Love Nest (21 page)

“Where were you?” Her tone was accusatory. He took another forward step. The stuffiness of the room was oppressive.

“How can you stand it in here?”

“I waited and waited,” she said. “I even worried.”

A kind of scowl clenched his face out of proportion. “Are you on something?”

“I swear I’m not. I don’t pop anything. I’m clean in every way.” One foot was snarled in a sheet that had been kicked away. Stirring, she freed the foot. “Can’t you come closer? I can’t see your eyes.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, his partially dry chinos stiff with sea salt. “This can’t go on,” he said, and she shivered as if from fever.

“I was afraid you were going to say that.” She eased over, onto her back, and propped her head against pillows. “The sound of your steps on the stairs told me.”

“You know what I want.”

“I would never betray him, Sonny. I would never betray anybody.”

He spoke hoarsely. “They used you, the both of them. They even made you available to their son. That was sick.”

“I’ve told you too much, Sonny. Now you’re throwing it up at me.”

He sat rigidly with his hands on his thighs, his loose and wrinkled shirt mostly unbuttoned. When the air changed subtly, his burnt chest felt it and then his nose detected it. “I don’t mean to,” he said.

“But you are. I don’t see any of them anymore, not even the shrink.” She lifted herself slightly, her face framed in her spread of hair. “I’m independent of them all.”

“For that you need a job.”

“I’ll get one.”

“A real one.”

“I promise.”

“Promise yourself, not me,” he said. He knew that a breeze was gently kicking up by the changing pattern of moonlight on her tight stomach. The foot she had freed shifted closer to him.

“I’m independent of everyone, except you.”

“You’re nineteen,” he said. “At that age you’ve got a hundred options. I should be the least of them.”

“I don’t see it that way.” A breeze blew in strong, and leaves outside the window swirled as if to music. There was lightning but no thunder. “It’s going to rain, Sonny. Like it did that first time.”

He felt the shock of her foot against him almost as if it were a knife. He gripped the slim, hard ankle from the back as the curtain billowed and the first serious drops of rain struck the screen. He meant to cast her foot aside, but instead he gathered it up and traced a thumb over the instep.

“I want it to happen,” she said. “More important, we both do.”

He folded his hand over her toes. “You’re a child.”

“A woman, Sonny.”

“No. When you’re a woman I’ll be an old fart. I felt like one today.”

“I’m a woman now, Sonny. Have been for years.”

“Then I’m the child.”

• • •

The rain came down in earnest, soaking the curtains and flooding the floor. She lay level now, her head no longer in the pillows but her foot still in his grasp, the heel pressed into his lap. “You can have part of me or all of me. Whatever you want.”

He took all of her.

The rain continued through the night, intermittent downpours, lulls of drizzle and mist, occasional lightning, some thunder. The sun rose behind a cloud cover but soon burst clear, with Dawson there to see it from his backyard. The tree near the house gave out its sharpest green and cast a vast shadow. A random breeze pushing through the sodden leaves sounded like people shaking their umbrellas.

Phlox grown too tall nodded to him as if in deference. He had planted them. When he lifted his eyes toward the house he knew she was out of bed and tidying up. Sounds carried. He heard the snap of a clean sheet.

He stepped into the garden shed his father had built and began idly poking about. Among the usable things were a short wooden ladder missing a rung, an apple basket rotted out at the bottom, and a rusted shovel lacking a grip. He was not really looking for anything. He simply did not want her to see him just yet.

In fifteen minutes or so she came out with a pair of scissors and crouched over marigolds and mums in full bloom. She made a bouquet. He approached her slowly, dusting his hands as if he had been working. She said, “I didn’t hear you get up.”

“I didn’t want to disturb you.”

Each was oddly self-conscious. She rose with the bouquet and dropped a mum. He bent double to pick it up. She pushed the bouquet at him. “For you.”

“I should have picked them for you.”

“Yes,” she said. “Why are you so quiet?”

“I’m always quiet in the morning.”

“No you’re not.”

She was dressed in a loose T-shirt, one of his, nothing beneath. Later, in the house, he asked her to put something else on. “Why?” she asked. “Are we going somewhere?”

“Yes,” he said.

She did not want to go to the bank with him, but he insisted. While she waited in the car, he went into one bank, Andover Savings, and drew out money, asking for it in cash and taking it in fifties and hundreds inside a buff envelope. “Hold this for me,” he said, back in the car. Then they went to another bank, Andover Citizens, where he softened his footstep, guided her to the desk of someone he knew, and started an account for her. “It’s money I won’t miss,” he told her after it was done, the passbook in her pocket, the sun in their eyes outside the bank. Her lips, pinched together, came apart.

“You’re getting rid of me.”

“It’s money for you to fall back on if you’re ever in need.”

“Meaning you don’t want me to fall back on you. Is that it?” She lowered her eyes and monitored every step they took back to the car, which she entered docilely. “You didn’t even ask me if I wanted it,” she said as they pulled out of the lot. “You’re kissing me off. Why?”

He ran a red light. “It’s no longer a professional relationship.”

“It never was.”

He turned clumsy and nearly struck a mail truck emerging onto Main Street. It was hot in the car, and he mopped his face with his sleeve. She looked away, out her window, then back at him.

“You’ll never find anyone like me again.”

“I know that,” he said, and his heart turned over.

“You love me, Sonny. If you say you don’t, you’re lying. To me. To yourself. But I don’t fit in this town of yours, so how the hell can I fit into your life. Right?”

He looked at her. Her eyes were full.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not the kind to cry.”

He sped along South Main Street and then slowed for the turn onto Ballardvale Road, where the scented dust of summer drifted in on them. When he angled into the drive and coasted to a stop beside her little car, she extended a fist, something inside it.

“Here,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Your key.”

S
ergeant Dawson emerged from Lem’s Coffee Shop and spotted the slight spruce figure of Dr. Stickney. Braving a sweep of bruising wind under the unbroken blue of an enormous December sky, he hustled across the street and followed the doctor through the busy sidewalk crowd past Nazarian’s Jewelry Store and Thompson’s Stationery. Then he trailed him into Citizens Bank, where the doctor proceeded briskly to one of the island counters. When he began preparing a deposit slip, Dawson edged up and said, “Don’t you bother to return calls?”

He glanced up casually, dapper in his snug overcoat and confident behind the gloss of his close beard. “I’ve been busy. Patients come first.”

“You must be doing well.”

“Extremely. I’m shifting into straight marriage counseling. Very lucrative. So many Andover women are unhappy with their high-powered husbands, and so many of these fellows are coming apart. You know their worst nightmare, Sergeant? One day they’ll walk into work, Raytheon, Digital, one of those classy places, and find they’re no longer wanted. If that happens, it’s not themselves they won’t want to face. It’s their neighbors.”

“It’s hard for me to work up sympathy.”

“Not for me, Sergeant. It’s my livelihood.” He returned his attention to the deposit slip, but the pen, dangling a loose chain, quit writing. He tried again, scratching hard, but it had gone dry. “Do you have a pen?”

“Pencil.”

“That’ll do.”

Dawson gave him a stub, and the doctor completed the task in an impeccable hand, the figures neat, tight, and small, like his teeth. Dawson said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what? Whatever it was, I probably didn’t want to overload your brain. Sorry, Sergeant. Just a joke. What didn’t I tell you?”

“It wasn’t suicide.”

Dr. Stickney deliberated before responding, then gave himself added time. “Are we talking about the Bauer boy?”

“Nobody else.”

“You say it wasn’t suicide. What was it?”

“An accident.”

“Very good, Sergeant. Are you brilliant, or did somebody put a bug in your ear?”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters very much since the medical examiner ruled suicide.”

“Such accidents usually are.”

“Yes,” said Stickney with a measure of distant formality. “Usually through ignorance or a wish to spare the family.” He looked around at the queues leading to the teller windows. “But this is a matter best discussed in camera.”

“Nobody can hear us.”

After a lapse, Stickney said, “Yes, it could’ve been an accident, but I don’t know that. I didn’t see the body.”

“But you knew his history, his habits. You knew his bent behavior.” Dawson’s voice jabbed at him like a knife that had been held in secret. “That couldn’t have been the first time he twisted something around his neck.”

“Everybody has psychological tics, Sergeant. His happened to be pathological and involved risk to himself.”

“The less oxygen, the greater the orgasm.”

“I see you’ve been briefed. Ultimate high, sin of Onan. The trick of course is not to hang yourself doing it.” Stickney undid the dark buttons of his coat, his manner infinitely calm. “You’d be surprised at the number of teenage boys found dangling in the shower. Not that the practice is rampant, but it’s not all that rare among troubled males sexually confident only with themselves.”

“Did his parents know he was into this?”

“Let’s put it this way, Sergeant. His father didn’t.”

Dawson looked deeper into the bank, beyond a rail to busy desks. He glimpsed Fran Lovell, but she did not see him. She was preoccupied with a customer and her desktop computer. Her lips, he noticed, were not set in a pretty way.

“Really, Sergeant, does it matter which way he died?”

He glimpsed Ed Fellows chatting deep in the lobby with a dowager of the town, who was perched plump and heavy under a crown of pastel hair, the hues pinkish and blue. Stickney returned the pencil stub.

“Does it change anything?”

“Everything,” Dawson said.

“Then I’ll give you a theory,” Stickney said, still with the utmost calm. “I think he went into his closet for a double purpose. To please himself … and, Sergeant, to kill himself.”

• • •

She was in their son’s room, sitting on his stripped bed and sorting school papers. The room was gradually taking on a bankrupt look. So much had been given away, thrown away, burnt. Posters peeled from the walls left their ghostly shapes. Three quart jars of pennies were gone from the shelf, where the stereo still rested, though the television was gone, donated to the Lawrence House of Correction, along with stacks of adventure comic books. The pennies she had scattered in the woods where they had last walked together. The school papers would be harder for her to discard, though she had no doubt she would do it.

Alfred Bauer waited for her to come out.

She said, “Why don’t you come in?”

It was not easy for him. The room seemed alien to him, no longer a part of the house, a taboo area fraught with sounds and silences of his son that only his wife could detect.

“Sit down,” she said, patting a place on the mattress away from the papers, but he stayed on his feet. “Do you know what I regret?” she said, and he held his breath. “I regret we didn’t donate his organs. Then parts of him would still be functioning. Breathing. Living. His heart could’ve served somebody well.”

He was uncomfortable with her voice, which stretched up into something he did not fully recognize. Her head tilted back. Her face was blank and colorless.

“The body was going to be cut up anyway. Somebody should have approached us. Asked us.”

“Somebody may have,” he offered. “We weren’t in shape to hear.”

“When he was ten, twelve, I could see into his future. I could see the shape of him at forty, at fifty. I never saw him dead.” Her hand brushed over the papers, which included high school examination booklets, grade school drawings, compositions with gold stars. “Do you want to look at any of this before I burn it?”

He shook his head slowly and spoke through dry, awkward lips. “I think we should get away for a while. Florida.”

“Is that what you think? Is that what you think we should do?”

“We need the change.”

“You look old,” she said with the lift of an eye. “All at once you look old. Do I?”

“No,” he said.

“Thank God for that. I wouldn’t want everything taken from me.”

He stooped down, crouched before her, placed his hands on her knees, which were jammed together to hold papers. There was a troubled pause. “At a time like this a man and wife should draw very close.”

“Yes, they should,” she agreed with the sympathetic start of a smile. “But it doesn’t work out that way. And actually our losses are different. Mine is Wally. Yours is Melody.”

“Harriet, please.”

“I idolized you, Alfred.” Her voice had stretched tenuously and was feather-soft, a tickle, and her hand reached out to stroke his bare head, a habit. Her fingers were familiar with every contour. “I loved you more than anything. The others, Eve James, her kind, never mattered. Darling women, but playthings. Melody was different.”

Sunlight paced itself into the room, stopping just short of them. Still hunkered down, he felt a strain in his back from muscles losing their resiliency. He had not worked out in days nor plunged into the pool for his customary laps.

Harriet said, “You led her on in a way that was real. She actually thought you might leave me for her. For a time, you toyed with the idea. Do you deny it?”

“I never would’ve done it.”

“You were so jealous when the cop took her over and so relieved when he dumped her. She loved him like she loved you. She couldn’t help loving people, could she, Alfred? It was how she kept going, poor thing. You knew that, we both did, because Stickney told us. He said she was searching for saviors and saints. Instead she got us. It wasn’t what you’d call an orgy, was it, Alfred, simply an extravagance.”

“Why are we talking about her?”

“You hurt me so.”

His eyes flickered. “You think you didn’t hurt me when you put her and our son together?”

“Wally needed help and you needed hurting. It was really as simple as that.” Her smile was dry, placid, ambiguous. Her hand, which lacked warmth, slipped from his head to his shoulder, and her presence seemed to gather around him, to imprison him. She said, “If you hadn’t fallen in love with her, I’d still have him.”

• • •

Claire Fellows, an early bloom and a fast fade in her youth, was quite unremarkable in her middle years: pale, plain, and quiet. She was dressed in muted colors, which tended to blend her into the background when no one was talking to her. Which was the case now. She stood against lush drapes in a private room of the Andover Inn and watched the other ladies mill and chatter over crystal glasses of white wine. The occasion was the annual meeting of the December Club, dedicated to preserving the town’s more genteel traditions and instilling proper manners in the children of newcomers, most of whom were unaware of the club’s existence. Its first president was Claire Fellows’s maternal grandmother, a fact many members had forgotten.

She did not care for the wine, a rather bland Chablis, but sipped it anyway because it made her appear occupied and not in the least mindful that she was being ignored. Then quite suddenly, with a start, she heard her name uttered from the swirl of sounds and leaned expectantly into the voice, hiding her feelings the instant she saw the face.

“How nice,” she said. “How lovely.”

They kissed, expertly missing each other’s mouth.

Paige Gately’s scent held a cinnamon quality. The tasteful accessories worn with her fitted navy suit matched the silver glint of her hair, every soft curl magically in place.

“We seldom see each other anymore,” Claire moaned.

“I know,” Paige said. “A shame.”

“We must rectify it. My goodness, how the years pass, and you’ve been so busy, so industrious. I know because Ed keeps me in touch. I can’t imagine why you wanted to buy that motel, especially after what happened there, but I suppose you have some marvelous plans for it. You were always so clever. Remember us at Abbot? I was always rather frightened and silly, and you always had a head on your shoulders. You were always one up on me. You used to tease me something terrible, do you remember?”

Paige did, quite well. She said, “No.”

“I was so shy and awkward in class, a miracle I graduated, but things came so easy for you.”

Conversations near them grew louder. Three women to their left, one wearing white-textured stockings, were discussing European vacations in relation to the exchange rate of the dollar. Paige, who had brought with her a full wineglass, took a careful sip. “You forget, Claire, I was there on a scholarship. I didn’t have your money.”

“But for you that wasn’t essential. For me it rather was, don’t you think? I lacked your toughness and drive. Nothing fazed you, I remember that. Not a very good Chablis, is it?”

“I’ve had better.”

“Those days seem so distant now, so idyllic in my mind. Does it bother you, Paige?”

“Does what bother me?”

“Growing older. I’ve often wondered if death is final. I sometimes believe it is. Yet nature seems to argue against it. My flowers vanish in the fall but pop right up again in the spring. So what about us? Do we die or just hide for a while?”

“We die.”

“You speak with such certainty, it’s so like you.” Claire sighed deeply as if her admiration were boundless, their girlhood friendship never in doubt. “Odd,” she said, “you don’t remember teasing me. You were jolly good at it. Others thought you were jealous because I was prettier than you, but I always thought you were prettier.”

Paige smiled. “I’m sure you were right.”

“You always got whatever you went after. Like the highest grades. Every exam you had those little crib sheets up your sleeve. I bet you thought I didn’t know.”

Paige smiled again, her reserve inviolate.

“Remember when you decided you wanted Biff and not Ed. I was so relieved. So grateful to you. Of course it hasn’t been an easy marriage, but no marriage is. And you had your problems with dear Biff, so handsome, wasn’t he?”

“A doll.”

“What did he die of? I was never quite certain.”

“Everything.” Paige tapped the brilliant stem of her glass with a glossy nail and shifted her eyes elsewhere.

“Are you looking for someone to rescue you?”

“Don’t be silly. I was admiring Mrs. Bledsoe’s white stockings.”

“They are nice, but I don’t have the legs for them. You do.” There was a significant pause, a kind of gathering of breath and resolve. “May I make a minor criticism, Paige? I don’t like your perfume.”

“Men seem to.”

“Yes, I know.”

They went silent, each listening to the other’s breathing. Paige’s was steady and calm. Claire’s was not. She sloshed about what little Chablis remained in her glass.

“Are you going to throw that at me?”

Claire’s eyelids fluttered, and her wan face flared with color and heat. “I very much want to. God, how I want to!” She weaved slightly. “But I don’t dare.”

“Of course you don’t. Nothing changes.”

Mrs. Bledsoe, the club’s outgoing president, a perfect rightness about her, strode toward them with eyes full of concern. “Is anything the matter?”

“Everything’s fine,” Paige said, smiling nicely. “Mrs. Fellows is simply having one of her hot flashes.”

• • •

The season’s first snowfall came during the night, the accumulation a couple of inches. In the morning Ralph Roselli in a black overcoat and Florsheim shoes was shoveling the graded walk leading down from Rita O’Dea’s house. A car was parked on the street, engine idling, a solitary face behind the windshield. Roselli had not seen the car before, but instinct told him everything. When he reached the bottom of the walk, he leaned the shovel against the massive post of the mailbox and shuffled over to the car, driver’s side, where the window was halfway lowered. He spoke through the space. “Something you want?”

“Beautiful neighborhood,” the driver said. “One of the loveliest in town. When I was a kid, nothing was here. Just woods.”