—Where did this come from? His voice was hoarse, hollowed out.
The other car’s lights slipped away. Restored to their usual darkness, this was a man who could look at Perry straight on. His expression could be innocence. Or curiosity.
—Sorry, man. Can’t feel the other one down there. The man slipped a hand between the seats to confirm this.
A swap, then. Something found for something lost. Was the other earring now at the bottom of the lake, a glinting, showy thing attracting the bottom feeders?
Or was this another of Elsa’s sneaky leavings, like strawberry hulls and cigarette butts?
By whatever trick or oversight, for all they’d ripped his truck and his reputation apart Perry had in his hand what the authorities had failed to find. Elsa’s last decoration, the part of her that would always be too young for secrets and gates and injury being the price of love.
Tomorrow Perry would hear the voice of an authority confirming his daughter’s identity. The Other Family would receive the same call. They would lay their suspicions of Perry to rest. Someday, through a chance encounter with an old townie, they might learn that Ellen had died of cancer. They might even grow to understand how happy the father and daughter had been, once they’d adjusted to the mother’s absence. How Perry had never missed Elsa’s band concerts or bit parts in school plays. How he’d provided for her, granted her heart’s desires when he could, suffered a beating for her. Perry would be restored as an ordinary man, who suffers as other men do who have lost their darling.
Once she was identified, Elsa would never again appear to him in their familiar places, always sixteen, dark hair ruffled by the breeze. She’d never again accuse him of driving her to search for a new life. Tomorrow he would receive confirmation that she’d never had any reason to forgive him, and even that crime would be taken from him.
Perry pocketed the silver earring. Pulled up to the tidy ranch house. The engine idled at a fast hum. The gear seemed sticky on the shift to park.
—Should I keep driving? Perry asked the man. It was still possible to do what his daughter had not. Drive past the clans’ complexes that had multiplied over the years. Accelerate past the prison now standing on the county’s outskirts, a federal penitentiary with prisoners of secret origins and crimes. Pick up the interstate, never take this man home.
The man shook his head.
—Thanks for these rides.
He folded Perry’s jacket between them and opened the passenger door. The dome light clicked on and off, a brief, searing brightness. The man walked steadily up the gravel drive to the unlit porch. A man in control of his senses and destiny, who would again lie down in the hollow beyond the hairpin curve, and this he would do by choice, not madness.
On another night soon, care of this man would again be left to Perry, and because this man was the only kindness left to him, Perry would never walk the man to the porch, enter his home, wake his parents, and beg them to save their son.
The Lavinia Nude
He couldn’t continue to stare at that girl staring right back at him, but there was nothing else to look at except the nude hanging above the young woman’s left shoulder; and Marlin couldn’t look at that without blushing. The nude wasn’t the sort of painting that belonged on the wall of a family diner. It lacked eyes, for one thing. The formless nose was contoured from eddies of thick sun-colored paint. The hands were etched in messy black strokes, stumps without fingers, as if the artist couldn’t be bothered with her details. And the exaggerated breasts, with enormous black areolae, were all out of whack with her slender body. No, he couldn’t look at it without fire rising to his cheeks, and he didn’t want the young woman in the corner to think he was reddening under her eyes. Because—unbelievably—she had looked at him first. Because she was very young, very pretty, and her gaze, deliberate and glowing, was an invitation.
Ridiculous. He was old enough to be her grandfather.
He couldn’t go on just staring. Their connection had passed the brief point of accident, had turned nearly familiar. If it went on much longer one of them would have to cross the room, begin a clumsy conversation that would either sever or solder their shared gaze. Marlin reluctantly shifted his attention away from the girl’s depthless watch on him to the art, and he wondered, as he always did, what Sarah was trying to say through the nude, and to whom.
He pushed the thought of his daughter-in-law away, decided that the girl at the corner table had to be looking at something else, perhaps at the painting on the wall behind him of a finch gripping a snowy birch branch. The finch was his. So were the other watercolors. His paintings weren’t great art, but they were attractive enough. And they fit in, for God’s sake. The chickadees in the pines. The snowbird on the fluted iron birdbath. The pair of mallard duck decoys on the shelves above the clock over the waitress station. He had carved those ducks. He had built and hung the polished oak shelves. In fact, the nude was the only thing in the place he hadn’t made or worked on over the years.
After they’d gutted and updated the diner a couple of years back, Sarah’s nude had replaced his watercolor of a cardinal perched on a rail fence. Sarah’s fence in Sarah’s backyard. He had painted her listing pear tree in the foreground, her patch of beetle-ravaged rosebushes tangled up against a fence post. Sarah and Ben, his son, were too busy to deadhead and prune. The roses never bloomed. The bird feeder he drew dangling from the pear-tree branch was filled with leaves and gray, clenched roly-poly bugs. He hadn’t meant to be judgmental. He had only drawn what he had seen one day out their kitchen window. Sarah had liked the watercolor, or so she said. But after the renovation, the nude was hung in its place.
Just looking at the thing ignited an electric jolt of grief and guilt, and he dropped his eyes to glance—casually, he hoped—at the girl again. Those eyes were watching him still. Warm. Sexy. Impossible. What color were they? He couldn’t tell.
Marlin blinked. The girl stared into him, her flat lips curving upward, the dusting of a smile.
The diner was unusually quiet for midmorning, so there was little to distract from their flirtation, if that’s what it was. The gang of regulars who always sat at a row of tables to his right was depleted. Probably all out sick. Flu season was just hitting Michigan. A nasty strain this year was killing otherwise healthy people. An eleven-year-old in Illinois had died yesterday. Staph had piggybacked on the boy’s illness, infected his lungs. In Ohio, a twenty-five-year-old Iraq War vet had succumbed after he’d been home from active duty for just two weeks. Every morning Marlin searched for grim health stories in the Brecon Sentinel. He read the obituaries, too, combing the notices for anyone he may have known. He skipped the lists of surviving relatives and career successes and civic-service highlights to mine the cause of death, digesting that information with the usual knot in his gut. With his illness phobia he knew he shouldn’t be seeking out death notices, but he found he couldn’t break the habit. Maybe it was natural at his age to indulge fear. That’s exactly what Lily called it, too. Indulgence.
Now the flu was hitting their town hard, according to that morning’s Sentinel. Only Sam and Al had shown up for their daily fifteen-minute break that always stretched to an hour or more. There was no way to join in on their conversations about the day’s headlines, their supervisors, or their wives or kids or whatnot without interrupting them outright. Anyway, it would seem strange to the guys if he spoke to them first. Usually they butted into his business, not vice versa.
No, there was no easy way to avoid that beautiful girl’s gaze.
Had Lily ever looked at him that way?
He didn’t think so, even when they were happier and still making love. Days she had left behind too easily, so it seemed to Marlin, as she moved through the sex-sabotaging stages of a woman’s aging. At first, her loss of desire made him feel guilty, as if he must be to blame for his wife falling out of love with him. His reserve during arguments that she mistook for lack of forgiveness. His harmless comments meant as compliments—on Ben
, on a new hairstyle, even the colors she chose for a quilt she was sewing—that she viewed as disapproval. Why she had begun to misinterpret him so, he didn’t know. When she had stopped loving him, he couldn’t say. He understood only that it was down to him: his fault, his failing. When, several years back, they finally ceased making love, he figured it was probably him she wanted to avoid, not sex.
But when she lost interest not just in him, but everything else, he realized that their sexual life was forever over. As she tired easily and barely spoke to him; as she napped and watched television during the day when she never used to; as she quit sewing or crafting anything with her hands; as she faded and he did not, he grew restless. Not just restless. Horny, to use that ridiculous word from his youth. Suddenly his orderly life—up early, breakfast alone with the paper, midmorning coffee at the diner, then painting or puttering around until dinner and her early bedtime and his late nights with television and ice cream and cigars on the back porch—was steamrolled by lust. He found himself watching G-String Divas on the TV. He watched girls on the street or at the local mall as they shopped or ate salad and French fries or chirped into cell phones. He gazed at their bodies under their sloppy clothing, which these days resembled the old cotton pajamas Lily used to wear except for the writing across their butts—PINK, or CREW, or the University of Michigan’s block M hitching a ride on each rounded cheek. Loose flannel slung low on their hips as if they might shimmy right out of their pants with every step. Tight under-Ts held their breasts firm. Bras were, apparently, out of fashion again. He saw girls nude, even in deep winter buried under heavy coats and snowy hair and the steam of sweet breath. He watched them in that disrespectful and public way he never could stand to see in old geezers. Now he was one.
He lusted shamelessly after these young girls, yet he reacted to Sarah’s nude as if it were porn. He stripped girls in his mind yet he couldn’t bear to look at that damn painting, that eyeless face, those ugly areolae like molasses cookies on the inflated breasts. How was that picture any more pornographic than the feelings he had right now for that girl in the corner?
Or than the feelings he had for Sarah, and what the nude had made them do?
And here came the waitress, oppressively ebullient, threading her way through the narrow aisle formed by a row of unsteady tables Marlin balanced by wedging sugar packets under the legs. He had been meaning to level them properly for weeks now, but kept forgetting his tools. Ben, of course, never had a proper wrench on hand. She held the coffee pot high as she descended upon him with resolute cheer. Her skin was yellow and smooth, like custard, and she was dressed casually in jeans and one of those tight Ts under an open cotton shirt. Her hair was loose. There was a hole in the worn knee of her pants. If Sarah was here, she would never allow such sloppiness. But her casualness turned Marlin on, like everything young girls did these days. He couldn’t take his eyes off her breasts as she leaned over him.
“Let’s warm you up,” she said. Coffee splashed into the cup, coffee he did not want. He started, jerked his hand, bumped the cup. Coffee seared his fingers. The waitress reacted with predictably energetic dismay, dabbing at his hand with a towel already soiled with the morning’s previous catastrophes. Marlin was shamed by this girl’s tone of concern and the edgy movements it was bringing out in her; touching him on the shoulder and looking at him as if he were crystal, as if the translucence of his skin, the deep, loose ridges between his knuckles, the glassy shimmer in his eyes, meant that he would totter and fuss and buckle under the strain of a minor burn. When did he begin to inspire such anxiety in young people, anyway? The more he desired these young girls, the more like a hopeless old man they seemed to treat him.
He flushed and raised his hand. The skin was a faint pink where the coffee had scalded. “No harm done,” he told her. “It wasn’t too hot.”
She flashed a fake, automatic smile and moved on to the regulars at the next table. He wished it was Sarah filling his cup. Sarah turning him on. Sarah, his beloved complication.
She used to flirt with him, even for a little while after that afternoon when everything should have changed.
Sarah was home with the baby now, and hadn’t flirted with him in months. That’s what had changed.
He picked up his cup and chanced a glance at the girl in the corner, but she was absorbed in writing something down on a legal pad. Marlin fidgeted when she turned suddenly to look over her shoulder at the nude. He felt himself blush as she stared at the thing. Did she find it grotesque, or sexy? A wave of desire strong-armed him.
Ben came out from the kitchen in a veil of grease and yeast, motioning abruptly to the waitress for a cup of coffee. The gesture was curt. Shy, not imperial. Ben wasn’t used to being waited on. Before Sarah stopped working to stay home with the baby, he had never hired any help except the occasional teenager to wash dishes. He spent the hours before dawn alone baking, then cooked all day until the diner closed in the early afternoon. Marlin thought that schedule might have to change with the baby, but so far Ben was persevering in his old ways.
Today he looked drawn as he sat down across from Marlin. Ben had been a somber boy. Now he was a grim man, distant, with no pursuits beyond his business, which he would never grow, and his family, unexpectedly growing, neither of which seemed to give him joy. He and Sarah had been trying for years to conceive. You’d think he’d be happier about the baby, Lily had observed more than once.
“How’s Sarah?” Marlin tried not to sound wistful.
“The baby’s got the flu.” Ben’s voice was hoarse with fatigue. A cup of coffee appeared timidly on the table before the waitress flew away. “Her temperature’s been climbing all morning.”
“Well … did she get a shot?”
“You know Sarah. We all got the shot.”
The mention of a day’s headline, in this case the ineffectual flu vaccine, always invited a regular to butt in. Today it was Sam who took the bait. “Fucking vaccine.” His blue Con Ed uniform was dusted with cinnamon-roll crumbs. Sam was a messy eater. He thrived on widespread mess—corrupt voting machines, the anticlimactic identity of Deep Throat, imprecise public-health policy. “That’s what’s killing everyone.”
“You’re taking a few sensationalized cases and making a big deal. Anyway, there’s plenty of cross protection.” Albert was a mechanic at the garage down the street. The ink of grease was permanently tattooed into his fingertips. Marlin liked Albert’s optimism, even if it had taken him three separate repair appointments to fix Marlin’s brakes last month. “It doesn’t match the H5N1, but it’s got an H6 variant, so there you go.”
“That’s bird flu, you dope. People get H3N2.” Sam always had the facts straight. Maybe that accounted for his grim outlook. “Anyhow, some cross protection. Those kids who died in Colorado, some of them were vaccinated. What’s your baby’s fever up to, Ben?”
“One oh three,” Ben said tiredly, but he smiled at Sam. The regulars were his customer base. He mustered the tolerance for them that he couldn’t for his family.
“That’s high.” Marlin felt the familiar bubble of anxiety. He swallowed hard. Nothing like illness to smother lust. He didn’t even want to look at the girl in the corner now.
“You better take that baby in.” Sam popped the rest of his roll into his mouth. Flecks of cinnamon peppered his chin.
“I’m going to close up in a while and go home early,” Ben told Marlin.
Al said, “Business isn’t going to be worth much this afternoon. Most of my crew is home sick.”
“I can go over to the house,” Marlin said to Ben. The offer wasn’t sincere. There was his anxiety, and there was Sarah herself. Sarah in the diner was a different creature altogether from Sarah at home with the baby, with her chronic fatigue and endless worry turning her by excruciating degrees into Ben, exhausted, unsmiling, preoccupied.
“It’s OK. Wouldn’t want you to get sick. But you never do, do you? Lucky you.” That pebble of anger in Ben’s voice.
&nbs
p; “I don’t know, if it’s luck or not.” Marlin didn’t want to discuss his devilish immunity to illness. But it was the time of year when Ben, susceptible as he was to colds and viruses of every strain, always brought it up, and with such resentment Marlin always wondered what his son really wanted to say to him. As if there weren’t plenty to say.
“So, Benny, if your wife isn’t coming to work anymore, how about taking that lady home?” Sam nodded to the nude and grinned. Marlin glanced over at the corner. The girl was writing again and seemed oblivious to the comment, although Sam’s voice filled the dining room. “Gives me a stomach cramp every time I look at it.”
“It’s not so bad.” Al gave the painting an appraising look. Al was the only regular who didn’t mock the nude. The regulars also made fun of the scruffy artist who had painted it, although he was famous around Brecon for having shown his work in New York City. But any kind of long-hair fame was fodder for the regulars. “Except for the digits being chopped off. Wonder what the guy has against fingers.”
“Fuck the fingers. What does the guy have against nipples?”
Marlin winced. Making fun of the nude always made him cringe. Sam’s coarse language in earshot of the beautiful girl made the whole thing unbearable. Why didn’t Ben take it down, anyway? He knew Ben disapproved of it even more than Marlin did.
Ben shuddered, a subtle twitch of his shoulders that only Marlin noticed. “Think I want to have to look at it at home?” he said. “Plus I wouldn’t want to remove such a vital conversation piece.”
“Looks like she was hacked to bits,” Sam muttered. “How’re you supposed to eat corned beef hash looking at that?”
“It’s Lavinia.” Ben’s tone wasn’t lightened-for-regulars anymore.
“Oh. OK.” Sam turned away. A line of crumbs on his shirt lifted like a regiment of fleas. He wouldn’t brush himself off until break was over. Nor would he ever admit he didn’t know who Lavinia was.
“Explains the fingers,” Al said. Marlin was surprised. He wouldn’t expect Al to know his Shakespeare.
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