The Wonder Spot (26 page)

“You always say that,” she says. “And you never come.”

He says, “I will if I can.”

. . . . .

I love the old-fashioned bulk of the Wagoneer. As Dena drives it up and down a long, hilly dirt road, I picture Matthew and me driving as boyfriend and girlfriend. Then I imagine us older, as husband and wife, my stepdog, Margaret, in the back.

“What are you thinking about?” Dena asks.

“I was thinking I'd like to take a road trip.”

The beach around the lake is just a rim of muddy sand, and the widest stretch is occupied by other lake- and sunbathers. No matter: Dena has a grassy spot staked out, a clearing by a glade of low-slung shade trees.

Margaret goes and sits in the water.

After lunch, Dena closes her eyes, and I think she's about to take a nap.

I lie beside her. In a sleepy-time voice, I say, “Did anything ever happen between you and Matthew?”

“No,” she says. “Why?”

Her
why
comes so fast and sharp that I say, “I just wondered.”

She sits up and pulls out a big fat book called
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
. She's wide awake now.

I'm between books, so I've brought three, plus the newspaper,
which I can't read because the wind has picked up. I take out my notebook and decide to start my advertising homework. After a while, I have two names—“Comfort Innsiders” and “The Red-Carpet Club,” both of which seem awful, but can a name for a Comfort Inn club be great?

I say that I'm going for a swim.

Dena reminds me to wear sneakers. “It's mushy,” she says. “And there are snapping turtles.”

I hesitate; I think of Matthew joining us and how I'll look in my bikini and sneakers.

Dena looks up from her book. “You need them.”

I decide to put off swimming until she takes her nap. I pick up my notebook and try to think of a third name; in advertising, you always need three of everything.

“You're not going in?” she says.

“Not yet.”

Dena lies down. She's asleep when I see Matthew riding a mountain bike toward us. I remember Dena telling him, “You never come,” and I think,
He came for me.

I watch him set his bike down on the grass. He's wearing a rumpled shirt over seersucker bathing trunks.

I point to Dena and mouth,
Sleeping.

He looks at Margaret sitting in the water and asks if she's gone swimming at all. I shake my head.

He tells me that she needs to swim—it's good for her hips—and that he's going in.

When he takes off his shirt, I see that his shoulders are narrow and his chest almost hairless and almost concave. For a second I'm disappointed but right away I think,
Grow up; this is the chest of a husband.

He puts his spectacles in their case and tells me that he's blind now and depending on me to get him to the lake. I tell him that when I don't have my contacts in I'm blind, too; without them, I say, the world becomes an abstract painting, and he smiles without looking at anything, the way blind people do.

We're halfway to the lake when I say, “We don't need sneakers?”

He says, “Dena thinks we do,” and laughs.

He runs into the water—it's cold—and dives under. Margaret swims beside him, and, like a good father, he encourages her.

I squish into the lake up to my waist. Standing in the pale brown water, I realize that I haven't actually swum in a long time. I'm used to the ocean—ducking under waves and floating and getting pulled around in the surf. I try to remember the swimming lessons I took at camp, but all that comes back is the odor of chlorine and wet Band-Aids.

Matthew says, “You want to swim across?”

For a moment, I act like I'm too absorbed in the majesty of the scenery to swim. Then I decide to be truthful with him; I say, “I don't really know how to swim anymore.”

“Want me to teach you?”

“Teach me,” I say.

He moves his arms to demonstrate the crawl, and then, standing behind me, moves mine. His touch is light but sure.

He says, “And just do a flutter kick.”

I ask the question that has been nagging me for years: “Do you keep your legs straight?”

“Slightly bent,” he says.

I look toward shore, and I see Dena: She's using her hand as a visor and watching us.

. . . . .

The three of us make dinner together. We have corn on the cob and a salad with tomatoes and lettuce from the garden. When I start to tell Matthew about Dena's
Salade Fatiguee,
she says, “Shut up.”

As ever, I want to say,
You shut up.
Instead, I walk out of the kitchen as though remembering an appointment upstairs.

Matthew grills fish, an unfavorite of mine, but it tastes better than I thought fish could, and I think,
He even makes fish taste good,
and this seems to be a metaphor for the hard things we will face together.

We sit on the screened-in porch. There's the sound of crickets. I
talk about my dad, and Matthew tells me about his—a priest, still alive, in Kansas.

Dena insists on clearing the dishes herself, and a few minutes later she comes back carrying a chocolate cake with candles and singing “Happy Birthday.”

Matthew joins in: he has a deep, deep voice, which makes me think,
Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.

I make a wish and blow out the candles.

When Dena goes into the kitchen for plates, Matthew says, “I didn't know it was your birthday.”

I tell him it isn't until Wednesday, and that my brother's having a party for me. “You should come,” I say. “Dena's coming.”

We only eat a few bites of cake before Dena looks at her watch and says, “We have to go.”

“Where are we going?” I ask.

She says it's a birthday surprise.

Matthew pours scotch into a silver flask and tells me to get a sweater. “You don't think you'll need it,” he says, “but you will.”

. . . . .

The amphitheater is crowded, and just as we find seats in the bleachers, six black women in pastel dresses walk onto the stage. In a perfectly synchronized move, they turn their backs to the audience and place their white pocketbooks on the floor, which seems funny, and Matthew thinks so, too; he catches my eye.

They sing gospel and sound like The Staples Singers, especially on “I'll Take You There,” one of my favorite songs of all time.

After a while, practically the whole audience is standing, and Matthew and Dena and I are, too. Everyone is clapping along, and if I do not believe in Jesus exactly, I believe in whoever or whatever it is that makes these singers sing the way they do and this night breezy and Matthew's fingers touch mine a little longer than necessary when we pass the flask back and forth.

Toward the end of the concert, Dena sits down. I ask if she's okay, and she says, “I'm tired.”

Now it is just Matthew and me and the flask of scotch and our lingering fingers.

Everyone sings the encore, “Amazing Grace.” I close my eyes at “I once was lost, but now am found.” Matthew's voice is loud and clear for me to love. I myself am tone-deaf, but I mouth the words with all my heart.

. . . . .

“What does
gospel
mean?” I ask in the car.

“The message of the Lord,” Matthew says.

“The truth,” Dena says.

“So when people say ‘That's the gospel truth,' are they saying ‘the truth truth'?”

Matthew shrugs twice.

At home, I announce that I'm going to have another scotch scotch on the porch porch.

The chill in Dena's “Good night” makes me wonder if I thanked her for the cake and the concert. Maybe I haven't been helpful enough in the kitchen. I wash the rest of the dishes.

Then I get a glass of scotch with ice cubes and go out to the porch. I stroke Margaret's back and look out at the moon lighting up the hills.
Another minute,
I think,
and Matthew will come downstairs and out to the porch and he will kiss me, and our life together will start.

An hour passes before the porch door opens.

It's Dena.

I try to make my face look happy to see her, and I notice that hers is grim.

She sets her own glass of scotch on the table and sits across from me. “You asked me if anything ever happened between Matthew and me.”

She takes a deep breath. “The first year that we rented the house.”

I can see how hard it is for her to talk, and that she doesn't want to; I say, “You don't have to tell me.”

I think maybe she's decided not to; she is studying her glass,
turning it around, as if to figure out how the factory made it. She keeps her eyes on the glass while she speaks. “We both had a lot to drink one night. Or I did. I went into his room,” she says, “and got into bed with him.”

I can tell that she's remembering that night, and she is with him in his bed more than she is with me on the porch. Maybe she's putting her arms through his or kissing him.

Then her face sort of freezes into a smile, and I see the humiliation in it. “He said, ‘No.' He kicked me out.”

I realize I've been holding my breath only when I hear myself exhale, and I hope Dena didn't hear.

She says, “The next day he told me that he didn't feel that way about me, and he said he never would. I would have to know that if we were going to be friends.” She looks at me. “We never even kissed.”

I want to put my arm around her, but I can tell she does not want consolation.

She asks if I have any cigarettes, and I get them. I light one, my first since arriving; I haven't wanted Matthew to know I smoke. I hand the cigarette to her, and she holds on to it, so I light another.

“How many years ago?” I ask.

“Four?” she says. “Five?”

“Isn't it hard to share a house with him?”

“No,” she says, and her voice is adamant. “We're friends. We're great, great friends.”

. . . . .

After she goes to bed, I drink another scotch on the porch. Dena has finally talked to me the way I've always wanted her to, but I don't feel any closer to her. Maybe it's because her story seemed pointed—not that I know what the point is.

On the stairs, I realize I'm a little drunk. I go into the bathroom and wash my face and brush my teeth until I don't taste scotch or cigarettes anymore.

Matthew's door is open a crack; his light is on. I stand here, trying to decide whether to go in. I think of what Dena told me and wonder if it was a warning.

I knock.

After what seems like a long time, Matthew says, “Come in.”

He's sitting at his desk, marking up a big piece of honey-colored tracing paper. He waits a moment before turning around to me.

“I just wanted to say good night,” I say.

He says, “Good night.”

. . . . .

In bed, I try to think what gave me the idea that Matthew felt as I do. He came to the lake—but maybe he just got enough work done; he stood behind me and moved my arms—but maybe he just wanted to teach me to swim; his fingers lingered on mine when I passed the flask but maybe he was just being careful.

I tell myself I will know in the morning, and in the morning I do know.

The house feels deserted, though both the Saab and the Wagoneer are in the driveway. There's coffee in the percolator, and I pour myself a cup. The only movement in the house is the cat clock's shifting eyes and switching tail.

Matthew comes in through the screen door, saying, “Morning. Dena's taking a bike ride.”

He offers a section of the newspaper to me. Our eyes meet, but his look at mine like I'm anybody, any weekend guest or any friend of Dena's; he looks at me like I am nobody to him.

I say, “I'll take whatever you're not reading,” because I need the paper between us.

There's no need, however; he goes out to the porch to read.

. . . . .

The pain is sharp at first, and then without easing exactly, it becomes steady and deeper, more ache than pang.

At the lake, I imitate how I'd act if I didn't care about Matthew.
When he asks me what Dena was like at fourteen, I say that she was pretty much the same as now.

He says, “Tell the truth truth.”

She says, “Don't tell him anything.”

I don't; I know that they are just talking to each other through me.

Everything this afternoon calls forth my faults and flaws, all the reasons why this man I want doesn't want me, and those reasons call forth more reasons.