Aquamarine (8 page)

And that’s it. She can’t push it any further, although there surely was a further. As hard as she can stare at the insides of her eyelids, she can’t bring the colors back.

Neal is easy to wake up, even in the middle of the night, even when he’s on his back with his mouth open, looking like a fighter on the canvas, out for the count. She touches him and his eyes pop open.

“The baby!” he says, startled, but alert, ready to go.

“No, it’s just me. I’m all riled up.”

He rolls over and props himself on an elbow and touches the scar at her jaw. She wonders how he can even find it in just the moonlight.

“It’s the air conditioning,” he says. “It throws the ions in the atmosphere out of kilter. I read it somewhere. If the heat keeps up, we should really just go down and sleep in the cave.”

“No. It’s my past.”

“Your checkered past?”

“My aquatic past. I took Alice Avery out to the quarry today. She remembers me from back when. Something about that nerves me up. Gets me to thinking old thoughts.”

“But all that’s over, dead and done, a million miles behind you.”

She rolls away from him, looking for comfort in what used to be their old spooning position, only now she’s too big for him to get his arm around her. She rolls back in frustration and props herself up on bunched pillows. “I worry I was my best self then, my best version of me. And I can never get back to her.”

He sits up, too, and looks down at her. “Sweetheart, I’ve known you the whole time between then and now. I’m practically an authority on you. Ted Koppel will have me up on the screen when he does a ‘Nightline’ on you. And I’ll tell him that you were great when I met you, a wonderful girl and all, but really just at the start of you. I knew I was taking a big chance.”

This is the kind of place where she usually gives him a fake punch in the stomach, but she doesn’t have the heart now.

He goes on anyway. “All you really were then was great-looking and incredibly fast in water. All the really good parts have been filled in since then. You just can’t see it because you’re sitting on the inside. Lucky you’ve got me with twenty-twenty to set you straight.”

Jesse grabs onto his beard and starts to cry softly, silently, just tears sliding out the corners of her eyes. She has never told him about the aquamarine, or even much about Marty. Jesse has been with Neal more than twenty years chesting these trumps. And yet she let almost all of it come tumbling out to Alice Avery today. In the same off-balance way, she has not really ever let herself experience passion with Neal, who has thrown his whole lot in with hers. Has instead squandered it, on two near strangers.

Jesse and Wayne are sitting across from each other in a semicircular black vinyl booth in the cocktail lounge of the Holiday Inn by the interstate. They come here because there’s no one else but them and tourists and passing-through salesmen. It’s two in the afternoon. She’s having a Coke, Wayne’s having coffee—he drinks it all day long, mostly from Styrofoam cups with half-moon holes punched in the tops.

He’s panicked. She has just told him she can’t see him anymore until after the baby is born. She meant to say she can’t see him again ever, but she had a last-minute failure of nerve. She is sure that in two or three months he will be onto something else, maybe even another town, and she will be safe. Right now, though, she’s not safe at all. She’s trying to rescue a flailing man while going under herself.

“You could come with me,” he says.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“I could come up with something wonderful,” he says. “We could go to Florida. I could skywrite over those long beaches full of college kids. You could teach swimming at a hotel pool. You could teach the sidestroke to old ladies. We could eat fried fish dinners and go to the drive-in for a movie at night.” This is a scheme pulled straight out of his desperation, but she knows he’ll punch it up into real life around her if she gives him a chance.

“The baby,” she says.

“The baby would be our papoose. We’d put her in a backpack and bring her along. Wherever.”

But there is no wherever for them. At this moment, Jesse feels a sharp catch beneath her breastbone, the price exacted for creating this thought, the thought of really never seeing him again. She also feels a lilting relief. She is standing in a red velvet and sequin bathing suit, inside the exploding burst of magician’s smoke. When it clears, she’ll be gone.

***

They’re having Thanksgiving at Hallie’s this year, more or less by default. Jesse, who usually has it at her house, has been too frayed and short on sleep with the baby, who has turned out to be a happy and easygoing, but nocturnal creature. Having the dinner at Frances’s was out of the question; she’s a notoriously terrible chef. And everyone agreed Alice spends enough time in the kitchen the other days of the year and should be able to just put her feet up for the holiday. She and her lover, Jordan, have been invited on the condition they don’t complain about lumps in the gravy.

It turns out to be a particularly fun afternoon. The balance is just right. Frances comes by herself. Darrell is off at one of his daughters’ in some extremely backwoods Arkansas hollow, where the traditional holiday main dish—Frances informs them as though Darrell is from another country—is fried wild hare.

“Road kill,” Jesse says under her breath to Neal.

Frances is totally taken with Alice, considers her sophisticated for being from Kansas City, and a restaurateur. This fascination takes her attention off Jesse and Hallie, who she doesn’t enjoy seeing together. Today though, they can just hang out in the steamy kitchen with Hallie doing the real cooking while Jesse takes the easy jobs—cutting the canned cranberry jelly into slices, folding the Cool Whip into the Waldorf salad—while extending a toe to jostle Olivia, who sits cackling in her bouncer. Neal watches football on TV in the living room with Willie, who enjoys the game for what must be reasons of his own, since he can never find the ball in any given play.

After a while, Willie comes back, wanting the baby, making gimme signs with his outstretched hands. He is quite proprietary about her. Not that he thinks she is his, in the sense of being her father. It’s more like he assumes Jesse has brought Olivia into the world for him.

“Okay, okay,” Jesse says, and pulls her daughter out of the contentment of her bouncer and hands her up to Willie. He adores the baby, is serious and overly careful with her.

When the turkey is out of the oven and cooled down a bit, Neal comes back into the kitchen to wield his electric carving knife. “A
man’s
job,” he says in a bogus macho way, waving the buzzing knife over his head.

They all take places on regular chairs and folding ones brought up from the basement, wedged in next to each other in Hallie’s small dining room. Frances, who is the only regular churchgoer in the group, says the blessing, thanking God for Olivia (with whom she is still tentative, edging slowly into grandmotherhood) and for “new friends.”

After dinner, after the coffee and pies—pumpkin, mince, and chess—have gone around, they all groan and push themselves away from the table and totter off, either to clatter away in the kitchen with dishes and leftovers and vast sheets of foil and plastic containers, or to find soft spots in the living room, where they can collapse and digest.

Jesse takes Olivia upstairs to nurse her, something they both enjoy. Jesse is nuts about this baby. She couldn’t have guessed this. She had no idea she had this particular set of feelings inside her. A lot of the time it’s as though she is drunk with love. And it’s a right love, about something real and permanent. Not some riling thing making all the hairs on her neck stand up and setting everything else on edge.

All that is behind her; she can feel herself sealed away from it. She has put it on the other side of the liquid wall she sees as the border of her life as she’s living it. Beyond this, hidden from view, are the rejected choices, like Wayne.

Also the unmade ones. Even though she can’t see these clearly, she feels them pulsing out there, all the unmet others, all the untried ways of pushing against the fates. She knows they exist, though, by the shape of their absence, by the shadows she can just barely make out on the other side of the membrane.

When she has put the baby down for a nap, Jesse joins the others in the living room. The TV is on one of the soaps, but not the right one. Everyone’s talking, though, nobody’s really watching, and so Jesse picks up the remote and clicks it to “M.D./R.N.” Rhonda is on the witness stand, lying about where she was on the night of Stephen Poole’s death. (The net is closing in on her.) But Jesse is not really listening. She’s bothered by the bandage on Rhonda’s hand. She has been wearing it since sometime in late summer. Supposedly this was about an accident in her kitchen, something she did to herself on account of being rattled about the murder. Jesse never bought this. Anyone with the presence of mind to shoot a guy, then stuff him into a garment bag and drag him out of her apartment and down the service elevator and dump him into the river with dumbbells tied to his wrists and ankles is not going to accidentally stuff her hand in the food processor along with a bunch of carrots.

They try not to show it—the hand—but this is hard in close-ups, like now, when Rhonda is bursting into tears in the courtroom (a big show for the jury), sobbing violently into her hands, one of them wrapped tightly in gauze. She suspects the hand problem is not Rhonda’s, but rather belongs to the actress who plays her. She’d like to know what happened. It bothers her to seem to know whatever there is to know, to operate on all the information that’s offered, and still be missing some piece of knowledge, the one that would make everything come clear.

This has been the first blue day to surface from weeks of gray, and the afternoon is in its last spectacular moments as they head home. Jesse is driving, Neal next to her in the front. Willie is catnapping in the back. The baby, in her car seat, is patting the top of his head and making soft noises, a private song.

“Eighty,” Neal says. He always keeps a casual eye on the speedometer when Jesse’s driving. She lifts her foot off the accelerator, and simultaneously lifts her eyes from the road in front of them. There on the clean slate of sky is a smoky script being scrawled by a plane, just coming off the loop of the final “e” of Jesse. Her heart takes a thrilling deer’s leap and she feels her fingernails cut into her palms around the steering wheel.

It’s hard to pretend not to notice skywriting, but Neal manages.

Old Souls

July 1990 New York City

J
ESSE IS STANDING
at the cabinet in her carrel in the literature stacks, filing away notes on Flannery O’Connor for a book she’s writing about the influence of illness on certain twentieth-century American writers. In this research phase she has become both mesmerized and profoundly depressed. There are times when she wishes she were writing instead on the influence of puppet shows on certain American writers, the influence of clowns tumbling out of small cars. Hurled cream pies.

These back stacks are among the few truly quiet places in Manhattan. They look out onto an ivy-clogged courtyard, a souvenir from another New York. The only sounds are internally generated ones—the occasional rustling of papers being gathered up, the soft thwack of book covers being shut, a constant fluorescent hum. But now there is a sudden rush of air, the sharp clank of a bangle bracelet hitting the shelves, followed by Kit sailing in breathless. Finding Jesse, she stops short, her elbows lofting a little as she slams out of forward, into neutral. She often arrives this way, as though she has been missing for years, shipwrecked and given up for gone, but now—astonishingly—here!

In fact, it has been less than three hours since they last saw each other. Jesse looks down. She doesn’t like Kit to see how strongly she is affected by her; it seems a little absurd even to Jesse.

Anyone could walk back here, although it is summer and Friday and late in the afternoon, and so probably no one will. Still, Jesse feels the dead atmosphere of the room begin to crackle a little with risk as Kit presses her back against the jutting handles of the file drawers, tugs her shirt free, and runs her hands up Jesse’s back and then around, tracing her breasts.

“I think,” Jesse says when her mouth is freed up, “that if I get fired from a tenured position, I’d especially like for it to be on account of the morals clause.”

Kit puts her hands behind Jesse and pulls her in.

“Maybe we’d better go home,” Jesse says. “Start our vacation.”

Kit nods, kind of hearing.

They walk on an angle through the Village. Kit gets stopped by a flurry of teenage girls. Jesse thinks, boy, teenage girls these days sure look like hookers. Then she notices one of them negotiating with a guy in a delivery van and realizes these girls
are
hookers. They are also fans of Kit, and want her autograph.

Kit is an actress of sorts. She plays Rhonda, the vampy intensive care nurse on a terrible hospital soap. Five days a week, she has to Rhonda around in an extra set of eyelashes and outfits that are as provocative as possible within the limitations of their also being white uniforms. Wardrobe has also worked up a sexy nurse’s hat for her.

When she first came on the show, Rhonda was almost immediately given a juicy euthanasia subplot. She was accused of pulling the plug on an intensive care patient, an old guy who only days before he died, changed his will to generously include Rhonda. Since this story line was resolved, though (it turned out there had been an inadvertent mix-up in medication charts), for months all the scripts have let Rhonda do is lurk suspiciously around the medicine room, and vamp through her mirrored apartment in slinky hostess gowns and earrings that hit her shoulders, entertaining married doctors. Kit was worried they were going to write her character out entirely, but now she’s gotten a break. Rhonda has shot the latest of the married doctors after he laughed at her ultimatum that he leave his wife.