The Rom-Commers(45)

And then I’d casually glance over time and again to see Charlie cutting the bell pepper into a star shape, playing Pachelbel’s Canon through his phone speaker to get Cuthbert into an eating mood, and changing out plates because apparently the texture of Limoges versus Fiestaware can impact a guinea pig’s gustatory experience.

“Sensitive” didn’t start to cover it.

Sometimes I’d eavesdrop on their conversations. “I know you miss him, buddy,” Charlie would say. “It’s hard. I get it.”

On a really bad day, Charlie might slice a carrot into thin sheets on a mandoline and form it into an origami-style carrot flower. Or hum “Bohemian Rhapsody” a cappella while he waited for the nibbling to start. Or both.

“You’ve got a great voice,” I told Charlie.

Charlie shrugged. “He loves Freddie Mercury.”

I don’t want to sound insensitive, but at one point, I said to Charlie, “Won’t he eat if he gets hungry enough?”

Charlie shook his head, like Common misconception. “If he goes too long without eating, his health can start to fall apart. And the thing about guinea pigs is that they’re prey animals. So when they get sick, they hide it. Because the weakest of the herd are always the first to get picked off.”

“Cuthbert,” I said, in a tone of affectionate reprimand, “no one in this room is getting picked off.”

We both gazed at Cuthbert. Then Charlie said, “I don’t think he’s buying it.”



* * *



ONE NIGHT, WHEN I’d been there for more than two weeks and was feeling very at home, Charlie and I had just come back from another trip to the market when we heard the high beeps of Charlie’s front door disarming and then a woman’s voice calling, “Charlie?”

I’d been handing Charlie cans of crushed tomatoes to stack on a high shelf in the pantry—but at the moment her voice sounded, Charlie grabbed me by the arm and yanked me in with him.

Then he pulled the door closed until the tongue caught in the latch.

“What are you—” I started.

But Charlie shook his head like crazy and lifted a finger to his lips.

It was not a large space. We were corralled tightly by shelves of food, with only room for about an inch between our bodies. Which made me suddenly both exquisitely aware of the electromagnetic energy around Charlie’s body … and aware that Charlie was also suddenly aware of mine.

I shifted to a whisper. “Why are we hiding in the pantry?”

“That’s Margaux,” Charlie whispered back.

“Who’s Margaux?”

“My ex-wife.”

Of course. Margaux. They’d been quite the power couple for a brief moment in time, the year when his movie Forty Miles to Hell and her documentary Women Aren’t Funny—which was just an hour and a half of women stand-up comics being hilarious on the topic of that very thing—were both sweeping up prizes on the awards circuit.

I’d read a few features on her, in fact, over the years. My big takeaway—and please don’t be alarmed—was that she, and these are her words, “didn’t like fiction.”

I’ll give you a minute.

This lady, who was married to one of the most celebrated writers of fiction in the world, didn’t like fiction. If I recall, she’d said that she “just couldn’t get into fictional stories” because they “weren’t real.” One of the articles, in fact, ended with her rhetorical question: “It’s all made up. It’s all fake. How can it possibly matter?”

So, yeah. That marriage was probably doomed from Day One.

I don’t know if they make red flags bigger than that.

Anyway—now she was here. In Charlie’s house.

“What’s she doing here?” I asked. Weren’t they divorced?

“She’s here to pick up Cuthbert,” Charlie answered.

“She just comes into your house?” I asked.

“She still has the code.”

That raised more questions than it answered, but okay. “I thought you guys weren’t close.”

“We’re not.”

Next, Charlie heard a sound that I didn’t, and he stood up straighter, eyes wide, like Oh, god, she’s coming this way.

Sure enough, as I fell silent, we could hear her. She must have been talking to someone on the phone. “His car’s here,” she was saying, “but he’s not answering.”

Then she called again: “Charlie? Are you home?”

I looked at Charlie like Maybe we should just turn ourselves in.

And he looked at me like Never surrender.

I heard the ex-wife drop her keys on the kitchen counter and then wander off to another part of the house.

As her voice receded, I whispered, “Maybe we should make a break for it.”

“To where?” Charlie whispered back. “She’ll be back any second.”

“Text her! Tell her you’ve gone out.”

“Just randomly text her my whereabouts?” Charlie said. “I never text her.”

“Are you saying she’ll get a text from you and think, That’s funny. He never texts me. He must be hiding in the pantry?”

“I’m just saying it’s weird.”