He stepped closer, frowning. “You got a problem.”
“OK,” she said. He had grabbed the doorframe so that she had to lean back. “OK.”
“Don’t do that,” he warned her.
“What?”
“Don’t make no sign of the cross.”
“I’m not, I’m just getting—out of your way. See?” She drew her legs up into the van and laughed. “Are you a werewolf?”
“No. No, ma’am, and you’re not a priest. But I’m pretty sure you think you could be.”
“I do, as a matter of fact, think that I should be allowed to be if I wanted to be, which I don’t.”
“Right,” he said. “We won’t see that day. See anything in there? Hey, you don’t need a warrant. I’ll show you around.”
“I was just looking. Did you see Silence of the Lambs?”
“Nope,” he said. “I don’t go to that kind of show.”
“‘Show,’” she said. “Where did you grow up?”
“No matter where I say, you’re gonna say something,” he said, shaking the van as he sat down. But he pushed himself back and got all the way in, onto on a roll of carpet. He stretched out his legs. “Aren’t you? You’re gonna say something. New York City, that’s where I grew up.”
“Really?”
“Where did you think?”
“Nevada? Florida?”
“That some kind of insult? I was born in Indiana.”
“Gary, Indiana?”
“Terre Haute. So figure out the rest.”
“Guys from Indiana, aren’t they supposed to be basketball players?”
“The tall ones.”
“Do you think of yourself as short?”
“Do you think of yourself as bitchy? Where’s that boyfriend you’re supposed to have?”
“I don’t know.”
“Up some mountain with a lot of fancy gear, that’s what I hear.”
“That’s what he does.”
“What do you want him to do?” He said it quietly.
Oh, no you don’t, she thought.
But he had her by the arms again, he was using them to bring her into the van with him. He held her weight against his chest and then went down on one arm, stretching out on the carpeted floor in an easy motion that had nothing she could argue with in it, though it brought her down beside him. Lying down could just as easily have been her idea. She let her head hang back but her body came forward.
*
“How come it stays warm in here?”
“It’s warm outside.” He didn’t say the obvious, that they had raised the temperature in the dark van. The doors were still open, with the limbed pines standing on either side. She could see the brown glow of the porch light.
She rolled over, propped her bare ankles on something and crossed them. On his knees he pulled a blanket down from the logs of carpet and spread it over her. What on earth was she doing here, under an army blanket in the back of a van? She said sleepily, “You got my mother that thing, didn’t you, that heart.”
“Somebody gave it to me. I gave it to her.”
“Somebody. A girl.”
“Yeah, a girl. You’re one of them know-it-alls.”
“A girl thought you needed it.”
“Guess she did.”
“Knowing about your life. The story of your life. The stories. You’re quite a storyteller. You had my folks pretty amused tonight.”
“I get into trouble in bars. I get going. I like a story.”
“I’ve heard you get into trouble.”
“You heard that.”
“Heard you get into fights.”
“Well, yes I do,” he said. “Or I use to. Half the time I liked the guy thrown the punch.”
“I see,” she said, in a classroom voice. Maybe she always had this voice.
“People get acrost me.”
“You didn’t mean it when you said you like my parents, did you?”
“What now?” he sighed at the ceiling.
“I know what you meant. You meant you love them.”
“I guess you could say that.”
“And you think I don’t. Love them.”
“You better hope I don’t think that, if I make a pass at you.”
“This was a pass?”
“I’m not going after some girl that don’t give a damn.”
“Are you going after me?”
“I got you.”
“Oh, you think so?” She put her finger on the crease in his cheek to feel the smile.
“Definitely.” With one of those slow shifts of his that she already recognized he got himself lying with his head on her thighs. He was outside the blanket and she could make out the white of his legs in the dark, and the dark sockets of his eyes. He turned over, sighed, and moved both hands up her legs until he had her hips in his hands the way you would hold somebody’s, a child’s, shoulders, if you had to gently lecture her. He rubbed his jawbone heavily against the blanket. “You’re a beautiful girl,” his muffled voice said wearily, as if it were a lesson he had had to teach too many times.
“Funny, you said.”
“Don’t fight about it,” he said. He was holding onto her. Both of them slowly adrift. It might be she was drifting and he was towing, though without effort.
“So . . . my mother told you a lie. And you gave her a Healing Heart to comfort her.”
“I reckon I wouldn’t use ‘lie,’” he said after a while, “if it was my mother.”
“Where is she? Your mother?” The baby blanket under his pillow.
“Couldn’t tell you. I left home when I was eight.”
“Eight.”
“Eight.”
“Why? Why would you have to leave Terre Haute, Indiana?”
“You don’t wanta know.”
“No, I’d like to know. I would. I’d like to hear you describe it,” she said humbly.
He shrugged himself under the blanket with her.
Describe it. An assignment. But one he declined with silence.
Describe a time you were praised. This was for her night-school students, the Vietnamese and Samoans. Describe a view from a window in paradise. The Muslims liked that. Envision the world with a key improvement.
And her students would write, striving—against their work-study schedules, their mono, their hangovers—striving to please her, it had to be that, by means of an imaginary world with a key improvement: three sexes, or plants generating the power, or no composition courses.
In the world I envision there would be only this one power, no other. Love, it was, though she frightened herself with the word.
When she woke there was no sound, not even the dripping on metal to which she had gone to sleep. She sat up in the dark and tried to see her watch. She would have to be quiet getting back into the house. But not yet. She put her fingers to the back of her head, where the hair was matted. No one could see her, her prettiness at this hour gone puffy. It was arrived at, anyway, not to be found in the middle of the night.
It was not that that made her catch her breath as if she had been sobbing. It was not betraying Nat. When had Nat ever wanted her exacting loyalty? It was not that a few hours ago she had been gasping under this stranger as if she were being murdered, and taking pleasure in being murdered. It was an absence. A sound of roaring, or rushing, not close to her but half-heard and ever-present, the sound of her life, had stopped, rolled back from bare beach, herself.
Her ears were stopped up as if she were yawning, and the leg doubled under her had gone to sleep, while Aiken lay at ease, on his back, breathing peacefully. The black eyelashes fanned out along his cheekbones. That’s what it was, she thought, looking at the hollows of his face. That’s what happened to me. That’s pretty simple. That’s a first. I just gave in to it. Is that what it was?
She had only to wait. She knew the life would run back in. Her voice would begin in a minute, in her own mind, she could not escape it. But she could sit here until then.
What if
it started in and she stayed anyway, watching him?
“We snuck in and watched you,” her father would say when she was little. “Your cur-rls were spread out and you were sleeping the sleep of a clear conscience.” “And the baby, too. Little angels, you were,” her mother would say, as if the shock of this family formed out of nowhere, out of nothing but two orphans, could never weary her. As if two ordinary children were beauties, and if they were, as if beauty were goodness. She could see why her parents had forgotten her and her cruel brother and imagined themselves the mother and father of a girl who had died and Aiken.
americans love dogs
On Brianne’s first day as their au pair, the French couple tested the dog. They were going to observe its reaction to her presence near the baby, l’enfant, le bébé, whom the dog, said the father, lived to protect. Their dog was a sober animal, he said, not playful like those Brianne would be used to in the US. “Asseyez-vous,” he instructed Brianne. He opened a door and the dog, an untrimmed standard poodle, gray and tall, stood calmly sniffing for a moment before it entered the room and crossed the rug. A male, Brianne saw. The dog came to her and laid its muzzle on her knee. “Poof!” said the little girl, Nathalie. She was not yet four but she already knew English and was said to like the idea of having her own language and of speaking it at all times with Brianne. The father Luc gave a clap. “Les Americains aiment les chiens!”
On that afternoon Brianne barely took in his glowing eye and early silver at the hairline. Everything she said was directed at the mother, Clemence, who nevertheless let her husband do most of the talking.
Clemence was tired and losing weight but had not yet had all of her tests. With his small taut briefcase Luc arrived home every day on a gust of fresh air. He told Brianne her name came from a cheese. Or from the masculine Brian, which came from brecan, meaning “break.” At any rate, a mimicry of French, one of the silly names so American. Brianne fell in love in the first week, recognizing this kind of talk for the warmth it concealed, like a béarnaise with pepper flakes. “Spicy!” he said with relish. “For me, it is better to have not very much cayenne,” Clemence mentioned in private. In addition to speaking English to the children Brianne was to do some of the cooking as well as clean a little. At home her friends had said, “They’re French and they want you to cook?”
At home Brianne had been a nanny, until she exiled herself from American loves. For four years now she had been putting off college and getting into difficulties, most of them arising at the edges of her workday, with the fathers. Her mother had given up and just wanted her to be married.
Clemence came home in the middle of the afternoon from her appointment with the specialist. She sat down on the ottoman in front of the red armchair—the furniture was colorful and small—where Brianne watched TV while the children were having their nap. The French were serious about the nap. Every day Brianne had two hours of freedom while the two children slept, one in his crib and the other in her little French-sized bed. On this day Brianne was watching TV with her Mauriac novel open on her lap. She was not reading and had formed no plan for improving her French or reapplying to college. The dog was at her feet.
“Ma chère, will you bring un petit Dubonnet,” said Clemence. When Brianne came back with the little glass of ruby liquid Clemence said, “Mais toi-même aussi.” Brianne didn’t like Dubonnet but she poured herself a glass, drank it in the kitchen, and poured another. Clemence was still on the ottoman, with her head in her hands. Among the curls her fingers still had the tiny glass in their grip. “I know that he makes some advances to you and I think you love him,” she said, sitting up straight again. “But do you love my children?”
Always say you love the children. But Brianne was sincere in this, whatever her effect on men—and it was not her fault that they had a similar effect on her, though only certain ones, very nearly a type, to be exact, and to give herself credit, for her the type was not the matter of looks and fresh youth that it was for them, but some sense of a person at once a father well established in life and a pent-up little boy. The truth was she liked the boy side better, preferring children to adults. She would have at least two of her own. But she would take care never to slight the beautiful pair sleeping down the hall, who were half hers already, as was the dog, who stirred against her feet and opened his intelligent eyes when he scented the tears of his owner. He did not get up and go to the ottoman, where Clemence had wiped the tears, swallowed her Dubonnet, and fluffed her curls. Luc was at the door. With his head still high the dog shut his eyes as if asleep, as Brianne cried, too, and absently picked up and laid down his silken ears.
sleepover
Angie sat up. “Come in,” she called, but no one came and there was no second knock. She got out of bed stiff from hard sleep and opened the door. A woman stood there in a purple bathrobe very like her own, long and quilted, with a satin collar. It was Cham. Cham, the housekeeper. Angie put her hand on the commotion in her chest. No need for it. She was in her daughter’s house, in the guestroom. One of the guestrooms. Cham was here.
“Somebody here,” said Cham. “Boy.”
“Who is it?” Angie responded foolishly, reaching for her own robe. Hers was red, given her by Bill Diehl just before he got married, as a consolation. A size too big, owing to her loss of weight. Cham helped her with the inside-out sleeves, not even glancing at the arrow of scar where it sank cleanly down the neck of Angie’s nightgown when she reached back for the armholes.
“Boy,” Cham said again. “In there, with girls. One girl turn off alahm.” One girl. Not Erika, your granddaughter. Cham’s face gleamed with oil and she had a purse in her hands. Would she keep a gun? In a special purse, for the nights she was alone with a child in this outsized house?
Would thirteen-year-olds at a slumber party let in someone they didn’t know? A sleepover. “Don’t say slumber party,” her daughter Pat had warned her. “Or pajama party.”
“We’re in this together, Cham,” Angie said. Cham’s feet were bare and a strong smell of nutmeg wafted to Angie, perhaps the oil Cham had on her face. I don’t see why she can’t be friendly, Angie thought, following her down the long hall like a child, but they had reached the great dim room and Cham was already turning without a word to leave her there.
The moon was high and the skylights spread four pools of gray light on the floor. At the far end of the room where candles were burning on the glass table, the girls huddled in a cloud of pillows and sleeping bags. Sniffing for marijuana Angie got only nail polish remover and candle wax. The heavy couches with their rolled backs seemed more ponderous in the semidark, under the vaulted ceiling. A hushed laugh drifted in the room.
“Your grandma!” someone hissed.
Next to her granddaughter in the circle sat a blond boy.
Angie’s heart attack had been written up in a medical journal. She was proof that women might have a reaction all their own to having their arteries blown open with balloons, or cut up and spliced. They might repay the most delicate and constructive of procedures with clots, wild rhythms, ugly infections, fevers. “Now, Patty, would you not give me that look,” she said to her daughter on the first day of her visit. “Just remember, when you came down to see me I was using a toilet chair. I’ve come a long way. And what about you, if you get any thinner you can live in that wall of yours.”
Pat’s wall was a block long, built high enough that no one on the curving boulevard to the lake could see a house behind it, even the roofline, let alone the lake below. Apparently no law said a city ought to be able to see its own lake. The wall was a foot thick and had its own miniature roof of slate tiles. Pat said nothing, but went on looking at her, and it was true that in the vast, smoky mirror over the fireplace, a wraith could be seen standing with Pat, nodding and pointing, instead of a solid woman with round arms and a good neck for sixty-seven.
Sometimes, Angie did not say to Pat, it seemed the blood pumped off during her bypass and fed oxygen for all those hours had
run back into her carrying seeds of despair. But at least she had not lost her wits to the pump, as people her age frequently did. They woke up confused and stayed confused. Pumpheads, the doctors called them. Once it was clear it hadn’t happened to her, her friend Terri had told her about pumpheads. Terri was an ICU nurse.
Angie was not a pumphead. Still, she had not really picked herself up and gone on. She was waiting to decide. Decide what? Pat would say. Pat had her own copy, from the Internet, of the article about Angie’s case. Nothing would convince her that Angie understood it. Coronary artery bypass, or microchips, or the human genome: Why should somebody like Angie try to catch up? Angie’s territory was the past. But the past that clung to her was mixed up, for her daughter, with movies that had come out long afterward, and dressed things up. The Summer of Love, and Woodstock—it didn’t matter to Pat that Angie had not been at Woodstock and had in fact been a pregnant woman in her thirties at that time, with a husband too sick some days to get out of bed.
Pat didn’t remember her father Rudy. Angie could supply her with dates: How she and Rudy had started in before there was any such thing as a hippie, crisscrossing the country in a van and signing people up to buy record albums that might or might not come out. How long she had been married and how tired she was, by the time Woodstock came around, how hungry to go back to Oregon and live alone with her husband and, at last, their baby. Pat.
“OK, so a beatnik,” Pat would say. And she didn’t mean the real past, anyway, she meant the past-in-the-present. She meant Angie’s shawls and posters, her friends who got arrested on picket lines. Her boyfriends, who might be younger, in their fifties, and wear those thin ponytails—or like Bill Diehl, fluffy blow-dries—and see no harm in accepting loans from a person like Angie who always had work.
*
Early in the course of the birthday party, Angie had angled the big suede armchair to give her a good view of the girls. Just when she thought one face was perfect, another would come up from the tray of colored bottles—they were painting each other’s toenails—and this one would be dreamier, longer-lashed, more perfect. Then fine red hair would fall across that face and another would look up, skin taut, full lips parted. That was her granddaughter Erika, getting up with the phone to her ear. Then a composed, high-cheeked face with shining bangs: that was Tamiko, who had come to the door in the company of her uniformed driver. Then another, fringed in unruly curls, a child’s face, black-browed, heart-shaped.
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