Big City Eyes

by Delia Ephron

  Obediently, I went limp, letting my legs crumple. He lowered me into a sitting position, then squatted in front. “Those suckers are dangerous,” he observed, smiling. Dangerous, yes. I had barely the energy to lift a teacup, but was seized with a desire to throw myself at McKee and knock him backward into the sand, where we would writhe amorously.

  “Come on, do as I say, lie down.”

  I stretched out on my side, the least exposed of the possibilities. “That was scary,” was all I could manage.

  He nodded. “Look at the sky.”

  I didn’t want to. Several months of tears, maybe a few years of them, were about to burst forth. I needed to board up my eyes, hammer crisscrossed two-by-fours over them, or I might drown in a flash flood.

  “Roll onto your back and look at the sky.”

  I did as I was told. “It’s all sooty,” I said, taking emotional cover in my usual disinclination to appreciate nature.

  He leaned close. I felt his breath against my cheek. “Rain clouds,” he whispered. “Big black rain clouds.”

  “Sooty,” I said. “Like the kind of grime you wash off your face after a long walk on a windy day in New York City.”

  “You miss that place?”

  “I ache for it.”

  “So move back.”

  “I can’t. My son.”

  While I confided about Sam, McKee sat down next to me. He consumed three Myntens, twisted the paper into skinny swizzle sticks, and used them to draw aimless lines and loops in the sand. It was cold, and the wind echoed the crash of the waves. There was something brave, even daring, about lying in the sand in threatening weather and pouring out my heart.

  He listened. On that afternoon on Town Beach, I found out how sexy listening was. I was used to asking the questions, to drawing men out, but I had no idea that listening could be a form of tenderness. I remembered things long forgotten. Not that I spilled them all. I didn’t reveal what had upset me the most, couldn’t bring myself to, and I wasn’t quite that needy. I only insisted to McKee and myself that Sam had been the happiest baby, a joy bug, as images, like recovered memory, flitted in and out of my consciousness: Sam in his Sesame Street pajamas marching in circles on his bed, Sam galloping through the apartment to throw himself into my arms, Sam squealing, “Again!” after Allan and I kissed him simultaneously, one on each cheek. “Don’t ever get divorced,” I told McKee, recollecting the night after Allan left. Sam, five, was playing with a twistable plastic toy, ignoring me, intently converting it from robot to truck and back as I tucked him into bed. No marching around, no flopping down, his bangs and forehead damp with excitement.

  “I kept telling myself he’d get past it. Like grief. Work it through.”

  McKee didn’t argue that Sam couldn’t be shut down solely from the divorce. I was grateful because I knew I was right.

  “Divorce is the destruction of childhood.” I couldn’t recall the first time that thought came and clonked me, the first bedtime Sam turned away to face the wall and seemed to squeeze his eyes shut rather than close them. From then on, it arrived regularly, a night visitor, to make me heartsick. Later, as I aimlessly channel-surfed or flipped through magazines, this crushing guilt would be nudged aside by a different feeling: relief giving way to happiness, even exuberance that there wasn’t a whiff of Allan anywhere. He was gone. As a mother, perhaps I was not in the normal range. How could my sadness be kicked out of bed so easily, even by a dam-bursting sense of liberation?

  “Why did you split up?” McKee asked, startling me.

  I answered another question—a trick journalists were always on the lookout for—intentionally misunderstanding what had been asked. “His father’s in Massachusetts, lives in Newton, has a chain of pizza parlors along the East Coast.” I loaded on details to deflect McKee further. “He inherited them. An okay guy—he’s responsible financially and he loves Sam. Technically, we have joint custody.”

  “Big-city lives.”

  “Isn’t it the same everywhere? I’m just here because … no clubs, no heavy-duty drugs for Sam to buy. Less temptation. So much less temptation.”

  “Is there?” He brushed my bangs lightly to the side.

  I shuddered, an involuntary temblor.

  McKee stood up. Scrambling to match his move, I got up, too. He collected the sunglasses he had discarded on the beach, and put them back on. I busied myself beating the clammy sand off my arms and legs. “So tell me,” I strained to speak naturally, “was that woman in the beach house Mrs. Nicholas?”

  “There is no Mrs. Nicholas.”

  “Who was she, one of the owner’s girlfriends?”

  McKee checked his watch. “I’ve got to get going.” He started back to the car.

  “Tom?” I used his first name without thinking. “Who was it? Come on.”

  “None of your business.” He tugged a cell phone from his pocket and tapped in a number as he kept walking. I trudged after him. “Sorry, Billy, I got held up. … Be there in five, bye.”

  “Whoever she was, she wasn’t from here.”

  “Why do you say that?” he asked. I tweaked his sleeve, and he swung around. I expected the return of his bold flirty smile. Although if I could have decreed it, I would have erased that smile from his lips and stripped off his horrible reflector lenses so I could take one last dive into his absolving eyes. Instead I saw the cop. He folded his arms across his chest and boasted the backing of the entire police force as he inquired, “What information do you have, exactly?”

  “None. Just speculation. Never mind. Thanks for—” I couldn’t figure out how to finish the sentence. I could write an entire column about my tendency to thank people when I felt hurt or wanted to kick them. Maybe I would write a column about it. “Thank you for taking time,” I said finally.

  “No big deal. Good-bye.”

  He opened the door of his heavy-duty Jimmy. I walked across the lot to my Honda.

  “I still think you should call Mr. Nicholas.” I couldn’t resist lobbing a last directive his way, some offhand bossiness to show that in fact nothing had happened on that beach in the way of intimacy. Although … I could also write a column about my inability to let things rest. “You should call.”

  “I did,” said McKee.

  I sprinted to his car and rapped on his window until he lowered it. “Who was it? Tell me.”

  “Mr. Nicholas did not authorize any visitors to the residence.” McKee spoke as if he were logging a report. “Pursuant to my call, he came out last weekend to ascertain if anything had been taken, and it hadn’t. I’ll see you.” He started the engine.

  “Wait. Let me get this straight and then I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  I ignored the question. “If Nicholas is telling the truth, the woman broke in. No—” My mind was crackling with what I now considered “the case.” “No, the alarm was deactivated, so she or whoever she was with knew the code. An assignation. I bet we arrived in the aftermath of an assignation. That would explain the sexual tension.”

  “Would it?” asked McKee.

  “Of course. So who had the keys, who knew the alarm code? Omigod”—I restrained myself from shrieking—“I saw tire tracks in the sand.”

  “A trespass with nothing missing does not merit an investigation. We changed the locks and the alarm. Mr. Nicholas wants the entire matter dropped. In situations like this, the police comply.”

  This barrage of police-speak was making me cranky. “Did you notice her toenails?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Each nail was painted a different bizarre color—black, blue, green, silver. She could have been a hooker.”

  “That’s why you suspect the woman wasn’t from Sakonnet Bay?”

  “No,” I said, though it was one reason.

  McKee did not respond. He appeared to be watching the waves through the windshield, and I wished I could disown my toenail/ hooker theory. I had been on a roll, only to blow it with that inanit
y. McKee scratched his neck.

  “When my daughter was about seven,” he said, “all she did was color nails. She lugged around a shoe box packed with polish. She painted her brothers’, her dolls’, her mother’s.” He burst out laughing.

  In cataloguing his responses—and I was becoming an expert—I’d noticed a mocking, amused laugh, which was short and abrupt, and a deep appreciative laugh, a rarer thing. But this particular laughter was wholehearted and spontaneous, as if it had bubbled up from an underground spring. “Alicia’s a real case,” he said, still chuckling. “She even painted the fingers and toes of this statue of Jesus my mother-in-law gave us.”

  “So are you saying this woman might have been a seven-year-old?” I was furious and possibly something else—jealous.

  “I’m saying that, in this instance, she might have had a sister or a niece.” He was serious now, reinstating formality. “Why else is it your opinion that she wasn’t from here?”

  I rushed on to get it out before I thought about it. “Her pubic hair—” Why, at the age of thirty-seven, did I still find the word “pubic” embarrassing? “It was trimmed in a triangle. I used to see this in locker rooms in Manhattan gyms all the time. But I use that gym behind the candle shop, and I’ve never seen it in the locker room there.”

  Now that I was getting down to describing that naked body, I was relieved that McKee was manifesting all the animation of a traffic cop. His woodenness bolstered my confidence. I opined, to no particular end, that the woman’s breasts were real. I didn’t say that they sagged comfortably sideways like beanbags, but I did mention that they didn’t have the pumped-up look of basketball breasts on late-night cable TV. This, I admitted, might undermine my high-class-hooker theory. But it might not. With this final pronouncement, I ran out of steam.

  I waited, longing for an argument. Hoping to delay him another hour.

  “A trespass with nothing missing does not merit an investigation,” he repeated.

  “What about a trespass with a dead body? Or a drugged body? Don’t forget that arm. That arm was weird.”

  He released his emergency brake, prepared to depart.

  “The question is”—I imitated his cop formality—“what person with access to the house possesses a car that is capable of being driven on the beach?”

  “Me.” The smile that knew its own power broke out once again.

  “What about your brother? Does he drive one?”

  McKee raised the window.

  I felt the wet smack of a raindrop on my cheek. Another landed on my head with a splat. It was going to be a drenching rain that began with single bloated drops landing here and there. I glanced down at my sand-coated sneakers; dirty wet spots began to muddy them. I heard the crunch of big wheels on gravel. The lumbering family car pulled back past me. I didn’t bother to watch, only heard the insult of its leaving me behind in the lot.

  CHAPTER 7

  THAT EVENING the wind threw torrents of rain against the house. Shortly after six, the electricity blew, so Sam and I dined by candlelight. I preferred not to consider the irony. As I was not in a mood to engage in futile attempts to amuse, I turned on Jane’s handy housewarming gift, the transistor radio. It filled the void with local news about the nor’easter and the power outage.

  Sam leaned on his elbow as he shoveled in a few bites of stir-fry before leaving his plate on the counter, a half-moon of it jutting off precariously. I didn’t point this out, just accepted his carelessness as a further burden. He navigated his way up the stairs with a flashlight.

  I had a supply of votive candles, also thanks to Jane, and turned the house into an Italian church, offerings burning from one end to the other. Amid the flickering flames, I settled under my quilt on the living room couch. It was perfect obsessing weather: a stormy night, no lights, and two teenagers having sex above my head.

  Deidre had arrived around eight, paying a rare school-night visit. I assumed her parents were strict about studying, though without electricity, there was no way to do homework. I hadn’t heard a knock, but my son came down from his room with astonishing swiftness. How had he known she was there? Were they linked by an extrasensory connection? In the dim light, I saw him bound across the foyer—love having raised his energy and spirits—and open the door to an enormous yellow slicker with a hood that left only a rectangular opening to see through. The rain-slicker killer, I found myself thinking, as the huge shiny ensemble followed Sam up the stairs.

  Sam had ignored my banishing Deidre, and I had let the matter drop. It wasn’t that I was helpless in controlling my son, although perhaps I was, and it wasn’t that I reneged out of guilt, although I was consumed by it. I couldn’t separate Sam from his only friend. I had raised the subject of condoms, of course, made an impassioned speech about them, and handed over a paper bag containing several packets. He accepted them, and I tried to find that reassuring, since I was sharing my house with insatiable lovers, to judge from the amount of time they spent in Sam’s room.

  In dread of overhearing any orgasmic yelps, I raised the sound on the radio. I considered phoning Jane and telling her the entire McKee saga from dog bite on, then mentally thumbed through my New York friends. The telephone was one of the few activities available. But I would not confide, even considering it was pretense. I didn’t want to reveal my own complicity, my provocativeness, my foolishness. Besides, my attraction to McKee was solely physical. A product of my own dislocation and loneliness.

  What had put it all in perspective was the statue of Jesus.

  I had a bias against religion, inherited from my father. “Most wars were caused by religion,” he used to mutter with some frequency. One of my jobs, self-appointed, was to retrieve his asides and lob them in my mother’s direction, hoping to stimulate her interest, yearning for them to connect. “Really, Daddy, most wars?” I wasn’t subtle, and she wasn’t interested. My father died of a heart attack when I was fifteen, before I knew that blaming religion for war was not particularly original. This didn’t matter, because he had said it, and I, caretaker of his words, observed it as a sacred canon of a faith of my own.

  Since my divorce, I had dated often and had several tepid affairs. None of the men had been more than casually observant—Jews who attended temple only on High Holidays, Protestants and Catholics who went to church on Easter Sunday or Christmas Eve. I had never, knowingly, even had a drink with a guy whose decor included religious artifacts.

  Was McKee’s statue large, a big stone object occupying a corner of his living room, or had it been consigned to the garden, a shrine next to the swing set? Maybe it stood on the mantel, an image in plastic or plaster of Paris. It couldn’t possibly be a crucifix hanging over his marriage bed—that vision appeared only in Catholic hospitals and Italian movies. To think of McKee sleeping under a crucifix amused me. In an iron bed, the plain gray kind. I saw it clearly—the line of thick metal poles forming a headboard with all the charm of jail. My fantasies kept getting away from me, beginning in spite and ending in perverse enjoyment. Maybe McKee didn’t want the icon, displayed it only to humor his mother-in-law, a religious fanatic? That was the most favorable interpretation of the whole statue-of-Jesus business, and I discounted it immediately.

  I was not going to consider anything that made him more appealing. My anger, after all, was about being humiliated. Seeing him leap to his feet after my inadvertent frisson. Seeing him repelled. Just thinking about it made me cringe. And his snide remark after I had pathetically pledged not to bother him again if he would answer one measly question. “Is that a promise?” he had said. That was cruel. I hadn’t asked him to touch my hair, to smooth my bangs.

  If he went to confession, he ought to confess that slick, seductive move.

  Being attracted to McKee was ludicrous. N-I-C. Nothing in common. I hugged my legs—a sad consolation, having only my own limbs to cozy up to. And then there was a knock on the door and I stiffened so suddenly my back cracked. I felt my spine, it was still there in one
piece, and as the rapping grew more insistent, I sprang off the couch.

  I checked to see if something should be cleared, removed, prepared. I looked down at my dismal sweatpants, paused to regret my outfit, then, untangling the quilt from my ankles, grabbed the flashlight. I had trouble turning it on, jamming the button in the wrong direction. I would send McKee away. Not even let him in the front hall, although he had braved a virtual hurricane to see me, although it couldn’t possibly be he, because at this moment he was reading Goodnight Moon to one of his many children, conceived because he didn’t believe in birth control. Fears and wishes tumbled over each other as I opened the front door and aimed the light aggressively into the face of whoever was there.

  “I hit a deer,” said Jane.

  I pulled her inside, and she began to sob, apologizing over and over, berating herself for crying, and sobbing harder. She was a mess, in a trench coat so soaked that it clung to her in patches, and a silly plastic rain hat that tied under her chin. I hugged her and immediately needed to be hung out to dry myself.

  “Now we’re both drenched. My God.” I failed to elicit a smile as I began to extricate Jane from her coat. I undid the belt, then the buttons, a teacher creating calm around a child who has gone to pieces. “Tequila?” was all she could say. I peeled off the sopping garment.

  “No, but I have vodka. Did you kill it?”

  She shook her head and continued to weep helplessly. I untied the strings under her chin and took off her hat.

  “This way, please”—I nudged her into the living room to wrap her in the quilt, then steered her into the kitchen. She sat at the table, sniffling. The quilt fell slack, unnoticed, while she followed my orders to replace her wet shoes and knee-hi’s with a pair of my thick socks.

  I poured two inches of vodka into a juice glass and set it in front of her. “What happened?”

  The words did not come out in logical order. Between gulps of vodka, Jane recalled seeing a large object pass in front of the car, only she wasn’t sure it had, because the wipers provided only a split second of visibility between blasts of rain.