“Sweet,” said Jonah. “Chelsea’s playing at LA Galaxy soon.”
“I’ll get us tickets,” said Anders and squeezed his shoulder. “You’d really be okay with that?”
Jonah looked at the ground and shrugged.
“I don’t care.”
He lunged for the ball and began bouncing it on his head. Anders intercepted it and called for him to go long. Jonah raced away across the lawn, the West Side silhouetted behind him. The sun was still setting early, but there was a good hour of light left. Anders took a few steps back, ran forward, and let the ball go. It was a perfect pass.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Early March
Frank had left a note on the kitchen counter for Cleo to find, but it wasn’t written by him. It was from their next-door neighbor. He was complaining about their “late-night soap opera histrionics,” as he put it. The neighbor was a theater critic with impeccable hair, so he could say a thing like that. Cleo read the note once more, folded it neatly into a square, then set fire to it over the kitchen sink. It was noon.
Frank had left early that morning for a shoot that wouldn’t wrap until long after sundown. She had not heard him leave; he had taken to sleeping on the sofa, ostensibly to avoid disturbing Cleo when he came home late, but mostly so he could return drunk with impunity. It went without saying that this arrangement meant they were no longer having sex. Cleo had spent the morning lying in bed, watching the sunlight creep accusatorily across the ceiling, until thirst drove her to the kitchen, where she’d found the note waiting. Frank had not messaged her or appended any note of his own to the neighbor’s. He’d left it for her to discover alone.
She placed the matches back in the cutlery drawer. There were the hand-painted chopsticks she had made for him when they first met over a year ago. She was always making things back then, carrying them to Frank like a cat proudly dropping a sparrow at his feet. Not anymore. The note was a new kind of humiliation. Someone had witnessed them. Worse, someone had confirmed what she already feared: they were not normal. It was not normal to fight like they did. Not normal for Frank to return drunk so many nights in a row. Not normal for her to react with such savagery when he did. In the past month, she had shattered a vase and an ashtray, she had hit his face and chest and arms, and last night she had hurled the blue orchid he’d bought her as a wedding present at him, snapping the stem in half.
“No one else is like this,” she’d said the night before. They were sitting on the living room floor, the orchid’s black soil scattered around them. “Are they?”
She looked at him.
“I don’t know, Cley,” he said.
“Well, what do you think?”
“I’m sure there are couples that are worse.” He shrugged. “And better.”
“You thought we would be better?”
He shrugged again. “I didn’t expect it to be so hard.”
“Being married?”
“Living together, everything. I didn’t think you’d be so … so affected by me.”
“What am I meant to be affected by, if not you?”
“I know, I know. It’s just, I work hard. Life is hard. I don’t want to come home and have … The fighting, you know. I don’t like it. And you being upset with me all the time.”
“But why is the onus on me not to be upset? Why can’t you come home earlier? Or not spend every other night out? Why can’t you … I don’t know, be better?”
Frank cupped his forehead with his palms and looked down.
“What?” she asked. “Too many feelings for you, Frank?”
He looked up at her from between his hands.
“It’s not fun, you know,” he said quietly. “Always being wrong.”
He’d stood up stiffly and left the room, and it was like all the light left with him, leaving Cleo in the shadowed world of her own thoughts once again.
Cleo turned the tap on and ran water over the ashes in the sink, scooping the black mess down the drain with her palm. A soap opera, the neighbor had called them, and it was true.
She knelt on the kitchen floor and punched herself once, twice, in the stomach. She fell forward onto her hands and knees, breathing heavily. She could feel her breasts and stomach pulling toward the floor. She balanced on one palm and punched her fist into her stomach again. It was pointless; gravity worked against her, softening the blow. She wanted the anger knocked out of her, to be left feeling quiet and still, but the punches had been too dull to dislodge it. It surged on.