Open Water (19 page)

“I’d like to go ring that doorbell. You know, go in there and tell her my condolences.”

“Sure, I’ll wait here,” Holly told him.

“Can’t.”

“Well, of course you
can’t
.” Holly flip-flopped. “You can’t just go in there like a family member. Why don’t you just let it alone. I’m not making a criticism, but maybe you shouldn’t dwell on these tragedies. My father’s dead. Once they’re dead, they’re dead.”

Willis said, “I try to imagine them. I don’t mind trying. I like to give it the benefit of the doubt.”

“Are you talking about ghosts?”

“The human spirit,” he said.

“Maybe you could think about it once a day. Like when you pray,” Holly said.

“I don’t pray. Not since I was a kid. Do you pray?”

“Shit.” They turned their heads and looked out opposite windows. “No, I don’t take time to pray. Maybe we should start up again.”

Holly used to go along with her father to the Presbyterian church at Four Corners. The minister used those four corners in his sermons each Sunday, inventing antithetical
metaphors, such as the corners of guilt and innocence; wrong and right; faith and despair.

The Sunday light clothed everything, streets and sidewalks in bleached muslin. She sat in a polished pew beside her father. The gleaming rows smelled like Murphy’s Oil Soap until her sinuses felt raw. Her father watched ahead, listening to the sermon, ready to follow the broader guidelines. Her father might be stinging from his losses at Lincoln Park dog track. Sunday mornings, Holly listened as her father shaved and dressed for church. If he mimicked the track announcer’s voice, his ascending singsong as he sights the mechanical rabbit and calls the start, “AND HERE COMES YANK-EE—” he had had a lucky night.

Willis steered the car away from Sheila Boyd’s Cape-style house. He wanted to show Holly another place. A graveyard by the sea. The misty twilight was perfect and eerie; it almost necessitated a cemetery visit. He drove along the salt marsh and rocky meadows of Second Beach and onto Indian Avenue. He pulled over at a forlorn place, a few empty acres called White’s Monument Village, and turned off the ignition. They got out of the car and started to walk.

Willis led Holly to a divided area in the park. Holly saw a stone monument that supported a large bronze scroll. The scroll had the word
BABYLAND
on it. Willis fingered the bizarre compound word. He said, “These little squirts didn’t know what hit them.” The scroll was a smarmy salutation welcoming children to their new home:

“That’s sick,” Holly said.

“That poem comes from the Gorham Monument Catalogue. Gorham is like Hallmark or American Greetings for the burial industry. This poem isn’t unique. There’s nine hundred of these Babyland scrolls in cemeteries all over the United States. Think of it.”

“How do you know that?”

“Fritz used to work here cutting grass. The groundskeeper was a chatterbox.”

“I guess it’s a lonely job,” Holly said, “tending graves. I bet it makes somebody want to yack.”

Holly didn’t like the poem. How could children be given such a short straw. She didn’t like the sentiment that a child was only worth its weight in gold. Willis walked ahead of Holly to a fresh excavation. The earth was carefully removed. All four incredibly short sides were expertly smoothed. It looked square as a lunch pail sunk in the velvet lawn. The grave did not yet have a marker.

“This one’s for Sheila’s baby,” he said, “when it gets back from the Research Triangle.”

“When it gets back from where?”

“When the medical students are through gawking at it.”

“How do you know whose grave this is?”

“A hunch. It’s too small for me. So I know it’s not mine.” He looked at her. “Shit. It’s about the size of a breadbox,” Willis said.

“Out of the
oven
and into the
breadbox
,” Holly said.

He didn’t like the joke. The baby cemetery was more than he could handle; for Willis an acre of tiny, doll-size skeletons was plenty enough reason for a man to slit his own throat.

“I’m not fucking you in a cemetery,” she told him.

He turned to face her and shrugged.

“Is this your idea of romance? Making love in baby graveyards? That kind of thing went out with the beatnik generation.”

He walked ahead, taking long strides. He went over a knoll before Holly could catch up. He was thinking of his mother’s grave in detached ruminations. Had the little chunk of sausage that had choked Wydette been buried with her remains? What happens to the undigested stomach contents, the velvety gruel left inside the bowel? All of it was part of the same soup, stirred by the worms.

Holly caught up to him and they stood together looking at the chalky grid, intensified in the twilight. Willis steered her over to his parents’ simple monuments. Both stones were engraved only with the surname Pratt. Lester was on the left, Wydette was on the right. In a few more years, no one would remember whose side was which. Willis had always thought that there was some sort of deception being practiced. The anonymity of the family name seemed crude.

“Do you always bring girls to meet your folks like this?”

He was surprised by her words and laughed. His laughter was exciting to Holly, it exposed him. Real laughter erupts from a man’s soft interior, and she was pleased to feel its luxurious notes dissolving in the air around her. She tried another quip, but it wasn’t successful; he was on guard after the first time.

Holly said, “Ever been to Neptune’s?”

“That string of summer shacks?”

“My home away from home,” she told him.

Willis took her over there. He told her, “I always liked the place. You can see it from across the cove. These shacks are white, all right, like a row of teeth.”

“It’s nice, isn’t it? Yachtzies can see it offshore. They
sail into the Ida Lewis Yacht Club to rent moorings and ask about this place. They can see these shacks all the way out in the sound.” She made Willis park the car and she walked him down the string of shacks, telling him their distinctions and peculiarities. Each cottage was boarded up; Holly had to paint the interior with words. She even tried to describe the shelf paper in the cupboards. The wallpaper. The matching curtains. Everything was cabbage roses. “I start changeovers again in about a month.”

“What exactly happens at these changeovers?” he said.

“I work my ass off. People start coming and going. I tell you, it’s a view of the world. People check in and they check out. You get a picture of someone. After one week of vacation, some fellows look good, they’re satisfied. Other ones look worse for it, like they can’t accept the fact that life is ninety-five percent hard work at a regular job and only one week off. I watch it all. They party it up, get some big lobsters. Did you know everyone puts his lobster down on the linoleum before they shove ’em in the pot? I think that’s a scream. They have a feast, then they sink into gloom. It’s a whole spectrum of feelings.”

“What about these hooks?” Willis said. He pointed to the empty hooks over the front doors of the cottages.

“These hooks are for the flower signs. You know, ‘Lupine,’ ‘Myrtle—’ ” She recited the names of the flowers. The bare hooks over every door gave Willis an uncomfortable feeling. It was the same feeling he got when he saw blank granite monuments displayed on the front lawn of the stonecutter’s shop. Holly told him that the signs were removed and stored until the summer season so the wind couldn’t lift off the lettering. “The wind out here,” she said, “is like a chisel.”

Willis put his arms around her waist and leaned into her
on the doorstep of one cottage. “Which one is this?” he said.

“Clematis,” she said. It had an anatomical sound, which she hadn’t yet noticed after all her years there, not until that moment.

He tugged her and rattled the door handle. He moved his hips against her, as if he was climbing through her. He shook the door. He was playacting, but she knew he wanted in.

“Locked,” she said.

“You don’t have privileges?”

“No. But I have my other keys with me.”

“What keys?”

“My old apartment. The place with the sinkhole. You hear about it?”

Willis said, “Everyone in town knows the place. It’s a regular attraction.”

“Want a closer look?” She might have been talking about the sinkhole or something else. He studied her face.

Willis admitted that he was curious.

They rode into town and parked on Spring Street. Spring Street was dead. In the twilight hours, the world resumes its clarity, everything is arrested. Night falls over the town the way a drop of water pins a flea with its minute surface tension. Willis knew that a flea could survive until the water evaporated; but he often didn’t think he would emerge intact from any given night. He looked up. A pink moon was eroding, cherry of morphine. When he had these thoughts, his eyes started to hurt, his sinuses stabbing. He rubbed his knuckles across the bridge of his nose to soothe the pinging. Holly watched his moods shift. His modulations of feeling were disturbing, yet she disliked men who never washed over a certain level.

They walked around the sinkhole, skirting the flat chunks of broken asphalt. Her apartment house was still condemned, but she saw construction had started. The joists had been shimmed and the foundation was partially filled in with gravel and chalky-blue hardener. The front door of the building was left wide open. She ignored the
NO TRESPASSING
signs and took Willis inside the building, as if nothing had ever happened to suggest that the building might, at any minute, give way to its years. Willis followed her up the stairs. The hall was dark. The electricity was shut off.

Once inside the apartment, she found the drawer with the hurricane candles. Together they tapered the wicks and lit them with kitchen matches. Willis arranged the candles along the kitchen windowsill, letting the wax drip on the ledge before grinding the stems into the hot puddle. She sat down at the dinette set, which was coated with concrete dust from weeks of jackhammering in the street outside. Willis sat across from her and pushed the heel of his hand through the powder, reaching for her. The candlelight stuttered in the draft, one waffling gold zone.

The building’s decay seemed a strange catalyst. It was a phantom dwelling; the sinkhole’s gaping pit attained the dreamy character of a castle’s moat. They didn’t have to remember the exterior world, their lives already in progress; their irrefutable pasts seemed, suddenly, open-ended.

They moved to the sofa. He was careful not to rest his plastered arm against her bare skin, until at last she asked to feel its chilly swipe. He tugged it gently over her hips and guided it along her mound of Venus. She pinched her legs closed upon it. She released her hold and they laughed. She shivered with temperature shifts; pleasure surges ricocheted through her erogenous landmarks in one cluster response. Her sharp inhalations couldn’t keep up. Willis liked
hearing her shaky respirations, which vacillated with his touch, as if he manipulated a magic throttle.

Willis rolled onto her. His skin was flushed where the candles threw their light. The hair at his temple smelled like hard-milled lavender soap, like old-fashioned boxed soaps sold in department stores.

He was holding back. “Wait a minute. Are you all right?”

She told him yes.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I’m fine,” she told him.

“Are you sure? Some girls are just like Chia Pets. Next day, they’ve sprouted.”

She wondered what he was talking about. “Bean sprouts?”

“Just think a minute. Think of Sheila’s baby.”

Holly couldn’t imagine it.

Then he started again, his reserve was crumbling. In his mind, he said Holly’s name. Her name was an illumination, her name flared like smudge pots along a remote runway. Again he held up. Now it was his romantic notions which dizzied him with their complexity, or it was morphine which almost stole his erection. Holly seemed to recognize that he had moved ahead of sex, and she told him to concentrate on one thing. One thing.

He fucked her and let his mind rest.

In a moment, Willis jumped up. The window was blazing. Candle wax had puddled and ignited the jacquard curtains; even the window sash was catching, its old linseed paint snapping. The flames rose up both sides and across the top valance.

He went to the sink and turned open the tap. The water was off. Holly took her sweater and hit the flames with its little cuff, but it only fanned the blaze. In the dark,
the golden frame was hypnotizing, and Holly stopped her efforts to stand beside Willis and watch. The fire threw a sheet of light across their bodies and they looked back and forth at one another with only a slight veil of modesty.

At last, Willis picked up a kitchen mat and rubbed it over the window frame, clockwise, as if he were dusting the furniture. The thick rug robbed the flames of oxygen and the window grew dark. The scorched wood released its immediate scent.

“Shit, that took off fast,” Willis said. “This old paint—”

“You weren’t there yet,” she said. She pulled his hand to her bare waist, but he had lifted his jeans from the floor and was tugging them over his legs.

“Come on,” she said.

Willis said, “Not here.”

She tugged his sooty fingers.

“Jesus, girl.” He peeled her hand off his wrist. “I’m sure someone saw that fire in the window. It was the fucking Fourth of July. They’re dialing 911.”

He drove her back to the duplex. He parked the car in his usual spot against the side of Rennie’s house and he walked Holly over to her porch. Willis stopped dead in his tracks. He was eyeing something.

Some nights, a family of skunks congregated at the porch steps and Holly had to pick her way carefully. She looked for the skunks. She didn’t see anything.