Like Life Page 12

12. Girl on library steps, the step is her home. Comb and mirror and toothbrush with something mashed in it laid out on step like a dressertop. No teeth. Screaming.

  13. Stumbling man. Arms folded across his chest. Bumps into me hard. Bumps with hate in his eyes. I think, ‘This bloke hates me, why does he hate me?’ It smells. I run a little until I am away.

  The front door creaked open, and shut with a thud. Millie closed the notebook and went out into the living room in just her nightgown. She wanted to say good night and make certain John locked the door.

  He seemed surprised to see her. “Thought I’d just hit the hay,” he said. This was something he’d probably heard Ariel say once. It was something she liked to say.

  “Ariel phoned while you were out,” said Millie. She folded her arms across her breasts to hide them, in case they showed through her thin gown.

  “That so?” John’s face seemed to brighten and fall at the same time. He combed a hand through his hair, and strands dropped back across his part in a zigzag of orange. “She’s coming home soon, is she?” It occurred to Millie that John didn’t know Ariel well at all.

  “No,” she said. “She’s traveling on the Continent. That’s how Ariel says it: on the Continent. But she asked about you and says hello.”

  John looked away, hung up his coat in the front closet, on a hook next to his baseball cap, which he hadn’t worn since his first day. “Thought she might be coming home,” said John. He couldn’t look directly at Millie. Something was sinking in him like a stone.

  “Can I make you some warm milk?” asked Millie. She looked in the direction John seemed to be looking: at the photographs of Ariel. There she was at her high school graduation, all formal innocence, lies snapped and pretty. It seemed now to Millie that Ariel was too attractive, that she was careless and hurt people.

  “I’ll just go to bed, thanks,” said John.

  “I put your clean clothes at the foot of it, folded,” said Millie.

  “Thank you very much,” he said, and he brushed past her, then apologized. “So sorry,” he said, stepping away.

  “Maybe we can all go into New York together next week,” she blurted. She aimed it at his spine, hoping to fetch him back. He stopped and turned. “We can go out to eat,” she continued. “And maybe take a tour of the UN.” She’d seen picture postcards of the flags out front, rippling like sheets, all that international laundry, though she’d never actually been.

  “OK,” said John. He smiled. Then he turned back and walked down the hall, trading one room for another, moving through and past, leaving Millie standing there, the way when, having decided anything, once and for all, you leave somebody behind.

  IN THE MORNING there was just a note and a gift. “Thank you for lodging me. I decided early to take the bus to California. Please do not think me rude. Yours kindly, John Spee.”

  Millie let out a gasp of dismay. “Hane, the boy has gone!” Hane was dressing for church and came out to see. He was in a shirt and boxer shorts, and had been tying his tie. Now he stopped, as if some ghost that had once been cast from the house had just returned. The morning’s Scripture was going to be taken from the third chapter of John, and parts of it were bouncing around in his head, like nonsense or a chant. For God so loved the world … John Spee was gone. Hane placed his hands on Millie’s shoulders. What could he tell her? For God so loved the world? He didn’t really believe that God loved the world, at least not in the way most people thought. Love, in this case, he felt, was a way of speaking. A metaphor. Though for what, he didn’t exactly know.

  “Oh, I hope he’ll be OK,” Millie said, and started to cry. She pulled her robe tight around her and placed one hand over her lips to hide their quivering. It was terrible to lose a boy. Girls could make their way all right, but boys went out into the world, limping with notions, and they never came back.

  IT WAS A MONTH later when Millie and Hane heard from Ariel that John Spee had returned to England. He had taken the bus to Los Angeles, gotten out, walked around for a few hours, then had climbed back on and ridden six straight days back to Newark Airport. He had wanted to see San Francisco, but a man on the bus had told him not to go, that everyone was dying there. So John went to Los Angeles instead. For three hours. Can you believe it? wrote Ariel. She was back in Warwickshire, and John sometimes dropped by to see her when she was very, very busy.

  The gift, when Millie unwrapped it, had turned out to be a toaster—a large one that could toast four slices at once. She had never seen John come into the house with a package, and she had no idea when or where he had gotten it.

  “Four slices,” she said to Hane, who never ate much bread. “What will we do with such a thing?”

  Every night through that May and June, Millie curled against Hane, one of her hands on his hip, the smells of his skin all through her head. Summer tapped at the bedroom screens, nightsounds, and Millie would lie awake, not sleeping at all. “Oh!” she sometimes said aloud, though for no reason she could explain. Hane continued to talk about the Historical Jesus. Millie rubbed his shins while he spoke, her palm against the dry, whitening hair of him. Sometimes she talked about the garbage barge, which was now docked off Coney Island, a failed ride, an unamusement.

  “Maybe,” she said once to Hane, then stopped, her cheek against his shoulder. How familiar skin flickered in and out of strangeness; how it was yours no matter, no mere matter. “Maybe we can go someplace someday.”

  Hane shifted toward her, a bit plain and a bit handsome without his glasses. Through the window the streetlights shimmered a pale green, and the moon shone woolly and bitten. Hane looked at his wife. She had the round, drying face of someone who once and briefly—a long ago fall, a weekend perhaps—had been very pretty without ever even knowing it. “You are my only friend,” he said, and he kissed her, hard on the brow, like a sign for her to hold close.

  The

  Jewish

  Hunter

  THIS WAS IN a faraway land. There were gyms but no irony or coffee shops. People took things literally, without drugs. Laird, who wanted to fix her up with this guy, warned her beforehand in exercise class. “Look, Odette, you’re a poet. You’ve been in po biz for what—twenty years—”

  “Only fifteen, I’m sure.” She had just turned forty and scowled at him over her shoulder. She had a voice menopausal with whiskey, a voice left to lurch and ruin by cigarettes. It was without a middle range, low, with sudden cracks upward. “I hate that phrase po biz.”

  “Fifteen. All right. This guy’s not at all literary. He’s a farm lawyer. He gets the occasional flasher, or a Gypsy from the Serbo neighborhood in Chicago, but that’s as artistic as he gets. He’s dealing with farmers and farms. He wouldn’t know T. S. Eliot from, say, Pinky Eliot. He’s probably never even been to Minneapolis, let alone New York.”

  “Who’s Pinky Eliot?” she asked. They were lying side by side, doing these things where you thrust your arms between your raised knees, to tighten the stomach muscles. There was loud music to distract you from worries that you might not know anyone in the room well enough to be doing this in front of them. “Who the heck is Pinky Eliot?”

  “Someone I went to fourth grade with,” said Laird, gasping. “It was said he weighed more than the teacher, and she was no zipper, let me tell you.” Laird was balding, and in exercise class the blood rushed across his head, bits of hair curling above his ears like gift ribbon. He had lived in this town until he was ten, then his family had moved east to New Jersey, where she had first met him, years ago. Now he had come back, like a salmon, to raise his own kids. He and his wife had two. “Little and Moist,” they called them. “Look, you’re in the boonies here. You got your Pinky Eliot or you got your guy who’s never heard of Pinky or any Eliot.”

  She had been in the boonies before. To afford her apartment in New York, she often took these sorts of library fellowships: six weeks and four thousand dollars to live in town, write unpublishable poems, and give a reading at the library. The probl
em with the boonies was that nobody ever kissed you there. They stared at you, up, down, but they never kissed.

  Actually, once in a while you could get them to kiss.

  But then you had to leave. And in your packing and going, in tearing the seams, the hems, the haws, you felt like some bad combination of Odysseus and Penelope. You felt funny in the heart.

  “All right,” she said. “What is his name?”

  Laird sighed. “Pinky Eliot,” he said, thrusting his arms between his knees. “Somehow in this mangled presentation, I fear I’ve confused you.”

  PINKY ELIOT had lost weight, though for sure he still weighed more than the teacher. He was about forty-five, with all his hair still dark. He was not bad-looking, elf-nosed and cat-eyed, though a little soccer ball—ish through the chin and cheeks, which together formed a white sphere with a sudden scar curling grayly around. Also, he had the kind of mustache a college roommate of hers used to say looked like it had crawled up to find a warm spot to die.

  They ate dinner at the only Italian restaurant in town. She drank two glasses of wine, the cool heat of it spreading through her like wintergreen. One of these days, she knew, she would have to give up dating. She had practiced declarations in the mirror. “I don’t date. I’m sorry. I just don’t date.”

  “I always kind of liked the food here,” said Pinky.

  She looked at his round face and felt a little bad for him and a little bad for herself while she was at it, because, truly, the food was not good: flavorless bladders of pasta passing as tortellini; the cutlets mealy and drenched in the kind of tomato sauce that was unwittingly, defeatedly orange. Poor Pinky didn’t know a garlic from a Gumby.

  “Yes,” she said, trying to be charming. “But do you think it’s really Italian? It feels as if it got as far as the Canary Islands, then fell into the water.”

  “An East Coast snob.” He smiled. His voice was slow with prairie, thick with Great Lakes. “Dressed all in black and hating the Midwest. Are you Jewish?”

  She bristled. A Nazi. A hillbilly Nazi gastronomical moron. “No, I’m not Jewish,” she said archly, staring him down, to teach him, to teach him this: “Are you?”

  “Yes,” he said. He studied her eyes.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Not many of us in this part of the world, so I thought I’d ask.”

  “Yes.” She felt an embarrassed sense of loss, as if something that should have been hers but wasn’t had been taken away, legally, by the police. Her gaze dropped to her hands, which had started to move around nervously, independently, like small rodents kept as pets. Wine settled hotly in her cheeks, and when she rushed more to her mouth, the edge of the glass clinked against the tooth in front that was longer than all the others.

  Pinky reached across the table and touched her hair. She had had it permed into waves like ramen noodles the week before. “A little ethnic kink is always good to see,” he said. “What are you, Methodist?”

  ON THEIR SECOND DATE they went to a movie. It was about creatures from outer space who burrow into earthlings and force them to charge up enormous sums on their credit cards. It was an elaborate urban allegory, full of disease and despair, and Odette wanted to talk about it. “Pretty entertaining movie,” said Pinky slowly. He had fidgeted in his seat through the whole thing and had twice gotten up and gone to the water fountain. “Just going to the bubbler,” he’d whispered.

  Now he wanted to go dancing.

  “Where is there to go dancing?” said Odette. She was still thinking about the part where the two main characters had traded boom boxes and it had caused them to fall in love. She wanted either Pinky or herself to say something incisive or provocative about directorial vision, or the narrative parameters of cinematic imagery. But it looked as if neither of them was going to.

  “There’s a place out past the county beltline about six miles.” They walked out into the parking lot, and he leaned over and kissed her cheek—intimate, premature, a leftover gesture from a recent love affair, no doubt—and she blushed. She was bad at love. There were people in the world who were good at love and people who were bad at it. She was bad. She used to think she was good at love, that it was intimacy she was bad at. But you had to have both. Love without intimacy, she knew, was an unsung tune. It was all in your head. You said, “Listen to this!” but what you found yourself singing was a tangle, a nothing, a heap. It reminded her of a dinner party she had gone to once, where dessert was served on plates printed with French songs. After dinner everyone had had to sing their plate, but hers had still had whipped cream on it, and when it came her turn, she had garbled the notes and words, frantically pushing the whipped cream around with a fork so she could see the next measure. Oh, she was bad, bad like that, at love.

  Pinky drove them six miles south of the county beltline to a place called Humphrey Bogart’s. It was rough and wooden, high-beamed, a former hunting lodge. On a makeshift stage at the front, a country-western band was playing “Tequila Sunrise” fifteen years too late, or perhaps too soon. Who could predict? Pinky took her hand and improvised a slow jitterbug to the bass. “What do I do now?” Odette kept calling to Pinky over the music. “What do I do now?”

  “This,” said Pinky. He had the former fat person’s careful grace, and his hand at the small of her back felt big and light. His scar seemed to disappear in the dancelight, and his smile drove his mustache up into flattering shadow. Odette had always been thin and tense.

  “We don’t dance much in New York,” she said.

  “No? What do you do?”

  “We, uh, just wait in line at cash machines.”

  Pinky leaned into her, took her hand tightly to his shoulder, and rocked. He put his mouth to her ear. “You’ve got a great personality,” he said.

  ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON Pinky took her to the Cave of the Many Mounds. “You’ll like this,” he said.

  “Wonderful!” she said, getting into his car. There was a kind of local enthusiasm about things, which she was trying to get the hang of. It involved good posture and utterances made in a chirpy singsong. Isn’t the air just snappy? She was wearing sunglasses and an oversize sweater. “I was thinking of asking you what a Cave of Many Mounds was, and then I said, ‘Odette, do you really want to know?’ ” She fished through her pocketbook. “I mean, it sounds like a whorehouse. You don’t happen to have any cigarettes, do you?”

  Pinky tapped on her sunglasses. “You’re not going to need these. It’s dark in the cave.” He started the car and pulled out.

  “Well, let me know when we get there.” She stared straight ahead. “I take it you don’t have any cigarettes.”

  “No,” said Pinky. “You smoke cigarettes?”

  “Once in a while.” They drove past two cars in a row with bleeding deer strapped on them like wreaths, like trophies, like women, she thought. “Damn hunters,” she murmured.

  “What kind of cigarettes do you smoke? Do you smoke Virginia Slims?” asked Pinky with a grin.

  Odette turned and lowered her sunglasses, looked out over them at Pinky’s sun-pale profile. “No, I don’t smoke Virginia Slims.”

  “I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you smoke Virginia Slims.”

  “Yeah, I smoke Virginia Slims,” said Odette, shaking her head. Who was this guy?

  Ten miles south, there started to be signs for Cave of the Many Mounds. CAVE OF THE MANY MOUNDS 20 MILES. CAVE OF THE MANY MOUNDS 15 MILES. At 5 MILES, Pinky pulled the car over onto the shoulder. There were only trees and in the far distance a barn and a lone cow.

  “What are we doing?” asked Odette.

  Pinky shifted the car into park but left the engine running. “I want to kiss you now, before we get in the cave and I lose complete control.” He turned toward her, and suddenly his body, jacketed and huge, appeared suspended above her, hovering, as she sank back against the car door. He closed his eyes and kissed her, long and slow, and she left her sunglasses on so she could keep her eyes open and watch, see how his lashes closed on o
ne another like petals, how his scar zoomed quiet and white about his cheek and chin, how his lips pushed sleepily against her own to find a nest in hers and to stay there, moving, as if in words, but then not in words at all, his hands going round her in a soft rustle, up the back of her sweater to herbare waist and spine, and spreading there, blooming large and holding her just briefly until he pulled away, gathered himself back to himself, and quietly shifted the car into drive.

  Odette sat up and stared out the windshield into space. Pinky moved the car back out onto the highway and picked up speed.

  “We don’t do that in New York,” rasped Odette. She cleared her throat.

  “No?” Pinky smiled and put his hand on her thigh.

  “No, it’s, um, the cash machines. You just … you wait at them. Forever. Your whole life you’re just always”—her hand sliced the air—“there.”

  “PLEASE DO NOT touch the formations,” the cave tour guide kept shouting over everyone’s head. Along the damp path through the cave there were lights, which allowed you to see walls marbled a golden rose, like a port cheddar; nippled projections, blind galleries, arteries all through the place, chalky and damp; stalagmites and stalactites in walrusy verticals, bursting up from the floor in yearning or hanging wicklessly in drips from the ceiling, making their way, through time, to the floor. The whole cave was in a weep, everything wet and slippery; still ocher pools of water bordered the walk, which spiraled gradually down. “Nature’s Guggenheim,” said Odette, and because Pinky seemed not to know what she was talking about, she said, “That’s an art museum in New York.” She had her sunglasses perched high on her head. She looked at Pinky gleefully, and he smiled back at her as if he thought she was cute but from outer space, like something that would soon be made into a major motion picture and then later into a toy.

  “… The way you can remember which are which,” the guide was saying, “is to remember: When the mites go up, the tights come down …”

  “Get that?” said Pinky too loudly, nudging her. “The tights come down?” People turned to look.