The Last Good Night (11 page)

The radiator made a loud creaking sound and we both turned to look at it as if at an intruder before returning to each other.

“There can't be any more phone calls, Jack. And no more calling cards.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The postcard.”

“What postcard?”

“You didn't leave a postcard of the Breezeway in my office?”

“No. Of course not. Where would I have gotten that?”

“Are you lying to me?”

“I'm not the one who lies.”

Confused, I looked away.

He took a step closer and touched my arm.

If there had been only sadness in his eyes, I would have been relieved.

But there was sadness and other things too.

“I thought you'd like to know,” he said, his voice suddenly hard and brittle, “that I followed your suggestion and went to see some of the sights. The Empire State Building, Times Square, the Staten Island Ferry. I even went to the Forty-second Street Library. Pretty impressive, all those ancient reading rooms and banks of computers.” He took a breath, held it, and finally exhaled while we both waited. “I thought I'd punch your name into one of those computers, see what came up. You know, see what you've been up to, catch up on lost time. I even looked you up in that big black book they have, what is it, the
Celebrity Register
? Funny thing, your official bio. Interesting. But not quite accurate, is it, Marta? Not exactly what you'd call complete.” He shook his head. “Did you really think you could get away with murder?”

W
HERE DID IT
begin?

Did it begin with Astrid, with Garner, did it begin with the men, with the moment I met Jack? Did it begin with bad luck? Or did it begin with something within, a stain, a scar?

Of course, there are those who say it doesn't really matter where it begins, where any of it begins.

All that matters is the act itself.

 

I
CAN STILL
hear them, still feel them, each of them.

I can still feel the heat.

 

I
HEAR MY
mother and stepfather in the living room of our apartment behind the office of the Breezeway Inn, eating their breakfast, the television turned up loud to cover their voices.
Still, the words passed through the thin yellow walls like ghosts, forming, disintegrating, re-forming.

“Just tell me why you won't do it,” Astrid said.

“Because she's not my daughter.”

“But if you adopt her, she will be.”

“I never said I would. Did I?” Garner demanded. “Did I ever say I was going to adopt her? Answer me, Astrid, did I?”

I'd heard the words before, sometimes strident, sometimes plaintive, since my mother had married Garner Clark. I knew that Astrid would quickly drop the subject, ask about dinner, make a joke. Astrid, figuring the odds, moving on, forgetting.

“Just tell them your last name is Clark anyway,” Astrid said to me, “instead of Deuss. Who'll know the difference? Who asks for papers here?” Astrid, who believed you were whoever, whatever you said you were, why not?

I got up and walked soundlessly past them, slipping through the screen door in the kitchen. I hurried down the path that ran along the back of the motel where we piled trash between pickup days, and onto the empty two-lane road. The nascent sun was sharp and clear, its edges not yet blurred with humidity. Out here, you could see a storm forming miles away, tell when it was raining by the striations of light in the large and open sky, watch the storm moving toward you, over you, away from you.

It was only eight-thirty in the morning when I got to the public beach a quarter-mile from the motel. Except for a few elderly couples taking their constitutionals, it was deserted. The waitress at the Driftwood Café was setting up its outdoor tables, putting napkins beneath the salt and pepper shakers so they wouldn't blow away, filling ketchup bottles. Her face was a weathered brown with soft pouches beneath her eyes, her hair was cropped short in a tight wiry gray perm. “You're awfully early today, hon,” she said. “We don't open for another half an hour.”

“I know.”

“You want a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.”

The waitress, Thelma, went inside and brought me a cup of black coffee in a paper cup. “Don't let no one see you.” She winked.

I nodded. Thelma often got me coffee in the morning and free refills of ice tea on days when I managed to come after school, sitting at an empty table after the lunch rush, doing my homework, killing time, avoiding Garner.

I took the coffee and perched on the wooden banister, staring out at the ocean as I drank it. It was calm today, and there were no early morning surfers. It hardly seemed the same ocean I had crossed all those years ago, coming with Astrid from Germany. Then it had been a livid monster.

A few of the hardier passengers spent the afternoons playing cards and drinking whiskey in the lounge, and on the second day, they asked Astrid to join them. “Go play with the other children, sweetie,” Astrid instructed. “You must be bored with me.” I moved a few yards away and watched Astrid settle down at the small table with the men, take their proffered liquor, and put her money on the table. Every now and then one of them nodded in my direction and they all laughed. Embarrassed, I left to walk alone around the perimeter of the boat, climbing over ropes, running my hands around the cold steel railings and ladders. But within an hour, I returned and, standing a little farther away, once more kept watch over my mother.

At night, after tucking me in, Astrid went back to the lounge for more whiskey, more cards. It was three, four in the morning before she returned to our tiny cabin, her makeup smudged, her dress crooked. Sometimes it was later, dawn.

I knew that time, for Astrid, had a tendency to melt, to slip away.

“So German,” Astrid remarked scornfully of the others in our crowded tenement in Dortmarr who watched her progress dis
dainfully, who could not forget, would never forget that Astrid had me when she was just seventeen, and unmarried. And worse, unapologetic. “So staid,” she complained. “So set in their ways.”

For as long as I could remember, Astrid dreamt of escape from the dingy Ruhr Valley town, where the only beauty came from the sunsets made brilliant by the coal dust rising from the mines. Astrid and her plans, her endless talk of
opportunities,
always looking for a way out, out of Dortmarr, out of Germany, out of poverty.

And so regularly disappointed.

Still, she almost always lost her sadness in the night and rose cheerfully to search for the next big chance. If not, there was always a man, men, a parade of nameless, faceless men who came and went in the dark, staying for just an hour or two and leaving behind small gifts, a gold-plated bracelet, a scarf. Money.

On those nights, I slept on the couch in the living room, and though I rarely saw the men, I heard them sneaking past me to the bathroom, the sound of the hard steady stream of their urine a fearful portent of masculinity.

But always, before and after, Astrid came back to me, just to me.

Sometimes, on bad nights, empty blue nights, Astrid slipped into bed beside me, her soft squishy breasts pressed against my back, her folded hands between my legs, warmth cupping warmth.

Until Garner Clark.

One day, I came home from school to find Astrid writing and rewriting drafts of a letter, an English dictionary by her side to help her fill in the blanks of her schoolgirl vocabulary. The man in the butcher shop, whom she had grown up with and who secretly pitied her, had a brother in America who played poker with a man who was looking for a wife. The American still remembered the German girls he had seen during his stint there after the war and was amenable to meeting one.

“Why does he have to get a wife in the mail?” I asked.

“People meet all kinds of ways,” Astrid answered peremptorily. “Anyway, we have friends in common, don't we?” She never believed in examining any details, drawbacks, or unpleasantness that might hinder her plans. Why be negative?

Astrid repeated the word reverently,
America
. America, with all its land and its inventions and its belief only in the future, surely that was the place for us.

She had her picture taken, enclosed it in the letter, and waited.

It was two months before Garner Clark wrote. He told her that he'd never done anything like this before, but that she looked nice. He told her that he owned a motel on the gold coast of Florida, thirty miles above Palm Beach. “I have the ocean and the palm trees and the sun,” he said, as if they were his personal possessions. He enclosed a photo of himself in skimpy bathing trunks perched on the edge of a motorboat. He had a lean torso and slicked-back wavy hair. There were no visible defects, no obvious scars or withered limbs.

She had me take another picture of her in a lacy black negligee, her short dark hair tousled suggestively about her pretty face, and enclosed it in her reply.

Six months later, we came here.

I finished the bitter coffee and wandered to the scalloped edge of the ocean. The wet sand rose between my toes as I headed down the shoreline, bending now and then to pick up interesting shells, examining them closely and then discarding even the most beautiful of them. I did not like the idea of possessions, of being weighed down, did not like most of all the possibility that I might wake one day and find that what I had once thought exquisite was really nothing at all.

By noon, I had walked three miles down the coast to where the white hotels were clustered, identical rectangles with balconies overlooking the sea. Hot, I dove into the water, hearing it
rush past my ears as I closed my eyes. For a moment everything was gone, just gone.

When it was finally late afternoon, I walked back to the motel.

Back in my room, I stripped off my wet clothes and brushed my long tangled hair before the mirror, watching as it fell in black dripping ringlets across my bare shoulders.

Suddenly, I saw Garner's reflection in the mirror, his eyes stuck to my skin.

By the time I turned around to face him, he was gone.

I picked up the brush and began again, my fingernails scraping my scalp as I stroked.

 

M
OMENTS, LOOKS
. T
HAT
is what you remember. That is what you try to forget.

And touch. That too. That most of all.

They seem, later, like a ladder, leading up and up to the single inevitable landing.

Do they seem like that at the time? Perhaps.

 

T
HE MOTEL WAS
crumbling about us. The yellow paint on the two-story U-shaped structure was peeling. The docks of the fourteen boat slips were splintered. Only when you sat at the end looking across the intracoastal to the state park, a dense wall of pines, did it look anything like the postcard. Maybe that's why Garner brought us here years ago, to help save it. There didn't seem to be anyone else. By the time we arrived, the German friend he played poker with had disappeared, along with the game. He had no friends in Flagerty, and his efforts at the simplest public transactions were painful to watch, his fear and distrust of strangers
coming out in short angry exchanges. He came quickly and completely to depend on Astrid for most of his communication with the outside world.

Our apartment was separated from the front office by a narrow door. The office itself had royal blue walls, a ceramic vase of plastic flowers, a rack of local maps, and a large wooden fish painted in iridescent blues and pinks. There was a bell to call us, the motel's only phone, the large reservation book, and a machine that took credit cards. It was always very neat and tidy, organized and dusted. Behind the door, though, our apartment had long since grown into chaos. There were the tools that Garner was always using to fix the constant stream of broken appliances—faucets, mowers, sprinklers, even beds. There were the stacks of towels and sheets, the chlorine for the pool, the slatted plastic chairs that needed mending, the suntan lotion and dog-eared paperback books that guests left behind. The smell of cooking oil, suntan oil, machine oil, hovered thick in the air.

Often guests tried to peer behind the door, but even Astrid, whose weight had been ballooning since the day we arrived and now, six years later, was well over two hundred pounds, was adept at slipping through and closing it tightly behind her.

But if the guests themselves never quite saw the chaos, its scent and its havoc seeped through the vents.

Maids quit every other week, tired of Garner following them around and barking at their flaws. None of the local boys would even cut the grass. Most of the time, there was only the three of us to clean the twenty rooms, tend the lawn and pool, organize the boat slips.

 

W
HEN
I
DIDN'T
retreat to the beach, I went to Rosie Jenson's house, where we sat behind the closed door of her bedroom, painting our toenails, smoking, analyzing and reanalyzing our
faces, our chests, our chances. All the other girls at school, the ones who ruled in perfectly coordinated outfits, their long slender arms and legs tanned a uniform gold, their straight hair swinging loose down their backs, ignored us.

When I first arrived in Florida, I had watched them silently, unable to understand what they said, but I began to learn English quickly from long lonely hours watching television and listening to the guests in the motel. “English now,” Astrid used to insist whenever I tried to talk to her in German. “Only English now. We are in America.”

Within the year, I could speak a clearer English than Astrid, and unlike Astrid, who, not having my child's malleability, never lost her accent, it was not long before strangers no longer asked where I had come from, and when, and why.

Soon, I no longer even dreamt in German, dreams that I had treasured and been comforted by, the familiar sounds and sights of home only attainable alone in the night—now gone even from reverie. I tried to will them back, but I couldn't. I began to forget my old language.

I tried then to make friends with the popular girls. I tried to look like them, dress like them, laugh at their jokes that I never quite got. I even tried to tame my curly hair to be like theirs. At night, I ironed it on the table and slept with it wrapped tightly around my head. Each day, it was smooth and straight when I left the motel, but by the time I got to school the relentless humidity had already frizzed it. The air itself became my enemy.

They had long since tired of Rosie, with her gray plastic glasses and her perfect grades and her fat. That is how we found each other, sitting in the back of the classroom, ignored. And that is what we now spent most of our time plotting to escape—the back row, the girls, Flagerty itself.

“I think San Francisco is best,” Rosie said. “California. That's where I'm going.” She had seen a picture in an old
Life
magazine of a long-haired boy with high cheekbones and a haunted look in
his eyes standing in front of a record shop in Haight-Ashbury. She was much taken with the idea of free love. Surely some of it would have to rub off on her.

I listened once again. I wanted to tell her that there was no more summer of love, that there probably wasn't even a Haight-Ashbury anymore, not the way Rosie meant, we had missed all that, the war was over and Patty Hearst had just been caught and looks mattered, they always had, but I didn't want to hurt her feelings.