The kitchen and the garage were connected by a breezeway. Darcy went through it in a hurry, clutching her housecoat against her—two days before their run of exceptionally warm Indian summer weather had broken, and now it felt more like November than October. The wind nipped at her ankles. She probably should have put on socks and a pair of slacks, but Two and a Half Men was going to come on in less than five minutes, and the goddarn TV was stuck on CNN. If Bob had been here, she would have asked him to change the channel manually—there were buttons for that somewhere, probably on the back where only a man could find them—and then sent him for the batteries. The garage was mostly his domain, after all. She only went there to get her car out, and that only on bad-weather days; otherwise she parked it in the driveway turnaround. But Bob was in Montpelier, evaluating a collection of World War II steel pennies, and she was, at least temporarily, in sole charge of casa Anderson.
She fumbled for the trio of switches beside the door and shoved them up with the heel of her hand. The overhead fluorescents buzzed on. The garage was spacious and neat, the tools hung on the pegboards and Bob’s workbench in good order. The floor was a concrete slab painted battleship gray. There were no oilstains; Bob said that oilstains on a garage floor either meant the people who owned the garage were running junk or were careless about maintenance. The year-old Prius he used for his weekday commutes into Portland was there; he had taken his high-mileage SUV dinosaur to Vermont. Her Volvo was parked outside.
“It’s just as easy to pull it in,” he had said on more than one occasion (when you were married for twenty-seven years, original comments tended to be thin on the ground). “Just use the door opener on the visor.”
“I like it where I can see it,” she always replied, although the real reason was her fear of clipping the garage bay door while backing out. She hated backing. And she supposed he knew it… just as she knew that he had a peculiar fetish about keeping the paper money in his wallet heads-side up and would never leave a book facedown and open when he paused in his reading—because, he said, it broke the spines.
At least the garage was warm; big silver pipes (probably you called them ducts, but Darcy wasn’t quite sure) crisscrossed the ceiling. She walked to the bench, where several square tins were lined up, each neatly labeled: BOLTS, SCREWS, HINGES HASPS & L-CLAMPS, PLUMBING, and—she found this rather endearing—ODDS & ENDS. There was a calendar on the wall featuring a Sports Illustrated swimsuit girl who looked depressingly young and sexy; to the left of the calendar two photos had been tacked up. One was an old snap of Donnie and Petra on the Yarmouth Little League field, dressed in Boston Red Sox jerseys. Below it, in Magic Marker, Bob had printed THE HOME TEAM, 1999. The other, much newer, showed a grown-up and just-short-of-beautiful Petra standing with Michael, her fiancé, in front of a clam shack on Old Orchard Beach with their arms around each other. The Magic Marker caption below this one read THE HAPPY COUPLE!
The cabinet with the batteries bore a Dymo tape label reading ELECTRICAL STUFF and was mounted to the left of the photos. Darcy moved in that direction without looking where she was going-trusting to Bob’s just-short-of-maniacal neatness—and stumbled over a cardboard box that hadn’t been entirely pushed under the workbench. She tottered, then grabbed the workbench at the last possible second. She broke off a fingernail—painful and annoying—but saved herself a potentially nasty fall, which was good. Very good, considering there was no one in the house to call 911, had she cracked her skull on the floor-greaseless and clean, but extremely hard.
She could simply have pushed the box back under with the side of her foot—later she would realize this and ponder it carefully, like a mathematician going over an abstruse and complicated equation. She was in a hurry, after all. But she saw a Patternworks knitting catalogue on top of the box, and knelt down to grab it and take it in with the batteries. And when she lifted it out, there was a Brookstone catalogue she had misplaced just underneath. And beneath that Paula Young… Talbots… Forzieri… Bloomingdale’s…
“Bob!” she cried, only it came out in two exasperated syllables (the way it did when he tracked in mud or left his sopping towels on the bathroom floor, as if they were in a fancy hotel with maid service), not Bob but BOH-ub! Because, really, she could read him like a book. He thought she ordered too much from the mail-order catalogues, had once gone so far as to declare she was addicted to them (which was ridiculous, it was Butterfingers she was addicted to). That little psychological analysis had earned him a two-day cold shoulder. But he knew how her mind worked, and that with things that weren’t absolutely vital, she was the original out-of-sight, out-of-mind girl. So he had gathered up her catalogues, the sneak, and stowed them out here. Probably the next stop would have been the recycling bin.
Danskin… Express… Computer Outlet… Macworld… Monkey Ward… Layla Grace…
The deeper she went, the more exasperated she became. You’d think they were tottering on the edge of bankruptcy because of her spendthrift ways, which was utter bullshit. She had forgotten all about Two and a Half Men; she was already selecting the piece of her mind she intended to give Bob when he called from Montpelier (he always called after he’d had his dinner and was back at the motel). But first, she intended to take all these catalogues right back into the goddarn house, which would take three or possibly four trips, because the stack was at least two feet high, and those slick catalogues were heavy. It was really no wonder she’d stumbled over the box.
Death by catalogues, she thought. Now that would be an ironic way to g The thought broke off as clean as a dry branch. She was thumbing as she was thinking, now a quarter of the way down in the stack, and beneath Gooseberry Patch (country décor), she came to something that wasn’t a catalogue. No, not a catalogue at all. It was a magazine called Bondage Bitches. She almost didn’t take it out, and probably wouldn’t have if she’d come across it in one of his drawers, or on that high shelf with the magic hair-replacement products. But finding it here, stashed in a pile of what had to be at least two hundred catalogues… her catalogues… there was something about that which went beyond the embarrassment a man might feel about a sexual kink.
The woman on the cover was bound to a chair and naked except for a black hood, but the hood only covered the top half of her face and you could see she was screaming. She was tied with heavy ropes that bit into her breasts and belly. There was fake blood on her chin, neck, and arms. Across the bottom of the page, in screaming yellow type, was this unpleasant come-on: BAD BITCH BRENDA ASKED FOR IT AND GETS IT ON PAGE 49!
Darcy had no intention of turning to page 49, or to any other page. She was already explaining to herself what this was: a male investigation. She knew about male investigations from a Cosmo article she’d read in the dentist’s office. A woman had written in to one of the magazine’s many advisors (this one the on-staff shrink who specialized in the often mysterious bearded sex) about finding a couple of gay magazines in her husband’s briefcase. Very explicit stuff, the letter-writer had said, and now she was worried that her husband might be in the closet. Although if he was, she continued, he was certainly hiding it well in the bedroom.
Not to worry, the advice-lady said. Men were adventurous by nature, and many of them liked to investigate sexual behavior that was either alternative—gay sex being number one in that regard, group sex a close second—or fetishistic: water sports, cross-dressing, public sex, latex. And, of course, bondage. She had added that some women were also fascinated by bondage, which had mystified Darcy, but she would have been the first to admit she didn’t know everything.
Male investigation, that was all this was. He had maybe seen the magazine on a newsstand somewhere (although when Darcy tried to imagine that particular cover on a newsstand, her mind balked), and had been curious. Or maybe he’d picked it out of a trash can at a convenience store. He had taken it home, looked through it out here in the garage, had been as appalled as she was (the blood on the cover model was obviously fake, but that scream looked all too real), and had stuck it in this gigantic stack of catalogues bound for the recycling bin so she wouldn’t come across it and give him a hard time. That was all it was, a one-off. If she looked through the rest of these catalogues, she’d find nothing else like it. Maybe a few Penthouses and panty-mags—she knew most men liked silk and lace, and Bob was no exception in this regard—but nothing more in the Bondage Bitches genre.