Illumination Night

by Alice Hoffman

  Vonny is let into the apartment by a maid named Odell, who clearly doesn’t remember her and who asks that she wait in the hall. Along this hallway are four bedrooms, a maid’s room, and offices for both Reynolds and Gale. Gale is a therapist whose specialty is rich young anorectics, whom she urges to eat. The one time Vonny peeked into her office she saw Limoges dishes filled with chocolate hearts and sweet dried apricots. From the doorway where she stands, Vonny can make out the dark couches and veined marble tables in the living room. The ceramic peacocks are still there, guarding the dining room doorway. The apartment is freezing, and Vonny’s dress, still damp with sweat, clings to her back. Goose bumps rise on her skin. She has a moment of panic so severe she wonders if she has amnesia. Now that Simon and Andre seem like a dream she cannot imagine what she’s doing here. What has she come to ask for? What can she really expect? She puts her suitcase down on a mahogany table, then opens her pocketbook and searches for a brush. When she turns to a gilt-edged mirror and brushes the lank hair away from her face she sees a tall, dark woman with severely cut hair who wears a beige dress, a thin gold wedding band, a pink ivory bracelet. The only part of her that seems familiar are her eyes.

  Reynolds’s sudden presence startles her. There is a moment when they don’t know how to greet each other. Finally, Vonny laughs and shakes her father’s hand.

  “This is a great surprise,” Reynolds says, and Vonny is not quite sure if he means it’s a pleasant surprise or a nasty one. The last time she brought Simon here he was eighteen months old, and Reynolds advised Vonny that she would have to pay for anything Simon broke.

  She lets him guide her into his office, the place where he keeps his gold coins. It’s impossible to hear any street noise up here. They might as well be in the clouds. A worn maroon-colored rug covers the parquetry floor and two easy chairs face Reynolds’s desk. As Vonny sits across from her father, she feels like an unskilled laborer on an interview for a job which she is monumentally unqualified.

  “I never leave the apartment when it’s this hot,” Reynolds says. He pours himself coffee from a silver pot, then, as an afterthought, offers Vonny some. Vonny nods, but what she’d give anything for is a cigarette. She has not had one since she began to try to get pregnant. Now she feels like asking her father to wait while she runs down to the drugstore.

  “Andre and Simon doing well?” Reynolds asks.

  “Very well,” Vonny says.

  “Mother still with her optometrist?”

  “Delray Beach,” Vonny assures him.

  Reynolds has a lopsided grin that appears as he thinks of Vonny’s mother safely removed to Florida. He is quite a powerful presence really. Vonny would hate to come up against a banker like him should they have to get a mortgage on the house. She is certain that Reynolds would never grant a mortgage to self-employed people who have no regular income.

  “Where are you staying?” Reynolds asks.

  Vonny is tongue-tied. Surely he has seen her suitcase out in the hall. If there is such a thing as a disinvitation, Vonny has just received it. Quickly she says, “Jill’s. Out on the Island.”

  “Sweet girl,” Reynolds says.

  Vonny does not bother to mention that this sweet girl now has teenage daughters.

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” Vonny says. She leans forward, knowing she looks desperate. “I’m here for a reason.”

  “Are you?” Reynolds says.

  Vonny can tell he has been waiting for this day. After so many years he continues to view his first marriage as a noose around his neck.

  “Whatever it is,” Reynolds says, “I’d prefer to get it over with before Wynn comes home.”

  Vonny pushes her coffee cup away. Wynn doesn’t quite know who she is. At most he has seen her four or five times. Once, when Wynn was five or six, Vonny called her father Dad in front of him, and Wynn’s head snapped up, his attention focused. Vonny realized he had never been told that his father had been married before. She wonders sometimes if he’s figured it out or if he imagines she’s an aunt or a distant cousin. But Vonny understands what Reynolds is getting at. He has erased the failure of his first marriage, which includes erasing Vonny. It is the natural progression of denial. And yet something in her curdles when he protects Wynn from her. She feels less like a beggar now than a thief. Before she was married, Reynolds and Gale took her out to dinner. Just before dessert Vonny noticed that Gale was wearing the ruby ring Vonny’s grandmother had always promised her. Vonny excused herself, went to the women’s room, and threw up. It does not make any sense; Vonny hates jewelry, it is nothing but a nuisance to her and yet she still wants that ring. Secretly she hopes that one day they may discover that the ring, which her grandmother bought in India, has been dipped in slow-acting corrosive acid that wears away flesh or that it carries a curse that robs the wearer of speech.

  So far, Gale is still talking. Vonny can hear her now out in the hallway. And the quiet voice of a boy. Wynn. Reynolds grows impatient. But there is something more. He seems afraid of Vonny.

  “What do you want?” he says.

  “I need money,” Vonny says, somehow thrilled by how crude she sounds.

  “Absolutely not,” Reynolds says.

  It is amazing. He doesn’t even have to think twice.

  “May I tell you what I need it for?” Vonny says politely.

  May I tell you how they stuck thirty-two needles into your grandson in one morning? May I tell you that if I can ever face my child and be this cold you have my permission to shoot me through the heart?

  “I don’t think I need to know,” Reynolds says.

  There is a brass letter opener on her father’s desk. Vonny is mesmerized by its sharp, cold shape.

  “You may like to think otherwise,” Reynolds says, “but I don’t owe you anything.”

  At home, Simon is probably waking from his nap and Vonny wonders if he’ll cry when he realizes she’s not there. Can it be that as a child she put her head on her father’s pillow the way Simon does when he comes in to sleep beside her? Can it be that he held her hand as they crossed the street? It does not seem possible that she is to Simon as Reynolds is to her. A lizard stands inside this equation, blocking its probability. On his flickering tongue there is a gold coin that he will swallow whole if he has to. Even if he chokes.

  “I need five thousand dollars,” Vonny says.

  “Earn it,” Reynolds suggests.

  Vonny’s mother, Suzanne, swears she fell in love with Reynolds because of his looks. This makes Vonny nervous. She wanted Andre for the very same reason. When she thinks of falling in love with him she thinks of his dark hair and of clothes he used to wear, an aqua-colored T-shirt and a worn brown leather jacket. She thinks of the heat that rose up from his skin. And there was something more. It amazes Vonny now but she was attracted to his silence, to the way he really seemed to listen to what she had to say. Her mother has told her that the deeper attraction for her was how honest Reynolds was, how little regard he had for money.

  It is terrifying how people can misjudge each other. Even more terrifying to think that an initial judgment was correct and that it is possible for someone to become utterly, unrecognizably changed. Vonny wonders if her mother would know Reynolds if she passed him on the street.

  Gale opens the door of Reynolds’s office. She freezes when she sees Vonny, but quickly regains her composure. She closes the door behind her and smiles.

  “Vonny!” she says, and for a moment Vonny thinks Gale is crossing the room to embrace her. Instead, Gale goes to Reynolds, kisses him, then backs away.

  “Wynn’s home,” she says meaningfully.

  Although Vonny knows she is too young to have a heart attack, there is an awful pounding inside her.

  “We’re talking about money,” Reynolds tells his wife.

  “That’s right,” Vonny says. She doesn’t make any attempt to control her voice when it breaks, even though she knows Reynolds recoils from anything remotely suggesting hysteria.
“Are you giving me the money or not?” Vonny says. “Let’s not waste our time, right? We don’t want to do that.”

  “Calm down,” Reynolds tells Vonny.

  Vonny can feel Gale studying her. Perhaps she is changing her diagnosis.

  “I’m perfectly willing to give you the five thousand,” Reynolds says. He would hate it if he knew there was an edge of hysteria in his voice, too.

  Vonny realizes that the one revealing piece of information she has about his childhood may not even be true. Suzanne has told her that Reynolds’s father used to tie him to the bed when he refused to go to sleep. Vonny wonders how her grandmother could have endured the screams. The sound of Simon’s cries makes her both stupid and fierce. She will do anything to stop them.

  “But I have to get something out of this, too,” Reynolds says. “I want you to sign an agreement disregarding the divorce settlement.”

  For a moment Vonny is confused. Has he forgotten she is not the one he divorced?

  “I want to be free to make my own choices,” Reynolds says. “It’s my goddamn right to make my own choices.”

  Meaning Vonny will get nothing, rather than the fifty percent of his estate Reynolds agreed to when he was so desperate to end his marriage to Suzanne. Vonny has told no one how much she stands to inherit. Even Andre has no idea that his mother-in-law, who has lately joined her neighbor on her porch every evening to search the horizon for UFOs, managed to get Reynolds to agree to her terms.

  When Vonny sees how carefully Reynolds and Gale are watching her, she knows she has them. For this brief moment they will do anything she asks to get her to sign. To test her powers, Vonny asks for a cup of tea.

  Gale jumps up from the arm of the couch where she’s been sitting and immediately calls into the hallway for Odell. Gale’s haste makes Vonny wonder if she could ask for ten or fifteen thousand. Even push her luck and ask for twenty. Reynolds would scream at her, he might have to hold himself back from striking her, but in the end he would probably agree. She thinks of what all that money would mean to them. She thinks of fuel bills and college tuition and a closet full of new clothes. But something stops her. Something makes her idly cross her legs and wonder if Odell will remember lemon for the tea. How ridiculous to think she would be spending the night here. It almost makes her laugh.

  Gale returns with the tea. There are both a plate of lemon slices and a small silver pitcher of cream. They will ply her with cream. Vonny knows they are equally kind to their cat, a sleek black thing whose name she has never managed to learn. As she drinks her tea Vonny wonders if she can get to Penn Station in the next twenty minutes and beat rush hour. The Long Island Rail Road will have her at Jill’s before suppertime. Tonight Vonny will sleep two doors down from where she used to live. A long time ago her father made homemade apple pies, in defiance, she knows now, of the factory pies his own father produced. First he cut the apples on a wide wooden board. Then he squeezed lemon on the slices so they would not yellow as he made the dough. He turned butter and flour into crust and pounded it out until the kitchen table shook. He used only brown sugar, never white, and he preferred green apples to red. In every pie he made there were four apples, unpeeled, but carefully cored by hand.

  Vonny is fairly certain Odell has been told to keep Wynn in the kitchen and, in a way, she’s sorry. She would like to really look at him and see if there’s anything at all familiar in his face. When she tells Reynolds she cannot agree to his terms, he tells her he expected as much. He thinks her decision has something to do with money, but it has more to do with the look on his face when he asked where she’d be staying that night. She is actually looking forward to the heat out on the street, to the long run through the cavernous station so she will not miss her train. She sees herself to the door, so eager to be gone from her father’s house that she can barely contain herself until the elevator reaches the lobby.

  On the way out to Long Island, Vonny wonders what she would do if Simon and Andre were both on the train and the underwater tunnel they sped through exploded. Which one would she save? She knows right away, the answer is Simon. Andre, she is certain, could take care of himself. And she does not see any point in clawing her own way to the surface if there is no one else worth saving. The surface is all illusion anyway. The tall buildings, the taxicabs, the train tracks through Queens are all reorganized dust. Vonny assumes she can get a mortgage on their house or, at the very least, a personal loan. Though she knows it is late in life to realize this, or even to care, she now sees that if she had been given her grandmother’s ring she would now take it off her finger and let it drop to the floor, listening with great pleasure as it rolled to the rear of the train.

  SIMON begins to miss his mother after his nap. It is not so much a thought as an ache, as though he has eaten too many sweets. When his father fixes his snack, Simon cries because there are no rice cakes, even though he doesn’t even like rice cakes anymore. His mother always gives him orange juice, never cranberry. He gets his father so mad that he says, “Damn it, it’s this or nothing,” as he throws a bag of saltines on the table.

  Afterward they eat in silence, chewing saltines and slices of cheese, not daring to look at each other. The windows are all open but the air is motionless, hanging heavily in invisible threads. Nelson has not moved from the ditch he dug that morning in the shadiest part of the yard. While Simon pours dog food into Nelson’s bowl with a plastic measuring cup, Andre calls around to see if there’s someone for Simon to visit so he’ll be free to finish work on the Harley he hopes will cover Simon’s medical bills. He tries the members of the defunct playgroup first, but Matt has already left for the beach and Kate’s grandparents are visiting. Andre calls the Freeds as his last hope. Eleanor Freed doesn’t have the faintest idea who it is she’s talking to until Andre identifies himself as Simon’s father. She is so startled by her surly neighbor’s pleasant request she tells him to bring Simon right over, then instantly regrets it.

  Simon is filling the dog bowl dangerously high. Pieces of kibble start to fall into the metal water bowl. The kibble expands in water, and when Simon reaches for the pieces they dissolve in his hand. Nelson is all right, but he never wants to play. To get him to chase a ball you have to make a big deal out of it. When he finally retrieves, he lays the ball at your feet, then flops down, exhausted. Nelson is really his mother’s dog, and Simon begins to miss his mother all over again. Andre hangs up the phone and takes the measuring cup away before Simon makes any more of a mess.

  “Let’s go,” Andre says cheerfully.

  When they get outside, Simon runs toward the truck, but Andre shouts, “Hey, wrong direction.” Simon stops and looks back. He has to shade his eyes with his hand and he still can’t quite make out his father’s face.

  “Over here,” Andre calls.

  Simon runs over to the shed and watches as Andre pulls out the bike.

  “Let’s test drive it,” Andre says.

  Simon’s energy level rises one hundred percent. Andre and Simon both know that if Vonny were here Simon would not be allowed on the Harley. It is all Andre can do to get Simon to stand still so he can fit the helmet on and tighten the strap. He reminds Simon twice that he must hold on. He cannot let go of his father’s belt for anything. Simon steps back while Andre kick starts the Harley. Then Andre reaches out a hand and helps Simon onto the rear of the bike. Simon’s knees stick out; he holds on to Andre’s leather belt with sticky fingers. It is less than a mile to the Freeds’. If they are lucky they will not meet up with the border collie who chases anything slower than the speed of light. Simon laughs and holds on tighter at every bump in the road. Halfway there, Andre remembers that the last owner of this bike was killed at a traffic circle in Eastham. He didn’t pay any attention when the owner of the junkyard told him this, but now Andre breaks into a cold sweat. He slows down and takes the turn into the Freeds’ driveway carefully. He unhooks the helmet and lifts Simon off the bike. Up on the porch, Eleanor Freed waves.

&
nbsp; “Are you sure he’ll feel comfortable here?” she calls to Andre.

  “Oh, yeah,” Andre assures her. “He’ll do just fine.”

  Samantha Freed, now six years old, is attaching a white laundry rope to a magnolia tree. She pulls the rope and winds the other end around the trunk of an old crab apple. Simon reaches up and grabs his father. He vaguely remembers Samantha from last summer, but he’s never actually played with her before, and his mother never just drops him off anywhere, she always stays with him.

  “I’ll be just down the road,” Andre assures him. “By the time I come to get you, you won’t want to leave.”

  “Stay,” Simon begs his father, though he doesn’t know why. He’s not sure his mother would approve of this, and he’s not sure he does either.

  Andre leans down and gives him a hug. Samantha Freed pulls the rope so it is tight and about six inches off the ground. She wears polka-dot shorts and a blue T-shirt. She sits down and takes off her sandals and her socks.

  “Just call if you want me,” Andre says.

  He makes Simon repeat their phone number. As he says the numbers, Simon squints in the sunlight to see what Samantha is doing.