The Used World (34 page)

“Caroline loves you.”

“I know—I’m sorry. I love her, too.”

“Have you seen your parents today?” Hazel took a sip of the wine, licked her lips to hide any expression she might have made at the taste of it.

“Oh. Well.”

“Finney, for God’s sake.”

“There was a chance he might drop by. He didn’t say when, so I was afraid to leave. You know how it happens that you walk out the door for just a moment and the phone call you’ve been waiting for comes right then?”

“No. No, I don’t know, because I don’t stake my life on telephone calls.”

Finney took a deep drink, blotted her lips on a cloth napkin. “I don’t want us to fight.”

“Neither do I.”

“He doesn’t come right out and say it, but I think there’s a possibility, I think he may be considering leaving her when he’s never thought about it before.”

“He will never leave her.”

“They don’t sleep together anymore, that’s what he told me, not even in the same bed.”

Hazed sighed. “He’s lying.”

“No, no—their lives are completely separate. It’s more like a contract he’s fulfilling.”

“That isn’t even remotely true.”

Finney drank the rest of her glass, poured another. Hazel rested her hand lightly on top of her own glass to prevent Finney from giving her more.

“We have a deep emotional bond, Hazel. I know you don’t believe it, but it’s impossible to put into words and impossible to get over.”

“Clearly. You have wasted, Finn,
ten years
of your life. You can call it a deep emotional bond or mental illness or prison, you’ve still wasted it.”

“I don’t consider that time wasted.” Finney sniffed, sat up straighter. Her second glass of wine was half gone, although Hazel had not seen her drink it.

“I never would have thought you could be this person.”

“You don’t love me anymore.” Finney’s eyes filled with tears. “You are the last friend I have and you don’t love me either, anymore.”

“You know why you have no friends. You know perfectly well what the reason is. Most of your friends couldn’t even bear hearing about it anymore, this ghastly story you keep repeating and repeating, trying to convince everyone, trying to convince yourself.”

“He’s not who you think he is.”

“Is that so?”

“I know you consider him…sinister in some way, cruel—”

“You left out dishonorable and manipulative.”

“—but when we are together, when it’s just the two of us, he’s so tender. I know because of him what it feels like to be
loved.
When I’m in his arms I am loved and that’s an amazing feeling, the only thing that matters.”

Hazel blinked, looked down at the table.

“Can you say the same? Can you say you have ever felt loved?”

I felt loved by you once.
“Do you know what this is, this argument you offer? You have somehow come to believe that there’s such a thing as ‘love,’ such a thing as a
feeling
that is also an a priori truth, rather than an invention by the courtly poets. And you’ve got movies and music and books
confirming
for you that romantic ‘love’ is the highest good and it’s what everyone is seeking and should be seeking. But it’s a meager justification for what you’ve traded your life for. If there is any such thing as that sort of love, as opposed to the perfectly obvious and real love between parents and children, between friends, this ain’t it, Finn, and you damn well know it.”

Finney let her head fall to the table and she began sobbing. “I know you’re right, I know what I’ve done here is awful and there’s no justification for it, none at all. It makes me hate myself.” She wiped her face with her napkin, leaving a smear of mascara on one cheek.

“Then stop.”

“I try.” Finney cried harder but was still able to pour herself another glass of wine. The bottle was nearly empty. “I’ve tried two thousand times. He gets ready to leave and I know he’s going home to her and to his life, which everyone thinks is one thing and only I know the truth—”

“No, I also know the truth and so does Jim Hank: he’s a fraud and a charlatan who has not only fooled you, he’s fooled an entire community.”

“—and I say to him, I scream at him, ‘Just don’t ever come back! You’re killing me and I can’t take it anymore! You’re
killing
me!’”

Hazel could, alas, picture the scene: the disordered bedclothes, Finney flushed with drama while he stood before her, silently getting dressed and planning his return to his real life.

“Sometimes I even stick to it, I don’t answer the phone or the door and if he comes into the diner because I won’t answer him, I get someone else to take his table. He doesn’t dare ask for me. But then something will happen, a week will go by, once even two weeks—”

“You talk as if I don’t remember those two weeks. I remember them the way one would remember time spent as a
hostage.
”

“—and I ran into him by accident. By accident, Hazel—”

“I was
there,
Finn.”

“—at the gas station and our arms touched”—Finney rubbed her upper arm—“here, they touched here, and if we hadn’t been in public we’d—”

“Do stop. Please.”

Finney drained the wine, pushed the bottle aside with a practiced gesture. “I’m beginning to think he might not
always
be honest with me. There have been moments.”

“So you’ve said.”

“He talks about her sometimes and I get the feeling he’s not telling the whole truth, it’s just a sensation in my gut, I get sort of sick and fluttery just to hear him say her name. His mouth forms the word and I feel like his mouth belongs to me and another woman’s name should not be in it. I told him not to call her by name anymore, I said he could refer to her as That Person, but he refuses. I think sometimes he doesn’t even listen to me.” Finney’s chest and cheeks were bright red from the wine. There were dark circles under her eyes and her fingernails were chewed down to the quick. She reached for Hazel’s full glass and Hazel said nothing. “Sometimes I follow him at a distance, when I have a day off I sometimes just follow him the whole day. I would give up the whole day just to see the back of his head in front of me, or in the summer to see him rest his arm on the open window. He has a scar on his left arm shaped like an arrow. I drive and I sit in the parking lot waiting for him to come out of the hardware store or the bank, I think about the first time I ever saw him and I can remember
everything.
I was so young but not too young, I was exactly the right age to see him.”

Finney had begun to overenunciate all sibilant consonants, a sure sign that she was working overtime at staying upright and conscious. Hazel had heard it before—a few times, now that she thought about it.

“I—” Finney stood quickly; the blood drained from her face and her chin quivered. She ran with an awkward, tilted gait the few steps to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Within seconds Hazel could hear her, and she closed her eyes in sympathy. There was nothing worse than being sick that way, nothing. Hazel herself had never consumed enough alcohol to vomit, but she imagined it would be even worse than the flu, because she would know she’d done it to herself, as Finn was doing it to herself.

Hazel stood, took the empty bottle and the wineglasses into the spare, damp kitchen. Finney was trying to grow herbs in a little kitchen garden on the windowsill, but everything looked thin and barely alive. She washed out the glasses so Finney wouldn’t have to face them in the morning, threw the bottle in the trash. In a drawer that only opened halfway, Hazel found a hand towel, which she soaked with cold water and took with her to the bathroom.

She didn’t knock. Finn was on her knees in front of the toilet, her head down on her forearms. She was breathing heavily; panting. Hazel knelt behind her, laid the cold towel across her neck just as she began throwing up again.

“I didn’t eat all day.”

“I understand.”

“I should have eaten, I thought if he came I’d leave afterward and go home and Mama would feed me.”

Hazel pulled off Finney’s flat shoes, put them in the closet, then unbuttoned her blue jeans and pulled them down. It wasn’t easy; Finn neither fought nor helped. She lay on her back, completely still and staring at the ceiling. She wore beautiful underwear, probably something she’d gotten at Sterling’s—white silk with lace inlaid on either hip.

“You might have to—Finn, you need to sit up just a minute so I can get your sweater off.”

“My bra, too, I can’t sleep in a bra.” She didn’t move.

“You’re going to have to sit up a minute.”

Hazel wrestled her out of everything but her panties, and Finn lay back, exhausted.

“You have to stay with me tonight, Hazey, you have to.” Finney was crying, but easily. She made no noise and didn’t draw attention to her tears. “You don’t know how lonely and heartsick I am all the time. If I didn’t have two jobs I don’t know what I would—”

“It isn’t night.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said it isn’t yet night. It’s only five-thirty in the evening.”

“No, it’s very late. It’s very late, Hazel.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, making phone calls. Malcolm and Janey first, to say that Finney wouldn’t be coming over because she was ill and in bed. They were sad, and confused. They’d been confused about Finney for years. Hazel barely made it through the conversation without bursting into tears herself.

She called Caroline, who seemed a bit perplexed that Hazel wasn’t home; she hadn’t noticed her daughter’s absence.

“Enjoy yourself, dear.”

“Mother, will you make sure Mercury has food and water?”

“I will if I remember,” Caroline said, before hanging up.

Hazel expected to turn around and find Finney asleep, but her eyes were wide. “I’m going to borrow a nightgown, okay?” Hazel asked.

“They’re in the top drawer. Take whichever you like.”

Hazel chose the longest and most modest, which was still more revealing than anything Hazel had ever owned.

“Please, you’re going to stay, aren’t you? Please don’t go.”

“I said I would.”

“I’m afraid you’ll change your mind.”

“I won’t.”

“Please come get in bed with me, my teeth are chattering.”

“You aren’t wearing any clothes.”

“I’m freezing, please come get in bed with me. You aren’t going to leave, are you?”

Hazel pulled back Finney’s old crazy quilt, a second blanket, a sheet, and slipped in beside Finney, who was indeed shivering.

“I’ll stop talking about him now,” Finney said, turning on her side and facing Hazel.

“Good.”

Finney was studying her, and Hazel felt the gaze travel over her like a fever. She closed her own eyes, she would not return the look. The bedroom was so quiet she could hear every movement of their skin against the sheets. Finney moved an arm up, up. A cold hand—just the right amount of cold—rested on Hazel’s cheek.

“Hazey,” Finney whispered, now very close to Hazel’s face. In the bathroom Hazel had helped her brush her teeth and still there was the wine on top of the toothpaste. The smell of the wine was abiding, as if Finney had been working on it a long time. Finney’s breath was nothing at all what it had been when they were growing up. Her skin, too, smelled different.

Hazel opened her eyes just before Finney kissed her, and saw that Finney was crying harder—late crying, it might be called—just tears flowing steadily, ignored. Her lips were chilled, the hand that had been on Hazel’s face was now resting in the curve of her neck. Finney kissed just the corner of Hazel’s mouth, light, lightly, then took Hazel’s bottom lip between her teeth. Tears dropped onto Hazel’s face and ran down toward the pillow, and it took a moment for Hazel to realize she was crying, too.

“This is what you want, isn’t it?” Finney spoke quietly into Hazel’s mouth. “This is what you’ve always wanted.”

Hazel couldn’t answer. She was stunned to discover that she could
feel
the shape of Finney’s mouth; the Cupid’s-bow top lip she’d only ever seen, she could now feel with her own. When did she begin kissing back? Later she wouldn’t be able to separate the moments, one from another.

“Everyone else is gone, so disappointed with me.” Finney moved her hand across Hazel’s shoulder. “But you stay.”

“I stay.”

“Because you’re in love with me.”

“No, Finn.”

“Yes, you are. You are devoted to me in a way he’ll never be.” Finney was crying harder now, speaking between small gasps. She moved her body closer to Hazel’s, closer still, until her breasts were pressed against Hazel’s own. Hazel couldn’t breathe; she felt her chest expanding and contracting, a flutter there that was perhaps fatal. What if this was how she died? How could it be explained? Her body was turning to liquid, water spilling over hot stones. Finney’s hand traced the contours of Hazel’s face.

“There it is,” Finney said, choking on tears, every other word a supreme effort, “there’s that old scar.”