She finally proposed it a few months ago, while they lay awake in bed. She would sell her apartment and move into his house. “It’s big and empty,” she told him. “We could be near one another.”
“We’re already near,” he said, hoping to defuse the situation. He hugged her to him.
“You know what I mean. Bernardo, we’re old. Admit it, this is it for us.”
He shrugged. “So why not keep it as it is?”
“Because I’m afraid we’ll be lonely,” she said after some thought. “That if we live apart like this for much longer, we won’t know how to stop. I’m afraid of the day when it will be as easy for you to stay home without me as it will be to come be near me.” She took a breath. “I’m afraid I’ll get that way too.”
“So then everything will be as it should. We’ll do what we want.”
She turned over and took his face in her hands. “Is that really what you want?”
“Not now, no. Of course not.”
“Because if that’s what you want—for our love to just wear away to nothing—then leave me now. I don’t want to see us do that to each other.”
“Paula!”
“No! Better to go out with a bang!”
“I don’t want that,” he said. “You know that. But what makes you think that will happen? Unless you think something’s wrong now…”
“No, there’s nothing wrong. It’s just…we’ve been through a lot together, but we’ve never been obliged to do anything, not once…”
“And we’ve been happy.”
“Yes, so far. But soon.” She shrugged.
“Soon what?”
“Soon we might not be able to get around so well. Or we’ll get sick. I want us to trust each other to be around for that. I want you to know I’ll be there for you.”
“Ah,” he said. “You mean you want to know I will. You mean you don’t trust me.”
She sighed. “I do trust you, as far as I’ve needed to. But as for the future…”
“Yes?”
“I want a promise,” she said. “I need this from you, Bernardo. I want you to rise to the challenge.” She sat up, the sheets tumbling off her like the unveiling of a monument. “I challenge you to invite me into your life.”
He gave it a moment’s consideration, though now—with the business in flux, and his hardest years, he hoped, behind him—now the idea made him terribly weary.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
“You will.”
“Yes, I will.”
Of course all of that was meaningless now. For two months, he said nothing of that conversation, and their lives went on as usual, intersecting when ever it was convenient or desirable. And then, in the last few days, when the market burned, he panicked and didn’t speak to her at all.
It was a mistake, all of it. There was a lot in his life he would like to have erased, a lot of bad decisions he’d like to have the chance to make again. But all he wanted now was not to have run away, to have instead run to her and made something of a life together. Of course it was too late to go back. He tried to imagine himself a year from now, two at the most, established in America doing…something. Would she give up her life and come live with him?
No. She owed him nothing, and he hadn’t found the courage, when it counted, to give her his life—or his death, which now would come to him in a strange country, perhaps alone. At long last, he understood what a fool he was.
He gripped the sides of Paul and Anita’s mattress as if it were a rowboat tossed by storm, and he let misery wash over him, bitter and worthless as the waves, and as cold.
* * *
Outside, he poked through the boards that used to be the tool-shed. It hadn’t been terrifically strong to begin with—the walls were cheap plywood that had nearly rotted through in places, and the studs had simply been set in holes, no cement. He pushed aside a few planks and discovered a capsized workbench littered with loose tools. He found a hammer and a handsaw, and a flattened cardboard box spilling nails.
There were also garden tools—a hoe and a shovel, the handle of each snapped off at the base, and a dirt rake. In a bent plastic bin were some hand tools, a tiny spade and a weeding hoe. The ruined patch at the edge of the yard had indeed been a garden, and he wondered why they dug it so far from the house, in the shade of trees. Probably simple ineptitude. He had a momentary flash of irritation—people shouldn’t undertake things they knew nothing about. But who was he to criticize? He was hungry again and the sun was hot, and he decided to go back inside.
It was there, his head suddenly clear in the quiet and cool of the house, that it occurred to him for the first time that he was a bad man. Not just a failure, or a rube, but a truly bad man, selfish and cruel, and rotten luck to anyone he touched. So terrible that he pushed away his son and his lover, that he drove his parents and wife to early graves. And hadn’t he gotten an inkling of this on the hill, looking down on the ruins of the plane the way a murderer might stand for a moment over his victim, savoring the awful simplicity of killing, the finality of it?
He reeled, and caught himself against a kitchen chair. He was worse than a murderer, who, if nothing else, had the gun or the knife to believe in—Bernardo believed in nothing, trusted no one. He was useless and alone in the world.
He collapsed into the chair, lowered his head onto his folded arms and finally cried, the rough grain of the table blurring before him like the bars of a cell. For long minutes, there were only the tears and the incessant heave of his body, and slowly these things brought him back to earth. He felt the table under his fingers and the floor under his shoes, and his hunger, which always returned to him, no matter how miserable the circumstances. And soon enough he felt like himself again, a small, wrung-out version of himself that he could bear to inhabit, and he got up from the chair and breathed deep, thankful breaths.
That was when he thought to make them dinner. Anita was bound to be angry when she got home, and most people found it hard to maintain their anger when there was a plate of food in front of them. If he was going to get himself together, to make some sort of life, he would have to start here. Anita and Paul, for better or worse, were the only thing he had.
He looked through the kitchen cabinets. They had a lot of things in cans. He found dry pasta, tomatoes, a bottle of olive oil crusted stickily over with dust. Some flour in a plastic container, a few packets of yeast in the refrigerator. The ingredients began falling into place in his imagination, in their familiar way. If nothing else, he at least had a way with food. There were worse things to be good at.
When he heard the car pull up, he had a focaccia baking in the oven, flavored with sage he’d found growing outside, and a pot of what he considered passable tomato sauce, all things considered, bubbling on the stove. He felt, to his surprise, almost useful, a little less far from content.
Then the door swung open, and Anita said, “You!”
“Hello…”
“Get out of here! I told you to get out!” She tossed her briefcase onto the table, where it landed with a deafening clap, and pushed him away from the stove. “What are you doing!” she said. “You’re cooking!”
He held up his hands. “Paul—he asks me…”
“Paul!” Her face was struggling; it twitched like a piece of frying bacon. “Paul?” She turned.
“I didn’t ask her yet,” he said ruefully as he came in. Bernardo could see the car through the door, spilling over with lumber.
“Ask me what?”
“I told him…I said I’d see if you’d reconsider…” He made a defeated gesture with his arm toward the corner of the house. “I’m so bad with fixing stuff. We could use the help.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“Mi dispiace,” Bernardo said. “I make you food…”
She turned on him, but her eyes fell to the oven. “The oven’s on.”
“I bake bread.”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe you left him in
the house,” she told the floor.
“You made food?” Paul said.
Bernardo looked at him, then at her. “Spaghetti. Tomato sauce. Focaccia.” He leaned toward the oven and opened the door. The smell of sage filled the air. “No problem.”
“Mmm,” Paul said.
“Paul.” Anita was glaring at him now.
“What!”
“Outside,” she said, shaking her head. She leveled a finger at Bernardo as she left. “Don’t touch anything.” He raised his hands to indicate he understood.
He watched them through the window. Paul had his hands shoved deep into his pockets and his head down. His hair cascaded over his shoulders, obscuring his face. Anita, her arms pistoning before her, seemed to be doing most of the talking. Bernardo’s water had come to a boil, and he automatically dumped the pasta into it and began to stir.
When the door opened again, Anita walked through the kitchen without a word, and Paul followed her, plodding, into the bedroom.
“Pretty soon you eat,” Bernardo informed him as he passed.
“Okay.”
He remembered where he had seen the dishes and took out three matching ones, then found some silverware in a drawer. He listened to the grudging, negotiating mutter of the voices in the next room but could make nothing out. In another drawer he found a grimy pair of votive candles, and he lit these and set them on a small plate. He was filling glasses with water when Paul came out.
“Hey,” Paul said, his eyes wide at the sight of the table. He solemnly took a seat. Anita appeared in the doorway and stood very still for a moment, staring at the candles as if she’d never seen them before.
Bernardo served the dinner. It smelled good after those days of foraging and stolen leftovers. Paul took the first bites, and Bernardo was pleased to see the sudden light it brought to his face; Anita said nothing, but ate anyway, her eyes locked on her plate.
They had nearly finished when she looked up and said, “Get the shed up as soon as you can. You can sleep there until you’re finished with the rest.”
This did not produce the effect he thought it would on Paul—a relieved, victorious grin. Instead, Paul hung his head again, as if he had just heard a papal decree. Bernardo found himself getting a little angry—I need no favors! he thought to announce, but of course he did need them, desperately—and managed a mumbled thanks.
“This is pretty good,” she added, as an afterthought.
“Yeah,” Paul said, and she glared at him. He went on, more quietly: “After dinner, we can get the wood out of the car.”
“Good,” Bernardo said. And this was what he wanted, wasn’t it? To buy time, to keep himself in food and under a roof until he could figure out what to do next. But something had changed between Paul and his wife; suddenly they were careful, as if they’d only now noticed that something had come between them. Bernardo felt like he had tripped a silent alarm.
They finished eating in silence, and he gathered the dishes. Then, without a word, Paul beckoned him to the car, where he would get to work building himself a new home.
11
Three weeks later they had rebuilt the shed and were well into replacing the corner of the house. The new studs and joists stuck out palely like the bones of a half-carved turkey, and they had bought wood siding and salvaged the old insulation in anticipation of finishing the wall. The work had gone well, if slowly; Paul found himself increasingly busy working for Ponty. For several days he had posed as a college student to track down a kid who had vanished. He found the kid holed up, paranoid, in the bowels of the University dining hall, where he’d been stealing food and running heroin out the loading dock door at night. Paul was stunned at how easily he passed for a college student. None of the kid’s confidants ever questioned his intentions; they only took a quick look at his long hair and longshoreman’s cap, his baggy pants (which he’d gotten at a junk shop for a buck), and decided he was okay to talk to. It amazed him how guileless these students all were, and amazed him even further how much the paranoid kid reminded him of himself—the perpetually stoned Tuscaloosa version of himself, the one who partied through his father’s death and burial without having heard a thing about it. He pitied the kid terribly, and with a little guilt, as if he had no right.
Another case was simple surveillance. He was supposed to watch a young woman from outside her apartment, and take unusually detailed notes. He had picked up the woman’s photograph and some other particulars from a rich lady who lived on a ranch outside town. The rich lady had to be about eighty. Her face was heavily made up, and she wore a fringed rodeo shirt and spurs on her boots indoors. She smoked Marlboros through a plastic holder. Paul could gain little insight into why she wanted this younger woman followed, but he expected a lot of driving around, a lot of slipping into the darkest corners of bars, a lot of intrigue.
Instead, the young woman stayed home every night. Paul usually showed up around five, and watched her come home from work, cook some food, read the newspaper, and wash the dishes. She was about thirty, bespectacled, plump; she never had friends over and spent most of her nights looking at magazines and watching television. One night he was thrilled to see her come out and walk to her car; he followed her to a movie theater, where he sat three rows behind her. She watched the movie alone. It wasn’t very good. Then she went home.
He learned to bring along things to read and eat, and a tiny flashlight. On his last night, he was munching on a bag of crackers when he heard a phone ring. He looked up at the window and saw the woman walk out of sight to get it; a moment later she reappeared at the window, the receiver cradled between her head and shoulder, and peered out into the dark. Paul ducked, but he was sure he’d been seen. When he heard a door slam, he fumbled in the glovebox and pulled out the owner’s manual to the car, which he opened to a random page. The woman appeared at the car window.
“Hi,” she said.
“I’m having some car trouble,” Paul told her. “I think I’ve blown a fuse or something.”
“I know who you are. Grandmother called to make sure you were out here.”
“Grandmother?”
“The old lady with the boots?”
“Uh.”
“Do you want to come in for tea or something? I’m watching It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”
“I don’t get it,” Paul said. “You knew I was…”
“Not exactly. She does this sometimes. She’s a little mad herself. Did you go up to the house?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you notice there aren’t any doors? When my brother and I were kids we had to stay there for a week every year, and there was no privacy at all. No door on the bathroom, and she has one of those showers with the sliding glass partitions. It freaked me out. Imagine being nine and your grandfather walking by to check you out while you were in the shower.”
“Geez.”
“It took years of therapy to undo the damage. Are you sure you don’t want to come in?”
“I’m sure,” he said.
She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
He stayed in the car until the woman had gone to bed. She waved to him before she turned out the light, and Paul waved back.
He kind of missed that assignment when it ended. It had given him a lot of free time to think. What he thought about mostly was Alyssa Ponty, whom he had been following around almost every day.
When he saw her at Montana Gag that Tuesday, he’d immediately been struck with strange and nauseating waves of empathy; these redoubled when she came back the following day, again with the boy in the truck. Wozack was in that day, and Alyssa and the boy walked away with a paper bag of pot. Paul had the camera ready behind the doughnut shelf, and he aimed it at her virulent shock of purple hair as it moved across the parking lot. At the last possible moment, before they climbed into the truck, he snapped three shots in rapid succession.
Wozack had a lot of customers that day, and Paul filled his roll of film. In the afternoon, when he waite
d at the mall photo shop for his prints to be finished, he tried to decide what to do about the Alyssa pictures. Was it his responsibility to turn them in with the rest, or would that represent some kind of betrayal? How could it be a betrayal when he didn’t even know the girl? How was it his responsibility?—he was only Ponty’s employee. He left the pictures on top of the stack until he was standing outside Ponty’s door, then he shoved them into his pocket.
After that, he was obsessed. It was a familiar feeling; he’d never been very good at keeping secrets. In grade school, he alienated his friends by tattling their confidences to anyone willing to listen, which was everyone. Eventually nobody told him anything. He couldn’t get hold of a piece of knowledge without acting on it. And if telling her father wasn’t the way he was going to act on what he knew about Alyssa, he would find another way. That way was following her.
The day after he took those pictures—a day he was supposed to take off, to help Bernardo with the shed—he grew restless and took the car out to the high school. It was around two-thirty, about the time he expected the students to get out, and he parked half a block from the main entrance. He passed the time listening to some Celtic folk songs on the public radio station.
After about half an hour he heard a distant bell, and students began to empty out through the school’s wide double doors. There were so many, and they came out so fast, that he quickly lost hope of identifying her. Then he noticed the battered blue pickup parked at the corner on the next block. If she was going to get a ride with the boy from yesterday, they would have to walk right past him. And sure enough, when the crowd of kids began to thin and the cars around him disappear in clouds of exhaust, he noticed them coming toward him across the school’s wide yard, the boy with his arm around her and a red baseball cap hugging the dome of his head, she leaning precariously against him, her hair shoved up under her black beret, out of sight. Paul slid down in his seat and angled the rearview mirror to watch them approach: they seemed more at ease than he could ever recall being in high school. She was taking long, slow strides, and his steps seemed shortened to meet hers halfway, so that they walked together, bobbing like a pair of buoys on calm water. They passed within a few feet of Paul and didn’t notice him; when they reached the truck they parted and got in their respective doors, only to meet again in the cab. They sat there a long time. Paul saw smoke curling out a half-open window. Then the truck started up with a rattle and pulled away.
Light of Falling Stars Page 17
