The Inseparables (27 page)

Henrietta nodded. “Maybe I'd reevaluate that position if everyone brought me baked goods.”

“If he's a fan, he's a creep.”

“Not all of my fans are creeps.”

“Your male fans?”

“Fine. Most of my male fans are creeps. I'll accept that as a fact. But he seems kind.”

“What happened to you?” Oona laughed. “Where did my mother go?”

“It was refreshing in there, to be honest. He let me speak. And he didn't interrupt me. Do you know how rare it is for a woman my age to speak without being interrupted?”

Apparently Oona believed this to be a rhetorical question, and then, a moment too late, she offered up a response. “Rare?”

“Yes, Oona. Rare.”

A set of keys jingled behind. Turner stood waiting in the hallway with his coat on.

“The weathervane is in my car. Do you mind walking? It's in the lot just behind us.”

Henrietta turned back. Oona shook her head. “Don't you dare,” Oona said.

Henrietta pulled up her coat's hood. “Wait five minutes,” she said, smiling. “If I'm not back by then, call in the cavalry.”

Turning around, she went slowly through the shop and out through the back door. Turner waddled on ahead of her. Snowplows had left enormous piles high against the brick tenement walls surrounding the parking lot. “It's right up here,” Turner called out, pointing to an old Cadillac, painted purple, surely a collectible or antique or something uniquely rare.

The snow had turned to a freezing rain, and as Turner unlocked the car, Henrietta started to shiver. “We can do the exchange in the car,” he said.

She watched him. Rain in his mustache. Squinting while the sleet hit his face. He shivered, too. She looked into the car, upholstered with brown leather. On the backseat he had a box roughly the right size to fit the weathervane.

“Is that it?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Fine,” she said, opening the door. “Let's make this quick.”

Inside, the car was stale with cigarette smoke. Turner started the engine so that he could run the heat. “Your daughter is very protective of you,” he said. “That must be nice.”

“She's suspicious in general,” Henrietta said. “It's an inherited disposition. I suppose I have to accept responsibility for that.”

Turner took the box from the backseat and put it on his lap. He'd wrapped it in blue paper and a yellow ribbon. A white tag stuck to the edge had her name on it.

“I didn't expect such a nice package,” she said.

“Consider this a gift,” he said, handing it over.

She shook her head. “A gift?”

“My mother insisted that I not charge you.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“She adores you. She says that it was a crime America did not treat you well.”

“It sounds like I might get along very well with your mother,” Henrietta said, smiling.

Turner laughed. “I got this for basically no money. And you seem like you really need it.”

“It's that obvious?”

“Those are your husband's pens in the store, aren't they?” Turner asked.

“How did you know?”

“I could pretend that I'm incredibly astute. But his name is on the case.”

“That's right,” she said.

“Was he sick?” he asked. “Your husband?”

“No,” she said quietly. “It was sudden. It happened suddenly.”

Turner appeared to think about this. “I don't know if that's better or worse,” he said.

“Neither do I.”

They were parked against the back of a corner grocery. Through the shopwindows she could see what she guessed was a father and a mother and a son shopping. Maybe this was yet another stage of grief: refusing the urge to feel jealous of other families.

“Do you remember him?” she asked. “From when he brought the pens in?”

Turner frowned. “I wish I did.”

“He was tall,” she said. “He was always cleanly shaven. He had blue eyes. He would have had on a brown coat with big pockets. He was nice. He would have probably been very nice to talk to. And he had a good smile.”

Turner shook his head. “I'm sorry.”

“I don't know what month it would have been. But he always wore the same sneakers. They were blue Nikes with a white stripe. They're very distinctive shoes. They're hard not to notice.”

Turner kept shaking his head. The longer she was away from her husband, the longer the list of essential facts about him became.

“He had white hair,” she said. “Or maybe a red ball cap. He sometimes wore the hat if the weather was bad. I bought it for him.”

“I don't remember.”

“Right,” she said. Then she grew excited. “Maybe you have video surveillance? Cameras? Maybe we could go back in time and look and find the day? Is that something you could do?”

Even as she said it, she knew that he wouldn't have cameras, and that even if he did, she could not say for sure that she would want to see what Harold had looked like that day when he came in with his bag of belongings, looking for cash. She closed her eyes.

“I'm very sorry,” Turner said.

The heat felt good against her bare hands.

“Can I ask you a question?”

She nodded.

“Is there any chance you're working on a sequel?” he asked.

“A sequel?” She laughed. “You're one of those.”

“One of who?”

“Not enough screwing around in the first one? You needed more?”

He laughed. “Well…”

She waited.

He laughed. “It's not that. I just wonder.” He chuckled. “Whatever happened to her? Whatever happened to Eugenia?”

“What do you mean, what happened to her?”

“Did she end up happy?”

“Happy? She wasn't real. I made her up. She's a character. What happened to her? The book ended. She ended. That's what happened to her.”

“She's not you?” he asked.

Henrietta's shoulders fell. “Why would you think she was me?”

“Everybody thinks she was you.”

She hesitated a long moment, long enough for him to laugh awkwardly.

“I see,” he said. Then he turned off the car. “Here I am, ruining a perfectly fine morning between two nice people.”

She smiled politely and then began to reach for the door handle. “Thank you for everything, Mr. Turner.”

“What happens now?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” she said. “What happens now is that I leave. I go home.”

“You're single, though?” he asked.

“I'm married,” she said straightaway.

“I don't understand. You married again?”

“Turner,” she said. “Thank you for the weathervane. And the bread.”

“Maybe you would like to come with me to see the symphony?”

“Like I said, thank you—”

“Or maybe you would like to go see some poetry being read,” he said.

“Goodbye, Mr. Turner.”

Before she turned to the door one last time, he kissed her. He put his hand behind her neck, took her by the scruff, really, as if she were a kitten, and he pulled her to him. His face smelled like the cinnamon from his bread. All of this lasted only a few short moments. His tongue was all over her, against her clenched teeth, against her pursed lips. The push broom of his mustache mashed into her face. He moaned. As if this was supposed to be pleasurable. She had made a fortune once, pretending to know about this, about being this woman, this person who had casual sexual experiences with strange men in antique shops, or in the basket of hot-air balloons, but she had never been that woman. People had always made this mistake. She'd drawn the diagrams, inked the black lines of the pubic hair, the vulva, the hungry man, the supplicating woman, the comically long prick; she'd written the idiotic floor fucking scene, the balloon fucking scene, all the scenes in which her invented characters fucked each other dumb. And even though she was a seventy-year-old woman, this continued to happen.

Turner pulled away. He smiled at her. What am I doing here, she thought, in this purple Cadillac, with this man with this big mustache who had my husband's things in his shop?

“I like you very much, Henrietta Olyphant,” he said. “Maybe you can come see me again.” While her hand was on the door handle, he leaned forward and put his hand gently across her cheek, as if they had always been lovers, as Harold had done, as she'd written in her book.

Oona opened her door then, surprising Henrietta and making Turner jump and pull away. Henrietta got out quickly, wiping his saliva from her mouth, his spittle.

“What the hell is happening?” Oona shouted at him. “What were you fucking doing to my mother?”

“We're leaving,” Henrietta said quietly to Oona. “We're getting out of here.”

“Were you kissing my mother, you sick fucking animal?” Oona pushed past Henrietta.

“An animal? It was just one kiss!” Turner cried. “One little kiss! That's all!”

“She's seventy years old!”

“Oona!” Henrietta called out. “It's fine. Walk away. Leave.”

“What's the big deal?” Turner said. “It was just kissing. We were having such a nice time. We were laughing. I thought she and I were—”

“What happened?” Oona asked, running after her. “Tell me what happened.”

Henrietta shook her head. “Why did I go in his car?” she asked.

“Are you okay?” Oona asked.

“You were right,” Henrietta said.

All this time Turner was yelling for her:
Come back, sweetheart! This is getting out of hand.
Henrietta and Oona were in the middle of the parking lot.
Henrietta! Come on!
Henrietta had the blue box in her hand. She leaned against the back wall of the store to unwrap it. She removed the yellow ribbon and then pried open the top folds. Immediately she knew that it was not her weathervane. “This isn't it,” she said. She repeated this over and over, louder each time, her anger growing, not simply about the weathervane, which was not hers, but about the whole of the past eleven months, the slow vanishing of her normal life, the sudden terrifying emptiness of the future. “This isn't it!” she cried out one last time. Beside her, Oona squinted down at the box.

“Are you sure, Mom?” Oona asked.

Meanwhile, standing across the parking lot, Turner had lost his patience. “You're crazy,” he said. “You know that? You're just a crazy cocktease!”

Henrietta took it—this copper thing that was not even a woman, but a man in a golfing cap, the top of a trophy, perhaps, a man holding a nine iron—and walked deliberately across the parking lot, past Turner, and threw it through the window of his purple Cadillac.

The night that Lydia ended up in Charlie's bed, they sat out first on the lip of the ridge overlooking the valley in Mount Thumb. This was a Thursday night, early in February. It was mild for Vermont, which meant that it was still frigid. They wore thick winter coats. A meteor shower was about to happen, he had told her, which was a lie, just a way to get her to sneak out of Rosewater and come see him and maybe afterward get her to come up to his bed and take off her top and very likely do things to his body. While they sat, he gave her wireless headphones, and they listened together to someone talking about
Voyager 2,
the space mission that left Earth in 1978 and reached Neptune twelve years before she was born. “What is this?” she asked. “A lecture?” Their legs dangled over the edge of the rock face. It was hundreds of feet down. He had on yellow socks and blue canvas sneakers caked in mud. He pretended that he was losing his balance, and she pulled him back and hugged him close to her. “Stop,” she said. “You're scaring me.” He kept trying to impress her, to show her that he occasionally did things like contemplate the shape of the universe. “I'm not just a pretty face,” he said.

They had been out long enough that her eyes had adjusted fully to the dark, and when he said this, she looked closely at him. “Not just a pretty face? Let me be the judge of that. Turn and let me look at you.” She reached out and took the point of his chin. He mistook this for a chance to kiss her, which he did, unskillfully, when in reality she'd just wanted to look at him, to see exactly who it was she had attached herself to. All across Hartwell they were being discussed in tandem—Lydia and Charlie, Charlie and Lydia. He was her boyfriend now, whatever that meant. “Stay still,” she said, holding him, both hands on his cheeks. He had a perfectly round face, oddly round, a complete and whole circle, in the middle of which was his small and subtly squashed nose. “What happened to it?” she said, touching it. “Did someone punch you?” She laughed. “Some people, you can just tell that someone punched them. You seem like you're one of those people.”

He wore black knit mittens, and he took one off to touch his nose. “What do you mean?” he asked innocently. “What's wrong with my nose? Nobody punched me! Is my nose messed up?”

He wanted her to hear about the Golden Records scientists had put on board the Voyager missions. He turned up the volume. This was what the lecture was about. The Golden Records were a catalog of everything that humans had accomplished on Earth. On it, scientists had left recordings of the human voice, photographs of the Taj Mahal and the city of Boston, photographs of dolphins and chimpanzees and toads and airplanes, evidence of the languages that people had created, reproductions of great art, Senegalese percussion, Peruvian panpipes, Glenn Gould playing part of
The Well-Tempered Clavier,
Louis Armstrong playing “Melancholy Blues.” There were examples of the mathematics that people had invented, and analog reproductions of the sound a dog makes and an airplane makes and of crickets and rain. Jimmy Carter left a greeting. Scientists hoped that wherever the Voyager missions ended up, in whatever corner of the universe, whichever gas-or-ice-filled star they eventually crashed onto, light-years from now, someone or something might excavate these records and see what people had made here. Charlie wanted Lydia to hear this. “This is some dope shit,” he told her, which, in his way, was as deep as he got.

“I bet the aliens will be really psyched to hear from Jimmy Carter,” Lydia said. While they listened, he tapped her knee or wrist and nodded gravely, as if to say,
Listen: this is important.
These were things she would not forget, beautiful things, essential things, maybe, experienced with a person she would not forget either, all of this becoming in the future inseparable for her—the endless sky and her new body and this person and the sense that she was always being watched.

Also, he wanted to sleep with her here. When the lecture ended, he told her this. “I think it would be really nice,” he said, pausing, nervous, sweating in the freezing cold. “It would be nice to make love here.” It would be his first time, which was news to her, since he bragged so much about how incredible he was in bed, how smooth he was, and yet how powerful, how he was, more than most boys, so carefully attuned to a woman's needs.

“Wait a second,” she said. “You want to do it now?”

“You don't?”

“Here? On this rock?”

“It's private. It's the only private place on campus.”

She banged her hand against the rocky edge. “You expect me to lie on this thing? It hurts just to sit on it.”

“But it's cool. We're beneath the stars.”

She threw a pebble over the edge. “It's also hundreds of feet down,” she said. “Imagine the headlines if one of us fell over.”

“Oh, I'd catch you, baby,” he said.

She rubbed a finger across the top of the rock. Dirt and pollen and probably cigarette ash came up on her skin. “It's super hygienic, also.”

“What about on the ground, then?” he said. “Beneath the maple trees.”

“I love that you just said ‘beneath the maple trees.'”

“It's softer than the rock.”

She put her hands in her pockets. “It's really cold here, Charlie.”

“Well, let's go back to my room, then.”

She laughed. “You thought this lecture about the
Voyager
would get me in the mood?”

He laughed also. “So what you're saying is that space is not a turn-on?”

He had pretended to know the names of the constellations that night as they walked back to his dorm. He kept looking up and tracing indeterminate shapes with the tip of his finger.

“That line out there, that's Cincinnatus,” he said.

“No it's not,” she said. “Cincinnatus is not a constellation.”

“And that,” he said, making an oval in the sky. “That—the princess's crown—that's Diana.” Lydia had smiled.

“Wait. Do you think Princess Diana has her own constellation?”

Lydia thought of this as she left Charlie's house with her father. It was evening and the stars were out. It was warmer here, two hundred miles south, warm enough that she didn't need the gloves she'd stuffed into the pockets of her coat. They were her mother's. Lydia had found them at home in her mom's closet, which was mostly empty now that she'd gone. The only things left were things like this—forgotten gloves, worn-out black surgical scrubs, her wedding gown.

Her father walked off ahead of her, down the brick walkway that went from the Perlmutters' door to the sidewalk. He had his phone out.

“What are you doing?” she called out, rushing after him.

“I'm going to get this kid arrested,” he said.

“We tried,” she said. “It's over.”

“We're
trying,
” he said. “I have to keep trying.”

“Enough is enough,” she said.

“No it isn't,” he said, trying to dial, failing, cursing himself. He looked red, irate; his hands shook.

When all of this was over, she'd learn that Charlie's father had apparently done nothing but ask her dad how much money it would take to make them go away.
How much for all of this? Two grand?
They had been in a room that sounded very much like the room Lydia had been in—leather and animal heads and oil paintings of animals about to be murdered. This was Mr. Perlmutter's opening figure: $2,000 for her body.

At the end of the pathway a line of huge oaks towered over the Perlmutters' house, which was lit up behind them in white, like a temple. The neighborhood had gone quiet. All the other mansions had their gates drawn. Her dad dialed the police. She could hear the ringing through her father's phone. He leaned against one of the trees, attempting to catch his breath. Tears had dried in a line running into the stubble of his beard. The moon hung low above the slack telephone wire. Black birds perched on top of the utility pole.

Someone came on the line. Her father stood up straight, and he began to cite offhand the whole litany of crimes against her: illicit photography of a minor, distribution of child pornography, cyberharassment, aggravated stalking.

Maybe she knew already that this wouldn't work. She thought of the government-free Pacific island where her body lived now, dispossessed, eternally fetchable, always fifteen. Her father paced, first in wide circles around his parked car, and then up and down the sidewalk along the fence that separated the Perlmutters' house from the road. This was his habit, the walking and talking, a relic from his old life, something that her mother had told her about in stories of their years in New York, this inability to stay put, to sit, to act normal. He was so skinny then, her mother said. He always looked nervous. He always wanted to argue with someone about the news or about politics. Lydia watched him now, his fist clenched, the white hair on his temples messy in the breeze. Motion-detecting lamplight fell aslant on the decorative stone lions.
I'm here,
her dad was saying, his voice bounding down the empty street.
I'm waiting for someone to come and do something.
She sat on the curbstone to wait.

In the opposite direction, she heard a bicycle on the street, and before she turned she knew already that it would be Charlie. He came to a small rise in the road and stopped there. To see him here, without his Hartwell uniform—his shawl collar, his necktie, his ever-present cigarette, his sneer, his phone, his camera—momentarily startled her. His bicycle was tiny, something built for a child, a relic, probably, from the last time he had lived here full-time.

“I heard you were coming,” he called out.

She turned around to find her father, but he had walked down the street far enough that she could not see him.

Charlie got off his bike and walked with it. She put her hand up. “Don't get any closer.”

“I was under strict orders to stay clear—”

“Stop fucking walking toward me.”

He stopped. “—because I guess your dad's on some mission to have me strung up and hanged.”

“Who says it's just my father's mission?” she said.

“I guess he wants me locked up.”

“I want that, too.”

Charlie moved forward a few steps.

“I told you, don't you fucking come any closer,” she said.

He stood beneath a streetlamp. He brushed back his hair, hooking it behind his tiny ears. This hair: the first hair of any boy she had touched or admired, and certainly the first hair she had ever deigned to tuck behind someone's ear. Acne had bloomed in an archipelago on the soft ridge of his chin, purple as a bruise, picked at already, proof of stress, maybe, or guilt. Evidence, perhaps, of a soul.

“So you met my parents?” he asked, turning to look at the house. “Pretty wonderful and kind people, right?”

She said nothing. She looked down the street, hoping for her father.

“Should explain why I am the way I am,” he said.

Again she didn't answer. Behind her the motion-detecting lamp went off and then on, brightening one of the lions' hides and the pavement between her and Charlie.

“I don't know how to get it down,” he said. “The picture. It's not like I didn't try.”

“You're a liar,” she said.

He kept getting closer.

“Stop walking,” she said.

“Let's just talk,” he said.

“Stop fucking walking.”

He got closer. Light marked the dark spot of his pupils.

She turned. “Dad!” she called out.

“Are you okay, at least?” Charlie asked.

“Did you seriously just ask me that?” she said.

He took yet another step toward her. His face was calm, his eyes wide. The look, she knew, was a perfectly crafted replica of what a concerned person looked like. He took out a cigarette. “You want one?” he asked.

She took a step away.

“You never answered. I want to know if you're okay, Lydia,” he said. He was trying to sound sweet. The effort from him appeared so obvious now. “Are you? I hope you're okay.”

“Yes, I'm doing terrific, Charlie,” she said. “Really fantastic.”

Just then the brass gate to the Perlmutters' house closed, the lock clicking into place.

“I feel bad,” he said. “You know what I'm saying? It got out of hand, I guess is what I'm trying to say.”

Finally her father walked up the street. He had his head down and his car keys out. Years from now she would think of this moment—her father on the street, Charlie on the street, two stone lions watching them—when she heard, finally, that Charlie had been arrested, not for anything he'd done to her, but for something with a different woman altogether. Lydia looked for a sign from her father, some hopeful motion of his hand to say that, yes, he'd done it, and that, yes, someone was coming for Charlie. Her dad lifted his head and must have seen her standing in the middle of the road and Charlie standing behind her, because he stopped. She heard sirens then, and it wasn't a moment until she saw the blue lights of a police cruiser flickering behind her father on the tree bark and the houses. She turned back to Charlie, still in the middle of the road, smoking, his hair having fallen in his eyes. She allowed herself a smile. The sirens grew louder. She turned back just as the first police car came into view, speeding, its sirens deafeningly loud. Then the second car. Her father, she thought, had done it. She stood off to the side, expecting surely that they would come to a stop here, beside her.

When the police passed, the first car rushing, and then the second going even faster, she threw up her hands, confused.

“What's happening?” she cried out. “Come back!”

Behind her Charlie had changed his tone. “I don't know why it had to be this way,” he said, but she had stopped listening. Why had the cops passed by? Why weren't they stopping?