Cold Blooded

Four in the morning and I was there in the dark. Sleep had left a while back already and it wasn't coming back, that much I knew. There was this smell in the room. The formaldehyde and the soap and the skin and then underneath all of it, like it was hiding, something sweet. Vanilla. Her shampoo. The one she bought at Walmart in the yellow bottle and always left uncapped on the rim of the bathtub.

Faye.

She was downstairs. In the oak casket I'd picked out myself, cream lining, bronze handles. I hadn't let anyone else do it. I'd washed her. Combed her. Sutured her. I'd done all of it with my hands and my hands hadn't shaken and I don't know what that says about me. I was the one who'd killed her too. That I also knew.

But there was against my hip in the bed a coldness. Not a whole body. Just a touch, the way she'd done for years. She'd won my side of the mattress centimeter by centimeter, night after night, never stopping, and eventually I'd end up on the edge of the bed sleeping on six inches of mattress while she took all the rest. That's how it was between us. It had always been that way.

I didn't move. It wasn't courage. I never had much courage for anything. It was just that as long as I didn't turn my head I could keep both things at once. Downstairs Faye was dead in her casket. And here in this bed something cold was breathing against me. And if I didn't turn my head it could stay like that. Both things could exist at the same time and I didn't have to choose which one was true.

I could feel the sheet on my thigh. I could feel the cold. I could smell the vanilla.

I'm going to have to start over from the beginning.

There are things people don't say about the undertaker's trade. People don't want to know. They say funeral home the way they'd say bakery or hardware store. A clean business with hours and a cash register. So I'll say it without dressing. The smell of formaldehyde doesn't leave. It never leaves.

At first it burns your nose. It catches you by the throat and squeezes and you go outside and it comes out with you. It's in your clothes and in your hair and under your nails and you can wash yourself all you want it changes nothing. And then one morning you wake up and it's not outside anymore. It's inside. It's in the bread you butter in the morning. In the butter. In the steam rising off the plates. In everything that's warm. And then it's in your wife's hair when she leans over the sink and you bury your nose in her neck.

My house is two stories. There's a staircase between them and that's all they have in common. Two worlds. They don't touch. They never will.

Downstairs is the parlor. That's where I work. The stainless steel and the fluorescent light and the table and the instruments laid out on it in the order I need them. The casket catalogs with dog-eared pages that families flip through with trembling fingers and eyes that see nothing because they can't see. They nod and they point and they say that one or that one. There's the foundation too. The stitching. The last hairdos you give to someone who doesn't give a damn. People come down to my place in one state and they leave in another. More presentable than they ever were when they were alive.

Upstairs was life. The coffeemaker gurgling in the morning. The radio too loud because Faye always turned the radio too loud and I'd stopped telling her. Her footsteps on the floor. The sound of a drawer opening and closing. A door. The bathroom faucet. All those sounds you stop hearing after a while and that just become the sound of someone being alive in the same house as you.

Between the two there's the staircase. Fourteen steps. The third one creaks. It always creaked. Since the first day. I could have fixed it. I could have ripped the board out and put in a new one and it would have taken me an hour maybe not even. But I never did. You end up living with the sounds. With all the sounds. The ones from upstairs, the ones from downstairs. And one morning you don't know which are which anymore.

In October, Hank Muller died.

The heart, they said. It was always the heart. It made an easy word to say to the neighbors over the fence and to the family on the phone. The heart. It made a clean word. A word that washed its hands.

Irene called him for coffee. Once. Then a second time. And somewhere between the two times she understood it wasn't coffee that was the problem.

Hank had spent three days on my roof one summer. Three days in full sun ripping off old shingles and nailing on new ones. He came up in the morning with a thermos of coffee and came back down in the evening and between the two he said almost nothing. Just the sound of the hammer and the nails between his teeth and the sweat running down his back. The third evening I pulled out my wallet. I opened it and started counting bills and he looked at me. There was no anger in his eyes. That wasn't it. It was something else. Like I'd pissed in a well. I put the wallet away. I said nothing. He said nothing.

A week after Hank died Irene called. Her voice didn't tremble. She said:

— Come over.

I took the road and drove up to their place. She led me to the storage room. A closet of ten square feet. Boxes and tools and loose screws and dust.

She pulled open a drawer. She didn't search. She knew where it was.

She held out a Polaroid.

Faye.

Naked. Breasts out.

In the image there was a narrow room. A single bed. A window with no curtain. The kind of room where you fuck in the afternoon and the heat sticks to the walls.

My face did nothing. An undertaker's face.

Irene was watching me. She was waiting for something. I don't know what she was waiting for. For me to fall maybe. For me to say something.

And that's when I saw something else.

The hair.

In the photo she had her part on the left. The same fold. The same discipline above the temple. That hairstyle was summer. That summer. The one where she smiled too much and I couldn't figure out why. She'd chosen that left part in June. I knew because I was the one who picked her hair out of the shower drain every evening.

Irene wore the same hairstyle. Not roughly. The same. Repeated every morning in two houses three streets apart for forty years. The same mirror for the same man. Like a virus that settled into two bodies at the same time.

Hank.

The worst part is we used to laugh about it. Hank and me. Sitting on the dock. The sun beating on the backs of our necks and the mosquitoes and the warm beer in the cans and the silence between us. That silence. And then Hank would turn his head toward me and say it.

— We got the same taste in women Lloyd. The same goddamn taste.

And he'd smile. That smile of his. It climbed up one side of his mouth first, and then the other side followed, and when it was done he'd look at you with that thing in his eyes that looked like friendship but wasn't. And I'd laugh. And Hank would laugh too. He'd laugh with me. He'd look me straight in the eyes and laugh.

Irene was watching me. She was looking for a crack somewhere in my face.

I slipped the Polaroid into the inside pocket of my jacket. I said nothing. I left.

On the road I didn't cry. I didn't scream. I didn't even swear. I felt nothing. Nothing clean anyway. Just a taste. The taste of formaldehyde in the throat, except I hadn't worked all day. The taste came from somewhere else. It came from inside.

When I got home Faye was in the kitchen. She was cutting carrots. Her hands were wet and she was wiping them on the towel hanging from the oven handle and her hair was already done. The part on the left. The clip above the ear.

She turned her head.

— You're early.

I didn't say anything to her.

The next day, Hank was on my table.

There's a moment in this job. The body is there on the stainless steel, naked under the fluorescent light, and you're no longer dealing with a dead man. You're dealing with the guy who handed you a beer sitting on the dock. Who laughed in your face. The same meat. Not the same weight.

That moment doesn't last long. Less than a second.

I took the trocar. I drained Hank. The carotid. The formaldehyde through the left side, the blood through the right.

My gaze slipped. One second. To his cock. And in that second there was no thought, no morality, just a name rising like water in a ditch. Faye.

The blade bit the cheek. A thin line where the skin wasn't holding on to much anymore. An accident of nothing at all. The kind of mistake that doesn't happen when you're sure of your hands.

I recovered. Foundation. Powder. My fingers put the surface back in order. Outside the wind was turning in the power lines.

The ceremony took place. The way they all take place.

People in black in the room, packed on the benches like crows on a wire. The flowers set out in rows. The words, he's at peace, he didn't suffer, words measured out like the chemicals, that slow things down, that cover, that give shape to what has no shape anymore. That heal nothing at all.

Irene in the front row. Dark glasses, hair pulled tight. Faye beside me. Dry lips, hair pulled tight.

Two left parts in the same room.

Between them, Hank in his suit, blue tie someone must have picked out in a shop. The nick on the cheek hidden under the foundation. The pastor read a passage.

When people left, Faye folded the chairs. She stacked them one against the other without a sound, hands steady, back straight. She'd always known how to do things right. Maybe that was the worst part.

The night before the burial I woke up. Three o'clock. My feet found the floor in the dark. The third step creaked the way it always creaks.

Downstairs the hallway light cut the parlor in two. Faye was leaning over the casket. Her hand flat on Hank's forehead. She bent down and pressed her mouth to the skin.

Her face.

I'd never seen that. The features open, slack, emptied of stiffness. A face that wasn't performing anymore. More naked than the body on my table. More naked than in the Polaroid. In the photo she was giving flesh. Here she was giving what she had underneath.

It wasn't her face. Not the one I knew. The one she'd worn under my roof for forty years, like an organ you only find at autopsy, when you open up and discover it looked nothing like what you thought.

I went back up. The step creaked anyway. I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling.

Twenty minutes later she came up. She slipped in on her side. Her skin carried the cold of the stainless steel table. She laid that cold in the bed, against my hip.

Three months passed. The house didn't move.

Objects made their rounds. The coffeemaker in the morning. The dresser drawer. The sheet each of us pulls to their own side. The step that creaks. We ate face to face in the kitchen and outside the crows landed on the wire and left for no reason. I'd always taken that silence for the silence of old couples, the kind that comes when everything's been said. That wasn't it. It was a wall. And I'd lived forty years against a wall believing it was my home.

Faye had the heart. Fifteen years she'd been monitored. Every evening two pills, a glass of water from the tap, the gesture done standing by the sink. For years I hadn't watched. After Hank's heart attack I couldn't help it anymore. I counted the pills the way you watch the water level in a well in August.

And something settled. A weight in the chest that's waiting for you when you open your eyes in the morning and is still there when you leave work at night.

The medical file was up to date. Four months since the last appointment with Graham. Not too recent, not too old. The kind of gap where nobody goes looking.

I called the supplier. Oak casket. Cream lining. Bronze handles. Same model as Hank's. The guy on the line asked if I had a service coming up. I said it was for stock.

He said all right. Nobody asked questions of a man who lives with the dead.

For eighty-nine evenings I was a decent man. On the ninetieth I opened the door. It was a Tuesday.

The dishes. She washed, I dried. Our fingers touched with every plate passed. For years that had become our intimacy.

We went up. Fourteen steps. The third one creaked. Faye sat on the edge of the bed. The bottle made its click. The glass of water from the tap. Her hands around the glass. That night the pills weren't the same.

She swallowed without looking.

— Good night.

— Good night.

The words made the sound they always make.

She fell asleep. I counted. Seven minutes.

The rhythm changed. Not all at once. Like a stream drying up, the water slows, hesitates, can't find the passage anymore. A long breath. The air caught in her throat. Then a gap between two takes.

The last sound. Wet. Something scraping to get out. A word maybe. My hand was a few inches from hers on the sheet. I didn't touch her. I was afraid of the cold.

I got up.

I took her. Her body kept the shape of the mattress and the mattress kept the shape of her. Foam remembers longer than people. I carried her down the stairs. The third step said nothing. The wood knew.

The stainless steel. The fluorescent light. The cold.

At seven fifteen I called Greer. Not Graham the cardiologist. Greer the GP. The kind who signs because he wants to go home. I put the words in order. Woke up. Breathing. Heart. File. I said the sentence you say when you want a door to open.

Greer came. He put his hand on my shoulder. He looked the way you look at a watch when you already know the time. He signed. His car started in the driveway and the gravel made the sound that gravel makes.

I put the apron on. Took the instruments out of the cart.

The trocar above the navel. I'd kissed that navel. That was a long time ago. We still did that kind of thing back then. We made noise in this house. The sound of a husband on his wife is the same sound as the work you do on a stranger. The formaldehyde doesn't know the difference.

The injection in the neck. The neck I'd breathed against a million times in the dark. Her blood in the tube. My fluid in her veins.

I pushed the liquid into the phalanges, massaged the joints the way you maintain something that no longer holds. She had to look like she was sleeping. The work had to be clean.

The stitch on the belly veered. One centimeter. I undid it. I redid it. Straight. The dead are owed that much.

The hair. The plastic comb at ninety cents. The part on the left. The gesture she made every morning in front of the bathroom mirror for a man who laughed in my face. And it was me now. Me pulling the comb through her hair. Me finishing. The last thing I did for my wife was style her hair for her lover.

I set the lid. The sound of wood on wood. Like a suitcase you close before a trip nobody comes back from.

I went up. The step creaked. I lay on my back. The ceiling was where it had always been.

And in the dark:

— Move over. You're on my side.

Her voice. Hoarse. The morning one when she'd slept badly.

The mattress shifted. The hollow. The one her body had made in the foam over a whole life. The foam hadn't forgotten.

I moved over. My body obeyed before my head. A marriage leaves reflexes in the bones.

Her hip against mine.

Cold.

Not the cold of a woman coming back from the hallway. Not the cold of a window. A hard, mineral cold, a cold of stainless steel and fluorescent light. A cold of death.

My feet searched for the floor. The floorboards gave back a normal cold. A house cold. A wood cold. I ran.

The third step creaked.

The fluorescent light in the parlor. The oak casket. The bronze handles. I lifted the lid.

Empty.

The cream lining without a wrinkle. As if nobody had ever been laid there. From upstairs, in the night still standing:

— Lloyd. Stop your nonsense and come to bed.

The mattress made the sound of someone turning toward the wall.

— I'm cold.