Eric Lustbader: Last Snow

He heard voices rising up from the hot water pipes behind the toilet. Over the course of the week, he’d occasionally heard a drift of voices from the room on the floor below, but had never before been able to make out a single word. This time, a man’s and a woman’s voice were raised in altercation.

“I hate you!” the woman said, her raw emotion vibrating through the pipe. “I’ve always hated you.”

“You told me you loved me,” the man said, not plaintively, which might be expected, but with the guttural growl of a stalking male.

“Even then I hated you, I always hated you.”

“When I was pinning you to the mattress?”

“Especially then.”

“When I made you come?”

“And what was I screaming in my own language, do you think? ‘I hate you, I’ll see you in hell, I’ll kill you!’ ”

“Jack?”

Sharon’s voice in his ear caused him to twist on the water full force. He wasn’t one to eavesdrop, but there was a vengeful, knife-edged sharpness to both voices that not only compelled listening, but made it almost impossible to stop.

“Jack, are you at a party?”

“In my room,” he said. “The people downstairs are going at it tooth and nail. How are you?” An innocuous enough question, but not when you were forty-six hundred miles apart. When so much distance separated you, there was always a question in your mind: What is she doing, or, its more far-reaching corollary, what has she been doing? It was possible to tell himself that her day proceeded precisely as it did when he was there: She got up in the morning, showered, ate a quick breakfast standing at the kitchen counter, stacked the dishes in the sink because there was time to either wash them or put on her makeup but not do both, went to work, shopped for food, came home, put on Muddy Waters or Steve Earle while she prepared dinner and ate it, read an Anne Tyler or Richard Price novel or watched 30 Rock if it was on, and went to bed.

But he couldn’t help wondering if her day differed in some significant way, that it had been added to, that someone else might have inserted himself into her day or, far worse, her night, someone handsome, understanding, and available. Now he couldn’t help wondering whether this fantasy was jealousy or wish fulfillment. When, three months ago, Sharon had moved back into his house, he was certain they had reconciled the differences that had driven them apart in the first place. The intense physical desire for her that had first drawn him to her had never truly been entirely extinguished. But the fact was, they were still the same people. Jack was dedicated to his work, which Sharon resented, because she had no such dedication. She’d tried several different careers, all without feeling the slightest attachment to them. At first, she’d set herself up as a painter, but though technically accomplished she lacked passion—and nothing good, or at least worthwhile, can be created without it. Typical of her, she’d then drifted into dealing art, figuring to make easy money, but again her lack of conviction, or even interest, predetermined her failure. Finally, she was hired by a friend who worked at the Corcoran but was let go after less than a year. As a result, she now toiled joylessly in real estate, work that was tied to the vagaries of the economy, which, he imagined, could only further stir the pot of her simmering anger—at him, at the world, at her life without their daughter. He couldn’t help but think that she wanted him home for dinner every evening as a kind of revenge, for enjoying his job when she clearly didn’t. This was a desire that made him feel as if he were being strangled. He had always been an outsider—from his dyslexia to his unorthodox upbringing he’d never fit in and, as he’d finally been able to admit to himself if not to anyone else besides Alli Carson, he didn’t want to. One of the things that had bonded him with Alli was that they were both Outsiders. Sharon was conventional in most things; in all the others she was regressive. In the beginning, he’d loved her despite their differences, loved the smell of her, the sight of her both naked and clothed, the intense way she made love. Now Emma, or, more accurately, Emma’s memory, stood between them like an immense, immovable shadow that limned their differences with a cutting edge that was painful.

“Who’s that I hear whistling?” he said now.

“My mom. She arrived yesterday.”

Sharon’s mother had never liked him. She hadn’t approved of the marriage, telling her daughter that it would end in tears, which of course it had. That triumph of hers was in no way mitigated by Sharon having returned to him. Their daughter—her granddaughter—Emma was dead, killed at age twenty in a car accident. As far as Sharon’s mother was concerned it had all ended in tears, no matter what happened from now on.

“Jack, when are you coming home?”

“You asked me that yesterday and the day before.”

“And yesterday and the day before you said you’d find out.” She made that noise where her tongue struck the roof of her mouth. “Jack, what’s the matter with you? Don’t you want to come home?”

The subject, he suspected, would not be coming up so insistently if her mother hadn’t arrived with all her pernicious baggage. “I told you when I signed on with Edward—”

“My mother said you never should have taken that job, and I have to say that I agree with her.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you cared about me, if you cared about repairing the damage to our marriage, you would have found a job closer to home.”

“Sharon, this is starting to feel like déjà vu all over again. I can’t—”

“That’s your answer to everything serious, isn’t it, making jokes. Well, I can’t take that anymore, Jack.”

Silence on the line. He didn’t know what to say or, rather, didn’t want to say something he’d regret. It was strange how intimate conversations became attenuated—how emotions seemed muted, almost murky—when transmitted over long distances, as if the phones themselves were having the conversation. Perhaps it was his alien surroundings—his present, and therefore his priorities so different from her familiar ones.

“You didn’t answer my question.” Her voice sounded thick, as if during the interim she’d been crying.

“I don’t know. Something’s come up.”

“Something’s always coming up.” Her voice had sharpened like a knife at the strop. “But that’s precisely what you want, isn’t it? You—”

The rest of her acerbic response was drowned out by a sharp, insistent rapping on the door he had come to associate with the president’s Secret Service staff.

He took the cell away from his ear and ducked back into the main room, which was at once anonymous and oppressive, a hallmark of what passed for modern Russian decor. It was on the top floor of the vast H-shaped hotel, whose somewhat faded hallways reminded Jack of The Shining . The entire floor was allocated to President Carson, his family, and his entourage.

Dick Bridges, the head of Carson’s Secret Service detail, filled the doorway. He made no move to step inside, but silently mouthed POTUS , the Secret Service acronym for the President of the United States. Jack nodded, held up a forefinger in countersign: a moment. Now , Bridges mouthed, and Jack stepped back into the bathroom where the water was still running.

“Sharon, Edward needs me.”

“Did you hear a word I said?”

He was in no mood for her mother-instigated bullshit. “I’ve got to go.”

“Jack—”

He killed the connection. Back in the room, he stepped into his shoes and, without bothering to tie his laces, went out into the hallway. President Carson, flanked by two agents, was standing in front of the metal fire door that led to the stairwell, which had been blocked off to the floor below. They had the aspect of men who had been talking together for some time: Their heads were tilted toward one another, their mouths were half open, and familiar glances were being exchanged. All of these small observations told Jack that something of significance had arisen at this late hour.