His frustration spilled over when #2 asked for something to eat—maybe an avocado? Haden loathed avocados. Those strange green things that always reminded him of legless frogs…
“I hate avocados! I would never ask for one.”
When he said that, Leni looked at him with outraged, hurt eyes and immediately began to cry. Why? What had he said?
She put her head in her hands and wept. Haden’s clone looked at him and tsk-tsked its disapproval.
“What? What’d I say?”
“You fucked up now, brother. Look what you did to her.”
“All I said was I don’t like avocados.”
Leni looked up from the wet bowl of her hands. Her eyes were shiny. “You bastard. You told me you loved avocados. That was one of the nicest afternoons I can remember. Now it turns out you were lying. Thank you very much, Simon. You are a bastard.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Leni?”
She wouldn’t answer him, so the other Haden did.
“Don’t you remember the day you two went shopping together and you stole her avocados?”
Flummoxed, Haden looked at the ground and tried to match these words to a memory. Shopping? Stolen avocados? When she was sure he wasn’t looking, Leni peeked up to see if his expression showed any kind of recognition. He dug deep in his memory but that first attempt came up with nothing. Digging deeper he saw something but it was vague and amorphous—a ghost of a memory, ectoplasmic at best. Leni watched him trying to remember but finding nothing. Tears welled in her eyes again.
One of life’s (and death’s) nastier lessons: what’s important to us is not necessarily important to others, no matter how close we are to them. What we love or hate, they don’t. What we hold to be true is not often their truth. How could Simon forget? How could a day that lovely have slid through his memory like water and fallen away forever?
Leni’s husband was out of town for a weekend conference. She went to meet Haden at a café. He needed groceries for his apartment so they went shopping at an outdoor market nearby. The sun was out for the first time in a week; the sky was the blue of a baby’s room. He bought this and that while she tagged comfortably along. It amused her to think strangers imagined them as a couple: this handsome man and his handicapped wife.
At one stand she noticed two beautiful fat avocados and on a happy whim, bought them. When she got home later they were gone from her bag, replaced by a note that said if she wanted to see her avocados alive again, she had to go to this address at a certain hour later that day. It was Simon’s address.
When she arrived, his living room table was laid with a bowl of bad lumpy guacamole surrounded by potato chips and other simple finger food she realized he had bought earlier when they were shopping. They drank two bottles of Barolo wine and never touched each other. She stayed till late in the afternoon. The sky outside was falling into deeper and deeper purple. She hadn’t slept with him yet but that day decided it for her. She wasn’t used to surprises. This experience reminded her of how much she enjoyed them.
Meanwhile, #2 only had to say two or three sentences about their avocado day to jog Haden’s memory. “Ohhh yes, I remember that day.” He was smiling now. “You choked on a carrot stick.”
She stood up. “You bastard. You son of a bitch.”
“What? Why are you so upset, Leni? What’s the big deal?”
Again she patted herself on the chest, only this time hard enough so that both men heard the hollow thump each time she hit it. “Because it was my memory and my life. Now you’ve changed it and there’s nothing I can do about it, you bastard! Now it will always be the day I choked on a carrot stick and you hate avocados. Not the day you stole them from me and made us guacamole. Thank you—you’ve completely ruined a memory, and it was one of my favorites.
“You ended our thing badly, Simon. But you were also the avocado thief and that always made me smile when I thought of you, even afterwards. That day, that memory mattered. You were sweet and thoughtful and we had such fun. After our relationship was finished, when you ruined it by leaving for no good reason, something in me, in here, still treasured that avocado day. It was good—it was almost worth everything else.”
What Leni left out was that experience was also one of the main reasons why she later fell for John Flannery. With seemingly innocuous questions their first time together, he learned how much she enjoyed being surprised by a man, thrown off balance and, well, swept off her feet by imagination and thoughtfulness. Once Flannery had that piece of information, winning her was very simple.
“All right, Leni, fine. So now it’s my turn: Petras. Hmm? Did you get that? I’ll say it again for you—Petras.” Haden spoke in a challenging petulant voice.
She stopped and frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Petras Urbsys.”
Despite the strangeness of the name, it was familiar to her. As if he might be able to help, she turned briefly to her imagined Haden and threw him an inquiring look. He held up both hands as if to say I know nothing. Remember, I came out of your head.
She didn’t like this turn of events. She didn’t like the way Simon had turned this event. It felt like he was doing it to avoid blame. She would humor him for another thirty seconds and then get back to the avocados. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Should I?”
“Petras Urbsys was the man who owned that great strange store I took you to one day in Vienna. Don’t you remember? The guy who was selling his whole life in there? All of his possessions were for sale. I loved that store. I loved it so much that I took you and Isabelle to see it. I even introduced you to Petras. But you don’t remember it, do you, Leni?”
“No.”
“Exactly. So we’re even. I don’t remember your avocados and you don’t remember Petras Urbsys.”
This was wrong—Simon was hijacking this. What he said wasn’t really correct, but then again it was. He’d outmaneuvered her, checkmated her using the same moves. Leni was abruptly left with a mouthful of nothing to say and feathers.
“May I add something to this conversation?” Haden #2 asked sweetly.
Haden and Leni had momentarily forgotten about #2 in the heat of their battle. Now they both looked at him, annoyed at his interruption.
“No!”
“Go away,” she said and like the Troodon before him, #2 evaporated.
“Leni, no matter what you think of me, this isn’t about me. That’s not why I’m here. It’s about Isabelle Neukor.”
Leni had so much resentment in her heart and so many questions in her head. All of them vanished when he said her friend’s name. She immediately asked, “Isabelle’s dead?”
“Worse.”
“What is it, Simon?”
“Come with me and I’ll show you.”
“What is this?”
At that moment Haden was too busy to answer her. Whipping his head back and forth, he kept looking for a break that they might scamper through in the insane traffic rocketing by. He had never seen traffic like this before. It literally never appeared to slow or stop. It reminded him of documentaries he had seen on television showing blood cells rushing through veins. These cars were going by so fast that none of them had real shape—they were all just large colored blurs to his eye.
“What are we doing here?” Leni stood behind him with her hands on her hips. She sensed what he had in mind, but there was no way she was going to try and cross that whizzing flow. With her bad leg? Was he crazy? For what purpose?
To make matters worse, Simon hadn’t said a thing to her about any of it. They’d taken an elevated train to a forlorn edge of the city that bordered this busy highway. It looked to her like the main road out to the airport. On the ride over, he wouldn’t tell her anything about where they were going or why. The reason being that he was afraid she would turn around and leave if she knew. Instead he made vacuous small talk that bored both of them right up until they got off the train and, leaving the station, walked to t
he edge of this road.
Zoom zoom zoom—the flow of traffic never stopped or lessened, not for a second. “Simon, I came this far with you, but I swear that if you don’t tell me right now why we’re here, I’m leaving.”
Resigned to the worst, he sighed and asked, “What was your favorite song as a kid?”
Leni almost physically recoiled at the strangeness of the question. “What?”
He raised his voice. “I’m answering your question. What song did you, Isabelle, and Flora play all the time when you were girls, especially when you were together?”
Exasperated, she snapped, “What does that have to do with this?” She pointed to the traffic. A long and loud horn blatted by them and on down the road.
Haden waited till it was gone to answer. “Leni, you asked me a question. I’m giving you the answer. How many times do I have to say that? What was your favorite song when you were fifteen?”
All right, all right—she’d go along with this and see where he was going with it. She squinted, trying to find the answer to his question in her attic of memories. Her favorite song? What grade was she in at fifteen, tenth?
Haden didn’t wait. “If you can’t remember that, who was your favorite rock group back then?”
A picture entered her mind: the three teenaged girls standing shoulder to shoulder in Flora’s living room. All of them were wearing huge, helmety horrible hairdos and identical black T-shirts that announced in yellow letters AC/DC, the heavy-metal rock group.
She smirked at the image and that memory, remembering the day and the mood: how cool they thought they were in those haircuts and shirts. “AC/DC. We all loved AC/DC.”
“Right. And what song of AC/DC was your theme song?”
She didn’t hesitate. “ ‘Highway to Hell.’”
Haden threw a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the busy road behind him.
She looked toward it and then back at him. “What? What are you saying?”
“There it is—your Highway to Hell.”
“I don’t understand, Simon.” Disturbed, she glanced again at the road. It was only a road, as far as she could see; just a road with lots of cars on it.
“This is your dreamworld, Leni. You made all of this and that’s part of it. You loved that song when you were young, so somewhere in your teenage dreams you made up a real Highway to Hell and this is it. Our problem is that we have to get across it now because what I need to show you is on the other side.”
“You mean all of these cars are driving to Hell?” The moment she said the word she became scared. “You mean there is a Hell?”
Haden could have answered that question and wanted to, but knew he wasn’t permitted. Restraining himself he said only, “We have to get across that road.”
“Wait a minute. Simon, those cars are going in both directions. How can they be going to Hell if they’re going in opposite directions?”
He looked at the ground, unwilling to make eye contact with her.
“Simon?”
A half-filled paper cup of Coca-Cola was tossed out the window of a passing car. It hit the ground near them and splashed across their legs. Leni screeched and was about to yell at whoever threw it, but saw something that stopped her. A few feet away the cup lay rocking back and forth on its side. She could see inside it. Three yellow somethings lay in there. Peering closer she realized they were three slices of lemon. Chin tipped up, she looked toward where the car had been seconds before, then back to the cup. Something was dawning on her; not fast but gradually. Leni looked at Simon Haden; she looked at the road, the cup, the road.
Taking several cautious steps forward, she tried to see into the passing cars to catch glimpses of the passengers. It was difficult because they moved by so quickly. But Leni had a powerful hunch now and wasn’t going to be deterred. While this happened, the song “Highway to Hell” played over and over in her head for the first time in years. It had been their anthem and rallying cry as teenagers. With their big hair and dreams of spectacular futures, the girls played the tune constantly, especially whenever they were together.
She knew her hunch was correct when she saw the hand. A car sped by. Sticking out of the passenger’s window was a bare arm, the fingers of the hand open and playing with the wind. For an instant she saw the fingernails—they were all painted green. She didn’t see who the hand belonged to, but the green fingernails were enough.
One day when they were twenty, Flora had given her a bottle of green fingernail polish as a joke. Because they were bored, the three friends had painted their fingers and toes with it. They’d even had a picture taken. Wanting to be certain though before asking Haden, she continued staring at the highway. In time Leni noticed something else which turned out to be the convincer.
All of the cars were the same. Seven different makes and models passed in both directions again and again and again. Car after car, always the same seven. Their colors never varied either. The Opel was always navy blue, the Volkswagen bus beige; every Mercedes-Benz station wagon that passed was white. Once she recognized this fact about the seven cars, she understood why their colors never changed. She checked every passing Mercedes after that just to make sure. On the rear window of each in exactly the same place was a decal of the cartoon character Asterix and his big friend Obelix. Leni recognized the decal because she had put it on the car window herself when she was twelve and had read every Asterix comic book numerous times.
Every one of the vehicles on this particular Highway to Hell were the cars Leni Salomon had had in her lifetime. The Opel Kadett, Volkswagen, and Mercedes were her parents’ cars; the ones she had grown up with until she was old enough to have her own. Those later cars were here too—the yellow VW bug she’d gotten as a high school graduation present, the black BMW 320 with the “Rapid” soccer club decal on one of the rear windows. She’d had sex in the backseat of that car with Simon Haden. She wondered if he remembered that. A gray Lancia she’d once owned and wrecked when she was going through her phase of driving too fast. And her red Honda Civic. The car she owned when she died.
“It’s me in there, isn’t it? In every one of those cars it’s me. I always drank Coke with three slices of lemon. And the green fingernails—”
“You’re warm.”
“What do you mean warm, Simon? Is it or isn’t it me in there?”
“You’re warm, you’re close. Keep going.”
“Close? This isn’t a game.”
More to himself than to her he said, “No, it’s your Ropenfeld.”
“What? What did you say?” Another horn honked nearby.
“Nothing, Leni. You’re really close now. Look again. You’ll get it.”
She wanted to ask him what Ropenfeld meant but this was more important. Now that she had an idea of what was going on, she watched the scene with different eyes. But squinting and concentrating as hard as she could, she still failed to see anything concrete inside those cars—only forms. No matter how hard she tried to shape them into a person or a face, she could not. This world around them, although entirely her creation, was indifferent to her. When she went into her deepest heart and asked for help, it offered none.
A smell shoved its way between everything else and up to the front of her mind. Leni didn’t notice certain of her senses when she was concentrating on others. Staring hard at something, she would forget or take no notice of the smells in the air, the sounds all around, her cold feet, or a sour metallic taste in her mouth. But this smell was so pervasive now that it refused to be ignored. It hung around until she became fully conscious of it.
A wet dog—it was the smell of wet dog. Animal, thick, not nasty but not nice either. When she came around and focused her attention on it, she recognized what it was. She knew what it was and it both surprised and shamed her.
It was the smell her body had given off all of her life whenever she was very afraid. It had followed her into death. As fastidious as she was, she nonetheless exuded this odor in varying degrees w
henever she had been genuinely frightened. One doctor she consulted said it was only a minor hormonal aberration she could not change. Besides, it was only body odor that disappeared whenever the threat disappeared. He said a surprisingly large number of people had the same problem. Unsatisfied with that prognosis, she visited two highly esteemed endocrinologists who told her essentially the same thing. The irony was that in most difficult situations Leni was the calmest, most reliable person around. But whenever this singular odor began to rise off her skin, she knew it was her body’s way of saying Run away!
The smell was unmistakable now, but there was something wrong this time because she wasn’t afraid. Curious, yes. On edge and wary of what was happening… But not the kind of frightened that in her past had always caused the smell.
It grew stronger but that was because she was fully aware of it now. The cars flew past a few feet away. Standing nearby, Simon Haden remained silent.
The answer came when those lemon slices in the cup led her to suddenly remember a name—Henry County. He was the boy Leni had dated on and off throughout high school. He was American, wickedly clever, and manic-depressive. She never knew whether she really liked him or was just sort of spellbound by his erratic character. But he did have his own odd compelling gravity that kept pulling her back to him for a while.
Once toward the end of their relationship he’d gotten angry at her while driving them to a movie. She was drinking Coke out of a paper cup. He snatched the cup from her hand and threw it out the window. A Coke with three slices of lemon in it. The speed and wildness of his gesture frightened her and the smell came right away.
The day she had painted her fingernails green with Flora and Isabelle, a man followed her home afterward. He sat across the aisle on the 35A bus but moved over and sat down next to her. He started a conversation by asking too many questions about her “interesting” fingernails. She stopped answering them after the fourth and pretended to look out the window, trying to ignore him. He would not be ignored. Fortunately they arrived at her stop and she got off the bus. But he got off too and followed. When she paid no attention to him, he tried to touch her arm.
GLASS SOUP Page 19
