Dancing After Hours (16 page)

While beneath her fast heart, her husband left his office and the gymnasium, his gray overcoat unbuttoned, his head bare as he walked into the parking lot under his last moon. The boy lay in the dark and her husband opened the door, and dim light was in the car, and he got inside and closed the door, and it was dark again. The boy rose, and her husband’s head and the revolver and the bullet and the boy were poised. In her body she saw the flash, heard the explosion of powder, saw the sudden hole and the spray of blood, her husband’s dead eyes and falling face. Her hands rested on the table. It could be in this second; or the next; or the one a minute ago. Her right hand moved toward the cup, and she felt that her arm could reach through the night sky, her thumb and forefinger open to hold the moon.

O
N A THURSDAY NIGHT IN EARLY AUTUMN
she nearly committed adultery, was within minutes of consummating it, or within touches, kisses; it was difficult to measure by time or by her mouth and tongue and hands, or by his. She made love with her husband, Ted Briggs, on Thursday night and Friday night and at first light Saturday morning, before her young children woke. Early Saturday afternoon, wearing sunglasses and sneakers, gray gym shorts and a blue tank top and blue nylon jacket, LuAnn Arceneaux kissed her children, the girls ten and eight and the boy six, and Ted, broad and bearded, standing with his cane in the kitchen; and carrying her purse, she went through the mudroom and walked down the long, curving driveway, a forty-three-year-old woman with
dark skin and long black hair she wore this afternoon in a ponytail. She smelled the tall pines she walked past on her right, and the sunscreen she had rubbed on her face and arms and shoulders and legs. When she rounded the curve, she saw Marsha stopping her car in the road, then turning into the driveway, a Japanese car with dust on most of its red surface, and Marsha waving behind the windshield. LuAnn got into the car and they kissed cheeks.

They were talking about the lovely weather before Marsha backed onto the road; then she drove past trees with yellow leaves, and red ones, and Marsha said the river would be beautiful, in this light, with the leaves at its banks. Marsha’s nylon jacket and shorts were silver, and LuAnn guessed she was wearing the purple tank top. Her hair was auburn, cut above her shoulders, and her sunglasses were dark. They lit cigarettes and LuAnn said they could just take beer to the park and lie in the sun, and Marsha said she could do that; her son, who was seven, had refused every morning this week to get out of bed, to dress, and to go to school, and she fought him as he dressed, and she and Bill and Annie encouraged him at breakfast, and snapped at him, and ordered him, and he went to school. LuAnn said that Julia and Elizabeth and Sam were good on school mornings; sometimes they fought with each other, but they did that in summer, too; and Marsha said if a workout didn’t give her the same relief smoking and drinking did, she’d get a six-pack now; she said she had brought them a bottle of water. They were driving on a road built through a forest. LuAnn wondered if the road had once been a trail for loggers, for horse-drawn wagons and carriages. Large houses were acres
apart, built on lawns surrounded by trees. LuAnn said: “Maybe something’s wrong at school. A bully.”

“I think he doesn’t like the way I am in the morning. I don’t like morning. Not on weekdays.”

“We made love this morning.”

“During cartoons?”

They drove out of the trees. There was a farm on the left, and beyond the dead cornstalks LuAnn saw the river; across the road from the farm were houses, and after the farm they were on both sides of the road. LuAnn said: “I woke up early.”

“That’s really good.” Children were on the grass and sidewalks, cars were on the road, and men were mowing lawns. “If I
ever
woke up first, without the clock radio, I probably wouldn’t even think of that. I’d creep to the kitchen and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and stare. I work too Goddamned much.”

“I don’t miss it.”

“I’m sick of it. I want your life. Or Ted’s money. Imagine: in the morning. Ted will be a lamb all day. He’ll take you to dinner.”

“A stallion. When his day starts with sex, he sort of stays fixed on it.”

“So you’ll put on something pretty, go to Boston, have dinner.”

“I feel like a movie. Some nice video the children can see.”

“Get Zorro. Little girls love Zorro.”

At an intersection Marsha stopped, waited for cars to pass, then turned left and drove a block between houses with small front lawns, and swaths of lawns or low wooden fences between them. There was a one-story yellow house with green trim and a maple with
red leaves in the yard and a blue tricycle on the front porch; LuAnn imagined herself living in it; she loved her life and she knew she would love it in that yellow house, too. As a young woman working in Boston for an insurance company, then a small publisher, she had thought very little about money; then she had married Ted, a lawyer, and always there was plenty of money; so all her life she had not worried about it, except having so much of it; when she paid the monthly bills, she sent checks to homes for those who have no homes. On Thursday nights she went to a home for teenaged girls and read a story to some of them. It was not something she felt like leaving her house to do on Thursday nights; but she believed in sharing her gifts, and she liked the girls.

Just this summer she and Ted had bought the big house on the country road and she loved being in it, and was grateful for the money they had; it saved her from a job, and from some difficulties, and she had a housekeeper. She could live in the yellow house. She would miss looking out her windows at the rise and fall of wooded land, miss the solitude of trees, the private spaces her large house gave, and her big kitchen. But she knew that she and Ted, and Julia and Elizabeth and Sam, would be no different. She wished Marsha could quit her job. Marsha turned onto a narrow street and drove downhill, the red-brick hospital on their left, and farther down a yellow-brick church where LuAnn went to Mass. Marsha turned and drove past the church; they tossed their cigarettes out the windows, and went past the football stadium, and turned into a parking lot. The high school team was playing and through her
open window LuAnn heard the band, and she looked at people sitting high in the stands. She and Marsha put their sunglasses on the dashboard, got out of the car, took off their jackets, and put them on the front seat, covering their purses. Marsha was wearing the purple top and holding her key ring. She came around the car and they started walking fast, across the lot and onto an asphalt path. To their right, black boys without shirts played basketball on a court. A woman on a bicycle rode toward them, and a young couple on Rollerblades came from behind them and skirted them and went bending and swaying up the slope. Large trees stood scattered in the park, and the high sun shone on the path and warmed LuAnn’s face. She said: “I almost cheated Thursday night.”

Marsha looked at her and said: “I wish I’d had the chance. Tell.”

“You do?”

“I’m human. Depends on who it was.”

The path gently rose and LuAnn looked at the trees on the riverbank and, far away, the trees across the river; she could not see the water.

“Roger Sibley,” she said.

“Who’s Roger Sibley?”

“The director. Of the girls’ home.”

“Him?”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing. I saw him that one time, in the bar. The reason I said
him
was I couldn’t get a picture. How do you get that done while you’re reading—What?”

“Alice Munro.”

“You look like you’re in heat.”

“I am. That’s why this morning I—” She looked at Marsha’s hazel eyes. “And last night and Thursday night. I’m burning it up with Ted.”

In Marsha’s eyes was a brief concupiscent light; then she smiled and looked ahead, and LuAnn did, and they walked between two old oaks with yellow leaves. The football crowd cheered and someone steadily beat a bass drum, and LuAnn heard her deep breath and Marsha’s, in rhythm. Desire was part of their friendship and they had known it for a long time; known they could be lovers and they would not be; they neither talked about it nor avoided talking about it.

“Lucky Ted,” Marsha said, and LuAnn looked at her in profile, at her mouth and a trickle of sweat on her cheek. “I’m going to volunteer there. You’re sitting in a room with some very unlucky girls, you’re reading Alice Munro, and somehow—” LuAnn saw the room, and Sylvie, sixteen, with a small body and a pretty face and light brown hair down to her lower back and falling over her cheek when she lowered her head; Sylvie watching, listening to LuAnn read. “Didn’t you tell me it was a glass room?”

“It’s all windows—the upper halves of the walls. It’s on the first floor, and it doesn’t open to the outside. You can’t be in there without someone seeing you. It was later, in my car.”

“Holy shit.”

“It’s their smoking room—the girls, the staff. The girls can smoke on the sundeck, if a woman is with them. They can’t be alone. Only in the bathroom or when they go to bed. Sometimes when I’m reading, girls come in to smoke, and sometimes they stay and listen to the rest of the story; sometimes they just listen
while they’re smoking, then leave. Thursday I had my regular four—anyone can come; I wish they all would—but I had Sylvie and Tracy and Lisa and Annette. Sylvie is smart. They’ve all seen too much and heard too much, and they’ve had too much done to them, and they’ve done too much. Some don’t seem bright, but I don’t know if that’s because they’ve spent all their lives surviving, or if they wouldn’t be bright anyway. But Sylvie is smart. If she had just had ordinary parents—” LuAnn saw again the small yellow house in the neighborhood near the hospital. “Just ordinary, bumbling, mistaken parents, who loved her and made a home for her, and fed her, and sent her to school. Read her a story at bedtime. Talked to her. She’d be in high school in some little town, with girlfriends, and a boyfriend, and learning to drive, and thinking about college. What she got was a father she’s never seen and a mother whose boyfriends fucked her since she was four years old. There was always somebody fucking her till she was twelve; then she ran away and everybody fucked her. She was on the streets till she got in drug trouble. Then it was juvenile court, and now she’s watched all the time, and fed, and taught. And loved, too. By some of the girls, and the staff.”

“And you.”

“And me. Sometimes I think about adopting her. But I don’t know if I have it in me. She was the catalyst Thursday night.”

The path rose toward the riverbank; then she could see the water. On her right, a Hispanic family with three young children sat on the grass, eating sandwiches. To her left were trees, tall and close to one another, their leaves red and yellow. In the stadium the
band played. The river was bright blue and moving toward the sea. The path turned away from the trees and was flat, parallel to the river, and the couple on Rollerblades came toward them, and LuAnn and Marsha parted to let them through. Trees lined the high bank and LuAnn looked between their trunks at the river, and across it at red and golden trees, and hills.

“Sylvie asked if she could go to the bathroom. I stopped reading. She took her purse. I lit a cigarette. So did the girls. We talked about our hair. Tracy had hers cut, and she dyed it pink. Some girls were doing homework at tables in the dining room. A staff woman was with them—Sherri—reading something. Roger was working in his office. Facing me, but his head was down; he was doing something at his desk. I looked at his yellow rusty hair. I finished my cigarette. The girls finished theirs. We were still talking about hair and I was looking around through the glass, and then Annette was, and I said to her: ‘Do you think Sylvie’s all right?’ And Lisa and Tracy stopped talking, and Annette said: ‘I don’t know.’ And she sounded like she did know. Or she sounded frightened. She’s Sylvie’s roommate. And Tracy and Lisa and Annette looked at me; there was trouble in their eyes, and they were waiting. For me. For Sylvie. For what was going to happen next in their lives. So I said: ‘I’ll just check on her,’ and I left my purse on the floor by my chair, and while I was going through the dining room, and girls were looking up from their homework and saying hi, and I was smiling and saying hi, I worried about the money in my purse, but it wasn’t really the money; it was having it taken from my purse, my intimate piece of dead calf, and I was feeling stupid for leaving that temptation for
three girls who have so many good reasons to take from somebody, especially some foolish woman with money who reads to them so she can believe or just feel that she’s doing
something
for the hopeless—”

“You Catholics can be very complicated.”

“We’re good at sin. We study it.”

“Did they take your cash?”

“No.”

“If they had, would it be your sin?”

“Equally” She smiled. “At least. But mostly I was worried about Sylvie. She hadn’t looked sick. She has these pink cheeks. I went down the hall to the bathroom and knocked on the door. It was quiet. I was alone in the hall, and I knocked again, and it was still quiet. So I said her name. Then I said it again, and knocked. Then I said it louder; then I went fast through the dining room and past the glass room, and Lisa and Annette and Tracy watched me, and I tapped on Roger’s window. When he looked up and saw my face, he got up fast. He’s so big, but he’s quick. And he always looks calm. He’s not. You look at his eyes and you know he’s
contained
. He opened the door and I told him and he nodded—just that—and was past me, walking as fast as we are now, and I followed him, and I’m sure the girls’ eyes did, in the glass room and the dining room; I was only looking at his back I couldn’t see around and his head I couldn’t see over, and I noticed he was quiet, his shoes—his feet—didn’t make a sound, and he turned down the hall and stopped at the bathroom and knocked lightly. Then he spoke very softly. So very softly. He said: ‘Sylvie?’ and I imagined being Sylvie in there, hearing him. Probably she never heard a man speak so softly till she met Roger. Not with love, anyway.
He said: ‘Sylvie, open the door, please.’ Then two of the staff came, Susan and Deborah, and they called Sylvie. Roger said: ‘Sylvie. Sylvie, I’ll have to open the door.’ I was standing beside him. He opened the door, and she was standing there with her sleeves pushed up to her elbows, she was wearing a teal sweater, and she was stabbing her wrist with a ballpoint, her left wrist, and she had stabbed her hand; it was bleeding and her wrist was, not a lot, but she was raising the pen high and
stabbing
—” LuAnn raised her right fist and swung it down to her left and turned it back and forth—“and twisting the pen in her flesh, and that’s what she was looking at when Roger opened the door. She looked up at us. Not at any one of us. I know she saw us all, but her eyes—those big sweet brown eyes—saw something else, maybe saw the pen going in, or the pen when she held it high and drove it down. Maybe she saw her whole self, stabbing, being pierced. As if she stood beside herself and watched. Maybe what she stared at was just being alone. This was an instant, that look in her eyes. Then Roger moved and grabbed her hand with the pen, and Susan was behind her, holding her waist, and Deborah was holding her bleeding arm and turning her to the sink. Sylvie was fighting. I just stood in the doorway, the woman who reads. I know she saw me. But seeing me wasn’t in her eyes. She was bucking, squirming, elbowing, kicking. And the sound she made was a long moan. It was plaintive, and it was angry, and her head was moving, up and down when she bucked and kicked, side to side when she squirmed and elbowed, and all the time she made this loud sound of despair; it only paused when she inhaled, but it was so loud and she was in so much pain that it didn’t even
seem to pause; it was like she was blowing a trumpet to raise the devil. I was trembling.”