“We have to kind of forage for sheets and stuff. I don’t really know what’s where, actually,” I said with some anxiety.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find something,” he said in a very calm voice. “Let’s eat first.”
“I don’t know what we’re going to eat.”
“Can we walk anywhere from here?”
I shook my head. We could call a cab. I hadn’t really thought about any of this. I was staring forlornly out the window when he asked if I had a bicycle.
“In the shed. But it will take you forever to get to the grocery store.”
“That sounds like a challenge,” he said.
It didn’t take forever, but it took a long time. I was smoking in the kitchen when I heard bicycle wheels crunch gravel. The squeak of a kickstand. The crumple of grocery bags lifted from the basket. His cheeks were bright, like apples, and his hair wild.
The only bottle I hauled from the bag was sparkling cider. I held it up, squinting from the smoke of the cigarette clenched between my teeth.
“This the best you could do?” I asked, half joking.
He broiled steaks while I looked for liquor in the basement. Found a dusty-shouldered handle of Canadian Club next to the lawn mower. The kitchen smelled good when I came upstairs. A salad of tomato and purple onion sat on the table, next to a round of sourdough bread on a cutting board.
* * *
—
After dinner, we sat at the table, me leaning forward once in a while to ash. A moth bumped itself into the bulb of the table lamp. The lamp’s red base cast a pinkness on our faces. There had been no plan when I’d decided to come out here. I was waiting for something to happen.
I sipped my neat whiskey, tapped my cigarette, looked from the moth to Kelly, and back again. His face was placid, the wide planes smooth and shining. He stared at the light, arms crossed. Cicadas outside became louder and louder, the silence inside deeper and deeper.
He finished his cider. “I’m beat,” he announced, and collected the plates. When he started rinsing things, I said I’d do that, he’d done enough.
He smiled over his shoulder: “I got it covered.”
I lit a new cigarette, listened to him quietly rummage in hall closets. Through the turquoise scrim of the screen door, a beetle showed his glossy underside to me, his barbed components working together as he climbed from left to right.
I was bewitched by my own solitude, and sat for an hour. Felt the cocaine and whiskey hushing down. I can’t say I had any thoughts. I don’t think I felt many feelings. The kitchen was suspended in the night, a room with a red lamp, an ashtray full of crushed butts, a garbage can with a rind of bread and two T-bones.
When I went up to my mother’s room, I saw that Kelly had found sheets and a tartan blanket, and had made her bed for me. His door was closed.
* * *
—
I woke to light coming through bamboo blinds in razor strips. My breath made steam. I didn’t want to get out of bed. Ever.
Kelly opened my door after softly rapping a few times. He held a spatula, greasy with egg bits. Sat on the edge of the bed.
“Morning,” he said, and he sounded like a farmer.
The blanket was pulled to just under my eyes, and I stared at him.
“All you have to do,” he said benignly, “is crawl into the kitchen. Eggs, cold steak, hot coffee. All you have to do, Lee, is get up, and I’ll do the rest.”
I kept staring. Finally he peeled the blanket from my face, pried it from my hands. I’d slept in yesterday’s clothes.
“You don’t even have to get dressed, girl. You have no excuse.”
I couldn’t smile, but I did pull myself to a sitting position and then put one foot and the other on the floor. Combed my crazy hair with my fingers, looked at him as if to ask if I was acceptable. He licked his palm, pressed down what must have been a few errant strands.
“I need a cigarette,” I croaked.
* * *
—
Light rippled in the cold kitchen. I gobbled eggs with a burning cigarette in the other hand. Holly leaves tapped against the window in the wind, and sounded like fingernails. I kept looking to see who was there.
Kelly’s hair was wet, raked into a neat braid. Shetland sweater, blue jeans. With his back to me, he started another pot of coffee.
“I woke up one morning,” I told him, and he turned around, “a few months ago. I’d been at Black Betty the night before, this bar in Brooklyn. Anyway. It was Brazilian night, and I did a bunch of coke with this kid, but whatever. That’s actually not the point.”
I took a long drag. Kelly stood, back against sink, big hands loosely gripping counter’s edge, waiting.
“I woke up,” I resumed, “and it’s not that I wanted to die. It’s that I knew for a fact that I was dying. Up until that morning, I’d been living. Maybe not a wholesome and productive life”—quick drag—“but living. Now that I’m dying, I almost want to speed up the process. I sure as hell don’t know how to slow it down, and I’m pretty sure there’s no way to get back to where I was before.”
Slowly he dried his hands on a dishrag. I smoked and watched him. He picked up our mugs and refilled them with steaming coffee. Set them down at the table, then sat across from me. Squinted at the ceiling for a moment, arms crossed. Then he looked at me.
“Okay,” he said. “First of all, I have to say this—I think you’re melodramatic.”
I made some noise of protest, or shock. He just shrugged.
“You are,” he insisted calmly. “Which is a symptom of imagination, and thus a good thing. You’re also totally self-involved.”
I just stared with mouth open, cigarette burning between fingers.
“Again,” he said, “the sign of someone who can create a world, who can mythologize everything.”
Then he reached across the table and folded one of my hands in both of his. “That said, I do believe you’re dying, and I know all about that; I know it inside and out. I can tell you everything you never wanted to know.”
I tore my hand from his, gaped at him with horror. I couldn’t believe how open I’d made myself. He seemed slightly amused, only fueling my indignation.
“You stupid fuck,” I said, standing up.
“Come on now,” he said, straightening his face.
“You tricked me.” I ran into my mother’s room and slammed the door.
* * *
—
I put up a decent fight. Even moved the bureau in front of the lockless door. Scowled at everything he said, my arms crossed and shoulders raised to earlobes, like an angry brat. The morning sun had been snuffed by clouds. I paced around the dark room. Thought of dropping out the window into the bleached hydrangea, but then what? My wallet was in the kitchen.
When I finally emerged, he was in the kitchen, tying a bundled quilt onto his back.
“You ready?” he asked.
“For what?” I scoffed.
“A nice long hike.”
“Hell no.” I grabbed a chair and sat down heavily.
“So you’re just going to hang out here with no food or cigarettes?”
“I have cigarettes.”
“No,” he said, tapping his homemade backpack, “I do.”
* * *
—
A surreal landscape of sloping farm squares adjacent to the sodded lawns of summer mansions. Traffic was sparse; a Lamborghini roared around a tractor.
Pewter clouds hung low. The darkness was thrilling, but I didn’t want to give in. Without being wet, houses and rhododendrons and cornfields were endowed with the lushness of bad weather. A hardy cosmos leaned from a tuft of straw. I walked behind him, throwing rocks and sticks into the hedges, and sometimes missing him by an inch. Kelly walked like a man on an unhurried pilgrimage.
“It’s going to rain, asshole,” I said.
“Good,” he said without turning around.
Wide space narrowed to an intimate neighborhood with gr
een-shuttered white houses close to the road, privet trimmed tight, a lighted window. In one yard, a white-bearded Labrador staggered arthritically toward us, his deep and throaty warning almost inaudible.
“It’s okay, old boy,” Kelly said. “We won’t bother you.”
The geography flattened, turned briny and grew reeds. We walked past the closed ticket booth, through the deserted parking lot, and climbed the boardwalk stairs. The wind tossed our hair, and I was startled by the sudden hiss of waves, of dune grass. I’d forgotten how sweet the salt smells. At the top of the stairs, we looked at the gray water, the sky, a dark sand stripe that zigzagged parallel to the surf line. A dead tree had washed onto shore, branches like an empty grape cluster. A tire. A yellow gasoline can.
* * *
—
Kelly used our boots to weight the quilt’s corners. I was starving, thirsty. We ate hard-boiled eggs, olives, bread, and a chunk of smoked ham we pulled apart with our hands. We passed cider back and forth. I smoked a cigarette while Kelly unwrapped a bar of chocolate. Ash flew in the wind. Hair caught in my mouth.
“When’d you boil eggs, mister Outward Bound?” I asked.
“When you were in your room freaking out.”
I laughed. “I’m not angry anymore.”
He winked, chewing chocolate.
While he pissed down the beach on wood slats stuck in dune, I lay half on quilt, half in sand. I could feel sand blown into the cuffs of my violet coat, and sifting into my hair. I looked straight into the sky.
“What are you going to do to me?” I asked Kelly when he sank to his knees.
“Nothing. I’ll do things with you. For you.”
“Are you making self-righteous distinctions?”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“But we both belong to other people,” I said. I was giddy.
“I don’t. Maybe you do. That’s your problem.”
“You do, too,” I protested, sitting up, smacking sand from my hands. “The girl. The girl you came to find.”
“Actually, that’s not what you think. I should have made that clear from the beginning. I didn’t realize how it came across.”
I kneeled, dropped a hand on his shoulder. “Just what am I supposed to think?”
“I know, I know,” he said.
His face fell, daunted. Wet brown eyes stared at eggshells and olive pits in the sand. I asked him to just tell me.
“I’m going to do better than an explanation,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Save next Thursday.”
“Okay.”
He stared at me, as if trying to communicate without words. So I punched him in the shoulder.
“Stop being glum,” I said. “You know, you’re the freak. Not me. You are.”
He chased me to the water. Then we followed the surf in and back, getting our feet wet. We combed the beach, throwing skate pods that were shiny like leather coin purses. I worked the tangerine hinge of a crab claw. It was a sweet home video, until rain fell.
* * *
—
Walking down dark, cold, hushed lanes. The rain never picked up. Huge, intermittent drops that splashed when they hit the road. As we passed through the populated stretch, Kelly stopped to read a cardboard sign stapled to a telephone pole.
“Check this out,” he said.
I read the sign. “I dare you to go in.”
He looked at me. “It’s too late. It’s dinnertime.”
I snorted. “Whatever.”
“Fine. I’ll go, but you’re coming with me.”
“Deal. I love strangers’ houses.”
A cone of light shone on the porch, deifying winged insects. A woman with butter-yellow hair down to her shoulders answered the door. Black turtleneck, black jeans, red lipstick and toenails. White wine. Probably forty, she smiled like a twenty-year-old—quickly, warmly, contagiously.
“I hope we’re not interrupting dinner,” Kelly said.
“We saw the sign about free kittens,” I said.
“Did you?” she asked enthusiastically. “Come right in. Of course you’re not interrupting.”
We drank wine with Christine on her screened porch. The floor was Astroturfed. The house smelled like hamburger, and bleached prints from museums hung in cheap brass frames. At the far end of the porch, fabric dangled from a sewing machine. A stringy-haired blond kid, whose gender I couldn’t determine, Rollerbladed with a Pop-Tart. Children sauntered around in pajamas, dripped off furniture, made vague complaints but didn’t pursue them. Through this, Christine sat sideways on her glider, feet up on the arm, unperturbed.
We told her about our beach picnic. She pointed out a gazebo her husband, Jason, was building for her in the backyard. Its skeleton loomed useless and ghostly in the dark. But I had a feeling Jason loved her, and I realized I liked Christine.
“This is my favorite little girl,” she said, knees cracking as she squatted to the box of newspaper shreds. She’d decided it was time for me to hold a white kitten with blue eyes. “All the others just run around, careening and wrestling, tussling, and this princess sits tight. She just likes to be held.”
* * *
—
As we walked home, Kelly kept looking at the sky, almost stumbling, his head tipped so far back.
“My God, you can see all the stars out here,” he said.
“People always say that when they haven’t been out of the city in a while,” I said, but kindly.
A warm thing cowered in my coat.
* * *
—
At home, Kelly plugged a transistor radio into the outlet above the stove. We sat on the linoleum floor, me in a black slip and Kelly’s sweater, him in jeans and long-john shirt. Listened to country music, laughed as the kitten chased a tinfoil ball that we batted back and forth. Laughed till we almost cried. I don’t even know why, but it had something to do with the drunken way she ran, weaving, tripping on her own feet, swaying and staring with confusion when she stopped.
“Did you know you were going to take one home when you went in there?” he asked.
“Fuck no.” I sighed, pulling hair from my hot face. “This is an accidental kitten.”
I knocked the ball under the table, and she pawed it back out.
“Oh, she’s tired,” he said as she staggered and collapsed against my black silk thigh.
Kelly tucked us into bed, putting water and food on the floor. I asked what would happen if I rolled over in my sleep. I was afraid of killing her.
“It’s not going to happen, trust me.”
She slept on the pillow, curled into my neck’s hollow. I was exhausted, the soles of my feet black from the dirty floors, my hair full of sand, my cheeks windburned. But I had trouble sleeping, electrified by her plush white fur next to my jaw. Her body rattled with dreamy breaths, contented. She already believed I was her mother.
SIX
The bee emerging
from deep within the peony
departs reluctantly
—MATSUO BASHŌ
I made Yves leave a meeting at the Mercer Kitchen to meet me at his place because Kelly had to work lunch, and separating had triggered a disappointment that made me feel sick. I was panicky. I actually had expected to introduce Kelly to my mother. Did I think she was on a trip? That she would return one day with souvenirs? Hand me hotel stationery, or a duty-free perfume set, or a conch shell, so waxy and perfect it seemed machine-made?
She would have loved to hear about our picnic in bad weather. She would have liked to eat ham with her hands like we’d done. She would have nodded knowingly when I told her how I lay on the beach, letting sand fill the billows of my clothes, and how I could have let the wind bury me with sand. Part of me had expected to tell her these stories. Waiting for Yves in his loft I’d shuddered, hating, as always, to think of her at all. Even the briefest vision, too small to constitute a thought, sent me to a bad place.
Now we watched Angel take in Yves’s
loft. She blinked blue eyes like a dumb blonde. Then zigzagged across the Persian rug with that drunken, artless swagger. Yves’s arms crossed. Face blank.
“Isn’t she sweet?” I said. “I mean, seriously. Don’t you love her?”
The kitty jumped onto the white Mies Van der Rohe chair. She sniffed the seams.
“Maybe she shouldn’t be up there,” Yves said.
“She’s fine. They can fall ten stories without getting hurt.”
“No, I mean”—he gestured—“the chair.”
His phone rang; he plugged in his headset and turned away. He stood at the window, tossing a paperweight between hands. Eyes darting back and forth, looking at nothing.
Talking business, he tried to leave the room, but I caught his waist, turned him to look at her. I beamed at him, squeezed. She batted the hanging corner of a throw. Then she sat down, dragged her bum on the wood floor, staring piteously at me.
“Let me call you back,” Yves said.
* * *
—
In his car, I played with the stereo. He told me to leave it on classical. I propped a shoe on the tortoiseshell dashboard, and he gestured it down. So I knocked my head against the white leather headrest.
“I’m just saying you should have asked her,” Yves said.
“Well she was so nice, Yves. I just assumed.”
He smiled thinly. “It’s not about nice,” he said. “I’m sure she was nice. That doesn’t mean she gave the cats shots.”
“Well, what do you care, anyway? You don’t care if she’s sick.”
“I care,” he said, “because I’m going to be late now.”
“No one asked you to drive me.”
We waited at a stoplight. I watched his eyes search for something that didn’t exist in the city: a horizon. Two white girls in jeans and Prada coats walked through red leaves.
“I’m sorry,” I said, apologizing for something I hadn’t even done yet.
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