Love Nest

by Andrew Coburn

  “The funeral? Hours ago.”

  “I dreamed about her.”

  “That’s bound to happen. For a while.”

  “It was real. She talked to me.”

  “Only in your head.” She fetched his robe, which was like a boxer’s, electric in color. “Lift your elbow,” she said firmly and helped him into it. The letter W adorned the left lapel inside a sparkle of stitches. To him, gazing at it with his chin tucked in, it was an M.

  “I don’t want to go in the pool.”

  “Then go down and pump. Or chin yourself. Work out, baby. It always does you good.”

  He was wrapped in his robe, the sturdy sash tied tight, but his shivering increased. He grimaced, as if every emotion in him were tainted. She stroked his fine-spun hair.

  “Be strong,” she said.

  They left the bedroom together and descended the wide stairs, he first, with a steadying hand on the rail. He did not want her to follow him to the exercise room. “I do better by myself,” he said, a little color returning to his face.

  “Give me a kiss, then.”

  It was slobbery.

  They parted in the foyer. She went into the kitchen, where she had left a sack of groceries from Barcelos on the counter. She was washing down a clump of seedless grapes when the telephone rang. The caller was from the high school. She knew him by his title of assistant principal and by a memory of his black hornrims, which kept sliding down his nose the time she had been in his office, Mrs. Medwick a nervous figure in the background and Sergeant Dawson a rawboned one, all of them gathered against her and her son, who could not bring himself to look at the teacher. “Why, Walter?” the assistant principal asked somberly, and she stepped between them and said, “The shrink will tend to that. That’s the deal, isn’t it?”

  Now, with a grape in her mouth, she said, “Yes, what is it?” Then she listened carefully, without comment but with a growing tremor of alarm as he told of pulling her son out of math class to talk with the sergeant, who was vague about the reasons.

  “The same sergeant. You remember.”

  “Yes,” she said coldly. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “Mrs. Bauer. Is there anything I should know?”

  “No,” she said. “There’s nothing you should know.”

  • • •

  Alfred Bauer reserved a private room at Rembrandt’s for lunch with Rita O’Dea and William Rollins, with Paige Gately to join them later. Rita O’Dea slung her mink over a chair, consuming and nearly toppling it. Rollins seated her opposite Bauer and himself at the end of the table, leaving himself enough room to lay out a file folder or two if called upon, though usually everything he needed was in his head. Rita O’Dea opened a leatherbound menu and after a couple of moments slapped it shut. “You order, Alfred. Something yummy.” The waiter was baby-faced and dumpling-cheeked. She stared at him with a smile and made him uncomfortable. “Anybody ever tell you you’re cute, young man? Look at him blush, Alfred.”

  Bauer ordered veal. “Won’t take long, will it?” The waiter, still red, assured him it would not. Bauer ordered three sherries, but Rollins shook his head. “Make it two,” Bauer said.

  The drinks arrived presently, followed by three salads. Rollins shifted his chair closer to the table, upsetting the briefcase he had placed beside him on the floor. He lifted his salad fork. “The funeral went well,” he said, and Rita O’Dea, a cherry tomato floating inside her mouth, glowered at him.

  “I don’t want to talk about that stuff, not when I’m eating.” She was still wearing her mink hat. She tipped it back a bit.

  “Why don’t you take it off,” Bauer suggested.

  “Why, do I look funny?”

  “Of course not, you look lovely.”

  “Alfred always butters me up, have you noticed, Willy? I know exactly what he’s doing, but he thinks he fools me. Remember, Alfred, I knew you when you were nothing but a pimp. That was when you first shaved your head and rubbed something on it to make it shine.”

  There were times he detested her, and this was one of them. Were she not who she was, he would have swiftly and joyfully struck her. Instead he smiled, sipped his sherry, wiped his lips, and said, “Shall we begin?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I always like to talk about money.”

  With a signal from Bauer, Rollins gave status reports on construction projects, the future ones including townhouses in Ballardvale, condos on the bank of the Shawsheen, an office complex in South Lawrence, the work subcontracted to companies once wholly or partly owned by her brother and now by her. At times she seemed inattentive, for the waiter had delivered plates of veal strips smothered in a sweet sauce.

  “Alfred, this is good.”

  “I thought you’d like it.”

  Without dipping into his briefcase, Rollins recited facts and figures, divulged tax breaks he had worked out, and projected profits, which brought a smile to her mobile face. Buttering bread, she looked at Bauer. “What do you think, partner? You happy?”

  “You heard William.”

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  “I’m happy.”

  Rollins, as if by afterthought, mentioned a lawsuit over flooded basements and cracks in a few foundations in the Cherry Dale section of town, a site overlapping wetlands, where, he reminded her, bulldozers had sunk in the mud after a spring rain.

  “I don’t want to hear history,” she said. “Tell me about the suit. Is it something Alfred and I have to worry about?”

  “I can settle on the sly with the leader of it. I know his lawyer. When he drops out, the others will too.”

  “That’s what I want to hear. Too bad you didn’t know my brother, he’d have made you a big man, Willy.” She turned again to Bauer. “Any other business?”

  Bauer said, “Paige Gately wants to buy the Silver Bell.”

  “That so? Why?”

  “She thinks she can do more with it than we have.”

  “I don’t trust her.”

  “Do you trust any woman, Rita?”

  “You were one, you wouldn’t ask. The Silver Bell has a stink to it now, thanks to you. She must have something up her sleeve. What’s she offering?”

  “No figures yet. She wants to negotiate a fair price.”

  “Fair price doesn’t interest me. She wants to talk money, maybe I’ll listen. Or maybe I’ll burn it down, her in it, tell her that.” She had been using her napkin as a bib. Now she tore it off. “You haven’t said anything about my godson. I had a lot of feeling for the girl, but I love him. I don’t care if he did it or not, don’t let him go down the drain.”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “No?”

  “I’d crush the cop first.”

  Rollins nervously pushed aside his plate with an obvious wish that he were elsewhere. Rita O’Dea’s gaze remained firmly on Bauer. “I never cared much for the way you brought him up. All that body-building crap you and Harriet put him through. It’s the muscle in the head that counts.”

  Bauer, with an effort, held his tongue.

  “He needs help, something more than a shrink. That never did him any good. Let him live with me for a while, I’ll straighten him out.”

  “I don’t think Harriet would consent to that.”

  “She’s a jealous bitch. My brother told you that years ago.”

  The waiter reappeared, and Bauer in a curiously heavy voice ordered coffee. Rita O’Dea readjusted her hat. “None for me. I’ve got soaps to watch.” She rose with a swish, her dress riding up on one side, and snatched up her mink. “Help me on with it, young man. Tip him good, Alfred.”

  After she left, neither man spoke. Rollins reached down and righted his briefcase. When he saw the coffee coming, he turned his cup upside down in the saucer. His hand had a slight tremor. Finally Bauer, without looking at him, said, “You can leave.”

  Paige Gately arrived a few minutes later, her entrance as quiet as Rollins’s withdrawal had been, and sat in the chair he h
ad vacated. She unbuttoned her coat but did not take it off. “Where’s Rita?”

  Bauer showed a shut face, a part of which seemed frozen. “Be glad she’s gone.”

  “Did you tell her what I want to do?”

  Bauer said nothing.

  “I deserve an answer.”

  His eyelids flickered. “At the motel. That day. I want you to tell me everything you know.”

  “Why ask me? Your wife was there.”

  He put a hand to his forehead. “Yes. But too late.”

  • • •

  “I like your jacket. Nice patches. Good-looking buttons.” Chief Chute felt the material. “Where did you get it? Andover Shop?”

  “Macartney’s.”

  “Could’ve fooled me. Sit down, Sonny.” Dawson thumped into a hard chair, and the chief settled himself behind his desk, his pink face pleasantly set. “You talked with the boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “I have enough to pull him in. I can probably get him to confess, the state he’s in.”

  “You don’t sound happy about it.”

  “He’s so damn vulnerable.” Dawson said with a restless gesture, his voice twangy.

  “You didn’t make him what he is.”

  “I just don’t want to be wrong.”

  The chief, who had jerked forward in his chair, sank back. “You carry everything on your shoulders, Sonny. I could never break you of that. I guess that’s what made me trust you more than the others.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You’re probably full of guilt about the girl.”

  “I should’ve done more for her.”

  “No, Sonny, you should’ve done less.”

  A silence fell between them. On the chief’s desk, in a stand-up frame, was a collage of color photos of his grandchildren. He seemed to be looking at it.

  “Go get him, Sonny. Bring him in.”

  • • •

  After the call from the assistant principal, Harriet Bauer stood with an unusual stillness, waiting with iron reserve for an inner weariness to pass. Finally she snatched up the phone and rang her husband’s office. The receptionist told her that he was at Rembrandt’s, a late lunch, business with Mr. Rollins and others.

  “Yes, I know that. I thought he might be back by now.”

  “If it’s important, I can call the restaurant.”

  “Yes, it’s important, but it can wait until he gets in. Have him call me.”

  The receptionist seemed to sense that the conversation was not finished and stayed on the line.

  “How’s he treating you, Eve?”

  There was no reply, none expected.

  “Don’t take his promises too seriously.”

  “Will that be all, Mrs. Bauer?”

  “Yes, Eve,” she said with neither inflection nor malice. “Go back to your Harlequin novel.”

  The abundant cluster of grapes was still in the sink, and she tore off a clump and picked at it, each grape progressively less sweet, her mood affecting her taste. She remembered herself as a lumbering adolescent with kneecaps red from kneeling and a head sore from praying, an explosive time of her life, waking as if from a drugged sleep inside a fundamentalist farm family with too many members to love, all demanding more than their share, the print of her father’s leather-skinned hand scored into her bottom. Think you’re better than us, don’t you, missy? She fled the farm on a Greyhound, good-bye to the hogs and chickens she would miss more than her brothers and sisters. New York frightened her, but Boston did not, and she bared herself in the Back Bay atelier of a second-rate painter who immediately made advances and eventually introduced her into the business. A rising mafioso gave her a smile, and later a blue-eyed, bald businessman told her she was the pick of the litter. Later he compared her to wine. I want you, he said, which was no problem, merely a question of money. Private stock, he added, which was a little different. To her mind, and by and by his, that meant marriage.

  The phone rang as she was putting away the grapes. She heard the receptionist’s voice and then her husband’s. “Come home,” she said.

  Quietly she made her way to the exercise room, where she hoped to see the width of her son’s chest glittering under a barbell. He was not there, nor in the pool, the surface of which was an unsullied sheet of blue. She was not surprised, for she had considered the possibility he might creep back to his room, either to bury himself in bed or, more likely, to dress quickly and skip out of the house for a walk in the woods or a random drive through the town.

  “Wally,” she called out when she reached the top of the stairs. She felt he was well beyond the carry of her voice, but she trekked to his room anyway, tapped hard on the door, and pushed it open. Her gaze, cutting into the dim, went immediately to the bed. Her voice softened. “Why didn’t you tell me the sergeant talked to you?” She thought he was under the covers because they were rumpled up high in the middle. Then, moving close to the bed, she saw she was wrong. As she started to turn, some tiny sound nicked the silence. It might have come from the intake of somebody’s breath, or it might have come from the silence itself. For the first time, her back rigid, she experienced a fear of her son.

  “Wally,” she murmured, as if he were in whispering distance but had taken on a protective coloring. Her back was to the bathroom. The door was ajar. She gave it a slow push, peered in, and saw nothing. Her fear lessening, she backed out. The door to the walk-in closet was closed. She yanked it open, glimpsed the electric glare of his robe, and froze.

  He had hanged himself with the sash.

  Seven

  No way I can compete with that, is there?” she said. She stood just outside the front doorway with a small sack of groceries in one arm but would not come in, her gaze traveling deep into the house, all the way to the kitchen. She was from the neighborhood, her face disciplined since her divorce to show little emotion, even in bed. “And certainly too gorgeous for me to hate. I should’ve backed off when I saw the strange car in the drive. In fact, I should’ve phoned first.”

  “It’s not in the least what you think.”

  “You don’t have to explain to me, Sonny. I’m not anybody big in your life, never felt I was.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said firmly. His hair was still damp from his shower. The towel that had girded his loins was now wrapped around his neck, bunching the collar of the ratty robe he had owned most of his adult life. “Come in and meet her.”

  “I’m not into that sort of thing.” She pressed the groceries upon him. “Here, let her make your supper. My gift to the both of you.”

  The sack would have dropped between them had he not held on. Her departure was swift, his closing of the door slow. Melody Haines stood in the entryway of the kitchen, clean-lined and fresh-faced, her jeans slung low across her hips. She gave out a sympathetic smile.

  “Did I spoil something?”

  “There was little to spoil.”

  “Good. Because she looked like a gloomy person. Not for you, Sonny.”

  “You’re pushing your luck.”

  She trailed him into the kitchen, stepped past him when he put the groceries down, and poked into them. “I can’t cook, but I can try.” She held up two small cuts of tenderloin held together under plastic wrap. “I might need some help with this.”

  “Put it back,” he said firmly. His face lengthened. “Why did you come here to my house? A straight answer, please.”

  “It seemed right.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “But it’s straight.” She turned and peered through the window over the sink into a backyard flower garden, phlox rearing up in lush bloom, each flake of color a sparkle in the low sunlight. “Who keeps it up, Sonny? You? It’s lovely.” She faced him. “I’d love to take a walk before it gets dark. Can we do that?”

  He stared at her. “Who put you onto me?”

  “You don’t trust me, do you?”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  He felt aw
kward in his robe and excused himself. Upstairs in his room, he put on a sweat shirt and chinos and frowned into the dresser mirror as if he were trying to puzzle out not her but himself. On his way down the stairs, he heard her lift the receiver from the wall phone in the kitchen and swiftly tap out a number. He had counted the taps and knew it was a toll call.

  “Hello, Sue? Mel. Any mail for me? Any calls?” Her voice was swift, distinct, and cheerfully confident, but undershot with a tincture of anxiety. “Miss me? How’s Natalie doing? Still moaning and groaning? Tell her to smile.” He entered the kitchen slowly, and her eyes seized upon his attire. “You look like an all-American boy,” she whispered away from the receiver. Immediately she spoke back into it. “By the way, I’ve met a marvelous man. Guess what he is. A cop.”

  “Enough,” he said quietly.

  “See you when I see you. Love you both.”

  There was a quiet after she hung up. She stood boldly, yet with a part of her subdued, which made her at once charming and challenging to look at.

  “My roommates,” she said. “I’ll tell you about them sometime.”

  “Sit down.”

  She drew a chair and sat at the table, her legs crossed, giving him a view of long, slim ankles and white sneakers with a cerulean trim. He regarded her with reserve.

  “Are you on something?”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If I were high, Sonny, I wouldn’t need your company.”

  “Ever been busted?”

  “Juvenile record count? If not, no.”

  He stood with his back to the refrigerator, half listening to the hum. “Tell me about the foster homes.”

  “Why?” Her tone transmitted indifference. “Not one of them was happy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I never think about it.” Restlessly she uncrossed her legs, stretched, and got to her feet. She seemed drawn to the window over the sink.

  “Were you abused?”

  “Soiled says it better. That’s behind me.” At the sink she went up on tiptoes and gazed out, the deep glowing color of her hair covering her back. “A squirrel, have you noticed, scratches and cleans itself just like a cat. I had a cat in one of the homes I lived in. It would never come to me.”