I’ll try, I said, not to belabor the rest of the day. Vacuuming the basement and attic takes Paul sixteen hours, with a break in the middle for a couple of saltines. Imagine pushing a vacuum over a two-foot-by-two-foot square for five minutes; then consider that a twenty-by-twenty room has a hundred squares. Audrey, meanwhile, has to deal with some post-conference stuff—there’s a snowstorm that delays a flight to L.A. and she has to arrange hotel rooms and alternative flights—but otherwise she cleans straight through and finishes the floors toward evening. The stuffed animals are supposed to be next, wipe thoroughly and blow-dry, the internet says, but the kid will have to go without Big Bird and his ilk for a couple of days, she’s too damn sore to stand at the sink. Instead she spends a couple of hours on the couch in the attic watching Paul vacuum. She keeps offering to take over, it’s her office space, after all, but he’s intent on finishing what he started.
“Paul the Lover’s gotta be going out of his mind,” the husband said.
I was about to say. Audrey does call him. She explains about the lead and says, again, that nothing has changed, she just wants to get a handle on this first. Paul the Lover stays quiet, and Audrey says she has to get back to cleaning. Then she hangs up and pours a big glass of red wine. The thing is, Audrey believes what she’s saying. Nothing has happened to change her original—my words now—gut-level calculation that on balance she’s likely to be much better off leaving. And no, the Paul variable hasn’t shifted due to his heroics, because he’s been heroic before. His problem isn’t an inability to rise to the occasion; it’s that his starting point is so far beneath it.
In the attic she asks Paul if it’s obnoxious to sit on the couch drinking wine while he vacuums, and they laugh. You know, he says, the floors weren’t this clean when we moved in, and she answers, without thinking, Nor will they be when we move out, and they laugh again. A clean house isn’t everyone’s idea of an aphrodisiac, but Paul’s carrying himself in this robust way, his face rosy instead of pale, and when he turns off the vacuum and drops to the couch Audrey slides over and straddles him.
One point in Paul’s favor, apparently, and I continue to marvel at this, is that he never smells bad. His dried sweat leaves this subtle salty smell that Audrey likes, and that’s what she inhales now, not a whiff of vomit. Paul, of course, is thinking Seriously? Right now? After three months and change? He reminds Audrey that he’s contagious but she shrugs it off, says nothing will go in her mouth and she’ll shower after; he suggests waiting until morning and she tells him not to worry, his responsibilities will be limited. Afterward, she says she remembers thinking when they moved in that this would be a fun couch to have sex on, and Paul says You were right, and then It’s not going anywhere, is it?
But still, still, Audrey goes to sleep and wakes up clear in her mind about leaving. Then, while waiting for her mom, she thinks of a few hard-to-reach places she didn’t clean, which puts her, when the phone rings, sprawled underneath the desk in their bedroom reaching for one of those goddamn magnets. So there she is on her aching knees, phone in one hand, red sausage link in the other, as the nurse tells her that the IV test results are back, the baby’s lead level is zero. Yes, zero, the first sample was contaminated, yes, these results are one-hundred-percent reliable, we’re sorry to put you through all this.