Leap Year

by Peter Cameron

  “I spent one night in jail,” said Heath. “My hearing was the next day.”

  “Is there anything I can do? Do you have a lawyer?”

  “No,” said Heath. “I’m defending myself.”

  “You are?”

  “Jesus,” said Heath. “Of course not. This isn’t a joke, you know. I could go to jail for fifteen years.”

  “I know it’s not a joke,” said David. “Is he a good lawyer?”

  “It’s a she,” said Heath, “and I hope so.”

  “You seem pretty glib about all of this.”

  “Glib? I’m scared shitless. If Solange doesn’t come out of her coma, I’m dead meat. She’s the only one who can save me.”

  “There wasn’t anyone else around?”

  “Just Amanda and Anton, but they swear they weren’t. And Amanda’s assistant and this creepy Trumpet woman are giving them an alibi.”

  “How is Solange? I mean, what are her chances?”

  “About fifty-fifty. But that’s assuming Amanda doesn’t get to her again. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she’s checked out at any minute.”

  “When’s the trial?”

  “Sometime in the fall.”

  “And what are you going to do till then?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t leave New York. I’ve got to find a job. The Hysteria fired me, for security reasons.”

  “Jesus. Do you need money?”

  “No. Listen, I don’t want to talk about this. It’s demoralizing. Let’s talk about something else, okay?”

  “Sure,” said David.

  “Let’s talk about us,” said Heath.

  David didn’t say anything. Their teas were delivered. The glasses were sweating.

  “Or is that equally demoralizing? I guess so. Why don’t we talk about you. That should cheer us up. I gather you’re back with Loren. That you’ve renounced your corrupt lifestyle and have returned to the straight and narrow path. With the emphasis on straight.”

  “It’s not that simple,” said David.

  “It seems pretty simple to me,” said Heath. “You are back with Loren, right?”

  “Yes,” said David. “But there are…circumstances. I wish I could explain it.”

  “You could try,” said Heath.

  David sipped his tea.

  “Start from the beginning,” Heath prompted.

  “When I met you?”

  “No,” said Heath. “When you met Loren. This is about her, isn’t it?”

  “It’s about you, too,” said David.

  “But mostly about her,” said Heath.

  David leaned back and looked up at the sky. Bird sounds emerged from stereo speakers hidden in the trees.

  “I met Loren on Cape Cod. I was there with my sister and Loren was there with Lillian. We met on the beach. It turned out we were both going to graduate school at U Penn. Loren was going to Wharton and I was getting a master’s in botany. We fell in love. We got married, moved to New York, and lived on Cornelia Street.

  I got my job editing garden books at Wilson Watson, and Loren got her job at the girl’s bank. When Kate was born we moved uptown. That’s when things began to go wrong. Uptown. We started to have trouble sexually—I mean, I started to have trouble sexually—and Loren met Gregory. We got divorced. Loren moved to Greene Street. I lost my job at Wilson Watson and got my job at Altitude. Lydia went home to Costa Rica for Christmas. You came to be my secretary. I fell in love with you.”

  Heath looked at him for a moment and then looked away.

  “Everyone was happy then,” David continued. “Loren and Gregory, me and you. At least I think you were happy. For a little while?”

  Heath nodded.

  “One night, last spring, Loren and I met at a party. We slept together. It was the night you went to Lar Lubovitch. Remember? Then everything bad started to happen, very quickly: Loren decided to move to California with Gregory. I burned my fingers. Kate was kidnapped. Loren and I went to L.A. A glass wall crashed on Loren. We thought we were going to die in an earthquake, but we didn’t die.” David paused. He was aware of Heath looking at him, listening to him, poor, beautiful Heath. He didn’t look back at Heath because he couldn’t bear to. He knew if he looked at Heath for too long he would betray Loren. And betraying Loren seemed, somehow, to be betraying Kate.

  “The man who kidnapped Kate taught her to swim. She wrote him a thank-you letter. She told me she that she misses him, that she loves him. And under the circumstances, why shouldn’t she? I guess that’s the point: We love the people perhaps we shouldn’t. We don’t love the people we should.”

  “Meaning that you love Loren,” said Heath.

  David nodded.

  “Meaning you don’t love me,” said Heath.

  “No,” said David. “It’s not that I don’t. It’s more like I can’t. I have this second chance to make things work with Loren, and I can’t turn it down.”

  “You could, if you wanted to. It’s just a question of what you want.”

  “It’s a question of what’s the right thing to do,” said David.

  “And the right thing to do is to live with Loren, who you don’t really love?”

  “I love Loren,” said David. “In a way.”

  “Who would you rather sleep with, Loren or me?”

  “It’s not a question of sex,” said David. “There are all these other factors, like—”

  “I know, I know,” said Heath. “But who would you rather sleep with?”

  “I don’t know,” said David.

  “You don’t know? Of course you know. It’s not a hard question.”

  “Okay, then,” said David, “you. But sleeping—I mean, you know, sex—it’s important, I know it is, but there’s a lot of other stuff that goes on. I mean, you have to consider the total picture.”

  Their salads arrived. The tuna glistened with oil and sunlight. The string beans were steamed to a violent green. The all of it was crowned with a ring of hairy anchovies.

  Heath felt sick. He looked at David. “Do you think you’ll be happy with Loren?”

  “Not how you mean happy. You’re very young. You don’t realize there are other things, other feelings worth having.”

  “Such as?”

  “Security,” said David. He tried to sound convincing. “Contentment.”

  “Well,” said Heath. “I guess that’s the difference between you and me.”

  “I guess so,” said David.

  Heath stood up. “I think you’re pathetic,” he said. “I pity you.” He went inside the restaurant. It was dark and cool. His eyes had to adjust. He could feel his irises expanding, or maybe it was the world shrinking. He could feel the horrible motion of living. He stood in the restaurant’s tiny bathroom, the light turned off, in perfectly sealed darkness. He wanted to cry, but he couldn’t. He wanted to cry for everything.

  Outside, the street was sunny. People were walking back to work from lunch. Everyone was tan and sated. Cars drove past with the windows rolled up tight. Air conditioners drooled onto the sidewalks. Trees moved their limbs, to no effect, overhead. Heath stood on the corner. I should go back inside, he thought. I shouldn’t have just walked out like that. Then he thought: Fuck it.

  He had just started to walk toward the subway when David appeared at his side. For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Heath said, “I’m sorry I walked out like that.”

  “It’s okay,” said David.

  “I’m very messed up right now,” said Heath. “I mean, I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  “Listen,” said David, “if you need anything, anything, if there’s anything I can do, I want to help you, but I understand if, well, if you don’t want to stay in touch. But call me if you need anything. And I’m sorry. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Heath.

  “I’m sorry…I’m sorry I’m not different. Braver, or something. Because you’re right, I think. I know you think I’m bad a person, but I’m not.
I don’t have bad intentions.” David touched Heath’s arm. “I just love badly,” he said. “I’m just bad at love.”

  One hundred miles north, Lillian leaned out of an upstairs window in a strange house. Below her, hummingbirds hovered above a bed of mango-colored irises. She had taken the day off and driven upstate to see the Loessers’ house, which she was considering renting for the last two weeks in August. She had found the key, hidden beneath the moss-stained brick on the patio, and wandered through the cool, quiet house. The rooms were full of books and wooden chairs; fabrics had faded, doors creaked. The sun shone through the latticed-paned windows, casting warm, patterned carpets of light on the slanting wooden floors.

  She drew her head inside the bedroom but left the window open. Except for the hum of the birds and ticking clock, everything was quiet. Well, of course, Lillian thought, these beautiful places do exist. People spend days here, eating and sleeping, cutting flowers, arranging them. Reading in the shade, drinking cocktails on the terrace. Cool nights in old beds. Stars and frogs. The slow procession of days.

  She lay down on the bed, a narrow bed with a white metal frame, a bed she could imagine in a French children’s hospital. She lay still and tried to feel the life quickening inside of her. Maybe I will never leave here, she thought. I will gestate and give birth on this bed. I’ll raise my child in the house…

  She awoke an hour later, hot, her clothes and skin damp. The pond, she remembered, there is supposed to be a pond. She got up and looked out the window. There seemed to be a glossy glint of water through the trees, at the bottom of the lawn. She went downstairs and out through the French doors, crossed the patio. The hummingbirds dipped and flew away. She walked through the garden, inhaled basil and mint. The lawn was hot and dry. She trod on the ceilings of gopher tunnels and followed a path into the forest of birch and pine trees, toward the coolness of the pond. It was small, rock-ringed, the water green. Lillian removed her sandals and waded into the weedy shallows. Fish appeared and nibbled her flesh. She kicked them away. She wished she had brought her bathing suit, and then, realizing that she was perfectly alone—the woods seemed to stretch away forever, there wasn’t another house around for miles— she decided to go in anyway. She undressed, laying her clothes on the grassy bank, and in what she hoped was a fish-frightening maneuver, charged into the pond and dove into the green water.

  It felt wonderful. She swam out to the middle, where icy currents bubbled up from some primordial spring. She lay on her back and floated, spinning under the sun. She kicked a little when fish nibbled. Then she let herself sink into the water, as far as she could fall into the dark coolness. When she surfaced she saw a man standing on the bank, next to her abandoned clothes, watching her.

  CHAPTER 19

  “ARE YOU DROWNING?” the man asked. “Do you need help?”

  “No,” said Lillian. She sunk back under water. She stayed submerged as long as she could, hoping he would go away, but he was still there. In fact, he had moved closer—he had waded out a ways into the water.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Swimming,” answered Lillian.

  The man seemed to ponder this response and find it acceptable. “I came to water the garden,” he said. “I come every day when the Loessers aren’t here.”

  “I want to get out,” said Lillian.

  “Out of what?”

  “The pond.”

  “Oh,” said the man.

  “I can’t do it while you’re standing there.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m naked,” said Lillian.

  “Oh,” said the man. He looked down at her clothes. Her bra lay like a dead bird, shot from the sky, fallen to earth. He looked back at Lillian and smiled. “I’ll go up to the house,” he said.

  “Go anywhere,” said Lillian. “Just go away.”

  “Do you want me to go home?” he asked.

  “Where do you live?”

  The man pointed across the pond, into the woods. “Over there,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Lillian. “Go home.”

  “You must be Lillian. Mrs. Loesser told me you’d be coming.”

  “Yes,” said Lillian.

  “If I go home, what about the garden?”

  “I’ll do it,” said Lillian.

  “Oh. After I water the garden, I usually have a cocktail, on the terrace. A gin and tonic.”

  “I’m getting cold,” said Lillian. “The fish are eating me.”

  “I’m sorry,” the man said. “It’s just that you look so pretty.”

  Lillian didn’t respond to this compliment. She didn’t reject it, either.

  “Maybe we could have a drink together.”

  “I don’t drink,” said Lillian.

  The man looked perplexed.

  “I mean, I don’t drink alcohol.”

  “There’s cranberry juice.”

  “No,” said Lillian. “I’ve got to get back to the city. Lickety-split,” she added, for some unknown reason.

  “Why?”

  “I have things to do,” said Lillian.

  “Oh.” He stood there for a moment, looking dejected. He was rather sweet, Lillian decided, in an odd, dim sort of way.

  “What do you do?” asked Lillian. “Over there?”

  “Where?”

  “Over there, where you live. What do you do?”

  The man looked into the woods. He thought for a moment. “I’m learning to play the piano,” he said. “I’m teaching myself.” He held his hands in the air and fingered an imaginary keyboard. He seemed to lose himself in this charade. He stood there, transfixed, in the pond’s shallow water, caressing the air.

  “Fine!” shouted Lillian after a moment, in an effort to awaken him. “Very good!”

  The man opened his eyes. “Do you know what I was playing?” he asked.

  “Mozart,” Lillian guessed.

  “Yes.” He smiled. “Are you sure about the drink?”

  “Yes,” said Lillian.

  “Yes, you mean no?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you won’t forget the garden?”

  “No,” said Lillian.

  “Okay,” the man said. He began to walk around the pond, to the far side, where a path disappeared into the woods. Lillian watched him. From the back he didn’t look half so dim: He had a groovy little pony tail and a great ass. He paused and looked back at Lillian. “Are you going to rent the house?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Lillian.

  He smiled. “Good,” he said, and disappeared into the trees.

  When she was sure he was gone—she listened to the sound of him fade—Lillian swam to the bank, tried to dry herself by shaking like a dog, and dressed. She sat on a rock, in the warm leafy sunlight. It was time to go, she knew, but something detained her. If she could have articulated what this something was, she would have said to herself, He may come back, but this thought remained cloistered, unacknowledged, one of those fish that skulk at the bottom of ponds, far from daylight, waiting.

  Henry Fank was sleeping. He made quiet, not unpleasant snoring noises. Judith lay awake beside him on her waterbed in the dark bedroom. She was feeling a little desperate. Simple—or not-so-simple—desire had carried her through much of the evening; it had flooded her body, possessed her, wavelike, and then retreated. And here I lie, she thought, high and dry. For now that it was over she could not embrace Henry. He had been a strong, sweet lover, but now, afterward, he was not someone she could lie down with. That was the pity of it. She wanted someone who knew her to hold her, wanted to hold someone she knew. Ultimately, she realized, it is not about love: It is about knowing and being known. And it was Leonard, and Leonard only, who knew her. How wonderful that was, but also how confining. And how impossible to escape.

  Henry woke up. Or perhaps he had never been sleeping, the transition was that graceful. He leaned on his elbow, above her.

  “Are you thinking of your husband?” he asked.
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  How could he have guessed that? Judith wondered. “Yes,” she said. Her voice sounded odd, broken. Unused. She tried to smile up at him, without success. He lowered himself and embraced her, but she did not make it a mutual gesture. He sensed this, unfixed himself from her, and got out of bed.

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  He began to dress in the darkness. Judith lay quiet, paralyzed. I should say something, she thought, anything—I can’t let him leave in silence. But she could not speak. He dressed quickly and paused for a moment, looking down at her. She forced herself to meet his gaze. The look they exchanged meant nothing. It was mute.

  He walked out of the room, into the kitchen. She heard him turn on the tap. She got out of bed, found her robe. He was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of water. She sat down beside him. Neither of them had turned on a light.

  “Do you feel remorse?” he asked.

  Remorse, she thought. What a complicated word. “How do you know that word?” she asked.

  He glanced at her, then looked away, out the window. A woman was walking a dog down on the street and paused while it sniffed a tree.

  “When I came here, when I learned English, I was very unhappy. As I told you, my wife, she died on our way here. So I think I learned all the sad words first.”

  The woman walked away with her dog. Judith stood up. “Please,” she said, holding out her hand, “come back to bed.”

  “Meet me at the polar bears,” Amanda commanded.

  “I don’t think they have polar bears,” said Anton.

  “Of course they do. What’s a zoo without polar bears?”

  “Well, what if they don’t? What if they phased the polar bears out?”

  “Then we’ll meet at the largest white mammals. Can you handle that?”

  “I don’t think the zoo is a good idea. Why don’t we just have lunch?”

  “No,” said Amanda. “The zoo is perfect. No one we know will be at the zoo. Everyone we know goes out to lunch.”

  “That’s true,” said Anton.

  “Plus I’m wearing a disguise,” said Amanda.

  “How will I recognize you?”