by Lise Haines
“I’d like to show you something,” she said. And then she turned to Sybil. “I have to show him the new painting. We’ll be back to help with coffee.”
“Take your time,” Sybil said. “All I have to do is flip a switch and it’s ready.” It’s possible she winked at her friend. But it might have been the pool lights playing with my vision.
I followed Edie down a long hall. I’d like to say I knew where that hall was going from the first tour but my head was lighter now that I was standing, the wine moving through my system. And there were a number of doors and passages. I know we went up a set of stairs and then a second and found our way to a room at the very top of the house with a slew of windows, like a widow’s walk, only bigger. You could see the lights of the city.
There was a low table draped with a cloth. On top were a couple of golden bowls, a candle, fresh flowers in a vase and a photograph of a man in an orange robe. There were cushions to sit on, and I assumed this was where Sybil and Edie sat and meditated, or at least thought about doing that. Off to one side was a daybed. On one wall was the painting. It was done mostly in reds so dark they were almost brown, and the figure was a little hazy.
Edie slid the rheostat up a notch, and I realized it was an image of the Buddha. I stood dumbly there, my head in a fine spin, when the lights dimmed again. Turning around I saw that Edie had opened her blouse. She slipped her arms out now and let it drop to the floor. I whispered, “Probably better if we don’t.” But I’m not sure she heard me.
She loosened the drawstring on her pants until they dropped and she stepped out of them. I was stunned to see she wore no lingerie at all.
In the months leading up to my departure, Liz and I had felt crushed by events. I thought we would make love the night before I left since we hadn’t in a while, well, several months, but she didn’t reach out for me. And I didn’t want to upset her or be met with rejection. We talked after I was gone and we both regretted not getting past a new kind of shyness that had settled between us.
Edie walked over to me and touched my face. Her hand was warm. When I started to say something she put an index finger against my lips, and then she began to unbutton my shirt.
“Maybe we should go down for coffee,” I said, as if this might put me in a sober state or make her clothes fly back onto her body.
“There’s time. It only takes the flip of a switch,” she said.
“Yes, but …”
When she reached for my zipper I took both of her hands in mine. I couldn’t see her full expression in the light. I asked her to talk with me for a minute. We sat down on the daybed. One side of her hair dropped in front of her face and she didn’t pull it away. Edie was a fine-looking woman, and I stopped finding the ways that she was foreign to me.
“I have a wife and two daughters. Back in Illinois.”
“Sybil told me. Divorced, one son in high school,” she said, fixing her hair behind her ears. “My husband cheated on me with my best friend.”
“That’s awful.”
She became still. Maybe she studied our hands.
“Sometimes I think about the way everything can change in a second,” I said.
“I’ve had my tubes tied,” she said in the sweetest way.
“No, not that, it’s …”
“Oh. Oh, God. Where’s my head? Sybil must have condoms stashed here and there,” she said. She was even more nervous than I was, stretching to look in a drawer behind her, her torso elongated, her pelvic bones outlined in such a way. She found nothing. Sitting upright again, Edie said, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had to worry about stuff like that. Only divorced a year now. Too wrecked by it, you know? She thought … Sybil thought … we might get along. She said she thought you had been alone for a while.”
“I haven’t completely expressed …” I tried again.
She reached for her drawstring pants. But instead of putting them on, she held them loosely in her hands Her shoulders rounded forward, her arms bent so they rested against her legs. “This was a bad idea.”
I took her in my arms and rocked her a little, and we stayed close for a while. I don’t know if anyone makes the perfume that filled my head. I think it was just Edie. I can honestly say I wanted this woman almost as much as I had wanted Liz when we first met.
And this made me think about Liz going out to see friends. Someone might hit on her. She could easily meet any number of men through the gallery. She would have plenty of chances if that’s what she wanted. I thought about lines—crossing them, drawing them, erasing them, drawing them again.
I pulled back a little and touched Edie under her chin. I kissed her face, and then I cradled her so that she would lie back. I told her, “I can’t make love to you the way I wish I could, but I want you to know how beautiful you are. How truly beautiful.”
I did things that have always pleased Liz, without going too far, without letting her take me. I don’t know if this makes me less of a man or more of a good man. Probably neither. But by the time Edie was at rest, I don’t think I had crossed the kind of line where I would need to make a confession or carry around a belly full of guilt. My pleasure had been in feeling her pleasure and in keeping true to Liz in the most fundamental way.
We took turns stopping in the small bathroom down the hall, and then we went downstairs and downstairs again and appeared by the lap pool, where there was a line of lounge chairs and where the others had gathered. We received a couple of looks, and I was handed a slice of cake.
I drank some coffee and waited until I felt my departure wouldn’t be awkward. Then I shook hands all around, thanking the hostess for the evening, the wonderful meal, the good company while my head continued to swim.
Edie offered to walk me out, so I helped her with her coat.
She leaned into me by my car. “I’m expecting you to get in touch,” she said. “I mean, we can just talk. Everyone needs to have a friend or two out there.”
“I’m probably the last person you want as a friend right now. My family … just today … I mean, I think my daughter would just as soon see me dead.”
She looked at me with care, and then she lightened and said, “The nineteen-year old? That’s rebellion.”
“I think it’s more about debts I have to pay.”
“We all have those in one way or another.”
I gave Edie a final kiss and got in my car.
As I approached the motel the lights from the car dealerships streamed across my windshield, reminding me of everything I could have: smooth lines, big offers, newness. I was dopey from wine and shouldn’t have been on the road at all that night.
The next day I went into the office determined to talk with Phil about my commissions again so I could get Liz caught up with some of her bills and go home and see my family—everything else could wait. But before I sat down my old friend and boss eased back in his chair and with precise aim shot me out of the sky. He told me about this other fellow who was coming back to work—to my job.
“What?” I said.
“He’s been with us a long while, Richard. We didn’t think he’d make such a quick recovery. Or that he’d recover at all. We’ll get a check to you right away with two weeks’ severance.”
This other fellow, I would learn later, was his brother, who had been on an extended trip. Maybe it was around the world. I heard he went to Prague, Barcelona, Dublin, Reykjavik, Morocco and Istanbul, as if he was throwing darts at a map—probably on my commissions.
When I pushed back Phil said, “I’ll write you a good recommendation. You shouldn’t worry about that. But now that all the stats are in, I don’t know that insurance is the place for you anymore. It’s possible you’ve lost your touch.”
I reminded him, though it was absurd that I had to, that I had more sales than anyone at the firm that quarter.
“Figures were inflated. I’m working with a new accounting firm now.”
“No matter how you cook the numbers, I haven’t seen a sing
le commission.”
“The check will take a day or two to cut.” He extended his hand and thanked me for pinch hitting.
“‘Pinch hitting’?” I said, letting his hand waver there.
“The bottom line is, you didn’t make it through the first year’s probation. It happens,” he said.
“You stated, emphatically, that the probationary period was three months. You congratulated me on passing the mark. You took me to lunch that day.”
“I’ll have my secretary send a copy of the internal memo related to this,” he said, egging me on. I knew if I punched the guy, everything would be lost.
The check arrived a week later with my regular pay less expenses. When I called the payroll person she ran down a list of expenses that included paying to have the name changed on my door and my parking spot.
When I asked where my commission check was, she said I’d have to talk with Phil. But Phil and his financial manager and then the payroll person stopped taking my calls. I contacted an attorney to see if she’d take my case on a contingency basis. After we talked at length she did a brief synopsis for me: The firm had the right to create a probationary period; I had no documentation on the length of this period; I had been laid off my last job, and that would provoke an inquiry; even if I won, there would be costs and court fees and the lengthy business of petitioning and reviewing documents; and Phil’s company could appeal. I tried two other attorneys and got the same basic story. Finally I decided my time was best spent landing the next job and getting to work.
I sold the car and put the funds in the bank and wrote out checks to Liz, stretching the money as far as I could. Now that I understood Leon’s situation, I asked him, man to man, if he would let me owe him the last month’s rent. I was out every day looking for work by then, but I was behind on rent. He said he had decided to sell the motel and that he didn’t care, honestly. He was heading to Kenya soon with Sybil. Then he said something I wasn’t expecting. “Edie has an empty guest house. That’s all. I just, well, I think she wanted me to tell you, so there you are.”
The idea of going home a failure, well, Liz had enough worries on her hands. She had moved out of Evanston into the city, renting a small apartment with the girls. I thought about looking it up on Google Earth, dragging the small person icon until he stood in front of the entryway, but I couldn’t.
Mona
To prevent Lola from being entirely uprooted when she began kindergarten, old friends in Evanston, the Halyards, agreed to say we lived on the top floor of their house—as far as Lola’s school was concerned.
“For play dates, she can go to friends’ homes,” Mom said.
“She’ll want to have her friends over,” I said.
“I know, but I’m in school. People understand hard work, right?”
“Do you want me to say something or just agree?” I asked because by then I had no idea. She looked heartbroken.
“Maybe for today just agree,” she said. After a serious talk with a career counselor Mom had signed up to become an X-ray technician. It was a training program where the hospital picked up most of the bill. When she first got her acceptance letter, she sat us down and said, “In two years’ time I will be a well-paid technician, and in an economic downturn the medical industry is still a pretty safe bet.”
“People have to get sick!” Lola said with enthusiasm.
My sister and I listened as Mom talked about the human body and the importance of good imagery until she ran herself out and was saying something, maybe it was about the luminous quality we have as people. But that whole X-ray thing … we no longer had any of her sculptures where we lived. Sometimes we got in the van and drove to a location where we could see one of them, and all of us choked up.
She was determined to help pay for college and said getting this credential would allow her to pitch in. “Next year,” she said, “the FAFSA will look completely different, the financial aid package a whole lot better. It’s going to happen.”
But the small things, the day to day, seemed to overtake her at times. “I don’t know how I’m going to get you back and forth from work and Lola back and forth from school and take all these classes,” Mom said, considering her schedule now.
“Just drop Lola off at her school and pick her up from aftercare. I’ll take the L.” Mom seemed to forget that I had been working out my own transportation for a long time now.
“What street would you walk down to get to the L?” she asked.
“From work?” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She tried again. “If there was a tornado warning, wouldn’t it be better if you took the same route home from work every day so I’d know how to find you?”
“Before I’m sucked up into the sky?” I asked.
“Be nice,” she said.
“It’s winter. We don’t have tornadoes in winter.”
To avoid a fight, I agreed to walk down Church from the studio daily, ritualistically. Not that I planned to do this. But what neither of us considered at the time was that anyone wanting to follow me, anyone keenly interested in my movements, could figure out where to find me during the work week, under the weight of my backpack, earbuds in, oblivious.
I was nineteen then and still saving everything I could to travel over the summer with my cameras. Geary kept telling me there was a story to tell in the country’s economic wreckage. I worked as many hours in his studio as he’d give me to get to that wreckage. The minute I walked in the door to the apartment, I hit household chores to get those out of the way early unless I was catching the last of the day’s light.
Glancing out our front windows now as I made Lola’s bed, I saw the holiday lights edging a window across the street and an electric menorah glowing from another. An abandoned shopping cart with its wheels off and a car engine sat in a driveway mounded with snow. I got out one of my SLRs and put the telephoto on. I could see the television show the couple in the stucco house across the way watched. Sometimes when I walked by their apartment I heard actors firing guns at one another that sounded a lot like the real gunshots we heard in the neighborhood. Three or four times since we had moved in the cops had pulled up outside their building, lights flashing. Cynthia said those were domestic battery calls, though I had never seen anyone being hauled away, so I had to take her word for it.
Ajay came into view and began to pace by the snow-buried cars. It had to be thirty degrees out and he was in an open shirt and down vest as if he couldn’t feel a thing. Most of his tattoos were the kind you’d see at a big water park on a hot day. A tiger, some words in an Asian language, a knotted symbol—maybe Celtic. The ink I was curious about was on one arm, covered by the shirt he buttoned now. I had seen it more than once in the hot weather. It was a name surrounded by wings: Constantina. I found myself repeating that name like a song I couldn’t shake. Of all the women who came around looking for him, I hadn’t figured out which one was Constantina. There was one woman in the early fall who had appeared in electric-red shorts and tight athletic tops. She used to take off with Ajay when he went on his daily run. They followed the line of the lake and often headed into Evanston. I knew from the times I passed them in our van that they probably did eight to ten miles before he came home slick with sweat.
She didn’t last long. Maybe they were just friends. Maybe they moved at a different pace. After a while, I assumed she wasn’t the reason he had gone under the needle.
The other women wore tight pants, leather jackets, short skirts, bulky sweaters, high tops, strappy sandals, scarves in their hair, short, sleek cuts, and long, complicated dos with rhinestone bobby pins. They pulled at his arm, wanting him to go somewhere, and when he wasn’t in sight they leaned on the bell, letting their cigarette butts and gum wrappers drop to the floor of the entry hall as they waited, so the rest of us had to wade through their trash. I wondered if Ajay cared about any of them.
I noticed he wasn’t very good at answering when this one woman with a tight updo and short, thin
jacket drove her fingernails into his doorbell. And Mr. Kapur couldn’t stand it if she showed. If Ajay went outside to talk with her, his grandfather would yell out the window in a quick string of Hindi. And once, when his shouting was ignored, as it sometimes was, I heard his grandfather slam a window so hard the glass shattered. Somehow she didn’t fit my image of Constantina.
Ajay stopped pacing now and drew his hand along the crown of his head, back and forth a few times. I couldn’t tell if he was concerned about something or if he just liked the way his bristly hair felt against his palm. I thought I knew what it would feel like if I were to touch it.
“Dinner!” Mom called from the kitchen.
“You go ahead. I’m not really hungry.”
Just then Ajay looked up at our apartment as if he knew I was watching. I switched to continuous shooting mode for a few seconds and let my camera rest. He went back to pacing.
“It’s going to get cold!” Lola called.
It was hard to refuse Lola. I came into the kitchen, kissed her on the cheek, and poured one cup of coffee for me, one for Mom. She had her laptop open. “Sorry,” she said, blowing on the cup. “I have to get this one in tonight.”
School had turned her into The Living X-ray. She was able to recite the names of all the bones of the body in under three minutes. And when she was really on, she could see right through you and read you like a piece of film held up to a light bulb.
She spent her evenings in a world marked by lung spots, broken tibias, and damaged skulls. One doctor gave her nothing but troubling images to consider. She would point to something, a tumor or a node, and make predictions about survival rates. The ones of babies, I couldn’t look at those. With her fingertips she scrolled her computer and suddenly smiled to herself. Then she remarked on the kind of fracture she was looking at as if the whole world hinged on the way things break instead of the simple fact that they were broken.