“When does anything like this happen?” she asked. “When does someone like him just appear at your back door? I don’t know how to explain it, O, that he’s here now when he was just there.” She pointed at the television at the foot of the bed. “I don’t watch television for my entire life, and then, in the middle of the night, I see a show that’s been off for decades, I laugh at this guy, and all of a sudden he’s moved next door, of all the places.”
“You don’t have to explain it,” Owen said, irritated. “He has to live somewhere.”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s exactly what I mean. And somewhere is here.”
“Because his daughter is here,” Owen said, but he knew she wasn’t really listening. She was busy with her own logic. “I thought we were making love, Mira.”
“I’m suddenly really tired. I’m sorry. I feel like an idiot.” She touched his face. “You know, it’s like I conjured him up. I made him out of my imagination, a real person.”
Was Wilton who she needed in some way? The wine drummed in Owen’s stomach. He was far from sleeping, but in a few moments, he heard Mira take her dive into dreams.
He imagined he heard Wilton shifting and sighing on an air mattress next door, imagined the sound of his heartbeat echoing in the empty house. If Mira believed she had plucked Wilton out of the television screen—conjured him up, but for what?—he believed he had plucked Mira from the distant rooftops six years before. Because he’d needed to, needed her. Through the wire-etched window of his first classroom at Spruance, before they’d ever met, he’d spotted the contour of her house a mile away. With his back to his students, he’d looked every day at the determined roofline and stately chimneys above the trees and telephone wires, and it had been like reading his own EKG. Its rhythm was vibrant, alive with highs and lows and history, but it was also out of sync in places, with an extra beat or a missed one, quiet and then sometimes howling with grief. But he couldn’t look away, and every time he saw the same thing.
The year before he’d fled overnight and wordless to Providence, leaving his job, his students, and his friends, he’d come so close to being killed one night in May that he’d tasted the briny end wash over him. The cold had bathed his eyelids. With Mira breathing lightly beside him, he couldn’t help replaying the moment the bullet announced its intention, not for him after all, but for Caroline, the woman he’d been having dinner with. His life was held in the gun’s slightest shift to the left. He could have moved, he could have shifted to meet it, but he hadn’t. He’d saved himself.
Caroline was not his girlfriend, though they had been sleeping together for almost a year. It was a strange, chilly arrangement. She was prickly and quick to defend herself, while he was evasive and sarcastic, and together they made a sticky mixture they couldn’t extract themselves from. They went to movies and museums, a Knicks game she hadn’t liked because her sweater kept getting caught in the flip-up seat. They ate at El Sombrero, where scorched cacti and a faded piñata crowded the front window. That night, Caroline chillingly bit off the point of a chip with her front teeth. This might be the night to end whatever it was they were doing together; he’d been chewing on the notion for a while. Dissatisfaction had finally begun to mobilize him.
But she spoke first. “We should discuss us,” she said, as though she’d gotten advance warning about the dinner’s topic. She was measured, exact. She didn’t intend to hurt his feelings; this was nothing personal, she said. “But people who sleep together should at least like each other.”
Owen’s tamale was impossible to swallow. He knew he should be relieved, but there was still the gut punch of surprise. He gulped his Corona and saw her very reasonable expression. He said something sarcastic and vaguely hurtful. A voice rose and a chair scraped at the front of the restaurant. She asked if he wanted to try her chicken and held out her full fork to him, but she didn’t want him to take the fork itself. She would feed him instead, always holding on to what was hers. Somewhere, a plate fell and shattered on the red tile. Fork still aloft, Caroline swiveled to get a view of the action. Her face grew grim and old. Hair swept behind her ear fell forward. A man wearing a cheap black ski mask, the eyes and mouth holes outlined in red yarn, approached. A gun was attached to his right hand, which rose toward an imaginary horizon, Owen’s head pinned like a kite against it. This was a cartoon stickup, a joke as synthetic as the threads rising from the mask in static electricity. Owen had the urge to laugh. Caroline’s jaw thrust forward urging him to do something. But what? His heart was under his tongue, his bowels retreating fast. He struggled to get his fingers around his wallet and extract it from his back pocket. He put it in the man’s hand. Caroline took her purse off the back of her chair and held it on her lap. Water rushed innocently in the open kitchen behind them. The skin around the gunman’s eyes glistened and his lips pushed forward. He gestured with a tick of the gun for Caroline to give her bag up. She said no, and then: fuck you.
This finally was the reason they shouldn’t be together; she said no when she should have said yes. Later on, Owen realized that moments of terror can have their own solipsistic lucidity. Back then, though, he began to piss down his leg. Caroline gave a look that seemed to say that the entire world was a disappointment, Owen at the top of her list—he, a big man and still a coward—and then she fell off her chair like a furious little girl, her hands obstinate on the tile, her skirt up to her waist revealing black underwear, her legs straight out, one shoe off. She had a startled expression. The sound of a jet roared through Owen’s head—but long after the shot had been fired. The timing was off and these were the moments that still stuttered until they slipped away from him out of frustration. It was disastrous, almost seven years later, to still detect the basaltic odor of Caroline’s death and he could only press his arm across his face to block it out. He couldn’t see her face anymore.
He’d met Mira a year later, and then not on Whittier Street or in her house, but on Ives Street, outside his apartment in Fox Point, on a summer’s nighttime glittering sidewalk where she nearly hit him with her bike. They had an unhurried conversation, she still straddling the bike’s cracked leather seat, while they watched traffic drift down Wickenden. She’d come to find the boy who’d stolen ten dollars from Brindle. There was something defiant and assured about her, with her old-fashioned, clattery bike, her torn sneakers, her deep red lipstick, her funny, bright, and strange clothes. When they turned in the direction of the bay, Owen snuck a few sideways glances at her. He liked how she kept pushing her glasses up her nose with her index finger. It was bookish and sexy. He liked her long neck and high clavicle, her smokeless smoker’s voice. She was on a mission to save the kid by having him own up to what he did, but it was really Owen she’d end up saving. She’d drawn him out of his gloom and made him happier than he imagined he’d ever be. He believed he’d conjured her up to take him to this house, this bed, this body, that his heart already knew from a distance, because he’d have slipped away without her. He wouldn’t have survived otherwise. She’d suffered tragedy’s long legacy after the death of her parents, and she treated what had happened to him as something cherished and fragile, the bubble that held within it the belief that they were safe when they were loved and loved back.
3
On the third floor of Mira’s house—servant quarters when there had once been servants—a series of small rooms ran off the hallway. There was a bed in each with a tamped-down mattress and air that was dusty with old grudges. In one room, Owen looked out at the State House and the dome’s Independent Man, a proud, gaudy marker. The hour glazed the edges of industry and blurred the city. It was a view he sometimes took alone, a way to see where he was.
When Mira had shown him this same view on his first-ever tour of the house, he had wondered why it was that people in a new place always gazed outward first, inward second. For his part, he was half afraid to stare at Mira too much, as though he might wear out the slightly scary exhilaration he felt looking at her. She�
��d pointed out landmarks and ruins and said that when the city was smoothed out like this, she could imagine she was living in any century. She could put herself in the place of someone standing at this window a hundred years before, a great-grandmother, maybe. Owen hadn’t asked what she really meant by that, not because he was incurious but because he already sensed he was going to have a hard time sharing her with her history. It was everywhere in the house, and in the accommodating, careful way she moved through and around it. He could not separate her from it.
He’d been the one to suggest she give him a tour that first evening. She’d had on a red sweater that zipped up the front but not to her throat, and her hair was collected with a piece of kitchen string, an attractive, careless touch. She was always barefoot. That she’d lived contentedly alone in the house for more than a decade after her parents had been killed made him question if there was room for someone else in all of it. If silence and echoes and still air didn’t make Mira hungry for company, then what would? Why would she ever need him? When they came to the third-floor stairs, she’d tucked her thumbs into the belt loops of her pants and announced there was nothing to see up there. Empty rooms, she said. Peeling wallpaper, an old bathroom with a claw-foot tub. Her tone had intrigued him for what she wasn’t saying. He’d backed her up a few steps, and she resisted only a little when he guided her the rest of the way with his hands on her hips. He’d wanted to stand very close to her and still feel the distance above and below and around them, while she was suddenly interested in pushing out the smallest space left between their bodies. Come closer, she’d said. Hold me tighter, take your clothes off. Press your chest to mine. He had put his shirt on the floor to protect her from splinters and she teased him about his manners and his armor of goose bumps. He was shivering for a few reasons, and he asked why they weren’t making love on one of the beds, or couches, or even rugs instead, somewhere warm, at least. She laughed and tightened her legs around him; she liked the chill contrast to his hot skin. He dwarfed her in a way they both were awed by. His hands were huge on her. They were cold in the ecstatic drafts blowing up between the floorboards. There was nothing casual about what they were doing; he didn’t want to mess this up, to be half-hearted, half-asleep, or afraid. She knew who he was and what he’d suffered, and how he suffered still. She wasn’t scared of his past—just the opposite. She wanted to understand it, but she admitted she’d always be, at best, looking in from the outside.
She told him that night how she’d seen him on Wickenden Street one evening when she was coming back from Brindle, his shoulders hunched as though he’d been trying to disappear. It sounded like too many evenings to him when disaster tailed him like something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. She said that she’d like to make him less forlorn, if she could, and pull happiness out of his gloom. That he would be the best work she might ever do.
Later that night, she’d looked ghostly, moving pale and naked to the far end of the hall, where she stopped in front of a closed door. This seemed to be a sort of ritual of hers that suggested something terrifying behind the door. A month after he’d moved in, she’d shown him the angled space where the ceiling zoomed low to meet the pitch of the roof and went on forever, but she wouldn’t go in. He smelled the closet’s morbid breath while she’d giggled uneasily, dismissive of herself and her babyish fears, and explained that the dread was just something left over from her childhood. But she did not want that erased or revealed; she was content to leave it alive and intact, and she’d pulled him back when he’d tried to take a step in.
Tonight Mira was staying late at Brindle again, getting the place ready for the fundraiser. Owen sniffed at the loamy stink of the four artichokes he was steaming on the stove and imagined the smell zigzagging across town to reach her, stirring up her appetite, which always waned in these anxious pre-party days. Down in the kitchen, he shut off the flame and noticed how the last sunlight hit the many bottles of wine Wilton brought each time he came for dinner, washing the wall in a thirsty red. Wilton gave them other gifts as well that he ordered online and had delivered to his porch by UPS—buttery steaks packed in huge Styrofoam boxes of dry ice, cheeses, glowing golden kiwis, cakes from Chicago, black bread from Poland. And most recently, along with the artichokes, a quartet of honeydew melons, one already soft in the box.
Owen packed dinner up and walked to Brindle, taking his usual out-of-the-way detour through Fox Point, where he’d lived before he’d met Mira. The view from his third-floor apartment there had given him a slivered glimpse of the bay. There were times in that bleakest first year in Rhode Island when he’d felt he was drowning on land, and he counted on that spot of Narragansett Bay, black and streaked with red warnings from the Allens Avenue gas tanks, to keep him afloat. Every morning around five o’clock, the scent of baking Portuguese bread had woken him, making him intensely hungry. At the bottom of Wickenden Street, crowded with students and people out for a cheap dinner, a dim underpass led below the highway. Fifty yards of sidewalk were tacky with shit from the pigeons that perched and cooed on the steel beams. A truck roared above, shaking Owen. The Point Street Bridge in front of him was a structure beautiful in its dereliction. It was one of Mira’s favorite places—the epitome of Providence, she claimed. The city had been fixing the bridge forever, and the fact that she didn’t think they’d ever finish it delighted her. The bridge was the city’s private joke, and like the city itself, corrupt, possibly dangerous, and endearingly rusted. The hurricane barrier, Mira said, was the city’s single admission of vulnerability—and only then to the forces of nature. Orange-and-white traffic barrels and a regiment of cement barriers made the bridge appear amputated in midspan. The water caught every reflection so you felt as if you were floating above the city rather than standing at its base. On the other side of the bridge, past the fluorescently bright Hess station with its fortified cashier’s booth, past Planned Parenthood devoid of its daily protesters at this supper hour, and one block in, was Brindle with its front door wide open to the warm, deserted street, and across from it, an empty lot surrounded by chain-link fencing.
Large windows on each of the two floors spread across Brindle’s brick façade. The building had once housed supplies for the costume jewelry industry. Later, it had stayed vacant for decades, except for the occasional squatter or rat. Mira’s father, in the family tradition of mindless acquisition, had bought it for reasons unknown to Mira, though she’d said it definitely wasn’t because he saw an art school in it or her future. Occasionally Mira would still find a sparkle or chip of ruby or sapphire glass between the wide wood planks. She collected them in a jar she kept on her desk.
The foyer held a counter Owen had built out of plywood and given three coats of glossy white paint. Mira called it the snow bank. When she wasn’t running around, Joy, her assistant, sometimes sat there. Unclaimed items were always piled at one end: a greasy Red Sox cap, a mitten, shirts, socks, a gutted cell phone. Mira’s compact office was secreted behind a turn in the wall, and to the right was the gallery that ran the length of the building. The high ceiling was mapped with pipes and beams that had been painted a hundred times. The room was chaotic now with ladders, bulbs, tools, pieces of pottery, pictures, water bottles, the curling remains of a pizza Mira had ordered for the kids who’d stuck around to help her earlier. Diffuse circles of light fell on bare walls and on Mira, who was nailing something in a far corner. She lifted her face to him and put down her hammer. She sat back on her heels, smiling.
“The door was open,” Owen told her. “Is that really such a good idea? Anyone could just walk in.”
“And so you did just walk in. Anyway, Brindle is open to anyone, O.” She stood. “You’re always afraid something bad is going to happen.”
He wanted to say, remember our own break-in? Remember how besieged that made you feel? He sensed violence’s proximity everywhere. “You’re not offering sanctuary here,” he said. “And it seems like you’re asking for trouble, inviting it in. What’s the poi
nt of that?”
Mira fiddled with one of her hoop earrings, a tic of patience and a reminder to him that she did fine on her own. But the skin under her eyes was puffy, and her expression was straining to be light. “Maybe I am offering sanctuary here. Anyway, I thought art was supposed to be a refuge. Like a church.”
“Not true,” he said, and smiled.
He didn’t like that she would jeopardize her safety to make her point or excuse her nonchalance with a joke, but this was her realm and he knew he shouldn’t say any more. She gave him a light kiss. Her breasts urged against her thin white cotton shirt as she put her hands at her waist and surveyed the room. Owen was struck by how peculiarly possessive he felt at that moment, as though he needed to pull her back from somewhere else. He wanted to take her into the office and claim her as his and only his, and cage her with his body.
“It’s a disaster in here,” she said, “but in a few days this place is going to be sparkling and packed with rich people and big spenders who want nothing more than to give Brindle their money.” She spread her arms in front of a bare wall. “Right? Paintings here, pastels there, ceramics around the edges. People will be surrounded by things they can’t resist bidding large sums for.”
“Bigger than large,” Owen said, slipping off his backpack and unloading dinner. “Massive and colossal.”
“Humongous,” Mira added. “And if they don’t bid? Then what?”
Owen presented her the giant artichokes in their tin foil coats. They looked like steaming jungle oddities. Her delight was gratifying.
“Wilton brought them over,” Owen explained. “He said you’d told him you loved them. That you two were talking about your favorite foods.”
“True. Sweet.”
Did she mean the food or the man? Behind her, past the window and the awkwardly shaped parking lot and the Dumpster, he saw the bend of the river, the newest tent city erected by the service road, and beyond, the swell of College Hill. Somewhere in the darkening trees was their grand house, but he couldn’t make it out.
The Tell Page 4