“She’s a plain Jane” is what he told his nephew when he came over for breakfast. “No substance, no depth. Full of herself for no good reason.”
“Maybe I’ll go over and say hello,” the nephew said, but he didn’t.
And then, a few days later, Jeb heard the thunderous squeal of a motorcycle peeling up the road. For hours, he listened at his basement window, nodding his head to the rhythmic tempo of the girl’s headboard hitting the wall, the gasps and grunts and growls. When it was over, he took off on foot down the road into town and spent the whole afternoon ambling like a stray dog under the striped storefront awnings, dodging the daylight, lest his white skin burn and blister. He licked a vanilla ice cream cone and regarded his slumped silhouette in the shop windows. He straightened his posture as best he could, but he was stooped by nature. He could still be a god on Earth, however, if only he found the right tribe. That would be something—to be worshipped and beloved. Jeb whistled through the warm evening streets, imagining this wonderful new place and all the stupid people who would gasp and fall to their knees in ecstasy every time he shuffled past.
THE BEACH BOY
The friends met for dinner, as they did the second Sunday of every month, at a small Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. There were three couples: Marty and Barbara, Jerry and Maureen, and John and Marcia, who had recently returned from a week-long island getaway to celebrate their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary. “Were the beaches beautiful? How was the hotel? Was it safe? Was it memorable? Was it worth the money?” the friends asked.
Marcia said, “You had to see it to believe it. The ocean was like bathwater. The sunsets? Better than any painting. But the political situation, don’t get me started. All the beggars!” She put a hand over her heart and sipped her wine. “Who knows who’s in charge? It’s utter chaos. Meanwhile, the people all speak English!” The vestiges of colonialism, the poverty, the corruption—it had all depressed her. “And we were harassed,” she told the friends. “By prostitutes. Male ones. They followed us down the beach like cats. The strangest thing. But the beach was absolutely gorgeous. Right, John?”
John sat across the table, swirling his spaghetti. He glanced up at Marcia, nodded, winked.
The friends wanted to know what the prostitutes had looked like, how they’d dressed, what they’d said. They wanted details.
“They looked like normal people,” Marcia said, shrugging. “You know, just young, poor people, locals. But they were very complimentary. They kept saying, ‘Hello, nice people. Massage? Nice massage for nice people?’”
“Little did they know!” John joked, furrowing his eyebrows like a maniac. The friends laughed.
“We’d read about it in the guidebook,” Marcia said. “You’re not supposed to acknowledge them at all. You don’t even look them in the eye. If you do, they’ll never leave you alone. The beach boys. The male prostitutes, I mean. It’s sad,” she added. “Tragic. And, really, one wonders how anybody can starve in a place like that. There was food everywhere. Fruit on every tree. I just don’t understand it. And the city was rife with garbage. Rife!” she proclaimed. She put down her fork. “Wouldn’t you say, hon?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘rife,’” John answered, wiping the corners of his mouth with his cloth napkin. “Fragrant, more like.”
The waiter collected the unfinished plates of pasta, then returned and took their orders of cheesecake and pie and decaffeinated coffee. John was quiet. He scrolled through photos on his cell phone, looking for a picture he’d taken of a monkey seated on the head of a Virgin Mary statue. The statue was painted in bright colors, and its nose was chipped, showing the white, chalky plaster under the paint. The monkey was black and skinny, with wide-spaced, neurotic eyes. Its tail curled under Mary’s chin. John turned the screen of his phone toward the table.
“This little guy,” he said.
“Aw!” the friends cried. They wanted to know, “Were the monkeys feral? Were they smelly? Are the people Catholic? Are they all very religious there?”
“Catholic,” Marcia said, nodding. “And the monkeys were everywhere. Cute but very sneaky. One of them stole John’s pen right out of his pocket.” She rattled off whatever facts she could remember from the nature tour they’d taken. “I think there are laws about eating the monkeys. I’m not so sure. They all spoke English,” she repeated, “but sometimes it was hard to understand them. The guides, I mean, not the monkeys.” She chuckled.
“The monkeys spoke Russian, naturally,” John said, and put away his phone. The table talk moved on to plans for renovating kitchens, summer shares, friends’ divorces, new movies, books, politics, sodium, and cholesterol. They drank the coffees, ate the desserts. John peeled the wrapper off a roll of antacids. Marcia showed off her new wristwatch, which she’d purchased duty free at the airport. Then she reapplied her lipstick in the reflection in her water glass. When the check came, they all did the math, divvying up the cost. Finally, they paid and went out onto the street and the women hugged and the men shook hands.
“Welcome home,” Jerry said. “Back to civilization.”
“Ooh-ooh ah-ah!” John cried, imitating a monkey.
“Jesus, John,” Marcia whispered, blushing and batting the air with her hand as if shooing a fly.
Each couple went off in a different direction. John was a bit drunk. He’d finished Marcia’s second glass of wine because she’d said it was giving her a headache. He took her arm as they turned the corner onto East Eighty-second Street toward the park. The streets were nearly empty, late as it was. The whole city felt hushed, focused, like a young dancer counting her steps.
Marcia fussed with her silk scarf, also purchased duty free at the airport. The pattern was a paisley print in red and black and emerald green and had reminded her of the vibrant colors she’d seen the locals wearing on the island. Now she regretted buying the scarf. The tassels were short and fuzzy, and she thought they made the silk look cheap. She could give the scarf away as a gift, she supposed, but to whom? It had been so expensive, and her closest friends—the only people she would ever spend so much money on—had just seen her wearing it. She sighed and looked up at the moon as they entered the park.
“Thank God Jerry and Maureen are getting along again,” Marcia said. “It was exhausting when they weren’t.”
“Marty was funny about the wine, wasn’t he?” John said. “I told him I was fine with Syrah. What does it matter? Que sera, sera.” He unhooked his arm from Marcia’s elbow and put it around her shoulder.
“It gave me such a headache,” Marcia complained. “Should we cut across the field or go around?”
“Let’s be bold.”
They stepped off the gravel onto the grass. It was a dark, clear night in the park, quiet except for the sound of distant car horns and ripping motors echoing faintly through the trees. John tried for a moment to forget that the city was right there, surrounding them. He’d been disappointed by how quickly his life had returned to normal after the vacation. As before, he woke up in the morning, saw patients all day long, returned home to eat dinner with Marcia, watched the evening news, bathed, and went to bed. It was a good life, of course. He wasn’t suffering from a grave illness; he wasn’t starving; he wasn’t being exploited or enslaved. But, gazing out the window of the tour bus on the island, he had felt envious of the locals, of their ability to do whatever was in their nature. His own struggles seemed like petty complications, meaningless snags in the dull itinerary that was his life. Why couldn’t he live by instinct and appetite, be primitive, be free?
At a rest stop, John had watched a dog covered in mange and bleeding pustules rub itself against a worn wooden signpost. He was lucky, he thought, not to be that dog. And then he felt ashamed of his privilege and his discontentedness. “I should be happy,” he told himself. “Marcia is.” Even the beggars tapping on car windows, begging for pennies, were smiling. “Hello, nice
people,” the beach boys had said. John had wanted to return their salutations and ask what it was that they had to offer. He’d been curious. But Marcia had shushed him, taken his hand, and plodded down the beach with her eyes fixed on the blank sand.
Crossing the lawn in Central Park, John now tried to recall the precise rhythm of the crashing waves on the beach on the island, the smell of the ocean, the magic and the danger he’d sensed brewing under the surface of things. But it was impossible. This was New York City. When he was in it, it was the only place on Earth. He looked up. The moon was just a sliver, a comma, a single eyelash in the dark, starless sky.
“I forgot to call Lenore,” Marcia was saying as they walked. “Remind me tomorrow. She’ll be upset if I don’t call. She’s so uptight.”
They reached the edge of the lawn and stepped onto a paved path that led them up to a bridge over a plaza, where people were dancing in pairs to traditional Chinese music. John and Marcia stopped to watch the dark shapes moving in the soft light of lanterns. A young man on a skateboard rumbled past them.
“Home sweet home,” Marcia said.
John yawned and tightened his arm around her shoulder. The silk of Marcia’s scarf was slippery, like cool water rippling between his fingers. He leaned over and kissed her forehead. There she was, his wife of nearly thirty years. As they walked on, he thought of how pretty she’d been when they were first married. In all their years together, he had never been interested in other women, had never strayed, had even refused the advances of a colleague one night, a few years ago, at a conference in Baltimore. The woman had been twenty years his junior, and when she invited him up to her room John had blushed and made a stuttering apology, then spent the rest of the evening on the phone with Marcia. “What did she expect from me?” he’d asked. “Some kind of sex adventure?”
“We can watch that movie when we get home,” Marcia said as they reached the edge of the park. “The one about the jazz musician.”
“Whatever you like,” John said. He yawned again.
“Maureen said it was worth watching.”
“It’s unconscionable what they are doing to you, Eduardo,” Marcia said to the doorman in the lobby of their building. The doormen were petitioning management to provide a proper chair for them to sit in. All they had now was a tall stool with no back. “To have to stand for that many hours, doesn’t that constitute torture? John is going to have a word with them. They’ll do something. They have to.” Marcia pulled the silk scarf from her neck and folded it in her hands.
Eduardo leaned on his little podium, propped his chin in his hand. “How was the vacation?” he asked.
“Oh, it was wonderful, wonderful. Everything. I mean, the seafood was just beyond compare! The ocean was like bathwater,” Marcia answered. “And now we’re utterly exhausted.”
“Jet-lagged,” John said.
Eduardo tapped his pen on the podium. “When I go home to my country, it’s the same. I don’t sleep.”
“Yes, it’s rough. Well, good night,” Marcia sang.
She and John climbed the wide marble stairs to their second-floor apartment. They’d lived in the building for twenty-six years. They could have navigated their way through the lobby and up the stairs in complete darkness, and had, in fact, done so during a blackout one summer when all of Manhattan lost power for a night. Marcia had enjoyed it. They’d lit candles, eaten the ice cream that was going to melt anyway, and talked.
Now they walked down the bright, wallpapered hallway, and John unlocked the door to their apartment. Inside, there was still a stack of unopened mail on the front table, a blinking red light on the answering machine, a smell of mothballs from the closet where Marcia had been looking for her squash racket earlier that day. “I want to get it restrung now,” she’d insisted, “before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?” John had asked. “For when someone asks me to play.” John had stood and watched his wife’s bottom wiggle as she stooped down into the depths of the closet. She was in remarkable shape for a woman in her fifties. She often teased John that he needed to start taking better care of himself. “I’m going to make it to a hundred and five. You don’t want me to have to replace you, do you?”
“You’d have no problem, I’m sure,” John answered.
It was true. People liked Marcia. All of John and Marcia’s friends were really friends of hers. John sometimes felt as if he were just a strange appendage to his wife. Surely she could have done better—a brain surgeon, a lawyer, a physicist. Had he given her the life she deserved? They did take a trip every year, usually in late summer to celebrate their anniversary, but that was all. They’d never had children. John had never won any awards.
“I’m going to take a Tylenol for my headache,” Marcia said. “Want to get the movie set up?” She shut the closet door and ran her fingers across the squash racket, which now lay on the table in the hallway.
“Will you eat popcorn?” John asked.
“I really shouldn’t. But if you’re making some . . .” Her voice trailed off as she walked down the hallway to the bathroom, flicking on the lights and rubbing her temples.
John went to the kitchen and got the jar of popcorn kernels down from the cupboard. He liked to make popcorn the old-fashioned way, in a big steel pot with a long metal arm that stirred the kernels. He lit the stove, melted the margarine, poured the popcorn in, and stood over the pot with his eyes closed, turning the handle slowly and feeling the warm air rise toward him, remembering moments on the island when the sun on his face had struck him as so hot, so intimate, it was like Marcia’s breath on his cheek.
As the kernels began to pop, he brought his ear to the lid of the pot, closer to the heat and the noise. The irregular staccato made his pulse speed up. The heart fascinated him. Sometimes he liked to put his ear to Marcia’s chest and listen. Her heartbeat was light and chatty, a rhythm that made you want to waltz around the kitchen. John could have been a cardiologist, but he’d pursued dermatology instead. At parties, he wowed people with descriptions of boils and rashes and growths, strange hair patterns, nasty scars, pus-filled cysts, bizarre freckles, cancers, moles. “Within six feet of this fellow, you could detect the distinct smell of porcini risotto,” he’d say. “His armpit was filled with fungus.” At the stove, John righted himself, continued to stir the popcorn with one hand, and took his own pulse with two fingers of the other, pressing on his throat and breathing slowly until his heart rate returned to normal.
Meanwhile, Marcia took two extra-strength Tylenol, splashed some cold water on her face, brushed her teeth, and went to sit on the leather sofa in front of the television in the living room. A sudden excruciating pain in her head made her vision blurry. It was as if she’d been plunged underwater, the room murky and muffled, and she couldn’t breathe. She tried to call out to John. “Honey? John?” She could only gasp. Her throat gurgled, her hands trembled, and then she died. It was that simple. She was gone.
When all was quiet, John turned off the stove and poured the popcorn into a wooden salad bowl. He carried the bowl and the saltshaker into the living room, sat down next to Marcia’s dead body, salted the popcorn, ate several handfuls, and turned on the television. “Which movie did you say?” he asked her, scrolling through the pay-per-view listings. He looked at her downturned face. Her head hung to one side, resting on her shoulder. John smoothed her hair, put a hand on her knee for a moment, changed the channel to the baseball game, lowered the volume, ate the rest of the popcorn, then fell asleep beside her.
• • •
“I’m sorry, Mr. John,” Eduardo said in the lobby, as the body was wheeled out early the next morning. John nodded, still in shock, having woken up and discovered Marcia, cold and limp, slumped across the couch beside him. He followed the EMTs out onto the street and watched them load her into the back of the ambulance and drive away, the siren blaring—but for what? “She’s already
dead!” John cried out after them. Eduardo took him by the arm and led him back inside and up to the apartment. A neighbor brought him some water from the kitchen. The glass, a souvenir from a cruise that he and Marcia had taken through the fjords of Norway, retained a faint smear of her berry-colored lipstick on its rim. John put his mouth on it and sipped.
The memorial service was a week later. The chapel ceiling at St. Ignatius was vaulted and painted a cornflower blue with spiky white stars. The carpet was dark red, with a jagged gold pattern that reminded John of shattered glass. Marcia’s friends filled the pews. They moaned and wept. Maureen and Barbara embraced John and held his hands and babbled all at once, drowning out the few words he had to say as he took his seat in the front pew. He dabbed at his eyes with old tissues he found squirreled away in the breast pocket of his suit.
Several friends told stories, boasting about how much Marcia had meant to them, how deeply she’d touched their lives. Marcia would have liked it, John thought—all these people discussing her, pointing out her best qualities, remembering her finest moments. She’d have eaten it up. But what did these people really know about her? What could one know about a person? John had known her best of all, had been able to predict her every move, the arc of her sighs, her laughs, the twists of her shadow as it crossed a room. In the days since her death, he’d felt her drifting through the apartment. He’d done double takes the way you do when you think you see your own cat or dog begging for food under the table at a restaurant. Nobody would understand, John thought, how well he knew the sound of Marcia’s coffee spoon hitting the saucer, how the sheets rustled around her when she turned over in bed. But were those things significant enough, he wondered, to boast about?
When it was his turn to get up, John spoke of their recent trip to the island. “She was so happy there,” he said. “So alive.” He paused, waiting for a laugh, but there was none. He looked out at the crowd, all those drawn, wrinkled faces wet with emotion. He could imagine Marcia sitting among them, already composing her opinion of the speech he was giving. “He was terribly overcome,” he imagined her saying to her friends over coffee and cake at the reception. “You could see him really straining to get something across. To no avail, I’m afraid. Well, that’s John. Not the best talker. But that’s why we got along so well.”
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