Love Nest

by Andrew Coburn

  “Cats are like that,” he said in a patient voice.

  “Sometimes, when they tuck in their paws, they sit exactly as chickens do. But they don’t lay eggs, only evil thoughts.” She half turned. “You’re looking at me, aren’t you? Do you like what you see?”

  “What do you want from me, Miss Haines?”

  “Call me Melody. Or Mel. I’d like that.”

  “My question stands.”

  She undid an upper button on her shirt. Around her neck was a delicate gold chain, a glitter against her skin. She removed it and let it drip into her other hand. Her smile, tentative at first, became outright. “It’s expensive,” she said. “Mrs. Bauer gave it to me. Do you know her?”

  “I’ve heard of her husband,” he said thinly, and she extended her hand, the chain a drift of gold on her open palm.

  “I’ll trade this,” she said cryptically, “for your green eyes.”

  His gaze was analytical, his mind was divided, and his decision was slow. “The only trade is information. For that you get my ear.”

  She turned back to the window and reached into her shirt pocket. He did not see her pop the pill, a stimulant, but he knew she had taken something. It was all at once in her voice. “Ask me anything, Sonny. I’d love to unload.”

  • • •

  He grilled the tenderloin. “Sweet of you,” she said softly when he served her the biggest cut. She was as hungry as a horse and instantly dug in. He offered to share the single bottle of beer left in the refrigerator, but she said, “I’d rather have milk.”

  He ate without haste, almost without taste, his eyes fixed on his plate, as she told of a time, not so long ago, when life had a flimsy hold on her, drugs a tighter one. She nearly died from a dirty needle. No more. Now she was clean, she said.

  “Hardly,” he said, looking up.

  “Safe stuff, Sonny. Just to make me smile.”

  He asked about the Bauers.

  “I knew you would,” she said and gave herself a mustache of milk, which she expunged with a slow finger. He listened with an amalgam of half-formed feelings as she equated the Bauers with the Three Bears and herself with Goldilocks eating their porridge and napping in their beds, overtouched and overkissed, apple of Papa Bear’s eye, mixed blessing to Mama, nursemaid to Baby. He drew back in his chair. She said, “You mustn’t think them evil. Nothing was done without my consent.”

  “Then why did you give it?”

  “Can’t escape loneliness, Sonny. It’s locked into all of us.”

  “He got you into the business.”

  “He got me out of it. That was in Boston. One of his clubs.”

  “You’re still a hooker.”

  “Therapist, Sonny. Much better wages.”

  “Are there others at the Silver Bell?”

  “We don’t mingle.”

  “Are they as young as you?”

  “In this work, nineteen is hardly young.” She sprang up and began clearing the table, her movements quick and bouyant. She fiddled at the sink and then spun around, her smile farcical. “You don’t have a dishwasher. Christ, Sonny, I thought everybody did.”

  “Leave them.”

  “No, help me.”

  She washed, he wiped. Her smile seemed permanent now, as if it summarized her spirit and something of her determination. She peered through the screen in the window. The moon was a bone against the dark sky. “Too late for our walk now,” she said and passed him in a dripping plate, which he accepted stiffly, avoiding contact. Her voice hit him in the face. “Don’t be afraid to touch me.”

  “Mrs. Gately,” he said roughly. “She another friend of yours?”

  “Yes, she’s a friend of mine.”

  “Mrs. O’Dea.”

  “Generous woman, if she likes you. I do her back.” He looked at her strangely. “Massage,” she explained cheerfully.

  “Attorney William Rollins.”

  “You know all the players.”

  “Do I?”

  “We need to talk some more, don’t we?” She drained the dishwater and dried her hands. “First I have to — ” He pointed, told her to turn left, and silently wondered whether any of this was worth it. He also questioned his motives. He did not realize she had left the door open until he stepped out of the kitchen and heard the tinkle. She spoke to him from the toilet, a princess on a throne, or a child in a school chair. “I like your house, Sonny. So much I could do with it.”

  He edged away quietly, into the living room, with an image he knew would impinge upon his senses for years.

  It was much later, nearly midnight, when her voice began thickening. Her eyelids drooped. “No more questions, OK?” She gave a drowsy nod at the couch. “Look, can I?” she said in a tone that blandished him into a reluctant decision. He went for a blanket. The lamp was off when he returned, the only light stealing in from the kitchen, and she was already on the couch, a flower folded up for the night, the side of her face only dimly discernible. She had the length of a finger between her teeth, as if she had a taste for it.

  It was another image he would carry.

  • • •

  He rose at the first violent pip of the alarm, his head heavy from less sleep than he was used to. He expected to find her still on the couch, but the blanket was folded. The bathroom was hot and vapory, and the shower curtain was shedding droplets. He locked himself in, leaned over the sink, and found underpants and a bra soaking in it. “This won’t do,” he mumbled and pulled the plug. Twenty minutes later he emerged dressed for work.

  The aroma of coffee rode in from the kitchen, where she looked a wonder in his ratty robe, the gentle slope of a breast visible in the parting. Her face fresh and alive, she made a welcoming sideway gesture with her arm. Breakfast was on the table. “My surprise,” she said.

  “I thought you couldn’t cook.”

  “Anybody can make eggs.”

  “Close your robe.”

  “Sorry.”

  The eggs were scrambled, slightly undercooked, missing something. He oversalted his, and she poked at hers, bending her head.

  “Not perfect, huh, Sonny?”

  He lifted his coffee cup and with effort ignored the lightly tanned stretch of her legs, her bare feet tensed near his chair like a ballet dancer’s. “Some of what you told me last night was interesting. Would you repeat it to a stenographer? Sign a statement?”

  “You mustn’t hold me to any of it.”

  “Then why’d you tell me?”

  “I was foolish.”

  The contours of his face seemed to change, to turn tired in places, threatening in others. “Someone like Alfred Bauer has no place in this town.”

  “Nor I. You told me to get out.”

  “Yet here you are.”

  “I’m always looking for a home, Sonny. So much I could do for you, but you’ll probably never let me.”

  He ate two mouthfuls of egg and quit. She continued eating hers. “I’m still a cop,’ he said. “Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “I quit being scared when I was twelve. Got tired of it.”

  She came up in her chair, and he could smell the freshness of her body alive with cool tones where it was impossible for him not to see into the robe, almost down to the hard, flat surface of her stomach.

  “I like the town, Sonny. I even like the ZIP …. 01810. It defies a mirror. Sonny, let me stay.” Her slim hand ventured near his on the table. “Can’t you be a big brother?”

  “That would never work.”

  “No, but it’d be a start.”

  He rose. “Get dressed,” he told her and waited outside. It was rubbish collection day for his street, and he secured a sack and clumped it near the mouth of the drive. Somebody in a passing station wagon waved, but his eye was on glinting threads of a spider’s web strung between two clusters of sunray in full bloom, each flower a sizzle. Already heat was gathering for the high temperatures predicted for the day. The station wagon stopped one house away and backed up. It was the
neighbor Norma, who would never again ring his bell bearing groceries.

  “Did you bang her, Sonny? Did you bang her real good?”

  Chiggers were in the air. He batted them away. No more cuttings from her flower beds and no more weeding of his when the fancy took her.

  “Fuck you, Sonny. And fuck your friend.”

  Melody emerged from the house five minutes later and approached him in the calamity of the rubbish truck’s arrival, its metal jaws grinding sacks. She carried her damp undergarments in a plastic bag and looked no more than sixteen in her loose shirt and jeans. She tossed the bag through the open window of her little city-stained car, which had a dent in one fender and a scrape along another. From the depthless quality of her eyes, he knew she had popped another pill.

  “I know why you’re doing this,’ she shouted above the noise. “It’s perfectly reasonable.”

  He waited. She smiled.

  “The breakfast was bad.”

  • • •

  He and Chief Chute were having lunch at Lem’s. Fran Lovell came in with a magazine in her arm and was about to join them until she glimpsed the private looks on their faces. The chief dunked a roll into his bowl of beef stew and said, “You feel for this kid, don’t you?”

  He was not sure what he felt. Everything she had said to him was written in large letters on his memory — evidence that he felt something. Her beauty, he feared, was too big for her, its effect on others too heavy to handle, placing her always on the brink of something thrilling or devastating and numbering her days. I’d hate to see her go down the tubes was what he wanted to say.

  The chief said, “OK, you gave her a break, let that be the end of it. What I mean is, don’t let yourself get suckered into anything.”

  Fran Lovell had found somebody from the bank to sit with, if not to talk with. She opened her thick magazine, a special edition of McCall’s, and riffled glossy pages. His eye caught hers for a silent second.

  “Could be talk, you don’t want that,’ the chief warned, his spoon in his bowl. “Worse thing a cop can do is try to save a hooker. I don’t speak from experience, but it’s common sense. Anyway, the point’s moot. She’s gone for good, right?”

  It was possible she was gone and just as possible she was not. He pictured her on Alfred Bauer’s doorstep, ready to assume whatever shape the man wanted, to cater to the whims of the wife, to tend to the son, to barter for the affection of each, their promises her ticket to the good life.

  “Main thing,” said the chief, “is you’ve put a word in the right ear. That should stop the funny business at the Silver Bell. Though I still can’t understand why Paige Gately allowed it. I mean, she’s proper. She’s Olde Andover, an e on the end of old. ’Course you never really know what makes somebody tick. Look at yourself, Sonny, you’re at a peculiar age, almost forty, right? You still ticking the same?”

  It was another question to which he was not sure he had an answer. He was not even sure he wanted to come up with one. He stirred his stew, a rich aroma to it, while the chief ate his.

  “What if she comes back, Chief? What if I can get her to sign a statement?”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I could put them all away.”

  “All except her. Isn’t that what you mean, Sonny?”

  He did not like being pinned down, his resentment aimed not at Chief Chute but squarely at her for interloping into his life, trading on his sensibilities, enticing his eye. A few minutes later he reached for the check, his turn to pay, the chief’s to tip.

  “You didn’t eat much,” the chief noted.

  “Seldom do.”

  “But less than usual this time.”

  He moved sideways between crowded tables, the chief in front of him, carefully threading the way. “At least speak.” The voice was slow to reach him over the clink of flatware. The face was Fran Lovell’s, absurd in its reproach, as if she blamed him for wrongs existing only in the dark of her mind. He smiled and waved.

  Outside, in the dry high heat of the glaring sun, they paused near a flower barrel brimming with pink and white annuals, gift to the town from a garden club. Down at the traffic signals near the library, a fair-haired youth in cut-off jeans was revving his motorcycle, the same kid that riled his neighbors by roaring through their quiet streets. The chief, shading his eyes, said, “You know what he’s doing, don’t you? He’s fantasizing he’s a Hell’s Angel. A real biker would toss him over the handlebars and bugger him, don’t you think?”

  “That your way of telling me I could get burnt?”

  “No, Sonny, I was just making a comment, sort of the way Billy Lord would.”

  He did not follow the chief to the station. He drove to the High Plain Road area, where a rising number of residents were reporting bicycles stolen from their garages, Hispanics from Lawrence suspected, dark-skinned boys seen cruising the vicinity in a soiled and battered van. He backed into a graveled space between the cool of two blue spruces and watched cars rumble by. The rangy well-seasoned woman who lived directly across the road ambled over to chat for a minute, her sun-baked face leaning in on him, her right arm toughened by a tennis racquet. “Hope you get the little bastards, Sergeant, that was the best bike I ever had. Seat fitted my ass like a glove.”

  The only vans that passed in the two hours he sat there were clean and unscathed and belonged to a plumbing contractor and a termite inspector.

  He intended to return to the station, but after crossing the railroad tracks at the foot of Essex Street he swerved right, shot past the old depot, and took the meandering route home. All that awaited him was a bill in the mailbox, a furled newspaper in the drive, and a small unassuming house that suddenly seemed dreary, the way it had when he moved back after his parents had died, a silence running through it like water, filling depths.

  He drank bouillon from a cup, read the paper from front to back, watched television until he could not deal with the noise, and then dozed off in the easy chair, waking when he thought he heard a door sigh open, but it was only a breeze agitating the curtains. Later, when it was dark, he stepped out the side door for a look at the stars and stopped in his tracks. Something was working in the warm night air, rippling it where the rhododendron grew massive, scenting it, as if an unseen animal were lurking about. “I know you’re there,” he said softly. He moved back slowly to the door and waited in the light. Footsteps gradually came out of what he had thought was an emptiness.

  “Are you surprised?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Angry?”

  He did not answer.

  “Sonny.” Her face sprang up in all its vividness. “So much in me has never been touched.”

  “Let’s not — ” He stopped, looked at her carefully. “Why the hell are you crying?”

  “Because I know you’re glad to see me.”

  Eight

  No services. The boy’s body was cremated Thanksgiving week, the bonemeal scattered by his mother in the woods where they had last walked together. The shock of his death was still in her eyes, and much more was seared into her brain. The rector of Christ Church tried to comfort her, but she would have no part of it, standing as pure force at the front door, ready to drive him back if he attempted entry. Later, when she was in the master bedroom, Dr. Stickney telephoned. “I’m here if you need me.”

  “I’ve never needed you,” she said and thrust the phone at her husband to hang up.

  In the past few days Alfred Bauer had aged ten years, his polished beacon of a head set on a neck of soft clay. In his dry hand was the boy’s diary, opened to the only page written on. He spoke. His voice, usually resonant, lacked life.

  She said, distantly, “Yes, I’ve seen it.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “What it says. If you choose to believe it.”

  “Do you?”

  She gazed through him, the dark of her dress stressing the starkness of her skin and the fairness of her hair.

 
“Please. Do you believe it?” he asked.

  “He’s gone. So it has no relevance now.”

  “Do you blame me?” he asked bleakly.

  “I blame you. Myself. The cop.” Bones never before prominent in her face asserted themselves. Her smile was uncanny. “I blame everybody.”

  “I never interfered,” he said, the tired muscles around his mouth slowing his speech. “You had the final word in bringing him up. I always knew what he meant to you.”

  “Just as I knew what Melody meant to you.”

  The silence was brittle, no denial, only a puckering of his features from too much popping inside his head. She turned away, slipped off her shoes, and removed a sweat suit from a dresser drawer, his presence nearly forgotten. Then she spoke.

  “I always loved you too much. Never a problem till Melody. She was different, wasn’t she?”

  “Harriet.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  “I was wondering when you’d ask.” She scratched at pinch marks left by the elastic top of her pantyhose, which, diminished to a clot, lay next to her dress on the floor. “Like your other question, it no longer has relevance.”

  “But I want to know.”

  “I’d rather you think about it.”

  “I want to protect you.”

  “Like you did Wally?” She turned to him and stood terribly straight, parts of her painfully arched, belly muscles rippling. Her thighs had a hammered quality, flesh packed in as if from pounding. “Is it too late?” she said, her legs evenly spaced. “Am I too old?”

  His bare head tilted in confusion. “For what?”

  “To be a whore again.”

  • • •

  Sergeant Dawson went jogging in the brisk morning air, a mere mile, but when he got home he could not keep his body quiet. It hummed and throbbed. His mouth was snapped shut, but the air hissed out of his nostrils. His ears rang, and his chest pinged like a hot engine tuning down. Later, when he began feeling more himself and somewhat confident he was not dying, he made a telephone call. He said, “I need to talk to you again.”