Knife Fight and Other Struggles (3 page)

I made for the bathroom—the second floor bath, which yes, I know, was a
faux pas
at Len’s parties, particularly late into the evening. But there was a small crowd around the two-piece off the kitchen, and I needed to tidy up sooner. So I slipped upstairs and made for the master bath. Which, happily, was vacant. The lights flickered on as I stepped inside and I slid the pocket door shut, and confronted myself in the long mirror opposite the showers.

I didn’t think I took that long; just splashed water in my face, ran a wet comb through my hair, shook the sand out of my shirt and tucked it in properly before giving myself another inspection. By my own reckoning, it couldn’t have been more than five minutes. But the hammering on the door said otherwise.

It was Kimi, Len’s Kimi.

In a week, she’d be on a plane back to New York, done with all of us, gone from Len’s circle for good. That party, she was on the verge of it. I slid open the door and apologized. “You shouldn’t be up here,” she said, “not this time of night,” and I agreed.

“Ask forgiveness not permission? That it, Tommy?” she said and brushed past me. She had been spending time in Len’s rooms, and it had gone about as badly as it did toward the end. You could tell. Do you remember that time Len had us all on that boat he’d hired for the summer? And she came hammering on our cabin door—with that fishhook stuck in just below the collarbone? And when you opened it, she was so quiet, asking if you knew where they kept the first-aid kit on the boat because “Len isn’t sure.” You knew something awful had happened, I knew something awful had happened.

We talked about it after we got the hook out and the wound cleaned and bandaged and Kimi, smiling brightly, had excused herself and skipped back to the cabin she and Len were sharing. What did you say? “One day, that armour of hers is going to crack. When it does, she’ll either leave or she’ll die.”

It was a good line; I laughed as hard as you did.

Well, there in the upstairs bath, the armour was cracking. And Kimi wasn’t dead. But she wasn’t leaving either. She leaned against the vanity, arms crossed over her chest. She was wearing a short black skirt. Her shoulders, arms, and legs were bare. There were no visible bruises. No fishhooks either. She studied me, maybe looking for the same things.

“You go for a swim?” she said finally. “You look like you went for a swim in the ocean.”

“Guilty.”

Her eyes flickered away a moment as she waved a hand. “Nobody’s guilty of taking a fucking swim. And it’s a good look for you.” Then she looked again, reassessing. “But you didn’t just go for a swim.”

“You were right. I took a fucking swim,” I said, and started to laugh, and she got it and laughed too.

“How’s your night going?” I asked. She made a little sneer with her lips—as if she was trying to fish a piece of food out of her teeth. Put her bare feet together on the slate tile floor, made a show of inspecting the nails.

“Len’s very tired,” she said.

I raised my eyebrows. “Oh dear. That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not as bad as that.”

“If you say so.”

She looked at me. “Are you hitting on me, Tommy?”

I said I wasn’t.

“Then why the fuck are you still here?”

There was an answer to that question, but not one I could really articulate—not the way she was looking at me then. I wanted to talk to her about Lucy, about the eyes. . . . I thought—hoped—that she would be able to help me parse the experience somehow. Or failing that, help me put it away, someplace quiet.

But her armour was cracked. She had nothing to offer me. And although I wouldn’t know for sure until a week later—she wasn’t leaving that night, she stayed the whole time—she was almost certainly planning her escape.

So I left her to it. “I’m very tired too,” I said, and stepped into the hall.

That one didn’t get a laugh. The bathroom door slid shut behind me, hitting the doorjamb hard enough to quiver in its track.

“You’re still thinking about
her
,” said Kimi through the wood. “Well, give it up, Tommy. It’s obvious to everybody. She’s done with you.”

Oh, don’t worry. I know you’re done with me. I’m done with you too.

I joined the conversation in the kitchen, or rather hovered at its edge. Dennis had stepped away, and now Emile was talking about Dubai, which was hardly a new topic for him. But the girls he and Prabh had brought were new. They hung on every word. I leaned against the stove, poured myself the dregs of a Chardonnay into a little plastic cup and swallowed the whole thing. Prabh found me a Malbec from Portugal and poured a refill.

“Yeah, you look like shit,” he said. “Bad night?”

“Not exactly bad,” I said. “Strange. Not exactly bad.”

Prabh nodded and turned back to his girl. She was very pretty, I had to hand it to him: tall, with streaked blonde hair and a dancer’s body. Twenty-seven years old, no older. I’d turn back to her too.

So I kept drinking, and Prabh kept filling my cup, and after a while, I’d moved from the periphery of the conversation to the juicy middle. And there, I asked as innocently as I could manage: “Any of you know Lucy?”

Shrugs all around. I showed a level hand to indicate her height. Another to show how long her hair was. “We don’t know her, Tom,” said Emile, and Prabh poured me another glass.

“Maybe you want to sit down?” asked one of the girls.

It was an excellent suggestion. I made my way to the sectional in the living room with only a little help here and there, as necessary.

Really, I don’t think I made
that
much of a spectacle of myself. But I had had too much to drink and I’d had it all too quickly. I was speaking extemporaneously, you might say. So I concluded it best not to speak at all.

I fitted myself into the corner of the sectional. Dru and Ben, a few feet to my left, made a point of staying engrossed in one another—and as soon as it was polite to do so, got up and found spots at the dining room table. And I was left to myself.

By this time it was well past midnight. You know how that is. It’s a time when you start asking questions about things that in the light of day you wouldn’t consider twice. It’s a time . . . well, we both know how it goes, in the dark hour.

I was left to myself.

I began to feel badly about leaving Lucy on the beach. I wondered if I might have handled things differently. I worried that I might have impregnated her, or caught a venereal disease. Briefly, I worried that some of those eyes might have migrated from her skin to mine—if I’d caught a case of leaping, burrowing, and uniquely ocular crabs. If I closed my own eyes, would I see a thousand dim refractions of the room from the point of view of my belly?

The notion made me laugh—a little too loudly, I think. Dennis, reeking of weed and vodka cooler, just about turned on his heel at the sight of me and fled back to the deck. But it got me wondering at the nature of Lucy’s peculiar disease again, if that’s what it was. If not she, then who was looking out through those eyes? And so, in circles, went my thoughts.

The front door opened and closed once, twice, five times. Water ran in the kitchen sink. Lights dimmed in rooms not far from this one.

“Hey, Tom. How you keeping?”

I looked up and blinked.

“Hey, Len,” I said. “Haven’t seen you all night.”

He nodded. “I’ve been a rotten host.”

Len was wearing his kimono, that red one with the lotus design. He’d lost a lot of weight—you couldn’t mistake it, the kimono hung so loose on him. His hair was coming back in, but it was still thin, downy. He sat down beside me.

“You met Lucille,” he said.

“How did you know?” I asked, but I didn’t need to; as I spoke, I saw Kimi over the breakfast bar in the kitchen, putting glasses into the dishwasher. She’d told him about our conversation in the washroom. He’d put it together.

“Yeah,” said Len, “you were on the beach. Two of you. Had yourself a time, didn’t you, Tom?”

“We had ourselves a time.”

Len put a bony hand on my thigh, gave it a squeeze of surprising strength, and nodded.

“Now you’re drunk in my living room, when everybody else has had the sense to get out. Too drunk to drive yourself, am I right?”

That was true.

“And you don’t have cab fare, do you?”

I didn’t have cab fare.

“You’re a fucking leech, Tom. You
smell
like a fucking leech.”

“It’s the ocean,” I said.

Kimi turned her back to us, lowered her head and raised her shoulder blades, like wings, as she ran water in the kitchen sink.

“Yeah, we know that’s not so,” said Len. “You smell of Lucy.” He licked his lips, and not looking up, Kimi called out, “That’s not nice, Len,” and Len chuckled and jacked a thumb in her direction and shrugged.

“Did she leave?” I asked. “Lucy, I mean.”

“Miss her too now?” Did I miss her like
you
, he meant, obviously.

“I just didn’t see her leave.”

“What’d I just say?
Everybody else
had the sense to get out.”

A plate clattered loudly in the sink. Len shouted at Kimi to
be fuckin’ careful with that.
Then he coughed and turned an eye to me. His expression changed.

“You saw,” he said quietly. “Didn’t you?”

“I saw.”

He looked like he wanted to say more. But he stopped himself, the way he does: tucking his chin down, pursing his lips . . . like he’s doing some math, which is maybe close to the mark of what he is doing until he finally speaks.

“Did she tell you how we met?”

“Friend of a friend,” I said, then remembered: “Not just a friend; one of your partners. And then you just kept inviting her out.”

“Always that simple, isn’t it?”

“It’s never that simple,” I said, “you’re going to tell me.”

“It is that simple,” he said. “Lucille Carroll is a high school friend of Linda James. Linda isn’t a partner now and I won’t likely live to see the day that she is. But she did work for me. With me. And she used to come out sometimes. And she brought Lucille one day. And not long after, Linda stopped coming around. Lucille still shows up.” He sighed. “Simple.”

Kimi flipped a switch under the counter and the dishwasher hummed to life. “I’m turning in,” she announced, and when Len didn’t say anything, she climbed the stairs.

“It’s not that simple,” I said when Kimi was gone. Now, I thought, was the time when Len would spell it out for me: tell me what had happened, really.

“And she doesn’t like to talk about it,” was what he said instead. “It’s private, Tom.”

What came next? Well, I might have handled it better. But you know how I hate it when my friends hide things from me. We both remember the weekend at the lake, with your sister and her boys. Did I ever properly apologize for that? It’s difficult to, when all I’ve spoken is God’s truth.

But I could have handled it better.

“It’s not private,” I said, “it’s the opposite. She’s the least private person I’ve met. The eyes. . . .”

“Her skin condition, you mean.”

“You do know about them.” I may have jabbed him in the chest. That may have been unwise. “Maybe you like them? Watching everything you do? Maybe they flatter your vanity. . . .”