Beauty: A Novel (4 page)

He let go of her shoulder but kept hold of her arm and said, “Are you okay?” He said it half like a joke, since how okay could she be at the moment?

She tried to smile. She did smile. She said, “I will be. I tripped and fell.” Then instead of him saying something when it was his turn, he just looked at her. He had kind eyes. She said, “I got a very hard telephone call and it knocked me down.”

He stopped smiling and said, “I’m sorry,” but he did not stop looking at her.

Two things. First, she never spoke like that to anyone, hard-call-knocked-me-down. Second, in the business of her life, if you broke your arm or had appendicitis, everybody ran to help you and get you to the hospital and came and checked on you, but if you said out loud that your heart was broken over a terrible disappointment, then people backed off.

This man kept looking at her. He said, “I’m Ezekiel Parsons, and you’re Carol MacLean, and if there’s anything I can do to make you feel better, tell me. I have my harmonica with me.”

She didn’t know about harmonicas, but she knew this was a small town. A lot of people would know her name by now. She pointed back at the old plant and was all ready to admit to being the Beast. But she didn’t. She just smiled. He smiled again, too. Ezekiel Parsons. She nodded at him and he helped her get up again and she realized how dark it was. They were lit only by a couple security lights along the fencing around the old plant.

He looked her up and down, and before she understood he was still trying to be sure she was all right, she was wishing she had a chest to push out.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” he said and looked unsure of what they were talking about. She was glad she wasn’t the only one who didn’t know.

“Thank you for stopping,” she said. “I needed your hand getting up.” Then she said, “I have to make one more call from the car. This one is an okay call. I’ll be fine.” She sat in her car to fake it.

His eyes let go of hers, and he was already going away.

She said, “Ezekiel Parsons.”

He said, “Carol MacLean,” as he sat into his truck. He waved, his other hand already on the steering wheel and drove off. She hadn’t even heard his engine start.

When he and his lights were altogether gone, she walked to the fence and stood with her fingers through the chain links. Out the tunnel to the dock and the harbor, she could see the lights from his boat and then she couldn’t see them. She had lost her company. She held on to the fence so the punch in her stomach would not bring her to her knees all over again.

Easy Parsons

P
arsons had seen the lights at the old plant and wondered whether it was the woman, that the secretaries at the company had said was coming to check on the old plant before deep-sixing it. Jesus, but that was a depressing thought, even if Mathews and his gang were such assholes.

He was right. It had been her. What he hadn’t expected was to find her on her knees, her face wet from crying. The secretaries said that supposedly she was called “the Beast” by her colleagues, and now of course Matthews and the rest. If you had half a brain you would look at Carol MacLean, anytime, anywhere, and know the thing about the Beast was just some cruel bullshit. You also knew, when you found her the way Easy found her, that she was a tough woman. As soon as he showed up, she stood and fell back down and stood again and pretended right through it.

She also admitted her hurt about as briefly as possible. Hard call that knocked her down. Six words. And no matter how brief, Easy saw the hurt.

The people around Easy, when he was still there in Mississippi, they’d seen his hurt. Of course some of them didn’t mind him hurting. He’d been from somewhere else and he’d loved too much and he hadn’t minded saying two words, ugly words about what he thought of God for letting his wife and baby die. He couldn’t have been happier when everybody left him alone, except his friend, Rice, who couldn’t bear to see somebody need as bad as Easy had needed. What Easy had needed was the love that was gone, so Rice had given him a harmonica and taught him how to play.

Whatever had put Carol MacLean to her knees, Easy believed she needed something. He didn’t imagine her the harmonica type, but he was glad he’d at least showed up to be a friend. Also, for a woman out in the storm, she’d looked nice. He’d have wanted to help anyhow, but no argument, she was a good-looking woman.

Easy parked the truck and went on board the boat and belowdecks and to bed.

Women

E
ither Carol could hold on to the fence forever or, as her father would tell her, pull her damn socks up. She let go of the fence and stood on her own two feet like she was as tough as the next jerk. She got back in her car and drove the streets of Elizabeth Island, looking for the furnished unit that would be her home for the next few weeks.

She found the place. She always found the place. It was at one end of downtown Elizabeth. It wasn’t a motel. It belonged to the company and had housed the executives who came through from Germany and then Japan. It wasn’t far from where she’d just let a phone call put her to her knees, for which she was ashamed. She quit being ashamed. Hands and knees and ashamed was nobody she knew.

The unit was back from a side street of low houses and built into a small barn that, years before, would have been some part of the business. It was still early spring and off-season, and none of the decent motels were open. She locked the car and went inside and smelled cigarettes. She took off her suit and shook loose a bit of sand. The shoes were fine.

She turned out the light and lay down on top of her bed, still feeling a punch deep into her stomach. She heard Remy saying, “You’re out.” She heard Ezekiel Parsons saying, “Are you okay?” She put those voices out of her mind. She had work to do.

The next morning,
she woke sore and stiff. She cracked some windows to air out what she could of the old cigarette smoke. It was not quite light when she went out her door, but she could tell it would be a gray day. She wore a three-quarter wool coat that would survive rain. She wore pants and sturdy shoes. She walked down across the bottom of a main street, past low houses and an Italian deli, an Italian bakery. Elizabeth was the last place she would leave until she caught on as somebody else’s funeral director for less money, if she did catch on. She put that thought away. She would do the job right, which was the only way she knew how—also the only way she could make Baxter guilty enough to give the can’t-bear-to-lose-her recommendation she’d need. It wasn’t too soon to start looking, but she didn’t have the heart for it yet.

She walked fast, heading down to the harbor. Even in the half-dark, she could sense it between buildings. As she got near and the security lights timed off, she angled to the left past refrigeration units and transfer docks and dry storage, all of it beat up. She cut back toward the water through an alley of corrugated siding and came out on a wharf exactly where she’d thought she wanted to be.

Down to her right were the small boats tied to one another in pods. Directly across from her was the old plant. The last brand decoration was peeling off, but the dock and building looked solid.

All right, she’d seen this side of the plant, which she needed to do, but that wasn’t what she’d really come for.

She’d come to thank Ezekiel Parsons, which was something you did. If somebody was kind, you thanked them. Also, Carol, for her own sake, had to face the fact that she’d been on her knees. That wasn’t how she knew herself, and she would have preferred to forget it all, including this guy who had seen her, but Carol had never had the smarts-education-background-looks-connections that would let her forget inconvenient things. She got where she got by facing up to who she was and what that meant about how much harder she had to work and how much longer she had to keep going and how much less she had to hope for even when she was hoping for everything. She didn’t have practice admitting heartbreak to a stranger, but common sense told her to come and stand in front of Ezekiel Parsons.

The relief was that Ezekiel Parsons’s fishing boat was not where it ought to have been. Parsons was gone, and she had now seen the harbor side of the old plant. She could go. She’d made the effort and could send a thank-you card.

Because of her sentimental appreciation for old industry sites, she took a moment to register the irregular, decaying backs of the buildings that led to the plant. Weather and salt had worked at the paint on the buildings until the colors were a succession of grays and weathered pastels. She thought of her neighborhood as a kid, not something she thought of often, the pastels of those houses, though pastel on purpose. She could see the passageway that cut under and through the plant, the passageway she’d walked last night. Just beyond the plant was a tall, narrow icehouse where boats, as she understood it, picked up the ice for preserving their catch. It had the plant’s wharfing and was functional and looked functional, but it was hardly new. Beyond that, water separated the end of the spit from the reach and run of the neck that protected the inner harbor from the outer harbor. The neck had a dry dock that looked like a factory skeleton, great rusted stanchions pointed up at angles around railroad tracks that ran into the water. Along beside that were more of the backs of the sort of harbor shops that ran to the plant, interspersed with two short piers of winter-shut restaurants. Looking straight out along the dock she stood on, Carol got glimpses of the outer harbor that opened largely away to a major breakwater and ocean. She couldn’t see to the breakwater because of a fog gathering as the sun came up. In fact, the fog was rolling in heavily and fast, already darkening the early day. Time for Carol to get on with things. She turned and started back the way she’d come, to circle the head of the inner harbor and find her way around to the front of her plant.

“No, no,” somebody said slow and singsong. “You don’t get away that quick.”

Without realizing it, she’d been looking across at her plant and around the inner harbor through a branch of communications junk and the tops of a couple of blunt hoists.

He said, “Easy is fine. It’s what everybody calls me.” He stood well below her on the deck of his boat, beside a great rusted industrial spool of rope nets. He wore boots and jeans and, cold though it was, just a white T-shirt. He was strong but way past a kid, the full head of hair starting to gray, legs too short and arms too big, a small hard pot for his belly. He stood with his legs apart. A working guy.

“I also really do have a harmonica,” he said. “If you were wondering.”

The deck of his boat looked like a factory floor. The booms came up in a “v” off the mast, and she might have touched the boom on her side, with its cable and its hanging iron plow. Down in the deck was a tangle of more cable, of winches and generators and more net and the gauges and the iron levers to drive it all.

“Since you asked,” he said, “I grew up here, fishermen after fishermen, poor branch of a nice old name. But then I went to the Army, and it was one thing and another.”

Carol didn’t speak. She concentrated on her surroundings. This was the kind of factory floor she had been shutting down for years, and she would have liked to see it run. It was the kind of factory floor her father would have worked in early days, before OSHA and the rest. It was too crowded and with too much open gearing not to chew up arms and legs, and yet here it was, too efficient in its niche to die. Carol thought that was interesting.

Easy said, “I ended in the Mississippi Delta, married, fishing, shrimp to start, friends with good, simple people.”

The day was coming as gray and cold as she’d expected. The boat was black and rust and pitted white, the loose net a damp, heavy tangle.

He was looking up at her, and she looked back at him instead of at his boat. She didn’t have anything to say, and he seemed to get that. He was trying to help.

He said, “I once got a phone call like the one you got last night. It ended up sending me back home to this harbor.”

His face was wide and his eyebrows almost touched. He had high cheekbones, and seamed wrinkles from working out of doors. He had a real chin with an old scar. It wasn’t an ugly face, but it wasn’t handsome either.

She could have shivered from being cold if she let herself. She said, “I would be afraid for the men on your floor, especially if there were waves.”

He watched her, the kind of man she’d spent her life putting out of business, the kind of man she’d expected to wind up loving.

She said, “I’m sorry,” and he nodded at her as if she knew him and as if her sympathy were important.

She also said, “I should have knocked.”

He smiled at that, though she hadn’t thought to be funny. He looked around for what she might knock on.

“Thank you for last night,” she said. “You were very kind.”

He said, “Come knock anytime,” and she couldn’t imagine a practical reason for that. As soon as she buried the fish company, she’d be gone back to New York to get herself a new job. She didn’t believe she’d ever see Easy Parsons again, but she wished she would.

She waved good-bye, and she got going. She cut across through a dirt parking lot above the small boats and the guys getting ready to take those boats out. She wanted to take a look inside the old plant before she met Parks at the new plant.

As she reached the potholes on the lane out to the plant, she passed another lane that ran off at an angle through a warren of old clapboard duplexes. The first house on the corner had a sign saying, “St. Peter’s Breakfast.” She would have missed it if she hadn’t smelled the bacon.

Thick fog was pouring in with daybreak, and she walked down the lane to the plant past a lobster outfit, and then there were the outbuildings for Elizabeth’s Fish and the run of the plant itself behind its Cyclone fencing. She got out the keys Parks had given her. She felt the cold damp of the fog wrap onto the skin of her hands and face; the arms of her coat were shined with it. She wondered what it was like to work in her fisherman’s factory when there was fog to go with the waves.

She stood in the spot where she’d talked to Remy on the phone last night, where she’d knelt. Ancient history.

The sun would be up soon, but the day was getting darker and colder. She walked along the fence, dragging one hand over the cold, slick crisscrossings until she reached the gate. She couldn’t immediately find the right key to the padlock, but she got through and found the entry to the plant floor and unlocked those locks and stood facing a darkness of machinery. She was prepared to braille every wall to find light switches, but then decided that for the moment she didn’t need to see.

Parks had told her the lines were still here. She would have expected the fat boys to have sold them. Carol wondered if the lines were connected to whatever faucet the fat boys still had their hands on. She stood in the doorway to the cavern of the plant. She could smell the shellac of old cooking. Beneath that, she could smell generations of fish dried to vapor. She could smell the life of this town that had gutted millions of pounds of the swimming life of the ocean. She could feel the scales of the fish on her like the fog, and she could sense the motion of the men who did the cutting in the days when a lot of that must have been handwork. The moment a bulldozer’s blade first pierced a wall, all of that would begin to seep out, and then the building would get ripped to rubble and carted away.

Baxter had brought her on and sent her to one factory after another. She’d always understood that he saw her worth, and she’d also understood that as soon as he didn’t think she was worth enough, he’d cut her loose. Blume, she’d thought, was the one who liked her. She imagined going back into the New York office. Would Blume have the balls to break the news? Baxter would promise to make the right calls for her, insist they plan a long lunch.

Outside in the fog she felt her way back along the fence and back to St. Peter’s Breakfast. There she sat at the counter among half a dozen old men who continued to get up early even though the fish were gone and they themselves were done with trying to catch them, or sort and cut them. She ordered two bowls of oatmeal, a banana, strawberries, and nonfat cottage cheese, and when St. Peter told her none of that was available, she had two eggs up, bacon, and a short stack with extra syrup, and while she ate, the fog lifted enough for her to see her way back to this month’s home and her car.

At the new
plant, she found Parks and Annette, the financial second, in Parks’s office.

Carol didn’t say “Good morning.” She said, “Take me onto the floor. Let’s get it over with.”