In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster Page B

scrambled into my clothes and left the apartment, walking down the stairs and out into the night. It had all happened so quickly. From beginning to end, I realized, the whole thing had taken just a few minutes. And Isabel had slept through it. That was a miracle in itself. I had come within an inch of killing her husband, and Isabel had not even stirred in her bed.
    I wandered aimlesly for two or three hours, then returned to the apartment. It was getting on toward 4:00 A.M. , and Ferdinand and Isabel were both asleep in their usual corners. I figured I had until six before the craziness began: Ferdinand storming about the room, flapping his arms, frothing at the mouth, accusing me of one crime after another. There was no way that wasn’t going to happen. Myonly uncertainty was how Isabel would react to it. Instinct told me she would take my side, but I couldn’t be sure. One never knows what loyalties will surface at the critical moment, what conflicts can be churned up when you least expect them. I tried to prepare myself for the worst—knowing that if things went against me, I would be out on the street again that very day.
    Isabel woke first, as she usually did. It was not an easy business for her, since the pains in her legs were generally sharpest in the morning, and it often took twenty or thirty minutes before she found the courage to stand up. That morning was particularly grueling for her, and as she slowly went about the job of gathering herself together, I puttered around the apartment as I usually did, trying to act as though nothing had happened: boiling water, slicing bread, setting the table—just sticking to the normal routine. On most mornings, Ferdinand went on sleeping until the last possible moment, rarely budging until he could smell the porridge cooking on the stove, and neither one of us paid any attention to him now. His face was turned toward the wall, and to all appearances he was simply clinging to sleep a little more stubbornly than usual. Considering what he had been through the night before, that seemed logical enough, and I didn’t give it a second thought.
    Eventually, however, his silence became conspicuous. Isabel and I had both completed our various preparations and were ready to sit down to breakfast. Ordinarily, one of us would have roused Ferdinand by then, but on this morning of mornings neither one of us said a word. A curious kind of reluctance seemed to hover in the air, and after a while I began to sense that we were avoiding the subject on purpose, that each of us had decided to let theother speak first. I had my own reasons for keeping quiet, of course, but Isabel’s behavior was unprecedented. There was an eeriness at the core of it, a hint of defiance and jangled nerves, as though some imperceptible shift had taken place in her. I didn’t know what to make of it. Perhaps I had been wrong about last night, I thought. Perhaps she had been awake; perhaps her eyes had been open, and she had seen the whole nasty business.
    “Are you all right, Isabel?” I asked.
    “Yes, my dear. Of course I’m all right,” she said, giving me one of her dotty, cherubic smiles.
    “Don’t you think we should wake up Ferdinand? You know how he gets when we start without him. We don’t want him to think we’re cheating him out of his share.”
    “No, I don’t suppose we do,” she said, letting out a small sigh. “It’s just that I was enjoying this moment of companionship. We so rarely get to be alone anymore. There’s something magical about a silent house, don’t you think?”
    “Yes, Isabel, I do. But I also think it’s time to wake up Ferdinand.”
    “If you insist. I was only trying to delay the moment of reckoning. Life can be so wonderful, after all, even in times like these. It’s a pity that some people think only of spoiling it.”
    I said nothing in response to these cryptic remarks.
    Something was obviously not right, and I was beginning to suspect what it was. I