Howard Roark laughed.
And she also didn’t think he’d like this book, which was why he was going to.
Deb had taken Kay on one of her walks, which, by now, hour forty-eight in Rhode Island, he’d already learned to decline. Simon wanted to be found reading in full view when they came back, but his mother would never catch him on the bird-shitty porch swing, so he’d gone down by the docks, where the ferry wasn’t, and where there were a few small shops in a row, two of which sold real estate. He sat at the round green table outside the sandwich shop that was closed. The table had a hole in the middle for umbrellas, the size of his fist.
He turned the book over in his hands. “A writer of great power. This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.” This was what Simon needed, to be dispensed a philosophy, a way of thinking and living and winning. He did not yet know precisely what objectivism was, but he knew it had something to do with ruthlessness as a way of getting what one wanted. Something to do with not being a tool. The cover art, besides, reminded him of Rockefeller Center, a man of gold gripping the sun, or fire. It made him think of ice-skating and of Radio City Music Hall, where he’d gone once to see the Christmas Spectacular.
Okay.
Howard Roark laughed.
Inside the sandwich shop, someone also laughed. He turned but saw only metal shutters.
Back to Howard, naked and on a cliff high up above a lake. So already that was pretty impressive. Definitely a cool opening. Simon looked out over the bay where the water was splashing, not like Howard’s, which was so still as to look stony. Or no—it was that there was stone, around the lake, and that the water was more still than the stone. He was confused by a pause more dynamic than motion, but imagined it was like in The Matrix where the bullets are flying and everything slows.
Laughter again from somewhere inside the shop and again he turned. Two voices, both girls’. He stood and moved a little ways down on the dock, nearer the water.
Howard was thinking how all the nature around him would be destroyed and put to use—the trees and rocks, for building—but not in the way Simon usually heard people talk about it, like it was something wrong or sad, like the animals would go extinct and the ozone would tear open and we would fry.
Just then a set of feet came slapping down the hill. He lowered his head and stared into his book.
It was only Kay, hurtling toward and then past him, to the pebbled edge where dock ceded to water.
“Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with you?”
“We found a cat,” she said, pointing. “Up the road. Mom’s watching it, come see.” She doubled over to breathe, like the low air would come easier.
“I don’t want to come see. I don’t care. The cats are everywhere here.” That morning he’d already seen one skulking around the yard across the way.
The voices in the sandwich place were louder now, the door suddenly open.
“You’re late” was the first thing she said to him, this girl the sun made hard to see, so that she was only a shape at first, hovering over him like a wave. “Lunch service ends at three.” She stepped back into shadow, and Simon pressed his palms against the dock, turning himself around.
“Oh, we weren’t—” he started. “I mean, I was just out here reading.”
“Anything good?” Her lips were chapped and pale, and her hair blew a blond banner behind her, thick like it carried a lot of salt in it. She looked like someone who spent a lot of time outside, this girl, in shorts and a big T-shirt, sleeves rolled to freckled shoulders. She would know how to tie knots for sailing.
Simon held the book up, felt dumb about it.
“She can’t read,” called the other voice—the other girl, darker and smaller, now coming out from the shop.
“Shut the ef up, Laura. I read.”
“Not books,” the other one—Laura—shouted, and began locking up.
Simon looked back at the first girl to find her staring at him seriously. “What?” she said. “You don’t think I read either?”
“Yeah, no…I mean, I just don’t know you.” He slipped a finger out from where he’d been holding his early place. “I don’t know what you like.”
“Well, now you do,” she said, holding out her arm. “I’m Teagan.” She must have been eighteen or nineteen. She had that friendliness, an ease that came with things like college, and time.
Simon stood and shook her hand. He was just barely her height.
“Here’s where you tell me your name, if you want.”
“Simon,” Simon said, feeling his heartbeat visible.
“Teegs.” Laura, by the door, windmilled her arms. “Can we go, please?”
“You asshole!” Teagan’s smile buoyed everything she said. Simon wanted her to call him asshole. “Is this your sister?” To Kay she said, “I like your sandals. Where are they from?”
Kay looked down at her feet, and for a moment they all did, contemplating the hot-pink jellies that passed for shoes. “They’re from Harry’s.”
Simon explained that Harry’s was in the city, then added, New York City, to be clear and just maybe to impress her. Kids he used to meet at summer camp, kids from places like Michigan, they’d always seemed impressed, assumed untrue things. “We’re here on vacation.”
“Yeah, no duh,” Laura said, arms now crossed like for leaving. “That’s what everyone here is on.”
Teagan took a step away. “Well, New York. Don’t be late next time.” Where the shirt pulled tight, he could see the curved cup of her bra—like the sun, he could see it without looking. “The wraps here are pret-ty good.”
Simon didn’t say he’d come back, hoping to preserve any air of mystery the city might have lent him, but he was anxious already, knowing he would. He watched them go, and repeated her name to himself, Teagan Teagan Teagan, so as not to forget.
“She’s cool.”
Simon started, remembering his sister. “Isn’t Mom, like, waiting for you somewhere?”
Kay grinned, reaching to pull her foot up behind her. “She’s cool, and you’re not.”
Simon looked at her, teetering on one leg. He could see the day’s sun already on her face, pinking her nose and cheeks, and he was about to say she looked like a hot dog, but she rocketed off quick as she’d come, up the hill, jelly shoes almost flinging themselves off behind her. She had never heard of cats that didn’t belong to anyone. She thought they might as well be hers.
But the cat had gotten away. Deb watched it go while Kay was off looking for Simon. She’d asked it to stay, pretty-pleased it to, she’d even tried standing in its way. Kay pouted when she came back and blamed her mother, as Deb knew she would, and the nice time they’d been having came to a close.
“You keep doing it,” Kay said on the walk back. “There, like that.”
“I swear, I’m not looking at you any way. I don’t mean to.” It was their first chance to really talk since Kay’s trouble at school, and Deb was often quiet, finding words to form the sentences. “Susan Haber called me.”
Kay said nothing, seemed to quicken her pace.
“Chloe and Brett’s mom.”
“I know who,” and she was definitely moving faster.
“So do you want to tell me, about what happened?”
“That’s okay.” Kay was nearly running now. They were almost to the house.
“Well, would you talk about it anyway, please?” Deb hurried after. “I’d like it, to talk about it.”
“No! Mom—” At the drive she stopped, looking wildly around. “The only reason you know about it is because they were being spies on me. That’s the only reason!”
Deb was about to say that it didn’t matter how she knew, just that she did, and that she wasn’t mad, not at all, but Kay’s attention seemed to have darted away.
From the house, two weedy legs, blondly fuzzed, were barreling down the small hump of lawn, alongside but without heed to the flat stone steps, made no use of by this
man who’d built them—who’d paid for them, anyhow. And he was still handsome, still startlingly well made, with his light eyes and strong jaw. Gary, Deb thought, looks so much the same.
“Sight for sore eyes,” he said, spreading his arms wide. He swooped his tall and narrow frame down to Kay. “And you! Where you been, huh? All my life.” With both hands he cupped the whole of her head, so it became a clay pot he was making. “Amazing.”
“Yeah, we like her okay.” Deb laughed. “We plan on keeping her.”
—
The three spent an awkward moment around the kitchen table.
“I remember your age,” Gary told Kay, as though this could mean much to her. “I hated school—hated having to get up that early.”
“Oh, please!” Deb said. “Mornings are the worst. But I don’t know”—trying to draw a smile from Kay—“you don’t give me nearly as bad a time as your brother. For him I need a bugle.”
“And what is it for you now? Junior high?”
“Middle school,” Kay answered.
“They’re hard years,” Deb said. “Much harder this time around than they were for Simon. Girls can be so, I don’t know, unkind at this age. Gossip and what have you. It’s tough. But we’re hanging in there, right, babe?” She reached across the table to stroke her daughter’s arm.
Kay drew both hands into her lap. That the two adults exchanged glances she knew without looking.
“Well,” Deb said after a pause, “how’s Nancy?”
“That…isn’t really happening anymore.”
“You broke up?”
“We just sort of petered out.” He shrugged. “Didn’t see a future.” To Kay he added, “Nancy’s my girlfriend. Was my girlfriend.”
Kay thought that, whatever his age, it was too old for a girlfriend: There should have been another word for it.
Then Gary suggested he and Deb scare up some wine from the cellar.
—
“Sorry it’s a total dust bowl down here,” he called from the unlit flight of stairs. Deb was surprised how immediately it made her nervous, being alone with him. He pulled a chain that hung from the ceiling. A single bulb threw light onto the honeycomb of dark bottles and, over it, one of Gary’s landscapes, which he rarely showed and didn’t sell except through hotels and restaurants in town. Mostly fine, precise oil paintings of local harbors, lighthouses on the sound. They suggested an appreciation for small and simple things, one she didn’t have herself but that she admired, hoped to cultivate. Jack said Gary lacked imagination, and vigor. Energy! He doesn’t have any energy.
“Okay,” Deb said, crouching down to survey the lowest rack. “What’ll it be?”
He squatted beside her. “Deb, listen. Your email, it didn’t mention…I heard what happened, about Jack’s show.”
“I guess maybe a white?” There was so much she didn’t know about wine.
“He must be in a pretty bad state.”
“Or red! Red we won’t have to chill.”
“Hey. Talk to me.” His hand on her wrist. He might have been asking the time.
“It’s not about the fucking show.” She kept her eyes fast on the shelf, the shadowed cubbyholes. “There’s been—someone else, you know?” Gary would know, wouldn’t even have to ask whose someone else, hers or Jack’s.
There had been a time, as Jack’s first marriage was ending, when everywhere they went it was tables for three. They went to the opera and to shows, the twenty-six-year-old and her fortyish escorts. Three was supposed to be a bad number for groups—whenever Simon or Kay fell into trios at school, there was always one kid left unhappy—but they’d never been a true triangle, more a line of three connecting dots, with Deb at the center, the leader dot in vee formation, if they were geese. She’d liked the feeling, looking over her shoulder, of these men following behind. She thought they’d liked it too, being both geese or both college boys again.
“Are you surprised?” She pulled an inky green-glass bottle from the wall of inky green-glass bottles and blew the dust off it.
“You’re an amazing woman, Deb.”
Everything, that was how much she didn’t know about wine. “We should probably head upstairs.” It felt like they were hiding, down there in the dark.
In the small garden, Gary lit two glass lanterns, casting shadows to dance on the white-stone table. Simon was back from wherever he’d been. He and Kay leaned over the low brick wall, pointing out fireflies and arguing over who saw them first. You are lucky. You are lucky, you are lucky, you are lucky.
The next morning at airport security, Jack drained his coffee, deposited his laptop into a bin, and smiled at the guard, militant but for a French braid running the length of her skull. Taking off your shoes was one thing. Now apparently they could ask for clothes.
In terminals people hemorrhage money, on magazines, eight-dollar trail mix, batteries, and packs of gum. The confines make them desperate for these things. Glowing amber bottles of duty-free perfume: They slow to look. Flight attendants herd past the shops, monitoring the sales. That personal gumball machine, $39.95. Not low enough yet.
Jack bought a slippery pack of Raisinets and ate slowly.
He found his gate and a row of chairs nearby. Across from him a young couple stood kissing, the woman with tangled hair and a flannel shirt buttoned halfway, the man in tight black jeans. Easy to tell Europeans from the Americans. His own family looked American but not garishly so, not in the way the rest of the world used the word, as a derogatory term. Though still they were, recognizably American. It had to do with what was square or self-serious about them. Optimistic in their ability to circumvent misfortune. Neither he nor Deb would ever take up smoking again, beyond the occasional puff, or ride a motorcycle without a helmet. Ride a motorcycle period.
It is ridiculous to watch the planes take off. Heartbreakingly clunky and hopeful seeming.
—
A lifetime later, his section called, Jack walked the connecting hallway of large accordion-like segments, feeling like lint pushed through a vacuum cleaner. A quick glimpse of ergonomic chairs and entertainment consoles and private islands and on to the narrower aisle in coach. Then they were lifted up, as though seized by the hand of some giant. Always a miracle when it worked, every time a breakthrough in physics.
“Light bird today,” he said to the flight attendant as she passed. He’d heard one of them say that once.
“We’ll be fine,” she answered dully, and kept moving.
As an eight-year-old he’d fallen in total love with a Pan Am stewardess who’d pinned him with a pair of wings. This was when stewardesses were younger and wore those costumes and when people were still allowed pins on planes. It had been his second time flying, the return flight from New York, the only time his father had taken him on one of his trips. They’d lived in a suburb of Houston, and Jack Senior was always flying to different cities to meet with clients, see factories, take the general manager’s family out to eat. The New York trip had been scheduled over young Jack’s birthday, which was why he got to go along.
Of the city he remembered next to nothing. He knew they’d stayed three days and two nights, but not where, and that they saw a musical, but not which one. Jack did remember, because of his birthday, that it was near to Christmas, and that they went sight-seeing on a tour bus and then an observation deck, so he could see the building tops all lit up. His father gave him a coin to put in the telescope and Jack had looked, as far left and right as the machine would let him, for the Empire State Building, but he could not find it. “And why do you think,” Dad had asked, “why do you think you can’t find it?” Jack kept looking until the time on the telescope ran out, not because he still believed he would find the Empire State Building, but because his face was upset and he didn’t want his father to see.
When Jack couldn’t travel with him, which was the rest of the time, his father always brought back some trinket from the hotel gift shop. Jack knew, even then, how it enraged his mother to
watch her son run to the door when the car pulled into the garage. The trinket would clutter the boy’s room, become something she’d have to pick up off the floor. I am a single mother in this house, she’d say. Single mothers have jobs, his father would answer.
His father’s job had sent him away sometimes five days a week, but it had paid for all this, and it really had been all this, plenty of space (too much space, his mother said), a maid who came by once a week to do the hard jobs, a banana-yellow Cadillac for his mother to drive around in. They had a color television and dimmers in the living room and a beautiful bar cart that his mother got the most use out of during the week, always going to the liquor store on Fridays to restock before his father got home. There were times also when she forgot, or slept late and didn’t have a chance to go, and those times Jack remembered watching her hold a bottle of something amber under the faucet to get the level up, returning it to the cart a shade too light. All of five and he knew the color of bourbon.
They soared, higher. Somewhere a tray that should not have been open during takeoff rattled. Jack looked out at the sky and had to stop himself from smiling whenever the wing broke through another school of clouds. Flying was the same, even if the airlines had changed. They were run less like hotels now, more like branches of government. Stewardesses had become flight attendants had become security guards. They tell us that a nail clipper is not a nail clipper, a nail clipper is a weapon, and we become people who have had to imagine how a nail clipper might be a weapon. Maybe by splitting it down the middle, pressing the sharp end into the jugular of somebody. Of some body.
He leaned his forehead against the window. At this angle he could see a sliver of a woman a few rows ahead, the pulse of her temple. Probably trying to keep her ears from popping. Jack’s own ears popped a little.
Among the Ten Thousand Things: A Novel Page 13