The Ghost Clause by Howard Norman

Author:Howard Norman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

Entwined Together in Trust

A week after Valentine’s Day, as they were getting ready for bed, Zachary said to Muriel, “I’m starting to look at ten or twenty people a day—just on the street in town, or driving past them in their cars—as possible kidnappers.”

“Not good,” Muriel said. “It’s not paranoid, but it’s not natural, either. Sort of hallucinating everyday life or something. What do you think you can do to change it, Zach?”

“When I told Erica this was happening, she said, ‘Welcome to the fucked-up part of the profession.’ She also said, the only thing is to keep to procedure. And try to sleep more than the three hours a night I’ve been sleeping. The less sleep, the more clouded one’s judgment.”

“You slept a good five hours last night.”

“So you noticed, huh?”

“Zachary, come on. Of course I noticed. I notice when you come to bed. I notice when you leave the bed. And, despite all the stresses and strains, I more than notice when you’re in bed, right?”

“I never thought so much about parentheses.”

“Me neither. And I wrote a whole damn dissertation on them.”

“Murr, you are a very beautiful, very sexy, and very irresistible woman.”

“Tell me.”

“You are a very beautiful, very sexy, and completely irresistible woman.”

“From ‘very’ to ‘completely.’ Now I believe you.”

“So why do you have such a serious expression all of a sudden?”

“Because. I’m going to say something to you, sweetheart. It has to do with—crudely put, with fucking as often as we want. Making love, I mean, keeping that part of our life strongly present. I mean, it occurred to me, and this was just last week. It frightened me, a thought I had.”

“Which thought was that?”

“My thought was that somewhere deep in that complicated mind of yours, you might be afraid—afraid of wanting to have a child with me. Because, what with Corrine’s situation. What with your deep sympathies with Johanna and Devon.”

“So, Murr, your thought was what? That knowing what can happen to a child in the world? Seeing how it’s torn her parents to pieces. That I would feel, what if that happened to us?”

“That’s pretty much it.”

Zachary said, “If I recognized that was happening, I’d quit this job on the spot. Pick up the phone and say, ‘I quit.’ Muriel, I love you, and I am very, very sorry that all of this has even put that thought into your head. I love this work, and I hate what’s happened to that little girl.”

“I hate it, too.”

“And neither of us could’ve foreseen any of this. Like that Robert Frost line you’re always quoting—”

“‘The best way out is always through.’”

“I’m in full partnership mode with Erica now.”

“I do think that’s for the best.”

From what I could hear as I sat in the library, Epilogue draped across the typewriter, Muriel and Zachary scarcely slept that night, but not out of worry or preoccupation, but (as the writer Jean Rhys put it, far better than I could) entwined together in trust.

A full two weeks later, after

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