Читать книгу A Stolen Summer - Allegra Huston, Allegra Huston - Страница 10

4

On the PATH train back to New Jersey, Eve’s mind and body wage exhausting war. Her limbs feel too heavy to move, as if she’s been hypnotized, while thoughts crash around in her head, charging and hiding like guerrilla fighters at the crux of a battle. The thoughts wear labels, “wrong” and “right,” but even so she isn’t sure which side they’re on. She feels hunted, her camouflage ripped away. Caught in the crossfire.

When she looked down from that rooftop, Micajah holding her tight onto him, she saw, hundreds of feet below, the Alice in Wonderland garden: the Caterpillar on a mushroom, the Mad Hatter pouring tea. What happened to her was the opposite of what happened to Alice: she had been spirited up to that high place, to a new reality above the trappings and troubles of her life, where she could bask in the rosy, unobstructed sun.

Now, heading home, she feels like she’s being carried toward some monster’s den. A place of torment and silently shrieking souls—hers, and Larry’s too. It’s suddenly clear to her how unhappy he is. And how dead to feeling she had become.

Recently she has begun to think, with the dispassion of a scientist observing a specimen, that she no longer knows what joy feels like—that sense of soaring delight in being alive that is more than mere happiness, which she came to define as merely the absence of sadness, so that she could occasionally claim it and keep her life on its tracks. If she had been asked, she would have said she was content, but now she recognizes that featureless condition for what it is: all sensation blurred into the same narcotic fog. With Micajah, she broke free of it, but here on the train, she feels it creeping over her again. Only extremes penetrate it, and they come as aggressions: so many fellow passengers that she feels as if worms are crawling over her. The platform lights so bright they hurt her eyes. A chilly wind, when she gets off, that blows her nerves to rags. The raucous laughter of a tipsy claque hopped up for a night in the city. As she drives home from the station, cars rage past her on the highway, too fast, too close.

As the garage door closes behind her, a rogue thought snipes into her brain: I could leave the engine on. For some seconds, she searches out the sweet smell of the exhaust. She imagines the atoms of her body pulling apart, the tendons and ligaments unhitching, her very self floating away. A good way to go, she thinks: a vanishing.

She snaps back to herself, clicking off the ignition. Larry’s Acura is in the garage, but that doesn’t mean he’s home; he took a cab to the airport. There are no lights on downstairs, so if he is home he’s already retreated to his room. Good—she will have some breathing space. She needs to put the day away, in a locked drawer. She’ll take it out and fondle it now and then, when she’s alone, but what happened today will not happen again.

She walks through the dark house to the staircase without turning on lights. A day like this should fade out, not assert its presence into the night hours.

Once, in the past, Eve thought of being unfaithful. It was nothing to do with Larry, and not much to do with the other man. It was just that the opportunity presented itself and she allowed herself to entertain the possibility.

It happened nine years ago, when Allan was a teenager. She was working in a client’s garden, and her client’s husband emerged from the house. The spring day was warm and she was wearing a sleeveless top. His hand on her upper arm, as he offered to help her dig, felt firm yet tentative: a seductive combination. The fact that the man was married—his wife and children had gone swimming for the day—was in his favor. This would be no more than a secret flirtation. He had commitments; she had no desire to jeopardize her marriage. Of course, she knew that married men—and married women—abandon their commitments all the time, but that fact seemed irrelevant. She was playing in her imagination. In the real world, it would lead nowhere.

She knew her line of logic was morally suspect, but on that day, that month, that year, she was prepared to give herself the slack. This is how other people live, she thought, people with more exciting lives than mine.

He knelt a little too close to her and allowed his hand to brush hers as they patted the soil into place around the newly planted wisteria. If I turn my face to him now, she thought, he will kiss me and I will fall back and we will be lying on the ground, and that will not be okay. So she finished her patting and quickly stood up, brushing the earth off her hands in a manner she hoped looked professional, standing there to assess her work, which did not need assessing, instead of moving away to fetch the hose. As he got to his feet, she turned to him in a nonchalant fashion, which could easily be explained away as a prelude to conversation—if there would ever be anyone she’d need to explain it to, which in this garden with high hedges there wouldn’t, which was what made this imaginary adventure possible in the first place.

He placed his hands on her upper arms. She allowed it, without protest, but without moving closer herself—keeping her route of excuses clear. As his face neared hers, she shut her eyes and thought, Here it comes. This changes me: from a boring wife into . . . What? Perhaps just a different kind of boring wife, the kind who cheats. But I am not cheating, she insisted silently. I’m just reminding myself what it feels like to be wanted.

The man kissed like a camel. When she thought about it later, she couldn’t help giggling. There was something prehensile about his upper lip. It snuffled at her. Her mind went to the camels in the zoo—when Allan was little, she’d taken him to the Bronx Zoo for four birthdays in a row—the way they scooped up tussocks of hay, their upper lips twisting and curling in a way that had struck her as almost obscene. They always looked mangy, too, with their hair (or was it fur?) falling out in tufts. She’d understood it might be due to the time of year, since Allan’s birthday fell in May, but still she held it against them.

That this man was, in that way, very un-camel-like—perfectly groomed, someone who made the most of every iota of his good looks—didn’t help at all. Clearly, he considered himself an excellent kisser. Maybe other women love this, she thought. She endured it until he stopped to invite her inside for a lunchtime glass of wine, which, she understood well, would be drunk, if drunk at all, naked and horizontal. No, she said, I’m so sorry, I’m running behind schedule already. The rush of walking away from him was more thrilling than the kiss.

Letting the warm water of the shower run over her, she plays back in her mind the quantum leap she took: the beautiful young man, the slow sunset, the gargoyles grinning at them, the hundreds of feet of deadly fall behind her. As the scene takes on shape and detail, it seems to be happening to another woman while she, Eve, watches from above. But she can still feel the imprint of Micajah’s hands on her body, his cells on her skin. She got into the shower to wash them away. They are not going.

Eve used to like the way Larry would get up and shower after sex; she appreciated his cleanliness, and it gave her minutes of solitude, which she came to hold precious. She’d become so used to faking orgasm that she was hardly conscious of doing it anymore: moaning at appropriate intervals, digging her fingers into his back, saying his name, giving a little cry and shuddering when it was all getting long and she hoped he’d finish soon. The act had come to include the acting too. She didn’t think of it as faking—simply as participating, “not just lying there,” convincing herself by these sounds and movements that she did still love Larry. Yet some part of her needed to recover, to reunify her spirit without his energy there to intrude. The sound of the water while she lay in bed helped her bring her split self back together.

Now, she finds it hard to shut off the running water. As long as she stays in the shower, unable to hear the door open or the phone ring, she occupies a lacuna in time, with no demands and no necessity to corral her identity into a user-friendly package. When she turns off the water, she will have to decide who she is: a woman, with all the potential the word suggests, or a wife. She will have to accept that she has cheated on her husband, and that all effects have a cause, and all causes have effects.

I need to have more fun, she thinks aimlessly, as she waits for sleep to take her. Then I would not be so quick to lose my head.

Micajah called it fun, and she agreed. But that’s not what she means, in her drowsy state. What does she mean? Bumper cars? Bridge? Line dancing? When she was twenty-two, before Allan was born, Eve might have described herself as “fun-loving,” if “fun-loving” hadn’t meant being what her mother called loose, an easy lay. Probably nobody uses that term these days; it sounds so quaint and innocent. It must mean “someone who loves fun” again, since there’s no such thing as loose anymore. What used to be loose is normal; it’s called hooking up, friends with benefits, things like that. Eve used to laugh at her mother for dividing girls into “good” and “bad,” but even though the crude moral judgment seemed antiquated, there was still an uneasy distinction between girls who slept around and girls who didn’t. Those who didn’t, like Eve, looked down—with distaste or contempt, envy or frustration—at those who did. Those who did looked down at those who didn’t with pity and maybe contempt—and, Eve realizes now, at least sometimes with envy too.

Eve feels sad for these girls, herself included, all wishing to be what they weren’t. As a teenager Eve longed for a clothes-hanger body, while her flat-chested friends stuffed their bras and later went under the knife. The shy girls longing to be outgoing; the loud girls wishing they could be the hunted rather than the hunters.

Men too. Larry is a sheep who wants to be a wolf. Did I marry a sheep? Eve wonders hazily, and the thought lands like a muffled punch. Certainly she didn’t marry a wolf in disguise. The wolf skin fits Larry awkwardly, but he is determined to grow into it. I need to sleep, she tells herself firmly. Count sheep. Count Larrys. She giggles, punch-drunk. Separate the sheep from the goats. Is goatish better than sheepish? Everything is better than sheepish. Larry is not goatish—that’s what satyrs are: ravening for sex, hairy, dirty. Who, or what, is Larry? He gets more insubstantial by the day. It’s not only that she knows him less, but there seems to be less of him there. As if he’s shape-shifting himself gradually out of existence.

I am shape-shifting too, she thinks. But we can’t both do it. Someone has to hold the fort. If one of us flies out too far, the other has to be the tether. That’s a marriage.

“You have got to be kidding.”

It’s six p.m. Deborah’s store is closed. Deborah herself, skinny and angular, reclines on a curvy Victorianish sofa, her bobbed white-blonde head thrown back against the gold velvet upholstery. A bottle of chardonnay sits on a fake marble column capital beside her. She sips from an antique cut-crystal glass.

“It’s a beautiful decorative object.”

“It’s a catastrophe in a case. Even the case is a catastrophe. What the fuck, Eve?”

“I couldn’t resist. It needed rescuing.”

“Go volunteer at the animal shelter. Or find a therapist.”

“You really don’t think any of your clients would want it?” Eve is enjoying this. And so is Deborah. They both know there was never any question whether Deborah would want this broken thing.

“Honey, my store does not run on mercy bucks. Those decorator queens are flattery-operated. Every one of them wants to be told I kept back something special just for her. And if it’s smashed up, it ain’t special.”

With her left hand she takes a swig of chardonnay, while with her right hand she tops up Eve’s glass—another antique, which doesn’t match Deborah’s.

“Killer score on the birdcage, though.”

Deborah’s shop is schizophrenic. At first glance it’s a conventional mix of grandmotherly furniture, silver and knickknacks, amusing needlepoint, and a riot of cushions. Above head height it is crammed with chandeliers, some antique, some new, and some strange mutations that she creates herself out of pieces of other chandeliers, bed frames, pot racks, old gates, and birdcages, covering them with gold and silver leaf and hanging them with crystal drops, feathers, Christmas ornaments, Mexican tin milagros, and anything glittery she can find. Mostly she sells them online, and to interior designers from New York.

“I think it’s special,” says Eve.

“Well, chiquita, of course you do,” says Deborah, patting her hand in a condescending way.

“Seriously. I went to the New York Public Library and I couldn’t find anything like it.”

“You think it could be one of those million-dollar violins that people murder each other over?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Any bloodstains?”

“None that I can see.”

“Something sure happened, though,” Deborah says with relish. “You need forensics.”

“How do I get them?”

“Auction houses. Best way to get a free valuation. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, whoever does instruments. Google it. I get ten percent when you sell it, for my professional advice. Hell, make it fifteen. I’m worth it.”

“Might only be a cup of coffee.”

“Non-fat triple macchiato with sugar-free vanilla syrup and whipped cream and slivered almonds or some shit on top. Those things add up.”

“Deal.”

Deborah reaches over to clink Eve’s glass. “Five hunting weekends in a row,” she says. “Lucky me.”

Even though it’s summer, and unpleasant weather for junk-shop hunting. Eve should be working in her own garden on weekends—it’s an advertisement for her work, after all—but the numbing fog has killed the enthusiasm she once had for making it beautiful.

“So tell me,” Deborah asks with sly sarcasm, “how’s that animal of a husband of yours?” Deborah laughed herself hoarse when Eve told her about Larry’s discovery of his wolf spirit. She had kept it quiet for months, but one night the chardonnay got the better of her discretion.

“Ow-ow-ow-ow-oooooo!” Deborah howled up at a particularly bright globe chandelier. Her favorite part of the story was that Larry had found his inner wolf not in a dehydrated delirium in a Navajo sweat-lodge, or on top of a wind-blasted peak in South Dakota with blood streaming down his chest, but in a boutique bed and breakfast in New Hampshire.

Eve couldn’t help laughing too, though she felt disloyal. Deborah and Larry never liked each other. He found her crass, and her swearing offended him. Eve’s other friends are decorous and safe, but Eve discovered to her surprise, after meeting Deborah over the years at PTA bake sales, school plays, and graduations, that hanging out with her was a relief from saying what she ought to say and thinking what she ought to think. Having Deborah for a friend is rather like having a pet tiger: you’re never quite sure when and where she will pounce. She can be exhausting sometimes, because it’s hard to have total confidence that the prey she’s stalking isn’t you.

She’s asking about Larry now because her instincts have been pricked by Eve’s abandonment of her garden. She smells blood.

“He’s in Arizona,” Eve says. “He’s supposed to get home today.”

“Supposed?” Deborah repeats. “You mean you don’t know?”

“Actually, he was supposed to get home last night. I don’t think he did.”

Eve slept the sleep of the dead—not because she was sated from sex, but because she was emotionally exhausted by the assaults of the truth. When she woke, she listened for the usual bathroom noises, the blender, the garage door. Had he already come and gone? She might not have known, comatose as she was. Should she be worried? The distance he’s forced between them in the past year has thinned her care for him.

“He didn’t call?”

“No.”

“Dick.”

Coming to see Deborah this evening is Eve’s way of asserting that everything is fine. But she came for a reality check, too. Because with Deborah, that’s what you get.

“Honey, he’s left you. And he’s too much of a coward to tell you to your face.” Deborah snorts. “Inner wolf, my ass. All that man found is his inner pussy.”