July, July

by Tim O'Brien

  "James is an adult," said Lincoln, "and he's pissed."

  Spook nodded. She was making this up as she went along.

  "Maybe so," she said, "but that just proves he's a male." She snuffed out a half-smoked cigarette and immediately lit up another. Her lime-green eyes were flashing. "I'm no history expert, but women've had to tolerate this sort of thing forever. What about Brigham Young? The Bible? Abraham and Jacob and David and horny old Solomon—it goes on and on." She sighed. "I thought we were enlightened about this."

  "The issue isn't enlightenment," said James. "The issue is your heart."

  Spook hooted. "My heart, you think?"

  "I do," James said. He looked at Lincoln for support. "How far can you spread love—how thin—before it stops being love?"

  "And becomes fucking," said Lincoln.

  Baldy Devlin blushed, wiped his forehead, and put his mind to retying a shoelace. Spook gave the man's knee a pat.

  "I hope I'm wrong," she said, "but it seems there's a pride-of-ownership issue here. I'm not somebody's convertible." Again Spook attended to Baldy's knee. She was out of control. She knew that. She needed that. Risk made her the Spook she was, something more than the sad, mute Caroline she had been christened. Risk kept her away from household poisons. "Our new partner," she said, "wants to give this a chance. The four of us, I mean. Isn't that right, darling?"

  "Four?" said Baldy.

  "In for a dime, in for a dollar," said Spook.

  Lincoln snorted. He was a tolerant man, low-key to the edge of drowsy, but now he found himself reaching for sarcasm. "What the lady means is," he said, "she means the more the merrier."

  "Wants her cake," said James. "Wants to eat it too."

  "Three cakes," said Lincoln.

  Baldy Devlin rose to his feet. "Look," he said, "I'm no swinger. To tell the truth, I didn't know she was married at all. Name's Spinelli, right? No kidding, I didn't make the connection until—you know—until all those drinks got drunk, until it was too late." He glanced at James, then at Lincoln. "I'll just head for the door. Let you folks work this out."

  "Don't be ridiculous," Spook said. She smiled and tapped the sofa. "Have a seat now."

  "I'd rather—"

  "Sit."

  Baldy sat down.

  "Here's an honest fact," Spook said. She was still smiling, but her smile had gone icy. "I won't be bullied, not by anything. If it's heart we're talking about, or love, or affection"—she paused and stared at James—"well fine, I care about each of you. And I won't let my emotions be dictated to me by some mom-and-pop idea of good behavior." She smiled again. "Am I pretty clear?"

  "Pretty," James said. "Except sooner or later people make choices. Nobody gets it all."

  "Who wrote that law?" said Spook.

  "Common knowledge."

  "Precisely. I'm uncommon. Got a problem with that, any of you, you're free to walk."

  "In that case," Baldy said, and began to rise.

  "Not you," said Spook.

  As it turned out, Baldy Devlin did leave—rapidly, permanently—and he took with him Spook's unblemished record for sovereignty over the male gender. Over the next several weeks her phone calls to Baldy went unanswered, her e-mails vanishing into deep cyberspace. She had trouble sleeping. She gained four pounds and kept on eating. She could not summon the energy to visit her gym. For the first time in fifty-odd years, Spook noted slippage in her once stylish mix of charm and magnetism, an erosion of her womanly appeal, which until then had seemed both a blessing and a birthright. Small, ugly dimples pocked her buttocks. Her breasts seemed closer to the floor.

  More than once, Spook broke down in tears. Meals arrived late at two tables. She began losing at canasta. Even her sex drive, once ravenous, disappeared entirely. Both marriages suffered.

  Her unhappiness, Spook realized, had little to do with Baldy Devlin and very much to do with her own self-esteem. The man was handsome, yes, but hardly that handsome, and in other circumstances she might already have filed him away under "conquest" or "good fun." As it was, she could not evict Baldy's face from her thoughts.

  She was sick of spirit. She was also frightened. She wanted no more lithium in her life, no more hospitals, no more dead people whispering in her ear.

  Spook's husbands offered little help. Through the dreary days of January, they spent more time with each other—drinking, sulking—than with Spook herself. On an afternoon in early February, Lincoln moved out of the house on Pine Hills Drive, renting a small guest bedroom in James's more humble residence on Spring Street. "Until this gets settled," he told Spook, "it's obvious you need time alone. James and I, we'll batch it for a while."

  Spook nodded. "Is he all right?"

  "I guess. Doesn't feel much like a husband."

  "No, I meant Baldy," she said. "You work with him. Does he ever—"

  "Oh, stuff it," said Lincoln. He picked up his suitcase, strode to the front door, then turned and studied her. "A word to the wise," he said. "People who want everything, they end up with nothing."

  Spook shrugged. "That's out of your stud handbook?"

  "No," he said, more gently than she deserved.

  It was not as if Spook had never known disappointment. On occasion, the extraordinary events of our universe can be explained by the purely conventional, the bizarre by the banal, and so with Spook Spinelli.

  She had been born a twin—Caroline to her sister's Carolyn—both blond and lime-eyed, identical except for their kidneys. At age five Carolyn had fallen ill with renal disease. Seventeen months later she died, and over the next year Caroline stopped speaking: a word here, a word there, little more. She was in and out of hospitals, subjected to the probings of child psychologists, but in the end her muteness seemed willed, entirely volitional, a product not of disease but of some fierce internal stubbornness.

  Her father nicknamed her Spook: to joke her into speech, to make light of the distanced, otherworldly quality that seemed to carry her through that terrible year.

  She heard voices sometimes, mostly her sister Carolyn's. She reverted to thumb-sucking. She giggled in her sleep. She was kept out of kindergarten and a good part of first grade.

  And then abruptly, just after her seventh birthday, Spook began talking again, whole sentences, as though she'd never stopped, and for the next five and a half years she was a normal, cheerful girl. People remarked on her lovely lime eyes, her sunny smile, her devil-may-care stance toward the world. Boys developed crushes. Teachers chuckled. An outrageous flirt, her father said. A born heartbreaker.

  At age twelve, on a rainy August afternoon, Spook dug a shallow grave in her back yard. Her mother found her there, lying face-up in the rain, eyes closed, hands folded at her waist, soaking wet, pretty as a picture. Spook did not speak again for eight months.

  Again there were hospitals, and this time drugs.

  Again, too, the recovery was sudden.

  "I didn't need to talk," she told her parents, and turned away, and said nothing more about it.

  She was sweet. She didn't want to frighten anyone.

  Except for one or two instances, Spook Spinelli's high school and college years passed with nothing more serious than a kind of charming exhibitionism. Public thumb-sucking, bared breasts in the yearbook, affairs with an assistant chaplain and a Marxist janitor and a wide assortment of very grateful students. She was well liked. She received excellent grades, shrugged off two abortions.

  After graduating from Darton Hall in 1969, Spook left Minnesota for Los Angeles, where her beauty and zesty appetites soon brought her to the bed of a forty-one-year-old screenwriter known for his uneven work in the dying genre of the western. Within weeks she had traded up for an actor, succeeded by a busboy, succeeded in due course by the keyboardist for a wildly successful rock band. Spook's future looked promising. Her name appeared twice in Variety. She was photographed beside Ryan O'Neal at a charity event in the Hollywood Bowl. But in the end L.A. went sour, which was partly her own fault. The keyb
oardist had no patience for Spook's courtship of a marginally more famous, marginally richer, marginally better-looking drummer for a competing band.

  "Chicks like you," the keyboardist told her on the night she was sent packing, "are what I write my saddest songs about."

  Spook returned to the Twin Cities. In less than a year she was engaged to Lincoln Harwood. Fourteen years later she married him. A long engagement, but worth the wait. Lincoln was financially secure, receptive to her eccentricities, and took pride in being the sequel to a rock star. Beyond anything, he loved her. Absolute and unqualified love, which was what Spook Spinelli required.

  In late February, a few weeks after Lincoln moved in with James, Spook hosted a strategy session with her two best friends, Jan Huebner and Amy Robinson. Amy had been divorced for just over a year, Jan for only a month, and their combined bitterness and realism brought wise counsel to the table.

  They met in the Pine Hills Drive residence. Coffee was served. "You know where this Baldy guy eats lunch," Amy said. "Take a job as a hostess. Show him your menu."

  "Work?" said Spook.

  "Forget it," said Amy.

  Jan Huebner cried. Then she said, "Spook, you're still beautiful—God knows how you do it—so why not be direct? Go to his house. Wear something slinky."

  "Exactly," Amy said. "Same sly crud you did in college. This coffee's delicious."

  "Kona," Spook said. "He won't see me."

  "E-mails?" Jan said.

  "Poof. Gone," said Spook. "As if I never wrote them."

  For a time they sat thinking.

  "Tell us more," Amy said. "Habits. Likes. Dislikes."

  "Weaknesses," said Jan.

  "Stuff we can use," said Amy.

  Spook did her best to recall the New Year's Eve conversation, but it was now an obscure buzz of innuendo and rising expectations. "Well," she said, "he's a Vikings fan. Football, you know?"

  "There you are," Amy said.

  "Where?" said Spook.

  "I'm not sure," said Amy.

  Jan Huebner teared up again. Her ex-husband had been a Vikings fan.

  "What about cartwheels?" Amy said. "A cheerleader, just like the old days, except now you're—what?—fifty-three, fifty-four years old. A novelty act, it'll knock him dead."

  "Fifty-three," Spook said crossly. "And I was never a cheerleader."

  "No?"

  "No," said Spook. She got up and stiffened their Kona with shots of bourbon.

  "Well, gosh," Jan sniffled, "you sure dressed like one. Everybody else in blue jeans, maybe a T-shirt, you show up in tinfoil shorts."

  "Not tinfoil," Spook said sharply.

  "Tinfoil," Amy said. "Tight tinfoil."

  "Metallic," said Spook. She smiled in recollection. "Flattering, I thought. Guys loved them."

  "Speaking of which," Amy said, "you owe me an apology. Billy McMann. Flash the tinfoil, steal him away."

  "That was love," Spook said.

  "This coffee does rule," said Jan.

  Amy's voice rose. "Give me a break. You didn't have to wreck it with Billy. My one chance."

  "Let's not fight," Jan said.

  "Let's," Amy said. "Unless she apologizes."

  "Apologize," Jan said.

  Spook shrugged. "Fine. I'm sorry. Billy loved me, though, and I loved him."

  "For six minutes," Amy said.

  "Stop it," said Jan, "or I'll cry." She pinched the bridge of her nose, blinked away the sting of a bitter divorce, a bitter marriage. "Listen, here's what Spook should do. She should march right into this guy's office—this Baldy manipulator—and she should pin him right to the wall and pry out some answers. He slept with you, right? On New Year's Eve?"

  "Pretty much."

  "Pretty much?" said Amy.

  Spook gazed into her coffee as if searching for something. "Lots of booze," she said. "I'm not sure he completely understood—you know—what happened."

  "Which was?" said Amy.

  "Cut it out. I needed the action. I'm married, for Pete's sake."

  "I'll say," said Jan.

  "In other words," said Amy, "the guy was in dreamland?"

  "Not totally."

  "I'm about to puke," said Jan.

  Amy Robinson took Spook's hand, held it for a second, then tapped her twin wedding rings. "This'll strike you as simplistic," she said, a little pompously, "but those two husbands of yours, they're nice people. More than nice. They're terrific. Jan and me, we've got zero. Try an empty house. Try going without."

  "Try loneliness," said Jan Huebner.

  "Try a vibrator," said Amy.

  Spook spread out her hands in exasperation. She wanted to speak, wanted to stand up for herself, but a deadening fatigue had come over her. Almost always desperate. Almost always afraid. Something sad and familiar was happening in her head, like a curtain coming down.

  Baldy Devlin was no longer the point. Spook wasn't sure if there was a point. She could scarcely recall the man's face, or what had so attracted her, or how she had ended up at this empty place in her life. She felt the horrifying press of middle age, plus the bourbon and the ghosts and the guilt and the endless pursuit.

  Nothing Spook could do. She let herself slide away.

  At one point she giggled.

  At another point, late in the afternoon, she put a thumb to her mouth and said, "Oh, hi," but no one heard her, and after that she said nothing at all.

  It lasted less than a month this time. James and Lincoln helped her through it, attentive and forgiving, and even Baldy Devlin showed up one day with flowers and good wishes. Spook watched the sunlight come and go. She ate meals, did some housework, allowed her husbands to hold her on alternate nights. If she had wanted to, she could've spoken much earlier, could've laughed and risen out of her silence and plunged headlong into some new and exhilarating affair of the heart. Instead, she claimed those days as her own. She allowed herself to be loved, found refuge in a doubled domesticity. What to an ill-informed, self-congratulatory stranger might have appeared peculiar or even bizarre—Lincoln pouring her morning coffee, James spooning in the sugar—was to Spook Spinelli a matter of the highest exigency, as essential as fresh meat to a Bengal tiger. Not that there weren't tradeoffs. There were many. And sooner or later, Spook knew, the curious circumstances she'd been given, or perhaps had chosen, would almost certainly lead to terrible things: a rainy day, a backyard grave.

  On a morning in late March, as she neared the end of her silence, Spook was visited by Jan Huebner and Amy Robinson. Both friends, like both husbands, were solicitous and understanding, their voices pitched low in deference to a larger, more catholic quiet. They kept Spook entertained with talk about their recent triumphs and troubles, news from old friends, an approaching college reunion. "I think it's sometime in July," Amy Robinson said, "so you've got a few months to get yourself together, plug up the leaks."

  "So to speak," said Jan Huebner.

  "Go shopping for tinfoil," Amy said. "Billy'll be there, I bet anything."

  "All six-three of him," said Jan.

  "Lying down," said Amy.

  Spook smiled a dreamy smile. Right then, she could've spoken, and almost did.

  She closed her eyes, put a thumb to her mouth.

  Already, in her rich imagination, Carolyn and Caroline were gliding hand in hand into the Darton Hall gymnasium, toenails blood red, hair highlighted, decked out in their matching bronze-and-silver miniskirts—maybe spike heels, maybe those sexy push-up bras to lead the way.

  Maybe Lincoln and James might come along. Maybe Baldy Devlin as a backup.

  Or maybe no one.

  Maybe this once she'd go alone.

  8. CLASS OF '69

  "I HAVE breast cancer. I'm fifty-two. Fifty-three in a week."

  "All the same," said Billy. "Still gorgeous."

  Dorothy Stier shook her head and looked away. "One never says, 'I had cancer.' One says, 'I have cancer.' It's like with brown eyes or a birthmark. You carry it to the grocery store. You
take it to the cemetery."

  "I'm sure," said Billy.

  They stood, half facing each other, at the edge of the dance floor. It was well after 4 A.M., and the gym was deserted except for nine or ten die-hard members of the class of '69.

  Billy tried to hurt her with his eyes.

  "Ron?" he said.

  "Fine. Rich. Pair of Volvos. Waxes the steel out of them."

  "And those boys of yours?"

  "Not boys anymore," Dorothy said, and laughed. "They're terrific. You'll probably meet them tomorrow."

  "No."

  "It wouldn't be a problem."

  "Still no."

  "Billy, that's absurd. Nobody cares what happened a whole lifetime ago."

  "Nobody, nobody," he said.

  "I didn't mean nobody."

  "I think you did."

  "Billy, be sweet. Meet the boys."

  "Thanks," he said. "Not my cup of tea."

  Dorothy frowned. "Dance, then?"

  "Too little, too late. Maybe a drink."

  "What's that in your hand?" said Dorothy. "Come on, please. One happy dance."

  "Cancer?"

  "Eight nodes, three years ago. I've got a chance. You used to adore dancing."

  "I used to."

  "Do you hate me?"

  "It helps."

  She rotated her jaw slightly, in the old way. Her makeup was thick and unconvincing. She looked ill. "Listen, I did what I had to do. My God, Billy, when does it stop?"

  "What's the 'it'?"

  "Hate," she said. "Wanting to hurt me."

  "No kidding?" he said.

  "Billy, let's dance."

  "Can't do it. Dance with Ron."

  Billy turned and moved to one of the tables in the darkness beyond the dance floor. For some time he sat alone, watching the tired faces bob above their name tags. Later, Dorothy came up to him and said, "Do you really want to leave it like this?"

  "Like what?"

  "May I sit down?"

  She sat on his lap.

  "Better?" she said.

  "Erases everything," he said. "Those two boys of yours. Do they have my eyes?"