She did not hesitate in choosing the dune buggy trail, although the face in her rearview mirror frowned mightily. She flew down the winding path, hardly able to see, crying piteously, making promise after promise if only God would find her a highway, get her out of this mess. She would quit smoking, she would return to Kansas, she would start speaking to her father once more, she would go back to college. Behind her a cloud of dust, before her a careless snaking path that could very well have ended at the edge of a plateau or butte, this sloping lane designed like an amusement park ride, totally thrill, no destination, all of her unamused effort for naught, car plummeting over the cliff.
The cop’s vehicle, she assured Oliver, was too large to take the dune buggy road. His big dumb American-made car, she said.
And God was listening, it appeared; she rode bumping and pitching, sailing and banging, winding through the desert for many digressing miles. Dark came on, she nearly ran out of gas, she was riding on at least two flat tires, ruining their rims, and her oil pan was drizzling from several punctures, but eventually she found the pavement. And on it she and her Karmann Ghia hobbled to a small town—no, she could not remember the name; it was a traumatic event, didn’t Oliver understand anything?—and went immediately to the tiny lighted police station. The officer there did not recognize the handwriting on the map and instructions the purported cop had provided. He didn’t look as if he believed YaYa’s story, although he did assist her in replacing her tires and oil pan, feeding her a sandwich, filling her gas tank. He found a genuine road map and drew a fat black line from where they were, here, to where she wanted to go, there, and sent her on her way.
“It wouldn’t have been a story YaYa told if there weren’t the two-weeks-later part,” Oliver said. Two weeks later, the real cop called to say that the phony cop had been caught off in the hills. He’d lured many a woman out there, said the officer, lured, raped, killed, and buried. “YaYa was lucky to be alive. All her stories ended with her being the person nobody could pull a fast one on.”
“You believed her?” Catherine asked, motioning for the bartender to bring her another drink.
Oliver shrugged, as if to suggest that he hadn’t. But he had. He didn’t any longer, but once he had. His passionate love for YaYa had overridden common sense. Now YaYa was merely his ex-wife the chronic liar, his fond nemesis, but back then she’d been his dearly beloved. He supposed that love still had that eclipsing power over him. How else to explain his current dilemma? He had fallen in love. It hadn’t happened to him in a very long time, not since Catherine, but he couldn’t deny that he was in its grip again. And he loved being in love. There wasn’t any more salutary emotion, he genuinely believed this, than being in love. It was good for him. It improved his health, that valuable jewel he protected. He was sixty-nine years old, and he wouldn’t scoff at an improvement in health.
In his right pocket he kept his public cell phone; in his left breast pocket his secret one. When it vibrated, with a message from the Sweetheart, he felt it near his heart. He was living two lives, which ran abreast of one another, and he could perform adroitly in each. He had his wife, with whom he’d spent eighteen very happy years, and he had his Sweetheart, with whom he had made love only three times now. Just the recent memory of that third encounter resulted in a surge in his chest, as if his heart were literally being worked. Amazing. Far preferable to pharmaceuticals, the extraordinary power of falling in love. Oliver felt certain he could become a triathlete, if he wished, now that he had this spare energy to burn, this reinvigorated muscle hardly contained by his rib cage.
As a young man, he’d taken for granted love. He’d believed he’d find it everywhere. He didn’t take it for granted now. He found it rarely. He treasured it, and yet also treated it as if he could hardly believe in it, as you might a miracle, as you might a dream from which you did not want to wake.
He swallowed his drink, shot his cuff to glance at his watch. The Sweetheart, and her allure, was starting to seem like an imperative, something that could slip away if he didn’t hurry. “We’re going to miss the auction,” he said. “Didn’t you want to bid on a cruise?”
Catherine leaned over and laid her head on his shoulder. “We could stay here, just listen to crooners and badmouth your exes.”
But there was the Sweetheart, waiting. He could feel her eyes anticipating his arrival, feel them even now turning toward the doors to monitor guests. Before he could make an argument for going across the street, his wife made it for him. She had met the Sweetheart, in her role as manager; she understood that the girl needed their support and presence, their parental beneficence at the ball. Reluctantly, she shook off the bartender’s offer of another round, applied lipstick, put on her game face.
Oliver said to her as he draped her coat around her shoulders, “I think you’d rather hear about my inglorious youth than tell me about yours. This kid, this bizarre gift that came out of nowhere, this blast from the past. What’s the story with that?”
CHAPTER 5
IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO,” Catherine said. She and Oliver lay in bed now, in her bed and bedroom, neither able to sleep. Insomnia was something they had in common, tonight in combination with two nascent champagne headaches. Did he also see little streamers of light when he moved his head? Did his eyeballs also seem out of sync with their sockets? And why had they purchased yet another Oriental area rug at the auction? She’d thought they would sleep separately, Oliver usually worn out by extra social obligations, in need of his monkish solitude: the large hard bed in the unheated room. The earplugs plus the white noise machine. The window shades designed to obscure all light. And the sleep induced therein? Like hibernation.
But no. He’d joined Catherine in her room, in her quaint old bed that complained when you turned, that dumped you always in its center, a too-soft nest made of feathers. She called the room her study, but in fact it was more closet than anything else, occasional guest room. Location of her sentimental cache from childhood, those things her mother would have donated or thrown away when she’d had to move from the old house. Without meaning to, she’d made the room a replica of the one she’d grown up in, floral lamp, antique dolls, free-standing full-length mirror. Outside, weekend hooligans had begun abusing the holidays, spinning on ice after closing the bars or parties, their usual exuberance spiced by seasonal cheer. The police had their hands full, sirens whooping and bleating, unnerving the Desplaines’ two dogs, who whimpered from their pads on the back porch downstairs, distressed about the helicopter overhead, about the fire engines and ambulances. If the disaster persisted (multicar pileup? house ablaze?), grew worse, her husband would reluctantly rise and “release the hounds!” allow them to come burrow beneath Catherine’s bed. It was the only solution.
They were never allowed in Oliver’s room.
“I guess I promised her,” she said, of her old best friend. “I can’t remember doing it, but I don’t doubt that I would have. We were pretty close.” They would have been drunk or high at the time, she did not say; her former self was a sometimes shaming secret, an undignified interlude—too like Oliver’s delinquent daughter Miriam, who’d lived with them during her own bad time, who’d occupied this bedroom and stolen a few of its mementos. Moreover, Catherine sometimes worried that she herself hadn’t let go of those days as thoroughly as she ought to have. She was in possession of all the markers of adulthood, was in every legal way entitled to claim the role, but still she was nagged by teenage unease. When she looked around her room she found the props from the past, the large oval mirror in which she’d studied herself for decades, a familiar wan wondering: When was that person looking back going to seem like somebody in charge?
She and her best friend had been among the holiday hooligans, back in her true adolescence, careless and careening. To realize how lucky she was to have survived her own incautious past always sent a shudder through Catherine—one run red light, one inexplicable pill, one bad man, one unforgivable decision, and everythi
ng would have turned out otherwise. Reckless they’d been, yet devoted: apparently they had exchanged this promise with the same conviction they’d exchanged blood from pricked pinkies, secrets from stricken souls. Best friends, sworn, avowed. If anything should ever happen … But Catherine hadn’t been close to her since high school—hadn’t even seen her since college graduation, when Catherine had been onstage, wearing a robe with the others, awaiting the subtle plucking of the tassel from one side of the mortarboard to the other, and her receding best friend had been out there in the wobbling heat-soaked sea that was the audience, a distant face stoned and grinning. Even then, twenty-some years ago, their friendship was on the wane. Catherine hadn’t yet met her husband, but she’d been cultivating an affinity, finding him by dating his prototypes. These were not the same types her best friend dated. Certainly at graduation there’d been a man in the audience beside Catherine’s best friend, somebody who’d supplied the cocaine or ecstasy, the hip flask, a drugged-up dropout just like her. Eventually that same type had materialized for long enough to father a child, then evaporated back into obscurity, perhaps only one among many, anonymous by virtue of ubiquity.
Come to think of it, wasn’t it often the case that Catherine had been onstage, performing in choir or receiving an award, playing some ugly stepsister or second-string Jet, even as far back as seventh grade, glancing out at the crowd, her best friend’s face there, down below, unheralded, unspecial, looking up, a slight smirk at the corner of the mouth that recognized the silly sham of it all? That lone skeptical observer, who seemed to penetrate with X-ray eyes.
“You know what I just realized?” Catherine said to her husband, blinking into the dark, newly alert. “When she spent the night, when we were in junior high and high school, we slept in this very same bed.” Yet another emergency vehicle went screaming by beneath the window, bright red and blue illuminating for a succession of strobed moments the confines of the bed, its rosebud details cast along its iron rails, the shadows they made on the wall like the bars of a cell. Catherine had picked out the bed at an antique store when she was thirteen, her unlikely birthday gift that year from her parents; her friend had drolly accused her of being a future spinster. Since then, Catherine had painted it a few times, and, most recently, stripped the layers of paint to locate its original brass luster. “And not that many people have slept in this bed with me,” she said now. The bed had stayed in her childhood home until she’d married and settled, waiting there safely with her parents until Catherine could be trusted with it.
Her bed gave Oliver back pain. Her bed made him sweaty and claustrophobic. He only rarely joined her there. Perhaps he was paying penance for being curt with her earlier; perhaps he wished to make love.
“Did you have a best friend?” She took his hand now as if he’d extended it at the last minute, over an abyss, into the deep. She was afraid of falling further into her memory, that unresolved reflection in the mirror that was her extended teenage life, its injury, its bottomlessness. She wanted a recollection of his to act as neutralizer.
“I don’t think boys have best friends in the same way,” he said. “We move in packs.”
“You’re not in a pack.”
“You move in packs until you get married. Then you have a wife.”
“Or a few wives.”
“I lost my taste for the pack. Maybe you can’t go back, once you’ve broken out.”
“You’re wolves, you’re saying.”
“Yes, wolves. Wolves, and dogs.”
A second helicopter joined the first, rocking the house, and the actual dogs, though they’d tried, could not help barking, a terrific fit that made Catherine and Oliver laugh. He rose, filled his cheeks, and blew his elaborate bird-calling whistle, the song the dogs knew meant that help was on the way, and Catherine felt her heart thrill, as it always did when he indulged the rare pitying gesture. He had left the heartless pack to live with women, and they had domesticated him.
From the stairs he was addressing the animals. “Lads,” he admonished. “What will the intruders think?” He bemoaned their neuteredness, blaming that for their lack of fortitude. In a less charitable mood, Catherine might note Oliver’s neutered state; did he feel reduced? When the porch door was opened, the dogs ran thumping—like fat rabbits, with their long ears back—up the stairs toward Catherine, nosing clumsily beneath the bed, jamming themselves happily against the wall. They were brothers, two portly corgis two and a half years in age. Lacking children, Catherine had pleaded with her husband for dogs; her mother hadn’t allowed her pets, she hadn’t had siblings, there would be no babies—surely he could understand her desire? Their friends no doubt pitied their misplaced affection. This was the third pair of siblings they’d owned, first black Labs, next cocker spaniels, now the corgis—each set a slightly smaller breed. “We’ll die with Chihuahuas,” Catherine had once told Oliver.
“You’ll die with Chihuahuas,” he corrected her. “I’ll die during the dachshunds.” In the past, he had enjoyed pointing at the discrepancy in their ages, his future ghostliness that would haunt her. He didn’t do that anymore.
“They’ve shredded their holiday bows,” Oliver reported. “Total confetti all over the porch floor.”
“They took heed when you told them to cowboy up.”
“They still smell like they fell in the foo-foo.” He climbed into bed again, toes icy from his brief errand.
“I like picking them up at the groomer’s,” Catherine said. “I enjoy their sniveling gratitude.” She’d almost forgotten them there, today; yesterday’s unexpected letter and its contents had derailed her, left her in a funny uneasy fog. Beneath the bed, she could feel the dogs nuzzling together, bumping against the box springs and slats. They were disallowed from Oliver’s room, that immaculate cell. Solid as ottomans, willing to be thumped, cheerful and attentive, they were the only dogs she knew who made unabashed eye contact, who could in fact outstare you. Her profound love for them frightened her.
Her friends might be right to find her affection misplaced.
“If I had a best friend from high school,” Oliver resumed, “it would have been Ogdoerf.”
“Ogdoerf?”
“We went by last names. Linus Ogdoerf.”
“Good God. Poor kid.”
“And if I got notified, twenty-odd years later, that he’d died and left me his child, and had moreover named that child for me, well, I’d be just flat-out astonished. I’d be less surprised to win the lottery, which I don’t even play.”
“Oliver Ogdoerf,” Catherine speculated. “Terrible! But you and Ogdoerf would never have spent the night in the same bed?”
“True. Same tent, but not the same bed.”
“And I bet you didn’t practice kissing each other, or inventing dance steps.” Or discuss how best to purge meals, or pierce one another’s ice-numbed upper ear rims using needles and corks, or carve into one another’s shoulder, with a Zippo-flame-sterilized shoplifted pocket knife, an asterisk, to signify the idea of extra content, footnoted character not readily available to the average, casual eye. Still there, Catherine thought, touching hers briefly, a little star-shaped divot.
“No,” he said, “we didn’t do that, either.”
“Still, it astonishes me, too,” Catherine said. “The dying, that most. Besides my dad, I don’t know very many dead people.”
“You will,” he said in that world-weary way he had. His family was entirely gone; he did not mourn the loss particularly, those people who’d not really understood him and wouldn’t be around to trouble him now.
“Then the bequeathing and the naming, a whole other ball of wax.” It was the fact of the name, she understood, that most intrigued. That for fifteen years there’d been plenty of general but only one other particular Catherine in the world. “She was never very happy with her own name,” she recalled. “Misty.” Misty. Into the telephone, in the high school halls—once it had been a name always on her lips, and now not for years. It car
ried with it the distinct sensation of regret. A turned back.
“Misty?” her husband said. “I never knew a Misty before. Dusty, yes, Misty, no. I know a Rusty and a Sandy and a Hunter, even a Rocky, but no Misty. What could that be short for?”
“Misdemeanor?” Catherine guessed. “I never thought about it. For all I know, she was named for that movie.”
“She was already around when that movie came out,” he said. “You have an abysmal sense of history.”
“And math. And geography.”
“Those, too.” He said it gently, fondly, pleased once more with her silliness.
“We were Misty and Cat, back then, sometimes Foggy and Dog. She lived a totally different life from mine. She was what I guess you might call white trash, although we didn’t call it that. My mom called her The Bad Influence. She got blamed for everything, even though some of it was my idea.” Most of it? Catherine wondered. She’d been a sheltered child, brought up by idealists, good citizens; she’d been restless, however, even before meeting up with Misty, restless and sometimes naughty. Her own parents were teachers, voters, drinkers of milk, while Misty lived with her grandmother, in a ratty house where certain lights were never extinguished, like a convenience store, where there was always some vigilant wakeful presence, scheming, ready to greet anyone who came through the door, just as ready to phone the police and rat out that anyone. The old woman—not a jolly gray-haired grandma but a scrawny embittered alcoholic on whom everyone dumped what they no longer wanted, the odd pet or child or broken machine—the smell of her home, the nauseating gloom, the occasional creepy relative, moody malcontents always giving the impression that they’d been recently released from a state institution of one sort or another, always with the twitchy gestures and paranoid countenance of the confined. “My parents didn’t approve, but they also were sworn liberals, so they were duty-bound to trust me with my decisions. Misty scared them. Which I must have liked about her. She was like a lesson I wanted them to learn. She’d been held back in grade school, so she was already driving a car by ninth grade. Her teeth looked like something out of the Soviet Union. The epitome of white trash: she had a car but not a dentist.”
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