Godsend

by Barry Knister

  Ivy was proud of himself because he had recorded his wife’s phone calls. Rivera unhooked the painting. He turned with it and looked down.

  “First, we’re going to get the Johns wherever you put it,” Ivy said. “Then we’re coming back here. You’re going to hang the picture where it belongs. Then we’re calling Immigration.”

  “Why?” Rivera had not seen the future until now.

  “Because I don’t like you, that’s why.”

  “We took good care of your father.”

  “‘No heroic measures,’” Ivy said, again imitating his wife’s voice. “‘No intervention.’”

  “Mrs. Ivy told me those were your wishes, not just hers. She told me your father said he didn’t want to live anymore.”

  “Dad didn’t know what he wanted.”

  Rivera sat on the chest and slipped off with the picture. He worked into his boat shoes. Ivy followed as Rivera moved toward the hall. “You knew she was screwing someone,” Ivy said.

  “It’s none of our business.” Rivera turned down the hall. “Our business is doing what clients ask us to do. We take care of people when the family isn’t available.”

  “Maybe you were on her to-do list, too, huh, Jimmy? A little tequila? She loves margaritas. Maybe a medley of mariachi favorites?”

  Rivera entered the dim bedroom and stepped up on the bed. He re-hung the bird picture and turned. Ivy was looking at him from the entry.

  “No, we just took care of your father,” Rivera said. “And lots of others. We take care of their needs. We listen to their stories. We don’t insult people who can’t remember what day it is. It’s our job.”

  “You’re good,” Ivy said. “No shit. You’ve got it down, the whole friend-to-seniors schtick. There’s just one problem. You hitched your burro to my slut wife. That’s what you did, and I checked you out. You aren’t kosher, Jimmy. There’s no such thing as James Rivera. You have a fake driver’s license and green card, and you know what? I think you’re going home real soon.”

  “I don’t want to embarrass him,” Brenda said.

  Schmidt drove without answering. He turned up the air conditioning. His rental was a Lincoln Town Car, and he had chosen it as a joke. His plan had been to show up in his summer shirt, playing the Naples sport for her by driving a huge boat of a car. Now the Lincoln seemed all wrong.

  They passed the clubhouse. People were still practicing their putts, and the women’s doubles match was still in progress. He remembered the stressed-out greenskeeper. The ladies were getting in a last set before karaoke.

  “You see what I’m talking about,” Brenda said. “The house is open, so there’s no reason to think anything’s wrong. His car’s there. We call, and the police show up just as he walks in the door.”

  Schmidt thought she was talking mostly to get him to answer. To get him involved. “He must know people here,” he said.

  “Rayette made some calls. Only two people on his street are here, and both of them work. Everyone else is out of town. She says no one’s seen him. He’s hard to miss.”

  “Yeah?”

  “About six-three, with white hair.”

  Stop being stupid, Schmidt thought. Stop feeling jealous over someone’s height and hair. He still felt bad about the Szechuan beef remark. “Wait a day,” he said. “Maybe someone picked him up. He could be doing business here.”

  “He’s retired,” Brenda said. “He was a lobbyist in Michigan.”

  “Okay, but he could own real estate. Maybe he’s checking out property.”

  Schmidt looked at her and back to the road. He glanced at the tennis players in his rearview.

  This is the payoff, he thought. A gated golf course for sales reps, lawyers, middle managers. Apartment-house owners. Lobbyists. This was life after work for people who had spent thirty or forty years earning a living. Now, they wanted distractions. Golf, of course, but also yoga classes and live music for dancing on weekends. Brunch on Sunday, cruises you could pick up on the cheap. Beach parties and book clubs, charity work, church fundraisers. Schmidt didn’t know why, but it all put him off.

  He pulled into her driveway and turned off the ignition.

  “Come on,” she said. “You must be hungry.”

  He undid his seatbelt and got out. Gardenia bushes were in bloom on both sides of the entrance. Schmidt stood smelling them, and now glanced at his carry-on bag in the backseat. Brenda was at the entry, waiting. She seemed truly glad he had come, but it would be awkward now, getting the suitcase out, bringing it in with him. Get it later, Schmidt thought, and moved toward the door. He reached her, and she took his hand.

  “What’s with the wheels?” She was smiling, looking at his rental.

  “I wanted to fit in,” he said.

  “To be a sport.”

  “That’s it. To be a regular Naples-type guy.”

  She raised his hand in hers, brought it to her face and smiled again. “Do I smell paint?” she asked. “Eggshell latex?” He smiled back, reassured she remembered he’d been working. But now she was serious again. “What do you want to eat?” she asked.

  “Whatever you’ve got.”

  “How about some brats?” Brenda smiled. “I must have known you were coming, I bought them on Saturday. Or we could have grilled shrimp.” She dropped his hand and readied her key, but turned back. “No, sorry, no shrimp,” she said. “I gave someone a lift on Saturday. All the way to Immokalee, where the workers live. When I got back here, the shrimp looked yucky.”

  “Brats, then,” he said. “Wisconsin comes to Naples.”

  “And salad with Marie’s chunky-style blue cheese. I have a baguette, there’s red wine and fresh fruit.” She opened the door. “The guy I gave the lift to is James Rivera’s cousin,” she said. “He locked the keys in his van.”

  Schmidt followed her inside. It was his first time in the front end of the house, and this, too, felt awkward. But it was Brenda, talking about food he liked and going on about giving someone a lift.

  “He installed these fans—” She pointed to the ceiling.

  “Nice.”

  “You’ve got your plantation shutters, your glass tables—” As she led him, Brenda was doing a routine, acting like a game-show hostess and waving her hand, caressing furniture. “You have your entertainment center, and out here—”

  “I already saw it.”

  Stopped now before the open door wall, Brenda turned to him. She appeared almost opaque to Schmidt’s sun-strained eyes. “I was here earlier, remember?” he said. “That’s how I knew to look up the greenskeeper.”

  “It’s so horrible to me, Charlie,” Brenda said. “His wife, and then the other. I couldn’t understand how someone could get through that. Sweeney was this jolly charmer on the plane. You know, all Irish blarney, telling me bad-boy stories about his life as a lobbyist. When I heard about his wife—it was an impulse, going to see him. I didn’t think about it, I didn’t have some idea. I thought it would be better not to eat alone, for both of us. That was all.”

  “Take it easy,” Schmidt said. “It’s all right.”

  “No—” she shook her head “—that’s a lie. I went there to ruin it between us. You and me. To do what I always do.”

  “Come on,” he said. “You were doing someone a favor. You hear this story, and think to give the guy some company. That’s you. You’re generous that way.”

  She didn’t say anything, just kept shaking her head slowly. I mean it, Schmidt thought. What’s the matter? What’s the big deal? You meet a guy, go to his house, have some carry-out—

  Then he got it.

  He laughed, a single, involuntary bark. In the last seconds his eyes had adjusted. He could now see her features outlined in the open entry. Blue pool water floated behind her head. He took a step, both to see her better, but also to make sure she saw that he finally got it. That at last, dense old Charlie Schmidt understood the reason behind her remembering he’d been painting, and naming food he liked, doing a game-sho
w routine. She was standing as she had on first seeing him, hands at her sides. Ready to take the oath, Schmidt thought. Ready to tell the whole truth and nothing but.

  “It was stupid,” she said. “Dangerous. All I can say is, I didn’t mean it.”

  “Dangerous how?”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “Are you talking about safe sex? He didn’t use a condom?”

  She took a breath and let it out.

  “‘I didn’t mean it,’” he said. “I’m supposed to know what that means?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Good. We agree on something. I’m slow, it takes a while, but I’m trainable. So, why don’t you tell me what it is you didn’t mean?”

  “Let’s not do this,” Brenda said. “Not now.”

  “You want to pencil it in for later in the week? Not now?”

  “We’ll eat something,” she said. “It’s no good fighting on an empty stomach.”

  He laughed again. It was bitter-funny to him. “So, you’re going to whip up one of old Charlie’s favorite snacks,” he said. “Give him a couple drinks. Then we can kick back and talk about how you didn’t mean it when you fucked someone you met on a plane.”

  “I didn’t fuck him,” she said, angry herself now. “I made love to him. I stopped fucking people years ago. Before that, I fucked them for recreation. For gym. Back in college I was the anything-goes girl. Really, that’s what they called me. You could find my name and number in toilet stalls all over Davison Polytechnic. Maybe you still can. By dangerous, I was talking about us.”

  Schmidt had the mental sensation of stumbling, of not being able to catch up with his thoughts. His feelings. He felt both superior and humiliated. He felt stupid. Looking at her, all at once he flooded with relief—his suitcase was still in the car. The meaning of this was out of all proportion to what it had meant moments before. But his joke over a ridiculous car now made him feel foolish. Exposed.

  And she wanted them to eat something. But he regretted saying fuck. It meant he had lost some kind of advantage. She had made him pay for it, and now, for just a moment, learning for the first time about her name scrawled on toilet walls—it softened him before her strained, pretty, sharp-featured face. Her chaotic hair. It’s always out of control she said of it, which was true, and Schmidt realized he was already being nostalgic. Thinking of her in the past tense. This, too, hurt. The idea of it.

  Brenda turned away. She stepped down to the deck, moved to the pool’s edge and looked at the water. “Maybe we should jump in,” she said. “Just trust to water.”

  Schmidt’s sympathy vanished. She wanted to just wash it away. Wanted to take a header into someone’s pool and call it a day. She turned and looked at him. “It’s there to do,” she said. “Enter a new medium. Anything’s possible.”

  If there was a reason, Schmidt didn’t see it. But her words now made him think of the frozen lake. Last night, he had ridden a snowmobile alone on the medium of frozen water. It had cleared his head, helped him to make up his mind. He had been as alone as the sole survivor of a crashed moon rocket. For no reason, remembering himself driving the snowmobile brought back his sense of gratitude and expectation. He had raced back to the cabin and made a sandwich, eating as he flopped open his suitcase and scraped hangers in the closet.

  “It takes time to meet,” she said.

  “Not for frequent fliers.”

  “Charlie, that’s not meeting. You know it isn’t. It’s the opposite. It’s what makes meeting someone take so long. I’m not just talking about you and me. I’m talking about meeting myself.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “To me, that’s monkey talk.”

  “We met last April. Really, how was it different from meeting on a plane? We were attracted immediately. In a strange place. Adventure. Disaster. We kept on meeting that same way, all these nine months. Right now, you’re meeting someone else. You don’t like this part. Why would you? I don’t either. I betrayed a trust. I’ve done this so often.”

  “Betrayed a trust? Not really.”

  “Don’t say it, Charlie. You know better. It doesn’t matter there’s no documentation or promises. Not between us. We both know better. I said words to you I didn’t mean, out of fear. And I had frivolous sex with Patrick Sweeney, and it was wrong, and I’m ashamed of it.”

  Maybe he understood. The anything goes girl, Schmidt thought. New discoveries, parts of the past coming loose—that’s what happened when you were with someone for years. The simple detail about her name scrawled on toilet walls in college hinted at all he didn’t know about her. He wanted to believe she was right.

  But as he stood feeling the slight breeze of a ceiling fan, it didn’t work. There were basics you needed to agree on. Fundamentals. Sex could be gym, or religion, or nothing at all. But you had to agree on it. You had to share that attitude. He was too old for surprises. Not this kind.

  “I’m going back,” he said.

  “Stay for the brats, then you can go.”

  “Are you trying to be funny? To me, this is not funny at all.” He still felt superior, but now the feeling was empty. He didn’t want it.

  “I’m trying to create some space,” she said. “Just an hour, some time—”

  “You want your space,” he said. “I get it. ‘Give me some space.’”

  Now Brenda laughed, a bark like his own. “You know that’s not it. Some time,” she said. “What are you afraid of? That I might talk you into something? I did something wrong. I made a mistake I absolutely regret, and I want an hour of your time.”

  “Why?”

  She sighed. Not because he was dense, but from the weight of the moment. He felt himself yielding. No, Schmidt told himself. No.

  “Because,” she said. “Why should a mistake have to lead to another? Why does there have to be some built-in destiny, some punishment for both of us, because I did what I did?”

  Think, Schmidt said to himself. With her, you had to. You couldn’t just blow her off, even when you wanted to hurt her. And he did. He wanted her to hurt the way he hurt.

  “If you go,” she said, “if you leave now, this will harden. For both of us. I know you enough to know you’ll work it over. You’ll worry it and study it. I won’t do that, Charlie. It’s happened so many times, I’ll just turn away and move on. Because it’s one more failure, and I’m not worthy.”

  She looked up through the pool cage. The sky had darkened.

  “Our start was twisted,” she said. “Terrible. Ugly. We live in different cities, and that’s made what happened easy to avoid. Because we didn’t want to risk how right we are together. For me, I’m sure facing what happened last spring would mean showing you much more about me. And I don’t want to. I’m afraid, and it’s what I always do, every time. But because of how we met and what happened, I can tell myself that’s the real problem. I talked about killing someone with Sweeney, a stranger. Someone I met on a plane. It was safe with him, it meant nothing. I think you went up to Minnesota for the same reason. To deal with it in your own way. I think that’s why I gave myself to someone I didn’t care about. I was grateful to him. Two people, Charlie, with secrets. If you go, that’s all there’s going to be.”

  Again Schmidt understood, and he thought she was somehow right. But his neck hurt from the flight. It made him think of his age. Of someone with white hair sitting next to her on the way to Florida. It made him jealous. It made him feel useless.

  The pool faced south, and a trace of western sunlight still glittered on the surface. He looked up through the cage at what just then were beautiful clouds, pastels. He felt alien, a northerner. With the pain in his neck, he again felt old, not up to whatever she wanted from him.

  That’s it, Schmidt thought. He turned and made his way through the house.

  Why are you speaking Spanish? You always tell me to speak English.

  Someone is with me. I need you to call Perez. Tell him to lea
se the big truck, and load everything at my house for Miami. Including my furniture.

  Why does this have to happen right now?

  Later, Ray. Don’t turn your pager off, keep it with you. Just tell Perez to be ready. I’ll be there in two hours.

  You’re going with the truck. You’re leaving.

  Don’t turn off your pager.

  This is about Marco, isn’t it? They called again.

  Tomorrow, I want you to take some money from the bank.

  All of it? Do we have to leave?

  Only me. Take a few thousand to be safe.

  “Come on, let’s go, let’s go—”

  George Ivy stood waiting under the light in his domed entry hall. Rivera pocketed his phone and knelt to re-tie his boat shoes.

  “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” Ivy said. “Just get the fucking lithograph and bring it here.”

  “You’re doing it because you’re a good man.” Rivera tied the other shoe. “You were mad before, I don’t blame you. I’m sorry about your wife—” He finished and stood. “But it has nothing to do with me. I don’t know about her life, I don’t know about art. I didn’t understand the picture was valuable.”

  “You can tell it’s worth money from what she says,” Ivy said. “‘He’ll go ballistic.’ What the hell did you think that meant?”

  Rivera stepped to him. “Only that you wouldn’t want anything missing.”

  “But you went ahead and took it anyway.” They looked at each other. Ivy’s fleshy mouth and blue eyes communicated contempt. “Not a good idea,” he said.

  “You’ll see.”

  Rivera got out his keys. Stepping around Ivy, he walked outside and moved toward the van. “I never took it off the property,” he said. The big door slammed behind him. “I took your picture to a safe place. From what Mrs. Ivy said, I thought the bird picture would be okay, you wouldn’t mind. Your mother painted it.”

  “Amazing.”

  “But if you wanted the 5 back, I’d go get it.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.” At the van Ivy waited for Rivera to use the remote. As the side panel slid open, Ivy held out his hand. “Give me my house key.” Rivera found it on his key ring, worked it off and handed it over. Ivy climbed in back and Rivera closed the panel.