Just After Sunset (26 page)

She held it out to me. “Take it back,” she said.

I did so without a word.

“His name was Roland Abelson,” she said. “Wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“He had red hair.”

“Yes.”

“Not married but paying child support to a woman in Rahway.”

I hadn’t known that—didn’t believe
anyone
at Light and Bell had known that—but I nodded again, and not just to keep her rolling. I was sure she was right. “What was her name, Paula?” Not knowing why I was asking, not yet, just knowing I had to know.

“Tonya Gregson.” It was as if she was in a trance. There was something in her eyes, though, something so terrible I could hardly stand to look at it. Nevertheless, I stored the name away.
Tonya Gregson, Rahway
. And then, like some guy doing stockroom inventory:
One Lucite cube with penny inside.

“He tried to crawl under his desk, did you know that? No, I can see you didn’t. His hair was on fire and he was crying. Because in that instant he understood he was never going to own a catamaran or even mow his lawn again.” She reached out and put a hand on my cheek, a gesture so intimate it would have been shocking even if her hand had not been so cold. “At the end, he would have given every cent he had, and every stock option he held, just to be able to mow his lawn again. Do you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“The place was full of screams, he could smell jet fuel, and
he understood it was his dying hour
. Do you understand that? Do you understand the
enormity
of that?”

I nodded. I couldn’t speak. You could have put a gun to my head and I still wouldn’t have been able to speak.

“The politicians talk about memorials and courage and wars to end terrorism, but burning hair is apolitical.” She bared her teeth in an unspeakable grin. A moment later it was gone. “He was trying to crawl under his desk with his hair on fire. There was a plastic thing under his desk, a what-do-you-call it—”

“Mat—”

“Yes, a mat, a plastic mat, and his hands were on that and he could feel the ridges in the plastic and smell his own burning hair. Do you understand that?”

I nodded. I started to cry. It was Roland Abelson we were talking about, this guy I used to work with. He was in Liability and I didn’t know him very well. To say hi to is all; how was I supposed to know he had a kid in Rahway? And if I hadn’t played hooky that day, my hair probably would have burned, too. I’d never really understood that before.

“I don’t want to see you again,” she said. She flashed her gruesome grin once more, but now she was crying, too. “I don’t care about your problems. I don’t care about any of the shit you found. We’re quits. From now on you leave me alone.” She started to turn away, then turned back. She said: “They did it in the name of God, but there is no God. If there was a God, Mr. Staley, He would have struck all eighteen of them dead in their boarding lounges with their boarding passes in their hands, but no God did. They called for passengers to get on and those fucks just got on.”

I watched her walk back to the elevator. Her back was very stiff. Her hair stuck out on either side of her head, making her look like a girl in a Sunday funnies cartoon. She didn’t want to see me anymore, and I didn’t blame her. I closed the door and looked at the steel Abe Lincoln in the Lucite cube. I looked at him for quite a long time. I thought about how the hair of his beard would have smelled if U.S. Grant had stuck one of his everlasting cigars in it. That unpleasant frying aroma. On TV, someone was saying that there was a mattress blowout going on at Sleepy’s. After that, Len Berman came on and talked about the Jets.

That night I woke up at two in the morning, listening to the voices whisper. I hadn’t had any dreams or visions of the people who owned the objects, hadn’t seen anyone with their hair on fire or jumping from the windows to escape the burning jet fuel, but why would I? I knew who they were, and the things they left behind had been left for me. Letting Paula Robeson take the Lucite cube had been wrong, but only because she was the wrong person.

And speaking of Paula, one of the voices was hers.
You can start giving the rest of the things away,
it said. And it said,
I guess it all depends on how stubborn your subconscious wants to be.

I lay back down and after a while I was able to go to sleep. I dreamed I was in Central Park, feeding the ducks, when all at once there was a loud noise like a sonic boom and smoke filled the sky. In my dream, the smoke smelled like burning hair.

I thought about Tonya Gregson in Rahway—Tonya and the child who might or might not have Roland Abelson’s eyes—and thought I’d have to work up to that one. I decided to start with Bruce Mason’s widow.

I took the train to Dobbs Ferry and called a taxi from the station. The cabbie took me to a Cape Cod house on a residential street. I gave him some money, told him to wait—I wouldn’t be long—and rang the doorbell. I had a box under one arm. It looked like the kind that contains a bakery cake.

I only had to ring once because I’d called ahead and Janice Mason was expecting me. I had my story carefully prepared and told it with some confidence, knowing that the taxi sitting in the driveway, its meter running, would forestall any detailed cross-examination.

On September seventh, I said—the Friday before—I had tried to blow a note from the conch Bruce kept on his desk, as I had heard Bruce himself do at the Jones Beach picnic. (Janice, Mrs. Lord of the Flies, nodding; she had been there, of course.) Well, I said, to make a long story short, I had persuaded Bruce to let me have the conch shell over the weekend so I could practice. Then, on Tuesday morning, I’d awakened with a raging sinus infection and a horrible headache to go with it. (This was a story I had already told several people.) I’d been drinking a cup of tea when I heard the boom and saw the rising smoke. I hadn’t thought of the conch shell again until just this week. I’d been cleaning out my little utility closet and by damn, there it was. And I just thought…well, it’s not much of a keepsake, but I just thought maybe you’d like to…you know…

Her eyes filled up with tears just as mine had when Paula brought back Roland Abelson’s “retirement fund,” only these weren’t accompanied by the look of fright that I’m sure was on my own face as Paula stood there with her stiff hair sticking out on either side of her head. Janice told me she would be glad to have any keepsake of Bruce.

“I can’t get over the way we said good-bye,” she said, holding the box in her arms. “He always left very early because he took the train. He kissed me on the cheek and I opened one eye and asked him if he’d bring back a pint of half-and-half. He said he would. That’s the last thing he ever said to me. When he asked me to marry him, I felt like Helen of Troy—stupid but absolutely true—and I wish I’d said something better than ‘Bring home a pint of half-and-half.’ But we’d been married a long time, and it seemed like business as usual that day, and…we don’t know, do we?”

“No.”

“Yes. Any parting could be forever, and we don’t know. Thank you, Mr. Staley. For coming out and bringing me this. That was very kind.” She smiled a little then. “Do you remember how he stood on the beach with his shirt off and blew it?”

“Yes,” I said, and looked at the way she held the box. Later she would sit down and take the shell out and hold it on her lap and cry. I knew that the conch, at least, would never come back to my apartment. It was home.

I returned to the station and caught the train back to New York. The cars were almost empty at that time of day, early afternoon, and I sat by a rain-and dirt-streaked window, looking out at the river and the approaching skyline. On cloudy and rainy days, you almost seem to be creating that skyline out of your own imagination, a piece at a time.

Tomorrow I’d go to Rahway, with the penny in the Lucite cube. Perhaps the child would take it in his or her chubby hand and look at it curiously. In any case, it would be out of my life. I thought the only difficult thing to get rid of would be Jimmy Eagleton’s Farting Cushion—I could hardly tell Mrs. Eagleton I’d brought it home for the weekend in order to practice using it, could I? But necessity is the mother of invention, and I was confident that I would eventually think of some halfway plausible story.

It occurred to me that other things might show up, in time. And I’d be lying if I told you I found that possibility entirely unpleasant. When it comes to returning things which people believe have been lost forever, things that have
weight,
there are compensations. Even if they’re only little things, like a pair of joke sunglasses or a steel penny in a Lucite cube…yeah. I’d have to say there are compensations.

Graduation Afternoon

Janice has never settled on the right word for the place where Buddy lives. It’s too big to be called a house, too small to be an estate, and the name on the post at the foot of the driveway, Harborlights, gags her. It sounds like the name of a restaurant in New London, the kind where the special is always fish. She usually winds up just calling it “your place,” as in “Let’s go to your place and play tennis” or “Let’s go to your place and go swimming.”

It’s pretty much the same deal with Buddy himself, she thinks, watching him trudge up the lawn toward the sound of shouts on the other side of the house, where the pool is. You didn’t want to call your boyfriend Buddy, but when reverting to his real name meant Bruce, it left you with no real ground to stand on.

Or expressing feelings, that was that. She knew he wanted to hear her say she loved him, especially on his graduation day—surely a better present than the silver medallion she’d given him, although the medallion had set her back a teeth-clenching amount—but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bring herself to say, “I love you, Bruce.” The best she could manage (and again with that interior clench) was “I’m awfully fond of you, Buddy.” And even that sounded like a line out of a British musical comedy.

“You don’t mind what she said, do you?” That was the last thing he’d asked her before heading up the lawn to change into his swim trunks. “That isn’t why you’re staying behind, is it?”

“No, just want to hit a few more. And look at the view.” The house did have that going for it, and she could never get enough. Because you could see the whole New York cityscape from this side of the house, the buildings reduced to blue toys with sun gleaming on the highest windows. Janice thought that when it came to NYC, you could only get that sense of exquisite stillness from a distance. It was a lie she loved.

“Because she’s just my gran,” he went on. “You know her by now. If it enters her head, it exits her mouth.”

“I know,” Janice said. And she liked Buddy’s gran, who made no effort to hide her snobbery. There it was, out and beating time to the music. They were the Hopes, came to Connecticut along with the rest of the Heavenly Host, thank you so much. She is Janice Gandolewski, who will have her own graduation day—from Fairhaven High—two weeks from now, after Buddy has left with his three best buddies to hike the Appalachian Trail.

She turns to the basket of balls, a slender girl of good height in denim shorts, sneakers, and a shell top. Her legs flex as she rises on tiptoe with each serve. She’s good-looking and knows it, her knowing of the functional and non-fussy sort. She’s smart, and knows it. Very few Fairhaven girls manage relationships with boys from the Academy—other than the usual we-all-know-where-we-are, quick-and-dirty Winter Carnival or Spring Fling weekends, that is—and she has done so in spite of the
ski
that trails after her wherever she goes, like a tin can tied to the bumper of a family sedan. She has managed this social hat-trick with Bruce Hope, also known as Buddy.

And when they were coming up from the basement media room after playing video games—most of the others still down there, and still with their mortarboards cocked back on their heads—they had overheard his gran, in the parlor with the other adults (because this was really
their
party; the kids would have their own tonight, first at Holy Now! out on Route 219, which had been fourwalled for the occasion by Jimmy Frederick’s dad and mom, pursuant to the mandatory designated-driver rule, and then later, at the beach, under a full June moon, could you give me spoon, do I hear swoon, is there a swoon in the house).

“That was Janice-Something-Unpronounceable,” Gran was saying in her oddly piercing, oddly toneless deaf-lady voice. “She’s very pretty, isn’t she? A townie. Bruce’s friend for now.” She didn’t quite call Janice Bruce’s starter-model, but of course it was all in the tone.

She shrugs and hits a few more balls, legs flexing, racket reaching. The balls fly hard and true across the net, each touching down deep in the receiver’s box on the far side.

They have in fact learned from each other, and she suspects that’s what these things are about. What they are for. And Buddy has not, in truth, been that hard to teach. He respected her from the first—maybe a little too much. She had to teach him out of that—the pedestal-worship part of that. And she thinks he hasn’t been that bad a lover, given the fact that kids are denied the finest of accommodations and the luxury of time when it comes to giving their bodies the food they come to want.

“We did the best we could,” she says, and decides to go and swim with the others, let him show her off one final time. He thinks they’ll have all summer before he goes off to Princeton and she goes to State, but she thinks not; she thinks part of the purpose of the upcoming Appalachian hike is to separate them as painlessly but as completely as possible. In this Janice senses not the hand of the hale-and-hearty, good-fellows-every-one father, or the somehow endearing snobbery of the grandmother—
a townie, Bruce’s friend for now
—but the smiling and subtle practicality of the mother, whose one fear (it might as well be stamped on her lovely, unlined forehead) is that the townie girl with the tin can tied to the end of her name will get pregnant and trap her boy into the wrong marriage.

“It would be wrong, too,” she murmurs as she wheels the basket of balls into the shed and flips the latch. Her friend Marcy keeps asking her what she sees in him at all—
Buddy,
she all but sneers, wrinkling her nose.
What do you do all weekend? Go to garden parties? To polo matches?