by Lily Tuck
Helen stands holding the front door of her house open for Craig. “She’s the patron saint of San Gimignano, where I was in Tuscany,” Helen explains. “Have you been to Italy?”
Craig shakes his head. “I wish,” he says.
“You can set everything down over there,” Helen tells him, taking one more quick, critical look at her painting. “I haven’t finished yet and I haven’t gotten Saint Gregory quite right.”
Craig nods but says nothing.
“Would you like something? A drink?” Helen asks all of a sudden. “I’m going to have something. A gin and tonic.”
“A gin and tonic would be fine,” Craig says.
Helen goes into the kitchen and Craig can hear her opening cupboards, getting ice, as he stands in the living room and looks around. The only other time he has been in Helen’s house, he was so intent on renting the cottage and making a good impression that he barely looked at anything in the room. Now, he notices that all the pictures on the walls are of ships. Most are prints, a few are watercolors and there is one picture that looks like it is made from woven wool.
When Helen returns with the two glasses of gin and tonic, Craig is still looking at the pictures. “Yes, my husband—my”—she starts to identify which husband but changes her mind—“he collected pictures of boats. He loved to sail.”
“They’re nice,” Craig says.
“Sit down, sit down,” Helen tells him. She points to an armchair across from where she sits on the sofa. “Make yourself comfortable.”
As soon as Craig has sat down across from Helen, Helen’s cat jumps up and settles on Craig’s lap and, although Craig does not particularly like cats, he strokes the cat’s back. Again, Craig is reminded of the accident and of the man having convulsions. When Craig had put the car into reverse, the neighbor had run out of her house just in time to see him back up over the cat. And although Craig had done his best to try to explain that he was putting the cat out of his misery, the neighbor never did believe him.
“I love to sail, too,” he begins.
After Craig has left, Helen washes the glasses and dishes —in the end she made Craig and herself some supper—then, after making certain the cat is still inside, she goes around the house locking up. When she gets to the back door she decides to go and take another quick look at the barn swallow nest—with Craig there, she had nearly forgotten about them—before going up to bed. The nest seems strangely quiet and there is no sign of the parents. Could all the chicks have fledged that afternoon while she was painting? Helen wonders. Despite everything she has read that warns against doing this, Helen goes back in the house and gets a step stool and a flashlight—she is just going to have a tiny peek. Taking off her shoes and trying to make as little noise as possible—she sways a little as she climbs up the step stool and has to reach out to the wall of the house for balance, the result of the gin and tonics—she turns on the flashlight when her head is level with the nest. The nest is not empty as she had feared but swarming with tiny bugs—bird mites—and the five barn swallow chicks inside it are dead.
From his bed in the cottage, Craig cannot sleep. He drank too many gin and tonics and he feels a little sick to his stomach. Also, he talked too much and he feels embarrassed. And each time he shuts his eyes, he again sees the wrecked car and the man convulsing on the stretcher. And it is exceedingly hot in his room. Getting out of bed, Craig opens the window wider to try to let in more air. As he does this, he hears a strange sound coming from across the lawn, from Helen’s house. A woman crying.
My Flame
The ringing phone woke them.
“Who the hell is that?” Mark asked, sitting up in bed.
“I don’t know. Hello? Hello,” Alison repeated.
“Who? Oh, Leslie.”
“Leslie?” Mark said. “What time is it?”
“Sssh, wait.” She motioned to him with her hand, although, in the dark, he could not see it. “What’s wrong?” she said.
“Tell Leslie it’s the middle of the fucking night,” Mark said, lying back down hard and making the mattress bounce. Outside, the headlights of a car briefly illumined one wall of the room and the dresser on which there stood a photograph of two small boys and a glass jar filled with change.
After she had hung up the phone, she turned on the light.
“My sister Janine is a drunk, a poor sad drunk,” his eyes squeezed shut, Mark said. “They should lock her up. Can you turn out the damn light.”
“Poor Leslie,” she said.
“How old is she?”
“I don’t know. Fourteen, fifteen. We saw her last Christmas.”
“Shit,” Mark also said, reaching over to push up Alison’s nightgown, “now, I will never go back to sleep.”
Years later, in another country, France, in another city, Paris, she will have completely forgotten about that night. Long since divorced, she rarely thinks about Mark or Leslie, who, in any case, are both dead. The only thing left to her from that time is the photograph of the two small boys—grown men now—which stands in a silver frame on top of the mantelpiece in her apartment, located a stone’s throw from the Luxembourg Garden, on rue Madame.
Seconds after he rolled off her, he fell asleep.
In one dream, he is riding a motorcycle on a mountainous road. The hairpin turns, the low twisted guardrails on the cliff side of the road, the view of the sea below, remind him of the corniche above the coast of the Riviera and of a summer years ago when he had sailed in the Mediterranean. But then the scenery in the dream abruptly changes, and he is riding his motorcycle through a village—a village that could be in England, in say the Cotswolds, where he has never been but of which he has seen pictures—with thatched-roofed cottages all lined up in a row, their tidy gardens filled with roses and tall hollyhocks. As he rides by, someone in one of the cottages calls out his name. He thinks it is his mother. Then the door of the cottage opens, and a little girl of about four or five with long blonde hair runs out into the street before he has time to stop. The woman who had called to him, who is not his mother and whom he does not recognize, shouts to him that it is his fault the little girl has been killed.
When, later, he awoke and for a few moments recollected his dream, he also remembered a day during that long-ago Mediterranean summer when he and a girl, who were both the crew on a Concordia yawl—he cannot recall her name, only what she looked like: small, with strong calf muscles (he can still see her balancing on the deck, even in rough weather, to adjust a jib sheet), and her curly hair—had taken a taxi to a village above Cannes and had lunch at an inn someone had recommended. At the inn, L’Auberge du Midi, or a name like that, the girl and Mark had helped themselves to pâté de campagne from a big earthenware crock, next to a large platter of little pink écrevisses they dipped into bright yellow mayonnaise, then a lamb cassoulet, cheeses, a homemade peach tart for dessert; and they had drunk wine, a rosé from the region served in a carafe, and it was the best meal he had ever eaten in his life. He would never forget that. Funny what one remembered and the curly-haired girl whose name he has forgotten and who he had wanted to sleep with but never did.
On a Greyhound bus, on her way to Mark and Alison’s house, which was a few miles outside the District, in Virginia, Leslie could not sleep. Her little Yorkshire terrier, Suzy, was stuffed under her seat in a tote bag. From time to time, the dog whined and although the bus was not crowded, Leslie worried someone might complain. Finally, taking advantage of the darkness, she took Suzy out of the bag and put her on her lap, half-covering her with her jacket.
“Sssh, sssh.” She patted the dog’s head.
On the phone, she had not told Alison about Suzy. About bringing her. Now, she hoped Alison would not mind. Alison was very kind but you never knew about people and how they felt about dogs, although her dog, Suzy, was no trouble. She was a sweet dog and Leslie cou
ld never give her up. Especially now. When Leslie thought about her mother and how, drunk, her mother had on various occasions threatened her with violence, she started to cry again.
Although it is cold and windy, Alison was standing outside of the bus station. The waiting room had been crowded with homeless people trying to keep warm; one man was stretched out full length on a bench, the fly open on his stained pants. She hoped the bus would not be late as it was her day to carpool, and in less than an hour she had to pick up the twins at school. Then she had to drive them to hockey practice. Meantime, she had made up the bed in the guest room for Leslie. She had made it up with her best sheets—fancy European sheets with a pretty flower pattern and scalloped borders—to make Leslie feel welcome. Also, she had put pink towels in the bathroom and a new bar of perfumed soap. In addition, she spent most of the day on the phone, getting transcripts from Leslie’s old school and making the arrangements at the local one. Mark, too, had had to make several calls. Shivering, Alison pulled her coat more tightly around her as she scanned the street for the bus. Who knew? It might be nice, for a change, to have another female in the house. Although shy, Leslie seemed like a sweet girl. Life with alcoholic Janine was certainly no picnic and her husband, Leslie’s stepfather, Anders—he was Swedish—was gone most of the year, mapping poverty in Senegal or Mali or somewhere in Africa, when Alison thought he should have been home mapping the wrongs in his own house. At dinner, the last time she saw Anders, he had been rude and dismissive. What had he said to her: that she was overly deferential? Unjustified, yet the remark had rankled. Perhaps, he, too, had been drunk. Janine, she remembered, had quarreled loudly with Mark during the meal, then had passed out on the sofa. At last, the bus came into view and Alison got ready to wave.
The twins were more interested in Suzy than in Leslie. Before supper, laughing wildly at each other, they took turns throwing a tennis ball for the little dog outside in the garden, making her fetch it. The ball was thrown harder and farther and, each time, the dog was made more agitated, jumping up on her hind legs and barking incessantly, until Alison went outside and called the game to a halt. “Enough,” she said, “it’s cold and the dog is getting overexcited.” Throughout their game, Leslie had stood at the living room window, watching, not daring to interfere. The boys’ exuberance intimidated her. She also did not want to alienate them. The twins were eight at the time and years later, when their mother told them how their cousin Leslie had been killed in a car accident while her dog—no doubt, by then, a different dog—who was also in the car survived unhurt, would have almost no memory of either Leslie or her little dog. “You don’t remember how she stayed in the guest room for months and her dog barked all the time and made me crazy?” Alison persisted. The thing that Peter, one of the twins, said he remembered best about that time was getting knocked out in the hockey rink—although he cannot actually remember that either—only the aftermath: the doctor asking him stupid questions like how many fingers was he holding up in front of his face and asking him to count backwards from twenty-five, as apparently he had suffered a mild concussion. While Sam, more conscientious, and always slightly prescient, had asked Alison: “Was she drinking?”
Sam does remember Leslie. In fact he will never forget how one night, afraid it would rain, he got out of bed and went to get his bicycle, which he had left lying outside in the garden, and as he walked past the guest bathroom window—both the guest bedroom and bathroom were situated downstairs in the house and the windows gave out onto the garden in back, which was private so there was no real need to draw the blinds—he saw that the bathroom light was on. Standing on his tiptoes, Sam peered inside. Leslie was running herself a bath, and he watched as she took off her clothes, her panties and her bra, exposing her already large breasts, her fat belly and her hairy mound, which was much darker than the blonde hair on her head. He watched her get into the tub, and then he watched as she positioned herself in the water in such a way that her legs were spread and up in the air and the water from the taps was running in between them. Leslie’s head was resting on the side of the tub, her eyes were shut and, all of a sudden, she cried out. Frightened, Sam must have cried out, too, as he ran inside the house, for he could hear Leslie call out, “Who’s there?” He wanted to tell Peter, but Peter was already asleep when he got back to their room, and also, the next day, he was not sure how to describe what he had seen. From then on, however, every time he saw Leslie, eating her Special K in the morning or after she had come home from school and was watching TV or as they were all eating dinner together, he could never quite rid himself of the image of her naked in the tub, her legs spread up in the air. As a result, he avoided her.
Opening the front door to his house that first evening, Mark heard a dog barking. “What the hell is that?” he said out loud to himself. “Pete, Sam! Boys!” He called out to the twins before he saw Leslie standing in the hall. She held the dog in her arms.
“Oh, Leslie?” Preoccupied at work, Mark had forgotten about Leslie. A French cheese maker was a prospective client but as yet he had not closed on the deal. La Vache Qui Rit, he kept repeating the name to himself in his head.
“Welcome,” he said, recovering himself. He wanted to be friendly to the girl. “Is that your dog?” he asked.
“Suzy.” Half-offering up the dog in her arms to Mark, Leslie also said, “Thank you, Uncle Mark, for having me come stay with you. I can’t tell you how much I . . .” Leslie was afraid she would start to cry again.
“No, no, don’t worry about it. It’s not a problem.” Mark leaned down and patted Leslie on the shoulder. “We’re glad to have you.” Since he had last seen her, Leslie, Mark noticed, had gained a lot of weight. “Does your dog bite?” He wanted to make light of the moment.
“Oh, no, Suzy is very sweet.”
“That’s good to know.” Mark smiled at Leslie. “Where’s Alison? Where are the boys? In the kitchen?”
Left alone in the house—Mark had left for work, Alison, too, was gone, as twice a week she volunteered at the Hirshhorn Museum, the twins were in school and Leslie had begun junior high that morning—Suzy chewed the fringe off the living room carpet, an antique, orange, blue and yellow patterned kilim Mark and Alison had bought on their honeymoon, in Turkey, from a rug dealer named Mohammed. She then threw it back up, half digested, on the carpet. She also shat—she had diarrhea by then—in the hallway, the dining room, the kitchen and in Leslie’s bedroom. Days later, the dog, Suzy, would have no memory of this—only perhaps a slight instinctive reaction of shame, so that each time she saw Alison, she slunk past her.
Mark claimed that he fell in love with Alison’s voice. The minute he heard it on the phone, when she had called to tell him that she had found his wallet lying on the stairs—she had specified the stairs in between the second and third floors—of her college dormitory. Right away, Mark said, the sound of her voice gave him a hard-on. “Gross,” was how later Alison had replied when he told her, although a part of her had been flattered and wanted to believe him. The wallet had contained a driver’s license, nineteen dollars in five- and one-dollar bills, a laundry receipt, a receipt for $13.34 from the college co-op, and two packages of condoms, also a photo of a girl in a striped bathing suit. The same girl Mark later told Alison he had gone up, taking the stairs two at a time in his hurry, to visit in the dormitory when the wallet must have dropped out of his pocket. “My flame,” was how he referred to the girl and never by her name.
Ma flamme, Alison repeats softly to herself on her way to the boulangerie on rue de Fleurus, a few doors down from where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas used to live. Something must have triggered the memory: perhaps the bit of brown paper lying on the sidewalk that for a moment she mistook for a wallet. When they started going out together, Mark had called her that as well: it was how he introduced her to his friends—“My flame.” How many flames had he had in his life? she wonders. A forest fire’s worth, she thi
nks, and she pictures huge orange flames licking up and consuming great tall trees that then, in her mind, turn into a blackened destroyed area, an area of total desolation, as she opens the door to the boulangerie and breathes in the odor of freshly baked bread.
The fancy imported sheets with the pretty flower pattern and scalloped borders were of little comfort to Leslie. The second night, she got her period in the middle of the night—early and, no doubt, due to stress—and stained them. In a panic, she stripped the bed and ran the sheets under cold water in the tub, scrubbing them as hard as she could with the scented soap, then she hung them over the pink towels to dry. Still, she could make out the darker outlines of the stains.
In the department store dressing room, Leslie sat fully dressed on the little bench staring at herself in the mirror, only occasionally getting up to make rustling noises in order to appear to be trying on the clothes. “Nothing really fits,” she called out after a while.
“Are you sure? Do you want to show me?” From outside the dressing room door, Alison called back. “Or shall I get you another size? A bigger size?”
“No. No, thank you, Aunt Alison,” Leslie answered, examining her face more closely in the mirror. “They’re just not my style.”
“Well, why don’t you have another look,” Alison persisted. “I saw some really cute capri pants and some neat shirts. I am sure you will like them.”
“It’s okay, Aunt Alison. I’m fine.” Leslie squeezed a pimple on her forehead, spattering pus on the mirror.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, Aunt Alison.”
It wasn’t that Leslie did not like Alison. On the contrary, she did. She liked her a lot and she admired her. Her calm, her good humor, her perfect figure. She admired how organized everything in her house was and how clean; the healthy fresh food, the meals always on time. The way, too, Alison handled the boys and their rowdiness. She never seemed to get angry, only, at times, irritated. There was never any shouting. Also, Leslie admired how well Alison and Mark seemed to get along. She did not appear to mind that he did most of the talking, and when he told jokes he made her laugh in a particular way, as if perhaps she was laughing in spite of herself or against her better judgment. On most weekends, they played tennis together. In the evenings, when Mark came home, they always kissed on the lips, even if Mark was late. In the car, on the way home, Alison was telling Leslie about her day at the museum and how she had taken a group of tourists through the Henry Moore sculpture exhibit.
