“Looking for something?”
“Me? No, no. Just looking.”
He’s handsome, the man, angular, young, speaks with an unexpected brogue.What is a Scottish man doing in my house?His shoes are nice, polished. Completely inappropriate for the weather. The man is peering at the outside of the refrigerator, the magnets, the abundance of photographs.
“Ah,” the man says. “It’s you.”
“Sorry?”
“You’re the husband.”
Al looks at him blankly. The man sets his whiskey on the table and opens the refrigerator, begins to root around through the many homemade meals that ooze and chill in plastic prisons.
“Hope you have an appetite.”
It’s the smile that jogs his memory, roguish but genuine. He’d been on the show with Susan, played one of her boyfriends or something like that. Maybe his voice was different. Al can’t remember. He has only watched a few episodes anyway—how was he supposed to stand watching his wife with other men? How was he supposed to congratulate her? Everyone always told him, you have to separate the character from the actor. But it was her, wasn’t it? Doing those things? They had never had a successful conversation about it, the things she needed to do. Ignoring it made the relationship work. It allowed him to forget.
“It’ll go quickly. The food, that is. Well, maybe everything will go quickly.”
“Everything?”
“Maybe not. Sorry, I shouldn’t presume. I shouldn’t make presumptions about your appetite. Or your sense of time, really.”
“Life and time.”
“Quite.” The man removes something from the refrigerator, closes the door, points at him. “You’re funny. She never said you were funny.”
Al is unsteadied by the asymmetry of the conversation. He had never heard Susan mention this man, and now he is slipping out of the room, taking with him memories that Al will never unlock.
“I hope it goes at your preferred pace.”
“What?”
“All of it. Life.”
He wants to shout after him, but doesn’t know what to say. He feels the sudden crushing sensation of his wife’s inaccessibility. That perhaps he never knew her at all.
The halls are swinging back and forth. Sebastian’s face is red with the blood and the laughter rushing into it, as Sadie flies him into the living room and onto his mother’s chair, which—perhaps instinctively—no one has sat in, wide arms and faded florals.
A few people are sitting in the other chairs, though, older peaked faces,looking openly at him and his aunt. His silvery birdlike grandmother cranes toward the fireplace, where a few crusty logs are giving up their forms.
This is the old people room, he thinks. He can smell their oldness on their clothes, their breath. It feels unfair that they should be warming themselves in here, so almost dead, when his mother had been—until recently—so very alive.
“Where is your father?” his grandmother asks him. He shrugs, without looking at her face. He hates when his grandmother is in charge, which is a lot recently. She shouted at him earlier for throwing his wet coat on the floor. The room takes on the stillness of a waiting room.
“We’re going to play a little music, all right?” Sadie announces, though it isn’t really a question, she is already thumbing through the reams of plastic CD cases that clutter the stereo alcove. “Jazz, jazz, jazz,” she grumbles dismissively. “Where is your mom’s stuff?”
Sebastian points to a basket on the floor, and Sadie crouches and plucks out a case with a blond woman’s face on it, lasers shooting out of the sides of her head.
“?‘Faster Than the Speed of Night,’?” she grins. “There she is.”
The old people look uncertain. Their quiet has been disrupted. Sebastian watches his aunt with a new reverence.She doesn’t care—she really doesn’t care.
“Honey, will you dim the lights?”
A few piano notes crinkle out of the speakers.
“I’m not sure—” his grandmother begins.
