The Ascent(17)

“This is not the apartment of a healthy man.”

I continued watching the marimba band for a while, though my mind was on the aborted creation in my living room: a statue that was not fully a statue, a creature that refused to be brought to life. I’d spent months trying to summon my old talent, but it had proven futile. And the futility led to self-loathing. In the intervening months, I’d grown to despise Andrew Trumbauer for shipping me the hunk of granite; what had no doubt been a thoughtful gift had in my own brain been bastardized into a snide, deliberate mockery—Andrew’s way of pointing out my weaknesses. I was unable to create—had been since Hannah’s death—and that half-assed abortion in my living room was the proof.

Disgusted, I gulped down the last bit of bourbon, then chucked the tumbler onto the beach. It didn’t disrupt the marimba band, but a few kids who’d gathered around to listen to the music glared at me as if I were Count Dracula sizing them up from the parapets of my castle.

I heard Marta sigh and stomp back inside. I followed her, rubbing my bleary eyes with the heels of my hands. She gathered her purse from the sofa and tossed an empty McDonald’s cup into the trash.

“Where are you going?”

“Out,” she said, a harsh finality to her voice.

“You can’t break up with me,” I told her. “We aren’t even dating.”

“I can’t keep seeing you like this. It’s breaking my heart, and you won’t do anything to fix the problem.”

“So what do you recommend I do?”

“Get the f*ck out of this apartment and start living again.” She gestured toward the statue in progress. “This … thing … isn’t living. You’re stunting yourself. I never met Hannah and don’t know a damn thing about her, but if you’re going to—”

“Stop it,” I said.

“What happened to her? Tell me what happened.”

“No.”

“Well, whatever it was, you need to get over it. Unless you want to die in this apartment.” She shook her head. “You need to let go.”

“Stop,” I said again, though there was little force in my voice.

“You stop,” she said, softening, and leaned in to kiss my cheek. “You stop. Okay? Or you’ll die, too.”

As she reached for the doorknob, I said, “It’s my fault she died. We were married, and I was too caught up in my career to give her what she needed. I felt the marriage breaking apart, but for whatever reason I didn’t try to stop it. So she left. She met a linguistics professor named David Moore, and they went to Italy. Then their car drove off the road and crashed. They were both killed.” The words had come from my mouth like a locomotive; I hardly took a breath.

Marta’s hand never left the doorknob. Finally she turned toward me. There was concern in her eyes, and her eyebrows were stitched together. She looked like she wanted to cry, but she was too strong for that. It suddenly occurred to me that I was the weak one. “That is not your fault.”

“It doesn’t matter what you say. You can’t change how I feel.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

After she left, I tore the kitchenette apart looking for alcohol, but there was none to be found. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shape move, but when I turned to look at it, there was nothing there except the refrigerator.

I stepped into the living room, where the hunk of granite stood, chunks of stone littering the floor, while powdered debris coated every available surface. I took a deep breath, inhaling the stone-dust particles that floated like motes in the air, and studied the unfinished sculpture.

The body was recognizable as female, but the face looked nothing like Hannah’s. The cheekbones were too high, too sharp, andthe brow was too dramatic and severe, almost Cro-Magnon. I’d spent the entire winter hammering and chiseling away at the stone, whittling it down to the framework of some unidentifiable woman. Looking at it, I felt a sinking in the pit of my stomach. There had been a time when in a single afternoon I could have taken a hammer and chisel to a lump of rock and carved f*cking Mount Rushmore.

But it wasn’t just the sculpture. It was Hannah, too. Because lately I saw her everywhere. It had become so constant that I started to doubt my sanity. Once, hustling down the stairwell of my apartment building, I thought I heard her laugh. I paused and stared up through the spiral mesh of stairs and caught a glimpse of someone retreating over the balustrade—a woman, no doubt. Hannah.

She was also in my apartment, and there was no getting around that. At night I would wake up to the sensation of her arm slipping around my waist or the feeling of her warm breath against the nape of my neck. These things were enough to drive a man crazy.

Maybe I was going crazy …

A poor diet and a constant urge to jog through the streets of Annapolis caused me to lose considerable weight. And while I felt stronger and healthier than I had in a long time, I could simultaneously sense something rotting away inside me. I couldn’t blame Marta’s reluctance to hang around; I had become a shadow of myself.

Disgusted by the sculpture, I laced on some tennis shoes and went downstairs to the lobby to retrieve my mail. I rifled through the stack of standard bills, advertisements, and requests for donations. Only one letter stood out—in a plain white business envelope, the return address somewhere in Australia. It was from Andrew Trumbauer. The envelope was weathered and scuffed. Someone had stamped his boot across its front; the impression of the sole was clear, a formulaic matrix of clovers and wavy lines.