Madeleine feels an immediate numbness in her face, as if the blood is blockaded in her veins. She drops onto the large leather easy chair, newly purchased for a thousand dollars.
“I can’t use the computer anymore,” David says simply. “The sound is awful, and it gives off a toxic emanation. I know I’ve been sensitive lately, but I can’t even sit at my desk when it’s on.”
Madeleine stares at him, at the ice cream bowl in his hand, the simian feet. “David, this was never a problem before.”
He shrugs.
Madeleine leans forward, grips the arms of the chair. Controlling her breath, she says, “What are you telling me? You’re telling me they fired you.”
David looks away, giving her his profile. He seems to be playing some memory in his mind. There is an unnerving little smile on his lips. A long moment extends, a bloated silence, and Madeleine realizes she has been holding her breath. She lets out a slow wheeze.
“How are we going to pay the mortgage?” she says softly.
“I have a plan.” He glances at her with a weird light in his eyes. “You have to trust me.”
In the pause that follows, Madeleine remembers her first visit to his childhood home in Pennsylvania, with wind chimes on the porch and laundry in the front yard. Inside, David’s gray-braided parents sat at a big wooden table, churning apple butter. Incense burned on the counter beside a statuette of Krishna. In his oxford shirt and loafers, David appeared as foreign to this environment as his parents were native. How strange, she’d thought, that something so strong and unbendable had been forged by this queer fire.
“Trust me,” David repeats.
Madeleine studies his face. He appears to be the same man. A man who has never given her a reason not to trust him. She had so easily, eagerly, fallen into the habit of trust. In their wedding vows, when they had promised to help each other achieve their dreams, to stand beside each other through any difficulty, it had seemed that the words were skewed to her benefit. It had never occurred to her, really, that she would be called upon.
“I think I can find a way to harness this,” David says.
“Harness what?” Madeleine asks. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m thinking I can learn traditional healing techniques and open an independent practice.”
Madeleine stares. “You’ve been in advertising for fifteen years.”
“It’s a career change, yes. People change careers all the time.”
“But the timing, David. We’re about to have a baby.”
He smiles. “Babies are born all over the world, to all kinds of people.”
“What does that mean?”
David is quiet. After a moment, he says, “What if I wanted to go to law school? Would you support that?”
There is a touch of impatience in his voice that Madeleine has never heard before. She sits for another moment, then rises to her feet, steadying herself on the back of the chair.
“Listen,” she says. “You can keep talking, but I’m going to go make dinner.”
He follows her into the kitchen. “I know you’re upset.”
She pours rice into a measuring cup without measuring it and fills a pot with water. She seizes a blind assortment of vegetables from the refrigerator and begins chopping. He stands beside her. “Listen to me. I think the bird is a messenger inviting me to change course. I’m luckier than some people, who never receive a tangible sign. They just feel sick and never know why.”
Madeleine gazes at the cutting board, where she has created a heap of cubed carrot, potato, cucumber. She slides the vegetables into a pot and her eyes alight on the backsplash behind the stove, a grid of glossy bloodred tiles. This is one of the details she’d loved about the house, but which now strikes her as superfluous.
David puts a hand on her arm. “I believe I’ve received a gift, Madeleine. I believe I’ve been selected for something very strange and wonderful.”
She turns to him and sees the fevered eyes of a teenager who has just discovered beat poetry. Her own face heats. She should have known that this was inside him all along, like a time bomb. This is what he came from, what he is made of. His corporate adventure—his visit to the culture of work, of responsibility—was just that, an adventure. A rebellion against his upbringing, short-lived. What she is witnessing now, she suddenly understands, is a return to his roots, his true character. The truth detonates before her.