Homesick for Another World(41)

“I forgot to call Lenore,” Marcia was saying as they walked. “Remind me tomorrow. She’ll be upset if I don’t call. She’s so uptight.”

They reached the edge of the lawn and stepped onto a paved path that led them up to a bridge over a plaza, where people were dancing in pairs to traditional Chinese music. John and Marcia stopped to watch the dark shapes moving in the soft light of lanterns. A young man on a skateboard rumbled past them.

“Home sweet home,” Marcia said.

John yawned and tightened his arm around her shoulder. The silk of Marcia’s scarf was slippery, like cool water rippling between his fingers. He leaned over and kissed her forehead. There she was, his wife of nearly thirty years. As they walked on, he thought of how pretty she’d been when they were first married. In all their years together, he had never been interested in other women, had never strayed, had even refused the advances of a colleague one night, a few years ago, at a conference in Baltimore. The woman had been twenty years his junior, and when she invited him up to her room John had blushed and made a stuttering apology, then spent the rest of the evening on the phone with Marcia. “What did she expect from me?” he’d asked. “Some kind of sex adventure?”

“We can watch that movie when we get home,” Marcia said as they reached the edge of the park. “The one about the jazz musician.”

“Whatever you like,” John said. He yawned again.

“Maureen said it was worth watching.”

“It’s unconscionable what they are doing to you, Eduardo,” Marcia said to the doorman in the lobby of their building. The doormen were petitioning management to provide a proper chair for them to sit in. All they had now was a tall stool with no back. “To have to stand for that many hours, doesn’t that constitute torture? John is going to have a word with them. They’ll do something. They have to.” Marcia pulled the silk scarf from her neck and folded it in her hands.

Eduardo leaned on his little podium, propped his chin in his hand. “How was the vacation?” he asked.

“Oh, it was wonderful, wonderful. Everything. I mean, the seafood was just beyond compare! The ocean was like bathwater,” Marcia answered. “And now we’re utterly exhausted.”

“Jet-lagged,” John said.

Eduardo tapped his pen on the podium. “When I go home to my country, it’s the same. I don’t sleep.”

“Yes, it’s rough. Well, good night,” Marcia sang.

She and John climbed the wide marble stairs to their second-floor apartment. They’d lived in the building for twenty-six years. They could have navigated their way through the lobby and up the stairs in complete darkness, and had, in fact, done so during a blackout one summer when all of Manhattan lost power for a night. Marcia had enjoyed it. They’d lit candles, eaten the ice cream that was going to melt anyway, and talked.

Now they walked down the bright, wallpapered hallway, and John unlocked the door to their apartment. Inside, there was still a stack of unopened mail on the front table, a blinking red light on the answering machine, a smell of mothballs from the closet where Marcia had been looking for her squash racket earlier that day. “I want to get it restrung now,” she’d insisted, “before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?” John had asked. “For when someone asks me to play.” John had stood and watched his wife’s bottom wiggle as she stooped down into the depths of the closet. She was in remarkable shape for a woman in her fifties. She often teased John that he needed to start taking better care of himself. “I’m going to make it to a hundred and five. You don’t want me to have to replace you, do you?”

“You’d have no problem, I’m sure,” John answered.

It was true. People liked Marcia. All of John and Marcia’s friends were really friends of hers. John sometimes felt as if he were just a strange appendage to his wife. Surely she could have done better—a brain surgeon, a lawyer, a physicist. Had he given her the life she deserved? They did take a trip every year, usually in late summer to celebrate their anniversary, but that was all. They’d never had children. John had never won any awards.

“I’m going to take a Tylenol for my headache,” Marcia said. “Want to get the movie set up?” She shut the closet door and ran her fingers across the squash racket, which now lay on the table in the hallway.

“Will you eat popcorn?” John asked.

“I really shouldn’t. But if you’re making some . . .” Her voice trailed off as she walked down the hallway to the bathroom, flicking on the lights and rubbing her temples.

John went to the kitchen and got the jar of popcorn kernels down from the cupboard. He liked to make popcorn the old-fashioned way, in a big steel pot with a long metal arm that stirred the kernels. He lit the stove, melted the margarine, poured the popcorn in, and stood over the pot with his eyes closed, turning the handle slowly and feeling the warm air rise toward him, remembering moments on the island when the sun on his face had struck him as so hot, so intimate, it was like Marcia’s breath on his cheek.

As the kernels began to pop, he brought his ear to the lid of the pot, closer to the heat and the noise. The irregular staccato made his pulse speed up. The heart fascinated him. Sometimes he liked to put his ear to Marcia’s chest and listen. Her heartbeat was light and chatty, a rhythm that made you want to waltz around the kitchen. John could have been a cardiologist, but he’d pursued dermatology instead. At parties, he wowed people with descriptions of boils and rashes and growths, strange hair patterns, nasty scars, pus-filled cysts, bizarre freckles, cancers, moles. “Within six feet of this fellow, you could detect the distinct smell of porcini risotto,” he’d say. “His armpit was filled with fungus.” At the stove, John righted himself, continued to stir the popcorn with one hand, and took his own pulse with two fingers of the other, pressing on his throat and breathing slowly until his heart rate returned to normal.