“These are just estimates,” the officer concludes. “Their people are still evaluating the costs. In the event that they’ll need to replace the tank, he’d be looking at a suit from their insurers, and a possible felony.”
“He’s already broke,” I mutter, about to ask him how much jail time Frank will likely face, if he flunks his medical review, when the door opens.
Frank sidles in, escorted by the same officer who showed me to Corporal Banks’s office. In the metallic light he looks fifteen years older. There is a reddish crescent on his wrist—from the handcuffs, presumably. His cheeks are pale, his hair still damp with rain. I cannot bring myself to meet his eye.
By the time we return to the parking lot, the storm has passed. Slow, tumid clouds block the setting sun.
“Where’s May?” Frank says, as I start the car.
“With her dad,” I reply, stung by the sound of her name. Again, the specter of what might have been rears up before me: water gushing from the tank, the floating strollers, the lacerated faces. You could have killed her, I do not say.
Frank fingers Maurice’s sweater—spotted, now, with my dried blood. There is traffic on the freeway, so I take a longer route, through the outer reaches of Kingston.
“It wasn’t speech,” he whispers.
Then he is quiet, and after a while I wonder whether I have imagined the remark. We pass a pair of identical buildings, strung together by a laundry line that sags under the weight of one sodden, turquoise dress.
“You know how, in music, the notes go straight to the feeling,” Frank says, “without wedging a thought in between? That’s what their language was like.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, wary of triggering him again. But he continues, shamelessly.
“Everything they felt—it was written on their faces, in their gestures . . .”
We have reached an intersection. I brake, yielding to a slender man of Frank’s vintage. He is dragging a suitcase, its little wheels accumulating slush. I nod as he raises a gloved hand in thanks, struck by the fact that the only thing standing between him and oblivion is the pressure of my sole.
“. . . so in tune with one another,” Frank is saying. “Their feelings—if that’s what they were—they flowed through me. Beautiful, terrible dances of the soul, more exquisite than any thought of mine could conjure up. I felt oafish beside them, kid. Their joy was painful to me.”
“You had a manic episode,” I say.
“I swear to you.” He turns to me. “I couldn’t tell this to the officers, but I swear to you, I could hear—”
“What you heard came from your own mind.”
Beyond the hanging traffic light, the old soap factory is coming into view. As part of an effort to gentrify the neighborhood, the state converted it last spring into a small museum. Prue and I took May soon after it opened, as part of our campaign to keep her occupied during her parents’ divorce. Soap is made from lye and tallow, we learned, which comes from ash and melted fat. May had marveled at how two unclean things could be converted, through immense pressure and heat, into agents of cleanliness.
“I’ve never been surer of anything,” Frank says. “I . . .” He drops the last syllable, pinching the bridge of his nose. With alarm, I realize he is crying.
“Animals protect their own kind,” I say quietly. “So do we, and so should you. Learn at least that much from them.”
His pocket buzzes. When he pulls his flip phone out of his pocket I feel an undertow of dread. Sure enough, he answers, “Pumpkin?”
She must be ready to crucify me. First, he disparages my work, I imagine her thinking. Then he lets my father attack me, in front of all our friends. Then he almost gets my niece killed?
“Not anymore . . . ,” Frank says. He wipes his sleeve across his face. “We’re in the car, yeah . . . A medical review . . . Saints, they said. Something like that . . . No, by noon tomorrow.”
We pass an abandoned warehouse, laced with balding vines. A water tower looms above it, covered in graffiti.
“Uh-huh,” Frank says again. “Okay. I love you.”
He checks the phone, then says, “Hung up.”
Snapping it closed, he lifts it up to shield his eyes. Light knifes through the windshield. The sun is still intact, hooded by clouds, like a huge fermata.
He says gruffly, “Just let me out here, would you?”
“What are you talking about?” I lower both our visors.
“I’ll find my way.”
“Where?” I laugh. “Back to our house?”
“To Vermont. I’ll hitchhike.” His voice cracks again. His hands are trembling. He sits on them, adding, “I’ve made enough trouble for you already.”
I lock the doors, half expecting him to try to make a run for it. Instead he raises his chin, giving his head a little shake. The motion is barely perceptible, but it floods me with sympathy. That I have ever tried to argue with him suddenly strikes me as both callous and inane. He is too credulous, too hopeful. Like a child, he grips the edges of his seat—incapable, like a child, of rational thought.
“Do I really strike you as someone who’d help you break the law?” I say gently.
“Yeah, actually.” He clears his throat. “You remind me of myself, sometimes.”
I have to smile. The man really is out of his mind.
“You’ve got this energy in you,” he is saying. “I can feel it. Always have. Just wish you’d let it out more often.”
“You don’t have to say that, Frank.”
“I’m not buttering you up, I’m just—”
“And you don’t have to like me, either. I can handle it. I wouldn’t say we’re exactly cut from the same cloth.”
We turn east onto our street. Golden light swells in the rearview mirror.
“We’re family,” Frank says. “We’re not supposed to like each other.”
Our house is coming into view. The sun is low enough to accommodate the glow of lamplight from Josip’s room upstairs, softened by a length of curtain. The blinds are drawn in our apartment, the kitchen windows dark. She must still be on campus. Thank god.
“I don’t think I deserve your good graces, to be honest,” I mutter, backing into the driveway. “Or Prue’s.”
Someone has shoveled the snow from the front path—Josip, most likely. Three snowmen guard our neighbor’s lawn, in varying postures of surrender.
As Frank wipes his nose with his sleeve I hear myself say, to my own surprise, “It’s true what you said last night. I was an idiot, shouting at her like that.”
The words fill me with relief. Why deny them any longer? I will repeat them to Prue tonight, if she can bring herself to look at me.
“It’s all right,” he says. “It was a lot to swallow, what she said.”
“No.” I take a breath, then say in a rush: “What she said had nothing to do with it. Animals had nothing to do with it. It had to do with the fact that she’s going places, and I’m going nowhere.”
I unclip my seat belt, but he does not. He says, “You’ve lost me, kid.”
So he wants me to say the words aloud. How generous.
“I don’t know, Frank.” I throw up my hands. “Maybe it’s the fact that I still haven’t published a book? Or that I peaked in my thirties, and she’s just getting started? Or that my greatest accomplishment is a solution to a problem no one’s heard of?”
He looks at me. I say, struck by the memory: “What you said in the rest stop the other day, about waiting? Waiting for life to happen to you, or whatever? Well, we have at least that much in common.”
“But you’re a philosopher,” he says. “That’s what she wants to be.”
More like what you want to be, I think. But he is speaking again.
“I remember when she first called me,” he continues. “Dad,
I’m dating this philosopher. He’s brilliant. You’re not gonna like him, which is exactly why I do.”
He unbuckles his seat belt. I stare at my lap, unnerved by this hint of all she must have confided in him about me over the years.
“You may be a goddamn pain,” Frank says, “but you’re a good person. A good uncle. A rock for Prue.”
“That’s an overstatement.”
“You have a profession. More than that: a career. Enough fire in your belly left to still piss yourself off. Me?” He laughs ruefully, then gazes out the windshield—at the dumpster, or the elm behind it.
“Hell,” he mutters. For a moment I am afraid he will start ranting again. But then he says, “I have no vocation. I don’t even have a cause.”
He opens his door, catching his sleeve on the lock. I reach over and pull it free.
“It’s a good thing we’re not cut from the same cloth,” he adds. “For your sake.”
Thirteen
I had forgotten about the flowers. They smell even stronger now than they did this morning, after stewing all day in the artificial heat.
“You trying to tell me I should become a gardener, Frank?” I say, locking the back door and flipping on the lights. “Because now I have no choice.”
He chuckles. As I hang up our coats a rustling sounds from deeper in the house. I think I have imagined it, but then Prue strides into the kitchen, her expression fixed and dark. She must have been in here all along, I realize with horror, as she slips past Frank and angles toward me. I have the presence of mind to step back, turning slightly. While I had been ready for a smack, I am too stunned to feel either disappointment or relief as, stumbling over one of Frank’s discarded boots, she reaches out and takes me in her arms.
“Walt mentioned you were hurt,” she says, drawing back to inspect my cheek. “Here, come.”
Still ignoring Frank, she leads me into the bathroom. Behind her body I see him shuffle down the hallway, toward the guest room. Then she closes the door with her foot.
“It’s pretty bad.” She sits me down on the lip of the tub, crouching before me. “But I don’t think you need stitches. Let me just . . .”
She presses the skin beside the wound, and I flinch. She apologizes, and then lifts her hand up to the light. On the pad of her finger, moored by blood, is a splinter of glass.
“Hold on.” She flicks it into the trash and then opens the medicine cabinet. She is wearing the silver pendant I bought her years ago, shaped like a wishbone, and her lavender fleece. Her phone is wedged into the pocket of her tight white jeans. As she rises on tiptoe to reach the highest shelf, I feel an erection coming on, despite everything.
She locates a pair of tweezers, swabs them with hydrogen peroxide, and then picks another shard out of my cheek. I wince again. As she murmurs her sympathy, echoes of our invective come hurtling back to me like shrapnel: the bravest thing about you . . . the only thing we have going for us . . . crazier than your father. Long ago, quoting a former teacher of hers during one of the marathon phone calls we had while she was on her Fulbright, she had described love as the act of teaching another person how to wound you most, and then agreeing tacitly never to do so. You fail, of course, she had added. It’s Chekhov’s law: the planted weapon has to fire. I asked her how she planned to do me in, when the time came, which was an early way of saying that I loved her. I don’t remember what she said. I promised to throw at least one plate.
“I am so sorry,” I say, as she smooths a bandage over my cheekbone.
“It’s not your fault he went mental.”
About our argument, I meant, but I do not correct her. Instead I tilt my forehead against her chest, inhaling her scent. Maybe this was all we had needed: a disaster to eclipse our own. As she strokes my back I close my eyes, allowing myself the facile thought that everything is relative, even catastrophe.
“In a way this isn’t the worst thing in the world,” she says. “Given that nothing irreversible happened. He needed a wake-up call. A stint in inpatient will do him good, I think.”
I nod against her. Then I say, “I’m sorry about last night.”
She sits back on her heels and sighs.
“It was pathetic to blow up at you like that,” I continue. “Especially after your dad’s—”
“Stop.” She presses a finger to my lips. Then she says, with a mix of awe and consternation, “You really outdid yourself today.”
She scrolls down my bottom lip, and I realize that she is referring to the flowers. My stomach flips. Yes, they really ought to have come from me.
“You never do things like that,” she says. Then she leans forward and kisses me—softly at first, and then purposefully—like she hasn’t kissed me in weeks.
I have to tell her, I think. She must sense as much, because she pulls back and studies me. Then she scratches at something on the underside of my jaw, blowing the powdery remnants—dried shaving cream, it must have been—off her fingernail.
“I miss you,” I hear myself say. “I missed you today, I mean.”
She makes a sound—half laugh, half sigh—and then kisses me again, almost angrily, her teeth scraping my lip.
I’ll tell her tomorrow, I think, like a perfect idiot. It will be too late by then. I have no choice but to stop her. But I don’t stop her, and before I know it we are making love.
I have lifted her up onto the sink, pulling her underwear to one side. As she arches her back the chain of extra links on her necklace swings back and forth, grazing the top of her spine. She moans, but in a canned way that makes me wonder with horror whether she is faking it. I draw back to find her eyes shut, her head tipped back against the mirror, patchy with my breath. I am still inside her, but we might as well be on separate continents. I try another tack, hissing her favorite obscenities, and soon enough her climax comes in four intensifying waves. She gasps, and I have to bury my face in her neck to keep from crying out as I give myself to her.
“I’m going to shower in here,” she says. By the edge in her voice I can tell we have mended nothing.
She steps away from me onto the bath mat, wiping the inside of her thigh. “Can you bring me some fresh clothes?”
I fetch them for her, and then draw a searing bath that does nothing to make me feel cleansed. When I emerge she is still in the hall bathroom, though the roar of the water has gone quiet. I linger by the door, listening. No sound comes from inside.
“P?”
“I’ll be right out,” she says, too loudly.
I lean my head against the wall, toeing the strip of light where the bathroom tile meets the hall carpet. Then I say, “Can I heat up some food for you?”
“I’m fine.” The sink faucet turns on. She adds, over the noise: “I had a late lunch with Daora.”
They must have reconciled, then. I wander down the hall to check on Frank, feeling the familiar melancholy tug that follows reminders of the full life she leads independently of me—her other attachments, connections—and find him curled up in bed, his blinds drawn.
When I whisper his name, he doesn’t move. He must be sleeping then, or pretending to, even though it is hardly past suppertime. Closing his door softly, I feed Rex, and then eat half a rotisserie chicken, letting the radio dull my thoughts. Already the memory of Frank’s eruption is losing its patina, the crime itself seeming more absurd than barbaric. As the news segment yields to ads I think of the aquarium, its galleries dark, and of the life in its walls: the sharks moving silently behind the massive pane, its crack no more menacing than lichen.
* * *
—
PRUE IS ASLEEP by the time I reenter the bedroom and brush my teeth, but she has left the light on. Dalton’s novel is tented on her chest.
A lock of hair has fallen across her nose and mouth, hewing to her lips with each intake of breath. Without touching her, I lift it up and lay it ba
ck across her pillow. Then I pick up the book.
There he is on the jacket, looking debonair as ever. City lights gleam at his back, and he is gazing into the camera, a smirk playing at his mouth as though he shares some secret with me. I wait for the twist of annoyance, but feel only exhaustion, mingled with guilt. The man could be gifted, for all I know. And so I flip to a page near the beginning, which Prue has dog-eared.
She must still love him, she thought, because she loved his qualities. They hadn’t changed. She almost never wished they would, and when she did she retracted the thought, or replaced it with a memory of when things had felt natural between them. She handled them lightly, these memories, taking care not to dwell on them too long. If she did, she might notice in one of them a flaw, or flatness, a detail successfully forgotten, that if remembered would disqualify the memory, throw the whole scene out of key.
One day her confusion had resolved itself into a sentence which, despite its initial shock, had calmed her. It came to her loudest when he climbed into bed, or when the lights of his approaching car swung across the kitchen wall. She learned gradually to keep it at bay, the sentence, but all the same it had become a kind of anthem.
He made her sad. That was the sentence. It was so simple she had almost laughed aloud when it first came to her. A sentence as humble as that—four words, four syllables—must have a cure. There was another sentence, after all, with which it coexisted: She loved him. It was all a matter of uniting the two sentences, she thought, of finding the right conjunction. She tried them out: He made her sad but she loved him; he made her sad because she loved him; she loved him although he made her sad.
Perhaps they had simply become too adept at playing the roles they had created for each other, she thought. Perhaps that was all: they had grown tired of the roles. She tried to think of a way to say this, without sounding harsh or unhappy, and could not. The roles had been traded in silence. Besides, she was no longer sure of the margin between herself and the character she assumed with him, of whether such a margin still existed.
The Study of Animal Languages Page 13
