A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

by David Gates

  “Nothing,” Portia said. “I mean, the obvious. What you used to call it—uninhabited sex? I just don’t really trust him.”

  “Why would you?”

  “I don’t mean it like that. I mean, of course not. I mean, I think he could get really angry?”

  “Oh, honey,” Lily said. “So does the wife know?”

  Portia refilled her glass and passed the bottle to Lily. “Who knows what that’s about. Why are you trying to make me feel bad? I don’t go off on you. And your weird stuff. Actually, he reminds me of you.” Portia had promised to drive up with Lily to spend the Fourth with their mother in Dennis Port, just the three of them, and they would take the Hobie Cat out and scatter the ashes. Lily had already reserved a rental car. Then Portia called to say that Garrett had invited them both to watch fireworks.

  “Great, so Mom’s going to be alone on the Fourth.”

  “This can’t wait one day? Anyhow, the Rosenmans are going to be having their usual bash. She’ll be fine with it.”

  “Are you going to be fine with it?”

  “Listen, I just need to do this, okay?” Portia said. “I thought you were supposed to be the great mind.”

  But surely only the mind of Omniscience could have foreseen that Portia would go into the bedroom with the host, a lean man in his sixties with a trimmed white beard, and his plump young wife. And that she herself would let this Garrett tell her these were “cool people,” that Portia would be okay, and that they could share a cab back to Brooklyn.

  —

  On Thursday night the parking lot at Tony’s is full—weekenders getting an early start. She’s chosen her black tank top, nothing under it, and taken out her contacts in favor of her black-rimmed glasses, to make herself look more violable. There’s a lone pool table with a faux-Tiffany lamp above it and three televisions over the bar, the sound off, playing what look to be two different baseball games. Lily takes a stool at the end of the bar with an empty stool next to it. The bartender looks like—it takes her a second—the gink who sings “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” with Ruby Keeler! Whose name she happens to know is Clarence Nordstrom.

  She orders a gin and tonic and begins watching the Red Sox and Cleveland. The batter in the whiter uniform has pants that come down to his feet like pajama bottoms, but so tight you can see his kneecaps. When she was thirteen and had hit a home run in softball at summer camp, her father took her down to Philadelphia, where the Phillies lost a doubleheader to Atlanta. He’d said, “Only the Braves deserve the pair,” and refused to tell her why that was funny. She can’t really taste the gin, which is either why you should never order gin and tonic or why you should always. She turns to check out the room—stools that swivel! the best!—and some guy’s already coming toward her, as if she’s the drop of blood in a cubic mile of ocean.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you with the hair,” he says. “Looks good, actually.” His eyes go to her breasts. “Evan.”

  “Evan, right.” The video store. “Lily. Actually, it should be Portia.” Oh my: Clarence Nordstrom does pour a good one. “At least it’s not Elena, right?”

  His eyebrows come in toward his nose. “What’s wrong with Elena?”

  “Now that,” she says, “is genuinely funny. I’m liking you already.” She leans forward—okay, embarrassing, but—and fiddles with the hem of her jeans long enough for him to see what there is to see. Then she straightens up and looks him in the eyes, which is easier than you’d think: you look at the eyes. “What are you drinking, Evan?”

  “Let me.” He raises a finger and Clarence Nordstrom is there. “Another one for the young lady,” he says, “and I’ll have…” He looks at the bottles behind the bar. “Knob Creek rocks?”

  “Grazie,” she says. “So Evan. Is this a place where nothing ever happens?”

  “Apparently not,” he says. Oh, now surely he’s in the right age demographic to have listened to Talking Heads. She thinks to check his ring finger. No. But he’s been married, you can just tell. The bartender sets the drinks down. “So tell me something, is that what you do?” she says. “Work at the video store?”

  “Actually, during the year I teach media studies.” He raises his glass. “Success to crime. What do you do?”

  “Work for a magazine nobody’s ever heard of,” she says. “I mean I used to.”

  He does his eyebrow thing again; it’s imaginable that someone might find it fetching. “And you live in the city?”

  “You’re remarkable,” she says.

  “I’m not.” He takes a sip and she sees he’s already down to ice cubes.

  “Oh. Well, maybe I’m just setting the bar low tonight.”

  “Then you’re just up here visiting?”

  “Tell you what,” she says. “Why don’t we finish up the due diligence, and then I have some very expensive sherry back at the house.” She’ll decide later if weed will scandalize him.

  “Really,” he says. “Whatever the catch is, it must be a doozy.”

  “Oh, I like a man who says ‘doozy.’ ” She fishes out her lime wedge, sets it on the bar and rocks it with her fingertip. “Do you know ‘Wynken, Blynken and Nod’?” She leans forward again—those pesky jeans! “What’s the trouble, do you not want to?”

  “Oh no, believe me,” he says. “Just, I should probably tell you I’ve sort of been seeing somebody. Does that bother you?”

  “Ah,” she says. “So you’re the one with the doozy. No, actually this makes me very happy. I mean, as long as she’s not waiting outside with a gun.” She drains her glass. “It is a she?”

  His mouth comes open. “What the fuck?”

  “That’s better. You were starting to lose me when you were being so nice. I have to go use the doozy.” She gets off her stool and stands up just fine.

  —

  “Daddy used to say he was a high-functioning workaholic,” Portia said at the memorial, and got the laugh. “But today I wanted to tell you some things you didn’t know.” Their father had asked them both to speak, along with Joe Hagerty, but Lily froze while trying to write something. It was Portia who’d pulled herself together to get up there and wing it from a half-page of notes, who’d dealt with the Harvard Club and even hired the fucking bagpiper.

  Lily had been waiting in the cottage when they’d brought him home to die. They’d taken him off the plane on a stretcher, but her mother said he’d sat up straight in his seat all the way from New York. High on the morphine and the five-hundred-dollar-an-ounce hydroponic Lily found for him—a last-minute appeal to Matt—he asked her to read him “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” probably for some drifty Rosebud reason. She had to go online to find it, and now she can remember only something about rocking in the misty sea, and that the original title was “Dutch Lullaby.”

  And then she’d missed the main event because she had to be at work. She’d run through her vacation time—a stupid trip down to Chapel Hill—and the magazine would give her only two weeks of family leave, plus her personal day. When they must already have been planning to lay her off! That Tuesday night, while her car was warming up in the driveway, she promised her father she’d be back on Friday, very late. According to Portia, he’d tried to wait for her—he’d made it till three that afternoon—but the fact remained.

  Their father, Portia told his friends and colleagues, had taken them to see Dexter Gordon at the Blue Note and Pavarotti at the Met and Nureyev at ABT, taught them to sail and to change a tire. Every Wednesday had been movie night, eight o’clock sharp. “When I was little,” she said, “I believed that Fred Astaire could actually dance on the ceiling. I believed my father could too. And Daddy, I always will.” Well: after that, one hardly needed “Amazing Grace.”

  —

  When she finally gets poor Evan out of Tony’s bar, Lily keeps his headlights in her rearview mirror, though what’s she going to do if he takes it into his head to peel off? He pulls up next to her in the driveway, and she sees him turn his cell off before getting out of
his car.

  “You know, I go by here all the time,” he says. “I always wondered what it was like inside. How old is this house?”

  “Old.” She takes him by the hand. “Come.”

  She has to put the candle over on the dresser so the fan doesn’t blow it out, and in this light he’s really not unthinkable. After he gets off the first time she has to persuade him that no, she likes getting (as he puts it) turned over, and then she has to talk him through it. So it was smart to have said nothing about weed. This time he groans as if wounded. Sweet man. The due diligence had revealed that he was divorced and that, surprise surprise, the wife got the house.

  After his breathing smooths out, with a growl at the end of every outbreath, she eases out of bed and goes down to the kitchen. She takes one hit—just one, or she’ll never get to sleep—and settles onto the sofa, gets to work with her fingers, then has a superstitious thought: she mustn’t come while thinking up Elena—or else in that white instant when she’s bodiless she’ll find Elena there, waiting to snatch her through into the world of the dead! Okay well now she has to, just to prove the thought wrong. When she returns to herself, still breathing hard, she understands what a crazy risk she’s just taken.

  She goes back upstairs, lies down so they’re not touching and feels herself start to drift. Poor, sweet man. But then it’s daylight and he’s all over her again.

  “What time is it, baby?” She rolls out from under him. Maybe she can get out of this one with hands and the Astroglide she was so prescient to pack—or how about her hands cupped around his hands? This always got Matt.

  When he catches his breath again, he says, “You’re pretty incredible.”

  She’s wiping up with last night’s tank top, which is a lost cause anyway. “So are you going to have some ’splainin’ to do?”

  “Do we have to talk about it right this second?”

  “I’m not trying to steal you.” She lies back down, pressing the girls into his arm. “Just borrow you a little more.”

  “Shit,” he says, “I forgot I have to open up this morning.”

  “Haven’t you already?” She remembers he’d done that same little thing last night, with the eyebrows. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

  She gets out of bed and puts on a T-shirt, which comes down just far enough to cover and still give him glimpses, then goes down to the kitchen. Spooning coffee into the French press, she hears the toilet flush upstairs. She puts water on to boil and goes into the half bath off the living room.

  When she comes out, he’s sitting on an arm of the sofa, fully dressed, even his loafers. “So we have to talk about tonight,” she says. “What time can you come over?”

  “I actually can’t tonight.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Now let me guess.”

  He’s turning red—sweet to see. “I could see you Sunday night.”

  “That’s going to be too late,” she says. “Why don’t we have our coffee out on the porch.”

  “You going back to the city?”

  “Oh, you sound so hopeful,” she says. “Has something happened to my incredibleness?”

  “I told you the situation,” he says.

  She darts over to the front door and leans her back against it. “What if I don’t move?”

  “Please don’t fuck with me,” he says.

  Clearly he means the “please” to sound ominous, but she can hear the “please comma” beneath it. He doesn’t seem like a hitter. “If you don’t come back tonight,” she says, “you’re going to jerk off to me the rest of your life.”

  “Shit,” he says. “I fuckin’ knew you were crazy. Let’s not make this a big drag for both of us, okay?”

  So he has some wit after all. And some woman, surely, has loved him. Maybe his wife, for a while. And maybe his new lady is beginning to love him too, the lady she’s gotten him to betray.

  —

  When Lily had come by to pick her up in the rented Ford Explorer, two days after the Fourth, Portia opened the passenger door, stuck her suitcase in and said, “I don’t really want to talk, okay?” She made her seat go back and slept for most of the drive to Dennis Port. Lily set the cruise control between seventy and seventy-five—the golden mean!—and they passed through one public radio listening area into another, like Venn diagrams. Lily learned that since the solstice they’d been losing two minutes of sunlight every day, and that seven people had been killed in two suicide bombings—she didn’t catch where—and that Terry Gross’s nervous fake laugh was getting worse. As they were going over the Bourne Bridge, Portia opened her eyes and said, “I can feel you over there judging me. So what did Garrett have to say?”

  “Why should he get to say anything?” Lily said. “Me either, for that matter.”

  “Oh, you’re so Zen,” Portia said. “Fuck you. Fuck me, actually. So who did he go off with?”

  “Nobody,” Lily said. “Actually, he was nice enough to drop me at my place.”

  “Really. Are we talking about the same person?” Portia looked over at Lily. “Oh. And were you nice enough to invite him up?”

  “Come on, I have some boundaries,” Lily said. “So does he, apparently.”

  Portia settled back in her seat. “I need to get my head around this.”

  They found their mother out on the deck with a canvas on her easel. “No, don’t look,” Janet said. “How was the traffic? I always hated the drive up here.” Their father’s favorite car game had been for them all to take turns improvising verses to “I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly”; once he’d rhymed “swallowed your father” and “Why did she bother?” Their mother hadn’t spoken again until they got there. “Listen, I’ve got tuna steaks marinating. What do you think, should we just go out and do this while we’ve still got some daylight?”

  “How far out are we going?” Portia said. “I don’t like those clouds.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, we can wade out and do it,” Janet said. “I doubt he’s going to know the difference.”

  “You don’t know what he knows,” Lily said.

  “Do you think he’s hovering? You’re not back on pot, are you?”

  “Mom, we have to respect his wishes,” Portia said.

  “Oh, well far be it from me,” Janet said. “I know how much my wishes always counted.”

  “I think you did all right for yourself, Mother,” Lily said.

  “Can we not get into this now?” Portia said.

  “No, I like it that she thinks,” Janet said. “It’s a very attractive quality. Or would it be an attribute? Whatever it was your father had.”

  “Please?” Portia said.

  “I’m sorry, am I ruining the occasion?” Janet walked back over behind her canvas. “This is vile.” She took it off the easel and dropped it facedown on the decking. “I hope he is hovering, actually. Just to sweeten up his eternal reward.”

  —

  How’s this for prescience? Of course Lily will turn her cellphone on, and of course Garrett will call, and of course she will give him directions. And again she will fuck a man in a dead girl’s bed. Two in two days? She’s unstoppable!

  She rolls back over against Garrett, fingers creeping around in his chest hair; you always come when it’s the bad boy. The fan’s still roaring, drying her sweat, giving her chills. “So,” she says, “I think I’m going to go for sixteen men on a dead man’s chest. Or is the pirate thing over with?”

  “Hmm, I’m picturing that,” he says. “Looks a little gay.”

  “Have you ever done two women?”

  “Why? Is that a thing that interests you?”

  “Did you and Portia do that?” she says.

  He takes her hand away and sits up against the headboard. “I don’t think I need to answer these questions.”

  “I forgot,” she says. “You go case by case. Is it hot to fuck sisters?”

  “What about you? Is it hot to fuck somebody who fucked your sister?”

  She puts her legs
over the side and stands up. “Do you really have to leave so soon?”

  He grabs her arm and yanks her back onto the bed.

  “What are you going to do?” she says. “Rape me?”

  He lets go of her arm. He reaches down, finds his T-shirt and pulls it over his head. Stands up and steps into his briefs. “Question.” Picks up his shirt. “Is Portia going to know about this?”

  Lily makes no move to get up again. “Come on, wouldn’t you rather just improvise?” she says. “It should be more exciting for you. Test your little”—she flitters her fingers—“ganglions. You can watch her face for signs. If you’re looking for your pants, they’re over by the door.”

  From the bedroom window, she watches his car back out of the driveway; her arm still hurts where he grabbed it. Already eight o’clock, and getting dark. Two minutes less light every day. She’s got three hours to fill just to get to movie time—and she’s already run through everything she’s brought except Royal Wedding, which she really doesn’t want to watch. And then? And after that? She hasn’t had her swim today, could that be what’s wrong? The recreation area closes at sunset, but that shouldn’t stop a girl who’s already figured out so much.

  She leaves her underwear on the floor, pulls on her jeans and gets her father’s white shirt out of the closet, goes downstairs and tucks the one-hitter and her lighter into the pocket. She’s halfway to the lake before she looks down and sees she’s driving barefoot. Since the gate’s closed, she passes on to the far side, where it’s privately owned and narrow paved drives have signs arching above them: Lochbrae, Breezy Shores, Pinewoods. She turns into a lane with a small sign simply reading Private and parks on the dirt, out of sight of the road, then reaches into her pocket.

  When she gets out of the car, the white shirt seems to glow in the dimness, so she takes it off, her jeans too, and walks, naked, through the trees, on merciful pine needles, to where she can see water, a dock, a cottage with lights on. She looks right, looks left, then leaves the cover of the pines and tiptoes toward the grassy bank. These people won’t spot her: she’s been gifted with invisibility. Only the dead can see her nakedness, and haven’t they been watching all along? She steps onto the moss at the edge of the bank—its softness feels green—and into the weeds and water. Her feet sink to the ankles in muck. It’ll be warmer once she gets in. She wades till the water’s up to mid-thigh, leans forward and launches herself.