“I almost never think it’s all right,” says Raymond. “That’s how I take care of that.”
“Know how I took care of it?” says Claire. “I went crying to Joey. Then I went upstairs and got out these star decals I’d been saving. I thought it would make me feel better. I’d been planning to paste them on the ceiling over the tub so I could take a shower with all the lights out and the stars glowing up above, and even in winter it would be like taking a shower outside.” Suddenly Claire is embarrassed by this vision of herself naked in the warm steamy blackness under the faint stars. She wonders if Dottie is listening from the other room and is almost glad the next part is about finding the shampoo bottle.
“That’s life,” says Raymond. “Reach for the stars and wind up with a bottle of piss.”
“That’s what I thought,” says Claire. “But listen.” She tells him about calling the girls in, and when she says “like newborn giraffes,” she really does feel awful, as if she’s serving her daughter up so Raymond will see her as a complicated person with a daily life rich in similes and astonishing spiritual reverses. Now she understands why she hadn’t mentioned the incident to Dottie or Joey. She was saving it for Raymond so it wouldn’t be just a story she’d told before. But Raymond’s already saying, “I know. Sometimes one second can turn the whole thing around.
“One winter,” he says, “Miranda was around two, she was sick all the time. We were living in Roxbury, freezing to death. We decided it was all or nothing. We sold everything, got rid of the apartment, bought tickets to some dinky Caribbean island where somebody told us you could live on fish and mangoes and coconuts off the trees. I thought, I’ll paint shells, sell them to the tourists. But when we got there, it wasn’t mango season, the fish weren’t running, and the capital city was one giant cinderblock motel. There was a housing shortage, a food shortage, an everything shortage.
“So we took a bus across the island, thinking we’d get off at the first tropical paradise, but no place seemed very friendly, and by then Miranda was running another fever. We wound up in the second-biggest city, which looked pretty much like a bad neighborhood in L.A. We were supposed to be glad that our hotel room had a balcony facing main street. Dottie put Miranda to bed, then crawled in and pulled the covers over her head and said she wasn’t coming out except to fly back to Boston.
“At that moment, we heard a brass band, some drums. By the time I wrestled the balcony shutters open, a parade was coming by. It was the tail end of Carnival, I think. The whole island was there, painted and feathered and glittered to the teeth, marching formations of guys in ruffly Carmen Miranda shirts with marimbas, little girls done up like bumblebees with antennae bobbing on their heads. Fever or no fever, we lifted Miranda up to see. And maybe it was what she’d needed all along. Because by the time the last marcher went by, her fever was gone.
“Miranda fell asleep, then Dottie. I went for a walk. On the corner, a guy was selling telescopes. Japanese-made, not like the one out there, but good. They must have been stolen off some boat—they were selling for practically nothing. So I bought one and went down to the beach. The beach was deserted. I stayed there I don’t know how long. It was the first time I ever looked through a telescope. It was something.”
For the second time that day, Claire’s struck speechless. Only this time, what’s astonishing is, she’s in pain. She feels she’s led her whole life wrong. What did she think she was doing? If only she could have been on that beach with Raymond looking through a telescope for the first time, or even at the hotel when he came back. Suddenly her own memories seem two-dimensional, like photographs, like worn-out duplicate baseball cards she’d trade all at once for that one of Raymond’s. She tells herself that if she’d married Raymond, she might be like Dottie now, confused and restless and wanting only to believe that somewhere there is a weed for her need. She remembers the end of the Hammett story: after Flitcraft’s brush with death, he goes to Seattle and marries a woman exactly like the wife he left on the other side of that beam. There’s no guarantee that another life will be better or even different from your own, and Claire knows that. But it doesn’t help at all.
There’s a silence. Claire can’t look at Raymond. At last he says, “If I could paint what I saw through that telescope that night, do you think I’d ever paint another dancing vegetable in my whole fucking life?”
For all Raymond’s intensity, it’s kind of a funny question, and Claire laughs, mostly from relief that the moment is over. Then she notices that Dottie has come in. Dottie looks a little travel-worn, as if she might actually have crossed the steppes from Moscow to Paris. She seems happy to be back. As it turns out, she’s been closer than that. Because what she says is, “Suppose I’d believed that old lady and dropped her off in the middle of Montpelier? What would have happened then?”
Claire wants to say something fast before Raymond starts inventing adventures for a crazy old lady alone in Montpelier. Just then, Joey reappears. Apparently, he’s come back in and gone upstairs without their hearing; he’s got the girls ready for bed, scrubbed and shiny, dressed in long white cotton nightgowns like slender Edwardian angels. Claire looks at the children and the two sets of parents and thinks a stranger walking in would have trouble telling: Which one paints dancing vegetables? Which one’s lived before as a Napoleonic soldier? Which ones have mated for life? She thinks they are like constellations, or like that engraving on Evelyn’s father’s desk, or like sunflowers seen from below. Depending on how you look, they could be anything.
Then Raymond says, “It’s almost midnight,” and they all troop outside. On the way out, Raymond hangs back, and when Claire catches up with him, he leans down so his lips are grazing her ear and says, “I hope this doesn’t turn out to be another Comet Kohoutek.”
Outside, Claire loses sight of them, except for the girls, whose white nightgowns glow in the dark like phosphorescent stars. She lies down on the grass. She’s thinking about Kohoutek and about that first winter she and Joey lived together. How excited he was at the prospect of seeing a comet; and later, how disappointed! She remembers that the Museum of Natural History set up a dial-in Comet News Hotline which was supposed to announce new sightings and wound up just giving data about Kohoutek’s history and origins. Still, Joey kept calling long distance and letting the message run through several times. Mostly he did it when Claire was out of the house, but not always. Now, as Claire tries not to blink, to stretch her field of vision wide enough for even the most peripheral shooting star, she keeps seeing how Joey looked in those days when she’d come home and stamp the snow off her boots and see him—his back to her, his ear to the phone, listening. And now, as always, it’s just when she’s thinking of something else that she spots it—that ribbon of light streaking by her so fast she can never be sure if she’s really seen it or not.
Everyone Had a Lobster
EVERYONE HAD A LOBSTER. This was a serious problem. Roy, the SoHo contractor who’d served as a kind of treasurer for the lobster dinner, took Valerie aside and said he was sorry it wasn’t pasta or bouillabaisse, something stretchable. Valerie should have telephoned in advance, they would have bought a lobster for her. Valerie thought: Shut up. Her friend Suzanne—Roy’s girlfriend, in fact—had specifically told her not to arrive till after dinner; she said Valerie should start being discreet about having lived in the summer house for six weeks without having paid any rent.
The others, a lawyer, two therapists, a cameraman, a painter, a contractor, and so forth—were splitting the rent of this mini-Versailles with its enormous restaurant kitchen, its Citizen Kane fireplace, its French doors facing on Block Island Sound. But no one seemed to mind that Valerie didn’t contribute. They found her entertaining. They were all around thirty and felt that they used to know more people like her. They said she was right out there, right on the edge, by which they meant she had no income and was a bit manic, lean, a fearless swimmer, she had a terrific tan. Besides, they only saw her on weekends. They w
orked weeks and came out Friday nights, everyone but Suzanne, who was on vacation from teaching high school and had sublet her place in the city. Weekdays, the house had felt empty, so Suzanne had tracked down Valerie at her parents’. Valerie came for a visit and stayed.
Valerie liked the house, the shore. And Suzanne was her oldest friend. But by August some things about her life here felt like a job, a receptionist’s job, not the chilly receptionists of the rich, but of those borderline businesses that hire you to be constantly cheery and up. Once Valerie had had such a job, at a carpet wholesaler’s. Her boyfriend then often had speed, and she would do just a little before going to work. She wouldn’t take speed now—it was so hard to get and terrible on your teeth—but she’d found an African bark called kavakava you could buy at the health food store and chew and get a noticeable buzz.
She needed it to stay up, especially after a day like this, a whole boiling summer Saturday driving the Long Island Expressway after Suzanne suggested she clear out for the day, keep a low profile for once. Valerie had planned to go to the city; the museums would be air-conditioned and empty. But she didn’t expect so much traffic in that direction, stalled, overheated cars, thirty miles of steam pouring out from under hoods, and her chewing kavakava, so that finally she pulled off the road and followed signs to a state park where she was the only white person on the beach.
At first this was a little disconcerting: She gave the groups of Puerto Rican guys a wide berth, but no one seemed even to notice her, or pay any attention. It was as if she wasn’t just white, but transparent. The point was, everyone was busy with their own good times. She stayed there all day, and later stopped at a Chinese restaurant where she ordered a dish of day-glo orange sweet and sour pork she would have been embarrassed to eat in front of anyone she knew.
She was positive that the people at the summer house would be long finished with dinner, but she walked in to find the table elegantly set, each individual lobster leaking cloudy water onto its individual plate. At least twenty people were seated around the table and at least five or six of them called to Valerie—“Eat! There’s steamers and corn!” Valerie said she’d eaten, relishing the memory of her sweet and sour pork. They would be horrified, or else mistake her pleasure in it for some interest in edible kitsch. They were all very serious about food, they planned elaborate menus, all shopped and cooked like some semipro catering crew. Suzanne and Valerie had always liked cooking and eating, but last week Suzanne told Valerie she was going to strangle the next person who said “radicchio.”
As Valerie caught Suzanne’s eye, it occurred to her that everyone was saying, “Eat! There’s steamers and corn!” but no one was saying a word about lobster despite the humongous red ones sitting right there on their plates. Suzanne put her hands over her lobster, as if to protect it from Valerie, and Valerie knew she wasn’t mad about her showing up too early.
Valerie was always telling Suzanne she was too paranoid about the other people in the house. Suzanne’s problem was that she made the least money of anyone—though not little enough to seem brave, like Valerie—and that her boyfriend Roy made the most. Roy wore the three-piece suits, the ponytail and potbelly of a rich California dope lawyer. He was bisexual, he liked to talk about his leather-bar night life. Especially when someone new—someone innocent and shockable—was around, Roy could get pretty graphic. He said he didn’t worry about AIDS, every six months he went to Rumania and had his blood changed. Sometimes he would say this right in front of Suzanne, and Valerie would thank God that she wasn’t leading Suzanne’s life.
Not that Valerie felt she was leading her own life, exactly. Lately she had the sense she was stuck in some pre-life, some in-between life, waiting for her serious life to start. For now, all that mattered was keeping interested. Lobsters were very low on her interest list, but she had to focus on them for a while before she could make herself look at Nasir, who was way at the top of the list. Nasir waited till she looked at him, then cracked the claw off his lobster, held it out to her, and at the same time motioned toward the seat next to his.
At that table, that art director’s gourmet dream of perfect red lobsters on perfect sea-green glass plates, Nasir’s ripping into that lobster seemed really kind of primitive and nasty. But Nasir could get away with it because he was so beautiful and graceful, and was basically a nice guy. Also, Valerie noticed, he held the lobster body so the juice dripped on the plate.
Everyone got quiet and waited to see what Valerie would do. For weeks she and Nasir had circled each other; it gave the atmosphere an erotic charge and was part of what people found entertaining. Valerie would have liked to sit next to Nasir. She was so drawn to him it scared her. One problem was Nasir’s girlfriend, Iris, sitting across from him. But that wasn’t it, exactly. No one liked Iris, and Nasir cheated on her constantly; last winter he and Suzanne were involved for about two weeks.
Nasir was Pakistani, British-educated, with a terrible and romantic history of loved ones disappeared into Zia’s jails. Unlike everyone else in the house, all of whom were their professions, Nasir shot commercials for a living but was actually something else—a Marxist who dreamed of making political documentaries. So he too was more like the people these people used to know, and maybe that was part of the kinship Valerie felt with him. Also, they shared a similar manic edge. He was the only one she could have taken to the state park, the only one who would have seen what she saw in that Cantonese restaurant extravaganza of red and gold.
The last commercial Nasir shot was for a manufacturer of remote control lamps. Last weekend, Nasir brought twenty lamps out to the house and put them around the living room, and they all took turns standing in the center of the pitch black room making twenty lights dance on and off with the remote control wand. Nasir was always surprising them, turning out to know card tricks, to play stride piano and an amazing game of soccer. He had very large brown eyes, and the power of his attention was such that now, as Valerie laughed and shrugged off his lobster offer, she was so adrenalinized and trembly she had to sit right down next to Suzanne.
Suzanne said, “You chicken.” She was all for Valerie having a romance with Nasir—partly, Valerie suspected, because then the responsibility for Valerie’s continued presence would no longer be just Suzanne’s. Last week, when they were alone in the house, Suzanne told Valerie that she and Nasir would be good together, they both had great bone structure. It was something a fifteen-year-old would say, but Valerie couldn’t help asking, “Really?” or being embarrassed by how happy it made her.
Based on her own little fling with Nasir, Suzanne has warned Valerie not to expect too much, so Valerie could hardly tell her that what held her back, what kept her from even taking a lobster claw she might have liked, was that she expected the world, she had a sense that what happened with her and Nasir could be serious. She could imagine a life with Nasir, or anyway, time enough to find out who he was.
Dutifully, Suzanne asked if Valerie wanted a bite of her lobster, and Valerie said no, she didn’t want to spoil her high, and showed Suzanne her little plastic bag of kavakava. Suzanne made a face. Up and down the table, they were talking about food. Roy was going on about lobsters, information he’d picked up from the man at the fish store, many incredibly boring facts about water temperature and seasons. Then Nasir said that when he first came to this country, he’d worked briefly at a restaurant with a fresh water tank in which there was one lobster no one would touch, a forty-eight-pounder named Captain Hank.
Someone asked Nasir where he’d been today, and he said, “I ran away with Valerie.” Valerie was so shocked she laughed idiotically and said, “No, he didn’t!” And where was Valerie? Valerie described the beach she’d been to as if she’d headed there on purpose, and when Roy asked how it was, she said, “Oh great, just like Carnival in Rio! You would have loved it, Roy!” Then she asked how their day at the beach had been, and after a funny silence, everyone said fine.
Valerie said, “What are you guys not te
lling me?” Suzanne whispered, “Hey, be quiet, okay?” But before anyone could answer, Valerie stood up—the kavakava was making her thirsty and unable to sit still. There was only wine and beer on the table; it would have been okay pharmacologically, but mixing alcohol and the root left a bad taste in her mouth. As she filled a glass at the kitchen sink, she heard someone behind her.
Nasir came close and said, “Wait till you see what’s on today’s tape. I’m gone a few hours and all hell breaks loose.”
One custom of the house was that they videotaped the whole day—breakfast, grocery shopping, the beach—and watched it after dinner on TV. The only event left undocumented was dinner, which they were too busy eating to shoot. Mostly Nasir did the taping, the equipment was his, but he had shown everyone how to use it, and in his absence, Iris generally took over.
“Don’t tell me—an orgy,” said Valerie. Nasir just laughed, as did Valerie, thrilled by their apparent agreement that an orgy without the two of them seemed truly beneath contempt. “Then what?” she said. “A murder?”
“Believe me,” said Nasir, “a murder would look healthy. Fun. Compared to what they’ve got taped, a murder would look like nursery school.”
“Wow,” said Valerie. But Nasir wouldn’t say more. He said he hadn’t seen it, only heard, and now it was hard for Valerie to insist, with ten people carrying in dirty lobster plates while ten more came in debating the best way to unmold crème caramel.
After dessert and the coffee, which took forever because the cappuccino machine could only make four cups at a time, they settled around the living room in front of the TV and turned off all the lights. Nearly everyone sat near the small screen, except for Valerie, who was chewing kavakava and pacing, and Nasir, standing and leaning against the back wall, his face lit and shadowed dramatically by the flickering TV.
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