A layer of fog floats over the Delaware, pooling along the hulls of container ships. In Center City, the thousand lights on the Comcast Building, the Circa Center, and One Liberty Place form bright smoky clouds that stamp out the dark patches of the skyline. They walk west up Pine Street, and as they cross Broad, Paul glances north, toward City Hall, where arches are tiered upon arches: a wedding cake of a monument.
At the intersection of Pine and Eighteenth, his toe gets caught between a slab of asphalt and an upended cobblestone, and he stumbles.
“Nice save,” Mark says. “You all right?”
“I’m fine.” He steadies himself. “I’m fine.”
*
Paul rubs his eyes and gazes skyward. Somewhere, an airplane thunders and yawns; a pigeon that was picking its way across the clinic’s parking lot floats upward and settles on a power line. On Route 7, a car honks, and Paul feels it poke holes in his brainstem. He forces himself to blink. He runs his tongue across his teeth; his mouth is dry, filled with the dust of last night, and each time he yawns he thinks he tastes bourbon. He’s forgotten what it’s like not to worry about hangovers.
“Do I have to get in now?”
“What?” He looks at Wendy, who has her trembling arms wrapped around a trash can. The loose skin around her triceps flattens out against the tin like a pair of fleshy wings.
“Jesus, Paul, could you pay attention?” Her nostrils flare. She breathes deeply. “I asked if I had to get in again.”
Paul clears his throat and swallows. “Oh, right,” he says. “Yes, I’m afraid you do.”
Wendy’s head hangs. “I knew it.”
Paul tries to regain his footing. “It’s part of the treatment regimen. If at any point you—”
“Save it.” Wendy lifts up a hand, but she doesn’t look at Paul. “I’ll do it.”
Paul adjusts his belt and starts to roll up the sleeves of his shirt. “You need some help getting in there?”
“I’ve got it,” Wendy says, shooing him away. “Wouldn’t want you to break a sweat.” She looks down at her khaki pants and white Keds. “Can I keep my pants rolled down?”
“We’d prefer it if you rolled them up.”
“Of course you would.”
Wendy kneels and forms high cuffs with each hem. Blue veins draw maps across her ankles.
Paul looks up again and tries to determine how the clouds shift.
“All right,” Wendy says. “All right.”
She grips the rim of the bin and braces herself, tightening her hold until her knuckles fade to white. (Paul wants to point out what an improvement this fact alone is—two weeks ago, the thought of holding a trash can as if it were a lifesaver would’ve sent her into a tailspin!—but he resists; she needs her focus.) Lifting one foot and then the other, Wendy lowers herself into the abyss.
“An eleven,” she says.
“An eleven?”
“I know you’re going to ask what my anxiety level is, so I thought I’d tell you. It’s an eleven. Write that down. Eleven.” She raises her arm and hides her face in the crook of her elbow. “Christ, the smell.”
She’s right—it’s bad today. Paul woke up late this morning, and Mark took forever in the shower. He missed the eight o’clock SEPTA and had to catch the eight fifteen, which ran local—hyperlocal, even—stopping not just at the less-trafficked stops, but at stops Paul didn’t even know existed. All of this added up to Paul being robbed of his standard half hour to Dumpster-dive when he got to work this morning. Instead of searching for junk in his preferred roster of places (the Bala Cynwyd SEPTA station; the parking lot of a Fresh Grocer a half mile away; the women’s restroom at the clinic), he barely had enough time to grab two bags full of shit from the Dumpster outside the Macaroni Grill next door. So: it’s all half-curdled alfredo sauce for Wendy today, Paul figures. And, by the smell of it, a few loaves of stale focaccia. Some raw chicken breasts in an unpleasant state of decay.
Paul nods at Wendy and suppresses a gag.
“Still an eleven?” he asks.
Her face is still hidden by her arm. Still, she manages to say: “A fucking twelve.”
He scribbles the figure down on his clipboard, even though he knows Goulding will yell at him later for it. (“Our scale goes to ten. Accepting a score of twelve allows them to hyperbolize their anxiety, which is exactly what we’re trying to prevent.”) Across the lawn he sees Goulding in his office, seated behind his desk. His fingers are pressed together so his hands form a sharp triangle, and he nods as the man and woman sitting across from him speak. Or, more accurately, as the woman speaks: the man’s not saying anything, so far as Paul can tell; he’s slouching, in his own world, as he stares at the giant globe Goulding keeps in the corner of his office. One of those ancient ones where all the countries are in sepia tones and the ocean’s the color of parchment paper and Zimbabwe’s still labeled Rhodesia. A new victim, Paul thinks. The man.
*
He watches the woman sit down again and reach for her purse. As if Goulding can feel Paul’s gaze, he turns in his chair and locks eyes with him. Paul blinks first, and looks down.
“Paul, are you listening to me?”
Wendy still stands in the trash can. She looks taller than normal; her hipbones are an inch higher than the rim’s bin.
“Wendy,” Paul says, “get down off your tiptoes, please.”
“Why should I? You’re not even listening to what I’m saying to you.”
He says, “That’s not true. Of course I am.”
She lowers herself back to her heels, slowly. “Yeah? Then what’d I just ask you?”
Paul sighs. The clouds have stretched themselves out into thin, barely there scrims. He squints and wonders how long he can get away without answering.
“Well?”
Not very, as it turns out.
He says, “You’re right. I’m sorry. I wasn’t really listening.”
Wendy shifts her feet, and Paul hears something squishy and wet: the sound of toes sinking into pasta and soggy calamari.
“What’s with you today?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I’m hungover.” Paul sits cross-legged in the grass. He tilts his head back so he can look up at Wendy, and with his right hand he shields his eyes from the sun. “Wendy, how long have you and Hank been married?”
“Have Hank and I been married?”
“Yeah. How long?”
She glances down at her ankles, at the filth that Paul imagines is swarming around them, and she scrunches up her nose like she’s just smelled something obscene. “Thirty-seven years,” she says. “It’ll be thirty-eight in July. Can I get out of here, please?”
“No, not yet.” Paul checks his watch: another fifteen minutes. “Can I ask you a question?”
“It’s not like I’m going anywhere, am I?” Her bravado is thin; her voice cracks with nerves. “Well, then, let’s have it.”
“Right, okay.” Paul pulls up a tuft of grass. He sifts through the blades until he finds the longest, thickest one, which he uses to tie a few loose bows. “What do you think you’d say if Hank … God, I really don’t know how to ask this.”
And this is the truth. At Maryann’s, questions like Paul’s are so commonplace as to seem banal. But here, as he considers Wendy’s pearls and her frayed white cable-knit; as he looks beyond her, past the manicured grass of the clinic’s lawn to the Macaroni Grill and the other little suburban temples that dot the background, he wonders if it’s possible to say what he wants to say without coming across as some deviant sex pest.