Box Nine (31 page)

The advertisement begins with the whine of maudlin violins and Ike looks at Eva and says, “Listen to me. There was a box in today's mail. Just like last time. It was addressed to box nine. It was wrapped in plain brown paper. There was no return address. I cut it open.”

He pauses. A voice from the radio is saying something about
when the time comes, we'll be ready.

Ike takes a breath. “Now listen to me. It was a box full of human fingers and blood.”

“Jesus Christ,” Eva says, hands going up to her mouth.

“The sight of it made me faint. I was on the floor for a few minutes, I guess. When I woke up, the box was gone. And there was no one else in the room.”

“Why didn't you come and get me?”

Ike stares at her.

“You think I took the box?”

He doesn't say a word.

“You think I sent the box? You think I'm involved in this?”

He sinks down slightly into the bed.

“For God's sake, Ike, how can you suspect me? Don't do this, Ike. I can't be alone on this.”

“I'm going to try to sleep now,” Ike says, drawing the covers up to the fold between his neck and shoulder.

Eva stares down at him. The ad on the radio finishes and the host comes back on, his voice sounding refreshed.

HOST: We are back and our caller is Lois.

LOIS: Yes, hello, Ray. Let me tell you a little story about how these skinheads accosted my mother downtown last week, right on the common, near the reflecting pool …

Eva eases her shoes off her feet. She stands and begins to undress. She quickly folds each item as it falls away from her body and places it in a neat pile on the floor. When she's naked, she takes a corner of the sheet and quilt and yanks it back from the bed.

Ike's eyes snap open and she lets him take a long look at her. She drops hold of the bedclothes, places her hands lightly on her hips, model-like, and does a very small twist from side to side, to indicate she's on display, to give him a full chance at observation.

“Eva,” is the only thing he can manage to say and it comes out as a stunted question.

She raises an index finger to her lips and gives the ancient
quiet
sign.

“You don't want to talk,” she whispers, “we won't talk.”

She climbs into the bed and advances at once, pulls her body across the mattress until its full length is parallel with his. Then she puts her arms around him, cradles him, pulls their chests together, flattening herself. She intermingles their legs and can already feel him growing against a thigh. She's pleased, bordering on being something like proud, comforted by the fact that he's getting hard in spite of his shock and depression and paranoia and confusion and terror.

They fumble, pull him free from sweatpants, T-shirt, underwear, all the while kissing, wet, breathless, tongue-crazy.

The only noise beyond their breathing and muted, guttural groans is the talk-show host, Ray, starting up again, voice rising in both pitch and volume, building another ranting theory, preaching his endless warnings of decay.

Chapter Twenty-Five

L
enore sits in the Barracuda for a few minutes. She's parked across the street from Rollie's Grill. It surprises her how much she can see through the front windows of the diner. It's like a little diorama, a small scene enclosed in a porcelain-framed case. An intricate picture of dozens of interacting parts becomes clearer the longer you look. She can see that half the booths are filled. She notices an enormous customer in mechanic's coveralls perched on a counter stool. She spots one of Harry's cousins, possibly Lon, clearing the empty tables. She can see Isabelle behind the counter stirring the contents of the big kettle. And Harry is next to her, his mouth moving, jabbering a story as he chops peppers.

She thinks that Harry and Isabelle have always struck her as an odd but instantly appealing and attractive couple. And now it dawns on her why. At first glance, their glaring disparateness, most obviously, but not limited to, their racial difference, makes them seem like such separate entities. But then, constantly on the heels of that observation, there's the indisputable fact of their togetherness, this plain happiness of their mutual attraction and love, and it burns away the separateness and acts as a billboard for the possibility of
family, wholeness, belonging.

An image forms in Lenore's mind. She hates it, instinctively, but like an annoying and persistent daydream, she can neither eliminate it nor alter it. She's stuck with it: herself as Isabelle tending a pot filled with an exotic stew. And here's the tough part: Woo as Harry, dicing up vegetables and babbling the pleasant fables of his grandfather.

A fact becomes apparent that's so bizarre it makes her dizzy.
She could love Woo.
There's the genuine possibility that she could care for, pledge herself to, undertake a life with this odd Oriental linguistics professor. The Barracuda is full of the smell of him. And she knows this is why she lingers, why she doesn't want to get out.

He had suggested that they shower together. That she call Miskewitz, tell him she needed some sleep in order to keep going. That they push book piles aside and have a postcoital picnic on the floor of his library. He'd said he could make a huge gourmet omelette for two, something special, a surprise. He'd stroked her forehead and said she had to sleep soon, that it had been days since she'd really slept and that something could
happen
to her, emphasizing the word so that it conveyed a childlike fear, a dread of inconceivable monsters.

She'd lain in his arms and listened to him speak, kissed his chest, run her fingers over his bony cheeks. But she'd left the loft, still wet, her legs a little unindependable, her nervous system shorting out slightly, sending small blue flashes before her eyes as she found her way back to her car.

She knows she should have gone back to the green duplex, searched for a Valium, called in to the lieutenant for a break, collapsed into bed, and crashed. But instead she drove to Rollie's Grill, intent on black coffee and overspiced food. And something else. Now, staring through the boxy, rectangular windows, she's intent on studying Harry and Isabelle, on paying attention to their gestures, their mannerisms, the number of times they touch one another. She wonders about the sound of their voices as they speak to one another. She wonders if there's a signal that two people give off when they're bound together, committed in some old-time, superstitious way. Do they learn some difficult, shared language, some bizarre and insulated code only understood by the two bound parties? At night, in bed, at the end of the once-endless day, do they dispense with language entirely, fall into a lazy, sleepy telepathy? Do they utter sounds on a frequency that outsiders can't hear? Do their inner organs vibrate when their mate comes within a certain perimeter? Like some birds, do they have an ability to will their own death when a spouse dies? Like swans? Like her parents?

There has never been anyone that Lenore felt this way about. She's been involved with a number of boys and men over the past fifteen years. She has never felt rejected. Normally, she was the one who decided to sever a relationship. But even when she wasn't the one who called it off, she always felt relief, never rejection. It was always like a great weight had been lifted.

But now images she can't eliminate or adapt to are coming into her head, stuff so alien that she doesn't know what to do with it: She sees herself moving into Woo's cavernous loft, preparing to bake bread on his gleaming black counters, folding her freshly washed sweaters on the couch as he works at his ridiculous desk, instructing burly, ethnic moving men on where to put down the new bed. She sees herself and Woo hosting a small dinner, a homey, old-fashioned casserole of some kind, dense with noodles, cheese, multicolored vegetables. Woo sits at one end of the new teak table—
we've got to lighten this place up a little, honey
—and Ike, their sole guest this evening, sweet Ike, still having trouble renting out the empty half of the green duplex, sitting at the other end. And Lenore in the middle, equidistant from each, closest to the kitchen area so she can run the show, pull things from the oven and refrigerator, grab a new bottle from the wine rack. She sees her own mouth opening. Words come:
Fred, honey, you should really take Ike up to the new courts with you next week. Ike, they've built some beautiful new racquetball courts up on the hill. Fred could show you the basics. It would really do you a world of good …

“What the fuck am I doing?” she says to herself, aloud, inside the Barracuda.

She jumps out of the car, starts to walk to the diner, then turns back, pulls open the door, and grabs the keys from the ignition slot.

A gust of steamy air hits her as she pulls open the metal door and steps inside the diner. Lon almost drops his rubber tub of dirty dishes trying to say hi to her. She slides into the first booth and nods hello. The table is littered with the debris from the last customers. There are two breakfast plates coated with the hardened yellow remains of fried eggs, large glasses with grainy traces of tomato juice, side bowls dusted with the last brown crumbs of Harry's secret-seasoning home fries, toast crusts, orange rinds, coffee mugs. She guesses that both customers were men, probably truckers, possibly in their mid to late forties. Then she stops herself, annoyed that she can't even take a seat in a lunchcar without reflexively analyzing the landscape like a crime scene. She can't turn off being a detective, looking for the tiniest evidence that might reveal something more. But what? What is ever revealed that's truly of use? It's the process, the breaking apart of the immediate environment, sifting it fragment by fragment and looking at each particle from all perspectives, dusting it, photographing it, putting it down and picking it up again—this is what has become important to her. The method. The technique. The system. The idea that she can no longer sit in Rollie's Grill without her mind taking over, shifting into an inspect-and-analyze mode, reconstructing a common diner-booth's previous occupants—she finds this pathetic beyond words.

Behind the counter, Harry raises a full coffeepot toward her and she nods again. Lately, she's noticed that inside the diner, communication is often assisted by the gesture and the hand signal accompanying normal, audible words. She assumes this is because of the number of different primary languages that all the inhabitants speak. As far as she knows, only Isabelle is terribly fluent in a second language.

Isabelle manages to get her instructions across to everyone. She snaps Spanish at her own extended brood, handles a beautiful, rhythmic English with the customers, and cuts what, by her own admission, is a broken, sometimes humorous Khmer dialect. She is the translator through whom all interracial communication must pass. She referees the fights between her Uncle Jorge and Harry's cousin Lon.She relays Harry's words about clean grill to her sister Luisa. She's able to barter with both of the odd, lanky “sales reps” from both the Mekong Market and the New Ponce Bodega. And she's able to keep Karl, the redneck milkman who calls the diner “the town's own goddamn United Nations,” harmless and under control.

Lenore watches Isabelle now as she comes out of the storeroom wiping her hands on her apron. She's a large woman, but she moves like someone half her weight and age. Though Lenore has to admit, she has no idea how old Isabelle actually is. Lenore envies her grace behind the counter, not just in the way she moves, the ease and agility of her body—Lenore thinks she could match that—but her easy manner of dealing with people. Lenore has never seen her blow up and yell. In any language. She's never seen her grab the front of someone's shirt or throw a water glass or serving spoon across the room. Even in those moments when the diner is packed to capacity during a dinner rush and boothfuls of college kids are screaming rude insults about their wait and cousin Lon has burned a second omelette and the dishwasher has started to leak again, Isabelle just dances through each crisis, attending to one thing at a time, cajoling the college boys with refills of coffee and her smooth voice, patting Lon on the back with a soft word to relax, even taking a monkey wrench to the bottom of the old Cleansomatic.

Lenore feels that put in the same position, she, too, could handle all the problems. But it's the method that differs and how things are left in the wake of the job's completion. It's not a comfortable thought, because her method for dealing with all problems arises out of the core of her personality. Her schematic is simple—confront the problem and take the shortest, most direct route toward its solution. Every other consideration is superfluous. She's never doubted this before. It's been the first holy truth. The truth of truths. But in looking at Isabelle, she sees a woman—and it's an important fact that she's a woman—capable in an all-pervasive, almost primal way. And yet there's no blood left in her wake, no jumpy casualties, no pockmarked landscape.

The disparity of their jobs is no answer. Lenore can actually see the diner as a microcosm of Quinsigamond. It's not that much of a stretch. A bunch of unassimilated people side by side, droning and bitching from time to time in a native tongue, serving drunks and head cases and average hungry schmucks, passing time. The fact is that even behind the counter, in a much more insulated and controlled world, Lenore would be bullying her way toward the last clean plate and the end of the day.

Lon appears with a dish bin and an embarrassed smile. He clears the table of all the dirty dishes, wipes it down with a damp rag, and heads back behind the counter with this endearing, scampering run. Isabelle walks up in front of her and slides a black coffee onto the table.

“Don't you ever get tired of this place?” she asks.

Lenore shakes her head. “This is my free zone, Isabelle. This is where I relax.”

“Free zone,” Isabelle repeats, smiling. “I like the words.”