A Multitude of Sins

Under the Radar

On the drive over to the Nicholsons’ for dinner — their first in some time — Marjorie Reeves told her husband, Steven Reeves, that she had had an affair with George Nicholson (their host) a year ago, but that it was all over with now and she hoped he — Steven — would not be mad about it and could go on with life.

At this point they were driving along Quaker Bridge Road where it leaves the Perkins Great Woods Road and begins to border the Shenipsit Reservoir, dark and shadowy and calmly mirrored in the late spring twilight. On the right was dense young timber, beech and alder saplings in pale leaf, the ground damp and cakey. Peepers were calling out from the watery lows. Their turn onto Apple Orchard Lane was still a mile on.

Steven, on hearing this news, began gradually and very carefully to steer their car — a tan Mercedes wagon with hooded yellow headlights — off of Quaker Bridge Road and onto the damp grassy shoulder so he could organize this information properly before going on.

They were extremely young. Steven Reeves was twentyeight. Marjorie Reeves a year younger. They weren’t rich, but they’d been lucky. Steven’s job at Packard-Wells was to stay on top of a small segment of a larger segment of a rather small prefabrication intersection that serviced the automobile industry, and where any sudden alteration, or even the rumor of an alteration in certain polymer-bonding formulas could tip crucial down-the-line demand patterns, and in that way affect the betting lines and comfort zones of a good many meaningful client positions. His job meant poring over dense and esoteric petrochemical-industry journals, attending technical seminars, flying to vendor conventions, then writing up detailed status reports and all the while keeping an eye on the market for the benefit of his higher-ups. He’d been a scholarship boy at Bates, studied chemistry, was the only son of a hard-put but upright lobstering family in Pemaquid, Maine, and had done well. His bosses at Packard-Wells liked him, saw themselves in him, and also in him saw character qualities they’d never quite owned — blond and slender callowness tending to gullibility, but backed by caution, ingenuity and a thoroughgoing, compact toughness. He was sharp. It was his seventh year with the company — his first job. He and Marjorie had been married two years. They had no children. The car had been his bonus two Christmases ago.

When the station wagon eased to a stop, Steven sat for a minute with the motor running, the salmon-colored dash lights illuminating his face. The radio had been playing softly — the last of the news, then an interlude for French horns. Responding to no particular signal, he pressed off the radio and in the same movement switched off the ignition, which left the headlights shining on the empty, countrified road. The windows were down to attract the fresh spring air, and when the engine noise ceased the evening’s ambient sounds were waiting. The peepers. A sound of thrush wings fluttering in the brush only a few yards away. The noise of something falling from a small distance and hitting an invisible water surface. Beyond the stand of saplings was the west, and through the darkened trunks, the sky was still pale yellow with the day’s light, though here on Quaker Bridge Road it was nearly dark.

When Marjorie said what she had just said, she’d been looking straight ahead to where the headlights made a bright path in the dark. Perhaps she’d looked at Steven once, but having said what she’d said, she kept her hands in her lap and continued looking ahead. She was a pretty, blond, convictionless girl with small demure features — small nose, small ears, small chin, though with a surprisingly full-lipped smile which she practiced on everyone. She was fond of getting a little tipsy at parties and lowering her voice and sitting on a flowered ottoman or a burl table top with a glass of something and showing too much of her legs or inappropriate amounts of her small breasts. She had grown up in Indiana, studied art at Purdue. Steven had met her in New York at a party while she was working for a firm that did child-focused advertising for a large toymaker. He’d liked her bobbed hair, her fragile, wispy features, translucent skin and the slightly husky voice that made her seem more sophisticated than she was, but somehow convinced her she was, too. In their community, east of Hartford, the women who knew Marjorie Reeves thought of her as a bimbo who would not stay married to sweet Steven Reeves for very long. His second wife would be the right wife for him. Marjorie was just a starter.

Marjorie, however, did not think of herself that way, only that she liked men and felt happy and confident around them and assumed Steven thought this was fine and that in the long run it would help his career to have a pretty, spirited wife no one could pigeonhole. To set herself apart and to take an interest in the community she’d gone to work as a volunteer at a grieving-children’s center in Hartford, which meant all black. And it was in Hartford that she’d had the chance to encounter George Nicholson and fuck him at a Red Roof Inn until they’d both gotten tired of it. It would never happen again, was her view, since in a year it hadn’t happened again.

For the two or possibly five minutes now that they had sat on the side of Quaker Bridge Road in the still airish evening, with the noises of spring floating in and out of the open window, Marjorie had said nothing and Steven had also said nothing, though he realized that he was saying nothing because he was at a loss for words. A loss for words, he realized, meant that nothing that comes to mind seems very interesting to say as a next thing to what has just been said. He knew he was a callow man — a boy in some ways, still— but he was not stupid. At Bates, he had taken Dr. Sudofsky’s class on Ulysses, and come away with a sense of irony and humor and the assurance that true knowledge was a spiritual process, a quest, not a storage of dry facts — a thing like freedom, which you only fully experienced in practice. He’d also played hockey, and knew that knowledge and aggressiveness were a subtle and surprising and uncommon combination. He had sought to practice both at Packard-Wells.

But for a brief and terrifying instant in the cool padded semi-darkness, just when he began experiencing his loss for words, he entered or at least nearly slipped into a softened fuguelike state in which he began to fear that he perhaps could not say another word; that something (work fatigue, shock, disappointment over what Marjorie had admitted) was at that moment causing him to detach from reality and to slide away from the present, and in fact to begin to lose his mind and go crazy to the extent that he was in jeopardy of beginning to gibber like a chimp, or just to slowly slump sideways against the upholstered door and not speak for a long, long time— months — and then only with the aid of drugs be able merely to speak in simple utterances that would seem cryptic, so that eventually he would have to be looked after by his mother’s family in Damariscotta. A terrible thought.

And so to avoid that — to save his life and sanity — he abruptly just said a word, any word that he could say into the perfumed twilight inhabiting the car, where his wife was obviously anticipating his reply to her unhappy confession.

And for some reason the word — phrase, really — that he uttered was “ground clutter.” Something he’d heard on the TV weather report as they were dressing for dinner.

“Hm?” Marjorie said. “What was it?” She turned her pretty, small-featured face toward him so that her pearl earrings caught light from some unknown source. She was wearing a tiny green cocktail dress and green satin shoes that showed off her incredibly thin ankles and slender, bare brown calves. She had two tiny matching green bows in her hair. She smelled sweet. “I know this wasn’t what you wanted to hear, Steven,” she said, “but I felt I should tell you before we got to George’s. The Nicholsons’, I mean. It’s all over. It’ll never happen again. I promise you. No one will ever mention it. I just lost my bearings last year with the move. I’m sorry.” She had made a little steeple of her fingertips, as if she’d been concentrating very hard as she spoke these words. But now she put her hands again calmly in her minty green lap. She had bought her dress especially for this night at the Nicholsons’. She’d thought George would like it and Steven, too. She turned her face away and exhaled a small but detectable sigh in the car. It was then that the headlights went off automatically.

George Nicholson was a big squash-playing, thick-chested, hairy-armed Yale lawyer who sailed his own Hinckley 61 out of Essex and had started backing off from his high-priced Hartford plaintiffs’ practice at fifty to devote more time to competitive racket sports and senior skiing. George was a college roommate of one of Steven’s firm’s senior partners and had “adopted” the Reeveses when they moved into the community following their wedding. Marjorie had volunteered Saturdays with George’s wife, Patsy, at the Episcopal Thrift Shop during their first six months in Connecticut. To Steven, George Nicholson had recounted a memorable, seasoning summer spent hauling deep-water lobster traps with some tough old sea dogs out of Matinicus, Maine. Later, he’d been a Marine, and sported a faded anchor, ball and chain tattooed on his forearm. Later yet he’d fucked Steven’s wife.

Having said something, even something that made no sense, Steven felt a sense of glum and deflated relief as he sat in the silent car beside Marjorie, who was still facing forward. Two thoughts had begun to compete in his reviving awareness. One was clearly occasioned by his conception of George Nicholson. He thought of George Nicholson as a gasbag, but also a forceful man who’d made his pile by letting very little stand in his way. When he thought about George he always remembered the story about Matinicus, which then put into his mind a mental picture of his own father and himself hauling traps somewhere out toward Monhegan. The reek of the bait, the toss of the ocean in late spring, the consoling monotony of the solid, tree-lined shore barely visible through the mists. Thinking through that circuitry always made him vaguely admire George Nicholson and, oddly, made him think he liked George even now, in spite of everything.

The other competing thought was that part of Marjorie’s character had always been to confess upsetting things that turned out, he believed, not to be true: being a hooker for a summer up in Saugatuck; topless dancing while she was an undergraduate; heroin experimentation; taking part in armed robberies with her high-school boyfriend in Goshen, Indiana, where she was from. When she told these far-fetched stories she would grow distracted and shake her head, as though they were true. And now, while he didn’t particularly think any of these stories was a bit truer, he did realize that he didn’t really know his wife at all; and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person — of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself — while not exactly a lie since it existed someplace if only as an idea (in his parents’ life, at least marginally) was still completely out-of-date, defunct, was something typifying another era, now unfortunately gone. Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her — the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke. Marjorie might as well have been a hooker or held up 7-Elevens and shot people, for all he really knew about her. And what was more, if he’d said any of this to her, sitting next to him thinking he would never know what, she either would not have understood a word of it or simply would’ve said, “Well, okay, that’s fine.” When people talked about the bottom line, Steven Reeves thought, they weren’t talking about money, they were talking about what this meant, this kind of fatal ignorance. Money — losing it, gaining it, spending it, hoarding it — all that was only an emblem, though a good one, of what was happening here right now.

At this moment a pair of car lights rounded a curve somewhere out ahead of where the two of them sat in their station wagon. The lights found both their white faces staring forward in silence. The lights also found a raccoon just crossing the road from the reservoir shore, headed for the woods that were beside them. The car was going faster than might’ve been evident. The raccoon paused to peer up into the approaching beams, then continued on into the safe, opposite lane. But only then did it look up and notice Steven and Marjorie’s car stopped on the verge of the road, silent in the murky evening. And because of that notice it must’ve decided that where it had been was much better than where it was going, and so turned to scamper back across Quaker Bridge Road toward the cool waters of the reservoir, which was what caused the car — actually it was a beat-up Ford pickup — to rumble over it, pitching and spinning it off to the side and then motionlessness near the opposite shoulder. “Yaaaa-haaaa-yipeeee!” a man’s shrill voice shouted from inside the dark cab of the pickup, followed by another man’s laughter.

And then it became very silent again. The raccoon lay on the road twenty yards in front of the Reeveses’ car. It didn’t struggle. It was merely there.

“Gross,” Marjorie said.

Steven said nothing, though he felt less at a loss for words now. His eyes, indeed, felt relieved to fix on the still corpse of the raccoon.

“Do we do something?” Marjorie said. She had leaned forward a few inches as if to study the raccoon through the windshield. Light was dying away behind the slender young beech trees to the west of them.

“No,” Steven said. These were his first words — except for the words he took no responsibility for — since Marjorie had said what she’d importantly said and their car was still moving toward dinner.

It was then that he hit her. He hit her before he knew he’d hit her, but not before he knew he wanted to. He hit her with the back of his open hand without even looking at her, hit her straight in the front of her face, straight in the nose. And hard. In a way, it was more a gesture than a blow, though it was, he understood, a blow. He felt the soft tip of her nose, and then the knuckly cartilage against the hard bones of the backs of his fingers. He had never hit a woman before, and he had never even thought of hitting Marjorie, always imagining he couldn’t hit her when he’d read newspaper accounts of such things happening in the sad lives of others. He’d hit other people, been hit by other people, plenty of times— tough Maine boys on the ice rinks. Girls were out, though. His father always made that clear. His mother, too.

“Oh, my goodness” was all that Marjorie said when she received the blow. She put her hand over her nose immediately, but then sat silently in the car while neither of them said anything. His heart was not beating hard. The back of his hand hurt a little. This was all new ground. Steven had a small rosy birthmark just where his left sideburn ended and his shaved face began. It resembled the shape of the state of West Virginia. He thought he could feel this birthmark now. His skin tingled there.

And the truth was he felt even more relieved, and didn’t feel at all sorry for Marjorie, sitting there stoically, making a little tent of her hand to cover her nose and staring ahead as if nothing had happened. He thought she would cry, certainly. She was a girl who cried — when she was unhappy, when he said something insensitive, when she was approaching her period. Crying was natural. Clearly, though, it was a new experience for her to be hit. And so it called upon something new, and if not new then some strength, resilience, self-mastery normally reserved for other experiences.

“I can’t go to the Nicholsons’ now,” Marjorie said almost patiently. She removed her hand and viewed her palm as if her palm had her nose in it. Of course it was blood she was thinking about. He heard her breathe in through what sounded like a congested nose, then the breath was completed out through her mouth. She was not crying yet. And for that moment he felt not even sure he had smacked her— if it hadn’t just been a thought he’d entertained, a gesture somehow uncommissioned.

What he wanted to do, however, was skip to the most important things now, not get mired down in wrong, extraneous details. Because he didn’t give a shit about George Nicholson or the particulars of what they’d done in some shitty motel. Marjorie would never leave him for George Nicholson or anyone like George Nicholson, and George Nicholson and men like him — high rollers with Hinckleys— didn’t throw it all away for unimportant little women like Marjorie. He thought of her nose, red, swollen, smeared with sticky blood dripping onto her green dress. He didn’t suppose it could be broken. Noses held up. And, of course, there was a phone in the car. He could simply make a call to the party. He pictured the Nicholsons’ great rambling white-shingled house brightly lit beyond the curving drive, the original elms exorbitantly preserved, the footlights, the lowlit clay court where they’d all played, the heated pool, the Henry Moore out on the darkened lawn where you just stumbled onto it. He imagined saying to someone — not George Nicholson — that Marjorie was ill, had thrown up on the side of the road.

The right details, though. The right details to ascertain from her were: Are you sorry? (he’d forgotten Marjorie had already said she was sorry) and What does this mean for the future? These were the details that mattered.

Surprisingly, the raccoon that had been cartwheeled by the pickup and then lain motionless, a blob in the near-darkness, had come back to life and was now trying to drag itself and its useless hinder parts off of Quaker Bridge Road and onto the grassy verge and into the underbrush that bordered the reservoir.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Marjorie said, and put her hand over her damaged nose again. She could see the raccoon’s struggle and turned her head away.

“Aren’t you even sorry?” Steven said.

“Yes,” Marjorie said, her nose still covered as if she wasn’t thinking about the fact that she was covering it. Probably, he thought, the pain had gone away some. It hadn’t been so bad. “I mean no,” she said.

He wanted to hit her again then — this time in the ear— but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure why not. No one would ever know. “Well, which is it?” he said, and felt for the first time completely furious. The thing that made him furious — all his life, the very maddest — was to be put into a situation in which everything he did was wrong, when right was no longer an option. Now felt like one of those situations. “Which is it?” he said again angrily. “Really.” He should just take her to the Nicholsons’, he thought, swollen nose, bloody lips, all stoppered up, and let her deal with it. Or let her sit out in the car, or else start walking the 11.6 miles home. Maybe George could come out and drive her in his Rover. These were only thoughts, of course. “Which is it?” he said for the third time. He was stuck on these words, on this bit of barren curiosity.

“I was sorry when I told you,” Marjorie said, very composed. She lowered her hand from her nose to her lap. One of the little green bows that had been in her hair was now resting on her bare shoulder. “Though not very sorry,” she said. “Only sorry because I had to tell you. And now that I’ve told you and you’ve hit me in my face and probably broken my nose, I’m not sorry about anything — except that. Though I’m sorry about being married to you, which I’ll remedy as soon as I can.” She was still not crying. “So now, will you as a gesture of whatever good there is in you, get out and go over and do something to help that poor injured creature that those motherfucking rednecks maimed with their motherfucking pickup truck and then because they’re pieces of shit and low forms of degraded humanity, laughed about? Can you do that, Steven? Is that in your range?” She sniffed back hard through her nose, then expelled a short, deep and defeated moan. Her voice seemed more nasal, more midwestern even, now that her nose was congested.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” Steven Reeves said, and opened the car door onto the silent road.

“I know,” Marjorie said in an emotionless voice. “And you’ll be sorrier.”

When he had walked down the empty macadam road in his tan suit to where the raccoon had been struck then bounced over onto the road’s edge, there was nothing now there. Only a small circle of dark blood he could just make out on the nubbly road surface and that might’ve been an oil smudge. No raccoon. The raccoon with its last reserves of savage, unthinking will had found the strength to pull itself off into the bushes to die. Steven peered down into the dark, stalky confinement of scrubs and bramble that separated the road from the reservoir. It was very still there. He thought he heard a rustling in the low brush where a creature might be, getting itself settled into the soft grass and damp earth to go to sleep forever. Someplace out on the lake he heard a young girl’s voice, very distinctly laughing. Then a car door closed farther away. Then another sort of door, a screen door, slapped shut. And then a man’s voice saying “Oh no, oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, no.” A small white light came on farther back in the trees beyond the reservoir, where he hadn’t imagined there was a house. He wondered about how long it would be before his angry feelings stopped mattering to him. He considered briefly why Marjorie would admit this to him now. It seemed so odd.

Then he heard his own car start. The muffled-metal diesel racket of the Mercedes. The headlights came smartly on and disclosed him. Music was instantly loud inside. He turned just in time to see Marjorie’s pretty face illuminated, as his own had been, by the salmon dashboard light. He saw the tips of her fingers atop the arc of the steering wheel, heard the surge of the engine. In the woods he noticed a strange glow coming through the trees, something yellow, something out of the low wet earth, a mist, a vapor, something that might be magical. The air smelled sweet now. The peepers stopped peeping. And then that was all.