He hadn't given a thought to Natalia all afternoon, except to consider, somewhere in the back of his mind, that they'd have to go out to dinner because he really hadn't had time to plan anything. She had the car, so she would have been out shopping and she would have picked up the kid and probably taken her for a sandwich someplace. He was thinking alfresco, if the mosquitoes weren't too bad--there was a place in Cold Spring, right on the water. Maybe they would try that.
The first thing he noticed was that the sprinkler was going on the side lawn--Madison had been dancing through the revolving sheets of water in her shorts and T-shirt and he must have told her ten times already to be sure to shut the water down when she was done because it pooled there and made a mess of the lawn--and then he saw that Natalia, in her haste to haul her loot into the house, had left all four doors of the car wide open. Or no, it was only three. She was improving. Definitely improving. When Sandman pulled up beside the Mercedes and cut the engine, the first thing Peck did was get out and slam all three doors before ducking round the corner of the house to shut off the water and retrieve the sprinkler. In the process of which, he got his Vans wet.
Sandman was standing there in the driveway grinning at him, his aviator shades throwing light up into the trees. “Good to be home, huh?” he said. “The comforts of the hearth and all that.”
“You mocking me?” Peck said, feinting as if to toss him the bright yellow disc of the sprinkler. “Because you set the record there, my friend. How many wives was it? I mean, I only knew Becky...”
“Yeah,” and he was already turning to the house, “but I'm a bachelor now. But hey, you got any of that French Champagne left? Because I think we ought to be celebrating here, don't you?”
They were in the kitchen, and Peck was removing the foil from the neck of the bottle when out of the corner of his eye he spotted something anomalous on the kitchen counter, something that might have been a dollop of raw meat or--“What the fuck is that?”
Sandman was slouching against the refrigerator. He clipped his shades with two fingers and dropped them in his shirt pocket. “That? I don't know, it looks like shit to me, some kind of animal shit. Raccoons? You're not keeping raccoons here, are you?”
At that moment, the mystery revealed itself. A cat he'd never seen before--spotted like a leopard, with outsized paws and unhurried eyes--slid into the room, followed by a second one just like it. The two of them came right up to him, lifted their heads and began to yowl disharmoniously for food.
That set him off--he couldn't help himself, cat shit on the counter where he prepared the meals, where he kept his knives and his cutting board and his infuser and his grapeseed oil and extra-virgin cold-pressed Ravenna olive oil in the cut-glass decanter--and before he knew what he was doing, right there in front of Sandman, he lost it. His first kick--a reflex really--caught the near cat and sent it spinning into the cabinet across the room; the second kick caught only air. “Natalia!” he shouted, and the cats were gone now, vanished like smoke. “God-damnit, “Natalia!””
Sandman seemed to find the whole thing pretty amusing, holding the Champagne flute to his lips as Natalia, utterly unconcerned, drifted into the room in her own good time and stood there watching him, hands on hips. “You are shouting,” she observed. “I do not like this shouting.”
He was trying to keep it in, trying to keep his cool, trying to remember what he'd learned inside, what he'd learned from Sandman, but he couldn't. “What is this?” he hissed, outraged, gone already, and he pointed to the lump of soft wet excrement on the counter. “What the fuck do you call this? Huh?”
Small, slim, dark-eyed, her feet bare and her breasts heavy in a stretch top--she'd always claimed they were natural, but now it suddenly occurred to him how gullible he'd been to believe her--she shrugged and crossed the room to tear a wad of paper towels from the dispenser. “It is called shit,” she said, bending to engulf the redolent little patty and drop it into the wastebasket beneath the sink. Then she extracted the disinfectant, sprayed the countertop and wiped it dry with another towel.
“The cats,” he said. “I didn't, you didn't--”
“They are my Bengals,” she said, sweeping his glass from the counter and emptying it in a gulp, Russian-style. “I have found them in an ad today, this morning, the male and the female. Don't worry,” she added, grinning at Sandman, “you will love them. I know you will love them. But that is not the issue--”
“Issue? What issue? What are you talking about?”
“I am hungry. Madison is hungry.” Another look for Sandman. “And you have been partying without me.”
There were gulfs here, whole gulfs of unreason and bitterness opening up between them, and he was sour now, no question about it, but he threw in a peace offering: “I thought we'd go out.”
She was at the refrigerator, her back to him, pouring herself a second glass. “I do not wish to go out. I wish to stay home. With my daughter.” She turned to him now, her eyes burning, and he could see this went deeper than he'd thought--his mother, if she mentioned his mother again, he didn't know what he would do.
“We just got back,” he said. “I didn't pick anything up. I thought we'd go out.”
She ignored him, but she was playing to Sandman, trying to make him look bad.
“If you're so hot to eat at home, why don't you get off your lazy ass and do something for a change, huh?” He wasn't shouting, not yet--that wasn't his style--but he could feel himself slipping. The look of her infuriated him, the hard little nugget of her face, the way she gazed off into the distance and lifted the glass to her lips as if he didn't exist. His voice rose. He couldn't help himself. “Instead of shopping all the time. Instead of bringing home these fucking cats to shit on the counters, and where else are they shitting, I wonder? Tell me that.”
Another shrug, more elaborate than the last. “I will make the omelet, soup, anything. Tunafish. I will make tunafish.” She moved to the cabinet, her jaw set, and began to shift pots and pans around.
That was when Sandman set his glass down on the counter. “You know, I just remembered I got to go. Really. I just remembered this was the night I was going to pick threads out of my carpet.” The grin. The mockery. And then he clamped on his shades and was gone.
Everything was still for a moment, then Peck heard the car starting up in the driveway and somewhere beneath it, from Madison's room, the sound of the TV. He went to the refrigerator, took the bottle by the neck and poured himself a glass of Champagne. He was going to celebrate and he didn't give a good goddamn whether she liked it or not. She was at the stove now, turning up the heat under an empty pan. “Who you fooling?” he said.
When she turned round, her face was composed and when she spoke, finally, her voice was so soft he could barely hear it: “Nobody,” she said. “I am fooling nobody. Because I am not your wife and I have never seen your mother.”
Two days later, at eleven-thirty in the morning, he drove into Peterskill, though it was against his better judgment. Natalia was sitting beside him, leaning forward to study herself in the mirror on the back of the sun visor, sucking in her cheeks and rounding her lips in concentration as she reapplied mascara and eyeliner. She was wearing a shiny cobalt blue dress that clung to her figure, matching heels, stockings (though it must have been ninety degrees out already) and she'd deliberated for half an hour over taking along her silver nylon jacket, just, as she put it, to make a good impression, but finally decided against it. They'd dropped Madison at camp on the way and then driven the few miles into town along the old scenic road with its views of the mountains, the river and the humped gray domes of the nuclear power plant. Natalia had wanted to bring her daughter along--“She must meet her new grandmama because she will love her”--but he told her he didn't want to make his mother too nervous this first time with the kid around and she gave in because he was giving in to her and she was making an effort to be reasonable. And sexy. Very sexy. She'd climbed all over him the night before and he'd woken to her taking hold of his cock beneath the sheets and trailing her lips down his chest and abdomen in a flurry of hot sucking kisses. What he hadn't told her was that when he'd called his mother to tell her he was in town (but just briefly, briefly, just passing through) he'd asked her to see if she could set something up with Sukie. On the quiet.
His mother, for all her obvious flaws, had been good about that, staying a part of her granddaughter's life, and so Gina and her parents wouldn't be all that suspicious and as it turned out Gina's screaming hag of a mother was down with bursitis and Gina was working and the Bullhead was too busy making money to bother with babysitting and if Alice wanted to come and pick up Sukie for the day that was fine with them. So it was settled. Sukie would be there. And how did he feel about that? Strange, yes, but hopeful. It had been something like three years now and she would have had a chance to grow up and see things with a bit more perspective instead of just adhering to the party line Gina would have fed her. He was her father, after all, and he wasn't some jerk like Stuart Yan or whoever Gina was seeing now because how could she stay with Yan, how could she have even seen anything in him in the first place? But there'd be some other tool, some moron her father found on a jobsite someplace, somebody she'd met at work... But they weren't Sukie's father, whoever they were. He was. And no matter what it cost him he was going to try to hook that up again.
“No,” Natalia was saying, “you are not listening to me. I am not going to go there, to the house of your mother, unless I have Russian vodka to give to her--export, good Stolichnaya, no pepper flavor, no vanilla, no nothing--and flowers. Roses I will give her. White roses, three dozens, with the long stem. And you stop. You stop--there. There is a store.”
“You don't understand,” he said, his eyes locked behind his sunglasses, “but this town is a slum, nothing like that here. No florists, no liquor store that sells anything more than the cheap shit in the pint bottle. This is forty-ouncer territory, malt liquor, Miller High Life in the tall can.”
They were in downtown Peterskill, sitting at a light. He'd already taken a little detour past Pizza Napoli--boarded up, scrawled over with graffiti, the big red-and-white sign he'd spent twenty-five hundred dollars on still in place, still proclaiming the optimism he'd felt back then--but he didn't say a word and Natalia, busy with her face, didn't even notice.
“Then you go right back out of this town to anyplace, I don't know, the mall, the supermarket, and a good quality of liquor store. I am telling you. I will not get out of this car.”
It was all right. It was fine. In a way, it was a relief to flick on the blinker, hang a left and cruise up Route 6 a couple miles to the upscale mall because he was tentative about the whole thing, about exposing himself not only to whoever might be looking for him to glide up in front of his boyhood home and see his mother but about Sukie too. About that first instant, that beat of recognition. Would she come to him? Would she even know who he was?
At the mall, he parked at the far end of the lot and stayed in the car while Natalia trooped off in search of fatted calves and burnt offerings, but not before a colloquy that was like a KGB inquisition. (“And why will you not come?” she wanted to know. “I don't want to run into anybody, that's all.”
“Your ex-wife, is that who? Or some policeman? Is that it?”
“Just anybody,” he said. “I don't want to see anybody, okay? What's your problem? You see the store? There's the fucking store.”) It took her a good hour or more, the pavement radiating heat till the whole vast oceanic lot shimmered and blurred in mirage and he ran the car for the air-conditioning till it began to overheat. He had no choice but to crank the windows down--and there was that smell again, the smell of his boyhood, of all his years here when he didn't know the rest of the world existed. People stalked by, wrapped up in the private resentments and narrowing back rooms of their own personalities, mothers and children, Jewish, Italian, dark hair, dark eyes, retirees, punks in their street racers and the girls they performed for, everything a performance.
It came to him then that he was being crazy, purely crazy. Nobody knew him here. Nobody would recognize him. He could stroll right in there and buy all the flowers they had, cases of vodka--drink it in the lot out of the open bottle. Sure. Beg for it. Beg for them to come and lock him back up for violating his parole and running out on his child support and the Harley and whatever else they could dig up. At least he'd got rid of the cardboard plates with the dealer logo and the chrome license-plate holder with Bob Almond's name on it and the Larkspur address because that was flying naked. If anybody wanted to know he had the temporary registration taped right there in the lower right-hand corner of the windshield as per California regulation and the plates were on the way--though he did have to get on the stick and see about registering the thing in New York. Driving without plates was just asking to get pulled over. Right, tomorrow. He'd do it tomorrow. And then it occurred to him--it hit him, hammered him with a kind of flaring panic that got his stomach fluttering all over again--that he had to get out of the car and go into that store, or one of those stores, because in his fog he hadn't thought to pick up anything, no toy, no doll, no candy, nothing, for his own natural sweet little daughter, for Sukie.
The house hadn't changed at all, at least as far as he could see--maybe some of the trees were taller, the weeds thicker along the edges of the lawn. He was standing there at the door of the car, caught in a shaft of sun that was like a spotlight, a box of Godiva chocolates in one hand, the flowers in the other, and the stuffed toy he'd bought for Sukie wedged under one arm, giving the place a quick scan as Natalia, running the brush through her hair one final time, made him wait. His father had always spent an inordinate amount of time and money on the place, putting on the addition with its brick fireplace, pouring a new concrete walk, repainting the exterior every three or four years and the trim every two, as if that could forestall the declining property values, and though he'd been twelve years dead now, the effort still showed. Decay had settled in, that was inevitable. And his mother certainly wasn't about to worry over it--as long as the roof didn't fall in on her she'd be happy to sit there in front of the TV with her bloated friends and a vodka and Collins mix and watch the water stains creep down around the fireplace where his father had screwed up the flashing despite the best of intentions.