Calamity

It seemed there was only one thing to do. Tom knew what he was thinking wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. But could anyone else understand how guilty he felt every time he looked over and saw Natalie’s pale thin arm encased in the bulky plastic cast?
It was an accident. She knew it, he knew it. No protestations, no recriminations. Natalie bore the annoyance of losing the use of her right hand with grace and charm. Tom was beginning to hate that. It took her twice as long to cook dinner but she brushed away his offer of help. He sat on the couch feeling like a heel while she bustled around the kitchen. Every time he heard her drop something, he winced.
He might have truly believed that she had forgiven him if not for the fact that she had called a halt to their sex life. “All the jostling hurts my arm, honey,” she said gently. He had no option but to accept her excuse and kiss her softly on the forehead each night before bed.
Tom had discussed the situation with his buddies, who were of varying opinions.
“You broke your girl’s arm?” said Steve incredulously, “How the hell did that happen?”
“It was an accident.”
“You’re screwed,” Rick added. “You can’t come back from this. It’s like she’ll always have this ace in the hole. Whenever you have an argument she can always say, ‘well, you broke my arm.’”
“So, what am I supposed to do?”
“Break up with her.”
“I broke her arm, so now I’m supposed to break her heart? I can fix this.”
“Maybe you could buy her something really expensive,” suggested Steve.
“That only works if you cheated or forgot her birthday. He broke her arm,” said Rick. “As long as she’s got that broken arm you are on unequal footing. What you need is something to make her feel sorry for you.”

That night Tom lay in bed listening to the sound of Natalie’s breathing. In his mind, the afternoon of the accident played over and over. Sunday afternoon, he and Natalie fighting over the remote control. He wanted to watch the World Wide Wrestling, she wanted to watch Martha Stewart. Natalie made the first attack; she jumped into his lap, nearly upending the recliner. Tom held the remote behind his back; Natalie reached behind him and began to tickle him mercilessly.
His memory replayed the next moment in triple slow motion. He grabbed Natalie around the waist and he began to tickle her back. Her legs were draped over the recliner arms. Somehow, one of her flailing feet hit the lever on the side of the chair. Next thing he knew, the two of them were catapulted through the air. They landed together on the Oriental rug, which slid back across the hardwood floor. Natalie put out her arm to try and stop their slide but it was too late. Wham! They slammed into the wall. Tom’s knee connected with Natalie’s arm as it connected with the thick wood molding.
In the emergency room, Tom felt like the lowest form of life. The doctors and the nurses asked how it happened. Every time Tom explained it, the story sounded more implausible. By the time Natalie was ready to leave the emergency room he scarcely believed the story himself.
The guys were right; there was nothing Tom could do to make amends. He thought of what Rick said. Sympathy. Equal footing. He could break his own arm. What if he did do that? It would level the playing field, the two of them muddling around in casts. It would be comical. It could also be the romantic gesture of all time. He could take a situation that was a disadvantage and work it to his favorite. That angle appealed to Tom’s logical side. Yes, he would break his arm. Tom rolled over and slept the sleep of the righteous.
In the morning he was less confident about his plan. It was one thing to think about, quite another to execute. He didn’t exactly relish the idea of causing himself bodily harm. But in the kitchen he watched Natalie attempt to scramble eggs with one hand. The pan kept sliding away from her spatula. If he offered to help, she would refuse him. Instead, he went upstairs to his home office and began to plot.
His first idea was simple enough. He would jump off the roof and land on his arm. Perhaps he would be lucky and break both an arm and a leg, then Natalie would know he was truly sorry.
Tom opened the window, lifted the screen, and stepped out onto the roof. His sneakers made scraping noises against the shingles. He looked down into the backyard, trying to decide if he wanted to land on the patio or the lawn. The lawn was definitely the more appealing option but also the less likely to succeed. It would have to be the patio. Tom hovered over the edge of the roof, took a deep breath and jumped. At the last minute, his body instinctively rebelled against what he was about to do. But his momentum had already begun and he wasn’t able to stop himself. Instead, he slid down the side of the house, taking a two-foot piece of aluminum gutter with him. He landed on the patio, feet first like a cat, bruised but essentially intact.
His fall made quite a clatter. The gutter clanging on the flagstone patio and tree branches bending forward and snapping back as he hurtled by. Natalie came running out of the house to find Tom sheepishly dusting himself off.
“What happened to you?”
“Just a little slip. No big deal.”
“You fell off the roof! What were you doing up there?”
“Just checking on something.”
Before Natalie could question him any further the smoke alarm inside began to shriek and Natalie rushed back inside to save breakfast. Tom collapsed into a lawn chair and put his head in his hands. He was no better off than before. In fact, including the broken gutter and the burned breakfast that Tom would no doubt be held accountable for, he was definitely worse off. Of course, he could always try to jump again but Nat might not buy the idea that he had fallen off the rooftop twice.
That afternoon, Tom went to the hardware store. A new plan was forming in his brain. If he couldn’t fall, maybe something could fall on him. Maybe an anvil or a sledgehammer, some sort of calamity that might befall Buster Keaton or Wiley Coyote was what he needed. He wandered around Winter’s Hardware for forty-five minutes, testing the weight of various heavy metal implements against his hand. He left, one hundred dollars poorer, with a heavy box of supplies and a light heart.
Natalie was out for the day with her girlfriends, leaving Tom with the house to himself. He could do the deed, drive himself to the emergency room and be home, suitably broken and casted before she arrived home, laden with packages. How guilty she would feel knowing that all the while she had been out shopping he had been in pain. All the past could be erased and they could go back to peace and quiet. They could make love gently, their casts clacking against each other like crab claws. Tom let these thoughts cheer him as he went about the chore of setting up the metal vise on the kitchen counter.
Tom was right-handed and so he decided to break his left. He could get more mileage out of having broken his dominant hand, but he didn’t relish a month of learning to do everything left-handed. He put his left hand into the vise and then spun it shut. He grabbed the sledgehammer and swung back, aiming for the vise. At the last minute his hand pulled away and the hammer glanced off the fleshy part of his forearm. The edge of the hammer left a long scrape on his arm and the beginning of a bruise but he could tell that there was no breakage. Tom wanted to take his arm out of the vise and blow on the injured area but he was afraid he would lose his nerve. He swung again. This time the head of the hammer hit the vise but instead of snapping his wrist the hammer swung up and hit him full force in the chest. He staggered backward taking with him the vise, with his wrist still enclosed, and a large chunk of kitchen counter as well. Tom sprawled on the kitchen floor, momentarily stunned.
Tentatively, he unscrewed the vise and let it fall on the floor. His wrist was smooth and unmarked. He realized now, with the bright-white clarity of hindsight that the vise had the opposite effect that he was looking for. Instead of placing his wrist in potential danger, it had instead served as an insulator, protecting his wrist from calamity. “Damn it,” he swore and threw the vise across the room where it banged against the cabinet.
Tom went into the bathroom and pulled down his shirt. His chest now bore a deep purple bruise the size of a fist. He poked at it, watching the white imprint of his finger turn back to purple. He opened the medicine cabinet and reached for the Advil. Using his cupped hand as a glass he swallowed two pills with water.
Back in the kitchen, Tom surveyed the damage. He ran his hand against the ragged expanse of broken kitchen counter. How in the hell was he going to explain this to the landlord? Forget that, how was he going to explain it to Natalie. He grabbed the vice in his right hand, the sledgehammer in his left, and walked out to the garage. First things first, hide the evidence. He stashed the vice and the sledgehammer under an old drop cloth and was just about to go back inside when he saw Natalie’s car pulling into the driveway. He ducked and dashed back through the garage and up the stairs into in his study, quickly closing the door.
Tom leaned against the door and tried to calm himself down. He had to think fast. Obviously it wasn’t going to take her long to find the damage and come looking for him. He couldn’t let her catch him here, a sitting duck, an idiot. No, he had to face the trouble head on.
He walked down the stairs and met her in the kitchen. She was just standing there staring at the counter. He searched her face for clues, she didn’t seem angry, just confused.
“Hi honey, how was your day?” Better to start off on a conversational tone.
“Tom, what the hell happened here?”
“I’m going to repair it.”
“We’re going to have to put in a whole new counter.”
“You always said you hated this one anyway.”
“Tom, it’s not our house.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Natalie didn’t say anything else. She made a strangled noise low in her throat and walked up the stairs. Tom heard the bedroom door slam and the echo reverberated through his body. He was so screwed. Beyond screwed, there wasn’t a word for how very screwed he is. He should cut his losses and move on. Nat wasn’t even the prettiest girl he had ever dated. Maybe there was someone else out there, someone who would forgive little accidents and never say no to sex. But Tom wasn’t sure about that. He had a sinking feeling that there might not be anyone any better than Natalie out there for him.
The next morning Tom got up a full hour before Natalie. He snuck out of bed and cooked breakfast before she woke up. He called a contractor and arranged to get the counter fixed. For two days, Tom did everything right. He cooked the meals or brought home take out, he didn’t say much and let Natalie infer great and wondrous things from his silences. On the second day, she favored him with one of her full-teeth megawatt smiles. “You’re making it very hard to stay mad at you,” she murmured.
“That’s the idea,” he answered back with a grin of his own.
Later that afternoon at the office, Tom reviewed the situation. Overall, he concluded, he had succeeded. Of course, there was still the no-sex rule to be dealt with. In the afternoon lull while his officemates were polishing their solitaire skills, Tom came up with a new plan in which Natalie accidentally would run over his foot with her car. It would be tricky to pull off but Tom was certain if he could just accomplish this one thing all would be restored.