Bag of Bones (32 page)

“Could he have been talking about someone in your wife's family?”

“Nope. There are Arlens in Maine—they're a big family—but most are still in Massachusetts. They do all sorts of things now, but if you go back to the eighteen-eighties, the majority would have been quarry-men and stonecutters in the Malden–Lynn area. Devore was pulling your leg, Mattie.” But even then I suppose I knew he wasn't. He might have gotten some part of the story wrong—even the sharpest guys begin to lose the edge of their recollection by the time they turn eighty-five—but Max Devore wasn't much of a leg-puller. I had an image of unseen cables stretching beneath the surface of the earth here on the TR—stretching in all directions, unseen but very powerful.

My hand was resting on top of my car door, and now she touched it briefly. “Can I ask you one other question before you go? It's stupid, I warn you.”

“Go ahead. Stupid questions are a specialty of mine.”

“Do you have any idea at
all
what that ‘Bartleby' story is about?”

I wanted to laugh, but there was enough moonlight
for me to see she was serious, and that I'd hurt her feelings if I did. She was a member of Lindy Briggs's readers' circle (where I had once spoken in the late eighties), probably the youngest by at least twenty years, and she was afraid of appearing stupid.

“I have to speak first next time,” she said, “and I'd like to give more than just a summary of the story so they know I've read it. I've thought about it until my head aches, and I just don't see. I doubt if it's one of those stories where everything comes magically clear in the last few pages, either. And I feel like I
should
see—that it's right there in front of me.”

That made me think of the cables again—cables running in every direction, a subcutaneous webwork connecting people and places. You couldn't see them, but you could feel them. Especially if you tried to get away. Meanwhile Mattie was waiting, looking at me with hope and anxiety.

“Okay, listen up, school's in session,” I said.

“I am. Believe me.”

“Most critics think
Huckleberry Finn
is the first modern American novel, and that's fair enough, but if ‘Bartleby' were a hundred pages longer, I think I'd put my money there. Do you know what a scrivener was?”

“A secretary?”

“That's too grand. A copyist. Sort of like Bob Cratchit in
A Christmas Carol.
Only Dickens gives Bob a past and a family life. Melville gives Bartleby neither. He's the first existential character in American fiction, a guy with no ties . . . no ties to, you know . . .”

A couple of loggers who could produce millionaires. They shit in the same pit.

“Mike?”

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

“Sure.” I focused my mind as best I could. “Bartleby is tied to life only by work. In that way he's a twentieth-century American type, not much different from Sloan Wilson's Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, or—in the dark version—Michael Corleone in
The Godfather.
But then Bartleby begins to question even work, the god of middle-class American males.”

She looked excited now, and I thought it was a shame she'd missed her last year of high school. For her and also for her teachers. “That's why he starts saying ‘I prefer not to'?”

“Yes. Think of Bartleby as a . . . a hot-air balloon. Only one rope still tethers him to the earth, and that rope is his scrivening. We can measure the rot in that last rope by the steadily increasing number of things Bartleby prefers not to do. Finally the rope breaks and Bartleby floats away. It's a goddam disturbing story, isn't it?”

“One night I dreamed about him,” she said. “I opened the trailer door and there he was, sitting on the steps in his old black suit. Thin. Not much hair. I said, ‘Will you move, please? I have to go out and hang the clothes now.' And he said, ‘I prefer not to.' Yes, I guess you could call it disturbing.”

“Then it still works,” I said, and got into my car. “Call me. Tell me how it goes with John Storrow.”

“I will. And anything I can do to repay, just ask.”

Just ask.
How young did you have to be, how beautifully ignorant, to issue that kind of blank check?

My window was open. I reached through it and squeezed her hand. She squeezed back, and hard.

“You miss your wife a lot, don't you?” she said.

“It shows?”

“Sometimes.” She was no longer squeezing, but she was still holding my hand. “When you were reading to Ki, you looked both happy and sad at the same time. I only saw her once, your wife, but I thought she was very beautiful.”

I had been thinking about the touch of our hands, concentrating on that. Now I forgot about it entirely. “When did you see her? And where? Do you remember?”

She smiled as if those were very silly questions. “I remember. It was at the ballfield, on the night I met my husband.”

Very slowly I withdrew my hand from hers. So far as I knew, neither Jo nor I had been near TR-90 all that summer of '94 . . . but what I knew was apparently wrong. Jo had been down on a Tuesday in early July. She had even gone to the softball game.

“Are you sure it was Jo?” I asked.

Mattie was looking off toward the road. It wasn't my wife she was thinking about; I would have bet the house and lot on it—either house, either lot. It was Lance. Maybe that was good. If she was thinking about him, she probably wouldn't look too closely at me, and I didn't think I had much control of my expression just then. She might have seen more on my face than I wanted to show.

“Yes,” she said. “I was standing with Jenna McCoy and Helen Geary—this was after Lance helped me with a keg of beer I got stuck in the mud and then asked if I was going for pizza with the rest of them after the game—and Jenna said, ‘Look, it's Mrs. Noonan,' and
Helen said, ‘She's the writer's wife, Mattie, isn't that a cool blouse?' The blouse was all covered with blue roses.”

I remembered it very well. Jo liked it because it was a joke—there
are
no blue roses, not in nature and not in cultivation. Once when she was wearing it she had thrown her arms extravagantly around my neck, swooned her hips forward against mine, and cried that she was my blue rose and I must stroke her until she turned pink. Remembering that hurt, and badly.

“She was over on the third-base side, behind the chickenwire screen,” Mattie said, “with some guy who was wearing an old brown jacket with patches on the elbows. They were laughing together over something, and then she turned her head a little and looked right at me.” She was quiet for a moment, standing there beside my car in her red dress. She raised her hair off the back of her neck, held it, then let it drop again. “Right
at
me. Really seeing me. And she had a look about her . . . she'd just been laughing but this look was sad, somehow. It was as if she knew me. Then the guy put his arm around her waist and they walked away.”

Silence except for the crickets and the far-off drone of a truck. Mattie only stood there for a moment, as if dreaming with her eyes open, and then she felt something and looked back at me.

“Is something wrong?”

“No. Except who was this guy with his arm around my wife?”

She laughed a little uncertainly. “Well I doubt if he was her boyfriend, you know. He was quite a bit
older. Fifty, at least.”
So what?
I thought. I myself was forty, but that didn't mean I had missed the way Mattie moved inside her dress, or lifted her hair from the nape of her neck. “I mean . . . you're kidding, right?”

“I don't really know. There's a lot of things I don't know these days, it seems. But the lady's dead in any case, so how can it matter?”

Mattie was looking distressed. “If I put my foot in something, Mike, I'm sorry.”

“Who
was
the man? Do you know?”

She shook her head. “I thought he was a summer person—there was that feeling about him, maybe just because he was wearing a jacket on a hot summer evening—but if he was, he wasn't staying at Warrington's. I knew most of them.”

“And they walked off together?”

“Yes.” Sounding reluctant.

“Toward the parking lot?”

“Yes.” More reluctant still. And this time she was lying. I knew it with a queer certainty that went far beyond intuition; it was almost like mind-reading.

I reached through the window and took her hand again. “You said if I could think of anything you could do to repay me, to just ask. I'm asking. Tell me the truth, Mattie.”

She bit her lip, looking down at my hand lying over hers. Then she looked up at my face. “He was a burly guy. The old sportcoat made him look a little like a college professor, but he could have been a carpenter for all I know. His hair was black. He had a tan. They had a laugh together, a good one, and then she looked at me and the laugh went out of her face.
After that he put an arm around her and they walked away.” She paused. “Not toward the parking lot, though. Toward The Street.”

The Street. From there they could have walked north along the edge of the lake until they came to Sara Laughs. And then? Who knew?

“She never told me she came down here that summer,” I said.

Mattie seemed to try several responses and find none of them to her liking. I gave her her hand back. It was time for me to go. In fact I had started to wish I'd left five minutes sooner.

“Mike, I'm sure—”

“No,” I said. “You're not. Neither am I. But I loved her a lot and I'm going to try and let this go. It probably signifies nothing, and besides—what else can I do? Thanks for dinner.”

“You're welcome.” Mattie looked so much like crying that I picked her hand up again and kissed the back of it. “I feel like a dope.”

“You're not a dope,” I said.

I gave her hand another kiss, then drove away. And that was my date, the first one in four years.

*   *   *

Driving home I thought of an old saying about how one person can never truly know another. It's easy to give that idea lip service, but it's a jolt—as horrible and unexpected as severe air turbulence on a previously calm airline flight—to discover it's a literal fact in one's own life. I kept remembering our visit to a fertility doc after we'd been trying to make a baby for almost two years with no success. The doctor had told
us I had a low sperm count—not disastrously low, but down enough to account for Jo's failure to conceive.

“If you want a kid, you'll likely have one without any special help,” the doc had said. “Both the odds and time are still on your side. It could happen tomorrow or it could happen four years from now. Will you ever fill the house with babies? Probably not. But you might have two, and you'll almost certainly have one if you keep doing the thing that makes them.” She had grinned. “Remember, the pleasure is in the journey.”

There had been a lot of pleasure, all right, many ringings of Bunter's bell, but there had been no baby. Then Johanna had died running across a shopping-center parking lot on a hot day, and one of the items in her bag had been a Norco Home Pregnancy Test which she had not told me she had intended to buy. No more than she'd told me she had bought a couple of plastic owls to keep the crows from shitting on the lakeside deck.

What else hadn't she told me?

“Stop,” I muttered. “For Christ's sake stop thinking about it.”

But I couldn't.

*   *   *

When I got back to Sara, the fruit and vegetable magnets on the refrigerator were in a circle again. Three letters had been clustered in the middle:

g   d
o

I moved the
o
up to where I thought it belonged, making “god” or maybe an abridged version of “good.”
Which meant exactly what? “I could speculate about that, but I prefer not to,” I told the empty house. I looked at Bunter the moose, willing the bell around his moth-eaten neck to ring. When it didn't, I opened my two new Magnabet packages and stuck the letters on the fridge door, spreading them out. Then I went down to the north wing, undressed, and brushed my teeth.

As I bared my fangs for the mirror in a sudsy cartoon scowl, I considered calling Ward Hankins again tomorrow morning. I could tell him that my search for the elusive plastic owls had progressed from November of 1993 to July of 1994. What meetings had Jo put on her calendar for that month? What excuses to be out of Derry? And once I had finished with Ward, I could tackle Jo's friend Bonnie Amudson, ask her if anything had been going on with Jo in the last summer of her life.

Let her rest in peace, why don't you?
It was the UFO voice.
What good will it do you to do otherwise? Assume she popped over to the TR after one of her board meetings, maybe just on a whim, met an old friend, took him back to the house for a bite of dinner.
Just
dinner.

And never told me?
I asked the UFO voice, spitting out a mouthful of toothpaste and then rinsing.
Never said a single word?

How do you know she didn't?
the voice returned, and that froze me in the act of putting my toothbrush back in the medicine cabinet. The UFO voice had a point. I had been deep into
All the Way from the Top
by July of '94. Jo could have come in and told me she'd seen Lon Chaney Junior dancing with the queen, doing the Werewolves of London, and I probably
would have said “Uh-huh, honey, that's nice” as I went on proofing copy.

“Bullshit,” I said to my reflection. “That's just bullshit.”

Except it wasn't. When I was really driving on a book I more or less fell out of the world; other than a quick scan of the sports pages, I didn't even read the newspaper. So yes—it
was
possible that Jo had told me she'd run over to the TR after a board meeting in Lewiston or Freeport, it
was
possible that she'd told me she'd run into an old friend—perhaps another student from the photography seminar she'd attended at Bates in 1991—and it
was
possible she'd told me they'd had dinner together on our deck, eating black trumpet mushrooms she'd picked herself as the sun went down. It was possible she'd told me these things and I hadn't registered a word of what she was saying.