by Dan Noble
But I’d found her. She was walking in, the way she had for Erika. She wasn’t wearing exactly the same thing—her boots were different, more beat up; there was a gash in the toe I could see from there—and her T-shirt had a triangular logo I couldn’t make out, rather than a retro rock band name.
At the bar, she was familiar with the girl who poured her drink. Were they friends the way Erika’s version predicted? The sex of the bartender had been different, but so far, everything else more or less matched. Erika had been bold enough to approach her, but would I? My chest tingled at the idea. I didn’t want to make a spectacle, especially in front of someone this girl knew, but wasn’t this the quickest way to work out where I knew her from? I didn’t want to come here every night. Gav would start to get suspicious, and if I did that, regular stroller walkers and joggers along the Strand would start to recognize me. On the other hand, just because I’d spoken to a friendly stranger at a bar, I wouldn’t necessarily be considered suspicious. Probably no one would remember.
I was surprisingly calm as I made my way over the zebra crossing to the open-air bar front. I’d have to change that for Erika, who’d had to hold her hand in a pocket to conceal the trembling. When you’re committed and the moment arrives, it feels almost fated. Since this is deeply akin to the feeling I experience when shards of a story begin to fall into place, I was more assured than ever I was on the right track. I had read about the neurobiological processes at work when a novelist creates, and I had come to think of us as more evolved, or at least more practiced, than the rest of the population in this vein; the sensation served as a reassurance of this theory.
As Erika’s and my paths merged to approach the pinky-blonde girl, there was a religiosity to the transcendence I felt. I was getting somewhere, or maybe I was already there.
She looked at me as I meandered through a few hi-top tables, perhaps trying to work me out—my tailored slacks and matching top, my discreetly expensive tortoiseshell sunnies. She wasn’t afraid to let her eyes travel my height. In fact, when she reached my eyes, she held my gaze. It was there; I was certain of it. She knew me.
“A Sav Blanc,” I said. The bartender acknowledged me with a nod, and went back to her conversation with Pinky-Blonde, who was a head taller than me. Pinky-Blonde tried now to disguise her watching, but I could feel her, beneath her head scratch, or arm stretch. She was memorizing me.
The barkeep unscrewed the cap, inspected the wine glass, and poured. “Do you think he’ll come to the shop tonight?”
I felt a frisson. What shop?
From the corner of my eye, I could see the pinky-blonde girl try to convey a message with a steely focus of her eyes. The bartender immediately understood she should change tack. She wasn’t subtle.
“You know how you’re always seeing your neighbor at that, um, coffee shop, and he’s always annoying you about your lawn needing a mow? Didn’t you say that last time I saw you?”
Pinky-Blonde’s look said, you’re a freaking moron.
The bartender returned with a silent, I’m sorry.
The giveaway: they both turned to me—as if they couldn’t help it—at the same time. I smiled politely, what I hoped was benignly. Had they already known I was up to something? She must have recognized me on that previous night. I’d been correct to be concerned. But how to tease out any further connection without looking guilty?
It came to me instinctively, the solution. I was always excellent at chit-chat. People called me charming. “I hate when people see you trying to relax and pick that moment to chat you up,” I said. “I have a gardener who always comes to talk to me just as I’m bringing my rubbish out in my nightgown. He has no sense of space.”
“I like the way you put that,” Pinky-Blonde said. “A sense of space.”
She seemed to mean it, but I couldn’t be sure; there was the fact of me barging in on their private conversation she could have been mocking.
“Doesn’t exist in a bar,” said the bartender, Aggie, according to her unevenly typed nametag.
“I saw you in here the other night. With that guy who’s always sitting alone,” Pinky-Blonde said, as if to emphasize the point.
“Yes, well.” Keep your cards close to the vest. Never do exhibitionists gain respect.
“Is he nice? He’s kind of good-looking, isn’t he?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” I said, noncommittally.
Getting nothing from me, they turned back to each other. The bartender spoke too loudly about someone she clearly hated. Bitch. Slag. It was as if she got something out of my hearing her say the words. Powerlessness has its manifestations. On the contrary, master of all the information, I felt incredibly powerful, though concerned about what Pinky-Blonde might do with her knowledge.
7
IRENE
He came back, and it was like he wanted me to ask what he was coming here for, like there was some kind of line he needed me to cross in order for anything to happen. It was always the same day of the week. From the second that day was over, I waited for the next time. The weeks were long, but exquisitely so (I looked in the thesaurus for that word; the feeling was so strong that special wouldn’t do it, and I thought he would like that—me finding the right word, as he spoke so perfectly, or articulately, as the thesaurus suggested).
He stayed precisely fifteen minutes each time, as if there were some threshold he’d cross if he were there any longer. The first time he returned, I was there with Celicia, who has a thing about being gruff to men. There was the usual kitchen chaos on MKR.
“Oh no he didn’t,” Celicia said of Gianni, who’d lost his cool at his fiancée for the third time in five minutes.
“He probably didn’t say all that together. It’s just the way they edit it,” I said.
“Well, whatever. Still.”
The door chimed, and there he was. Gavan Andrews, his credit card had said. Since his visit, each time I’d run my finger over the raised type of a card, I’d felt the same rush. This was new to me; normally, I went through the motions with men, who generally struck me as self-centered, thoughtless, and arrogant.
Now I watched as he purposely—or so it felt—avoided looking at me and made his way down the reds aisle. I could see him on the security camera beneath the counter. Under the grained, stop motion areal lens, he still had that posture. You couldn’t walk past this man without turning around, and yet he conducted himself as if this couldn’t be further from the truth. Like he was anybody. He picked up a bottle and inspected it, then another. That one he held, loosely, his thumb and fingers around its neck. The bottle pushed creases into his pant leg. I shivered now, around the corner, following him. I realized I’d been engrossed watching his grip on the bottle, the way it grazed his leg.
“Can I help you with something?” I asked. His gaze had settled on the second-highest priced Shiraz.
“Maybe.”
“I’ve tried that one. It’s lovely. Like Christmas.”
“Like Christmas. Now that’s a simile that could sell some red wine.”
“Okay.” My mother said that about everything. I never knew it was lovely. Mostly, she used it sarcastically. Oh, look who decided to show up. How lovely, like Christmas.
He was quiet, and I watched him shift that bottle to the crook of the same arm whose fingers dangled the first one, and then pick up another bottle in his other hand. I’d stood there too long and should have moved, but it didn’t feel like he wanted me to. I was just starting to feel stupid when he spoke again.
“Tried this one? Like Australia Day?”
“Nah, that’d be Four X.”
He smiled without looking at me; a shape-shifting one that transformed his face and then centimeter by centimeter disappeared.
“We had the rep from that vineyard here a while back. Bit of a wanker.”
He laughed and put that one back on the shelf.
I smiled. But then I caught sight of his wedding ring. Why did it bother me so? He could have been my father. I didn�
�t care if he was married; good on him.
“So which do you recommend?”
I should have kept my trap shut; for all the anecdotal information I gave out to customers, I didn’t know much about wines. I didn’t really like them as much as sparkling cider. I enjoyed the warmth of a red, the way it spread to my belly, but I couldn’t tell why one was better than another—except for the really cheap ones that tasted sour. Normally, I pushed the one that was on special, but I could tell he’d be onto that. I picked the most expensive one.
“Oh, really? Why?”
I didn’t want to lie; it seemed pointless. “It’ll make my sales look good.”
“Then this one it is.”
He walked right to the register, and though I kept watching his eyes, Gavan didn’t look me straight on again before he left.
I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I rolled our exchanges around in my mind until they were smooth and familiar in my memory—polished and at a fingertip’s blind reach.
8
ERIN
I didn’t get much out of my conversation with Pinky-Blonde and Aggie. They wanted to be taken seriously, to be seen as mature. They pretended to know about topics that would help them to appear so: staying out late, drinking too much, knowing people. Mostly, they spoke to each other, with an effort to cast me as their audience, pulling faces and catching my eye for a reaction. They were nice-enough, naïve girls. But it was clear they needed role models. Aggie let slip that Pinky-Blonde worked in the Hermit Park shopping plaza. After I drank my wine, I excused myself, happy with this information.
It was the parking sticker that gave Pinky-Blonde away. “BWS Hermit Park” it said on an old Honda with a pair of pink fuzzy dice slung over the rearview. Erika and I would go and check. But then what? What would I do with this information? I held off going until the reasons revealed themselves.
The next day, I woke again thinking of memento mori; as if in this idea, in the image of not a sunset, but the idea of an off-stage sunset, and its manifestation in this part of the world, there was a clue to the way the story should go. Remember, we must die. Was there another, more vital way to look at things that I could live with? I turned to the Internet and typed in “memento mori.” There was something taboo and heart-racing about the premise. Immediately, I was brought to an image page, full of photos of dead people—old women, beautiful young women, children in Victorian lace, splayed out with their doughy limbs. No one should have a page like this, was my first thought. My chest churned, my breath held, but I couldn’t bring myself to look away. I clicked again and again, staring into their dead faces, looking for something that would guide me. But what I felt most was separate—separate from these people. They were somewhere else, something else.
Again, the fateful feeling: I was meant to come to this point; my mind was driving me toward it in a way the conscious me couldn’t understand. Might I dare to think that this seemingly arbitrary literary tangent might be an extension of the mother-daughter connection no one can ever seem to locate the edges of? I remembered my leaking breasts when Olivia cried, the feel of my shirt dampening, sticking to my skin. The sensation now was so similar, I could feel relief sweeping over me, like I was getting closer.
This was where inspiration took hold.
I had Erika drive to the BWS. She didn’t have to sit long until she saw Pinky-Blonde. This felt too easy to be perceived as mere coincidence by Pinky-Blonde. If she went in, clearly Pinky-Blonde would recognize her from the bar. What then? It wouldn’t be odd for a local to pop up again in that way, but so many times in so few days? A conversation would doubtless ensue, and Erika would have to be prepared with whatever story she was going to tell of herself. She’d thought it through over and over, but kept getting stuck at the same point. Here’s where it began: I noticed you at the Royal Hotel before we talked the other day, the night I was there on a first date. I noticed you knew the bartender. I’m so glad I saw you here because I wanted to ask you if you went to that bar often; he said he did, and if you’d seen him there before, I wondered whether you thought there wasn’t something a little strange about that guy.
But what? What would be strange enough to raise the kind of after-the-fact suspicion that wouldn’t be so obvious that it seemed like a cover-up? She knew the power of suggestion. If she put the idea in Pinky-Blonde’s head, chances are, she’d start looking at him suspiciously—especially after something happened. But if it was clumsy, it would later be—aha!—easy to work out Erika’s guilt. So? What could plausibly concern her?
I wrote around for a few minutes, but nothing came. I looked over Rick’s character questionnaire, and couldn’t remember which of the traits were true and which I’d fictionalized. Or perhaps, more accurately, I could remember, but chose to blur the lines; the truth didn’t feel important. I liked the effect of the final product better than an accurate version could have turned out. So much so that I decided I would switch over to his real name; Rick was starting to jar, seem superfluous, arbitrary.
Yes, all the details were in place, but I couldn’t decide ahead of time where things should go; everything I tried felt artificial. I’d have to pants it. The familiar thrill set in. I was as keyed up to see what might happen as any reader might be—probably more.
Erika parked halfway across the mostly empty line of parks, as if that was the place she normally chose. She straightened her lipstick before leaving the car, not so much to look better, but to look right, the way she imagined she should look doing this. Red lips were important. Not everyone could wear them, and she could, and that would say something. Nothing you could put your finger on, but an intangible that mattered. She pressed her lips together and smudged her fingers toward the edges.
Sunglasses cocked on her nose, she cradled her purse like a baby in one arm. Nonchalance was probably oozing off her.
This is where the action on the page shriveled and died, but that heart-racing, toe-tapping bliss remained. I walked around the perimeter of our garden for a few minutes: took in the blowy surface of the ocean, focused on a few sailboats over by Maggie Island, thought I saw a turtle. And then I sat back down to the computer; a crow cawed. I closed my eyes, the brightness of the sky captured beneath my lids in color bursts, and when I pictured these characters at BWS, what I saw was that ridiculous bottle of wine Gav had brought home the other night. I didn’t know why it should bother me that he wanted pleasure, too. And what could be simpler to enjoy than a good wine? Of course we weren’t going to talk about this kind of motivation while we drank the wine, and if I did ask, he’d deny it—say it was the first one he saw or some such bullshit.
Again, I was stuck. I tried to imagine Pinky Blonde at the counter, and I was just getting a good look at her, seeing the reflection of the sunlight on her glossy hair, when I realized exactly where the inspiration had been headed. I needed to switch gears: What if I experienced first, and then put the experience into my writing after the fact? How might that affect the writing? What would this change in the work accomplish? Would it make the work not fiction anymore, but something else? Something closer to whatever I was trying to achieve? But what about the responsibility element? Was I trying to avoid that? No. No, that wasn’t it. I knew for sure because again, I had that feeling: closer. I knew about guilt, that Zen view of it, that soldier’s view of it: guilt was a pointless emotion that clouded rationality and what needed to be done. People who worried about the possibility of guilt could not achieve the most important—always the most complex—tasks. Because at that level, everyone shared the guilt; nothing was so black and white as to be free of it. I imagined myself finally beyond it and now onto the more crucial, truer, and more valuable level of the experiment. Yes. This was right in every sense.
I nearly ran out of the house and drove, shaky, keyed up, in order to find out what the change in order would stir up. As I drove, thoughts raced through my head. I knew the risks of “reporting” on your life in fiction writing: endless pages of boring, meande
ring crap that broke all the rules of fiction craft—making for a wonky, self-indulgent story that pleased no one but the writer. But this wouldn’t be that. It would be research, creation, only played out in reality. It wasn’t my existing life I was trying to capture in fiction. It was an extension of the art, something no one had done before, and it was exciting as fuck. I felt like I could do anything. Even reach my dead daughter? I wouldn’t let myself be so concrete. But.
I slowed my breathing along with my pace as I made my way to the door. Pinky-Blonde looked over from the television immediately as the door opened, as if she’d trained herself to, not, I suspected, because she wanted to. She made eye contact and nodded her head before realizing who I was, which registered with more of a start than I would have liked.
I resisted the urge to swallow.
“The woman from the bar; I’d love to chat to you, but I wouldn’t want to invade your personal space.” She smiled, looking for approval of either her remembrance or clever usage. Maybe she was just innocently surprised to see me.
“And you’re . . . Irene.” Her nametag was pristine, as if she polished it regularly. And her presence seemed to ask, why wouldn’t she? I had been mistaken earlier; she did seem to take pride in what she did. Her counter was sensibly arranged, dust-free. “What can I help you with?”
“Hmmmm. Not quite sure. Thought I might try something new.” Yes, that was good. It would get her talking.
“Any special occasion?”
“Well, it’s a little embarrassing, but that man you saw me with, that was our first date.” I brought my hand to cover half my face. I saw it as Erika’s hand, as a gesture she might make.
Irene swallowed as if this idea made her uncomfortable, but she tried to cover it up with a polite smile. “Why would that be embarrassing?”
“Well, to be honest, I really like him.” As Erika, I darted my eyes up and down playfully; I was getting into the role. It was quite fun, exploring this character.
