Читать книгу Small Acts of Sex and Electricity - Lise Haines - Страница 8

The morning Jane left, I crawled into bed with Mike and didn’t wake up until the midmorning express vibrated the French doors of the second-floor deck. Mike was propped up on one elbow, watching me. He looked amused, probably thought Jane and I were having him on. Maybe he was employing that simple carnival trick of his: to guess the weight of a head. Mike had worked on a midway one summer during college, and he had gotten pretty good at sizing up a person by the pound. But he wasn’t reliable then and gave away too many stuffed cats and cloth dolls.

—Holding Jane’s place? he laughed.

I sat up against the bolster, and launched into a nervous rap about the Jaguar. He leaned into me as I talked openly about the canvas top and the broken mechanism. We both liked machinery, how a good piece of equipment works, but I could only distract him so long, and I ran myself out detailing that car. Mike unraveled his pajamas from the covers, slipped into the bottoms, and got out of bed.

—Shout if I get warm.

He looked under the dust ruffle, stepped in and out of the bathroom, checked behind the yellow stuffed chair. When he came back to bed, he took my hand and said:

—I give.

—I tried to stop her.

He looked at my head again. I felt it lift off my neck and go onto the scale.

—She left the girls’ insurance cards. Took two bags. I should have woken you. I haven’t slept for . . . She’s probably in San Luis Obispo by now. Paso Robles. This looks so bad. I couldn’t think.

I watched the gill-like movement of his jaw, the small muscles tensing and relaxing. He balled up his pajama top and threw it across the room, and said:

—Fuck.

Then he laughed to himself.

—It’s okay, Mike said. I lifted the receiver on the old white princess phone sitting on the bedside table, but it slipped from my hand and dropped to the rug.

—I’ll try her cell, I said, unwinding the cord and starting over.

—She won’t answer.

I hung the phone up.

—Did she go north?

—No. I mean, I don’t know.

—Which car?

—The Jaguar.

—Is it too early for a drink?

He knew where Franny had kept her gin and brought it back to bed. I took a sip, watched him, waiting for something other than the weary, almost luminous look he gets after being up all night editing. For years Mike had made documentaries. Exquisite, quirky things. My favorite was the man fixing a VW Bug who talked about his six ex-wives while he gapped the plugs and set the timing, his lone voice working like a chorus in a Greek tragedy. He said:

—You have to feel like you came out here for nothing.

—Don’t worry about me. Maybe the police could . . .

He touched one of my eyebrows, as if it were out of place.

It’s okay? I thought. Sometimes Mike suffered from the same kind of melancholy that overtakes me, so I understood that at least. And I understood his way of protecting me. He lost his sister when he was fifteen. But, it’s okay? The blue bottles on Franny’s dressing table sent out light. The fog had burned off a good deal. It was the first clear sky since our arrival, but that was how June was, unlimited fog with a few breaks. I hoped it would be all right where Jane drove.

—This is what she does. She drives off, he said.

I realized his eyes used to be a true, faded color. Now they looked blue like laundry soap. I looked for contact lenses as he gazed toward the islands, but I didn’t see any. I couldn’t understand the way he’d aged. It wasn’t that his face was waxy or taut, injected or stitched into place; it was unchanged. Changed, unchanged. I played with this like a power surge—lights coming up, blacking out.

—Aren’t you blind without your glasses?

—I can see you better this way, he said.

He moved his thumb over my right palm, not far from the spot where this random line bisects the lifeline and another line, the three lines forming a triangle if I flatten my hand out as a palm reader would. But instead he formed my hand into a small basin, as if he were going to pour something there. Once again he assured me that Jane was fine, that I shouldn’t worry.

—We have to keep it low-key for the girls, he said, but his words and his mouth worked at different speeds now.

—Her disappearance, he said, as if I hadn’t understood.

I probably had that stretched-awkward smile I get. We both took another drink.

—We could say she’s gone to look for architectural salvage, I said.

—We’re knee-deep in architectural salvage.

—But she has her time away, right? Conferences?

I began to feel my own break between phrasing and delivery. As I watched his face, I picked up something of Jane in the ticking of the feather pillows, mixed with her grandmother’s oily scent. I looked at his chest. I felt like the girl in Duras’s The Lover, when she was about to touch the man’s chest for the first time. I offered to stay a couple of extra days, make some headway on Franny’s stuff. Then I caught myself and quickly wound back to the girls.

We agreed that it would be plausible for Jane to go off and work for a while in seclusion. She had a commission designing sets for a version of Peter Pan, in Boston. Mike would hide her drawings.

He picked up the knotted ends of my nightgown ties and rolled them between his fingers, letting them drop against my chest.

—Can you really make any knot? he asked.

—I know knots, I said.

My father had taught me dozens of sailor’s knots.

—And flags, I said. Capitals. By-products. My mother and her fucking workbooks.

—I thought you did scrapbooks.

—Those too.

I rushed to tell him everything I could about the articles I clipped. On a variety of subjects.

—I know. I could tell you where tulips spring up on Dutch maps.

I put my hand on his cheek and he said:

—I’d rather see a knot.

I tried to do something with the nightgown ties, but they were a little short.

He kissed my neck, just below my left ear, as I fiddled.

If Livvy were awake she was in the clock room, across the hall, listening to the passage of time, stubbornly holding on to her bladder. She was like Jane, hated to get out of bed in the morning. I wondered if she drifted when things got crazy. If her subtle body fled when it was under too much pressure, the way mine does. I knew she had her antenna and it’s possible she could pick up sounds through the heating grate. Not that you could receive whole words that way, certainly not with the noise of the clocks, but Mike and I whispered nonetheless.

—I should go downstairs, I said.

—I know, he said, but touched my leg.

—There are people who eat tulips to calm down, I said.

—Tulip eaters, he said and slid his hand between my thighs.

I thought about bringing up the friend who slept with her second husband the night of her first husband’s funeral, but I guessed that was a random thing, and let it go.

—We’re both a little bereft right now, I said.

—This isn’t about that.

—No?

—No.

Mike slowly pulled my nightgown up.

—I know how to draw kitchen triangles, I offered.

—That’s why I’ve always loved you, Mattie.

—I have stats on gun-related deaths. Skee-ball accidents. Nothing on car flights. Less on why we drive toward collision.

I wanted to take my rental car and find Jane out in the state of California and bring her home, keep myself from going anywhere else. I wanted to climb onto his lap and stay on at freeway speeds.

He wetted my right nipple with his tongue. I looked at the small indentations on either side of his nose, from his glasses, as I tried to breathe. I pressed a baby finger into one of them. It fit perfectly, like a tiny shoe.

—Tell me one of your stories, he said.

That was what we did. We told each other stories.

—Okay. There was a woman who fucked the David once. That guy I knew in college, you remember Stuart, he told me that.

The light pressure of Mike’s teeth, the way his tongue flicked. I thought of a ruby-throated hummingbird. But I proceeded with my story.

—I’m . . . not sure if he meant the false David near the Uffizi or the real David in Galleria dell’Accademia. But I hadn’t been to Italy . . . then, and I think I was a little naïve about security. But I like picturing that . . . otherworldly event: the woman seeming to . . . float upward, maybe she used . . . a rope ladder, or had a harness or swing, maybe she had help . . . from friends. In either case, she must have ascended when the guards were changing shifts. I feel certain she held on to him . . . like a moth to a wool blanket . . . until the first shout and the hands . . . that plucked her off.

Mike slid his hand into the bottoms of my shortie pajamas. I closed my eyes and began to float. Just before my head hit the ceiling, I heard the door handle twist back and forth.

—There’s something I have to watch! Mona shouted from the other side of the door.

Mike lifted his head.

—I’ll be there in a few minutes, honey. Turn on the TV in the living room.

We listened to the weight of Mona’s descent.

—Fate? Mike asked, as if he were offering me a soft drink.

The TV went on downstairs: loud.

Though I didn’t ask, he told me not to worry about Livvy. She wouldn’t be up for a while. She had stayed up very late.

He said he wanted to see every knot I knew how to make later. I wasn’t sure when later was, but I knew he wasn’t either. So I agreed to later.

Then Mike got up, kissed me once more, and soon the shower went on.

I found one of Jane’s robes. A pocket held a scrap of paper with this message: Nan wants the tea service. I wasn’t sure who had written it. In college, after Jane had dropped architecture and started sleeping with Mike, she’d changed her handwriting. I thought she wanted to move away from rendering. But now I understand she was trying to copy Mike.

As I slipped out the door and inched down the stairs to the first floor, I realized that he was soaping himself, bending under the low showerhead. Large enough for three, the stall had been plumbed to hit body parts below five feet. It only bothered me when I had to shampoo. But Mike was over six-foot-one, Jane five-eight.

The blue satin cuffs of her bathrobe slid past my fingertips, the bottom hem made a petal on the floor, almost bridal. She was probably passing through central California as Mike’s hot water ran and I knotted the robe ties. Inhaling fertilizer, the scent of developing artichokes, she would pull off at the exit and head toward a stand. Probably the one with a mural of dancing artichokes on the side. The kind of place that also sells honey, walnuts, medjool dates. She would sit in the car for a while and try to decide if she should leave the 101 and take back roads instead. There wasn’t any hurry if she had no idea where she was going. Of course she could have just turned around, pulled the Jaguar into the garage, found me down in the living room with Mona, and never questioned my wearing her robe.

There was a guy who killed himself on the 101 by taking a shotgun and wiring it to the shaft of the steering wheel. When he was ready, and I have no idea what that means, he pulled on the metal loop he had attached to the trigger. His car fishtailed and launched into the oncoming lanes. He took out a teenaged girl who had planned an acting career in what-the-hell Hollywood. Her boyfriend had just detailed her Toyota Celica. She was wearing jeans and a pink sweater, no shoes. Her ankle bracelet had the boyfriend’s name engraved on it. It was hard not to think about that kind of stuff after Jane left.