The Donzerly Light

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  I had something, Jay thought. Too much to drink, a lecture on misguided charity. And what to call the other thing? A mystical experience? In the end he just nodded, not wanting to lie about that, nor even to skirt the issue this time.

  And to his reply Carrie herself smiled, something devilishly more than a happy face, and lifted her nightshirt to her neck, exposing her smallish breasts. Perfect little mounds that would not get her a job at BK’s, but were enough to raise a leering grin on her man’s face. “See anything as nice as these?”

  He stared, surprised not at all that after all their years together he still did stare, then shook his head. “No. No I didn’t.”

  She lowered the nightshirt, leaving just the yellow bird’s beaky grin pointing at Jay. On her face the smile was gone, leaving just a look of invitation, one that said, ‘Hurry, you’. “Well, they’ll be waiting for you in bed.”

  And with that she turned and headed for their room. His eyes dropped naturally to her rear, the cutest pair of cheeks he had ever known, the most alluring natural wiggle that still made his knees weak. That still made him want to know her in ways biblical and profane.

  Except for now.

  He turned back to the table once the bedroom door clicked shut, this wanting stronger than the wanting of her. This wanting to know. To understand.

  Three times, he thought, looking upon the coins. It would have to stop there, wouldn’t it? The envelope had been pushed, stretched, and broken. Right?

  As before, there was but one way to know.

  He did not want Carrie to be roused again, so he went to the living room and retrieved the paper from the day before. The day before the day before, he had to remind himself. It was Saturday already, and what was what he opened upon the table after taking the coins in hand was Thursday’s paper. Or the stock pages from Thursday’s Journal, to be precise. He spread them out just like he would if scanning the long columns of financial data, but now it was not to read, but to cushion. To quiet.

  His fist closed around the coins. He shook them like dice before a very, very critical roll, then let them fall again.

  And they came up heads.

  Four times.

  His head shook slowly from side to side and he whispered, “No way.”

  Again, he took them in hand and dropped them on the papered tabletop. They fell, settled with no unnatural display of motion, and came up heads once more.

  Five times.

  Jupiter was where Jupiter should be. And Mars. And Venus. God’s six day project was not torn asunder. The heavens hadn’t opened to spill destruction upon the world. Nothing cataclysmic had happened.

  But...

  But something was happening. Was developing. Slowly, like an image on film being gradually cut by the light shone upon it. Jay sensed this. Felt this. Knew this.

  “I see you, Jay.”

  He spun fast this time, because that was NOT Carrie’s voice. Of that he was certain now. Of that he was double damn certain when he was looking behind and saw Carrie not there. Saw nothing there. But...

  Oh, wonderful. Now he was hearing things.

  I see you Jay

  And half way around again he spun, looking back toward past the coins, toward the dim and empty living room. Looking because he had heard that. Had heard it said. Or...

  I see you Jay

  ...had he?

  It was there, yes, the words. But, and he looked back and front once more, had he heard them? Or had it been something—more than sound, more than sight, more than feeling—in his head? Something that was more of a...knowing.

  I see you Jay

  He remained still this time. Still as a stone. Hardly breathing. Not a muscle twitching. Nothing moving.

  Nothing but the coins.

  On the table before him they had begun to tremor. To twitch and shudder like kernels of popcorn did just before exploding. Like the Mexican jumping beans his uncle had given him when he was six. But mostly like the old electric football game he had gotten for Christmas before times got hard. The kind where the field was green sheet metal and something beneath it made it shake when a switch was flipped, which would send defense one way and offense the other in a haphazard advance toward their goal lines. The coins were moving like those old plastic players now, only their slow motion rush was not haphazard at all. They were moving, all right, in one vibrating mass in the direction of Jay.

  And when the first one had almost reached the table edge they all stopped.

  Jay’s breath hitched in and out as he stared at the coins, and after a moment they shook again in place, not moving this time. As if they wanted attention. As if they wanted...

  ...to be picked up again?

  And they stilled. Waiting.

  This was not the booze. No way was this the booze. This was something way more than the booze. Something...elemental. Something primal.

  The coins jittered briefly again, then quieted.

  “All right,” Jay said quietly, and took them in hand again, and dropped them on the paper again, and they came up heads again. For the sixth time they came up heads, and why that mattered or what it meant he had no—

  I SEE you Jay

  And the coins tittered almost gleefully for just a second.

  Jay gazed at the coins, and he thought of the ‘thing’ he was knowing in his head. The words that...

  I SEE YOU Jay

  ...that...

  And, yes, the coins quaked where they lay.

  I SEE YOU JAY

  ...were not words at all.

  I. SEE. YOU. JAY.

  Jay’s eyes swelled in steps like slowly inflating balloons—wide, wider, HUGE.

  I. SEE. YOU. JAY.

  The coins tremored again, lightly, almost humming.

  Jay’s gaze brightened with wonder. Before them, knowing surfaced in a black void of ignorance. A knowing that came not with the sudden flourish of summer rockets bursting in the sky with dazzling colors and sharp cracks of mini-thunder, but with a mystical grace, as if it had been there all along, barely veiled and the veil had been drawn casually aside to reveal and oh so obvious certainty. A certainty that nine rounds of metal had led him to.

  I. SEE. YOU. JAY.

  He understood none of it, and craved to understand all of it, but for the moment he could only revel in it. This thing. This knowing.

  Not words at all, he thought, a slim, cautious smile creeping onto his face as the coins shuddered one final time. Not words at all.

  ICUJ

  Four

  Magic Moments

  Carrie woke at eight and rolled toward Jay, planting a soft kiss on his shoulder. He lay facing away from her, dead to the world, whatever he’d ingested the night before anchoring him in a deep sleep that numbed any reaction he might have to her touch. That was all right, she thought, smiling. He would suffer when he woke. By his own hand (the one that had lifted the glass to his lips again and again) he would be made to suffer.

  For now, she would let him sleep.

  She slipped out of bed and took her robe from its hook on the back of the bedroom door, which she closed behind as she stepped quietly to the kitchen. She filled the coffee maker with water to four cups, reconsidered with a glance back toward the bedroom, and brought it up to the six cup mark. Someone was going to be needing coffee this morning, and plenty of it. And aspirin, she figured. Coffee to wake, and the bitter white pills to make that state tolerable. Only tolerable, she thought, grinning impishly.

  Just desserts, just desserts. Drinking in the presence of unfamiliar titties brings just desserts.

  Oh, couldn’t the joy inherent in jealous delights be as satisfying as it was cruel!

  But enough of mean thoughts, she decided, pouring the water in the coffee maker’s top reservoir and putting the pot beneath it before flicking the switch to glow a promising shade of orange. Yes, enough of those thoughts for last night’s main transgression—but maybe a few more could be called forth for what she saw as she turned from the cof
fee maker and took sight of the living and dining rooms.

  Still a child, she thought, her head shaking disapprovingly. Still a child in so many ways.

  Her man was in bed, asleep, but the little boy that he could be had left its mark from the front door to the hallway. Coat draping over the couch, its hem and plenty more than that on the floor. His keys lay haphazard on the counter, not five feet—five feet!—from the tray she had put on the side table just for them, for both their sets of keys, after too many mornings dashing about crying ‘Where are my keys?! I’m going to be late! Where are they?!’ Coat, yes, and keys too, and she suspected there was another piece to the ensemble and went around the counter. And there it was, his briefcase, lying flat on the floor, half blocking the door.

  Deep breath in and deep breath out, and she moved the briefcase to where it should beat the base of the side table, and put his keys in their place in the dish atop the same, and took his coat and straightened and folded it over her arm, all the while a bright little smile budding upon her face like a flower waking to a warm and wondrous sun, forcing its way through defenses that said she should be angry after the same damn thing happening so many times. That he was not a child who needed to be picked up after. And though she thought those things, and though those things were true and reasonable, the smile still came, because she loved him. Loved Jay Grady. Loved her man.

  Had loved him since the day she first laid eyes on him.

  The smile brightened more still as she remembered that moment. Like it was yesterday. Clear as a sunny winter morn, though it had been nearly the end of summer. She had knocked on Miss Dorothy Wells’ door, the neighbor to the Stiles family, and there he was.

  Her heart fluttered at the recollection. Twelve years later, her breath would still depart her when reliving that instant.

  She had said hello—had managed to get those two syllables out—and he had said hello back. She had handed over the recipe book her mother had borrowed from Miss Wells’, and he had taken it. And then it happened. The ‘moment’. That awkward slice of time that could have been ten seconds or ten minutes, though she would never know which because for her time had seemed to stand still. A magic moment, she believed, because in that short time when the spark was lit between them (hotter for her at first, she knew, but set to smoldering for him it was as well) nothing moved. Nothing was said. All that existed in the whole wide world at that moment was a look. The meeting of their stares. The mating of their souls, she came to believe some time later.

  And when the world came rushing back again, and the moment ended, he had said thank you and she had said you’re welcome and she had stepped back one step and he had closed the door. And there she stood, staring at the door as though through it, her heart thudding in her chest, her mind a dazzling cacophony of skyrockets and pinwheels and joyous fireworks of all kinds. Her whole little being was ablaze, and she knew at that moment what it was to be in love.

  Then she had run home. Just next door it was on McChesney Street in West Porter, Wisconsin, but still she had run. Faster than she could ever remember running. Flying, almost, up her own steps, across the deep porch, through the door and toward the kitchen, and slowing there before entering. Catching the breath that had left her along the way, regaining some sense of calm before strolling casually (casually with her thoughts all ajumble and her heart still thumpthumpthumping) to the counter where her mother was rolling out a sheet of cookie dough.

  She had returned the cookbook, she told her mother, and her mother had smiled and kept on rolling. Carrie picked at the corner of the dough and slipped the piece into her mouth. It was sweet, but the whole world was a sweet thing right then. And then she had asked the question. Or rather she had made the statement that begged a reply. She had said some boy (he was tall, and had green eyes, and kind of red kind of blonde hair, and he looked kind of sad but maybe it was just a serious look in those green eyes that shimmered like gemstones, and oh God he was handsome!) Answered the door, and her mother explained that that was Miss Wells’ nephew Jay, and that he had come to live with her because his father and his mother—who was Miss Wells’ sister—had died in an automobile accident. A tragedy, really, the way it happened, a police car chasing someone had broadsided his parents car at an intersection, killing them horribly, but miraculously leaving their only child, Jay, in the back seat with nary a scratch. And then her mother had said something to which Carrie had almost let a giggle slip. She had said it would be a kindly thing to do if Carrie would make nice with Jay.

  And make nice she had.

  They weren’t in the same classes at Roosevelt Junior High once summer ended and school began again, but she found enough reason to bump into him in the halls between class or in the cafeteria during lunch. Sometimes they would sit together over trays of small hamburgers and dry, saltless fries. Often they would walk home together, her books always ending up under his arm somehow. Twice she was able to drag him to the movies. All were practices which began to draw the inevitable taunts of ‘Two little love birds sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G’ from their schoolmates. But she didn’t care, and it seemed to her that Jay was also able to tune them out, and in the end the teasing became a strangely accurate footnote to the beginning of THEM. Because the Saturday after Thanksgiving, side by side on the low branch of a tree in the field behind his aunt’s house, their legs dangling and every so often touching about the knees, a close crack of dry thunder had startled her and she had leaned close to him. Then she felt his arm come up and his hand settle on her shoulder, and when she looked up she saw that he was already looking at her, and with every part of her tingling with anticipation it happened. His face moved toward her, and hers toward him, and their eyes closed slowly as if some sudden drowsiness had set upon them both. And in the second, the minute, the eternity after that, all that there was was...feeling. Their lips coming together so softly, with a tentativeness that made her want to pull back and made her want to pull him closer, to kiss him hard like people did in the movies. But she did not kiss him harder. She let it be gentle, and tender, and awkward, just lips and no tongue, and still she found herself thinking during the heights of this mini-passion ‘Were making love’.

  And they had, she still believed. Maybe not in the biblical sense, but they had made new love. Had made their love real.

  And real it was. Real it became. A giddy, infatuate love that grew with them over the years. Through junior high and high school, raging and cooling as young love could, but never dying, not even when she dated other boys and Jay other girls. Those tenth and eleventh grade dalliances during a cool period of their relationship only served to make their feelings more honest. More true. ‘Love’s best comparison is not a mirror, but a window’ her mother had told her when suggesting that seeing other boys might not be a bad thing, and she had been so right.

  Their love changed. Became not only the moment, but want of the next moment as well. A future lay before them, and together was how it would be.

  And that was how it was, Carrie thought warmly as she took her man’s coat to the hall closet and hung it. That done, she stood there before the dark space, sweet memories coming forth once more.

  It was hardly bigger than this closet, she thought, recalling their first apartment. A room, really, above a toy store in West Bend, Indiana. The Catholic Church in West Porter, where Jay and his parents had worshiped, had put up what money he could not raise through scholarships, and he was off to the University of Notre Dame. And Carrie had followed.

  Of course it would have been frowned upon had the good parishioners of St. Paul’s known, but they did not, and apparently never found out that the boy they had sent off to college was shacking up with his girlfriend, who had tagged along despite her parents’ vociferous pleas not to. Pleas that hit a crescendo when she’d informed them that she wasn’t going to be going to school (Gasp!). That she was going with him to work and help him make it through school (Double Gasp!).

  And that she had. Waitre
ssing, working during the Christmas rush in the toy store beneath their humble hovel. Jobs that were just jobs. Two jobs, sometimes three jobs at a time, so that he would not have to work more than part time. So that he could focus, and study, and work toward his dream.

  His dream. When had she first heard him talk of it? Long before he realized it was his dream, she figured. Last year of junior high, if her memory was on target. Walking home together, just out of the blue one day he had asked, ‘Do you know who owns General Motors?’ To which she had shrugged, which was a fortunate ignorance because he seemed all fired up to explain to her that thousands, maybe millions of people owned General Motors, the company that built the El Camino her father drove. She’d scrunched her nose at that bit of fact, confused, and he had gone on to say that there was this place called ‘Wall Street’, and that there there was a thing called the ‘stock exchange’, and at the stock exchange men called ‘stock brokers’ bought and sold stock for other people called ‘investors’, and that stocks were little pieces of companies like General Motors; pieces called ‘shares’. Big companies, middle sized companies, even some small companies. And anyone could buy stock in a company—if they had enough money. They could buy shares of General Motors, or Coca Cola, or Sears Roebuck, or Chase Manhattan Bank, or even shares of Madison Merchants Bank. The last example he had delivered with a bit of faintly sinister glee, something she had not understood then, but had come to as the years passed. Millions of people owned stock, which were actually pretty fancy looking pieces of paper, decorative like some award certificate you could get at the end of the school year for doing good in a subject—only more so. And all of this stock, every bit of it, was handled by the stock brokers. And for every share they traded, the broker made money. A ‘commission’, it was called.

  Some brokers were really rich, he had said, and the ones that weren’t were still doing all right. Really all right. Which meant that if you were a stock broker you wouldn’t be poor, you would make a whole lot of green, as he had started calling money right around then. She had never figured out why, and it had never mattered enough to ask, but from that time forward just about anything over a twenty was ‘green’ to him.