She nodded again, this time with less enthusiasm, as if she already suspected that I was about to write down anything that came into my head. Yet she drew what I needed from her purse.
“Thanks,” I said, affecting gratitude, and I leaned against the hood of Richard’s trunk, wishing this woman who hovered too close to me would finally say something. Distracted, I scribbled away with nervous energy and then stared in surprise at the notepad: out of habit I’d written “Michael Kirby,” and the beginnings of my real address. But with an eerie calmness I thought, Why not use this to my advantage?
“Here,” I said, turning to my skeptical witness, “why don’t you make sure all this is correct?”
“I’d be glad to,” she replied. She compared my note and driver’s license for any subtle discrepancy, her hands softly working at the paper, and then I knew she wanted to believe me.
“I’d appreciate it,” I said, adding a worried twinge in my voice, “if you’d leave your name and address too. You never know, this person might try to claim more damages than we got here.”
Her last suspicions withered away with these words. She took back her pen and through the invisible armor of my performance I watched the thin lips of her pinched mouth, the slight flare of nostrils as she worked out a spidery handwriting. Yet she also seemed utterly far away—if I reached out to touch her, my arm would have to stretch for miles. Was this oddly intimate distance what my mother and Laurie had grown addicted to?
The woman’s small script filled up the bottom of the page so slowly that I was afraid Richard might return before she finished. My eyes were on the mall entrance when she finally handed me the notepaper. “If more people were like you,” she said sadly, “the newspaper would be such a bore to read.”
I’d actually disappointed her. Without waiting for a reply, she turned and walked off to the mall, and I crumpled the incriminating note and stuffed it into my pocket.
Then I examined Richard’s damaged car with practiced eyes: this minor accident wouldn’t top the usual deductible. He’d have to pay for all the repair work, a small enough price for the gnawing anxiety he’d instilled in his wife. I jangled the keys in my pocket and considered making a long jagged scar down the length of his car, a little road he wouldn’t find on any map.
A strange tickling at the back of my neck made me glance up at Richard returning, only a few cars away and his eyes already on me. I wanted to kick at the red plastic pieces on the ground—why had I lingered here? Now it was too late to slip away. If only I could become someone else, and then that eerie sense of intimate isolation took hold again. I shook my head in disbelief at the shattered rear light, and as Richard drew near I asked, “Excuse me, are you the owner of this car?” Scowling at the damage, Richard muttered, “What next what next what next?” He kicked at the broken pieces, and though I cringed inside at this echo of my own impulse, I also saw it as a proof of the character I wanted him to be.
“Well, I saw the whole thing,” I offered, trying to calm him. “By the way, my name’s Tom Gibbons.”
Richard’s hand reached out and slipped through the air so quickly I pulled back, as if Sylvia’s dread ran through me. Was that a twitch of amusement that crossed his lips? If so, it was gone at once. We shook hands.
“I got a pretty good look at the car that backed into you,” I announced with a folksy touch to my voice, and I kept talking, afraid to lose it. “A red Chevy compact. I got some of the license plate, but not all of it, I’m sorry to tell you. G 56, and then after that maybe an 11, or a 17.”
“Thank you,” Richard replied, “thanks for all your trouble, really.”
“Or it could have been a 77,” I continued, warming to my character’s single-mindedness. “Or a 71, now that I think on it. I’ll guess the police know to figure out the combinations.”
“That’s okay, I’m sure my insurance will take care of this,” he mumbled. He took his keys out, ready to leave.
I wasn’t going to let him do that, not yet. “You’re right,” I said, stalling, “small bad luck is no bad luck at all.”
Richard wanted to slip past me to the car door, but I ignored his impatience. “That reminds me of my, my Uncle Henry. He knew all about bad luck.”
Richard sighed—he was going to have to hear this odd bird out. “How so?”
“All because of a little shell a man gave him.”
“A shell,” Richard repeated coolly, though his eyes revealed budding curiosity. He was suggestible.
“That’s right,” I said, stalling, for I really had no story to offer. Yet as I clutched that shell in my pocket, the smooth ridges seemed to speak to me. “It was a little shell, painted shiny black and glued together like something inside shouldn’t get out. He won it in a poker game, from an old man who had nothing left to gamble with. My uncle used to bet on anything, and after he won this shell, the old man let him in on a secret. The shell wasn’t ordinary, it could keep him from misfortune or rain it down on him, depending. The depending was this: if something went wrong in his life, Uncle Henry should accept it or it’d just get worse. Only if he learned to accept the trouble would his life ever get straight again.”
Richard kept nodding, urging me to the end of my peculiar story, but there was little hesitation in my voice—ideas were leaping over each other, a game of interior hopscotch. “My uncle threw that thing away his first chance, in the town dump on the way home. But that night he burned his finger lighting a cigarette, and even though all he did was put on a band-aid, the next day he started a fire with another cigarette on the arm of his easy chair. Of course he had to put that fire out. Then he remembered the shell, and he ran back to the trash heap and got himself a nasty cut on the hand before he finally found it. But he’d learned that old man’s lesson—he just let that cut fester and stink until it finally healed on its own.”
“This is all very interesting,” Richard broke in, “but you’ll have to excuse me. Thanks again for your help.” Sliding past me, he opened the car door and settled behind the wheel.
Determined to appear as hopelessly ineffectual as possible, I pointed to the dashboard and said, “Say, maybe that fellow hit you harder than I thought. What’s that flashing light mean?”
“It means I haven’t been given the opportunity to connect my seat belt.” He tapped at the steering wheel with an exasperated huff and I flicked my shell onto the backseat. It bounced lightly against a briefcase, the dull ping masked by the ignition turning over.
He drove off, down a false road I’d just given him—maybe he’d find it longer than any street he’d ever made up. I returned to my own car and rode away, still unsettled by the frightening ease with which I’d disguised myself, and I kept glancing in the rearview mirror, as if followed by my own inventions.
*
Sylvia sat beside me in a corner coffee shop, her hand groping for mine. The door to the coffee shop jangled open and she lifted her head sharply, but only two young women in identical black dresses had made their entrance.
She turned back to me, her lips tight. “Last night I had that dream again. We were at the movies this time, something noisy and violent. His hand was stroking my shoulder, and the more people on the screen that screamed and died, the more my shoulder hurt, it hurt until I felt like screaming—and I woke up. My shoulder throbbed, and I got out of bed to check in the bathroom mirror. I had to twist a little, and the pain had faded, but right where I still felt tender, I’m sure there was this faint pink line, like the imprint of a fingernail.”
Sylvia hesitated. “But maybe it was a, a rash? It could’ve been …”
She hedged and reconsidered and though I said nothing to contradict her, by now I knew how possible it was for anyone to be overtaken by a fierce and frightening urge. I kept to myself my spying and the easy violence I’d discovered within me, or Sylvia might find me as suspect as her husband. To chase this thought, with the same ease that I’d slipped into someone else’s voice at the mall parking lot, I assumed
the inflections of another me and asked, “Can’t you just leave him?”
Sylvia crumpled her paper coffee cup. “I’ve got to go, the bus’ll be here in a minute.”
“Bus?”
“Richard’s borrowing my car while his is in the shop.” She tossed the cup in a wastebasket. “Somebody backed into him, or something.”
So her husband had heard no warning in that story about the black shell. My face a casual mask, I kissed her good-bye.
That night I parked near Sylvia’s house, prepared to wait out the night, telling myself my presence might somehow prevent trouble. Before an hour passed, Richard tramped down the brick steps and drove off in Sylvia’s red compact. Was she all right? Ready to leave my car, I caught a glimpse of her slim figure passing by the living room window, so I sped after Richard, now nearly two blocks away.
I expected to be led back to the mall, but after a few miles he cruised down the center of our small city’s modest downtown, slowly exploring block after block for a parking space. Since Richard knew what I looked like I kept as far back as I dared, and when he managed to find a space on a dark side street I quickly drove past, my face averted.
I circled the block, returning to Main Street just in time to see him open the door to Tammy’s Tavern and vanish inside. I smiled. If he’d taken to haunting a bar, maybe he wasn’t so sure he could manage whatever trouble came his way. I could even imagine he’d found the shell and kept it hidden in a drawer, a secret waiting to reveal itself.
Again and again I rode around the block, waiting for Richard to settle into his first drink, and each slow circuit echoed that distant carousel ride with Kate when we’d both realized just how relentlessly I’d been pursuing her. One last time I turned down the side street where Richard had parked and I idled a few yards away from the red compact. I hated the thought of ramming into Sylvia’s car, but how else could I fulfill the prophecy of the mysterious shell, show her husband what kind of trouble could be had when you ignored the warning signs? Richard needed to feel singled out by fate even more.
Twisting my front wheels carefully and using all my experience as an insurance agent, I gauged exactly how I might do the most damage. The driver’s side door should collapse, and the window glass shatter to sharp rain. The side mirror should easily shear off from the impact, and already I could feel its untethering. Was this another secret poetry of my profession, an intimate familiarity with wreckage and ruin?
I scanned the rearview mirrors for any passersby. With only the empty street as my audience, I gunned the engine and tore into the little import. It groaned and crumpled and I urged against the seat belt that held me in place. I sat there a moment, utterly calm, even satisfied—Good, let Richard consider what could have happened to him if he’d been in the car. The ease of this thought so shocked me that I almost forgot to escape. But I managed to back up and speed away, searching for the safest, most deserted route home.
*
I turned from one side of the bed to the other, haunted by that battered car: I’d disfigured my love for Sylvia while trying to release her from her husband. And if he didn’t take this latest warning, what was I prepared to do next? Something had begun within me, something that might not stop. I pressed my hands against my closed eyes, afraid of any further escalation, yet still it faced me: Richard’s car forced off the road and upended in a ditch, its dark wheels slowly spinning, like a carousel, spinning until elusive sleep slowly offered me an escape.
It was no escape at all. I dreamt I was that damaged John Wayne statue, my glued pieces coming undone—first an arm, a shoulder, then the bottom of my legs lopped off, and I divided at the waist and tumbled to the ground. I tried to reach out and repair myself, but my body was wooden, and my unblinking eyes could only stare at the sky.
I rose to the alarm’s grating buzz and faced the familiar bedroom walls, frightened by what I’d done and might still do. This crazy knight-to-the-rescue spiral had to stop, and I reached for the phone and dialed Sylvia’s number, prepared to confess everything.
She answered in the middle of the first ring, as if she’d been waiting for my call.
“Sylvia, I have to tell you—”
“Michael? You wouldn’t believe—it’s … so strange—”
“What?” I rasped out.
“I don’t know how to describe—”
“Richard?”
“He came home last night with a tow truck. My car was so messed up, and his breath … but he swore he hadn’t been driving and drinking. He told another story about some hit-and-run with the parked car. But he was subdued about it. And then this morning, after he called a car rental he rang up the repair shop and told them to stop work on his car—”
“Stop work?” I repeated, not sure I’d merely heard what I wanted to hear.
“He told them to quit working on his brake light. But he didn’t stop there, then he told me not to bother fixing my car and I said, What do you mean, how am I going to get around, and he screamed at me that the car was totaled, we’d just have to live with it, and then he flicked his hand in that way and I thought he was going to … but he stopped. He looked terrified, scared of himself.”
I clutched the receiver, its dangling cord a weak tether. Somehow my foolish risks had succeeded, and now, before I could reconsider, I took one more. “Sylvia, now’s the time to ask for—”
“Oh Michael.”
“No, listen, if he seems scared of himself, don’t wait for something else to happen.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with the horoscope, does it?” Sylvia replied and I knew she was nearly ready, if only I’d keep at her.
“Look,” I said, “tell him somewhere public, like a restaurant, where he can’t give you any trouble.”
Sylvia said nothing. She wanted to hear more.
“I can wait nearby if you need help,” I said, pacing along the edge of my bed. “Call him now.”
*
I set my glass down again, adding another weak ring to the spirals on the counter, slowly working my way through this ale that grew more sour with each sip. The morning’s exhilaration now lost, I stared in the mirror at the reflection of the restaurant’s front door, directly behind me, and waited.
They were late. Perhaps Sylvia had resigned herself to living with the ambiguity of Richard’s intentions. I took another sip and considered the bleak possibilities even if she were able to leave him. How could I tell her what I’d done—for all Sylvia’s fear of her husband, he’d never accomplished the sort of violence I’d proved myself capable of. Yet if I didn’t confess, I’d have to remain a stranger to Sylvia, my secret transforming our intimacies into a sham.
I heard the door behind me open and I glanced up at the mirror again. An elderly couple made their way to the hostess’ table. I turned back to my reflection, at those calculating eyes, and there, clearer than ever, was the family resemblance to Mother and Laurie. Playacting had brought me to this, and now I understood their great loneliness, the isolation created by the stories they’d woven around themselves.
Again the door opened and Sylvia and Richard walked in. With a nervous sweep of her eyes she located me at the bar, and I stared down at my drink. If Richard followed her gaze and noticed me, everything would be ruined. Yet perhaps that’s what some part of me wanted.
When I looked up again I easily found their reflection in the mirror: an ordinary couple, sitting at a table near the window. Richard kept working away at something buried in his jacket pocket, and I knew he turned that little black shell over and over in his hand, miles down that false road. And what of all the other objects I’d given to people, or allowed Preston to sell at his gallery? I’d been so certain they’d be a comfort, but some of them might have proved to be delayed explosions, shards slowly working themselves into the lives of their new owners.
As we’d planned, Sylvia sat facing me. I took in through the mirror the tense lines of her distant mouth moving silently, her voice lost among the nearby
conversations and the sound of food served and enjoyed. Richard nodded, following whatever it was she said, those words that were about to change her life, and his, and mine.
A Matched Set
Without our usual breezy jostling and teasing, Sylvia and I prepared dinner together in silence, just as we’d done the night before and the night before that. She stirred a cream sauce for the chicken breasts with tight turns of her wrist and stared down at the tiny white whirlpool she’d created, brooding, I imagined, over Richard’s sad decline. I chopped away at a thick, sweet onion as if I could somehow rearrange the pieces of his story, this man who’d turned out to be far more complicated than the character I’d decided him to be. Sylvia had kept me a secret, as I had asked, and after Richard agreed to the divorce he’d insisted on giving Sylvia his own car, and he had hers towed off to a junkyard—a mystery to Sylvia, though I knew he was trying to reverse the influence of that scallop shell, perhaps even win her back. He took the bus to work, then he walked to work, and when it was clear that Sylvia wouldn’t return, he walked but didn’t always make it to work. Eventually he quit his job at the map company, and he split the sale of their house long before the divorce was finalized, and left town.
I reached for a tomato, slit it in half, and thought of the postcard that had arrived last week: an image of an oversized slice of cake, layered with dark gummy icing, and on the other side a faraway postmark but no return address. One little word—sorry—repeated as many times as a cramped handwriting could squeeze into such a small space. “Too late,” Sylvia had murmured, crying as she read it, “too late,” while I’d held her in my arms.
“Michael?”
I turned to see Sylvia with her hand hovering above the wok cover. She lifted it off the counter with a flourish, and there was the Felix the Cat night-light that I’d kept hidden on a corner of a closet shelf.
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