“Aurora. I’ll save you,” he said; the sound of these words comforted him. “I swear it.”
But she did not let him touch her—she backed away from him with a dim expression. She was already disappearing and believed this was what people had truly wanted from her all along.
HE SKIPPED WORK. HE DID NOT SLEEP. THE RIGHT HEART WAS NOT appearing. He tried to think about who would give up their heart for millions of dollars. Drug addicts, the terminally ill—but their hearts would be in poor shape. He sat behind the dark glass of his limo, grimly watching girls play soccer, wishing one of them would trip. He imagined his Mercedes plowing into a group of teenage boys running on the sidewalk, killing enough of them to give Aurora more of a chance.
He proposed to his staff a special episode: “Who Will Die For Money.” They would audition people willing to give up their hearts for a staggering pot of $5 million. His staff thought it was a PR stunt and called an audition. The holding room filled with an assortment of the homeless, individuals not in the best health, and well-dressed, shifty types who seemed to think there was some way to obtain the money without dying.
They were all busily filling out their names and addresses when he got a call from Rosita.
“A heart has arrived on the doorstep,” she said.
He rushed home.
A man identified himself as a cardiac surgeon and a purveyor of black-market hearts. He was from Ukraine. Dr. Stoly Michavcezek sat in Lenny’s living room, holding a Styrofoam ice chest on his lap.
“Whose heart was this?” asked Lenny.
“A man. Olympic gymnast. Fell on mat and dead. Few hours. Payment up front.”
They transferred the heart, quickly, to Lenny’s enormous Sub-Zero freezer; then Lenny brought in a specialist from Cedars-Sinai to look at the heart.
“This isn’t a human heart,” said the doctor. “This is the heart of a chimp.”
When he returned to the studio, the prospective contestants had all been dismissed, and black-suited men from the legal department were waiting in his office.
“Lenny,” said one. “This has got to stop.”
AURORA WORKED ON HER MOVIE OBSESSIVELY; SHE SPENT MUCH OF her time in her room. When they had a meal together, he did most of the talking; he lied about his closeness to saving her. “There’s a doctor in Mexico,” he’d say, “a small hospital. International laws, they’re all we have to get around . . .” She ate very little and watched him like a child who had disbelieved adults her whole life.
One night, she burst out of her room and hurried to her seat at the table. “My plot has changed,” she said. “Listen. There are seventeen aliens from the planet of Eyahoo. They have legs in the shape of wheels and heads like potatoes. Their planet is very slippery, and they move very fast on their wheels. Often they bump into each other. Their heads are getting sore.”
He listened.
“They need a new cousin who can make their planet less slippery. Their cousin is named Yabonda, and she lives on a neighboring planet. She has long legs with huge feet that are very absorbent, like paper towels. They want to learn how to have feet like her. Now. Do you think they should maybe invite her to Eyahoo for dinner or just come and kidnap her?”
She leaned back in her chair, clasped her hands tightly, and watched him.
“What would happen with each?” he asked.
“If they asked her to dinner, she would be transported in a glamorous carriage made of starlight.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If they kidnapped her, it would hurt.” She stretched out her fingers, as though trying to hold everything. “Tell me,” she said, sharply.
WHEN AURORA HAD LEARNED ABOUT HER CONDITION, SHE STOPPED stealing. Lenny began leaving things out for her—his cell phone and toothbrush and car keys—in the hope that she would take them, but in the morning, they remained where he had left them. He missed her midnight rambling through the mansion, waking up to see which objects of his she would find precious.
One night, he heard her footsteps padding down the hall.
Lenny jumped out of bed and followed her. This time, Aurora seemed to have no particular direction, but went around the foyer like a floating, circling bird. Then she saw Lenny. They stared at each other in the dusk of the hallway, and the shocked quiet around them made Lenny feel that they were meeting for the first time.
Aurora began to cry. “I don’t know what to take.”
The girl knelt to the floor and threw up. The child’s distress made Lenny feel as though he himself were dissolving.
“Take me,” said Lenny.
The girl stared at him.
“I’ll go with you,” said Lenny.
“Where?”
“Wherever. I’ll go too.”
“How?”
“I can find a way to do it.”
He did not know how to stop these words, did not know if they were lies or the truth—they simply came out of him.
“I don’t want to be by myself,” said Aurora.
He closed his eyes and said, “I’ll be there, too.”
When the dawn came, he was sleeping on the floor beside Aurora’s bed. He woke up, his promise an inchoate, cold feeling in his body; then he remembered what he had said.
He got up quietly and left the room.
IT WAS JUST SIX IN THE MORNING. LENNY WENT TO HIS GARAGE AND got into his red Ferrari convertible. He shot up the Pacific Coast Highway, feeling the engine’s force vibrate through his body. The highway stretched, a ribbon reaching through the blue haze to the rest of the world. He felt poisoned by the girl’s presence in himself and wanted to get her out.
By eight o’clock, he had hit Santa Barbara. The main street was filled with a clear golden light, and the people strolling the sidewalks looked so contented and purposeful he wished they were all dead. He thought of the way Aurora stood on half-toe when she wanted something, the sweet, terrible optimism in the girl’s walk when she headed down the hallway. He wanted to stop his car and rush out among the strangers and find a woman, proposition her, and have sex with her in an alley. He wanted to strip naked and run into the ocean. He wanted to drive his car into the glass windows of a restaurant and be put in jail. He drove back and forth down the main street for a while, hands trembling on the steering wheel.
He turned the car and roared toward where people knew him best: the studio. At 11:00 AM, he walked through the doors and stood in the shadows, watching. Eight contestants were white-lit, hitting buzzers, shouting out answers to questions, and the producers and crew were scrambling noisily in the dark around the stage.
Lenny stared at the brilliant stage set. On this stage, he had seen parents allow their children to walk them on a leash, like dogs, for five hundred bucks. He had seen teens who agreed to twerk in front of their grandparents for a thousand. He had stood in this brightness, watching others fall dimly around him.
“Lenny,” he heard. “Hey, Lenny—”
Now he stood in this corridor, a strange, familiar fear in his mouth. He knew what would be unbearable.
He turned around several times before he saw the exit. Pushing the metal doors, he ran into the parking lot, jumped into his car, and drove home.
When the Ferrari drove up to the mansion, Aurora was sitting on the stairs. The girl was still, as though she had been sitting there for a hundred years. Her blue eyes were fixed on Lenny as he began to walk up the stairs.
“I thought you weren’t coming back,” said Aurora.
“I had to do an errand,” said Lenny.
He sat beside Aurora on the stair.
“I have a new plot idea,” she said. “To help Yabonda.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her paper towel feet have dried out,” she said. “Whenever she lifts her feet, they make a weird crackling sound. Everyone on the planet wants her to go away. They can’t stand the noise her feet make. It keeps them all awake. There is mayhem and murder.” She looked right at him; her gaze was stern. “She meets Glun
gluck, a kindly alien who was kicked off her planet because her ears, which resemble long straws, suck up everything around them, and people were losing their purses and keys.”
“Go on,” he said.
“They make a neighborhood,” she said. “They add other sad aliens, Kogo and Zarooom. They build big walls around their neighborhood made of glass roses. The only aliens who can move in are other losers. They all have had bad luck. In their neighborhood, they can talk to each other. They make up songs and have contests. Nobody wins. When the good-luck aliens try to see through the wall of roses, they are jealous and lonely.”
He looked at her face. Her forehead was gray and creased, like an old person’s.
“I’ll produce,” he said.
HE DID NOT STOP LOOKING. HE HAD KEPT THE AUDITION SLIPS OF the people who had been willing to give up their hearts for $5 million and was meeting one, Wayne Olden, secretly, for lunch at a Fatburger in Hollywood to check him out. He was planning to take him in for a full medical exam; after that he would hand over the organ donation forms. Lenny had not figured out how he would kill the man, particularly to maintain the integrity of his organs. They were finishing up a hot dog when he received a call.
“I’m not feeling good,” said Aurora.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
Lenny jumped up.
“I have to go,” he said to the man.
“You’re kidding,” said the man.
“Here,” said Lenny, throwing him a thousand-dollar bill. “That’s for lunch.”
The man looked disappointed. “I thought I was going to get five million bucks!”
LENNY’S MERCEDES RACED HOME. IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON, THE shadows long and dark across the grass. Aurora was sitting on the lawn by the pool. She had brought out the sack of stolen items and had set out everything that she had taken. There were pens, staplers, shoes, caps, some loose change, postcards, a spoon, a sock, paper clips, some crumpled Kleenex. The brown paper bags that held them were crumpled up, a pile of small paper balls. All of this surrounded her; the late sun made her face look gold.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I don’t have enough,” she said.
He sat down beside her. His throat was stiff, tense. He said, “Tell me about them.”
She looked at the many items spread out in front of her. She picked up an aluminum cupcake tin. “Sharon Eastman. Cook in the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago, asked me about my favorite foods and showed me how to make cupcakes with buttercream frosting. She made one for me with a rose on it, as I said I wanted one.”
She picked up a coat hanger and said, “This was Greg Mixon’s, who was the coat-check man at the Century 100 Restaurant in Miami, where we went every night for dinner for a month, and who let me sit and read in a corner in the coat closet and gave me a new button for my coat and said this coat hanger would hold it . . .”
He listened to her talk and talk, her words coming fast, as though she were in a rush to get everything out. She remembered so much that the others had said, as though she had stored each sentence up when she had been told it. She leaned softly against his shoulder, and he put his arm around her. He was aware of the way his hands fell open by his sides, the way they could hold absolutely nothing.
“Aurora,” he said. “Wait.”
She stopped. Her face was flushed.
“Give me something.”
“What?”
“Give me something of yours. I need it.”
“What thing?”
“Anything.”
“You want something of mine?” she whispered, surprised.
“Yes. Now.”
She shrugged and dug into her pocket. There she had a small piece of red velvet that she had used on her poster for Danger. She handed it to him.
“Here,” she said.
He took the scrap of velvet, closed his fingers around it.
She sat up very straight and looked right at him. Her gaze was sharp. He froze. His skin was as thin as silk. He wondered what she could see, what the light of her gaze detected. He was aware of the palm trees moving gently in the warm wind; he believed he had stopped breathing.
He waited.
Around them, the night sky pressed down like a lid, the stars faint nicks of light in the darkness.
She sat back down; she didn’t say anything. It was a flat, immense silence, and it frightened him. He didn’t know what she saw, and he never would. He sat, not knowing what to say.
She picked up a paper clip off the lawn. She cupped it protectively in her hand.
“This was from Jennifer Macon in Washington, D.C.,” she said. He listened as she told about the paper clip and the rose barrette and the jar of lip balm. She talked, her voice softly piercing the air. The city lit up, a bright, glimmering plain, below them as the sky drained from orange to blue to black. Together, they sat, looking into the dim green exuberance of the garden.
The Third Child
As the streetlights blinked on, Jane Goldman stepped onto her front porch to listen to the faint sound of screaming float from the other houses on her street. The screaming was the sound of children protesting everything: eating, bathing, sharing toys, going to sleep. As the weather warmed, she stood outside on her porch, smoking a rare cigarette and listening. This was her life now, at forty: she had married a man whom she admired and loved, and after the initial confusion of early marriage—the fact that they betrayed the other simply by being themselves—they fell into the exhausting momentum that was their lives. They had produced a son, now five years old, and a daughter, now eight months, two beings who hurtled into the world, ruby-lipped, peach-skinned, and who now held them hostage as surely as masked gunmen controlled a bank.
Jane was a freelance editor for technical manuals, and her husband, after seeing his business as a high-priced website designer dry up, settled into a job as a consultant. They had moved to a midsized city in South Carolina. It was not their first choice, and they did not know if they would ever feel at home there, but they could afford, finally, a small house as well as a car. They had found their own happiness, weighted by resignation: that they were who they were, that they could never truly know the thoughts of another person, that their love was bruised by the carelessness of their own parents (his mother, her father); that they would wander the world in their dreams with ghostly, intangible lovers, that their children would move from adoration of them to fury, that they and their parents would die in different cities, that they would never accomplish anything that would leave any lasting mark on the world. They had longed for this, from the first lonely moment of their childhoods when they realized they could not marry their fathers or mothers, through the burning romanticism of their teens, to the bustling search of their twenties, and there was the faint regret that this tumult and exhaustion was what they had longed for too, and soon it would be gone.
Jane stood on the porch each night, watching the dusk settle on to their street. And when the screaming had ended, she sat watching the other families move behind the windows, gliding silently in their aquariums of golden light.
ONE MORNING SOON AFTER, JANE SAT CROSS-LEGGED ON THE FLOOR of the bathroom, the baby grappling at her breasts, and watched the line form on the test. She and her husband had not been trying for another child. She pressed her lips to her baby girl’s soft head, this one she wanted to love, and she understood, clearly, that she did not feel capable of loving a third child. She had given everything to the others. She kissed the baby’s head, grateful for the aura of kindness the baby bestowed upon her, for now there was no illusion, as there had been when she was a young woman, that this being inside of her would not become a child; she held the thick, muscular result in her hands. The baby’s tiny fingers made her feel faint. They lived in a part of the country where a third (or fourth or fifth) unexpected child arrived and, with jovial weariness, families “made room” for them. She looked at the red line, and it measured all the moments rema
ining in her life.
The husband staggered awake after a depressing dream in which a childhood friend had retired early and moved to Tuscany. The kitchen smelled fetid, as though an animal had crawled into a corner and died. The boy, still grief-stricken over his sister’s birth, utilizing their guilt over this to demand endless presents, described his longing for a Slinky that another child had brought to school. “I did want it,” he wailed in a monotone. “I did. I did. I did. I did.” He wanted to wear his Superman shirt with the red cape attached to the shoulders and spent his breakfast leaping out of his seat and trying to shoot his sister with a plastic gun. She, too, already had preferences and screamed until Jane put her into a purple outfit with floppy bunny ears. They wanted to be anything but human. Her husband could not find anything to put on his lunch sandwich and, with a sort of martyred defiance, slapped margarine on bread. “What a man does to save money,” he murmured.
“Why don’t you just buy your lunch?” she asked.
“Do you know how much that costs?” he said. “Do you know how much I’m saving this family by eating crap on bread every day?”
“Get me a Slinky!” the boy yelled, to everyone. The baby screamed.
“Will everyone please shut up?” she said, and then she flinched, embarrassed.
“Don’t say that around the children,” he said.
“I can say what I want.”
“Don’t say shut up,” the boy said, in a ponderous tone.
“Eat your breakfast,” she hissed at him.
“I hate it,” he wailed, writhing out of his seat and onto the floor, where he curled up under the table as though preparing for a nuclear bomb. She glanced at her husband; their love had been, like all love at the beginning, a mutual and essential misunderstanding, a belief that each could absorb qualities held by the other, that each could save the other from loneliness, that their future held endless promise, that they would not be separated by death. This version of joy was what they had chosen of their own free will.
The baby, not wanting to be outdone, suddenly struck a pose like a fashion model. “How cute,” said the husband; they all hungered for a moment of beauty. The baby laughed, a glittery sound. The boy wept. The future lay before them, limp and endless. The husband got on his hands and knees by the son. “Come now,” he said, his voice exquisite with tenderness. “You’re a big boy now.” He pleaded for maturity for five minutes, and when his voice was about to snap, the boy crawled out and donned a backpack, which made him resemble a miniature college student. He turned around, delighted, so they all applauded.
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