“Dennis, where are you applying?” asked Lynn, ever the gracious mom.
“Ah, my old man’s after me to apply to Penn State ’cause he went there, but I heard about a school in Vermont that lets you work on a farm for a year.” Dennis rolled the question off his scrawny shoulders.
“Hannah’s applying to Amherst, Yale, and Princeton,” Barry cut in, and then he immediately regretted shooting his mouth off.
Who cared if she went to a snooty Ivy League school? On the other hand, this was a girl who breezed through twelfth-grade Latin in ninth grade at one of the best private schools in San Francisco. This was a girl who read all of Edgar Allan Poe and half of Shakespeare while her classmates were watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He wasn’t scrounging around for forty thousand dollars a year for her to learn to milk a cow.
“I just have a hard time writing about myself.” Hannah cocked a hip and wrapped a black curl around her finger, all hippie girlish modesty nowadays in front of her less-accomplished boyfriend. “It feels like bragging.”
“Blow your own horn or else there is no music,” said her father.
He wondered if it was his fault that she’d tried on so many different identities in so few years. She was a hyperfastidious little apple-polisher when they were living in Manhattan; but on the West Coast she’d started running with a crowd of status-mongering little fashionistas who hassled their parents to buy them Lexuses and encouraged one another to starve themselves. Now that she was in the ’burbs, she’d thrown in her lot with the Junior Environmentalists, the Goths, the punks, and all the other misfits who’d banded together because there were too few of them in each group to have a market share of their own. Maybe if he hadn’t moved the family around so much for work, she’d have a more stable crew to hang out with.
“Yeah, well, so that’s cool,” said Dennis with a kind of hangdog acceptance. “So, Mr. S, I heard you saw that body at the train station this morning.”
“Well, I guess I was one of the people.”
Barry looked uneasily from his wife to his daughter, trying to figure out who would have said anything.
“So, what did it look like?” asked Dennis.
“You know.” He looked over the boy’s head, trying to keep it casual. “It was a crime scene.”
“Is it true a crab crawled out of her neck?”
“Eeeww.” Hannah’s face stitched up.
“It was upsetting,” Barry said evenly, trying to keep the image out of his head. “But I’m sure they’ll find out who did it soon enough. In most homicides it turns out the victim and the suspect knew each other. So there’s not that much for the rest of us to worry about.”
Why they should have felt reassured by him, he didn’t know. By the time he was their age, he’d stopped believing three quarters of what his parents said.
He looked at his Rolex and then back at Dennis pointedly. “I’m sure you still got some more work to do tonight, don’t you?”
“No, I’m cool,” said Dennis, poker-faced and pretending to be oblivious to the hint.
“Hi, Daddy.”
Clay came trudging down the stairs in his big potato-sack jeans and black Stone Cold Steve Austin T-shirt, with Stieglitz, their horny old springer spaniel, following close behind.
“What’s the report, commander?” said Barry, trying not to let any of his concern show.
Once again, the kid’s weight had shot up alarmingly. He was looking a bit like one of the carnival cutouts of a little boy’s face on top of a huge bulging man’s body. Lynn had asked him not to say anything about the boy’s erratic eating habits. He’s getting self-conscious about his body, she’d said. It’s different for boys these days. Everybody’s supposed to be so fit and buff.
Well, he could come out and throw a ball around with me sometime, Barry argued. It wouldn’t kill him.
“How’s the Torah going?” asked Barry as the dog tried to jump up and lick his face.
“It’s okay,” said Clay, who was less than two months from his Bar Mitzvah. “You know, scrolling along.”
“I love the Old Testament,” Hannah interrupted, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “It’s so full of blood and human sacrifice. Dig it, man. It’s like Ozzfest.”
“So, what are you up to?” Barry ignored her as Stieglitz started to hump his leg.
“Um”—Clay’s eyes wandered up toward the exposed wood beams—“I think 3:16.”
“Oh, you are so busted.” Barry pushed the dog down. “You think I don’t know what 3:16 is? ‘“That’s the bottom line,” saith Stone Cold.’ You’re really going to make me and your mother proud if you get up and do that at B’nai Israel in front of two hundred people. I thought you were doing Abraham and Isaac.”
“I practiced for an hour and did homework for an hour. What do you want from me?”
“Hey, listen, it’s no skin off my nose. We can cancel the whole party if that’s what you want. I’m not looking to spend another seven thousand dollars this year.”
He saw the boy’s face fall and immediately admonished himself for wounding him. Very nice. The kid looks up to you and you embarrass him in front of his sister and her boyfriend because you’re feeling insecure about money.
“It’s all right.” He put an arm around Clay, noticing brownie crumbs by the corner of his mouth. “I’ll work with you on it later. I could use a little brushup myself.”
“Then can we play a little Home of the Dead?”
“Only after we get through the sacrifice. I don’t want you turning into a total mook.”
He loved his children with an intensity that scared him sometimes. He agonized through their minor illnesses and exulted in the tiny triumphs of their daily lives. He praised their finger paintings as if they were Rothkos, negotiated their endless demands for Barbie and Mortal Kombat, let them stick their grubby little fingers in his ears while he carried them on his shoulders, and bare-handed their vomit on long car rides to Maine. Occasionally, he missed his bachelor days, when he could afford to be a little more reckless about himself. Because over the years, he had learned that love did not, in fact, make you whole. Love broke you up. Love smashed you into a million different pieces. Love left you distracted and worried. Love put your business in the street.
“Well, I think it’s time for my boot heels to be wandering,” said Dennis, going for a pair of steel-toed Dr. Martens by the front door. “I actually haven’t cracked the books for that trig test yet.”
Clearly, the party was over now that the old Chastity Brigade had arrived in the ’97 Saab.
Barry wondered if his daughter was actually doing it with this malodorous milky-looking boy and, if so, whether Lynn had already taken her on a long car ride to discuss the appropriate measures to protect her personal environment.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” said Hannah, opening the door.
Stieglitz jumped up and down in front of the two of them, sticking his nose in their crotches as if he smelled some special heat there.
Barry watched them swat the dog away and go out, wishing for a moment that the house had a screened-in porch with an old rocking chair so he could sit with a twelve-gauge shotgun across his knees, creaking back and forth and reminding skeezy little Dennis to mind his manners with his daughter. For all her butt-twitching and occasional bratty sarcasm, she still seemed fragile to Barry at times, and as the door closed behind them, he thought he understood for a moment what it was like for air traffic controllers watching little turboprop planes disappear off their radar screens.
“Hey, somebody from your work called while Mom was out.” Clay started up the stairs.
“Who?” Barry called after him.
“Some lady.” Clay slouched over the railing. “Mrs. Spock.”
“That’s Lisa, our chief science officer,” said Barry out the side of his mouth. “She leave a message?”
“She said she has the tricorder readings and needs to be beamed up right away.”
Lynn probed him with h
er eyes. “What does that mean?”
“It’s just corporate hyperbole. Hey, Clay, do me a favor. Don’t press against that thing so hard. You’re gonna break the spindle, and then we won’t be able to find one that looks the same to replace it.”
The boy straightened up, looking slightly hurt, as if his father had criticized his weight directly. Barry reached over to muss his hair, but Clay raced the rest of the way up the steps, tramped across the landing overhead, and slammed his bedroom door.
“Is something going on?” asked Lynn.
“No, everything’s fine. I’m just working with a bunch of thirty-year-olds who’ve never been through a downturn. Every little dip feels like Armageddon to them.”
“I saw the stock took another pounding today.”
“Well, I told you not to look at it every day, didn’t I? That’s how you drive yourself crazy. It’s a long ball game.”
“You’d tell me if we were in serious trouble, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course.”
He kissed her on the forehead, picturing himself as a suspicious package on an airport security conveyor belt, encased in lead and impervious to X rays.
“Listen, we have our health, we have our children, and we have a home in a relatively safe place,” he said.
“Don’t fuck with me, Barry Schulman. I know you too well.”
“Hey, you’re the one with all the deep dark secrets about your old boyfriends.” Her lips parted slightly, just short of a knowing smile.
“How bad was that breakup anyway?” he asked.
“He messed up some of my pictures at a high school show.”
“Really?” He felt like someone had just popped him on the shoulders with two open palms. “And that guy’s a police lieutenant and he knows where we live?”
Instinctively, he found himself sticking his chest out.
“Relax.” Lynn patted him. “It was a long time ago, and he has a wife and three kids now. I’m sure he doesn’t still feel the same way. And to tell you the truth, I wasn’t a totally innocent party either.”
“Whatever that means,” he said.
He studied her, discerning the things that would turn a sensible man into a disgrace. Not just the cheekbones, the slender responsive body, the dark hair, or the way her skin glowed as if she were lit from within. It was her eyes. Her way of looking at you and seeing things you didn’t know yourself. Over the years, he’d seen other men—sometimes even close friends—quietly get hooked on her, but never to the point where he actually had to tell one to back off.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said, starting up the stairs. “But can we have a serious talk about money one of these days?”
“We’re always talking about money, even when we’re not talking about it.”
“Ugh. What a terrible thought.”
He studied the arch of her back as she climbed the steps, leaving him to his own devices in the living room.
Outside the front bay window, the stars in the night sky were fragments of bone china smashed on a black floor. He listened to Stieglitz barking and Dennis’s phlegmy old V-6 engine fading down the driveway as his daughter started that long lonely walk back up the gravel path. He remembered that she didn’t have any shoes on when she left the house, and the image of her walking over sharp little stones for this boy filled him with tender foreboding and wonder.
Light fog filled in the corners of the windows. A stiff wind rattled the shutters and made the pool cover in the backyard flap like a great fallen wing. This summer had lasted longer than any he could remember. It was even warm and clear that morning when he first saw that American Airlines plane flying so low between the buildings that he could almost read the lettering on its side. But now he felt the chill in the air and sensed that the long arrogant season was finally ending.
8
BY AROUND MIDNIGHT, Mike had reached the point in the evening when he was too exhausted to keep working but way too wired to go straight home. He’d been up since six, and his mind was full of flying dust and seeping gases. In the old days, he could’ve rallied the guys from his shift for choir practice in the parking lot behind the old station on Bank Street, drinking like lords and bellowing into the night until somebody fell face first into a puddle of his own piss. But these days, everyone was so temperate and married, a bunch of Baby Bores rushing home to change diapers and sing lullabies. Bit by bit, he’d become one himself, though there was still that side of him that needed to bay at the moon once in a while.
Shit. What was he going to do? He knew he should just drive home, tuck the kids in, have the usual tense few words with Marie in the kitchen, and then go downstairs and start working on a game plan. But the thought of sitting still at this point made him gnaw the inside of his mouth.
Where else could he go, though? It wasn’t like he could just pick up the phone and hash things out with Harold anymore. The man was chief. You had to watch your step around him. All the same, he found himself wanting to be around familiar things.
He thought of cruising past Lynn Stockdale’s house again. Just for the hell of it, he’d run the license plate number on the Motor Display Terminal in the car to see if the husband had any outstanding DUIs or moving violations. Not that he was looking to make trouble or get his balls in a jam. He’d only gone by the house—what?—maybe three or four times since he spotted her crossing the supermarket parking lot in March and looked up her address on the computer. You couldn’t call that a habit, could you? He was satisfying his curiosity, that’s all. Seeing how she’d made out for herself, coming a little farther up the driveway each time, to get a better look.
It was only five minutes from his house anyway, so what the fuck. It wasn’t doing any more harm. He made the abrupt turn off Grace Hill Road and cut the lights on his unmarked Caprice halfway up the long gravel path. The old farmhouse with the leaky roof and the sloping property lines. Local legend was, Farmer Grace, who used to live here, got captured and tortured by British loyalists in the Revolution. Supposedly, they hung him by his thumbs trying to get him to tell where he’d hidden all his money. Must have been a tough bastard, because he never cracked; his wife, on the other hand, gave up the booty in a New York minute, wailing about how she couldn’t stand to see the man suffer. Women.
He pulled off to the side and got out with the binoculars he used for his occasional on-duty birding expeditions. Shafts of light streamed out of the house, stark white diagonals stabbing through the trees. He raised the binoculars, adjusting the focus knob with his index finger. Lynn blurred and then came into focus. She was downstairs in the kitchen, rubbing lotion on her chin and hands and fixing herself a drink. The usual routine. She’d taken a shower, and her hair was still damp and sleek, as if she’d just emerged from the river. A white terry-cloth bathrobe parted at her collarbone, revealing a fair glistening delta. This was insane. He knew he shouldn’t be doing this again, especially not today of all days. But certain women were viruses. You couldn’t get rid of them. They got into your bloodstream and seared your veins.
He turned the knob another three or four degrees until the view was sharp enough to read the label off the Chardonnay bottle and see the little hairs clinging to her temples. When he tried to fine-tune the focus a little more, she turned into a cloud of white cloth and floating dark hair.
He raised the glasses and saw the husband upstairs in the bedroom, taking off his tie and sneaking in a quick furtive phone call. Kiss my ass. He’d never liked these city guys anyway. Always jabbering at you when they came to renew their parking permits for the station, always making speeches at the School Board meetings—Let me tell you something, I pay taxes here too—as if they were volunteering at the firehouse every Saturday washing the hook-and-ladder truck. All right, you bought your wife a big house with a swimming pool and a rolling lawn that you pay somebody else to mow once a week. The skin hadn’t started to separate. Okay, jerk-off. Let’s trade places. I’ll give you the shield and you give me the big h
ouse and the wife and we’ll call it even.
He panned around the grounds with the binoculars, taking in the vinyl-mesh deer fence, the covered pool, the gnome with the basketball, and the small blue ADT security system sign on the window near the door. Incredible. A man pays more than a half-million dollars for a house with less than four acres, jacking up the prices on all the working people, and then pays less than two grand to have the property protected? Any moron crackhead burglar knew where to cut the line so he could have the run of the place. A man that careless didn’t deserve what he had.
He took a few more cautious steps up the driveway, raising the glasses to see if he could find the kids’ bedroom windows. There was a dim pale glow from behind one of the curtains. One of the children was still up. The girl was about the same age Lynn was when he’d gone out with her. Was it possible that that much time had passed? He remembered how she used to buck and try to roll him off when he got on top of her, especially when he got a little rough. One time, he found his hands around her neck, squeezing. She said she didn’t like it, but he knew she did. She liked to feel his power over her. The fact that she wasn’t easy to push around only made it better. He hated the ones who just rolled over and played dead.
He lowered the binoculars and turned the focus knob back a few degrees, and there she was again, still gleaming and damp from the shower. He remembered that day they went swimming in the river. The cocky way she hooked her thumbs under the bra straps and gave him that look over her shoulder, daring him to follow. A sense of yearning rose in him like a compass needle finding magnetic north. She always managed to stay a little bit ahead of him, no matter how hard he fought the current. She was absolutely fearless back then. He could still see her pitching her white body against the black tide, riding the swells, always receding, never looking back. That was the thing he should’ve noticed then: she never looked back.
He fine-tuned the focus again, wondering why any woman with two children had the right to look this way after twenty-five years. It was as if several other ladies had given more than their share of ugliness to make her. His own wife was getting a little thick and knobby these days. Shouldn’t Lynn be marked, wrinkled, or tainted somehow, especially after what she’d done to his family?
The Last Good Day Page 8
