Blood Acre

by Peter Landesman

  "I can’t do what I used to do."

  "Yes.”

  "But, Claire-"

  "I don't expect you to. I know it will be hard."

  "But we could be happy, couldn't we?"

  "Yes," Claire says. "We could be happy."

  – and far across the ocean, the little bungalow, the unseen roar of surf beating the sand, the strong clean onshore wind-all of it waiting-

  It is six in the morning. The thunderclaps above, and the thunderclaps just beneath the surface of his skull. And yes, that is Errol Santos's Chevrolet parked out front.

  Nathan tries to send back his confusion like a bad meal but he can't. Blinking, he stretches his legs, slowly focusing on the readout display of his beeper, fourteen messages: New York Times… Doctor E … Errol Santos … New York Post … Errol Santos… Errol Santos … it goes on, but he doesn't, he can't, he aims the beeper at Baron, who is sitting upright in the passenger seat beside him. "What do you think? Staying silent, I see. Of course, you're right, as always." Clipping the beeper safely to his belt, Nathan presses thumb and forefinger, his messages flying off to wherever they fly, to message heaven, the graveyard of electronically snubbed pleas and particles of undesired need. His memory now clear, he slips in a CD, Ben Webster and "Soulville," slow and heavy as a dirge, recasting the gray day as a blue idea. Now he knows where this day is going, how it ends. And it will end, it must.

  The dog's eyes, meanwhile, are following some distraction outside the window: the red sedan, drifting slowly down the street between the rows of motionless cars. Its windows have fogged, but Nathan can make out the father-and-son shapes of the driver and passenger sipping at paper cups of coffee, struggling with wrapped doughnuts. Blurry-eyed-they must be tired-they pass on, slowing as they drive by Claire's. One seems to be peering into Errol's car and writing something down. Then they drift away, turn the corner, satisfied for the moment, it seems, to have merely taken the temperature of the situation.

  Quickly Nathan lifts his head. The living room curtain has fallen. Or has it? Maybe it was a draft? He remembers old number 11, those big windows with their shaky panes and chalky glazing; the breath of the day threading through, hot or cold, even in the stillest weather. But the curtain settles, and now Baron's behavior has begun to interest him. The dog has caught something-maybe a fly, hatched obviously in the warmth of the garaged car-but instead of swallowing, he seems to hold it on his tongue, playing it in his teeth, as if to present it to Nathan alive, fetched for the master to devour himself. Nathan feels a surge of paternal pride, and he is happy for his hunting dog, all that mass of purebred instinct finally coming to use. Utility. How that must feel.

  Nathan reaches over and gives the dog a good scratch behind the ears. Baron, his grimace easily mistaken for a smile, clamps his long teeth, jailing the insect, and swallows.

  Errol Santos is standing in the doorway, squinting worriedly upward, hugging himself against the cold. Halfway down the stoop he picks up Claire's Times, unfolds it, then, obviously seeing something he doesn't like, releases it, dropping it in the snow. Nathan watches him drive away as his own little cube of environment swells with a throaty ballad and the tall-lights on the Chevrolet recede to mere punctuations in the early morning.

  Baron, whimpering now punches at the glass, ripping loose squeals and farts. Nathan opens his door and the dog hurdles him, bolts into the day, snout to its first solid ground in ten hours. Proudly, he lifts his leg and pisses a hard stream across the driver door. "Jesus christ," Nathan moans, then snatches the dog by the collar and drags him to a dead tree stump where he prances reluctantly, as though with something else in mind. Sad and self-conscious, Baron eyes Nathan, who obligingly turns as the dog squats, strains, and finishes up with a little downward dab. Nathan stands peering at the steaming, gleaming pile, obsessing on it like a drunk, then kicks it under the wheel of the next car, dragging the toe of his shoe along the sidewalk. "In," he cornmands, pointing the way toward the open car door.

  A little wobbly but steady on his feet, following the faint blue shadow the light behind him casts down on the walk, Nathan heads for Claire's door. He shakes the paper free of the snow. There on the front page of the Metro section, just beneath the fold, is Isabel, Isabel young and silly, not the Isabel he knows. A three-inch column continues inside deep alongside the seam separating Sports from National Weather where beach volleyball is the new rage and the Yankees are contemplating an off-season deal and a quadriplegic ex-lineman for the jets preaches legislation against licensed aggression. Then Nathan's eyes flit across his own name, his father's, Errol Santos's. He turns the page where a kidnap victim demands retribution. Meanwhile, in Croatia. Meanwhile, at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center where the Riverside Drive jogger. In Mexico City, meanwhile. Meanwhile, Nathan doesn't fold the paper but rolls it into a tube, panicky, he pats himself down for his phone, flipping it open and presses buttons. Messages, messages, where did they go? Tell me I am alive. Tell me I will live.

  Halfway to calling his own 900 number he disconnects. How strange that would be, to be billed a hundred dollars by none other than yourself. Whom would you owe? Whom would you pay? And if you didn't? If you ignored the billing, as you always do, driving it to the brink, waiting for the collection agencies to send the registered letter, to serve the subpoena-could you be defendant and plaintiff in the same case, Stein vs. Stein, in which the defendant, Nathaniel Stein, rightfully billed $99.99 for the legitimate use of phone number 1-900-945-5343, commonly known as 1-900-W-I-L-L-D-I-E, owes owner of said number, Nathaniel Stein? So fine. He's making, what, twenty grand, forty? He can afford to be merciful just this one time, let himself off the hook, forgive the debt.

  A single clap of thunder explodes midair just behind, over the river. The slate beneath Nathan's feet gives a little jolt. Holding out his hand for the rain, he peers up at a sea-green sky. Smears of black smoke descend behind the buildings.

  The heavy, well-oiled door still makes no noise as it swings open. Unhurriedly, meticulously, Nathan lifts his face to Claire, who is cinching tight a robe he remembers from winters past. She looks radiant, youthful, even angelic. Though not stunning. Those slightly jumbled teeth, a flaw that always gave her imperious beauty its vulnerability, a way in. The long red hair wispy and electric. Nothing has abandoned her over the years, not her simple hairdo, not the crimp in the corners of a mouth that still seems ready in equal measure to smile or frown.

  "Don't look at me like that," she says.

  "I'm sorry."

  Claire lifts her head with wonder up to the spindly trees. "I don't think I ever heard you say that."

  "Yes, you did. I just didn't mean it."

  She hesitates but he makes no move. He and his little blast of honesty have confused her.

  She holds out her hand: "My paper?"

  Nathan tosses it into a trash can. "Everything's terrible. You wouldn't want to know. Surprised to see me?"

  But Claire just stares. She's sniffed out danger, poised to leap. That long body, perfectly still-she's all kinetic potential.

  Trying to calm her, Nathan replies with that particular smile of his, the one that can agree with you or fight you, depending on the depth of your disbelief.

  She sighs wearily, and her free hand, palm upward, involuntarily indicates the air, as if in irritation, or an unconscious plea. "No," she says. "I'm not surprised. Nothing you do would surprise me. You just missed Errol."

  "I'm sorry."

  "There it is again."

  "But I saw him last night," Nathan says.

  "Did you. He said afternoon. He didn't mention anything about last night."

  Another explosion, double, nearer. Black clouds like swarms of bees crisscross at a low elevation.

  "They're saying it's going to be the storm of the century," she says. "You'd better come in."

  Claire leans into the trash and picks out the paper, then heads with it into the dark of the hallway, leaving the door open behind her.

&nbs
p; Inside, at the sudden change in temperature, the shift in pressure, every nook in the apartment nudges a remembered cranny in his brain; every chink in the wall snags on the irregularities in his mind. But willfully he won't remember, until he sits at the old table and runs a finger along its worn edge. "We used to love these early mornings," he says. His voice, though not his hand, is steady now. But feeling something on his tongue he wouldn't like to actually say, he swallows hard, tamping it back down.

  She is staring at the paper. "You never think these things happen to someone you know."

  "Which thing?"

  Claire's eyes widen with alarm. "But you know, don't you?"

  "The Riverside jogger?"

  “-dead, Nathan. They found her, Isabel, out on-"

  "Yes."

  "Have you spoken with Errol? Yes, of course, yesterday afternoon." Claire looks down at him. "What happened to your hand?"

  He covers one with the other, though that one is no better. The bites have become infected, damp. "I was fixing a flat."

  "You? That's likely. What was her name?"

  Nathan focuses on a kitchen window across the little yard, the back of the next block of brownstones. He used to watch the tenant here, a hugely fat man, leaning into the sauces steaming on the stove.

  "By the way, Errol was wrong," Claire says. "You look terrible. Did I say that yet?"

  She says it not to him but to the window, at his reflection superimposed on the fat man's building. As though the distance the glass grants them provides a vacuum of time, making him harmless, unthreatening-someone else, out of reach. And she is right, he sees. He looks awful: sallow, his lips bluish, the hollows below his cheek bones, once sculpted, sunk to divots.

  "But you look good," he says.

  "What do you want, Nathan?"

  "I was in the neighborhood."

  "At six in the morning?"

  "Is that what time it is?"

  "You look so tired," she says in a voice near a whisper. Sitting beside him, her hands falling away, into her lap, she is still addressing his reflection: "You look so tired. I was going to fax you, actually. Until this thing with Isabel. I just thought you should know, I took one of your cases."

  "Regina Nunez," he says flatly.

  "So she's already fired you. Good for her. Maybe she's not as stupid as-"

  "I saw her last night."

  "Well, don't do that again. She needs help. She doesn't need you. She's about to give birth, Nathan. Or didn't you notice? You've abandoned her. You've missed her court dates."

  "Abandoned her?"

  "What else would you call it?"

  "I'm going to help her," he says.

  Laughing, she shakes out her hair. "You and your delusions."

  The phone interrupts and Claire, startled, is on her feet before the first ring falls out of the air.

  "Why don't you let the machine get it," he says. "That's what they're for."

  "That's not what they're for, Nathan," she says, and then before she can stop herself: "You never answered the phone. God forbid you ever did without screening it or making me, running across the room drawing your finger across your throat, whispering, I'm not home, I'm not home, without even knowing who it was." She pauses, blushing. "God forbid you got lassoed into something you couldn't control."

  Nathan gazes at her, at the conversation exactly as it was left years ago. Its preservation is a biological condition, he assumes, an instinct to keep us from returning to old used lovers again and again across eternity. Across all the time and the silence Claire has not stopped piling on the complaints and Nathan has not stopped slithering out from under them. "Who is it this early?"

  But Claire is having none of it, heading already into the silence that has followed another ring, standing across the room over the phone, waiting. "It's none of your business. You don't live here anymore, remember? Hello-?"

  Nathan, his hands together in that same attitude of prayer, remembers.

  Her back turned, Claire's hands cup the mouthpiece. She is mumbling, but she does nod her head, once, turning obliquely to the wall, Nathan assumes, to keep him there, in peripheral view.

  "Yes," Claire is saying, holding tight to the phone one beat longer than she should. As though afraid of floating off.

  "Who was that?"

  Again addressing his reflection, his ghost, transparent, half gone. "Nobody. Work."

  "Errol."

  "No. He's got more important things-"

  "Maria is dead," Nathan says. "I thought you should know."

  Claire is looking at him, finally, Nathan in the flesh. Her pale eyes, bottomless, little circles of reflected sky, examining, rationing attention in measured doses. "You mean Isabel."

  "And Maria."

  "Jesus. What, am I next?" She gives a little laugh, then touches her mouth as if to rearrange it. "I'm sorry," she says flatly. "No, I'm really sorry. It's terrible. How, how did it happen?"

  Nathan has wrung a paper napkin to shreds. "It's complicated.

  "It's awful.

  He doesn't even believe she thinks that's true. “So where are you now?" Nathan knows that the question can be read a dozen ways; whichever road they travel will be her decision.

  “Sorry, but don't tell me this is all about tbat. This little visit. You're free now, you have what, some time? That you're here because Errol's left for work, because Maria's-"

  "I am going away,” he says, startling even himself. "I want-I’d like it if – ” The words roll off his tongue before he knows it, slipping out of him from he doesn't know where. Is it really true? He has no idea. As if he is caught in a continuum of possible emotions, from which he plucks the most fascinating without considering the consequences. First he tells a lie, then the lie tells a lie-

  “- if you came with me."

  “Don't joke."

  “This isn't a joke."

  “Of course it's not a joke."

  “I mean I'm not joking."

  They sit a moment in silence, both of them weighing the multitude of possible replies. Claire lifts the backs of her hands to her eyes.

  “I'm not talking about a vacation, Claire."

  "You want to run. You always wanted to run. Well, too bad."

  “Claire-"

  “Just hold on, Nathan. just please, all right? Just don't let's start with that curious tidbit."

  " Curious-?

  "Because you're a freak!" she sputters, clutching at her hair with one hand, pointing back at the silent phone with the other. As if news of his character had just come through it. "You sit here and it's years and years later. So Maria is dead now. And Isabel, God help her. And now here you are. Always after something new. But you forgot, Nathan, I'm not new anymore. Whatever you liked me for is what you ended up hating me for. You don't like me if I'm strong, you don't like me if I'm weak. You don't like me if I'm funny or if I'm sad. You don't like me if I'm ugly, you don't like me if I'm beautiful. You don't like me if I'm white, you certainly don't like me if I'm Hispanic."

  She tilts her head to the side, as if she sees she's hit the mark: "There's something wrong with you, isn't there. You look terrible. Is that what Ruth meant?"

  " Ruth? "

  But Claire is waving him away. "You haven't changed, Nathan. How can you stand it?"

  Mouth open, he can feel his face go numb, her anger like dentist's gas, shutting him down. Outside, traits of snowdust rip away from the roof and pass on the horizontal gusts. Somewhere down there, in the tiny plots of greenery, in some herb garden, wind chimes clang at regular intervals, as at the opening of a Catholic service, announcing-what? He doesn't know. He doesn't know what Catholics actually do. Something, he's sure. Something practical. He'd like to know.

  Leaning on one hip, Claire has been watching him. "So what are you going to do?"

  He looks confused. "Do?"

  "She has a son, remember? Doesn't-" She looks fearful. "Didn't Maria have a son? Don't you two have a child?"

  The boy's sweet pas
tiness rises to his eyes like a flash card, both sides -word and meaning-of a vocabulary of some life not his. "Benny," he remembers.

  "Benny. What are you going to do about Benny? Your son."

  "He's not mine, really."

  "How does that feel, Nathan, to be a father?"

  "I'm going to keep him," he says, surprising himself again. Is this why he came here, to hear out this strange-maybe better – version of himself?

  She stares and stares. "They won't let you do it, Nathan. Not you."

  "Of course not." He glances at his watch, half rising out of his chair. "I should go see him before school. I should tell him."

  She frowns. "Tell him?"

  "About his mother."

  "You mean he doesn't know?"

  "How could he know? It happened last night, they weren't going to call bim, after all? The kid's nine, or something."

  "Or something. Excellent, Nathan. You haven't even told that boy his mother's dead? What are you, mad?" She's in the doorway, wringing her hands, blowing a wisp of hair away from her eyes.

  "Who was on the phone?"

  She has his coat in her arms. The front door is open. "Get out." She is sobbing. "I have to be in court in an hour. Get away."

  He lifts his hand to touch her. "Who was it?"

  Leveling at him a fiery gaze, "Don't you dare!" Her face bunching and her eyes bitter, her hand rises in a parody of a karate chop and whip-snaps, knocking away his purpling swollen fingers and swatting him in the tender cushion between jaw and neck. Both of them gasping at the cold. With the tip of his tongue Nathan probes his lip. Claire's hair is scattered, her robe pulled aside revealing the pale slope of her breast. Hands still clawed. She comes down a step, bereaved and grief-stricken. "Don't say anything," she pants.

  "I-" he says, beginning yet another thing he can't finish, I, I, I, I -

  "Hey, remember me?" he asks the next brownstone down, the next block, the day, the world. “Remember?" A last appeal.

  Claire steps up, backward, retreating. "Please go away."

  The door crashes shut, the tapping brass knocker punctuating Claire's final words with a fading ellipsis.

  She lies for long minutes on her bed, the coffee within reach on her bedstand untouched and cold. She listens to the sidewalk patter of the Jehovah's Witnesses heading off to their little Kingdom, their slice of waterfront heaven beneath the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, the young women in their long coats, their hair stiff and brilliant even in the storm-mothers all of them, she is sure, their apartments crawling with bright, blue-eyed babies-the men combing and buttoning, clasping their Bibles while the dregs they pass-she, her neighbors, friends-seem more disheveled and what children have survived are less defined and more quiet and more ill, everybody more in need than ever.