Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

So he couldn’t even send his righteous e-mail.

That night he boxed up Sally’s kitchen and took it to the basement, pulled the art from the walls and put it in the dank studio. He couldn’t decide on what was a more hostile act, packing the filthy bath mat or throwing it away. Packing it, he decided, and so he packed it. He tumbled the mothball-filled bedclothes into garbage bags. He moved out the platform bed and slept on the futon sofa and went the next day to the nearby mall to buy his very own bed. The following Monday the cleaners came, looking like a Girls in Prison movie (missing teeth, tattoos, denim shorts, cleavage) and declared without prodding that the house was disgusting, and he felt a surge of actual happiness: yes, disgusting, it was, anyone could see it. He was amazed at how hard they worked. They cleaned out every cupboard. They hauled all those bottles to the curb. He tipped them extravagantly. One of the house cleaners left her number on several pieces of paper around the house — PERSONAL HOUSECLEANING CALL JACKIE $75—and the owner of the cleaning service called the next day to say that she’d heard one of the girls was offering to clean privately, was that true, it wasn’t allowed, and Stony accidentally said yes, and was devastated that the perfect transaction of cleaning had been sullied. Then he called back and said he’d misunderstood, she hadn’t, everything had been by the book.

That night he wrote Sally an e-mail explaining where he’d put things: kitchen goods boxed in basement, linens and art in the studio.

He painted the upstairs walls and hung his own art. He boxed up some of the resident books. Slowly he moved half the furniture to the studio and replaced it with things bought at auction. The kindly archivist, his boss, came by the house. “My God!” he said. “This place! You’ve made it look great. You know, I tried to get you out of the lease last May, but Sally wouldn’t go for it. I tried to find you someplace nicer. But you’ve made it nice. Good for you.”

At work he cataloged the underground collection, those beautiful daft objects of passion, pamphlets and buttons, broadsides. What would the founders of these publications make of him? What pleasure, to describe things that had been invented to defy description — but maybe he shouldn’t have. The inventors never imagined these things lasting forever, filling phase boxes, the phase boxes filling shelves. He was a cartographer, mapping the unmappable, putting catalog numbers and provenance where once had been only waves and the profiles of sea serpents. Surely some people grieved for those sea serpents.

He didn’t care. He kept at it, constructing his little monument to impermanence.

By March he was dating a sociology lecturer named Eileen, a no-nonsense young woman who made comforting, stodgy casseroles and gave him backrubs. He realized he would never know what his actual feelings for her were. She was not a girlfriend, she was a side effect of everything in the world that was Not Pamela. The house, too. Every now and then he thought, out of the blue, But what did that woman mean, she bent over backwards for me? And all day long, like a telegraph, he received the following message: My wife has died, my wife has died, my wife has died . Quieter than it had been: he could work over it now. He could act as though he were not an insane person with one single thought.

In April he got a tattoo at the downtown parlor where the students got theirs, a piece of paper wafting as though windswept over his bicep with a single word in black script: Ephemera .

Then it was May. His lease was over. Time to move again.

Through some spiritual perversity, he’d become fond of the house, its Sears, Roebuck feng shui, its square squatness, the way it got light all day long. Sally sent him e-mails, dithering over move-out dates, and for a full week threatened to renew the lease for a year. Would he be interested? He consulted his heart and was astounded to discover that, yes, he would. Finally she decided she would move back to the house on the first of June to get it ready to sell. Did he want to buy it? No, ma’am. Well, then: May 31.

He found an apartment with a bit of ocean view, a grown-up place with brand-new appliances and perfect arctic countertops that reminded him of no place: not the farmhouse in Normandy, or the beamed Roman apartment, or the thatched cottage near Odense. As he packed up the house he was relieved to see its former grubbiness assert itself, like cleaning an oil painting to find a murkier, uglier oil painting underneath. He noticed again the acoustic tiles on the upstairs ceilings and the blackness of the wooden floors. He took up the kilim in the living room and put down the old oriental; he packed his flat-screen TV, a splurge, into a box and found in the basement the old mammoth remoteless set and the hobbled particle-board cart. He cleaned the house as he’d never cleaned a rental before, because he was penitent and because he suspected Sally would use any opportunity to hold on to his security deposit; he washed walls and the insides of cupboards and baseboards and doorjambs. She had no idea how much work she had ahead of her, he thought. The old rocker was a pig to wrestle back into the house; he covered it with the Indian throw, so she would have someplace to sit, but he left the art off the walls, and he did not restock the kitchen.

And besides.

Besides, why should he?

Those boxes were time machines: if he even thought about them, all he could remember was the fury with which he packed them. These days he was pretending to be a nice, rational man.

He bought a bunch of daffodils and left them in a pickle jar in the middle of the dining-room table with a note that reminded Sally of the location of her kitchenware and bed linens, and signed his name, and added his cell-phone number. Then he went away for the weekend, up the coast, so he could take a few days off from things, boxes, the fossil record of his life.

In the morning, the first cell-phone message was Sally, who wanted to know where her dishcloths were.

The second: bottom of the salad spinner.

The third: her birth certificate. She’d left it in the white desk that had been in the dining room, and where was that?

The fourth: what on earth had happened to the spices? Had he put them in a separate box?

The reception in this part of the state was miserable. He clamped the phone over one ear and his hand over the other.

“Sally?” he said.

She said, “Who’s this?”

“Stony Badower.”

There was silence.

“Your tenant—”

“I know,” she said, in a grande dame voice. Then she sighed.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“It’s more daunting moving back in than I’d thought,” she said.

“But you’re all right.”

“I found the dishcloths,” she said. “And the desk.”

“And the birth certificate?” he asked.

“Yes.” More silence.

“Why don’t I come over this evening when I get back,” he said, “and I can—”

“Yes,” she said. “That would be nice.”

He’d imagined a woman who looked spun on a potter’s wheel, round and glazed and built for neither beauty nor utility. Unbreakable till dropped from a height. Her daughter the small blonde gone to seed. But the door was answered by a woman as tall as him, 5′10", in her late sixties, more ironwork than pottery, with the dark hair and sharp nose of her granddaughter. She shook his hand. “Stony, hello.” Over a flowered T-shirt she wore the sort of babyish bright-blue overalls that Berlin workmen favored, that no American grown-up, he had thought, would submit to. They showed off the alarmingly beautiful curve of her back as she retreated to the kitchen. Already she’d dug out some of the old pottery, and found a new tablecloth to cover the cigarette-burned oilcloth on the dining-room table.