by Nancy Mauro
Lily clears a round patch in the grain and sits down. Against her better judgment she has watched for signs of what will happen next. Birds striking the sunroom window, the pattern of flight of a plastic bag, the scattering of twigs in the grass. She knows there are techniques of divination that are beyond her: the study of bones, the interpretation of laughter. Sideromancy, the burning of straw on hot iron. But Lily prefers the observable, the empirical. Happy coincidences, common denominators, even numbers. Things that happen twice.
She had met him before. Before the time they began to date, she had met him briefly, they had bounced against the surface of each other with a pleasant thud. And then they parted. And then they met again.
The second time she had just returned from Italy. She was walking in the area of the university, circumnavigating it really, waiting for her thoughts to polarize. Lily was trying to find a path to take her from the last two years in Europe to what lay ahead. Was it academics? A return to the seminar rooms and libraries divided into floors of prattle or hush. Eventually she might apply to the Institute of Fine Art for a Ph.D.
She had just put the question out there, so that when she saw Duncan—she realizes this in hindsight—she couldn’t help but think it was the universe responding. Bright, efficient, prompt for once, it had dropped a piano on her. Maybe that was her mistake. Taking Duncan as a sign rather than a coincidence. But from that point on, she was unable to divorce him from the shape of her future.
He was with a film crew that day, wearing gloves against the bite of early spring and ratcheting the lid off a cup of coffee. Around them the city was bald, waiting for either buds or one last snow to smudge the hard edges. Lily had stopped short, his name in her mouth. He was standing with a gang of men and she was too shy to approach. Waited instead for him to recognize her or something of what had passed between them two years before.
There were things about Duncan that had vanished: the blink and stumble of boyhood, the loose pouch of a boy’s body. He was rough and tousled, a kind of beauty discovered only when youth begins to disappear. A man now, hair snipped like corded wheat, a fine imprint of lines around his eyes. But the eyes—there it was. Exactly the same Indiana sky. She felt her mouth line with mink and a light in her belly rousing not the butterflies felt by girls, but the thousand frantic moths that awaken women.
Duncan saw her, turned toward her. Around them and then rising above them, the piers of the Washington Memorial Arch, and in the impossible fraction of time she imagined it took for her visage to complete the transit between his eyes and brain, she said to herself, The processional arch was historically used for triumphant returns to the city. And if she was looking for a sign of her future, something more portent, more flesh and blood than the burning of straw on hot iron, the analysis of pebbles, well, here he was. Duncan. He opened his mouth and said to her, “You’re blocking the shot.”
Lily’s cheeks turned the color of pickled ginger. She wanted to bury her head in the shoulders of the production assistant who’d nudged her back through the arch. Back with the rest of the pedestrian traffic. She saw a young woman in a thin cotton dress and a sack of groceries step to the curb. Is Duncan making movies? she wondered. Has this all really happened while I was gone? As Lily watched a motorcycle ripped through the gridlock, came to a halt at the curb where Fifth Avenue traffic split east and west. The rider was anonymous and leather-bound but there was something equine in the way he straddled the bike. While the girl stood with her groceries, he began to rev his engine at her, the pattern of it a sexually suggestive trimeter.
This must be a romance, Lily thought, fascinated.
The girl didn’t hesitate. Before the shopping bag had time to hit the pavement she’d mounted the bike and hiked her skirt about a mile up her thigh.
“Cut,” someone called and a blanket was tossed around the shoulders of the actress. “Can I get playback before we check the gate?”
Duncan had walked over to the huddle of men around a television monitor. Lily thought, Jesus Christ, it’s been two years and he’s already written a movie?
“What is it?” she asked the production assistant.
“Panty hose.” His walkie-talkie sputtered to life, mixed clicks and static into his words.
“What?”
“Panty hose commercial,” he said, releasing the flow of detained pedestrians into the park.
The group at the monitor broke apart and men threaded off in separate directions as though relieved to be liberated from one another. Duncan’s route was linear; it took him past the marble statue Washington at War and directly toward her. She didn’t have time to compose her face or glance away or feign disinterest. There he was. She thought, His face is the same, not so changed after all.
“Lily,” he said. “You’re back.” As though days or weeks had passed instead of the two years since their parting. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“I thought you were going to be a writer,” she said. Her tongue, always at the ready with the wrong words. It was nerves, an eager need to jump to the crux and then circle back slowly to review details. Something in his face collapsed with the sentence, like the upright knocked from the single slope of a lean-to. She hadn’t meant it that way—she was impressed. More than impressed, she was awed by him. Owling her head around the square, she noticed the towers of lights, the reflective disks, the garbled dialogue of a dozen walkie-talkies.
“I am a writer,” he recovered. “A copywriter. I’m in advertising.”
She nodded. “Well, I like panty hose.” Then felt bullish and obeisant once the words were out of her mouth. Duncan smiled, though. He understood she wasn’t good with the small talk and switchbacks before hearty discussions. Besides, it was obvious that he’d made it. A couple short years and his career was already under way while she was as aimless as ever. The moths darted in her belly.
They had met once right before she’d left the country. It was at the library. Sharing a table had led to spending the day together. They introduced themselves in the morning and by nightfall were alone in the house she shared with two Australian flight attendants. Had they even kissed? She didn’t think so. Their mouths moved only with talk of how life was going to scatter them like the radials of dandelion satellites. They were both young enough to be comfortably unremarkable. Hands had crossed and touched that night. She had a sense that he was carried in a bubble, that he’d thrown open the hatch. And although she felt snug there, the exit was also in his eye. A conviction that fate held something in safekeeping for him and that their destinies were to play out without mutual distraction. Regardless of this, or perhaps because of this, their day was shaped like a sine wave, the end of it dipping below the horizon. When she watched him disappear down her street she understood she had met him and lost him all at once.
“I’ve thought of you,” Duncan said to her in front of the Memorial Arch. “I wondered if I’d ever see you again.” Washington at War regarded them from under the brim of his cocked tricorn. She looked up at Duncan, her legs lost some stability. The moths left her belly, picked Lily up beneath the arms and there was nothing left to consider. She drew toward him.
“Well, here I am,” she said. And there she was.
Lily can’t breathe. She tries, mashes barley shafts to death in her struggle to get to her feet, slaps at her puckered cheeks trying to suck down oxygen. She feels she might drown despite solid ground. Who will find her? Will Duncan know where to look?
Lily stands a shoulder over the grain and presses fingers against her face. Breathe, godammit. Slowly she begins to feel the underlying structure, the familiar geography of cheek and bone, and she breathes, realizes she has been breathing the entire time. She focuses on what is observable, barn swallows diving across the surface of grain, her hair gummed against her neck with a malt residue. Lily waits. Her heart continues to be unreasonable. Maybe it’s the effect of that cannon, the clean and pitiful stack of bones in the cellar, but she suddenly understands wh
at simple business it is to make a woman disappear.
CHAPTER 19
The Circulatory System
He will go upstate tonight. He’s made a promise to Valerie of the Historical Society. This means he still has a long drive ahead of him—although Lily, the bones in the garden, all of it feels distant and poorly imagined. At the moment, the tight love in his chest he holds out to his small fraternity.
Strap-hanging on the number 1 train, and at the terminal end of Thursday’s cocktail hour, they are oblivious to the interstitial stops and heaping of passengers. Something is spun between them, a conviction hoisted by four pairs of hands and growing in diameter until large enough to hold them in its volute shell. No small feat. What they have done at this point in history, Duncan believes, is form a band of insurrectionists, each member of the group chosen for a particular subversive talent. And he at the head, mounted on horseback.
In this raining, cabless city, they have loved him enough to come underground, to board and to follow him home. In exchange for the meager stash of beer in his refrigerator, Leetower, Kooch, and Anne will even watch as he packs for the weekend.
“Even Pershing took care of his troops first,” says Kooch, with good humor that suggests, for one night, he’ll concede to being an enlisted officer under Duncan’s command.
They have been into their cups since three-thirty this afternoon. A couple hours knocked off the official clock and transferred to the back of a local bar (an unlikely Western pub called the Badge and Holster), Anne signing the sum on her corporate American Express. Who was going to stop them? Who would dare argue their ascendancy? News of their progress has spread equally now between Upstairs and Downstairs people, the two communicating by their usual Morse code tapped onto air-conditioning vents. The question everyone wants answered: What new beauty has sprung from the Kiss of Death account? While there is talk of denim and war on both floors, the actual Vietnam executions are secret intelligence, kept off the shared drive and stored exclusively on Duncan’s laptop. Not a single marker rendering is left out overnight or tacked to cork. They operate with a cabalistic fervor, mad-eyed as dot-commers before the big mash, before having the lining fucked out of them.
—Hello, Wing, Duncan says to his team.
—Hello, General.
It could just be the witchcraft of this flotilla, but over the course of their short tenancy on this project, the very thought of Hawke seems to be erased from corporate memory. His bungled efforts with Stand and Be Counted purged, leaving Duncan, Anne, Leetower, and Kooch innocent, prelapsarian, cruising the office with neither fig leaf nor shame.
—You are, each of you, a little piece of me, Duncan thinks.
—Yes, sir.
“Ravi keeps mentioning this glut of directors moving up from music videos to film.” Anne braces her liquored weight against a subway pole. “They seem to think the pause in this continuum is television commercials. But I told her, forget it. We have money, get us a name, for chrissakes.”
“That’s our girl,” Leetower tells her, shifting forward to allow Kooch to pass behind. They have all noticed the pretty office girl seated across from them, but only Kooch takes initiative.
“Anne,” Duncan says. “When I’m God, you’ll be rewarded for your shrewd wrangling of freelance producers.”
She smiles. “You’re just sweet because you’re soused as a kitty.”
Duncan briefly touches his finger to the end of her nose. “Untrue.”
“Don’t worry, Duncs. We’ll make sure you’re back on the wagon for your drive to the woods.”
Beside them, he sees Kooch reach down and shake the office girl’s hand. Then, loud enough for the entire car to hear, “It’s Kooch. Remember that, you’ll be screaming it later.”
Anne takes the pole with both hands. “Listen, Chief, this is so confidential, but they’ve been asking me about you.”
Despite the envelope of booze, Duncan feels a swift punt to the gut.
“I said to them, ‘Get that goddamn sod back on Tide before he leaves us for happier pastures!’ They know your wife’s rich, you don’t have to work. And I think it’s going to happen this time, Duncan. They’ve okayed the budget for a Ukrainian dwarf.”
My rich wife, he thinks. Alone in East Deliverance, New York.
“Wait until they see his paratrooper shit.” Leetower is looking at Duncan as shyly as one man may be permitted to look at another. Until now, he’s been dithering at the edges, waiting for his moment of admiration to materialize. “In spring Duncan’s going to remove the Grunt Girls from the hurry-up-and-wait of ground warfare, the snaking on all fours through the grass. Separate their fates from the Leathernecks—the Marines—by stuffing them in a plane, strapping chutes to their backs. Screw the bunkers, Anne! We refresh the campaign in Q-2 with the Airborne Brigade.”
Leetower catches his breath and Duncan thinks, I have gained mastery over the animals. Why is Lily never around for these moments?
“La-di-da,” Anne says. “Duncan. Anything else I can do for you besides get your goddamn superstar packaged-goods account back?”
“Strip, sugar.” Kooch shoulders back into their huddle. Duncan turns in time to spot the office girl push her way to the back of the car. “Nothing sleazy, McPherson. Give us a tasteful pole dance.”
Anne laughs, lurches around the pole. “It was the fan dance that put me through college, boys.” She begins a disturbing bent-knee shimmy down the length of the pole. Kooch whistles despite his defeat, the smell of single-malt scotch venting through the car.
Although Duncan hasn’t forgiven her, he’s noticed Anne’s attempt to regain his favor since her screwup with Upstairs. She hasn’t left his side the entire evening. In the train, he finds her lurching toward him suddenly, reaching for his head. There’s a rack focus shift from her face to her hands. Wary of losing an eye, Duncan tries to rear away from the manicured spades of her fingers, discovers a depth-of-field issue in the action due to that last greasy tumbler of scotch.
“My liege.” Anne holds him up with one hand. With the other, she pulls a paper napkin off his head.
He had forgotten the napkin. At the Badge and Holster they had folded him a snug crown then toasted his coronation.
“Over the course of your career, what would you say was your biggest mistake?”
Lloyd takes a drag of his Slurpee. “Once I paid to watch two Labs fucking. It sat poorly with me for weeks.”
It’s Thursday night and Lily stands beside the pervert, peering between cedar pickets at the rear of the tidy bungalow. “You’d call a do-over on it?”
“Nah, just part of the curve, Lily Mae. Same as killing that boar was for you.”
“A curve or a turning point?”
“Well, man has always been a hunter. Evolution—should you hold forth such a notion—has yet to obviate the frontal incisors.” Lloyd bares his teeth; each appear vaguely capable of tearing flesh. “Anyway, who’s the interlocutor in this relationship?”
“Just one more question.”
“Quickly, quickly.” He shifts over a few slats along the fence to check on the driveway. “You’ll have about ninety seconds once he gets here.”
“Would you say that the prerequisite for a crime of passion is, exclusively, passion?”
Lloyd considers, nibbles the end of his drink straw. “I’m not one for strict dictionary definitions, but I’d have to say passions are, at best, ephemeral things.”
“Shape-shifters, as the aboriginals would say.”
“To take from a page of my own life, Lily Beth, there’s a certain preschool in Poughkeepsie. I spent hours outside the place. Christ, I’m surprised I still don’t have the chain-link print on my forehead. I was younger, I was unclear as to the direction of my talents. And they were so docile, a field of grazing lambs. I thought I might go that way for a while.” His sentence ends in the midregister. “But then, I see that little brunette from the library. With the pimples and earphones?”
“Audio
phile.”
“I’m drawn to her despite her terrible skin. Correction, on account of her terrible skin. I keep imagining the gratitude—you see it quite often with fat girls—but I think she’s got it in her. And the idea of having that gratitude bestowed on me, at the moment, that constitutes passion.”
Lily turns back to the driveway. A car noses in and banks left until it disappears behind the carport. She feels a slight rash of annoyance at Lloyd’s theoretical slip. Why is it so difficult to find consistency in human beings? “I thought you said nonconsensual was best.”
“I’ll concede, it often begins that way.” He runs a hand along the top of the fence and unlatches the gate. “Anyway, you’re really starting to pick at the lint here. You want to ask a lot of questions or you want to see some good shit?”
“I choose B.”
“Okay.” He slides open the gate enough to let her pass. “The porch sags, so stick to the left because I am not in the business of pulling feet out of floorboards. Your best view is beside the baby stroller there. But when you hear me whistle, you come running.”
Lily puffs air in her cheeks to keep focused.
“Remember to stay low, Lily girl.” He holds out his drink straw and she fills her mouth with red syrup and ice.
“Ready?”
She nods, performs a quick jog on the spot. He punches her kindly on the shoulder.
The stroller is really an enormous pram, as spring-loaded and spoked as a golf umbrella. The padded carriage could easily hold her. Lily positions herself between it and the metal trash bin. It’s not quite dark out so she’s careful to raise herself by inches until acquiring a sight line into the room. The paint on the windowsill here is fresh, malleable enough in this late-evening heat to take up the tracks of her fingerprints. Good job, she tells herself. Leave some DNA while you’re at it. She sponges her knuckle into the prints, attempting to obscure them.
The kitchen, oak paneled and unremarkable, forecasts a home where cleanliness outpaces décor. Furniture carries the round edges of country corners, the simplicity of boiled potatoes. The only indulgence, perhaps, is the beveled glass face of a hutch that shields a tier of marmalade glazed crockery. Around the dining table, wooden chairs of varnished pine, seared knots studding their shins like cankers.