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Gerbil Pi

 The Key

When he arrived home from work, the dogs were in the front yard.  “What the Hell?”  He asked as they came to greet him, their wiry little terrier bodies bouncing.  “What are you guys doing out here?”  He knelt and they were all over him, squirming, yipping, whining: me first! Me! Pet me.  “Both of you.  Shameful little narcissists,” he said softly.  Grundie, the littlest, was licking his hand as if it were the last Popsicle on earth.

“Is Sheila home from school already?” he wondered out loud to them.  “Odd that she would let you out in the front yard without an escort.”  He was looking towards the corner of the house where the driveway emerged.  He stood then and the dogs did spirals, running and leaping around the front yard as he walked over to look down the driveway to see if Sheila’s car was tucked next to the gate at the back of the house.
 
“Huh,” he grunted at the empty driveway.  He’d fully expected to see a car.  The dogs were at his feet looking down the empty.

“What are you guys doing out here?”  Sheila would never have left them and gone off.  Absent minded as she might be sometimes, she was always mindful of her babies.

Mounting the porch steps, pulling the keys from his pocket, he paused; the front door, cracked open, caught his attention.  Heart quickening, chest constricting with a tug from his abdomen, he realized a moment of panic.  He tried to squash it: probably late and in a rush as usual, just didn't pull it closed to make sure it latched.  But he knew, and when he swung open the door he was already prepared for the visual shock that jolted him, quick freezing him in the doorway, framed.

The couch was knife slashed, stuffing hanging out, sticking up in tufts here and there.  The book shelf lay on its face, books and broken ceramic sculptures — some of Sheila’s recent projects from a ceramics class — lay scattered.  The Stereo was gone, two thousand dollars worth of superb equipment, half paid for on the Master Card..  Lamps lay on their sides, the ceramic one cracked in half with the electric cord running through it visible.  The brass Chapman’s reading lamp he’d picked out for himself at the  artsy furniture store down in Pioneer Square was bent in the middle of its long stem, but still standing on its heavy base.  Frames for two paintings — a Northwest watercolorist with growing national recognition, a friend of Sheila’s — broken on the floor, the paintings gone.  His thoughts drifted, broken as the scene... work your ass off... why the damage? ... so intentional...why break her work?

He found himself staring at the broken sculptures.  Who?  Her recent months of late night study with school friends, returning home at two or three in the morning, sometimes drunk or stoned, suddenly flitted through his mind.  He tried to suppress the the thoughts but they were already out.  She has a right to let loose he told whatever it was that sent the thoughts.  Then quickly, challengingly, Is there supposed to be  a relationship between those thoughts and this? No answer. You want to blame it on that; you would love to start something over that, wouldn’t you?  It has been eating at you and now some son-of-a-bitch has broken into your home, her home, broken her sculptures, among other things don’t forget, and you want to blame it on something that has no relationship what so ever.  You're an idiot.

Resentment towards Sheila hung behind him like a presence though he tried to wish it away.  Maybe she has a boy friend she’s been seeing and somehow...ENOUGH!  You never know...you never know...

.He knew he was going to have to deal with Sheila about this feeling: it had been growing in him.  But it had become so hard to talk to her lately.  Anytime he tried to ask about what she was doing those nights she stayed late — didn’t even call some nights! — started an argument.  “Why are you so dependent?” she would challenge him.   But then, that was perhaps another reason for his growing suspicion, the arguments...

You know how she has always complained about jealous possessive men.  The more you worry about it, the more she stays away.  You are probably causing it...  Yeah, but who is paying her bills while she’s having fun in school?  You’d think she would appreciate that!

It’s absurd, he realized, having an argument with himself with the house torn to ribbons and the precious stereo gone.  No wonder the poor woman couldn’t stand to come home.  He really was becoming and obsessive, possessive neurotic!

The bedroom door, half open, caught his eye.  A flashing image of their bedroom, violated, brought him back to the immediacy of the moment.  He nearly stepped on Grundie, crouched at his feet, as he took an impulsive step towards the door.  He could feel the anger rising even before he opened it.  When he saw the scene, it almost felt as if he were fainting, the shock of anger hit against the top of his skull so hard.  His imagination caught the thief in the act and he nearly floated off the ground, seeing himself grabbing the man, back turned as he emptied the dresser drawers, flung him against the wall, smashing his head again and again into the plaster until it cracked and shattered on the floor...

The table where Sheila worked on wax models for the metal sculptures she was making was cleared, broken pieces of wax lay scattered amongst the debris of clothing, dresser top paraphernalia, and bed clothes from the slashed mattress.  Wave upon wave of anger flowed through him and, in his frenzy, he hit the wall with a clenched fist, cracking and denting the old lathe and plaster.  Pain brought him back to his senses as he grabbed his fist, holding it close against his abdomen.  He hoped it wasn’t broken, then didn’t care, while, for a moment, he wished never to work again, then hoped it wasn’t broken again, not wanting to break his life long record of never having broken a bone.  You can always quit work. No excuses, just FUCK IT!

Withdrawing his hand from the protection of his abdomen, he examined it.  The skin was broken across the first two knuckles.  Blood appeared, filling the crevices in the abraded skin until there was just a growing puddle of blood.  Slowly he opened and closed his fist, feeling carefully the internal working of the joints.  It seemed to be working, just a bruised pain that would last for some time, no doubt; there would be swelling, stiffness,  just so he would remember not to do such a self abusive act to himself again.  The body is always trying to communicate one way or another.  He needed to listen more often, it was true.  Glancing at the room again, he decided he had better phone the police.  He left the room, squeezing his fist gingerly as he went.


The police had been gone about five minutes when he heard a car in the driveway.  He put the plastic bag of ice he had been holding on his hand in the sink.  The hand was feeling better, the swelling hadn’t grown as much as he’d expected.  The officer, a black woman had expressed concern.  The malicious nature of the damage was unusual, she’d said, for what appeared to be a theft.  She hoped that it wasn’t the beginning of a new, deranged, crime spree.  Had he or his wife made any enemies lately?  “No, none that I know of,” he’d answered, wondering as he was now what had she been doing those evenings.   And we aren’t running a dope ring either, if that’s what you’re wondering. He’d added, but kept it to himself.  At least not to my knowledge.  That was strictly for himself.  As they’d looked around they could not determine how the thief had gained entry.  Either he — they had referred to the thief as “he” he realized — had a key, knew how to pick double locks, or the door had been left unlocked.  They found nothing forced.

With some hope that he could lessen the inevitable shock at seeing the house torn to shreds, he went out to greet her on the porch.  He watched as she rounded the corner.  The dogs leaped by him and were dancing around her feet.  She stooped and they were all over her, hipping, licking.  She looked up at him, smiling, warm and relaxed.  He wished there was some way to change what lay behind him, ahead for them.  He did his best to smile back.  She turned again to the dogs.

He watched her face while she talked, petting the dogs.  “Hi babies.  Have you been good dogs?  You’re so excited today.  Has Corry been mean to you?  He’s such a mean old grouch, isn’t he?”  She said to them,  teasing at him through the dogs.  Her features were clean and fine, always a pleasure to watch.  Her skin, luminescent and fitted, was just beginning to show the fine lines around the eyes and across the brow that would deepen with age.  Her face was a constant obsession with her.  She could spend hours making it up.  He had once been under the misconception that women made up their faces for men.  Now, he realized, it must be some kind of personal, ongoing art form, learned from infancy and shared in some form amongst all women in a way men do not comprehend.  When they’d first begun to live together, he had attempted to convince her that she looked perfectly beautiful to him without make up — even more so, because to him it was she herself as she honestly was.  That was a concept, he soon realized was totally irrelevant to her, with regards to make up, anyhow.

While it seemed to him such a waste of time to spend hours in front of a mirror, staring at one’s face, she apparently derived such personal pleasure from doing that daily routine that he now tolerated it without comment.   Except on those occasions when she’d ask, “How do I look?” and he’d answer, “You always look beautiful,” which he realized must discredit him in her eyes as an art critic.   She would turn back to the mirror and saying absently to the face there,  “nobody always looks beautiful.”   No one has to, he’d respond silently.  But she would be staring at her face.  Once she’d perplexed him by adding absently, “Thank God.”

She looked back up at him, her brow wrinkled slightly. “Why are they so excited today?” 

“They have had, I suppose you could say, a very traumatic day.”  Her brow wrinkles deepened.


“Why?  Is something wrong?”  She rose smoothly, her legs, long and shapely in fitted jeans, straightening.

Leaving the porch to meet her as she came, he turned, puting his arm around her waist and they continued.  We had at least one visitor today, while we were out.”

“At least one?”  She asked.

“There was no calling card, but there was plenty of evidence someone was here.  They left something of a mess behind.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“I would have had it all cleaned up, but the police just left, and I was pretty busy with them.”

“The police?!”

At the door, he paused, looking into her eyes for a moment before saying, “this is a hell of a thing to come home to.”  Her eyes widened and he squeezed her close.  Taking a breath he turned the doorknob and said, “brace yourself.”

When the door swung open, she gasped with a quick intake of breath and he felt her go rigid under his arm .  “Oh my God,” she said softly.

Inside, standing, looking silently, they stood together.  Then he felt her pulling away, separat3ing herself from him, and he wanted to hold her longer but he let go, saying gently, “Aside from the stereo and the paintings, nothing seems to be missing.”  She was shaking her head slowly back and forth as if denial could remake the scene, or, perhaps, end a bad dream.  “The police could make no sense of the damage.  She said it seems more a sheerly malicious act than one of someone looking for something, and that people in the act of thieving don’t usually take time to do this kind of thing.”

“Who would do this?  Why?”

“It doesn’t appear they broke in.  All the windows were closed and locked. The front door was open and the dogs were in the front yard when I came home.  I guess we can be grateful they weren’t murdered.  I would imagine they would have been barking at the intruder, at least they bark when we are home.  Either someone forgot to lock the door when they left.” he had said everything in an uninflected monotone, and he intentionally  made the last statement non specific even though they both knew she was the last to leave, “Or,” he paused, “the perpetrator had some kind of key.”

She had been moving into the room while he spoke, she paused after his last statement, seemed to be listening for more, then knelt and began to pick up the pieces of broken ceramic sculptures.  He watched for a moment as she looked at them, tenderly sadly, inspecting each one carefully as she lifted it, as if to see if it were possible to put them back together, somehow.  The he followed into the room, going to the bookcase, lifting it back against the wall, and together they began to clean up.

She was not as upset by the bedroom as he had been.  Looking at the broken pieces of wax, she said, “they weren’t working out, anyway, this is a good excuse to start something new.”  While they cleaned, he mentioned how fortunate that they had just renewed the insurance and they’d included theft coverage this time. The stereo could be replaced.  He tried to be light-hearted, saying, “You’ve been wanting some new colors on the furniture, anyway, so we can thank our friend for that at least.”


Finally, they were through.  They stood, arms about each other, looking at the living room.  She had pulled from storage some of their colorful, old India-print spreads from their early days together in college when they’d slept on a mattress on the floor of their one room apartment.  With the genius of colorfully woven cloth magically transforming the damaged furniture, the house seemed almost cheerful now.  They wee preparing to go out for dinner, neither feeling a desire to cook.  Through it all she had been unusually quiet. But then, this was not a usual circumstance, he decided.  He bent his head and kissed her in the soft place under her left ear.  “I’m sorry,” he said , softly.

“Oh, there’s nothing for you to be sorry about.”  Reconciled grief edged her voice.

“Perhaps not, but when I saw the door cracked open, the dogs outside, I thought you had gone off in a cloud, forgetful...”  He stopped, leaving the condemnatory ‘again’ unsaid, feeling her tensing as he spoke.  Now he wished he had not spoken.

She drew away, turning to face him, her facial muscles hardening, a veil dropping across her eyes.  “You don’t really trust me, do you?”  The words spat sharp, hot daggers, searing his chest.

Caught off guard by her vehemence, he mentally reeled trying to find his footing.  He realized he must have stumbled through another one of those doors in her mind behind which lay a deep, dark subject she could not, or did not want to discuss.  If it was ‘could not,’ he would want to try.  If ‘did not,’ it must somehow quickly stop.  Past experience was never enough.  All the mystery, all the confusion and lack of communication that had been growing between them over the past months was present for him in this moment.  He suddenly felt weak and inadequate to the challenge his careless sentence had suddenly presented for him.

“I don’t understand.” he began carefully, “What do you see trust having to do with what I just said?”  A lamely, uncertain voice echoed behind the clumsy question and he feared she too would hear his uncertainty and misinterpret, then conclude he secretly agreed, at least with regard to this point, when in fact he really was confused by her sudden accusation.  “We both know you’ve been forgetful lately, is that what you mean by mistrust?”  He heard himself adding,  as if he were trying to provide sense, when in fact he was trying to put a net over a burgeoning feeling of fear at the sudden appearance of a deep, huge hole in his understanding.

“It’s your questioning!”  She exploded.  “I’m sick and tired of your constant questioning.  I feel like I’m being controlled all the time.”  Her words slapped him back and forth across the face with their rhythm.   Trembling, slightly, she stood in front of him, hands on hips, staring, breathing shallow and fast.

His head was shaking slowly back and forth, trying to deny what was happening.  Something very real must be going on within her that she could get this angry, this quickly.  If only he could know.  But for him, to know was apparently what she did not want.  “I just don’t understand what’s going on.”  His head was still shaking in denial.

“It’s not understanding, it’s knowing.  You have to know everything.  You can’t understand what a person needs.  A person needs freedom.”  She reached into a pocket and pulled something out, thrusting it at him.  “Here.”


He stared, seeing a key while wondering: how does she not have freedom?  She has a car, she’s going to school, stays out when she pleases... I pay the bills...

“It’s yours.”

He reached slowly out and took it.  “Listen, if you want to go to work and pay some of your own bills, or something, because you feel confined by my controlling such things, you are more than welcome to do so,” he said, half absently, while he studied the key.  “This is the front door key,” he finally realized out loud, a note of surprise making his voice louder.

“So now you want to go back on your agreement to help me through school so I can get a decent job.  Figures.”  Her voice reeked incrimination.  With barely a pause she finished with “You are really a bastard, you know that?”

“What? No, no.  What I meant was...”  But he wasn’t even sure he could remember correctly what he said because he had been distracted by examining the key.  Bills.  Yes, that was it.  “I mean, look.  How can you be free if I’m the one going to work, paying all your bills?  It just doesn’t make sense.  I don’t know what you mean by freedom.  I just thought maybe you were complaining because I was forcing you...”  But he stopped, suddenly, hearing a growing sound of sarcasm in his voice, which he realized was a form of gasoline in their past arguments.  Plus, he had an elusive feeling he was actually about to create an even worse problem than he already had if he were to carry on.

As if she were reading a script she swiftly responded with “You’re doing what you want to do.  You always say: ‘whenever I do something, it’s what I want to do,’ don’t you?   Isn’t that what you always say?  Aren’t you doing what you want to do by going to work?”

Now she was badgering him.  He could see that.  It had to stop.  There was no sense to it.  There was some deep thing underneath all of this and he could not go on without grasping it.  He would just get angry.  He always had.  He did not want to let that happen.  Not with everything they’d been through in the past couple of hours.

“If I were to stop going to work tomorrow, and decided to go back to school, or go on a trip, or start writing a novel, I would perhaps be doing what I want to do, but what would happen then?  What about duty?  What about obligation?  I can’t just do what I want.”

“Just because you are doing your duty, doesn’t mean you own me,” she shot back at him without hesitation.

He stopped.  It’s like a script in a play.  Except I don’t feel like I have all my lines.  He saw that it would just go on.  At seeing that, he felt himself getting angry  and he realized they were accomplishing nothing more than venting anger.  To distract his feelings he looked at the key.  “Why do you have my key?”

Her fixed, angry stare did a momentary transformation then shifted to the key.  In a different tone, though still tinged with anger, she said, “I took it off your key ring this morning.”

He waited.

In yet another change of voice, “I lost mine last night.”


Watching her carefully now, still waiting, he acknowledged to himself a new feeling of confusion: lost her key... house broken into... angry at me... why? What’s going on?  She was beginning to look more defensive to him than self-righteous and angry.  At last he said, “You lost yours?”

“When I was leaving Jenny’s last night,” her voice seemed hurried, “as I went to the car and pulled my keys out... I guess the clasp must have come open.”  She paused as if to recall the events.  “Keys went all over into the lawn in the dark.  I got down and felt around and gathered them up, but I didn’t realize until I got home that I hadn’t found them all.  I went around to the back door and used that key.”

He remembered, he had been in the kitchen at the back of the house having a beer.  Though she usually came in the front door because the gate sagged and was difficult to open, he hadn’t given it any thought at the time.  “I’m surprised you didn’t knock at the front door because of the gate.”

“I thought you would be in bed.  Anyway, I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d remind me that you had told me to get one of those rings like yours that don’t come apart.  I borrowed your key so I could get another one made.”

He tried to make himself believe her but he had to ask what seemed obvious.  “I guess you realize I would have found out when I got home and didn’t have my front door key?”

“I had planned to come home early today.”  Pausing, then, as if she had to drag it out of herself, “I forgot.”  He chin was up.  She looked like a martyr waiting for the final blow.  “I got into a conversation with a friend.”

The way she was always using the ambiguous ‘a friend’ was one of those subtle red flags that never failed to stir him, however slightly.  Furthermore, nothing really made sense to him.  “I can’t believe you have become this worked up over losing your key.  This whole thing is just too bizarre to believe.”  He paused.  “Then you get mad at me, as if I’m somehow to blame.  Just what the hell am I supposed to think a bout all this?” he asked while shaking his head.  But he didn’t really expect an answer.

“I knew it would end like this,” she said tersely, her full lips squeezed tightly. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you about it.  You always get so suspicious.”

“That’s probably why it has.  Expectation is the mother of prophecy, you know.” 
And while he tried to unravel the last sentence he’d uttered, she responded quickly, “yeah, I expect you not to trust me and you don’t.  You never have and never will.”  There was a bitter, closed ring to her words that he felt no reason he could surmount would ever tap.

Trust.  Still the issue, he realized.  There was nothing he could do to stop the anger he could feel swelling from deep within as he looked at her stubborn, set face.  He put his hand to his head, pulling at his hair, knowing he would be shouting unctrollably if thisdid not stop now.  “One thing is very clear to me.”  His voice came out from deep within, ominous, exact and final.  “At least one of us does not trust ourself.  That’s where trust begins.”  He could feel himself glaring now.  “I’m through, I don’t want to talk anymore.  If you don’t trust me to trust you, where does it end?”  While he stared at her he tried to figure out just exactly what he meant by what he had said.  He was feeling dizzy and that made him feel even more angry.


She glared back for a moment, then turned, entered the bedroom and slammed the door.

Suspended, staring, studying the five etched rectangles on the white surface of the door, he began nodding, slowly.  You are definitely a jerk, he told himself.  He went to the kitchen for a beer, then returned to sit in his rocking chair, looking out the wide window at Greenlake across Aurora Avenue.  Two small sailboats with brightly colored orange and blue sails, barely filled, glided slowly in the evening breeze.  Cars moved freely in between, rush hour over now.  Joggers, cyclists, roller skaters, and walkers moved along the concrete path circling the lake.  That thick, yellowed look at the end of a sunny Northwest summer day pervaded the scene, a color like a photographic print from daylight film shot indoors, under incandescent lighting, without a blue filter.  Rich, sad, and deep with promise of a coming night.

Pistol and Grundie came out from behind the couch, crouching, peaking to see if all was clear.  Setting the bear on the floor next to the chair, he slapped his lap and they ran, leaping happily, wriggling, licking, whining their joy.  His mind offered him thoughts, though he tried to ignore them.  You fool... why don’t you just leave it alone?  You’re driving her away... 

“It’s all right, babies,” he began, talking to the dogs, hoping to quiet his tumultuous thoughts and subdue his roiled feelings.  “Fight’s over.  Poor things, you don’t know what in the universe has gone wrong when we start at each other like that, do you?” He stroked both of them, lovingly, tracing their pointed sagital crests with the forefingers of each hand, then flowing along their furry backs.  They were happy, panting.  Little eyes looking around the room.  “Neither do we.”

He heard the door open.  Silence.

“I’m sorry.”  Her voice soft now.  He began nodding, looking out the window.  He did not trust himself to speak.  The scene blurred slightly.  He felt her hip brush against his shoulder.  Reaching, putting an arm around her, he pulled her close.  Her hand came against the other side of his face, pulling holding.

Feeling the cloth of her jeans rub against his head as it began to nod, he finally managed, softly, “me too.”

“Let’s go get something to eat.”

He kept nodding.