Mr. Bones

by Paul Theroux

  “May I introduce my wife?” Ray said. “This is Shelby.”

  The women smiled, they clucked; but Ray saw that Maura had narrowed her eyes, and Annie had leaned closer, and Roberta seemed to snicker. Putting his arm around Shelby, he felt her tremble.

  Maura said to Shelby, “Angie was so mad when I went to the junior prom with Ray. Angie was my best friend—still is.”

  Roberta hovered over Shelby and spoke in a deaf person’s shout, “He took me to Canobie Lake. He got fresh!”

  “Remember what you wrote in my yearbook?” Annie said. “‘You’re the ultimate in feminine pulchritude.’”

  “I guess I had a way with words,” Ray said.

  “You had a way with your hands,” Roberta said, shouting again.

  Maura said to Shelby, “I’ve known Ray Testa since I was seven years old.”

  Everything that he’d forgotten was real and immediate to them—the prom, the lake, the yearbook, Miss Balsam’s third-grade class. He had lived his life without looking back, and he’d been happy. But had their disappointment made them dwell on the past, as a consolation?

  He said, “Shel and I need a drink.”

  Maura said, “I’ll get it.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  But she insisted, and after she slipped away they spoke with Annie and Roberta. While they chatted about changes in Medford, he remembered the rowboat at Canobie Lake, the fumbled kiss, his clutching Roberta, the way she had snatched at his hands. And Annie—the summer night on her porch, her arms folded over her breasts, and “Don’t, please.” And when Maura returned with the drinks he recalled the back seat of his father’s car at the drive-in, the half-pint of Four Roses, and “Cut it out.” Horrible.

  Maura handed over the two glasses of white wine. Ray sipped his, but Shelby held hers in both hands as though for balance, not raising it.

  “Drink up,” Maura said.

  Shelby put her glass to her lips, and Ray did the same. The warm wine had the dusty taste of chalk and a tang he couldn’t name, perhaps a metal—zinc, maybe, with the smack of cat piss—and he found it hard to swallow, but to please Maura he swigged again, and he knew he was right in thinking it was foul, because Shelby did no more than sip. And seeing Shelby struggle, Maura looked on with what he took to be satisfaction.

  He remembered their flesh, and he sorrowed for what they had become, parodies of those young women. They had badly neglected their teeth. He felt grateful that Shelby did not resent his being so much older, but he was never more keenly aware of their age difference.

  In the ballroom, where a small band played, some couples had begun to dance. His arm around Shelby’s waist, as he steered her onto the floor, he could feel her body go heavy, resisting the music.

  “How you doing?” he heard. It was Malcolm DeYoung, a high school friend. “Hey, who’s this fine lady?”

  “Shelby, I want you to meet my old friend Malcolm.”

  Malcolm said, “What about some food? There’s a buffet over there.”

  They stood in the buffet line, and afterward they sat together at a table. Ray said, “I used to know everyone. But the only people I’ve met so far, apart from you, are those three”—Maura, Roberta, and Annie were at a nearby table. “The funny thing is, they were my girlfriends, at different times.”

  Malcolm said, “You got a target on your back, man,” and he winked at Shelby.

  “I really wanted to introduce Shel to my old friends.”

  Malcolm put his fork down. He stood up and said, “I don’t drink these days. But let me tell you something. In a little while these people are going to get a little toasted. I don’t want to be here then. I don’t think you want to, neither.”

  Then he left them. Ray didn’t speak again, nor did Shelby say anything more. She put her knife and fork on the uneaten food on her plate, and her napkin on top, like a kind of burial. Ray hugged her and said, “Ready?”

  She said, “I was ready an hour ago.”

  They left quickly, not making eye contact, and in the hotel lobby Ray said, “Shall we go upstairs?”

  “What did you do after the prom?”

  “We watched the submarine races up at the Mystic Lakes.”

  “Show me.”

  He drove her through the town and to the familiar turnoff, then down to the edge of the lake, where he parked, the house lights on the far shore glistening, giving life to the black water. He held Shelby’s hand, he kissed her, as he had in the first weeks of their love affair. He fumbled with her, loving the complications of her dress, delighting in the thought of her body under those silky layers slipping through his fingers, and now she seemed as eager as he was.

  “Here?” he asked. “Now?”

  “Why not?” She shrugged the straps from her shoulders and held her breasts, and as she presented them to him, their whiteness was illuminated by the headlights of a car, swinging past to park beside them.

  “Cops,” Ray said.

  Shelby gasped and covered herself, clawing at her dress, and ducked her head, while Ray rolled down his window. A bright overhead light came on inside the other car, which seemed full of passengers.

  “You pig.” It was Maura Dedrick, her face silhouetted at her window, someone beside her—Annie, maybe—and someone else in the rear seat.

  Ray was in such a hurry to get away, he started the car without raising the window, so he heard Maura still calling out abuse as he drove off, and the shouts were mingled with Shelby’s choked sobs that made her sound like a sorrowing child.

  Back at the hotel (the reunion was still in progress—fewer people, louder music) Shelby lay in bed shivering, repeating, “That was awful.” Ray tried to soothe her, and in doing so felt useful, but when he hugged her, she said, “Not now.”

  Once, in a dark hour of the night, the phone rang like an alarm. Ray snatched at it, and the voice was a shriek, the accusation of a wronged woman, which Ray felt like a snatching at his head.

  “Wrong number,” he mumbled, and hung up, but was unable to get to sleep again.

  In the morning Shelby said, “Show me whatever you’re going to show me,” and slid out of bed before he could touch her, “then let’s go home.”

  He drove her to his old neighborhood and then slowly down the street where he had lived as a boy. The trees were gone, the wood-frame houses faded and small. Shelby sat, inattentive, as though distracted. But he urged her to get out of the car, and he walked her to the side of a garage where he’d scrawled a heart on the cinderblock with a spike, the petroglyph still visible after all these years. It was here, in the garage between two houses, that he’d kissed a girl—what was her name?—one Halloween night, crushing her against the wall, tasting the candy in her mouth, and running his hands over her body.

  “Hello, stranger.”

  A great fat woman with wild hair stood, almost filling the space between the garage and the nearby house. She laughed and put her hands on her hips. She wore bruised sneakers and no socks, and when she opened her mouth Ray could see gaps in her teeth, most of her molars missing. She raised her hand, clapping a cigarette to her lips, then blew smoke at him.

  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Is it”—he squinted to remember the name—“Louise?”

  “Who else?” she said, then, “Who’s that, your daughter?” and laughed again.

  Shelby said, “I’ll meet you in the car.”

  “She’s scared,” Louise said triumphantly.

  Ray was frightened too, but didn’t want to show it. The woman was hideous, and her sudden appearance and her weird confidence made him want to run. But he sidled away slowly, saying, “Don’t go away. I’ll be back.”

  “That’s what you told me that night. I’ve been waiting ever since!”

  Had he said that? Probably—he’d told any lie for the chance to touch someone. She had scared him then, she scared him now. He had the sense that she wanted to hit him, and when she took another puff of her cigarette and tossed th
e butt aside, he feared that she was coming for him. She was big and unkempt and reckless-looking.

  “Please,” he said, and put his hands up to protect his face and ran clumsily to his car.

  Louise did not follow him. She watched from the passageway beside the garage, potbellied, her feet apart, and as he started his car she shook another cigarette from the pack, fearsome in her confidence.

  “I haven’t seen her for years,” Ray said. Shelby did not reply; she was mute, her arms folded, faced forward. “Imagine, she still lives there.”

  “Waiting for you.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  But when they got home there was a further shock. Ray parked and noticed a white slip of paper thumbtacked to the front door. The idea that someone had come up the long driveway and through his gate and left this note disturbed him. And he was more disturbed when he read the note: Ray, You must of gone out. Sorry I missed you—Ellie.

  “Who’s Ellie?” Shelby said.

  He was thinking must of, and he knew Ellie had to have been his college girlfriend. She’d become pregnant. “I missed my period.” It had happened just about the time they were breaking up. She told her parents, who arranged for her to have an abortion in another state—it was illegal in Massachusetts then. When it was over they’d written to his parents, denouncing him, saying he’d ruined their daughter’s life. He had not seen her since. And that was who Ellie was—Ellie Bryant.

  But he said, “I don’t know anyone by that name.” It was the first lie he’d told Shelby in all the time he’d known her. Shelby seemed to guess this, and smiled in triumph. Ray said, “Maybe an old patient.”

  Another bad night, and in the following days, each evening he returned home with Shelby from the office, he expected Ellie to be waiting for him. Friday came. He knew something was wrong when he passed the front gate. The gate, always latched, was ajar—a small thing, but for a frightened house owner, alert to details, it had significance. And he heard on his nerves the creak of the porch swing at the side of the house.

  Shelby said, “There’s someone here.”

  “I’ll check—don’t worry,” he said, and braced himself for Ellie.

  She was on the porch swing, facing away. He saw the woman’s back, her cold purply hands—it was November—on the suspended chains that held the seat, the kerchief tightened over her head. She turned and the swing squeaked again.

  “You.” The snarled word made her face ugly, as though with pain.

  He had no idea who the woman was, and before he could speak, Shelby came up behind him and said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Visiting my old friend Ray Testa,” the woman said.

  “Are you Ellie?”

  The woman frowned at the name. She said, “No. Ask him who I am. Go on, Ray, tell her.”

  But he didn’t know. Even so, he started to gabble in fear.

  “Think,” she said. “You used to visit me and my husband in New Hampshire. He was a photographer. You pretended you were interested in his pictures. You were very chatty. And then, when he was away, you visited me. You couldn’t keep your hands off me. Always sneaking around, sniff-sniff.” To Shelby she said, “This man drove two hundred miles to touch me.”

  And the effort seemed preposterous, because the woman was gray, with papery skin and sad eyes and reddened gums showing in her downturned mouth. He hated himself for seeing only her fragility and her age, but because of her defiance it was all that mattered.

  He said, “Joyce.”

  “See? He knows who I am.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Just to pay a friendly visit.”

  “Please go.”

  The woman said, “Isn’t it funny? You drove all that way to see me—took half a day to get to my house, and all the probing, to make sure Richard was away. And now you can’t wait to get rid of me.”

  With that, she stamped on the porch floorboards and hoisted herself from the swing. She stood leaning sideways, and she came at him, maintaining the same crooked posture, with a slight limp, a suggestion that she was about to fall down.

  “This is how he’ll treat you one day, sweetheart,” she said to Shelby.

  Ray let Joyce pass, then followed her to the driveway and kept watching her—where was her car? How had she gotten here?—but, still watching her, he saw her vanish before she got to the road.

  Shelby was in tears, her face in her hands, miserable on the sofa. She recoiled when he reached for her.

  “You know them,” Shelby said. “All of them.”

  She refused to allow him to console her. She was disgusted, she said. She didn’t eat that night. She slept in the spare room thereafter. He regretted their sleeping apart, until one night soon after Joyce’s visit, he woke in his bed and became aware not of breathing but of a swelling shadow, someone holding her breath in the room.

  He said, “Shelby?”

  The soft laugh he heard was not Shelby’s.

  “You probably think you had a hard time,” the woman said, becoming more substantial, emerging from the darkness as she spoke. “In those days, an abortion was a criminal offense. A doctor could lose his license for performing one. And it was painful and bloody and humiliating. It had another effect—I was never able to bear another child. I got married. My husband left me when he realized we’d never have children. I became a teacher, because I loved kids. I recently retired. I live on a pension. You destroyed my life.”

  Just as he thought she was going to hit him, she disappeared.

  In the morning Shelby said she’d heard him. “Who was it?”

  “Talking in my sleep. I was dreaming.”

  Certain that he was lying, Shelby said she could not bear to hear another word from him, and when he attempted to explain, she said in her unanswerable, dead-certain voice, “You keep saying how old and feeble they are, and how repugnant. But don’t you realize who they look like?”

  He gaped at her, feeling futile.

  “They all look like you. I sometimes think they are you. Each person in our past is an aspect of us. You need to know that.”

  Ray called his ex-wife, but got her voice mail. “Angie,” he pleaded, “I don’t know how you’re doing it, but please stop. I’ll agree to anything if you stop them showing up.”

  For several weeks no women from his past intruded, and Ray believed that Angie had gotten the message. He even called again and left a thank-you on her voice mail.

  Shelby demanded that they see a marriage counselor. Ray agreed, but on the condition that the counselor be in Boston, far from their home, so that their anonymity was assured. “I want it to be a woman,” Shelby said, and found a Dr. Pat Devlin, whose office was near Massachusetts General Hospital.

  On their first visit, after they filled out the insurance forms, they were shown into the doctor’s office.

  “Please take a seat,” Dr. Devlin said. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

  She read the insurance forms, running her finger down the answers to the questions on the back of the page. She was heavy, jowly, almost regal, wearing a white smock, her hair cut short, tapping her thick finger as she read, and her chair emitted complaint-like squeaks as she shifted in it, her movements provoked by what seemed her restless thoughts.

  “I’m afraid I can’t take you on,” she said, sighing, removing her glasses, and facing Ray, who smiled helplessly. “Did you do this deliberately, to make me feel even worse?”

  Ray said, “The appointment was Shelby’s idea.”

  Looking hard at Ray, the doctor said, “I thought I’d seen the last of you and heard the last of your excuses. Maybe it’s unprofessional of me to say this—but it’s outrageous that you should come here out of the blue after the way you treated me.” She gripped the armrests of her chair as though restraining herself, and holding herself this way, her head back, she seemed like an emperor. “Now I must ask you to leave.”

  Shelby was silent in the elevator, because of the other passengers, but
in the street she said, “Tell me who she is, and don’t lie to me.”

  “We were at BU together,” he said. “Premed.”

  “You’re stalling,” Shelby said.

  He was. But he had been thrown by “Dr. Devlin.” Her name was Pat Dorian—Armenian, a chemistry major. She was beautiful, with a sultry central-Asian cast to her face, full lips, and thick jet-black hair. He’d taken her to a fraternity party and they’d gotten drunk, and she’d said, “I feel sick. I have to lie down,” and she’d fallen asleep in his room, in his own bed, only to wake in the morning half-naked but fully alert, saying, “Did you touch me? What did you do to me? Tell me!”

  He’d said, truthfully, that he could not remember; but he was half-naked too. And that was the beginning of a back-and-forth of recrimination that ended with Pat changing her major to psychology, so that she would not have to face Ray again in the chem lab.

  “I knew her long ago,” Ray said.

  “Don’t tell me any more,” Shelby said. She turned her gray eyes on him and said, “She looks like you too.”

  Shelby became humorless and doubting, and she was like a much older woman, slow in the way she moved, as though fearing she might trip, quieter and more reflective, seeming rueful when Ray passed the bedroom and saw her lying alone—her bedroom. He slept in the spare room now.

  He wanted to tell her that most people have a flawed past, and act unthinkingly, and that we move on from them. New experiences take their place, new memories, better ones, and all the old selves remain interred in a forgetfulness that was itself merciful. This was the process of aging, each new decade burying the previous one, and the long-ago self was a stranger. But for these women, all they had was the past. They dragged him back to listen to them, to take part in this ritual of unfulfillment, the reunion of endless visitations, old women, old loves, old objects of desire with faces like bruised fruit.

  Instead of telling Shelby, he called her father and told him some of this. He did not seemed surprised to hear it. He hardly reacted, and when Ray pressed him for an opinion, the man said, “I can’t help you.”