Game of Secrets

by Dawn Tripp

  Rain has begun to fall, soft drops on her face, strung through her hair. It is a light rain, short-lived. She likes the cool wet of it, how her skin shrinks.

  She stops in at the post office—a line at the window, longer than she wants to wait, but she waits—there’s a parcel for her mother, that print she mail-ordered from Sears, to cut for summer curtains.

  As Jane steps out of the post office, the package under her arm, she runs into the tall engineer. He is carrying an umbrella and, being the kind of man she has sensed him to be, offers it to her, and because it is too much to explain that she would prefer to just be in the rain for the short distance she has left to go, she accepts. He walks with her, his hand holding the black hooked curl of the umbrella handle, walks with her past the boardinghouse where he is staying, to her grandmother’s, two doors farther on. He stops by the gate, holds the umbrella out to her and, when she protests, he waves her off, so cavalier. I’ll get it back another time, he says, the clean flash of a smile. Then he starts back down the street through the rain, and she is struck by the pointlessness of it, of being left holding a loaned object in each hand, in one the precious book, in the other, the unwanted umbrella, never having asked for either, but stuck with both now, and wishing he had not insisted, that man, wishing now there was not some link of an indefinite future pending between them.

  Not that there was anything about him that was unpleasing. A week ago, he had approached her grandfather about renting the old shucking house that was on Gid’s property, down the little slope and close to the river. It had been unused for a number of years. The engineer explained he wanted it as a sort of office, just for the duration of the few remaining months he would be here. There was no outside lock, he explained, on the door of his room at the boardinghouse, and occasionally, upon returning, he’d had the sense his papers had been disturbed. He didn’t like that, he said with a brief, self-deprecating laugh, not that there were nuggets of genius worth pursing. He just didn’t like the sense of his things being tampered with.

  Jane was in her grandmother’s kitchen at the time, rolling out a pie, she had overheard most of the exchange.

  What surprised her was that Gid had agreed. But the engineer had offered to pay twice what it was worth, and it was, Jane supposed, the money that turned Gid’s head.

  He was a fine-looking man, very tall, his hair on the gray, streaks of that rich glossy hue blond will turn to. He wore it combed back, in an older style. There was a tone about him, a certain curiosity she’d observed as he stalked around the job with his camera and a pad of paper he’d take out to jot a note down, a certain penetrating curiosity, in excess, perhaps, of what the job demanded. A certain attention in how he listened, looked at things, like he was seeing through them. His speech, too, was different, without accent, every syllable pronounced, a polish to it, not a shine, but rather an exactitude. He reminded her, in an odd sort of way, of that new road—something paved, incisive, immutable about him. Like under his face, there was no face.

  She shakes the rain now from the umbrella, closes it up. There is water on the book, not much, but some, seeped into the top edges of the pages. She blots them with a dry cloth, carefully, page by page, but still they dry darker, a ruffled warp left along that upper edge, a tide-line stain.

  It was when the engineer came around to pay Gid the first month’s rent for use of the shucking house that he gave him the photograph. No work of art, he said, just a snapshot and completely incidental. He’d taken it when he had first come to the Point the summer before. Jane happened to be in it. Without realizing, she had, apparently, walked into the frame.

  She didn’t like that photograph. She didn’t care any that he’d taken it or that he still had it, but she thought it made her face look crooked, her mouth too wide, and it irked her when her grandmother stuck it in a frame and hung it on the wall in the parlor, and she had to look at it, hanging there, whenever she went into that room to dust.

  GLOVE

  JANE

  July 23, 2004

  Ada is steamed.

  “You’ve done it, Jane. You wanted that tight little corner, you got it now, good and tight. Got us both boxed in.”

  It was the turn just past that did it—the play I made—setting a T onto H-E-I-S-T running V-E-T up, jamming that last edge still open.

  V

  E

  T-H-E-I-S-T

  A strand of Ada’s hair has fallen loose. She tucks it back in place.

  “You’ve been plotting this,” she mutters, frowning, her eyes on the board, her face intent. She has two choices now—keep chipping away at things or give in. Sooner or later, one of us will have to give in, and I suspect Ada realizes as well as I do that that one of us can’t be me.

  She does it then, throws down the glove. She clips a D to the end of T-I-N-C-T-U-R-E, and runs D-I-B across. “There’s one more dink for you, Jane.”

  She knows what she’s done: put me in easy reach of the bottom mid-center edge of the board, a coveted dark red triple-word. She knows I’m not the kind of player who’ll snub a chance, laid in the hand. Who in their right mind would?

  I take U-S-Y, and run those three letters down off the B, and the Y fits so nice, neat and snug, into that red triple square. Twenty-seven points.

  I’m nearly caught up.

  But then—what I don’t expect. She does it again.

  “I’m done with you, Janie,” she says coolly. “I am done with your tight-fisted board.” Off the E in E-X-I-T, she runs R-A-Z-E back across. It’s a nervy move, the letters driven into the open, vulnerable there, exposed. And she gets so few points. No number squares—no extra mileage for that Z—she doesn’t get much at all. Unthinkable to me—to sacrifice a thing of value for so little.

  I know what it is. Bait. She wants me to take it. She knows that if I can, I will.

  Wait, though. Wait.

  My mind—a moment loosened—spins.

  “Get on with it, Jane,” she says.

  Wait. There’s something I’m not seeing.

  “You think I’m taking a fall, Jane, don’t you? I know you. I know that’s how you see it. And it may be so: It may be I’m opening up some good opportunity for you now, but it may also be I’m opening up something for myself down the road.”

  I look down at the word she has made. Raze. The word that has opened the board—her sacrifice or gamble—a word that in and of itself never asked to signify either, but is only what it is.

  I set a B on R-A-Z-E, and run A-B-O-U-T down to meet the T at the end of T-H-E-I-S-T. Twenty-four plus sixteen. Forty. I have moved ahead. Made up my losses. It’s Ada’s turn again now.

  Her hands are on the table, still, fingers interlaced. The ring she wears. The only ring I’ve ever seen her wear—white-gold S-curve with the sapphire and the two little diamonds that flank it.

  Yesterday, Marne was reading that book—The Secret of Light. All day yesterday, in every spare moment it seemed, I’d catch my daughter with her nose in it. I watched her and I could see it so clear, how she threw herself into it, resisting and at the same time drawn, as I once was. Such a whatnot, that little book, with its spellbinding premise, rejecting common sense for a beauty that may not exist. Yesterday, I watched my daughter’s eyes work across the page. Line after line, left to right. That inescapable order.

  PART V

  THE NIGHT POOL

  SCRABBLED

  MARNE

  June 22, 2004

  I suck at mini golf.

  I think to mention this when he picks me up on the Bonnie bike and tells me, as I am slipping his spare helmet on, that he thought we could go up to City View, play a round of mini golf there.

  It’s always the windmill, hole 7, that throws me.

  You look through the slat underneath and think you’ve got a clean shot—if you can just time it right to miss those three revolving arms. If you hit it straight, it will drop into the hole the other side of the windmill, which pipes down to a second oblong green be
low.

  It seems so benign. So bucolic, that windmill. But I always manage to fuck it up. Hit one of the arms or the top of the slat, because I smack it too hard, or not hard enough, and the putt fails, the ball gets stuck underneath.

  ——

  Elise Daignault and I used to come here to play, to rev up before we went to Muldoon’s downtown, or drove over to Newport when local-range pickings seemed slim. We’d knock those small pocked colored balls around. It was a decent way to kill an hour, and Elise would bring me up to speed on her latest conquest or her next intended victim. I can see her even now, in her skinny Guess jeans, spiked heels poking cuts in the turf.

  As expected, it takes me over seven shots to get through the windmill. Ray is laughing. “That was just awful,” he says, jotting down my score. I swipe the card from him and tally what we’ve played out so far.

  “I am way losing,” I say. “You didn’t tell me how steep the damage already was.”

  “Is that my job?”

  “What job is that?”

  “Protect you from self-inflicted damage.”

  “Very funny.” I make a face.

  He laughs, gives me a light knock on the leg with his putter—I glance at him—that unruly swirling thing in my body again, flush of heat, I can feel it—but I go through the motions. I line up my feet at the starting edge of the next tee, set my little red ball on the black rubber mat, three holes punched into it. That mat has seen better days.

  I clock him on holes 9 and 10, under par for both, redeem myself slightly. On 11, I read the graffiti someone has carved into the stand: MICHAEL D IS A WIENER. An X through a rough heart drawn around JIMMY + LEANNE.

  “You know the other day I looked up that word,” I say.

  He is lining up for his next shot, sets his hands on the putter.

  “What word’s that?”

  “Scrabble.”

  I see him pause a moment, I think that’s what I see, it’s quick though, then he hits the ball, hits it clean, a nice straight thwack.

  “Five definitions as a verb,” I say. “Four, I think, as a noun. To scratch or scrape. To scribble, scramble, scrawl. Underbrush, too—as a noun, like I said. No mention of that game, though.” Another pause, mine this time. I shrug it off. “It was an old dictionary.”

  He glances at me. “Interesting,” he says. He nods to my ball. “You’re farther away, your turn.”

  “You’re closer, you go.”

  He putts gently, drops the ball over the scuffed plastic lip of the cup.

  Such a noncommittal word. Interesting. Why did I even bring it up?

  We move on, the following hole, then the one after that, in silence, a knobby sort of silence.

  “Do you ever play with your mom?” he asks.

  “Mini golf?”

  “Scrabble.”

  “Me? No. I used to, sometimes, when I was younger, she’d rope me in. She still goes every week you know, to play, just like always. Like nothing ever changes. Do you ever notice that, no matter what actually happens, nothing around here really seems to change? Every Friday my father, he takes her out for breakfast, she takes her walk, and then he drops her off at the COA, just like always, goes and does some grocery shopping for her, picks up a prescription, whatever, comes back for her later.” I am explaining this all—logistics, details—more than I need to explain. I can’t seem to stop myself. Like the details will justify. “They sort of make a day of it. Even when we had that weird bout of awful heat that second week of May—it must have been pushing a hundred that Friday. You’d expect she’d wilt.”

  He gives me a curious look, then a smile. “No. I wouldn’t actually.”

  It stops me. How he says it. So matter-of-fact. The smile.

  “Things do change,” he says.

  There are four kids behind us with one mom. She’s clutching some Dunkin’ Donuts supersize drink. I hope for her sake it’s full of caffeine.

  Ray grabs the waist of my jeans, pulls me off the path into the gravel. “Let them play through.”

  “You’re getting awfully close,” I say.

  “Not close enough,” he whispers, his mouth near my ear.

  “That tickles,” I say.

  He doesn’t let go. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten our trade.”

  My golf-mind is pretty much blown after that.

  He slaughters me by at least twenty strokes. He gets his hands on my body once more, around hole 16, the little crooked house—fingers on skin, where my shirt rides up, I slam my ball off the edge of the green.

  He fishes it out of the fountain for me, his wrist wet, water dripping onto my hand as he gives it back.

  “Penalty, one point,” he remarks.

  I shake my head. “Crime of distraction.”

  “You’re contesting it?” His voice is sly and I don’t answer. I line my ball up again, line up my feet, self-possessed, give it a whack, and putt it straight off the green yet again.

  “This game is so over,” I say. He is laughing at me. “I need ice cream. Two scoops, need it now.”

  “You think that’s what you need, Marne?”

  “Stop!”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You have to stop messing with me.”

  “You’re so fun to mess with.”

  “Please let me survive this mortification. I don’t think I can go two more holes.”

  “You want to quit now?”

  “Grant me some dignity. Let me go out with that. I’ve always been lousy at this game.”

  He is laughing, leaning against the edge of a wooden bench set in the pause between tees—that Dunkin’ drink the mother of four was carrying, down to the ice cubes.

  “Stop laughing at me. Christ!”

  He doesn’t stop. I swoop down, grab my ball off the mat, clutch my putter, walk over. I get right in his face. He’s a good six inches taller than I am, and it’s dizzying, a kind of vertigo, looking up at him from this vantage point, being so near, this close.

  “Stop!”

  I expect him to answer, to slip his arms around me. One at least, his hand to come around the back of my neck, at the base of my skull, feel the pull on my hair, his fingers, that touch. But he doesn’t move, just stands still, leaning on that bench in his own clear space, looking down at me, that smile in his eyes. Just waiting.

  Slightly fucking arrogant, I think. I turn and walk back to the start of 16. I hear his soft laughter behind me. I don’t turn around. I hit that little red ball, I hit clean and smart and neat down the green synthetic corridor. Drop it into the white plastic bucket in two.

  “Look how well you do when you get a fire going in you, Marne,” he says lightly.

  “Bug off,” I murmur. “You know you’ve won.”

  At the last hole, there are three pockets. I sink my red ball into the center one. A light goes off, starts flashing.

  “Look at that,” he says, “you won a free game.”

  “Yeah, that’s my luck.”

  I hand him my putter, and he hands them both together to the kid behind the desk, along with the pencil stub. We walk across the parking lot toward his bike. He grabs my hand. The night is rising. The sky that denim worn blue it falls to sometimes in summer, a strip of that weird lucent color in the west near the line where the sun has gone down. The trees are full and black. The chrome on the Bonnie gleams.

  “You still want ice cream?” he asks, setting on his helmet.

  “In some future,” I answer.

  He smiles, and that’s all he asks. He throws a leg over, and I climb on the bike behind him. He pulls out the choke, kick-starts the engine, and we ride. I don’t ask where he is taking me. Right now, I find, I don’t need to know.

  As we turn off Route 6 onto the back roads, the air darkens, grows hushed and clean and smooth, the night and the wind washing down, my thighs are tight around his hips. Through his shirt, I can feel his ribs under my fingers, the cotton cool, billowing.

  I tuck my head in closer agai
nst him, my chin in the cut of his shoulder. I speak into his neck, his skin, the smell of him that I’ve begun to learn, mingled with the dry colder taste of the speed, faintly metallic. I whisper into his shoulder, knowing he will not hear. What does it matter? Now, somehow, none of it seems to matter. He leans the bike into the turns. I can see his hand on the grip. In the side mirror, I can see the edge of my face. I can see the road behind us, all of that old back there—my mother, his mother, my grandfather—that skull—what might have been done—old lives meshed, knotted, torn, the secrets and the dead—it’s all the weight of moonlight now thrown down on some night pool. No more than reflection now. Collapsed into a mirror the size of my palm. That road behind us.

  * * *

  The house he rents is small. A cottage, not winterized. Woodstove. Galley kitchen. The two back rooms are cramped, but there’s a loft in the front room where the ceiling shoots up, a single big window looking out onto a field.

  “What do you do about January?” I ask him.

  “Shovel in wood and wear a coat,” he replies.

  I’m a good fling. No frills. I’m not a snuggler. I don’t require a check-in call. I’ve endured a few longer-term ventures but, as a rule, I’ve shied from men who are viable, not to mention a guy I’ve almost loved since I was twelve.

  He is rummaging through the fridge for a drink. It makes a funny hiccuping sound—the fridge—my ex got the appliances, he explains, along with the house.

  Sex—actual Sex—with someone who used to be a fantasy—will never jibe with expectation. It might surpass but, more than likely, it will fall short. You’ve touched yourself in the dark too many times—conjured sex in the woods discounting the bugs, sex in the dunes with no sand. Your glass dream of him is littered with fractured narratives, scenarios—clandestine, taboo—a secret fuck in a foyer while the Real World where you both ought to be jingles on in a room down the hall. Or the surreal encounter in an extremely public place—a soccer game, a store—everything else suddenly frozen, to sleep or stone, except for him moving toward you, undressing you slowly—