While watching the evening news, a lawyer—Robert Leonard Singer, Esquire—learns of a woman found dead in her motel room, the apparent victim of a drug overdose. Authorities have yet to identify the victim, but Robert thinks he knows who she is. In fact he’s sure.Her name is Jenny, and she disappeared a year before, “a year of feelings shut away like furniture crated in some dark, musty warehouse.” From this we infer that Robert and Jenny were close—involved in an intimate affair, perhaps, or a fling? At the next paragraph’s end we learn that Jenny was his wife.
Whatever relationship he had with Jenny, we know her disappearance—and now her apparent suicide—have both affected Robert deeply. Overcome by his emotions, or benumbed by them, he collapses onto his sofa, hugging its pillow “tightly” as the evening news murmurs on and the smell of leftover Thai takeout drifts his way from the dining table. Instead of attending to the dispositions in his briefcase, Robert drifts off to sleep. The page ends with him waking “to the chatter of a late night talk show” still in a torpid state and unable to work.
Though the events conveyed by this passage are sensational—a woman’s unexplained disappearance, the sudden discovery of her body in a motel room, her apparent drug-overdose suicide—the opening scene itself is as torpid as its main character. Robert listens to the evening news, lies down on his sofa, and goes to sleep. That’s an accurate if skeletal summary of the “action” here, such as it is. And though Robert’s descent into indolence is, presumably, triggered by grief, one gets the feeling—I do, anyway—that even on his best days Robert is not exactly a man of boldness and energy—witness the takeout cartons on his dinner table. He seems to have been depressed long before he switched on the television news. The news of his missing wife’s death plunges—though that may be too active a verb—him into a deeper indolence, one that, on the emotional altitude meter, drops him from something like two feet down to one and a half: not exactly an ear-popping descent.
But Robert’s emotional torpor goes beyond numbness into oblivion, to where, moments after learning of his wife’s death, having decided at some point to call the authorities and verify things, his thoughts wander to getting dressed for work in the morning, to tying “the tight Windsor knot on his tie and spend[ing] the day reviewing documents and dispositions.” From there his thoughts drift even further away, to a contemplation of his name, from which he has recently shed the “Junior” and replaced it with “Esquire.” But what in blazes has any of this to do with the shocking news of his wife’s dismal suicide? Nothing—which may be the point. We are witnessing the extent of Robert’s disconnect from his emotions. We're dealing with an unhinged personality, with a man losing, or having already lost, part of his sanity to grief.
But since Robert’s feelings—along with that measure of his sanity—were already “shut away like furniture . . . in a dark, smutty warehouse” what we're met with here is the spectacle of his musty, crated feelings sprouting a fresh layer of mold and mildew. And watching mold grow isn’t very exciting, even when the mold is fertilized by dramatic, sensational events.
