Free The Facades: A Novel by Eric Lundgren Page A

fortune and engaged in a slow, relentless
     program of sabotage. My love for her was a nervous worship. With her success, our marriage became porous. Every admirer, male
     or female, was a potential rival, and my fits of jealousy were constant, sickening. The lithe understudy, the muscled tenor.
     The millionaire, the visiting college poet, the endless ushers. I don’t know how she endured it all. “What would it take to
     convince you, to make you believe?” she asked in arguments toward the end, and I suppose if I had been honest, there was no
     right answer. There had been moments, whole days and weeks, as when she sang the Alto Rhapsody in the cathedral—when everythingaligned, a clear sky, the fresh air, the chrysanthemums, my wife’s vocal cords thrumming at the center of a harmonious world.
     Now that she was gone, it was as if all the nights of doubt had been justified. It was the oblivious, contented days that
     I regretted. I relived them, over and over, as Molly had practiced especially difficult lines in scores, but while she eventually
     mastered them, I never did.
    O UR LAST NIGHT together was an ordinary one in every way. Molly came home from the opera, bitching about Strauss. We ate a late, quiet dinner
     of chicken parmesan without Kyle, who had eaten on his own after driver’s ed and had adjourned to his room, not to be disturbed.
     While I did the dishes, Molly went upstairs to change into a nightgown, a worn gray dowdy thing with a white collar. She came
     back down and settled into her favorite armchair with a carton of mint chip ice cream, a spoon, and the book she was reading.
     It was a warm night and we had the ceiling fan on in the family room; it ruffled the pages of Molly’s book, a hardcover with
     yellowed paper and a dark dust jacket. (In the days after, I scoured the house for this book, but I couldn’t find it.) She
     was absorbed in her reading, and as I smoked my last cigarette of the day on the couch she barely looked up from the text,
     though usually she would give me subtle disapproving looks when I smoked in the house. She took dainty bites of the ice cream,
     which soothed her throat. I stabbed out my cigarette in the ashtray and went over to her chair.
    “So I’ll see you tomorrow after rehearsal?” I asked.
    “Mm-hmm,” she said, without looking up. She dug into the ice cream and, still reading, extended the spoon to the areawhere my mouth might be. “You should have a bite of this, it’s delicious,” she said.
    I was full, but I leaned over slightly and took the ice cream. I held it in my mouth for a moment and let it melt, my cold,
     sweet substitute for a goodnight kiss. Halfway up the stairs, I turned to see my wife observing me with a studious, neutral
     expression. It was the look she might have subjected me to when trying to decide if a piece of spinach was still stuck between
     my teeth.
    “Good night, Molly,” I said.
    There was a barely audible pause, an eighth or quarter note rest that might have meant more to her musical ear than it did
     to mine. Then she replied, “Good night, Sven.”

9
    T HE THIRTEENTH HOLE AT S HERWOOD F OREST C OUNTRY Club, par four, opens to a lovely downhill view of the old Trude Fairgrounds. Men in sweater vests pause there, putters in
     hand, to consider the urban ruin they’ve left behind. The metallic struts of the grand arcades stand like dinosaur ribs over
     pools of shattered glass. Nearby, the unburied bucket seats of the half-submerged Ferris wheel turn in the wind. A huge marble
     arch serves as a gateway between two empty fields. These fairgrounds hosted the 1898 Quite Grand Exhibition of Manufactured
     Wonders and Medical Curiosities, the event that still must be considered the turning point for our city. The story of the
     fair forms a long set piece in the course Trude: Its Brief Glory, Tragic Fall, and Long Decline, required for all-sixth-graders
     in the Trude public school system. My own sixth-grade teacher was