Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(37)
He gets up from the table. She could have had the decency to postpone the dropping of her writ until he’d dressed and shaved: a man in his five-day-old PJs is at a pitiful disadvantage.
“Where are you going?” she says. “We need to discuss the details.” He’s tempted to come out with something hurt and petulant: “Onto the street.” “As if you care!” “No longer any of your f*cking business, is it?” But that would be a tactical error.
“We can do that later,” he says. “The legal crap. I need to pack.” If her thing is a bluff, this would be the moment; but no, she doesn’t stop him. She doesn’t even say, “Don’t be silly, Sam! I didn’t mean you had to leave right this minute! Sit down and have a coffee! We’re still friends!”
But they are not still friends, it appears. “Suit yourself,” she says with a level glare. So he’s forced to shamble ignominiously out of the kitchen in his sleeping gear printed with sheep jumping over a fence – her birthday gift of two years ago when she still thought he was cute and funny – and his downtrodden woolly slippers.
He knew this was coming, just not so soon. He should have been more alert and dumped her first. Kept the high ground. Or would that have been the low ground? As it is, the role of aggrieved party can be his by rights. He climbs into his jeans and a sweatshirt, throws a bunch of stuff into a duffle bag he’s had for a while, part of a seafaring project he’d never carried out. He can come back for the rest of his junk later. Their bedroom, soon to be hers alone – once so charged with sexual electricity, then the scene of their drawn-out push-me pull-you tug-of-war – already looks like a hotel room he’s about to abandon. Had he helped to choose their graceless imitation-Victorian bed? He had; or at least he’d stood by while the crime was being committed. Not the curtain material, though, not with those dumb roses on them. He’s guiltless of that, at any rate.
Razor, socks, Y-fronts, T-shirts, and so forth. He segues into the spare room he’s been using as an office and whisks his laptop, phone, notebook, and snarl of charging cords into his computer bag. A few stray documents, not that he trusts paper. Wallet, credit cards, passport: he slots them into various pockets.
How can he get out of the house without having her see him – him and his abject retreat? Twist a sheet, climb out the window, shinny down the wall? He’s not thinking clearly, he’s slightly cross-eyed with anger. To keep himself under control he slides back into the mind-game he often plays with himself: suppose he was a murder victim, would his toothpaste be a clue? I judge that this tube was last squeezed twenty-four hours ago. The victim was therefore still alive then. How about his iPod? Let’s see what he was listening to just before the carving knife went into his ear. His playlist may be a code! Or his awful cufflinks with lion heads and his initials on them, a Christmas gift from Gwyneth two years ago? These can’t be his, a man of taste such as himself. They must be the murderer’s!
But they were his. They were Gwyneth’s image of him just after they started dating: the king of beasts, the forceful predator who’d fling her around a bit, do some toothwork on her. Hold her down, writhing with desire, one paw on her neck.
Why does he find it soothing to imagine himself lying on a mortuary slab while a forensic analyst – invariably a hot blonde, though wearing a lab coat over her firm, no-nonsense lady-doctor breasts – probes his corpse with delicate but practised fingers? So young, so hung! she’s thinking. What a waste! Then, nosy, pert little detective that she is, she attempts to re-create his sorrowful snuffed-out life, retrace the wayward footsteps that mixed him up with a sinister crowd and led to his tragic end. Good luck, honey, he beams at her silently out of his cold, white head: I’m an enigma, you’ll never get my number, you’ll never pin me down. But do that thing with the rubber glove just one more time! Oh yes!
In some of these fantasies he sits up because he isn’t dead after all. Screams! Then: kisses! In other versions he sits up even though he is dead. Eyeballs rolled right up into his head, but avid hands reaching for her lab coat buttons. That’s a different scenario.
One more sweatshirt stuffed into the top of his duffle: there, that should do it. He closes the bag, hoists it, picks up his computer case in the other hand, and canters down the stairs, two at a time, as he has done before. Replacing the worn carpet on those stairs is no longer his concern: that’s one plus for him, anyway.
In the hall he grabs his winter parka out of the closet, checks the pockets for gloves, his warm scarf, his lambskin hat. He can see Gwyneth, still in the kitchen, elbows on the upmarket glass-topped table sourced from his end of things but that would now be hers, as he has zero intention of squabbling over it. He didn’t exactly pay for it in the first place, anyway: he acquired it.
She’s studiously ignoring him. She’s made herself some coffee; the scent is delicious. And a piece of toast, from the looks of it. She’s certainly not too upset to eat. He resents that. How can she chew at a moment like this? Doesn’t he mean anything to her?
“When will I see you?” she calls as he heads out the door.
“I’ll text,” he says. “Enjoy your life.” Was that too bitter? Yes: rancour is an error. Don’t be a dickhead, Sam, he tells himself. You’re losing your cool.
That’s the moment when the car decides not to start. Fucking Audi. He should never have accepted this hunk of luxury-car junk in lieu of settlement from a guy who owed him, though it looked like a great deal at the time.