The Case of Lena S.

by David Bergen

  That afternoon Mason went home, and he took a clean notebook and began to write what he would call “The Lena Poems.” He wrote briskly and furiously, late into the night. And then, exhausted, he went to bed and fell asleep, dreaming of immortality.

  Mason’s father was usually home for breakfast. He liked to be there for Mason and he had taken to making him poached or scrambled eggs and toast and he’d serve juice and then sit with a cup of coffee and watch Mason eat and he’d talk. He had stories to tell about the night, about one fare that refused to pay or another, a young girl he picked up in the Higgins area, who at five in the morning wanted to go to Perkins and have a grilled cheese sandwich and who asked Mr. Crowe if he wanted to join her. She would buy. “She was way too young, at best eighteen, but she was done for the night and I thought she was lonely and needed something so I went into Perkins with her and I thought maybe she could pass for my daughter or something but they wouldn’t let us in. They looked at her and said the place was full. It wasn’t. There were empty booths everywhere but I guess they could tell what her job was. She was a prostitute.”

  “I know that, Dad. It’s obvious,” Mason said. He was eating his toast and he was aware of his father’s diminished size, as if in the last while he’d been sick.

  “Okay, fine, it’s just it wasn’t that big a deal. I mean, she was wearing a very short skirt and carrying a pink handbag and she wore those fishnet stockings but I don’t think that’s any reason to not let her eat a grilled cheese sandwich. I told them that. Then I said that they had just lost my business. That I wasn’t about to come back to Perkins and it was a place I ate at a lot and I had a family of six children and they wouldn’t be seeing any of my children there either.” Here he paused and rubbed his eyes and looked down into his coffee mug. He said, “They thought I was her customer. I realized that later. Or maybe her pimp. I could’ve been that. It was amazing. I dropped her off on Langside. She lives in an apartment there. Her name was Barbara. She was young enough to be going to school with you.” He gestured at Mason’s plate and asked if he was still hungry. Mason said he wasn’t. His dad needed a shave and his hair was too long and when Mason thought of him going into Perkins with the girl he was embarrassed and could only think of his father as ignorant. Or maybe he was a liar and he had known exactly who the girl was. Mason didn’t want to think those thoughts. He stood, poured himself more juice, and sat down again.

  Mr. Crowe said, “I’ve got to get your brother up. He’s supposed to be out looking for work.” Then he asked, “Does Lena spend time with Danny?”

  Mason said that they’d only met once, just last week when Lena was over. “Why?”

  Mr. Crowe lifted several fingers and made a shooing motion. “Forget it.”

  Mason held his glass of juice and watched his dad. He said, “What’s going on? Did Danny say something?”

  “No. No. Not at all.” His father looked at him. Then he shrugged and said, “I saw Lena out here on the deck one day. With Danny. That’s all.”

  Mason thought about this. He wanted to ask if Lena had looked pleased but he didn’t. He said that Lena was too smart to get tricked by Danny. “She sees through people. She knows when they’re fake.”

  “That’s good,” Mr. Crowe said. He got up from the table and poured himself more coffee, stood and drank, and then he said that he’d been seeing this woman, her name was Dorothy, and that he’d like Mason to meet her some time. “She’s older than me, in her fifties, and she’s not beautiful in the traditional sense, but I think she’s beautiful. I don’t want to do what your mom did, foist some stranger on you. She certainly isn’t rich like Mr. Schmidt.”

  “I don’t care about rich,” Mason said.

  “Of course you don’t. She’s got a daughter living in Calgary who’s twenty-one. I gave Dorothy a ride home from work one afternoon and we started talking and didn’t stop.” He paused and drank the remainder of his coffee and then looked at Mason.

  Mason said, “Great, Dad,” but he didn’t really think it was that great. Nor was he interested in meeting Dorothy. He was still thinking about Danny and Lena and later that day, when he got home from school and the house was empty, he went into Danny’s room and he looked around. He opened drawers and looked under pillows and though he didn’t know what he was looking for he thought he might find it. He came across Danny’s sketchbook and sat down and opened it and near the middle he came across the sketch of Lena. Danny had done a good job. It was Lena from the waist up. She was sitting and looking straight ahead and she looked relaxed and the folds of the top she wore, near her stomach, were shaded in. Mason closed the book. Opened it and looked again. Then he ripped the page out and put the book back on the shelf and he went to his room and lay down on his bed and studied the drawing. What Danny had done was make her bigger than she actually was. Not physically. Just her presence. It may have been her eyes. She was holding a cigarette and her mouth was slightly open and it looked as if she was about to do or say something. Danny had concentrated on the straps of her tank top. She had breasts. Mason placed an index finger against the drawing, close to Lena’s shoulder.

  That night, when Danny came home, Mason went into his bedroom and stood in the doorway and said, “Last week, when you met Lena, you shook her hand. Do you always do that? Shake hands with people like you’re an accountant or a car salesman?”

  Danny looked up. “She shook my hand. She offered her hand and I took it. She’s the weird one.”

  “Dad told me she was here with you.”

  “Dad’s a loser.”

  “He said you were sitting out on the deck together. You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “She came here,” Danny said. “She was looking for you but you were off being the scholar so I invited her in. She accepted. However,” and here Danny turned his face so Mason could see the wideness of his jaw, “she was perfectly chaste.”

  “I saw the drawing,” Mason said. His brother was sitting by his barbells and Mason thought it might work to pick up a weight and drop it on Danny’s head. “What did you do, bribe her to sit for you?”

  “No. She was perfectly fine with letting me draw her. She’s like a fucking Tinker Bell.” Danny fluttered his hands like wings. “She needs people like me to tell her she exists.”

  “Stay away from her. She’s not Seeta. Just stay away from her.”

  Danny waved Mason away. “She is, though. She’s a girl just like Seeta and Maryann. All girls have a little secret place, a centre that you have to discover. Didn’t you know that? Only Lena’s centre is a little harder to find. Anyway, I haven’t seen her since. She likes you. That mad mad girl likes you.” Danny shook his head, indicating that this fact was unbelievable.

  Mason walked away then. He left his brother sitting there and he went to his own room where his newborn book of poems, and the sketch of Lena, awaited him, but he found himself lying on his bed, eyes wide open, thinking about Lena and wondering if it was true that her centre needed to be discovered. He wondered if he, Mason, could ever find her secret place and save Lena Schellendal.

  He did not know what he would say to her the next time they met. He imagined he might carry the sketch in his back pocket and pull it out to show her. Not say anything, just let her explain, but he pushed this idea away. The next day she phoned him and said, “I have to see you,” and they met on the street outside his house. When she approached him and held his hands and said, “Take me somewhere,” he was glad he didn’t have the sketch to show her.

  “Where do you want to go, Lena?” he said. She was wearing cut-offs and a pale-blue top with half-sleeves and rubber flip-flops. Her arms and legs were unbearably white and Mason couldn’t help thinking about the way her breasts looked in Danny’s drawing. He wondered if Lena liked Danny’s bulk, the way his arms and shoulders were shaped.

  Lena looked around and then she went up on tiptoes and held Mason’s elbow and whispered in his ear, “To the beach. The big wide beach.” She dropped away and
looked up at him, as if he were a parent who could give her permission.

  “I can’t stand the city,” she said. “Julianne was at Grand Beach on Sunday and she said the water was warm and everyone was out playing volleyball. She said it was perfect. I’d like to go there. Or somewhere.” She was hollow; it wasn’t her body, it was her voice. It exited from her mouth like an echo inside a thin tube. Mason had the urge to tap a knuckle against her skull.

  He borrowed his mother’s car on a Thursday when he had no school and he took Lena to Patricia Beach. They lay in amongst the dunes, out of the eye of the public, and alternately slept and read. Lena wore jean shorts and a long-sleeved white shirt. At one point she smelled the shirt and said it was her father’s. When the heat overwhelmed them they went out to the edge of the lake, where Lena waded up to her ankles and Mason walked out until the water was up to his chest and then he sank beneath the surface. He swam parallel to the beach, keeping his eye on Lena.

  In the afternoon they ate peanut butter sandwiches and drank warm water. Then they lay on their backs and smoked as dragonflies hovered above them. Lena kissed him. She said, “Here,” and hovered above him and when he tried to touch her she pushed his hands away but kept kissing him. “Harmless,” she said. “Let’s pretend we just met.”

  “But we haven’t.”

  “Let’s pretend.”

  And so she asked him his name and he played along and asked about her family and her work and she said she was a bona fide genius.

  “Are you in love?” he asked.

  “Truly, madly, deeply,” she answered. “With a boy. There is only one.”

  She ate a grape that was transparent and clear and the juice dribbled down her chin. She wiped it away with her wrist.

  “What happened to the girl who loved God?”

  “She still loves God. She just needs something else.”

  “You scare me. I worry that you’ll kill yourself.”

  “Don’t, Mason. Don’t worry. Do I look dangerous? Come, let’s go swim. I’ll show you.”

  And so they waded out into the water until the shore had receded and they swam and Lena’s head bobbed in the brown waves and her arms were thin sticks floating on the surface.

  Later, on the way home, Lena sat back against the passenger door and laid her bare feet out over Mason’s lap. He placed a hand on one of her ankles.

  “I like that,” she said. Then she asked him if he was happy.

  Her window was half open and the wind snapped at her hair and he was aware of her legs against his thighs and he said, “Right now, like this, yeah. I am.”

  “I was thinking that we could just keep driving. You and me.”

  Lena was watching him. He knew that, but he didn’t look at her. He said, “Is that a test question?”

  “If it were, would you pass?”

  He said, “My mother thinks I should stay away from you. She’s never said it in those words exactly, but she worries.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.” She sat up and tucked one leg under her and laid an arm across the back of the seat. “And your father?”

  “He doesn’t interfere like that. He’s got this new girlfriend, Dorothy, who I’ve never met but he says she’s nice. And older. That’s what he said. My father likes you. He said once that you were special. That you needed looking after.”

  “He told you that? What, was he feeling sorry for me, like I was some pathetic creature lying on the sidewalk?”

  “He didn’t say you were pathetic, or a creature. He said something about the world being turned upside down and how the first, in the end, would be last.”

  “It’s hard to tell what he’s thinking. When he picked me up that night I didn’t know what to say. At one point he said there were more important things than love. Do you think he knew about Aldous?”

  “He probably suspected something, though he was gone a lot and he tends to believe people. If you say you’re telling the truth, he believes you. I think if my mom told him, even today, that she still loved him, he’d believe it. He can’t help it. Actually, I think he’s still trying to figure out why she left him.”

  “That’s so sad.”

  Mason shrugged. “There are two types in my family. My father and me, we’re faithful, and then there’s my mother and Danny.” He watched Lena to see if Danny’s name would affect her.

  Lena laughed. “You? You consider yourself faithful, the guy who liked Seeta and then Sadia and then me and now Rosemary and who knows who else after that?”

  “My dad said he saw you at our house.”

  “Yeah, I was. Remember, you made me a white cake.” Her face was innocent. There was no hint of deception or malice.

  “Another time, too. With Danny. I saw the sketch that he drew.”

  “Oh.” She took her hand off his shoulder.

  “You acted like you didn’t know him. When he came into the kitchen. A big show of shaking hands and stuff. Was that for me?”

  “I guess it was. I’m sorry.”

  “When he was drawing you, he was looking right at you,” Mason said. “Like, for how long? Half an hour?”

  “Less. Anyway, Mason, it didn’t mean anything.” She said that she had no interest in Danny. She had no interest in boys at all these days. Except for Mason, who was like a path she could walk down in the darkness. “I’m gonna slide over and put my head against your neck, okay?”

  Mason looked at her. He nodded.

  She did what she said she was going to do. He could smell the sunscreen on her face and forehead. She was wearing her bikini top and jean shorts. She’d removed her father’s shirt. She said, “Now put your hand on my leg. Not on the inside, just on the top and hold it there. There.”

  They passed the town of Lubow. Lena said she didn’t want to go home yet so at a gas station they picked up a coffee to go. A few miles further on, Mason detoured onto a side road and drove until they came upon a driveway that led to a broken-down barn. Mason parked the car and Lena climbed out and went behind the barn to pee. Mason stood in the bright sunshine and stretched and, when Lena reappeared, she came up to him and stood close. “This is our place,” she said. “Hang a little sign, Home Sweet Home, set a table with flowers. Bet we could live here for weeks and nobody’d notice.” She pressed the palm of her hand against his chest. He caught her wrist and the underside of her arm flared white. The dark and heated mat of an unshaved armpit.

  “You look worried,” she said.

  “Maybe I am. A little. I never know what’s going to come next. That time when we met on the street, I saw you and you said my name and you talked to me but I wasn’t sure if you were really there. Then you go and sit for my brother like he was some kind of Gauguin and when I ask you about it you say it’s nothing. Nothing. Well, in my mind it’s more than nothing. It might not be terribly important but it’s not nothing. You know what nothing is? It’s you never meeting my brother, never letting him look at you, never letting him draw your hair and mouth and breasts. That’s nothing.”

  “Don’t.” She took his hand and held it and said, “I thought it might be okay, having him draw me. But then I thought sending you away would be okay, too. What I understand and what I don’t understand are the same. I keep thinking I’ve forgotten something and then I go back and I can’t remember what I’ve forgotten.” She stopped. Her hands were at her side. “But,” she said, “Right now, I feel great. Everything is clear. I’ve been stripped clean. Remember that day you came to my baptism? I felt something then. I wanted to be with you but my father took me away.” She paused, then said, “What have I done wrong? I haven’t hurt anybody.”

  Mason listened to her talk and he leaned against the car and drank his coffee. Lena stood close to him and smoked. Then she reached through the open car window and stuck a CD in the player and put it on and began to dance through the deep grass. She closed her eyes and threw back her head and called out, “Don’t you love girls, Mason? Aren’t they amazing?” She was a wraith. Her
arms and legs. Her belly button like a place where you could insert a key. She came back to Mason and stood close to him and said, “I wonder sometimes if Jesus loved any girls. Like when he was a boy. Or even a man. Did he notice girls in the street? Did he want women? Did he think about them naked? It’s a good question to ask. He was supposed to be perfect, but he was human. Maybe he secretly loved someone. Like Mary Magdalene. She was always hanging around stalking him. At his speeches, his crucifixion, his tomb.” She looked up at Mason. Grinned. “Mary and Jesus.”

  Mason grinned. Lena put her fingers like a handcuff around one of his wrists and said, “I love this.” Later, back in the car, she drove, the heel of her hand hitting against the wheel in time to the music. Mason slept briefly and dreamed of two blackbirds banging beaks on a wire. He woke and considered telling Lena about the dream but he didn’t. She had bitten the skin at her thumb and a thin line of blood had seeped onto her cuticle. It was hot and Mason rolled down the window and watched Lena drive. She looked over at him and said, “Hey.” Then she took his hand and she said, “Take me away and you can have whatever you want.”

  She smelled of the sun and the water. Her shoulders were slightly red from too much sun. Mason said, “Where would we go, Lena?”

  “We would disappear. I was thinking that we should steal Mr. Ferry’s car. It just sits in the garage out back and he can’t drive. He wouldn’t miss it.”

  “I couldn’t do that to Mr. Ferry,” Mason said. “It was one thing to steal his books, but I couldn’t take his car.”

  Lena was quiet, and then she said, “That’s a no, then?”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  Lena still held Mason’s fingers but she’d stopped playing with them and, after a bit, she took her hand and put it on the steering wheel.