A Private Sorcery (13 page)

At first, Rena had planned to stay only a few days past Joe's funeral, but then Eleanor disappeared to track down the girl and Gene stopped eating or talking. Waking one night to check on Gene, she found his bed empty and then heard a whimper from the closet where he crouched inside. In the morning, she called the dean's office and arranged to take incompletes in her courses and, since they wouldn't grant less than a
year's absence, a leave for the following year.

“I'll stay,” she told Eleanor, “but I can't live with the deer and the guns.” Eleanor nodded. Usually not a drinker, Eleanor had been intoxicated since the funeral. Rena bartered with the guy across the street, Russell, a contractor with a side yard filled with tires. He'd haul out the deer's head and the boxes of girlie magazines in exchange for one of the guns, the rest of which he helped her sell to a pawnshop in San Rafael.

In February, after the electricity was turned off because Eleanor had failed to pay the bill, Rena began taking the seven
A.M
. shift at the diner where Eleanor worked three to eleven. Rena would ride her bike there and then drive Eleanor's car back, the bike hanging out of the trunk, five minutes to spare before Gene got home from school. Afternoons she and Gene would play catch in the yard or board games on the floor, and she'd make them dinners of soup and burgers or casseroles of macaroni and cheese. Every day she'd tell her mother, “Call if you need a lift home,” and Eleanor would nod, but she never called, never made it back before three in the morning, after the bars had closed when someone, maybe the bartender, would drive her home. Every night Rena would do the dishes, help Gene with his homework, pack his lunch, forcing herself to go to bed with pillows over her ears so she would not listen for the sounds of her mother coming in. Sometimes six would roll around and there'd still be no Eleanor and Rena would be sitting in her waitress uniform at the kitchen table drinking tea, Gene's breakfast set up, and she'd have to call the hostess and say, “I'm going to be a little late, Gene's bus comes at half past seven,” and she could hear Sheila sighing because they'd have to juggle for an hour with two girls and everyone impatient to get served right away.

Saturdays she'd take Gene and they'd go to stay with Rebecca for the weekend. Rebecca seemed cheered to have a child around, and while she and Gene sat on the couch reading together, Rena would do the housework. It was a beautiful house, a Victorian that Rebecca had bought before the Mission District became popular, with a carved banister, picture rail moldings and Romanesque friezes over the two fireplaces. When Rena was done with the cleaning, she and Gene would
walk to Twentyfourth Street to do the week's food shopping and buy burritos for dinner. They'd eat at the round oak table overlooking the walled garden, where a fir and palm tree grew side by side. Rebecca would retire early, and Gene would draw or read or build things with the pulleys and springs and wires they'd recovered from a wooden trunk in what had once been Rebecca's son, Max's, room.

For three months, Ascher stayed away while Rena was there. He would come during the week to visit Rebecca (even from her sickbed, still his teacher) and to cook for her. He did Rebecca's banking, left the crisp twenty-dollar bills Rena used to do the shopping in a carved box on the foyer table. Sometimes, rounding a corner in the house, she'd think she detected his smell—sharp like the scent of wet moss under a rock. On a few occasions, he left her coded messages: papayas, a fruit he had introduced to her and she loved, set on the kitchen counter; the week of her birthday, calla lilies placed by the bed where she slept.

Then, in April, he came. It was a warm afternoon, and she'd dug out a pair of Max's gym shorts and an old T-shirt she'd tied at her waist. In the upstairs bathroom she bent over the tub, the window open, the radio up high, vigorously scrubbing, as if success in removing the stains from the hundred-year-old porcelain would translate into a victory over the cancer and its relentless march through Rebecca's lymph nodes. Superstitiously, she scrubbed and scrubbed, so that she did not know how long Ascher stood watching her backside, only that when she turned to get more cleanser there was a shadow cutting the tiles. She looked up into his face. Slowly, she raised herself so she was seated on her knees. She wiped her hands on the T-shirt as he moved in from the doorway, closing the door behind him and then reaching down to pull her up from the wet floor. “Your hair,” he murmured, his thick fingers moving over her scalp.

And so they resumed, this second try, four years since the Demo cratic party Brahmins had told Ascher he had a choice: the girl or your place on the ticket. Every night he would drive his Jaguar, the car the firm had leased him after he lost—
my consolation prize
, he joked to Rena—over the Golden Gate Bridge. Arriving after Gene went to bed, he would
leave before Eleanor returned. All spring, they'd gone on this way, lucky, Gene never waking to discover them, Eleanor never surprising them. An extended parenthesis with the poignancy of something that will not last—a casaba so sweet and ripe it's almost a juice, a triangle of sunlight on a polished oak floor. It didn't matter that she didn't let him help her in any practical way, that Eleanor and Gene had never heard her so much as mention his name. She was leaning on him inside. He was the one she talked to in her head at the diner as she carried platters of sunny-side-up eggs and hash browns, as she prepared meals for Gene, coaxing him to eat. It was a marvelous trick, this narration of all the day's events to Ascher, first in her head, then later, lying in the crook of his arm: it made the days unreal, like a bad movie that can be flipped on and off.

It was all stolen time, the nights ticking off—one month, two months, three—until the point when someone would inevitably find out. Last time, it had been Mano, Ascher's driver. This time, they never figured out who. It could have been anyone: the toll clerk at the bridge, the attendant at the garage where he parked. A dick a corporate client had put on his tail. Someone from the community who felt betrayed that he'd disappeared from politics into his work at the firm. A white racist furious that he was with a white woman. Someone who knew how to type a note with gloves on his hands. Who knew to speak through a wad of tissues. One sentence:
I'm onto you, nigger
. Then, a few days later, a call, a muffled voice:
The girl, we know who she is
. Click.

S
HE HEADS INTO
the kitchen to turn on the kettle. It's a Saturday morning, but without the prospect of work on Monday she feels at sea. The answering machine blinks with last night's messages. She listens as she waits for the water to boil.

“Hi. It's Maggie. Calling to see how you made out on your last day. Hope the party was fun. Give us a call.”

Another beep. “Rena,” Saul says. “I wanted to hear your voice. But all I hear is my own voice still on the message tape.” A pause. A sigh. “Well, there's not much to say. I had to wait an hour and a quarter to make this call, so it'll probably be a while before I try again. My father
says it's impossible to get through to me here, so maybe that's why I haven't heard from you. Or maybe you've needed some space.”

Saul laughs. It's a forced laugh, more anxiety than amusement. Rena stands rooted to the kitchen floor.

“Space. What does that mean? Space in your head? What do I have, fifteen seconds left? Well, I finished
Ulysses
. All the way through to Algeciras. Algeciras. I'm working in the metal shop now. Not license plates. Brackets for shelving. Oh, and you probably heard, the sentence was set. What can—” and then he is cut off.

S
HE SITS AT THE BACK
of the bus with her sweater draped over her chest, the shopping bag with more magazines, books and tapes on the adjacent seat. It's been nearly two months since she last visited, a spur-of-the-moment decision after hearing Saul's spooky message which left her feeling both ashamed that she hadn't gone and afraid of what she might see.

At the visitation center, the clerk, a doe-eyed girl with straightened hair, takes Rena's name and Saul's ID number.

“You okay?” She smiles, revealing a gold front tooth.

“I'm fine. Just a little carsick from the bus.”

“That happens to me, too. There's a cafeteria over in Building Ten for staff and visitors. Visiting hours aren't until one. You can get something to drink there while you wait.” The girl glances behind her, then reaches into the pocket of her uniform shirt. “Here, have a piece of gum. It'll settle your stomach.”

Rena takes the stick of gum, mumbles her thanks.

“Your old man?”

Rena nods.

“How long?”

“Four years.”

“That's not too bad. My brother's in for twenty. You want another piece?”

“No, thanks. I'm fine now.”

“I always keep something on me. People come here looking kind of ragged.”

Rena heads over to Building Ten, more out of fear of disappointing the girl than out of any desire for food. She walks through the cafeteria line, taking a saucer with a spotted banana and a styrofoam cup of tea. The room smells of ground meat: sloppy joes, meat loaf, hamburgers with gravy. She sits as far as possible from the food line.

At one, she returns to the reception area. She steels herself for the pat-down, empties out the shopping bag. A second guard leads her down the long hall and through the double gates to a room identical to the one where she saw Saul last time. She sits at the table and puts the bag in the middle.

A few minutes later, a third guard escorts Saul into the room. Rena senses it immediately: the sunken chest, the brightness drained from the eyes, the smell the skin gets when a person has collapsed, thoughts slowed to an excruciating crawl.

The guard repeats the directions about the buzzer and no physical contact. She fights the urge to grab the guard's sleeve and plead,
Don't leave me alone here with him.

“You don't look so good.”

“I've been kind of down.” Saul shifts his gaze to the back wall. “When did this happen?”

“A little after the sentencing. It hit me then. That I'm here for a long time. A tenth of the rest of my life.”

“It's a long time.”

“And it seems even longer when you can't sleep. At least if you can sleep, you have a third of the time off.”

“Maybe they can give you something.” She's appalled at her words—the same ones that had started this whole thing. She watches his reaction, his inability to muster the energy to pull off the kind of snappy rejoinder he would have in the past about no one wanting to fix a plumber's leaky faucet.

“Dealing with the medical staff here is enough to turn anyone into a bigot. Not one of them speaks fluent English. They're all afraid of me. Afraid I'll report them to the medical board for some piece of sloppiness and threaten their immigration status.”

“That's absurd. Did you talk to Morton about it?”

“No. That's the point. That's what they expect me to do.”

Saul pulls on a cuticle, the surrounding area inflamed and red. He puts the injured finger to his mouth. “What I can't figure out is your old buddy. Why he chose me to be the sacrificial lamb.”

When Morton had told her Saul believed Reed had left knowing Saul would be arrested, she'd assumed, wrongly, she sees now, it was something that would pass. “What makes you think that?”

“Oh, come on, Rena. They must have worked it all out. If Bria got caught, she'd make a deal by telling them about me.”

What she wants to say is,
I don't believe that, I don't believe Reed would ever do that to you, to me
, but she feels Saul's deadness washing against her, is afraid that anything she says now will only make it seem that her loyalty lies with Reed, not him.

“Are you still the secretary for that guy, the gang leader?” “Marsden Stem, Grand Marshal of the Blackjacks. Yes.” Saul closes his eyes. “I have to do that. If I stop doing that, it's all over for me.”

She squeezes her hands together. It's a familiar feeling, one she knew with Eleanor: the wish to run, to leave the other person to rot by the side of the road, to find air free of depression's stench.

“I brought you some books.”

“I can't read. Next to not sleeping, that's the worst part. By the time I get to the fourth line, my concentration's shot. Sometimes at night it's a little better, but then the noise is so bad—everyone jerking off and hooting and cursing.”

Silence gathers between them, Saul in that state where even if it occurred to him to ask about her, he would not be able to feign interest. Although he does not know why she's come—an impulse this morning to tell him that she'd finally quit her job—she feels foolish for having thought it would matter to him.

They remain in silence. She cannot say if it is two minutes or ten. Then, searching for something to say, she asks about his prison job.

“Same. Making brackets for state shelving. Three hundred a day.” “And your parents?”

He stares at her. It's the first time she has ever seen him look at her with disdain, disdain for filling time, for retreating from him.

“They're okay. My father comes every Sunday.”

Abruptly, Saul pushes back his chair and stands. “Tell Santiago. Tell him about me.”

The guard opens the door and before Rena can say
the magazines, the books
, Saul is gone.

T
HE SECOND TIME
with Ascher, she'd said it first. There was no choice but to stop. It would destroy him. He couldn't bear to humiliate his wife, Delia, that way. So they stopped as suddenly as they'd started. The first time, the hard, heavy feeling in her chest had slowly slid down toward her abdomen, letting her breathe again; this time, the weight grew day by day, like rocks one on top of another.