Providence Noir

by Ann Hood

  One afternoon, their search led them as far north as Palm Beach, where they found a shop on Highway 1 called True Treasures. Most of the furniture in the place looked like something an old movie star might have owned in a sprawling house high in the Hollywood Hills. As Joy wandered among those curiosities, she stopped to poke fun at the more outrageous pieces, like a four-poster canopy bed with a glittery silver headboard and so many layers of fabric that she dubbed it the Elizabeth Taylor Sleeper, or an endlessly pillowed sectional sofa in clashing geometric patterns that she called the Joan Crawford Couch. None of it fit their taste, but that was okay since half the fun was laughing about the things that were difficult to imagine being anybody’s taste. In the midst of all that, they laid eyes on a simple, soft blue wrought-iron table and matching chairs tucked in the back of the store. The set would fit perfectly on their little terrace, it was decided, and money was handed over to the clerk. While Charlie stood at the counter arranging the delivery, Joy wandered to a shelf overflowing with dishes and vases and ashtrays.

  “Look,” she said.

  Charlie turned and saw her pointing to an object high on a shelf. When she pulled it down, he realized it was a bright pink ceramic cookie jar made in the shape of a pig. Never once had Joy mentioned the nickname those kids called him back at Central High School, and yet he wondered for the briefest of moments if she was making some joke about it for the first time by showing him this pig. But at the end of the long hallway where the oasis of her art classroom had been situated for so many years, Joy had managed to isolate herself from much of the unpleasant happenings at that school. Chances were, she never mentioned the name because she had never even heard it, which was just fine by Charlie. And so, he determined that she had pulled down the pig-shaped cookie jar simply because it called to her in that way certain objects have of calling to people. The moment became something akin to a person passing the window of a pet store and deciding they had to take home the puppy or kitten glimpsed on the other side—not at all necessary, but somehow completely necessary at the same time.

  “This big guy is pretty cute, huh?” Joy said.

  “More crazy than cute, I’d say. Look at those eyes. Those teeth.”

  Joy stared into that strange face a moment, before lifting its head from its plump body and peering at the emptiness inside. She put the head back on and looked up at Charlie. “Let’s take him home.”

  “Okay, but you better feed him and walk him and deal with the neighbors when they complain about him oinking all the time.”

  She smiled and brought the cookie jar to the counter, letting the clerk know they’d carry it home in the car rather than have it delivered with the table. That’s when Charlie thought to ask, “Do people who aren’t allowed to eat cookies even need a cookie jar?”

  “Oh, I allow you to eat cookies, Charlie,” she replied in the same teasing tone of voice that he had asked the question.

  “Right,” he said. “One cookie. Once a year. At Christmas.”

  “What are you talking about? You just had those Mallomars when we stopped in Tennessee on the way down from Providence a few weeks ago.”

  “Mallomars? I don’t remember any Mallomars.”

  “Probably because you ate them so fast.”

  Back and forth, they kept ribbing each other while the clerk wrapped the head of the pig in newspaper, then wrapped the body. Once they were rung up and finished with their business, Joy carried the bag with her new find out to the Oldsmobile, where she strapped it in the backseat with a seat belt rather than risk it rolling around and breaking in the trunk. When she climbed into the passenger seat and strapped herself in, she said, “I was just thinking, Charlie. You know those golf balls you keep bringing home from your walks the last few weeks?”

  He started the car. “I do.”

  “Well, maybe you can put them inside the cookie jar instead of lining them up on the counter the way you’ve been doing?”

  That is how The Pig found a home in Charlie and Joy’s apartment in Fort Lauderdale. And that is how the golf balls found a home in The Pig.

  So many years later, after Tünde brought it crashing down upon Charlie’s head, then slammed the door and left him for dead, some part of the man’s conscious kept flickering over that memory. All the while, his body lay still on the floor, surrounded by jagged pieces of ceramic and those golf balls brought home during the first winter of his retirement, which filled The Pig in no time, so he switched to tossing them in a drawer instead. Slowly, the light in the kitchen shifted, brightening with the high sun, then dimming as the sun went down. At some point, there came a distant knocking that grew more rapid-fire, before fading away. The memory of that store on Highway 1 faded too, as Charlie’s mind moved from flashes of his past to a conjuring of his future. If he had indeed lived through the violence of that morning, he would need to make a new plan for his life without Joy. First, he would call his brother in Detroit, since there was no one else left for him to reach out to. He would explain that his mind was slipping away, not slowly as he hoped, but quite quickly, much to his dismay. Then he would sell the house in Providence, sell the apartment in Florida too. And if it came to it, which he knew it would, he’d allow himself to be put in some sort of home for people in his situation, where he would live out his final days in a lonely bed, staring out a window while waiting for the last of his mind to become one with that blank blue sky above.

  Charlie thought about all of those things for some time, before accepting that the end had arrived for him in all the ways that really matter. Once he accepted that, at last there came the sound of a door opening somewhere in the house, then the sound of footsteps, familiar ones. He opened his eyes and lifted his head to see her standing before him. She had snapped on a light and, after all the darkness, it was so bright that it hurt his eyes. He squinted against it.

  “Charlie,” she said and came to him, kneeling on the floor.

  “I killed you,” he told her.

  “No,” she said.

  “I killed you,” Charlie repeated. “I pushed you from the terrace. And you fell. I lied to the police and to the people in our building. I told them it was an accident. I had your body cremated, and I came home.”

  She was quiet, slipping her arms under his shoulders and cradling his head in the warmth of her lap. She brushed her soft hands against the many cuts and bruises on his skull. She brought her soft lips there and kissed him, the way she used to do every morning and night during all the years of their marriage.

  Then she said, “It’s not your fault, Charlie, that you see things this way, but I want you to try hard and keep what I’m about to tell you in your mind, because it will make things easier and be more pleasant for you than those other thoughts: We had a fight on the terrace, and I went to bed. When I woke in the morning, you weren’t there. I figured you had gone for a walk on the golf course until I saw our bathing suits had fallen from the railing, and I went down to the parking lot to get them. That’s when I discovered the Oldsmobile was not in its usual spot. The keys, I realized when I came upstairs, were missing too. And so was that old pig. Oh, Charlie. I had the police searching for you down there. I kept calling your cell phone too, which turned up at a gas station not far from the apartment. Someone there said that they saw you fall and drop it in the bathroom. That you hit your head. But that’s all they knew. And while the Florida police kept looking for you, I contacted the ones here in Providence in case somehow you’d made it all the way home. But they kept coming by the house and looking around, calling me back to say no one was here. I even sent that boy over who turns on the pipes and boiler for us, but Todd couldn’t find the key so he left a note for you instead.” She stopped and was silent for a moment, holding him still, caressing his head. She was crying now, but kept talking in the gentlest of voices: “Finally, since no one had any luck finding you, I gave up on you being down in Florida still. I had to do something, so I got on a plane and came here myself to see if you made it h
ome. And now here you are. But what has happened to you? Are you all right?”

  “I killed you,” was all Charlie said again. He was as certain of it as he had been of the business with the money and the groceries. “I saw you fall.”

  “No,” she responded, and hugged him close. “None of that happened.”

  He stared around at the pieces of the broken pig and the golf balls that filled the kitchen in their house, where they had lived happily for so many years before becoming snowbirds, moving north and south with the sun in an effort to dodge the cold and the gray winter skies over Providence and so many unpleasant elements of life in their final years. But there were some unpleasant things you could never outrun, no matter how hard you tried. And anyway, he thought, maybe all of it was just a trick of his mind. Maybe he was still back in Florida on that terrace watching their bathing suits blow away and dance in the wind before falling to earth. Maybe he was already in some Detroit nursing home where his brother had put him and everything that had happened was nothing more than a terrible vision out a window beside his bed. And there was another maybe, one he considered when he first saw that light she brought with her, when he felt the indelible softness of her skin and heard the sound of her voice comforting him when he never thought he would hear that voice again. This final maybe should have frightened him most of all, though it did not so long as Joy was with him. But how could he be sure she was? He looked up at her face, reached with his fingertips to try and feel her tears. He closed his eyes and opened them to see her there. He closed his eyes and opened them to see that she was not there. And in this way, Charlie Webster kept on blinking.

  She was there. She wasn’t there.

  She was. She wasn’t.

  She was.

  UNDER THE SHEPARD CLOCK

  BY ANN HOOD

  Downtown

  The storm began as soon as I stepped out of the Shepard department store. I struggled to get my umbrella open, but the wind immediately blew it inside out, rendering it useless. Frustrated, I tossed it in the nearest trash can. The rain came down in horizontal sheets, wetting my shopping bag enough to cause it to give way and send my new, carefully chosen tube of Murderous Red tumbling out. I’d had my hair done the day before, and I could feel it deflate under the onslaught. The smell of hair spray mixed with spring rain.

  In the middle of this calamity, I heard someone call my name.

  I looked up from retrieving my stray lipstick and saw a man hurrying toward me. Tall, wearing a London Fog raincoat (I recognized the brand because my husband Jim had the identical one), and holding a large black umbrella aloft, he grinned at me from beneath a dark walrus mustache.

  “Barbara!” he said again, and the voice made me feel flushed.

  “Fred?” I asked, even though I knew for certain that this was indeed Fred Lancaster, the man who over the course of two decades had managed to break my heart, twice. The first time was when he left for the war, shipped out to the Pacific without ever looking back. The last time, he swept back into my life and out again so fast it felt like I’d dreamed his return. I’d vowed that if I ever I saw him again, I’d be sure to make him suffer. But Fred had moved out of the country, to Buenos Aires or some other hot South American city, and my fantasies about how to hurt him eventually faded in the chaos of Vietnam and assassinations and my own enormous grief.

  Now here he stood.

  In a storm like this, it was hard to say no to a man with an umbrella. I ducked beneath it, dripping rain on his wing tips.

  “I can’t believe I’m actually running into you,” Fred said, shaking his head. “Just this morning I was wondering how I could find you.”

  “Really,” I said, unable to hide my sarcasm.

  “I heard about your daughter—” Fred began, but I held up my hand to shush him. I did not want Michelle’s name coming out of his mouth.

  With his free hand, he touched my wet cheek. “How are you, Barbara?” he asked tenderly.

  I wish I had recoiled. Or stepped out into that storm. But instead I bent my head so that his hand cupped my face. Fred stroked my cheek, and traced my lips. I closed my eyes. When his fingers lingered on my mouth, I wanted to stand on tiptoe and kiss him. I wanted to let him hold me again.

  Instead, I opened my eyes and stared straight up into his.

  Then I bit him.

  Hard. Enjoying the feel of bone, the skin breaking, and the metallic taste of blood.

  “Hey!” he gasped, his hand jerking back, knocking against my teeth.

  I smiled. Revenge felt sweet.

  Fred assessed the damage to his finger. “Lucky for you, I think I’ll live,” he said.

  That’s when I noticed the thick gold wedding band on his ring finger. I ignored the pang of jealousy that cut through me, and said, “Lucky how?”

  “Well,” Fred answered slowly, “lucky because that means I can buy you dinner. Tomorrow night?”

  I knew the response should be no. I knew that I should walk away, fast.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” Fred said, his voice low.

  He bent toward me. I didn’t like the new style men were wearing, droopy mustaches and long sideburns. And Fred had both. Despite my protests, Jim had done the same thing.

  “Maybe third time’s the charm,” he whispered, making me hate myself for the way those words and the smell of his Old Spice made my heart beat a little faster, made me want to rip off his London Fog and feel his skin beneath my hands again.

  “Don’t count on it,” I said, surprising myself that I could pull off sassy.

  In one swift motion, Fred straightened and yanked the umbrella shut. I could see small pinpricks of blood on his finger and they made me smile. The storm had ended as quickly as it began.

  “We’ll meet right here then?” he said, motioning with his chin toward the Shepard clock. “Six o’clock?”

  Before I could answer, he simply walked off in the direction he’d come, leaving me wet and alone, my tube of lipstick still clutched in my hand.

  * * *

  We’d named her after the Beatles song. At night, we sang it to her to put her to sleep. Michelle, ma belle . . . When that song came on the radio now, I had to pull over, stop driving, until I could catch my breath again. Jim still played it on the stereo, over and over again in the living room with the shades pulled shut, a glass of bourbon by his side. That’s where I found him when I got home, flopped in the easy chair, bourbon in hand, that hateful song’s final chords playing.

  “Please,” I said, “don’t put it on again.”

  He didn’t respond, or even acknowledge me. But he stayed seated at least, and let the needle on the record player keep skittering across the 45.

  “Is there dinner?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  Maybe he shook his head no.

  I didn’t wait around, just went to the kitchen and peered into the near empty refrigerator. At first, people brought food: tuna casseroles and Chicken Divan, meatloaf and lasagna. But eventually those stopped, as if in half a year’s time we should be better, over it, back to cooking dinner and living our life. Even though the high chair sat empty in the corner, and down the hall a room with lemon-yellow walls had a half-finished puzzle on the floor, a box of Crayola crayons opened, and an unmade big-girl bed. Even though, I thought as I opened a carton of cottage cheese, we had nothing to live for anymore.

  * * *

  Six o’clock on Westminster Mall is full of men in business suits, women in high heels, shoppers laden with shopping bags pushing through the revolving doors of Shepard’s and The Outlet and Gladyings. I’d read in the Evening Bulletin that some politicians wanted to demolish the pedestrian mall and open it to automobile traffic. They wanted to enter the 1970s with an all-new Providence. But standing there on a warm April evening and watching life pass by me, I couldn’t believe that anyone would let that happen. A policeman forced two long-haired college students in ripped jeans and T-shirts, holding signs that said Hell
No, We Won’t Go! to move along. Not for the first time, I found myself thankful that when I went to college, students still dressed for class—boys in ties and girls in skirts and sweater sets. We combed our hair and took baths and loved our country.

  “You look deep in thought,” Fred Lancaster’s voice interrupted my silent rant.

  I pointed to the two boys still lingering near The Outlet.

  “I was reminiscing about my own college days,” I said.

  Fred smiled down at me. Had he always been so tall? I felt small beside him.

  “We had our heads in the sand,” he said, linking his arm in mine. “This generation is exciting, isn’t it? They’re thinking, questioning—”

  “If we’re going to have a pleasant dinner,” I said, “maybe we should change the subject.”

  “Ah! You’re one of those,” he teased. “Please don’t tell me you voted for Nixon.”

  “I think I’ll take the fifth,” I said, trying not to concentrate on the way our hips bumped pleasantly together as we walked.

  “I seem to remember that you weren’t quite such a straight arrow in college.”

  My cheeks burned, and I hoped he didn’t notice.

  “The night on my friend’s boat,” he said, as if I didn’t remember.

  “Well,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

  “And that weekend in Maine.”

  “Was that Maine?” I asked. “I don’t think I saw anything except the inside of a bedroom.” I could play this game too.

  Fred stopped walking.

  “The wallpaper had bluebirds on it,” I said, flirting.

  Without any warning, he tipped my chin up and kissed me full on the mouth. It was as good as I remembered. Only Fred could make my knees wobbly with one kiss.

  “Cardinals,” he said, his face still close to mine.

  “What?”

  “The wallpaper had cardinals,” he said. “There was a red and gray and white–striped Pendleton blanket on the bed, and scratchy sheets by some Scandinavian designer.”