Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction (22 page)

Mrs. Warburg said, “Let me get another drink.”

I lay back on Anne’s bed and sipped my beer. Mrs. Warburg and I had agreed that since I didn’t always remember to get rum for our get-togethers, I would make do with beer. Anne actually liked beer, Mrs. Warburg said. Mr. Warburg liked Scotch. Mrs. Warburg went right down the middle, she felt, with the rum and Coke.

“Should we have gone to Teddy’s funeral?” she said.

I didn’t think so. Mrs. Warburg had never met Teddy, and I certainly didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to sit with his family, or sit far behind them, hoping that since Teddy was dead, Anne was alive, or that if Anne had to be dead, she’d be lying in a white casket, with bushels of white carnations around her, and Teddy would be lying someplace dark and terrible and unseen.

“I think Anne might have escaped,” Mrs. Warburg said. “I really do. I think she might have gotten out of those awful mountains and she might have found a rowboat or something—she’s wonderful on water, you should see her on Lake Erie, but it could be because of the trauma she doesn’t—”

Mr. Warburg got on the line.

“It’s three o’clock in the morning,” he said. “Mrs. Warburg needs to sleep. So do you, I’m sure.”

Eugene Trask and Anne traveled for four days. He said, at his trial, that she was a wonderful conversationalist. He said that talking to her was a pleasure and that they had had some very lively discussions, which he felt she had enjoyed. At the end of the fourth day, he unbuckled his belt so he could rape her again, in a quiet pine grove near Lake Pleasant, and while he was distracted with his shirttail and zipper, she made a grab for his hunting knife. He hit her on the head with the butt of his rifle, and when she got up, he hit her again. Then he stabbed her twice, just like Teddy, two to the heart. He didn’t want to shoot her, he said. He put her bleeding body in the back of an orange Buick he’d stolen in Speculator, and he drove to an abandoned mine. He threw her down the thirty-foot shaft, dumped the Buick in Mineville, and walked through the woods to his sister’s place. They had hamburgers and mashed potatoes and sat on Rose’s back step and watched a pair of red-tailed hawks circling the spruce. Rose washed out his shirt and pants and ironed them dry, and he left early the next morning, with two meat-loaf sandwiches in his jacket pocket.

They caught Eugene Trask when one of his stolen cars broke down. They shot him in the leg. He said he didn’t remember anything since he’d skipped his last arraignment two months ago. He said he was subject to fits of amnesia. He had fancy criminal lawyers who took his case because the hunt for Eugene Trask had turned out to be the biggest manhunt in the tristate area since the Lindbergh baby. There were reporters everywhere, Mrs. Warburg said. Eugene’s lawyers, Mr. Feldman and Mr. Barone, told Eugene that if he lied to them they would not be able to defend him adequately, so he drew them maps of where they could find Anne’s body, and also two other girls who had been missing for six months. Mr. Feldman and Mr. Barone felt that they could not reveal this information to the police or to the Warburgs or to the other families because it would violate lawyer-client privilege. After the trial, after Eugene was transferred to the Fishkill correctional facility, two kids were playing in an old mine near Speculator, looking for garnets and gold and arrowheads, and they found Anne’s body.

The dead body makes its own way. It stiffens and then it relaxes and then it softens. The flesh turns to a black thick cream. If I had put my arms around her to carry her up the gravel path and home, if I had reached out to steady her, my hand would have slid through her skin like a spoon through custard, and she would have fallen away from me, held in only by her clothes. If I had hidden in the timbered walls of the mine, waiting until Eugene Trask heard the reassuring one-two thump of the almost emptied body on the mine-car tracks, I might have seen her as I see her now. Her eyes open and blue, her cheeks pink underneath the streaks of clay and dust, and she is breathing, her chest is rising and falling, too fast and too shallow, like a bird in distress, but rising and falling.

We are all in the cave. Mrs. Warburg went back to her life, without me, after Anne’s funeral that winter (did those children find her covered with the first November snow?), and Mr. Warburg resurfaced eight years later, remarried to a woman who became friends with my aunt Rita in Beechwood. Aunt Rita said the new Mrs. Warburg was lovely. She said the first Mrs. Warburg had made herself into a complete invalid, round-the-clock help, but even so she died alone, Rita said, in their old house. She didn’t know from what. Eugene Trask was shot and killed trying to escape from Fishkill. Two bullets to the heart, one to the lungs. Mrs. Warburg sent me the clipping. Rose Trask married and had two children, Cheryl and Eugene. Rose and Cheryl and little Eugene drowned in 1986, boating on Lake Champlain. Mrs. Warburg sent me the clipping. My young father, still slim and handsome and a good dancer, collapsed on our roof trying to straighten our ancient TV antenna, and it must have been Eugene Trask pulling his feet out from under him, over the gutters and thirty feet down. Don’t let the sun catch you crying, my father used to say. Maybe your nervous system doesn’t get the message to swallow the morning toast and Eugene Trask strangles you and throws you to the floor while your wife and children watch. Maybe clusters of secret tumors bloom from skull to spine, opening their petals so Eugene Trask can beat you unconscious on the way to work. Everyone dies of heart failure, Eugene Trask said at his trial.

I don’t miss the dead less, I miss them more. I miss the tall pines around Lake Pleasant, I miss the brown-and-gray cobblestones on West Cedar Street, I miss the red-tailed hawks that fly so often in pairs. I miss the cheap red wine in a box and I miss the rum and Coke. I miss Anne’s wet gold hair drying as we sat on the fire escape. I miss the hot-dog luau and driving to dance lessons after breakfast at Bruegger’s Bagels. I miss the cold mornings on the farm, when the handle of the bucket bit into my small hands and my feet slid over the frozen dew. I miss the hot grease spattering around the felafel balls and the urgent clicking of Hebrew. I miss the new green leaves shaking in the June rain. I miss standing on my father’s shiny shoes as we danced to “The Tennessee Waltz” and my mother made me a paper fan so I could flirt like a Southern belle, tapping my nose with the fan. I miss every piece of my dead. Every piece is stacked high like cordwood within me, and my heart, both sides, and all four parts, is their reliquary.

When Your Life Looks Back

When your life looks back—
As it will, at itself, at you—what will it say?

Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool.
Flame curl, blue-consuming the log it flares from.
Bay leaf. Oak leaf. Cricket. One among many
.

Your life will carry you as it did always,
With ten fingers and both palms,
With horizontal ribs and upright spine,
With its filling and emptying heart,
That wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled, in return.
You gave it. What else could do?

Immersed in air or in water.
Immersed in hunger or anger.
Curious even when bored.
Longing even when running away.

“What will happen next?”—
the question hinged in your knees, your ankles,
in the in-breaths even of weeping.
Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in.
Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face.
No back of the world existed,
No unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for.

This
, your life had said, its only pronoun.
Here
, your life had said, its only house.
Let
, your life had said, its only order.

And did you have a choice in this? You did—

Sleeping and waking,
the horses around you, the mountains around you,
The buildings with their tall, hydraulic shafts.
Those of your own kind around you—

A few times, you stood on your head.
A few times, you chose not to be frightened.
A few times, you held another beyond any measure.
A few times, you found yourself held beyond any measure.

Mortal
, your life will say,
As if tasting something delicious, as if in envy.
Your immortal life will say this, as it is leaving.

—J
ANE
H
IRSHFIELD

WHERE THE GOD OF LOVE HANGS OUT

Farnham is a small town. It has a handful of buildings for the public good and two gas stations and several small businesses, which puzzle everyone (who buys the expensive Italian ceramics, the copper jewelry, the badly made wooden toys?). It has a pizza place and a coffee shop called The Cup.

Ray Watrous looked in The Cup’s big window as he walked past. He saw the woman he’d represented in a malpractice suit ten years ago because laminated veneers kept falling out of her mouth. He saw the girl who used to babysit for them when Neil and Jennifer were small, now a fat, homely young woman holding a fat, homely little kid on her lap. He saw his daughter-in-law, Macy, at a table by herself, her gold hair practically falling into her cup, tears running down her face. Ray turned around and went inside. He liked Macy. He was also curious and he was semiretired and he was in no hurry to go to Town Hall and argue with Farnham’s first selectman, a decent man suddenly inclined to get in bed with Stop & Shop and put a supermarket in the north end of town, where wild turkeys still gathered.

Ray liked having his son and Macy nearby. Sometimes Ray went down to New Haven for lunch and sometimes Neil drove up to Farnham, on his way to the county courthouse. They talked about sports, and local politics and the collapse of Western civilization. The week before, Neil mentioned that a girl he’d dated in high school was going to run for governor and Ray told Neil that Abe Callender, who shot out the windshield of his own car when he’d found his girlfriend and
her
girlfriend in it, a few years back, was now a state trooper in Farnham.

“Can I join you?” Ray said.

Macy twisted away from him, as if that would keep him from seeing her tears and then she twisted back and took her bag off the other chair.

“Of course,” she said.

Randeane, the owner and only waitress of The Cup, brought Ray a black coffee and put down two ginger scones with a dollop of whipped honey on the side.

Ray said, “These scones have Dunkin’ Donuts beat all to hell.”

Randeane thanked him. “Cream and sugar?”

Ray, who was normally a polite man, said, “The coffee could stand a little fixing up, I guess.”

Randeane put her pencil in her pocket and said, “People love our coffee. It’s fair trade. Everyone loves our Viennese Roast and our French Roast and I believe people come here
for
our coffee.”

Ray said, “I hate to disagree, but they come for the pastries or the atmosphere or because of you but they don’t come for the coffee.”

“I beg your pardon,” Randeane said.

Macy laughed and said, “Wow, Ray.”

“I’m just saying, people don’t come for the coffee.”

“I’ll make you a fresh cup.”

Randeane brought him another coffee and Ray drank it. It wasn’t great. Macy ate a little bit of her scone and she sighed. Two high school girls sat down at the table next to them.

“I’m not
retarded,”
the skinny girl with pierced eyebrows said.

“I
know
. But, duh, you can’t go for a job interview looking like that.” The other girl was chubby and cheerful and in a pink uniform.

“Fine,” the skinny girl said. “Fix me.”

Macy and Ray watched the two girls walk hand in hand into the ladies’ room.

“Girls are good at friendship,” Ray said.

Macy shrugged. “I guess. I was thinking about my mother when you came in and saw me crying,” she said.

“My father was a no-good fall-down drunk,” Ray offered. “My mother was as useless as a rubber crutch. But sometimes I miss her. That’s the way the dead are, I guess. They come back better than they were.”

“We weren’t close,” Macy said.

She’d been sitting in the kitchen just two days ago, thinking about gumbo and looking for filé powder, when the phone rang. Her mother said hello, she was just passing through and wanted to see Macy. She didn’t say
hope to
, or
love to
, she said, “I want to see you, kid. I’m in New Britain. There’s a place just off Route 9. It’s called the Crab Cake. Meet me there.” Her mother wore skinny black jeans and a yellow blouse and high-heeled yellow boots. She had a scarf pulled over her black hair and she sat in a booth, smoking, and when Macy came in, her mother didn’t get up.