The Good Neighbor (6 page)

“Let’s talk turkey,” Colt said to Marge.

“I’ll wait outside,” said Francie, and she left with her purloined comic.

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The Blood of Angels

A
fterward, they stopped for lunch in Plainsburg, which, like every other middle-sized town in Pennsylvania—or in America, for

that matter—had two parts to it. The first was old, dating back in this case to the late nineteenth century, all false wooden store fronts and one or two old stone warehouses-turned-retail-spaces, and a charming, broad brick sidewalk running down both sides of Main Street, itself lined with imitation gas lamps. The second was new, with a four-lane highway on the outskirts of town that boasted a frizzled, litter-strewn grass median, strip malls on either side stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see, and four lanes of traffic moving along in a snarl.

They chose the old part to have lunch in, but not without ar guing about it, and so, sick of each other, they talked little as they ate, not even about the house. Colt was unusually dreamy—un usually for him, anyway—and a poem had drifted into the room and found Francie. They always came to her this way, accosting her like beggar children, arms outstretched. She spent the meal picking absentmindedly at her french fries, trying to capture this

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OWALSKI

one on a napkin before it left again. Something about veins run ning through wood. Wood that was like flesh. As usual, it had seemed brilliant at first, but now that she had the shape of it she could see that once again she had failed. It was another abortion.
Argh. Feh
. She cast a sidelong glance at her husband, who was gob bling his cheeseburger as though there was no such thing as po etry. Or manners. Colt never asked how her poems turned out, she thought resentfully; he didn’t care that for years now they’d been a series of mutants, a lineage of misbegotten circus freaks. Of course, someone like him could not be expected to understand. To him they were just words.

❚ ❚ ❚

“What did you talk about?” she asked him as they sped east, homeward.

Colt turned to look at her and smiled lasciviously. He reached for her thigh and gave it a suggestive squeeze. Francie was sur prised at this; he rarely touched her with any kind of spontaneity anymore. If he brushed against her in the apartment, he was more likely to mutter “Excuse me” than to reach out and caress her. What on earth was going on with him?

“You and Marge,” she prompted him. “What did you say to her?”

“I made an offer,” he said. “She’s going to take it back to the owners.”

His hand was still there on her thigh, squeezing, rubbing, sug gesting. They hadn’t had sex in a month, probably. Maybe six weeks. And now he wanted to mess around in the car, like teenagers? Not likely. Yet despite her indignation, Francie felt her self growing warm. It was the house that was really doing it to him, she told herself. Or the deal. Spending money always made him horny.

“Just like that?” she said. “It’s done?”

The Good Neighbor 39

“No, it’s not done,” he said. “All I did was make an offer. That’s only the first step.”

“Who owns it, anyway?”

“A bank. A bank I own stock in, as a matter of fact.” He slid his hand farther up her leg and began to massage her inner thigh. Through her jeans, she could feel the friction on that never- sunned part of her body, as pearlish and tender as the inside of an oyster shell. She clamped her legs shut like a flytrap and pulled the hair on his wrist. “A bank? Do you think they even know what it looks like?” she asked.

“I’m sure,” said Colt, shaking free of her, “that they have a very clear financial picture of the place.”

“But what it
looks
like, I said. Not how much it’s worth.” “They’re not stupid people. That’s why I own their stock.” “How much did you offer?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “If you knew it would keep you up tonight.”

“Oh, Coltrane!”

“I said don’t worry. We can afford it. We can afford ten houses like this. About time we started spending some money, don’t you think?”

“I guess so,” said Francie, surprised. It seemed to her that some thing in Colt had changed recently without her noticing, until now. First he had agreed to drive her out to the country, and then he had noticed the house at the same time she did, and now this. She wondered what had brought it about. It was one of the greater ironies of Colt’s character that he took no pleasure in spending money, only in earning it. For him to really get turned on, he had to make a killing at work. He already had piles of money, scads of it, oodles. He had literally more money than he knew what to do with. It was sitting in all kinds of different ac counts, earning yet more money in interest and dividends, and making the two of them rather disgustingly rich, to be honest. But Colt had never before wanted to buy anything big; and Fran

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cie had never been the furs-and-jewelry type. They didn’t even own the apartment they lived in, though they could have easily enough. It occurred to her now that perhaps Colt was entering some sort of Golden Age of his own. If so, she wanted a glimpse of it—just to see. She knew she would never be a part of it, even if he bought them both everything they’d ever wanted. It would al ways be
his
money, and the things they bought with it would al ways be
his
things.

Except the house in Pennsylvania. That was already hers. She’d felt it from the moment she set foot on the porch. It was like com ing home.

❚ ❚ ❚

They rounded the Delaware Water Gap again, the water choppy and cold-looking in the slanting sunlight that lay over it as thin as gold foil. A couple of optimistic powerboaters were out, deter mined to make the most of the waning season.

“That looks like fun,” Francie said.

“I never saw the point to having a boat,” said Colt. He reached over to stroke the side of her breast with the backs of his fingers. She took his thumb in her mouth and bit it, gently but seriously, and he pulled away again. “Look at those guys. They drive all the way down here from God knows where with a boat on a trailer, just so they can put it in the water and race up and down. It seems dumb.”

“Why are you coming on to me here, like this?”

“What do you mean, why? You’re my wife, aren’t you?” “Yeah, but.”

“But what?”

“Maybe they like it,” Francie said, looking out at the boats. “Well, they’re idiots.”

“Don’t you ever want to get a boat?”

Frustrated, Colt put his hand back on the wheel. “If I was

The Good Neighbor 41

gonna have a boat, I’d want it to be down in the Keys. Somewhere warm. And I’d want a real fishing boat, not one of these dinky lit tle tubs. A charter-type thing, with two decks and a wheelhouse and . . . all the other stuff you can get.”

“You can get to the ocean through the Water Gap,” she said. “It’s a long ways, but you can do it.”

“You can? How?”

“Down the river,” said Francie. “The Delaware River.” “Why can’t I touch you?”

“You have to earn it.”

Colt smirked. “How do I do that?”

Francie giggled at his impatience. “Through acts of grace,” she said. “Are we going to buy this house?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then you don’t get to have sex with me,” Francie said, return ing her gaze to the highway.

They had just entered New Jersey. Colt veered swiftly off the road, making her gasp, and they pulled into the parking lot of the first motel that appeared on the roadside. He turned and leered at her like a high-schooler.

“Coltrane! What am I, a cheap date?” “I was not aware that we were dating.”

She stayed where she was. Colt got out and opened her door. The manager of the motel came to the office door and stared at them— a short, squat man in a T-shirt and long shorts, with kneecaps like softballs. Colt crossed the parking lot on winged feet and handed him a couple of twenties. The man reached inside the office for a key and handed it over.

They went down a cracked concrete sidewalk with weeds growing up through it to a room that smelled of stale cigarettes and chilled air. Colt slammed the door shut and tossed her onto the bed, shedding his clothes, then slowly divesting her of her own. When he discovered the comic book in her shorts, he said, “What the hell’s this?”

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“Oh, that. I forgot. I stole it.” “Bad girl. You need a spanking.”

“Don’t hurt me,” she said, closing her eyes.

❚ ❚ ❚

They were in there for half an hour. When Coltrane finally col lapsed on the mattress, spent, Francie opened her eyes again and stared thoughtfully up at the ceiling. She was preoccupied by the notion that Colt hadn’t used a condom. That was rather odd, ac tually, she thought. Colt always used condoms, because she was afraid of the Pill (not another pill, she told him), and the other im plements of birth control, jellies and sponges and diaphragms, were all too cold and squishy and intimidating. Had something else changed too, then? Now that they might own this house, were they finally to talk about having a baby? It wouldn’t do to ask him directly; when you wanted something from Colt and thought he might say no, the last thing you did was ask him di rectly. Maybe he had just forgotten. He wasn’t in the habit of car rying condoms around with him, after all.

At least, she hoped he wasn’t.

She felt between her legs and touched the wetness that had dripped onto her thighs, rubbing it between her fingers. His se men. She hadn’t felt it in some time. When she was younger, she’d imagined that the marrow in her bones would look just like this, not red like blood but white and shimmery, iridescent.

Oh, shut up, she told herself. You think too much. And don’t ask him about it, or he’ll get mad, and the day will be ruined.

“How come we only ever do it after you spend a lot of money?” she asked instead, running her finger through the swirls of hair on his back. Last time, it had been the purchase of his very expensive cell phone that sparked things. The time before that... she didn’t remember.

“Mmf,” he said.

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“Coltrane.” “Hm.”

“Do I still excite you? On a day-to-day basis?” “Hum,” he said. “I’m sleepy.”

“But do I?”

“Of course you do,” he said. “Why do you always feel the need to quiz me on our relationship after we have sex?”

“I do not.”

“Always.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up at the ceiling again. “Are we go ing to stay here for a while?”

“I wanna take a nap.”

He lay with his back to her. Francie grabbed the remote and flicked on the TV. A man and a woman lay in bed and nuzzled each other. The woman was wearing a silk nightgown and the man was wearing silk boxer shorts. The sheets of their bed were silky-looking, too. They lived in a silk world. Francie muted the television and watched with envy as these people talked gently to each other, imagining what they were saying, trying to read their lips, trying to figure out how it was really done.

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A Historical Digression

A
dencourt was built, in its slapdash fashion, on the orders (and with the considerable family fortune, got by the slave trade)

of Captain Victor T. Musgrove, gentleman-hero of the Mexican- American War of 1848, and of several unnamed Indian campaigns before then. Captain Musgrove knew a fair bit about one or two things, including Indian warfare and a couple of native languages, but was completely ignorant of everything else, including the principles of architecture. This didn’t matter in the slightest, as far as building the house was concerned; for the Captain consid ered himself to be a man of impeccable taste, and no one was rich enough to contradict him.

Adencourt was one of those spectacularly solid and impenetrable homes of which it was said, even one hundred fifty years ago, that it would last at least one hundred fifty years. One could tell this just by looking at it. It was a breathing, alert thing, looking something like a submarine monster: the vast, oaken panel of the front door like a mouth agape; the windows, its many blank eyes; the roof, by turns gabled, peaked, flattened, and widow’s-walked, a ridiculous