Blood Acre

by Peter Landesman

  The bar stools have emptied. Though a bar never seems to sleep, Claire believes, it should never be so deserted, or so quiet, or the bottles so straight, so ready. A bar empty and quiet seems to her too much the terminal abode.

  As if to prove her point, on the other side of the frosted glass a bulky shadow-figure is raising and lowering its arms in the streetlight, and Claire rubs a new circle in the window to find a man and a woman on the sidewalk, kept upright only by their attachment at their hips. The man, stone sober, has descended, Claire sees, into a black mood. The woman, caving a little, bumps her head on the glass at Claire's fingers, as though seeking her blessing or absolution. The man props her and looks up, pleading with Claire for a loyalty that once had to do with the great history of drinking and drunks. But Claire pulls back and is already looking beyond, angrily peering into a circle of spotlit snow beneath a distant streetlamp, as if at particular moments of Nathan's secret life strolling down the street before her.

  What it had become with Nathan was primarily an arrangement of recognitions, a series of checkpoints at which Claire had reassured herself that she could, like him, act without loyalty to a thing. Nathan, she'd assumed, would be vastly different. The others she'd known before they introduced themselves. They were always big and thickly muscled and confessional, and she knew them in her father and her three brothers and every one of the men at her small southern college. She knew what car they drove and at what escalatored and potted-planted mall they bought their records, how they would kiss and how they would make love to her and what they would say about it and her and themselves afterward. Initially, about Nathan, she'd thought she'd known nothing. Not his order of things, not the ritual before or after, his foreign but still obviously male conceit. She did not know what to do when he first met her in her small law school dorm room and undressed before her, this Jew, the head of his cock unsheathed. Though he was not, her southern-belle mother had agreed, a jewy Jew, hook nose and all; he almost could have passed for one of their own. Nor did Claire know what to do when she was liking it and the sex was not, after all, very much like what she had had before. Nathan was forceful and investigative. The others had always been effusive, tender before, absent afterward, but ultimately unintelligent.

  Still, every morning after a night with him, she woke breathing heavily, with Nathan breathing heavily beside her. She closed her eyes again and found herself trying too hard to sleep; not because she did not want to be tired the next day but because in the morning she felt fear, fear of being awake at dawn, the dust taking flight, the vodka still sharp in her head, the light slowly revealing Nathan encircled in her arms.

  Then Claire made her discovery.

  Outside of her, it seemed, Nathan had a favorite brand. Marlboros or Camels. Coke or Pepsi. Caucasian, black. Nathan's was Latina. It was like an aspiration. It had become a joke among Nathan's law school friends, to whom he had always brought his women for their stamp of approval, their clubby endorsement, that until Claire every one of his dates had fit a precise mold. Each of them had been extraordinarily, unusually beautiful, each finely done up, and each a young mother, a mother before twenty, before they left Honduras, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Colombia. Not merely Latina but a specific Latina subspecies: tall, athletically lean; light skinned, a shade darker than a Spaniard, say, or an Egyptian; and tightly sealed in a thin cotton shift or leather dress that left nothing to the imagination. As though Nathan had laid the outfits out on the bed. As though he had a closet full of little black dresses. And his family, Nathan's family, even his friends, Claire's friends, they'd all been complicit. All of them-even I, Claire thinks, we accepted our role, took it on, as it were-over time we became Nathan's accomplices.

  Claire shifts uneasily on her stool. We were his bait. His foreplay.

  Of course, Maria was disarming. Claire, actually bringing herself to follow him, saw her once from a distance. She possessed a quick tongue, Claire could tell. And she wore-well, practically nothing. A little black leather something, an afterthought. You looked everywhere. It would have been impolite not to.

  After that, Nathan himself became a pattern. Claire discovered that she did after all know his lines ahead of time and found herself moving her mouth with them in the dark: also that she knew by heart his strategy in lovemaking and had found herself lying in wait in certain positions of her own. She became aware of him acting with the usual bravado of a man with all the cards. It crossed her mind that perhaps all that time she had been employed as a pontoon bridge, and that Nathan and his immigrant mistresses had been communicating across her span, exchanging goods, finding little understandings with which to build treaties of further, deeper understandings. This is how cultures self-destruct, she thought to herself, fuck by fuck.

  On the other hand, she was free. Gone was any fear she might have secretly harbored that Nathan would show himself to be remarkable. Sometimes, with him, she had forgotten many times through the night that she was even with a man, and after a while had been only thinly conscious of being shaken by some hands, not knowing whose they were until the light came on and she recognized the fingers clawing her belly. She might leave those hands tonight, or next year, it would not matter. She knew she could, and would, go anywhere. The world was now clear, a transparent plain on which she would ride free from turbulence, from geographical seams. What had bound her was her illusion of another, more perfect, world. But now Claire was free from all that. Nathan had seen to it. She was freer than anything. She felt as capable of cutting through lies as walking through air.

  Her last night with him, five years ago, Claire waited atop their bedspread with her back against the wall, feet extended. Her red hair was pulled back tight, her throat forward, damp, the creases faintly lined with grease. Their wedding, a myth until the invitations arrived that day in a box from the printer, was taking shape somewhere without them. Claire-her small, elegant features now undone-wore the look of the deeply pious who had jumped ship.

  Nathan took off his jacket and sat at the edge of the bed, knees apart, tie loosened. Claire stood. Mosquitoes, having fought their way here through the smog, had been waiting and drew to her face. She ducked slightly, raising her arms, and pulled off her dress, letting it drop at her feet. She rose now out of the faded material, her arms and neck and face bronzed, the rest illuminated pale blue sunlessness. She reached and switched off the bedside lamp. The mattress sank beneath her. Nathan collided with her knees. She lifted her legs. He fell to her side and began to caress her face. "No," she said, and pried at him and slid under. Nathan began to kiss his way downward. "No!" she cried, and pulled him on top of her. She felt his lips against hers. She very nearly softened and opened, but then his sourness-his, the others', Maria's- appalled her and she turned and stiffened. Nathan, having given over to her demand, began the stale, anonymous thrusting. He hardly breathed. They themselves made no sound. The bed jousted beneath them. Their hands did not touch.

  In the morning she woke not only fearful but also perspiring. She closed her eyes again and found herself trying hard not to think, and she sat up. Nathan slept beside her, one hand between his chubby thighs. He too was sweating, the dampness had already reached her through the sheets. Carefully, insistently, brown dawn came. The street, the cars outside, the floor and tables and chairs, her hands, everything a shade of brown. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway began its morning whine. The monstrous boats rusting in the harbor.

  Claire cradled her belly. She began to murmur to it. She was pregnant with Nathan's child. About to marry a man already emotionally gone. She'd bring it to term, though. She'd have that. From Nathan now she wanted nothing else. And he was gone, with no more than his usual lukewarm whimper of protest.

  He has come by the apartment for the dog. A tree-lined street, the leafless gloom. Pale window light falls across the walks like trap doors in the snow, ways out to sunnier, warmer times. Hugging himself he hesitates at the stoop, looking up to the address in confusion. He has been giving out
a street address on scraps of paper, corners of envelopes, the backs of business cards for years, We should get together, hear some jazz, grab a bite to eat, drink a drink, the address in the East Eighties. This is West Ninth. He brings out a ring as big around as a janitor's, sprouting dozens of keys. They all look alike, apartment keys, office keys, security door, doorknob, dead bolt, various other drawers, cabinets and bus terminal lockers what holes they fit he can't remember. But he can t de-ring yet. Something might catch up to him, something, anyway, that might need opening. Trying one key then the other he works expertly, glancing up and down the street, as though he is breaking in, until the lobby door gives and he hesitates in surprise and lifts his head to the sound of forgotten doors opening on the hallways of old addresses and slamming closed one by one. A stack of mail bearing his name has toppled across the lobby table. He eyes it cautiously and picks at it here and there, all of it official,

  credit bureaus, law firms, department of parking violations, the office of the United States Marshal. Two pieces of overnighted mail signed for by a neighbor he has never met. The postmarks go back weeks, but that doesn't tell him when he was last here. He could have left the mail three weeks ago, two weeks ago, last week, yesterday. As he leaves it now.

  Inside his first-floor door, a tropical warmth. The radiators knock and hiss. His entrance has set off a commotion at the far end of the apartment. An English pointer takes a wide corner at full gallop and is upon him, all tongue and breath and claw and raw, impolite power. Nathan kneels and presents his face. The dog braces itself on Nathan's shoulders and Nathan struggles up and past, bowing and twisting away from the blows to the crotch and defending his jacket, dancing his way down the hall. "Baron, stop."

  The lights are on, every one, bedside, chandelier, the microwave is ajar a mug of coffee spotlit on the carousel. The sink blooms with waste, flower-stenciled dishes spilling onto both wings of the counter. In the bedroom there is no bureau. A single sock petrified by the heat seesaws on the radiator.

  "Get, Baron-away."

  His footsteps echo in the back room where a black leather easy chair is an island on an otherwise bare wooden floor. French doors letting out onto a small patio are flanked by a pair of mansized speakers. In the corner blinks the readout of multitiered controls, a solar system of green and red stars clustered in this one remote corner of Nathan's universe.

  He sits, sighs, aims the remote control once, fires, fires again. A muted horn leaks out of the speakers. The soft lick of a drum. Civilization strides in. The apartment phone rings but Nathan doesn't budge, as though it has been ringing all day-and it has, he knows; the solid red light on the answering machine tells him that the tape is full. The dog sulks by and sits shivering by the doors. How long has he been waiting? Nathan can smell it now, the reek of nervous waterings and clandestine shits. The dog turns his head, pleading out of the corners of his sad cue-ball eyes. Nathan is seated, and tired, but sighing he gets up with a wince and throws open the doors and stands there clutching the doorjamb. The dog circles his own old piles deodorized by frost, sniffing his way one to the other, connecting the dots, holding back his new batch for signs of an imaginary intruder. Looking out into the garden, Nathan remembers having taken this apartment for the exuberance of its growth, the little ordered rows of pachysandra and hyacinth, its brave stand against the perpetual shade between the buildings.

  The dog has sulked off against the back wall of the brownstone behind. He squats silent and without reflection in the dark, as though understanding how alone he really is.

  Nathan, meanwhile, has been observed. His neighbor, Mr. Somethingorother, shoveling snow at their common fence, peers at him with open disapproval. He is being silently condemned, Nathan sees, and feels hemmed in. Gone-long ago now-is his little vision of floral order. What else his neighbor must have seen-

  Barton. The neighbor's name is Barton.

  In the back room the now-familiar chirp of his cellular. Nathan recognizes the voice of someone he knows, faint among the other voices. He knows none, he knows them all, he can't decide. It doesn't seem to matter. He raises his own voice. "Isabel-found?"

  He must pack. A phone slams, but which? The dog pushes his way through Nathan's legs and Nathan closes the door and sits quickly in the chilled leather. He closes the phone, then his eyes, as another CD, another selection, wheels around. Here comes Chet Baker, singer and trumpeter, discovered not long ago in a puddle of his own bones and gristle at the base of his Amsterdam hotel, a dozen floors beneath his well-appointed room. Nathan feels a certain kinship with him, always has. The voice of an angel, the face of eternal boyhood, quiet and patient to the point of transparency. A living ghost. Those old standards about lost love slipping easily out of that throat. As if he really knew. Nathan had actually believed Baker a young woman the first time he heard him, he had that kind of sensitivity. Maybe that was the problem, Nathan wonders, for it was all a lie. Baker was all surface, his bewildered innocence, his wide-eyed sincerity. His arms pinched to hamburger by needles, his veins coursing with crank. Everything he did-even the music-to get laid and high, and his silky boyhood face cracked like a window into a web of fissures with his little pug nose in the middle like the thrown stone that brought it all down. Inside, he was rotting, contaminated by self-absorption and sloth. Like us all, Nathan thinks, the pressure from within building and building, what we really are pushing its way to daylight and leaking over our pretty faces.

  Nathan sags deeper into his chair. The millimeters pass like miles. Lovely Isabel floats by in her long red dress. Hey, sister. He found her competence in denying the obvious sympathetic, extraordinary even, worthy of applause. After all these years he'd taken it upon himself to tell her. So last night, on a whim, he asked her to take his extra seat at the opera, then dinner at Gambone's, then after the wine he took her to the New Haven to hear Eddie Young. Aged in the years since Nathan last saw him, Eddie Young stood in the colored haze flagging his fingers at the keys of his alto sax, working the changes through a competent Charlie Parker. The tight acorns of muscle throbbing in his cheeks and his throat leaping and the octave hammer sputtering like the top of a kettle come to boil, a hint of white froth at the corners of his mouth. In his presence Isabel, like everything else, receded behind an even greater tragedy, a more urgent memory.

  Once, years before, when Nathan was in law school, Eddie Young, playing after-hours at a lesser club, invited any in the audience to join him at the mike. Claire was sitting beside him. They were drinking heavily. And it was Claire who whispered in Nathan's ear that night to go on, here it is, what are you waiting for, and nudged him up. Nathan cinched his strap. The band patiently idled. The pianist flitted over the chords in a playful meander. Smoke swirled through the cones of those blinding lights, the dark beyond them in which his constituency stiffened halfway between approval and embarrassment. The gentle rebound of the keys beneath his fingertips, the heat and crescendo of the band. The bell of his saxophone swung out into the dark. Then the unlanguage and uncharted buzzing of the reed on his tongue. Eddie Young cocked his eye, as though he'd heard something small he liked. He stepped to the side and briefly roused the unseen home team with head-fakes, clapping the new phenom on. Then he clapped him quickly off, and there came Nathan's slow promenade around stands of bottles and glasses back to his seat where the vodka had gone tepid, where he heard himself murmur in Claire's ear that he really did love her, he really would marry her. Marry me, be my wife. "Someone to Watch Over Me," Chet Baker croons now, today, a man famous for watching over no one.

  Nathan's eyes sting. Sweat runs off his brow. At some point he has risen and-knees cold and weak-sat back down. Through the glass of the french doors, through his own reflection, he sees his neighbor, armed with his shovel, glaring away. Woozily, Nathan gets back on his feet. He digs his hands in his soaked pockets in a heroic attempt to appear nonchalant. But it is all in vain. He lurches forward, shattering the image he hoped to convey, a kind of lawyerly majesty
, peering out his windows, taking in the view, plotting his next point of order. Objection, objection! Barton scowls, and Nathan's eyes rendezvous with his neighbor's at Baron's latest deposit, a steamy green log set artfully atop a small mound freshly snowed, like a cairn showing the way. Across the little yard Nathan offers up an expression of profound surprise. Again, he drifts-

  "Who's the kid?" Isabel had asked last night.

  At the end of the New Haven's bar slouched a tow-headed youth of sixteen or seventeen. His body was a pubescent collection of lines and angles, his white hair as fine and feathery as a child's. Nathan noted the saxophone case between his knees.

  Nearing the end of "Cherokee," Eddie Young pulled up short. He twisted off Parker's finish with a riff of his own, then ceased mid-run, his saxophone in a pose, his quivering lips receding off the mouthpiece, teeth bared like a whinnying horse. Then Young nodded at the blond kid, who, without ceremony, took his case across his knees and assembled the saxophone with the trained, passionless calm of a sniper snapping together his weapon. He gave it a neck and a mouthpiece and hung it with its strap and, sucking on a reed, took three strides toward the band. Tedium and indifference had long ago veiled Isabel's cherub face. Really, was all she'd replied, unenthralled, when Nathan told her he used to play the saxophone. After that he ignored her. She, like the others, couldn't understand. Claire was the only one who cared about all that, who understood the perils of an abandoned dream. Why had he given up? Why is the sky blue? Why was it so hard to attempt, so simple to stumble, so terrifying to risk all that polluting ambition? Claire was the only one who urged him to play in the privacy of their apartment. To play, to do, to be anything, to keep playing and playing and playing-

  Nathan watches, watched, as Eddie Young brought the microphone up to the boy's saxophone, then bent to talk into it. "Here's a young man I'd like you all to know, ladies and gentlemen. This morning he won a contest at the Conservatory. I had the honor of being the judge of this contest and also the grand prize. The award was to come down here tonight and share this late gig before youall." He paused, then, extending an arm toward the boy: "Mr. Ernest Filch. Ladies and gentlemen. Ernie Filch."