He could hear the sound of Grace’s shower as he sat and waited. She almost always showered at night. And he in the morning. For years it had been a subject of contention between them. He remembered many nights lying in bed, listening to that shower, and feeling his passion ebb. By the time Grace emerged, he would be asleep or involved with some reading he had to do for the next day or so angry at being kept waiting that he would pretend to be asleep. He also resented Grace in the mornings when he would have to step gingerly around the bedroom, easing drawers in and out, sliding his loose change carefully from the top of the bureau into his pants pocket so as not wake Grace, who always slept until the last possible moment.
There too was a difference that separated them. Robert went to sleep and woke up as if he had a master on/off switch. When his alarm buzzed, usually before six, he would sit up instantly and turn it off in one motion. He rarely did anything before getting showered and dressed. Grace bought him a robe once for a Christmas early in their marriage, but after a few token efforts he stopped wearing it. Contrary to her intentions, he could not relax in his robe and slippers. He fidgeted, he played with the belt, he crossed and uncrossed his legs. Morning and night, workday and holiday and weekend, Robert got dressed when he got up and stayed dressed until he went to bed.
Grace on the other extremity luxuriated in time. Free time was something to be savored, cherished. Tiny morsels of it could be nibbled at in the mornings, even while getting ready for work. An hour’s worth of unfettered moments could turn into a feast. On a Sunday morning, especially after the children had grown, she could stay in her robe for hours, drifting in the incredible richness of time.
The shower stopped. True to it’s claim, the XL sound gun bored a tiny hole through the noisy atmosphere of New York City and allowed Robert to hear the squeak of the faucets as Grace turned the shower handles. The sound was thin and extremely distant as it came to Robert from the tiny capsule perched on his ear, but it was enough to make him tense for action. He checked everything he could think of: the gun mount was adjusted for smooth and fluid motion; the Nocturne Sundowner was on; his right hand cradled the barrel of the gun and his left index finger rested lightly on the trigger. He even tuned the sound gun to best hear Grace’s movements as she prepared to exit the bathroom.
He knew every sound she made. He had heard them almost every night of his adult life. It was like eavesdropping on his own past. He imagined himself lying on the bed, hearing the small clicks of the silver boxes that contained her potions and salves. The catch of the medicine chest was a sound he knew, the slight rattle of the glass shelves to the right of the sink, the rummaging sound Grace made when she took her hair brush out of the drawer. He imagined himself lying on the bed, listening to each of the sounds his wife made every night. He knew the man lying in the bed felt small and unwanted; he knew the man lying in the bed loved the woman on the other side of the door and could no longer show it; he knew the man lying in the bed covered his self-pity with anger; and he hated the woman who made him feel that way.
The bathroom door opened. The image on Robert’s scope shimmered as the rush of air from the bathroom pulled at the quiet atmosphere of the bedroom and distorted the patterns of heat and light. The Plan beat in Robert’s heart and forced blood to his head. It leapt into his throat and crawled up his chest with cold, taloned feet. His neck ached from tension and the top of his head felt as if it had simply drifted off exposing his brain to the air. The Plan pulled the gun hard against his cheek and welded his right hand in place. Grace moved toward the window. Even with all of this high tech assistance, Robert knew the closer to the window Grace was, the more accurate his shot would be. He waited and The Plan thrashed around the room trying to intimidate him.
Grace was at the window. She raised an arm to open the curtains. Even across a hundred yards of Manhattan night filtered through optical lenses and miniaturized circuitry Robert could sense her breast pushing against her robe as she reached for the pull chord. He knew her throat would be visible in the vee of her robe, and he knew if he looked very closely he could see her pulse in the soft indentation just above her collar bone. Her heart was beating. She was vulnerable. Robert began to squeeze the trigger.
If he hadn’t taken a split second to scan the rest of the bedroom before he moved the trigger that last infinitesimal bit, Robert would not have noticed the second figure in the room and Grace would be dead. She would be dead soon enough anyway, but Robert knew it would be easier and more satisfying if he waited until Grace opened the curtains and he learned the identity of this man who had suddenly appeared behind his freshly-showered and anointed wife. He knew his long-lived anger would be reborn and refreshed if he waited to discover who it was that Grace turned to so quietly and compliantly, who it was that softly placed his hands on her waist. Even The Plan waited expectantly to discover the identity of its unexpected ally.
The couple in Robert’s scope kissed, holding each other close, their hands probing for the exciting and the familiar. Robert watched, couched in his fury, as the tiny image of a man and a woman brightened on the screen. Their temperature was literally rising, and the heat sensitive circuitry of the Nocturne Sundowner documented their mounting passion. What turned Robert’s anger into a stabbing pain was not simply the fervor between his wife and this shadowy stranger but the intimacy, an almost relaxed comfortableness that distinguished their knowing, loving embrace from the frantic grappling of a first-time, a one-time coming together. Grace knew this man well. And Robert realized that he himself knew Grace not at all.
Grace disengaged gently from her lover with a series of small kisses on his eyelids and forehead. Robert agonized at the ease with which she did this.
"Wait. I want to see the view." It was Grace’s voice. Robert was startled. Even with his expensive eavesdropping apparatus, he had not expected to hear her speak. There was something awful about the inhuman, shrill transformation of his wife’s words. Robert felt as if he were profaning her, stealing something more crucial than her life. The Plan grew contemptuous of Robert’s vacillation. It whispered reminders of their true purpose in his ear.
Grace opened the curtains and Robert’s heart stopped. Even The Plan gasped and withdrew. She was beautiful. Somehow he had forgotten how beautiful she was. But it was more. There was a youthfulness to her that Robert could not fully believe. Did his absences always restore her like this? Not his absence. Of course. But a presence. The presence of the man now stepping into clarity from behind the drapes. His drapes. In his bedroom. With his wife.
Robert gathered his strength, and his anger for two shots. The man would be first so Grace would know why she was about to die. He moved the cross-hairs to the man’s face.
It was a face Robert knew. For a moment he wasn’t sure how he knew this face, then he remembered and he was engulfed in his own dizziness. It was a face Robert knew well. He had watched it change from the hard, aggressive reflection of a young man challenging the world to a more subdued, sad mask that hid from life. It was a face he had seen on his son, Robert Landry Jr. It was a face he had seen every day of his life. It was his face. The man with his wife was Robert himself on the day they moved into this apartment almost twenty-five years ago.
He took his eye away from the scope and looked across the street. The lights were out and the drapes were closed. Grace, apparently had gone to bed, yet on the screen of his scope a scene from his past was somehow being replayed. In the scope, Robert took his young wife in his arms. "I have the best view in the world tonight."
He remembered the incredible sense of pride he had felt when he said that to Grace. He was undoubtedly the youngest broker on the floor to be able to afford a view of the park. One of the youngest even to own his own apartment. He had started working for the firm during college and had spent his summers organizing investment seminars on cruise lines. By all accounts, some only in hindsight, it was a brilliant plan. The passengers were a self-selected group of well-to-do couples with an interest in investing and the obvious means to pursue that interest. In the relaxed atmosphere of the ship, the seminars were viewed as entertainment, something to fill the idle hours. For Robert, it was an opportunity to forge relationships with a moneyed clientele. He worked hard, built friendships, and laid the foundation of a client base that would become the source of his rapid success. After three summers, Robert had a Rolodex that would make many senior brokers bitter with envy. These same brokers had never taken Robert’s Atlantic Investment Training sessions seriously. They even tried to stop the firm’s support, accusing Robert of getting a paid vacation at the company’s expense – something Robert reminded them of every time a new account was opened with his name listed as the broker of record.
One of the great ironies of all of this was that, when Robert originated the plan, the main attraction was a paid vacation at the company’s expense and up to four first-class cruises a year. It was only when he began to organize his arguments for the proposal that he saw its true worth. By the time he presented his plan, he knew that an important opportunity was riding on the firm’s decision, and he crusaded relentlessly to get their approval. He needed the company’s name behind him to get the support of the cruise lines and to make himself credible to the passengers.
This was also how Robert met Grace. It was his third summer, between his junior and senior years, on a Queen Elizabeth 2 cruise to London. He noticed Grace as she boarded the ship – noticed and rejected her.
He conscientiously surveyed the boarding ramps at the start of each cruise, trying to gain a sense of his prospects. Grace was clearly not a candidate for the seminars. At nineteen, she did not display the kind of pampered beauty that Robert was used to in the daughters of his wealthy shipmates. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a careless ponytail. If she wore make-up, it was not evident from Robert’s vantage point. What outraged Robert the most was that she wore jeans and carried her own bag on board, a lowly army-surplus duffle bag. He actually muttered, "new-age bitch," under his breath. To Robert, the ways and values of the upper-classes were objects of near religious worship. Grace’s haughty display of independence, her public rejection of these values, was beyond contempt; it was blasphemy.
Inevitably, Grace and Robert were assigned to the same table at meals. Grace tried to be a pleasant dinner companion. The two elderly couples that shared their table were delighted to have some young people to enliven their trip, and Grace obliged, discussing the affairs of the day, music, movies, popular literature, and becoming serious and thoughtful when asked to provide a young person’s perspective on a given subject. But Robert was not so placid. His social graces did not extend far beyond his business interests, and once he determined that the other diners at the table were not likely investors, he went after Grace like a prosecutor. He baited her on Carter, on the economy, on anti-nukes, on forced bussing. Robert felt he knew her views before she ever announced them, and would launch into spirited counterarguments to opinions she had yet to express. Grace tried to evade his badgering, but Robert was not easily dissuaded, and she felt forced to defend her views, calling Robert a bigot on race, a militarist on foreign policy, and a robber baron on his economic views.
What confused him, and infuriated him more than Grace’s recalcitrance, was his own inability to ignore her. He began looking forward to meals even though they frequently ended in one or the other of them placing a wadded napkin on a half-eaten plate of food and walking away from the table. He would become moody and taciturn if Grace did not show up.
He sometimes roamed the decks hoping to run into her. He was once nearly late for his seminar because he could not pull himself away from the railing where he and Grace were in a heated discussion about Reagan, or Iran, or music. He could not remember, because at some point he had lost track of the conversation and found himself staring at the glint of moonlight on her hair. Robert had fallen in love.
It was a shock for him to remember the intensity of those feelings as he sat with a high-powered military rifle aimed at the room where Grace presumably slept. He had not been a hermit, nor was someone with Robert’s self-confidence ever shy around women, but Grace was the first to touch him in a way he could not ignore. From that moment, in his mind, she was his. And Robert pursued her. From shipboard to London. Through Europe. To her family home in Bucks county. To Radcliff at summer’s end. To the altar. And now, on the screen of the Nocturne Sundowner XL, he watched the true consummation of that pursuit – a young, successful, stockbroker, flush with success and potential, embracing a beautiful woman, his wife, in the bedroom of his park-view apartment. The potency of that moment filled the screen, and Robert began to cry as he watched himself slip Grace’s blouse off her shoulders, letting his hands glide down her arms to her breasts. She undid his shirt buttons, nibbled at his chest, and pulled them out of sight to the floor of their unfurnished bedroom.
Robert sat quietly for a long time. The Plan too was silent. The Ruger Hawkeye sat idle on its tripod, the barrel pointed carelessly at the street below. He reached for his scotch and took a long drink of the warm watery liquid before he realized that all that was left were melted ice cubes.
He went to the kitchen, and while he poured another drink, he tried to discover a trace of passion. He was willing to go either way – back to the intensity he had felt for Grace or into the arms of The Plan – but he was unable to move from an emotional stasis that left him numb and drained. He sat with his drink and tried to understand the dreams that had been presented on the screen of his night vision scope.