What do you suppose goes on in that house?” asks Harry. “Two women like that, by themselves?”
His wife Mary sits opposite him in the matching beige recliner. She raises her eyes above her Book of the Month Club selection, and she looks at him, he thinks, as an object of study.
“Everything with you is sex, isn't it Harry,” she says, turning the page. Her book jacket is silver and black, with the author's name in 72-point letters. Every month it's Grisham or Steele or Quindlen. She ingests thousands of words a day under that Walmart pole lamp, and he wonders why none of them seems to move her.
“All this time we've lived here, I've never seen a man next door,” says Harry. “Those girls are only, what, forty. Maybe not even that.”
She remains hidden behind her book, sighs before responding. “When you help them move the refrigerator today, you can ask what they do. Maybe they'll let you watch.”
He imagines their neighbor Clara seated on the sofa in early evening, curtains closed. She's in a plush terrycloth robe, her long thin legs crossed, her toenails painted scarlet, the auburn hair unfurled and shining, unhidden by the painter's hat she wears while doing her yardwork. Her roommate Helen carries over the bowl of popcorn, watching Clara watch the video of the film Obsession which they rented for tonight. Clara uncrosses her legs as she scoops a handful of popcorn, her robe opening with her legs. Helen smiles, kneeling, and moves into the just showered, powdered, sweet warmth.
Mary clears her throat as she turns the page.
Harry asks, “When did Clara leave her husband?”
He catches her eyes above the book's spine, but they aim over him, searching the wall above his head for the answer.
“I don't know. A year before she moved in with Helen.”
“So that's nearly ten years without a man.”
“I've told you, Harry, that women are different.”
“Ten years. You think she just, you know, does herself?”
Mary rolls her eyes.
“They have a living arrangement,” she says. “Financial, whatever. They're best friends, like you and Ted.”
“Ted doesn't have a pussy.”
She gets up to leave the room, as he knew she would. Their son's death six years ago also meant the death of something more between them. It was as though the physics involved in the 18-year-old's 75-mph jetski bulleting into a concrete breakwall on Lake Michigan required disintegration of far more than the meager mass of plastic machine and 145-pound boy.
Funny, he understood how part of that mass had to be their love. But as long as they both chose to still live, he thought, consuming food and maintaining a home and speaking when necessary and ineluctably breathing, they ought also be fucking, if for no other reason than the brief respite from grief it might give her, in the same way that an orgasm for him during hayfever season in August would be the only moment of the day when he could freely breathe. Yet this wife who once upon a time would sleep entangled in his arms and legs now showed irritation in her eyes and forehead at the mere mention of sex.
Which he does more and more—mentions it. Was he bringing it up on purpose? Maybe it's not a strategy. Maybe he just talks about it because its absence is so big. The way have-nots talk about money. The way a dieter thinks about the box of Fannie Mae candy in the freezer since Christmas. He likes the candy image. He makes a mental note to remember that metaphor for work. To mention in front of Viveca.
Viveca, who likes to be licked while she's standing up. Who insists on washing her boyfriend's prick in soap and warm water, slow and thorough, before making love.
At least, that's what Viveca tells Harry. Well, not just Harry. She informs everyone at the lunch table at Midtown Data Storage—himself and Diana and Rosemary.
Ted, his friend of twenty years who is in insurance, tells Harry these very intimate “news” items from Viveca amount to an invitation, and Harry laughs and tells Ted that he's way off, it's not like that, Viveca is way out of his league, it's just workplace banter. And so on.
Young women speak that way, he would tell Ted. Not like when he and Ted used to take Mary and Jenn to the River View Amusement Park and to the Prudential Building, when they'd have thought the girls sluts if they heard them say fuck, let alone shit; but these girls today, even the college graduates, let the f-word poof out of their pouty mouths—“Fuck that shit!” Viveca says, her front teeth denting her purple painted bottom lip. They talk that way at work, but they really let loose at Alph's, a nearby lounge where they occasionally gather after quitting time, and to which they ask Harry along mainly, he thinks, because they know he'll gallantly produce his Discover card at the end of their happy hour. So he tells Ted that Viveca and the other girls just think of him like some queer uncle that they talk around, who is good for a laugh and for the tab.
What he tells himself is that Viveca probably makes half this stuff up. Yeah, he thinks she does, but then he sometimes thinks maybe not. Of course, if she were making it up, then Ted may be right after all—that it's a come-on. Ted, who divorced Jenn and knows things since he dates other women, says that since Mary has hung out her “No Fishing” sign, Harry is projecting interest, even if unconsciously, so he receives reciprocal interest.
“Women can smell it,” said Ted. “Called phonemes or something.”
“Wait a minute. Isn't that a language term?”
“Fuckin' aye. The language of love, my friend.”
Harry remains skeptical. Like the state lottery, or Publisher's Clearinghouse, in your heart of hearts, you know it won't ever happen. But at least he gets to hear and see the jackpot each day at work. Viveca's lurid bedroom machinations spoken almost as rebuke through glossy lips constitute Harry's current sex life. Or at least the foreplay, delayed until he got home, requited in his downstairs workshop. Alone.
It's Saturday morning and already Clara is out in the yard with the hoe she uses to scrape and shovel the dog shit into a plastic bag. She does this first every Saturday, preparatory for her other yard work. She wears white shorts, a pink halter, and a white scarf instead of the painter's cap. Is that because I'm coming over today, he wonders.
She is a tall woman, and Harry uses his hand to shade his eyes and to conceal his appraisal of her breasts, about the size of ricecakes, beneath the pink cumberbun. He likes the way the smooth, tanned skin of her legs disappears into the tennis-white shorts, and how he can see the bottom edge of her abdominal muscles above the waistband, the same pale milk chocolate color.
She is thin-waisted and thin limbed, probably because she's a vegetarian. And one time he had advised her that the Jell-O she was snacking on was made from animal fat. She hadn't known and she thanked him, but he regretted causing the elimination of another food from what must already be a limited and joyless selection.
She has unusually wide hips and a flat behind, like a sewer cover, attributes which he doubts also derive from her diet. Surely, she must get plenty of exercise, running with those two little canine annoyances each evening, and then all the yard work, and the swimming, which is something else she must be doing inside that house, since he saw the truck delivering the swim-in-place pool two years back.
He doesn't feel right exchanging pleasantries while she's harvesting the dog shit, so he waits until she cinches up the bag and places it in the trash can.
“Hi,” he says. He's by his own back door and she's in the back of her yard by the trash cans. He likes for them both to have plenty of leeway, then maybe they move closer, depending on her eagerness to talk.
She looks up at him, white plastic frame sunglasses, a style revisited from the 1950s, he thinks, hiding her eyes. She has a sharp pointed chin, a aquiline nose, a cable for a neck.
But then she smiles a shy, ice cream smile, and he thinks he perceives something from her inside—whatever it is that consumes her consciousness while she brushes her hair to a shimmering softness; whatever's inside that produces the tendency to incline her head slightly down and to the left; whatever's inside that, like a battery, emits a fevered purring, secret and physical and warm and dark.
He stands in his tiny square yard on a Saturday morning, his dick as hard as one of the galvanized fence posts that separate them, realizing how sexuality has less to do with the blonde hair and body of someone like Viveca, than with, perhaps, something hidden and human and vulnerable. Clara reaches overhead to snug her scarf, unintentionally exposing a shadowy patch of underarm stubble.
“Did I see your car towed away on Thursday?” he asks.
She used to stop working to chat with him over the chain link fence. But now she talks while fitting the trashcan lid. Possibly she's cool to him since the Jell-O business.
“Uh-huh, it wouldn't start,” she says. “It cost me an arm and a leg for them to tow it and charge the battery and then call me to pick it up.”
Reflexively he appraises her left leg, the knee slightly bent for leverage in clamping down on the lid. The tendon that runs up the back of her thigh and into the tunnel of her loose shorts, flexes and unflexes. He pauses too long. She is looking back at him.
“Might be a loose wire, some kind of short draining the power,” he says.
“They said they couldn't find anything,” she complains. With glint of her smile and shrug of her bony shoulders, she converts the exasperation with the mechanic, to a celebration of human quirks and foibles.
“I suppose I should just be glad it's runnin',” she says.
He thinks that he could be with this woman. He wonders what happened with the man to whom she was married?
“Next time it doesn't start, why don't you call me first,” he offers. He can't fix a car if there is really something wrong, but he can look at. With no man in the house, Clara and Helen are in awe over someone handy. Or else maybe they just act that way for Mary's benefit. Acting like she's so fucking lucky, when inside they laugh over their popcorn.
He imagines himself and Clara, in her darkened garage, as he emerges from under the hood in triumph—“Just a disconnected vacuum hose,” he might say—and she embraces him gratefully. He can smell the fruity shampoo in her hair. She pulls back to say she already called work to tell them she'd be late, so why don't they go inside, and …
“You have enough of your own to worry about,” she startles him back to reality. With a wave of her hand, she heads for the other side of the house, to another chore, and she is out of sight before he can remind her about the refrigerator. But it's a favor he's supposed to do for her. Shouldn't she be reminding him?
A wave of sadness rolls through his chest and head. He sees an overhead image of himself standing in the fenced-in quarter acre lot, a microscopic spec in a checkerboard of a billion squares. Then the wave recedes. Dissolves.
He thinks Ted has it all wrong. None of these women think about anybody but themselves. Mary, Clara, even Viveca—absorbed in their own one-way lives, their minds closed to the lives of everybody else, by which, he means, mainly, closed to him.
He opens the side door of his own garage and pulls the string of the overhead fluorescent light fixture above the workbench. He should clear the work surface, sort these loose tools and bolts and pieces from his last Saturday project. But it's a good day for being outside, so maybe, instead, he'll back the car onto the apron and change the oil.
But as he pigeons his head against the driver's window to peer at the odometer, he calculates that he needs to drive another twelve-hundred miles before the next oil change is due. He repairs to the workbench and picks up an adjustable crescent wrench which he used to remove the beater bar on Mary's vacuum last week after it became seized with some fibers from a throw rug. The wrench hangs on the second nail above his tool rack, above which hangs his fiberglass fishing rod, suspended horizontally on several nails along its six foot span. That's what he should do, he thinks, drive to the lake and do some shore casting. It's really not too late to leave; he could drive down there, fish a little, stop at that Steak and Shake so he wouldn't have to have supper with Mary.
“Like, I know all about those fishing trips,” Viveca had said during the office coffee break one morning. It had been a Friday, and Harry had asked the women about their weekend plans: “Sleeping in,” Diana had said, and, “No idea,” from Rosemary.
Viveca said she planned to go with a new friend to Boogie Nights, one of those cavernous, strobe-lit dance halls modeled after the cinematically immortalized Studio 54 in New York. She'd spend Saturday afternoon getting her hair done.
“Why don't you forget fishing and bring your wife to the Nights,” said Viveca.
“Hmm, very tempting,” said Harry. “Let's see: a dark smoke-filled room full of twenty-year-olds, high decibel music, the Pet Boys singing ‘Slap Your Bitch Up Side the Head.’ You know what, Viveca, I think maybe I'll go fishing instead.”
“Eewww, fishing?” said Diana. “You actually kill those things?”
“Not usually. I like searching for them, you know, fooling them. And then there's the surprise when you hook ‘em. I don't usually keep them.”
“I think he likes the smell,” said Viveca, not even looking up. She had been focusing on her nails, spreading the fingers of her left hand, a spiral thread of blue smoke rising from the cigarette held in her right hand. She wore a yellow top, like a man's dress shirt, the top two buttons undone where Harry saw a pale blue vein roll taut and aslant just beneath the skin and down to the first fleshy furrow of cleavage and disappear beneath the shirt. He raised his eyes and saw her looking right at him.
“My father used to tell my mom he was going ‘fishing,’ nearly every weekend,” she said. Her eyes were slitted, accusing. “He took his rod, all right, but it never left the car.”
That explains a lot, thought Harry. “Sorry to hear that.”
“Forget about it,” she said. “I love my mom, but she's a fucking witch. Impossible to live with.”
“I thought you got along with her,” said Harry.
She couldn't reply immediately, as she was holding her mouth open, using the flat of her thumb to trim the lipgloss, while she held a cigarette and a compact mirror in her other hand.
“Well, sure,” said Diana. “You get along fine with mother once you move out. Ain't that right, Viveca?”
“Newsflash” said Viveca, snapping the mirror shut with timed emphasis. She used to respond to things she thought obvious with a sarcastic, “Hello?” Then it was “Thank you” for several months, more groaned than spoken. “Newsflash” was her latest.
She picked up her make-up bag, stood up. She looked into Harry's eyes, touched the tip of her pink tongue to her upper lip and slid her fingertips up and under her black mini-skirt to adjust her pantyhose. Diana laughed and Rosemary rolled her eyes.
“Maybe that's what you need to do Harry, baby,” she said as she sauntered around the table toward the door. She stopped behind Harry and tugged playfully on his right earlobe. She must have applied a fresh spray of perfume in the washroom, for its warm, lilac heaviness descended and engulfed his head as though he had entered a greenhouse. “Maybe Harry needs to leave ‘mommy,’ too.”
Diana's laugh convulsed her shoulders, and she stopped short, her quick over-the-shoulder look at Harry telling him all too well the nature of their regard for him. They could have been pubescent eighth graders shining on the school maintenance man.
That scene was from last month, and maybe Viveca was right; maybe he ought to leave Mary. Ted thinks so, too, yet Harry knows that Ted and a number of men and women who made an art out of leaving people didn't seem much better off for it.
Of course, he had no sense that things could get better at home. She was different—they were different—from the two people who had remained lovers even after their son was born. Even through the crippling mortgage payments and used cars that didn't start in the winter and paycheck battles and grade school teachers that asked galling questions about their homelife, through all of that, they still had maintained a romance sanctuary—an escape, if only to their own bedroom, when she reverted to being the tallish, rangy brunette who would lose herself in his embrace, who would abandon motherhood and decorum as she bit through his shoulder flesh in those satisfying moments of self-celebration and absorption and blood. Since the accident, she made even reminiscing about those times feel like some kind of sacrilege.
He may as well go fishing. If there is one thing he has learned, it is to go fishing when you feel like going fishing. Brilliant.
Carrying the rod and tackle box out to the car, he looks at his watch and calculates the time to drive to Lake Michigan, fish a couple of hours, and drive back. He had stopped asking Mary to go after too many refusals, when she'd close her eyes and shake her head, doubtlessly thinking not of a blue lake but of a sea of darkness and oblivion that had swallowed her child. He, however, felt drawn to it. The city's contagion was halted by its shore, by the sweetwater wind that buffeted his face. And maybe he was compelled by the same thought which kept her away, that the last living his boy had done was between its silvery folds.
It had been his son, too, for crissake. But after six years he was tired of all her hurting, of her weakness, of her eyes that accused him of not caring, of loving less. Why can't she just take the hurt and compress it into a hard black ball of anger deep within, where it's hidden and manageable and, hell, even something strong.
He'd go fishing all right and be back a little after dark, soon enough to watch Mary fall asleep during the news. Or maybe she will have dozed before then, regenerating enough energy to stay up in bed for a change. Maybe if they had a glass of wine.
“Oh no you don't,” came the voice from behind him. The warning familiar, the voice familiar; but the two didn't go together. He turned to see Clara with her hands on her hips. Not pulling weeds. Not moving.
“You fixin' to hang up your ‘gone fishing’ sign, mister, before keeping your promise?” She pronounced 'promise' with a breathy first syllable, and ironic fricative—onomatopoetic. The word was full of portent.
“You caught me, all right,” he said.
“I declare, when Helen said we ought to hire the he-man next door for the job, who would have thought he'd try to sneak off.”
He-man. What Ted calls a come-on? Or it also could be another eighth grader patronizing the janitor. It's what these women do, tease to please the silly middle aged man, turning on all their charms because they bet his prostate makes it pretty safe.
He wheels slowly to face her. Hers a wide open smile, big teeth. Brow squinted and glistening in the sun. He remembers now that she was born in Alabama or North Carolina, somewhere down there. Not much trace of accent left, but some of the expressions remained.
“Any other time I'd say git—go fishin', enjoy; but that new fridge is coming, Harry. I'd bet it would take only a few minutes.”
“Famous last words,” smiles Harry. Her smile flattens—he can't tell if in confusion or disappointment.
“Let's get her,” he says. “I'll just go to my workshop and get the two wheel dolly and be right over.”
“I'll be in the kitchen. Just walk on up.”
Standing in the middle of the workshop, he grasps his shirt at the top button and pulls it away from his collarbone, smells inside. He takes two pieces of Trident gum from the economy twenty pack he's kept on the windowsill ever since his dentist told him it was a half-way substitute for flossing. The red two wheel cart hangs from a bicycle hook next to the door, but he hesitates before reaching for it. He recalls the advice Ted gave him for dealing with Viveca, to talk to a woman and pretend to listen hard. So he'd ask Clara some telling questions about herself. Not her garden or her new pair of shears, but, let's see, how long do you plan to live here and how many years have you been, and was it because you suddenly discovered you were a lesbian that you split from your bridegroom after only two months?
On the way to her back door he feels a telltale misstep. Goddam it, dogshit all right. His fault for interrupting her that she didn't finish the job. He went back and changed into his deck shoes; he'd probably have to throw the sneakers out—you could never get everything out of those deep treads.
She'd told him to walk right in, but he knocks anyway. In all these years, he has never been inside his neighbor's house, nor either of them inside his. Just over-the-fence neighbors. Good fences make good neighbors. The second he violates the fence rule he springs a dogshit booby trap.
“Be there in a second,” comes Clara's voice from somewhere else in the house. “Come on in.”
The kitchen clean and bright, what you'd expect with two women living together. A thirteen-inch television on top of the counter. But he would have expected a different house smell, soapy or flowery, instead of what he scents now. Something oily, perhaps smoked food. Oniony. But from yesterday or the day before. They obviously ate other things besides popcorn.
Clara emerges from the hallway and her scarf is gone. He wonders if she was in the bathroom, smelling under her own shirt. She looks young with her mane of hair stacked and bunched above the pony tail. But out of the sunlight her face is sterner, tired. He'd probably see shadows under her eyes, but her sunglasses remain on. Maybe there's some anxiety at this man filling up her kitchen, the first one in years.
“Had to cage the dogs,” says Clara. “They're funny with strangers. I mean, you're not a stranger …”
“It's okay, I know,” says Harry. “I'm a dog person. Your place, it's nice.”
“Oh, thanks,” she says, “but it's such a mess. Changing fridges.”
“Yeah. A lot of work.”
“Poor Helen. She takes care of most everything inside.”
“I didn't see her today,” he says, squirming inside, at how this sounds. There's an extra second before she replies, and as she does, she looks over at the faded avocado Westinghouse with top and bottom doors open.
“She doesn't normally work Saturdays, but she had a meeting. A half-day thing. I expect her soon. You think we need a third person?”
“What? No, I was just … let me slide the dolly over here. You have some tape or something for these doors?”
She brings him a roll of brightly colored red duct tape—what the hell would you use that for?—and they tape shut the doors and he slides the base of the cart beneath the refrigerator. As he reaches over the top to tip it onto the cart, she grasps an opposite corner. She holds her right hand against the olive colored freezer door, and he notices her neatly trimmed nails, unpainted, and the thin delicate fingers arching in, pressing against the metal. A child's hand, really, in earnest effort. He looks at her face near his own hand on the Westinghouse's top, thinks he sees a nervous flicker behind the brown tint of the sunglasses, her lips puckered in and tightly together. He feels something, he doesn't know, like when his kid was small and walked his bike the three miles from school with his pantleg caught in the chain.
“You know, Clara, I'd rather you not be behind the cart.”
She nods, keeping her lips pursed, backing up, grateful.
“Tell me what's the best way I can help you, Harry?”
Her hands are on her hips again, and he and she are suddenly two stevedores in collaboration and brotherhood.
“You shouldn't be making such an opened ended offer to a man, you know,” he says.
Hands still on her hips. She's smiling, but it may only be with her mouth. The sunglasses hide the way she takes this.
“If you can just hold the door open, we'll see if this guy will fit through the jambs,” he says.
The refrigerator fits with an inch or two to spare on each side. He bumps it down the stoop without incident, but when he makes the turn to put it out on the street for the garbage men, he senses through his arms the object's momentum and dangerous bulk flirting with a sidelong dive into Clara's Buick Regal. He stops—a hold-your-breath stop, hoping it's not too abrupt, and the Westinghouse leans back straight onto the cart. After he stands it straight by the curb, he slides the cart away and untapes the doors and then uses the red strips to tape them open. Clara is nowhere in sight.
He returns to his workshop and hoists the cart onto its appointed hanger. He can smell the befouled shoe in the workshop and goes back outside. Clara is not at the back door, either. He will go and load the rest of his gear.
“Oh, there you are,” she says, holding her back door ajar. “I'd gone around the front and you had already skidoodled. Come up, Harry, and least-wise have a soda or something cool.”
“Well, I suppose those fish will still be there,” he says to no one. Clara disappears inside.
He targets her door but studies the terrain this time, no booby traps in his path; but he does spot the offending mass off to his right, lines and arrows from his Sears cross-trainer sole stenciled on the flattened brown plateau.
This time she opens the door as he arrives and motions for him to sit.
“Sorry I didn't help you out front, Harry, but this disgusting mess under the fridge couldn't set there another minute,” she says.
She tears a paper towel from the under the cabinet dispenser and drops to one knee to swipe hard at yet one more stain where the fridge had rested, a stain Harry can't see. Maybe it's just a smear on the lens of her sunglasses. Or maybe it's a calculated move, as his eyes rest on the bronze arch of her back below the halter, a freckle to the left of her spine just above the waistline. He inventories the colors: pink halter, white shorts, umber hair—Ted will want details.
“What can I get you?” she says. She's breathy after standing up.
“Anything diet,” he says. Maybe he shouldn't say that. “You know, just some water is fine, Clara.”
She stands on her tiptoes over a red and white cooler on the kitchen counter.
“Got orange juice. And Helen bought some Diet Mountain Dew. It's all ice cold. You sure?”
“Water's fine.” She has seemed taller over the fence, he thinks.
She reaches in front with a glass of water and he thinks he smells coconuts. Shampoo? Sunblock?
He waits for her to sit, but she's back at the counter moving things in the cooler.
“That Westinghouse didn't look that old,” he says.
“Helen bought it when she moved in. That's ten years.”
She closes the cooler lid and leans her back against the counter edge, gripping the rim with her hands. She looks about her own kitchen, a woman who can't stand still. Harry senses that she wishes for the phone or doorbell to ring.
“And you.”
“Me?” She smiles as if awaiting a punchline.
“How long are you here?”
“A year after Helen.”
“You moved up from where, Tennessee?”
“Georgia. After my divorce I moved here from Addison. You know where that is?”
“Oh, sure. And Addison. How you'd like it there?”
“What do you mean, Harry?”
“Did you like it? How long were you there?”
She looks at the floor and nods.
“You mean how long was I married, don't you?”
He shrugs his shoulders.
“It's okay; I don't mind. I used to, but it's been a long time.”
When she doesn't continue, he takes a drink of water. This isn't going well. He starts to get up.
“I thought you wanted to hear about Stan?” she says.
“No. I'm sorry.”
“Sit. I should be grateful that anyone cares to know, really.”
Her mouth has shrunk to a pale rose. He can see her neck pulsing.
“I never really dated anybody else,” she says. She seems to be forcing herself to look at him now, as though someone had told her, a psychotherapist, perhaps, that forthrightness was the best way to deal with it, even with a neighbor you barely know.
“He was the first man I loved. We were married in August. August fifteenth. It was September twenty-third, a Thursday night, when I listened on the kitchen phone while he spoke with his ex-girlfriend. It turned out ‘ex’ was a lie.”
She efficiently condenses the facts. More calls, the initial confrontation with Stan, later revelations, dates, the separation, divorce lawyers. It reminds Harry of one of those timelines at the end of a chapter in his high school history book. Just the facts; the blood and gore skipped over, concealed behind her sunglasses.
“It might have been worse,” says Harry. “You could have gone months, maybe years without knowing.”
Her chin rises. She's thinking about this and he expects her assenting nod.
“No … that's the worst of it,” a clutch in her voice.
He should hold her. Or just touch her. It's what people need, as when he and Mary sat in the hospital waiting room. He needed bad to feel her, to hang on. But she shrunk away. She said later it was because she hurt too much.
“I had been so hopeful,” she says, “the ‘blushing bride.’” Her hands leave the counter edge to clutch her opposite shoulders. She lowers her head and he can see her trembling now, but no tears. He rises from the table, touches her arm. She lets him. He puts his hand on her other arm. She's letting him comfort her. Should he kiss her? Ted says it's all in the timing.
As she looks up at his face, her sunglasses have slid down on her nose so that he can finally see her eyes—pale green. Mossy, but not teared up. Dull. Ten years of betrayal having leeched away the light. And something else in them.
“I didn't even get a chance to have illusions,” she says.
When she speaks into his face is when he catches it, a smell of decay like spoiled meat. The mephitic source of what he had smelled when he earlier entered the house.
Then he realizes what the other thing is in her eyes, a pathetic animal kind of thing. Flat. Disconnected. What he has seen in a fish's eyes when it's been foul hooked in the gills instead of in the jaw. Or in bird's eyes when it can't fly off. He has found them in the yard: a broken wing, a missing foot. You can almost never save them. The slightest injury fatal.
Viveca is in a bad mood on Monday morning, and Rosemary and Diana talk small and careful. Her legs are crossed as she smokes a cigarette hotly and with no apparent pleasure.
“How about let's get a drink at Alph's after we're outta here,” she says. She flashes one look at the other two women. Harry could be invisible. Diana flips uneasy eyes at Rosemary without moving her head.
“Sure,” says Diana. “Sounds good.”
Viveca doesn't respond, but she shifts in the folding chair, and now the crossed leg is swinging side to side. A rhythm of thought. Some perceived offense by her boyfriend? Some slight.
“What about you?”
She is not looking at him, but the other girls turn to Harry to wait for an answer.
“You gonna have a drink or are you too pussy-whipped?” Viveca says. She flashes him a glance which he thinks is a challenge, but he's not sure. She is wearing some ensemble of silver and blue eye make-up that is probably the latest rage—Star Trek vogue, or something—but it gives her an odd, hard to read expression. Harry is surprised to see the beginnings of a run in her stocking, a three inch gash rising from the instep of her high heeled shoe.
Were he to join them, he knows what the evening would entail. The thrill, secret, of wading into the dim scarlet light of Alph's lounge as a companion to three young women. Conversation, liquor, careless words. The illusion of closeness.
But the reality masked by laughter that comes too quickly. By music. By the astigmatic focus sped by rum and coke. By Alph's smoky haze.
And as soon as one looks at her watch, they would all gulp their drinks and scuttle their separate ways, armored against tomorrow.
“Not tonight,” says Harry. “I'm going home.”
Diana exhales smoke in an I-told-you-so hiss. But Viveca stares, appears to hear it—a note from him that maybe she's not used to, while Harry thinks about the cascade of time that has been wearing away the last chance to fix a broken wing. A slim chance to save her. Save himself.
David McGrath divides his time between teaching English at College of DuPage in Illinois, and splitting wood and nightfishing on Moose Lake in Wisconsin. He is the author of a novel, Siege at Ojibwa, and his essays and stories have appeared in Artful Dodge, Sport Literate, Chicago Reader, Education Digest, Midwest Outdoors, Chicago Tribune, and Fourth Genre. He can be contacted at mcgrath@cdnet.cod.edu.