“Yes.” Kitchen saw how, for someone unacquainted with the sisters, Clef’s actions might need interpreting. “Yes, she asked you to do that. Bring Lark back to sleight.”
“So what’s the problem?”
West’s levity irritated Kitchen. Kitchen followed Clef’s logic, but he didn’t relish having to explain it to this near-stranger who, though puppetmaster, played at clown.
“As a hand. You’re bringing her back as a hand. Clef thought that you’d make Lark what she’d been before.”
“But the book, you were there—Clef gave me the book. And I told her I was looking for a hand.”
“I know. You did. But this is where she has gaps. She never imagined. She doesn’t see Lark’s talent as …”
“Genius?”
“Just so. She doesn’t see it that way. Her older sister was out of step. Problematic. Clef thought you’d bring her back and she’d quietly finish what she couldn’t before.”
“You’re telling me Clef thinks Lark …”
“Failed, yes. Where Clef succeeded. And the book—proof that Lark regrets having left. Clef never imagined the sleights would pan out, or even that what Lark draws are sleights at all.” Kitchen was shaking his head. He’d seen the book. He’d known what West would do, could kick himself for not trying to make Clef see it. He made an apology with his hands as he spoke. “So she sees this as a betrayal.”
“But your director …” West was still unbelieving. “He told me Clef has been working on architectures based on Lark’s work.” West grunted, shifted the peas. He looked toward the door where he’d left the fidgeting man. “What a fucking idiot.”
“No. I mean, yes. But he happens to be right. Clef has created over a dozen new architectures from Lark’s sketches.23 We’ve brought them. She’s been obsessed, and the designs are—they’re fantastic.”
“So. I don’t … I don’t get it.”
“Clef, she has her … gaps. I do get them. Eventually, they work out—or into—a sort of pattern.”
When Clef came back around six, Kepler was packing up the bus for the motel. She headed to the restroom, where T cornered her. Clef’s back was pressed against the wet sink as T apologized.
“We shouldn’t have done that and I’m sorry we did.”
“What?” asked Clef, a little taken aback by the moon-faced woman who stood so close.
“Once West heard you’d brought them, he made your director bring them in. We worked with them all day blind—your architectures. I wouldn’t blame you for being upset, but I have to tell you, they’re wonderful.” And then T extended her hand. Simply that. And an invitation to dinner at her place. “Please bring Kitchen.” Clef didn’t refuse.
Though T hadn’t said, Clef assumed West would be there. T had the sway of a negotiator, the fluid wrists, open face. Even the cold water on the small of Clef’s back worked to T’s advantage—Clef felt rigid: the woman in front of her was a move toward warmth, flexibility. And Clef, having spent the bitter afternoon wandering through suburban decay, was ready for wine, bread, a yielding. Her first fury was ebbing. She would offer West an opportunity to explain.
CLEF: I presume you can tell me when my sister will be here?
WEST: Byrne said they’re leaving tomorrow. It seems there was some issue with arranging the nanny for her daughter, but it was resolved.
CLEF: My niece?
WEST: Yes, of course. I’m sorry—your niece.
CLEF: And for how long will you be asking Lark to abandon her family?
KITCHEN: (from across the room) Clef, come over here and take a look at this music.
MONK’S DIRECTOR: It certainly is an impressive collection. Are you from Mississippi, T?
T: New Orleans originally.
MONK’S DIRECTOR: Oh.
T: But Josh is the blues baron.
CLEF: Who’s Josh?
T: My husband Josh.
CLEF: You mean you aren’t West’s?
KITCHEN: Clef.
T: No, that’s okay. I’m not anyone’s, Clef. But why doesn’t everyone come to the table for some salad? The pasta will be ready in a few.
CLEF: Where is Josh?
T: He’s in DC preparing for trial. He’s a lawyer. It’s a big case, I think—class-action suit, another insurance company. He likes this kind of work.
CLEF: “This kind” meaning lucrative?
T: “This kind” meaning punitive.
CLEF: Ahh.
MONK’S DIRECTOR: Are these sunflower seeds?
T: Pine nuts.
WEST: I think, Clef, that Lark will stay up here until she feels that she’s accomplished what she needs to. She’s welcome to bring her family. I’d be happy to help arrange that.
KITCHEN: Then you’ve spoken with her?
WEST: Not yet, but Byrne assures me—
CLEF: Who the hell is Byrne?
WEST: (pauses, looks across the table at T)
T: WEST found him. He’s an unbelievable writer—Byrne wrote our last precursor. Phenomenal. But you’ll get to hear it for yourselves … along with some new work, I think. (pause) Also, Byrne is my lover.
CLEF: Your lover?
T: One of them.
CLEF: (laughing, lifts a wine glass) To T. Faulty to her nest.
T: Thank you, Clef. I deeply believe in nests. Are we at peace then?
CLEF: Armistice.
WEST: Will you come to rehearsal tomorrow, Clef? We weren’t entirely successful with your designs this afternoon.
MONK’S DIRECTOR: I tried to explain to them what I’d seen you …
CLEF: I’ll come. (to Kitchen) What did you do all day? You didn’t help them?
KITCHEN: I didn’t show them anything. But I meant to tell you … the designs, Clef—they started elucidating themselves.
T: It’s true. No one was having any luck—
MONK’S DIRECTOR: Despite my efforts.
T: —until we split up and started improv-ing in separate studios.
KITCHEN: I just watched. They actually came up with most of our links and some that we hadn’t.
CLEF: Hadn’t yet.
KITCHEN: Yes. You’re right. Yet.
Lark spent the week before they left like something in a locked box. Byrne hung back, trying not to require the extra energy a guest requires, as she made preparations to join Kepler and Monk in York. Drew, Byrne saw, was sad but wanted a whole wife. Lark sat at the kitchen table those last days scribbling instructions and making calls, while Drew busied himself with the domestic space around her, drying the dishes, clearing crumbs from the mustard-colored linoleum, pausing often as he passed to touch her head. During these moments, Byrne looked away. He’d seen Drew make the same bear-like gesture with Nene. The man’s hands lacked coherence. Though they clearly loved him, when Drew pawed at them, something inside his wife and child ducked.
While the couple spent their remaining nights up late talking and having, except for the bedframe, soundless sex, Byrne browsed the books lining the thin walls of the guest room—mostly history and theoretical science written for the layperson. He skimmed an old volume on plate tectonics, newer ones on chaos and string theory, and devoured a biography of Linnaeus and his system of morphological categorization: naming bound by shape. Byrne kept study of Lark’s book for the mornings, but waited to put down the words evoked by her sketches until the afternoons.24 In the evenings, while Drew made dinner, he walked with Nene to the lake. He was teaching her to skip stones.
“You’re getting good, Nene. That was four.”
“I can do six.” She leaned over and brushed the red clay off a thin oval rock. She held it up for Byrne to inspect. He nodded.
“When have you done six? I never saw that.”
Nene let the stone go with a deceivingly faint flick. Six dips in and out of the calm. Across the water a jagged bruise of pines spread from earth to sky, in world and in mirror. She looked up at Byrne.
“My daddy taught me this summer. He’s better at it than you. So’s
Newt.”
“You didn’t tell me you knew how.” Byrne looked out over the vague, multiple rippling and dropped his next throw—a small yellow-white one—onto the bank. He brought the empty hand to his other and started massaging his wrist and forearm.
“You said you wanted to teach me.”
“Nene, that’s like lying.” Byrne wasn’t sure why he was upset. He struggled with his tone, tried not to accuse her. Of what, being four? After three weeks with Nene, he knew this revelation of her past history skipping stones was meant to hurt him. He asked her. “Why would you do that?”
“You’re taking Mommy away.” Nene wasn’t sulking. She was answering.
“Yes, but only for a little while. She’ll be back soon. I know she’s explained this to you.” Byrne was irritated to be comforting her—she’d wounded him. And he felt ridiculous, having wounds.
“Mommy doesn’t always know how things will result. Newt says she wouldn’t have made a very good scientist. She ignores certain factors.” Nene enunciated these words as if she’d recently been made aware of their secondary definitions. “What factors is she ignoring?”
“For example: before anything can mean, it must suffer understanding.”
“Where did you hear that?” Byrne barely registered Nene’s language as extraordinary anymore, just odd—like a streak of white hair, or an ominous birthmark. But this was aphoristic even for her. Byrne didn’t like to speak of Nene’s dead grandfather as if he were a playmate, but sometimes it was the only way to get a response from her. “Did Newt tell you that?”
“That’s silly. Newt thinks that stuff is bunk. It’s from Mommy’s book, page forty-two. Don’t you remember?”
“Nene, you shouldn’t poke around in other people’s—in my things.” Byrne didn’t know whether to scold or soothe. Parts of Lark’s book, the photographs mostly, had given him nightmares. He hadn’t paid as much attention to the words—journal entries, captions, quotes. They made him uncomfortable. He read just enough to assure himself they weren’t precursors. “What do you think what you just said means, Nene?”
“It means Mommy’s going to make people hurt. Because she does. Because she thinks it’s right.” Nene sounded, as she rarely did, angry. Byrne watched as her collarbones pulled forward, grew sharp.
Byrne felt cold. The air was wet with lake and the sun, low. Bits of trash at the water’s edge were beginning to look placed—the right shadows adding significance to a candy wrapper, an abandoned sock. Byrne got down, reddening his knees in the mud to look into the girl’s gray eyes. He was either forgiving or being forgiven, he didn’t know which, and Nene’s terrible smallness was starting to show. When it reached full pout, she kicked a Red Bull can into the water, then crossed the short distance between them. She bent over so that the top of her head pressed like a miniature cannonball into Byrne’s chest. He reached out and with his clear hand took her shoulder. He didn’t pull her any further in, and she didn’t cry. His other hand and the rock it held rose and fell beside them, unable to settle.
For the first few hours in the car, Lark said nothing, although she did point out each atrocity billboard as they passed it. Byrne didn’t mention his proprietary feelings toward them, or toward Nene for that matter. They were approaching the blue mountains—drunken giant-brides, sprawling and roomy. The morning was in mist, and the car had already begun pressing itself drowsily against the curves when Byrne asked if they could take a bathroom break.
Lark answered him, “That’s a type of torture you know, an interrogation technique—not letting someone urinate.”
“I did,” said Byrne, “I watch TV.” But the flippancy struck out, humorless, so he apologized by adding, “I’ve also heard a few war stories.”
Lark eyes flickered from the road, appraising him. “Have you?” She wasn’t being sarcastic, and Byrne blushed as if he’d been caught bragging.
“On Sundays, Gil sometimes took me to the VA hospital where he worked. I think it was supposed to be punishment.”
“Gil is your father?”
“Was. I could take a bleach-and-urine sauna in the basement laundry with him, or I could pretend I was someone’s grandson in one of the common areas.”
Lark spoke into the windshield. “You chose the latter.”
“I did.”
Pissing, Byrne realized he’d had a favorite. There had been, always beside the aquarium, a powder-haired man who’d smelled of menthol cigarettes and Dial soap. Byrne hadn’t been scared of this patient; his damage was less apparent than most. Once he had told Byrne how he’d been captured outside Dresden. How he’d been made to work with three other POWs in the German camp. Digging latrines starving. How one day, the soldiers had heard enemy fire—Allied fire—and this man, but not the others, had started walking toward it. No one had stopped him. How he’d walked, how he couldn’t have run—he thought it must’ve been two hours, maybe four miles. And not been shot. How, hospitalized a week later in England, he’d weighed thirty-eight kilos. The old man had said that frail as he was now, he weighed double that. “And back before the war,” he whispered to Byrne, “I boxed.”
Byrne emerged from the interior of the truck stop. “Truck stops,” Lark had explained before pulling off, “make more coffee more often.” Byrne had noted only a burnt smell. His recovery of the old man’s tale was like an itch, and as he recounted it to Lark, he felt a little too excited. She was filling the tank.
“Why do you think that one stuck?”
“He was an elegant man, didn’t look tough. But the way he told it—it was nothing. Losing half his body weight was nothing.”
“There are worse things.”
“Yes.”
“No.” Lark was suddenly adamant. “There aren’t. You can’t do comparative suffering. It doesn’t work.” She ran a hand through her dark hair. “You just like how he didn’t make you feel awful. Elegant, you said. You were eight? ten? He made you feel big—told you that story in a way that didn’t make it seem impossibly far away or insane. But I don’t admire pretty, or what’s … self-abnegating.” Her hand fell away from her head. “Of course, I’m not a man.”
It pissed Byrne off a little, actually—Lark, condescending. As if he were much younger than she was. He wasn’t.
“How about you? Vomiting up emotions—that’s not self-abnegation? not denial? Christ then, what do you call it?”
Lark pulled out, gasoline dripping. She stared at Byrne blankly, then turned back to the pump to retrieve the receipt—glancing at, then crumpling it.
“What do I call it? I don’t. You can’t imagine what it’s like … not to have desires but be populated by them.”
“Tell me then.”
It was a dare. She cocked her head at him. This was a confessional truck stop, perhaps. But she couldn’t talk about it, not after that. He would compare. He would hold her story up against his war hero’s and find it lacking.
Byrne was gnawing on some jerky he’d picked up inside. Lark watched his mouth, his jaw, the willful working of the flesh.
“What does that taste like?”
Byrne swallowed before answering. “It’s a little like … like a beef raisin.”
Lark laughed. She was pretty when she laughed, and it was electric, such an abrupt shift in the dynamics of her face. Byrne found himself smiling back, bits of jerky in his teeth. Then Lark opened the car door, signaling that the conversation was soon to end. She didn’t converse well while driving.
“My mother would sometimes put raisins in our lunches. Press them into the sandwiches to make desiccated little eyes and mouths. Clef loved it, but I wasn’t … convinced.”
Clef walked outside the room to go find coffee, maybe a bagel, and saw a paper on the ground two doors down, big photo and headline font too large. She picked it up. As she read, her stomach knotted. And then a lower cramp, lower than her stomach. She dropped the paper. Ran back through her motel room into the bathroom, fell to her knees. She wanted to, found she couldn’t vom
it. She reached over to lock the door and then slumped, forehead against the toilet bowl, staring at the crossword of tiny black, white, and blue-green floor tiles for minutes. She couldn’t identify the size or shape of the repeating unit, which infuriated her. Kitchen eventually knocked.
“I saw it, Clef. Come out. Please.”
“I’m going to be sick.”
“Then let me in.” Kitchen waited. He tried again. “Or I’ll huff and—”
“Children die all the time. Famine. War. So there’re killers in the neighborhood. That makes it special?”
“It tends to.”
That morning they barely worked. It was all over the papers and on TV. To report it was to encapsulate the current world-sickness, different from past world-sicknesses only in the viral speed with which things of horror could be repackaged for re-creation. Still, doorsteps mattered. These twenty-three, possibly twenty-five, had been killed in York, a few streets over from West’s house—in a well-kept and mannered neighborhood, if such places were to be believed, which they weren’t. They’d all been young, from what could be told, between five and eight. And these were recent killings, all within the past half decade. It was like bad cinema—the mug shots of the couple hovered, Bundy-style, around a-little-too-good-looking, but white like most and in their mid-thirties; the husband sang in the church choir every Sunday, and the wife was on her company’s softball team—apparently, a solid second baseman.
The sleightists had drifted in behind schedule that morning, and then done not much. West ordered some salads for a late lunch. He sat both troupes down on the floor in the largest chamber. Still clutching the plastic utensils he’d handed out at the door, some of them stretched hamstrings and quads. But no one ate, as no one had worked.
“This has nothing to do with us,” West said, “but we can use it.”
Haley glared. Many of Monk’s members nodded as she spoke. “I think we should call this day shot—I mean, you guys live here. We’re just passing through, and it still feels like I’ve been kicked in the gut.” She started, “Did you see how they …” then broke off.
Sleight Page 11