Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

At the brownstone, I’d found Audra in the kitchen. When I walked in, she was sitting at the table with Emmy, who was eating a bowl of cereal with bananas before bed. Niels must have already been upstairs.

Until then, I’d kept it out of the house. Even on the weekends, I’d kept it out of the house.

As soon as I entered that room, though, I knew that tonight was going to be different. The world had dulled. Dulled and darkened — over months, I’m talking about — but suddenly it was about to wink out. Maybe it was because of the day. I was still irritated by a certain slant in the run, a slant in which the Shores-Durbans had missed a decent-sized slice of the pie. To the tune of maybe two and a half million. I was sure they could have gobbled it, but they hadn’t. They fucking hadn’t gobbled it.

I was going to discover why.

If I could only get the world to shed its dark. I kissed my wife and daughter. As soon as possible, I stepped back out to the living room.

“Wait a minute,” said Audra, a moment later, entering from the kitchen.

I was leaning down over the Mpingo coffee table.

“What are you doing?” she said, backing up against the curtains.

I lowered my head hungrily. With one eye I glanced up. “What do you mean, what am I doing?”

“Wait. Wait. Wait. What is this, Hans? Are you kidding me?”

I sprang up and shot through the kitchen door for the refrigerator, which dispensed the glacial ice water that I craved. I was alive now inside a flickering shell of light. At the table, Emmy looked up from her cereal bowl and said, “Hey, Daddy-o.”

“Hey, love.” I kissed her on the forehead.

Back in the living room, I mouthed to Audra, “North of twenty sticks today, babe.”

She was still standing wide eyed against the curtains. She whispered, “What? Please, Hans — what is this?”

“North of twenty today, Aud!” It might have come out as a shout. “Not bad. Come on, honey. Sit down with me and celebrate!”

On the way home, I should also mention, Lorenzo had dropped me for a quick stop at one of the boutique hotels downtown. I’d done a couple of nice bumps there, too, with another quant I knew, on the dazzling glass towel shelf in the dazzling marble bathroom of a dazzlingly opulent bar. In those days, though, a bump lasted about as long as a breath.

“Hans,” said Audra. “I have no idea what you’re doing right now. In front of me like this, in your own house, and with your own daughter right there .” She pointed through the wall. “What is this? Is this a joke?”

“The door’s closed, Aud. She can’t see anything.”

I should also add: it wasn’t as though my wife had never seen it before, herself. She’d even done it with me, once, early in my career — some diluted Mexican street puff at a party during my first year in New York, on the medium-fancy roof deck of a midlevel, Midtown customer whose account already meant just a little less than nothing to me. I hadn’t exactly pretended to be new to it all.

“Stop looking so shocked,” I said. “How do you think I’ve been making all this bank?” I powered down the last of the water and shook the ice cubes onto my tongue. When I bit down I couldn’t tell whether it was the cubes that were breaking or my teeth. “How do you think I’ve been making our shiny little nut, sweetheart? You think I just do all this on my own ?”

She retreated into the kitchen. I heard her cellphone open. I heard it close. “What?” she said again, reappearing in the doorway, running her hands through her hair. Her mouth made the shape of a scream, but what emerged was a short, breathy wheeze. I was hunched at the table, licking up the dust.

“How do you think I’ve been keeping us inside our little pyramid of fancy?” I said. With quivering fingers I pointed at the blazing French Empire chandelier above the fireplace. The room was alive now with light. I ran those fingers across my gums and sucked.

Her next scream was real.

AS I WALKED back through the cabin, I tried the rest of the lights. The dining nook. The staircase. The porch. They were all burned out except for the one behind me in the living room. In the narrow hallway, I took my phone from my pocket and held it in front of me, the dull-yellow walls and worn floors easing forward out of the dark. Finally, at the pantry door, the old fluorescent lamps flickered on.

The kitchen was clean, too. A couple of washed plates in the rack. A sponge standing in the sink. Water still dripping from the tap. I shut it off. “Dad?” Alongside the refrigerator I found the old broom on its peg. With its splintered handle I rapped the floor, the way Mom used to do when it was time for breakfast. “Dad?” I called out, rapping it again. Behind the cabinet doors were a few supplies. Vegetable oil. A jar of pickles. A loaf of wheat bread. In the refrigerator, a pack of hot dogs and a quart of milk.

I pulled out my phone again and dialed. From the living room came the startlingly loud ring. When I found the extension, the light on the answering machine was blinking. I knew what it would say, but I held the glow to it anyway: MESSAGES FULL.

I stepped to the bottom of the stairs. “Dad?”

Through the side window my glance fell again on his car. I saw now that it had a flat tire — left rear, all the way to the rim. He wasn’t driving, then. Someone must be doing his errands for him.

A woman.

If I waited here, would he walk in with her? Standing at the window, I understood that this was exactly what he’d done. In five minutes, in an hour, he’d be coming in the door with some rumpled young thing on his arm. That’s what I had to prepare for.

Or I could just drive back up the road to the hotel.

But then what? He wasn’t even checking messages. When we’d spoken, I’d told him exactly when I’d be arriving. He wouldn’t have forgotten: dates were numbers.

In the shallow closet at the rear of the pantry, I found the old sheets from my childhood bed. Stiff but still clean enough.

Upstairs in my old bedroom, the table lamp still worked. The same ancient shades with their bent-twig pulls still hung over the windows. The same oval rug still covered the floor. Paulie’s framed drawing of a sunrise, still propped next to the mirror. I pulled the sheets over the mattress.

What kind of woman would choose a life like this? The tidy kitchen, the tended garden. But you still couldn’t get around the fact of what it all was.

When I pushed open the door to my parents’ room, I was wary. I guess I expected to see the first real evidence of whoever she was. I flipped on the light, and what I actually noticed was that it didn’t look at all like the rest of the place — the blankets on the bed had been pulled into a heap, and the floor was scattered with cigarette butts. She wasn’t taking care of him: that’s what crossed my mind. It was only then that my eyes traveled across the room and saw that in the chair by the window sat an enormous, wild-haired man, staring out into the dark.

“I’m sorry,” said a high voice. The head didn’t turn. In the glass I saw the face.

“Oh, God—” I said.

The voice was a young girl’s. It was my daughter Emmy’s.

“It’s you, Hans,” he said feebly. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

“Oh, God, Dad. It is .”

I’d seen him ill before, but this was different. He looked like two men — a fat one sitting on a thin one. His flesh had been stretched to bursting, and the weight of it had pulled him forward over his knees, where his huge arms hung like two more legs. They almost touched the floor. He was panting, and through his swollen eyelids he looked out from a pair of tiny crescents. At the corner of one, I could see a bloody wedge. That’s where my gaze finally settled, on that rheumy red triangle at the side of his eye, which still seemed somehow like a view inside him.