winding down. And she was scared. She could no longer see anything behind Spencer’s eyes but annoyance-and Lord knows how she hated this word-issues. She taught English and literature to high school girls at the Brearley School on the Upper East Side, and this spring the headmaster had brought in a consultant who called herself a corporate interdependence trainer and the woman had used that word-issues-as a euphemism for both actual crises and petty discontents. Instead of challenge, a word that Catherine knew other consultants depended upon as their substitute for weakness-as in “We have myriad strengths and a couple of small challenges to address”-this trainer savored the businesslike spitefulness of issue. Like agenda, it was a word that purported to sound neutral, but in truth was two syllables with inherently negative connotations: There really was no such thing as a good issue. It gave the woman the conversational upper hand with the school’s teachers and administrators, implying at once that the faculty and staff had problems, while suggesting that she would never approach them in a manner that was overtly condescending. Patronizing? Yes. Condescending? Only if you thought for a moment about what the doctrinaire pedant really was saying.

Well, clearly, she and Spencer had issues, and they had only gotten worse since Charlotte had left for her grandmother’s house in the country. Catherine had expected the time alone would give the two of them a chance to reconnect. They’d go to movies and dinner together, just the two of them, and perhaps he would relax and they would talk about… about everything. What demons were driving his temper. Why he could be as confrontational with his wife and daughter as he was with associations of big game hunters. Why he had become so focused on work that he could practically ignore Charlotte for weeks: He would jet to Washington (a presentation on the evils of biomedical animal research to the minions of some Senate committee) or Omaha (a press conference about the practices of a company that specialized in mail-order steak) or Sarasota (something about the treatment of circus animals) and then talk to his daughter when he returned home with about the same conversational involvement that he demonstrated with telemarketers. What happened to the days when he would whisk Charlotte off to a concert or museum or one of the Broadway shows that she loved? Patiently help her use the Internet to research school papers about the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, the dolphin’s glorious brain, or the reasons why we have seasons?

Likewise, he was neglecting her, too. His wife. In the two weeks that Charlotte had been in the country, Catherine had barely seen her husband before eight or eight thirty at night, an hour that felt particularly late because she was through with work until the middle of August, when she would begin preparing her classroom in earnest for the fall. She saw friends and she played tennis and she read on the grass in Central Park. But she didn’t see much of her husband.

Sometimes she found herself flirting. She would flirt with Hank Rechter, the fifty-five-year-old headmaster of a school on the West Side-not, thank God, Brearley-when she would see him jogging near Belvedere Castle late in the afternoon. It was an amiable flirtation because he was a neighbor in their building who was as happily married as everyone supposed she was, because his smooth business suits fit his wondrous shoulders like slipcovers, because he never seemed to sweat when he ran. Because he always found a way to touch her with his fingertips that was at once chummy and rakishly inappropriate. Sometimes when he would see her in the park he would sit down on the grass beside her, and she sensed that she was speaking to this man in the sort of breathless, whispery voice her husband no longer heard.