“When the choke closes, it increases the gas intake. The more closed it is, the more gas it sucks. You see, the pistons going up and down cause a vacuum pulling whatever is in the choke area down to the manifold.” The minute he said “manifold,” Narayan knew he was lost. He continued to look into Stan’s busy mind through his eyes, but he kept seeing nothing but Zinnie.
Everyone else watched Stan with dazed, uncomprehending, polite expressions.
“Hey,” he said. “Here I was getting four miles to the gallon and now I’m getting eight. Eight!”
“Hmm!” Narayan smiled at him.
Anthony leaned on Swamiji’s naked knee and peered into his face. “You have a elephant?”
“Not many left of those, eh, Swamiji?” Stefan leaned towards him.
“No, not many. One friend of mine does. Jagir Singh. He has a lovely—”
“There was a famous bow hunter,” Stefan said, “can’t think of his name, he felt he could kill an elephant with an arrow. Well, no one could do that, the arrow would just bounce off his hide—but he’d insisted that he could. Everyone laughed at him. And then he did it.” Stefan grinned. “Does anyone know how?”
Carmela drummed the table with wifely impatience. “No, of course we don’t know. Just tell us.”
“He shot the elephant in the ear.”
“Yuch,” said Claire.
“What he did,” Stefan said, “was draw a line back from where the eye is, back to the ear, and he shot the bugger, thwack, into the brain and killed him dead.”
Swamiji looked out the window, now.
“Through the flap, of course,” Stefan said. “This was in Africa, though. I think.”
“Oh!” Mary said. “That reminds me. Mr. Kratzer was up in the woods Tuesday and he let his Scottie, you know his cute little black Scottie, the one ran around like a bossy little sheriff—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So?” Zinnie said.
“Well he let him have a run around on his own and he lost sight of him for one moment. Off chasing a squirrel he went just for one moment and those wild dogs took off chasing after him. They got him, too!”
“What?” they all said.
“Yes.”
“Is he dead?”
“No, but he might as well be. Those bloody dogs tore him up nice and proper.”
“Gee, whiz,” Zinnie said.
“They come tear up my pails,” Freddy said, “I’m putting poison out.”
“Well, that’s what everyone is saying,” Mary said. “But you can’t poison animals.”
“I wouldn’t hesitate,” Stefan sniffed, remembering how he’d had to kick a couple of them off last week, while jogging through the woods. Unnerving, it had been.
“And what about the rest of the animals? Or some innocent dog on a leash, sniffing by. You can’t,” Mary insisted.
“One could put out black pepper,” Swamiji suggested.
“And rose branches,” Claire added. She wanted to take those blankets and packs off the rug in the dining room and get someone to help her bring them upstairs. Swamiji and Narayan could have the other third-floor room, across from Zinnie and Michaelaen. She left everyone, for the moment; she didn’t really need any help. She took Swamiji’s and Narayan’s packs and lugged them up the stairs. She opened the window and let the air sweep through. They were going to love this room; no one had used it yet. It had, before Mrs. Kinkaid died, been her sewing room, and the dainty bouquets of violets through ribbon stripes on aged cream-colored wallpaper were very pretty, very quaint. There were also two big, low-to-the-floor windows that looked out onto the street and up to the park. From this part of the house more than anywhere else did you feel how attached you were to the dense woods, as you looked down into the tree boughs here. Claire went over to one of the windows and knelt down. What an absolutely wonderful house her husband had bought them. She held herself with her arms and felt emotional, sentimental tears start up when she suddenly caught sight of what it was that Andrew Dover was having delivered across the street. My God. She covered her mouth with one horrified hand. It was a huge and futuristic satellite dish. It could not be. It was. This was too obscene to be believed. She had to notify the others. Claire went swiftly, quietly down the stairs. She stopped at hers and Johnny’s bedroom door and looked in to see the reassuring curve of his swarthy arm on the quilt, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere. She stuck her body in and called his name. He wasn’t there. Bewildered, she went the rest of the way downstairs.
“Anthony,” Claire interrupted, “when did Daddy go out?”
“Early. He came in and gave me a kiss and told me to go back to sleep.”
“All right.”
“What’s the matter, Claire?” Mary asked.
“Andrew Dover is having a satellite dish installed on his roof.”
“Is he really?” Zinnie got up and had a look out the window.
“That’ll cost him a pretty penny,” said Stan.
“At least someone will have something interesting to watch at prime time,” Freddy said to Stefan, and they both laughed.
“I can’t believe this,” said Claire.
“Not only that,” Carmela, the Francophile, panted excitedly, “he can get television directly from Paris.”
“What?” cried Claire. “This is too much!”
“Calm yourself, Claire,” Swamiji leaned forward, concerned.
“You don’t understand!” Claire cried. “This man’s wife died two weeks ago!”
“Claire!” Mary grew angry. “Dharma is just outside!”
“Right. She’s in front of our house watching her father install a multi-thousand-dollar monster on her roof across the street. Which I am absolutely sure she knew nothing about. Don’t you think that’s a little bit strange?”
“Well,” Stan started to say, “people do all sorts of strange things when they lose a loved one. They—”
Claire interrupted him, “This just is not right, I tell you!”
“What is it exactly you object to?” Carmela wanted to know. “That he’s getting on with his life or that he’s ruining your view?”
Claire thought for a moment. “Both,” she said. “And I thought Tree was your friend.”
“She was the star of my play. I have more reason to be upset than you do. I mean, honestly, you hadn’t laid eyes on her for years and years.”
“What has that got to do with the fact that her husband is acting like this is the best thing that ever happened to him?”
“Claire!” Stan said.
“I hardly think—” Stefan said.
“You mean Tree never called you, Claire?” Zinnie frowned.
“Can’t we change the subject?” Carmela moaned.
How, Claire wondered, could they all be so blind? Why were they making excuses for such abominable behavior? Because, she imagined, they hadn’t been exposed to all the incriminating facts that she had.
“I saw you going into church this morning, Claire,” Stefan said, appropriately enough.
“Oh, yes?”
“I thought you were out shooting houses this morning,” Carmela accused.
“I was. I just like to start the day with a calm meditation.” Freddy had come in while Claire was upstairs, and he and Stefan were acting with the same embarrassed delirium the little boys in Claire’s fourth-grade class had done. Freddy had made a paper airplane of Mary’s dollar-off detergent coupon. He shot it into Stefan’s ear.
“Come on, you guys.” Claire picked up the paper airplane and aimed it at Freddy.
Johnny stood silently outside the kitchen and beheld this scene. Last night, when he had gone to bed, his house had been at peace. There were sleeping children, a mother-in-law, and a sister or two, but this was almost a carnival.
Claire looked up, elbows deep into pouring bubbling chocolate pudding into the good stemware (the only set she had that matched, and that there would be enough of). “What?” she said, her eyes round in question.
J
ohnny turned his face. He couldn’t bear to have them all see him so moved. It looked like a fucking movie in there. Relatives. Meatballs frying. Chocolate pudding. Smells that would set you into a spin. Company. Johnny hadn’t seen a house that full that wasn’t a drug bust in fifteen years. He smelled like a horse. He went up the stairs before any of the others saw him, and hopped into the shower.
“Narayan,” Claire said, “would you pass me that quart of milk there, please? Narayan? Narayan!”
“What?” said Narayan. “Oh. Sorry. What did you say?”
“Jet lag,” Freddy laughed, indulgent towards flawless manhood.
“Never mind.” Claire reached across the table herself and snatched it. Narayan could not take his eyes off Zinnie. Zinnie leaned, unperturbed, on her sister Carmela’s blue coat. She combed her hair back with her fingers. Her lips were parted. Her knees were only just opened the slightest, finger breadth. Claire watched a moment longer than she should have and witnessed their eyes, heated siphons of what was up, meet.
Oh boy, thought Claire. She stirred her milk into a saucepan for the new batch, poured in My-T-Fine chocolate, and stirred and stirred until it came to a boil. Now, she decided. Now is the moment I would most love a cigarette. But she wouldn’t; something inside her still pushed it off. She was remembering now that morning she had sneaked into an extremely early mass and walked up to the front. She floated, a ghostly Chagall figure, back to the tall, tall church, all of great archways and domes and oranges and greens, with stained-glass, extravagant, episodic windows in rich blues and beet-pink reds and whites that were silvery translucent like shaved abalone. They were magnificent. Jewels leaking rivers of prismed sunlight through the warm colors and cold corridors, through the vast spaces where tile and oak pews were the last thing to meet them. There then was Claire, dressed in drab colors to watch and not be watched. There was Claire, eyes leaking with the sheer terrifying beauty and drama of her own coming death and the passage of her soul to another dimension; one, her certainty, the other, her faith. She took a deep breath and filled her lungs with the here and now, wondering, finally, if there were no more small children waiting unknowingly inside her. “Yes,” she answered her mother at the end of the few seconds it had taken these thoughts to fit in. “It was Johnny, all right.”
“Daddy!” Anthony heard from the yard and ran in and up the stairs. They had heard every word, those kids.
“Well,” Mary said, “I was waiting in the hopes of saying hello, but I hear from the pipes he’s already in the shower.”
“Aren’t you staying for dinner?” Claire asked. She was peeved, now, at Johnny. He could have at least stuck his head in. Buying a racehorse was one thing. Deliberate bad manners quite another.
Mary stood and went in search of her hat.
“She’s taking the bus up to Deauville,” Zinnie said. “You know. To visit Mrs. Dixon.”
“What, today? With everyone here?”
Mary, having found her hat, now went in search of her bag.
“Mrs. Dixon?” Swamiji inquired politely.
“Mrs. Dixon,” Carmela informed him, “is a murderess who has been committed to a prison for the insane upstate in Deauville, New York. She was my mother’s neighbor and my mother continues to visit her.”
“By bus.” Zinnie glared at her father.
“She shouldn’t be visiting her at all.” Stan shrugged. “I drive her to the bus station and that’s all.”
“Mom,” Claire said, standing still, “I didn’t know you still visit her.”
Mary came busily back into the room, opened the cabinet with a mirror on the inside of its door, and applied her lipstick before them all. They watched her, aghast.
“Every fourth Sunday, she goes,” Stan said.
“Not only she goes,” Zinnie said as she threw her head back in disdain, “she brings her crumb cake from Gebhard’s. And then the two of them walk around the asylum hallway just as cozy as you please.”
“Really?” Stefan looked up, amazed. “They let her walk around outside?”
“That’s this pansy Liberal Party stuff,” Stan sniffed. “All prisoner’s rights. What about the mothers of those kids she did in, eh? What about them? What about victim’s rights?”
“It’s not like that at all.” Mary tightened her lips. Mrs. Dixon was writing a book and she, Mary, was helping her do it. It was a terrible book. All about what had happened to her as a child.
It’s so horrible children can’t talk about the things that really hurt, thought Mary. And so they say nothing until sometimes, it all comes out in a horrifying reenactment. Mary blamed herself. This was her way of making recompense. She should have noticed sooner. If she hadn’t been so preoccupied with her own problems, her own flesh and blood, she might have seen it, should have seen it, wouldn’t she have? And so, yes, she was helping.
“I can’t believe it,” Claire said.
“Oh, sit down, Claire,” Carmela said. “You can’t believe anything today. Just sit down.”
“Do you have the bus schedule, Stan?” Mary put powder on her nose.
“Got it.” Stan stood reluctantly. Boy, did he love arugula salad, with that gorgonzola and the chopped egg, the way Claire did it up.
“Save a dinner for your father, Claire.” Mary read his mind. “Put it in aluminum foil and he can just pop it into my microwave. He can pick it up after he comes back from the city.”
“Mrs. Dixon,” Carmela continued, enjoying Narayan and Swamiji’s horrified fascination, “went on a rampage of murder in this very neighborhood.”
“Yeah,” Zinnie said, “and the people she killed were all children.”
“Goodness!” Swamiji was appalled. Narayan made a face. He looked away. He didn’t like to hear about such unpleasant things.
“She took their pictures and she killed them,” Carmela continued, her eyes glowing.
“Do you mind?” Stefan said.
“Can’t we find something else to discuss?” Stan agreed. He didn’t like to see Zinnie upset.
“Zinnie’s own son,” Carmela informed Narayan and Swamiji, “Michaelaen, watched Mrs. Dixon photograph one of the children she intended to kill.”
“Your father said that’s enough.” Mary narrowed her eyes.
And tried to kill me as well, thought Claire. Pulling a radio down and yanking it into my tub. Claire had escaped only by jumping out and answering the opportunely ringing phone. She remembered still the silent feeling in the house then, the palpable air of treachery. She had never told Mary about that part, worried that the poor woman had gone through enough. She doubted that if Mary knew that, she would still visit Mrs. Dixon. Frenzy was one thing, premeditation quite another. Claire shook her head sorrowfully. She held the little dog Floozie, who’d jumped up to her lap. “I just don’t understand how you can go and visit that woman. After the things she did.”
“She is sick,” Mary said, robotlike. “There were things done to her, to make her that way.”
“Yes,” Claire said, “but to your own grandson!”
“She never did nothin’ to Michaelaen,” Mary whispered shrilly.
“Claire.” Carmela nudged her. “Michaelaen’s coming in.”
They were all profoundly silent as Michaelaen came obliviously in, went to the sink, and washed his hands. The back of his neck told him they were all watching. He continued to lather his hands with soft-smelling oatmeal soap, but he turned his cheek slightly.
“How are they doing across the street?” Mary asked him.
“Hanging cables down the side of the house,” Michaelaen said shyly.
Claire held her head. She saw the way they looked at her. They thought she was paranoid, reliving the excitement of that horrifying time, a time that inadvertently had brought her so much. She was a mother, now. She must think about that and not go making rash accusations. She put her hand around the letter in her pocket and went swiftly to talk to Johnny.
“What’s with her?” Stan followed her out with
his eyes.
“She just up and runs away,” Freddy shook his head at Narayan, including him in his pert assessment of Claire’s erratic behavior.
Narayan glared at him. “The best thing you can do is run away from evil, not fight it!”
“I’m afraid I don’t agree with you there, old chap,” Stefan said, his shoulders squared for German tanks and prison camps.
“The moment you begin to fight evil,” Swamiji said swiftly, “you become part of evil yourself.”
“Who is evil?” Mary cried, chip on shoulder well in place.
“More likely,” mused Stefan, chewing his lip, concerned, “she’s having a nervous breakdown.”
“Claire?” Zinnie pooh-poohed the idea. “Breslinskys don’t have nervous breakdowns.”
“There’s never been a nervous breakdown in the Breslinsky family,” said Mary.
Stefan watched the empty doorway through which Claire had run. He put his slender hands into tweedy, well-turned pockets, and within a voice entirely Dr. Jackowitz he said, “Well.” He puffed on his mean little pipe. “I suggest a few weeks at Cascade.” And they (all but the Indians) couldn’t help but let out with a mean-spirited little cavalcade of laughter.
Claire stood outside the shower door and looked at Johnny’s puddle of clothes on the bed. This was the bed she had always wanted, with the man she had not even dared dream of. The windows faced the east and south. There was the still morning light to match the buttery walls. Even from here she could smell the clothes. What a smell! Women whose husbands are having affairs can smell the other woman on them. This is a well-known fact. So that was it. He was having an affair after all. She sat down on the bed by the clothes. Did people really die of broken hearts? She was lurched back to harsh reality and moved herself over some actual distance. Sheesh, what a smell. Johnny opened the shower-stall door and jumped when he saw her. Guilty conscience. More evidence. So: He was having an affair with a rancid gorilla.
He came shamelessly out, the great hulk of a man. She watched him. He used his towel like a dishtowel on that furry, humongous body: circling, stropping, shining. Then he turned on her hair dryer and aimed it consecutively, hum-ti-dum, at head and chest. He would never let her photograph him. He’d laugh out loud at the very idea. “What do you think I am?” he would say, holding his chest, horrified. “Some kind of porno nut?”
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