Hum: Stories Read online

  My wife talked to Jolina about area schools, about the supermarket down the street that was being remodeled, and about Spreckels Lake in Golden Gate Park, which they had both frequented as children. Finally my wife got around to asking about Frank, a question which she slipped so seamlessly into the conversation I almost missed it.

  “Oh, I remember that night very clearly,” Jolina said, leaning forward. “Frank was helping me paint the upstairs room—it took hours. We’re expecting, you know.”

  “Congratulations!” my wife and I said simultaneously.

  Oh, Lord, help me, is what I was thinking. If there’s anything sexier than a pregnant woman who hasn’t yet started to show, I don’t know what it is. I wondered if Jolina could tell I was turned on. I crossed my legs and took a long gulp of my drink; I could sure use another.

  “Would you like to see the nursery?” Jolina offered.

  “Of course.” We followed her upstairs, where she opened a door onto a yellow room. All the windows were open and an electric fan was turned up high, its wired white face rotating slowly back and forth. The breeze caught me in the face, filling my nose with the faint scent of paint.

  “We wanted to go with a neutral color,” Jolina said. “We’ve decided not to know the gender ahead of time.

  I considered telling her something I’d read in House Beautiful, that most family fights occur in the kitchen because so many kitchens are yellow, a color that causes anger and aggression. I considered telling her in great detail about the fight my wife and I had had the previous week in our very own yellow kitchen, when she demanded to know exactly how many drinks I’d had that month and then bandied about insulting phrases like “lingering immaturity” and “inadequate long-term goals.” I considered telling Jolina about the children’s book I’d written, which honest-to-God was being published by a New York publisher, and about how it was the realization of a life-long dream. But Jolina was so happy about the nice color of the baby’s room, I didn’t mention it. I decided I’d send her a copy of the book when it came out. While reading The Enchanted Chimney, savoring the delicate slant rhymes and laughing at the subtle double entendres meant to amuse clever parents, Jolina would think of me, would remember how good I looked on her sofa, my elegant hands wrapped around the blue glass. She would probably read the book several times a day for a week, before finally working up the nerve to call and ask me over for cocktails.

  “It looks lovely,” my wife said.

  “Thank you. The crib will go over there.”

  Jolina shut the door and we went back downstairs. Something in me applauded her determination to lie for her husband. I wondered if my own wife, given similar circumstances, would lie for me. Had she noticed the faint smell of paint? Years ago, when she was still in law school and we were barely making it on my adjunct pay, I took odd jobs painting. A newly painted wall has a certain sheen that lasts two, three days at most. The yellow room had that sheen. It couldn’t possibly have been painted two weeks before, which meant Frank wasn’t helping Jolina paint the room on the day of the murder. His alibi was bogus.

  Back in the living room, Jolina showed us a care package she was putting together for Frank. In it was a pair of socks she had knitted, some books, and a few photographs of the two of them in happy poses—walking on Ocean Beach, hiking at Point Reyes, holding hands and kissing in front of the chapel at The Presidio—Jolina in a pale blue dress, Frank looking handsome and law-abiding in a three-button black suit. “And I’m going to make him chocolate chip cookies,” Jolina said. “He loves those.” I was touched by her ability to believe in her husband’s innocence, even as she lied for him. I wondered if my wife would be able to muster such irrational faith in me.

  We talked until the kitchen clock said 6:25. As we were standing to leave, Jolina reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear, and I noticed a spot of yellow paint on the pale curve of her neck. I wanted to kiss that spot of paint, I wanted to make love to her, I wanted to be her guest forever and always, to sit in the plush depths of her sofa and accept sparkling drinks from her steady hands. I could do so much for her, I could be her man on the outside, the reliable one, the one who’d never do her wrong. Instead I took my glass to the sink and rinsed it, while she protested mildly from the living room. I ran my fingers over the cool marble countertops, breathed in the scent of dish soap and something else—lavender, maybe? Citrus? For a moment I pretended I lived in that warm welcoming house with Jolina, that she took good care of me and treated me with kindness, like a fifties housewife.

  Jolina walked us out to the car, shook our hands, and said to my wife, “Frank would never hurt anyone, you know. I hope you can bring him home.”

  “Don’t worry,” my wife said, but I could hear the undercurrent in her voice, a touch of uncertainty no doubt inspired by this new and accidental revelation, the matter of the paint.

  I wanted to offer my own reassurance, to tell Jolina she’d thrown the best party I’d been to in quite some time, that her child would be intelligent and brave, that I knew she’d do just fine with or without Frank. Instead I said, “It was nice to meet you.”

  For several minutes my wife and I drove in silence. On Grand Avenue, I turned to her and said, “Would you do that? If I committed a crime, would you lie for me?”

  “Why do you ask?” she said. And then, to deflect the question, “Would you?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s your answer.”

  It was quiet in the car as we cruised down Grand Avenue, all the lights synchronized in her favor. I had married such a capable woman, I sometimes felt afraid.

  “Would your lie be better than Jolina’s?” she asked.

  “I like to think so,” I said, silently willing Jolina to get it right, to improve her execution of their chosen alibi. I thought of her and Frank in the yellow room with the new baby. I imagined their clean and meaningful life, the lemon cake and rich coffee she would offer to members of the PTA when they came to visit, the fine parties she would host for the child’s birthdays and graduations.

  “If I did go to prison,” I said, “would you make me a care package?”

  “Sure.”

  “What would you put in it?” I pressed, imagining our new life of small kindnesses and daily hospitality, her heart warmed by my desperate plight.

  “Chocolate chip cookies.”

  “Homemade?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you’ve never made me chocolate chip cookies before,” I said.

  “You’ve never needed them.”

  “How do you know that?”

  We were approaching the toll booth, and the cars were beginning to bottleneck.

  People were honking and giving each other dirty looks. My wife swerved expertly to avoid a blue Honda Civic that cut in front of us, then reached up and with one swift motion unhooked the velvet contraption in her hair. Her long dark curls uncoiled. “Trust me,” she said, somehow managing to give me a seductive and almost loving look while navigating the traffic. “I know.”

  The fog had shifted, so that it formed a wide, fast-moving circle around the city. The Bay Bridge stretched out beneath a perfectly blue swath of sky. I reached for my wallet, preparing to retrieve the toll, when my wife began to navigate the complex matrix of fast-moving lanes, first one, then another, and another, a space magically opening for her each time, until we were cruising along in the smoothest lane, the one labeled Fas-Trak, and my wife did not so much drive through the gate as she glided through it, while behind us, in the rearview mirror, I watched the chaos of other cars left behind and struggling, the towers of Oakland’s shipyards disappearing in the fog.

  LOVE

  He doesn’t want to say that his wife has changed. But she has. Something essential in her has been altered. When he met her she was soft and joyful, and she wore her relative poverty like a badge of honor. She shopped at thrift stores and ate ice cream. Stayed up late working. God, she was ambitious. There was so much she wanted from
life, so much she demanded of herself.

  Now her desires, her demands, have shifted outward. She runs her household like a corporation. She wants her children to be smarter, more competitive, so she packs their afternoons and weekends with language classes and music lessons and organized sports. She wants her husband to be more attentive, so she fills their calendar with date nights and weekend getaways, outings with other couples to restaurants with extensive wine lists. When was the last time they bought sandwiches at a deli and ate them on the beach?

  She wants a different kitchen; she spends hundreds of hours choosing fixtures, paint, marble countertops. Those wasted hours, he thinks. Those wasted conversations.

  Her body is a rock. She’s taken up running and resistance training, pilates on Tuesdays, Cross Fit on Thursdays. She is in the best shape of her life. “Men no longer look at me,” she complains. “You get older, and women still look.”

  “It’s not about age,” he tells her.

  “Then what is it about?”

  “You’re beautiful,” he says, trying to change the subject. In fact, she is only forty. He looks at women her age, and older, all the time. How to tell her that her body, so muscled, so disciplined, so hard and angular, is like a stop sign? When he holds her, his hands press into bone and muscle. He used to love the pillowy feel of her hips, the slight cushion of her belly. He’s heard her boasting to friends that she’s down four sizes from their wedding. She’s so lean that her body looks stingy. When they go out to dinner, she invariably demands some variation to the dish. She orders fish but wants it grilled, with no butter. She refuses the bread, the dessert. She stares angrily at his potatoes.

  “It’s this town,” he says to her. “We should move.”

  “What’s wrong with the town?”

  What’s wrong with the town is what is wrong with her. She used to love to drive to the beach on the edge of the city, with its graffiti-spattered seawall and sand dunes covered with ice plant. Now, when she says “beach,” she means Hawaii. She used to love easy weekends, reading the paper and going to the movies. Now, they spend winter Fridays driving to their rented cabin in Tahoe, wrestling with snow chains. The children, pale from exhaustion, beg to quit ski team, but she already dropped a few thousand on equipment. “It’s crazy that we don’t own a place up there,” she says.

  Crazy. He remembers their first vacation. They took a driving trip in his old Nissan Stanza, through Texas and Alabama, down to the Florida panhandle. They slept in shabby motels and ate at Denny’s. They made love everywhere they went. She was beautiful and a little sloppy. She bought a sundress from the Daughters of the American Revolution charity shop in Galveston and wore it for a week with a pair of old cowboy boots she’d had since high school. She gained a few pounds from all the milkshakes and hash browns and didn’t care. She loved to kiss him, couldn’t get enough of him. She wanted sex anywhere and everywhere. She’d make him pull off on the side of the road to do it. She was kind to everyone. She left big tips she couldn’t afford. She got excited about roadside attractions. His best friend described her as sweet. God, she was sweet.

  When he hears her berating the housekeeper, his heart breaks.

  He can’t say, “I don’t recognize you.”

  Instead he says, “If you expected from yourself one tenth of what you expect from others.”

  This ends badly. There are tears and recriminations. She takes a weekend getaway, saying she needs time to herself. She actually uses the phrase retail therapy. He feels sick. What has happened to her, to them? If he had been less successful, if she had been required to work, if they had not chained themselves to this monstrous house in this ridiculous town, would she still be the woman he once knew?

  When she returns, he apologizes, even though he doesn’t believe he has done anything to apologize for. Still, he wants to make things right. He wants her back, the woman he fell in love with, the woman who fell in love with him.

  “This town is toxic,” he says, “Let’s go somewhere else. We can downsize. We can all spend more time together. We can rent a cottage on the Gulf Coast. The kids can play in the surf and hunt sand crabs. You can work again, if you want.”

  For a moment, she softens. He feels a glimmer of hope. He is waiting: for the sign that she still loves him, that she still loves their children, that she is capable of love at all.

  TRAVEL

  We first spotted them at Gate B27 in Dallas International Airport. Both were tall, blonde, and neatly dressed. I got the feeling their physical similarities brought them together, two people looking for near copies of themselves, albeit in the opposite sex. She stared at me while he was engrossed by his book, a paperback with embossed gold lettering on the cover. The title of the book was All of Us.

  The woman stared a second too long. I hid behind The Dallas Morning News. “Is she still looking?”

  “Yes,” Jim said.

  “What does she want?”

  “Maybe she knows you.”

  “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

  On the plane, the blonde couple sat right behind us, so close I could smell the light, flowery scent of her perfume. Every now and then I’d peek through the crack between our seats and they’d be whispering to each other. When they caught me spying they’d stop talking.

  Finally we descended toward the runway in San José del Cabo. To the left I could see the desert mountains, sanded a dull brown, and to the right the lush sea, blue and roiling. It was early evening, and a yellow light shimmered over the mountains, the sea, the tip of the airplane’s wing. We stepped off the plane into a dry pleasant stillness. After passing through customs, where a crumpled man gave our passports a cursory glance, Jim and I followed a driver named Lupe to an old blue van and climbed in. Minutes later the couple boarded the van and sat behind us.

  “Surprise,” I whispered. We looked straight ahead, but the man leaned forward and said in an unnaturally loud voice, “Hello. We’re the Thompsons. How often do you do this?”

  I turned around and got my first good look at him. His face was pleasant and eager, his hair wavy; he looked like one of those guys you see modeling off-brand slacks in the Mervyn’s catalog. His wife was a few years his senior and was holding a big orange beach bag on her lap. On top of the bag was a brochure for their hotel: Westin Regina. No Barriers. The front of the brochure had pictures of surgically proportioned women in small bikinis frolicking in the surf.

  “It’s our first time to Mexico,” I said, vaguely sensing that I wasn’t answering the appropriate question, that by this he meant something other than vacations to Mexico, although I wasn’t sure. “What about you?”

  “This is our second year,” she said. “Our first to Mexico, but our second time to do this. Last time it was Puerto Rico.”

  “We live in Chicago,” the man said. “I have psoriasis, and the salt air and heat is good for my condition.” He held up his arm and showed us a large brown patch stretching from elbow to wrist.

  The woman shifted in her seat and looked down at the floor, and he glanced over at her, apologetic-like, and reached for her hand but she wouldn’t take it. I got the feeling he was always making inappropriate comments that turned people off to them as a couple, always confessing things best saved for later. I got the feeling maybe she couldn’t forgive him for doing this, but it was a habit he couldn’t break, born of desperation and a naive kind of honesty.

  “Oh,” I said. “My dad had that.” It wasn’t true, but I wanted Mr. Thompson to know I didn’t hold the psoriasis against him.

  “Really?” Mr. Thompson said.

  And then I realized “had” was probably the wrong word choice, as it implied that my dad might have died from psoriasis, so I added, “He died of liver cancer.” Also untrue. I added a few small details to make the lie more credible: “Last month. He was 93. The funeral was in New Orleans.”

  There was another awkward pause. Mrs. Thompson said, “I’m sorry to hear that,” and Jim said, “It’
s okay. They weren’t close.” I marveled at his ability to take a white lie to its logical end, to twist the lie in such a way as to make everyone feel as comfortable as possible.

  I stared out the window. Small motels rose up between stretches of unoccupied beach and desert brush. Skinny cacti lined the median. The roadside was crowded with dilapidated billboards advertising perfume and cigarettes, health clubs and tequila. Finally a grand resort came into view, all red and blue stucco lit up against the cool brown evening. Lupe pulled into the long driveway winding down toward the beach. The resort was called Westin Regina. Attractive Mexican youth in hotel uniforms were standing around in the open lobby. The lobby was just a pale elegant slab of marble nestled under some rustling palm trees, no walls or windows. No barriers, as Mrs. Thompson’s brochure promised.

  The couple got out of the van. “Have fun,” I said.

  Mr. Thompson looked confused. “Oh, you’re not staying here?”

  “We’re at Solmar.”

  “We’ll be here for a week,” Mrs. Thompson said. “Call us. We’ll get dinner, drinks, see how it goes.”

  “Okay, we’ll do that,” I said, knowing that we wouldn’t. They seemed too desperate somehow, too needy. I could imagine them hanging onto us through the whole vacation, sapping our attention, grinding on our nerves. I thought about a girl I knew in grammar school named Doris, who wore fuzzy yarn ribbons in her hair and followed me earnestly from first to fifth grade, each year inviting me to a birthday party at which I was the only guest.

  In our room that night, with the sea breeze coming in from the balcony and the sound of fireworks thundering in the distance, we leafed through the complimentary Cabo magazine. On page 57 there was an ad for the Westin Regina. “They have passion,” the ad said. “They have fun. They have . . . no barriers.” At the bottom of the page, in big yellow letters: “Westin Regina. Where The Lifestyle meets the sun. Choose your travel partner wisely.”