“Better?” Daphne said.
Cashdollar didn’t answer. He’d been inclined to feel grateful but hadn’t the vaguest idea where this was going now. She sat on the floor and he watched her sip from the glass. She made a retching face, shuddered, regrouped.
“At school one time, I drank two entire bottles of Robitussin cough syrup. I hallucinated that my Klimt poster was coming to life. It was very sexual. My roommate called the paramedics.”
“Is that right?” Cashdollar said.
“My father was in Aruba when it happened,” she said. “He was with an AMA rep named Farina Hoyle. I mean, what kind of a name is Farina Hoyle? He left her there and flew all the way back to make sure I was all right.”
“That’s nice, I guess,” Cashdollar said.
Daphne nodded and smiled, half sly, half something else. Cashdollar couldn’t put his finger on what he was seeing in her face. “It isn’t true,” she said. “Farina Hoyle’s true. Aruba’s true.”
“What are you going to do with me?” Cashdollar said.
Daphne peered into the glass.
“I don’t know,” she said.
They were quiet for a minute. Daphne swirled the whiskey. Cashdollar’s back itched and he rubbed it on the chair. When Daphne saw what he was doing, she moved behind the chair to scratch it for him and he tipped forward to give her better access. Her touch raised goosebumps, made his skin jump like horseflesh.
“Are you married?” she said.
He told her, “No.”
“Divorced?”
He shook his head. Her hand went still between his shoulder blades. He heard her teeth click on the glass.
“You poor thing,” she said. “Haven’t you ever been in love?”
“I think you should cut me loose,” Cashdollar said.
Daphne came around the chair and sat on his knee, draped her arm over his shoulder.
“How often do you do this? Rob houses, I mean.”
“I do it when I need the money,” he said.
“When was the last time?” Her face was close enough that he could smell the liquor on her breath.
“A while ago,” he said. “Could I have another sip of that?” She helped him with the glass. He felt the Scotch behind his eyes. The truth was he’d done an apartment house just last week, waited at the door for somebody to buzz him up, then broke the locks on the places where no one was home. Just now, however, he didn’t see the percentage in the truth. He said, “I only ever do rich people and I give half my take to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.”
Daphne socked him in the chest.
“Ha, ha,” she said.
“Isn’t that what you want to hear?” he said. “Right? You’re looking for a reason to let me go?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
He shrugged. “Who’s to say it isn’t true?”
“All those Make-a-Wish kids,” Daphne said.
She was smiling and he smiled back. He couldn’t help liking this girl. He liked that she was smart and that she wasn’t too afraid of him. He liked that she had the guts to bullshit the police.
“Ha, ha,” he said.
Daphne knocked back the last of the Scotch, then skated her socks over the hardwood floor, headed for the window.
“Do you have a car?” she said, parting the curtains. “I don’t see a car.”
“I’m around the block,” he said.
“What do you drive?”
“Honda Civic.”
Daphne raised her eyebrows.
“It’s inconspicuous,” he said.
She skated back over to his chair and slipped her hand into his pocket and rooted for his keys. Cashdollar flinched. There were only two keys on the ring, his car and his apartment. For some reason, this embarrassed him.
“It really is a Honda,” Daphne said.
There was a grandfather clock in the corner, but it had died at half past eight who knew how long ago, and his watch was out of sight beneath the duct tape, and Cashdollar was beginning to worry about the time. He guessed Daphne had been gone for twenty minutes, figured he was safe until after midnight, figured her father and his lady friend would at least ring in the New Year before calling it a night. He put the hour around eleven but he couldn’t be sure, and for all he knew, Daphne was out there joyriding in his car and you couldn’t tell what might happen at a party on New Year’s Eve. Somebody might get angry. Somebody might have too much to drink. Somebody might be so crushed with love they can’t wait another minute to get home. He went on thinking like this until he heard what sounded like a garage door rumbling open and his mind went blank and he narrowed the whole of his perception to his ears. For a minute, he heard nothing—he wasn’t going to mistake silence for safety a second time—then a door opened in the kitchen and Daphne breezed into the room.
“Took me awhile to find your car,” she said.
She had changed clothes for her foray into the world. Now she was wearing an electric blue parka with fur inside the hood and white leggings and knee-high alpine boots.
“What time is it?” he said.
But she passed through without stopping, disappeared into the next room.
“You need to let me go,” he said.
When she reappeared, she was carrying a stereo speaker, her back arched under its weight. He watched her into the kitchen. She returned a minute later, empty-handed, breathing hard.
“I should’ve started small,” she said.
He looked at her. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s a good thing you’ve got a hatchback.”
For the next half hour, she shuttled between the house and the garage, bearing valuables each trip, first the rest of the stereo, then the flat screen and the Blu-ray, then his pillowcase of silverware, then an armload of expensive-looking suits and on and on until Cashdollar was certain that his car would hold no more. Still she kept it up. Barbells, golf clubs, a calfskin luggage set. A pair of antique pistols. A dusty classical guitar. With each passing minute, Cashdollar could feel his stomach tightening and it was all he could do to keep his mouth shut, but he had the sense that he should leave her be, that this didn’t have anything to do with him. He pictured his little Honda bulging with the accumulated property of another man’s life, flashed to his apartment in his mind, unmade bed, lawn chairs in the living room, coffee mug in the sink. He made a point of never holding on to anything anybody else might want to steal. There was not a single thing in his apartment that it would hurt to lose, nothing he couldn’t live without. Daphne swung back into the room, looking frazzled, her face glazed with perspiration.
“There.” She huffed at a wisp of hair that had fallen across her eyes.
“You’re crazy,” Cashdollar said.
Daphne dismissed him with a wave.
“You’re out of touch,” she said. “I’m your average sophomore.”
“What’ll you tell the cops?”
“I like Stockholm syndrome but I think they’re more likely to believe you made me lie under threat of death.” She took the parka off, draped it on a chair, lifted the hem of her sweatshirt to wipe her face, exposing her belly, the curve of her ribs, pressed it first against her right eye, then her left as if dabbing tears.
“I’ll get the scissors,” Daphne said.
She went out again, came back again. The tape fell away like something dead. Cashdollar rubbed his wrists a second, pushed to his feet and they stood there looking at each other. Her eyes, he decided, were the color of a jade pendant he had stolen years ago. That pendant pawned for seven hundred dollars. It flicked through his mind that he could kiss her and that she would let him but he restrained himself. He had no business kissing teenage girls. Then, as if she could read his thoughts, Daphne slapped him across the face. Cashdollar palmed his cheek, blinked the sting away, watched her doing
a girlish bob and weave, her thumbs tucked inside her fists.
“Let me have it,” she said.
“Quit,” he said.
“Wimp,” she said. “I dropped you twice.”
“I’m gone,” he said.
Right then, she socked him on the nose. It wouldn’t have hurt so much if she hadn’t already hit him with the toilet lid, but as it was, his eyes watered up, his vision filled with tiny sparkles. Without thinking, he balled his hand and punched her in the mouth, not too hard, a reflex, just enough to sit her down, but right away he felt sick at what he’d done. He held his palms out, like he was trying to stop traffic.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “That was an accident. I’ve never hit a girl. I’ve never hurt anyone in my life.”
Daphne touched her bottom lip, smudging her fingertip with blood.
“This will break his heart,” she said.
She smiled at Cashdollar and he could see blood in the spaces between her teeth. The sight of her dizzied him with sadness. He thought how closely linked were love and pain. Daphne extended a hand, limp-wristed, ladylike. Her nails were perfect.
“Now tape me to the chair,” she said.
our lady of the roses
Mondays and Thursdays, Hadley Walsh taught art at Our Lady of the Roses School. She was twenty-six years old. She didn’t need the money—her father gave her an allowance because he still felt guilty about leaving her mother. She had a black cat named Jezebel. On her days off, she lunched with friends or did some painting of her own, watercolors mostly. Weekends, Hadley dawdled with her boyfriend. This all took place late one winter in Mobile, Alabama.
The school was one story, flat-roofed, brick, nothing much to look at inside or out, but the art room featured a bank of windows overlooking the parking lot and during second and third period, light streamed mercifully through the glass and over the painted cinder block, the scarred supply cabinets, the graphitied wooden stools, the battered sinks. Most of her students were Hispanic or black, only a few white faces mixed in. None of them knew what to make of art class. They seemed to consider it a sort of extra recess, especially the older kids. She had only fifty minutes a week with each grade, K-8, four classes on Monday, five on Thursday, and while Hadley had no illusions about her job, she wanted the students to leave her class knowing at least a little more than they had when they walked in. She had designed projects around the Mona Lisa and Starry Night, obvious choices. This week they were working on Jackson Pollock, dripping and flicking and spattering paint onto canvases on the floor—an exercise in silliness, the students seemed to think, and that was fine with Hadley, but she had always been intrigued by the way randomness could hint at meaning. Hadley paid for the canvases herself. Our Lady of the Roses didn’t have much budget for art supplies.
Her favorite students were the second graders, miniature untarnished versions of their future selves, old enough to be interested and to understand but still young enough that they weren’t bound up by self-consciousness and attitude. Third period. Thursday. The sight of them buttoning each other into smocks, men’s dress shirts picked up at Goodwill and worn backward over their uniforms, was enough to buoy her through the rest of the day.
Hadley was circling the room, treading carefully between canvases, offering comments and encouragement—“Excellent, Regina. That’s it. Don’t think too much. Just paint the way you feel”—when Sister Benedicta cleared her throat at the open door.
“May I have a word?”
She tipped her head. Hadley instructed her second graders to keep painting, she’d be right back. The women trailed their shadows into the hall.
“What’s up, Sister?”
“I wanted to remind you that this is a Catholic school.”
Because of her dark skin and the clipped, slightly foreign inflection in her voice, Hadley had at first believed that Sister Benedicta was Caribbean, maybe from Haiti—the church was always running can drives for Haitian refugees—but the math teacher, Annie Grayson, informed her that Sister had come to Mobile from a convent in Uganda. She’d arrived in November, a replacement for Sister Imogene, who’d been put out to pasture. Sister Benedicta’s age was difficult to guess. She might have been thirty-five or fifty. In her clogs, Hadley was a head taller than the nun, but Sister Benedicta was possessed of density. The hallway seemed to tilt in her direction. Hadley had the idea that if you set a marble on the floor it would roll toward Sister’s feet no matter where in the building she was standing.
“I’m not sure I follow,” Hadley said.
“Shouldn’t your students be making art of a more liturgical nature, an Easter project perhaps, something for their parents?”
“They will have something to take home. They’ll have these Jackson Pollock canvases. They’ll have all the work they’ve done since Christmas break. They’re very proud.”
Hung on the wall outside the classroom were the fruits of previous lessons, portraits and Postimpressionist pieces, and Hadley aimed a finger to prove her point. Two doors down, a fifth grader with minidreadlocks burst into the hall, a boy carrying a laminated bathroom pass. At the sight of Sister Benedicta, he reined in his relief at being free of class, his impulse to run or loiter—Hadley could see this struggle playing out in his shoulders and on his face—and forced himself to walk slowly, hands clasped, all the way to the bathroom.
“I’m sure my implication is quite clear,” said Sister Benedicta.
Later, drinking shiraz and watching TV at her boyfriend’s house, Hadley said, “If creativity comes from God then isn’t all art religious?”
She had known Davis Fitch most of her life. Their mothers were friends. Back in kindergarten, she’d had a habit of chewing her ponytail when she was nervous. One day, during recess, with what she recalled as genuine curiosity, no malice at all, he had asked her how it tasted and she allowed him to hold the ends of her hair between his lips for a few seconds before Miss Frederick noticed and shuttled them to the principal’s office. In high school, they had avoided the pitfalls of romance by inviting each other to proms and winter formals. Strictly platonic. No pressure, no melodrama. Hadley went off to Brown while Davis stayed in state, but they kept in touch, regular emails, phone calls. They dated other people but nothing serious. After graduation, Hadley spent a lonely year working as a docent in New York and then her parents split and she came home—her mother was a mess—and there was Davis doing wealth management at his father’s firm.
“You should ask her that,” he said.
He was blond and round-faced, not quite plump. Soft was the word Hadley thought sometimes but did not say. Comfortable. He’d hung up his suit and changed into sweatpants, his blue button-down open over a T-shirt, beer bottle in one hand, bare feet crossed at the ankle on the coffee table, the hair on his toe knuckles blond as well. Not long after her return to Mobile, they’d gone out with friends, had too much tequila, ended up in bed. Davis couldn’t keep it up. He’d blamed it on the booze but Hadley suspected he was terrified. An awkward few weeks passed before they tried again and then it was nice, tender and thrilling at the same time.
“She doesn’t want to hear it,” Hadley said. “She’s like one of those puffed-up African dictators. Like a female Pol Pot. Worse, she’s like one of Pol Pot’s toadies. You should see her sucking up to Father Marco. She doesn’t care if these kids learn. She just wants them to behave.”
Davis massaged her shoulders. He owned the house on Japonica Lane. That’s what one did in Mobile—bought a midtown cottage, built equity, got married, moved to a bigger house in Spring Hill. On TV, a female detective poked a dead body with a pencil.
“I think Pol Pot was from Cambodia.”
“Whatever,” Hadley said.
She’d been surprised at how close to the surface her anger had remained, how quick it was to flare up now. She had let the rest of her classes go on with Jackson Pollock,
figuring she would give them a new assignment after Mardi Gras break, something more to Sister Benedicta’s liking, but all afternoon her heart had raced and her eyes were hot, and she left the art room a disaster, paint everywhere, smocks in a heap, brushes unwashed. She didn’t usually spend weeknights with Davis—her mother insisted that she keep her own apartment—but she hadn’t wanted to be alone.
She was hunting boxers to sleep in when she found it, a black velvet ring box hidden among the socks in Davis’s top drawer.
Contrary to popular belief, Mardi Gras started in Mobile, Alabama. In Mobile, not New Orleans. The first masked ball took place in 1704, the first parade in 1711, a dash of revelry before Lent. Schools are closed during the last week of the season, so Hadley was released from Sister Benedicta.
On Saturday, she arrayed herself in satin and attended the Mystics of Time Ball with Davis, the ring box snagged like a hangnail in her thoughts.
On Sunday, she had dinner with her father, Louis, and his new wife, Pam, a physical therapist. They’d met after surgery on his rotator cuff. After dinner, he presented Hadley with three hundred dollars cash. “Fun money,” he called it, holding her car door open. “Next time bring your young man.”
On Monday, she went out for beer and oysters with her friends. Only Peyton was married. The others had been her bridesmaids. Now Peyton was pregnant, beaming, sipping Diet Sprite and nibbling saltines. She told stories of her husband’s befuddlement—with birthing class, crib assembly, pregnancy sex. The others howled, their beauty not just physical but in the way they occupied space like no one else was in the room. Peyton volunteered, belonged to clubs. Virginia and Caroline both worked part-time at a funny little store on Old Shell Road where a certain kind of woman could find certain kinds of clothes and certain kinds of accessories. They were waiting for their real lives to begin. They had seemed so proud of Hadley when she went off to school and they seemed pleased to have her home, back in the fold, but she had detected—or thought she had detected—a hint of gloating in their welcome as if they’d known all along she would return, nothing accomplished. She didn’t tell them what she had found in Davis’s sock drawer.
Eveningland Page 4
