“Yes, of course.” He had to check on something first and then he’d call her right back to tell her when.
He dialed Delores’s number, then hung up quickly, confused when he got the recording. He was supposed to be there in twenty-five minutes, so why hadn’t she answered? Maybe she was busy cooking. He called again, listened to the tape. “Hello, Delores?” he said in a rush at the beep. “Delores, this is Gordon. Gordon Loomis. I can’t . . . The thing is, I have to . . . that is, you see . . . well, let’s see now, what should I do? Maybe you’re at the store. Maybe you’re not home yet. I’m going to call you there. That’s what I’ll do. I’m going to call you at the store.”
Listening, Delores froze, hand inches over the phone. She’d heard that tension in so many men’s voices. If she answered, he’d say he couldn’t come. But at least he wasn’t leaving the message on her machine the way others had done. The phone rang again. He sounded frantic. “Hello, Delores? Delores, this is Gordon Loomis calling you back. I mean, I called before and you weren’t there, so now I’m calling back. I just called the store, but you’re not there. And now you’re not home, either, so I don’t know. I’m not sure, maybe I’ve got the wrong night. I thought you said this Friday. But maybe you meant—”
“Gordon!” she cried, as if in a breathless run for the phone. “I couldn’t really hear who it was. I was busy cooking and then I realized it was you, and yes, you’re right. I did say Friday. Tonight. In fact, everything’s just about ready. . . .” The countertops were cluttered with cucumber peels, onion skins, and discarded lettuce leaves, bottles of spices and oils, the sink filled with bowls and pans. Her shoulder crimped to the phone, she turned on the hot water and began to scrub the encrusted fry pan.
He couldn’t come. There was an appointment, a very important appointment he had forgotten until just a few minutes ago. “I’m sorry—”
“No!” she cried. It was all the unanswered letters, the long, hopeful drives to Fortley, her prideless efforts to keep the conversation going, telling him things he so obviously had little interest in, her sisters, nieces, nephews, neighbors, the store, her boss, and the illicit sensation of speaking Albert’s name to another man, this man she had grown to care deeply about. But then, as with Albert, the secret had taken on its own life, its significance swelling with an imagined complicity that required no acknowledgment on his part. It suddenly seemed so twisted. Yes, it was. It was. She knew it was, but she could not, would not, continue to be unloved, and so his cold disinterest and her desire had to exist on parallel tracks, unexamined. And now with their collision she wasn’t sure who she was berating, the fantasy lover or the socially blunted ex-convict. “You can’t just be calling me up twenty minutes before you’re supposed to be here! I’ve been expecting you! I’ve got everything cooked.” Her voice faltered as she looked around. “I mean, what am I supposed to do with all this—”
“I’m sorry. I should have thought. I’ll be right there. I’ll still be on time. I just have to make a phone call and then I’ll leave . . . I’ll be right there!”
Bag clutched to his side, Gordon hurried down his front walk.
“Hey, how’s it going?” Jada’s mother, Marvella, called in a lazy voice from her top step as he crossed the street. She waved.
“Hello.” He gave a stiff nod and walked quickly by. Serena knew Marvella’s brother, Bob, the only near-normal one in the family—well, the only one that worked, she’d said. He had his own business—his own truck, anyway—cleaning out septic tanks.
“Come on over sometime. Sixty-four Clover, come over, come over, first floor, door on the right, where there’s always a party going on, going on, going on, always a party . . .”
Her bawdy voice pursued him to the corner.
He had to hurry. He wasn’t enjoying this walk at all. His feet hurt. Winded, he took the steps two at a time to Delores’s second-floor apartment.
“I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry,” they both said with the opening door.
“I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that,” she said.
“I shouldn’t have called at the last minute like that.” He was trying to catch his breath.
Their uneasiness continued through the brief cocktail time. She had a mug chilling in the refrigerator, but all he wanted was a Coke. The can was fine, he said before she could pour it into the frosted mug. “No sense dirtying a glass.”
“That’s no problem,” she said, pouring it anyway. She spilled her Manhattan onto the sofa, then drank the next one much too quickly. They sat at the round table dragged in earlier from the kitchen. She had covered it with an embroidered linen tablecloth and positioned it in front of the living-room window. She struck a match, and her hand trembled as she lit the tall green candles. The two salad plates were the only ones left of her mother’s pattern, Desert Rose. Someday she would complete the set, she was telling him, but he looked at her blankly. Yes, she thought, when she did her registry. She poured them both Cabernet, Albert’s favorite with any kind of roasted meat. She felt better now. He looked at his watch again. Such a big man, he must be hungry. The ruby liquid glistened through the facets as she raised her glass in a well-practiced toast. “To your return home, Gordon.” She paused, but he didn’t take up his glass. “May your days be filled with good food, good times, and good friends. And may your heart know only love.” He began to eat, so she made a little swoop of the glass and then took a sip.
“Thank you. Thank you very much.” He was halfway through his salad. “That was delicious,” he said when he was done. He glanced around the table. She thought he was embarrassed to have finished so quickly while she was still eating. She offered him more; there was a whole other bowl in the refrigerator. “Oh, no. No, thank you.” He told her how Fortley’s salads had been a slimy mush of limp lettuce and crushed tomato chunks. “What’s that cheese called?” He pointed to her fork.
“Goat cheese,” she said, keenly aware that his lips parted as she raised the fork to her mouth. She took his plate into the kitchen. When she returned, he grinned to see the cheese-covered salad she placed in front of him.
Everything was delicious. It was, he said again as he ate the last baked potato. It was the best meal he’d ever had. “Leave room for dessert,” she warned. She hadn’t even mentioned her chocolate cake, so touched was she by his thoughtfulness in bringing dessert.
“I hope you like strawberries,” he said with such hopeful concern that a trickle of warmth seeped from her chest up into her cheeks.
“I do.”
“They’re right in season now.”
“Yes, this is the best time.”
“I can’t wait to try them.” He glanced at his watch again.
She thought he was concerned about walking home in the dark. She had already said she’d give him a ride.
“That was something I really missed,” he was saying. “Fresh strawberries. So many other things I forgot about . . . well, not really forgot. Just never gave much thought to. It all just kind of faded. The possibility—I guess that’s what I mean.” He shrugged uneasily.
It was the most he’d ever shared of his feelings. Tensed on the edge of her chair, she stared at his face, the strong chin, the smooth cheeks and wide brow, boyish in spite of all he’d been through: depravities she could only imagine, loneliness more terrifying to her than death. Twenty-five years, she thought, heavy eyed with this blinding ache in her belly, twenty-five years and he’s never been held or touched by a woman. There was an odd agelessness about him. He was both young and old, but with no experience, no connection in between. Her head trembled with the struggle to keep her fists clenched on the table. Let me help, let me touch you and hold you, give me your pain and I will show you how good life can be, how beautiful. There wasn’t a morning she didn’t wake up knowing that this was the day she had been waiting for. Love, with its mysteries and excesses, children, food, laughter, it was all such a wonder. Even grief had its own allure. At wakes and funerals she could give the best
and most of herself, consoling, weeping, embracing even mere acquaintances in their time of need. She had never been afraid to feel any of it. Being unable to love, that would be the worst torment of all.
“Some things never go away, do they?” She wasn’t sure what she meant. She had to be careful. She had drunk almost the entire bottle of wine herself. This time she had vowed there wouldn’t be even the suggestion of intimacy, no touching or sitting too close. First there had to be an emotional connection. “It must have been so hard. I mean, I can’t imagine it, being so young and then suddenly it’s all gone, everything you’ve ever known or wanted. Your future, I mean, what does that do to a kid?” His implacable stare seemed too high a wall to surmount. She waved her hand weakly. “How do you live without . . .” What was the word he’d used? “Without possibility? How do you do that?” she asked, voice and heart quavering with the message in his cold, unblinking eyes that she had gone too far again, not with the bulk of her flesh this time, but with her own pain—when it was his pain she was feeling, his wounds she would help heal.
“That’s just the way it was, that’s all.” He looked at his watch.
“But you had to be so strong. I mean, when you knew—”
“I had to be realistic.”
“But Jerry Cox lied. You know he did. He went back there after. He went back by himself.” She felt herself stumbling toward him now but couldn’t stop because she had read all his testimony on microfiche and needed to help, needed him to know that if no one else on the face of the earth believed him, she did. He may have left the woman unconscious under the pillow, but he had left her alive, not strangled to death the way they said.
“I’m not going to talk about that.” His face blurred over the long blue flame. “If you don’t mind,” he added quietly.
“I’m sorry.” She stood up. “I’ll get your dessert. It’ll only take a minute.” She patted his shoulder and he looked at her with an expression of such anguish, such loss, that from now on, whatever this poor man wanted, she would do it. Anything. Anything at all, her eyes told him.
“I have to leave in a half hour. I’m being picked up.”
“What do you mean?” She turned dizzily. “Who? Who’s picking you up?”
“A real estate agent. Jilly Cross. That was the appointment. Remember? When I called—so I changed it. I changed the time.” Clearly nervous, he checked his watch again. “You don’t have to slice them, you know. I mean, they’re just as good whole.” He swallowed hard. “And maybe even better that way.”
“You have an appointment with a real estate agent?” He hadn’t said date, but then, under the circumstances, would he?
“To see some condos. She had new ones she wants to show me.”
“Condos? You’re going to sell the house?”
“No! No, I like it there. It’s Dennis. It’s like a favor for him. I mean, he wants me to move, but I’m not. The favor, I guess, is to give Jilly Cross some business.” He smiled.
“Well, if you’re not going to buy anything, it sounds more to me like you’re just, you know, wasting her time. Stringing her along.” Wasting his own time, she thought, irritated by Dennis’s influence. He hadn’t even wanted his brother back here.
“I know, but I told her.” Gordon followed her into the kitchen with his soiled plate. He dropped his knife and fork into the sink with an unnerving clatter. “She knows I don’t want to move.” He put a strawberry into his mouth. “I don’t know, maybe she thinks she’s going to change my mind or something.” He grinned and a thin red trickle ran down his chin. He wiped it away with his cuff.
In her rush she cut herself, so now she was trying to slice the strawberries with a paper napkin wrapped around her thumb. Bits of tissue kept sticking to the fruit. She tore it off, only vaguely concerned that her blood might be mixing with these raggedly sliced berries. She carried his bowl to the table. A dull ache had started at the base of her skull. Her period. What a waste that was. The monthly reminder of emptiness. The soon-to-be-ebbing tide of . . . of possibility, she thought, standing over him now with the chilled can, shaking and shaking and shaking it, then giving a long, vicious spurt of curled cream onto the strawberries he shouldn’t have brought here without asking, she thought as flecks of cream sputtered onto the tablecloth, angering her even more. Now, everything is ruined, and he doesn’t even know.
“Thank you,” he said, chewing. “Oh, this is so good.”
Suddenly, she was glad he was leaving. She would have the rest of the night to herself, to do whatever she wanted. She wasn’t a young woman anymore. This constant solicitude was draining, bewildering to never have it returned. She sat down, but he didn’t look up. She sucked at the tip of her finger and watched him tilt the bowl for the last spoonful of juice. It’s more than reserve. Or caution, even. No. He’s missing something. Something inside. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe there’s nothing in me for a man to love or hold on to.
“As it turned out, there’s only one we can see,” Jilly Cross said stiffly as they drove down the street. Her voice sounded different tonight, strained.
He was afraid he was annoying her with his struggle to get his seat belt buckled. Eight o’clock was too late for the people on State Line Road, which left only the Meadowville condo, she said, but that was vacant, so it would be better to go when he could see it by daylight.
“That’s all right. I can see it tonight,” he said quickly. He didn’t want to be taken home. He pressed the seat belt against his hip so it looked buckled. It was these small ineptitudes that made him feel most out of step with everyone else.
“There’s another one that just came in, but the woman has cats so she has to be there when it’s shown. Or something like that, I don’t know.” She seemed distracted.
“Why, do they bite or something?”
“No, they’re house cats. She’s afraid someone’ll leave a door open and they’ll get out.”
“How can they be house cats if they live in a condo? They must be condo cats,” he said with a broad grin. He wanted to make her laugh. He almost felt giddy as they drove toward the fast-rising moon, tangerine in the blue-black sky. The evening air was sweet.
“That’s right.” Her nose and cheeks were red, as if she’d gotten sunburned. Her lips were a soft coral, the same shade of the scarf knotted around her neck.
“I like cats,” he said. “We never had our own pet cat, but they were always around. My mother was always feeding stray ones. My father didn’t like them too much. He said all the milk bowls and cat food on the back steps used to attract every kind of animal for miles around. Stray dogs and raccoons and skunks. And the squirrels! Oh, my Lord, he hated squirrels most of all. Rats with bushy tails, he used to call them. I forgot about that.” He sighed and shook his head. “It’s funny the things you forget.”
They were coming off the highway now. It felt good just to be able to talk. About nothing, really, and yet something wonderful was happening. He felt so much looser and more open. He could be himself. He didn’t have to watch every word the way he did with most people, especially back there with Delores. He kept trying to think of something clever to say. Jilly drove slower, maybe, like him, wanting the trip to last.
At the security gate she showed her Realtor’s pass. Meadowville was an enormous complex with at least ten five-story buildings. She parked in the visitors’ lot and left the motor running. The headlights shone onto a rock garden of white flowers. In the center a fountain dribbled water from a sculpted fish’s gaping mouth.
“Gordon . . . Oh, I don’t know what to say. You see, I didn’t realize . . . I mean . . . well, I knew you’d been away for a long time, but Dennis never said why.”
“Oh.” He turned, forgetting to hold on to the seat belt. She gave a start as it snapped back. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew.” He shifted his feet. His knees jammed into the dashboard.
“No, he just told me. Right before I picked you up, as a matter of fact.” She touched her flushed cheek, then
her throat.
“Well, I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to say.” Ahead, the wet stony gills seemed to pulsate in and out.
“I was telling him we could only see one, the empty one, because of how late it was, and I said how that’s something I never do unless I really know the client, but of course with you being his brother and everything.” She sighed.
“We don’t have to go in. I understand.”
Her mouth kept opening and closing, then she blurted, “He said it was a murder. A woman, the same age as me.”
He nodded.
“He said it was an accident. That you were trying to keep her from seeing you, but the pillow smothered her.”
He rubbed his eyes.
“I mean, how can that be an accident?” She shivered and folded her arms.
“I know,” he said dully. The air had turned heavy, the moon paler.
“An accident’s something you don’t mean to do. But you broke into her house, right?”
“We didn’t think anyone was home.” It hurt to speak.
“And that’s when she woke up?”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you run?”
He glanced at her beautiful face, then had to look away from such innocence. How many times had he asked himself that very question?
“Why didn’t you just leave?”
He shook his head and had to close his eyes. Even with Jerry screaming at him to cover her face he had wanted to run, knew he should, could have still run and saved his life and hers, instead of grabbing the pillow next to hers, the one on which her husband’s head would have, should have been but for her swollen ankle sprained earlier in the day so that she could not travel with him, so that when the intoxicated, giddy intruders blundered into her bedroom, she was lying there alone. Fresh for the kill, the prosecutor had whispered to the jury. Unable to move, Janine Walters and her unborn son lying there, waiting with only minutes left to live.
A Hole in the Universe Page 10