Perfect Recall
Page 30
And so it is. He clasps the rail with his left hand, maneuvering with the cane in his right. He sinks into the water and bumps down the steps. On the deepest step, sunk almost to his neck, he grins up at Randy, who is standing in a proprietary way, almost like a tall lean crane himself, ready to swoop forward any minute. Realizing that he’s hovering, Randy looks away. “You taking all this in, or have you already sprouted angel wings after you’ve flown the coop?” Randy calls up into the tree.
Angel wings? So Randy has known all along. He must have heard the tires, too. He might even have seen it, from the bath room window. For some reason, he obviously intended to pretend, before, that it hadn’t happened. But he knew it had. He knew all along, and he had just been pretending things were otherwise.
Hopper exhales, letting tension exit with his breath. His shoulders sag comfortably and he slides what he thinks is one more inch forward, then slowly leans back on his elbows. He is that way when Lisa drops off the Famous Poet, parking the Mercedes and saying something quickly to her passenger, waving to the two of them but not returning to the house herself— setting off, later than she wanted to, for another night with her girlfriend.
The Famous Poet stands for a few seconds, just inside the bougainvillea. He has only one small leather satchel: a suitcase that looks to Hopper—and he should know, he thinks grimly— all too much like a doctor’s bag. But no: he has not come to minister to the sick. Just before his arrival, Randy impulsively stripped down to his underwear, too, to join Hopper in a final dip. So the Famous Poet stands there, not suspecting anything is wrong with them. In the twilight, he sees only the familiar faces he’s seen intermittently through the years, smiling as they’ve always smiled, and he thinks—Hopper knows he thinks—that they will soon be at his disposal. My God—the time he sent me out for grapefruit juice, when there was already orange and apple, Hopper thinks. He thinks I’ll spring out of the pool and run off to get him whatever he might want, Hopper almost whispers to Randy, he’s so amused with what an impossibility that would be. At the same moment, Randy is thinking: He thinks things are the way they’ve always been. And he locks eyes with the Famous Poet to see whether that isn’t so.
But look at him suddenly noticing the wheelchair, trying to put that together with the rest of the picture. Look at him searching the yard to see if maybe somebody else is present: some Christina—one of those pretty women from the past— down in the grass that isn’t really grass, but fieldstone, reaching toward the house straight behind them—no house up a hill in the distance in Key West. But that’s not it, is it? It’s one of them in the hot tub—one of them, who’s not letting on, since both faces have turned to him with pleasant, almost bemused expressions. It must be the older one, or could something have happened to the younger? He will write a poem about it, later; but for now, he can only imagine which one it is, never suspecting that for all intents and purposes, it’s both. Meanly— childishly—neither is letting on. Through no prearrangement, they’ve become perfectly complicitous, hiding everything from him but their smiling faces, as if to say: Here we are. As a prize-winning analyst of matters of the human heart, would you care to descend and join us?