The Clairvoyants

by Karen Brown

  If a boy did a back flip, my mother would inhale, sharply, and bolt upright in her chair, waving her hand.

  “Oh, you there! Someone, one of you, tell him not to do that.”

  She’d have on her usual large-framed Giorgio Armani sunglasses. Her hair was dyed a reddish shade of auburn then, short and soft around her face.

  My grandfather complained, saying we trampled his lawn, saying it wasn’t a public pool, saying we had the Sound to swim in with our friends. But after he died, and we’d grown older, there was no one to monitor our comings and goings. Leanne and Sarah had stopped swimming, choosing to spend time with boys home on vacation from Loomis Chaffee or The Gunnery. My mother thought we were old enough to monitor ourselves. Younger children weren’t allowed to freely roam, as we had been. The group of kids at the pool was always only our group.

  The pool was one of the first installed in the area in the 1950s, oval-shaped, inground, placed at the base of the sloping backyard that joined the woods on one side and the tamed and rounded holes of the golf course on the other. From the pool a path of flat stones led through the privet hedge and up to the house, where large horse chestnuts and maples threw their shade, and my grandfather’s delphiniums waved on tall stalks. He’d never been a real farmer. He was an entrepreneur who sold lightning rods, traversing the New England countryside in a shiny Cadillac, quoting installation prices for barns stacked with freshly mown hay, for clapboard houses with mourning doors. When my mother met my father he was my grandfather’s employee—a young man who climbed the old slanted roofs, nailed the copper wiring and the bracketed rods to sides of silos, to widow’s watches, his boot heels slipping on slate and loose asbestos shingles.

  David Pinney was new to our group, someone to pay attention to that summer—his shock of blond hair, his lean, tan torso, his daring on the diving board. I’d seen him at the Spiritualists by the Sea camp a few times when I’d gone without Del. He’d be on the beach with his friends, and we’d watch each other. I’d become friendly with Reverend Earline, and we met to talk in the temple, and sometimes I’d see David Pinney walk past the open doors and peer inside. Looking for me, I’d thought. Not all of the cottage owners were Spiritualists, and David’s family probably viewed the old camp as a novelty, the spirit circles and the organ music quirks of the community. What had once been cart paths were now narrow, tarred roads with rustic street signs on wooden posts: Osprey Lane, Sea Breeze Way, Nehantic Path.

  It was hot the summer David died, and the sun had burned the grass. The heat of it along the pool’s concrete rim scalded the backs of our legs. The meadows were filled with black-eyed Susans, and overhead the horse chestnuts and honey locusts swayed. There’d been the sound of the wind through the leaves, and the Spiritualists by the Sea’s organ, its notes almost mournful. Reverend Earline and I had a falling-out—I’d accused her of being a fraud, and she’d been hurt and confused, and decided we should no longer meet. That had been weeks before, in June. The day I’d left, walking home tearful and angry through the woods, David trailed me. When I stopped to confront him he paused as well, lit a cigarette, and then walked back the way he’d come. He appeared at our pool the following afternoon, and no one questioned his arrival. A month later it was as if he’d always been part of our group.

  The neighborhood boys in the water performed for us, the girls, rimming the pool in our bikinis. Dragonflies dipped near the blue, chlorinated water. One boy, Curtis, had the best pot. He kept it hidden in a plastic bag in his towel, and after he swam he’d pull it out and roll a joint. Not everyone smoked with him, but those of us who did became closer than the others—me and Del and Jane, a girl named Katy Pepperill, another boy, Paul Grant. David didn’t smoke. He kept to the fringes, mostly kept to himself. People took other drugs they didn’t share—Jane would show up, her eyes glassy from her mother’s Valium. Paul would bring beer in a cooler, or a stolen bottle of Captain Morgan rum, and someone would ride a bike to the beach clubhouse and get Cokes, and I’d slip into the old house for glasses. We’d swim, and then sit on the patio with our drinks, like imitations of our parents.

  That summer became a foggy, blurred succession of days—all of them blissful, filled with laughter, with our own clever mocking of one another. It was July when girls began to disappear with various boys—usually into the barn, or around to the back patio, where my grandfather’s flower beds had become overrun with weeds. You’d notice someone was there a moment before, and then you simply forgot about them. No one looked to see who was with whom—and it was only if they were caught appearing together from around the corner of the house, holding hands, or a boy’s arm thrown over the girl’s shoulder, or a girl’s bathing suit bottoms on inside-out, that we’d know anything at all had happened.

  I didn’t like any of the boys that way—they were boys I’d grown up with, friends. But I noticed David Pinney, simply for his sun-bleached hair, his habit of hanging out beneath the diving board, watching everyone in his quiet way.

  “He’s mysterious,” I told Jane.

  It was the first week of August, the heat unbearable, and we were all in the water, Jane and I lounging on the steps. She’d stolen a bottle of Krug champagne from her parents’ anniversary party, and we’d chilled it, secretly, in the freezer. Every so often I slipped inside and refilled our glasses, and then the bottle was empty, and I brought it out of the house and threw it into what we’d begun calling the “bottle pit,” a patch of woods behind the barn that bordered one side of the golf course. It hit another bottle, the sound of shattered glass carrying, and Del came around the side of the barn and stood, staring at me, her hands on her hips.

  “Why didn’t you share?” she said.

  “It wasn’t mine,” I said. I came unsteadily up the hill to the edge of the barn and joined her.

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  She had on Leanne’s pink bikini. She’d been sunbathing on the lawn and had the top undone, and she held the strings up on either side of her breasts. Her blond hair was long and loose down her back. The boys loved Del, but she didn’t pay any attention to them yet. We joked that we were the vestal virgins; we needed to remain pure so as not to corrupt our clairvoyant powers.

  “Mother is going to have a fit,” she said.

  Our mother had suspected we’d been drinking last week and had given us a warning.

  We came around the barn and Jane was swimming her laps, and a few of the girls were on the hammock in the shade with Paul, and David Pinney was under the diving board, watching everyone. Del returned to her towel, and I slipped from the edge of the pool into the water at the deep end. It was so cool, I wanted to stay submerged. Jane’s legs, white under the water, kicked up little waves. David Pinney’s navy blue suit trunks and the lower part of his tan torso wavered in the deep end. And then he slid down into the water, and we were suddenly looking at each other, and I knew for sure he had picked up my interest in him, like an electromagnetic wave. We both surfaced at the same time, and I swam over to the board and looked at what he saw from that spot—the whole of the house against the sky, the points of the copper rods, the canopy of trees beyond, the lawn rolling out in all directions, the windows glinting with the sun like mirrors sending messages.

  “This is a nice view,” I said.

  He laughed, and his voice was low and pleasant. In the confusion of other voices I hadn’t had the chance to notice.

  “So is this,” he said.

  I watched the way his eyes shifted to my breasts, and I felt the heat in my face. Del called me then, stood by the rim of the pool, her towel wrapped around her. The sun moved behind a cloud. She told me she was going to the beach, and was I coming with her, and I told her no. She stood, waiting, but I ignored her, and then she rejoined Katy and a few others, all of them crossing the lawn, moving toward the pebbled drive. Del looked back once, and I waved to her, and she must have believed David Pinney was harmless, a quiet boy who kept to himself. Maybe she thought we were talking about
school in the fall, or our favorite movies, or books, or songs—the sorts of things you talked about with regular boys. David’s face and mine were so close he might have kissed me there in the pool, but he didn’t.

  “Meet me in the barn,” he said.

  He pulled himself out onto the pool’s rim, the water dripping from his suit. He dried himself with a towel in the grass and started up the lawn toward the hedge, his back speckled with water dripping from his hair, his arms swinging by his sides. He didn’t once look back at me, as if he knew, from the moment he’d been next to me in the pool, that I was the kind of girl who’d be intrigued and, once hooked, would never refuse him.

  14

  William began spending every night in my apartment, and it seemed natural that he would simply move in—although when he did he brought very little with him, claiming his old place was furnished and that he didn’t need many things. Owing to his orphan status, I didn’t press him. It seemed incredibly bohemian to live the way he did—free of all the material encumbrances that defined my life growing up. My own clothing overwhelmed the bureau my mother had purchased for me. When I made tea William handled my grandmother’s dainty Limoges with exaggerated tenderness. “I’m just a mug sort of person,” he said. His choice of vessel would have been a large stoneware cup, medieval-looking and clumsily crafted—something my family might have used to hold screws on a shelf in the garage. Then I felt like my grandmother, passing judgment on my father for not being our kind.

  At first, William and I stayed home alone evenings—watching my little television or reading. Once, we went walking together, as we did that first night, and the groups of students and their revelry seemed a species entirely different from my own. The sex was a given—the reason we never felt the need to leave the apartment. It was part of our day—like heating soup for lunch, or brushing our teeth at night. I loved the regularity, the way we’d created our own little world, a bubble broken only when one of us had to leave, or Del came to the door. More often than not I found a way to avoid her. I told her I had a sore throat or I was too tired to go out. She never argued. She’d taken my relationship with William in stride, though I suspected she wasn’t entirely happy about it. When I felt twinges of guilt for avoiding her, I reminded myself it was her decision to move to town; I didn’t have to entertain her.

  William and I liked the shadowy elm, its familiar rattle of branches, and the way its shape, cast by the streetlight, moved against the plaster ceiling. Mary Rae was often out there, and I grew resentful, as if she were spying on us. It was clear from her appearance at the encampment, and her leading me to William at the party my first night in town, that they’d known each other, though I wouldn’t have gone as far as to assume they’d had a relationship. When I tried to ask him about his past girlfriends, and mentioned Mary Rae, he seemed confused, almost angry.

  “Why would you ask me that?” he said.

  I couldn’t say that I’d never heard anyone else call him “Billy.”

  Then, as if Mary Rae could read my irritation, she stopped appearing.

  When William wasn’t teaching, he was working in the lab on the photographs for his new series. He came in some nights after a long day and he flung himself onto the bed and began to talk, full of stories about our future together—how we’d one day buy a house in the country, like Anne’s. How we’d set up our own studio, and have children and dogs and a swimming hole reached by a path across a field, then through the woods. I liked the sound of his voice and let him ramble on. Slowly, his dream of the future became my own.

  I wondered if Geoff minded the sound of William talking, or if he sat by the wall and listened in his plaid robe, his eyelids heavy, soothed by the sound, as I was. Sometimes, as William talked, he touched me, his hand moving over my body like a blind man’s over Braille. I bit my lip, willing his hand to move higher up my thigh, between my open legs, the waiting unbearable. He asked me to tell him not to stop. I did anything he asked. I never questioned the bruises I found on my inner thighs, my arms, the marks on my breasts. The more urgent the sex, the more desperate I believed his love for me. These things, hidden beneath the layers of clothing necessary to survive the winter, never seemed to matter. What kept me moored to him was the sound of his voice at night, his roaming hand. I believed I had gotten what I wanted—I was loved finally, unquestioningly. I became complacent.

  When William and I finally socialized together it wasn’t with his colleagues, as I would have thought, but with his old friends in Milton, the town where he’d grown up. At the center of this circle was Anne, his mentor, who had retired from teaching due to her illness and hosted regular gatherings at her farm, Windy Hill. The first invitation was for Thanksgiving. William came in from shoveling the walk with Geoff and announced that Anne was hosting dinner.

  “Really?” I said. “Do we have to go?”

  I’d thought we might have our own small feast at home. I’d even looked up recipes, thinking I might duplicate Thanksgivings from my childhood before my parents’ divorce, when even the preparations were extravagant, and the little ranch house was filled with cooking smells, and my father would wrap his arm around my mother in a boozy sort of embrace.

  William looked annoyed. “I don’t want to go alone.”

  As with the All Hallows’ Eve event that Geoff had taken us to at Anne’s, I felt in some way manipulated to attend.

  “Who will be there?” I asked William. “Can I invite Del?”

  William said he had no idea who’d be there—that he hadn’t asked. “She is your sister,” he said. “I suppose it’s all right.”

  That evening, I tried to find Del to tell her about the plans, but she wasn’t home, and on Thanksgiving morning there was still no answer at her door. By afternoon it had grown so cold, everything frozen over. I was worried about Del, but William brushed over my fears.

  “She’s probably visiting Sybil Townsend, learning card tricks,” he said.

  “What if she’s missing?” I said.

  I wished I had gotten Del a phone, although I knew she wouldn’t have kept it charged and wouldn’t have carried it with her at all times. It began to grow dark. William asked me if I was ready.

  “I have to take a shower.” I stepped into the bathroom and turned the taps to the shower. The pipes groaned, and I left the water running to heat up.

  William sat in the duck-carved chair. He often did, to read, and he was looking over student essays. “What have you been doing all day?” he said. He kept his eyes on the pages in his lap.

  “I was in the lab.” William was always curious about my work—always asking me if I would like him to take me to sites he’d found. I suspected his interest was more competitive than he would admit, and I mostly refused.

  I stood in the light from the little bathroom. I’d taken off my clothes, and the water was running in the shower. He looked up at me, and his expression changed—his eyes softening.

  “You want to kiss me,” I said.

  He shuffled the pages, slowly, his eyes still appraising. “That and more,” he said. “We have to leave in fifteen minutes, though. We’re riding with Geoff.”

  I went to him and moved the essays from his lap, slid my legs alongside him, and took his face in my hands. He groaned, a sound I loved to urge from him. Meanwhile the shower ran and the apartment steamed up—the cold windows by the chair, the chrome fixtures on the stove, the mirror hung beside the door. We’d often made love in the chair—William’s head leaning against the upholstered chair back, and me moving over him, clutching the carved ducks’ heads. I would close my eyes and then open them to find him watching me, intently, and sometimes I found it disconcerting that he would see me in the moments I was least in control. That night he kept his eyes open in the darkening room, the steam swirling around us, and I didn’t protest or ask him not to look at me, as I often did. It was funny how you expected the moment of orgasm to be joyful, but really, his eyes revealed so much more—a strange mixture of joy and
pain and sorrow. Once I mentioned putting the mirror behind the chair, so I could see what I looked like, what my own eyes revealed. William never moved the mirror, but I knew he didn’t judge me for my request or think me strange; rather my desire to see my own expression was just another thing he found interesting about me.

  That night I kissed him in the fog of steam, and he lifted me off of him, almost abruptly.

  “I don’t want to make Geoff wait,” he said.

  I felt out of sorts, reminded of the first night he refused me. “Come in the shower with me,” I said, tugging on his arm, but he pulled away and gave me a look I suspected he gave his most ignorant students.

  I took only a few minutes to shower, then I dressed, shivering with cold. Neither of us spoke. We went downstairs and I knocked on Del’s apartment door, but there was no answer, no lights, and no smell of incense. Geoff was waiting for us in his car at the curb, exhaust spilling out and blackening the snow.

  “You’ll have to help me watch for black ice,” he said as we climbed in.

  I made a sound of concern, and he chuckled.

  William pulled the passenger door closed. “Black ice is transparent,” he said to me. “We’ll know we’ve hit it if the car is spinning.”

  “Where’s your sister?” Geoff asked.

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “Maybe she’s with Alice’s family.”