All Things Cease to Appear (29 page)

Yes. Of course you can trust me.

Why are you always so late?

I’m just starting out over there, he told her. I have to put my time in, pay my dues.

She turned and looked at him, tentatively, as if the consequences of meeting his eyes might be damaging, then turned away again, dissatisfied, and closed her eyes. He wrapped his arms around her, her body tense, unyielding. It made no difference to him. She was upset and he would comfort her.

I’d be lost without you, he told her. Try not to forget that.

The Secret Language of Women

YOU NEVER WANT
the ones who are willing to love you. This was something her mother had told her once. And Willis decided it was true. Because she knew that anyone willing to love her had to be pretty fucking desperate.

She knew how to use her body to make him crazy. She used her eyes and her lips, her little-baby pout. She used her long legs, which her mother complained had gone to waste ever since she gave up ballet. She used her knees, which were kind of like upside-down teacups. She used her hips. And her head, when she tossed her hair out of her face like she gave a shit. You could make your body say one thing, while inside your head you were thinking another. That was what she liked best about being female, this ability she had to trick people.

George. He wanted to do things to her. That’s what he told her. He had laid her out on the bed, stretching her arms over her head and pulling her legs out straight, and he stood there looking down at her. His hands were even bigger than her thighs, and when he pushed on them she felt caught and her eyes went blurry like she might cry. Then he took his hands off, like she was on fire and he’d gotten burned, and walked out. She hadn’t seen him since.

She had called her mother that night, but when she heard her voice and pictured her in the kitchen on East Eighty-Fifth Street, something cooking in the oven, one of her hippie casseroles, and she could imagine her tragic face with every second in her brain a battle between good and evil or fair and unfair or persecuted and privileged, it got so intense and noisy in her own head that she couldn’t stand it and hung up.

When she closed her eyes and saw George Clare, Willis felt guilt splashing in her gut, and that was what she wanted, because she was guilty of so much. And she was reckoning with it. With the simple fact of who she was. The alien offspring of Todd B. Howell, the famous criminal defense attorney with his drippy, savage clients. The heavy envelopes he’d leave on his desk, how she’d sneak into his study late at night and unwind the red string round and round and round until its yellow mouth opened and stuck out its tongue, depositions and photographs of the things people had done, very bad things, how she’d spread them out around her on the floor, messy and spectacular as birthday presents. How her father’s pudgy face looked when he talked about his clients over dinner, a kind of nauseous pride, bragging about always getting them off—like it was something sexual—because he could find the one detail nobody else would ever think of, that was his special skill. Even this guy who’d put a gun up someone’s vagina and pulled the trigger—well, he’d found some loophole, some tiny thing.

Because in this world you could get away with stuff like that. You could get away with being despicable.

That had been it for her, as much as she could take. And she’d walked out onto the terrace, standing there in the crazy wind, so hot it was like you were turned inside out, and the city just waiting, the tall gray buildings, the dark sky, the flash of lightning over the river, and she gave in to it, its routine madness, the countless windows of countless apartments in which terrible things were taking place, and she climbed up on the ledge and held out her arms. Here I am, she’d screamed into the emptiness, do what you want with me.

—

THEY’D PULLED HER
out of school. Her mother didn’t want her going back out west in her condition. Her shrink told her it was time to come to terms—stroking his beard, adjusting his bifocals with neurotic regularity. Waiting. Waiting for her to talk about the thing with Ralph.

She’d met him on the subway. It was an ugly name for such a good-looking man—he told her he was a model but wasn’t gay. He was tall and big-shouldered, the kind of person who had to watch his weight. He was a little older. She lied and said she was a model, too; he believed her. They lived in the same neighborhood. Like her, he was still living at home with his parents, but he’d found a place, he said, his lease started in a month. After the first times he’d tied her up, she thought about God. She wondered why He’d chosen her for this—why this person, this strange sad boy-man.

There was no one to talk to about it with. People would think she was a freak. And the guilt, because she kind of liked it. Being captured. Held in place. You have no choice but to enjoy it, his eyes seemed to say. They had things in common. His father worked for the FBI, an intelligence analyst. Ralph had a skinny, ugly dog that would roam around anxiously while he fucked her. Then he’d untie her, watching her face, looking for something—some expression or revelation. They’d emerge from the oily arcade of his room into the living room, thick with cigar smoke, his parents watching TV, and she’d put on her nice-girl-from-a-good-family smile and he’d walk her out, standing apart from her in the elevator like they were distant acquaintances and what had just transpired between them was no more than the fulfillment of some clerical agreement of service. She didn’t know why, but he stopped calling her. The abrupt dismissal sent her spiraling deeper into isolation—her very own version of exile.

—

THE NEXT TIME
George came to see her, he apologized for acting weird. You’re just so beautiful, he said. It’s disarming.

She wasn’t, though. Not really. Not in the classic sense. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

He looked down at his hands like a guilty man. You’ve got me all fucked up. I can’t think straight.

Thinking is overrated, she said, and kissed him.

—

SHE HADN’T LIED
about everything, only some things.

She hadn’t told him she was rich. Or that she was only nineteen. Or that she wasn’t using birth control. Or that her father was one of the most famous attorneys in New York. Or that she’d dropped out of UCLA or—ahem—been asked to leave. The real reason she’d come up here was because Astrid, her mother’s girlfriend, who was Dutch and like a Jack Russell terrier, always wagging her little tail, was moving into the apartment now that her mother had decided she was gay.

Ironically, the only person she wanted was her mother, but she couldn’t bring herself to dial the number and utter the words: Mom, it’s me, Willis.

She had grown up on horses, and Mr. Henderson had hired her out of the goodness of his heart to ride for all the rich people who pretended they didn’t have time but were really just scared. Scared of falling, of breaking something and ending up in a wheelchair shitting themselves. She already knew she wanted to be a poet and would write late at night in her little room, at the table with the little yellow lamp, and the screen a mosaic of gypsy moths, and it was a splendid summer until she met George Clare, because her life changed after that and she didn’t even know who she was anymore, the girl down deep whose voice had gone quiet, who’d gone off somewhere to hide like something that needed to die. She had studied psychology and taken classes in criminal behavior and she knew things about George Clare that nobody else did and it scared the shit out of her. He was another one of her many bad mistakes.

Her father had taught her about the system. How it could be manipulated. He said it all came down to perception. When he was defending someone—a creep, usually—he’d hole up in his office for days, reviewing the case and its allegations, the evidence, the photographs, looking for what he called a way in. He told her you had to get into the mind of the defendant. To see things through his eyes. Sometimes it could be some tiny thing, some bogus distraction or implacable truth that shed a fresh uncertainty on the claims against him. Whatever it was, he usually found it.

Unforeseen tragedies were a big business in the city, so her father was loaded. He didn’t wait in line for things. They’d open the ropes for him at clubs, where he’d walk right in like some eminence. His clients and their families took care of him. Back when she was little, her parents would entertain them. Thanksgiving, Christmas. They could be nice, too. Some of them gave her presents. They seemed like normal people.

Once, her father caught her in his office, going through his things. Willis, who’d been named after her grandfather, a judge on the federal court, had started to cry. How can you do this? How can you save these people?

Saving people is for God, he’d told her. What I do is uphold the law—nothing more, nothing less.

He had a special mirror, she thought, that made what he was doing look good.

—

THEY SAID
she could work in the barn with the babies. She had to feed some with a bottle. It was so loud in there, you couldn’t believe how loud, and the babies wanted all of her attention and looked up at her with sorry furry eyes until she felt her heart breaking. It occurred to Willis that babies needed their mommas, and she thought that for those young sheep life had suddenly become terrible. Their mommas had been taken away from them and the mommas’ milk was turning into cheese instead of filling their babies’ bellies. She wasn’t much interested in farming but liked working with animals and liked being out of doors. Her mother had shipped her off here. Make it work, she’d said, kind of bitchy. Because I’m out of ideas.

Once, she saw her mother and Astrid making love. It was incredibly weird, mostly because it was her mother being sexual, vulnerable, expressing herself. Because Astrid was skinny, inaccessible, even a little grim, and Willis couldn’t understand what they saw in each other. She concluded that what connected them was dissatisfaction with how fucked up the world was, how doomed they all were.

—

HER FAVORITE HORSE
was Athena, the biggest mare, black with white socks. They’d ride out together across the field. They’d climb the trails up to the ridge and look down on the old Hale farm. She’d go at dusk, when the lights were coming on. Sometimes she’d tie off Athena and walk down the hill on foot through the tall grass, the sweet lavender. When she got close to the house her legs would quiver a little and her cheeks got hot, the same buzz she’d get when she stole things. You could hear them through the windows, the clatter of dishes, Franny climbing up into her chair and banging on the table with her baby spoon. She was a cute little girl. Patiently waiting for her mother to wake up and give her what she wanted.

Like a panther, she cased the house, just seeing if she would get caught—knowing she wouldn’t. Walking past the windows with their wavering shades, the colored bottles on the sideboard turning the dining room into an aquarium, the back-and-forth trilling of the window fan, the wind tousling the crystals on the chandelier. A house that made music. Their footsteps on the creaky floors. The teapot, the thwack of the refrigerator. The little girl making noise.

He had told her things about his wife, personal things. In bed she’d just lie there, like a shovel you used to bury something dead. But she was a good mother. He said he’d hear her crying sometimes when she thought he was asleep. That she was a painter but wasn’t very good at it. Painting by numbers, was how he put it. She was Catholic, his wife. They had different ideas. He wasn’t attracted to her anymore. My wife is cold, he said. She doesn’t like having sex.

—

THEY’D KISS
for hours. Look what you do to me, he’d say.

But it wasn’t love. She knew that. It was something else.

—

WITH EDDY
it was love. What they called True Love. She could feel it with him. He was the first person she’d ever said it to, even though she wasn’t sure she meant it. And he didn’t even touch her. I’m just getting to know you, he told her. We don’t have to rush.

She liked just walking around with him. He was taller, bigger. Sometimes he wore this black felt hat. She kind of liked it. He’d pull out a harmonica, play her something. His fingertips were hard and round, like the buds of new flowers. They’d walk down to the creek and pitch rocks. Or he’d come find her at the barn and she’d let him hold a lamb and feed it with the bottle and he was tender with it and she could feel herself giving up inside, because she didn’t want to love him so much. He was like a brother. He’d never hurt her. She could trust him. He didn’t make her do anything.

But George was altogether different, and it was a dirty, awful love that made her crazy. The mean kind she thought she deserved. Sometimes he’d show up during the day, when everybody was out working. It would be so quiet. She’d hear his footsteps coming up the stairs. Take off your clothes, he’d say, and slowly pull down the shades. Or sometimes it was the middle of the night. What did you tell your wife? she’d ask. She thinks I’m in my study. I’m writing a book. She thinks I’m working. An interloper, he always came on foot, a couple of miles from his house. She’d say no, but he was good at talking her into it. He knew how to convince her. He was smart, eloquent. The things he told her made sense. You and me, we’re a lot alike. We require certain things.

They would drink a little bourbon. That fire in her throat. He would talk about art and stuff like that, mostly how people needed beauty in their lives and that’s why he needed her. Because you’re so beautiful, he’d whisper in a creepy, greeting-card voice, the kind at Christmas with sparkles on them. He’d complain how people were so fake and putting on fronts all the time and how his wife was just a stranger to him and sometimes he’d wake up and look across the pillow and not even know who she was. He said he wanted to go away and maybe even leave the country and live someplace like Italy, in a villa, where nobody knew him.

Show me, he’d say, and she would open her legs and he’d run his fingertips over her like velvety rain and before she knew it he’d be inside her.