What Was Mine: & Other Stories (25 page)

“Of course,” she said, “I can imagine that I’m making it too complicated. It might just be that people see you have one kind of problem, which makes people feel less guilty about presenting you with another one.” She dropped her hands to her lap.

“Let’s have a cup of coffee,” he said.

She took her sunglasses off the top of her head. She looked out the window, as if he hadn’t spoken, then gently pushed the arms of the glasses above her ears.

“Let’s go on to the next town,” she said quietly. “If I’m going to be gone awhile longer from my son, let’s go somewhere that’s new to me. Someplace where I’ll feel like I’m really away from him.”

“Who do you talk to?” he said. The car that had been riding his tail passed, cutting sharply in front of him to avoid an oncoming truck.

“Sometimes I talk to my son’s father,” she said, “but he has a wife and family. I can’t quite pick up the phone and talk to him.”

“He remarried?” Chap said. He was nervous. Why had he asked a question when he had already been told the facts?

“He’s always had a wife and family,” Mrs. Brikel said. “There was never a time I was married to the father of my son.”

5

“You keep looking away,” Ben said.

“I was looking at that table over there. Tired tourists not knowing what to eat.”

Ordinarily, she did not eat fried food, but Fran loved the fried fish platter at this restaurant. Each time she and Ben returned, she ordered it. “And obviously it feels strange to be seeing you again,” she said. She took a sip of iced tea. Before they went on vacation, she had established the lie: that she was being interviewed by a design firm that might want her to handle the graphics for a big new Boston hotel. In fact, she had already gotten a commission to do the artwork for the hotel’s brochure. She did not think she would land the large part of the account, though.

“Have you been drawing in Vermont?” he said.

“I’ve just been batting around the house,” she said. “It must seem like a real vacation, though, because my city driving reflexes didn’t come back to me. And the air is killing my eyes.”

He nodded. His cup of black coffee sat on the table untouched, steaming. His right hand was on the table, a few inches from the saucer, absolutely immobile.

He picked up the cup and took a sip.

“Chap and I are getting along very well,” she said.

“I can’t see why somebody wouldn’t get along well with Chap,” he said. “Such an upbeat fellow.”

He infuriated her. They had been together only ten minutes, and already he was violating the rule of not criticizing the other person’s mate. The four of them had crossed paths half a dozen times over the years. Boston—and the art world—was only a small game in a small town, when you came to think of it.

“I did do a still life,” she said, deciding not to let him spark her anger. “I’d hoped the house would have interesting spaces and that things …” She frowned in concentration. “That things would call out to be sketched. But the house is strange. A lot of it is empty space, like the kitchen, and when you do find things you might draw, they look too predictable. Like duck decoys. Or the collections of things they have.”

“What do they collect?” he said.

“More stuff than you could imagine. I was in his study and closed the door behind me, and there were shelves behind the door holding blue Fiestaware. Imagine finding that behind a door?”

“So you went into his study to snoop, huh?” Ben said. A year before, Ben had been a sort of mentor to her. She had taken one of his classes at night. As a former teacher, she liked the way he was always one step ahead of any student, however advanced the student might be. Now she tended to think that he just didn’t listen.

“I went in because I heard a noise somewhere in the house, coming from that direction.”

“But if there’s a prowler, you’re never supposed to close doors behind you,” he said. “You haven’t watched enough late-night movies.” He took another sip of coffee. “What else do they collect?” he said.

“Why are you so interested?”

“Because I’m a visual sort of person,” he said. “I like to be able to imagine where you are.”

She smiled in spite of herself. When he said he was “visual,” he was alluding to a pronouncement someone had made about him at a cocktail party. They had found the drunk’s interpretation of Ben’s raison d’être particularly funny. They had gone late to the cocktail party, and arrived sober, because they had been making love.

“I used to collect powder horns,” he said. “I still collected them when I was in college. They were what my grandfather collected, but after a while I couldn’t see the point in buying powder horns and putting them in boxes.” He finished his coffee and looked for the waitress. In profile, Ben was the most handsome man Fran had ever known. Though she had met him as a grown woman, she still had something of a schoolgirl’s crush on him. The waitress was coming toward them with a pot of coffee. “The way some of them are embossed reminds me of certain drawings of yours,” he said. As the waitress poured, he said: “I should dig some of the good ones out and send them to you.”

“We’re never meeting again?” she said.

“Excuse me,” the waitress said. She put the coffeepot on a busboy’s cart. “Would you like to order?”

Ben opened his menu. “Do you know what you want?” he said to Fran. Please get some excitement into your voice about the fisherman’s platter, he thought. Please get some excitement into your voice about something.

Her eyes lit up a bit when she ordered the fisherman’s platter. Coleslaw, not french fries. Yes: another iced tea.

He ordered broiled mackerel. He asked for a Samuel Adams. That satisfied both desires: not to drink, because he might get morose, but to have a beer, because a beer was not a potent mixed drink that would go to his head.

When the waitress walked away, he, too, looked at the tourists. They were pale and slightly overweight. Their teenage son did nothing to disguise his annoyance at being on the trip. One of the things Ben hoped most earnestly was that his three-year-old son would never become sulky and estranged from him. They could change the ground rules entirely when the boy hit puberty, if it came to that. Whatever it took, Ben was willing to do it.

“Well,” Ben said, “our rental on the Vineyard fell through. They returned the check last week, when there was no chance in hell of our finding anything else, with a scrawled note that didn’t even have our names on it. They said they’d decided to rent the house year-round, and the tenant was already occupying it. We’ve rented that house for the last six years, and that’s the sort of kiss-off we get. Great, huh?”

She gnawed her lip. She felt sure that he was saying something indirectly about the two of them. Obviously, that was why he was so angry.

“We had a signed rental agreement,” he said. “If my lawyer wasn’t already working on two other things, I’d dump this one on his desk.”

“You always talk about Rob as if you hardly know him. ‘My lawyer.’ He was your college roommate.”

He shrugged. “When we’re playing handball I think of him as my college roommate, and when I’m pissed, I think of him as my lawyer.”

The busboy brought bread and butter. For a second, the white napkin folded over the basket reminded him of his son’s diapers. He had been awake at five
A.M
., changing his diapers.

“You can find a place somewhere on the Cape to rent,” she said. “People always cancel at the last minute.”

“Maybe we could have your friends’ house,” he said. “Didn’t you tell me they were leaving for a month, but you could only be there two weeks because that was all the vacation time Chap had?”

She looked at him. There was some small chance that he was completely serious.

“It’s just a house in the middle of nowhere,” she said.

“Aren’t you skeptical of my wife for liking flashy things? It might be a way to start deconditioning her.”

“I think you and your wife should try to work out your problems on more neutral territory,” she said. “I always have thought you should work out your problems.”

He surprised her by laughing. He fluttered his eyelids and said, quite archly: “I always have thought you should work out your problems.”

The busboy, passing with bread he was carrying to another table, looked down as he heard Ben speaking in falsetto.

Ben saw the boy slow down and could hardly muffle his laughter. Fran, too, began laughing.

“You’re lucky he walked by when he did,” Fran said. “You’ll probably be shocked to hear that I was about to strongly object to your impersonation of me.”

“ ’Atta girl,” he said. “Got to defend yourself in this world.”

“You know,” she said, “you talk about people in the capacity in which they exist: my wife; my lawyer. You always say ‘my son’ and ‘my tenants,’ and the people who live downstairs from you have been there for what? Ten years?”

“I don’t get your point,” he said. “I hear your voice icing over, but I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at.”

“You don’t use people’s names,” she said.

The family they had watched earlier got up. The teenage son was the last to leave the table, and he pushed all the chairs back in place, which broke her heart. She could remember being places she had not wanted to be, and acting inappropriately. Tripping over herself in an attempt not to stumble. What equanimity she had now had not even begun until she was in her twenties. What did she still do that communicated things she was oblivious of signaling? Until Ben mentioned the way her voice became detached and cold—icing over, as he called it—she had had no idea of her immediate impulse to withdraw when there was contention. She knew she sometimes lifted her hand to her head and fluffed her hair, but she had not known about the voice change until he pointed it out.

“Ben,” she said suddenly, “I don’t feel there and I don’t feel here. I do think it’s a good idea that we be friends, but coming back to the city to meet you, when I was off in the woods on vacation, just makes me feel …”

“It makes you feel bad,” he said. “You’ve always been very consistent about saying that. That basically, seeing me under any circumstances makes you feel bad. Why don’t you tell me a lie for a change and see if there’s some truth in the lie.”

“I don’t want to lie to you,” she said. “I feel peculiar about seeing you. I’m afraid I didn’t cancel this lunch because of cowardice. I wanted to fall back on you, in case the vacation turned out to be a disaster.”

“Is that true?”

She nodded yes.

“We’re friends,” he said. “What’s wrong with wanting something from me?”

He was astonished when tears began to roll down her cheeks. So surprised that he pushed his chair back, wanting to embrace her. He would have, if she had not held up her hand. What a strange gesture! As if those delicate fingers could stop anything more tangible than a breeze. He thought of the school crossing guard at his son’s preschool. The black gloves so large they must have been padded. Yet why would a crossing guard have boxer’s mitts? Or was that the way the man’s hands had looked, after all? He blinked, remembering his son, early that morning, walking in front of him, the sun striking his ash-blond hair, and the gloved hand at the crossing guard’s side, the other hand raised to stop traffic. He thought: The crossing guard was Tony Hightower, taking his turn as a volunteer. Not a crossing guard,
Tony Hightower
.

“You look terrible,” she said, drying her cheeks. “I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something else. Do you know anything funny?”

He sighed, letting the image go. “I’m sure that’s what half the people in the restaurant are doing,” he said. “Half of them are recounting disasters, and the other half are telling jokes.”

The waitress appeared at Fran’s side.

“What do you think?” he said to the waitress, who was lowering a plate. “I just said to my friend that I thought half the people here were yukking it up and the other half were in great distress.”

“Whichever way it starts out, they always walk out in the opposite mood,” she said. She was standing there with her hands at her sides, like a child reciting. She reached up and touched her earring. “At least, that’s usually true,” she said. “If they’re drunk, it’s another thing. But if they’re just in a good mood, they’ll be sedate when they leave, and if they came in quiet, they’ll be talking up a storm when they go out.”

Ben was looking at Fran, who was looking at the waitress. It wasn’t collusion, Fran knew—there was no way he could have put the waitress up to saying what she’d said. But what had she said, really, that puzzled her so deeply? Just that people changed?

“I don’t often stop to think about it,” the waitress said, springing into action again and giving Ben his lunch. “Is there anything else I can get for you?”

“You probably see it all in a second, don’t you?” Fran said. “You can probably look in their eyes and see what kind of a tip they’re going to leave.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” the waitress said.

“What their relationship is to one another,” Fran said.

“Yes,” the waitress said, looking directly into Fran’s eyes. “I’m usually right about that.”

6

Disturbing, Chap thought. Disturbing to get such a self-pitying letter from Marshall, saying that summer would be the ideal time to die. That predictable periphrasis: “Passing on to the Heavenly Kingdom.”

Disturbing that the Brunettis’ house seemed to intensify Fran’s feeling of isolation. Though she had finally perched on one of the wooden kitchen stools to draw a still life of fruit in a wicker basket, her heart hadn’t been in it. Things had to speak to Fran—declare their necessity, so she would not feel she was just some zookeeper, capturing them—or drawing became just a chore. Of the several drawings she had done during their stay, the first seemed to him the most complex and … well, disturbing. The loose weave of the basket was picked up, or rather made to seem similar to, the grillwork of the Galaxy fan they had brought with them. Once the eye detected the strange similarity between the fan front’s splayed metallic regularity and the basket’s handwoven symmetry, though, you began to notice what the grillwork hid (amber blades) and what the basket contained (shiny, overripe fruit). That was what artists did. Like poets, they ferreted out strange connections. Though he was not really sure what conclusion could be drawn from what he observed in Fran’s drawing. That two dissimilar things were similar? If that was all there was to it, why wouldn’t she jumble together any number of similar shapes?