Jonathan stands; the wife stands. They look at each other for a moment. Then they say goodbye. The three men leave her, as men always do, alone with the television and the kitchen. Outside, she hears the truck’s engine turn over as it pulls away, toward Hampton Bays and sunlight and the train that will take Evan away from Speonk, and out of her life for good.
Well, that’s one way things could have turned out. But though this might be an end to Jonathan’s story, it isn’t the end to mine.
One Saturday, a few weeks after Naomi drove us to New York, I ran into her on the beach in Bridgehampton.
“Guess what?” she said, leaping up from the sand. “The other day, I looked up Speonk on a map, and it’s only an hour from here—less in the middle of the night, when there wouldn’t be traffic.”
“So?”
“Well, doesn’t that make it seem a little improbable?”
“What?”
“That Ben wouldn’t pick him up.”
“Pick up Jonathan? Maybe Ben was busy.”
She rolled her eyes. “Are you kidding? He’s one of Jonathan’s best friends. But even if he did say no—which I find hard to believe—then why didn’t Jonathan just call a taxi to take him to Hampton Bays?”
“Well, maybe taxis don’t run that late in Speonk.” I sat down on the edge of her towel.
“Fine. So why didn’t he call me? He knows I would have picked him up.”
I didn’t want to get into the thorny question of why he might not have wanted to call Naomi.
“What are you saying?” I asked. “That he made up the whole story?”
“Not the whole story, necessarily. It’s just, when you think about it, it’s full of holes. For instance, this idea that he had no other choice but to hitchhike. Of course he had other choices! I’ve just listed them. And then the larger inconsistency, which is, how likely is it that some truck driver, some guy who spends all his time on the road, is going to recognize an actor from a soap opera?”
“Don’t they usually drive at night?”
“Sure. But would The Light of Day really be up the alley of your average trucker?”
“Who says he was your average trucker?”
Naomi threw sand at me then. “Oh, be quiet, you’re just playing devil’s advocate,” she said. “I can hear it in your voice, you’re as dubious as I am. You’re wondering, was Jonathan just making the whole thing up for the sake of giving a performance? You know, poor Jonathan, he couldn’t bear playing the villain anymore, so he quits, and on his last day of work, look what happens. No matter where he travels, Evil Evan follows him. It’s like something out of Stephen King.”
“Or a soap opera.”
“Exactly.”
Making an excuse, I got up, and walked farther down the beach. Somehow I couldn’t stomach any more of Naomi’s suspiciousness—not at that moment. And yet I have to say this for her: with the tenacity that distinguishes certain very relentless and untrusting natures, she had managed to root out from Jonathan’s story every questionable detail, every immoderate coincidence, laying those trophies before me the way a cat will lay out the remnants of its prey. And faced with such evidence, how could I not revise my own imagined version of what took place?
So: third variation.
Let’s agree, at the very least, that Jonathan did end up in Speonk that night. Let’s also agree that, either from necessity or by choice, he decided to hitchhike to Hampton Bays. A truck picks him up, only this time the driver is alone. No cousin tags along for the ride. The driver is beer-bellied, hairy-shouldered, wears a New York Knicks baseball cap. He grips the wheel so tightly his knuckles whiten, and the contemplation of those knuckles—the knowledge that this man could crush Jonathan’s neck with his bare hands if he wanted—provokes a weird commingling of panic and arousal in Jonathan. His mouth waters. From the little green cardboard tree that dangles from the rearview mirror, there emanates a smell of men’s rooms; of urinal cakes.
If the driver recognizes Jonathan, though, he doesn’t let on. Instead he says, “Jerry,” and holds his hand out sideways as he slows for a red light.
“Jonathan.”
They shake. With an audible thunk, the light changes to green. The truck accelerates. “You know, if I take you straight to Hampton Bays, you’ll just have to wait at the station,” Jerry says. “Tell you what, why don’t we go to my place? My wife will make us some coffee.”
“Won’t she be asleep?”
“Norma?” He laughs. “She never sleeps. Never goes to bed before three, and then she reads.”
“Well, if you’re sure—”
Without signaling, Jerry maneuvers the truck off the main drag and onto a narrow street lined with shingled houses. In most of them, the lights are off. A few more turns—left, right, left, Jonathan notes, in case he has to escape—and they pull into a graveled driveway bordered with lawn and geraniums. “Home, sweet home,” Jerry says, switching off the ignition.
They climb out of the cab. The house is dark except for a yellowish light glimmering in one window. Taking a ring of keys from his belt, Jerry opens the door and shouts, “Norma!”
“In here.”
They step through the front hall, where Jerry hangs his cap on a peg. A smell of pot roast and stale coffee lingers in the air. Pushing open a swing door, Jerry leads Jonathan into the kitchen, where a woman with long, badly dyed hair is sitting at the breakfast table, smoking and doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. Behind her is a padlocked door. In front of her sits a half-empty glass of orange juice and an ashtray in which a cigarette is smoldering. She is holding a pencil.
Lifting her eyes from the puzzle, she looks Jonathan over—not with surprise, exactly, though not with complacency, either; instead, her expression might best be described as one of slight botheration, enough to tell Jonathan that, though her husband may not be in the habit of bringing strangers home at two in the morning, neither is it unheard of for him to do so.
“Norma, this is Jonathan,” Jerry says, and hoists himself up to sit on the corn-yellow countertop. “Jonathan, Norma.”
“Hey.”
“He was hitching near the station. Got the wrong train out of Jamaica. Has to get to Hampton Bays, but the next train don’t leave for a couple of hours.”
“Bummer.”
“Make some coffee, will you?”
Obediently—but with evident impatience—Norma puts down her pencil, gets up out of her chair, and walks to the stove. She has a big behind. She’s wearing an old-fashioned lacy pink bathrobe, buttoned to the neck. Her age is difficult to read. Forty? Forty-five? Although she has the long hair of a girl, and she’s painted her nails with glittery pink polish, nonetheless the skin around her throat is pliant and loose. There are tiny, colorless hairs on her cheeks. She reminds Jonathan of an over-the-hill Grateful Dead groupie he once saw interviewed on television—“rode hard and put up wet” was how Ben Brandt described her—and for that very reason, he finds her powerfully attractive, much more attractive, say, than Betsy, the pretty girlfriend for whose sake (at least in part) he quit his job. It’s that slight air of tawdriness—the dyed hair, the glittery nails, and then the odd touch of the grandmotherly bathrobe: it all contributes to a fantasy he’s working up, has been working up ever since Jerry invited him home. After all, he’s no innocent, he’s seen the ads in the back of the Village Voice, on Internet bulletin boards: COUPLE SEEKS SINGLE … INSATIABLE MOM CAN’T GET ENOUGH … GIVE IT TO MY WIFE WHILE I WATCH. Is this the real story, then, the real reason Jerry brought him here? And if so, will she go along with it? (Probably; to avoid trouble with her husband, he suspects, she’s probably gone along with far worse things. Even so, her lack of interest is vivid, and, curiously enough, the knowledge that she would submit, if at all, reluctantly, only heightens his curiosity.)
And no one, not Betsy nor Naomi nor Ben, will ever know. For he goes unrecognized. That’s the icing on the cake. Evil Evan is so far from here he might as well be dead.
Unless, of course, they do recognize him and are just pretending not to, so that they can spring something on him at a compromised moment.
The coffee is ready. Norma pours it into mugs and hands one to Jerry, the other to Jonathan. “Thanks,” he says. “Oh, ‘Life’s a Beach.’ You know, I never got that joke before.”
Norma says nothing. She sits down, grinds out her cigarette, and takes up her pencil.
“Any milk?” Jerry asks.
“Went sour.”
A sound of gulping from behind Jonathan.
“Is that today’s puzzle you’re doing?”
Norma nods.
“I finished it on the train, so if you get stuck on anything, just let me know.”
For the first time since his arrival, something akin to a smile passes over Norma’s lips. “O.K., smarty-pants, so long as you’re offering. Twenty-six across: Monster’s home.”
He grins. “Loch,” he says.
“Shit. Like Loch Ness.” She erases. “I had lair. So that means twenty-six down is—Musical Lynn. Loretta!”
“I was born a coal miner’s daughter,” Jerry sings.
“Any others?”
She scans. “Thirty-seven down: Bygone queen.”
“All right. How many letters have you got?”
“T-blank-blank-blank-I-N-A. At first I thought it might be Titania, but that doesn’t fit.”
“Tsarina.”
“Tsarina.” She writes in the word. “Which means that fifty-two across—Bleep—is … Edit out!”
“Why do you waste your time with these stupid puzzles?” Jerry asks. “Up all night, and doing what? Working on your novel? Nope. Puzzles.”
“You’re writing a novel?”
“I don’t like to talk about it,” Norma says. “He knows that. He knows I don’t like to talk about it.”
She returns to the crossword. Behind where she and Jonathan are sitting, her husband chuckles a little. And how curious! Now the Grateful Dead groupie is, of all things, a novelist. She sits up at night doing crossword puzzles. Out of the lips of her jokey husband emerge the words “Butcher Holler …”
Soon it will be time to go. Jerry will drive him to Hampton Bays, where he will catch a train to Bridgehampton, where Ben Brandt will pick him up: his own life. And then, in that crowded summer rental on the wrong side of the Montauk Highway, maybe he will tell his friends the story of Jerry and Norma, or some variation on it, adding a twist to make it more interesting and less incriminating. Months will go by, and Betsy will or will not agree to marry him. Evil Evan will recede, and the best part is, he will recede far faster than Jerry and Norma. Far faster than Speonk.
Somewhere a bird starts singing. Only the song isn’t coming from outside: it’s the clock above the kitchen sink. Instead of numbers, each hour is marked by a different singing bird: great horned owl for twelve, northern mockingbird for one, black-capped chickadee …
Who’s singing now? Northern cardinal. Three in the morning.
“We’d better scoot if you’re going to make your train,” Jerry says, alighting from the countertop.
“Fine, just one more clue,” Norma says. “Thirty-one across: Arizona attraction.”
“Petrified forest,” Jonathan says.
“Petrified forest, of course.” Feverishly she erases. “Good, now I can finish the damn thing. Now, finally, I can finish the damn thing and go to bed.”
The Scruff of the Neck
Lily’s girl, Audrey, called Rose and asked if she could interview her; she was getting her master’s degree in epidemiology, she said, and for her thesis she wanted to prepare a medical history of the entire family. “From soup to nuts” was how she put it. “And since you and Minna are the only ones of the brothers and sisters who are still alive, obviously it’s worth the trip to Florida to talk to you.”
“You’ll want to see Minna, too, then?” Rose asked.
“Let me interview you first,” Audrey said, and proposed that she come to tea at Rose’s house the following Tuesday.
“Wonderful, dear. And you’ll spend the night, won’t you? Or a few nights.”
But no, Audrey said, she was going to stay with her boyfriend’s parents in Fort Lauderdale. “Oh, and if you could have your birth certificate and passport handy, plus any medical records—really, whatever you think might be relevant—that would be great. Also anything on your children. And grandchildren.”
“I’ll see what I can find.”
Audrey hung up. This was on Friday; over the course of the weekend Rose sifted through the boxes in the basement and the files at the back of the kitchen desk, trying to dig up material that Audrey might consider useful. Yet how could she know what Audrey might consider useful? She found vaccination certificates for two of the three children, some old passports, the insurance papers from when Burt had died. (Why had she saved all this stuff?) Also her marriage license. But would that be “relevant”? Rose had no idea, so she stuffed it along with everything else into a big manila folder.
It embarrassed her that she had no pictures of Audrey, or any memories by which to gauge what the girl looked like. The truth was, where her great-nieces and -nephews were concerned, Rose always felt a little at sea. When you are the youngest of eleven, nieces and nephews have a way not only of proliferating, but of sharing the same names, so that it becomes harder and harder to keep track of which David is which, or whether it was Ernie’s Sarah or Laura’s who had just graduated from law school. Some of them Rose had never met; Audrey she had met only once, when she was three years old. This was only in part circumstantial. Of all her sisters, Harriet, Audrey’s grandmother, was the only one to whom Rose had never had much to say. To put it mildly, Harriet had always been eccentric, sitting on the porch on summer evenings and brushing out her long, dark hair to scandalize the neighbors. Later, for reasons that remained murky, she was thrown out of nursing school, then married a rabbi and gave birth to Lily, also a bit of a weirdo. Lily had been divorced more times than Rose cared to remember, had gone to India and changed her name to Anuradha, and stayed at the Betty Ford Center. She had only the one child; was it fair to say, then, based on her phone manner, that the girl took after her mother and grandmother in many ways?
Audrey arrived, as promised, on Tuesday. That morning, Rose woke up worried about tea. Generally speaking, tea wasn’t part of her vocabulary; like Minna, she preferred coffee. Although Minna was about to turn ninety-six, she still had lunch every day at Ravelstein’s, where she drank black coffee with her corned beef sandwich. She even drank coffee at supper. She had no patience for the cappuccinos and espressos and whatnot that you found at the new Starbucks, which she called Starburst, or sometimes Starbust; no, she preferred good old American coffee, she said, made in a stainless-steel pot. As for Rose, what little she knew of tea she had learned from Masterpiece Theatre, programs like Upstairs, Downstairs, on which much always seemed to be made over who poured. The details she tried to excavate from memory. At Publix she bought Peek Frean biscuits and cucumbers and Pepperidge Farm thin-sliced bread, as well as several varieties of tea: Queen Mary, Earl Grey, Prince of Wales. But then when she got home she realized that she didn’t have any butter. Could you make cucumber sandwiches without butter? Would it be all right to add mayonnaise instead?
She cut the crusts off the bread, spread them with Hellmann’s Light Mayonnaise. From outside, barking sounded. She looked out the kitchen window and saw that Dinah, her puppy, was trying to kill the pool sweep again. Round and round Dinah went, chasing the little mechanical monster as it circled the pool, lunging at the water whenever it neared the periphery.
Rose rapped on the windowpane. “Dinah, no!” she scolded. But Dinah didn’t stop. Catching the pool sweep between her teeth, she yanked it out of the water. “Dinah, no!” Rose repeated, hurrying out on the deck. “Bad girl! No!”
Dinah looked at her. From the pool sweep’s underside, water jets sprayed the deck, the lawn chair, the silk dress Rose had put on for the occa
sion. “Oh, Dinah!” she said, extracting it from the dog’s mouth. “Look what you’ve done. And now I’ll have to change.”
Then she picked Dinah up—as the dog lady on television had instructed—by the scruff of the neck. When they misbehave, this dog lady had said, just grab them by the scruff of the neck, the way their mothers did; that way they’ll know you mean business.
Hem dripping, Rose carried Dinah inside. Dinah’s belly was brindled, the fur on her vulva turned upward in a wet-kiss curl. With adoring eyes, eyes full of lamentation and contrition, she gazed up at Rose, who gazed back. “Oh, Dinah, why can’t you learn?” she asked. “And to think that this dress cost more than you did!”
She was just undoing the buttons when the doorbell rang.
Audrey turned out to be a wisp of a thing, with short black hair and squinty eyes. A slender gold ring pierced her left nostril. She wore Groucho Marx glasses, a black turtleneck, black jeans, and carried a black backpack.
“Well, look at you,” Rose said, kissing her on the cheek. “Little Audrey, all grown up.”
Audrey flinched. Her shoulder blades, when Rose touched them, were bony; static electricity clung to her turtleneck. They stepped into the living room, and Rose sat her down on one of the recliners. From the kitchen she brought the tea things on a tray: the Peek Freans, the sandwiches, the cups and the sugar bowl and the milk pitcher. “You’ll have to excuse my appearance,” she said, “I’ve been having a little trouble with the puppy.”
“You have a puppy?”
“A Wheaten terrier. Dinah. She’s out in the yard now. You see, George—that’s my oldest boy—gave her to me last autumn when your uncle Burt passed on. And she has this thing about the pool sweep. She loves to chase the pool sweep.”
“What’s a pool sweep?”
“Well, it’s—how do you describe it? It’s that little thing that circles round the pool and cleans it.”
“I’ve never seen one of those.”
“Newer pools don’t have them. Ours is almost thirty years old, if you can believe it … oh, but I’ve forgotten to give you tea. And what kind would you like? As you can see, I’ve got ’em all. Earl Grey, Queen Mary, the whole royal family.”
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