Waxwings

by Unknown

  “What was the noise?” Her voice was groggy with sleep.

  “Your bike. Sorry.”

  “—Take it to the dump . . .”

  He sat on his side of the bed, stroking the nape of her neck.

  “Mmmm,” she hummed, then settled back to sleep again.

  Finn’s eyes had welled with sudden tears when she came home with her new buzzcut, but Tom had felt a rush of tender excitement. People talked of the boredom of marriage, but Beth was always surprising him, and never more often than now, when each day seemed to call forth from her some unexpected grace or favor. Her familiar footfall on the porch steps was still rousing for him, this sound of news from the outside world, of treats, and jokes, and bombshells. Before, Tom struggled with the idea of love much as he had with trigonometry at school, getting the general drift without ever quite mastering the details, but Beth had made it seem as easy as two-plus-two.

  Lately, she’d been surpassing herself, with her new hair, new car, new job, new language, even. Just this evening she burst through the front door to announce, “There’s a jihad on at work!” her knotted face looking exactly like some fundamentalist holy warrior’s. Last night, he bent over her while she was working on the laptop from which she’d become inseparable; nodding at the screen, she said “Bitstorm!” and he’d kissed her wonderingly. She was amazing.

  Not yet ready for sleep, and anxious not to disturb Beth in hers, he padded next door into Finn’s room, where the blueish astral gleam of the night-light showed him asleep on his back, arms wide, fists lightly curled, head pillowed on Squashy Bear, his mouth a candid O. He was not, surely, hyperactive? Tom pulled the covers up under his chin, moved—as always—by the trustful unguardedness of his sleeping child. No adult slept like that. He and Beth adopted the same defensive fetal crouch: some nights, he cuddled up behind her, some nights she did the same for him, his right hand spread wide on her bare stomach or her left hand on his. “Why do we sleep as if the Furies were after us?” he’d once asked her. But Finn had no Furies. His body lay any-old-how, wide open, in a posture of reckless surrender. A circular patch of drool the size of a silver dollar darkened his pillowcase. Tom brushed his forehead with his lips. This love, too, was easy—far easier than he ever could have guessed. In London, he’d thought of fatherhood as a burden borne by other men, not his sort of thing at all. Yet in this, as in so much else, what had seemed true there had been proved false here. American alchemy again.

  He stood at the window and watched the storm blowing itself out. On the Sound, the broken water was ribbed with streaks and gashes of reflected light. The last ferry from Bremerton, lit up like a chandelier, was moving fast across Elliott Bay, and the traveling blaze defined a matte-black rectangle closer inshore, a big ship lying at anchor almost within spitting-distance of the house. The shadow became substance as, bit by bit, the winking waves pricked out its silhouette: twin radar domes atop a high bridge near the stern, containers piled almost to the level of the bridge, a stubby foremast on the blunt bow.

  Studying the motionless black ship and listening to Finn breathe in his sleep, Tom was struck dizzy by the thought that he wanted nothing else than to be here, now.

  Waxwings

  2.

  At 5:20 A.M., the Pacific Auriga, loosely attended by one small tug, docked at Pier 28 on Harbor Island. Two hours before dawn, the fierce sodium lights of the container terminal made it look like a giant illuminated stage with all of Elliott Bay as its darkened auditorium. In windless calm, the ship slid quietly backwards into the berth—the sea boiling briefly white under the stern—and stopped within inches of the pier’s concrete wall. Heaving-lines were passed to the half-dozen men waiting on the dock, who silently hauled the massive warps ashore and dropped their spliced eyes over the iron bollards.

  Up on the bridge, the pilot said, “Nice.”

  “New bow-thrusters,” the Captain said, his face flushed and tautly smiling. “The old ones were gutless and she was a pig to handle at close quarters. Last refit we had, they put in new thrusters. That made all the difference.”

  “What’s your tonnage? Forty-five?”

  “Fifty-one.” Coffee mug in hand, the Captain looked up at the tall pilot. “Remember me to Doug, will you? Tell him I was shocked to hear his news.”

  Out on the wharf, two INS agents sat in a parked Camry with government plates, waiting to board the ship. They’d stopped at a gas station with an espresso stand and were sipping Americanos from paper cups emblazoned with the Torrefazione logo.

  “After dial-up, you wouldn’t believe it, it’s so damn fast,” Refugio Martinez said. “I mean, it’s click and you’re there.”

  “You install the modem yourself?” Stacy Sakiyama said.

  “Wasn’t nothing to it. They send you a kit, and you just follow the instructions.”

  “When it comes to that stuff, I’m clueless.”

  “I could put it in for you. You’d love DSL, it’s magic. You have to be inside of fifteen hundred feet from the main cable, but where you live that’s no problem.”

  “Uh-huh. Boarding ladder’s down. Looks like we’re on.”

  The agents set up a temporary command post at a table beneath the electronic dart-board in the officers’ lounge and processed the crew’s passports, which the purser had produced in a rubber-banded bundle.

  The Captain, still buoyed by his textbook docking operation, stopped by to play the amiable host. “Coffee? Biscuits?” he said. “I mean, cookies to you.”

  “We already got coffee, thanks,” Sakiyama said. “Cookies would be good. You’re going to be seeing more of us today than you probably want to, Captain. They’re sending out S.A.’s to do a spot check on the cargo. They should be here at eight.”

  “I’ve got a lunch date at noon with our agent here,” the Captain said.

  “I don’t think so,” Martinez said, not looking up from the passport he was studying. “Rest of the crew can go, soon as we finish this, but they’ll need you and the loading officer.”

  “You hear about Long Beach yesterday?” Sakiyama said. “Seventeen Chinese in a container. That’s Long Beach, Vancouver, and L.A.— all in the last couple weeks.”

  Martinez stamped the passport and scribbled his initials over the stamp. “There’s a rumor floating around the Chinese community that the President’s going to declare an amnesty for illegals on the first of January. That’s what the snakeheads are saying, anyway, so I guess business must’ve slowed down—and now everybody’s trying to sneak in before the deadline.”

  “Everything normal on this trip, Captain”—Sakiyama glanced at the passport.—“Williams?”

  The Captain snorted. “I don’t know what you call normal. We ran into some funny weather on the trip out, which put us three days late in Hong Kong. Then we were five days late out of Osaka, where a Maersk ship got ahead of us in line. When we finally left, we had a big tropical storm just to the north of us, and it kept us company all the way to Juan de Fuca. We were meant to be in here last Tuesday and out of here yesterday. We’re eight days off-schedule.”

  “I meant with the containers. You didn’t see or hear anything?”

  “Weather we had, they could’ve thrown a rock concert down there and no one would’ve heard a thing.”

  “You take on any rag-tops in Hong Kong?”

  “There may be one or two down there. You’d have to talk to Bob Stenhouse, the loading officer.”

  In the corridor, passport in hand, the Captain met the Chief Engineer, already dressed for shoregoing in raincoat and rollneck sweater.

  “We’ve got the Black Gang with us for the day.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Spot-checking for illegals. You’re all right—you can go. But I was meant to be having lunch with Tony Andressen—”

  “Captain?” Martinez called from the doorway of the officers’ lounge. “We’ll need the cargo manifest.”

  “Go fetch . . .” the Chief said.

  In his cabin
on 9-Deck, David Pilbury, the Third Officer, was readying himself to face the wilds of Seattle. Freshly shaven, in peek-a-boo Grinch boxer shorts, and smelling powerfully of Old Spice, he wriggled into his purple-striped Rugby shirt and faced the big decision of the morning: Levis or leathers. He settled for the leathers.

  At six, Beth was up and showered. Leaving the autodrip coffeemaker to hiss and splutter on the kitchen counter, she brought in the New York Times from the porch and glossed the headlines. The Cuban boy was still the big story—only two months older than Finn, and the poster child for the last battle in the Cold War. Of course Elian should go back home. The Miami Cubans were a pain in the ass—their hatred of Castro now righteously disguised as sentimental love for a little boy whose life they were only too happy to turn into some political game-show. She skimmed Maureen Dowd, then filled her insulated beaker with coffee and turned to the Business Section to check on how her stock was doing in the Nasdaq. Down 눕, up 162½ on the year.

  On a blue Post-it, she wrote:

  T—

  It’s pool day today—pack F’s swim-things. Don’t forget goggles (!)

  Laundry?—pretty please? Back 6-ish.

  She signed it XOB and pinned it to the fridge with a plastic-asparagus magnet, then washed down a quartet of vitamin pills with a swig of bitter coffee.

  Outside, she waded through a slurry of fallen leaves. Lights were on in half the houses on the street, and a gang of early-rising crows had set up a raucous parliament in the trees. Tom’s VW was parked askew under the sycamore, its front wheel up on the curb, its windshield splashed with a glob of creamy, speckled crow shit. Triggered by the remote, the ancient machinery of the garage door groaned and clattered as it canted back to disclose the dark spectre of the Audi.

  The locks clicked. The interior lights bloomed. Beth snugged down her coffee beaker in the cup-holder, turned on the ignition, then faced the constellation of red lights and dials, more like the control console of a 747 than of any car she’d known, and breathed in the Audi’s good air. When she touched the glowing button of the CD player, an explosive ripple of drums and percussion led to a few bars of melody picked out on twelve-string guitars and the low, raw, sleepy-talking voice of Lucinda Williams singing “Right on Time.”

  The whomp, whomp, whomp of the bass line throbbed with a jack-hammer pulse that found an answering reverberation in her own bones. The car had eight hidden speakers and a subwoofer—and whatever that was, it did it for her. Beth was right in there with the band. The intimacy of it was freaky: she was Lucinda. Turning the volume up a notch, she eased out of the garage and was soon afloat, the Audi’s tires seeming to not quite touch the uneven surface of the street.

  The car was six weeks old, with 1,143 miles on the clock. Its purchase ranked high among the big events of her life. Most of the important things had just sort of happened to her: going to Smith, coming out from Brooklyn to Seattle (that had taken nine days in Chad’s rustbucket Ford Galaxy, and they’d split almost the moment they arrived), then meeting Tom and getting pregnant with Finn . . . But the Audi was entirely her own adventure, and the most reckless act of self-indulgence that she’d ever dared to commit. She was still unnerved and excited by her own audacity, as if in buying the car she had opened up a whole new world of impulse and extravagance. What next? Sky-diving? Canoeing down the Amazon?

  Her pleasure was tempered by a vague, generalized alarm at what the car had uncovered in her character. Certainly, it went against what she had always believed to be her natural grain. In the showroom, she’d been astonished at herself. It was surely not her but a third person who’d felt that stab of hungry desire at the sight of the bone-colored leather seats with blue piping. It was only upholstery, for godsake! Yet the ache to make it hers was as intense and blind as the promptings of sex—or sex as she remembered it, from rather long ago. This, she’d lectured herself, was like a high-school romance—and you can’t have a crush on a fucking car.

  She mentioned it offhandedly one evening, while Finn was watching “Rugrats,” expecting—hoping, really—that Tom would laugh her out of it. Feeling more than faintly absurd, she passed him the fat brochure that she’d come away with from the dealership. He studied it carefully, reading each page like it was Our Mutual Friend or something. Every so often, he glanced up at her with the crooked, private, British smile whose meaning she could never securely fathom. “What are puddle-lights?” he asked.

  Beth shrugged.

  “Performance and panache,” he read, “visceral in its appeal. Like sculpture, worthy of long, loving, and knowing looks from any angle. Every angle.” Speaking in his “radio” voice and rolling his r’s, he gazed at her over the tops of the half-moon glasses that added ten years to his age. “So which are you going to get, the manual or the automatic?”

  Feeling satirized, she smiled and shook her head, but two days later went back to the dealership for one last look. This, she thought, would purge her of her longing, and she could walk away light-heartedly, but the blue piping did its seductive thing again. She got the automatic, because they didn’t have the manual in her color, which was Andorra Red. When she wrote the check, she scribbled it out fast, as if it were for groceries at Thriftway. After the trade-in (an ’87 Dodge Spirit with a long gash on the driver’s side) and with tax and license, the Audi came to—she wrote this bit especially quickly—thirty-six thousand, eight hundred twenty-four and dollars. It looked like the price of a house. Still, she had nearly $19,000 left over from her first batch of vested options, with the next instalment falling due in less than six months’ time.

  At work, the new car was of no account at all. Where the scarred Dodge had looked suspiciously like a statement, the Audi shrank modestly into the lot where Steve Litvinof parked his silver Mercedes SL500 and the tech staff rolled up in new Porsche Boxsters and Lexuses. It was at home that Beth felt prickly and protective of it. She hid it in the garage, with the door that stuck as often as it creaked open, to save it from the cynical gaze of Tom’s UW friends. When the three of them were out en famille, she chose to ride as a passenger in the Volkswagen, even though this meant yielding the front seat to Finn.

  With the Audi came the realization that she had never until now had a real place of her own. Between roommates, Chad’s apartment, more roommates, and Tom, she’d always fitted in as best she could to other people’s spaces, taking for granted their music, their pots and pans, their books, their posters from the Louvre. Her junk and their junk got boiled up together in a stew that was everybody’s and nobody’s. She and Tom had furnished the Queen Anne house together, but it was he who nearly always paid and often exercised his right of veto. This Beth accepted as one of one of life’s givens, like the weather.

  Now she had climate control and programmed the Audi to produce a constant temperate summer of 72 degrees, even with the power sunroof open. Here she was the sole proprietor of her own estate, and from the driver’s seat began to see vistas that reminded her of that long view from Blenheim Palace, the year before Finn was born: the turf cropped close by sheep, the misty elms and oaks, the soothing distance of all those acres whose only function was to please the eye and invite the mind to roam. Gazing out, she’d said, “It’s heaven!” and truly meant it, thinking of the astounding artifice and labor that had gone into the making of something so beautifully useless, and an echo of that feeling was awakened in her now. The office was a ten-minute drive downtown from Queen Anne Hill, so for nearly two hours a week, between the house and her corner cubicle in the Klondike building, Beth could revel in this strange and ducal view.

  Like a gull on the wind, the Audi, in light traffic, went swooping down the Counterbalance. Only the luminous pointers on the dials betrayed the workings of the four-liter engine, the interior as insulated from the outside world as a padded recording studio. Cushioned in blue-piped leather, glancing at the trip-computer, Beth sipped at her coffee and drank in the sound of Lucinda Williams getting right in time.

  After
“Arthur” on the TV, after the battle of the Froot Loops and the doing-up of the difficult button on the jeans, after the abrupt U-turn to retrieve the forgotten swim-things and the encounter with the fascinating banana slug on the sidewalk and the guarded exchange of fire with Amy’s mom, who was taking an extension course in Advanced Fiction, and with Sally, who was in charge of the Sunshine Room, Tom got back to the house just in time to hear the phone ringing in his third-floor study. Gasping from the sprint upstairs, he picked it up and said hello.

  “Thomas. It is Shiva. Shiva Ray.”

  Though he was said to be in his thirties, Shiva Ray’s voice had little more than a trace of an Indian lilt and belonged to an older generation of Englishmen. It was the voice of the Pall Mall clubman, or the BBC newsreader—Alvar Liddell!—of the old, fruity, Oxbridge kind.

  “I am in the air,” he said gravely. “I am flying from DFW to JFK.”