A Hole in the Universe (46 page)

“We’re friends.” He cringed.
That night.
Even the way she said it was an indictment. “See? Here, take this. It’s for you.” He handed her one of the roses.

“Thanks,” she said, grinning.

Once inside, he hurried upstairs. He was supposed to be at Dennis’s at six for dinner, and it was four forty-five. He was unbuttoning his shirt when loud voices rose from the street. He looked out the window and saw two young men, shouting and running toward Jada. The shorter man, burly and bald, grabbed her while the other tried to pull the dog from her. Jada kicked and shrieked for them to let her go. The burly man was behind her with his hairy forearm across her throat. Yelping, the dog ran in circles while the second man tried to grab his leash.

“What are you doing?” Gordon demanded as he ran into the street.

“She took my dog! This is my dog!” The second man had finally gotten the leash.

“Leave her alone!” Gordon ordered. The man still gripped Jada’s neck.

“She’s a fucking thief,” the man shouted as if to justify his hold on the skinny girl. “She came and took him right outta the yard.”

“I don’t care what the hell she did. Let go of her,” Gordon growled, advancing on him.

He released her, and Jada rubbed her neck with both hands. Up on the porch, Marvella Fossum peered down from the doorway.

“It’s not his dog!” Jada cried. She grabbed for the dog, and the man pushed her back.

“What are you, nuts? It’s my dog!” he said, lifting his chin from the puppy’s lapping tongue.

“Jada.” Gordon moved closer until he was between her and the men. “He says it’s his. Is it?”

“No! It’s mine!”

“She says it’s hers.”

“Hey, look, I ain’t got time for this. It’s my dog,” the man said, backing off, the exuberant puppy in his arms. “And if you got a problem with that, then you do something about it. You hear what I’m saying?”

“It’s not your dog, you fucking asshole!” Jada screamed, and now the burly man charged toward her.

“Watch your mouth, you crazy spook, or whatever the hell you are.”

“Jada!” Gordon grabbed her as she lunged forward, trying to get at the man. “Stop it! Stop that now,” he said. The man laughed as she screamed obscenities at him.

“It’s not your dog,” Gordon told her. “You know it’s not, so stop it! Stop it! Why are you doing this?” Even with both arms around her, she struggled and screamed.

“Why?” He turned her to face him. “Why?”

“I found him.” She sank against him, sobbing. “I didn’t steal him, I swear I didn’t. I found him. And I wanted to keep him. That’s all, I was just tryna help him, that’s all I was doing.”

“Go home, Jada. Go on inside.” He stepped away now that the men were gone. “Go on. Go ahead now.”

She picked up the rose from the sidewalk. “You don’t believe me, do you.”

He nodded. “I believe you.” Believed that she’d take whatever she needed to get by. Believed that for her there was no other choice.

A
fter drinks in the great room, Lisa had eased her guests into the dining room. It was a casual affair, the women in slacks, the men in open-necked shirts, place mats instead of linen. Up and down the table, small votive candles floated in bowls of water above iridescent glass chips, reflecting ripples of light off everyone’s faces. Lisa looked especially pretty tonight, radiant, Gordon thought as she sat beside her mother. His initial panic at seeing so many people here had subsided into a careful busyness with his utensils and his food. He was pleased to see his roses in the middle of the table, however spindly they were compared to the profuse arrangement they had replaced, pink and orange dahlias spiked with pink and white astilbe. The brighter bouquet sat on the sideboard, but it was the fragrance of roses that graced the room. He was grateful for the anonymity he felt as conversations cross-fired around him. They were all vigorous talkers, each as anxious to be heard as he was to be ignored. Twice now from his end of the table, Mr. Harrington had tried to include him. Gordon’s responses were brief. His pallor ashen, Dennis sat at the other end. Above the untouched food on his plate, his fixed smile made him look bored and distracted. Across from Gordon was Father Hensile. Next to the priest sat Luke, the new youth minister. A delicate young man with thinning hair, he seemed only a shade less nervous than Gordon, and his fair cheeks smarted with any attention. Farther down the table were Marty and Becca Brock, Mitzi and Tom Harrington’s very best friends. Tom and Marty had been roommates at Dartmouth. In fact, it had been Marty’s sister who had introduced Lisa’s parents. Well into her seventies, Becca Brock was a petite, startling-looking woman with heavily made-up eyes and long, inky-black hair. Busily opinionated, she was able to tune in to three or four conversations at once. She had just asked Jennifer, the teenage girl hired to help with dinner, to get her another fork, her tines were bent. Dennis stared at her.

“And that was the last we ever saw of him.” Tom had been telling Father Hensile about a man he and Marty Brock fondly recalled as Mossie. Lisa looked up quickly and asked her father if he’d like more wine. It was obviously a story she’d heard too many times before. The way both men told it, Mossie, heir to a steel company, got up one day in his parents’ Pittsburgh manor, had a robust breakfast with his father, “steak, home fries, eggs, put on his snowshoes, then went three miles into the woods out back—”

“Oh, five or six, anyway,” Marty interjected. “They owned half the county.”

“He dug a little hollow in the snow, sat down against a tree, and put the gun in his mouth—”

“Tom!” Mitzi said with a pained smile. “Lisa wants you to try the new Merlot. Here, dear, let me.” Mother and daughter exchanged looks as Lisa passed the bottle.

The teenage girl had returned with a new fork. The men continued to wonder why Mossie would choose to end such a charmed life. “Looks, brains, bucks, dames, the kid had it all!” Marty sighed as he cut his veal.

“Amazing,” Tom agreed, as if suicide had been just another of Mossie’s accomplishments.

Gordon thought of Jerry Cox. He had killed only what was already dead. His suicide had been the ultimate pretense, an empty contrition, the coward’s last opportunity to inflict more pain on good people.

“Would you pass the sauce, please,” said John Stanley from Gordon’s right. John Stanley was a reedy, droopy-faced man whose crisp British accent Gordon found unnerving. Its authority announced itself like the running
tap tap tap
of a guard’s baton along the bars, demanding attention, respect, obedience. Gordon couldn’t see any sauce.

“Gravy. Right there.” With John Stanley’s sharp nod, Gordon seized the boat too quickly by its handle, splashing gravy into a candled bowl. “May I have its dish, please?” Stanley held the gravy boat over his own plate to catch the dribbles. “It’s right there.”

“Oh, yes, here. I’m sorry.” Gordon handed him the dish.

Like a slow-turning beacon, Dennis’s dull gaze caught him.

“You are just the most fabulous cook!” Becca Brock called across to Lisa, who had gotten up to fill her father’s wineglass, though he had already said he didn’t want any. She leaned close and squeezed his shoulder.

“So, Gordon, I hear you’re painting the house,” he said with the cue.

“Yes, sir. Well, touching it up.”

“Well, you ever need any help now you be sure and call”—he peered over his glasses—“your brother here.”

“I don’t know, Dennis is pretty busy.”

“He could use the exercise.”

“He gets plenty of that, sir,” Gordon said, and everyone laughed—with some relief now that Gordon had spoken and seemed normal enough.

“I did some work with the Samaritans,” Rena Stanley was telling Marty Brock.

“Suicide should be a person’s right,” Becca Brock declared. “I mean, we control everything else in our lives, why not that?”

“For God’s sake,” Dennis said under his breath.

What’s wrong with him?
Gordon thought, looking between his brother and sister-in-law. In the watery candlelight her olive skin glowed.
Doesn’t he know what he has here? Two beautiful, healthy children downstairs watching videos with the Stanley children. Friends, a brother who loves him.
Or was that it? Did Dennis really think he had no feelings? That he didn’t care about him? That he never had? Gordon’s chest felt heavy, watching him.

Dennis gave another sigh, sprawled back in his chair, bored with the too familiar repartee, irritated and making no effort to hide it.

Mitzi launched the roll basket and meat platter around the table again. “So tell us, Gordon,” she said. “What kind of a boss is Tom?”

“Very good.” He looked to make sure there’d be enough for everyone, then took a few slices. “He’s a very good boss.”

The teenage girl returned to say the children wanted to watch another video. Lisa said they could. Becca Brock and Rena Stanley were still on the subject of suicide. Luke (Gordon hadn’t caught his last name) was telling them that his brother was a fireman. Last week he had rescued a woman threatening to jump from the roof of her apartment building. Her husband had just left her with three small children to support and—

“Luke,” Father Hensile interrupted, “tell us about your sister. She’s a caseworker, isn’t she?”

“Yes, for an adoption agency,” Luke said. “Most of the babies she places are from China.”

“My friend’s trying to do that,” Gordon blurted, surprising himself as well as everyone else.

“. . . which is my whole point, a personal, moral issue,” came tatters of Becca Brock’s voice into the hush. “If I want to die, I should be able to do it when I want and how I want.”

“As well you should, Becca,” Dennis sighed to uneasy laughter.

Lisa smiled and leaned toward Gordon. “Trying to do what?”

“Adopt a baby. Well, a little girl. She’s Chinese. May Loo’s her name.” The regurgitation of words piled on the table in front of him.

“Who? Your friend?” Lisa asked.

“No, that’s the little girl’s name. She’s pretty. Delores showed me her picture,” he said miserably.

“Delores? She’s adopting a baby? Oh, that’s so wonderful!” Lisa cried, eyes bright in the flickering light. “She’ll be such a wonderful mother. Oh, thank you, Gordon. You’ve made my night. That’s the best news I’ve heard in ages.”

Shocked by what he’d done, he looked down, his brow slick with sweat.

“You know Delores, Mum.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Delores Dufault,” Mitzi told Rena Stanley. “She’s quite a character. One of those flamboyant, larger-than-life women, she’s . . .”

Larger than his own stunted life, Gordon thought. He had told her secret, exposing her to strangers. Now Becca Brock had taken on foreign adoptions, a farce when there were so many needy children in this country. “It’s just another kind of racism.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Father Hensile said. “Foreign adoptions are just speedier, that’s all.”

“So why aren’t people trying to adopt African babies, then?” Becca Brock asked.

“Excuse me. . . . Excuse me,” Gordon repeated a little louder, dredging the words from the pit of his stomach. “I just thought, I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

“Oh, no, Gordon.” Tom Harrington was quick to come to his aid. “Nothing like a little more fuel on Becca’s fire.”

“I resent that,” Becca Brock huffed with coy indignation.

They sensed his misery. Only his brother looked at him. “What I mean is, Delores hasn’t told anyone. I shouldn’t have betrayed her confidence.” Again lowered his eyes. Dennis seemed only more amused.

“Well,
we
won’t say anything, will we?” Lisa asked around the table.

“Well, no.”

“Of course not.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Besides not knowing the person,” John Stanley said, “I’ve quite forgotten the name.”

“That’s all right,” Rena Stanley assured Gordon. “You were just so excited for your friend.”

Now he felt worse. And foolish. The conversation quickly turned to golf. The teenage girl brought out more warm rolls. He was the only one who took one. Dennis pushed away his untouched dinner plate, a signal, Gordon realized, that everyone else was done. He set down his fork. If only Delores were here. She would have been in the thick of it by now, allowing him to fade into her presence.

“They’re very beautiful,” Father Hensile said. “The roses, they’re from your garden, aren’t they?”

“From my yard.” He had been staring at them. “They were my father’s. He planted them a long time ago.”

“Is gardening as relaxing as everyone says it is?”

“Yes. It is. It’s very relaxing.”

The doorbell rang. Lisa slipped out to answer it.

“I wonder why,” the priest continued. “It’s pretty hard work, right?”

“Not really.”

Roses are so beautiful and yet so hazardous, the priest said as he poured more wine.
Hazardous.
Gordon glanced up. An odd word to use.

“Did you ever wonder why roses have thorns?” the priest asked. “I can see why blackberry and raspberry bushes do—to keep birds and animals away from the fruit, but why roses?”

“Maybe for the same reason, but to keep people away. Until they’re ready. The roses, I mean,” he added nervously.

Lisa entered the dining room. Her mother’s expectant smile faded as Lisa leaned over and whispered in Dennis’s ear. He stood up at once. He said something. She nodded, went to touch her face, and her hand shook. She laid it on her shoulder and watched him leave.

“What is it, dear?” her mother asked.

“Emergency root canal?” her father called down the table, and she stared back, face frozen in placidity.

“Can you imagine,” Becca Brock sniffed. “The nerve of some people just showing up on your doorstep like that. My uncle was a doctor and, I’ll tell you, nobody ever did that!”

“He was a plastic surgeon, for goodness’ sake,” Marty crowed.