Tracking Time

Thirty-six

Janice Owen did not remember going to bed or Bill's coming in during the night. The sound of the shower made it rain in her dream. Her baby was getting wet. He was tucked tightly in the stroller, but she'd lost her umbrella. It was a strange-looking baby; something was wrong with his head. She hurried to get out of the rain, pushing the stroller and running in bare feet. A dwarf was following her. He wanted to take the baby from her. Janice struggled out of the dream, heard the shower, and realized her husband was home.

She dragged herself out of bed, padded into the kitchen for coffee, and turned on the news. The dream left a residue of unease she needed to shake. The morning news reported that the man who'd been missing the night before was still missing. Today the Central Park story was expanded with reports of a number of recent assaults there as well as the two homicides in the last year, which included a woman raped and strangled in the Ramble and a man whose cause of death had never been established.

The bad dream, her husband ignoring her in the shower, and the unpleasant Central Park story caused Janice to storm into David's room, where he was curled up on his bed, sleeping like a baby. And stinking to high heaven, she might add. Unbelievable smell! She opened the window of his room, then stormed back into the bathroom, where Bill was humming away in the shower.

"Bill, where the fuck were you last night?" she screamed, sliding open the shower door.

Bill had shampoo on his blond hair. His body was covered with soap. The warm water was pelting down making stripes in the soap. He had a full erection, was singing and dreamily soaping his cock when the first bomb of Pearl Harbor struck him. "Huh?" he croaked in surprise.

The still-prominent erection reminded Janice that she and Bill hadn't had sex in months and months. This enraged her, too. How dare he get a hard-on at a time like this.

"Do you know what's going on in your own city? Do you know where your son is at night? Do you know any fucking thing at all?"

Indignantly, Bill turned his back on her and let the water cascade down.

"Was your son here when you got home?"

"What's with you? Of course he was."

"Do you know for a fact he was?" Janice stood there in a filmy nightie, her eyes still gummy with sleep, holding a coffee cup like a cross against the devil. The man was avoiding her. He didn't care.

He grabbed a towel and got out of the shower, brushing past her almost roughly.

"Bill!"

"What?"

"You almost knocked me over," she cried.

"You're dreaming. Are you drinking too much again?"

"I never drink." Indignantly, she followed him into the bedroom, where he tried to close himself in the closet.

"Don't try to avoid me. We have to talk." She opened the door. He turned his back on her again. Water from the shower dripped down his back, stabbing her in the heart. He toweled his back and his butt.

"I'm late. Maybe tonight," he muttered.

"Not tonight. Now!" she insisted. Bill was still a good-looking man. She knew how many women were attracted to him.

He groaned hugely, stabbing her again. "Janice, give me a break."

The groan broke her. Give him a break? "All you get is breaks. You're never around. You're always out with that tart. The least you can do is give your son five minutes of your precious time." It was out of the bag. She retreated a step, shocked that she'd said it.

"Where did you get that idea? There's no tart in my life." He turned to look at her for the first time, shocked to hear her talk like that.

"Oh yeah, I forgot. You call that ugly bitch your associate. You're out with her every night. You come home at three, four in the morning. Do you think I'm stupid?" Once her deepest fear was out in the open, Janice kept screaming.

"We call that work, Janice," he said angrily, his face mottled with the blood rushing to the surface, showing it all.

"Right. Give me that kind of work," she said bitterly.

"You're crazy." He turned his back on her a third time, pulled on a pair of shorts, then the Loro Piana navy blue nail-head cashmere trousers of a Bergdorf Goodman suit. He grabbed a shirt from a hanger, not even looking at it first. He was in a big hurry.

The deep blush, the nail-head suit, and the great big hurry were more than Janice could bear. She had a headache and a hangover. She swerved to the subject most likely to move him.

"Bill, I can't take all the responsibility of David myself. I've done all the parenting here. You have to participate. This is his junior year. His whole college career, maybe his whole life, depends on his knuckling under now."

"Knuckling is an incorrect image. You don't want him to knuckle under, you want him to settle down and work."

"Fine. You're his father, you talk to him."

"What do you suggest that I say?"

"Well, he's breaking the house rules again," she said, furious at both of them. Bill also was breaking the house rules, but one thing at a time. "Tell him you know about it. You're going to dock him his allowance and ground him if he doesn't knuckle under and live up to his potential."

Bill finished tying a new tie, a stunning Ferragamo with lovebirds on it so vivid you could almost hear them coo. Janice had never seen it before.

"Where did you get that?" she demanded.

"Do you like it? Peggy gave it to me."

Janice paled. Peggy was giving him inappropriate gifts now? Lovebirds? "I think it sucks a big one," she said.

Bill came out of the closet with a small tight smile on his smug face. He was gleaming all over-face pink and healthy, newly scrubbed and shaved, fancy suit, lovely new tie. He brushed by his wife, who was still holding the coffee cup, her thickening body showing clearly through the nightgown.

He marched into his son's room. David's head was under the covers.

"Good morning, David. Say hello to your father."

"You two are fighting again. You woke me up," came the angry response.

"David. Your mother and I love you very much. We're both very proud of you. Now listen to me. I want you to come home after school and get on the stick, you hear me? You're a wonderful, bright, brave boy, and you deserve all the good things life has to offer. We're proud of your efforts and we want you to try harder. Not for us, for yourself."

He turned back to his wife with an expression that said, There, I spoke with him. Satisfied?

No, she wasn't. There was one thing he hadn't mentioned. "And keep out of the park," she added. "I don't want you in that park. It's not safe. Your breakfast will be ready in four minutes. Meet me in the kitchen." Without looking at Bill she went back into the bathroom for her turn in the shower. She knew he'd be gone by the time she came out.

In the bedroom David was muttering, "Fuck you both."