by Paula McLain
“Are you asleep?” Fawn whispered. “Jamie?”
WE GOTTA GET OUT OF THIS PLACE
Someone likes you,” Leon whispered like a fourth-grader, snickering lightly. He and Raymond were up on the scaffolding, having a beer in the heat of the afternoon, while Katrina, the grown daughter of their landlady, Mrs. Unger, stood below them on the sunburned grass, gawking up. There was something not quite right about Katrina, though Raymond had a hard time putting his finger on it. Whenever he passed her in the hall, she stared openly at him, stood too close, let long pauses fall when he tried to engage her in the smallest pleasantries. She always looked as if she’d been sleeping in her clothes, her dress yawning open to reveal glimpses of her pale, plush underbelly. Her hair was flipped up on the ends and teased high, full of holes she hadn’t seen or looked for in a mirror.
“Hi Katrina,” Raymond called down to her now. She didn’t answer, just peered into his face with an attention that was so focused, so full-bore, he began to feel that she could see all of him, everything, right through to his skeleton. It was so unsettling that he picked up his brush and went back to work, even though when Leon had arrived with the beer, he had pretty much decided to knock off for the afternoon.
Today, the priming finally complete, the house color was going up. Mrs. Unger had chosen a pale gray that looked lavender in some light, reminding Raymond of the pigeons on the wharves, the ones that preened like beauty queens though they ate anything—fish scales, popcorn, hardened buttons of saltwater taffy—though they walked around with their own shit on their claws.
“Well, if you’re going to be that way,” Leon said, watching Raymond moving the paintbrush across a line of bricks, “I guess I’ll take a nap.” With that, he climbed through the fitted-pipe railing of the scaffolding and into his and Raymond’s open kitchen window, heading into the cool dark of the apartment.
Raymond heard Katrina laugh when Leon wriggled through, but didn’t look down, and after a time she seemed to give up on him, wandering back into the building. Alone again, Raymond painted slowly, letting the mortar grooves lead the edge of his brush forward and back. Pigeon-colored paint flecked back, freckling his wrist and lower arm. After an hour had passed, he’d moved the scaffold but was still perched just under the windows of his own apartment. If he craned his neck slightly, he could see through the stacked rooms and into the living room, where Leon sat on the floor cross-legged, leaning back on his hands, chin tilted. Whoever he was smiling at full-wattage, Raymond couldn’t see. All he could make out from this vantage point was a woman’s foot rocking back and forth, toes pointed and tipped with pale polish. He wanted to think Leon had gone out instead of napping and asked a girlfriend up, but he knew it was Suzette. He knew it, and felt a sick internal thudding as Leon moved closer to the swaying foot, bending to kiss the instep, then ran the tip of his tongue into a groove between toes.
Without thinking of the consequences, how it would piss either or both of them off to look up and find him staring in like a Peeping Tom, Raymond banged on the glass. Getting no response, he banged again louder, but the action only sped up. Now Leon stood up with his belt unclasped, his lower belly brown and flat, and Suzette followed him. Her hair was down and loose, her blouse trailed in one hand. She was braless and it was all Raymond could register for a moment—her white, white skin, the dip between her breasts—until he looked into her face. And there it was in blooming, too-close color, too close, like his own home movie: Suzette on the cliff’s edge. Her expression was radiant and purposeful—and what else? Satisfied. As if she knew she could have Leon if she wanted, or anyone else, anything else. The frailty and vulnerability Raymond knew better than his own interior had disappeared, leaving this fifty-foot woman—some impossible predator in a late-night movie about to devour the whole world. It was the strangest sensation for Raymond, seeing his sister in action. He knew, of course, or had guessed that this was how her life worked. That once she had something in her sights, she forgot everything else and reinvented herself on the spot. But ever since their adolescence, he’d been spared this close a view of the drama’s upswing, the scariness of her euphoria. Seeing it now made Raymond feel ill, because the only outcome was catastrophe. Leon, though Raymond loved him like a brother, was as bad a choice for Suzette as Benny. He’d only break her heart, and when he did, Raymond would have a front-row seat—like watching a car accident in slow motion with no distance from the wreckage.
As he stood there, leaning forward with such concentration that his forehead hit the window casing with a thunk, the couple began to move together, out of the living room and toward Leon’s bedroom down the hall, their hands all over each other.
“I see you,” someone called from below. Raymond jerked away from the window so fast he nearly fell, and the voice came again, louder, “I see you up there!” He peered over the edge of the scaffolding and there was Katrina’s round face looking up through sycamore branches, her round eyes blinking slowly. “I’m supposed to come and get you.”
He nodded and waved to show her he’d heard, but as he began to lower the scaffold slowly, his grip on the rope system was shaky. Vertigo buzzed between his ears. What the hell was going on? Leon had sworn to him, given Raymond his word—and just days before. Was he lying then? Had the asshole already been sleeping with her?
When he reached the ground, Katrina was waiting. She had changed her clothes and now wore a pale blue shirtwaist and skirt. Her hair was combed. She wore lipstick. Standing entirely too close to him she said, “The gas man’s coming today. You need to open 1B for him, that’s what I’m supposed to tell you.”
“Sure.” He scratched his head and began to step out from under the ropes and pulleys. “I can do that.”
All the way across the lawn and through the front door Katrina shadowed him. He stood fitting his key into the lock of 1B, feeling the heat from her body, smelling the slightly pumpkin-y odor of her skin, her breath.
“I’ve always wanted to see in here,” she said. “Can you give me a tour?”
“It’s the same as your place,” he said distractedly. Part of him wanted to rush upstairs and confront Leon and Suzette. Part of him wanted to go out and get very, very drunk. None of him wanted to be where he was, talking to Katrina. “The units are exactly the same layout,” he said, pocketing his keys, trying to appear busy.
“But this one’s empty.” She arched her back, her plush belly pushing into the space between them. She clearly wanted him to lead her inside, to close the door. And then what? Was he supposed to kiss her, was that the daydream? Or make love to her even? Her face was hopeful, and Raymond felt a rising disgust at this, the way she was like a door propped open.
“Well?” Katrina prompted, and he snapped back to himself. “I have to get back to work,” he said.
“Work? Yeah, I saw you working.” There was something in her tone that made Raymond think she knew something more, had seen him spying into his own apartment.
“Sorry,” he said, moving away.
“You’re not either,” she said to his back. “You’re not sorry.”
He turned fast on his heel and nearly ran into Suzette, who’d come noiselessly down the stairs.
“What do we have here?” she asked. She must have instantly taken in Katrina’s hungry plushness, Raymond’s discomfort. Nothing else would account for her tone, which was small and mean and loaded with insinuation.
Why was Suzette there anyway? Something had gone wrong with Leon, he knew, or else she’d still be upstairs with him—but Raymond hardly had the patience, at that moment, to pursue the matter. He was too angry to say anything but “Shut up, Suzy,” as he pushed past her and out the front door.
“What?” She followed him. “What the hell is your problem?” she yelled as he moved farther down the sidewalk. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
Everything in her words, her voice, told Raymond she thought she had really caught him at something he shouldn’t have been doing, and more tha
n this, that she was getting pleasure from it—enjoying the fact that he could make mistakes too. And it was ludicrous, really. She was the one who’d been braless minutes before.
Raymond knew he should have kept walking, and let her say whatever the hell she wanted, to his back. But something small and mean in his own self surfaced. “My problem is you,” he said, turning on her. “What are you doing anyway? You stupid girl. You think Leon’s going to be your boyfriend or something? That he’s going to save you? That he wants anything more from you than five minutes in bed?”
Suzette froze, her mouth falling open in shock and surprise, like a character in a cartoon. She was speechless.
He left her there. He left everything—his brushes drying stiff in the sun, the paint growing a skin in the open can, Katrina very likely complaining to her mother about him—and walked up the street. At the bodega he bought a six-pack of beer and drank them one after another on a bench in the park. Afterward, he lay down on the bench and closed his eyes. When he woke, the sun had dropped considerably and shifted behind the trees. He walked home wondering if he’d be able to look at either Leon or Suzette without wanting to punch them, and sincerely hoped they’d both be gone. But as he approached the building he saw they were outside, sitting together on the front steps.
Suzette stood up as he walked nearer, and reached out to latch onto his arm. “Don’t be mad at me, okay, Ray? Nothing happened.”
He shrugged off her hands and started to climb the steps to go inside.
“Ray?” Suzette said plaintively, as if to follow him. Then Leon spoke up.
“You’re being an asshole, you know that? Can’t you see you’re making your sister feel terrible?”
Raymond stopped at the door and turned around. “I’m not making her do anything. She’s a big girl, right?” His voice was thickly bitter.
“It’s not what you think, man. I’ve told her how it is with me. I’m not taking her for a ride. It’s fine, but you need to get cool about it.”
“That’s not going to happen.” Raymond pitched himself down the stairs at Leon, but overshot it. He felt himself collapse onto the sidewalk, his tailbone colliding with a jarring thump. When Leon tried to give him a hand up, he stood and lunged simultaneously, grabbing Leon around the middle and taking him back down. Raymond was too drunk to land a punch, too close to Leon’s body to do more than push at his rib cage with soggy-feeling fists. It was a miserable semblance of a fight, and what’s more, Leon wouldn’t fight back. The whole time, Suzette stood to one side with her hand to her mouth. No one said anything, there were just the pathetic sounds of Raymond’s missed punches, and finally, weary of thrashing, Raymond scooted away from Leon and sat on the bottom step, looking off down the street at nothing.
“You all right, man?”
Raymond was silent.
“Anything I can do?”
“Stop screwing my sister?”
“I’m not screwing your sister. It didn’t get that far. Trust me.”
“Right,” Raymond said. Then he stood up, climbed the stairs, and entered his apartment. It was hushed and gray, cool. On the floor in the living room there was a full wineglass and an empty one, Suzette’s shucked sandals. Leon’s bedroom door was open, the sheets on his bed rumpled. Raymond sighed and went into his own room, locking the door behind him. He didn’t recognize anything. It was as if he had never lived there at all. There was a purple Indian print on the bed, plastic beads draped over the window, records scattered everywhere on the bare floor. Everything in the room smelled of Suzette’s shampoo and sandalwood incense. He lay down on the bed anyway, and pulled the coverlet over him. When he stretched out, he inadvertently kicked something to the floor. It was the expensive May Company dress rolled up in a little ball, discarded—just another skin thrown off.
Over the next few days, Raymond couldn’t bring himself to speak to either Leon or Suzette. He spent long hours out on the scaffolding, painting in a rhythm that almost soothed him. Almost. But then his arms would tire, even when he switched right to left and back again, his elbows flagging as the sun sank lower. The day was only so long, and he could accomplish only so much before he’d have to go inside and face Leon and Suzette.
It’s not as if Raymond thought he could ignore them forever, but he definitely needed a break, some time off from his thoughts, from the rut he’d dug himself into over the years. If only he could just float along for a while, not talk, not listen, not make the motions of repair. But they wouldn’t, either of them, let up on him.
Leon kept insisting the whole thing had been his mistake. “Things went pretty far with Suzette,” he admitted, “further than they should have. She came on to me, and I thought I had a handle on it, but then…Well, you know how things can happen. But I didn’t sleep with her, I swear it.”
“What, you want a medal or something?”
“No, man, just a little compassion is all,” he said, shaking his lion head.
As for Suzette, she apologized too—in her usual way, insinuating herself, making herself small enough to tuck into his pocket. And it was hard to ignore her; it was against all their rules. He loved Suzette. She’d been the focus of most of his whole life, but he was tired of being her savior, tired of their dance. Didn’t they know any other steps? Couldn’t they be another way with each other?
After a week of Raymond’s silent treatment, Leon came out to where Raymond was stirring paint. “You need a vacation,” he said.
“What do you mean? I work three, four hours a day.”
“Not from work, from this, your life. We’ll all go camping.”
“Camping? You, me, and Suzette? If I need a break from my life as you say, then I’d better go alone.”
“No, this is a great idea. Trust me.”
There was that word again, trust. Raymond wanted to trust Leon, he did. He wanted to believe Leon was telling the truth about putting the brakes on with Suzette, wanted to let the whole thing go. He was spending way too much time thinking about this, and couldn’t seem to stop. The more he stewed on the facts, the more Leon became every man who had ever wronged Suzette or ever would. She wasn’t going to change. She would always be two women, the one who swung herself fanatically off cliffs and the one who lay whimpering at the bottom, and although Raymond loved his sister fiercely, he wasn’t sure he liked or could spend another day with either of the selves she yo-yoed between.
He also wasn’t sure he could fight her anymore—or Leon. It took too much effort not to let himself be swept back into the agreed-upon routine, into the safety of his life as he knew it. “Camping, huh? All right. As soon as I finish the house.”
“No, now. Tomorrow.”
“Just give me a week. One week,” Raymond said.
“You’ve got it,” Leon said. But when Raymond knocked off work that night and went inside the apartment, he saw a tent and backpacks piled in the center of the living room, a Coleman lantern, a scarred green plastic cooler.
“I thought we agreed on a week,” Raymond said to Leon, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a sleeping bag and half a bottle of red wine.
“Don’t be such an old lady,” Leon said. “Have a glass of wine with me, and then we’ll talk about it some more.”
STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU
When I finally slept, I slept for twenty-eight hours, all day and through the night and into the next afternoon. Sitting up in bed I felt drugged. My scraped knees were swollen and achy and I was aware of a vaginal tenderness that I didn’t want to think about, not then, not ever. I was also aware that the story Fawn and I had told Raymond was likely already unraveling. Claudia knew nothing about the “kidnapping.” If she had told her parents even half of what really happened in Chicago, even just that we had taken her father’s car on a joyride, then the Fletchers had probably already called Raymond. I felt dread collect in the pit of my stomach. It was Sunday. Raymond would be lying in wait for us—or me, rather, since Fawn’s cot was empty. She and I
wouldn’t even have time alone to get another story straight. I wanted to crawl back under my sheet and make myself disappear, but it was inevitable. Fawn and I had told a terrible lie and would have to face the consequences.
But when I found my way to the kitchen, I saw that Raymond was making us a late breakfast of French toast and bacon. Fawn sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee, which I had never seen her do before. Maybe it was the quality of light, or because I myself felt tired all the way down to my bones, but Fawn looked older somehow, as if she had turned a corner, passed over the barrier to adulthood while I slept. And it didn’t matter that I was awake now; I would never catch up, never really be where Fawn was. But maybe that was okay. For now I didn’t want to think about the future—not even what lay half an hour ahead. I just wanted to eat my French toast, sponge up every bite, every dark drop of syrup until I was too full to move or think.
As we ate, Raymond hovered, offering more toast, more juice. And I liked it, the way the night before I had liked being carried from the car, tucked in, and worried about. Maybe he hadn’t realized until Fawn and I were really in trouble how much he cared about us, or maybe he’d never had such a concrete way to show his feelings for us before now. Whatever the reason, I didn’t mind at all when, after clearing the plates, Raymond reminded me that he wanted to take me to see a doctor. In fact, I felt grateful for his concern.
“I don’t need to go, right?” Fawn asked. “I mean, I’m not hurt or anything.”
“What about those bruises?” Raymond said, pointing to the place above Fawn’s left wrist, where purplish bands—the exact shape and size of a man’s hand closing in a clamp—had bloomed overnight.
“So? I don’t need a doctor.”