“I'm not going to be here forever either, you know—I'm eventually going back to school,” she said. “You should tell Marie all this.”
“She knows. She cured him. Or, at least, she thinks she did. She treated him.”
“Marie was his therapist?”
“Yes,” I said. “And so she already knows, but she thinks she worked her hoodoo and he won't hurt her daughters, or anyone's daughter. But I think she's wrong. However, I can't prove that, so there's nothing I can say to Marie at all. Hence, I'm telling you.”
“Why not turn him in? You know, like, have him arrested?”
“Ah, Louisa, you are still so young and innocent,” I said. “Because, if he hasn't done anything, there's nothing to arrest him for.”
“Shut up,” she said. “I'm not as innocent as you think. If he hasn't done anything, then how do you know he will?”
“I hope he doesn't,” I said.
We stared intently at each other.
“I don't quite see what you want me to do,” she said finally.
“All I want is to know that you know and that you'll keep
your eyes out for those kids. Bellatrix too. Otherwise I won't be able to go.”
“I never even see Bellatrix,” she pointed out. “Where are you going, anyway?”
“Away,” I said.
She rested her forehead in her hand and tapped her foot briskly against the leg of the table. “I know what you're doing,” she said.
“What am I doing?”
“Killing yourself,” she said with a weird smile.
“Bingo,” I said cheerlessly.
The weird smile turned into a grimace, a shaking of her lower lip, and I realized she was on the verge of tears again. “Oh my God,” she said. “Why?”
“I'm dying anyway. I have a terminal disease. I made a deal with myself that when the pain got too bad I would put myself out of my misery.”
“What does your doctor say?”
“That it's only a matter of time either way. Meanwhile, I'm taking synthetic opiates now for the pain; I don't want to be addicted to them for long.” I held up my glass and took a good slug. “I've been planning this for a while. It's nothing sudden or hasty, believe me.”
We both mulled a few things over for a moment. I could see that once again she was struggling to be objective and not react emotionally. For a woman with hormonal problems, this was truly heroic, and I wanted to kiss her with gratitude but didn't, because we'd been through this already.
“Now,” I said when it seemed she'd had enough time to absorb what I'd told her sufficiently to return to the topic at hand, “listen, Louisa. Please don't quit your job and go away just yet. Please stay here a little longer. Dennis is a spineless shmuck, and he's the only other man they've got.”
“And I'm supposed to do what, fight them all off with my
light saber?” Louisa asked sardonically. “I'm ready to pack up and hitchhike to the train station and go home where I belong right this second. What's stopping me?”
The doorbell rang.
“I have an answer for you when you come back,” I said.
She went away and came back bearing a large cardboard box, which she set on the floor by the refrigerator with a heavy thunk. “Okay,” she said. “What's your answer?”
“My answer,” I said slowly, because I didn't really have one and hadn't come up with one while she was gone because I'd been too busy refilling my drink, “is this: you can't go home right now because you took this job and you're not finished with it yet. You have to honor your promise. This isn't a game. You already prevented a library from being blown up, now prevent something else bad from happening.”
“Why me,” she sighed with mock distress.
“That's my girl,” I said.
“How long are you suggesting I have to stay here?”
“Just until the summer,” I said. “Please.”
“But after that, then what?”
“I can't ask you to give up your education just to watch over my nieces,” I said, “but I can beg you to finish out the year you signed on for. Okay?”
She gave me a canny smile. “You're not so bad, you know,” she said. “No matter how you try to come off.”
“Yes I am.”
“I mean it,” she said. “Shut up. I would stop you, if I could, from doing what you're going to do. I don't know why, but stopping people from doing things seems to be, like, my specialty or something. But, you know, I can tell you've made up your mind.”
“It is, and I have,” I said. “I think you're an exceptional young woman, and I'm sorry I won't be around to know you. See you tomorrow, anyway.” I kissed her on the forehead and
rinsed my empty glass, left it upside down in the drain, and took my leave.
It occurs to me now that I've implicated Shlomo by writing down all the details of our arrangement here. So before I go I'll have to remember to rip out the offending pages, anything to do with him at all. Actually, I think I'll bury all these notebooks where they won't be found.
On my way home I stopped at Stewart's, where I asked Carla for a pack of a different brand of cigarettes just to prove the point I'd realized when I saw her getting married—namely, that I don't figure into her life at all, and she doesn't really remember me from one meeting to the next, let alone the brand of cigarettes I always buy.
She handed me the unfamiliar brand I'd asked for with a faintly perturbed expression on her moonlike face. “Since when?” she said.
“Actually,” I said, inflating with joy, “just kidding, I'll take the usual. By the way, I'm quitting soon.”
“Quitting smoking?”
“That's right,” I said, and almost added “and everything else” but managed to hold my tongue. I don't want to go around dropping ominous hints, or someone will surely try to stop me—not Carla necessarily, but I don't want to get into the habit. Louisa I can trust not to try to stop me, because she's got a rare, tough-minded sense of tragicomedy. But in general it's the human way to try to corral everyone else to join into
whatever activity or group you yourself are stuck in, whether it's a religion, parenthood, or life itself. I leaned on the counter and looked Carla in the eye. She blinked but held my gaze.
“Congratulations, by the way,” I said. “If you were still single, I was going to get up my nerve to ask you out on my iceboat this winter, one lovely sunny day, but now I guess that's out of the question. Have you ever been on an iceboat? They're extremely invigorating. You would have loved it. We would have flown over the ice together; afterward we could have had cocoa and Lorna Doones. You could have worn a bright-red scarf, and I might have tried to hold your hand.”
She stared at me, her mouth slightly open, quite lovely in her milky way.
“Well,” I said briskly, “anyway, I hope he's worthy of you.”
At this, I choked on something in my throat. It struck me that I was a little distraught. All the time I'd wasted mooning over a married divorce lawyer with unnaturally taut thighs, I'd thought I was impervious to feeling anything for this stolid local girl. Now I'd lost her to another, more perspicacious, if thick-necked and uneducated man.
“Anyway,” I said, “best of luck to you, and much happiness, assuming there is such a thing.”
“Um,” she said, “I think you're talking about my sister. She just got married. When did you see her? Did you go to the wedding? We're twins, that's why the mistake.”
“I drove by the wedding,” I said. Her twin sister. “You were coming down the steps in your bridal gown. I thought it was you. You didn't get married? Really not?”
“Um,” she said, twisting her finger, the one where a wedding ring would have been and where, I now saw, there was none. “No, not yet, I mean I don't even have a…” She flicked a sidelong glance at me. “Anyway, the guy's really nice, Lee, the guy Darla married. You didn't see me? I was there.”
Another customer was awaiting her with a gallon of milk, several boxes of sugary breakfast cereals, and a package of mass-produced cupcakes with a cellophane window that flaunted their lurid pink-and-yellow frosting. Carla turned and rang it all up with her usual attention. Not overly quick, my girl, but careful, intent, deliberate, almost Zen-like in her apparent lack of frustration or impatience.
“Darla is your sister,” I said with dizzy apprehension when the customer had tootled off with her bag.
“That's right.”
“Carla and Darla,” I said teasingly almost tenderly for me (where was this coming from? why now?). “My heart was broken. Now I have hope again.”
She twisted around to look inexplicably up at the video monitors. I sensed that I had upset her equilibrium in a way I found I liked, after all these months—or years, has it been? After all this time.
“Will you come out on the iceboat with me sometime this winter?” I asked her.
“Okay,” she said skeptically.
“I'd like to take you to dinner afterward, if you'd like to go. An afternoon when the river is frozen, if it ever freezes again, given all the so-called climate changes.”
“Okay.”
“And you won't marry anyone else in the meantime?”
She looked at me and laughed. “You've got a lot of nerve, making me promise that. What if a millionaire comes in here and offers to take me away from all this crap? I might just say yes. I can't promise I won't. Can you blame me?”
Technically, I'm almost a millionaire and could easily take her away from all that crap, but I refrained from pointing this out, self-protectively: no sense in awakening her no-doubt latent gold-digging faculties with the news that I'm a catch,
theoretically, or would be if I weren't already married, and if I had plans to stay alive and live a fruitful life, two nonselling points I was likewise not revealing just now.
“I see your point,” I said, trying to seem crestfallen. “I can only hope and pray that the river freezes soon.”
“Are you really quitting cigarettes?”
“Why?”
“I can't kiss a smoker,” she said, smiling right at me.
At this, an erotic charge went off in my lower belly. “Boy Scouts’ honor.”
She gave me a look.
“And you're a Girl Scout?” I shot back. “Didn't you steal from the cash register and lose your job for a while?”
“Who the hell told you that?”
“Your uncle.”
“He's a big liar,” she said. “He told you that?”
“I asked where you were,” I said, sorry I'd brought it up. “I missed you.”
“You missed me?” She twinkled at this and then remembered. “I never stole. I did take money, but it was mine. He tried to shyster me out of fifty bucks in my pay, because he claimed I owed him for time he says I took off He fucked with the time sheets from back a month ago and tried to make it look like my fault. He lost some money on the horses and thought he could just take it from dumb little me.”
“He tried to cheat you.”
“That's right,” she said. “And when I fought him on it he suspended me without pay. But the trouble is, I'm not dumb. The trouble for him, anyway. So I told my father, that's his brother, and he had to threaten to kick the shit out of Uncle Evan if he didn't reinstate me with full pay and a bonus, even though I didn't even want the fucking job any more. But I came back. It's the principle. My father said, give it a few more
months and then I can quit and come work for him at the lumberyard doing accounts when Maud retires.”
“Listen, you can try to change the subject all you want,” I said solemnly. “We have a date. Don't forget.”
“I might,” she said, “if you don't remind me. I got a lot going on.”
“Of course you do,” I said. Reading the tabloids! Listening to talk radio! Teaching Sunday school! Restocking the baked-goods section! Coming up with complicated theories to try to explain the craziness of the world at large! If only I were the kind of man who could court this girl with the proper degree of passion and sincerity. She is a gem.
I went out to my truck with some of Dennis's recent swagger showing in my gimp and drove off lost in reveries of those heavy breasts against my bony plate-armored chest. Maybe in the afterlife, if there is a heaven, I'll spend eternity sailing over the frozen Hudson with Carla, lying on our stomachs on the small cushioned platform a foot off the frozen river with the wind rushing into our faces, hearing the soft slicing of the three blades against the ice, ducking our heads as the boom swings across, the sail filling again as we tack downriver; heightening the pleasure would be the anticipation of hot chocolate and cookies, and then dinner at the Turtle Inn and of course sex afterward, but still hours of daylight away…. That is my idea of heaven, I suppose, at least one of them, the one I'm most taken with at the moment. What would sex with Carla be like? How old is she, anyway? Her twin sister is evidently of a marriageable age, which around here could be sixteen, but now I'm thinking she's twenty, or even older. Old enough for me— which is to say, old enough for my end-of-life fantasies. I imagine her reclining luxuriantly, taking all the pleasure I give her with the same divine, mute, womanly composure she brings to her cash register, with flashes of her crackpot wit and
opinionated theorizing surfacing in the clutch of her hands in the small of my back as she positions herself just so under my pubic bone.
Later—I am now back from shopping for that damn Christmas dinner. The impossible Vero insists with humorless academic doggedness on making lists, accompanying me to butcher, snooty yuppie organic overpriced upscale farmers’ market, bakery, supermarket, etc., giving unsolicited advice and opinions and directions all the while, which I ignore, and therefore she and I are embroiled in a passive-aggressive mutual disapproval that must make everyone think we're husband and wife. Indeed, we're an unintentionally hilarious parody of a married couple. Meanwhile, my actual wife has taken Bellatrix Christmas shopping somewhere, and Dennis is spending Christmas Eve with his wife and their children while his mistress is off somewhere with her husband, so we're all parodies of ourselves today. The illusion of family harmony reigns supreme, while upstairs in my old room Fag Uncle Tommy sits in my old chair in his tatty silk bathrobe with his hair carefully combed and his teeth in, and communes, I imagine, with the echoing afterimage of my old friend Erasmus, that either dead or departed-for-sunnier-climes maladjusted obsessive-compulsive bird.