Blood Acre

by Peter Landesman

  Santos finally sips at his coffee.

  "Did he ask about me?"

  He begins to answer but she turns from him. She has changed her mind; she doesn't, after all, want to hear the answer.

  A silver Chevrolet pulls up outside the window, in the mirror. Claire hears honking. She points a finger. "Isn't that your little friend? "

  Santos turns around. "Excuse me," he says, with his overbearing politeness, and heads for the door.

  "Errol-" When he turns around, she says, "I don't want to see him again. Nathan," she says, to clarify. "I don't want it to startall over."

  She watches him run into the street, ankle-deep in snow, leaning into the driver's window, his breath rising and twisting away in the wind. She remembers the first time she met him. Nathan had arranged it, of course, an evening with law school chums, to begin at Jackie's Topless. Ruth was there, and Oliver Schreck. The whole gang, of sorts. And next to the footlights sat Nathan and Errol, best of friends, so like adopted brothers, warriors in jeans and penny loafers without socks. Two chuckling cousins, she liked to imagine, who had pledged to run off to the strip club together at the height of the tedium of a family dinner but had never actually done so, until years had passed and their navels had grown to long gashes, and slapping high fives like middleschoolers at the varsity game they geared up the courage to flee after dessert. But they were in over their heads. It wasn't what they thought. The light was dingy and the men's room reeked and the unairbrushed girls were spotty with patches of cellulite and other minor glitches of construction. And later, they would slink into bed and with closed eyes and lax tongue wordlessly make love to their groggy women-Nathan to her, Errol to his young wife-kneading thigh and breast and puffing the right name, "Am I big enough, Am I big enough," but in their minds fucking against the men's room stall the sixteen-year-old stripper with pubescent tits and pristine mons who had leered at them repeatedly from the stage, shaking at them her cottoncandy promise until each dropped a twenty at her feet, after which she looked over not again, not ever, not even a mistaken glance-

  "I have to go," Santos says. He has returned out of breath.

  But Claire is unable to move. The roar of surf has returned to her ears. A little white road climbing and dropping, the tropical villages steadily passing. Their tin churches, signs in a language she never heard of-a kind of paradise.

  She blinks it away. "But you just got here."

  "I'm sorry."

  "They can't do it. You're off duty."

  He is fumbling with his coat, nervously squeezing his pockets."I don't know what's going on. I'll meet you later, back at your place. "

  She stills his hand. "Errol, are you okay?"

  He looks up. "They called me."

  "Why would they do that?"

  "They didn't say. That almost always means something, when you ask and they won't say."

  Claire, worried, arranges on her face a smile of certainty. "You worry too much. It's nothing." She searches up and down the bar. All signs of the crying baby have gone. "Check for me here when you get back."

  Santos slips out; the tail-lights of the car taking him away fade then turn a corner.

  It's nothing," Claire says again, this time to no one, not even herself.

  Back again at the middle window facing the harbor, she slides her free hand into the pocket of her jeans while in the competing reflections the wedding invitations she still remembers hover, blurred around the edges like a late-night commercial for romance, the same homemade paper with pressed flowers, the same florid print:

  Nathan Stein and Claire Proffitt

  request the pleasure of your company …

  That was six years ago. Nine years ago, Nathan's big victory for his father was an actual innocent man, a petty thief who had been manhandled by police who quarried up and inside him in search of cocaine-packed condoms. They had found nothing. They had the wrong apartment, the wrong man. An anonymous Dominican, an easy patsy. But Nathan, through the nights writing his opening and closing, drawing up lists and lists of questions for cross, ques tions for redirect, stirred the indignation of the court and the newspapers, untiI, like his father, he was more conductor than lawyer, inspiring articles and talk shows, making a martyr of his client, stumbling upon this image of himself as a desired man-a man actually desired for the right reasons. In Washington Heights, he was a hero.

  The attention eventually faded, Nathan had more work than he could handle, and he and Claire took the opportunity to run. He had had his heart set on Honduras, for reasons unclear to Claire at the time. That interminable ride to Tegucigalpa, a drive far outside that city to the home village of a client of Milton's, where in the mornings they were handed a glass container with the milk still warm. New York vanished. Milton's reach withdrew. Their walks were slow and endless and lovely. Outside the village, the grass chewed low made winding shapes between the goat tracks burned into hillsides. Straight young pine trees bisected the tops of the hills, a boundary separating some grass from other grass. By late afternoon a wind began, and the crisscrossing clouds piled up behind the hills. Days and days and days and all those young pines leaning into the wind, all that grass sighing at once.

  Their last afternoon, atop a hill, the clouds descended nearly to them. It was a Sunday, and they could hear church instruments calling and answering each other from four or five different corners of the village at once. Goats tore at the ground, children's shrieks and a dog's barking flew upward, circled, evaporated. Brown squares of garden and disks of small homes and circles, circles of women's heads and circles of swollen bellies of children wandering in circles, collecting wood, scrubbing, picking, always with something in their hands, a hoe, arcing high overhead in a half-circle and cutting into the corn. Older children with more circular baskets. Half-sober half-dressed shoeless men weaving along the banks of the brooks toward their semicircle of thatch roof in compounds swept and groomed by other hands and goats. Everything had geometry, everything in its place, in its order.

  The curtain of rain in the distance was already pounding some other place; it looked to be falling in surges, and Claire knew that the darker streaks must really have been something when they hit the mud.

  A drum beat had started up somewhere behind them, steadily, vaguely threatening. The air was unfocused, tenuous with a fragile peace bargained for by grand compromises. In the distance the rain crashed against the trees.

  Nathan pulled one of Claire's hands up to his mouth and bit on a knuckle, an opening, the sort of affection from him she'd dreamed of. She thought she'd lost it without having won it in the first place. Her forehead settled against his spine.

  The first spit of spray passed over them. The thunder was underfoot.

  "Claire," Nathan said, "we're going to get creamed." They were both twenty-six.

  By the hand she led Nathan to the line of pine trees that divided the grass and sat them down adamantly, as if she had prepared something particular to say. Nathan sat behind with her between his knees and braced them together.

  The grass on the hillside ripped, the trees knelt. Claire stiffened in Nathan's arms. Then it came in cold sheets, firmer than she expected, like soft wood. Nathan bent to her, but the press of his lips was lost in the weight of the rain. She reached up and pulled his head down to her, and against her ear his chest rose and fell, rose and fell, that side of his face, she felt, the only part of him that kept warm and dry.

  When the rain stopped the air was peculiar, empty of sound. Slowly the grass rearranged itself.

  She looked to him, his hair a wide dark curtain, face streaked and dripping. A thin veil seemed to drop between them, the feeling of a shared, rural peace, blurring for a moment her suspicions. Nathan hummed. She felt her heart melting.

  They skirted down the hill. It was dark then, with dusk this time, the spaces between the trees and the tops of the village roofs more and more blue. Their little shabby house loomed before them.

  Nathan tried to light a match f
or the cigarette he had somehow forgotten to put to his lips, but both were wet, and when he failed to light either he dropped them in the grass, and for a time they confronted each other like two enemy forts, mute, waiting-

  The hospital's lobby staff gives Nathan the impression not of paid workers but retirees on social security. The old black guard sitting half-on, half-off a high stool beside the turnstile, his fixed-smile demeanor, his uniform the formal-informal combination of chauffeur's cap and old gray cardigan. Up the elevator, in Nathan's hand always the same scrap of paper with the hospital's address and a room number. On the sixth floor a pail of water and a mop bar entrance to the nurses' station. The long green hallway is silent, two opposing rows of green doors as quiet as linen closets.

  Nathan stares wearily at the label outside 614. The name was there last night. It is there now. It might not be next time. That was what he thought yesterday. He thinks it again now: She's still there. Gone, a small harbored hope.

  He knocks lightly. No answer. He pauses, then begins to push. But hearing footsteps down the hall he turns his head sharply, catching a glimpse of the heel of a shoe, a dark trouser cuff, pulling into a doorway.

  Nathan watches, then walks through, "Jesus Christ," blinking, his nostrils flare against the reek: urine, ammonia, something else, something harder to take. A trash can blooms, soiled paper towels, latex gloves, a crusty syringe. A half-filled bedpan in the sink, the remains of her dirt, listing in a greenish muddy puddle. He is intimate with her shit by now.

  But Nathan stands a moment in confusion. He looks at the bedpan, again at the bed. Emaciated, her hair thin and greasy, unwashed for weeks it seems, this woman is not who he expected, no Washington Heights beauty queen stopping traffic on the dance floor of Limelight, but a kind of dishwater blonde, moneyed Upper West Side material. Admiring the chiseled bone structure of the face-yes, Columbus Avenue, linen pants, Museum Cafe now betrayed and plunged into an old woman's crusty death. She stares ahead at the air but does not see it, as though she is asleep or fixed in a trance, perhaps already dead, though her eyes have not gone to stones.

  He yanks aside the edge of the bisecting curtain and faces a bank of windows purpling with the twilight. In the office across the street many of the windows are actually alight, whole offices of little desks and drafting tables at which little people sit beneath banker's lamps, flanked by cartons of Chinese food. He steps to the foot of the other gurney where, superimposed on all the deadlines and ambition in the window, stands a transclucent replica of himself haloed by the bright gauze of the curtain behind him.

  Once, Nathan was beautiful. He can still remember when he was approached at parties or on the street by someone claiming to work for a modeling agency. Have you ever thought about becoming a model, you'd be great, couple you with some yuppie mom on one of those sun-splashed solarium porches, full page in the New York Times Magazine, a killer wife on your arm, smoking Kools. Or no, a lanky blonde piggybacking, you're laughing so hard having that dreamily great time plastered across bus stop billboards, catching them all over Broadway with those baby blues of yours or are they green? Or Land's End, at the edge of a pier, that dimpled chin of yours, khakis yes, sandals, the water, you like the beach? You ever go to the beach?

  The beach. Yes, he likes the beach.

  Once he'd actually called the number on the card. He'd had a feeling about her. He'd mentioned he liked opera so she'd suggested Sfuzzi's, across from Lincoln Center. She was waiting at the end of the bar. Long dark hair and a tight black skirt an inch beyond mere allusion and into the region of out-and-out promise. She moved fluidly between subjects. His subjects, what he did, when he did it. Depositions. Trials. She was most curious-fascinated really-about those conjugal visits at Rikers Island she read about in The New Yorker. How does a murderer fuck, do you think? Is he sensitive and generous, does he wait for her, or possibly remorseful? Or does he do it like he wants to kill her? She led him back to her apartment through the snow. There had been no talk of cigarettes or Land's End. She didn't bring up her agency, the subject of his modeling never arose, and before she asked him up to her place it crossed his mind that the feeling he'd had about her was correct. It amused him. He said yes, coffee, fine, a drink, a drink better yet. Why not? he thought. It was a benign sort of trick, the sort he might have played himself.

  Within fifteen minutes she'd flung down the Murphy bed with one hand while undressing with the other in a minimal and practiced show of effort. She was all fun, paper-thin, loud, an exhibitionist. He half thought she'd ask him to show her how they did it in jail. As if you'd know, she'd say. And he did. And he kept thinking she wouldn't like it. And thinking, too, about her neighbors on the other side of the wall. How many of her climaxes had they heard over the years, scorecards on the table, that one, that one, no way, faked that one for sure. He'd call again, he said, later, smiling at the door, buttoning his coat with one hand, waving with the other in his own show of minimal and practiced effort. She was expert at saying hello. Nathan the good-bye artist. Even before the doorman let him out he'd forgotten her.

  "Nathan"-said with neither surprise nor pleasure.

  Maria has been watching him. Maybe watching this, this very thing about the good looks with which he knows he has swindled even her. And maybe she is thinking the same thing he is: What a shame. What a waste.

  She waves her scabby lips, shriveled fruit. Her cheeks, Nathan sees, are no longer sunken. There is nothing left to sink, or give. She is picked clean: her eye sockets, protruding through the skin as though they lie atop it, make with the bridge of her nose the figure of a cross. Beneath the covers the body is dissolved, without contours, hardly a ripple across the surface of the blanket. They've cut her hair since yesterday. It is shorn unevenly, mere tufts in places, the scalp bared in others, like a sheep's. It gives Nathan the impression that she has been hurried along an assembly line into some sort of institution, prison, concentration camp during an epidemic of lice; that there are many more just like her on the other side of the walls, others up and down the long corridors, in the wards above and below, shorn and freshly disinfected; and that these people are not ill but mad, the criminally insane. Maria's hair gives Nathan the impression that she has gone bad.

  "Nathan." She speaks a full octave below her former voice, as though someone else is speaking for her, a heavy smoker, a whiskey-voiced transvestite, someone who is really expecting him. Maybe-it does actually cross his mind-someone he deserves.

  A skeletal arm drops out of her blanket and motions toward the chair at the foot of her bed.

  Who have you told that I'm here?" Nathan hangs his head.

  “You are no good, Nathan. Though your friends love you. Ruth was here today. Somehow she knew."

  Nathan, alarmed, checks his watch. "Today?"

  Maria's cracked lips part, in a smile, Nathan supposes, but the effect is monstrous, a demonic sneer. "And I love you. But you are no good now. I'll tell you what has happened. You've become just like your father. When you were fat I couldn't tell you apart. I used to think that you'd crawled inside his body. You laugh. Look at you, laughing. You made fun of him your whole life, the things you said about him, but now look. You waited your whole life to be something else but you never were anything but him. Did you tell anyone, Nathan? Does anyone know I'm here?"

  Nathan shuts his eyes. He has been going around without her for more than a year, bringing along with his bottles of wine his new excuses: Maria has to stay late at work; Benny is sick; Maria's mother is not well. When is it that he thinks up these lies? Even he doesn't know. Does he conceive of them over time, making certain they are enough unlike the ones preceding; or do they come to him while he stands at the front door, ringing the bell, spontaneously, randomly coming to him, and he is merely lucky the lie is different enough, for it is, all the lies are different enough. Or is he so practiced at producing excuses that they merely fly out of his mouth via a direct conduit between his lips and the lying part of his brain?
<
br />   Maria doesn't come, can't, won't, won't ever again. And by the way, didn't I tell you? She is dying.

  The world is not that gullible. It is merely too afraid to insist.

  "I am dying."

  "Yes," he says.

  “Yes.”

  Yes. Nathan traces the sweaty creep diagonally across the base of his neck. As though he has said not yes but guilty, as though he is giving it again, in case she didn't believe it the first time, her verdict: guilty.

  Maria lets her head drop toward the window and the office building across the way. "They're always watching," she says dreamily. "You don't know. They send signals."

  Nathan sighs, then leans forward, solicitous. "What do the signals say?"

  "That they're going to kill me."

  "They look too busy."

  "There is an aerobics class on one of those floors."

  "Tuesday and Thursday nights."

  "And don't you love that," Maria scolds.

  "I was only kid-"

  "Young girls shaking their tits at me in the window. They want me to die."

  I'm sorry.

  We'll be happy.

  Nathan says neither of these things.

  A light comes to her face, a union between stillness and sweatsheen and the dingy blue light. Her lips harden and curl. Eyelids flutter, pupils capsize, as blank now as a marble statue's. Beneath the blanket she brings her feet together and lifts the jagged knobs of her knees. Her arms lift, her head turns, and her eyes, rolling and rolling, now return, staring with electric certainty at the drab gray wall. Stilling, breathing quietly, she doesn't move until her position hardens over the long seconds into a Christ-like pose. Nathan half stands, seeing not Maria but something using her, inhabiting her body, again that thing that awaits him, too. Dementia. Sign of last days.

  Up Nathan goes, looking away, taking a wide berth around Maria's outstretched arm, reaching for the phone. He dials, lifts his wristwatch and counts to fifteen. This is a nifty thing he's learned. His own 900-number charging $99.99 a call for nothing. He wanders the city, using phones at offices, at friends', calling himself, holding on for the required fifteen seconds, and hanging up. Most offices will miss the calls, not enough digits to stop the eye. A hundred bucks a pop, he can make what, twenty grand, forty, before someone catches on, before he's long, long gone. It is horrible, he knows. Horrible, especially, here.