Jack shook his head. “Heard only about half of that.”
Nearly shouting now, she said, “I don’t have to worry about the next thing until the next thing comes. Until it does, there is a song by Shaggy to dance to.” The DJ announced the songs and singers before he played the track. Over the course of the evening, Anna discovered she liked some of this—hip-hop? urban rap?—music, liked Shaggy and Nelly and Mary J. Blige. And she was going to buy Eminem’s CD for her and Flynn’s music collection.
He took her hand and kissed it. “You know I love you,” he said.
She nodded. “I do know that. And I know that my world is better because you’re in it.”
She lit a cigarette, nodded for another round of tequila. “This place, anyway, is kind of great. I’ve spent exactly five dollars all night, and I’m sloshed. People have been buying me drinks all night long.”
He took a puff off her cigarette, then moved to a stool where he had a clear view of the staircase so he could see when Stuart came down. Finally, after an eternity, Jack saw him as he threaded his way through the throng, looking this way and that for him and Anna.
The three of them walked out into the early morning air, folded themselves into a taxi where Jack closed his eyes and dreamed of getting back to Maine, to his quiet and comfortable life with Anna and Flynn and that smelly dog. Stuart coming back to stay, to live with them in Maine, would make his life perfect. He reached for Stuart’s hand, and Anna’s, on the other side of him. Stuart’s hand was lifeless and chilly, but he didn’t pull away. Anna’s hand was warm. Jack laid his head back, closed his eyes. “Even in reunion there is parting,” he said, his dreams opening before his sleep.
“What’s that?” Anna said.
“Nothing,” Jack said. “It’s just nothing.”
THIRTEEN
AFTER THE FIRST DEATH THERE IS NO OTHER
Somebody was having a birch log fire. Anna had slept with her bedroom window cracked open and the scent of wood smoke was wafting in from somewhere. It was just after dawn, and the house this early was still quiet. She opened the curtains and looked out. Wintry. The sky heavy-looking with snow, the water at the shoreline gray and marbled with white, like a cheap cut of meat. Still, gloomy as it was, Anna loved days like this, always had.
In the kitchen, she put the coffee on then stepped out on the back porch in her nightgown. The houses along the inlet were doglegged and hidden, but she saw the smoke rising from the stand of spruce to the west, which meant Violet’s place. Anna hoped Violet would come to Jack’s birthday party tonight; Violet didn’t like crowds.
Jack had argued for a small gathering, but Anna’s instincts and Stuart’s good sense—they’d been back from San Francisco a week now, and he hadn’t shown any signs of leaving, which was fine with her—led her to invite most of the town. There were people coming in from Boston, old friends of Jack and Stuart’s, and Marvin, who hadn’t been up to see Flynn in months. Anna hoped Flynn might open up to her father in ways she no longer did with Anna. When she and Jack and Stuart got back from California, Anna questioned Greta, who had come up to Maine and spent two days with Flynn, enough time to form an opinion. Did Flynn seem unusually quiet to her? Unusually withdrawn? Melancholy or disturbed?
“She’s an unusual girl,” Greta had said.
“Yes. What have you noticed?”
Greta shook her head. “Nothing in particular, I guess, other than she seems really detached.”
Anna pressed her further.
“Well, it was like she didn’t remember who I was,” Greta said. “Like she was looking at me from the wrong side of a telescope. Or no, actually. The way you look at someone you know from a half a mile away. You’re pretty sure it’s who you think it is, but not positive until you get up close. Does that make sense?”
Anna nodded. “Do you think she’ll be okay?” She paused. “Well, that’s not a fair question.”
Greta took her hand, squeezed it. “You worry too much. You’re like a new mother.”
Back upstairs, Anna looked out over the water from her bedroom balcony, sipped her coffee. She took a deep breath, inhaled the scents of brine and wood smoke and the wet canvas from the old tent Flynn had gotten out one afternoon six weeks ago then left in a moldering heap by the wood shed. Anna had The White Glove Maids coming later this afternoon, and Stuart was going to help with the cooking—just basic things, since she had the bakery in town doing a cake and sweets, the town liquor store providing the booze, and the Shimmer Deli putting together party plates of sliced meats and cheeses. She’d hired four or five college kids to take care of the serving, music, and bartending. In fact, Anna had delegated so well, that this might be the first party she’d ever thrown she could actually enjoy.
Anna filled the tub for her bath and got some towels out of the hall closet next to Flynn’s room. She put her ear to Flynn’s door. There were strange sounds: Pacing, thumping, the sound of moving furniture. Anna walked away, went in to have her bath. She added the salts and oil, felt a pang of nostalgia. She supposed the days of Flynn keeping her company while she bathed were over. As recently as two months ago, Flynn came in when she heard the bath running and stretched out on Anna’s bed, chattered through the open door. She’d go through Anna’s closet, try on clothes and jewelry, or rummage through her makeup drawer.
Anna rapped lightly on Flynn’s door. Maybe what they needed, the two of them, was to go out for Belgian waffles at Sugar Loaf, Flynn’s favorite. It was in the next town, a twenty-minute drive on the highway. But there was time, especially with the extra help Anna had hired. The day was already gorgeous, bright but chilly, perfect for a huge breakfast. Maybe Flynn would want to shop, too. She might want something new to wear for the party.
“Flynnie? I have a great idea,” she said. The door was half ajar, and it swayed open under the pressure of Anna’s hand. The room was dark with the pulled blinds, not a crack of light from anywhere. Anna squinted at the bed, but the rumpled lumps were just blankets and pillows. She turned on the bedside lamp.
In the corner, Flynn was sitting atop a pile of household goods from the shed—a tower of wood and fabric, old draperies and tarps. “What are you doing?” Anna felt something sink inside her. “What are you doing, Flynn? What is all this?”
Flynn looked down at her, pale and wide-eyed. “It’s a meditation tower,” she said.
“Why?” How—and when—did she get all this stuff in here?
“Because I didn’t want to sit on the floor.”
Anna opened the blinds, studied the pile of junk, lumber from bookshelves Hugh had started but never finished, the baby gate they used for Poppy when she became too interested in the stairs, old tabletops, quilts. Anna touched one at eye level. She herself had pieced this, Poppy’s baby quilt. And here was a huge bag of knitting, yellow baby yarn, twenty-five skeins of it—Anna remembered buying this, too—she was going to make Poppy a blanket, something for the bed Hugh made when Poppy outgrew the crib. Anna quit the project after about fifteen rows. “I had no idea all of this stuff was still around,” Anna said, looking up at Flynn and smiling, as though it was perfectly natural to have her granddaughter nesting like a bower bird in a stack of old lumber and discarded hobbies. Flynn looked down at her impassively.
“I was thinking the two of us could go get some breakfast at Sugar Loaf. We haven’t been there in a while,” Anna said.
“I’m not very hungry.”
“You might be, once you get up and get moving. Why don’t you bathe and dress and meet me downstairs in an hour?”
But by the time Flynn emerged a little over an hour later, Anna was already involved in supervising the maids who arrived at ten instead of four—a scheduling mix-up—and polishing the silver. She pulled out the sheets for the guest beds that needed to be laundered. You never knew who might have to stay the night, too drunk to drive.
Flynn found her grandmother in the kitchen scrubbing the floors with strong-smelling soap. “I thought we were going t
o get breakfast.”
“Well, I waited, but didn’t think you were coming. I’m in the middle of things now. You’ll have to fix something for yourself. But don’t eat anywhere where the cleaning people are or have been.”
Flynn sighed, went in and fixed herself a sandwich and took it outside, past the maids, to the front porch. It was cold out here—why had Anna said it was a nice day? Everything felt cold to her now, her hands and feet, her bed. She balanced the sandwich on her knee, watched the way the jelly glinted in the light, and took a sip of what she thought was Kool-Aid but which turned out to be margarita mix—Jack was always putting his margarita mix in the wrong pitcher. She wished Stuart would leave. She knew what jealousy was; she wasn’t jealous, but she also wanted Jack to herself for a while. She overheard Stuart talking to his friend on the phone, heard them arguing, which meant he was probably going to live here forever.
Two weeks ago when she was rooting around in the shed, she found an old record player with her mother’s name printed on it in red nail polish. Three albums, the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar, The Best of Bread, and Mac Davis’s Greatest Hits. For two weeks the soundtrack from Jesus Christ Superstar had been in her head, though she only played it a couple of times. It was terrible, the line that stuck—We beseech thee…hear us—and she felt so sick, sick in a way she couldn’t describe, except that it was like something in her head was rubbing away at the skin deep inside her like a blister. The song played over and over in her head, and she thought constantly about what it was like to be dead. She was sure she was going to die, and despite what she told her grandma that day on the train tracks, she was afraid. It felt like everything in her future was rushing toward her, and everything that had already happened was pushing from behind, so that she was stuck in the narrow space between the two, barely able to breathe, living every single minute of her life all at once. She couldn’t ever relax. Even in bed, she felt strained, as if the parts of her body were all boxers and competing for a place on the mattress—if her legs relaxed, her neck craned up, if her head sunk into the pillow, her back arched. The winning parts sent the losing parts off the bed. She couldn’t let go, couldn’t just let herself drift away. Sometimes she lay at the water’s edge in the cool sand and imagined that she was already dead. Sometimes she wished very hard that it was so.
Everything hurt. Her head, her knuckles, every strand of hair. She curled up on the chaise longue in the sun, wrapped herself in a quilt and closed her eyes. She smelled the salt in the air, the fishy water and imagined herself floating, floating away to the middle of the ocean. She squeezed her eyes shut tight against the sun, covered her head with a sweater that smelled of dust and damp. She didn’t know why she felt like this, why nothing sounded like fun and nothing mattered. Being alive felt like being dead.
She listened to the crash of the waves against the shore, heard the whistle of the midday train from a few miles away and fell into a light sleep, a dream of her mother waiting for her in a train station after a long trip where she was crammed in a seat with three other people, one very old woman and two men. There was a terrible smell, like too many hot bodies, and a half-full Coke bottle on the floor full of blue-winged flies. The light inside the train got darker and darker. People began to moan and complain. Flynn looked up at the conductor, who was in almost all of her dreams lately. He caught Flynn’s eye in the rearview mirror and smiled. His teeth were black and looked like they’d been put in upside down and in the wrong places. She saw tiny faces in them. Just last night he’d sung Spanish songs to her, love songs, and turned the leaves on the trees into parrots to make her laugh. Now this.
Anna didn’t know there were so many people in the town—all of whom now seemed to be assembling in her living room in brightly colored clumps. Violet was here, in a typical strange outfit of three skirts, a Shetland sweater, and army boots, and Elmer Thibbodeux III, who went by Tripp, the pharmacist whose father and grandfather owned the drugstore that was now in his hands. Each generation of Thibbodeux druggists, in Anna’s view, looked more like used car salesmen. Tripp was hugely fat, an epicurean with delicate hands and a penchant for seaweed facials at the—inferior— salon in the center of town. He didn’t care who knew about his skin vanity, the assortment of lotions and unguents in his bathroom (on the sly he dated the facialist’s mother, who of course broadcast the quantities of money spent on skin-care treatments). The only visible difference, as far as Anna could tell, between a small town like this one now and fifty years ago lay in what people were willing to reveal; Tripp’s father, if he’d had such preferences, would never let it be known that he had forty kinds of body lotion.
“Hey, hey,” the tall man in the corner yelled, as he had every time a new guest walked in. He was somebody’s nephew; Anna couldn’t remember whose. He was about fifty, well over six and a half feet, and held a pizza box in his lap. He was, Anna guessed, a borderline case, with an I.Q. of about sixty or seventy. “I’m Asa, but people call me Toot, and I’m a palindrome,” he said, looking up at a group of gay men who had just come in.
“Oh yeah?” one of them said. “Are you out of the closet yet?”
Asa looked up with his slightly crossed eyes, his chin slick with saliva. “I brought pizza. Is this a potluck? I jerk off too much. Huh.”
Anna watched her living room fill. The party hadn’t been underway long enough for the locals to mix with the gay crowd, who were showing up in astonishing numbers; Anna had no idea Jack had so many friends. Gay people liked parties. Was that too much of a stereotype? The gifts they brought, too, were mounding toward the ceiling. Jack himself was gorgeous tonight in a tuxedo he’d brought from the city, an Armani sharkskin left over from his other life as a rich investments partner. The tux was newly retailored for him and made his thinness not less noticeable, but intentional-looking somehow. With padding and reseaming the tailor had expertly restructured the jacket so Jack’s slight camel’s hump was nearly invisible. His sparse blond hair was combed and gelled so it shone. He looked, Anna thought, like a Renaissance angel; his straight, columnar body designed to receive the lights of heaven. He’d never looked better or healthier in the time she’d known him. Jack stood in a group of men, some of whom, inexplicably, were in costume. Anna counted three Marilyn Monroes, one Roy Rogers, and a very good Judy Garland—a handsome young man who had Judy down to the thick fringe of lashes and the sleepy, half-lidded languor of intoxication. His hips were as narrow as a girl’s in the gold lamé gown. He was the one who’d brought what looked like a huge painting. It was wrapped in Christmas paper printed with demonic-looking elves. He’d left a red imprint of lips on Jack’s cheek.
Anna circulated through the crowd toward the bar, a little anxious that Marvin and Greta hadn’t shown up yet. Greta had said she was getting an early start out of Boston; Anna had anticipated that she’d be here before noon. Maybe there were last-minute arrangements with Lily. Marvin, too, now that she thought about it, was overdue.
Anna handed her martini glass to the bartender. Stuart was sitting in the bar area like a weary businessman with a high debt-ratio; he looked harangued, anxious. “Are you supposed to be Gene Kelly?” Anna asked, nodding at the raincoat he was wearing.
“Excuse me?” Stuart said.
“Your raincoat.”
“Oh, no,” Stuart said. “I’m not in costume.” He realized how ridiculous he must look, wearing this coat buttoned up and belted like the town pervert. Then again, he was standing next to a crowd of Judy Garlands and Marilyn Monroes, the nostalgic reenactment of the Marilyns they’d all been on the Gay Pride float two years ago. Jack was at the height of both his beauty and his infidelity then, though Stuart didn’t know the latter part till later. If he didn’t lose his nerve, he planned to present the coat to Jack when he opened his gifts. Most of the men here—well, all—knew of Jack’s extracurricular love life. Stuart counted at least five in the group who had indisputably slept with Jack at one time or another. It was important that it be a public
presentation; he’d already considered and dismissed the idea of giving it to Jack in private. The most recent additions were the instructions from the tampon box Jack had modified for Flynn, the stark outline he had colored in and embellished with smiles and jewelry. This technically didn’t belong in the coat that documented their life together, but it showed a newly formed side of Jack—compassion—that had begun to creep into their relationship. Not that they were officially together. Stuart didn’t know. But at this moment, being with Jack was what he wanted. David had threatened and cajoled and issued ultimatums, so Stuart stopped calling and stopped taking David’s calls. He just couldn’t be back in Boston right now. One of the graduate students agreed to teach his classes for him.
He swallowed down the last of his whiskey, hoped his nervous perspiration wasn’t ruining the dried flowers in the sleeves and soaking through the pages of The Song of Solomon pasted all around the collar. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; he feedeth among the lilies.
Two hours into the party the left side of the room had made forays toward the right, the path smoothed by alcohol, perhaps, but still, the Y2K doomsdayist Albert Cyr, who had a bunker full of canned food and bottled water, was speaking to one of the Marilyns as though they were lifelong friends, and Violet was dancing with the man dressed as Judy Garland to “I Believe in Miracles.” Jack had been opening gifts for an hour and the end was nowhere in sight.
“Anna, look,” Jack called to her. “Robert Mitchum’s entire body of work.” He held up the DVDs. “Anna will make me watch these upstairs, no doubt.”
“Just the second time through. A little Mitchum goes a long way.”
“I’d settle for a long Mitchum going a little way.”
Anna sat on the ottoman next to Jack so she could look through the loot. Cashmere socks, three Armani shirts, an original Edward Weston photograph, CDs, a hand-carved spice rack and a family-size bottle of Vitabath body lotion and shower gel. “I didn’t get near this haul when I turned fifty,” Anna said.
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