by Jeffrey Lent
They sat at the plank table with a tin pitcher of water drawn from the cistern and a pair of mismatched glasses. The water was warm but sweet. Moving from porch to house something unspoken had been settled between them, not so much truce as acknowledgment that both stood precarious. Without speaking toward it, or touching, some tenderness between them had risen. Emerged from wherever each believed it hidden.
Jamie removed his jacket before he sat and rolled up his sleeves. Without thinking removed one shoe to empty the sand and then caught himself and looked at Joey across from him. She grinned at him. Those small perfect teeth. “Go ahead,” she said. “It’s a beach house. Sand’s in everything. So how’ve you been, Jamie?”
His shoes and socks off he drank down the glass of water and poured another and said, “Why am I here?”
“I’m not going to dance around it. I want to come home. If you’ll have me back. There’s complications.”
“Is that right? Complications for you? Or complications for me?”
“I understand those questions. I’ll answer whatever you want with the truth but I won’t apologize for anything. How’s that sound?”
“That’s the high road all right.”
“It’s the only road I’ve got.”
“I guess. But it puts me in an odd place.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, whatever you say, it makes it hard to doubt it or get angry about it. Sounds like a discussion between a pair of angels what you’re after. We’re not either one of us that, so how could it happen? Seems to me we’d be better off letting it lather and spit and if there’s any pieces to be picked up after, why then we’d know what we were left with at least. I’m here, doesn’t mean I’m not some pissed off at you. Part of me doesn’t even know why I’m here. Why now, I stop to think about it much at all, I couldn’t tell you.”
She nodded. “That’s fair.” And again left hanging unspoken where he was.
He said, “So what happened up there, over there? Wherever Providence Rhode Island is from here. I don’t even know where the hell I am.
“I’m going to have a baby.”
He stood up from the table and walked barefoot across the room past her to where a screened door let out onto the back of the house. Stood there and lighted a cigarette. The smoke broke through the screen and curled away. The rain cistern was out by the back small ell of the house. Past that just sweeps of dunes braided with the air flowing through the beachgrass. Late-afternoon light. With his shoes off, his pantcuffs scuffed the floor. He stood there by the door and finished his smoke and tipped open the door enough to flip the butt out onto the sand. Then turned. She was still at the table, her back to him. She hadn’t moved. Her shoulders and neck and head were stiffly held. He wondered if she expected him to strike her. He walked back to the side of the table and looked down at her and said, “I guess that’s the complication you spoke of.”
She looked up at him. Her face in pieces, as if he couldn’t bring all her parts together in his eyes. Or all those parts stricken and fierce at once on their own, independent of him. She said, “I didn’t ask you to come rescue me.”
“Is that right?”
Then those pieces all were one. If that was him or her he could not say. Then knew it was her. She said, “That is right. I don’t need you to raise up a child. I’ve seen it done alone firsthand and know it can be done. And I know what it takes, what it costs. And you do too I guess. I’m not talking about me here. All I know about me is what it takes is what I’ll do. But I’m thinking about how it was for me as a child and how it was for you. One of us the mother gone, the other the father. I’m not saying we turned out wrong—truth is I think we’re both pretty smart because of it. But it’s a smart we had to fill out as we went along, a smart to make up for something not there to start with. And I’m thinking maybe we could avoid that, this time along. I’m thinking, we wanted, we could do some good together.”
“Jesus shit,” he said.
As if life just disguised as a woman had sat up and told him that a structure is in place before you even begin to think and it reveals itself not when you want it to or think you’ve keyed it but when it wants to, capricious. And for no good reason thought of the brand new Ford motorcar maybe a mile up the beach in the dunes and was ashamed of it. As if it were everything wrong with him drawn up into one machine.
He said, “I’d guess you’re parked out here in nowhere because your friend Mister Sloane wanted to ease you on out without you making trouble for him. I guess you saw that handwriting before he even opened his mouth and already knew what was the best angle for you. I bet you thought That Jamie, he’s a stupid son of a bitch and I can work whatever I need off him. I bet you’ve got more money on you than you ran away with. And I even bet you already thought of everything I could say before I even knew there might be a reason for me to say it, and had a answer cooked up ready to serve me. And here I am. Feeling like the chicken just looked up to see no it’s not shellcorn but the old woman with the axe.”
She looked away from him then. Down to the table where she spread her hands flat and studied them. Without looking up she said, “It’s our baby, Jamie. Yours and mine.”
“Why, of course it is.” He backed a step away from the table and jammed his hands down in his trouser pockets. “You wouldn’t have called me down here to ask my help raising up another man’s child, no. Not at all. You, you’re a straight-shooter. You’re not a girl chases opportunity down whatever rathole offers up. Not you.”
She pushed hair off her face. Turned her head as if she was tired. “You say anything you want. You won’t get a fight out of me. Go on, spout all you like. It’s you made the trip down here.”
“Could’ve saved me that trip, you’d written more than a single line. It wouldn’t have taken much. Could’ve just asked if I wanted to raise up a bastard child with you.”
Her eyes cut in half. “You wouldn’t have come? You really wouldn’t have come?”
“Even an animal, given the chance, won’t lay down in shit.”
The water glass burst against the side of his head. His shirtfront was wet with the sprayed flung drops of water. He’d closed his eyes before the glass struck and against his closed lids could see like moving pictures the black and white of her snatching up the glass and hurling it. Not ducking. Closed his eyes against the splinters of glass. Then the image of her was gone and the pain swept through him. It was more hurt than he expected. He thought it would be like a slap. He leaned forward and shook his head, getting rid of the glass splinters, trying to shake his head free of the pain. He opened his eyes. One hand up, trailing fingers through his hair to pull away the glass. His fingers came down bloody. Then heard her. He thought she’d been speaking right through it.
“Get out,” she said. “Go back. Get out of here. Get away. I was wrong about you. I thought there was a man behind that little-boy mug of yours. Sitting down here I thought maybe this is happening because it’s what needs to happen. But I could be wrong. Being wrong, that’s something you don’t know the first thing about. But I can be wrong, I know it. So just get out. Go.”
“Jesus, you got a rag or something? I’m bleeding.”
Then she threw the water pitcher at him. This time he ducked and heard it ring out a hollow gong as it struck the wall. Bent over he saw her rise and take up the chair she’d been sitting in and come around the table toward him, the chair held up over her head and he thought he could take her down with a body block and thought of her being pregnant and paused and then she was too close for him to do anything and he scampered sideways away from her, one hand crabbing for his shoes with the socks stuffed in them and then she broke the chair over his bent back. He went down. The wind out of him. A sharp pain in his side. Could have been a piece of the chair run into him. Or a broken rib. He got his wind back and came up onto his hands and knees and slowly stood as if unfolding. His side hurt when he moved. Breathing hurt. There was blood on his face, in his eyes
, from the cuts in his scalp. He was still holding the shoes.
She held out his coat. “Get out of here.” Her voice a livid hatred of him.
She picked up the ruins of the chair and set them atop the stack of drift-firewood. Swept up the broken glass. There were a few sprayed spots of blood on the floor and she left those to dry and be swept away with the sand. The pitcher had a dent in it and she set it back on the table. The damage would give the Sloane wife something to ponder next summer. She went out on the porch and took up the quilt from the daybed and wrapped it around her shoulders. Through the screening she could see him. He’d gone maybe a quarter mile up the beach the way he’d come. He’d rolled his cuffs high on his calves and was carrying the shoes and his jacket over one arm, walking down on the wet packed sand just above the waterline. Walking slow. The impatience she felt toward him she knew was toward herself more truly. To have sat waiting for him. An idiot. All making more clear why she’d left New Hampshire that summer past. Now she had not much but to get on with things. Watching him straggle along the beach she only wanted him gone. So she would be freed finally she understood to sit in the house that night with a fire burning, the driftwood throwing off blue and green sparks of burning salts as she determined what came next. For this day, it would be motion enough to do that.
Then while she watched he stopped. He didn’t turn back to look at the house but walked up to the dry sand and bent to set down his shoes and spread his jacket and then he sat on the jacket, facing the ocean, his knees drawn up before him, his arms wrapped around his knees and his chin down atop them to gaze out onto the breaking water. If anything she’d expected to see him arrest himself and turn back with intent purpose. He looked small. She could not watch him. She reached up behind her and took the ribbon binding from her hair and shook her head and then worked her fingers through her hair. It needed washing. She would never know what he was thinking sitting there but she recognized the configuration of him; it had been hers the first week she’d spent here. She pulled the quilt tight around her and went across to the daybed and sat down on it, drawing her feet up under her with her knees angled and then draped the quilt around herself. With her hands inside it, laced over her belly. The sun low enough now so it came broken through the screening into her eyes. Waiting for him.
The world had gone amber when he came back through the screen door of the porch, still barefoot, his jacket again over his arm. He opened the door and looked at her and stepped in. She saw he’d left his shoes somewhere and wondered if he even knew that. He laid the jacket on a porch rocker and said, “What I was thinking was, maybe one of those beers wouldn’t taste so bad.”
“Is your head all right?” There were streaks of dried blood on his cheek and she could see where the hair was clotted.
He grinned at her. “No, my head’s all fucked up.”
“Beer’s in a crate on the floor in that little pantry off the kitchen.”
“You want one?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe I do.”
He came back in with the opened bottle of beer and a saucer to use as an ashtray and sat crosslegged on the floor before the daybed and sat looking at her waiting and she watched him and decided the spleen was out of him and that he was curious and now she was frightened, not of him but of herself; the central fact was out between them and fail or not everything else was up to her. So she sat and told him how it had been, that it had not been what she’d hoped but neither what he’d predicted. That Edgar Sloane had taken her from the Providence station not to a rooming house as she’d expected nor to an existent apartment as she’d feared but to a narrow three-story brick row house with a slate roof and a brass knocker in the shape of a swallow and delivered her into the hands of Virginia Reeves, a woman of Sloane’s age, well-kept and formal, simply and expensively dressed in white and black, her straight black hair unstreaked and pulled back to a tight French braid, who spoke briefly with Sloane before leading Joey into a parlor with a fine grand piano where the woman played a series of scales before nodding to Joey and together they went through a couple of music hall numbers and then the woman paused to ask Joey what song she’d sing if her life depended on it and Joey replied “If I Could Tell You” and the woman played it in a slow tempo, softly, with her head tilted away from the keys to watch a point across the room as Joey sang. When the song ended the woman trailed a few final notes into the room as if wanting them to linger there and then ignored Joey but turned to Sloane and said, “Where did you find her, Eddie?”
So Joey came to live with Virginia Reeves. Through the rest of July and the month of August. And did not ask and did not need to be told what lay between the woman and Sloane but could see it for herself that first afternoon and later the one or two evenings a week he’d come to the house at a quarter past five on his way from his sporting goods store to his home where his wife and children waited dinner upon him; stop as Virginia prepared a gin rickey for herself and Sloane would pour himself an inch of scotch into a tumbler from the decanter on the sideboard and they would sit then, the three of them, and pass the time of day. Joey could see them as they were when their younger selves first came to the grand collision that would not be enough to draw either of them from the course each had already set but strong enough to alter that course and so create the taint of sadness in their pleasure of each other. The pleasure Virginia Reeves and Edgar Sloane created was received and bestowed measure for measure effortless but at great cost. And she watched them together and knew she was being allowed a privilege few others had. Watching them, her skin hurt.
Daytimes she sang scales and exercises until her stomach muscles were a hard band and her lungs pressed outward within her chest. Drank chamomile tea with lemon and honey for her throat. They worked through Joey’s repertoire as song by song Virginia Reeves discarded all but a handful and she learned new ones, some new to her and some new altogether off sheet music arrived from New York. Afternoons they had tea with frail cookies baked by the Irishwoman in the kitchen and served by an Irish girl and the tea would turn to drinks and then they would eat together a meal again prepared and served by the mute help and afterward would sit in the parlor alone on the nights Sloane did not stop and play mah jong or listen to opera arias from the Victor gramophone; they would sit when a record came to an end with the haunt of sound lingering until one or the other would finally rise to lift the bumping needle and place the heavy curved arm back in its rack or sometimes start the needle at the beginning to listen once more to the recording. What conversations they had beyond instruction and manners were slight, as if the Reeves woman in her silence was not only maintaining privacy but allowing Joey the opportunity to discern the full import of a mantle of discretion.
But with this reticence, perhaps because of it, Joey learned things. As simple as tracing the past by walking slow down the six turns of landings from her top-story room to the ground floor and studying the photographs framed on the walls along the way. Some framed newsprint. By dates, clothing and the slow-changing face tracing thirty years in the woman’s life. From music halls and revues onward to be a single figure in concert halls and extravaganzas. And Joey decided Virginia Reeves was older than she looked and then decided she looked as old as she was, and so learned; life was not always a flattening press but might also be a conveyance toward a stretching-out into something she might call dignity. Self-possession. An attribute, she determined, that come what would she’d locate within herself.
Then Virginia Reeves began to have people in for dinner: small parties of four or five, at most six guests, men her own age or older, some with wives and some alone or with younger women companions, actresses one and each. The wives regarded the actresses with cool appraisal. Virginia Reeves paid no attention to this but while appearing to include equitably each of her guests it was with the men that another coded language was spoken, all at the table aware of it and no others trying to take part. At the end of each of these evenings Virginia and Joey would
sit together and Virginia would instruct her in who each of the men were—what theatres they owned or which entertainment companies, what their political positions were and what that meant within the frame of greater Providence, what sports teams or ball clubs they owned a share in, what their other business holdings were, how devoted each was to their own particular pursuits, as well as which ones drank too much or were frivolous with the actresses. When Joey asked when she would sing for them she was told the men knew well enough why they’d been invited, and something of who the strange dark girl was, simply by her presence at Virginia’s table. “We will let them think about you a little bit, let them wonder just who you are. It’s good for men. Let their imaginations work before you even open your mouth and they will be lovestruck. You’ll see.”
August then and she missed her period and fretted but chalked it to excitement or the strange place when she thought about it which she didn’t as best she could. At first thought that wanting to sleep, needing to sleep all the time, was only a way to avoid that panic, to close her eyes against it. She was not sick but allowed Virginia Reeves to think she might be as explanation for her fatigue and so although not sick found herself mealtimes staring down at the food on her plate as upon heaps of strange matter, some alien forage that even as she minced into small pieces and lifted to chew and swallow she could not believe she was doing so. And felt the eyes of Virginia Reeves upon her not just at those times but all others as well. And the panic would break through its fine web and flush through her. As if the panic was an advance guard of the truth she would not face.
One afternoon in the middle of practice Joey bolted from the room down the hall to the bathroom with her hand over her mouth to stop the uprush of soured chamomile tea and stood leaning over the basin with the water running, feeling her stomach clench as gorge rose again, thinking, It’s supposed to be in the morning, and then washed her face with warm water and stood looking at herself, at the hollowed and bruised and bulging face, unknowable, gazing back at her from the glass and was at sudden peace. Went on steady feet back the long hall into the music room and announced to the woman still seated on the piano bench what the woman already knew but had been clearly and patiently waiting for Joey to reveal. And Virginia Reeves spoke briefly of an acquaintance, a doctor who quietly tended to the actress demimonde of Providence and when Joey refused to even allow discussion of this the Reeves woman rose from the piano bench and stood a long moment, regarding her with eyes of ferocious sorrow and then wordless left the room, her back erect as always. Leaving Joey to consider the not-very-broad array of cause for that sorrow. Even while hearing the low tones of the woman down the hall at the telephone table.