Lisey's Story(70)

Sometimes she wishes she had never met him at all.

9

"That's not true," she whispered to the shadowy barn, but she felt the deadweight of his study above her as a denial - all those books, all those stories, all that gone life. She didn't repent her marriage, but yes, sometimes she did wish she had never met her troubling and troublesome man. Had met someone else instead. A nice safe computer programmer, for instance, a fellow who made seventy thousand a year and would have given her three children. Two boys and a girl, one by now grown up and married, two still in school. But that was not the life she had found. Or the one that had found her. Instead of turning immediately to the Bremen bed (that seemed too much, too soon), Lisey turned to her pathetic little excuse for an office, opened the door, and surveyed it. What had she meant to do in here while Scott wrote his stories upstairs? She couldn't remember, but knew what had drawn her here now: the answering machine. She looked at the red 1 glowing in the window with UNPLAYED MESSAGES printed beneath it, and wondered if she should call in Deputy Alston to listen. She decided not to. If it was Dooley, she could play it for him later.

Of course it's Dooley - who else?

She steeled herself for more threats delivered in that calm, superficially reasonable voice and pushed PLAY. A moment later a young woman named Emma was explaining the really extraordinary savings Lisey could enjoy by switching to MCI. Lisey killed this rapturous message in mid-flow, pushed ERASE, and thought: So much for women's intuition.

She left the office laughing.

10

Lisey looked at the swaddled shape of the Bremen bed with neither sorrow nor nostalgia, although she supposed she and Scott had made love in it - or f**ked, anyway; she couldn't remember how much actual love there had been during SCOTT AND

LISEY IN GERMANY - hundreds of times. Hundreds? Was that possible during a mere nine-month stretch, especially when there had been days, sometimes whole working weeks, when she didn't see him from the time he sleepwalked out the door at seven AM

with his briefcase banging his knee to the time he shuffled back in, usually half-lit, at ten PM or quarter to eleven? Yes, she supposed it was, if you spent whole weekends having what Scott sometimes called "smuckaramas." Why would she hold any affection for this silent sheeted monstrosity, no matter how many times they had bounced on it? She had better cause to hate it, because she understood in some way that wasn't intuitive but was rather the working of subconscious logic ( Lisey's smart as the devil, as long as she doesn't think about it, she had once overheard Scott telling someone at a party, and hadn't known whether to feel flattered or ashamed) that their marriage had almost broken in that bed. Never mind how nasty-fine the sex had been, or that he'd f**ked her to effortless multiple orgasms and tossed her salad until she thought she might go out of her mind from the nerve-popping pleasure of it; never mind the place she'd found, the one she could touch before he came and sometimes he'd just shudder but sometimes he'd scream and that made her go goosebumps all over, even when he was deep inside her and as hot as...well, as hot as a suck-oven. She thought it was right the goddam thing should be shrouded like an enormous corpse, because - in her memory, at least - everything that had occurred between them there had been wrong and violent, one choke-hold shake after another on the throat of their marriage. Love? Make love? Maybe. Maybe a few times. Mostly what she remembered was one uglyf*ck after another. Choke...and let go. Choke...and let go. And every time it took longer for the thing that was Scott-and-Lisey to breathe again. Finally they left Germany. They took the QE2 back to New York from Southampton, and on the second day out she had come back from a walk on the deck and had paused outside their stateroom with her key in her hand, head tilted, listening. From inside had come the slow but steady click of his typewriter, and Lisey had smiled. She wouldn't allow herself to believe it was all right, but standing outside that door and hearing his resumption, she had known it could be. And it was. When he told her he'd made arrangements to have what he called the Mein Gott Bed shipped stateside, she had said nothing, knowing they would never sleep in it or make love in it again. If Scott had suggested they do so -  Just vunce, liddle Leezie, for old dimes' zake!  - she would have refused. In fact, she would have told him to go smuck himself. If ever there was a haunted piece of furniture, it was this one.

She approached it, dropped onto her knees, swept back the hem of the dropcloth that covered it, and peered beneath. And there, in that musty, enclosed space where the smell of old chickenshit had come creeping back ( like a dog to its vomit, she thought), was what she had been looking for.

There in the shadows was Good Ma Debusher's cedar box.

Part VIII. Lisey and Scott

(Under the Yum-Yum Tree)

1

She had no more than entered her sunny kitchen with the cedar box clasped in her arms when the phone began to ring. She put the box on the table and answered with an absent hello, no longer fearing Jim Dooley's voice. If it was him, she would just tell him she had called the police and then hang up. She was currently too busy to be scared. It was Darla, not Dooley, calling from the Greenlawn Visitors' Lounge, and Lisey wasn't exactly surprised to find that Darla had the guilts about calling Canty in Boston. And if it had been the other way around, Canty in Maine and Darla in Boston? Lisey thought it would have been about the same deal. She didn't know how much Canty and Darla still loved each other, but they still used each other the way drunks used the booze. When they were kids, Good Ma used to say that if Cantata caught the flu, Darlanna ran her fever.