After Claude by Iris Owens

Author:Iris Owens
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781590174104
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 2011-07-17T23:43:21+00:00

7

I WOKE up feeling so bad that turning my head to read Claude’s digital-clock radio remains one of my memorable achievements. It was two thirty, and the room was saturated with the gloomy light of a rainy afternoon. I just lay on that bed, pitying Claude, because the idea of being bodily molested was too grim to wish even on him. I knew in my bones that Claude wasn’t back. The reason I knew was that I was freezing, which suggested that the air conditioner had been in action all night.

I didn’t have the strength to mess around with the TV set. Anyway, if they aren’t burying some murdered dignitary, Saturday afternoon is the absolute bottom of the barrel. I didn’t think about Claude’s treachery or my suspicion that the child abuser had spent the night with Baba. When your physical system is as ravaged as mine was, everything except the necessity of breathing becomes a detail. All that concerned me was how to get to the air conditioner and turn it off before I was frozen solid. Forget it. The numbness, the drowsiness, the inability to rouse oneself, so movingly described in the diaries of Arctic cadavers, overtook me. I surrendered to the sweet embrace of eternal sleep.

When I came out of that stupor, my face was turned in the right direction, so it was without effort that I saw it had become six o’clock. The chill in the apartment was now unbearable. Leave it to the rat to arrange my destruction by the method I myself had frequently requested. Where was he?

I switched on the TV, and there before a map stood a madman doing a doctrinal dissertation on the fact that it was raining. It was easy to leave him to his ranting, and I made it to the living room, fell on the air conditioner, and turned off the death machine. The lamp on the floor was a hideous reminder of the recent debacle. Where was the. rodent? I appreciated his guilt, but as always, he was complicating the situation. The longer he waited to face the music, the more my divine patience ran out.

I seriously considered dressing and leaving the apartment. Let the rat crawl in shamefacedly and find me gone. That would give him something concrete to worry about. But where in that downpour, and in my weakened condition, was I going to drag myself? Better to have our scene over and done with.

What tone and position should I assume regarding his infantile behavior? I sat down on the couch and lit a Marlboro. I was still dressed in my festive fineries, adding an unbearable note of pathos to the tragedy. Tragedy? Should I treat it as a tragedy? Wasn’t that giving Baba a bit more importance than the amateur home wrecker deserved? I knew, on some intuitive level, why Claude had permitted her to take advantage of him. Of course, he was proving his masculinity to me, which was nonsensical. I was more than willing to have him prove it directly.

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