Maggie Brown & Others

by Peter Orner

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 by Peter Orner

  Cover design by Lucy Kim

  Cover artwork copyright © by Frederic Cirou / Getty Images

  Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group

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  First ebook edition: July 2019

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  ISBN 978-0-316-51613-6

  LCCN 2019930556

  E3-20190605-NF-DA

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I: Come Back to California The Deer

  Fowlers Lake

  Tomales Bay (Emily)

  Naked Man Hides

  Reach

  The Case Against Bobbie

  An Old Poet Is Dying in Bolinas

  Pacific

  The Going Away Party

  On the Floor, Beside the Bed

  Stinson Beach, 2013

  Above Santa Cruz

  The Apartment

  II: Lighted Windows The Return

  Two Lawyers

  Padanaram

  My Dead

  Untitled

  Maggie Brown

  The Roommate

  Allston

  Ineffectual Tribute to Len

  III: Crimes of Opportunity; or, The 1980s Speech at the Urinal, Drake Hotel, Chicago, December 1980

  Visions of Mr. Swibel

  The Laundry Room

  Miami Beach, 1961

  The Language of That Year

  Crimes of Opportunity

  In the Lobby

  1984

  The Captain

  Solly

  IV: Castaways Erwin and Pauline

  Do You Have Enough Light?

  Uncle Norm Reads Spinoza as His Cookie Business Collapses Due to the Rise in Sugar Prices in the Dominican Republic

  Bernard: A Character Study

  Fall River Wife

  V: Renters: A Sequence Rhinebeck

  Historians

  Montreal

  Other Nights

  The TV Room

  Evergreen Garden, San Francisco, 2012

  Strand

  VI: Walt Kaplan Is Broke: A Novella 1: Truesdale Hospital: Fall River, Massachusetts, July 21, 1977

  2: August, Bedroom

  3: Gus’s Highland Spa

  4: Gang Plank (at the Cove)

  5: Garbage Day

  6: The Jaffe Girl

  7: Gus’s Highland Spa

  8: A Single Chair

  9: TLAW Packaging

  10: Massachusetts v. Rhode Island

  11: Rachel Plotkin

  12: Notes on Practical Salesmanship

  13: Gus’s Highland Spa

  14: Agudas Achim

  15: Kaplans

  16: Dumb Luck, Brief Treatise

  17: The Woman at the Alhambra

  18: His Mother

  19: Beth El Temple Notes, October 8, 1939

  20: Miriam’s Egg Experiment

  21: His Scar

  22: To the Dark

  23: Kaplan’s Furniture, Fourth and Pleasant Street, March 1961

  24: Moonlight

  25: Walt’s Spending Diary, March 15, 1978

  26: The Life Jacket

  27: Statistics

  28: Beth El

  29: 100 Delcar Street

  30: Sarah

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More Peter Orner

  About the Author

  Also by Peter Orner

  For Katie, Phoebe, and Roscoe

  AND

  In memory of James Alan McPherson

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  At that moment it all seemed extraordinary to me

  and made me want to flee from it and yet remain forever.

  —Isaac Babel

  I

  Come

  Back

  to

  California

  Come back to California, come back to California

  every mapmaker, every mapmaker is pleading.

  —Jack Spicer, “Letters to James Alexander”

  The Deer

  When she was a kid, she watched a mountain lion chase a deer into the lagoon at low tide. She’d been riding her bike on the path along the edge of Murch’s farm. The deer ran out so far into the water that the mountain lion turned back to the shore and vanished into the trees. An hour later, the deer was still stuck in the mud. The tide began to roll back in through the channel connecting the lagoon to open water. She was only a kid, but as she watched the deer out there alone, she knew almost right away that this was something she’d carry the rest of her life. Later, she heard that a tourist, seeing the deer in the lagoon from Highway 1, had called the fire department and begged them to do something. The assistant chief said, “What do you want me to do about it? Go out there with a boat and get kicked in the head? Call the DNR.” The lagoon, the waves, the motionless deer. It made no sound, or at least none that she could hear from where she was sitting as it waited, or seemed to wait, while the water rose, covering its legs and then rising higher.

  She’d sat on a wet log and watched. The damp seeped through her pants. The wind began to blow inland from the ocean. No, it wasn’t really happening. Even then it was more like an image, fixed, not a breathing deer out there in the water. So much of what she remembers became lodged this way. Something occurs, in the motion of the present, but it’s already over. Because even then, even as she watched, she was already moving away from it, already thinking how years from now she might tell someone about this. Someone who’s never seen this lagoon. The wind began to blow harder. The sun had long since fallen, but there was some light left. When she couldn’t watch anymore, when she picked her bike off the ground and rode away, the water had reached the deer’s chest, and still it had not moved.

  Fowlers Lake

  Fowlers Lake is out past the national forest campground, about nine miles or so from McCloud, California, off Route 89. It’s not a lake; it’s a swimming hole, a place where the river widens out. Somebody built a crude dam there fifty years ago. We call it our lake, our mountain lake, and it’s so cold you can swim only in August, when it’s hot enough outside. Sometimes in July, maybe a week or two into September, depending on the year. Billy and I liked to go out to Fowlers in the late afternoon when the sun was just about to drop beneath the tops of the trees. The place was usually
less crowded with campers by then and we could pretty much have the lake to ourselves. I read a philosopher once who said heat and cold are pretty much the same thing, that their contraries are mirrors. Whatever the hell he meant, he never swam at Fowlers. Heat, isn’t it amazing how it vanishes? It’s so heavy when you’re in the thick of it. As soon as the sun began to drop, no matter how hot the day, the shadows always brought a sudden chill, and that was the exact moment we chose to swim.

  It was a Wednesday, and the parking lot was empty when we got there except for a pregnant woman with a flat tire and no spare. She said she was from Shasta City and that her boyfriend wasn’t answering his phone. There’s no reception out at Fowlers. She must have told us that in order to seem less helpless.

  Billy, who was an expert on everything, said the rim of his truck’s spare wouldn’t match the rim of her little Mazda. Otherwise he’d lend her a tire. Instead, he offered to drive her to McCloud, where she could get some help or arrange a cab home to Shasta City. She could leave the car and deal with it tomorrow, he told her. The rangers would wait a couple of days before they ticketed her for overnight parking. Would she mind, though, waiting a half hour while we swam?

  She didn’t say yes or no. She just smiled. She looked only at Billy. She was pretty far along, maybe seven and a half months. She stood there the way I’ve seen other pregnant women stand, with her feet pointing a little outward, for balance, I guess. We figured okay, so we dove into the water and fuck it was cold. And you couldn’t warm up a little out of the water anymore because the sun was already farther down past the trees and the whole lake was in shadow. But as Billy said, that’s when your body has no choice but to acclimate fast and become fishlike, no longer dependent upon the sun for survival but on the water itself, which is only, Billy said, as cold as your brain permits it to be. This load of total bullshit was weirdly right. Freak that he was, Billy sometimes made sense. And the more I swam around, the more I got, if not warm, something, yes, maybe a little fishlike, fishish. We didn’t talk, Billy and me. We didn’t touch. We just splashed around in our own worlds for a while because that’s what you do if you’re going to stay in that water at all. You’ve got to concentrate. Hard to imagine what we must have looked like to her. She wasn’t a kid. We found out later she was thirty-two. It turned out there really was a boyfriend in Shasta, just no evidence that she’d tried to call him. Apparently, she didn’t even own a cell phone. She was sort of a hippie that way, the boyfriend told the police later. She was against phones on principle.

  She’d spread a blanket on the little patch of rocks that passed for a beach and watched us. That’s what I remember and that’s what I told them after, that she was just sitting on the rocks on a blanket, watching, holding her stomach in front of her like you might a large bowl. We may have ended up swimming more than a half hour. It could have been forty-five minutes. It might have been closer to an hour. Once we got going in the water, time was different. And a late-August day, even the shadows of it, drags on forever. Anything was possible. Maybe I’d finally fuck Billy. Maybe I finally wouldn’t. He never pushed his case, though I know he ached, and sometimes his puny hard-on would win out against the cold and push against his shorts like a ruler. We were considered smarter kids, college bound. There weren’t that many of us our year. Maybe I was thinking about Billy, about yes or no to Billy. Or maybe I was just breaststroking around, looking at the light, thick green and yellow, how it merged with the gray-blue lake water and made everything…the only word I can think of is radiant but that’s not right. It’s too loud. There was something stealthy about the light that didn’t call attention to itself. It was glowing, but not in a showy way. We were still swimming, still trying to stay ahead of the cold, knowing that getting out would be worse because now there was hardly any sun at all behind the trees. So, all told, it probably was longer than a half hour.

  We checked the Mazda, thinking maybe she was lying down in the backseat. Billy knocked on the door of the porta-potty. We didn’t know her name, so we just shouted, politely, into the woods like we were calling for a teacher: “Excuse me, miss, we’re ready to go now. Miss, we’re ready to go! Sorry for the wait! Miss?”

  Billy jogged up to the road to see if she was up there waiting to hitch a ride. She wasn’t there, but that’s what we figured, or Billy did, anyway, that she’d gone up to the road. The next day the boyfriend reported her missing, but the story wasn’t in the Shasta and Redlands papers until two days later. That’s when Billy and I went to the sheriff’s office and told them what we knew, which wasn’t much. We said we’d told her we’d give her a lift and she didn’t wait. Her car was still in the parking lot. Teams searched the woods for three days running. Divers searched the lake. But the working theory has always been, and it’s been almost eight years now, that she got tired of the waiting and ended up hitching a ride on Route 89.

  My own small thought about the whole thing, for whatever it’s worth and it’s not worth much, since it won’t help find her, wherever she is, is that when we got out of the water she was still there, still at Fowlers. That she was somewhere on the edge of the woods, looking at us, hearing us call for her, but for some reason not answering. I never mentioned it at the time because what good would it have done, since they were already searching the woods around the lake? What happened to her, I say, happened later. When Billy ran up to check the road, that’s when I felt her eyes on me. I stood there in a bikini and cutoffs, teeth clacking, and I knew she was still in the woods watching me through the trees. Miss! We’re ready to go! She’d been watching us swim. Maybe she noticed me toying with Billy? Maybe she envied the fact I could still toy? God knows maybe whatever made her refuse to answer had nothing directly to do with me. I’ve just never been able to shake the certainty that she would have done just about anything other than ride in a car with me to McCloud. Billy, yes; me, no. And maybe there’s something to this. That one refusal may have led to another refusal and that whoever she accepted a ride from, if she accepted a ride at all, had no choice but to let her be and drop her somewhere. Somewhere—or a stop on her way somewhere—she’d always wanted to go, she just hadn’t known it until she got that flat.

  Tomales Bay (Emily)

  From the kitchen window she watches the fog lift. She often wakes early and waits for it, this moment when the vague gray curtain rises and there it is, the bay and the mountains beyond. She always feels, as she does now, exalted, but at the same time unworthy. She grew up in the Midwest, where beauty is filched in glimpses. As a kid, in winter, she’d walk down the street to the edge of the bluff and look out at the lake through the leafless trees. She’d watch how the waves would push the shards of ice forward, as if trying to unload the burden of them onto the beach. A kind of grace. Still, nothing like this. The bay, the mountains, this fog, thick and smoky. Behold thy beauty. All hers now, this view from the top of the ridge. But that didn’t make it any less somebody else’s dream, this house, this kitchen, this big window. She’d always considered it a kind of arrogance of the rich to imagine that there was one place on earth destined to be yours and only yours. Neil says they can move anytime. Say the word and we’ll go, he says. And she knows that if she were to call his bluff he’d do it, he’d sell. For her, he’d sell anything. But then he’d drag this house around in his head. What would be the point? Why not stay?

  Still, there was no getting around the fact that the Polaroids of his dead wife on the wall in the kitchen unsettled people. When her sister visited from Madison, she took Emily aside and asked, “Why don’t you make him take those down?” She told her sister that she did it for his children. “You know, so they can still come home to home? You know what I mean?” This explanation was only half true, and she knew, of course, that the four grown-up kids, in their twenties and thirties, would certainly have understood if the pictures came down and were shoved into a drawer. And it wasn’t as if Neil hadn’t offered. A number of times, he’d offered. No, she’d actually demanded that th
e pictures stay up. She didn’t expect her sister or anybody else to understand. She’d never spelled it out to anybody, including Neil, but there was something about being a permanent guest in her own house that felt right.

  Last Thanksgiving, when the children had all come home (and one girlfriend, one husband, a couple of grandkids), she and Neil had made an enormous spread—homemade cranberry sauce, a small mountain of mashed potatoes, a turkey they’d slow-cooked for eleven hours—and everybody’d had a good time, and she’d felt not only tolerated, but welcomed, even loved. The following morning she’d slept late—not slept, stayed in bed with a magazine—because, again, this was the house they’d grown up in. She did want them to feel like they could come home. But when she had, at last, come down to the kitchen in her robe, the chattering, the jokes, the laughing, stopped immediately, only for a moment but enough to horrify them with embarrassment and remorse. They all spent the next hour or so trying to make up for it, forcing her into every reference. She’d searched in vain for a silent way to say, Please, please, I get it. There’s no need. All your years here.

  She’d stood there in the kitchen, gripping her coffee, pleading with them with her eyes, but they were too busy frantically including her to even notice her anymore. And yet there must have been something inside each of them, even if they didn’t admit it to themselves (after all, didn’t they want their father to be happy? after so much heartache, didn’t he deserve to be happy?), that found it galling. She wasn’t a whole lot older than Neil’s oldest daughter, which didn’t scandalize anybody, this was California, but there was no getting around the cold math. The house would be hers. Not soon, but soon enough. Their dead mother smiling on the wall. The photographs have faded over the years in the sunlight so that they’ve begun to look like X-rays. Didn’t that ghost on the wall demand loyalty?