Christopher Hacker - The Morels

I said, “I read about the lawsuit in the paper. How are you holding up?”

“The lawsuit,” she repeated. “Oh, the lawsuit. That’s just my father being crazy.” She zipped the suitcase and jerked it up off the bed onto the floor. “Will!” The place was ransacked. The dresser’s drawers remained yanked open, a pair of stockings spilling out. The closet was empty but for a few full-length dresses.

“I hope this isn’t because of us,” I said. “Please don’t leave because of us. You two can still work it out.”

Penelope glanced past me to make sure nobody was there and then narrowed her eyes at me. “I told you never to mention that,” she hissed. “There is no us. I told you that, too.”

“Then where are you going?”

“I tried,” she said. “I tried with him, but there’s only so much I can do. At a certain point, I’ve got to start being a mother. God, why did it take me so long to figure that out?” She clicked the suitcase handle into place and rolled it out of the room. “Will,” she shouted down the hall, “are you ready?”

I tried with him . Was she talking about Will or Arthur? I followed after her into the living room.

Will was kneeling at the television. “Hey,” he said to me.

Penelope said, “Where is your sleepover stuff?”

“I want to make sure it tapes. It’s the second episode in a two-part—”

“I told you, Will. We’re not coming back for a while.”

“But when we do come back—”

“Your sleepover stuff. Now.” Will got up and marched into his room.

“I know you have your hands full here,” I said, “and I don’t want to make things more complicated for you right now. But I have a thought — not a thought, more of a proposal — for you to think about on your way to wherever you’re going. Where are you going, by the way?”

“Jesus, just ask what you’re going to ask already.”

“I want an interview with you.”

“An interview.”

“We’re going to make a film. About Arthur, about your lives. You can be famous.”

“What is this? You want to film me? What for?”

“And Arthur. It would be a documentary.”

“Fucking unbelievable. You people are fucking unbelievable. It’s like a steamroller, a runaway steamroller. Will!”

Will stomped out of his room. “I’m packing,” he yelled. His voice was angry, but his eyes were afraid.

“Forget it. We’re leaving. Now. Out the door.” She ushered Will into the hallway. “Hit the button,” she called, following him, leaving me standing in the center of the room. She didn’t bother to close the door on her way out.

I related this run-in to Suriyaarachchi, who said, “Don’t worry about her, she’ll come around.” He rubbed his hands together. “So the plot thickens!”

The next day, I tried knocking on their door again, half expecting it to be open, but it wasn’t, and nobody answered. I had Arthur’s cell number and tried that a few times, but it was going straight to voice mail. The campus directory at Columbia put me in touch with the Writing Division, and the woman who answered the phone said he had office hours on Thursdays. It was Friday.

“Isn’t he around any other day?”

“He’s here now, but I couldn’t say how much longer he’ll stay. Most people leave early on Fridays.” I thanked her and told Suriyaarachchi that I would be back later.

I arrived at the doorway to Arthur’s office, flushed and out of breath. “I’ve been looking for you.”

He was seated at his desk, stack of papers in front of him. He looked up. “What do you want?”

Despite Penelope’s claim, it seemed clear to me that the frantic business of her packing was the direct result of our affair. I was certain it had caused this final tumult in their lives — a shouting match that ended with her throwing the fact of her infidelity in his face. Arthur’s abruptness appeared to confirm it.

“Nothing urgent,” I said. “Mostly just concerned.”

He gave me a frown. The office was dim and windowless, barely big enough for one of the two enormous desks here. Whoever occupied the one opposite Arthur was not here now, though there were signs of a recent vacancy: unfinished e-mail on the monitor, a Tupperware container open next to the keyboard: pasta, fork with a bite twirled neatly around resting on the lid.

“That’s Don,” Arthur said, seeing where I was looking.

“I tried calling. And knocking and ringing your doorbell. Where have you been?”

He was unshaved, hair uncombed, shirt untucked. He watched me for a moment and then, as if to wish me gone, returned his attention to his papers. I sat down at the unoccupied desk, waiting for him to tell me what he knew, readying my apology.

“Don’s coming back,” he said without looking up. And then, putting down his pen, “Penelope left me. She took Will.”

“Oh no,” I said. Then, testing the waters, “What happened?”

“I came home last night,” Arthur said. “There was a reading up here, over at eight. I thought she might be picking Will up from the neighbors’. Then I saw the bedroom.”

Closet empty. Dresser empty.

He called her cell — straight to voice mail. He sat down on the bed, pulled a coat hanger out from under his seat. He tossed it on the floor with the others. He had always thought that he would one day end up alone — that his luck would one day run out. So in this way, the discovery was not an unexpected one. After all, who could love someone like him? What was there to love? He was too literal, too humorless and detached, with a self-destructive streak a mile long. Arthur would say to Penelope during their first year of marriage, You’re going to leave me . At first she would protest, reassure him that she wouldn’t, then later it would provoke an argument. Do you want me to leave? Is that it? You can’t handle being married? Is it too hard for you? Somewhere along the way he’d stopped saying it, though he hadn’t stopped thinking it, which was maybe why this scene he’d walked in on was not shocking, why it felt like some piece of bad news he’d known for some time though hadn’t been officially told to him.

What did surprise him was the panic. He’d recently gone after a student for describing a character as being in the grip of panic. Why does panic always have to grip ? Can’t panic do other things? Can’t it flog or pinch or startle or finger ? Why always grip ? But sitting there on the bed, he felt very much in its grip. His ribs pressed in on him, he had trouble catching his breath, he felt squeezed, felt his pulse ticking loudly in his head, his thoughts trapped in his skull. He got up, paced the apartment.

Will’s room was similarly ransacked of things.

He called Penelope again, and again got her voice mail, again stopped short of leaving a message.

Where had she gone? Where had she taken Will?

He dialed the Wrights. Constance answered. She doesn’t want to speak with you, she said. That was it. She hung up. Arthur called back, but this time got the recorded voice of Frank declaring that nobody was home.

Arthur was not a man of action and would not have imagined he’d be one to hail a taxi to the airport, no plan other than to see his wife and son, to wait standby for a flight to Dulles, yet there he was, no overcoat, no change of clothes, still gripped — yes, gripped — by a feeling that some terrible change was taking place, had already taken place, while he wasn’t paying attention, and that he was entirely at fault. It was up to him to make it right. But what could he do, what could he say to make things right? He had tried. For the past two weeks, he had tried — but had obviously failed miserably.