Look at me: (38 page)

“Maybe you should,” he said. “Go there, too.”

“Never!” Abby said fiercely, and the pressure of her smile finally shoved the tears from her eyes, a single strand veering haplessly down each cheek. “The people out there have no souls. They’re not really people—they’ve got plastic in their faces, their legs, their breasts. Even the men, they put it in their calves to give their legs a better shape. I mean, these are not human beings in the traditional sense.” She blotted her eyes with a napkin. “How could I live in a place like that?”

Michael crammed a last bit of fajita into his mouth and washed down the chicken and green peppers with margarita slush. The food made sweat prick to the surface of his face. He was tired of Abby, of her anger. It felt tedious, like something not just he but all the world would soon be rid of.

“The good news,” she said lightly, as if in apology, “is I’m finally getting some money out of the guy. I reupholstered the entire living room, even the rocking chair! Now I’m redoing the outside, putting flower beds in the front, and in back? That big concrete patio with the grill? I’m having them jackhammer that away, and I’m putting in grass.”

Michael listened with approval. He remembered the area, and she was right, grass would be far, far better than concrete. He swilled the last of his drink and wiped a napkin over his hot, pounding face. Then he had an idea: “You ever thought of doing prairie?” he asked.

He walked Abby to her car under a black sky, a big spongy moon off to one side. He kissed her cheek and received in exchange a puzzled look, as if she were remembering before, and wondering why—or why not.

“Thanks,” he said, “for keeping me company.”

“Thank you for dinner. It was perfect timing—I’ve been a little lost without the kids.”

How did she survive, Abby Reece, with her transparent face? How had the world not stamped her into pieces and ground her to a fine, glittering silt? Yet here she was, intact, tears in her eyes and a heart so tender that Michael imagined he overheard its gentle beating; she had survived, and showed every sign of continuing to do so. And there had been a time, he knew—perhaps just a moment—when exhaustion had tempted him to lay down his small bundle at the threshold of Abby’s flat yellow house, to uncoil himself among the modest dimensions of her life. And then the girl had come along and startled him, distracted him. Yes, he had Charlotte to thank for the fact that now, as a plan amassed within him, he would not have to leave Abby Reece and her children behind, not stun them with his sudden, inexplicable departure.

“Howard told me you aren’t coming back next year,” she said, looking up at him in the darkness.

“No.”
A revolution is happening
.

“You’re teaching somewhere else?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I think … probably not.”

“What will you do?”

“I haven’t decided. Something different. Something new.”
Everything is going to change
.

“That sounds exciting,” she said.

Michael nodded, looking into her eyes. He was eager to be rid of her. At last she got in her car, and he waved to her as she pulled away.

Charlotte could hear the party, a bass line seeping up through the car, thumbing her insides. Laurel opened her shiny pale blue purse, whose hue exactly matched her fingernail polish. After some feral digging, she excavated a lipstick and applied a blossom of color to her lips. She offered the lipstick to Charlotte, who shook her head.

“Aw, live a little,” Laurel said. And with breathtaking precision, considering that Roselyn was parking the car in which they sat, Laurel seized Charlotte’s shoulder with one hand and used the other to push the soft nub across her mouth.

“Gimme,” Sheila commanded from the front seat, clutching for the lipstick. “Hey,” seeing Charlotte. “You’ve got lips.”

Laurel was applying her blusher, a lunar, sepia glitter in the streetlight. “No,” Charlotte groaned, recoiling as her friend came at her with the brush. It grazed her cheeks, soft as mink.

“Mascara next. Hush hush,” Laurel said. “Or your face’ll be totally de-balanced.” It was hard not to flinch—Charlotte’s eyes felt so exposed without her glasses. But there was a clean divide in her, one part simulating disgust so the other could accept the mascara with impunity.

“Nuh-uh,” Laurel said, swiping Charlotte’s glasses away when she tried to replace them. “That’ll wreck it.”

“You realize that I’m totally blind,” Charlotte said.

“There’s nothing to see in there anyway.”

They left the car and wandered toward the music among ranch-style houses and waxen golf course pines lit from below, past open garage doors exhaling smells of motor oil and cut grass and rindy walnuts still in boxes from last fall. They paused under a tree to relight Sheila’s half-joint. The pot, in conjunction with Charlotte’s uncorrected eyesight, made her feel like a stand-in for herself. Laurel brushed Charlotte’s hair with a small neon-green plastic brush, and she felt it lift slightly from her head.

Michael stood alone in the parking lot, an asphalt version of the empty sky. A clear, cool night, a smear of light to the east, where Chicago was. The emptiness of this land and sky had ceased to trouble him; they no longer felt empty in the way they had. The plastic signs were everywhere—Mobil, Holiday Inn, Kentucky Fried Chicken—holding him like the fingers of a hand that would reach as far as he might wish to go. He pulled his car onto State Street, heading west, then took a right, then another right onto Squaw Prairie Road, still amazed at how quickly civilization yielded to countryside: fields, tractors in silhouette, long rows of freshly turned soil, other fields abandoned, still crowded with last year’s dead stalks. Old barns like ghost ships. He crossed over the interstate and soared beyond it, heading for a building site he’d visited once before. It glowed: a cloud of low, flickering light. A condominium village at an early stage of construction that was weirdly akin to devastation—the sort he’d once dreamed of causing himself.

Michael parked his car and went to look at the development. Nothing had changed since his last visit: four sample condominiums were poised among acres of dirt and curved, sparkling sidewalks. The houses were jaunty ersatz Victorians, each one distinct in size and shape but accented with identical festive trim, mailboxes saluting out front. A vast constellation of Victorian lampposts haunted the empty sidewalks, leaking a faint lunar glow from their flame-shaped bulbs.

Michael followed one of the sidewalks to its desultory end, then kept walking, trudging through loose, turned earth that worked its way inside his shoes, until eventually he reached three strands of barbed wire demarcating the outer limit of the development. Beyond these lay a planted field, rows of shoots just lifting their heads from the soil. From planted crops to condominiums: three strands of barbed wire abridging a gap of millennia. Wind cackled around him.
Cross pollinization.
No. Pollination.
Cross polliniz
—no!
Globalization, pollination. This is the new Renaissance.

All you need to know is how to tell a story
.

Well, that he could certainly do. That he’d been doing all life.

The door to the party house was open. Inside flourished the sort of event made possible only by a blanket absence of parents, not an out-for-the-evening absence but an out-of-town absence. A primordial murk, a loamy, humid stench of beer and carpeting, a ravaged kitchen where four guys were playing soccer with a beleaguered cantaloupe. A stereo heaved up the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” at disorienting volume. Charlotte was astonished to find it all still here, undiminished by the passage of months or her own lengthy absence. Head down, she avoided people’s eyes at first, then discovered that she couldn’t see them even when she looked. The world slurred, buckled, smashed pleasantly, the lashes of her eyes felt heavy, coated like sticky buds, and her lips and cheeks were hot. As she moved among the unrecognizable faces, her hesitation yielded to a marvelous detachment, a sense that she wasn’t herself anymore, so none of it mattered. She carried her face like an object newly made, still wet, in danger of smearing or losing its shape as she followed her friends downstairs to a basement rec room populated by boys in baggy attire who nodded their sparsely bearded chins in accord with the rap music stomping from a boombox. And here was the keg, the party’s faulty, intermittent heart, a guy squeezing out cup after cup of foam, complaining bitterly about the pump.

“Yo, Tupac!” someone bellowed.

Stories? You want stories? I got a doozy, said the voice of a Hollywood producer as Michael envisioned him, a voice cribbed from movies and TV, a man who took meetings beside a pool with slices of fruit on his cheeks and chamomile teabags over his eyes.
Listen
, he said,

We’ve got a guy from one of those crappy parts of the world where people get shot up every other day—Lebanon, let’s say, but hell it could be anywhere, Sri Lanka, Nigeria. Sudan. Say Lebanon’s southern coast—Tyre—cute little tourist town until everyone started gunning it to pieces. He’s from a middle-class family, Shiites. No, you clown,
shee
-ite, two syllables. It’s one of those Muslim sects. Now our guy, he’s a prodigy. Math whiz, gobbles up numbers like most kids eat M&Ms. Goes to college in Beirut, honors in every class, brilliant career ahead of him yadda yadda. Gets married, has a kid. Then bam. Chucks the whole thing. It’s the early eighties, the Israelis’re in South Lebanon trying to clear out the PLO, and our guy joins a bunch of Shiites that’s trying to get rid of the Israelis. Hezbollah, you’ve heard of them. Scary folks. Extremists in the extreme. But our guy
wants
that—see, he’s mad. Pissed. Becomes a fundamentalist, starts baying at the moon or whatever the hell they do. No booze, no girls in bathing suits. Then poof, he disappears. Wife, kid, folks, they all wait terrified. Never hear another word—finally they figure he must be dead.

Is he really dead? No, he’s in Iran. It’s a Shiite majority over there so they like Hezbollah, send ’em money, ammo, whole bit. Our guy gets noticed by the higher-ups because he’s got this knack for languages, picks ’em up like that, accents, jargon, dialects, the whole tamale, plus he hates
—despises
—America. Thinks we’ve got a plot to control the world with our “cultural exports,” which you know what that means: how come our nice girls start whipping off their head scarves every time Brad shows up on the screen?

So these Iranians, they’ve got an extremist chameleon on their hands who hates America—but hates it. So whaddo they do? Set him up somewhere, Africa, let’s say—Kenya—gets married all over again, new name, new history, starts a business doing import-export. But really, he’s part of an intelligence network, people who let’s just say our health and happiness aren’t real big on their priority list. But our guy gets restless fast, he’s got all this hate inside him and it’s eating him up and he wants to
do
something. Wants action! So when Hezbollah doesn’t move fast enough, he disappears again. Poof, can’t find him. Hooks up with some more splintery types, coupla rich guys in the deep background pulling strings. They want to send him to America, do some real damage. Horse’s mouth, right? Whack the Holland Tunnel, whack the White House. Hey, don’t kid yourself—this stuff goes on! He relocates to Libya, Afghanistan, wherever. Doesn’t matter. New name, new wife. Then at a certain point the guys in the shadows say go. To America. Poof, he’s out the door. Doesn’t look back. Buncha phony documents in his hand. And where does he wind up? One guess. New fucking Jersey—how about that?

Charlotte followed Roz through sliding glass doors to the backyard, tonguing her cup of foam as she stepped into a familiar grind of wood against concrete, a sound like an electric saw in reverse. She made out a swimming pool girded by slouching, comma-shaped sentries, boys without jackets spurting one at a time up the sides of the empty pool and landing on its rim. Charlotte wondered if Ricky might be among them, her blurred eyes fumbling in search of her brother, but no, he’d lost his skateboard back in January and refused to buy another, even though Charlotte had offered to help pay for it.

Resting her screamers, Roz was uncharacteristically quiet.

“Whose house is this?” Charlotte asked her.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking (said the voice), I’m reading your mind as we speak. What’s this story about? You’re thinking, God help us if it’s terrorism, because
Nightmare in Gaza
tanked and
Middle East Massacre
barely broke even, including international.

(“Paul Lofgren’s,” Roz said.)

You’re thinking God forbid this is some kind of history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I mean not even Spielberg’s taken that one on, and he can make just about anything taste sweet. You’re saying, How can we root for this guy? He’s a jerk, a fanatic. A loony. What kind of guy walks out on family after family? It’s not human, right? Okay, look. The movie’s got nothing to do with history. Wigs, horses, sex scenes where they have to paw through all that lace—this isn’t like that. This is about
self-discovery
. It’s one man’s personal history!

And sure enough, Charlotte made out Paul Lofgren inside the pool, grinding up against the edge. Roz’s sort-of-boyfriend came outside and bit her cheek and she went away with him, leaving Charlotte among the bevy of skateboarding spectators, one of whom, the guy beside her, was starting to look familiar. Charlotte stared at him with the brazenness of the nearly blind until at last he looked back. “Hey,” he said, and she recognized the voice. Scott Hess.

Charlotte turned back to the pool, mortified.

“Hell—o—o.” Scott was waving an arm in front of her eyes. Except the arm was not an arm, but a white triangular shape. An arm in a sling. “We’re twins,” he said.

She’d forgotten about her Ace bandage. Now she lifted it, returning his goofy salute. And realized, then, that Scott Hess had no idea who she was.

“Happened to your arm?” he asked.

“I got caught in the middle of a fight.”