Licorice

by Abby Frucht

  “She forgets,” he was saying. “The lady forgets.” For a moment he gazed at the ladder-back chairs, but soon he started down the road. He didn’t walk on the sidewalk. He stayed on the curb lawn, and I kept my eye on him until he vanished among some trees. The leaves appeared to heave and then settle around him.

  Meanwhile Eva reappeared in the yard, nibbling a green bean from Nikki’s overgrown garden. Delicately, she spit the husk between her paws, then paused, cocked her head, and trotted back through the gap in Nikki’s fence.

  A second later, Joe followed, twanging his slingshot as he ducked behind the posts.

  “HAVE SOME WATER,” said Daniel then, when everything had grown still. He dumped out the glass of iodine, washed it, filled it, and gave it to me.

  I closed my eyes as I swallowed, and was afraid to open them. What would I see? On the table lay Gail’s ring in the folds of Arnie’s jacket, while from the back of a chair slipped the un-hemmed dress, little by little. In the yard lay Joe’s painter’s cap, upside down. Looking dignified and pleased, Eva trotted out alone from among the pine trees, mud on her nose. From her teeth hung a rope of small, hard red onions that swung to and fro. Soon she crouched on her forepaws to snack. She did so with great elegance, peeling with her teeth the onions’ fragile, insubstantial coverings.

  Daniel was staring at me. He set the radio upright and turned a few knobs. It beeped shrilly-frantically-until he turned the knob again. In the sudden peace and quiet I heard a faint humming. Rather, I felt it. It tickled. It vibrated, and my whole body seemed to vibrate with it. Horrified, I slid my hands into my pockets, then felt around my blouse and the buckles of my sandals. In retrospect I know I saved the earrings for last, certain all the while of what Daniel had done. He must have done it while I slept; opened an earring, slid the transmitter inside.

  I closed my fingers on a locket. It had a pulse of its own, a faint humming vibration as familiar as the pulse of our marriage.

  Daniel looked scared.

  “You didn’t give me a choice,” he said. “I was scared to death you’d leave us.”

  “So was I,” I said.

  INTERVAL FOUR

  ONLY LATER that night, after dinner and the rain, did I remember the letter to Deets. Still in my pocket, it must have played on my awareness just exactly the way, if the phones are in order, a ringing phone might haunt the edges of a deep slumber. How the ringing persists, its implications woven carelessly, influentially, into a dream.

  Ben was in our kitchen helping Daniel with the dishes. Simon was asleep on the living room couch with Amie’s jacket for a blanket. I took hold of Ben’s elbow and steered him toward the table where I spread open the fragmented letter and held it in place.

  “Read this,” I said.

  Daniel stood at Ben’s shoulder and read it, too.

  “It’s definitely a letter,” Daniel said when he was done.

  “It’s one letter from two loonies,” said Ben. “That’s all. What do you want me to do? Go live with them? Go eat their gazpacho? You don’t want me to come here for dinner anymore, I won’t, I promise.”

  “Listen,” I instructed, and I recited the part about falling in love. “Leah said that to me once,” I told him.

  It was a lie but it felt right to say it. She could easily have said it. She felt it, I knew, because I’ve felt it myself.

  “She wants to fall in love again, with you. She wants you to find her.”

  “Oh, great,” said Ben.

  “She wants you to try,” I went on. “See, it says right here, pack your bag, shut the light, walk out the… and then think, and remember, and follow your—”

  “I can read,” said Ben. “I’ve always had a feeling that’s what I should do, but I felt too stupid to do it.”

  “Do it,” I said.

  “Do it, I guess,” said Daniel. “You can always come back.”

  “No way I’ll come back,” said Ben. He lifted Simon from the couch and carried him out to his car. Half an hour later he was at our door again, to show us what he’d found in the inside pocket of Simon’s miniature Ghostbuster suitcase. He’d found a bead, that’s all, from one of Leah’s necklaces. The necklace, of clay, had been made by an old friend of Leah’s in Boston.

  “That’s a long shot,” said Daniel, when Ben had driven off. “Boston’s a mighty big place.”

  I nodded. I took off my earrings, undid the clasps of the lockets, slipped the transmitter out and laid it gently on the table. I put the earrings back on and finally let our eyes lock.

  “Over the river in Boston. That’s what he said. He’ll find her,” I said, and thought of fish and flower markets on sun-heated cobblestoned streets, and of a doorway with a potter’s apron hanging on a hook. In the distance the river might stink of debris, but in the shop would be the sweet, penetrating odor of mud. The floor would be concrete splattered with slip, and on a shelf in the rear would be a row of jars of pigments amid packets of oxides and ores. From behind a low partition would come the whir of the potters wheel along with a voice from a radio. Ben, creeping closer, might see the top of her head bent over her work, her hair coming undone from a ponytail. Near her elbow would be a yogurt container filled with water and several paintbrushes and utensils and on the window behind her would be her sunglasses hung on the curtain rod. Still Ben won’t say anything to get her attention; instead he’s looking for signs of a lover, looking to see whether she’s healthy and whether her clothing under the apron is the same sort of clothing she wore when she left him or whether she’s changed her style. There might even be a photo of himself and of Simon, so of course Ben stares at it thinking that since it’s on the wall behind her she only looks at it when she comes in in the morning and maybe when she stops for lunch and maybe when she goes home but not while she is working at the wheel. After that he examines the pots, to see if she’s been productive, to see if she’s feeling creative, to see if she’s had luck with glazes and if the kiln is reliable. If Leah still hasn’t noticed him he might lift a finished pot off a shelf and tap his fingernail lightly against it to test its construction. The more thin-walled the pot the better, Leah always claims, the very beauty of a piece of ceramics being that wedding of fragility and durability.

  Then, when she still hasn’t seen him, Ben, at a loss for words and action, leaves the studio and steps out into the hot street again where he sits on the edge of a wall and watches the doorway before circling around to the back to make sure there is no second exit. There is, naturally, leading out to a yard where the kiln sits, but there’s a wooden fence around it with no gate. Ben will not have brought Simon, having left him in the care of some people he knows. Around noon he goes back into the shop where the air feels still moister and cooler than it did before, and where the radio is off and the potter’s wheel silent. He has a moment of panic before seeing Leah’s sunglasses still hanging on the curtain rod and then Leah herself at the sink preparing a sandwich. Bologna of all things. As far as Ben knows Leah never ate bologna while living with him, and the sight of it on slabs of her usual homemade, whole wheat bread weakens anew his resolve to speak to her, so he goes back into the street again. The air smells of dead fish. There he sits until the shop behind him closes its doors and there are no longer quite so many tourists on the sidewalk. The tourists have been following the Freedom Trail, a painted red stripe that on the sidewalk at Ben’s feet has worn to a few red speckles. When he goes into the shop again, Leah is gone. Her sunglasses are gone from the curtain rod. The potter’s wheel has been sponged and scraped clean; the utensils, freshly rinsed, lie drying on a paper towel next to the sink.

  “Oh, no she doesn’t,” Ben says aloud. “No, she doesn’t. No, she doesn’t. No, she doesn’t.”

  He pokes his head outside the door again and looks both ways on the Freedom Trail, which angles down toward the river and up to a place where the buildings are tall and narrow. He might call her out loud, his first utterance, but remembers too horribly the long silent secon
ds following his calls on the very night she disappeared, his head in the dark of the eaves just next to their bedroom. He makes his way through the studio to where the back door leads to the fenced-in yard. He opens it gently and steps just onto the threshold. The kiln yard is small, no more than twelve feet from the door to the fence, and the shapeless brick kiln takes up half of the space. The rest is ramshackle lawn adorned here and there with Leah’s pots planted with flowering vines. Leah is stretched out in the middle of them on a chaise lounge, reading a book. She has taken off her smock, and Ben recognizes her khaki shorts as the ones she always wears on summer evenings, and he recognizes the blue halter top, and the strong, bony angles of her legs and arms, and even the book, or in any case its author of whom Leah has always been fond. Now that she is again no more than six feet away from him, Ben cannot make himself call out to her or even whisper her name, and he can not move himself through the door to approach her. He only stands and watches, wondering at her sheer inability to see him – she is sitting at an angle; it is not out of the question that she should catch sight of him from the corner of her eye. Experimentally, Ben tries a few gestures, first flexing his fingers, then lifting the whole hand, running the fingertips through his hair, and at the end a little wave in his wife’s direction, but Leah only turns the page of her book and keeps on reading. She crosses her long legs, angles her face into the last of the warmth from the evening sun. She has not lost weight, as he has. She has not gained weight. What is different about her is only this queer, unsettling self-absorption that even the noise from the street can’t penetrate. It seems to Ben that if he were to walk straight up to her, sit down on the edge of the chaise lounge, remove the book from her hand and lean forward to kiss her she still would be unaware of him. He needs to wait for an opening, a crack in the empowered glaze of her exterior. It might never happen, Ben tells himself.

  Some time later, Leah rises, walks barefoot to the kiln, checks the fuel and the temperature and then, satisfied, returns to her book. Ben ducks inside the doorway as she crosses the yard. Her naked feet are painfully familiar. So is her habit of reading in dwindling light; Leah often reads in near darkness, in the bedroom late at night after Ben is in bed, with the glare from the hallway her only source of illumination. Next to her he’ll lie awake and hear the comforting sound of her pages turning, reassuring as a heartbeat. Leah never falls asleep while reading. She marks her place in the book, closes it, lays it flatly on her night table and is asleep within minutes but never without first reaching for Ben, always with the identical gesture; her knuckles caressing the hairs on his chest, her fingertips stroking the expectant peaks of his nipples.

  Now all at once the book tumbles to the grass. It lands on its spine. Its pages fan out and then flop back together. Leah’s right hand slides from her belly as if in pursuit, her knuckles caressing the dry tops of the grass, her fingertips searching the hard top-soil-searching and searching. Ben feels in his nipples the familiar, upright tingling, and sees the yearning in her fingers, in their persistence and frustration and in the way they close finally on air only to open again and resume. This is the crack, the opening for which he has been waiting. Still he waits a minute longer just to be certain, and a minute after that. When he takes off his shirt, he believes he feels the heat from the kiln rolling toward him in waves across the narrow fenced yard.

  ONLY AFTER I’ve convinced myself of the inevitability of Ben and Leah’s first kiss on the chair in the heat of the kiln yard, do Daniel and I make contact. Touch, that is. We are lying in the guest room, on top of the covers, and we both catch sight of the same thing at once; what has happened to the wall. A blemish in the plaster, a faint haze of white dust with the moonlight slanting through from the other side of it. It is not a large hole, about the size of-well-about the size of one of Joe’s slingshot missiles. And there’s another where the wall meets the ceiling. Gazing at them, and at the night coming through them, our touching each other doesn’t come as a shock. In fact several seconds pass before I realize that my open hand is resting on his. In his, actually, for he has closed his fingers over my palm. For the first several seconds our two skins feel like the usual no-man’s-land, that half-inch of empty space to which we’ve grown so accustomed, and I think nothing of it. But then—how warm it becomes, my skin against his, his skin against mine, the skins of our two hands so distinct, for a minute, from the rests of our bodies that it’s as if we are again touching anther to stigma, petal to petal, out in the woods together. This time of year, the woods have a damp, creeky smell, and there is always the sound of water dripping although the drops are not to be seen. Perhaps the sound is only sap popping out of the trees, for everywhere the leaves are spotted with dried sap which clings also to the stems and bark and makes a sticky mist over the leaves of the undergrowth and over us as well; on our hair and clothing. Its presence is subtle, cobwebby, easy to overlook, but its flavor on Daniel’s lips is sharp and quite unusual so for a moment I can almost believe that I am only tasting, like someone sipping a glass of wine not from thirst but curiosity. Then all at once there is the flavor of his tongue, dense and familiar, and the scent of shampoo at the roots of his hair, and the sweet, urgent smell when he no longer holds himself back. I’d forgotten about that; Daniel, my scientist, letting himself go. How naturally it happens, and how he welcomes his own astonishment-crying out, gasping, sweating, tears in his eyes – so for a minute I am like a person in the eye of a tornado. Around me spins a tunnel of breathless, purple air as if love itself were composed of one fierce spiral, and before morning it is that that sweeps me off my feet, not the plunging of Daniel’s body but the height and duration of love as it hovers, then touches down. All along it must have waited in the wings for this moment, whirling and whirling, gathering intensity.

  “I missed you,” I say.

  My last thought is of my fingers and of Daniel taking hold of them; how eager they were for the touch of his hand.

  PART FIVE

  Hungry Love

  FOR OVER A WEEK, rain falls. Noon brings intermittent thunder bursts followed by slow spells of increasing humidity; at night there is the plunk and trickle of water in the gutters, water on the roof, water threading through the needles of the pines outside our windows, and by morning a chilly mist blankets the sunken lawn next to the reservoir. The water has risen until no more than a corner remains visible of the concrete block on which the father of the two fishing boys used to sit while smoking his cigarettes, and even that is damp to the touch. When the sun comes out, once each mid-morning, it seems only to draw the moisture out of the ground, between the cracks of the sandstone sidewalks, in sparkling patches that dim as the clouds converge, and in pools spreading out on the meadow under the fruit trees.

  None of which is unusual; it happens every year about this time-mid-August, late August, early September-and every year when the rain ends and the sky is free of clouds, that is the day when summer is understood to be over and autumn to have begun. That morning, we notice that the leaves on the tops of the trees have started to turn, and that day, the wind starts blowing in circles, and that evening, during our walk, the sun sinks before we’ve made it around the reservoir instead of waiting until we’re home, and that night, lying in bed, we hear the college students partying on their way to the second reservoir to skinny dip, and we turn to each other and say, “They’re back.” But this year, when the weather clears sometime midway through the second week in September, it’s not autumn at all but clearly, unabashedly summer again, and the students have not returned. The creek has risen a bit since the day the rains started, the path is muddier, the rocks and tree trunks mossier, and here and there are a few odd debris that must have made their way over from the center of town; a supermarket cart, a municipal trash can, the chained, sodden phone book from a public phone booth. In places the creek is motionless, and on our walk one night we lean over the bridge railing and count an army of mayflies skimming upstream from one motionless patch to another.
We count over seventy of them, and when we’re finished Daniel tells me, very calmly and matter-of-factly, with his arm around my shoulder and my arm around his waist, that the Latin name of the flower we’ve been pollinating all summer is Impatiens and that the common name, more common than jewel-weed, is Touch Me Not, and that all summer long he has been unable to use either one of these names in my presence.

  Now he takes his T-shirt off, draping it over one shoulder. I plant a long, wet kiss on the other shoulder and am embarrassed by what I see when I’ve pulled my mouth away; a smoky echo of the kiss, a licorice shadow. With the hem of his shirt I wipe the black kiss from his skin, not meeting his eyes. Only this morning, while showering together, he commented on my girth (increasing), my breasts (swelling), my eyelids (fatigue), my mornings (sickness). After the shower, Daniel held up my toothbrush (black). Dr. Kirshner would be appalled if she were not by now in London.

  “I tried to quit,” I told Daniel. “I tried throwing it away right after I bought it, after only two bites, but I couldn’t find a trash can. I tried giving it away, but I couldn’t find a person to offer it to. I tried offering it to you, if you remember.”

  “I don’t. Besides, you know I hate licorice. I didn’t see you offering it to Nikki.”

  “Nikki took out her teeth,” I tell him. Terrible. But true. I’ve been saving this fact for a moment like this, when I want to distract him.

  “Nikki took out her what?”

  “They were false to begin with. Her teeth. Nikki’s monkish. Maybe shy. She doesn’t want to have to talk anymore. And there’s always somebody she doesn’t want to kiss, I think.”

  Her brother, I was thinking. But I’d save that for next time.

  “That’s grotesque,” Daniel said.