On the drive back to Booth Hill (not in a Ford, never in a Ford) her father said, “How’d you like that question? I pulled a fast one. Spontaneity. Good answer, Cecilia. You can think on your feet.” Adding, with a burst of laughter: “Even if you can’t stand on ’em!”
“What about the ice cream,” CeCe answered.
In her wispy voice, Gloria said, “Dear, let’s do really stop for some. It’s been a long day.”
And now, here is George’s bent head! She can’t shake the certain, if nonsensical, conviction that if she doesn’t praise him, he’ll fall down dead at her feet like a little bird from a tree. She can’t speak against his work. But his opera mustn’t be staged. He’ll be humiliated.
She’ll
be humiliated! Her name—his humiliation will make it into the paper. Nasty gossip. He’ll lose his job, if he hasn’t already. She won’t have as easy a time finding him a new one as in the past. Easier when he was young, without so many terminations to his record, without his increasing age and her waning influence. Who on earth are these people working with him to produce this opera? Can they all be so sinister? No. He’s paying them astronomically. That must be it. It’s why he’s here. He must be desperate. He’s never managed money properly. Not for long. No one will back this monstrosity. Without her help,
The Burning Papers
—what a stupid name!—won’t see a stage.
“It’s a masterpiece,” she says.
“Yes?” The light, breaking over his face. His body, settling.
“Yes.”
“Am I relieved! That is good to hear, good to hear!”
“It is exceptional. But—”
“And that’s only a recording from rehearsal. Not even proper audio. And Judith was hoarse that day. She—I’m somewhat disappointed in her. But. Can you believe I made that? Can you believe I’ve done all that myself? And! It’s a safe investment.
I
think, anyway. The arts are doing better than you’d expect. People are still going to the theater. People do take risks! We’ll break even on ticket sales. I’ll pay you back, of course. And that’s only the beginning. After box office, we—”
“George, I’m very proud of you, but I will not help you. You’re on your own.”
“What?” He leaps up, his hands in his hair. He doesn’t appear to understand. He sinks back down onto the stool, leaps up again. “But you said it was good.”
“It is. However, you are a grown man, and if you’ve ruined your affairs, which I suspect you have”—she can barely bring herself to say it. She sets her jaw and hears her own voice, slow and steely, such an effort it takes to keep the pity out!—“you’ll have to find a way to unruin them by yourself.”
“You won’t—you mean to say this is because I didn’t visit?”
“Do you know I had pneumonia? I almost died?”
For the first time she understands it’s true, she
had
almost died, and quick as lightning what began as a plan to protect her child catches up to her as wrath.
“Telling your wife you’ve been calling me, that I refuse visitors?”
“We are from this, from all of this!” George cries, pointing at the table of photos, to a black-and-white photo of John Stepney, the year before he died, standing stiffly on the lawn in front of the immense fortress that was Apollo Court. “And you won’t help me! What’s it good for, then? What’s it for? You’re happy to give it away as long as it isn’t to me! You don’t know anything, you—”
She has the same feeling as when—Walter, how much money he asked her for, over the years, after their divorce. By letter and long-distance call. She’d wire it to him, two, three times a year. One day, she opened an envelope from Italy. He’d forwarded the bill for a suit. After that she stopped helping him and he disappeared.
“But, but you have to.”
“I do not.”
“You ruin my life,” George cries, “because you like to.”
“Now when you tell Iris I don’t want visits, it needn’t be a lie.”
It is the only way she has left to look after him. She’s done what had to be done.
“I provide for my wife,” he says, a defiant choke in his voice.
“No, I provide for your wife. I provide for you by letting you forget it.”
Shitty shirt, shit stuffed animals from the claw arcade, shit white compact cars, old issues of supermarket tabloids (alien babies, diet disasters), fringed purses, crusted bottles of bright nail polish, bright manufactured anything, plastic anything, glass figurines, Disney merch, ballerina music boxes, stadium-concert ticket stubs, mugs with quotables, tracksuits, aluminum cans, cherry pop, cherry anything, scratch-n-win, chips with a neon-orange dust, carnations for special, antifreeze blue, antifreeze green, daisy petals with brown seams bruised into the white, white leather clothes, black leather furniture, limited-edition sports memorabilia, mesh hats, dirt bikes, rabbit’s foot, shamrock, cartoon pop, kitten heels, martini-glass stems shaped like legs, novelty dice, dogs in the yard, dogs tied to the fence in the yard, turds in the yard, no yard, money-grams, cinnamon candles, musk oils, French braids, false idols, bubble gum, boozy booze, Tic Tacs, hair spray, death-by-machine accident, death by sugar, death in the bathtub, acne scars, crooked teeth, bloody noses, cardboard boxes, blood outside the body, garbage on fire, cutting down trees. As far as her mother-in-law is concerned, it is from this catalog of crap Iris was procured, along with her shirt. This, or whatever CeCe’s idea of white trash happens to be. Not that she’s given it much thought. Not that she’s right.
Iris hurries across the damp lawn. She looks back once, but there’s only the yellow limestone and the sun glinting off CeCe’s closed glass doors.
Did you leave your paper umbrella in the car?
Blam! The old gal’s in fine form! A sneaky way of calling her cheap. Hey, what’ll it be? Is she cheap, or is she a gold digger? How can she spend too little and cost too much? She continues past the lake, its surface ruffled by the breeze. She climbs the shallow hill around the side of the facility and steps through a strict topiary colonnade, into the garden. She’s on a path of loose, white gravel. The garden is big enough to wander an afternoon. She just might, rather than go back. To calm, she leans in to smell the even tufts of sea lavender, tall as her elbow, filled with bees. As she stomps along the rows, the names come back to her from the learning garden behind the School of Agriculture’s Plant Science Building. Maybe it’s because she’s angry, maybe because she’s escaped, but the flowers teem, unnaturally vivid to her eye, too high and radiant for the beginning of fall. Here are butterscotch dahlias and purple verbena. Pitcher sage, with its fan of sky-blue flowers. She crosses a footbridge over a dry streambed and follows a low stone wall bordered with mottled leopard flower and silver curry plant. Crimson butterfly weed, coral zinnias. Here is clematis, a name she remembers for its ugliness, like a welting disease. Hoping to get lost, feeling a little better, she touches the tops of the flowers, humming with insects. Rain from that morning scatters off their tufted heads. She finds her anger’s been replaced by the strange sense that she’s being followed—not by any person, but by her own gathering dread, a dread she can neither see nor shake. George, lately. The way he moves, the way he speaks.
She’s come to the end of the garden. A stand of fruit trees, already half-wrapped in plastic for winter. What looks like woods are just behind the fruit trees, though she can faintly hear the highway beyond. She tries to put George out of her mind. Peaceful, to head back down the hill through the woods, though she still isn’t peaceful. She enters a soft grove, pulls some pine needles into her hands. Deutschland astilbe—there’s another name she remembers for its ugliness, though there isn’t any of the ivory firework here. Fear drilled that one into her memory her first day at Booth Hill. She and CeCe were leaned up against the flagstone balustrade of the veranda. CeCe, thin as a latch, pointing a ringed finger at the distant curve of the lawn’s terraced perennial border, cataloging her garden, jabbing left to right as if her gold-laden knuckle were a brush and she were painting the flowers into existence as she went. George had escaped into the cool kitchen for what seemed to be a long time, to relay to Esme his mother’s instructions for sandwiches and a pitcher of tea. Iris, knowing the names, but so stunned by Booth Hill she was only able to offer that her own name was a flower. Like a six-year-old, or a half-wit. And that, she thinks, is pretty much how it’s gone with CeCe ever since.
Halfway down the slope, she enters a clearing. Three men in tan jumpsuits sit on the ground, their backs against an oak. More like a man and two boys—the boys look sixteen, eighteen, but are taller than their boss, whose stout torso reminds her of an old-fashioned wine jug. Maybe this is Yasser. He snores lightly. His legs are splayed and a pole saw is balanced over his knees. His jumpsuit is dark with sweat at the collar, unbuttoned to the waist. What she can see of the T-shirt underneath reads
OSA’S ANDSCAPE AND EE
.
The boys sit up and stare at her. The younger boy has a runtish, narrow look, his flame-red hair swept over his forehead in a soft bowl. He’s sucking on a silver chain that hangs around his neck. The older one tosses sticks and clumps of dirt, a pale chicken arm swinging from the rolled-up sleeve of his jumpsuit. His wide-set eyes are on her, but lazily, oddly uncoordinated. The boys sit up and look at each other, momentarily surprised to see her. The younger one lets the chain fall from his mouth, smiles, sticks his tongue between his index and middle fingers and makes several slurping passes in her direction. His friend laughs, but silently, looking to make sure their boss is still asleep.
Twerpy little shits. What a terrific day! She knows this type of kid. Pea-brained, all defensive posture and slide-eye, their life’s work to make sure everyone knows it’s women, and only women, they like to fuck. Her disapproval—this is how CeCe must feel, all the time.
The older boy stops laughing. “Hey, where do I know you from?”
“Great opener,” Iris says. “You’ve done this before.”
“No seriously. You’re standing like—” He crosses his arms over his chest and leans back. “Wait, I know! You’re on those ads. I’m going south on Route 22, it’s you, right?”
The younger boy pulls the chain back into his cheek. “Now I think on it, we do see her like six times a day, do we not? Tasty old thing. Selling houses?”
“You got me.” Sometimes she misses the straightforward rudeness of the bars, of real life. “Have a good one.” She continues down the hill, thinking suddenly of the day she met George. She’d spent part of it wandering the School of Agriculture’s garden. After a swim at the athletic facility, she’d gone out of her way to drive past the kid’s university housing at the edge of campus, a cluster of low houses with aluminum siding, mostly empty for summer, thinking, That’s where we sat on the stoop at night, that’s the tree we studied under. She parked and strolled over to the house, pretending to no one that she was a touring parent or a touring alumna, out to see the pretty trees. His housemate came to the door and waved. She thought they were all gone and could think of nothing to do but walk on over.
“3D, stay,” she said to the big red dog she’d just adopted, against all reason, no life to keep a dog. The housemate was one of those kids left on campus who didn’t have anyplace to go and had stayed to work off his loan. He had spiked black hair, heaped shoulders, a worn black Slayer T, a studded belt to which his pocketed wallet was attached by a chain, no ass, bare yellow feet, giant headphones around his neck, stubble and acne competing for real estate on his chin. A style that made more sense in cooler weather. He leaned in the doorway. She with her wet hair, in her mint-green golf-club uniform.
“Glad I cleaned,” he said, and opened the door wider for her to enter. A baseball game was on TV. He lifted a bowl of rainbow cereal and a heaping ashtray from the couch and pushed aside a paper plate. She’d missed the house, the house she’d slept in many times.
“Hang on.” He disappeared into a bedroom. “You should say hi to the girls.” Iris muted the game and listened. No one else was home. She smelled weed and incense. The roommate returned with a mangy ferret wiggling under each arm.
“Pretty as ever, aren’t they? You want some?”
She shrugged, sure. He handed her the slinking ferrets and rustled his pocket for the joint. She let them squirm off her lap and ooze under the couch. It was strong weed. She and the roommate forgot each other awhile, he watching the game on mute, she watching the poster on the wall behind the TV, its title and artist’s name in large fascinating letters across the bottom:
WATER LILIES CLAUDE MONET
.
“I can tell you miss him,” the roommate said abruptly. “But he’s not an interesting guy. I’m not being a dick. It’s just true. Just because the pool’s got a diving board don’t mean it’s got a deep end. You want a beer?” He pulled two tall cans from the minifridge at the side of the couch. “Nice, right?” He patted the fridge, thoughtfully draped with a faded Tibetan flag, topped with a stuffed gorilla and a tray of sand containing a tiny rake.
“Can you tell me, have you talked to him?”
“I haven’t—Iris! Shitting outside the cage.” He laughed and pulled the smaller ferret into his hands. “He named her after you, kind of. I couldn’t think of a name, and he was talking about you, and I said, that’s fucking fantastic, it’s totally an unpet name. Like Paul is an unpet name. Like com’eer, Paul, what? It doesn’t make any sense on a pet. Missing the C-factor. You been swimming? You look all swimmy. You into this baseball? You like movies? I could change it to a movie.”
He knelt and fiddled with the pile of DVDs. She had ten, twelve years on him. Like a knife at her neck, remembering that, though it could have been the claws of a ferret, out from under the couch to thrust its sock length into her hair. She was thirty-one.
The housemate held out his finger, covered in peanut butter. A ferret leaped to it.
“Not that you don’t have the C-factor.”
She put down her beer. “Sure, what’s the C-factor?”
“Cuteness.”
“Get this one off me.” She, stood to go, swiping at the animal still clinging to her neck.