After the Plague (25 page)

“Yeah,” I said. “Nice seeing you again. And hey, happy birthday.”

She'd already turned away from the bar, earrings swaying, face composed, but she stopped to give me a smile over her shoulder, and then she made her way across the room and out onto the darkened patio.

And that would have been it, at least until I could get home and watch her shimmy out of that gown and paint her toenails or gorge on cake or whatever it was she was going to do in the semi-privacy of her own room, but I couldn't let it go and I sent over dessert too, a truly superior raspberry-kiwi tart Stefania had whipped up that afternoon. That really put them in my debt, and after dessert the three of them came to the bar to beam at me and settle in for coffee and an after-dinner drink. “You're really just twenty-one today?” I said, grinning at Samantha till the roots of my teeth must have showed. “You're sure I don't have to card you, now, right?”

I watched the hair swirl round her shoulders as she braced herself against the bar and reached down to ease off her heels, and then she was fishing through her purse till she came up with her driver's license and laid it out proudly on the bar. I picked it up and held it to the light—there she was, grinning wide out of the bottom right-hand corner, date of birth clearly delineated, and her name, Jennifer B. Knickish, spelled out in bold block letters. “Jennifer?” I said.

She took the card back with a frown, her eyebrows closing ranks. “Everybody calls me Samantha,” she said. “Really.” And to her companions: “Right, guys?” I watched them nod their glossy heads. The older one, the sister, giggled. “And besides, I don't want any of the creeps to know my real name—even my first name—you know what I mean?”

Oh, yes, yes I did. And I smiled and bantered and called up reserves of charm I hadn't used in years, and the drinks were on me all night long. It was Samantha's birthday, wasn't it? And her twenty-first, no less—a rite of passage if ever there was one. I poured Grand Marnier and Rémy till the customers disappeared
and the waiters and busboys slipped out the back and the lights drew down to nothing.

I woke with a headache. I'd matched them, round for round, and, as I say, I'd started in on the Irish whiskey earlier in the night—and yes, I'm all too well aware that the concrete liver and stumbling tongue are hazards of the profession, but I'm pretty good at keeping all that in check. I do get bored, though, and wind up over-doing it from time to time, especially when the novel isn't going well, and it hadn't been going well in a long while. The problem was, I couldn't get past the initial idea—the setup—which was a story I'd come across in the newspaper two or three years ago. It had to do with an old woman's encounter with the mysterious forces of nature (I don't recall her real name, not that it would matter, but I called her Grandma Rivers, to underscore the irony that here was a woman with eight children, thirty-two grandchildren and six great-grandchildren and she was living alone in a trailer park in a part of the country so bleak no one who wasn't condemned to it would ever even deign to glance down on it from the silvered window of a jetliner at thirty-five thousand feet). One night, when the wind was sweeping up out of the south with the smell of paradise on it and all her neighbors were mewed up in their aluminum boxes lulled by booze, prescription drugs and the somnolent drone of the tube, she stepped outside to take in the scent of the night and indulge in a cigarette (she always smoked outside so as not to pollute the interior of her own little aluminum box set there on the edge of the scoured prairie). No sooner had she lit up than a fox—a red fox,
Vulpes fulva
—shot out of the shadows and latched onto her ankle. In the shock and confusion of that moment, she lurched back, lost her balance and fell heavily on her right side, dislocating her hip. But the fox, which later proved to be rabid, came right back at her, at her face this time, and the only thing she could think to do in her panic was to seize hold of it with her trembling old arms and pin it beneath her to keep the snapping jaws away from her.

Twelve hours. That's how long she lay there, unable to move,
the fox snarling and writhing beneath her, its heartbeat joined to hers, its breathing, the eloquent movement of its fluids and juices and the workings of its demented little vulpine brain, until somebody—a neighbor—happened to glance beyond the hedge and the hump of the blistered old Jeep Wagoneer her late husband had left behind to see her there, stretched out in the gravel drive like a strip of discarded carpet. Yes. But what then? That was what had me stumped. I thought of going back and tracing her life up to that point, her girlhood in the Depression, her husband's overseas adventures in the war, the son killed in Vietnam … or maybe just to let her sink into the background while I focused on the story of the community, the benighted neighbors and their rat-faced children, so that the trailer park itself became a character....

But, as I say, I woke with a headache, and when I did sit down at the computer, it wasn't to call up Grandma Rivers and the imperfect dream of her life, but to click onto
peephall.com
and watch another sort of novel unfold before my eyes, one in which the plot was out of control and the details were selected and shaped only by the anonymous subscriber with his anonymous mouse. I went straight to Samantha's bedroom, but her bed was empty save for the jumbled topography of pillows and bedclothes, and I stared numbly at the shadows thickening round the walls, at the limp form of the gown tossed over a chair, and checked my watch. It was ten-thirty.
Breakfast,
I thought. I clicked on “Kitchen,” but that wasn't her staring into the newspaper with a cup of coffee clenched in one hand and a Power Bar in the other, nor was that her bent at the waist and peering into the refrigerator as if for enlightenment. I went to the living room, but it was empty, a dully flickering static space caught in the baleful gaze of my screen. Had she gone out already? To an early class maybe?

But then I remembered she was taking only one class—“Intermediate Sketching,” paid for by the Web site operators, who were encouraging the Sexy Teen College Coeds actually to enroll so that all the voyeurs out there could live the fantasy of seeing them hitting the books in their thong bikinis and lacy
push-up bras—and that the class met in the afternoon. She was getting paid too, incidentally—five hundred dollars a month, plus the rent-free accommodations at Peep Hall and a food allowance—and all for allowing the world to watch her live hot sexy young life through each scintillating minute of the over-inflated day, the orotund month and the full, round year. I thought of the girls who posed naked for the art classes back when I was an undergraduate (specifically, I thought of Nancy Beckers, short, black hair, balls of muscle in her calves and upper arms and a look in her eyes that made me want to strip to my socks and join her on the dais), and then I clicked on “Downstairs Bath,” and there she was.

This wasn't a hot sexy moment. Anything but. Samantha—my Samantha—was crouched over the toilet on her knees, the soles of her feet like single quotes around the swell of her buttocks, her hair spilling over the bright rim of the porcelain bowl. I couldn't see her face, but I watched the back of her head jerk forward as each spasm racked her, and I couldn't help playing the sound track in my mind, feeling sorrowful and guilty at the same time. Her feet—I felt sorry for her feet—and the long sudden shiver of her spine and even the dangling wet ends of her hair. I couldn't watch this. I couldn't. My finger was on the mouse—I took one more look, watched one last shudder ascend her spine and fan out across her shoulder blades, watched her head snap forward and her hair slide loose, and then I clicked off and left her to suffer in private.

A week rolled by, and I hardly noticed. I wasn't sleeping well, wasn't exercising, wasn't sitting on the porch with a book in my hand and the world opening up around me like a bigger book. I was living the life of the screen, my bones gone hollow, my brain dead. I ate at my desk, microwave pizza and chili-cheese burritos, nachos, whiskey in a glass like a slow, sweet promise that was never fulfilled. My scalp itched. My eyes ached. But I don't think I spent a waking moment outside work when I wasn't stalking the rooms of Peep Hall, clicking from camera to camera in search of a new angle, a better one, the view that would reveal all. I watched Gina floss her teeth and Candi pluck fine translucent hairs from
the mole at the corner of her mouth, sat there in the upstairs bath with Traci as she bleached her roots and shaved her legs, hung electrified over the deck as Cyndi perched naked on the railing with a bottle of vodka and a cigarette lighter, breathing fire into the gloom of the gathering night. Mainly, though, I watched Samantha. When she was home, I followed her from room to room, and when she picked up her purse and went out the door, I felt as if Peep Hall had lost its focus. It hurt me, and it was almost like a physical hurt, as if I'd been dealt an invisible blow.

I was pulling into the drive one afternoon—it must have been a Monday or Wednesday, because I'd just worked lunch—when a rangy, tall woman in a pair of wraparound sunglasses came out of nowhere to block my way. She was wearing running shorts and a T-shirt that advertised some fund-raising event at the local elementary school, and she seemed to be out of breath or out of patience, as if she'd been chasing after me for miles. I was trying to place her as the gate slowly cranked open on its long balky chain to reveal the green depths of the yard beyond—she was someone I knew, or was expected to know. But before I could resolve the issue, she'd looped around the hood of the car and thrust her face in the open window, so close to me now I could see the fine hairs catching the light along the parabola of her jawbone and her shadowy eyes leaping at the lenses of her sunglasses. “I need you to sign this,” she said, shoving a clipboard at me.

The gate hit the end of the chain with a clank that made the posts shudder. I just stared at her. “It's me,” she said, removing the sunglasses to reveal two angry red welts on the bridge of her nose and a pair of impatient eyes, “Sarah. Sarah Schuster—your next-door neighbor?”

I could smell the fumes of the car as it rumbled beneath me, quietly misfiring. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “sure,” and I attempted a smile.

“You need to sign this,” she repeated.

“What is it?”

“A petition. To get rid of them. Because this is a residential neighborhood—this is a
family
neighborhood—and frankly Steve
and I are outraged, just outraged, I mean, as if there isn't enough of this sort of thing going on in town already—”

“Get rid of who?” I said, but I already knew.

I watched her face as she filled me in, the rolling eyes, the clamp and release of the long mortal jaws, moral outrage underscored by a heavy dose of irony, because she was an educated woman, after all, a liberal and a Democrat, but this was just—well, it was just too much.

I didn't need this. I didn't want it. I wanted to be in my own house minding my own business. “All right, yeah,” I said, pushing the clipboard back at her, “but I'm real busy right now—can you come back later?”

And then I was rolling up the driveway, the gate already rumbling shut behind me. I was agitated and annoyed—
Sarah Schuster,
who did she think she was?—and the first thing I did when I got in the house was pull the shades and turn on the computer. I checked Peep Hall to be sure Samantha was there—and she was, sunk into the couch in T-shirt and jeans, watching TV with Gina—and then I smoothed back my hair in the mirror and went out the front door. I looked both ways before swinging open the gate, wary of Sarah Schuster and her ilk, but aside from two kids on bikes at the far end of the block, the street was deserted.

Still, I started off in the opposite direction from the big white house on the corner, then crossed the street and kept going—all the way up the next block over—so as to avoid any prying eyes. The sun was warm on my face, my arms were swinging, my feet knew just what to do—I was walking, actually walking through the neighborhood, and it felt good. I noticed things the view from the car window wouldn't have revealed, little details, a tree in fruit here, a new flowerbed there, begonias blooming at the base of three pale silvery eucalypti at the side of a neighbor's house, and all that would have been fine but for the fact that my heart seemed to be exploding in my chest. I saw myself ringing the doorbell, mounting the steps of the big white house and ringing the bell, but beyond that I couldn't quite picture the scene. Would Samantha—or Traci or Candi or whoever—see me as just another
one of the creeps she had to chat with on-line for two hours each week as part of her job description? Would she shut the door in my face? Invite
me
in for a beer?

As it turned out, Cyndi answered the door. She was shorter than I'd imagined, and she was dressed in a red halter top and matching shorts, her feet bare and toenails painted blue—or aquamarine, I suppose you'd call it. I couldn't help thinking of the way she looked without her clothes on, throwing back her head and spewing flames from her lips. “Hi,” I said, “I was looking for Samantha? You know,
Jennifer,
” I added, by way of assuring her I was on intimate terms here and not just some psychotic who'd managed to track them all down.

She didn't smile. Just gave me a look devoid of anything—love, hate, fear, interest, or even civility—turned her head away and shouted, “Sam! Sammy! It's for you!”

“Tell her it's Hart,” I said, “she'll know who—” but I broke off because I was talking to myself: the doorway was empty. I could hear the jabber and squawk of the TV and the thump of bass-heavy music from one of the upstairs bedrooms, then a whisper of voices in the hall.

In the next moment a shadow fell across the plane of the open door, and Samantha slid into view, her face pale and tentative. “Oh,” she said, and I could hear the relief in her voice. “Oh, hi.”