“If you weren’t so goddamn negative about our relationship . If you didn’t always. . . . ”
“Oh, it’s my fault?” She made a noise like the Prince did when he sneezed. “I guess I should have known from experience. I been dumped on more times than your toilet seat, so it must be me. . . . ”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about! You’re always putting yourself down.”
“It must be me and not the dickwads I go out with.”
“Maybe all I need is a break,” said Clyde. “A little space.”
Joanie injected an artificial brightness into her voice. “What a good idea! I’ll give you space while you cozy up to what’s-her-buttass and I’ll just hang loose in case things don’t work out.”
“Goddamn it, Joanie! You know that’s not what I mean.”
“Tell me who she is.”
Reluctantly, Clyde said, “I only met her a couple of times. Her name’s Annalisa.”
For a second Joanie was expressionless; then she spewed laughter. “Oh, man! You hooked up with the willow wan?”
“I haven’t hooked up with anybody!”
She put her head down and shook her head back and forth; her hair glowed orange as it swept the top of the boulder.
“What’d you call her . . . the willow what?”
Joanie’s voice was nearly inaudible above a lugubrious bass line. “Wan. The willow wan. It’s what everybody calls her.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Because she’s pale as birdshit and always acts crazy and hangs out by the willow tree and she does all kinds of crazy things.”
“What’s she do that’s crazy?”
“I don’t know! Lots of things.”
“There must be something specific if everyone thinks she’s crazy.”
“She’s all the time going down south of the Dots. You have to be crazy to go there.” A look of entreaty crowded other emotions from her face, yet Clyde still saw anger and hurt. “She’s gaming you, man. You don’t want to mess with her. She games all the guys. She’s Pet Nylund’s ex-wife, for God’s sake! She still lives with him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Am I speaking Spanish? She fucking lives with him. In his house.”
Some evidence of the disappointment he felt must have surfaced in his expression, for upon registering it, she snatched her purse and jumped up from the sofa. He caught her wrist and said, “Joanie. . . . ”
She broke free and stood with her chin trembling. “Stay out of the Sub for awhile, okay?”
A tear spilled from the corner of her eye and she rubbed it frantically, as if trying to kill a stinging insect; then she said something he didn’t catch and ran from the room.
Clyde had the impulse to offer consolation, but the weight of what she had said about Annalisa kept him seated. Though they had established the frailest of connections, nothing really, he felt betrayed, hurt, angry, everything Joanie had appeared to feel—the idea floated into his mind that she might want him to suffer and had lied about Annalisa. But if it were a lie, it would be easy to disprove and thus it was probably true. He downed his drink in two swallows and went into the main room, a semicircular space with twenty or thirty of the boulder tables and a bar with a marble countertop and a stage, currently unoccupied, against the rear wall. Joanie was doing shots at the bar, bracketed by two men who had their hands all over her; when she saw him she gave her hair an assertive flip and pretended to be deeply interested in what one man (a big sloppy dude with long hair and a beard, Barry Something) was saying. He scanned the tables, hoping to spot a friendly face among the people sitting there. Finding none, he walked out onto the pier, sat on a piling under the entrance lights and listened to the gurgling of the Mossbach. Off along the bend, on the elbow of the curve, Pet Nylund’s house staggered up the cliff face, three side-by-side, crookedy towers, their uppermost rooms cloaked in darkness. Lights were on in several of the lower rooms. Clyde toyed with the notion of going over and busting through the door and venting his frustrations in a brawl. It was a bonehead play he would once have made without thinking, and that he now stopped to consider the consequences and hadn’t simply acted out his passions with animal immediacy, never mind it was the rational thing to do . . . it dismayed him. Carmine, he told himself, might have been right in his estimation: maybe Halloween wasn’t going to work out for him.
Laughter from the doorway and Joanie emerged from the Downlow arm-in-arm with the two men she’d been flirting with at the bar. The bearded man caught Clyde staring and asked what he was looking at. Clyde ignored him and said, “Don’t do this to yourself, Joanie.”
She hardened her smile and Barry Something put a hand on Clyde’s chest and suggested he back the fuck off. The touch kindled a cold fury in Clyde that spread throughout his body, as if he’d been dunked in liquid nitrogen. He saw everything with abnormal clarity: the positions of the men, Joanie’s embittered face, the empty doorway, the green neon letters bolted to the rock. He spread his hands as though to say, no harm, no foul, and planted his right foot and drove his fist into Barry’s eye. Barry reeled away, went to his knees, grabbing his face. Joanie started yelling; the other man sidled nervously toward the entrance. Barry moaned. “Aw, fuck! Fuck!” he said. An egg-shaped lump was already rising from his from his orbital ridge. Clyde grabbed Joanie’s arm and steered her toward his skiff. She fought him at first, but then started to cry. Some onlookers stepped out of the bar, drinks in hand, to learn what the fuss was about. Not a one of them moved to help Barry, who was rolling around, holding his eye. Talking and laughing, they watched Clyde poled the skiff into the center of the river. “Chickenshit bastard!” someone shouted. From a distance, the tableau in front of the bar appeared to freeze, as if its batteries had died. Joanie sat in the stern, her knees drawn up, gazing at the water. Her tears dried. Once or twice she seemed on the verge of speaking. He thought he should say something, but he had nothing to offer, still too adrenalized, too full of anger at Barry, at himself, too caught up in the dismal glory of the fight, confused as to whether it had validated his hopes for Halloween or had been an attempt to validate them. When they reached her pier, Joanie scrambled up onto it without a word and raced into her tiny, two-room house and slammed the door.
Working alongside him the following daymorning, Mary Alonso, who had gotten a buzzcut and a dye job, leaving a half-inch of blond stubble that he thought singularly unattractive, filled Clyde in on Annalisa.
“She shares the house with Pet, but she’s not with him, you know,” she said. “She keeps to her half, he keeps to his. Joanie was being a bitch, telling you that without telling you the rest. Not that I blame her.”
“For real? She’s not sleeping with him?”
“She did once after the divorce, but it was sort of a reflex.”
Clyde flipped a rotten walnut up with his rake, caught it in mid-air and shied it at the wall, provoking a stare from another worker, whom the walnut had whizzed past. “How’d you hear that?”
“Before me and Roberta got together, Annalisa had a girl crush on Roberta. She thought she might be gay, but. . . . ” Mary strained to break up a clump of walnuts that had become trapped in underwater grass. “Turned out she wasn’t. Not even a little.” She scowled at Clyde. “Don’t look so damn relieved!”
Clyde held up a hand as though in apology. ”So Roberta told you about her?”
“Yeah. They stayed friends and she talks to Roberta sometimes. But don’t get too happy. Her head’s fucked up from being with Pet all those years. She tells Roberta she’s going to leave, but she never does. There’s some kind of bizarre dependency still happening between her and Pet.”
Clyde went back to work with a renewed vigor, thinking that he might be the man to dissolve that bond. The weather was crisp and clear, and the sky crack showed a cold blue zigzag like a strip of frozen lightning that the ragged line of laborers beneath appeared to emulate. A seam of reflected light from the water jittered on the rock
walls.
“I’m worried about you, man,” said Mary. “I love you, and I don’t want to see you get all bent out of shape behind this thing.”
“You love me?” Clyde gave a doltish laugh.
Mary’s face cinched with anger. “Right. Mister Macho. You think all love is is the shit that makes you feel dizzy. Everything else is garbage. Well, fuck you!” She threw down her rake and went chest to chest with him. “Yeah, I love you! Roberta loves you! It’s amazing we do, you’re such an ass-clown!”
Startled by this reaction, Clyde put a hand on her shoulder. “I didn’t mean to piss you off.”
She knocked his hand away, looking like she was itching to throw a punch.
“I wasn’t thinking,” Clyde said. “I was. . . . ”
“For someone claims to have a problem with smarts, you do a lot of not-thinking.” She picked up her rake and took a swipe at the walnuts.
The other workers, who had paused to watch, turned away and engaged in hushed conversations.
“You’re so caught up in your own crap, you can’t see anything else,” said Mary, who had toned down from fighting mad to grumpy.
“We’ve established I’m a dick, all right?” Clyde said. “Now what’re you trying to tell me?”
“Annalisa’s not Pet’s wife, and she’s not his girlfriend, but she’s his business because she lets herself be his business. Until that changes she’s poison for other guys. That’s the number one rule around here, even though they didn’t write it down: Don’t fuck with Pet Nylund’s business.”
“Or what? You go to the Tubes?”
“Keep being a dick. You’ll find out.”
Mary raked walnuts with a vengeance, as if she wanted to rip out the bottom of the Dot. Clyde rested both hands on the end of his rake and, as he gazed at the other workers, some intent on their jobs, some goofing off, some pretending to be busy, and then glanced up at the gorge enclosing them like the two halves of a gigantic bivalve, its lips almost closed, admitting a ragged seam of sky, at the gray walls stained with lichen and feathered with struggling ferns, he had an overpowering sense of both the unfamiliar and the commonplace, and realized with a degree of sadness what he should have understood long before: Halloween wasn’t, as he had hoped, an oasis with magical qualities isolated from the rest of the country; it was the flabby heart of dead-end America, a drear crummy back alley between faceless cliff tenements where the big ones ate the little ones and not every dog had his day.
For almost a week he took to sitting each night beneath the dangling seventy-five watt bulb at the end of Ms. Kmiec’s pier, hoping to catch Annalisa returning in her skiff from down south. He was a fool, he knew that—he had no reason to believe she felt anything for him, and the wonder was that he felt so much for her; yet he was unable to resist the notion (though he wouldn’t have admitted it, because saying the words would have forced him to confront their foolishness) that they had connected on an important level. To provide himself with an excuse for sitting there hour after hour, he borrowed one of Stan Kmiec’s old fishing rods and made a desultory cast whenever he sighted an approaching skiff. Briefly, he became interested in trying to land one of the silvery bioluminescent fish that flocked the dark water, but they proved too canny and the only thing he snagged was what he thought to be some sort of water snake, a skinny writhing shadow that snapped and did a twisting dance in midair, and succeeded in flinging out the hook . . . and yet he heard no splash, as if it had flown off into the night.
The sixth night, unseasonably warm and misty (it had been like that all week and the bugs and bats were out in force), he spotted a skiff coming from the south with no light hung from its bow and knew it had to be Annalisa. She paused when she noticed him, letting the skiff glide. He whistled the opening bars of “Annalisa.” She turned the skiff, brought it alongside the pier, and said brightly, “What’s up?”
“Fishing.” He indicated the rod. “Thinking.”
She smiled. “Ooh. That must be hard work. Maybe I shouldn’t interfere.”
She had on jeans and a turtleneck and an old saggy gray cardigan; her hands were chapped and smudged with dirt, and her reddish brown hair (redder, he thought, than the last time he had seen her) was tied back with a black ribbon.
“The damage is done,” he said. “Come sit a while.”
She looped a line over a piling and he gave her a hand up. She settled beside him, her hip nudging his. She let out a sigh and looked across the water to the houses on the far side, a game board of bright and dark squares, their walls barely discernable and their piers lent definition by diffuse pyramids of wan light and whirling moths at their extremities. She smelled of shampoo and freshly turned earth, as if she had been gardening.
“I see Milly’s working late,” she said.
“Milly?”
“Milly Sussman. Don’t you even know your neighbors?”
“Guess not.”
“You need to get out more. How long have you been here? Three, four months? I should think you would have noticed Milly. Statuesque. Black hair. An extremely impressive woman.”
“Maybe . . . yeah.”
With her hair back, her face seemed more Asian than before; her prominent cheekbones and narrow jaw formed a nearly trapezoidal frame for her exotic features, making them appear stylized like those of a beautiful anime cyborg. From all her tics and eye movements and the working of her mouth, he read a mixture of desire and fear. Something left a trail of bubbles out on the river. Three glowing silver fish hovered in the water beneath her Doc Martens. She peered at them and asked, “You catch anything?”
“Yep. I hooked me a nice-looking one.”
“You’re being clever again. I can tell.” She kicked her heels idly against the side of the pier. “We missed out, not living in the age of courtly speech. I could say, like, uh, ‘Hooked, sir? Thy hook is not set deep enough!’ And you could. . . . ”
He placed a hand on the back of her neck and drew her gently to him and kissed her. She pulled away and, with a nervous laugh, said, “Better watch it. You’ll get girl cooties.” The second time he kissed her, she displayed no reluctance, no resistance whatsoever. Her tongue darted out so quickly, it might have been an animal trapped in the cave of her mouth, desperate to escape, if only to another cave. He caught her waist, pulling her closer, and slipped his hand under the turtleneck, up along her ribcage to her breast, rolling the nipple with his thumb. Their teeth clicked together, they clawed at one another and sought fresh angles of attack, striving to penetrate and to admit the other more deeply. The kiss was a brutish, clumsy, an expression of red-brained lust, and Annalisa surfaced from it like a diver with bursting lungs, exclaiming, “Oh God!”
After a few beats they kissed again, and were more measured in their explorations, yet no less lustful. Clyde was about to suggest they move things to his bedroom, but Annalisa spoke first.
“I can’t do this now.” She tugged the turtleneck down over her breasts. “I’m sorry. Really, really sorry. But I have to go.”
“Go where?”
“Home. I don’t want to, but. . . . ”
Despite himself, resentment crept into his voice. “Home to Pet.”
Annalisa cut her eyes toward him and finished straightening her clothes. “It’s complicated.”
“You going to explain it to me?”
“Yes, but I can’t now.” She re-buttoned the top button of her jeans.
“When am I going to see you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “You wanted me to kiss you.”
“I did. Very much.” She reached behind her head and retied her hair ribbon. “Since we’re being candid, I want to make your eyes roll back. But it’s dangerous. This was dangerous. I shouldn’t have let it happen.”
“How’s it dangerous?”
“You could die.”
She said this so flatly, he had to laugh. He wasn’t sure whether she was telling the truth or attemp
ting to scare him off. He stared at her, perhaps sadly, because she reacted to his expression by saying, “For God’s sake! It was only a kiss.” He continued to stare and she said, “Okay, the losing-consciousness part, that was new.” She climbed into the skiff, undid the line, and held onto the piling. “I’m incredibly motivated to be with you. You probably sensed that.”
He nodded happily.
“There’s a safe way we can be together,” she went on. “But you have to give me time to work it out. Weeks, if necessary. Maybe a month. Can you do that? If not, tell me now, because Pet is insane. It’s not that he’s suspicious or jealous. He is batshit crazy and he hurts people.”
“I can do it.”
A flapping of wings overhead, followed by long quavering cry that sounded like a man running out of breath while blowing trebly notes on a harmonica.
“If it takes a little longer even,” Annalisa said, “promise you’ll trust me.”
“Promise.”
“You won’t do anything stupid?”
“I’ll be cool.”
“Shake on it.”
She gave his hand a vigorous shake, but and trailed her fingers across his as she disengaged.
“All right. See you soon,” she said, and made a rueful face. “I’m sorry.”
It was slightly unreal watching her glide away into the dark and, after she had vanished, he felt morose and insubstantial, like a ghost who had suddenly been made aware of all the sensory richness of which he was deprived. The enclosure of the gorge, though invisible, oppressed him. Dampness cored his bones. It was difficult impossible to hold onto promises in all that emptiness. Whatever it was that made bubbles out in the river was still making them, trawling back and forth in front of the pier, closing the distance with each pass, lifting the water with each turn, causing swells. Clyde walked away from the pier, ignoring chased by the whisper of the water, the gleeps and tweetlings of frogs and other night creatures, and wearily climbed the ladder to his apartment.
They saw one another more frequently than he’d expected over the days that followed, running into each other in the bars, on the river, sometimes contriving to touch, and one afternoon, when Mrs. Kmiec sent him to Dowling’s (Halloween’s eccentric version of a supermarket and its most extensive building, four interconnected tiers of eight stories each) to pick up kitty litter, Annalisa accosted him in Pet Supplies, eighth floor, fourth tier, and drew him out through a door behind the shelves into a narrow space between the rear wall and the cliff face, and there she hiked up her skirt and they made violent, bone-rattling love balanced on girders above eighty feet of nothing, braced against rock that had been ornately tagged by generations of teenagers who had used the spot before them, swirls of orange, silver, blue, red, and fat letters outlined in black, most of them cursing the authority of man or god, whatever agency had ruled their particular moment, all their hormonal rebellion confined to this not-so-secret hideaway. Annalisa was sweet and shifty, cunning with her hips, yet she nipped his neck, marking his throat, and left a long scratch on his ribcage, and spoke in tongues, in gasps and throaty noises. It seemed less an act of abandon for her than one of desperation. Afterward he asked if this is what she’d had in mind when she mentioned a safe way of being together. “I couldn’t wait,” she said, staring at him with tremulous anxiety, as if the wrong word would break her, shatter the almost Asian simplicity of her face. He felt this to be the case, that she had put herself in physical and mental jeopardy by taking this step, and he realized that her strength and apparent independence was a carefully constructed shield that had prevented him from seeing what lay behind it—he still could not make out the roots of her trouble, but he sensed something restive, dammed up, a powerful force straining for release.
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