Game of Secrets

by Dawn Tripp

  I am overthinking this, then remember what he threw out on our first date, I want to see you naked, and the awful thought strikes me that ideals will be shattered both ways. I show okay nude, but I’m no spring chicken.

  “I’ve got beer,” he says. “Orange juice. That’s about it.”

  “Water’s fine,” I answer.

  He glances back. “Still your adventurous self?”

  “Think purist.”

  He laughs, running the tap until the water turns cold. He hits some ice into a glass, fills it for me.

  In your blood, there are a thousand worlds imagined where he knows how to touch you, just how to push into you—

  The tingly rush of that particular thought is more than enough to galvanize my body, so I have to stand up from the chair where I’ve plunked myself down—have to move, go somewhere, anywhere, and where is there really to go—it’s a tiny house—except toward him, under the pretense of accepting that glass of water, getting something, anything, cool and calm in my hand, to draw me back to earth. What I am not prepared for is that, in the process, I will trip over an electrical cord running from the wall to the TV, which slips on its stand, but doesn’t fall, except I do, go flying, slightly, metaphorically, crashing into him, the water spills down his shirt, all over me, the tumbler struck out of his hand, ice cubes and glass breaking into wet crystal mess on the floor.

  I bend down and start picking up pieces, muttering apology, while he grabs a dish towel to mop up the soak, and I am thinking how I am a bona fide magician for disaster, and if that’s not enough, I cut my finger on a shard I mistook for ice, it’s bleeding before I realize. He notices. He catches my hand, wraps it in the wet towel, applying pressure, then pulls me toward him.

  “You are perfect,” he says, his lips on my neck, near my ear.

  The exact word running through my head.

  But he doesn’t let go, he pulls me up, leaving that glass and water melting on the floor, he pulls me to the couch under the window, my hand still wrapped in the dishcloth glove, like Butterfly Ali, and the orchestration of it all is so awkward, so stumbling and real, and as it starts, the thought skims through my mind, I’ve been waiting for this, but thank God, I’m still self-possessed or cynical enough not to breathe it aloud, because This—I tell myself—will never turn out like I’ve planned. Yet just for now, the window is high above us, the cathedral of a window where the ceiling shoots up, and the field at night through it, the grass out there tipped by some bare light that might be imagined but is light I can feel—the shivering tingle of it out there in the dark—I half watch past his shoulder, feel the shiver, light on grass, skin rising to it, he is slipping my shirt off, fingers, mouth playing over me.

  The bra will be a sticking point, I think, as usual.

  He catches my chin in his hand. “Look at me,” he says, and as my eyes shift onto his face, his eyes opening down under mine, that unsealed flecked green of his eyes, I realize, This is what I am not ready for. He doesn’t let my eyes go, doesn’t let me look away, take my flight into the known dark of Out There through the free lofty stretch of the night window.

  Sex I love. Love to fuck, to be fucked. Love to come.

  As a rule, I don’t watch.

  As a rule, I do not look too long into someone else’s eyes.

  It’s a searing place. Perilous.

  That brink.

  “Look at me,” he says again, and I do, because this is what I’ve wanted and not wanted, desired feared most. This.

  After two rounds of sex we find ourselves in the shoe-box room—the small bedroom in the back of the house, with an open closet and a small round window. He’s left the lamp on. It’s an old thing—that lamp—black tin with a Japanese motif—the light it throws is gentle, forgiving—like dilute tea.

  Sweat has dried on the backs of my knees, the other stuff down the insides of my thighs. I like the tacky skim of it there—always have. I am cold, naked still. I slide under the sheet.

  There’s a tattoo on his shoulder—recently inked. A bird in flight, a banner in its beak, his daughter’s name. He has fallen asleep, his arm across my body, the weight of it settled. His breathing shifts, slower, more even, his lips part. I watch his eyelids move.

  Last week, on Sunday, I worked the lunch shift down at the restaurant. I got off at five. The day was overcast, wind off the ocean, the air rinsed with fog. I took a walk down to the beach. There was a small humped thing lying in the road ahead—some creature, a squirrel, I thought, hit—but it was just an old work glove, stiff, the shape of a hand, but no hand, no wrist, just cloth fingers curled into the shell of a loose fist filled with shadow. That glove lying there reminded me of Huck—and I was annoyed that he should be even the wick of a thought in my brain.

  ——

  I study Ray’s face, it is beautiful in sleep. Not a fair word, I know, to describe the kind of man he is. And yet.

  Last Sunday, on my way down to the beach, I left that work glove lying just where it was in the road. On the way back, though, I gave it a smug little kick into some poison ivy. Hick shit. I don’t entirely trust the person I become when I think of Huck. That urge to sabotage.

  When I was a kid, I stole Alex’s skateboard, gave it a shot down the hill and wiped out. The whole cap of my right knee was chopped meat. My mother dressed it, warning me to leave it alone. It healed up fast. Or would have, but I couldn’t quit picking the scab. I’d feel it itch, get my nail under it, give it a tug, see how much of a piece I could get in one pull. It wasn’t out of defiance, not purely, but rather a quiet, predatory curiosity to see what would happen if—

  Next to me, Ray stirs, opens his eyes.

  “I fell asleep?” he asks me.

  “Not long.”

  “You still want your ice cream?”

  “Everything’s pretty closed up by now.”

  “I’ll find you a place.” He runs his hand along my hip, the curve of the bone. “What’s the matter?” he says.

  “What? Nothing.”

  “Yeah, there’s something you’re noodling.” He touches the edge of my mouth. “You’re biting your lip.”

  There’s a gentleness about the way he touches me, the way he comes close to me, so honest and close, I want to die into it. Shut my eyes, walk right out of my mind, let it go.

  “You don’t want to know,” I say, which of course is all that’s needed to capsize the boat, kick the door open. I know this. I know it ahead of time, and do it anyway. I tell him about the work glove, I tell him how it bugged me, how it still does.

  And he listens, taking in what I say, more generous than I am, I can see it in his face, the lack of judgment. Undeserved.

  “You couldn’t be less like him,” I remark.

  His guard comes up, it’s subtle, but I see it, a thin veil slipping over his eyes. Not transparent.

  “We’re pretty different,” he says slowly.

  Hard-core understatement there.

  His eyes on me are wary, like he sees it coming, sees something coming, perhaps more clearly than I do.

  “Look, Ray, I need to be completely honest—”

  “Then be honest—”

  “This won’t come out well.”

  “Spit it out—”

  And so I do. I tell him, in not so many words, that his brother Huck is about every walking reason why I can’t live here.

  His mouth forms a thin line, deliberate. “You are living here.”

  “Ray, your brother—”

  “Your uncle.” His voice is quiet.

  I stare at that thin line of his mouth.

  “What?” I say.

  But he doesn’t pick up, doesn’t continue. “What did you say?” I ask.

  “Just what I said.”

  And in the pause after, that texture of silence between us now utterly changed, I feel it happen, like a hand, deft, brushed through me. Inconceivable.

  “What exactly are you saying?”

  He stares at the wall across the r
oom. “My mother. Luce. You know the story.”

  “Not this part.”

  “Adds up, though, don’t you think?”

  “I think it’s a load of crap.”

  He glances at me, a wry smile. “Funny you should put it like that. That’s exactly how Huck put it when Junie told him. Got his back right up. Said there was no way in hell that son-of-a-bitch—” He stops there, shakes his head. “Junie may have been a lot of things, but he was no storyteller.”

  I say nothing, seeing all. Jigsawed human geography, those pieces, their most horrible fit.

  Ray gives a short laugh. “A little nuts, huh?”

  That would be a way to render it.

  “Who else knows?” I ask.

  “You, now.”

  “My mother?”

  “I’m not sure. She might, I guess.”

  “Alex?”

  “I never had a reason to tell him.”

  “So it must have been your mother, Ada, who told Junie—”

  Ray nods. “After Silas died, I guess, one day, she was making up deviled eggs and spilled it. Junie told Huck and me some time after. When Huckie heard, man, did he have a day with her. Said things—he must have—God only knows what—but she sobbed and screamed, flipped her lid, wouldn’t talk to him for weeks after.”

  He goes on, telling me this story of a story, and I am hearing it. Sort of. Half of me is listening. The other half too busy falling off a cliff.

  There is a Greek word for this, I think, I grope for it now. Peripeteia.

  “To top it off,” Ray says, “apparently, when Huck was a kid, he had a crush on your mom. Thought she was something else.”

  Fuck. Could It Get Any Worse? My mother, Princess Leia, with loser Luke Skywalker.

  Rock-bottom. Nadir. All-time low.

  “Talk about scrabbled—” Ray says.

  Coup de grâce.

  It should be funny. It would be, I think, uproarious, under altered circumstances. I would laugh. I should laugh. Let the outrageous farce of it roll off my back. The room has turned slightly, tweaked on its ear, everything on the slide, toward some drain, going down.

  I look at Ray’s hand resting on the bed between us, the furrows of hair along the back of it, knuckles chapped, a bruise cut through the thumbnail. Shades of black-blue. His hand is inches from the pillow. I study it, intently, it is something I’m needing to memorize, and I don’t see his other hand reach out until I feel his fingers brush my cheek. It startles me, the touch, I shift, recoil, trying to keep myself from shrinking back. But it’s too late. He’s felt it. His hand drops.

  “You’re going to bail, aren’t you, Marne?”

  I don’t answer.

  “You’re going to bail over this?”

  I glance at him.

  “You know it’s not this,” he says bitterly. “You don’t even know for sure it was my father who took that shot—” I shake my head. “Don’t—”

  “Who really fucking knows, Marne? All the same, you’re going to hold me responsible.”

  I can’t explain to him that he is right, and at the same time, not right. It’s about all of this, and it’s about none of it. I should have known better than to climb into bed with a guy so far stuck in this town when there is nowhere I would rather be than anywhere but here.

  “I just can’t do this,” I say.

  It happens then. I see it happen. See the words strike his face, the surface of his eyes, straight through.

  The upside down of everything.

  Half an hour later, he is turning the truck in to the driveway, dropping me off.

  “See around you, then,” I say.

  “Sure.” His finger drums the wheel.

  “It’s not what you think, Ray.”

  “I don’t think anything.”

  He won’t look at me. And of course, at this point, there’s no reason for him to.

  I shut the passenger door behind me, the truck already moving, he is already pulling away. I go inside. The kitchen is dark. Pans and dishes in their midnight gleam on the drying rack. From the front room, rippling sound, blue wafered light off the TV.

  My mother is up. Watching some repeat on the Discovery Channel. Some documentary on evolutionary marvels that I’ve already seen.

  “You’re home then,” she says, glancing up as I sit down, and in that glance that lasts just a moment, I can tell she has seen the train wreck. The Ray and Marne derailment part at least.

  She won’t ask why. Should I tell her? Could I? She doesn’t know—not about Huck—I’m quite sure. Could she? No. There’s a part of me that wants to tell her, scream it, that wants to shatter this room with the scream. The dead are in their precincts, sure. That doesn’t mean they don’t have their dirty fingerprints all over the lives of the living.

  There’s a chip in my nail polish. An excuse to strip it.

  On the screen, an interview with some prominent ichthyologist. He is what you’d expect an expert on near-obsolete fish to look like—his back-to-the-future wild hair. His eyes are strangely flat, his voice almost antiseptic as he describes the traits of the African genus of lungfish—their svelte and eel-like shapes, their subdivided hearts—how during the dry season they will bore down into riverbed mud, encyst themselves in a mucous sheath that gradually hardens as the water table drops. They lie there, in a dry sleep, digesting their own waste until the rains.

  The restraint in his voice, that systematic monotone, can’t disguise the fact that he is enthralled by these residual creatures built literally (here he gives a wan smile) into the lives of modern-day tribes settled near them.

  I’ve peeled it. The polish on that one nail.

  The TV scene has shifted: rectangular bricks of mud cut and laid into a house. He’s still with us, though—our steadfast ichthyologist, in voice-over—as the camera pans toward a black sky, clouds massing, heavy rains striking mud walls. Fish awakened in them, calving away.

  It’s good and bare, that nail, disgraced against the rest.

  Commercial break. Man on a therapist’s couch. He’s got four alter egos. “Who are you? Nintendo GameCube.”

  Does she know? My mother. Could she? Is it possible? Even if she did, though, what would it really change? He’d still be a screwball. She’d still be sitting up watching late-night. A bastard brother. A murdered father. Nothing changed.

  I stand up.

  “You’re going to bed, sweetheart?”

  I nod.

  She pauses then. “I’m sorry, Marne.”

  “Yeah well, it’s how things go.”

  She studies me a moment longer like she might say something else, but she doesn’t. Because we don’t.

  I go upstairs, wash my face, brush my teeth. Do those minute and necessary tasks. On the inside of the medicine cabinet door, one of those round inset mirrors that swings out on its own and magnifies your face five or ten times depending on which side you choose. I always go out of my way not to look into it, but it’s staring at me now—that stifling proximity—flaws, pores, blemished aspects of humanness revealed that afterward of course you wish you hadn’t seen.

  In bed, I try to read the book about light. I flip back to the front and search out those lines about waves and form, but the magic seems gone. I crease the page down at the corner, tight, and toss the book into the nightstand drawer. I’ll go back to it at some point, I suppose.

  The night is warm. I fall asleep, woken only sometime after three by the sound of knocking, the sound of the shade hitting against the sill. The wind has picked up. The curtains are wild with it, filled with that restless damp air spilling through. I lie in bed, my body like hammered metal. The curtains snap at me and the sound of that shade knock, knock, knocking.

  I slip out of bed and cross the room, lay my hands on the hard cool wood of the sill, then pause a moment as I realize what I am about to do, then go and do it anyway. Like I could shut out whatever it was traveling through me, working its way up to the surface, even after all this time.


  BIRDS

  MARNE

  June 25, 2004

  The days lug by.

  Wednesday. Thursday. Now it’s Friday again. I have to be at work at four, and we’re not even pushing ten thirty. My parents are gone for the day, my father driving my mother over to the COA, dragging that Scrabble set, her brown-bag lunch, the new sordid twist in the tale—the star-crossed lovers. Is that how she’d cast it? Ladies Montague and Capulet sitting down for the ritual game.

  The tick of the clock on the mantel—tick tock, tick tock.

  The silence feels hermetic, unfinished.

  I sit out in the sun and fold paper. Four picture frames, four stands. Four African violet pots. Four paper window stars. Colors interlocking, I use more paper than is worth a single star. I am not saving with it. The folds are tight and strong, nothing slips, but I’ve begun to bite my nails, and the sun feels too hot, and I can’t seem to make more than four. I quit for the day and drop them off at Polly’s—she’s with a customer, no time to talk, I leave them on the counter—on my way to Best Buy to buy an iTunes card—which is more the kind of errand you need to run when you’re waiting for life to jump-start. The nineteen-year-old kid who sells it to me has acne and has never heard of Nina Simone. Lena? he asks, trying to be affable, he’s got a great smile, and is trying to find a point of connection with an old broad like me before he gives his pitch for some new fancy gadget with a two-year service plan.

  Friday-night work. Thank God.

  Saturday work. Sunday work. Hours cycling by at a faster clip, brisk, around the weekend corner. Then hit the wall. Two days off. Everything stalled to a screeching halt. Stuck.

  So goddamn stuck.

  I hurl myself into a late-night movie binge. Wim Wenders. What better way to drown? His Road Movie Trilogy. Wings of Desire. Those two angels roaming through West Berlin before the wall came down. Unseen, unheard, they wander. Their work to observe only—assemble, testify, preserve. Do no more than look!—until one falls off the wagon, falls in love, and gives up his foreverness for her. He bleeds, wriggles his toes, feels cold, runs into walls, and the film shifts from monochrome to color. Foolish choice, I mutter, foolish, foolish.