Patricia Gaffney

by Mad Dash

  Elizabeth noticed. “Are you drunk?” she broke off the argument to ask.

  Tim started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” she demanded.

  He laughed harder. “That.” He pointed at his umbrella, the forked spokes and stretched nylon remains splayed across the floor like a huge black bird, dead in a horrible accident. The waiter had to step over it to deliver drinks.

  “Why did you bring it in?”

  “I don’t know.” Tim was convulsed. “I couldn’t throw it away. It’s new!” His loud, lusty guffaw always tickled Andrew; he began to chuckle in sympathy. Elizabeth caught it, too. It began in fits and starts, but soon all three were rocking with laughter. Tim’s tears ran into his mustache; he held his sides and roared. Elizabeth put her arm on the table and her head on her arm, groaning while her shoulders shook. Tim’s umbrella was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. It had a five-foot wingspan. Every time they looked at it they cracked up again.

  Andrew felt weak, every muscle pleasantly used. Elizabeth sobered first, resumed her bored, lizard-eyed look, but the memory of her lax mouth and loose-limbed body and the helplessness of her silent laughter stayed with him.

  “I should go home and grade essays,” Tim said, signaling the waiter for another beer.

  “Me, too.”

  “Me, too.”

  “You still assigning journals?” he asked Andrew, who nodded. “That’s nuts. How many hours do you spend reading ’em?”

  “They’re a good learning tool. Easier than a formal essay. Students who have trouble writing, they’re good for them.”

  “Do you set a page limit?” Elizabeth asked.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No, they’re journals. The point is to animate the past,” he said carefully; his tongue felt thick. “Instead of memorizing dates, they have to dig into primary research. They can’t get away with dropping a few words like chamber pot or candlestick into a twenty-first-century narrative. And for some of them it’s therapeutic.”

  “Then you’re a voyeur,” Elizabeth said.

  “I’d be scared to find out that much about my students,” Tim said.

  “Sometimes I am a voyeur, in a way,” Andrew admitted. “Yes. Sometimes it feels that way. What they write can be painfully honest. I don’t take their confidences lightly.”

  “Do you have a…” She ran an olive on a pick around and around the rim of her glass. “What’s your…you know, philosophy.” She said it with a slight sneer. “Of teaching. I mean, do you have a goal?”

  “Not me,” Tim said. “I’m fresh outta goals.”

  Andrew thought. “To try to tell the truth. To get through the day without doing any harm.” Did that sound pompous?

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m dancing,” Elizabeth said without looking up. “Juggling, dancing. I can’t stop. If I do, they’ll…”

  “Not like you? But you don’t need to wear a mask. They see through it eventually anyway. They always know.”

  “Yes, not like me, but also not learn. Do you know?”

  “I think charisma can only take you so far. No one can inspire every day. The older I get, the more I think…the most important thing is to be kind. And competent, of course. But mostly kind.”

  “Do you digress a lot?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I don’t. Should I?”

  He laughed, but she was serious. “Well, for me, it seems they learn more, or just as much, on the byways, the scenic routes. Not the big highways I’ve taken so much time constructing ahead of time.”

  She scowled. She popped the olive in her mouth.

  “It’s all right to let yourself into the lecture. Let them see you as human—it helps them see history as human. I talk about music I like, about my daughter, a good mystery I’ve read. Places I’ve been. My thoughts. It seems to…wake them up. To possibilities. Sometimes you can practically see their minds turning corners.”

  She had her chin in her hand. “You really like them, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Don’t you?”

  Her eyes went out of focus while she thought, and he was filled with an apprehension, fear almost, that she might say no. “I haven’t made up my mind.” She rose abruptly. “’Scuse me,” and she glided away.

  “Ball breaker,” Tim said, watching her. His tone was affectionate. “Can we get some peanuts or something? What the hell time is it?”

  Andrew took a roll of antacids out of his pants pocket, and the foil-wrapped migraine pill he always carried in his coat pocket. He saw Tim lean back and smile. “What?”

  “You got a headache?”

  “I probably will have. You have to take one of these before it starts or they don’t work.”

  “You got heartburn?”

  “Yes. Not exactly heartburn. More a pain that comes and goes.” He put his hand on the right side of his stomach.

  “What’s that, the appendix? Maybe you’ve got appendicitis.”

  “Or it could be my gallbladder.” He expressed his darkest fear. “It could be my liver.”

  “Could be your head. Not saying it is.”

  Odd to swallow a headache pill with a glass of wine. “I’m not doing that well,” he told Tim. “To tell you the truth.”

  “How so?”

  “Insomnia. I get tinnitus.”

  “Ringing in the ears? What causes that?”

  “Could be an infection.” He looked at his hands. “Also, I think I have Raynaud’s disease. My fingers turn white when they’re cold.”

  “So do mine.”

  “No, this is a syndrome. The arteries suddenly contract, blood can’t get to the digits. I put my hands in hot water—say, I’ve come back from walking Hobbes and I forgot my gloves—I put my white hands in hot water and they turn blue, then they turn red.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes, but it can lead to worse things down the road.” He pulled his new gloves out of the pockets of his overcoat. “Look at these. Check this out.” He wasn’t going to tell anyone about his new gloves. For some reason they had vaguely embarrassed him, but now it was the embarrassment that seemed silly. He put the right glove on and blew into the little hole on top. “Then you snap the stopper back on.” He recapped the glove, held it up. “Warmth!”

  “Holy crap. Let me try.” Tim put the other glove on, blew into the hole, snapped the cap back on. “Huh.” They wriggled their fingers, high-fived each other. “Feels kind of wet.”

  “Moist air,” Andrew said.

  “I want some of these.”

  “I’ll get you a pair.”

  They drank, smiling around the room vacantly.

  “Did you call Dash?”

  “Did I call Dash?” Andrew picked up the burning candle on the table, tilting it to let melted wax coat the red glass sides. If he held his fingers below the wax line, they didn’t burn; above, they did. Over the flickering flame, he saw Elizabeth talking to a couple of men at the bar. She had her hands on her buttocks, as if in back pockets, her booted legs spread apart. She lifted her chin at one of the men, then at the other, accusing them of something, challenging them. They smiled back, hopeful but uncertain. Ball breaker, definitely. Why did he like her? She was certainly nothing like Dash. Except…chaos, he thought hazily. Chaos—they had that in common. He couldn’t control either one of them. So he was drawn to chaotic women?

  “Yes,” Tim said heavily, enunciating. “Did you. Call Dash.”

  “We talk. I tell her how much I deducted from the joint account for the mortgage and the utilities. She tells me the cabin’s porch roof is leaking.”

  “That’s nuts. Call her up, go see her at the studio.”

  “Why would I do that? I’m not even thinking about her, deliberately. It’s like an experiment. I banish her from my thoughts.”

  Tim wagged his finger. “‘The sleepless soul that perished in his pride.’”

  “It’s not pride. Nothing to do with pride. I simply don’t wanna talk
to her. Since the feeling’s mutual, we’re doing fine.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I’m telling you. It was bad between us.”

  “So?”

  “So now it’s good.”

  “So how come you can’t sleep, your hands turn blue—”

  “One thing’s got nothing to do with the other.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  Tim’s pink, jowly face annoyed him; so did his elbows on the table and his burly shoulders hunched, like a cop interrogating a prisoner. “Yeah. And look who’s talking. It’s not as if you put up much of a fight to make Meg stay.”

  He regretted that instantly. Elizabeth came back just then, or he’d have apologized. It was the drink. He’d never said that to Tim about Meg before; he wished he could take it back, even though it was true. He loved Tim.

  He loved Elizabeth. Look how she argued, half lying in her chair, boneless, firing off put-downs in staccato bursts, an automatic rifle of sarcasm. What a trio they were. They ought to form an eating club or something. Three singles—they ought to team up. They could buy a group home, pool their money and go in on a nice place near the college.

  Elizabeth stood, started putting on her coat. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He and Tim stood up, too. “Where to?” they asked.

  “My place. Get something to eat.”

  fourteen

  They ate dinner in Elizabeth’s elegant, oak-paneled dining room. Everything was takeout leftovers, but it was excellent takeout—sashimi salad, red snapper carpaccio, breaded veal chop in anchovy sauce—from nearby restaurants.

  “Guess you don’t cook much,” Tim noted, mouth full of mushroom risotto. He and Elizabeth ate like famished dogs, barely chewing, pushing and pulling Styrofoam containers back and forth. They’d switched to wine and were sharing a 2001 Château Magdelaine Saint-Emilion she’d gone down in her basement to get. It was after nine. Andrew ate sparingly; he’d gone beyond hunger, could only take occasional sips of the expensive wine.

  “I can make coffee. The housekeeper taught me.”

  Tim snorted a fine spray of Bordeaux through his nose. Everything was funny to him.

  “You have a housekeeper?” Andrew asked carefully. “For this house?” It was important not to slur or trip over his words, do nothing to reveal that, improbable as it seemed, he was most likely the drunkest of the three. He was hiding it in his usual way, to the extent that he had a usual way, by speaking slowly and, according to Dash, with artificial formality. “Cut him off,” she liked to say, “when he starts talking like Shakespeare.”

  “Mrs. Wilson,” Elizabeth confirmed, dabbing anchovy sauce from her chin with a linen napkin. “She lives in, but Tuesday’s her night off.”

  Andrew and Tim exchanged looks. They shouldn’t be surprised: Outside, the house looked like a small embassy; inside, a posh men’s club, all dark, heavy furniture and stained glass and old family portraits. The chandelier over their heads descended from an oak-coffered ceiling.

  “You still eating that?” A rhetorical question; Tim forked a piece of veal from Andrew’s plate and shook it onto his. “So, Elizabeth. You’re, how shall I say, loaded?”

  “I suppose. My uncle left me the house. I used to live here with him.”

  “But you have a mother.” Andrew distinctly remembered that; in fact, she’d recently married someone named Carlos.

  “Yeah, I have a mother. I used to have a father, too, but he died. So I got a stepfather, then I got another stepfather. When I was sixteen I ditched all that and moved in with my uncle. Who died, and here I am.” She spoke in a flat, uninflected voice, just delivering information. Andrew had a sense that he could ask her anything, and no matter how personal she’d answer in the same way.

  Tim had the same thought. “Sixteen. Must’ve been tough. For your parents, too.”

  “Mother and stepfather, you mean. Oh yeah, they were busted up.” She nailed him with her deadpan eyes. “They especially missed busting me out of jail for dope and shoplifting. They wanted to go through more abortions, too. They just couldn’t wait for me to return to the family bosom.”

  Bit of a conversation stopper. Sober, Andrew would probably have cleared his throat and asked if there was any more polenta. Now he said, “I grew up about three blocks from here. I was nine when my mother died. Six months later my father married a woman named Tommie. We hated each other. When they sent me off to school in Connecticut, no one was sorry. Although I can’t say the boarding-school experience was a very happy one. I never lived in my father’s house again.”

  Elizabeth’s heavy eyelids slowly lifted to show the fathomless black of her pupils. Her scrutiny felt as intimate as a strip search. She parted her thin lips, but then didn’t say anything.

  Tim stood up and leaned on the table with the heels of his hands. His weight made the wood creak. “Bathroom?”

  “Through there, keep going,” she said, still watching Andrew.

  There was a long, not unpleasant pause after Tim left. Andrew felt almost comfortable under the piercing gaze now, as if he’d aced some test. “Sounds like we have a couple of things in common,” he said, feeling bold.

  She nodded, so slowly it was almost imperceptible. She stood, snagged her glass and the half-full bottle. “Come on. I’ll show you the house.”

  It was the sort of house in which a round library didn’t seem out of place. A billiard room wouldn’t have, either, although there wasn’t one of those.

  “My uncle was a banker,” she said by way of explanation, standing back so Andrew could get the full effect of polished wood, ceiling-high shelves, green-shaded lamps, and, most of all, row after circular row of thick, mainly leather-bound books. A sleek computer on the massive oak library table jarred a bit. “This is my office. I decided to use it, not make it a mausoleum.”

  Behind the table, artfully draped on the wall beside a group of photographs, hung a long black burka, complete with depressing veiled eye curtain. From her last trip to Afghanistan, she said, just before the fall of the Taliban. “First fall, anyway. My real father was career foreign service. I lived in Turkey till I was five, then Italy, back to Turkey.”

  Andrew went closer to see the photos. Of Elizabeth as a child with her father, on donkeys in the desert, on camels, in a dusty market, in front of a white mosque. She could’ve been a little Persian or Lebanese girl herself with her tan skin and shock of black hair. Her father was tall and handsome; she held his hand with a proud, trusting smile. There were no pictures of a mother.

  “This is Cyprus, outside Nicosia. I went there on a dig in college. Thought of studying archaeology, decided on history. Much cleaner.” She was slumped against the wall, watching him, holding her wineglass low in both hands. “Mummy’s idea was for me to be a debutante, then marry another banker. So, of course, I became a scholar.”

  He nodded, in perfect sympathy.

  “But not before making her life as hellish as I could.”

  The drugs-and-abortions phase, he assumed. “How old were you when you lost your father?”

  “Ten. He crashed in a Cessna over the Red Sea. Body never found. So. Tell me about you. No, let’s go, I’ll show you the rest of the house.” She shoved off from the wall.

  They came upon Tim in the living room. Shoes off, stretched out on the camelback sofa, snoring. “Your chaperone’s fallen down on the job,” she murmured as they moved toward a curving staircase. She didn’t touch him, but Andrew felt as if she’d taken his hand as he followed her a step behind, or as if an invisible web were drawing him along, elastic but irresistible. Which would make her a spider, him…

  Upstairs, she didn’t waste time on more rooms. “Mine,” she announced, flicking recessed lights on in another regal, high-ceilinged chamber. This was a suite, complete with sitting room, enormous bath, and a view through an elegant dormer of the cloudy sky. The bed had a canopy.

  “Homey,” Andrew said. In truth, the room depressed him. The whole house did. Too big, every
thing too much, and all of it seeming to him to magnify Elizabeth’s aloneness. She was like the child in the desert, but without a father’s hand to hold in this oversized museum of a house.

  No, that was fancy, and he was drunk. He didn’t know anyone tougher than Elizabeth O’Neal. Part of her appeal was her ruthlessness, her no-brakes approach to whatever she wanted. He watched her crouch in front of a music system built into the wall, and in a moment, he recognized the opening of Death and Transfiguration coming softly from everywhere, no one source; it simply filled the room.

  “Like Strauss?” She sat on the bed and patted the place beside her in a peremptory way that was so typical, so…Elizabethan. He smiled, and never considered refusing.

  She leaned back on her elbows, a maneuver that pushed her breasts up, twin black-covered hills with a crystal winking between. She smelled of smoke and, faintly, curry. Her hair seemed to absorb the light, give none back; if he touched it, it would be like putting his fingers in a well of black ink. The timpani and strings of the music’s quiet opening were hypnotizing him.

  “Would you be interested in going with me to hear the National Symphony sometime?” A date. He was asking a woman out on a date.

  “Not particularly.”

  “Ah.”

  “Would you be interested in staying the night?” Only her top teeth showed when she spoke, the space between the two front ones very dark and distinct in the diffuse light. A target for the tongue.

  “Ah, well. Thank you,” he said sincerely. “Aren’t we both drunk?”

  “So we’re even.” She took his hand and slid it under her sweater. It rested on her warm abdomen, rising and falling with her slow breaths.