"Maybe
that's what happened to the girl from the motel."
"Drugs?"
Gryffin shook his head. "I doubt it. Not Kenzie."
"No.
This Denny guy. Maybe he kidnapped her or something."
"Uh-uh.
Denny never leaves the island. I mean, he might come over once or twice a year
to get some groceries, but that's it. Toby brings him whatever he needs when
he's out there provisioning Lucien. Denny's a total hermit. I mean, he's just
sane enough to be on this side of AMHI."
"AMHI?"
"Augusta
Mental Health Institution. State loony bin. If he were down in Portland or
someplace like that, he'd probably be on the street. But here—well, he's pretty
normal."
"Normal?"
I stared at him in disbelief. "Ever hear of Stephen King? I mean, you were
the one who brought up Charles Manson."
Gryffin
looked exasperated. "You're from away, so you don't get it. Half the guys
in Maine look like Charles Manson. Especially here down east. There's a lot of
survivalist types living off in the woods; you can't go arresting them every
time someone wanders off the Appalachian Trail. If you could even find
them."
"But
you know right where Denny is."
"Yeah,
and it's a good place for him." He stared out at the bulk of Tolba Island.
"Guys like Denny, maybe they know what's best for them. Stay away from the
rest of us. Some people just don't play well with others. If they want to hide
and waste their lives, that's their business."
I
didn't say anything, just stood beside him, gazing at the water. After a minute
I peered at his face.
"What?"
he demanded.
"The
green ray." I extended my finger. He flinched, and I stopped, my finger
hovering an inch from his cheekbone. "There—in your eye. That weird speck
of green. I've never seen that before."
"Pigment.
Too much melanin. Like a freckle, only in my iris."
"It's
weird. It's kind of beautiful."
"That's
your beer talking. Come on, I'm starving."
We
walked to Aphrodite's house. The day suddenly felt old. The sun was already
sliding down toward the western horizon, and as we approached the house it all
seemed plunged in shadow. I was hungry now too, and tired.
"I'm
going to crash after I eat," I said as we went into the kitchen. The house
was silent, with no trace of Aphrodite or the dogs. "I didn't sleep well
last night."
"I'll
get you set for a nap after lunch. Sit."
He
cleared aside the papers on the table by the window. We ate without talking.
When we were done he cleared the plates, then said, "Okay. I'll show you
the guest room. Then I've got to make some phone calls and do some work."
"What
about your mother?"
"What
about her? She's either schnockered or out in the woods with the dogs. She'll
be back at some point. Maybe after you have your little nap the two of you can
trade hangover remedies," he said angrily. "She drives me nuts. She
always has. We've never really gotten along.
He
sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "You want to know the truth? If I
were you, I'd just leave and go back to the city. Even if she'd known you were
coming, even if you had brought a tape recorder—she would have found some way
out of it. And that—?"
He
pointed at my camera. "Not in a million years."
I
stared at the table. I still hadn't paid Toby for bringing me out; it couldn't
cost much more to have him bring me back to Burnt Harbor. If I left early the
next morning, I could be home by tomorrow night. I wouldn't be out much more
money, or time, and I'd have the rest of the week to—
To
what? Scream at Phil? Drink myself to sleep or shuffle around the clubs looking
for music and someone to go home with?
That
wasn't going to happen. The clubs were gone. I had a better chance of getting
laid here in Bumfuck than on the Lower East Side. I had the Rent-A-Wreck for
the rest of the week, but not enough money to do something interesting with it.
And
there was still the minor matter of Phil Cohen. No matter that he'd screwed
this up, he would give me grief and almost certainly do his part to make sure
everyone within the Tri-state radius thought it was my fault.
"Shit,
I dunno." I looked up at Gryffin. "Listen, would there be a problem
with me staying overnight? I mean, this editor arranged this for me, and I
don't really want to bail and go back without anything to show him. I'll keep a
low profile," I added. "Just for a day or two."
Gryffin
sighed. "I guess we can see what she says. Get your stuff, and I'll show
you the guest room; you can sleep or read or whatever. Check how your Nokia
stock's performing."
He
led me back upstairs. We went past the room with Aphrodite's islandscapes, into
a narrow ell that led to one of those jerry-built additions, its floor uneven
and the windows mismatched.
"Remember
what I was telling you about the folks at Oakwind having no idea what they were
doing when it came to architecture and building? This is Exhibit A."
Gryffin waved in disgust at the walls. "Denny built this—
my
wing of
the house, including the guest room. And if you think it's bad now, you should
have seen it back then. Snow blew right through the cracks in the walls;
there'd be two-inch drifts in here. Nothing was plumb— you could set down a
bowling ball at one end of the hall and it would roll to the other. Toby had to
come in and basically rebuild it. So it's still kind of funky, but—"
He
stopped and opened a door. "You will find no snow in your sleeping
quarters."
No
heat, either, that I could detect, but I was afraid to push my luck by
mentioning that. The room was under the eaves. There was a bed with a white
coverlet, a nightstand and lamp, a ladderback chair and small chest of drawers.
Braided rug on the floor, a window overlooking evergreens and gray rocks.
"It's
fine." I dumped my bag on the bed. "Thanks."
Gryffin
bent to feel the baseboard heater. "This isn't on. And I forgot the space
heater. Well, you'll be okay for a while. If you stay, I'll bring you the
heater before you go to bed tonight, how's that? But now I have to get some
work done. Bathroom's down the hall, there should be hot water. See you
later."
He
left. I grabbed a change of clothes and found the bathroom. More mismatched
windows, a cracked skylight that had become a morgue for moths and flies,
clawfoot tub, rust-stained sink.
But
there was a nice Baruch rug on the pine floor, and expensive Egyptian cotton
towels, and a block of Marseille soap in a brass holder by the tub. All of
which led me to peg Gryffin as a closet sensualist.
I
took a long bath. There was plenty of hot water. When I was done I dressed,
keeping my expensive jeans but upgrading to a clean black T-shirt. Then I went
back to my room, crawled under the blankets, and passed out.
It
was late afternoon when I woke. The light seeping through the windows had that
trembling clarity you get in early winter, when there are no leaves to filter
it and the clouds are the same color as the sky. I exhaled and watched the air
fog above my mouth. Then I got out of bed, went to the bathroom and washed my
face. I raked my fingers through my hair and confronted the mirror.
I
looked like shit. For the last few decades I'd coasted on good bone structure
and good teeth. Right now those were the only things I still had going for me.
With my ash-streaked hair and sunken eyes, I looked like a bad angel scorched
by the fall to earth. I bared my teeth at my reflection and stepped back into
the hall.
The
door to Gryffin's room was shut. I knocked on it softly. No reply. I went
inside, closing the door behind me.
The
room wasn't bigger than mine, though less monastic. There was a more elaborate
rug on the floor, a nice Mission-style bed, carelessly made with plaid blankets
and a heap of pillows. Dark curtains, half drawn. A small desk with the
now-empty computer case I'd seen in his motel room. An open suitcase holding
flannel shirts and jeans. A few framed photos on the walls—a fishing trip,
friends from Putney, graduation from Bowdoin College. On the desk a heavy old
brass candlestick with a thick pillar candle and a Gauloises matchbox; on the
windowsill some smooth gray rocks and the carapace of a box turtle.
I
went to the bed, pulled back the covers, and ran my fingers across the sheets.
No protective plastic here—the bedding was fancy cotton, soft as suede, or
skin. Christine had loved expensive sheets too. She'd tried to buy some for me,
but I wouldn't let her.
"Why?"
she demanded. "This is crazy, Cass. Your sheets are like sandpaper! You
sleep on nice sheets at
my
place."
I
hadn't said anything. She wouldn't have understood. It
was
crazy. It was
like not having a cell phone or a digital camera. The discomfort, the
annoyance, reminded me that I was alive. It kept me from feeling completely
numb, even as it kept me detached.
Christine
had kept me human, barely. I knew that, and it scared me. Sometimes when she'd
touched me I'd felt like I was burning, like her bed was on fire. I still felt
like that sometimes when I thought of her.
I
picked up one of Gryffin's pillows and buried my face in it. It smelled of some
grassy shampoo, and faintly of male sweat. It had been a long time since I'd
been close enough to a man to smell him. I stood for a moment with my face
pressed against the pillow. Then I lay on the bed, pillow crushed to me so I
could breathe in his scent, and masturbated, thinking of the way he'd looked in
the photo, that green-flecked eye.
Afterward
I smoothed the coverlet and headed back to my room. I thought about getting my
camera, decided to leave it. I hadn't brought much film with me. I pulled on
Toby's sweater and went downstairs.
The
house had a strange, late-afternoon calm. Chilly hallways, dead bluebottles on
the windowsills; the dull ache, somewhere between anticipation and
disappointment, of knowing night was almost here. In the living room a
deerhound curled on the couch like a gigantic dormouse, snoring. Ho other dogs.
No Aphrodite. Not much heat coming from the woodstove, though I could see a
dull glow through the soot-covered window.
I
found Gryffin at the kitchen table, bent over his laptop. He waved tersely at
me without looking up. I crossed to the refrigerator and peered inside.
A
container of skim milk, another of V-8 juice; eggs and a bag of coffee.
Breakfast wasn't just the most important meal of the day around here. It was
the only meal.
"I'm
going to the store," I announced. "You want anything?"
"Me?
Uh, no," Gryffin said distractedly. "Thanks."
Outside,
chickadees fluttered in the trees. Something rustled in the dead leaves of an
oak then made a loud rattling sound as I passed. It didn't seem as cold,
despite looming shadows and a steady wind off the water.
Or maybe
it was like my grandmother always said: You can get used to anything, even
hanging. I remembered Phil's words—
all that bleak shit you like? Well, this
is it.
He
was right. It made me feel the way the Lower East Side used to make me feel,
before the boutiques and galleries and families moved in and the clubs closed
and the place became just another sewage pipe for American currency and
overpriced clothes. I loved the way it used to be, loved that edge, the sense
that the ground beneath me could give way at any time and I'd go hurtling down
into the abyss. I had fallen, more than once, but I'd always caught myself
before I smashed against the bottom. Back in the day, of course, I was out
there taking pictures of people who weren't so lucky. It was terrifying, but it
was also exhilarating.
Now
all that had changed. Now there were clean wide sidewalks over the pit. Making
my chump change last from week to week for twenty-odd years was no longer a
sign of being a survivor. It was further proof, not that any was needed, that I
was a fuckup.
I
was still managing to be a fuckup here, of course. But I was starting to like
it. It seemed a good place to be, if you needed something to slice through the
scar tissue so you could feel your own skin. At the moment, the cold was doing
a pretty good job of that. I zipped my jacket and shoved my hands into my
pockets, wind at my back. That beer had been good. Some Jack Daniel's would be
better.
I
walked through the woods. A small animal burred angrily from a tree. I stopped,
thinking of the fisher Toby had mentioned, looked up and saw a red squirrel
glaring down at me. I chucked a pine cone at it and went on.
There
was no one in the Island Store when I arrived, just the big Newfoundland lying
in front of the counter. The air smelled good, garlic and tomatoes cutting
through the underlying odors of beer and pizza. Dub music thumped from the
kitchen. The dog stood and yawned then followed me as I went to the back room
and got another beer from the cooler. When I returned to the counter Suze stood
there. She slid a carton of cigarettes behind a Plexiglas window, then locked
it.