"She was Catholic," Nathan insists, as if that matters somehow, an emotional stand grounded on nothing.
"That doesn't have anything to do with it," Cleary says. "However she did it, she took death in and made it her own. She was in charge. She stopped breathing when she knew exactly who and what she was, what she accomplished."
"No one finishes all of his tasks," Nathan says, hateful, then gives Cleary a sharp nod, hoping he'll go away, or burn himself out.
Instead, a small inconclusive smile plays on the priest's lips. "You are, of course, talking about yourself."
But before Nathan can protest, Cleary's hand comes up. The priest isn't through: "You didn't know her, Nathan," he says. "You don't know what you had."
"I think I do."
"No, you knew her body. Understand me-she was stunning. I don't fault you for wanting her. But your women are piled high, one on top of the other. You know something about the way they look but what do you know of their souls? You've kept yourself busy like a rat in his little cage, running his treadmill, faster faster, wanting more and getting it, but in the end only standing still. You treat them all indifferently and only care where the next one is coming from."
Nathan holds fiercely to the cookie, sniffs it, and smells-now he expects it-nothing. She gave it to me, he wants to say, but Cleary has backed away and receded, just one tree in the forest now, and like the others-all the others-is blank with shock and horror. The crowd has hushed. The priest heads up the aisle toward Maria.
Where the hell is everyone? Nathan wonders, looking around. Where are my parents? Ruth? Even Schreck, the fuck? Where's their respect?
He sits amidst strangers, his face bunched and spotted like a baby's, poised to come undone. The long pews keep filling. Blacks, whites, Hispanics. Nathan is astonished Maria knew so many people, people of different stripes and heights and weights and ages, until he realizes she didn't, that these are merely church members, Cleary's recruits, commanded by some inner voice to show up to the unveiling of every coffin that comes through these smoked-glass doors, to fill out the audience, to loan their respect, so that no one, especially paying customers, should go out so alone. Women in pillbox hats, boys in powder-blue tuxedos, old men like storks in their black summer-weight suits, the blacks of this ruined neighborhood who drop their tithe into the mahogany box at the head of the aisle, below the church scoreboard, the letters and numbers replaceable from the back like an old baseball scoreboard, the church's 537 paying customers in attendance last Sunday, the scales tipping, last week's eighty-seven dollars and fifty-nine cents against Lucifer's untold millions, bottom of the ninth and the church needs one hundred and forty-five dollars to fix the pews, to fix the men's toilet, to replace the broken windowpanes, the colored cellophane-
The choir stands, its adolescent singers, jogging up the aisles to the front like the faithful rushing to the man laying hands and healing them of their limp gawkiness and their very youth. Here and there the cellophane sucks in and out in time to night's heavy breathing. The windows flash. The choir raises its voice over the volleys of thunder. All of it to Nathan like a final prayer meeting on a ship hit and sinking in battle. He wants out. He wants out of it, this, everything, and looks once to the casket, as if for permission. He is crying. He is, in fact, crying hysterically. And Maria, lying there in her plasticine stillness, willfully says nothing.
Claire watches from the door as Nathan pushes himself up from the front bench and slides awkwardly along the wall, to the exit, not surprised to see him running. Though she is taken aback by his tears.
She touches his arm as he passes. "I want to talk to you."
"What are you doing here?" he asks, quickly trying to compose himself. He glances over his shoulder, toward Maria in her casket. A reflex, Claire knows, by now as quick and natural to him as drawing breath. He will always try to keep his women apart, keep them from knowing about each other, even when they already do, and even in death when it wouldn't matter.
Claire smiles. Maria's death, somehow, is registering with her unexpectedly. Maria is taking with her a piece of Claire as well.
"You asked me to come, remember?" she says. "As your representative. Then I heard you got your little gift, your get-out-of-jailfree card, but I decided to come anyway. Out of respect, as you said yourself. That was a nice little trick, by the way, coming up with those tax returns. I thought the judge could have made the condition a moonwalk and you'd be as likely to fulfill it. I underestimated you."
"They weren't my returns, Claire. I'm being set up."
"You're being set up? Please, Nathan."
He nervously scans the room. "Someone sprang me. Someone wants me in the game."
"Don't flatter yourself," she says.
Nathan looks at her, uncomposed. "Thanks, anyway, for coming."
Now he is peering through her fearfully, toward the door, the weather out there.
"And too bad Errol missed you at your office. He has something he wants to say."
"My office, what? Errol?"
"Someone told him you'd gone to the office to pick up some brief. That awful little man, I think, that Krivit-"
Not a muscle on Nathan's face moves but the ones that work his mouth. "Krivit told Errol where I was?"
"But I beeped him when I saw you here. He's on his way, if you want to wait. Then again, you never wait."
"Krivit," Nathan says again.
Lightly, she touches his wrist. "But I have something important to tell you before you go."
"This sounds like a farewell speech," he says.
"You are the one who said you're going away."
"There's always the phone."
She takes his elbow and draws him down. "This seems a good time to tell you. I know about Isabel, Nathan. We all do.”
She can feel him twist to get away, but she tightens her grip, shocked to feel her fingertips hit bone. He is too weak to resist. This man who once lay atop her so heavily. She could hardly hold him with her arms, her knees, his wide hips bruised the inside of her thighs. "Errol's on his way. I really think he'd appreciate it if you waited. It'll be just a few minutes."
"I don t know what you're talking about-what about Isabel do you know?"
"I don't hate you, Nathan. I half pity you. I'd try to save you if I thought there was anything left. Errol agrees. But I will not spend another minute of my life trying to get over you." Squeezing him she draws him closer. "You should be doing more here than you know. There's something I want to say, Nathan. Benny's a beautiful kid. He'll be fine."
Nathan tries to look back. "Yes, he's-"
Her lips against his ear. "I hope he's young enough to forget you."
From his left ear she crosses his face, her lips brushing his, to his right, telling both sides now: "I want you to know that there's a funeral you missed. I never told you. We should have been there together."
Nathan again tries to pull free. She can smell it now: he has begun to scare, to sweat. A gurgle rises in his throat.
"We had a son, Nathan. It was your goodbye gift. You were so oblivious you didn't notice me at three months pregnant, at four. You should have. I was radiant. You didn't notice when I'd take. time off. You didn't see I was gone."
Again, she switches sides. Cruel, petulant. "I won't tell you what his name was. He didn't keep it long. He died in my hands. But he was beautiful, a beautiful baby boy. He had green eyes. He looked just like you."
Claire reaches up and cups Nathan's face. Her fingers, her palms, have him memorized still. She presses on the new divots, the crevasses. His skin, once robust, thick, florid, is now thin and brittle as carbon paper.
She rises up on her toes. "I loved you once. You would have loved our boy. He would have been brave, like you were once. You don't want to wait for Errol? I can see you're anxious to go. Okay, Nathan, then just do what you do so well. Say good-bye."
She faces the congregation. The door opens behind her. The rain and snow, she hears, is falling more heav
ily. A gust of wind pushes at her and she turns to look: across the street, a little playground is empty. Nathan is gone. But something, she senses, is menacingly wrong.
"Where is he?"
Santos stands before her in the doorway, panting for breath.
His car idles at the curb.
"But he just left," she says.
He grimaces, scrapes his fingers through his hair. "And you just let him go?"
"What do you mean just? You know where he's going, Errol. Where he always runs. But why do you need to see him so badly?" Then she looks at him. Her hands come up. "Don't-I don't want to know."
"It's him, Claire. Nathan killed Isabel. His prints are everywhere. The time of death, the place, someone can put them there together."
“There?"
“Coney Island."
"I will not-I refuse- Who is it, Errol, who is the someone?"
"He and Nathan were supposed to meet but Nathan called to cancel. Nathan and Isabel were there. He saw them in the car. He saw them fighting. It was Nathan, Claire."
"Who was it, Errol? Who saw them?"
"I can't tell you that."
"Was it that Krivit? Just give me that. Tell me, was it him?"
Santos says nothing and outside in the horizontal rain, across the street, but only for an instant, Nathan stands in the playground amidst the plastic chutes and tunnels. But only Claire has seen him.
6 P. M.
Like hour hands gone awry, the windshield wipers sweep at the deluge, accelerating the twilight to midnight darkness. Strands of ground fog move with menace along the Long Island Expressway. Across the median the opposing traffic comes steadily down the lanes like a parade of motorboats, passing in clouds of vapor and vanishing in explosions of red mist.
In the mirror a pair of headlights holds at fifty yards, as for the last hour, no closer, then no closer.
But in here, in this hairy and coffee-stained car, the CD changer shifts around and it is the Philharmonic doing the Saint Matthew Passion. It was Maria's favorite piece of music. He remembers her ust months ago as she stood in the living room in East Hampton surrounded by night-blackened glass doors, still beautiful in a seamless black sheath, her lips curled in an impish grin, sweeping her withering arms-the crooks IV-punctured, as bruised as rotting pears-conducting, it seemed, her own march down the Via Dolorosa, her demise; and Nathan sitting immobile in the white leather chair, the music deafening, the floorboards vibrating, pinning him there-
He lifts the remote control and fires, and the brooding ends. Maria slips away. Now Paul Desmond's schmaltzy breeze, big band and all, a clarion call to some greater, unpeopled civility. Safety in here, to do as he likes, this place that he loves, his little space capsule on the go. He has his dog, his music, this sanctuary, his little womb-box of paradise, his past vanishing in the mirror and the objects of his desire pulling into view. And he sees his house perched high on a bluff, dry and safe and innocent with its angelic wind chimes and vaulted ceilings and sunken pool, silent now; a fridge stocked with a family's worth of food; in the morning the hummingbirds will approach the sliding glass doors and, wings ablur, peck pleasantly at their reflections. Another day beside his azure square of water, an evening before his largescreen TV, watching the Philharmonic on laser disc, wrapped in the graces of someone else's genius. The glory, the music, the paradise of his loneliness, the paradise of his despair-
East Hampton is abandoned. A squad car sits against the curb, its wheels splayed, the roadside trees bound with darkened Christmas lights. The antique salons, the boutiques, the Realtors with their posted yearbook photos of dreamhomes, the white flowerboxes-everything lovely and elegant is now encased in ice. In giant display windows, drifts of virtuous cotton, spotlit scenes of nutcracker soldiers and cherubs and iceskating angels. Electric trains orbit toy towns very like this one. The glass before everything taped with giant X's to withstand the storm, though to Nathan they read CANCELLED, and seem to offer as targets w at glitters behind them.
He threads the car through the debris in the streets and is drawn like a moth to the lit windows of a diner. The snow sweetly sifts on a car or two parked in front. But headlights swing into the parking lot, holding him steady. And between the beams, in the diner window, sits Krivit reading the newspaper-the beefy head, the pudgy fingers, half his meal down the front of his shirt. Nathan flicks on his high beams and Krivit turns, squinting outside, shielding his eyes. Baron collapses against the door as Nathan pulls out and the car fishtails across the vast lot. The dog understands the urgency: he hangs his head alongside Nathan's, eyes quivering, hypnotizing himself with the frantic wipers.
Nathan's beeper, like everything else, is quiet now. Even Serena. He snaps open his cell-phone and tries for a dial tone and hears only the dead plastic of the earpiece rustle against his ear. The circuitry, the lifeline, is quiet. Everything is quiet.
Letting his head drop against the headrest, he sees now the Coney Island pier where he and Isabel began to fight. He had wanted to bring her there. He had wanted to show her, tell her about the old times with Milton: This is us, he wanted to say. This is the you you don't know. But he can still hear his bitter accusations, his voice louder than the rest-there seemed to be more people in the car than just the two of them; there seemed three people, five, ten people in the car-he thought he spoke for them all. But one of the voices was Isabel's. Another was Claire's. They were both pleading. But it was Isabel who was kissing him beautifully. Her hand was on his thigh. Why couldn't they be married, have a baby, live like human beings?
He hears his pathetic somethingorother reply.
She went on, her reasons accelerating, making perfect sense: It would be a fairy tale. Like a movie, like one of those operas you always go to see. My mother worked for your father for years. Errol would be so happy, it would bring you two together like the brothers you once were… grew up together… practically family anyway… no one knows you better… husband and wife…
What, again, did he say?
She began to cry.
There are no tracks where he goes now. Slow and solitary, the road out of town is cracked into geometric sections like melting ice floes. In the mirror the streetlights fade behind columns of standing mist. The tires rip through the steady sleet-
After his brilliant arguments in his own defense, he had opened the door and strolled to the boardwalk. She didn't move in the passenger seat. Then she did. She came after him. He stood at the rail, the water below so black, so cold, so still it seemed a sheer drop down to the bottom of a ravine. The heights were terrifying. He held on to the rail. She held on to him. He closed his eyes. How long ago, how strange, how sad, distant as his memory of first love, Claire stood by the window of the printer's shop picking out their wedding invitations; then Claire left his mind and the hands he held to his face were Isabel's and the eyes that met his were Isabel's, were his, really, his father's, actually. Maybe Errol's, too, for all he knew. He saw only faces. Enclosed and surrounded by faces. And the faces seemed to be mirrors in which he saw and watched himself. And he knew them all better than he knew himself, the fear and puzzlement and the fatigue. He was so tired.
In the rear-view mirror headlights dart in and out of the trees, patient, staying back. Blades of light in the corner of his eye, pinlights twirling before him. Closer, they hold steady in ordered pairs. Elfish eyes. The headlights illuminate snouts, racks of antler, breastplates of white fur; a doe's nose no bigger than a rubber doorstop.
We are finished, he said, waving his hand. Tell her, he said. She asked, Tell me what?
Their father authored their humiliation but the orders Nathan followed were no one's but his. There had to be, Nathan knew, some things for which fathers cannot be accused and held responsible.
But I love you, Nathan, she said.
How many times had they slept together? He was going to be sick. His thinking began to slow. It slowed like a wheel turning through the sand and finally hitting the water, slowing and grin
ding down and stopping. And then he was sick-
He hears the explosion before he sees it. The steering wheel raps him squarely on the forehead. Baron spills into the front seat, kicking in all directions with panic, clipping Nathan across the cheek. A squealing spiral of brown and white fur in the glass. Nathan throws up his hands when the car is already stopped and a small doe is splayed across the hood, its loose head, cleaved above the eyes, slapped back and forth by the wipers. Bloody snow rinses across the glass. The doe's round eyes stare in, then blink slowly. Still alive. Howling, Baron jumps the seats, back and forth, wanting at it. Nathan puts the car into reverse and spins the wheels, but the car jolts hard; the back fender has crumpled; a tree spotlit red in the brake lights. The doe doesn't slide. Wheels spinning, Nathan pulls forward and skids to a stop and reverses again but the doe won't move. Baron is turning circles in the back, looking to unload.
Cursing, Nathan is out in the sleet, shielding his eyes, instantly soaked, his shoes full of slush. In the ambient glow of the one headlight left he can see the doe's chest fluttering. He staggers forward waving his hands, and, grabbing above the hooves, pulls hard. Corded mouth snapping, the doe pours off the hood and flips to its back. Nathan stands over it, blinking in the driven snow. Tiny convulsions beneath its fur. It kicks once, twice, then ills, head back, legs upright, like the legs of a table. The eyes glass over, their sight gone. Nathan exchanges the stare, dead with dead, and again finds himself low to the ground, on his knees, filled with a disquietude and unhappiness that is like a deep, twisting visceral pain. The snow showers the back of his neck with a child's kisses; like those of some angel, some mother's desire to treat him gently, like those perhaps of his and Claire's nameless an cries, and, boy's, to announce himself: I am. "I didn't-" Nathan cries, and, blinking, opens his mouth and on his knees he releases the doe and opens his hands before him to find nothing, and the night filled with no reply. I am. He grabs up at the falling snow, grabbing at her, at the doe-it was dead-at Isabel, but she was already gone. She was clip-clopping down the boardwalk, pausing finally to unstrap her high heels and throw them into the surf, barefoot on the ice, quickly fading out of his view. He started after her but he couldn't breathe, his knees wouldn't hold, and he ran until he couldn't, and he stopped. Then she stopped. They stared down the boardwalk at each other, panting, expectant, terrified, like gunfighters. Behind her the dark Wonderwheel and serpent-backed roller coaster like the ruins of a great city. Against his heels he felt the edge of that steep ravine, at his back the interminable drop to the bottom. He stepped away, toward her, and she stepped back and he stepped back against the edge again and she stepped forward. She would not move. Then his cell-phone rang. "Krivit," he said. "I'm glad you called. I’m having a little trouble here. I can't meet tonight. We'll do it tomorrow. Don't worry, yes, I'll be there." Then he was sick again and hanging over the rail and she came at him and he lifted his head and she slapped him hard. His glasses flew off his head. And she was crying. He closed his eyes from that and when he opened them she was in his arms and he first hugged her then took her around the neck, aware of the murderous power pulling him on, forcing him while he remained dispassionately aware of the consequences. He could almost hear his father: Do me the favor. Her teeth were up and down his arms. Pleading up at him with his own eyes. He released her. Coughing, she clutched her throat. He thought for a minute, with a detached, almost amused calm, of the infinite night that waited for him no matter what he did. Leave her, love her, marry her, kill her, they would both burn. And he would drop, into that ravine. But if he could release her, he knew, at least she would live. Then he left her.
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