by Chris Knopf
“My, aren’t you a handsome boy. What’s your name?”
“Eddie Van Halen.”
She kept scratching his face.
“Are you a guitar player?”
“He gave it up. No money in it.”
I switched on the furnace, hoping there was some oil left. I only ran it once in a while to keep it from rusting up, or when I couldn’t keep the house above freezing with the woodstove in the living room. The radiators clanged into action.
She stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room and watched me bunch up newspapers and toss kindling into the stove. I overstocked it with split red oak and opened up the dampers.
“You want some coffee?”
“You drink a lot of coffee.”
“Yeah, too much. Want some?”
“I drink too much coffee, too. Sure.”
I built a five-cup pot of freshly ground Cinnamon Hazelnut. The rain was trying to beat in the windows, but the house started to feel warm. From the kitchen, I could look through the living room and out to the screened-in porch. Beyond the porch the bay was all in a charcoal gray and white-tipped uproar. The nearest buoy, a green can, was rocking back and forth like a dweeble. The only thing in the room besides the stove was a pull-out couch. I sat on it after Amanda sank down next to the stove and took a sip of her coffee, holding the cup with both hands. Somehow while I was fussing with stoves and coffee she’d managed to brush back her hair and smooth out her face. She wore Reeboks, clean, faded Wranglers and a chambray shirt under her cotton windbreaker. The shirt was opened to just below the top curve of her breasts. Her chest had seen a lot of sun—it was very dark with freckles that were almost black.
“So,” I said, for openers.
“I’m sorry I’m bothering you again.”
“You mostly bother me when you say you’re sorry.”
Self-effacement can be hard work on the receiving end.
“You like your privacy. I’m making you uncomfortable.”
“I’m just not used to other people sitting in my living room.”
“I understand that. I’ve lived alone.”
“Where’s Roy?”
“He had to go to the City.” She looked up as if unsure I believed her. “HQ keeps a pretty tight rein, so he has to go in two or three times a month. I took off early. They’ll cover for me.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
She busied herself petting and cooing at Eddie. He didn’t discourage her.
“Of course not. That bothers you?”
“Not really. I’m just not much for company.”
“I’m sorry. I should go.”
“No, I mean, I’m not good company. Me. Obviously. You’re fine.”
“I still should go. You’re probably busy.”
She started to stand up. I waved her back down.
“Nah. Drink your coffee. I got nothing else to do.”
“When we talked about Regina Broadhurst it got me thinking about my mother again. Not that I ever stopped. It’s all I’ve done since she died. They’re all dying. Our parents. Yours, mine.”
“It’s been five years since my mother went. I don’t think about it much.”
Amanda leaned back against the wall and looked at me through frustrated, anxious eyes. Tears rushed up into her voice.
“She was just a sweet, wonderful old woman. She made dolls for charity for Chrissakes.”
The impossible tangle of her emotions created an attraction current that drew her legs back against her chest. She pulled them to her and rested her head on her knees.
“I’m an engineer, not a shrink. But it looks to me like it all happened too quick for you and you got what they call unresolved issues.”
A couple sessions of court-ordered therapy and I’m fucking Sigmund Freud.
“I know. They have grief counselors, but Roy was really unhappy about the idea. Doesn’t approve of it.”
“Can’t say he’s helping out too much here.”
“No, you can’t say that.”
Eddie found people down at his level irresistible. He tried to lick her face, from which she gently demurred. I told him to bug off, so he went out to the screened-in porch, a little put out.
“It’s none of my business, but since you’re here in my living room, I guess I can say you should talk to somebody about this and to hell with Roy. With all due respect.”
“Maybe I can just talk to you.”
“Now I know you need help.”
She smiled at me. “You want me to think you’re just an old burnout.”
It’s amazing how pretty women who like you and wear rough chambray shirts and smell like fresh expectations can say anything they want and get away with it.
“Too burned out to think straight, that’s for sure.”
Even though I couldn’t stop thinking about Regina floating in that bathtub. She had wicked bad arthritis. Could hardly bend down. She had an old tin-lined shower stall off the kitchen that she could just walk into. My old man used the tub in that bathroom to clean fish. In return he’d leave her a few in the freezer. When I went through the house I saw a bathrobe hanging in the broom closet, which was right near the shower stall, along with a bunch of beach towels. I realized, standing there looking down at Amanda, that Regina never sat on the beach. And never had any guests. Those were her bath towels. Thirty-year-old beach towels she was too cheap to replace.
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know, Amanda. Old habits die hard. I spent most of my life solving engineering problems, which are like big, complicated puzzles. You have to noodle ’em out. Only here I can’t say there’s anything to noodle. I must be growing an imagination in my old age.”
“You’re not that old.”
Amanda smoothed the legs of her jeans down toward her ankles, pushing out the wrinkles and reinforcing the crease up her shins and over her knees. I thought of my daughter’s cat.
“I wish you could have met my mother. She was very strict, but she had a sense of humor.”
“I probably would’ve been a bit young for her.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
I felt bad when I saw the tears pooling up in her eyes. I find it hard to talk about death without being sarcastic. Grieving relatives usually don’t find it too funny. I went into the bathroom next to the kitchen and got a box of Kleenex. I was able to keep my mouth shut long enough for her to blow her nose and mop up her tears.
“I think I would have liked her, too,” I said.
“How come?” she said, with a sniff.
“I can tell. Probably loaded with charm. A lot of it rubbed off on you.”
“Does that mean you like me, too?”
“Yes. It does.”
“That’s so amazing.”
“Why?”
“Because I feel so unlikable.”
For a brief moment, her history poured in from some other dimension, flowed around the living room, then drained away through cracks in the floor and special portals in the wall. It caused a lapse.
“So what made you come back to Southampton?”
She looked at me as if concentrating on my face. Evaluating. She scrunched up her mouth and looked away.
“Something bad,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“What about you?”
“Same here. More or less.”
“I thought so,” she said. “Want to know?”
“Nah. Enough of that stuff, okay?”
“Okay. If you want.”
The gray-black rain clouds outside made it even darker in the knotty pine room. I opened the woodstove and threw in a few more logs. We were washed by fire light and smoky dry heat. She took off her windbreaker and pulled up her sleeves. She hadn’t moved out of the way when I was stoking the stove. Her presence was beginning to unbalance the stolid resignation that decorated the inside of my cottage. I looked down at her and caught a glimpse of a tanned breast held softly in a low-cut
flowered bra. I went back to the kitchen to exchange my coffee for something stronger. Something with little blocks of ice in it.
The phone rang. It was Sullivan.
“They gave me a note from a guy named Jimmy Maddox. That’s her nephew?”
“Yeah. He’s letting me handle the funeral and settle the estate. First I want that cause of death.”
“When you get hold of a bone you sure do gnaw on it.”
“A lot of time has gone by. I’m not an expert on morbidity, but it’s got to affect an accurate read. Make sure it’s the full deal. Blood analysis, tissue trauma, stuff under fingernails.”
“That’s not an autopsy. That’s forensics.”
Amanda was standing there watching me. Holding the phone to my ear with my left shoulder, I held up the gin bottle and pointed to the tonic. She nodded. I poured and continued to talk to Sullivan.
“Okay. Do whatever.”
While I talked I watched Amanda busy herself around the kitchen. When she refilled the ice trays she leaned into the sink, bearing her weight on her right leg with her left tucked behind like a dancer.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Sullivan. “You just worry about gettin’ her in the ground. Call me with the name of the funeral home and we’ll send her over there when we’re done.”
“Okay, chief. By the way, who cleaned up her house?”
“I don’t know. Not us. Unless it was the paramedics.”
“Is that usually what they do?”
“No, that’s the family’s business.”
Amanda leaned into me when she reached across the kitchen table for the tonic. She poured for both of us and handed me the drink. She mouthed the word lime and I jerked my head toward the refrigerator.
“So you didn’t turn off the power.”
“I don’t think so. I’ll call the County Health people. The power’s out?”
“I just turned it back on.”
“Don’t forget to pay LIPA. You got the authority.”
“The cop,” I told Amanda when I hung up.
“The cop?”
“Joe Sullivan. Not really the meatball I thought he was.”
“He’s doing what you want?”
“I got Jimmy Maddox, Regina’s nephew, to sign an autopsy request. Sullivan’s going to get the county coroner to do it for me, which probably took a little pull on his part.”
“That poor woman has to be buried.”
“She doesn’t care,” I started going down one road, then quickly switched to another. “I’m just curious. Got a little itch to scratch. Can’t hurt anything at this point.”
Amanda smiled instead of apologizing, which was a step in the right direction.
“I’m sure. Cheers.”
She took a healthy pull on the gin and tonic. We looked around the inside of my barren little house for a while without saying anything.
“I’d better go,” she said, finally.
“Probably should.”
“I feel better.”
“It’s the proximity of the Little Peconic. Has that effect.”
“Couldn’t be the company.”
Eddie and I watched her get back in the windbreaker. He got a pat on the head before she left. I got a complicated little smile.
The rain grew louder and insinuated itself back into the mood of the room. I put on a sweatshirt and went back out to the screened-in porch so I could sit quietly with Eddie, drink my drink and watch the lousy weather do its best to upset the resolute tranquility of the Little Peconic Bay. After a time the world collapsed into a space defined solely by what I could see through the screens, and for the next few hours a tired, threadbare kind of peace took the place of the flat black anguish somebody had bolted down over my heart.
A heavy gray blanket of fog was lying all over the area when I got up the next morning. The automatic coffee pot was prompt and at the ready. A shower, a shave, a worn pair of jeans and a freshly washed shirt from out of the dryer. Things that make me feel a little less like an animal.
For almost thirty years work would get me out of bed in the morning. It would wake me up before dawn, with all the imperatives of the coming day rioting in the corridors of my nervous system. Sometimes I’d actually bolt upright in bed with a scream choked off in my throat. Usually the transition was slower and more tortured. I’d open my eyes and check the clock. I’d never go back to sleep. I never noticed what the weather was like outside. There was no outside; it was irrelevant. Abby was a blanketed mound on the right side of the bed. I’d be on my second cup of coffee at my desk about the time her alarm went off.
She’d tried a lot of different jobs. They all made her unhappy. Raising our daughter was her defined purpose, and she did the job very well. Our daughter was exquisite. The world loved her. She hated her father, so I didn’t know her very well. I didn’t even know why she hated me, though I could’ve probably figured it out easily enough.
We lived in a large contemporary house in the woods north of Stamford, Connecticut. I drove to work at an engineering center in White Plains, New York. In the early days I was on my dictation machine before I started the car. Later it was the car phone jacked into voice mail. Except for an hour or two at a boxing gym I found in New Rochelle, I worked all day and into the evening without a break, even for meals. I ate frozen bagels and prepared foods heated in a microwave in my office. I drank coffee until I could hear my heart rate fluttering in my ears. All day long I’d count my responsibilities in my head like an obsessive compulsive counting his fingers or the days of the week. Agonies and ambitions streamed through my office, afloat on a river of selfishness and sacrifice. From phone to fax to face I’d hurtle in a vertiginous sprint, breathless and jagged. With the help of one or two other people, I held a slender tether on a twisting angry chaos. Like a bull runner of Pamplona, I knew the beast could turn and gore me at any moment. But I saw no other way.
The building we worked in had a square jaw and was charged with purpose. Our ostensible mission was to give worldwide R&D and engineering support to the company’s manufacturing operations. For some of the employees the goal was to provide a staging area from which to launch elaborate corporate intrigues and sub rosa advancement schemes. I was a lot better at managing the engineering than the politics. Some felt this was my downfall, but that wasn’t really true. A little more political acumen, however, would have helped.
I steered the Grand Prix cautiously through the fog on the way down to the Village. I felt like I was in a submarine. The mist was cold—a winter harbinger. I flicked on the heater for the first time of the season. It smelled like burnt mold. I was glad I was still in a pretty good mood.
The Village municipal offices were on Main Street behind a colonnaded facade that guarded the occupants from the citizenry. The interior smelled like the lobby of an old hotel. The walls were decorated with aerial photos and geographical surveys hung like family portraits over waiting areas and brochure stands. Cops with creaking leather holsters and contractors angling for zoning breaks greeted each other as they passed in the halls. One of them pointed out the stairs that took you down to the Records Department.
A chest-high counter anchored the front of the room. A woman sat at a desk on the other side, looking at a computer screen through the bottom half of her bifocals. Her iron-gray hair was chiseled into a helmet that perched on top of her head. Ceiling-high metal racks, filled with oversized leather binders, stood a few feet from her desk and ran to the back of the room, the end point disappearing into darkness. She ignored me. I waited her out.
“Can we help you with something?”
“I need everything you’ve got on this property in North Sea.”
I slid a slip of paper with Regina Broadhurst’s address written on it across the top of the counter.
She hoisted her wide bottom off the chair and used its mass to propel her up to the counter. She wore a cotton print dress and blocky high-heeled shoes. A bead chain was clipped to the temples of her glasses
so they could double as a necklace. She looked at the address and handed it back to me.
“North Sea is in the Town. You’ll have to ask them.”
“They sent me here.”
She looked at me like I was the agent of a hostile power.
“It’s an estate matter. I’m the administrator.” I showed her my credentials. “All I need is the title, deeds, maps, whatever you’ve got.”
“That’s all you need? It’s not in one place. It’ll take some time.”
I wondered what purpose she thought all those records had. Saving them for the Second Coming.
“How long?”
“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t begun to look.”
“Okay. When should I come back?”
“You’re not going to wait? What if I have questions?”
I held my ground.
“All you need to know is that I need copies of everything in this building relating to that address.”
She saw an opening.
“You’ll have to pay for copies.”
“That’s okay.”
“And that will add to the time. You can’t just look at the documents here?”
I looked at the sign on the wall over the counter. It said the Village of Southampton was pleased to promptly provide copies of official documents. Word hadn’t filtered down to the troops.
“They’re not the ones who have to do it,” she said, catching the drift.
“I’ll be happy to go through the files myself, if you’re too busy.”
“We have to do it for you. Can you imagine if people just came in here and went through everything?”
I saw hordes of Long Islanders rampaging through moldy real-estate records.
“Is there anyone else who can help me?”
She snatched the address back out of my hand. “I don’t know why the Town thought this information would be here. Unless it’s in the dated stacks.”
“I don’t know what those are, but I bet that’s where you’ll find what I’m looking for. Let’s see.”
She left me standing at the counter and went off into the tall stands of metal racks. She came back a half-hour later to tell me she needed the rest of the day to do all the copies. I said fine, I’ll be back in the morning. I left her in the glow of her weary indignation and went to the corner place to caffeinate what was left of my good mood.