What Was Mine: & Other Stories (23 page)

What if they never came back? Fran thought. She wrote the question in her notebook. It was a notebook covered with lavender cloth Chap had given her for Valentine’s Day; since then, she had been keeping some notes, making a few sketches of things she had seen or done during the day. Like a teenager, she had sketched her face with and without bangs, to see if she should let the wisps continue to grow or have them trimmed. She decided, after looking at what she had drawn, to let the hair grow; soon she would have it all one length—the stark but simple way she liked to see herself.

She thought for a moment about people who had disappeared: Judge Crater; Amelia Earhart; Mrs. Ramsey. Though it was cheating to count Mrs. Ramsey among the missing: she had died—it was just that the reader found out about her death abruptly, and so reacted with great shock.

Fran drew parentheses in her notebook. She stared at the little curving lines for a while, then made quick motions with her pen, zigzagging a connection between the curves until they looked like the vertebrae she had sketched years before in her college anatomy class. She had fallen in love with the teaching assistant in that class. The summer she was twenty they had gone to Key West together, and he had given diving instructions while she waited tables at Pier House. They lived in a room in a guest house owned by one of his former girlfriends. The only other person living there that summer was a man named Ed Jakes, who wrote poetry they thought brilliant at the time, and who introduced them to good wine. She had kept in touch with him. He had become an interior decorator. Recently, she had shown Chap Ed’s name in
Architectural Digest
. It meant nothing to him, of course; no one ever really shared another person’s sentimental youthful attachments. He had collected canes with carved heads, she suddenly remembered: dog faces, tropical birds in profile. One night, in the courtyard of the guest house, Ed Jakes had held one of his canes higher and higher as she leapt over. When the cane rose to a certain height, her boyfriend had walked away, disgusted. Much later, meaning to hurt her, he had said that he and the woman who owned the guest house had gone to bed during the period they stayed there. It never occurred to her to question the truth of that until another boyfriend asked why she was so sure her previous lover hadn’t just been trying to make her jealous. She had learned a lot from that boyfriend, including skepticism. If she had stayed with him, and gone to his classes in method acting, she might have become quite a different person.

Since moving into the Brunettis’ house, she had begun to think about their lives. It was only natural. All houses had their owners’ personalities. In wandering through the rooms, though, she had not sensed much of Pia’s presence. She had even decided that the collections of things on the shelves must belong to Lou—or even that Anthony might have gotten into the act by collecting miniature versions of the Empire State Building. Anthony’s room was a shrine to athletes and rock stars. Instead of finding dust, Fran had found footballs—footballs had rolled into three corners. There were weird robots that fascinated Chap (they could be altered to become rockets), and he had chuckled over the violent comic books and the collection of movies: Schwarzenegger;
Ghostbusters; Robocop
. There had been so little evidence of Pia, though, that Fran had had to open the bedroom closet and run her hand along Pia’s dresses to conjure up a sense of her. She was puzzled that she could find no bottles of perfume, that the medicine cabinet shelves were almost empty, that the kitchen looked so well scrubbed, as if no one ever cooked there. Take-out menus were tucked in the phone book like bookmarks.

Chap was outside cutting the grass, seated atop Lou’s riding mower. He had on a baseball cap and the shorts he had bought in four different colors at the factory outlet they had stopped at on their way up. It was true of many men: their desire to get a bargain won out over their indifference to clothes. Fran thought about the garment bag she had brought—dresses she would probably never wear. All the restaurants allowed you to dress casually. She had removed her fingernail polish and not repainted her nails. Her hair was clipped back on top, to keep her bangs out of her eyes. She looked at Chap, heading down a line of uncut grass, fanning mosquitoes away from his face. He had covered his body with insect repellent before he went out, though his shirt was unbuttoned and he was pouring sweat, so most of it had probably washed away.

She thought about all the things she liked about Chap: his endearing smile when she came upon him and found him staring into space; his insistence that he had total recall, beginning at the age of five, which of course she could not dispute; his myopic concentration as his big fingertips moved over the tiny buttons of the calculator; the way he always pointed out a full moon; his insistence, every time, that at last he had found an honest car mechanic. When women talked about their husbands, there seemed to be no nice, comfortable gray areas of love: women either detested their mates or bragged or implied that they were great lovers, that they spent their nights joyfully enacting sexual fantasies as they jumped and toppled and fucked, like figures perpetually animated in a flip-book thumbed through time and again.

As Chap turned the mower and steered down another span of grass, she decided that when he headed back she would call out to him. She opened the refrigerator door and took out the half-empty bottle of red wine they had recorked the night before. She took a sip, then poured some into a wineglass. She would hold the wineglass out to Chap and smile a sly smile. She knew that he liked being propositioned in the afternoon; he acted slightly abashed, but secretly he liked it. Aside from surprises, he preferred morning sex, and she liked sex late at night—later than they usually managed, because he fell asleep by midnight.

As she put the glass on the counter, another thought came to her. She would go upstairs and put on one of Pia’s stylish dresses, maybe even Pia’s high heels if she could find fancier ones than she had brought herself. Clip on Pia’s earrings. Make a more thorough search for the perfume.

Going up the stairs, she felt as excited as a child about to play a sophisticated trick. There were small silhouettes—a series of ten or twelve—rising up the wall as the stairs rose. She wondered if they might be family members, or whether they were just something else that had been collected.

In the bedroom, she pulled the shade, on the off chance Chap might glance up and see her undressing. She opened the closet door and flipped through: such pretty colors; such fine material. Pia sewed her own clothes, using Vogue patterns. Friends in Rome sent her fabric. Everything Pia wore was unique and in the best of taste. From the look of the closet—dress after dress—it seemed she still did not wear pants.

The perfume—several bottles—sat in a wicker container. Fran found them when she lifted the lid. She unscrewed the tops and sniffed each one. She put a drop of Graffiti on the inside of each wrist, tapped another drop on her throat. She touched her fingertip to the bottle again and placed her moist finger behind her knee. Then she screwed the top on tightly and began to take off her clothes. She dropped them on the bed, then decided that she and Chap would be using the bed, so she picked them up and draped them over a chair. It was probably Pia’s needlework on the seat: a bunch of flowers, circled by lovebirds—very beautiful.

She took a dress the color of moss out of the closet. It was silk, flecked with silver. It had broad, high shoulder pads. Fran wiggled the dress over her head and felt at once powerful and feminine when the shoulder pads settled on her shoulders. She smoothed the fabric in front, adjusting the waist so the front pleat would be exactly centered. The appeal of the dress was all in the cut and the fabric—a much more provocative dress than some low-cut evening wear. The perfect shoes to go with it, simple patent-leather shoes with very high heels, were only a bit too small for Fran’s foot. She twisted her arm and slowly zipped the back zipper. Facing the mirror, she let her hair down and ran her fingers through it, deciding to let it stay a bit messy, only patting it into place. She clipped her bangs back neatly and looked at herself in the mirror. This was the place where Pia often stood studying herself. She smoothed her hands down the sides of the dress, amazed at how perfectly it fit.

Chap came into the house and called for Fran. The timing was too perfect to believe. She would slowly unzip the zipper, let him watch as the dress became a silk puddle on the floor. She would step out of it carefully. Once free, she could run to the bed and he would run after her.

She called to him to come into the hallway and close his eyes.

“I can’t,” he said. “A goddamn bee bit me.”

“Oh no,” she said. She checked her impulse to run down the stairs. “Put baking soda on it,” she called. “Baking soda and water.”

She heard him mutter something. The floorboards creaked. In a second, he hollered something she couldn’t understand. She went halfway down the stairs. “Chap?” she said.

“You don’t know where she’d have baking soda, do you?” he said, slamming drawers.

“There’s some in the refrigerator!” she said suddenly. She had seen an open box in the refrigerator. “Top shelf,” she hollered.

“The mosquitoes aren’t bad enough, I’ve got to get a bee bite,” he muttered.

“Have you got it?” she said.

He must have, because she heard the water running.

“Do you think taking aspirin would do any good?” he said. “Come in here so I can talk to you, would you?”

She stepped out of the shoes and ran into the kitchen. He was leaning against the counter, frowning, the box of baking soda on the drainboard, the bee bite—he had made a paste and then for some reason clapped his hand over the area—on his bicep. His face was white.

“Sit down,” she said, going toward him to lead him to the nearest chair. “It’s okay,” she said reflexively, deciding to be optimistic. Chap always rallied when someone was optimistic. “It’ll be fine,” she said, taking his elbow. “Go into the living room and sit down.”

“I don’t believe this,” he said. “I was finished. I’d shut the mower off. It came right at me and bit me, for no reason.”

They stepped across a fallen postcard and two cloud magnets he had knocked down as he bent to get the baking soda.

“What are you all dressed up for?” he said, frowning as he sank into a chair.

“Take your hand away,” she said. “Let me see.”

“I don’t think baking soda does anything,” he said. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I haven’t had a bee bite since I was about ten years old. How long is this thing going to sting?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She wiped his sweaty forehead. She dropped her wet hand onto the arm of the chair. She was crouching, looking up at him, wondering if he was just pale from shock.

“What are you doing in that dress?” he said.

“I was going to surprise you,” she said. “I got all dressed up to seduce you.”

He snorted. He closed his eyes again. In a few seconds he opened his eyes and said, “Is that your dress?”

“It’s Pia’s.”

“Pia’s?” he said. “What was the idea? That I’d dress up like Lou and we’d play house?”

She smiled. “I just thought I’d dress up and seduce you.”

“Well, when this fucking pain stops—if it ever stops—why don’t I put on one of Lou’s suits and we can talk about postmodern architecture and politics at the college?”

“And what do I talk about?” she said.

“Whatever Pia would talk about,” he said. A little color was coming back to his face. There was a white smear over the bee bite. So far, it hadn’t swollen.

She sat on the floor, her hand resting on his knee. “Does it feel at all better?” she said.

“I can’t tell,” he said. He briefly touched her hand, then clapped his over the bite again.

“I don’t know what she’d talk about,” Fran said. “She’d say that Anthony wants a new robot. Or she’d tell him about some paper Anthony got a good grade on.”

“Couples aren’t supposed to always talk about their children,” he said.

“But then I don’t know what she’d talk about,” Fran said, puzzled.

“Hey,” he said, “we don’t really have to do this. It’s just a game.”

“I don’t think she wears these dresses,” Fran said softly, running her hand across the skirt to smooth it. “The minute I opened her closet and saw that long row of dresses hanging there so neatly, I had the feeling that she never wore them anymore.”

“What do you think she wears?”

“I don’t know, but it wouldn’t make sense, would it? Most everywhere you go, you can just go as you are. She always looked so beautiful in the city. Remember that until I found out she sewed, I couldn’t understand how she could have so many designer clothes?”

“I always thought you were a little jealous of Pia,” he said. “Which is particularly stupid, because you’re such different types.”

“She’s what American girls want to be,” Fran said. “Very cosmopolitan. Sophisticated. Simple, but beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

“You know what I mean.”

“Take off Pia’s dress and we’ll go to bed and be sophisticated,” he said. “Just let me take a quick shower.”

“Is your arm better?” she said, letting him help her up.

“There!” he said. “That’s good: that’s just what Pia would say in this situation, right?”

She smiled. “I would imagine,” she said.

“Then maybe what Lou needs is to be in pain more often. That way his wife will have something to talk to him about.”

In the same way it came upon Fran that Pia no longer wore elegant dresses, it dawned on Chap that Lou and Pia no longer communicated.

“I don’t want anything to ever happen to you,” Chap said, following Fran up the stairs. He stood in the doorway and watched as she shimmied out of the dress.

“I don’t either,” she said, “but that’s not too likely, is it?”

“No,” he said.

“The question is just what’s going to hit me between the eyes.” She stepped out of the dress as carefully as she intended. She was wearing only panties and Pia’s black high heels. She gave him a coquettish look.