Peaceable Kingdom (13 page)

He said, “This is really incredible. You won’t believe how incredible this is.”

I said, “Come on. Is it true?”

He said, “Later. We’ll talk about it later. I can’t deal with anything this incredible right now.”

I said we wouldn’t talk about it later or ever, I didn’t want to be with him, no second chances on this one. We broke up over the phone. I hung up and after a while it rang. I let it keep on ringing. Then I called downstairs and told the clerk to please hold my incoming calls.

The next day I realized I’d been processing Paris, shredding it up and spitting out mental letters to Jason. When I wasn’t writing to him in my head I didn’t know where to look. I don’t remember that day very well. Maybe I went shopping. I couldn’t do francs into dollars or tell if what I was seeing cost sixty or six hundred. I went out and I came back. I didn’t buy anything. The light on my phone was blinking. I wished I hadn’t gone out. If I’d been here I could have answered but I couldn’t call Jason back. When I called down they said my mother had phoned: call home no matter how late.

I said, “Hi, what time is it there? Did I wake you up?”

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “Is everything okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “What’s up?”

“It’s Jason,” said my mother. “He broke into our house.”

I had visions of really embarrassing things, like him stealing my underwear.

“He dyed his hair,” my mother said. “In our bathroom sink. Brown,” she said. “Like his father. You’ll see when he shows up.”

Apparently Jason had stolen his father’s passport and spare eyeglasses and dyed his hair like his father’s and charged a one-way ticket to Paris on his mother’s MasterCard. Everyone was positive he was coming to see me, but the jury was still out on why he’d needed our bathroom sink. My mother said, “What’s with you two?” I said, “I guess he must miss me.”

I put down the telephone and waited to feel excited. But all I felt was embarrassment in advance, like when someone from one part of your life is about to show up in another. I knew that sleeping all day in a Paris hotel room so I’d dream about my boyfriend was a fairly pitiful excuse for a private world, but so what, it was my world, I had it to myself. I ordered a Coke from room service and double-locked the door. I felt like I was wanted by the F.B.I.

That night I went to dinner with just my father and Robin. I made her come to the bathroom with me and told her on the way—just the part about Jason stealing stuff and being headed here. I could tell she was impressed that a boy would do that for me. She stopped right by someone’s table and asked what I planned to do. “I don’t know,” I told her. “Just don’t tell my dad.”

Unlocking my door, I got a chill that Jason was already there, the same chill that I used to feel reaching into the potatoes. I thanked God for the light, the covers turned back, the little chocolate on my pillow. I lay down and thought about Jason. I wanted a dream in which it was warm and we were happy together, a dream from which I would wake not caring if he’d dyed his hair fiberglass pink. But I had the wrong kind of dream; in fact, the wrong kind of sex dream. I dreamed that Jason and some strange girl were naked in his bed. The creepy and perverted part was that I sort of liked watching. I thought about the Iroquois, how terrible it must be to live where everyone hears your dreams, and one night you have the kind of dream you could never tell anyone ever.

When I woke it was daylight. I knew that it was Jason pounding on the door. I said, “How did you get here so fast? What happened to your head?”

The top inch of his forehead was a root-beer brown, with a hard edge like a bathtub ring bleeding down from his hair. “I don’t know what went wrong,” he said. “Anyway, I’m sorry.”

I said, “Doesn’t it wash out?” Then I said, “Who was it?”

“Well,” he said, “it was Nan.”

I said, “You’re kidding. That hog.” I couldn’t help seeing Jason and Nan, his body wrapped around hers, only now it wasn’t like my dream, not interesting but repulsive; sex seemed like a truly disgusting thing for two people to do. I thought of some little details I hadn’t liked about Jason, how sunken and white his chest was, a certain way he touched me that he didn’t know hurt. Sometimes when we were together I’d think about these things, and it was funny how they moved me, made me love him more. But I didn’t like thinking about them now, I was happy how bad his hair looked. I said, “This would be totally different if you hadn’t fucked somebody else.”

“It was nothing,” he said. “I was mad at you.”

“It was not nothing,” I said.

He said, “I thought you’d believe me if I came and said it in person.”

I would have died if someone had come down the hall right then. “You’d better come in,” I said.

Jason sat on the edge of the bed. “I don’t have a passport,” he said. “I was trying to cash a check at the bank and the teller got suspicious. She went off to get someone, and I just turned and split. She had my passport and traveler’s checks. I’ll bet I’m wanted by the cops.”

“I can’t imagine how they’ll find you,” I said. “The guy with the two-tone forehead. Is that how you left my mom’s sink?”

“Please don’t be angry,” he said. “Everything will be all right if I can just sleep for a while.”

“Great,” I said. “A great idea. I’ll be back around dinner.”

I went out and walked around. It was totally hot and polluted. I almost couldn’t bear it that Jason was back in my room. I felt like the world was a TV screen he was standing directly in front of. It completely skipped my mind that I had been lonely before; I felt as if I had friends in Paris that he wouldn’t let me see. I sat on the stones at the Cluny and thought about my father, that the way I felt about Jason now was how he’d thought of my mother and me.

That made me feel instantly guilty and I went back to the hotel; this lasted until I saw Jason had got hair dye on my pillows. He said, “Jesus, I’m starving.” I said we could chance the roof café, and he fell back asleep. I was beginning to worry that the dye had bled through to his brain when he woke and got out of bed and raced me to the door. He wouldn’t have dared to tell me if he’d had a dream.

Waiting for the elevator, I noticed it was evening. I wondered where the day had gone, where my father and Robin were. The roof café was different at night, crowded with glittery people. The twinkly lights of Paris looked like restaurant design. We didn’t have reservations; there were no empty tables. Just as we were getting ready to leave, I saw Robin sitting alone.

Robin seemed glad to see me. She looked half blotto, but nervous blotto, talky and high-strung. “I’m hiding out,” she said. “He’s driving me nuts. He watches over me like I’m about to vanish off the face of the earth, and the thing is, I always think I’m about to disappear, and when he’s around and he’s thinking it, too, I get so I almost believe it.”

“Disappear how?” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Robin. “Vanish, vaporize maybe. Spontaneously combust. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I keep forgetting he’s your dad. He’s downstairs. He’s fine. He’s sleeping.”

Jason said, “I was sleeping.”

Robin and I stared at him as if he’d just appeared. “This is Jason,” I said.

“Do you mind if I ask,” said Robin, “what you did to your head?”

“Hair dye,” Jason said.

“Serious fashion mistake,” Robin said. “Something’s got to work on that. Kerosene? Nailpolish remover?”

Jason said, “I think I’d like to wait awhile before I give my head a toxic bath.”

“It’s all a toxic bath,” said Robin. “Have you seen the moon?”

Well, I couldn’t imagine how we could have missed it. The moon was gigantic, nearly full, half hidden behind a cloud, looming like another huge head just behind Jason’s right ear. Maybe the reason we’d missed it was: it was a frightening color. Actually, maybe we’d seen it and blocked it—it was kind of brown.

“This is worse than New
Jersey
,” said Robin. “At least there you still get that great industrial orange.”

“It looks like a potato,” said Jason. “The whole world’s a fucking tuber. Mondo Potato. Right?”

Robin leaned very close to him and took his forearm in both hands. “It’s all right,” she said slowly. “Or it will be all right.”

It bothered me for a second that she didn’t even know him and he was the one whose arm she was grabbing, pumping with sympathy. But why should that have surprised me? He was the one who deserved it, whose heart was being broken. He was the one whose story this was, the one who would get to tell about his first love and how it ended, how he made a mistake, dyed his hair, stole his father’s passport, went to Paris to find his true love, and lost her anyway. We were dividing everything; all of this was now his. From now on, whatever happened would happen to one of us at a time.

Robin said, “You know what I wonder? If the earth looks like a potato, too, if it looks like Mr. Potato Head when you see it from the moon. And the moon sees everything on earth like potato skin—potato ears and cracks and dirt, scaly spots on the peel.”

“The potato pyramids,” said Jason. “The potato Grand Canyon.”

I looked out at the lights of Paris and the traffic rushing beneath. When I closed my eyes the city noise sounded like waves on shore. I pictured one of those photos from space, I imagined rocketing off, the awe and homesickness of seeing Earth come up in your rearview mirror. I felt something cold rush past my cheek, a comet turning to ice. “The potato Eiffel Tower,” I said. “The potato Great Wall of China.”

S
O OFTEN, AT WEDDINGS
, one kisses and hugs the bride and groom and then stands there dumbstruck, grinning with dread. But today the guests congratulate Christine and John and immediately ask Christine, “How’s your leg?” If Christine’s leg didn’t hurt, she might almost feel thankful that a dog bit her a few days ago and gave her guests something to say.

Hardly anyone waits for an answer. They can see for themselves that Christine is wearing a bandage but limping only slightly. They rush on with the conversation, asking, “What happened, exactly?” though nearly all of them live nearby, and nearly all of them know.

By now Christine can tell the story and at the same time scan the lawn to see who has come and who hasn’t, to make sure someone is in charge of the champagne and the icy tubs of oysters, and to look for Stevie, her nine-year-old son. Stevie is where she knows he will be—watching the party from the edge, slouched, meditatively chewing his hand. The white tuxedo he picked out himself, at the antique store where Christine bought her thirties lawn dress, hangs on him like a zoot suit.

Many of the wedding guests wear elegant vintage clothes, or costly new ones designed to look vintage: péplums, organza, cabbage roses, white suits, and Panama hats; it is late afternoon, mid-July and unseasonably hot, so that quite a few of the guests look, like the garden, bleached of color and slightly blown. For a moment Christine wishes they’d held the wedding in June, when the irises and the peonies were in bloom; then she remembers it wasn’t till May that they made up their minds to get married.

At first she tries to vary the dog-bite story from telling to telling—to keep herself interested, and for John’s sake; John has had to listen to this thirty times. But finally she gives up. She says: “I stopped at a barn sale near Lenox. I was crossing the road. A big black dog, some kind of shepherd-Labrador mix, came charging out of nowhere and sunk its teeth in my leg. I screamed—I think I screamed. A woman came out of a barn and called the dog. It backed off right away.”

Even as she tells it, Christine knows: despite its suddenness, its randomness, the actually getting bitten, it isn’t much of a story. It lacks what a good dog story needs, that extra dimension of the undoglike and bizarre. She and John used to have a terrific dog story about their collie, Alexander—a story they told happily for a few years, then got bored with and told reluctantly when party talk turned to dog stories. At some point they had agreed that telling dog stories marked a real conversational low, and from then on they were self-conscious, embarrassed to tell theirs. That was even before Alexander died.

Yet today, as they greet their guests and the talk drifts from Christine’s bite to dogs in general, Christine realizes that she now has another dog story. She tells it, she cannot avoid it, and the guests respond with escalating dog stories: dumb dogs, tricky dogs, lucky dogs with windfall inheritances, mean dogs that bite. From time to time John or Christine senses that the other is on the verge of telling the story about Alexander. Although they are both quite willing to hear it, both are relieved when the other holds back. Christine feels that this—thinking of the story and knowing the other is also thinking of it and not telling it—connects them more strongly than the ceremony about to take place.

Perhaps her dog-bite story would be livelier if she added some of the details that, for laziness and other private reasons, she has decided to leave out. She can’t talk about the woman, the dog’s owner, without hearing an edge of shrill complaint and nasty gossip about how awful strangers can be; your own wedding seems like a peculiar place to be sounding like that.

When the woman got hold of the dog, she had stayed a few feet away, not moving. The dog got quiet instantly.

The woman said, “You scared of dogs?”

Christine’s leg didn’t really hurt yet, but her heart was pounding. “We used to have a dog,” she said.

The woman cut her off. “They always know when you’re scared,” she said. Only then did she drag the dog away. “Don’t move,” she told Christine.

She came back with a bottle of alcohol. It could have been kerosene, yet Christine let her splash it on her leg. The pain made Christine’s knees go rubbery. She turned and weaved toward the car. Probably the woman was right to yell after her, “Hey, you shouldn’t drive!”

Nearly all the wedding guests know that Christine is pregnant; it’s part of the sympathy her dog-bite story evokes, and why everyone winces when she tells it. Men tend to ask about the dog: What’s being done, has it bitten anyone before? The women ask about Stevie. Everyone is relieved to hear that Stevie was home with John. It isn’t just his having been spared the sight of his mother being hurt, but that most of the guests have seen Stevie around dogs—any dog except Alexander. He simply turns to stone. It has taken Christine years not to smile apologetically as she pulls Stevie off to the car.