Over Exposure Part 3

None I can think of.

Stories with bells, movies with bells? Dreams with bells?

Maybe there's a Christmas movie, I don't know, some clichd scene with kids in a sleigh in the snow. But it means nothing to me. Just some snippet I can picture, but I can't even remember the movie's name.

One-sixty five an hour. All those blackheads, all that pinching and ma.s.saging and cleansing the cheeks of the rich, the pampered, and Janet was converting all that into worthless back and forth blather. Nothing to show for it week after week as the bells continued to chime within their walls.

Janet reported on her sessions to Isaac. She claimed she was giving him the verbatim replay. Even if it was true, he doubted she caught every nuance of Ray's questioning, or her own responses. How could she? And it was often the nuances, the unspoken revelations hidden in the shadows of the sentences, crouched in the timbre of the voice or lurking in the incomplete phrases, the swallowed word, the unfinished thought which gave away the truth. He wondered if Ray had requested that Isaac attend a session. Couples therapy. He wondered if he'd been implicated in Janet's deteriorating mental health, this hallucinatory excursion she was taking. He wondered if Janet had refused to ask Isaac, for fear he'd decline. Or maybe she was working herself up to ask him. She was right. He would decline. That was certain. He wanted no part of shrinks and their manipulative manner, their insidious tactics for sneaking past the surface into the private regions. f.u.c.k them all. f.u.c.k their seemingly neutral questions, their long silences, their slimy trade craft.

He could distinctly hear other conversations between Ray and Janet. Conversations that went unreported, but which Isaac was nonetheless certain had occurred.

Were there any other stresses in her life? Problems. s.e.xual, marital, work related.

Oh, I forgot.

What's that, Janet?

Well, really it's no big deal. I mean nothing that would explain the bells.

Tell me about it.

A couple of months ago I had a miscarriage.

I'm sorry.

You think that could be connected? You think that miscarriage could have set this whole thing off?

Do you?

Well, I really did want to get pregnant and have a child. I still want to.

Go on.

But I mean, what? Like the bells might be related to a lost child? How would that work?

I don't know. But the mind is very good at finding images for its pain.

Oh. So like I'm hearing these bells, they're metaphors for the baby somehow. Bells I would've hung on the baby's crib. Is that it? The bells that were meant to be but aren't going to be? That's a stretch. I don't buy it.

Why not, Janet?

Bells on a crib? No. I don't really a.s.sociate bells and cribs.

Go on. See where that leads you.

Go where? I had a miscarriage. That was real. And now these bells are real. They're in the wall. Like rats or mice. Only bells.

Are they?

Yes, there're real.

But your husband can't hear them.

No, he can't. That's what he says.

You don't believe him?

The bells are real.

Why would Isaac lie?

Sometimes he's not supportive. Like he's unhappy with me. I love him and I know he loves me, but it feels like he's the enemy sometimes. Like he's run out of patience with me.

Is that what you think? Your husband hears the bells and he's lying so you'll doubt your own sanity?

He's very smart. He's clever and ingenious. I think he's disappointed in me. He seems to have lost interest in me physically. Especially since the miscarriage.

So make the connection. Your marriage is suffering a downturn and then there are these bells you hear in the wall.

Okay, okay. So somehow I created the G.o.dd.a.m.n bells to make myself interesting to Isaac? To get attention?

Did you?

No, absolutely not.

All right.

But while we're on my marriage, I've been thinking about something. This thing I haven't thought about it for years. It's probably nothing.

I'm here. I'm listening.

At the beginning, before we got married, we signed papers. Legal stuff. Prenups, you know. I get half no matter what.

Is that important? Are you considering a divorce?

I'm not. But sometimes I think Isaac may be.

And that connects to the bells how?

Well, you know, there's like a kick out clause or something in the prenups. I don't know what it's called. Something about sound mind, good mental health. Some boilerplate thing that the lawyers put in.

I'm not sure what you're getting at, Janet.

If I'm crazy, I get nothing. If I get committed to an inst.i.tution or if you diagnose me as unstable. Oh, never mind. That's too weird. It's impossible.

Why is it impossible?

I think I'm hearing bells. But you're not about to commit me to a mental ward, right? I'm not that far gone. Am I? Tell me I'm not that far gone.

Ray would laugh at that.

Janet, calm down. We're just talking. You're not that far gone. Not even close.

f.u.c.king shrinks. Isaac imagined this conversation. Imagined it, but it felt like it happened. And did she report it to him? h.e.l.l, no.

Isaac and Janet hadn't discussed the miscarriage or the emotional fallout. That morning when it happened she'd come into his office looking pale. Her face grim. He rocked himself to his feet, followed her to the bathroom.

"I don't think we should flush it. That would surely clog the pipes."

Janet said nothing. She stared at the soupy mess.

So Isaac disposed of it. Scooped it out of the toilet with a garden trowel and dumped it into a garbage bag, then put that in another, and that in another. Three bags for the little red ma.s.s. They discussed burying it in the backyard, but Janet said no. She couldn't bear the thought that it would always be so close by. So Isaac dropped the garbage bags into the can outside. The red unfortunate ma.s.s in the toilet bowl had to wait inside the garbage can for two days until the Friday pick-up.

Isaac wasn't ready for a child. Not even close. So he had to pretend to grieve, go through the motions. She seemed to buy it, and said rea.s.suring things to him, hugged him. Then sure enough, not long after that she began hearing the bells. So maybe there was a connection. One would think.

A week went by. The bells kept ringing for Janet. Janet, for whom the bells tolled. They didn't toll for Isaac. He smoked his dope, watched sports on TV, bought and sold his stocks. A day trader for the last five years, he was at his computer twelve hours a day making split-second money, in and out of one position, then another, you couldn't get sentimental about anything, or have any doubts, you had to forge on, click and click again, buy and sell and be quick about it, at his computer all day while Janet extracted plugs of wax from the enlarged pores of her pampered customers, the insipid spa music playing overhead.

Isaac rarely left the house. Everything he wanted he could order online. He bought his toothbrushes online, his deodorant, all his needs. Even his dope arrived at the front door. The teenage kid down the street came by every couple of weeks. Stood on the porch, and gave Isaac a baggie inside a paper sack, and Isaac gave him a white business envelope full of bills. Hydroponic sensimilla, one toke and Isaac was gone. Gone for hours. One freaking toke.

Lately he'd been making a new departure from the house twice a week. A round trip jaunt to his lover's condo on South Beach. Took a couple of hours off from work. Trading one perfectly timed transaction for another.

Was he a s.h.i.+t? Was he a s.h.i.+t for cheating on Janet after her unfortunate biological accident? Was that any way to be supportive? Okay, sure. He was a s.h.i.+t. A jacka.s.s, a son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h. Guilty as charged. Hey, he was a guy. What could he do? It was part of the job description. Psychoa.n.a.lyze that, Ray.

Wednesday night Isaac was watching ESPN, Indiana's tall white guys clobbering the beejesus out of a sc.r.a.ppy all-black Kentucky team. Online he'd placed a five hundred dollar bet on the Hoosiers, taking the eight point spread. And his bet looked safe late in the fourth quarter.

That's when Janet and Carla walked into the TV room. Carla wore a white T-s.h.i.+rt, the material as thin as a film of sweat. Isaac was thinking, why bother with a s.h.i.+rt at all?

Her b.o.o.bs were bigger than Janet's, perkier too, and her nipples were the shadows of pennies behind the vaporous fabric. She had shoulder length blonde hair and dark bushy eyebrows. The blonde was real, and the dark eyebrows were real. Janet had commented on it. Actually she said she found Carla hot. If she was lesbian, she'd hit on her. Slim-hipped, a boyish b.u.t.t, great legs that she liked to show off. Calves that you might expect on a ballerina. A physical specimen. Isaac had suggested a threesome, but Janet thought he was joking and blew him off. He wasn't joking. He'd never had a threesome. One of his many unfulfilled fantasies.

"Have the bells been ringing?" Janet asked him.

"Not so I've noticed," Isaac said. "Anyone want a toke?"

He picked the baggie off the side table. Held it up.

Carla smiled, but said nothing.

"We're just going to walk around and see if we can hear the bells," Janet said. "Carla's going to tell me if I'm crazy."

"You're not crazy," Carla said. "n.o.body thinks you're crazy. You've just been under stress."

Carla knew about the miscarriage. That made four people in the know, counting Ray. Their little extended family.

They started a tour of the house, searching for bells. Isaac waited till they were in the kitchen, the most distant room, then got up from the lounge chair, went into his office and jiggled the mouse to wake his computer. He clicked to the program he'd written.

His router was set to activate the wireless modules scattered through the house, each tucked a few inches inside air-conditioning grills, and all of them faced inward so the sound would travel back into the walls. Five chiming units, each with a microprocessor, set to play a few seconds of wind chime music or the tinkle of a xylophone. Small deviations between the bell sounds. He'd ordered the units online as he had with his toothbrush and deodorant. The s.h.i.+t you could find online, it was amazing.

Just that morning when he'd been resequencing them to keep things fresh, he found a bug in the system. He wasn't sure where or what it was. Since then, all afternoon, the chimes had been going off and turning on without warning. He rebooted his computer but that didn't stop it. Off and on, on and off. He'd f.u.c.ked up the program somehow, inserted a line of bad code, or deleted some crucial pa.s.sage, or the f.u.c.ker had just gone unstable on its own. He spent hours trying to track it down but couldn't. So the whole bell-ringing system was pretty much f.u.c.ked. He'd have to wait till Janet went to work tomorrow and take down each chiming units. Figure out what to do next.

For a minute he fiddled with the program, but it didn't respond. He'd lost control of the d.a.m.n thing, and now that Carla was here, there'd be no bells. Or maybe there would be. It was no longer his call. Some gremlin was calling the shots.

He went back to the TV. While he'd been gone, Kentucky had employed a full court press and those dogged ball hawkers had stolen three inbound pa.s.ses from Indiana and scored each time. Less than a minute he'd been gone, and the Wildcats had erased the comfortable lead and now were endangering the spread. Five hundred bucks about to disappear. More gremlins.

From the dining room Janet gasped. Then she made a bright metallic scream. The chimes had decided to ring. Just then, just at that moment, right in front of Carla and Janet together. Like black magic. Like chupacabra blood-sucking voodoo.

Then he heard their voices, Carla's was calm, trying to be reasonable with Janet, comforting her, telling her everything was going to be okay. Just relax, find her center, be tranquil, breathe breathe breathe. Then her voice grew quiet, and a second later Janet made a howl so low and forlorn you might've thought she was a starving dog.

After a long moment Carla marched into the TV room and sat down on the couch. He could hear Janet sobbing in the bedroom at the far end of the house.

"I a.s.sume you told her you didn't hear the bells."

Carla looked at the TV. She smoothed a hand across her forehead as if trying to ease away a headache.

"I told her I didn't hear them."

She looked at Isaac then stared off toward the other end of the house where Janet was sobbing. Frost glazed her blue eyes.

"Okay. Well done."

"I don't like this, Isaac. This is mean. This is s.h.i.+tty."

"You're not mean, Carla. Or s.h.i.+tty. You're a wonderful person. I'm the s.h.i.+tty one. Blame it on me. The twisted husband."

"Are you mocking me?"

"Maybe a little."

"Stop it, Isaac. Just stop it."

"Look, we're almost there," he said.

"I don't like it."

"Okay, sure, it's not pretty. But it's necessary. We need to suck it up, keep our focus."

"This is mean. Just flat out mean."

"Don't go soft on me, sweetness. You knew what it would take."

"Hearing about it is one thing. But thisa Janet is my friend."

"Lose a friend, gain a lover. You're having second thoughts, it's normal. Don't worry about it. You'd have to be a heartless b.i.t.c.h not to have second thoughts. I wouldn't like you if you were heartless. Completely heartless. A little heartless, that's fine."

They listened to Janet's sobs die to whimpers.

Carla pinched the bridge of her nose. A pretty nose, maybe a little bigger than textbook, but it gave her a certain exotic flavor. The places that nose had been. That prodding beak.