What Was Mine: & Other Stories (17 page)

At the shopping center, he parks and walks to the expensive lingerie store that recently opened. There is no one inside except a teenage clerk. He can read her mind, as he walks to a rack of panties and flips through.

Francine wears size five, and because so many are so pretty and he can’t decide, he selects three: black with appliquéd white lace hearts; a pair of sheer pink, with just a string through the crotch; white ones that would be prim except for the low-cut front, with tiny daisies embroidered there.

He pays cash and has the girl cut off the tags. He gives them to her to tear up and puts the pants in his pocket, knowing he’s shocking her. When Francine gets home, he will shock her, too, by giving her the pants. Or maybe he will wait until they are in the bar and have had a few sips of champagne, then pass them to her under the table and ask her to change into a pair in the ladies’ room.

In the skating rink he feels almost heady with the perfection of their marriage. In the wild circling of the ice-skating rink something shakes loose inside him—some fear, or fears, that he had been holding inside, that he suddenly sees he can just banish.

He finds that he doesn’t want to outskate her, but that he wants his arm around her waist; he feels as romantic, amid the flushfaced teenagers, as a figure in a Currier and Ives painting, gliding on a frozen lake with the most beautiful girl in the world. He says to her, making them both smile, that after one more turn around the rink, long scarves will suddenly materialize around their necks to float backward in the breeze. In his mind’s eye, they already exist in perfect miniature: a painting reduced to greeting-card size, or little figures in a snow dome, who appear to be in motion once the flurry of snow begins to sift down around them.

She had told him, in the bar, that she had a real bias against Brits; she had to force herself to act sanely in spite of her embarrassing prejudice, because to her they were always too pale, and stuffy, and stuck in their ways of thinking. She couldn’t
believe
he’d think she’d be receptive to Nigel Mawbry’s flirting.

They take a breather and drink Cokes from paper cups at the refreshment stand. An older couple, the man with white, wavy hair, his wife with a still-girlish figure, stand sipping hot chocolate from paper cups. There are one or two couples their age, Stefan realizes, once he’s out of the center of action, surveying it.

Francine’s nose is red. Little ringlets of hair lie plastered to her forehead. He touches the rim of his Coke cup to hers, and they both smile. “Maybe bowling would be fun, too,” she says. “I give you credit for coming up with a
very
good idea.”

“Need me to fix your skate laces?” he says, nodding his head toward one of the tables.

She swats his shoulder. “The place you got the panties,” she says. “Did the girl really blush when you put them into your pocket? How could you do such a thing?”

When she goes to the bathroom, he pretends he is going to follow her in. A teenage girl looks over her shoulder at him. He tells Francine about that, too, when she comes out.

“I remembered my old high school trick of putting my tube of lipstick in my brassiere,” she says, smacking her brightly painted red lips together. “It all comes back to me.”

“Let me see where it is,” he says, touching his fingertips to her breast and moving closer.

“Stop!” she says. “People will look!”

“I can still scandalize you,” he says. “That’s wonderful.”

“I can still kiss lipstick on your cheek and make both of us look foolish,” she says. “Better watch out.”

Again, they glide onto the ice. The music sounds like music from a carousel. She gives him a little hug before they start to gain speed. As they circle the rink, they begin to say which person they’re passing resembles which animal. The old man with white hair they saw before looks, in profile, exactly like a camel.

“That one’s Melanie Griffith!” Francine says, a little too loudly, as they whiz past.

“Melanie Griffith’s not an animal,” he says.

“I don’t care!” she says. “She
does
look just like Melanie Griffith.”

“She
does
look just like Melanie Grifith,” he echoes.

“She does,” Francine says.

“She
does
,” he says.

She bends forward as he lightly squeezes her ribs.

“I want to come skating all the time,” he says. “Agree, or I’ll never let go of you.”

“Who are you fooling? You know a good thing when you see it. You were never about to let me go. Kissing on the first date!”

“You provoked me.”

“
Fucking
on the first date,” she says.

“You asked me up. You were being provocative.”

She looks at him, the smile fading slightly. “Me?” she says. “Provocative?”

“The story you told,” he says.

“What story did I tell? About how boring it was to grow up in Illinois?”

He is panting. A wisp of hair flaps against his wet forehead.

“Not that,” he says. “The story about acting class. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.”

She frowns, slowing the pace. Her nose is bright red. Her cheeks are also flushed. “Oh, yes,” she says. “That’s right. That acting exercise. We were supposed to connect while not connecting. Actually, it was pretty easy material to do that with.”

“You were supposed to not connect?”

“I think so,” she says. “It was years ago.”

“It was something more provocative,” he says. “You said he had been your lover, and that doing the scene, you could feel him really moving away from you. Genuinely moving away.”

She shrugs. “He was my lover, if you call a couple of nights ‘my lover.’ But no: I think it was just that we did the scene very well. I think I was bragging.”

You were telling me that you felt very alone,” he says. “Wasn’t that the point of the story?”

“Subconsciously, it might have been. That would figure, wouldn’t it? That I’d think I was bragging, and you’d see that I was lonely?”

They are skating slowly. Melanie Griffith whizzes by, all smiles, her girlfriend in pigeon-toed pursuit. Their hair is so lacquered it doesn’t move at all. The girl in the rear wears a metal belt that clanks slightly as she makes the turn. He begins to notice that earrings dangle from some of the skaters’ ears, that many of the men have their jaw set a particular way.

“It wasn’t a come-on?” he says. “It seemed … I thought you were admitting you’d been thrown a curve. You seemed so vulnerable.”

She shrugs and smiles. “Is that an awful way to be perceived?” she says. “I really can’t remember the point of the story anymore, but I
did
think you were cute. You had no idea how to pour champagne, and it foamed over the top of my glass and ran down my fingers.”

He frowns. “Really? I don’t remember that.”

“That’s a good thing,” she says. “Listen. We were both more unsophisticated than we let on.”

“What do you think we are now? Truly sophisticated?”

“I didn’t notice you pouring too fast tonight,” she says, smiling.

“Seriously,” he says. “Is that what you think?”

“I think we both know more than we let on. That’s why you were worried about stupid Nigel—because you knew I wouldn’t let on if we
were
having an affair. Which we are not. And that’s why I perked up when you talked about what’s her name. The woman who has Julie tonight. Because you said her first name so familiarly.” She tightens her grip around his waist. “There’s no point in pretending,” she says. “Of course we realize that each of us knows more—goes through more—than we care to let on.” She looks at him. “What’s the matter?” she says. “You asked for a serious answer.”

Two hours later—after stopping for a brandy on the way home, after showering together and fooling around in the tub, and after rushing, half-wet, into bed and making love—he gets up when he hears her breathing lightly and regularly and goes into the bathroom, carrying the alarm clock with him. He sets it in the light of the bathroom, wincing as the little hand stops at seven o’clock. Then he pushes the button up and puts it on the bathroom counter while he splashes his face with water. He opens the medicine cabinet and takes two aspirin from the bottle, swallowing them with water cupped in his hands. He runs his wet hands over his temples, letting the rest of the cool water trickle down his face. Then he looks at his face appraisingly in the mirror. He might be able to outskate her, through the sheer power of his legs, but she is able to outdrink him. She is on her side, asleep in the dark room, and she will no doubt be fine when she awakes in the morning, too.

As he gets back in bed, sliding the alarm gently onto the night table and feeling the button again to make sure it’s set, he realizes that the damp covers are going to make it difficult to relax and go to sleep. He intuits, somehow, that if something bad has not already happened—and he supposes it has not—something bad might still be on the horizon. He has seen enough movies, read enough books, to know what happens to restless sleepers, in damp beds, who have had too much to drink.

Something bad will happen. It is what he has been fearing for years, and what he continues to fear.

It does not happen until months later, when he has stopped thinking it is imminent. He has gone back to driving without his seatbelt, sometimes, when Julie is not in the car to impress. Mentally, he has checked off the possibilities that might have materialized: that Gennine would escalate her flirtations (she has not); that Nigel would be intelligent and handsome (he is, as Francine has said, boorish and pale, with a distracted gaze that would be funny if there were any energy behind it). Francine’s job is not too much work for her to accomplish; he does not resent doing errands any more than usual. Over the weekend, Francine and Julie collaborated on a crayon drawing of the three of them: a nuclear family, the daddy taller than the mommy, the child squarely in the middle, their primary orange skin tones particularly touching. The radon test came back negative; the sound of someone entering the house was only a shutter that had blown loose in the wind.

When the phone call comes early in the morning, things have been going along smoothly. He has recently been accomplishing things with ease.

The woman who calls, one of the mothers he has not met, tells him that Mrs. Angawa is dead. She was struck by a hit-and-run truck while crossing the street. She had gotten up early and gone to get breakfast things for Mr. Angawa. A paperboy gave a description of the truck. It was believed that Mrs. Angawa, struck from behind, died instantly.

He looks at the rumpled bed sheets. Francine also had risen at the crack of dawn, but she had been going to the hairdresser’s, to get a permanent. Her stylist had agreed to show up early, so Francine could get a jump on the day. Some things were worth tipping big for, she had told him the night before. He hated it when she made statements like that—statements that had nothing to do with what sort of person she was. Sometimes, he is sure, she pretends to be jaded to see what reaction she can elicit. At the ice-skating rink, though he had been almost flooded with thoughts near the end, one thing had come to him clearly: Remember that you married an actress, he had thought. She had been trained as an actress.

Mrs. Angawa is dead. Immediately he reassures himself that although it is a tragedy, she was not an intimate friend. She was someone he had a rather odd conversation with months before—a protracted conversation about Julie and the way she spoke, although it is clear that since befriending Cassie Wallace, Julie has a new, private, autonomous identity that doesn’t depend on the way her parents see her, or even on the way Mrs. Angawa might have seen her.

There will be no school that day, of course, the woman says. The following day a psychologist will be in the classroom, and after a discussion period the children will be introduced to the substitute teacher. If he feels he will have trouble talking to Julie about the tragedy, the psychologist will be sitting by his phone for the next hour or so, advising parents. The woman clears her throat. “I’m sure this is a shock,” she says, “but can you give some indication that you’ve heard me?”

He has been thinking of Mrs. Angawa, in her professional, singsong way, saying something like: “Julie is a very good student. She is very good at spelling. She likes to write.” It was like a mantra, a positive recitation that could be chanted in worried parents’ faces, to calm them. She was struck from behind? It was dawn, just past dawn, was that what the woman said?

“Yes,” she says.

She was out getting groceries.

It seems clear that that is so often the way. That in some very inconspicuous moment, a person can be overwhelmed.

He thanks the woman for calling. “It can’t be easy to announce a tragedy,” he says, his voice still hoarse from sleep. The alarm clock ticks almost silently. In the other bedroom, Julie is sleeping. He will let her sleep until she wakes up. There is no reason to awaken her with bad news. There is no school. Let her sleep.

He thanks the woman again for letting him know. As he stretches across the bed to replace the phone in its cradle, his hand snags a pair of pink panties under Francine’s pillow—one of the pairs he gave her the night they went ice-skating, which she had worn to bed the night before, lifting her nightgown over her head and wiggling provocatively before climbing into bed. He looks at them as if they were the strangest thing in the world. So little material, for so much money—that’s one way to look at it. They seem more bleak than silly, considered in context with the goings-on of the real world.

His mother used to say: Always wear clean underwear, in case you end up in the emergency room. For a split second, he tries to imagine what sort of panties Mrs. Angawa might have been wearing when she was struck.

He thinks: I am focusing on details because I don’t want to think about the larger picture.

He gets out of bed.

He makes the bed, which he does not usually do. He smooths the duvet. Touching it, he suddenly thinks of the rabbit.

He sits on the newly made bed, his hand over his mouth. What a thought just came into his head: the rabbit will be in the dark closet all day if someone doesn’t think to take the cage out.