He then stood up from the table and posed for Cherilyn with the horn, as he had done several times since he bought it. He straightened his back, held the trombone at the ready position, and gave her a wink. This was something that had previously made Cherilyn smile, although not tonight. “How do I look?” he asked her and puffed out his cheeks on the mouthpiece.
“Ready to play the king’s court, I suppose,” she said.
“Picture it, Cher,” Douglas said. “Lights down. Radio City. There you are in the front row, VIP. What do you want me to play for you? You name it and you’ve got it.”
“You know I’m no good at this,” Cherilyn said. “Play something with a lot of trombone in it, I guess. ‘Seventy-six Trombones.’”
“A march?” Douglas said. “On a night like this? Not a chance. For my wife, the prettiest girl in Manhattan, I would play something romantic. Something soothing.” He adjusted his shoulders and readied himself. Then he lifted his chin above the silver mouthpiece and whistled a low and vibrating tune.
“That’s nice,” Cherilyn said. “Something exotic.”
Cherilyn moved to the stove and looked down at the boiling water. Pasta shells surfaced and dove like dolphins. Steam surrounded her face. And who could say how many worlds both invented themselves and disappeared in her mind as she let the vapor plume around her head? It was impossible, even for her, to keep count. So, she drained off the water, added milk, butter, and powdered cheese, and served dinner.
Douglas dropped a paper towel onto his lap, picked up his fork, and began to gently scrape the gray fat off the side of his hamburger patty. He shook the ketchup bottle, still thinking of his wife’s mysterious mood, and said, “I sure do love your burgers.”
“I was wondering,” Cherilyn said. “Have you seen that new machine at the grocery?”
“I don’t know,” Douglas said. “You mean the one that reads your future?”
“That’s not what it does,” she said, and poked at the ice in her water.
Douglas knew about this machine. It was apparently a recent addition to Johnson’s Grocery that sat near the big green box for people cashing in their change, but he’d not seen it himself. Yet he’d heard enough ridiculous anecdotes the past couple of weeks from people who’d played the game to make up his mind that it was not likely a fruitful pursuit. He was a history teacher, after all, and these are a hard lot to impress.
“It reads your DNA,” Cherilyn said, “and then it tells you your potential, like what you could have been if everything would have worked out just right. What you are capable of doing, of being. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“I think that’s the one my students are playing,” Douglas said. “Charlie Tate gave me some slip of paper the other day that said he’d grow up to be a nuclear physicist. Told me he didn’t need my class anymore, just to go ahead and give him the A. Isn’t that funny? Not just the idea that a nuclear physicist doesn’t need history classes, which is itself a horrific notion, of course, but the idea of Charlie Tate in charge of anything. His parents would say the same. I mean, I’ve seen that boy eat an eraser. But anyway, yeah, I remember it now.”
“You think that could work?” Cherilyn asked. “You think there is a way to know your potential like that?”
Douglas dipped a piece of his hamburger patty into the ketchup and chewed it. “Doubtful,” he said. “Just by pure definition, your potential isn’t written in stone, I don’t think. Then there’s the idea of nature versus nurture, as you know. Can’t teach an old dog new tricks, et cetera. The debate’s been around for centuries.”
“They can do all sorts of things with DNA these days,” Cherilyn said. “And you know Megan Daly started up that new sno-ball stand because her DNAMIX reading said Entrepreneur. She got the readout and just went for it the next day. Had it up in a week. That place already has a line around the block.”
“Good for her,” Douglas said, and he meant it.
“Do you think it’s silly for people to do that, though? To wonder about that stuff?”
Douglas saw that his wife was eyeing him intensely, leaning in toward the table, the bow of her white blouse dangling above her plate. “I guess people get into all sorts of things,” Douglas said. “But I wouldn’t put too much stock in a video game.”
“It’s not a game,” she said. “Why do you always have to put things down?”
Here was another small thing to make Douglas worry. He did not feel like he was putting anything down and yet she did. It was an odd experience for them to be sitting together yet feeling apart, and so Douglas set down his utensils and looked across the table at her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know I was doing that.”
Cherilyn placed her head in her hands. Her fork jutted out between her thumb and forefinger with each tine stuck through an individual pasta shell, something Douglas hadn’t noticed her doing while he ate. He looked down at her plate. The noodles had been shifted around the edges and pressed to the exact height of the skillet burger, which remained untouched. “Maybe you aren’t putting me down,” Cherilyn said. “You just don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m sorry. I know. I’m just tired.”
Douglas longed to say something perfect, to perhaps utter some sweet turn of phrase that might recalibrate the evening entirely, but could come up with nothing. So, instead, he instilled each bite he took with a noise meant to suggest that this particular piece of her meal was even more pleasurable than the last. And when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to eat her portion, Douglas reached across the table and switched plates. He forked off an edge of her patty and used it to scrape up some hardening cheese. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “this meal hit the spot. I don’t know what else a guy could ask for.”
Cherilyn took his empty plate from the table and walked to the kitchen. “It needed tzatziki,” she said. “Is that how you say it? Tat-zeeky?”
Douglas nodded, although he wasn’t quite sure, and began to whistle the theme to Peter and the Wolf.
Later that evening, Douglas sat on the couch watching a baseball game. Cherilyn had come out of the kitchen and gone into the spare bedroom, which they used as an office, without speaking. After an hour passed, Douglas walked down the hall to find her sitting at the desk and reading a large book, with her left hand inside her blouse. When Douglas pushed the door open, he saw her tugging gently at her nipple.
“Cher?” he said.
Cherilyn took her hand out of her shirt and looked up at him. “What?” she said. “I had an itch.”