Justin Kramon

by Finny (v5)

  Poplan and Mr. Henckel seemed unaffected by the odor. Or rather, they seemed to enjoy it. Both inhaled deeply through their noses, and Mr. Henckel’s pleasure was intense enough to prompt him at last to speak. “That’s astonishing,” he said. “What is it?”

  “It’s a durian,” Poplan said. “A kind of fruit. A delicacy in Southeast Asia.”

  Poplan explained that she had procured the fruit from friends who shopped at the markets in Chinatown in New York. It was a spiny fruit, actually a bit larger than a human head though with the same oblong shape. When Poplan hacked into it, a cloud of the offensive odor wafted over Finny, and even Earl had to cover his nose to prevent himself from choking.

  “Is it rotten?” Finny asked.

  “It’s perfect,” Poplan said.

  The flesh, Finny saw when she could bring herself to examine it, was yellow-white, like a used undershirt. The texture looked mushy, and a little grainy.

  “I can’t eat that,” Finny said.

  “You have to try it,” Poplan said, with an assurance Finny was afraid to question.

  “It smells rich,” Mr. Henckel said. “Like almonds. Or butter. Or custard, almost.” He seemed to have forgotten his shyness in his enthusiasm about the durian.

  “Exactly,” Poplan said. “Some people can’t stand the smell, and they think it looks terrible. But the people who love it would choose it over any fruit in the world. It’s all in your tastes. And how you see it.”

  Mr. Henckel looked overjoyed by this explanation, and he offered up several enthusiastic smile-frowns to demonstrate his approval.

  Poplan handed pieces of the fruit to Earl, Finny, and Mr. Henckel. Then she took a piece for herself. “Bottoms up,” she said.

  They each placed the fruit on their tongues. Mr. Henckel and Poplan had contemplative looks, like they were sampling a fine bottle of wine. Finny squished the weird fruit through her teeth. It had the texture of an apple that had gone completely soft. She and Earl ran to the sink at almost exactly the same moment and spit their helpings into it.

  “I’m sorry,” Earl said, looking at Poplan with an expression close to terror. His cheeks were ashen and glistening with perspiration, like he was about to puke. “I just can’t.” He bolted out of the house, forgetting even to shut the door behind him.

  Poplan and Mr. Henckel laughed. Finny watched them for a second, unsure what to do. Then she dashed out after Earl, shutting the door behind her.

  After she caught up to Earl, they walked around the valley for an hour, until they were sure the fruit had been either eaten or disposed of.

  “That was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted,” Finny said.

  “It was nice of her to bring it,” Earl said. “I felt so bad running out like that.”

  “Poplan doesn’t mind. She seems tough, but she’s really nice.”

  As they approached the house, Finny could already hear the piano music. It was the same piece she’d heard Mr. Henckel playing that day when Earl had first invited her over, that swirling melody, sweet but somehow sad. When they were in front of the door, she grabbed Earl’s arm and held a finger to her lips. They stood and listened. The music was arrestingly beautiful. Almost painful. It brought tears to Finny’s eyes.

  Then it was done. Earl opened the door and they walked back into the house. Mr. Henckel was at the piano, and Poplan was standing beside him. The smell of the durian filled the house, but more faintly now. The silver coffee set was on the kitchen table, and Finny saw two drained coffee cups there.

  “Welcome back, my young friends,” Mr. Henckel said. He looked in remarkably good spirits. It was only a little after one o’clock, though it seemed the earth had shifted in Finny and Earl’s absence.

  “By the way,” Poplan said, “the durian has been finished.”

  “It is the perfect accompaniment to coffee,” Mr. Henckel said, and he and Poplan laughed over this for a long time.

  Chapter14

  The Deal

  A tapping on Finny’s window. She was drifting in and out of sleep, and the sound became fingernails on a table in her dream, then crows’ feet on gravel. She heard it again, and this time realized it was something in the real world. She pulled herself up from the depths of sleep, through layers of dreams, into her bedroom, where she was lying with her face against the wall. This was several weeks after Poplan’s visit. It was a little after midnight, she saw by the blue numbers of the alarm clock on her shelf. She got up.

  The sound again. Tic. Tic. Tic. She walked to the window and drew the blinds. The yard was dark. She couldn’t see much. The floodlights had been turned off, and everyone in the house was asleep. Maybe she had imagined the sound?

  Just to make sure, she opened the window, by a little crank on the windowsill. She stuck her head into the warm night, and as she did it, she felt a sharp poke on her cheek.

  “Ow,” she said.

  “Sorry,” a voice called from below. It was Earl’s. She looked down and saw he was directly below her window. There were some white pebbles where he was standing that the landscaper had put in. Earl must have been tossing them up at the window.

  “You hit me,” Finny said.

  “I feel terrible,” Earl said.

  “Hold on. I’ll be right down.”

  She closed the window. She walked to her closet and opened the door. Put on the fastest outfit she could make: the green reaper and a pair of gray sweatpants. Then she went downstairs to the sliding glass door. Raskal was asleep in the mudroom, his chin resting on the tile floor. Finny tiptoed around him, yet he heard her and raised his head, his collar clinking. She shook her head, held up her hand to tell him to lie still. He stared at her. She opened the sliding door, and backed out slowly. She thought Raskal might bark, but instead he put his head down and went back to sleep. She closed the door.

  Earl was standing with his hands in his pockets, even though the temperature must have been in the sixties. It was humid, and Finny could already feel sweat budding on her lip. There was a three-quarter moon, and under its light Finny had a good view of Earl. He looked tense and distracted.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He turned toward her. “Hey. I remembered which one it was from when you showed me.”

  “Hopefully you won’t start tossing knives next time,” Finny said. She walked right up next to him and wrapped her arm in his, kissed him on the cheek. “What is it?” she said.

  “I’ve had a crazy night,” Earl said. He was taking deep breaths, and he kept staring at things—the sky, the ground, anything his eyes fell upon—the way Laura did just after Stanley died.

  “Bad?” Finny asked.

  Earl nodded. “Strange. I found out a lot of things.”

  Finny pulled him closer. She nuzzled into the gap between his neck and shoulder. She was several inches taller than him now, and she had to lean down to do it.

  “What?” she finally said. “What is it? You look like someone hit you on the head.”

  “I feel like that.”

  “Is it something with your dad?”

  “Sort of.” He moved his lips like he was about to speak, but no sound came out. At last he got around to saying, “He told me some things tonight.”

  “What?”

  “Can we find somewhere to talk?”

  They went to the vineyard. At this time of night, there were no lights from the houses, but they sat beneath a dome of stars, nestled between the walls of their hideout like children in a fort made of sofa cushions. Earl had brought a flashlight, and he led Finny into one of the dirt rows between the vines. They sat. Finny asked him to keep the light on, in case any animals came, so he wedged it into the dirt.

  Earl began by explaining that Mr. Henckel had taken a phone call that night, during which he’d asked Earl to go to his bedroom. After an hour Mr. Henckel was still talking, and Earl peeked out and saw that his father’s face was wet, like he’d been sweating or crying. Soon Mr. Henckel called Earl back into the room, and his father
said that he had some things to discuss with Earl. Mr. Henckel then promptly fell asleep.

  “So I shook my dad until he woke up.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Let me just explain first that I always thought my mom was dead.”

  “Your mom?” Finny said.

  “Or maybe not dead. But not available to me. Like she had another life and I would never be part of it. Some of my dad’s relatives had even told me she was dead, and that I shouldn’t think about her. So I guess I listened. I just assumed I was never going to see her. I knew my dad met her through his performing, but I never asked him a lot about her. I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Were they married?”

  “They were never married. I found that out tonight. You remember when my dad told you that story about how he was part of a traveling act?”

  “Yeah, the strip show, right?”

  Earl nodded, the shadows lengthening and shortening on his face. “Well, it turns out my mom was a … performer.”

  “A stripper?”

  “He never said that. He just said he’d met her there. He told me he was popular because of his piano playing, and that they were all artists and a little crazy. He said that he and my mother had carried on for a while—that’s how he put it—and then stopped. The only thing was, she was pregnant.”

  Finny could imagine Mr. Henckel trying to get this story out, the sweat pouring from his brow, the way he dabbed his face with the handkerchief, the nervous smile-frowns.

  “So what happened?”

  “It was a big mess. It tore the whole group apart. My dad wanted to live with her at first, to raise me, but they weren’t happy together, and she knew it would be the end of her career if she had to take care of a child. So they struck a deal.”

  “About you?”

  “About me. My dad would quit the act to raise me. He had money at the time, because his family is rich. He didn’t think I would get in the way of his performing career, since he could hire babysitters and maids, and he told me that the bottom line was he didn’t want to part with me, even though I wasn’t born yet. He didn’t know that his parents were going to disown him and he was going to stop getting money, once they found out all the stuff that happened. He said they called him a disgrace and an embarrassment, and that was when he lost his confidence for good.

  “Right after I was born, my dad took me away. He even said that my mom asked the nurses not to show her the baby, so she wouldn’t get attached.”

  “That’s so sad,” Finny said.

  “But the deal was that whenever my mom was ready, they would have to share me. I mean, I’d have to live part of the time with her. It was the only way she would agree to let me go, if there was a chance she could see me later. So my dad agreed to it, thinking it would never happen.”

  “But how would he know when she was ready?”

  “He promised he would trust her. The trouble started last year, when my mom said she wanted me back. He never told me till now. The problem is, she lives in France.”

  “What does she do?” Finny asked.

  “She’s a hairdresser now. But the point is, it would be impossible to have me flying back and forth all year.”

  Now Finny’s breath came harder. She knew what Earl was going to tell her, and the thought of it was like a weight in her chest. The stars seemed to spin above her. It was like a dream, sitting here surrounded by miles of darkness, hearing this strange and almost unbelievable story. It took all her energy just to keep herself propped up on the ground in the vineyard. She felt dirt and rocks pressing the palm of her hand, leaving marks.

  “Are you moving to France?” Finny asked. Her voice was high, breathy, barely audible.

  Earl nodded, the shadows moving again on his face. She heard the sound of leaves shaking, an animal scurrying in the bushes. Suddenly she was afraid. They could be eaten, or attacked. There was nothing to protect them.

  “I’m sorry, Finny,” Earl said. “I begged my father tonight. We stayed up till after midnight talking. He said he’d done everything he could to keep me with him, that he’d made every possible argument—about how I was comfortable here, about how it wouldn’t be fair to take me away from what I knew. But in the end there was still the deal. He couldn’t get around that. I can come back and visit, but I’m going to be with my mom through high school. She wouldn’t accept anything less.”

  “It was a stupid deal,” Finny said, angry now. “How could anyone make a deal like that?”

  “My dad knows that. But he said it was the only way. She even made him sign a contract. He didn’t want to give me up. He finally fell asleep tonight, while we were still talking, and that’s when I decided to come over and tell you. I wanted you to know right away.”

  Questions twirled like snowflakes in Finny’s mind. She grabbed for one, and then another, and finally settled on: “When are you leaving?”

  “That’s the other thing,” Earl said. “My plane’s in a week.”

  A lot could be said about how they talked and cried, the plans they made to escape, which they later abandoned. But in the end the sun rose, and they walked back to their houses.

  At a little after six the following Friday evening, Earl’s plane took off, headed for France.

  Chapter15

  An Interlude

  Sunlight. A fence shadow printed on the lawn. Grass leaning in the breeze like thousands of tiny arms. A gauze of clouds draped across the sky. Trees waving their leafy limbs. A row of gorgeous days ahead, strung like jewels on a necklace. This was the world after Earl left, as calm and bright as ever, like one of those persistently cheerful party guests who refuse to talk about anything but favorite restaurants and places to vacation.

  So the summer bloomed and faded. Fall arrived, bringing school and the old routines. Finny returned to kids she had left nine months before, though some of them seemed changed as well. They’d had braces taken off of or put on their teeth, had grown taller or fatter or skinnier, had longer hair or new outfits or breasts. She was welcomed back to the Slope School with smiles and hugs, though she knew they wouldn’t have thought of her ever again if she hadn’t returned. Since she’d been held back at Thorndon, she had to reenter Slope as a ninth grader, which meant she was in different classes from the students she knew anyway.

  High school is not the place to linger in Finny’s story. It wasn’t a place Finny gave much thought to, even though she spent four years there. When she remembered it, she had the feeling she’d glided over that time in her life. It was as if she had done enough living for a while, and so she set the controls to autopilot, put her hat over her eyes, and slept.

  But of course there were events. Rarely do four years pass without events. In her memory they appear like a slide show, a parade of snapshots projected on the screen of her mind.

  First the move. Laura saying, “It’s time to downsize.” They left the Geist Road house that fall. Boxes, a giant truck, sheets with boot prints on them tossed over the furniture. Laura throwing away and throwing away, until there was hardly anything left. The new house—smaller, on Old Court Road, up the street from the Slope School so that Finny and Sylvan could walk. A sunny kitchen with a skylight. A little backyard in which there was a sculpture of a lion made out of crisscrossing wires. It caught the leaves when they fell that season.

  Some lines from Earl’s letters:

  Our apartment is one big room. It’s in an apartment building on the border between the 9th and 10th arrondissements in Paris. That means the 9th and 10th districts, which are where a lot of artists live. Our street is called Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière. (Try to say that!) My mom rents the apartment from a rich American lady who lives part of the year in New York. The apartment used to be her maid’s room. We have to walk up five flights of stairs to get there, and the apartment always feels stuffy because there’s only one window and it doesn’t open very far and the steam from the shower comes into the room. The toilet is in the
hall, and we share it with the lady next door (who I’ve never seen), but the sink and shower are in a closet in our room. I guess all the bathrooms are like that here. I hate going to the bathroom in the middle of the night because it’s freezing in the hall and really dark, and you have to keep hitting the switch to get the light to stay on….

  My mom works just down the street. She’s an assistant to a “master” hairstylist, and one day hopefully she will take over his business. As of now, she washes people’s hair and sometimesdoes the haircuts when it’s a customer the master doesn’t like. It’s been strange getting to know my mom. It’s like we’re not even related. We’re both shy with each other and don’t always have a lot to say. But she’s very nice to me. She buys me loaves of French bread to eat while she’s at work, and once in a while little cans of this stuff called “foie gras,” which is made out of liver and is supposedly a delicacy. It looks and smells disgusting, but actually tastes good when you get used to it. I have to be very thankful when she buys it, because I guess it’s expensive and a treat….

  I go to school in an English school, which is good for me because my French is horrible. It sounds like I’m choking when I talk….

  Some things I like to do: walk to Montmartre and watch the artists sketch. Go to the Tuileries. Eat crêpes stuffed with Nutella and bananas. (I know how to say that in French: Nutella banane!) Go to the English movies with my mom….

  I don’t think I’m coming home for winter. My mom says it’s a very expensive time. Spring is better. Damn….

  And in the spring, an announcement from another friend, arriving in the mail: We kindly ask you to reserve the date of July 12th for the observance of matrimonial vows by Menalcus Henckel and Joan Poplan. Finny had some questions about how often Poplan and Mr. Henckel had seen each other, but all she could think was, Joan? when she read the invitation. How could someone as weird as Poplan have a name like Joan? When she called Poplan to ask about it, though, Poplan’s reply was succinct. “We shall never speak of it again,” she said.