The Holiday Season

by Michael Knight

  “Will you stay with me?”

  Her heart was bang-bang-banging in her chest all of a sudden. Her hands tingled with fear. They had arrived at the pivotal moment, she thought, the moment when everything would be revealed, and here Ike was gaping at her like a retard.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Here.”

  “It’s freezing,” he said.

  Lulu said, “It’s romantic. We’ll keep each other warm.”

  Ike looked at her a second longer, then chucked her on the arm, his features morphing into a smile, as if she was pulling his leg and he was just now catching on.

  “I gotta whiz,” he said.

  Though of course she didn’t know it yet, Lulu would remember this moment, that smile, for years to come and it would occur to her each time that perhaps Ike was only pretending not to understand what she wanted, how she felt, and her heart would break all over again in new and different ways.

  Stella

  Tiptoe said he knew a place where Ike went with his friends and he’d take them there on the condition that Boyd would let him drive the Mercedes. Two things struck Stella about the situation: first, that Boyd agreed, that he didn’t figure a way to connive the information from this man without capitulating, and second, that Roland Tiptoe had a better idea of where to find his child on New Year’s Eve than Boyd and Stella. She was in the backseat with her ex-husband. Tiptoe was behind the wheel, his Pekinese curled up on the passenger seat.

  “This leather’s gorgeous,” he said.

  Stella looked at Boyd, pinched his thigh.

  Boyd said, “Where we headed, Roland?”

  Tiptoe said, “You’ll see; not far,” and Boyd settled back in his seat like that was just the answer he’d been hoping for. But they’d already been on the road for twenty minutes and Stella no longer recognized any landmarks. On her right: a strip mall, half the storefronts boarded up. On her left: a wall of pines. Though she couldn’t see them, she heard the periodic roar and hiss of jet engines overhead. It occurred to her that her husband was afraid of Roland Tiptoe; that’s why he’d avoided a dispute. Boyd was Mister Confrontation among people like himself, whose method of negotiation he understood, whose likely reaction could be gauged. In court, he was known to be dangerous and sly. But take him out of his element and his spine dissolved. She was thinking in particular of a summer evening when Lulu was still a baby. Boyd was home early from work and they were pushing her in a stroller around the neighborhood when a black man in a 280Z came roaring down the street. As he passed, Boyd shouted at the driver to slow down; all the neighborhood husbands yelled at reckless drivers. Much to Boyd’s surprise, however, this driver hit the brakes and backed up in a hurry and rolled his window down. “What did you say?” His voice was rich with anger. Boyd repeated himself. Meekly. The driver went on a tear. “You don’t tell me what to do, motherfucker. Don’t nobody tell me what to do” and so on. When Boyd opened his mouth to speak, the driver said, “One word and I will get out of this car and beat you down before your wife and child.” He stared until Boyd lowered his eyes. “That’s what I thought,” the driver said. Then he roared off faster than before and neither Boyd nor Stella ever mentioned the scene again.

  Nobody liked to see the underside of someone they loved, she thought. Love was too hard an illusion to maintain.

  Stella tipped forward in her seat.

  “I like your dog,” she said.

  She was just extending a hand to scratch his head when Tiptoe said, “Grouch might be little-bitty but that’s one of the meanest dogs you’ll ever meet.”

  As if he recognized a cue, the dog lifted his head and growled at Stella. She withdrew her fingers. The dog couldn’t have weighed more than fifteen pounds.

  Tiptoe said, “I’ve seen him back a pit bull down.”

  “No kidding,” Stella said. Those gin and tonics had left her hangovery and raw.

  Tiptoe grinned at Boyd in the rearview mirror. “This car.” He shook his head, amazed. “It’s like riding on air.”

  He made a left, past a subdivision sign that read ILLUMINATION MEADOWS. The trees had been cleared as far as Stella could see and the houses were all dark. As Tiptoe wound farther into the neighborhood, she noticed that most of them were unfinished, plastic sheeting over gaps in the exteriors, frames exposed. They looked like the houses children draw, all straight lines and empty space.

  “The developers went belly-up last year,” Tiptoe said. “Maybe you read about it in the paper. Construction’s on hold indefinitely. I don’t know how my son and his friends found it but they like to come out here, make trouble.”

  It occurred to Stella that he was going to kill them for Boyd’s Mercedes. Tiptoe would make her watch, she thought, while he slit Boyd’s throat and did who knew what to her, then he would bury both of them right here in the ground. She’d never see her little girl again. When the developers had gotten their money problems sorted out, a construction crew would come along, pour a new foundation over her grave and she was sure that no one, not Lulu, not anybody, would ever know how or why she died.

  Then she saw the shimmer of candlelight in one of the houses and she recognized the shapes of cars parked in the grass, humps of deeper darkness silhouetted by the night. Tiptoe cut the headlights, eased the Mercedes off the road, sagged back into his seat.

  “That was a dream come true,” he said.

  They were quiet while Tiptoe savored the moment. It didn’t take long for the heat to bleed out of the car. Satisfied, Tiptoe reached over, snatched Grouch out of the passenger seat, stepped into the night. They watched him striding toward the house, the dog tucked under his arm. He brushed aside a sheet of plastic and disappeared.

  “Are we supposed to follow him?” Stella said.

  Boyd cracked his knuckles, a hollow gesture.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Stella frowned, hesitated, thought of Lulu. She was embarrassed for them both. She shouldered the door open and followed Tiptoe. The air was thin, sharp with cold. It pushed under her clothes, seemed to push right through her. She heard a car door close, and Boyd came hustling up behind her. They were almost to the house when Tiptoe emerged with a kid in a sheepskin coat, the kind cowboys wore in cigarette advertisements.

  “This is Ollie,” Tiptoe said. “Ike’s friend.”

  Grouch was wheezing in the crook of his arm.

  Ollie said, “Lulu’s a great girl.”

  “Is she here?” Stella said. “Where is she?”

  She could feel her heartbeat in her skin.

  “They had a fight or something,” Ollie said. “Ike took her home. You just missed her.”

  Stella sagged against her husband. Tiptoe did a toking gesture with his fingers and tipped his head in the direction of the house. “They’ve got some weed in there,” he said. “I’m gonna stick around a while.” He wiggled his eyebrows up and down.

  Ollie stared at him a second.

  “I guess that’s cool,” he asked.

  All the way back to her apartment, Stella admonished herself: How was it possible that neither she nor Boyd had considered the possibility that their daughter would come home? She had the sense that if she concentrated hard enough, if she worked backward through the years, past her antiques business and the divorce, past Lulu’s birth, past the day she met Boyd, worked her way all the way back to when her life was still her own, she might be able to trace a pattern that would lead her forward again to this moment, her ex-husband huddled close against the wheel of his expensive car, the world getting more familiar by the mile.

  Urqhardt

  Professor Urqhardt was contemplating straight women. Were they all crazy? That’s what he wanted to know. Were they all selfish and rude? Did they view gay men as rivals or as some sort of second-tier allies, always at their beck and call in a timeless conflict with straight men? First this one, Katie Butter. Then the other one, Esmerelda what’s-her-name. Now the Butter woman again. Minutes befo
re he’d been pressed up close to Kevin, his lips brushing the stubble on the back of Kevin’s neck, and now this woman was perched on the edge of the bed, crying into her hands while Kevin patted her thigh and said the kinds of things one said in such a situation.

  “Let it out. It’s OK. That’s right, sweetie.”

  He looked to Urqhardt for help but Urqhardt scowled and pushed his fists into his pockets. Kevin scowled back, like somehow Urqhardt was in the wrong here, like he was the one being insensitive. Urqhardt jangled his keys in an irritated manner.

  “I’m sorry,” Katie said. “It’s just, it seemed so real when I told you.”

  Kevin said, “There, there.”

  Urqhardt had met Kevin at a coffee shop on Old Shell Road. He didn’t realize he was a student at the time, though if he’d given it a moment’s thought, he certainly would have suspected. The coffee shop was walking distance from campus. And Kevin was exactly the right age. But all Urqhardt could think about was how beautiful he looked when he pushed open the door—the hooded raincoat, the neat goatee, his left ear dangling a small gold hoop. And the way he walked, that rolling gait. He was like a strange, gay pirate, unsteady on dry land.

  That was back in April and they’d had the whole summer together, undisturbed. Kevin was knocking out his language requirement. Some nights he spoke only broken, beginner Spanish. Then fall and Kevin’s friends returned to campus and he started running around with them again. Urqhardt made room for Kevin’s other life. He couldn’t hold his youth against him. When Kevin complained about money, Urqhardt invited him to move in. When he stayed out late and the apartment was quiet and Urqhardt was sprawled in bed alone, he thought, Let u and v be variables such that u is restricted to a proper subset of real numbers. He thought, Let the dependent variable y be a function of the independent variable x, expressed by y=f(x). He thought of Newton and Leibniz. He thought of the two Bernoullis. He thought of Euler and Lagrange and Gauss and Cauchy and Riemann. Urqhardt understood that he wasn’t a great mathematician; otherwise, he wouldn’t be teaching undergraduates in Mobile, Alabama. But he consoled himself with the notion that without someone like him, without someone to understand and admire the beauty of these other men’s work, the work itself would be lost.

  Katie sniffled, blotted her eyes, dropped her hands into her lap.

  “I’m sorry I’m such a mess.” She looked at Urqhardt. “I’m sorry I walked in on you. I’m sorry for everything.”

  “Don’t leave him,” Urqhardt said.

  Katie blinked and pushed the hair out of her face.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Don’t leave him,” Urqhardt said again, quieter now, his voice almost a plea.

  Esmerelda

  She was aware of all the people waiting in line outside the bathroom door, but Esmerelda refused to rush. She wondered if the men in the hall were listening to the trickle of her urine, if the sound inspired or disgusted them. Some men preferred to imagine that beautiful women had no worldly needs. Esmerelda preferred to imagine that her blind date had caught on fire. In an effort to boost her confidence, she stepped out of her panties (black, silk) and stuffed them in her clutch, then flushed and took a moment to admire her reflection in the mirror. She reapplied her lipstick. With the tip of her little finger, she smoothed her eyebrows into place. She was known to have remarkable eyebrows.

  The following is a list, in alphabetical order, of the men who had asked for Esmerelda’s hand over the years: Douglas Arbuckle, Jacob Bond, Yan Ding, Albert Dejournet, Preston Ford, William Little, William Locke, Rafael Manzanerez, Curtis Roper, Buckman Threadgill and Suyanarayana Vangabandu. They had loved her for a while. Perhaps some of them still did. True love, she thought, was tragic.

  She drew a breath and stepped into the hall, rustled past the shuffling, shifting line. Each man went still as she passed, his discomfort momentarily forgotten. There were women waiting as well, of course, but they vanished in her presence. She had a secret now and it restored her power and she was borne forward on the strength of it, back through the party and out the front door without bidding a single farewell.

  The night was clear and cold. She could feel it between her legs. Cars were lined up on both sides of the street. There was a man standing alone on the front lawn with his arms crossed. He appeared to be admiring the neighbor’s holiday decorations: the glowing icicles along the roofline, the spotlit nativity, the luminescent reindeer capering on the grass with old Saint Nick. It looked like they were selling something. She took a place beside the man, felt him double-take. His glasses reflected the lights. His left hand was curled over his right bicep in such a way that she could see his wedding band. She let him be the first to speak.

  “Tacky,” he said.

  “You are waiting for someone?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Our host and hostess.”

  “Not your wife?”

  She tapped his ring with a fingernail. He pushed his hands into his pockets. Across the street, the lead reindeer’s nose was blinking on and off.

  Esmerelda said, “Take me home.”

  “You need a ride? I’ve got my cell phone. I’d be happy to call a cab.”

  She met his eyes. She did the smile.

  “Oh,” he said. “Wow. Really?”

  “It is almost midnight,” she said.

  The man stared at her for a long moment.

  “Listen,” he said. “I mean, I’m flattered and all and you’re so incredibly—” He paused. “You’re kidding, right? This is a joke. You’re making an idiot of me.”

  “You are doing that all by yourself.”

  “I’m sorry.” He withdrew his left hand, waggled his ring finger. He blushed, like marriage was a shame. “I love my wife.”

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  “Hugh. Butter. Hugh Butter.”

  “Happy New Year, Hugh Butter.”

  And with that, Esmerelda strode off into the night. She wobbled ever so slightly when her heel sunk in the grass but regained her balance and ticked on toward her car with light from the neighbor’s yard playing in her hair.

  Evan

  Evan woke in his father’s leather chair with an erection pressing against his zipper. Miss Anita was shaking his shoulder.

  “Wake up, big brother,” she was saying. “It’s almost midnight. Wake up, boy. Hey.”

  Evan recoiled, brought one arm up to cover his face, dropped the other into his lap. He was at once relieved and embarrassed by his erection. He wondered if Miss Anita noticed. She straightened up now, put her hands on her hips. Behind her, Evan saw two more empty miniatures on the table.

  “The new year has arrived,” she said.

  He heard distant voices counting backward—eight, seven, six—located them on TV. An old man with dyed black hair was on stage now leading the chant. Five, four, three. A glittering golden orb descended a silver pole. Nicole was slumped against the arm of the couch, her jaw hanging open. Evan felt creepy, distant, half-lost in his dream.

  “What about Nicole?”

  Before the words were out of his mouth, the band cranked up and fireworks lit the TV night.

  Miss Anita shook her head. “They been a lot of new years before this one,” she said. “They be a whole lot more for her.” She chuckled and clapped her hands and did a little shuffle with her feet. Evan thought she was drunk. He’d seen his father after a couple of martinis but he didn’t act like this. “Praise Jesus,” Miss Anita said. She snatched up her purse and danced around behind the couch.

  “Time don’t never stop,” she said, high-stepping into the hall. Evan heard the front door open. He looked at Nicole. She was breathing deeply in her sleep. He pushed to his feet and followed Miss Anita, found her on the lawn, glaring at the stars as if they’d offended her somehow.

  “Ain’t no fireworks out here.” Her voice sounded too loud among the pretty houses, the magnolias, the somnolent sedans. Her words took shape, like ghosts, and lifted on t
he air. Evan shivered. His skin prickled at the cold. “Can’t have no new year without no fireworks,” Miss Anita said. She dipped her hand into her purse, rooted around. This time she brought out the pistol, wet-looking in the moonlight.

  “What are you doing?” Evan asked.

  Miss Anita smiled at him over her shoulder. Her eyes were swimming in their sockets. She looked almost sad.

  “We alive,” she said. “Time don’t never stop but we alive.”

  With that, she raised the pistol over her head and fired three times into the sky. Dogs erupted all over the neighborhood. After a moment, lights began to flick on in nearby windows. “You alive and baby girl alive and my children all alive,” she said. She uttered the word—alive—in a noisy kind of whisper, like she was afraid of jinxing it by saying it too loud. She fired twice more over her head. “Miss Anita alive,” she said. It occurred to Evan that the countdown on TV was in New York and he didn’t know if he’d been watching a tape delay or if there was still another hour until midnight in Alabama and he felt outside of time all of a sudden or like time was something insincere, his legs filled up with air, his heart loose and throbbing in his chest. He thought of Veronica and of Lulu Fountain. The canopy of trees along the road looked menacing and lovely, bare branches like women’s fingers, like demon arms. Miss Anita fired again, and Evan flinched. He doubted that his parents would let her off the hook for this, and before too long his father’s credit card bill would be arriving in the mail. There would be consequences for both of them. But after that … but right now … He didn’t know if the world looked so peculiar because he was still seeing it through the scrim of his dream. His lips were parted and he could feel the look of wonder on his face.

  Katie

  She found Hugh outside with the Marchands. Paul and Haley were on the front stoop, arm in arm, watching him waltz an enormous plastic Santa Claus across the yard. Apparently, he’d swiped it from the neighbors. Paul and Haley were laughing and cheering him on. Paul draped his free arm over Katie’s shoulder.