“Chill out there,” Nate said, looking through the cabinets of tinned salmon and prescription drugs for something more substantial. Finding nothing, he opened as many tiny cans as he could into the miniature bowls before the dogs shouldered him aside to get at their supper. He fetched them water and sat for a moment on the chair in the corner, watching their glistening tongues lick the steel clean.
And then their heads were up again, eyes still brimming with hope.
“That’s it, guys. Sorry.”
They sniffed at the cat baskets, rummaging in search of their inhabitants.
“Stay here, okay? Just stay.”
He pulled the door ajar and crossed back through the kitchen, heading out into the front hall, wondering where Ms. Graves might be. Here and there on decorative chairs and benches guests had taken refuge from the heat and the crowd, an older couple dozing upright on a chaise longue, a Japanese businessman in a tight black suit tapping away at his BlackBerry, while a few feet behind him a gaunt woman in a sweat-stained silk dress ruminated on a painting over the fireplace.
Heading up the stairs, Nate paused on the first landing, from which three hallways ran off into different wings of the house, each painted a different color, one beige, one pale blue, one dark red. The others had likely retreated to the third floor, back up to Jason’s room, which could only mean more bong hits and combat, a prospect he didn’t relish just now given how forcefully his retinas continued to pulse to the beat of his heart.
Stilled there on the landing for a moment, he found himself slowly drawn to the pattern on the wallpaper of the blue hallway. Little indigo diamonds were set on an azure background and surrounded by tiny gold stars each in turn ringed in a halo of silver, the design stretching on uninterrupted by picture frames or light fixtures, as if decoration of this particular wing had gone unfinished.
Coming closer, he could see another pattern beneath, stamped in outline onto the paper itself: hexagons contained within octagons contained in circles, which were themselves woven of figure eights, each figure only an inch wide, the stamp repeated a thousand times over. Moving from background to foreground and back, his eyes roved up and down, left and right, searching in vain for a place to rest, for something
to comprehend or analyze, but he could find nothing, no larger, central figure or meaning, forcing him eventually to give up and simply let the pattern enter him unconceptualized, the whole ungrasped, which strangely enough, after a few moments, produced an oddly pleasurable sensation, a kind of relief from the responsibility to understand, at which point he moved in a step closer losing all lateral perspective, as when he’d lost himself in the endless zigzag of the houndstooth check of his father’s overcoat as he was carried half asleep from the backseat of the car up to his bedroom as a boy, pressed against that endless repetition. The sudden memory of which he now condemned as sentimental. Thus covering self-pity in self-punishment, both of them equally false, both of them walls thrown up to block the view of something hopelessly vaster.
He kept on down the hall, coming to the open door of a bedroom done up in nautical style with powder-blue curtains and a navy bedspread and a replica of an old ocean liner set in a glass box on a table between the windows. At the bedside table, he picked up the cordless phone and dialed.
It rang three times, as it always did, before his mother answered, her voice rising gently on the last syllable of “Hello?”
“It’s me,” he said. “I’m over at Jason’s. I told you, right? His mother’s having this party.”
“Is she? Oh, good. Have they given you supper?”
“Yeah. They’ve got these tents set up and everything. Are you going to watch the fireworks?”
“Oh, I’ll probably put the TV on later. I suppose they’ll be starting soon. It’s a good night for them.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“That I’m not there.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m fine. I’m just catching up on the paper. There’s a wonderful piece about walruses with the most amazing pictures. Such odd-looking creatures and they sing these incredible songs to one another. I’ll cut it out for you.”
“I could come home if you want.”
“Nate, don’t be silly. I’m fine. Are you staying the night?”
“I might.”
“Well, enjoy yourself.”
“Did you put the air conditioner on?”
“Oh, no, it’s so loud. I hate the sound of it. I’ve got the windows open and there’s a bit of a breeze.”
“Mom, you should turn it on. It’s broiling.”
“It’ll cool down.”
“Well … I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“All right, then. Good night, dear.”
He put the phone back in its cradle, aware all of a sudden of the quiet.
“Nate? What are you doing here?”
He turned in wonder to see Doug already halfway into the room.
“Jason Holland,” he finally sputtered. “He’s my friend.”
“Jesus. What a mind-fuck this party is. Where the hell did Glenda put the bathrooms? I’ve been looking all over.”
“There’s one right there,” Nate said, pointing to the far end of the room.
When Doug had gone inside, Nate instinctively rose to shut the door to the hallway, his heart sprinting, imagining what would happen if Jason or one of the others were to wander in here now. Slowly, his breathing came under control. He tucked his shirt into his shorts and ran a hand through his hair, wishing he’d had the chance to shower after swimming and sweating out in the yard with the dogs. In the mirror,
the fabric bunched now at his waist looked queer so he untucked his shirt again and tried pulling his shorts lower on his hips.
When Doug stepped back into the room, Nate noticed that he was pale, as if he hadn’t slept. Strangely, the exhaustion seemed to have removed from his face a layer of his usual indifference.
“So you know the Hollands?”
“Yeah,” Doug replied. “I know them.”
“I stopped by the house a few times. Have you been away?”
“I’ve been busy.”
The thrill of being alone in a room with him again seemed to make everything else fall away. What would it matter if someone did come knocking at the door? This—between them—this was about what they wanted. Not who the desire made them.
Trying to hide his erection, Nate took a seat on the edge of the bed.
Doug paused to inspect the replica of the ocean liner.
It was the SS
Normandie
. Just over a thousand feet, according to the brass plaque. As long as an aircraft carrier, with a draft as deep, and likely capable of a similar speed, thirty knots or so, complete with the ballrooms and the luxury suites. Such a classy, elegant profile, she had, the stuff of postcards. Capsized dockside in the Hudson, if Doug remembered correctly, and sold for scrap.
“Glenda’s crazy,” he observed. “She thinks she’s some kind of duchess.”
“Mrs. Holland? Yeah. She’s a weird cook too.”
“Let me guess. You’re high as a kite.”
“No—I mean, not really. We smoked earlier but—”
“I need a favor,” he said, examining the fine thread braided into a miniature length of rope and coiled on the ship’s foredeck. “In the old lady’s house. There are papers, records, lots of them, I’m guessing. I
need as much about the case as you can get. Are you going to do that for me?”
“I thought it was over.”
“No. We’re just in a new phase.”
He came over to stand in front of Nate. A couple of weeks earlier he’d gone so far as to agree to go to a movie with the kid, even though he knew it would only feed his fantasy of the two of them as actually together. Nate had dressed up in pressed chinos and an ironed shirt; he’d even polished his shoes.
To be that innocent, he thought.
He looked up at Doug with such tender hope.
“What do you want from me?” Doug asked. “You want me to fuck you?”
Nate blushed. “Why are you being so harsh?”
“That’s what you want. Right?”
When he tried to stand up Doug put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him down again; he turned to face the wall. Looking at the kid’s profile, it occurred to Doug how easy it would be to take his head in his hands and with a quick twist of the neck, kill him.
“I swear to God,” Vrieger had said to him once, “I wish I had stabbed every one of those passengers to death. At least then I’d know what we did to them.”
“You think I’m an idiot,” Nate said. “You think just because I keep coming to your house you can say anything you want to me. I’m not as weak as you think. I’ve been through stuff.”
“Okay. Fine. But here’s the question: Are you strong enough to tell me what you want? That’s the test, in the real world. I told you what I want. I want those papers.”
He reached out and cupped the back of Nate’s skull in his hand, pressing his thumb and forefinger into the taut muscles of his neck.
Slowly, reluctantly, Nate leaned forward, letting his head come to rest against Doug’s stomach.
“What if I want to tell you that I love you?”
“You don’t love me. I make you hard, that’s all. Which is fine. The rest is daydreaming. But don’t worry,” Doug said, running his hand through Nate’s hair. “I like you.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Why not?”
D
AISIES AND MILKWEED
and high summer grass scratched at Charlotte’s ankles and shins, catching on the hem of her dress as the crickets and frogs all about her in the field sang in endless oscillation.
They can’t have gone far, she thought, how far could the dogs have gone? Lights from the party died away at the woods’ edge.
“Samuel!” she called into the blackness, dotted here and there by fireflies. “Wilkie!”
Mosquitoes swarmed at her head and along her bare arms she could feel the tingle of gnats. The air itself seemed to sweat, the pores of every living thing opening wide, sap bleeding from the pines, the bushy arrowheads of the grass stalks bursting to seed, the whole warm earth breathing in the darkness.
Her temples still throbbed from the receding cacophony of voices and music. She’d focused as best she could talking to Fanning, as she always tried to in the presence of others, holding fast to the teleological mind, that once broad current that flowed past the lacuna of doubt and random transport. But those organizing arguments dropped away again here.
Stepping into the woods, she reached her hand out and felt the smooth bark of a birch.
“Come along,” she called out to them. “Come along.”
She could barely see her hand in front of her face, the darkness molten now like a closed eyelid’s slow swirl.
Why search? Such pedants and moralists Sam and Wilkie had become. Yet as soon as she imagined being without them the feeling of loneliness bit at her. She had been nearly cured of that disease before they had come along. She had been content in solitude. Her soul kept alive by the leaps of incandescence that now and then hallowed intervals otherwise inconsequent: the rhythm of words singing off a page, a sonata turning time into feeling, a landscape on a canvas so caught as to grant one brief respite from the fear of total neutrality. These were the body and blood of her faith in the world. What the utilitarians and the materialists and the swallowers of all the cheap scientism would never understand: that the privilege of walking by the river in nature’s company owed as much to a mind trained by poetry and painting—of Protestant plainsong or Romantic largesse—as to any quiddity of nature’s own. You walked through the painting. You saw through the poem. Imagination created experience, not matter alone.
“Wilkie!”
If they went too far they might reach the road, where they could be hit by a car or cut their paws on glass.
Somewhere in the distance, she heard a young woman’s cry. She turned, seeing nothing but darkness behind her. All of a sudden, there was a terrible beating of wings and she felt the stiff tips of feathers brush against her arm as a bird took off right beside her, a crow by the sound of the call it made as it veered up and away. She began walking more quickly, her breathing growing heavy again, the back of her dress soaked through with sweat. Roots protruding from the ground and the low branches of the pines made the going hard. Just as she saw what she thought were lights up ahead, she felt a sharp nick on her leg and
shifted to her right to avoid it only to feel another stab on her wrist. Frightened, she reached her arms out in front of her, and started moving faster still.
T
HE GUESTS,
stuffed and drunk, had at last been herded out onto the lawn for the fireworks, the flush-faced town collegians on break from summer internships grabbing their third or fourth glasses of champagne as the foreign investors trailed after them remarking to themselves that no matter how weak the dollar or poorly managed the public fisc, really you couldn’t beat the States for all the sights to see. And there, teetering on a riser overlooking the pond stood Glenda Holland soused to the gills, trying to shush the players who’d already struck up the opening largo of the
1812 Overture
.
Hal, for reasons he couldn’t later recall, had been in search of twine and a shovel when, at about this time, he flipped the switch on the garage-door opener. The panicked sheep fled as if from the abattoir, waddling at a clip across the drive, bleating as they went, only to be penned again between the tents, driven into the rear of the gathering crowd, who turned in astonishment at this sudden outbreak of the agrarian. When an EverSafe Security employee drew a semiautomatic from under his jacket and held it down toward the shaggy, neglected creatures, a vegan sophomore from Vassar standing nearby cried “Terrorist!” at the top of her lungs. No sooner had she uttered the word, than champagne flutes were tossed aside and crushed under foot as the guests toward the front, blind to the nature of the threat, were sickened by the sudden knowledge that their decision to avoid city crowds had failed to deliver them from danger, and with no other direction to go they hurried down the slope into the grass, scattering toward the woods and the pond and roadway. Others closer to the incident merely
returned to their tables, baffled as to the origin or meaning of the episode. For a while, mild chaos reigned, Glenda trying desperately to conscript the guards as shepherds, while some of the younger and more inebriated guests, amused at the folly, began feeding the sheep the remainders of the peanut-butter parfait. Nerves shot, the animals began shitting profusely, on the grass, on the dance floor, on the feet of exhausted partygoers, who sent up new cries, the stink thrown off by the steaming piles mixing with the stale scent of the machine-cooled tents to give what remained of the gathering the air of a barnyard in autumn or early spring.