She’s been studying it ever since first grade. In a way, she’s like the anthropologist who moves into a jungle village, alien at first, fitting in so she can crack the place open for examination even as she’s welcomed into the tribe.
She knows now. Boy, does she know.
Before they bussed her across town to Northshore Elementary she was happy. She played in the dirt with kids who could care less who had what or who got invited or who your folks were, and if somebody pushed you down, you got up and started over. At Northshore, she spent solitary lunch hours and moody afternoons on the school bus, scheming all the way across town. Sure she could talk the talk and walk the walk if she had to, but she despised the superior little snots with their cotillions and sailing lessons at the Fort Jude Club. She loved to push their buttons. Never mind the cute outfits. She could turn heads, just boogieing down the hall in her trashy clothes.
Back in the day, there were still things nice girls just didn’t do, whereas Jessie didn’t give a crap. At Fort Jude High she sent those girls – the very friends she sits down with now – a different message:
I can take your boy away from you, no matter who you think you are. I can have any guy you have and every one you want.
Those girls used to look right through her, like,
slut
.
Well, she has their number now. But Jessie has mellowed.
Defiance sat better on Jessie back then. Odd how in the end you always come home to the town you stepped out of like dirty underwear and kicked away. Back in Fort Jude thirty-some years after the fact, she chose to assume protective coloration because for Jessie Vukovich these days it’s restful, fitting in.
Like a declared state of peace.
She has money; she still has her looks and she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life alone, rising on company ladders in strange cities. She’s proved herself. She doesn’t need to prove anything to these candy-faced, aging girls and she certainly doesn’t need to fight them. In fact, they’ve grown into nice, likable women that it’s fun to sit down with. Every one of them has been seasoned by troubles they don’t talk about: fucked-up kids, unfaithful or insufficient mates, some illness. They’ve all suffered losses and every one of them has chosen to smile in spite of it and keep going. These people have welcomed her, and at her age, Jessie is grateful. She needs a context, so she can rest.
There isn’t much else she needs, except a new man that she can go to all their parties with; she wants this one to be a keeper, so that when push comes to shove, they’ll both be around to help each other die. Odd what passes for happiness. Jessie’s led several lives outside Fort Jude so far, starting as a Blackjack dealer in Vegas at nineteen – high-end table at La Mirage, she might still be there if she hadn’t started marrying up. Her men were all good in their own ways, just not good at love.
It’s time to decide which of the good old local boys will wear well, and settle down.
First, Brad. Wake him up. Ask.
Even though the smell is disgusting, she puts coffee on the bedside table and jiggers the alarm clock to go off in five. She opens the heavy, lined curtains so the room is bright and pushes aside the sliding door. Then she sits down to wait.
In a way, it’s kind of wonderful. Pavlovian. He slams the clock off at the first beep, stumbles down the carpeted steps from the bed and lumbers into the shower. He comes out toweling his head with that useless dick flapping under his slack belly.
God she despises him.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m supposed to see if you’d offed yourself.’
‘Why would I do that?’ He does not move to cover himself.
‘Call it wishful thinking.’ She tosses him a throw from Mildred Kalen’s brocaded
chaise longue
. ‘Give me a break. Put this on.’
Only a fool with no sense of how he is perceived by others would crack that lewd grin, like,
woo hoo
. ‘I thought I was giving you a break.’
‘While you’re at it, cover that smirk.’
He drapes the Afghan over one shoulder and lets it drop as he heads into the walk-in closet, finishing his turn with a stripper’s bump of that hairy butt. She hears hangers sliding on the rack, drawers opening, Brad farting. When he comes out, the shorts and polo shirt hide the worst of the damages. Matchy green, one of those golf outfits Orville left behind when Brad shipped him off to Golden Acres. He faces her in an old man’s coordinated colors. ‘What are you really doing here?’
‘Lucy Carteret.’
Offhand: ‘I heard she died.’
Jessie’s head snaps back. ‘Who told you?’
Lucy? Dead? How does word get around anyway, zeitgeist? Jungle drums? Or do these people communicate like certain kinds of trees – bamboo, she thinks – with a common root system deep underground, woody tentacles interlocking?
He doesn’t answer. Instead he burps a question like that old TV comic who played the belching drunk, ‘What about her?’
Fuck if she’ll tell him that Lucy’s kid is down here from the north, Brad may not know he exists. Let him sop up that information like some fucking tree draining its secret life from the sandy Florida dirt. Better yet, let the kid smack him in the face with it. Let this Dan Carteret track him down and put the fucking question, and when Brad answers, she hopes the kid beats the crap out of him.
She hates this but she has to stay until she gives him the last, hard shove down the road to hell. The question she came to ask, and, as it turns out, can’t leave until she asks. ‘So. That time. Did you rape her?’
He picks up the mug like a defensive weapon. ‘When?’
‘Don’t insult me. Did you?’
‘Did I rape you?’
Vile, she thinks. Filthy, she thinks. Bitter. Bitter. ‘You know fucking well what you did.’
Instead of answering, Brad says, ‘Shitty coffee.’
‘So did you? Rape her?’
Brad raises the mug to mask whatever is going on with his face, which is not necessarily completely under control. He looks at her over the rim, snarling, ‘Why would I do that?’
She does not have to say, ‘You have a history.’
Brad does not have to say, ‘I suppose you want to know if she enjoyed it.’
They have no need to dig up old shit. He does not have to respond with another insulting question, or force her to deconstruct the only possible response she can make to it. Instead she fixes him with a look that makes even Brad crumble. He seems to be melting all at once, a decomposing lump of flesh like Jabba the Hutt, or a monster from a kids’ picture book.
Jessie watches.
Then Brad says through a spurt of bile, ‘You might wanna split before it hits the fan here. I’m gonna puke.’
Al and depressed Margaret just came in from Homosassa Springs with a pelican mounted on driftwood, a souvenir for him. Al is busy putting his arrangement of newspapers and empties back exactly how he had them, although Brad didn’t disturb much that Bobby can see. Margaret is tending her African violets with that apologetic air, as though she’s lamenting something so intense that she’s sorry Bobby’s not in on it. She bobs in the turret like a faded paper doll, picking off dead blossoms with a half-smile because death, at least, is something she can count on.
Ever since 9/11, Margaret’s had trouble going out. Bobby only lured her into the yard last month and Al got her into the car so she’s improving, but it’s slow. She claims it’s chronic fatigue syndrome, but Bobby is secretly convinced that after she lost the baby and her husband bailed, she just quit. She hasn’t exactly turned her face to the wall, but it’s close.
He’s grateful and singularly touched when he makes her smile.
Al is the most nearly content of the three. He never aimed all that high, which means he’s always been pretty well satisfied with whatever mark he happens to hit. Golden parachute, few demands, why not? He has something going with a waitress out at the Lighthouse; that’s all he seems to need, but Bobby. He had dreams.
He walks through these rooms grieving, but the other two will never guess. He’s that good at dissembling. It isn’t exactly the Fall of the House of Usher, but it’s close.
How did we get this way
, Bobby wonders.
How did we go from being what we were to this?
Margaret floats by. ‘Have you eaten?’
‘Not really.’
‘You look awful.’
‘Late night.’ Before they can ask questions he adds, ‘No big.’
Al says, ‘I’ve got Domino’s on speed dial.’
Margaret shudders. ‘All that grease! I’ll thaw my turkey soup.’
She’ll cry if Bobby doesn’t say, ‘Sounds good.’
‘And hot croissants,’ she adds. ‘Poppin’ Fresh.’
In New York, Bobby ate business lunches in the Oak Room and dinners at Lutèce and the old Le Cirque – all places, he realizes, that have ceased to exist, at least as he knew them. ‘That would be lovely,’ he says, just to see her smile.
‘I’m at the Lighthouse,’ Al says. ‘If anything comes up, you’ve got my cell.’
‘You don’t mind canned peaches, I hope.’ Margaret drifts into the kitchen. It’s a foregone conclusion that he’ll sit down and pretend to enjoy her idea of food.
How did it get to be twilight? Hard night, he supposes. Long day. It was nearly noon by the time he offloaded Brad and hosed down the Kalen laundry room, and the afternoon? He doesn’t know. He spent a certain amount of time roaming the house because he thinks somebody broke in last night, but he can’t prove it.
In the uncomfortable fug of Brad’s incursion he didn’t pick up on it, but when he walked into the house after delivering him, he got the idea that the air in here had changed. First he checked the obvious: strongbox. Yes. Family silver. Untouched. Then in a panic he upended the right-hand top drawer to the dresser he had as a kid.
The ring was still taped to the underside where he put it for safekeeping. He closed the drawer with an almost-sob, unless it was a groan.
Alarmed, he scoured his hard drive, but he found no tracks. Every file is timestamped: last accessed 6 a.m. yesterday, when he gave up on his piece about Fort Jude in the late 1800s and shut down. He headed downstairs, relieved.
There had, however, been a breach in security. He just didn’t pick up on it. Now, lingering in the shotgun hallway because he can’t bear to watch Margaret stirring her gummy turkey soup, he jerks to attention. The shelf with all their copies of
The Swordfish
is missing a tooth. He drops to his knees, disturbed.
His yearbook, the one with so much of his past in it, is gone.
Like the maid in that Ionesco play Bobby liked in college, he thinks,
My name is Sherlock Holmes.
He is sitting on the hall floor, double-checking, when Margaret sticks her head in. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘I was just. Ah. Getting a rock out of my shoe.’
‘Don’t give me that. You were looking at Lucy’s picture.’
She doesn’t need to know that he razored it out. It’s in the back of his closet in a morocco frame. She doesn’t need to know that his yearbook is gone. He cares even though Lucy is long gone, so even though his sister is all too prone to psychic disruption he has to say, ‘No. Something’s missing.’
Her eyebrows shoot up but she decides to forget it, for now. ‘Dinner.’
At the kitchen table he sits with his head bent as though they are Pilgrims waiting for somebody to say grace. He is looking into a bowl of Margaret’s turkey soup, the last cube of a batch she froze in a post-Christmas fit. Glutinous rice, cubed celery and overcooked carrots float among shreds of white meat in gray broth. She’s waiting for him to say, ‘It looks great.’
‘It’s my specialty.’
Oh, God he is tired of sitting down to awful dinners under fluorescent light.
They’re going along safely enough, hiding behind his dutiful Q. and A. about Homosassa, when Margaret pounces. ‘So, what are you going to do about it?’
‘About what?’
‘Lucy had a baby, and he’s here!’
Even she knows. Like the soup, it is depressing. ‘What do you mean, what am I going to do?’
‘Is it yours?’
‘What?’
‘You heard me. I saw you and him out there yesterday, talking. What’s he like?’
A direct answer would give her too much pleasure. He parries. ‘Like, you think he’d drop by? Just another stupid tourist, lost in Pine Vista.’
‘Did she have your baby, Bobby.’ It’s supposed to be a question but Margaret lets her voice drop at the end, like a person setting down a rock.
She doesn’t know.
A part of him unclenches. ‘Where’s this coming from, Mag?’
‘Who else would come looking for you, Bobby? Who else could it be? Tourists don’t come here. Turns out Nenna invited him to the Kalen party so you saw him, what’s he like?’
This town
, he thinks.
This town
. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
She removes his half-full soup bowl as if to punish him, and dumps it in the sink. Because her parts are not all that carefully strung together, he has to be careful not to let her see that this is a relief. She squints. ‘Were you finished?’
‘It’s wonderful, but I had a huge lunch.’
‘At the Flordana.’
‘No.’
‘That’s where he’s staying, I just thought . . .’
‘Who?’
He has to be grateful that she does not say ‘your,’ or ‘Lucy’s.’ Just, ‘The son. It’s time you and he connected.’
‘Margaret, I don’t know what you’ve heard or who you’ve been talking to, but they’re full of shit.’
She sets down bowls of canned peaches with blobs of Cool Whip. Margaret isn’t speaking to him, but he’s too preoccupied to notice. The missing yearbook, the Kalen disaster at the club, the last thing Brad said to him, run on a loop inside his head. He can’t stop cross-hatching the territory, chasing a question he can’t quite frame. OK, maybe he’s been silent for too long, but he’s closing on it.
Then his sister,
who he thought he was being strong for
, astounds him. Reaching across the table, she grips his arm in a spasm of sympathy, crying, ‘Oh, Bobby. How can you stand your life?’
I’m fine, eighteen months sober and still counting. Consolidating. Trimming the portfolio and fixing up the house for sale. Walking into that party was a piece of cake, so it won’t be hard to re-connect
. ‘You know what, Mags? It’s probably time we got you to a better shrink.’