Free There Must Be Some Mistake by Frederick Barthelme Page B

“That’s the worst story,” she said. “That’s awful.”
    â€œI kept putting one foot in front of the other. It was strange, her not being there, not on earth. I was on automatic for a year or two before I could even begin to function in the normal way. I shut down.”
    Leaving the fruit where it lay, we left the restaurant and went over the causeway and headed up the Gulf Freeway. It wasn’t unpleasant out. We got off at Dickinson and stopped at a gas station for ice-cream bars, a quality dessert, got back on the freeway, and went all the way to the League City exit before cutting across to Kemah. On the drive I told Chantal about Diane. How I’d met and married Diane after she enrolled in my advanced painting class. We had an affair, which was not specifically precluded in the e-handbook at the very modern school where I was teaching. Soon I was more valuable to Point Blank if I worked full-time, so teaching went out the window. Eventually we got a house in southwest Houston. Our life got smaller and more routine, even with Morgan in tow. We rented a bay-front condo I found one rainy night when I wanted to get away and drove down to Kemah for no good reason. Eventually we bought the place and moved there, thinking to enjoy life on Low. But the sourness that was creeping into the marriage seemed to ramp up. The whole world seemed to have gotten cruder, uglier, and less satisfying. At home the days got longer. The marriage was strained. We knew each other too well. We kept up the routines for a while, but when even those began to break down we divorced.
    â€œThat’s the short version,” Chantal said. “I recognize that.”
    â€œIt’s enough,” I said. “You get the picture. After the divorce people started looking strange to me. I worked at home. I was already keeping bad hours—up when everyone was asleep, asleep when everyone was up. Spent my spare time on the Net. The usual waste, though sometimes interesting. I joined Facebook, diligently reported my status, and made one thousand four hundred friends. I considered these things: When is thinking carefully the same as cowardice? When is avoidance cowardice? Is it cowardly to evade and dodge, to leave by the side door, to step out of the way? Is it fear that makes a person behave ‘properly’ and in accordance with one or another code of conduct? Must one seek always to attack and destroy an enemy? Must one regard the other as the enemy, always? Is ‘settling for’ something less than what you aspired to a kind of cowardice, or is it pragmatism or just good sense? Must one always pretend to be the hero? These and other questions preoccupied me as I motored through the second decade of the twenty-first century, widowed, divorced, alone.”

10
Crosley
    MY NIGHTS in Kemah were spent clicking around on the Internet, finding things that held my interest a few minutes at a time, sometimes longer—sort of like reading the paper was in olden times, except the range was wider and more colorful. I got sidetracked a lot, but I kept clicking most nights, link after link, and smoking the occasional cigarette, a vice I’d cultivated in spite of all good sense. I tried to keep it to a couple cigarettes a day, thinking I’d read somewhere that statistically a few cigarettes a day were the same as no cigarettes a day. The “few” was stretchable. The house at night was cleaner and more pristine than it ever was in the daylight, and since I always had most of the lights off, the place looked great—quiet and refined. It was magnificently straight. The pots and pans were polished, the silverware crisply sorted in its drawer, the curtains clean and flounced, the towels fine enough for hotel duty. Days were dreary, a time to work at something you didn’t want to do, a waste, time spent waiting for evening, for darkness, and the window, the bay, the birds, the pretty little