A Bigamist's Daughter (23 page)

There is, he tells her, a small bone or tendon near the skin inside her thigh, that rises or tightens under his tongue, creating a deep hollow in the flesh around it. A hollow that could, he is sure, catch rain.

There is, at the small of her back, a slight dimple like a gentle thumbprint. When he puts his thumb to it, she moves her hips. Always toward him. (He says this seriously, uncertainly, as if he himself believes it too good to be true.)

At the back of her neck, under her dark hair, there is a tapering line of lighter, finer hair, fading down into the shadow of her spine. If his fingers follow it, he thinks of fur, quick bones moving underneath. If he reaches around to her soft stomach, he feels he has suddenly lost his footing, as in a dream. Like a sailor who has suddenly considered the depth of the ocean beneath him.

He lies beside her, whispering: She tastes of rain—the way the heavy air tastes just before a thunderstorm, or just after. Of sea salt. He licks his lips in the dark, puts her hand to his mouth to taste her again.

He sometimes asks that they leave the light on. He loves the way her mouth seems to turn into itself at its corners, as if, he says, her lips, having given the world enough pleasure, quickly and demurely meet to withdraw.

Her bottom lashes are unusually long, did she know that? They seem to move together, forming points like small petals.

Her hair, he tells her as they are walking, takes on a different odor in bed. It loses its perfume, has a humid, grassy smell, much better. It feels cool when it brushes his chest.

One morning, he proudly shows her where she has bitten him, dug her nails into his flesh. He laughs when she apologizes and says she was unaware. He tells her they are his first tattoos. Gained while on adventure in a foreign land.

Alone, she studies herself, remembering his fantastic reports. She lifts her hair, watches her thighs, doubts him. Begins to believe.

He offers to photograph her.

She laughs, “But no one’s ever mentioned it before.”

He’s a writer, he tells her. The first thing he learned at Vanderbilt was to be specific.

She studies herself again. If he is no writer, what can be said for his writer’s eye?

Chapter 14

The simplest questions, the most ordinary responsibilities, are the ones that throw her. She can explain to any author, without hesitation, how eight pages added to a manuscript will mean adding another signature, which will mean increasing the size of the binding and the jacket, which will, of course, add considerably to the cost of production, and thus the contract itself. But let the same author ask her (after having eliminated the extra pages or paid her for them) how to get to Columbus Circle by subway, and her mouth will go dry, her heart will sink.

It’s as if the fine web of lies and illusions with which she gets through her day is penetrable only by those small, definite questions. Factual questions that can’t be faked, that slip like pebbles through the weave of her various poses and strike at what she fears is her raw stupidity.

How, after all, can a bright young editor at a large New York publishing house not know the difference between IRT and IND, between ounces and pints, between affect and effect?

And so, that Saturday afternoon, as she and Tupper Daniels pull out of her street in a rented Firebird and he says, “Which way?” the name of every road on Long Island—the Expressway, Grand Central Parkway, Southern State, Meadowbrook,
Northern State, Cross Island—meet and fuse in her mind, becoming, for her, one long stretch of featureless concrete.

“Take the Tunnel,” she says, trying to buy more time in the city, where names and numbers are predictable. “The Midtown Tunnel.”

He smiles, looking like a pale pervert in his flashing sunglasses. Though it’s late October, the day is warm and bright. He has a deep red sweater tied around his neck—it is blinding against the car’s white interior. “I take it then I have to go toward midtown.”

“That’s right,” and before she can adjust her seat belt he has cut west, through scornful pedestrians and changing lights, and turned onto Fifth Avenue.

She laughs. “Not this far midtown. The Tunnel’s on the East Side.”

He shrugs. “So we’ll go down Fifth. It’s prettier.”

Stopped for a light, he puts his hand on the seat beside him and races the engine. He only needs, she thinks, a can of beer and a wad of gum.

“You look right at home behind the wheel,” she says.

“I was
born
behind the wheel.” A teenage hillbilly grinning over his hot rod. She notices that he
is
chewing gum. When the light changes, he pulls out in front and cuts off two cabs, swearing he’ll make every light to Thirty-fourth Street. They’re stopped at the Plaza and in front of St. Patrick’s, and again at Forty-second Street, but he slips under each light going cross-town and veers into the Tunnel like a barnstormer.

She laughs. It’s a silly, peacock display, but it’s been a long time since she’s ridden in a car with a man, and not terribly long since such displays truly thrilled her (like Ann, there are parts of her adolescence she’ll never shake). And there is, she thinks, something about a man’s hands on the steering wheel—thick knuckles, strong wrists—something about the
casual slump of his body in the seat, the easy, screeching turns and clever shifts of gear, the absolute male confidence on the road, that makes her feel lucky, taken care of. Dad’s in his bucket, all’s right with the world.

She remembers breaking up with a boy in college because he sat stiffly behind the wheel and bit his nails as he drove.

In Wisconsin, her father had been killed by the other guy. Although the police had pointed out that her father, too, had been drinking.

As they come out of the Tunnel and go through the toll-booth, Tupper looks up at the signs and asks, “Do I want the Long Island Expressway?”

She says, “Yes,” although she means
If you say so,
and tries to force her mind to remember what comes next. She can only be sure of Montauk.

“How long do I stay on here?” he asks, getting into the fast lane.

“I’ll let you know,” she says. “It’s a ways.”

He glances at her, then in his rearview mirror. “Well, just give me fair warning. I hate it when women give directions like, ‘Make a right. Back there.’ ”

She smiles. “I’ll let you know.” And now even the names of the roads slip from her mind. Of course, it’s women. Women will get wet when you drive fast and look pretty beside you, but you sure as hell can’t depend on them for intelligence, much less directions. They’ll giggle and say, “Make a right. Back there.”

She gives up the idea of giggling and saying, “We’d better ask at a gas station.”

“What a beautiful Ferrari,” she says instead, casually, trying to sound like one of the boys, although she has to squint to read the car’s name. She considers saying something crude about the blonde driving it.
Dumb bitch, probably lost.

Tupper turns his head to look at the car. “Nice,” he says.

They drive silently, past the sloping lawns of Calvary Cemetery, where gray and beige and bright white tombstones crowd together like pedestrians on Fifth Avenue at lunchtime—although the cemetery has placed these New Yorkers in what seems an incongruous kind of order, as if, at their point, order mattered—and, weaving quickly through the traffic, follow the road through Queens.

They pass a sign for a street that she knows would lead them to her old apartment in Flushing, where she lived until she moved up with Bill, but she’d spent her year there without a car, being chauffeured by Bill or Joanne or the MTA, and all but the location of her own building and her apartment within it is a blank to her now. She could have spent that year as a murmuring recluse.

“I used to live around here,” she tells Tupper, although she suspects she is lying.

She’d found the apartment the day after her mother had announced she was leaving for Maine. Found it quickly, in a cold sort of fury—the pathetic girl-child flung from the nest—and she moved in before her mother had even begun packing, determined to prove that she too had plans for her own life and was anxious to get on with them, but hoping, she is sure now, that such a swift, startling first flight would frighten her mother into bringing her home again.

Instead, her mother had said, “What luck!” and offered her the good furniture from their living room. Elizabeth refused it, tightly telling her she could make do with the stuff from the basement, playing the martyr but also fearing to see the pieces from her own home huddled in that ugly apartment like flood victims in a school cafeteria.

She did, however, accept the double bed from her mother’s room, feeling that if her mother was making a statement by
offering it to her, she would make a statement by accepting it. Although just what either of them might have been stating remained unclear.

“Have you known this girl a long time?” Tupper asks suddenly.

“Joanne?” She wonders if the driving has made him forget to say woman. “Since grammar school.”

“What’s her last name?” The car has increased his accent too.

“Paletti. Or it was. Now it’s Paletti-Hanson.”

“Sounds like a machine gun,” he says. “The Paletti-Hanson 244.”

She smiles. Short rows of stores whizz by. A place where she and Joanne used to stop for bagels after bar-hopping in the city, still decorated, as it was then, with its multicolored grand-opening flags and a spindly fluorescent sign that says HOT. She calms down a little. This must be the right way.

“What does she know about me?”

She looks at him. His jaw, reflecting the red sweater, moves slowly.

“Just that you’re a friend.”

He nods. What she’d really said was that he was an author she’d met at work, so don’t ask what ridiculous things have happened at Vista lately. Joanne, who has always been more interested in romance than ethics, had said only, “Who cares what he does. Is he cute?”

“What does
her
husband do?” He emphasizes the “her” as if he were comparing hers to yours.

“Tommy’s a lawyer.” She sees a sign for the Cross Island Parkway, and so, because it’s two miles ahead, says calmly, “We take the Cross Island. It’s up here about two miles.”

He nods and looks over his shoulder to change lanes. She feels her heart pounding. Cross Island goes where?

“What time are they expecting us?”

“Between six and seven. But I told her you wanted to drive out to the beach first.”

“Here?” he says, slowing for the exit.

“Yes,” she says, having no idea. She’s reading signs desperately now, wondering how long she can keep him lost before he realizes it.

“You almost sound worried about meeting them,” she says, still looking out the window, trying to sound calm.

He shrugs. The road is narrow. Cars seem to squeeze in on all sides. “Well, this is the first time you’ve introduced me to any of your friends. I feel you’re finally letting me get past your professional life.” She wonders if he considers sleeping with him part of her professional life. He takes one hand from the wheel and puts it over hers, which is perspiring on the white seat. “I feel I’m finally getting close to you.”

He looks at her, smiling, squeezing her hand, and she smiles back at him, still glancing at the fleeting signs. He will make this evening significant despite her.

She has invited him, she thinks, because Joanne asked her to. Or, no, because he suggested renting a car and taking a drive and Joanne provided them with a destination. Because she had promised Joanne she’d come out and he could save her the trouble of the train.

They go quickly through an underpass that blocks the sun and her ears.

She has invited him because she feared, has been fearing since the wedding, to go to Joanne’s newlywed apartment celibate and unattached, like a pathetic old aunt. Because she feared Tommy’s exuberant graciousness as he carefully avoided touching Joanne or discussing their affection in front of her, the way one might avoid references to color and light when your only guest is blind. Because she feared Joanne’s pity and optimism—“Oh, you’ll meet someone. It always happens when
you least expect it”—dished out in her cozy living room, in her lucky marriage.

She invited him because she needed someone, some man, to hold up beside Joanne’s: Joanne’s man, Joanne’s love, Joanne’s happiness.

And yet, Joanne has claimed she’s not happy. Maybe, she thinks, she needed someone to hold up beside that too. If you’re out, I’m out.

They pass a sign naming a familiar road.

“The next exit,” she says, hoping, once they’re off the Parkway, that her memory will clear.

“Are you sure?” he says. “I thought you could go straight highway.”

“You can, but this is more scenic. The trees are so pretty.”

Saying it, she notices them for the first time. Brown, gold, yellow, red, lining the highway. Autumn again.

“You’re the native,” he says, turning off.

“That’s true.” But as they drive down a wide road, past 7-11’s and Burger Kings and body repair shops flanked by weary trees with bright leaves that are as pathetic as all final efforts, she knows she is lost.