Sinister Shorts
Page 24
He turned up the volume and listened to Ben Stiller, eyes still on his prizes.
“She's too pretty for him, and way too bright,” Laura said, interrupting a bad movie joke.
Daniel pulled out a notebook and took notes. Fan dozed while her baby sucked on a bottle, Curly wiggled the baby on her knee, Mole's baby adjusted itself and continued to sleep.
“Did you ever think, ‘Oh, I wish I had it all in hand'?” Laura asked him.
“I do have it all in hand.”
She was quiet for once.
Most of the passengers had pulled down the plastic screens over their windows so that the movie could be seen, which dipped them all in gloom. Hollywood droned on. A few people snickered. Very few laughed outright.
Daniel punched the buttons on the seat beside him, lowering the volume back to nil. He watched the women, annoyed with himself. He had remarkable instincts. Everybody said so. Why, then, so much trouble today?
All mothers looked alike. The thought sneaked in and he laughed. A few people looked at him. He examined the thought, found it unworthy, and laughed again. Well, he said to himself, once he was able to get himself under control, better locate some differences pronto.
Beside him Laura, who had been so critical earlier, laughed at bumbling Ben.
After the movie, the attendants came around with more drinks. Passengers were advised to use the facilities before landing began. Each of the three moms took a turn in the bathroom. He timed them. Each took about the same amount of time.
He strolled the aisles, taking a closer look. He couldn't tell one baby from the next, much less align its features with its purported mother.
The three moms all seemed equally nurturing, nervous, tired, concerned. They all, despite relative youth, had dark bags under their eyes. After the movie, the babies all began to fuss, one more than the others, but the mothers' anxious ministrations all seemed equally determined, loving, and calm.
The babies all cried during the landing. All the moms shoved bottles at them, and all the babies batted the bottles away, faces purple, ears apparently popping.
Laura, after exclaiming over the view of the islands on the way down, hadn't said anything in a long time. As they stood in the aisle waiting for the signal to disembark, he reached up into the bins for their winter coats. She said, “I've imagined this moment for so long. When we get off the plane, it's gonna feel like heaven should feel. Like velvet. Warm, silky, soft air.” She sighed.
“It'll be hot all right,” Daniel agreed, then he turned his attention back to the women. Fan, one hand holding a bottle, had her baby tucked up on her shoulder facing to the rear. Now quieted, it peered confusedly at the people standing behind her in the line. Curly, grappling with a massive carry-on, was still seated and trying to get organized. The woman beside her was holding the baby while Curly apologized and stuffed toys, diapers, rags inside the bag. Slightly ahead of her, Mole stood, baby neatly tucked into a fabric sling over her stomach, her bag on rollers behind her.
“Why did we come, Daniel?” Laura stood in front of him in the aisle, where the passengers were lined up like airplanes on the runway awaiting a signal to go.
Trapped.
“You don't give a damn about the weather. You don't care where you are. You haven't looked out the window once.”
“Laura,” he said urgently, keeping his voice down. “Not now.”
“You don't care about me.” She was bristling like a terrier.
“Oh, geez. Not true.”
He saw hurt and anger in her eyes and he didn't have time for this shit right now.
With relief, he saw the line ahead of them stirring. He could still pull this off. He considered shoving past his suddenly difficult wife, but with all the luggage jamming the aisle, he didn't think he could do it without raising some kind of general alarm, the last thing he wanted to do. “Please. Let's just get out of here. I hate being crowded.”
Laura set her carry-on down on his foot. Hard.
“Ow.” He kicked it off.
“I'm not moving until you tell me what's going on.”
Fan was making her way toward the front of the plane.
“Shit, Laura! Go, will you? You're holding all these people up.”
“I was so excited about this trip, the two of us. Only I expected everything to be different. I bought a new bathing suit. I thought we'd snorkel. Play. Love each other.”
Curly shuffled ahead, apologizing, knocking into people with her bulky bag, disappearing into the business class section.
He nudged Laura with his hip. “Honey, move it!” When she didn't move, he tried going around her. She turned to face him, stretching her arms out to block him.
Up ahead, Mole exited, her pink shirt flapping behind her. “Christ!” he said. “Please, Laura!”
Behind them, other passengers began stealing across the middle aisle to the other side of the plane.
He considered bolting, but only for a second. The look in her eye riveted him.
“It's one of those women, isn't it?”
“What?” He wanted to laugh but he didn't have time. “No.”
“It's her,” she said. “The pretty one.”
In spite of his consternation, he had to ask, “What are you talking about?”
“The one with the bogus baby. Did you think I wouldn't notice?”
“Notice what?” He felt his heartbeat all the way down to his fingertips.
“What's she, an au pair? A babysitter?”
“Who?” he asked urgently. “Which one?”
But Laura was on her own jag. “You had me so thrown off, the way you eyeballed those other two mothers. But you're devious, I guess I know that because of your work. Maybe you imagined you could throw me off that way? And for a few minutes there, I tried to think they just reminded you of… of me, when I first had our children. I thought you were remembering what I was remembering. I imagined tenderness.” A tear hung in the corner of her eye.
Registering it, he felt forced to ignore it for the moment. “You said bogus baby. What are you talking about, Laura? It's important.”
“At first I thought she was just another mother. She had me fooled for at least five seconds.”
“My God, honey, help me here. Which one had you fooled? Who?”
“Don't lie to me. You bribed your mother. I wanted to think it was for us. Now I know it wasn't.”
The three moms would be in the terminal now, buying tickets to places where the palm trees could hide them forever, waving down taxis, catching rides, out of his reach unless he could find a way out of this mess right now.
“Which one?” he yelled, grabbing her arm.
She pulled it away, reached down, and unzipped her bag. She pulled out a big straw hat. “I'm going down that gangplank onto the tarmac. I'm going to feel that sun-soaked air, and I'm going to love it. And I'm going without you.”
“For God's sake, Laura! Which one? Which one is bogus?”
The line behind them emptied as their fellow travelers continued to skulk furtively over to the next aisle and out the front.
She gave him a hard look and saw something new. Her expression changed. “Oh, Daniel,” she said, worriedly. “I got it wrong, didn't I.”
“You sure did!”
“It's work, isn't it? My old familiar rival. Same old, same old.”
“Yes, yes. It's work! Now who the hell is she?”
“Tell me why you need to know.”
But he was not supposed to tell. He couldn't share such things with her. She stood in one place, he stood in another. They stood frustrated in the airplane aisle, immobilized by her recalcitrance and his stubborn maleness.
“Tell me.”
She knew little about his work, except that mostly he did things he couldn't talk about.
He had no choice, and for once, he had no doubt he was doing exactly the right thing. “It's a kidnapping, Laura. She stole the kid.”
Laura's reply came instantly. “The
one in the yellow sundress.”
Fan.
“Go get her.” She stepped aside.
He ran.
The authorities in Puerto Rico arrested the woman in the yellow sundress just as she was trotting toward a plane for St. Kitts, ran her face and stats through their computers.
Fan was their bogus mom.
Baby was returned home to his, as it turned out, frantic family in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Daniel and Laura flew to Tortola and stayed for three weeks at a villa near Smuggler's Cove, Olga be damned. Laura loved the air, the humidity, the silver waves. Daniel loved Laura.
“Now,” he said that first night, the one where she wore the slinky black nightie until, four piña coladas past the yardarm, he tore it off her with his teeth. “How did you know it was her?”
“She got off the plane with a baby on her shoulder and a bottle in her hand. So where was her diaper bag?
“No insecure new mom goes anywhere without a pile of changes, activities, toys. She had one diaper, two bottles, no bag. I couldn't help wondering, where's the stuffy, the rattle, the plastic key set? Where's Shamu the stuffed whale?”
Daniel said, “I owe you, honey.”
“Then pay up,” Laura said, and he grabbed her.
To Still the Beating of Her Heart
Leaving the shop behind, Claude stepped outside onto the street and took a deep breath of car fumes. He wrinkled his nose and finding that insufficient defense, blew it on an immaculate handkerchief. He zipped his new leather jacket, walked toward the subway, then stopped, laughing a little at himself. Habit, old scripts. He had plenty of cards and cash nowadays. He scanned the street for taxis, but saw none. Hands in his pockets, he reflected on the circumstance that had led him into the perfume business. He loved the smell of women. He drank in their radiant skin the way other men guzzled fine wine. His father, trained at the Henri Jacques Parfum House in France, had left him the San Francisco shop when he died, probably worried about Claude. “A man needs an occupation,” he used to scold, “even a gentleman.” After the inheritance, crazy in love with Clea, with an excellent education in French literature but no calling, Claude discovered the latent talent hidden in his untrained but eager nose.
He waved a yellow cab down, got inside, and shut the cold wind out. Today had been unusually successful. Four Asian females, all beautiful, all petite and dark with hair that gleamed like dripping oil, had bought out the majority of his stock of his most precious French scents, the ones he had manufactured especially for his shop. He had a special connection to the factory outside of Eze. The town hovered pretty as a sprawling vacation villa above the Mediterranean, and was very near where his father's relatives all lived, and where he had spent the majority of his childhood until the divorce, when his mother had brought him to the States to live near her family. He thought perhaps something floral would suit them, heavy on the tuberose, beeswax, and rose de May, with a slight tickle of sweet honey.
Bantering, friendly, fun-loving, these Asian customers knew how to make a good day great, how to flirt with a man, how to make him feel-manly. On the way out, the prettiest of the group slipped her business card into his pocket, whispering, “I'll be back at the hotel by eight tonight. Call me.”
Unbidden images invaded his mind. Six years of happy marriage had inured him to such invitations, but recently, he felt pulled in an unfamiliar way. He felt a weakening, a lack of moral musculature where there once was brawn. Still, he did not want another woman. Another woman would not be Clea. He wanted Clea back, the way she was the day he met her.
The trip to their home in Noe Valley shouldn't take more than ten minutes from downtown San Francisco, but tonight, with rush hour in full roar… the halts and jerks of the cab irritated him, obliterating the last traces of his good mood. He began to picture Clea, at the window at home, waiting for him, her beady, unmascaraed eyes never wavering from the street.
Beautiful, she had been, with her flaming red hair, her perfect body and intense intelligence. Passionate, loving, the ideal model for his products, Clea was his vision of female perfection. She looked as she was, like a woman with a career of her own, thoughts, opinions, life, so much life. Everything a man could want, she had been.
No longer.
Now she waited for him, and he felt her waiting like a cable car slipped off the track on Powell Street, going downhill and coming at him. He would show up in the taxi, pay the man, get out, and wave at her face in the window. He would try not to look, but he would feel the onslaught of her need. He saw it coming, and he was paralyzed in its face. He would be flattened, reduced to a blot of blood in the dirt between the tracks.
As he paid too much for the taxi, he steeled himself for the charge, turned, and smiled at the pale moon-face that glowed like a headlight.
For a long time after the accident, he had believed Clea would get better. Her doctors told them there was hope that she would improve over time.
They lied.
Hurting, he watched the changes reduce her. Her skin, once a lovely pink, drained and tinged to blue. The cantering of her mind-they had taken so much pleasure in the evenings together talking by the fire, entertaining each other with tales of their days and the people that mesmerized them like the characters in her films-ceased. Conversations drifted away, sabotaged by a narcotized mind. She slogged behind him now like a snail, leaving a sticky trail of regret for what was, and what would never again be.
Where before, Clea held his heart in her hands, his worshipful attendance on her after the accident had subtly altered the balance of power and thrown the weight of their lives entirely upon him. He toiled in the world, she stayed home. He brought whatever life there was to this house which would otherwise fall rank with decay as a deserted shack. Once upon a time, she could inspire a frenzy of lust with a brush of eyelash upon cheek. Now when her eyelashes brushed her cheek, he felt only relief. Would she fall asleep early? Could he, just this once, sit in his study and read the newspaper, like a normal man in a normal house?
So over time, he who swore eternal love faltered. Grated to shreds with emotion on a day when she had cried inconsolably for two solid hours, he decided to tackle the issue coldly. Like a scientist collecting data, for the past few weeks he had observed his reactions and Clea's; he graphed them, and now he had reached a conclusion.
His feelings had altered, inexorably. His perfect wife had become his gothic madwoman in the attic. Her tiny moans worked on him like screams in a horror movie, making him jump. No matter how well he kept the elements of his life separate, smiling through his days in the city, stronger by the minute in his business, every day when he came home, she shambled from the background into the foreground and choked the screen with her colossal presence.
He hated her.
However, the more he considered, the more he wanted to preserve the idea of them as they used to be. Clea must never know what the graph showed, its remorseless descent. That would break her heart. She deserved love, and he would continue to make her believe in it as a tip of the hat to their past shared happiness.
If along the way the effort had become exhausting, if, in spite of his best efforts, cracks had appeared in his facade, well, he was human. He had seen her tilt the angle of her head at the sight of the new model, for instance. He had seen her moment of uncertainty, and his pity welled at the sight.
As he pulled his keys from his pocket and opened the front door to the claustrophobic miasma of antiseptic, bleach, and sick, he promised himself he would renew his efforts to keep her happy. Later tonight, after she fell into her usual drugged stupor, he would give her a last chance. He would examine the emotional graph one last time, inspecting his heart for dishonor. He would convince himself that killing her was by far the best solution to her problem, and she would die securely in the warm bosom of their love.
Sad, things coming to this. If only he hadn't taken on the role of white knight. He was ill-suited to the position, he knew now.
Stupidity. Clea had been right. She foresaw the bitter ending before he did.
They could not continue like this. He hated the man she now made of him. He hated their life together. But what other life was there for her without him? He had taken the truth away from her. The lie she lived rendered her unfit to participate in these painful deliberations. As he had several times before, he pictured telling her the truth, that he didn't love her. A vision of her face hearing the news flashed before him. This repulsive image filled him with businesslike energy. He would decide what constituted a merciful future for both of them.
He cleared his throat, the better to inject false joviality. “Clea,” he said. “Darling.” He leaned over to kiss her lips, still soft, closing his nose against the smell of her, the dirty-hair smell the nurse had not managed to eradicate, the smell of ointments, emollients, and chemicals, with no aesthetics, no pleasures for a man with an educated nose.
***
The sight of Claude outside made Clea's heart pound shallow and fast. With him, came pressure. When he leaned down to kiss her, she felt afresh the wheelchair, the indignities of the day, her pain, her fears. She breathed harder, her asthmatic lungs contracting with her emotions. He floated in on a wave of fresh air, smiled, and made her wonder at his horrific tenacity. When had his love become such a burden?