The day they left, when he could no longer hear the elevator noises of his family falling away from him, Jack made himself a bowl of cereal and watched the morning shows, like a man who’d have the apartment to himself for a couple hours. There had been a moment in the hall when he’d thought of turning to his daughter. Just hugging her. But he’d been afraid of what Deb would say. He’d be accused of, what—physical influence? Something like that. Pressure by proximity.
Of course there was time yet, to fix everything. They’d stay up there, what, a week? A week tops. Or maybe they’d call and he’d come and join them. Definitely tonight Deb would call.
He picked up the paper from yesterday and read again the piece about his show. “Don’t Take the Bayt.” Very clever. Bravo. And they say journalism has gone to shit. “We deeply regret what’s happened. We were assured by the artist that the explosives had all been detonated and accounted for well in advance of the show, and we’re looking now into what could have possibly happened.” Stanley, you ninny. Well, throw me under the bus. The artist. Fine.
He sucked milk from his spoon and returned the Cheerio fossils to the bowl. There was one of those talk shows on, with its women, all white and one black, all liberal and one conservative, all postmenopausal and one who still got her period. They were talking about postpartum depression, which Jack knew had nothing to do with having babies and which he got every time he finished a project.
He walked to the kitchen and added more milk, came back to the living room and lay down. Maybe it was the milk that made him sleepy, or it could have been all those women’s voices. Maybe he was only sad.
Anyway, he slept.
—
Stanley was usually at the gallery Sunday mornings, and that was where Jack caught him, early, just opening up.
“Please, Jack, not before my coffee.”
“One more go. A few weeks. A week.”
“Jesus, not before my vodka soda.”
“People will come.” Jack hit his palm against the hot brick. The sun made neither of them more agreeable. “Stanny.”
“People would come, just not for the reasons you want.” Stanley shook out his keys. “Rubberneckers. You want rubberneckers?”
“I’ll take rubbernecking.”
“My lawyers won’t,” he said, sliding open the heavy door. “Not until we know for certain this woman isn’t building a case.”
Inside it was not even cool. “Christ, you cancel the air in here too?”
Stanley pulled a triangle of handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “Everything’s backed up for me right now. Emily’s on vacation.”
“Emily who?” Jack asked. Stanley pressed the cloth to his forehead, blotting away the shine. “You know no one alive uses those. You iron those?”
“I’m going to Venice,” Stanley said, running up around the white spiral stairs, “for the biennale.”
“Hey, who’s Emily?” Jack called, hovering his hand over the receptionist’s desk, her silver cup of cheapie pens.
“You know Emily.” The AC clicked to life from the second floor. “You’ve met her a hundred times. My assistant, Emily?” Cold air began to fall.
“Oh, sure,” Jack mumbled. This was Emily’s desk. There was his note slid under the mouse. NO ONE MUST TOUCH THE DEBRIS.
“I fly out late Thursday.” Stanley was spry coming down the stairs, knees high. “You know, Jack, maybe you should take a vacation.”
“The bee-ehn-ah-lay? No thanks.”
“Or whatever. You guys have a house. Take the kids and go. The city’s a terrible cunt in the summer. Already it’s murder.” Poor Stanley. He was shining up again, surveying the room for what else to say. Jack looked down at the desk.
“Yeah, thanks, Stanny.” He shook the mouse until the computer came awake, the desktop a beach scene, palm trees. “Thanks. I think that’s just what we’ll do.”
Their first morning in Jamestown no one set an alarm, and still everyone woke up early. Hard to sleep through new places.
In the bathroom where Jack had done the tiling—tiny, white hexagons and black grouting, both dizzying and spartan—Deb relearned the eccentricities of the shower, fogging the mirror and making the faucet sweat over the sink. Out of it, dripping, she stood and examined her approximate shape in the mirror. Still the right shape, still in and out the right places. She rubbed clear her reflection and arched her spine, turned to look at the long back over her shoulder. And maybe she’d finally done the right thing, in bringing them here. Hopefully she had. With her hands gathering up her hair, she wondered how long they’d stay.
—
She took the kids (neither showered) to a cheery breakfast place where the juice came in rich colors, deep cranberry and orange bright as to have a light bulb inside.
“I thought we could go out on the water this afternoon,” Deb said, “explore around.”
“Beautiful out there, my gosh,” said the waitress, weighted on either side with orange- and black-handled pots of coffee. Her skin had that downy look of age plus makeup, cheeks pinked with powdery moons. “You all been out to Newport?”
“Oh, years ago, I have,” Deb said. “But not these two.”
“You’ll want to see the mansions there. And Trinity Church, that’s something. Lotta history.”
“We haven’t had a chance to see much of anything yet,” Deb said.
Simon and Kay stayed pointedly quiet. The waitress looked at them around the table. “Well then. Anyway, I’m sorry, what’ll you have?”
Then everyone asked for omelets. Kay asked her mother for a pen.
“I don’t want to go see churches,” Simon said when the waitress was well enough away.
“What I really want you both to see is Rose Island.” The islands were what Deb liked best about the bay, so many uninhabited patches of land with romantic, Brontë names: Patience, Hope, Prudence. Despair. Her first summer in Jamestown, she and Jack and baby Simon had gone over in the brown-and-gold rental boat that sputtered, and the man who did the weeding there had let them walk all around. Careful of the gulls. They’ll attack when they’re nesting. Deb remembered walking the perimeter, how the island really was shaped like a rose. Then a seagull ran at them and Simon cried, five months old and in her arms.
She leaned across the table, toward where her son was watching her daughter ink outlines around the drawings of cocktails on her paper place mat. “Simon, you’ve been to Rose Island before.” She disclosed this like a good secret, gossip about someone else, someone famous.
“That’s not how you do shadow,” Simon said at his sister’s drawing. He dragged a finger over the heavy line she’d scratched around a Tom Collins, smudging it. “You have it so the sun is coming from both directions.” He made a move for the pen.
“Stoppit,” Kay said, angling her body away from him. “They’re not trying to be shadows.”
Then the eggs came and covered the place mats, and they could not fight about shadows anymore.
Instead they fought about watering cans at the hardware store, souvenir magnets and ugly fleece pullovers at the gift shop. Take it, you’ll be cold at night. You think you’ll ever use that? I’m sure we have things like it at home. Where are those energy efficient ones, the ones that look coiled like telephone cords? But I want it. Gross. Put it back. It isn’t a fashion contest; you’ll be cold. No. I said no. I said enough.
At a bookshop that sold miniature electric fountains and miniature Zen gardens and even a few books, mostly titles from small presses about local lighthouses and walking tours, but also some fiction in back, Deb told the kids to pick out some summer reading.
Simon reappeared with a thick paperback. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“Why not?” He thrust it at her.
Deb was about to make a case for why not, but her eyes had already shifted focus to Kay, who was by the register turning the chirpy wire stand of bookmarks, a deck of them already fanned out in her hand. “All right, give it to me,” she said, a
nd added his book to the pile.
—
The sky began to look like rain, but if they were quick they could beat it to the supermarket, which was at the end of a long parking lot, spotted with a few sedans and a red pickup under blue tarp. A kind of junior-league strip mall, with a video rental store and a custom sign shop that advertised gold-leaf lettering for yachts.
“Stay by me,” Deb told them. Inside it was cold and bright and hard to find their way. With her kids filed behind her, Deb felt more alone, remembering they weren’t her company but her charges. Every time she led them down the wrong aisle, she tried to find something there they could use. She trundled the cart around corners and perused the flyer that had been left in it. She didn’t know what to get, so she bagged a lot of fruit and took what was on sale that week, a brand of seltzer she’d never heard of. Supermarkets outside the city left so much squandered space between the aisles. Once, in a time before cellphones, she’d lost Jack’s mother at a Sam’s Club in Houston and was twenty minutes paging her at the register.
At checkout, she found the food was definitely cheaper than in New York. A teenager with feathery brown hair and a divot in one eyebrow double bagged everything.
“Oh, wait,” Deb said, stopping a can of Sprite midair. “You want that now, squirt?”
Simon shook his head no and turned away from the cashier, who asked, “Need this taken out to your car?”
“We’re fine,” Deb answered. They had four bags of groceries, another from the hardware store, and a paper sack filled with books. That there was no car, she was glad the kids didn’t say.
In the parking lot again, the air had turned a live yellow. Deb would have stopped to call attention to it, how pretty, but they weren’t walking anymore: They were carrying. No rain yet but the wind had picked up, catching the tarp on the red truck so that it billowed. Strange, the way it sounded like thunder.
Jack could see his mother-in-law from inside the revolving doors—could see, at least, the helmet shine of her white-blond hair poking up over the back of a leather chair at the far end of her marble lobby. After Stanley, he hadn’t been able to go back home without having what to do there, because he knew what he’d do, which was laze on the couch and eat and watch TV while Deb continued to not call. Instead, at the studio, amid the beginnings of Sculptural Improvisation, he improvised too a reason for going away.
The lobby was where Ruth had agreed to meet him ten minutes from now. Jack was early because he knew Ruth would be. He carried Travolta in the cat box, thinking of the girl somewhere with her guinea pig in a box, and how this was what happened to animals when their owners found new ways of being selfish.
He’d meant to walk to Ruth’s, but on the second or third block this had struck him as unkind, hearing the cat’s claws drag against the plastic floor as she slid around. He’d put a dish towel in to homey the place, but it didn’t sound like it was getting much use. He tried hailing a cab, but so close to rush hour there weren’t any, and when the bus pulled up a few feet ahead, he got on.
On the bus, Travolta mrowwwwed and the other passengers looked in on her, making sympathetic faces. Jack stuck his fingers into the gated front and tried plucking the towel forward, so people could see it was there. She’s eight, he wanted to tell them. We must be doing something right. As to the masking tape on the side, TRAVOLTA in black marker from the last trip to the vet, to that he wanted to say: My son, he used to love the movie Grease.
Jack caught the eye of the yawning doorman/concierge behind the desk and nodded toward the blond head across the room. No doubt Ruth had announced that she was expecting company, Jack S-h-a-n-l-e-y, and that they shouldn’t turn him away when he came. She liked to make a production, his mother-in-law. She liked to think of all the things that might go wrong and plan against them. For fifteen years he and Ruth had enjoyed defying all that was conventionally known about husbands and their mothers-in-law. While Deb had preserved an adolescent sensitivity to Ruth’s small digs and asides, Jack was able to laugh everything away. Your mother’s a riot, he’d say, which Deb hated. Debby, don’t be mad; it’s only that she and I, we’re the same generation. His wife hated that even more, not least because it was almost true.
What would he and Ruth be to each other now?
Jack came around the side of her chair, cat box aloft like a peace offering. Ruth pushed her headphones off her ears and stopped her Discman. “My tapes,” she said, though she meant CDs. Ruth listened to books. There was one she especially liked about Aristotle on ethics, and another called Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff that she lent once to her daughter and that Deb had returned unplayed.
Jack held the handle high so that Ruth could see in. “Look who’s here,” she cooed. He felt Travolta’s weight recede toward the back of the box and set the whole caboodle down on the glass-topped table.
“Made it in one piece.” He sat beside her, trying to seem easy, though the depth of the chair into which he sank surprised him. He was feeling very low. From his jacket pocket he pulled two golden cans of Ocean Whitefish Feast. “I can go and pick up some more now with the litter—”
“I’ve got litter.” Ruth had had cats once too, though hers were dead some years.
“Don’t you want some new? You’re not going to carry that all from the store—”
“Jack, honey, I’ll tell you a secret. They deliver my groceries. Don’t worry.” She laughed. “I don’t carry a thing.” The laugh was tired and a little angry, as if it bothered her, this truth about herself. She’d never signed off on getting old.
“Good.” He nodded. “You shouldn’t carry. I mean, you absolutely could, if you wanted, but it’s good you don’t.”
“My friend Lorraine, you know Lorraine? She’s the one that started me on it. She said, ‘Ruthie, why are you killing yourself carrying?’ But Lorraine, she has her own problems. She’s not a well woman. Her feet—nothing serious. Anyway you know me, I’m such a dope, I said what did I need to be paying extra for? So I should hurry home and miss them? So they should forget a bag? Never did it. Never. Always carrying these big bundles home. Years.”
“That can be difficult.”
“And news flash, Jack, I’m not rich. Lorraine travels, no kids, two husbands divorced—and wealthy men we’re talking, not like my Norman.” It was the kind of conversation Ruth could never have with her daughter, who considered such micromanaging of finances depressing, who would have found her mother’s story tedious and self-exonerating. Fine, do it, Deb would say, but why do we have to talk about it? Jack had never minded Ruth’s soliloquies. He had an idea of what it might mean to be lonely, of how bad it could feel. Ruth, widowed, had not remarried, as his own mother had. He understood that there were people who liked talk, who needed it more than others. And he did think she was funny.
“You’re right, though. It makes more sense that you get them delivered.” He felt relief that she could still be normal with him, and when the ethics of delivered groceries had been exhausted as a topic of conversation, when again they had fallen silent, he wondered if she was surprised at having slipped into their old ways so quickly, if she was even now regretting it.
“Look at him,” Ruth said, turning her attentions on the cat. “Her, I mean. Isn’t that bad? Well, mine were boys.”
“I don’t think she took offense.”
“So,” she said, picking an invisible thread from her blouse. “Deborah knows about your going?”
Jack held hands with himself in his lap.
“Honey, look,” she said, leaning closer. “I don’t get involved. Okay?”
“Thank you.”
“I think you’re an ass, and a moron,” she said plainly, her voice higher but no louder than before, “but I know my place, and this is not my place.”
“I appreciate it.”
“My girl’s grown up, better or worse.” She laughed that tired-angry laugh. “She has her reasons. What’ll happen, who knows?”
The Shadow knows. Somethin
g Jack’s dad used to say. Jack had never heard the radio show firsthand, but his father always made the line sound noirish and pulpy, with a backdrop of heavy rain. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
—
Back at the studio, he called Deb.
“Hey,” she said on the fourth ring. She still sounded like herself, and not so far away. Like she could have been just at home, and not in Rhode Island. Not on some other planet he couldn’t reach. “What’s up?”
“How are you? How’s everybody?”
“Good. The kids are good. It’s raining.”
“And our buddy Gar? How’s pretty boy?”
“Don’t, don’t do that.”
“What shouldn’t I do?”
“Gary’s not here until tomorrow.”
“Well, and you? How are you?”
“What do you want, Jack?” There it was. The other planet, orbiting.
When he told her he was flying out to the university that had given him the new commission, to meet the deans and see the space, she didn’t sound all that surprised, even though she knew how seriously he didn’t take them, these commissions.
“My mom can feed Travolta.”
“I took her over there already. So she doesn’t have to go back and forth.”
“Whatever you guys work out.”
“We worked it out, I told you.” He wandered into the little half kitchen. Opened and closed a cabinet for no reason. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
“What do you expect me to say to that?”
Jack said: “You sound really far away.”
Deb said: “I am.”
When they were off the phone he dialed easy, laughing Jolie, to make her guess who was coming to town.
Howard Roark laughed.
His mom, as usual, had been wrong—wrong in this case about the ferry, which did not run every day, not until high season, and so they could not go to Newport, where supposedly there were shops and movie theaters and actual things to do. They couldn’t go to the islands either, not that he wanted to. His mom talked about these stupid islands like the whole world was poetry. Simon thought that if nobody lived on them, it was probably for good reason. What a moron.
Among the Ten Thousand Things: A Novel Page 12
