This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  Wally picks his way through dirty slush, around to the rear of the building. Dark back here. Heaps of abandoned junk that may well harbor vermin. Strange fishy smell, whiff of rotten eggs. To one side of a loading ramp he sees a door that has a peeling coat of brown paint on it. No chain or padlock. The door is stiff in the frame, but grudgingly it opens.

  Inside, as his eyes adjust to the dimness, Wally makes out a narrow staircase, and faintly, above his head, he hears out-of-tune piano music. At the top of the steps, in a dusty room the size of a warehouse loft, an old woman sits hunched at the piano. She has a dowager’s hump so pronounced it seems to wrench her entire body sideways. Her hands curl arthritically over the keys, bony wrists poking out of her sleeves. Feverish swipes of rouge inflame her cheeks.

  The room is lined with mirrors. Wally almost doesn’t recognize his reflection, because some distortion in the glass makes him look humpbacked, too. He has no neck, and his legs have buckled and shrunk. But it’s definitely his own topcoat, his own thin hair damped down with melting snow.

  Where can she be? Perhaps changing out of her clothes in a room elsewhere in the building. The pianist’s fingers twitch upward from the keys. “What do you want?” she croaks.

  Of course he can’t say who he’s looking for. He doesn’t know her true name.

  “You made a mistake,” the old woman says. “You came to the wrong place.”

  No one at work notices he’s late. In fact, it’s only four minutes past nine when Wally boots up his computer in the office at the back of the store. He considers returning to the dance studio another time—perhaps he’ll have better luck—but in the end never does.

  He falls into a spell of insomnia. Even his sleep doesn’t feel like real sleep, but more like an uneasy and partial letting-go of consciousness. He dreams that he is awake and unable to sleep.

  Wally decides to unplug the phone, so a call can’t disturb him. Not that he receives many these days. However, you never know when some fool is going to ring the wrong number at three in the morning, or a deranged person dial at random and commence to harass you. The next morning he neglects to plug the phone back in, and he discovers that being without a phone makes little difference in his life. After that he leaves the plastic connector dangling aimlessly from its cord.

  As spring approaches, he becomes afflicted with a constant itchy ache in his muscles that makes it impossible to concentrate on a book or video. Is this the opening round of some chronic incurable disease? In an attempt to deal with his agitation, he takes to walking around the city every moment he’s not at work or in bed struggling with sleeplessness. He passes the boarded-up department store and thinks of the octoroon dancing in bare feet, her hair plaited with beads and ribbons and tiny brass bells that smell of tarnish.

  One night, as he’s heading up the hill back to his apartment, the wail of sirens breaks into his thoughts. He can see, blurry in the fine mist that’s now falling, fire engines on the crest of the hill, in his street. Wally begins to run. He stumbles on the uneven sidewalk and nearly falls, by some miracle righting himself just in time.

  At the summit he finds a knot of gawkers gathered in the street, shards of broken glass in the alley, water dripping down the steps of the white brick building and pooling on the sidewalk. He pictures her climbing through the window and leaping onto the fire escape, the terrified cat clawing her arms. But the firemen are already leaving the building, winding up their fat gray hoses. To the disappointment of the bystanders, the fire caused little damage, and that to a side entryway on the ground floor only. The tenants must have huddled outside in the mist no longer than the time it took him to run up the hill. He never even got a glimpse of her.

  Next morning, a Saturday, the curtain still is drawn across the opening, frame to frame, the only gap near the top where the wire it’s strung on sags a little. At quarter past eleven Wally takes his shopping bag from its hook by his front door and sets out for the Mini-mart. Next door, carpenters are busy nailing sheets of plywood to the frames of the ground-floor windows that the firemen busted through. As Wally passes by, he hears one of them tell a scruffy woman in ragged parka and baseball cap, probably one of the mental cases from the nearby halfway house, that the fire was set.

  “By who?” asks the crazy woman.

  “What they think is, some character stalking one of the tenants.”

  Wally’s heart jerks in his chest.

  “But they didn’t catch him yet. Lucky the super found it before it got going good.”

  “Lucky,” she says, grinning happily, slack-jawed.

  “The old place would go up like a tinderbox.”

  “Pitiful pile of soggy newspapers,” the other carpenter says. “A little kerosene poured on ’em, smoldering in the entryway. Dumb asshole. You gonna do it, do it right.”

  “Luckee luckee luckee . . . ” Wally watches the lunatic hokey-pokey down the sidewalk, careen around the corner onto Union Street, and vanish into the ether. Carrying his empty shopping bag, he returns to his apartment.

  Across the alley the curtain is closed. He thinks about Weasel-eyes and Scar-scalp hanging out by the Dumpster, by the graffiti-sprayed fence. Maybe they’re not casual loiterers, but people she knows.

  What would be the harm in ringing her buzzer, asking if she’s all right? He could sit with her for a while.

  But it wouldn’t be easy to work out which apartment is hers, inside the complex maze of the partitioned mansion, with multiple dark staircases, winding and windowless corridors, double locks on oddly placed doors. He could lose his sense of direction. People could notice him wandering about, suspect him of being the arsonist.

  Wally decides to fix himself a sandwich, and when it’s made, he sits at the table to eat it with an eye on the rag of a curtain. Suddenly he notices that her window is open a few inches. Has it been that way all morning, or did she raise it as he cut his bread, layered it with leftover meat? He wonders at himself for not being certain one way or the other. The hem of the curtain fidgets, sucked in and out by shifts in air currents, nervously dragging on the frame. He toys with the idea of calling across the alley, but soon abandons that notion. She wouldn’t hear, or if she did, would assume it’s the men stalking her, and retreat to the farthest reaches of her apartment.

  Then it comes to him. He’ll take the elevator down as he does every day on his way to work, calmly, casually, and then equally calmly and casually walk around the side of the building, enter the alley, mount the fire escape, and slip his fingers between window and sill. No one pays any attention to someone who looks as if he knows what he’s doing and has every right to be doing it.

  Of course she’ll be frightened at first, hearing the heavy old window scrape up in its frame, but once she understands, she’ll be glad.

  To calm her nerves he’ll offer to brew her a cup of tea. She owns very few cups, of course, two at the most, one of them chipped. She has only a dented aluminum saucepan to heat the water in, no proper kettle. He’ll find real tea, though, black and smelling like smoke and prickly as twigs in the palm of his hand, and a china teapot, its spout stained from all the tea that has passed through it.

  He’ll steep the tea for six minutes before pouring it into one of the cups, the one without the chip, and adding milk from a carton in the refrigerator. Shall I bring it in to you? he’ll call.

  Please, she’ll answer.

  Her bedroom is in the innards of the apartment, dimly lit by an oil lamp that sits on the mantelpiece amid tissue-paper roses and heaps of yellowed letters in some illegible foreign script. Used books sprawl open, half read, on the couch and the floor. Her bedclothes are rumpled. On her dressing table is an unstoppered bottle, from which emerges the odor of musk.

  He’ll set the cup on the dressing table and wait while she takes a sip.

  Seated there at the dressing table, she’ll begin to unbutton the back of her loose
, thrift-shop dress. He’ll see one shoulder emerge, then the other, and the dress will fall to her waist. Her back is the color of wax, or egg white, no color at all.

  She’ll take another sip of the cooling milky tea. One by one he’ll count the knobs of her spinal column and, in the mirror, watch her breasts leap up as she unbraids her pale kinky hair.

  The dirty-white cat will watch, too, with its lazy, slitty eyes, from atop the marble mantel.

  Later, while she lies sleeping, for safety’s sake he’ll walk through the apartment, double-locking the door and hooking the chain, turning the latches on all the windows. Then he’ll stretch out beside her on the couch.

  In the night, the cat, aroused from its sleep by some unusual noise, will spring to its haunches and tip the lamp over.

  DRAGON PALACES

  Nicola appears on the beach dressed in a pearl-gray silk shirt and crimson trousers, her long black hair still damp from the shower. She’s been in the cottage all afternoon, writing. Laurie watches her take from a canvas bag a corkscrew, a bottle of chilled Muscadet, and two wineglasses, each wrapped in a dishtowel.

  “What a good idea,” Laurie says, though it’s illegal to drink alcohol on the beach, of course, and she feels a little nervous that someone’s going to say something to them.

  Smiling, Nicola uses the tip of the corkscrew to remove the metal wrapping and then winds the tool into the cork. She pours wine into the glasses and hands one to Laurie. The wine is not a present, exactly—the bottle is from a case that Steve bought in the wine shop in town. Nicola’s hostess gift was three bars of almond-scented soap, purchased, Laurie guesses, in an airport terminal shop.

  Laurie takes a sip of wine, her eyes never leaving the kids. Cameron is loading stones and shells into a bucket and dumping them out again, his waterlogged disposable diaper sagging around his hips. Now and then the tide slithers higher up the beach than the boy expects, momentarily unsteadying him or knocking him down. He doesn’t cry or look to his mother for reassurance. Helen’s with a group of children younger than she, who are packing damp sand into pails and then upending them, constructing an extensive, monotonous city. With one hand Helen keeps yanking the bottom edge of her swimsuit down over her rump, and with the other she swipes at her nose. Helen seems to be allergic to beach grass. Helen is allergic to almost everything. She’s not an attractive child, and to her own shame, Laurie feels embarrassed about her daughter in front of sleek, together Nicola.

  Nicola has composed herself on the beach blanket, avoiding the wet places where the kids have recently perched. “When will Steve be back from Boston?” Nicola asks.

  “In time for dinner. I bought some mussels this morning. We can steam them.”

  “Oh, let’s make a rémoulade.”

  The suggestion tires Laurie. Next thing you know she’ll be driving into town in search of fresh tarragon and capers and imported mustard that costs nine dollars a crock and God knows what else.

  “Cameron takes after his father,” Nicola observes. “Not just the dark coloring. He projects the same intensity.”

  “So everyone says.”

  “Something about the set of the jaw, I think.” With a manicured fingernail Nicola flicks away a yellow jacket that has discovered her wine. “There must be, what, five or six years between him and his sister?”

  “Almost six.”

  Casually Nicola asks, “An afterthought?”

  “Not really.”

  Between her two living children, four summers ago, Laurie gave birth to a child with genetic anomalies so devastating that it could not survive. Steve insisted they not name the baby or bury it, arguing that it would be useless to prolong the attachment with ceremonies. Laurie wept at his cool rationality, his stubborn refusal to acknowledge grief or perhaps even to feel it. Both exhausted, they agreed that he move out of the house for a few months, and they came close to separating permanently. Laurie is all but certain that Nicola has heard about that wretched time in their lives and is probing to learn more. Inquisitive beasts, writers. All she says, however, is, “Helen was so happy to have a baby brother. She didn’t want to be an only child.”

  “She was lucky, then.”

  A big brown dog heads their way, running in and out of the surf, chasing a stick thrown by a man in a sun visor. The dog barks a guttural wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh. Helen looks up from her play and becomes perfectly still. But Laurie knows how the child’s heart is hammering, how desperately she’s trying not to bawl, because if she does, the other children will make fun of her. Laurie rises and moves between the advancing dog and the sand city. “Get away!” she yells. The animal feints and dances with the stick in its mouth, teasing her, then hurtles past and within moments is a quarter mile down the beach.

  When Laurie returns to the blanket, Nicola says, “She’s afraid of dogs?”

  “Always has been, I don’t know why.”

  “She’ll have to learn to deal with them sooner or later. You won’t always be around to chase them off.”

  Laurie knows Nicola is right. For her daughter’s own good, Laurie must harden her heart. Nevertheless, she feels an aching tenderness for Helen’s sharp shoulder blades, wispy hair, sunburn-prone skin.

  For a while Laurie and Nicola sit in silence, watching the tide that is swirling with froth like soapsuds. The sky has become overcast; the forecast is for rain. Laurie calls the children and begins to pack up.

  Out in the kitchen, cupboard doors bang, the girl whines, a radio jabbers mindlessly. The noxious smell of hotdog sizzling in a pan drifts into every corner of the cottage. Nicola plucks her cell out of her bag and takes it out to the screened porch. Having settled herself in a rattan chair, she has to wait nine rings for him to pick up. “It’s me,” she says.

  “Are you coming home soon?” Pertek asks in his gasping, croaky voice. Home is the East Village, where she lives with Pertek when she’s not away on reading or lecture tours.

  Nicola leans back against the chair frame and crosses her legs. “Something surprising has happened. I’ve started a new long poem. All of a sudden the idea hit me, like a punch in the gut.”

  “That’s splendid, Nicola.”

  “It may be my best stuff since Dragon. To be honest, I feel superstitious about interrupting it.”

  “I understand,” Pertek says reluctantly.

  She’s sure he’s fumbling with a match, the phone jammed between shoulder and ear. He won’t ask her to tell him about the poem, because she’s made plain her scorn for writers who talk their work away. That’s what he’s done in his declining years, Nicola believes, holding court in bars and dissipating his creative energies in a haze of smoke and alcohol fumes. “I wouldn’t have predicted it,” she says, “but I’m absolutely knocked out by Maine.”

  From behind a muffled receiver she hears spasms of coughing and throat-clearing. Pertek will be in his grave in five years, probably sooner, with no one to blame but himself.

  “The sea, the tides, the centrality of nature in people’s lives . . . ” She pauses. “I’m thinking that before I can move forward, I need to go back.”

  “Back where?”

  “Back to essentials.”

  “It’s hot as blazes here,” he says irrelevantly—self-centered, as always.

  Finally, having made a kissy sound into the iPhone, she clicks it off and walks out onto the deck. The tide is receding, leaving an expanse of dully shining pebbles. A few drops of rain blotch her silk blouse.

  The kitchen in this rented cottage is cramped, inconvenient, equipped for minimal cooking only—and that’s fine with Laurie. Her enthusiasm for preparing complex dishes disappeared after the stillbirth. Her taste buds dulled. She lost confidence that a hollandaise would thicken or popovers rise.

  She’s slicing bananas and a chicken hotdog and putting the chunks on the tray of Cameron’s highchair. Helen eats her supper in the gl
assed-in, shed-like room next to the kitchen, which serves as a dining room. From day one Helen has been a poor eater, and now her meals are virtually limited to pasta and whatever sweets she can wheedle out of her mother or father. Laurie doesn’t understand her daughter’s obstinately conservative habits, although she worries that in some way she’s to blame. A few weeks ago Helen played the part of a faerie in the end-of-term pageant at school. The role called for her to frolic, with several other pink-Spandexed faeries, in a sylvan glade. “Egregious miscasting,” Steve said to Laurie after the performance. “Helen doesn’t frolic, she plods. She’d have been more convincing as a tree.”

  “That’s cruel,” Laurie replied. But she recognized the uneasy disappointment he felt. And she’d have to admit, if pressed, that neither of her children is turning out the way she expected. Unfair to imagine that the critically damaged baby, the one too fragile to draw a single breath, was the child who would have done so. Yet Laurie dreams often about the lost child and never, ever, about the living ones.

  Having grown bored with tossing banana onto the floor, Cameron is wrestling with his harness and demanding to be let down. She wipes his fingers and unhitches him, then holds him against her and kisses the soft skin under his ear. But this is not a cuddly child.

  Released, Cameron steams off toward the opposite end of the cottage. Ten past six by the flyspecked clock over the sink. Steve will be on Route 1 by now, cursing the slow summer traffic. Someone else at CK could have handled these negotiations, Laurie thinks, big deal though they may be. She mashes cloves of garlic into butter that’s been softening in the humid air. It’s not in Steve’s nature, however, to detach himself lightly from something he has a stake in.