The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

They were scheduled to make the move to Vermont on February 29. The day before – what would have been the last day of the month in an ordinary year – the telephone rang. It was Mrs Granger, Pastor Emeritus Winston’s housekeeper. As soon as Nora registered the woman’s hushed tone, she knew why she had called, and her first thought was What did you do with the tape, you bastard?

‘The obituary will say kidney failure,’ Mrs Granger said in her hushed someone’s-dead voice, ‘but I was in his bathroom. The medicine bottles were all out, and too many of the pills were gone. I think he committed suicide.’

‘Probably not,’ Nora said. She spoke in her calmest, surest, most nursely manner. ‘What’s more likely is that he became confused about how many he’d taken. He may have even had another stroke. A small one.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Oh yes,’ Nora said, and had to restrain herself from asking if Mrs Granger had seen a new video camera around anywhere. Hooked up to Winnie’s TV, most likely. It would be insane to ask such a question. She almost did, anyway.

‘That’s such a relief,’ Mrs Granger said.

‘Good,’ Nora said.

That night, in bed. Their last Brooklyn night.

‘You need to stop worrying,’ Chad said. ‘If someone finds that tape, they probably won’t look at it. And if they do, the chance they’d connect it with you is so small as to be infinistesimal. Besides, the kid’s probably forgotten it by now. The mother too.’

‘The mother was there when a crazy lady assaulted her son and then ran away,’ Nora said. ‘Believe me, she hasn’t forgotten it.’

‘All right,’ he said in an equable tone that made her want to hike her knee into his balls.

‘Maybe I ought to go over and help Mrs Granger neaten the place up.’

He looked at her as if she were mad.

‘Maybe I want to be suspected,’ she said, and gave him a thin smile. What she thought of as her inciting smile.

He looked at her, then rolled away.

‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘C’mon, Chad.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘What do you mean, no? Why?’

‘Because I know what you think of when we do it.’

She hit him. It was a pretty good thump on the back of the neck. ‘You don’t know shit.’

He turned over and raised a fist. ‘Don’t do that, Nora.’

‘Go on,’ she said, offering her face. ‘You know you want to.’

He almost did. She saw the twitch. Then he lowered his hand and unrolled the fingers. ‘No more.’

She said nothing but thought: That’s what you think.

Nora lay awake, looking at the digital clock. Until 1:41A she thought, This marriage is in trouble. Then, as 1:41 became 1:42, she thought: No, that’s wrong. This marriage is over.

But it had another seven months to run.

Nora never expected any real closure in her association with the Right Reverend George Winston, but as she went to work rounding the new house into shape (she was going to put in not one but two gardens, one for flowers and one for vegetables), she had days when she never thought of Winnie at all. The hitting in bed had stopped. Or almost.

Then, one day in April, she got a postcard from him. It was a shock. It came in a US Postal Service envelope, because there was no more space on the card itself to scribble forwarding information. It had been everywhere, including Brooklyn, Maine, and Montpeliers in Idaho and Indiana. She had no idea why it hadn’t reached her before she and Chad had left New York, and, considering its travels, it was a wonder it had reached her at all. It was dated the day before his death. She googled his obituary online just to be sure of that.

Maybe there’s something to the Freud stuff, after all, it said. How are you?

Good, Nora thought. I’m good.

There was a woodstove in the kitchen of their house. She crumpled up the postcard, tossed it in, and set a match to it. That’s that.

Chad finished Living with the Animals in July, writing the last fifty pages in a nine-day burst. He sent it to the agent. Emails and phone calls followed. Chad said Ringling seemed enthusiastic. If so, Nora thought he must have saved most of that enthusiasm for the phone calls. What she saw in the two emails was cautious optimism at best.

In August, at Ringling’s request, Chad did some rewriting. He was quiet about this part of the work, a sign that it wasn’t going particularly well. But he stuck to it. Nora hardly noticed. She was absorbed with her garden.

In September, Chad insisted on going to New York and pacing Ringling’s office while the man made phone calls to the seven publishers to whom the manuscript had gone, hoping some of them would express an interest in meeting with the author. Nora thought about visiting a bar in Montpelier and picking someone up – they could go to a Motel 6 – and didn’t. It seemed like too much work for too little gain. She worked in her garden instead.