Seven Loves

by Valerie Trueblood

  He waited for Laura to interrupt him but she did not. She let the pause drag on. He had other points to raise and never got to the book on Malaysia, May remembered that, though he read a paragraph of it as the music came up at the end of the show. He read a passage about the house lizards. Laura didn’t seem to mind.

  “Now I’ll clear up, and why don’t you take a rest, Mom? People are coming by later, so this is a good time to rest.”

  May lay back in the armchair. The pink moon was gone, the sun had broken through to make a glare on the wall, with her profile in it, the hair floating up in all directions. She narrowed her eyes drowsily. “You were the one, you liked to make shadow animals,” she called clearly, her first long sentence of the day, to Laura in the kitchen.

  “What?”

  “On the wall. In your room.”

  “Oh. I thought you were accusing me of . . . I don’t know . . . vagueness,” Laura said. “Making shadow animals.”

  Oranges. May could smell them in the air. A scarf of orange scent was being drawn back and forth in front of her.

  “Mom, guess who’s here?”

  They had been talking but it seemed she had gone to sleep. She struggled awake, her hand going to her hair.

  “Arne!”

  He knelt by the chair. She put her fingers on the “Reno Air” logo on his jacket, and then on the white bristles of his crewcut and the soft tanned skin of his cheek, pocked like a golfball. Through the tan came the blush of his endless shame. “Arne, you came to visit me.”

  He looked over at Laura, not sure whether to say she had sent for him. “It’s that time of year,” he said.

  In the fall, when the pavements were bright and full of reflections and streams ran in the gutters, May would observe how many objects lay around in the streets. Not just hubcaps but soggy bathmats. Paperbacks caught on grates. Tennis balls, blocks from any court. “Tennis balls just have to be free,” Vera said. Nick had the answer: dogs dropped them on the way back from walks. The light would change, the leash would tug, the dog open its mouth, the ball roll into the gutter. Nick had discovered this one day when he happened to be sitting on the curb beside a park for a long time.

  Umbrellas. Doorknobs. Oven racks. A telephone book.

  One big-soled running shoe, on its side. That was the most common. If she drove across the lake on one of the bridges without thinking of Arne’s boot in the water, it was not because she had left off imagining it.

  For a long time, years, she had obeyed the impulse, no matter where she might be in the car when it came, to get to the lakefront quickly and drive along the water. She no longer did that. She had had a particular hill for her approach. As you drove down this hill, Mount Rainier loomed beyond the lake in the center of the windshield, an immense pyramid of snow on a platform of air. No connection to earth. The mountain-that-was-God, the Indians had named it. What do we have? she had moaned to herself, turning downhill and suddenly seeing it after it had been shrouded in mists for weeks. The what that-was-God?

  When people asked how many children she had, May said, “Two,” or “Two daughters.” Gradually the necessity of explaining had abated, just as later, when she was a widow, the compulsion to offer proof of the years she had been married would sink away. That was all right. That was as it must be. Eventually the past went from being cards laid face down to cards not held at all.

  Someone was tiptoeing into the room, as if May were asleep, when in fact she was wide awake, talking to Arne. A very tall girl, a beautiful girl. Behind her a spray of feathers. Not feathers but a huge bouquet, full of ferns, nodding in Laura’s arms. “Hello, hello,” the girl said to left and right, though there was only Arne there with May. He jumped to his feet. The girl had a peculiarly soft, hushed voice.

  May stared for a minute, and then, thank God, grasped who it was, it was Jackie from her office. How could she not have recognized Jackie?

  Laura set the foil-wrapped vase of ferns and tiger lilies on the coffee table, with a smile that told May she remembered the stories of Jackie. May had sent Laura a chronicle of her experimental year in the office—funny, savvy letters, she thought as she mailed them off, offered as proof that she was on top of things, able to leave retirement behind her and learn computers, able to get along, make friends, amuse and be amused.

  In answer to her descriptions of Jackie, Laura had sent her a Malay phrase for clumsy. It was long, perhaps it was a verse. May couldn’t remember it but it meant something like “Big as the earth may be, I miss it if I try to hit it.”

  Jackie. She had missed, without knowing it, the sight of Jackie making her way through the office with yellow Post-its fluttering around her, sweeping folders off people’s desks with her hip. The gait, all her own, with which Jackie now advanced, awkward yet delicate, like a loaded camel led on a bridle. “May? Honey? It’s Jackie.”

  “Jackie, how wonderful! But I can see you.”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know, I thought I would make sure because—well, at the office? We weren’t sure?” Jackie put up her shoulders in her high, countrified shrug.

  “I haven’t forgotten . . . anybody, in one week.”

  “Oh, May. Don’t be mad but it’s a month.” When pushed, Jackie would stand up for herself. She sat down, took May’s hand in hers, tenderly pressed little pleats into the thin skin over the knuckles. “Oh, and I brought you a book, I don’t know, it’s just a paperback,” she said, putting down May’s hand to rummage in her purse. “It’s probably no good,” she said humbly, to Laura. “I wish I could find a copy of your book. The one about, where is it you live? To read, I mean.”

  “There might be one around here somewhere,” Laura said kindly, making no move to find it.

  May held the book between her palms before she looked at it. It would be Love, Medicine and Miracles. But it wasn’t, it was a novel, with a young, long-haired woman not unlike Jackie on the front, her face and body embossed like the title. “Thank you. Have you read it? And tell me . . . about the kids.”

  “I didn’t read it but I heard about it. It may be too . . .”

  “Romantic? Spiritual?” May said, her mind suddenly quite clear, even cutting.

  “No . . . just . . . The kids—fine, I think. He has them this week. I’m Jackie,” she said to Arne, who was staring at the silky hair she had gathered into one hand and strewn back over her shoulder.

  “Jackie, this is Arne Olafsson,” Laura said. “I’m sorry I can’t remember your last name.”

  “Hmm,” said Jackie, without supplying it. “Pleased to meet you, Arne.”

  Laura brought a tray of coffee cups and the cake that had been sending the teasing smell of oranges through May’s sleep. “Arne is a cousin of ours,” she said to Jackie, passing the plates.

  “I . . . think I know,” Jackie said, with her finger to her lips like a child who knows the answer to a riddle.

  Arne merely ducked to his cake. After a silence he gave the newspaper on the coffee table a slap. “Look at this. Flesh-eating bacteria.”

  “Ah! Isn’t that awful?” Jackie said. Her blue eyes swept them all.

  “Some people say it’s been brought into the country,” Arne said. He set down his plate and drew himself up in the chair. “They think it’s part of a lot bigger thing.”

  “I wonder.” Jackie turned her large dazed eyes full onto Arne. Gradually her face emptied of the sweetness lying in the eggshell tints of the skin; it furrowed, took on concentration. “You know, Mr. Olson,” she said, “May has told me about you.” She studied him. “You’re a police officer.”

  “I’m the one,” Arne said.

  May always made an effort to be like her daughters, who insisted on going to the door and flinging it open to let the subject of Nick in, but she was too tired, she didn’t feel like going along, if Laura allowed the afternoon to take this turn.

  “You’re the one who tried to save May’s son,” Jackie went on relentlessly.

  Arne’s tan had darkened,
mottled. He cleared his throat. “No. No, that’s not the way I’d put it,” he rasped. He looked at Laura for help, but Laura was cutting more cake. May couldn’t help him; no one was going to help him. “I guess it’s up to—” He jabbed his thumb at the ceiling.

  “To God.” Jackie gave him a long look over the edge of her cup. “You . . . have . . . religious faith,” she said with deep sobriety.

  “I wish that was true.”

  May closed her eyes and let her head fall back on the cushions. Was there a subtle, sneaking advantage to the weariness the stroke had left her? Into the past, even into the immediate past, even into Jackie’s beauty, had crept this restful unimportance. She was beyond it. And was Arne, too, beyond this old ritual of theirs? No, you could hear in his voice that he wasn’t. If anything it was stronger in him; he was waiting for the rounding off, the release into the next year.

  Keeping her eyes closed, May began to breathe deeply and regularly. Sure enough, there was a pause during which she could hear Jackie rustling, gesturing to Arne: she’s going to sleep.

  “I don’t have it, faith,” Jackie said. “I just plain don’t. I’m what you’d call an agnostic.” She paused, assessing the effect of the word. But now she was not to be stopped, she was getting her teeth into the subject, with the strong sense she always had of what was important to a man. “It’s probably wrong but I sort of feel that, for me, I might be looking for something that isn’t in the files.” No one else spoke. Was Laura in the room anymore? “You’re pretty sure it isn’t in there, actually, so that, I mean, should you start in on hours and hours of looking for it? When you’re pretty sure it was never even there in the first place?”

  “You’re not sure it’s not there.” May heard Arne’s cup rock in the saucer.

  “What about some more cake?” Laura said. So she was in the room.

  “But just say it isn’t. Here, look.” Jackie was tapping along the coffee table, it seemed, with the edge of a hand. May opened her eyes. She’s doing file folders, she thought with a familiar glee, and closed them again. “Now,” Jackie said, “it can be misfiled to kingdom come, if you know, if you have proof it’s in there, you just keep looking, it’s worth it. The same way it’s worth it if you know you dropped your contact in the bathroom. You know it has to be in that room, somewhere near the sink. Do you see what I mean?”

  Here May opened her eyes again to send Jackie a look—Don’t take anything away from Arne. Arne was unclenching his big hand as if he had just punched somebody. But Jackie would know not to do that, remove any prop. Looking at the fist, the red face, she would know. And she did, she put her fingers up to her soft cheek and leaned forward politely as Arne said, “But wait a minute!”

  “Religion,” Laura put in unexpectedly, “is the sigh of the oppressed creature. You always said that, Mom. Leaving out what God might be,” she added soothingly, to Arne.

  “I didn’t say . . . no . . . I quoted . . . my mother.”

  “Her mother was a lapsed Catholic,” Laura explained to Jackie.

  “I can go with that,” Arne said.

  “Oh, I agree,” Jackie cried, posing her head so that she appeared to be looking up, like Princess Di. A familiar look. May could place it, a look from below you on the steps. She had seen the same look when her sister Carrie greeted Laban, the young minister, and made it her business to marry him. May happened to know that Jackie had toyed with Scientology, and after that the Foursquare Church. Agnostic! Jackie! What was the word for a person who was ready to believe anything?

  Arne was leaning over the table dipping his cake into his coffee, his neck sunk between his shoulders. “How’s this?” He took a deep breath, expanding the shirt May knew he had ironed himself, and blew it out. “Sigh of the oppressed creature,” he said, looking around brightly. Jackie laughed, and gave a musical sigh of her own. Arne had set his legs squarely apart so that the trousers, pulled tight, had to be loosened from the bunched muscles of his thighs.

  “Not today,” he said to Jackie, with a broadly signifying look at May, “but I’ll tell you the whole thing some time.”

  Arne had had two wives already, he was halfway down the road to being crazy, he gambled away everything he had, he was too old for Jackie. But maybe not.

  For as long as he lived, Cole thought of Arne as the person who killed Nick. May could not remember when she had realized this. She sometimes wished she had heard him say it, encouraged him in some way to speak his mind about Arne, but he had stopped short of that. May suspected that it was for Laura’s sake that he had refrained. They were careful with Laura. Laura had been thirteen when Nick was born, the kind of sister who was half mother. When Nick died, her way back was as slow as the arrow that never arrived because the distance it was traveling could still be cut in half.

  It was not that Laura was a pushover. It was not as if Arne Olafsson would come out a hero, if Laura were to tell it. She would simply be factual, chronological, as she had been in her books: Arne didn’t leave the city, he didn’t leave his job. Despite the fact that he wasn’t going anywhere on the force, he stayed. The department didn’t get rid of him but it was clear he was being kept on and that was all. He didn’t seem to care. As a cop it was no use to have ambition anyway, once you got the label oddball. He had had his event, and gone inside it, and his loyalty was to it.

  Arne’s hair went white, in stark contrast to the tan he got from the hours he spent on a tanning bed, cultivating an orangey tea color year-round, which everyone else found comical. He told May about the comments he got at the station; he was one of those people who don’t know any better than to tell stories on themselves. But he didn’t start drinking, and he was proud of that. He did lose his wife, and then his second wife, the one who got to be a friend of May’s. Missing a rung here and there, with a momentary jolt, and then catching itself, getting its balance, his life went in little stumbles downward. He started to gamble. Just poker at first, he told May. “Hey, I’m watching it.” Then the gambling got a little out of control, and he lost his house.

  He felt less guilty about that than May would have supposed, all of his guilt being taken up elsewhere. About the gambling he seemed content with a kind of bashful, sentimental regret, as May discovered when she took a ride with him in his patrol car. “Listen to this,” he said, putting in a tape. He wanted her to hear a bluegrass song about a gambling man whose mother kept sending him warnings from the back of a playing card. “That gets me,” he said, driving with his eyes on the rearview mirror, as was his habit.

  Around the fifth year, Arne said to May, “I have something to tell you.” This was soon after he married his second wife, Lorraine, when the house they were living in was being sold out from under them. “I’ve accepted Jesus Christ.”

  “I’m glad. I always wish I knew what that is. What’s involved.”

  “You just . . . you see how things could be different. From here on out I feel like I can quit dwelling on it.”

  “How things could be different. That’s good.”

  “I don’t know.” He scratched his tanned neck.

  “It’s good.”

  “Well, to tell the truth, I’m not as convinced as Lorraine. But she’s had the Lord a lot longer. She knows this stuff.”

  After their divorce this second wife did not abandon Arne. Months before he told May about it, Lorraine had called her to say, “I thought you ought to know we’re separating.”

  “Thanks for calling me,” May said. “Oh, what’s going to happen to him?”

  “I’ll keep in contact,” Lorraine said. Contact. A word May had not let her students use, as verb or noun. But Lorraine’s heart was in the right place. “Anymore, I feel like he’ll stay where he is now,” she said. “I don’t feel like I was for a while, that he’ll go down. But you know him. He’s got it on his conscience. You know the problem.”

  “I think so,” May said. At one time she would have pursued this line of talk so that she could give her version, in which ev
erything that led up to that particular night was carefully pieced in and basted together into a plausible whole. This attempt led her on a path to hidden, guarded stores of blame. Self-blame, for the most part, but also blame of others who would never suspect they were even involved. Girlfriends, teachers, doctors. She held on to it, made it precious for a while, if for no other reason than to fight off the articles and books forbidding blame, which her friends sent her. She no longer prized this version, with the luxury of blame and possible punishment. Next she resumed the piecing together and the retelling, and the process grew so exhaustive and complicated that everyone got off, more or less; they all jumped ship one by one, on a rope of details, leaving Nick to go down alone. She no longer covered that ground either. Words could not come anywhere near the pulsing, living, enshrined truth.

  “I can’t blame Lorraine, she wants kids,” Arne said, about his divorce. It seemed he shot blanks. That was how he put it.

  But Lorraine was a decent person. She had to be, as Arne pointed out; she had no choice, she had the Lord. The mysterious Lord. On that subject May was cautious. After all these years she still felt an undertow from anybody who had that particular settled, satisfied attitude, like a person after a big Thanksgiving dinner. Anybody decent, that is. Anybody happy. Had there been a time when she could have gone in that direction? She had longed for someone, after all. No one she knew, no one human. She had petitioned someone in secret, those first years, to take hold of her and wring out the dark water and bring her back. Rescue her.

  Was it the Lord who gave Lorraine a new husband and two sons? Lorraine was the kind of woman who sent out oversize pop-up cards announcing IT’S A BOY! May had hers on the mantel for so long the second one appeared beside it.

  “I thought about whether I oughta send you that announcement,” Lorraine said the first time, hoisting the baby in his plastic carrier. “You know.” She and May were halfway to being friends by then.