When Joey went to the front door and opened it, he knew something was different right away; an old dog stood on the threshold and blocked his way. The collie barked and bared his teeth, and Joey stopped in his tracks, even though he could have easily booted the dog out of his way with one kick. Teresa got up from the table and ran to the door; she grabbed Atlas by his collar and pulled him away.
“I’m not who you think I am,” Teresa explained, right away. “Harper’s still at work.”
As soon as he saw her Joey wondered how he could have ever mistaken Teresa for Harper, as soon as he saw her he imagined Teresa in his trailer, in his bed, behind a window where passionflowers grew on a trellis of dark leaves.
“You’re exactly who I think you are,” Joey told Teresa that night. “You’re somebody I’ve been looking for all my goddamned life,” he said to her, and as if in gratitude Teresa gave him back a silent smile, and Joey immediately believed that her smile was a perfect gift, the gift of a woman who had been waiting to be rescued for such a long time that it might be years before her tongue could form words, and even longer before she could conjure up the strength to say a word like no.
They were lovers weeks before she moved into his trailer. While Harper worked at Nina’s Lounge, Joey and Teresa made love in her bed, careful to smooth the sheets when they were done. Each time they made love Teresa silently counted to a thousand, in her head she recited the capitals of every state, the alphabet, the days of the week, anything to stop herself from imagining that another man held her, and when Joey told her he loved her the words were like stones.
“Please don’t say that,” she told him. “Don’t love me,” she said, but every time she told him not to fall in love with her his passion was renewed. He was certain that if given enough time she would love him in return, she would thank him for finding her in Harper’s living room that first night, she would vow never to look at another man.
There were times when Joey left Teresa at two in the morning only to return to the house in the afternoon, after Harper had awakened, careful to act as distant to Teresa as he had that first time Harper had introduced them, days after Teresa and Joey had first become lovers. Harper knew something had happened, but she didn’t flinch when she noticed that Joey was staring at Teresa, his eyes blurry with a vision of pearls and black feathers; she didn’t even consider dusting the skin near her heart with basil so that Joey would remain true to her. And when Harper finally asked Teresa to move out, she wasn’t the least bit surprised to find out that Joey had asked her to move into his trailer.
“It’s just temporary,” Teresa told Harper on the day that she left.
“Sure,” Harper said. “Admit it. He’s crazy about you.”
“I didn’t go after him,” Teresa said. “He wants me to be in love with him, but I’m not.”
“Are you stupid?” Harper had said then. “You’re telling me your troubles? You’re complaining about Joey to me?” She shook her head. “Jesus Christ, don’t cry to me because Joey’s not sweet enough to you in bed, or because you don’t love him. Good lord, Teresa. Grow up.”
“You’re mad at me,” Teresa had said. “You hate me.”
“Oh, God,” Harper sighed. “Look,” she told Teresa, “Joey and I would never have made it through another year—you just speeded it up. And now he’s yours. That’s all there is to it—he’s yours.”
And so Teresa moved into Joey’s trailer, and they lived on his monthly caretaker’s salary. It was late in the summer, and the trailer park was quieter than it had been in June and July, most of the summer vacationers had already gone back home and on some nights, when the moon was orange, already becoming an October light, Teresa felt as though she were living in a ghost town. As the weather grew colder and the trailer camp emptied of all but a few fishermen and Joey had to nail boards over his trailer’s windows to keep the river wind out, Teresa discovered that she was learning how to spend all night by someone’s side and stay awake till dawn without ever letting on that she hadn’t been able to sleep. She was learning to cook the dinners Joey liked, learning to tune the radio in to the country-and-western station he listened to, in a little while she discovered that she knew the words to some of the songs. Pine needles covered the earth in the trailer camp, and it was possible for Atlas to walk so softly that the black-tailed squirrels didn’t hear him, and he caught one once and brought it to the trailer’s front door.
By October, when they had lived together for nearly two months and the moon was orange nearly every night, the last fisherman left the trailer park. They were alone, and that was exactly the way Joey wanted it. He didn’t trust Teresa out of his sight, he had begun to suspect Harper of trying to get back at him and he wanted to make certain that Teresa didn’t run into her by accident. So he kept an eye on Teresa, he didn’t even want her taking the laundry into town, and he watched from the window as she hung towels and sheets on the rope clothesline that stretched from the trailer’s porch to the nearest pine tree. They were together nearly all the time, they ate breakfast together and dinner, they were in bed by nine. But there were some hours every day when Joey had to leave her alone, hours when he had to board up the windows of all the trailers and sweep away the piles of pine needles and replace the paths that had been worn away. Teresa looked out the door after him as he walked across the trailer park. He was tall, nearly as tall as King Connors, he wore his hair long, and he always had on the same denim jacket no matter what the temperature outside. He was handsome, Teresa thought when she watched him from a distance, but he seemed more and more like a stranger, and she was thankful for those times when she could close the front door and be all alone in the trailer.
Now that the weather had begun to turn bad, Atlas no longer spent his days outside; instead he slept in the kitchen, his jaws snapped in his sleep as he dreamed of cats and butterflies. Because it was autumn, because there were pines surrounding the trailer, the afternoons now seemed darker than ever, and Teresa spent all of her time alone looking through the cracks of the boards Joey had put up to protect the windows. And although she tried not to think about the future or the past, though she tried to remember that she was now living with a man who promised always to love her, Teresa found herself thinking about summer, about a sky clearer than topaz, and a man who carried pearls and desire in his hand as carelessly as another man might carry an apple or a pear. And she couldn’t help but wonder what Silver had thought when he opened the door to her room and found an empty bed, and she couldn’t help but wish he was missing her still.
It wasn’t until November that Lee realized she had become so accustomed to silence that the sound of the telephone or the front doorbell ringing could startle her. It had gotten so she couldn’t stand the hum of the television or the roar of a jet overhead. Fortunately, Silver respected her need for quiet; he left her notes when he was going to be out especially late, and whenever they were in the same room they circled each other wordlessly, as if caught in separate dreams. And it wasn’t until November that Lee realized how afraid she was of the time when they finally spoke to each other, a time when she would ask Silver what Teresa meant to him, when she finally asked how long he thought they could go on this way.
Jackie was in school for half the day now, but he was still quieter than any child Lee had ever known. He had never said Atlas’s name while the dog was living with them, but now he occasionally called the name out loud, although he knew the dog had gone away, and with him Jackie’s aunt, a woman with long hair who danced to songs on the radio. Not that Jackie really missed her, or the dog either, he didn’t mind being alone most of the time, he liked it. What he didn’t like was the time when his father came home. Then the air in the house would change; when Silver stepped through the front door there seemed to be a fire burning its way down the hallway, a fire devoured the oak floors, the posters on the wall, the desire for silence Jackie shared with his mother.
Something had happened to Silver—maybe it was Teresa disapp
earing, or Lee walking in on them, maybe it was because he was certain Gregory was still following him. He didn’t care if his blue jeans were ironed, he spent too much money, and he went out in the street only when he had to, no longer enjoying nights without moons, midnights, the sound of his boots on cold cement. He felt as if his own bones were betraying him, making him feel old. He considered hiring a private investigator to find Teresa, but he wasn’t quite sure what he would do once he found her—he wasn’t ready to forget that she was his sister, but he was slowly edging toward a time when it no longer mattered. He was lonely, lonelier than he’d ever been, and at the same time he felt as if he were never alone, as though someone was watching him night and day. One night Lee awoke near dawn to find Silver staring at her in the dark bedroom, and even in the darkness she could see his desperation as clearly as if she studied him through a magnifying glass.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” she asked, and her voice sounded terribly loud in the quiet room.
Silver shook his head; he went to the window and looked out. He didn’t shout at her, didn’t tell her to mind her own business; he ran his thumb over the glass and studied the street. Lee reached for a cigarette and lit it; she didn’t hide her smoking from him any more, he never even mentioned it now. She went to the window and stood behind him.
“We could start over,” she told him.
“Pretend we’ve just met?” Silver said.
“Sure,” Lee whispered.
“You’d go to a bar,” Silver smiled, “and I’d follow you there. I’d sit right down next to you and tell you what beautiful blue eyes you had.”
“Did you ever think so?” Lee asked.
“I picked you, didn’t I?” Silver took the cigarette from Lee’s hand, inhaled, then put it out in the ashtray on the bureau.
Lee shook her head. “I was the one who picked you. And I’d do it again. I’d invite you up to my place, I’d sit so close to you you couldn’t help but know how much I wanted to kiss you. And then, later, if you told me I was beautiful while we were making love I wouldn’t even care if you were lying.”
“You don’t mean that,” Silver said.
“Sure I do,” Lee told him. “Tell me lies. Tell me dozens of them.”
“You can’t still want to be married to me,” Silver said then.
“I do want to be,” Lee said, and for a few seconds, because Silver hadn’t laughed at her or turned away, she thought her fear of talking things out had been crazy, she thought they might have a chance.
“You can’t want it,” Silver said finally. “No woman wants to be married to someone who doesn’t love her.”
“Oh,” Lee said. She got back into bed and pulled the covers up. Outside, in the sky, a jet was moving eastward and the sound of its engines made Lee shudder. Silver came over and sat on the edge of the bed.
“It’s not that I don’t care about you,” he told her. “I think of you as part of my family.”
“Like a sister?” Lee said bitterly. “Is that how you think of me?”
When he didn’t answer he hurt her more than ever before. Lee’s blood turned cold, desire left her that night, it left for good. They stopped talking to each other after that, weeks went by without one word exchanged. Lee didn’t bother to get dressed in the morning any more, why should she bother, she wasn’t going anywhere. After Jackie went to school she would call the grocery and order what she wanted delivered, and then she would sit in the kitchen, she’d watch the garden, stare at clouds, and before she knew it Silver would be waking up. She would hear him, every day, hear the shower running in the bathroom, hear the closet door in their bedroom open and then close, but he never came into the kitchen to talk to her, and when he was finally gone, when she heard the front door slam, and the Camaro’s engine start out on the street, Lee cried. Every day she cried, and every day she was shocked to discover that she still had more tears left inside.
Even if he had been talking to her, Silver wouldn’t have told Lee all that had been going on. He wouldn’t have mentioned that for four days in a row the Camaro’s tires had been slashed, so that he had begun to carry not only a spare in the trunk but one in the back seat as well. He wouldn’t have told her that he had found a pigeon with its throat cut wrapped in a blue towel and left on their front stairs one evening, or that envelopes addressed to him, but having no letter inside, had been placed in the mailbox every day. Silver believed he could handle these threats alone, he was handling them, he tried to convince himself they were the threats of a man who lacked courage. And in the end it was a little thing that set him off, something that might have been an accident. Silver went to the Cadillac Cleaners late one afternoon to pick up his black suit. The clerk apologized, but what could he do, there was no point in looking through the back, through the containers of lost clothing, because somebody had already picked up Silver’s suit, a stranger in a navy-blue coat had insisted that Silver had sent him.
The clerk offered to pay for a new suit, but Silver shook his head, it wasn’t another suit he wanted. That evening Silver couldn’t bring himself to go to work, he missed two meetings in south San Francisco with dealers certain to buy thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine; he was sure that somewhere in the city Gregory was dressing in black linen, he was buttoning each button of the tailored jacket with long, calm fingers. When Silver went home he went straight to the hall closet where belongings that were never used but couldn’t be thrown away were stored. In a cardboard box, beside a tray of Dina’s silverware Lee had taken after the funeral but never used because the forks tarnished so easily, was the gun Silver had bought from the dishwasher in Santa Rosa years before. He took out the gun and oiled it; he found bullets in a smaller box that also held photographs and keys which no longer fit any of the locks he used. Somewhere, Gregory had thrown away his navy-blue coat and had dressed all in black; he had put his wallet, his car keys, his gold cigarette lighter into the inside pocket of the jacket. Somewhere, he was waiting for Silver.
Silver rushed into the bedroom and unlocked the top bureau drawer. Lee hadn’t even known he was home, she had assumed he was out just as he was every night, she hadn’t heard him rooting around in the hall closet. When he ran into the room Lee was in bed reading a magazine, she had just begun to read a column about new sorts of permanents that wouldn’t damage hair when she saw him. As he threw open the door and ran to the bureau, Lee could see that he was carrying a gun. She was certain he was going to kill her. She pulled up her knees, the straps of the slip she wore fell down on her shoulders and the skin beneath the lace flushed.
“Don’t hurt me!” she said.
Silver closed the drawer and turned from the bureau. He had the gun in his left hand, and in his right hand he had an envelope. He sat down on the bed next to Lee; she had her hands covering her eyes, there were goose pimples all over her skin. Silver put the gun down on the bed and reached into the envelope.
“Look at this,” he told her.
“Don’t do it,” Lee whispered. “Don’t shoot me.”
“Will you cut it out,” Silver said. “Take a goddamned look at what I’m showing you.”
Lee uncovered one eye. Silver had taken more than ten thousand dollars in cash out of the envelope. Lee uncovered her other eye.
“I thought we only had seven hundred dollars in our savings account.”
“Shows how much you know,” Silver said. He put the cash back into the envelope, then handed it to Lee. “Take it,” he told her.
“Why?” Lee asked. She narrowed her eyes; she still wasn’t certain that he didn’t mean to kill her.
“Take it,” Silver insisted. Lee finally reached over, got her pocketbook, and dropped the envelope inside. “What I do is dangerous,” Silver explained then, “so this is insurance in case you wind up a widow.” He sprawled out on the bed and he leaned his head against the wooden headboard. “Christ, if anything happened to me you wouldn’t know what to do,” Silver said.
Lee suddenly felt light-
headed: she wasn’t going to be murdered by her husband, there was ten thousand dollars in her purse, and the truth was she immediately knew what she would do if Silver were to die.
“I’d go home,” she told Silver. “I’d move in with my mother and Jackie could go to school in Santa Rosa.”
“You’d go crazy living with your mother,” Silver said, surprised that Lee could think that far ahead. He got up, took off his clothes, then got under the covers with her. “Yackety yak,” he whispered. “She’d drive you insane.”
Now that she had begun to think about Santa Rosa, Lee found she couldn’t stop. She had never wanted to come to San Francisco, never wanted to have a fenced-in yard that couldn’t keep out the pigeons and the sound of firecrackers in the summer. She wanted someplace where there were front porches and stars, a bed where the man right next to her didn’t think of her as a sister. She kept on thinking about that: he thought of her as a sister, he could lie right next to her and not even want to touch her, he didn’t ask her to take off her slip, didn’t even hold her hand.
“I’d get a job in an office that was air-conditioned,” Lee said now. After work she would walk home barefoot, then sit out on the front porch in summer and drink gin and tonics; she’d meet a man who would beg her to let him take her dancing until she finally agreed. And even then, she’d insist on paying for her own drinks, she’d let him know from the start that she had been in love once and didn’t plan to do it again soon.
“You’ve got it all worked out,” Silver said accusingly. “I’m not even dead yet and you’re already deciding what dress you’re going to wear for your job interview.”
“It’s not like that,” Lee said. “It has nothing to do with your dying. You’re not dying,” she told Silver. “But I don’t see why I should wait till I’m a widow.”
White Horses Page 23