The Bad Box Read online

  He sighed, got up and put on a bathrobe. Usually he enjoyed lounging around naked, but he didn’t want to give Emily any encouragement. He didn’t have to teach until 1:00, and he was hoping to get her out of the house so he could have a few hours to himself.

  He trudged to the kitchen to make some coffee. It was the wrong brand, something Emily had picked up. Here just two weeks, and already she was buying groceries. Already she had made herself at home, already his friends were hers, already the whole department seemed to know they were a couple. At first he had been delighted that she was spending the next night and the next, delighted not so much by her as by how Sarah would feel when she learned that he already had another mate.

  It occurred to him that Emily’s next step would be to give up her apartment. It wouldn’t surprise him if she had already given her landlord notice.

  “Oh gee, I was going to make it,” Emily said. She stood naked in the kitchen doorway, as bright and boring as a daisy.

  “You make it too weak,” Peter said.

  “Oh. Well, I’m glad you told me. How many scoops do you use?”

  “Never mind,” he muttered.

  He stood over the coffee maker, wishing it would hurry up. Emily came over and gave him a big wet kiss, her breath smelling of mouthwash. He pulled away and continued glaring at the coffee maker.

  Was there no way to dispel her cheeriness? It seemed to be all over his house, sticking to the furniture like cheap perfume. Now she had her hand inside his robe, stroking the red hair on his chest.

  “You going to prance around naked all day?” he asked.

  A dark cloud swept over her sunny face. She turned away, looking as if he had slapped her, and headed to the bedroom to get dressed.

  “Shit,” Peter muttered, feeling a little ashamed of himself. It hadn’t been necessary to hurt her feelings.

  He told himself that he was just dreading his one o’clock. He hated teaching summer term and hated the classes he was stuck with. The students were unresponsive, almost hostile. But he knew they weren’t the problem. His heart just wasn’t in teaching right now. He stood dully in front of the class, speaking in a monotone, barely able to focus on the subject and feeling like a fraud.

  Until this summer he had been a popular professor. He had always been a master of passionate classroom revelations, holding his arms in front of his chest and flexing his fists to show his muscles, a sinewy workman toiling for truth. Subjects that most of his peers reduced to dry statistics had issued from his mouth as fiery sermons that stirred the souls of even the most apathetic students. Maybe some of his colleagues muttered that he played fast and loose with facts, that he hadn’t published anything in years, but they were just envious. He had always dismissed them as dried-up number crunchers, dull scribes in the Temple of Truth, but now he wondered if they were right.

  It was Sarah’s doing, he thought. A couple years ago, as one of his students in a graduate seminar, she had been swept up in his vision. But as soon as she had moved into his house, her niggling facts and figures had taken over. She was the opposite of him, all numbers and no tongues of fire. Every time he opened his mouth, she would scrunch up her small face in that serious frown that he both loved and hated, and she would cite some dreary statistics to spit in the face of everything he stood for.

  “But if that’s true,” she would quibble, “why is it that such-and-such percent of this or that group are earning X wages just Y years later?”

  All kindling and no flame—but after a while her numbers had chipped away at him. Then, as soon as she had wrecked his self-confidence, she had packed her belongings and roared away.

  Goddamn her anyway, Peter thought. All her rubbish about how we couldn’t get along. We were doing just fine.

  He was disgusted that he was thinking of Sarah again, as if no other woman existed. Ridiculous. She wasn’t even that pretty. Cute, but no great beauty. Time to get on with his life.

  He yanked the carafe from the coffee maker though it wasn’t finished brewing and filled a cup. He opened the refrigerator and started shoving wine bottles and pickle jars around impatiently. Of course there was no cream. Of course Emily wouldn’t remember to buy any. He slammed the refrigerator door shut and gulped the coffee black.

  He began redoing the past in his head: he should have demanded summer term off; he should have taken Sarah somewhere—maybe Spain or Greece. It would have been a nice way to help her get past her parents’ death.

  He imagined her lying on a beach in Greece wearing just the bottom of her bikini, a scrap of pink cloth. Her small breasts were bare, and he could see her dark nipples so clearly that he became erect. He thought of her usual costume around the house, a skimpy pair of panties and a T-shirt, thought of how exciting it had been to gaze at her sitting half naked while she read a book, unaware of his attention, thought of how snugly her panties had clung to her . . .

  “I think I’ll go to my place for a while,” Emily said, standing in the kitchen doorway. “I’ve got some things I need to do.”

  Peter could tell she was hoping he would ask her to stay. “Sure. That’s fine,” he said, not turning fully toward her because he didn’t want her to notice his erection—she wasn’t the one who had inspired it.

  She turned and left, doing a pretty good job of showing she was angry without saying so. Peter sat down at the kitchen table and rubbed his temples. He reached for his phone and tried to call Sarah but got a recording instead: “The number you have dialed is incorrect. Please check the number and try again.”

  What a ball-busting bitch! She had no right to cut herself off from him like that, not after two whole years of living in his house and sleeping in his bed—and just because of a couple stupid arguments. It wasn’t fair. It was like sawing off one of his legs and hiding it somewhere.

  Pocahontas jumped up onto the kitchen table and sniffed his coffee. Peter pushed it angrily away. Damned cat had always liked Sarah better than him. He should have allowed her to take it. Maybe he had been thinking that if he kept the damned cat, she would be more likely to come back—or maybe he had just wanted to make her miserable.

  He rang Howard Goldwin’s number. He was annoyed with Howard for helping Sarah move. Howard was supposed to be his friend, not hers. Damned traitor.

  “Hey, Howard, how’s life and all that? Say, I’ve got some important mail here that I need to send to Sarah, and I seem to have misplaced her address. Well, yeah, sure, I’d just call her, but the last time we talked, a couple days ago, well, frankly it wasn’t very pleasant. I’m afraid she’s a little put out because I’m seeing someone else, you know, she’s a little jealous, and I’m afraid it will make her feel bad if I call her about a lot of bills and rubbish like that. I’d hate to hurt her feelings, she’s, well, you know, she’s so sensitive, it may take her a while to heal, if you know what I mean. I’d rather just mail the stuff. Yes. Here, let me write this down . . .”

  Peter hung up the phone and stared at the address for a minute. He knew where the street was, not a nice neighborhood at all. At first he thought: good, let her find out what it’s like to run out on me without two fucking dimes to rub together—she’ll be dragging her ass back here pretty soon, begging me to forgive her.

  But the longer he stared at the address, the less happy he felt. She could be mugged or raped, maybe even killed. He pictured the squalid neighborhood, litter everywhere, miserable crack-house apartments, barking dogs, prostitutes and gangs roaming the sidewalks. He looked around his spacious kitchen at the designer faucet and expensive stainless steel appliances, the gourmet skillets and kettles hanging neatly above the gleaming granite counter, the sliding glass doors that led to a pleasant back yard with dwarf fruit trees and a hot tub and a privacy fence.

  Time to rescue her, he decided. Maybe I won’t even make her apologize.

  Chapter Four

  Sarah Temple stood in the front room of her new apartment and watched an ancient Volkswagen bug trying to crawl into a parking pl
ace out front. It was a small sunroom with ten cheerful windows, perfect for plants, though the only plant she owned was the half-dead jade that Peter had given her way back when there was still a reason for them to give each other presents. The street and the tiny singed lawn that the windows looked out on weren’t so cheerful, especially now that the afternoon shadows were lengthening and gangs of young boys were beginning to emerge from them like flies from a rotting carcass.

  Really not a bad place, she told herself. She had been telling herself that for two weeks.

  The Volkswagen squirmed back and forth, trying clumsily to work its way closer to the curb, as it did each evening at 5:15. Finally the driver shut it off and climbed out. It was the ghost, Sarah’s upstairs neighbor. Slight and pale, maybe thirty years old, dressed always in the same black suit despite the heat, he looked more like an apparition than a creature of bones and blood. He drifted slowly toward the entrance of the building, stepping so weightlessly that his feet seemed scarcely to touch the pavement, as if he weren’t quite connected to the earth.

  Each evening Sarah would hear a few ghostly footsteps above her and then nothing else, no radio, no TV, no voice talking on a phone or even to itself. Each weekday morning at 7:45 she would hear the door above her shut quietly, and then the ghost would drift down the stairs so softly that she sensed him more than heard him. She would be sitting in the sunroom drinking her morning coffee, but he seemed not to notice her or anything else as he emerged from the building and headed to his rusty old bug.

  The landlady had said that the other three apartments were occupied by singles, the ghost above her and one woman in each apartment on the other side. But after two hot lonely weeks of living here, Sarah had met none of them. Her three neighbors all kept to themselves, and their aloofness seemed to demand that she do the same.

  She could hear a TV behind the door of the other downstairs apartment whenever she was in the landing, but it always seemed to be talking and laughing to itself, and she had never seen anybody go in the apartment to give the poor TV some company.

  Last weekend she had caught a quick glimpse of the woman who lived above that apartment. Sarah had seen her creeping down the rear fire escape, peering at her feet through dark glasses, trying to keep her high heels from getting stuck between the iron strips of the steps.

  She was nice looking if you like the look of prostitutes, a young woman with sleek blond hair halfway down her back, her tight, short purple dress advertising her slim figure and showing every detail except her price tag.

  Sarah was bent over watering the withered jade when someone outside turned on a boom box so loud that the windows rattled. She turned and saw a gang of teenagers in the small front yard, staring in at their new neighbor. One of them grabbed his crotch and gave her a face that said eat this, bitch.

  She slammed the windows shut and moved to the rear of her apartment, where she had been organizing the dining room into a study. It was still cluttered with boxes of books and endless piles of paper, which she hadn’t the stomach to sort through. She sat at her desk and stared angrily at her computer screen.

  Even with the windows shut, she could hear the boys outside yelling above their boom box, their adolescent voices already as hard as gun metal. Crime statistics swarmed unbidden into her brain, as if she had clicked open a computer file, the residue of two years of graduate study in sociology. She knew all too well the crime figures for this neighborhood, but she also knew the tiny figure in her checking account, and it told her she couldn’t afford anything better.

  She was hot and sticky, the rattling box fan having nothing but hot air to blow around. She wanted to strip down to her underpants, but she hadn’t gotten around to buying drapes for the windows, and the old roller-blinds offered plenty of peepshow holes.

  Friday, soon to be Friday night, and she had nowhere to go, no one to see, and nothing to do.

  Though she had lived in Columbus for over two years, she had been too wrapped up in her graduate studies to make any close friends. Peter had plenty of friends, most of them faculty, and she had accepted them as her own even though she had felt uncomfortable around them, being younger, being just a student, being just a small-town girl from Iowa, being just Sarah while they were all Dr. This or Professor That, the esteemed author of Such and Such. Now that she had time for friends and wanted some, they just seemed like his people. Calling them would feel awkward, a step back into his world, a world that had never really been hers.

  She was beginning to wonder if she would ever have a world of her own. A few weeks ago she had been hectically busy with her teaching assistantship and her master’s thesis, with Peter’s weekend soirees and his burly body beside her each night, with her vague plans to write a book based on the research for her thesis. Each day had bustled by with duties and deadlines and dramas, and now each day crept by with boom boxes outside, a ghost tiptoeing upstairs, and inside just a gnawing, aching void.

  The void had been there all along, she thought, but she had been too busy to notice. It had suddenly grown deeper at the end of last fall semester when she got the call saying that the house she would always know as home and her parents who had been asleep inside it were now just ashes, ashes to ashes, and she had been so busy grading final essays and writing her own essays that she had barely found time to fly home for the funeral, much less to make her peace with these two new graves added to the emptiness inside.

  And the void had dug itself deeper still two weeks ago, when Peter slammed her head against a wall and slapped her once too often. Sarah didn’t intend to spend any more days or years in the OSU sociology building watching the bastard strut up and down the halls with his coterie of coeds, so she withdrew from the doctorate program that would have begun this fall. Now she would have to apply to other schools, and that meant waiting another year to begin her studies, so while she waited she may as well try to write her book. It almost seemed like a plan if she didn’t think about it too hard.

  So here she sat in the box-cluttered dining room turned study, surrounded by piles of papers and bookmarked books and newspaper clippings, and she strained to see in the gray pixels of the computer screen some inkling of the idea she had once believed she had for converting all these dull facts and statistics into a book just screaming to be written, but the only thing screaming was the boom box outdoors.

  Twenty-seven years old, and nothing to show for those years except a lot of boxes and a few bruises.

  Friday. No doubt Peter was going to have people over, a few attractive female students among them. In another hour he would be opening a bottle of wine and firing up the gas barbecue grill in his nice back yard so that he could cook the shish kebabs that had been marinating all day in his big kitchen. She thought of his long red hair, his tanned arms, his strong hands that knew every part of her body.

  Goddamn Peter and his nice fucking yard! The son of a bitch wasn’t going to have any trouble getting into some cute new panties tonight.

  Instead of evaporating the sweat on her back, the fan seemed to be congealing it into an itchy second skin. The boom box seemed to be moving away, thank God. Sarah could hear it thumping off into the distance, a giant thug roaming its turf.

  She got her address book and thumbed through it. Peter’s friends, Peter’s friends. How could such a jerk have so many friends? Only one person listed in the book was more her friend than Peter’s. She had met Howard Goldwin through Peter, but he’d had a bellyful of Peter’s crap a long time ago. She called.

  “Oh, hi Sare. How’s the place?” He sounded bright and chipper, as always.

  “Alcatraz guarded by the Shadow Boys. They roam around out front, make sure no one escapes.”

  “I told you so. I warned you. My darling, you’re lucky you’re still alive.”

  “Thanks.”

  She pictured Howard, slender and elegant, groomed and cologned and nicely dressed, no doubt wearing a colorful silk tie and sipping a glass of wine.

  “Move in her
e,” he said. “At least until you can afford a better place. I told you, I’ve got an extra room. More than one—I’ll give you two rooms.”

  “You’re sweet, Howard, but no thanks. Can’t even put up with myself in the mornings, sure wouldn’t expect you to. But I was hoping we could go have dinner.”

  “Love to, but not tonight, my dear. I’m gazing at the reason. Adonis, sitting right across the table from me. Chewing a bagel with lox. Poor sleepyhead, he just got up. He needs some babying.” A moment’s pause, and Sarah could see him making a face at his new paramour. “But soon, darling, soon,” Howard said. “Why don’t I have you over for dinner next week?”

  “I’d like that. I’ve been talking to myself so much I’m beginning to feel like an old couple.” She tried not to let him hear her disappointment.

  “By the way,” Howard said, “Peter called this morning and said he’d lost your address.”

  “He can’t lose what he never had, and he never had it because I didn’t want him to.”

  “Oh dear. Then I’m afraid I blundered. I was silly enough to give it to him. Sorry, Sare.”

  Sarah didn’t like what she was feeling. Was Peter missing her? Wanting to see her? Wanting to apologize? Wanting her to move back? Why should this excite her?

  “I should have known better than to believe his poppycock,” Howard said. “He implied that you’ve been chatting away like old chums.”

  “Did he say why he wanted my address?”

  “He said he has mail for you.”

  Great. Mail. Ain’t that a thrill? Sarah was disgusted with herself—no self-respect. Two weeks on her own, and already she was wanting to crawl back. Probably Peter was seeing some joy-toy by now. If anyone would know, it would be Howard. She tried to think of some discreet way to ask.

  “I hear he’s seeing someone,” she said.

  “Oh, really? Whoever told you that, my dear?”

  “Someone,” she said awkwardly. “Well, no one, actually. I just want to know.”