Cardinal Numbers: Stories (9 page)

He understood murder: When the thing you want most but cannot have is so close that it overflows the eye.

CELIA
told his fortune with cards. She showed him the queen of hearts and said he would die for love. Che was embarrassed.

“Better than dying by accident,” she said.

He remembered the first corpse he had ever seen, remembered incoherent sensings in the way that dream pieces return, so vividly that they must actually have happened. It was just spring, the park pale green with buds, walking home and the school satchel chafing his leg. She lay under a tree, a pine tree, not old or young, gray as a clam, bewildered, and none of the men standing around had thought to close her eyes.

“You shouldn’t think so much,” Celia said, refilling his cup.

“And what instead?”

Her smile made him think of incisions; there was lipstick on her teeth.

“Tell me. What instead?”

They were sitting at a square, oilcloth-covered table in the hotel kitchen, where everything was freshly stacked and wiped. It was late; even the wash boy had left. Celia had Havana tuned in on the radio, Arsenio Rodriguez, a mambo. She cut the deck twice without looking: Jack of spades, jack of spades. “Go ahead. Don’t make yourself a choice.” The time he truly wanted to be a doctor, writing out twenty-five reasons. When had that been? He could see her red nails on the back of his hand, but the flesh was numb.

He recalled a line from Marti: “That which is suspicion today will be outcry tomorrow.”

THE
bus had been loud with arguing. The beach was crowded, but quiet. Che rolled up his trousers and waded. He found green bits of glass tumbled smooth, a jellyfish big as a hubcap. With each receding wave needle-billed birds ran up to peck at airholes in the sand.

He thought of Granados swinging a gaviota to break its neck, and the foul meat they swallowed to show they were ready for anything. The “wastes” of Patagonia: Just starting out, full of dare, they had burned all their guidebooks and maps in the cookfire. Sand in the gas tank, sand on the chain sprockets, while the beach was covered with clicking black stones. And they talked all night about the great Italian restaurants in Santiago.

Che understood that they wanted him to take their picture. Overelaborate mime. Hold it this way, press down here. The man got between the two women, his arms draped over them, theirs circling his waist.

“Más. Uno más!”

Then he had to get between the women. They smelled of oranges. He knew his ribs stuck out and he needed a bath. The man said something. Che shrugged. The man gave him a warm can of beer and went away.

The “wilds” of Amazonas, the “rugged peaks” of Peru. Miami Beach Welcomes You. The Playground Paradise. Everyone, he supposed, carried a guidebook, a catalogue of expectations which made it possible to travel without going anywhere, to go nowhere while traveling. Only the sea, he supposed, was without borders.

A postcard (Avenue of Palms) home:

Dear Family,

I am well. This is not a ransom note. Trust that there is some explanation for my being here, and as soon as I know what it is, you will too. When Ponce de Leon searched for his fountain, anything seemed possible by the method of wandering. For today the only result is fatigue.

Love to all—E.G.

He could not risk Celia’s charity any longer. The organ stings of bad drama were all too easy to imagine. He noticed the smell of church incense in her vicinity. He found candy on his pillow, and now even the maids called him “gaucho.” But then he had come to mistrust his own judgment. Mundane objects seemed to impose themselves, mundane words took on too many meanings. “Something in the water” was his grandmother’s expression, applied to any distress. Was it absurd to wonder if Celia was drugging the coffee? The more he tried to clear his head, the worse the tangle became. United Snakes. Wriggling in the water.

This was the time, a typically reticent Sunday. Celia’s cockatiel was swooping around the lobby as he went out. The cars on the boulevard were shiny. He passed a cotton candy wagon and a blue drugstore. The expansion of his lungs made him smile.

If he made his route back a straight line, there were a hundred islands in between, lagoons and melon juice and coral heads and fast deadly fish. He passed a boy selling coconuts with painted faces. He supposed an island boy like that who could say: “El Señor? He lived all those years in a place behind that hill, and no one ever knew a thing about him.”

If you knew how, there was true satisfaction in being tired. He had his duffel bag, and a brim above his eyes, and he was walking south.

J
OAN WAS HAVING A
birthday the way other people have flu. She’d turned thirty-seven five days ago, but those forlorn and morbid symptoms still hung on. The ferries tripled on Friday and everyone already on the island took deep breaths. She passed the scone shop and the book nook and the toggery. She passed Ramona’s sidewalk tables, where trust-fund carpenters sat with their imported ale. They wore jaunty little hats. They discussed timber prices and dilemmas of wiring. The dogs at their feet were stuporously pictorial.

She’d got up on her birthday (sunny after early-morning fog) believing that in some way she must mark it. One evaded or ignored a charged event and its tendency was to curve back with months of trouble. Nothing convinced her. But she had rules for safety, remote, uncodified. She put a half pint of Jim Beam in her pocket and went all over the beach thinking how plain she was in every way. She hunkered by tide pools, chanting in her mental voice, “I will never never have children.” Vapid abjections, indulgent. As a punishment, she stopped smoking.

A man stepped around her in the post office, a man wearing, with no sense of parody, Top Siders, tomato-juice pants, and a crocodile sport shirt.

“So what the hell are you on?” he said.

People waited in line who were not accustomed to waiting in line. They held claim slips for products they had bought by mail: country curtains, language tapes, barometers, bird-of-prey lithographs, authentic Creole pralines.

She took her change into the wooden booth. Eight rings, a gulped hello, her brother-in-law sounding unhappily startled by her voice.

“Richard, I walked in four miles to make this call.”

“Everything’s all right?”

“I wanted to talk. I mean, I do want to.”

“Randi isn’t here. She’s driving the kid up to allergy camp.”

“Right.”

“Are you very tired? You sound tired.”

“I stopped cigarettes.”

“You’re a tough kid.”

“So where are you going to be middle of next week?”

“No telling.” Always in his voice that apologetic little shrug. “I’ve never seen the Vineyard.”

She wanted to say something astonishing and intimate. A different conversation spilled onto their line, then tumbling relays. She heard him swallow.

The sandals dangled from her hand now, leather blackened by sweat, hieroglyphically dappled. There were tar bubbles in the road and she popped them. The air vibrated from motors all around the island: scooters, chain saws, a backhoe. She smelled pine instead of the sea. Hardened gum, no weed or salt. Insects instead of fish. Foliage painted on mailboxes dismayed her. Flamenco guitar swirled from a patio. In the sky there were no clouds, no art director’s arrangement. And what she wished was that she and Richard could be like a paperback French novel with a translucent stain of suntan oil on the opening page. The cheapest of bittersweet, but lasting.

Molly’s car was not in the driveway, which meant she’d been sober enough to find the keys. Molly’s great-grandfather found silver in Nevada. Her first two husbands were developers. The last had been a member of the Danish royal family. So Joan lived in the back cottage for no rent—Molly could afford that. She kept the vegetable garden, fed the dogs, and most important, was in nights, just close enough to keep Molly from blowing her brains out.

I don’t need work, just a name for it.

This also was in her mental voice, the one that spoke several dialects.

A drizzly almost-evening washed off the last of the “set” colors. She sat outside smelling of insect repellent and tried to think of some reason to now be in love with her sister’s husband. Randi, her youngest, most reliably conventional sister, and Richard with his professional eyes. It was not a situation that lent itself comfortably to “thought.” She looked back at the cottage, orange candle glow behind the two tiny windows. It was a box, silvery weathered shakes and green trim. It was a box that might as easily be for storing floating booms and cranberry flats as for living in. She had been in it almost three years.

Twelve birthdays ago, a round number, she had been in Denver earning a quite alarming salary as editor of a sportswear company’s in-house magazine. She drove a Saab, lived in a rental “chalet,” owned recreational equipment. But she found being complacent extremely hard work. Anyway, that was how she put it in her mental voice. Perhaps it was very much more a matter of her inability to make, or rather to keep, friends. How quickly she began to notice the triviality of others, their repetitious bluff, childish calculation. Was she insightful or only petty?

“Have you seen Puck?” Molly asked, describing a slight arc across the lawn, like a rightward-breaking putt.

“Not since this morning.”

Puck was the basset hound.

“Poor thing. I’m always afraid he’ll forget where he lives.”

Molly blew into her hands as though it were autumn. Poor Molly. She looked like the poster for an organization campaigning against the long-term danger of cosmetics.

“You went somewhere today? I saw the car was gone.”

“Over to Gay Head. Isn’t that an absolutely wonderful name? Yes, I went over to Gay Head to see about a catamaran that was advertised in the paper.”

No, she wouldn’t take the bait, wouldn’t ask what possible use Molly, who hated water like a cat, could have for that fancy boat. Her landlady with the twelve-foot sofa and the ginger-jar lamps, but no telephone; because of one disputed bill, Molly denied herself the lonesome drunk’s most precious outlet.

She admired the reality, not the principle, said now, “Animals are brave because they’re stupid.”

“I know just what you mean,” Molly said, not elaborating.

That night just before sleep, purely as an exercise, she imagined Richard with the body of a woman.

On Sunday, as usual, she was late to the church and sat in back. The sermon took as its text an obscure verse from the book of Micah, and followed a confusing line. But when the organ played “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” though it sounded out of joint and driven by steam, she was moved to tears.

By two o’clock the sun had burned through the haze and she put on a bathing suit to work in the garden. She pulled green worms pin-striped with yellow off the broccoli and dropped them in a tin of kerosene. She weeded and staked, cut beet tops for soup. And all the time she was dying for a cigarette.

Twenty-nine birthdays ago (as it turned out, all of these numbers were round), having unequivocally refused to go with her family on their two-week trip to Lake Champlain, she was staying on 138th Street with her baby-sitter, whose given name in full was Jimmie C. Glass. Jimmie’s husband, Hubert, came from Barbados and worked as an elevator operator at the Hotel Theresa. Hubert told her animal stories that always had a moral at the end. Jimmie sat in the kitchen, the same as she did downtown, adding long columns of figures on the backs and fronts of envelopes; and she showed in the
Daily News
how the last three digits in the mutuel handle at Belmont Park made the magic number. On the birthday they took her to a big cafeteria on St. Nicholas Avenue and let her eat nothing but dessert. Later they all put on foil hats and listened to Hubert’s rumba albums.

On Monday she wrote a letter to Randi full of hallowed family anecdotes and quotations from Stendhal, put a dollar’s worth of stamps on the plain white envelope, and mailed it to an imaginary street in Cagayan de Oro on the Philippine island of Mindanao.

Puck was still absent. Molly wandered the neighborhood all morning with a box of Milk-Bone, calling the dog’s name as loudly as she could, and was predictably misunderstood by a home owner, who called the Vineyard Haven constables. Molly was abusive in the cruiser and arrived home in cuffs.

After putting Molly to bed, convincing her to take a little soup, she went to the cottage to knit. There were shops on the island that paid her as much as seventy-five dollars a sweater. The needle rhythm, which usually calmed her, now had no effect, and she worried more and more over Richard. The alpaca yarn felt unpleasant against her skin, like moth wings. She undressed, lay down on the bunk, and tried to see her body as Richard would, as a question resolved. She liked the hair on her legs, but would he? Should she shave?

Aloud, in her regular voice, she said, “This could be a decision.”

That night, unable to sleep, she thought of her mother’s legendary knitting. With great care and the aid of graph paper, seated at the kitchen table like Jimmie, chain-smoking, her mother would plot out figures for the family sweaters: reindeer, castle turrets, leaping salmon, Mahler full-face. The skin was brown and taut over her hands.

Before dawn on Wednesday she applied toenail polish called Creme Coral. She knew that Richard admired her feet. Once after a badminton game, with Randi inside making gazpacho, he’d held them and said they felt like little animals. She picked a light-green sleeveless dress that fell below her shins and sunglasses with thick black frames. It didn’t matter. Richard’s professional eyes would only see what they wanted to.

She began the walk, feeling more and more frightened, tighter and tighter in her stomach. She refused rides from a dental assistant in white acetate, two men on the way to golf, and shivered in the damp. Queen Anne’s lace grew thick and high at the edge of the road, and smelled like poison carrots. To her left, following their own road through sumac and scrub oak, power lines crackled. After an hour, cold and sick, she rested on a warm asphalt driveway. Close at hand were dead, dry things that looked smokable. Probably, she thought, it would be wise to spend the day here.