Like Life (15 page)

“Yes,” said Millie. “He probably just wanted some fresh air. He’s been spending all his days in the city. He keeps going to the top of the Empire State Building, then just walks around looking at other tall buildings. And the cars. He hasn’t been to any plays or anything.”

There was a silence. Hane cleared his throat and said into the phone, “I suppose I’m not the best sort of person for him. He probably needs a man who is better with kids. Somebody athletic, maybe.”

“Tell us more about Italy, dear,” Millie broke in. She imagined Italy would be like Florida, all colors and light, but with a glorious ruin here and there, and large stone men with no
clothes but with lovely pigeons on their heads. Perhaps there were plays.

“It’s great,” said Ariel. “It’s hard to describe.”

At twelve-fifteen they hung up. Hane, because he was reading the Scripture the next morning in church, went off to sleep. But Millie was restless and roamed the house, room after room, waiting for John to return. She thought about Ariel again, how much the girl’s approval had come to mean to her, and wondered how one’s children got so powerful that way. The week before Ariel left for England, the two of them had gone to a movie together. It was something they had not done since Ariel had been little, and so Millie had looked forward to it, like a kind of party. But during the opening credits Millie had started talking. She started to tell Ariel about someone she knew who used to be a garbage man but who was now making short industrial films for different companies. He had taken a correspondence course.

“Mom, you’re talking so loudly,” Ariel hissed at her in the dark of the movie theater. Ariel had pressed her index finger to her lips and said, “Shhhh!” as if Millie were a child. The movie had started, and Millie looked away, her face crumpling, her hand to her eyes so her daughter couldn’t see. She tried to concentrate on the movie, the sounds and voices of it, but it all seemed underwater and far away. When afterward, in a restaurant, Ariel wanted to discuss the film, the way she said she always did—an
intellectual
discussion like a college course—Millie had just nodded and shrugged. Occasionally she had tried to smile at her daughter, saying, “Oh, I agree with you there,” but the smile flickered and trembled and Ariel had looked at her, at a loss, as if her own mother were an idiot who had followed her to the movie theater, hoping only for a kind word or a dime.

Millie looked out the guest room window—John Spee’s room—into the night to see whether she might spy John, circling
the house or kicking a stone along the street. The moon was full, a porthole of sun, and Millie half expected to glimpse John sitting on someone’s front step, not theirs, kneecaps pressed into the soft bulges of his eyes. How disappointing America must seem. To wander the streets of a city that was not yours, a city with its back turned, to be a boy from far away and step ashore here, one’s imagination suddenly so concrete and mistaken, how could that not break your heart? But perhaps, she thought, John had dreamed so long and hard of this place that he had hoped it right out of existence. Probably no place in the world could withstand such an assault of human wishing.

She turned away from the window and again opened the blue notebook on the desk.

The front door creaked open, and shut with a thud. Millie closed the notebook and went out into the living room in just her nightgown. She wanted to say good night and make certain John locked the door.

He seemed surprised to see her. “Thought I’d just hit the hay,” he said. This was something he’d probably heard Ariel say once. It was something she liked to say.

“Ariel phoned while you were out,” said Millie. She folded her arms across her breasts to hide them, in case they showed through her thin gown.

“That so?” John’s face seemed to brighten and fall at the same time. He combed a hand through his hair, and strands dropped back across his part in a zigzag of orange. “She’s coming home soon, is she?” It occurred to Millie that John didn’t know Ariel well at all.

“No,” she said. “She’s traveling on the Continent. That’s how Ariel says it:
on the Continent.
But she asked about you and says hello.”

John looked away, hung up his coat in the front closet, on a hook next to his baseball cap, which he hadn’t worn since his first day. “Thought she might be coming home,” said John. He couldn’t look directly at Millie. Something was sinking in him like a stone.

“Can I make you some warm milk?” asked Millie. She looked in the direction John seemed to be looking: at the photographs of Ariel. There she was at her high school graduation, all formal innocence, lies snapped and pretty. It seemed now to Millie that Ariel was too attractive, that she was careless and hurt people.

“I’ll just go to bed, thanks,” said John.

“I put your clean clothes at the foot of it, folded,” said Millie.

“Thank you very much,” he said, and he brushed past her, then apologized. “So sorry,” he said, stepping away.

“Maybe we can all go into New York together next week,” she blurted. She aimed it at his spine, hoping to fetch him back. He stopped and turned. “We can go out to eat,” she continued. “And maybe take a tour of the UN.” She’d seen picture postcards of the flags out front, rippling like sheets, all that international laundry, though she’d never actually been.

“OK,” said John. He smiled. Then he turned back and
walked down the hall, trading one room for another, moving through and past, leaving Millie standing there, the way when, having decided anything, once and for all, you leave somebody behind.

IN
THE
MORNING
there was just a note and a gift. “Thank you for lodging me. I decided early to take the bus to California. Please do not think me rude. Yours kindly, John Spee.”

Millie let out a gasp of dismay. “Hane, the boy has gone!” Hane was dressing for church and came out to see. He was in a shirt and boxer shorts, and had been tying his tie. Now he stopped, as if some ghost that had once been cast from the house had just returned. The morning’s Scripture was going to be taken from the third chapter of John, and parts of it were bouncing around in his head, like nonsense or a chant.
For God so loved the world
 … John Spee was gone. Hane placed his hands on Millie’s shoulders. What could he tell her?
For God so loved the world?
He didn’t really believe that God loved the world, at least not in the way most people thought.
Love
, in this case, he felt, was a way of speaking. A
metaphor.
Though for what, he didn’t exactly know.

“Oh, I hope he’ll be OK,” Millie said, and started to cry. She pulled her robe tight around her and placed one hand over her lips to hide their quivering. It was terrible to lose a boy. Girls could make their way all right, but boys went out into the world, limping with notions, and they never came back.

IT
WAS
A
MONTH
later when Millie and Hane heard from Ariel that John Spee had returned to England. He had taken the bus to Los Angeles, gotten out, walked around for a few hours, then had climbed back on and ridden six straight days back to Newark Airport. He had wanted to see San Francisco, but a man on the bus had told him not to go, that everyone was dying there. So John went to Los Angeles instead. For three
hours.
Can you believe it?
wrote Ariel. She was back in Warwickshire, and John sometimes dropped by to see her when she was very, very busy.

The gift, when Millie unwrapped it, had turned out to be a toaster—a large one that could toast four slices at once. She had never seen John come into the house with a package, and she had no idea when or where he had gotten it.

“Four slices,” she said to Hane, who never ate much bread. “What will we do with such a thing?”

Every night through that May and June, Millie curled against Hane, one of her hands on his hip, the smells of his skin all through her head. Summer tapped at the bedroom screens, nightsounds, and Millie would lie awake, not sleeping at all. “Oh!” she sometimes said aloud, though for no reason she could explain. Hane continued to talk about the Historical Jesus. Millie rubbed his shins while he spoke, her palm against the dry, whitening hair of him. Sometimes she talked about the garbage barge, which was now docked off Coney Island, a failed ride, an unamusement.

“Maybe,” she said once to Hane, then stopped, her cheek against his shoulder. How familiar skin flickered in and out of strangeness; how it was yours no matter, no mere matter. “Maybe we can go someplace someday.”

Hane shifted toward her, a bit plain and a bit handsome without his glasses. Through the window the streetlights shimmered a pale green, and the moon shone woolly and bitten. Hane looked at his wife. She had the round, drying face of someone who once and briefly—a long ago fall, a weekend perhaps—had been very pretty without ever even knowing it. “You are my only friend,” he said, and he kissed her, hard on the brow, like a sign for her to hold close.

               
THIS
WAS
IN
a faraway land. There were gyms but no irony or coffee shops. People took things literally, without drugs. Laird, who wanted to fix her up with this guy, warned her beforehand in exercise class. “Look, Odette, you’re a poet. You’ve been in po biz for what—twenty years—”

“Only fifteen, I’m sure.” She had just turned forty and scowled at him over her shoulder. She had a voice menopausal with whiskey, a voice left to lurch and ruin by cigarettes. It was without a middle range, low, with sudden cracks upward. “I hate that phrase
po biz.
”

“Fifteen. All right. This guy’s not at all literary. He’s a farm lawyer. He gets the occasional flasher, or a Gypsy from the Serbo neighborhood in Chicago, but that’s as artistic as he gets. He’s dealing with farmers and farms. He wouldn’t know T. S. Eliot from, say,
Pinky
Eliot. He’s probably never even been to Minneapolis, let alone New York.”

“Who’s Pinky Eliot?” she asked. They were lying side by side, doing these things where you thrust your arms between your raised knees, to tighten the stomach muscles. There was loud music to distract you from worries that you might not know anyone in the room well enough to be doing this in front of them. “Who the heck is Pinky Eliot?”

“Someone I went to fourth grade with,” said Laird, gasping.
“It was said he weighed more than the teacher, and she was no zipper, let me tell you.” Laird was balding, and in exercise class the blood rushed across his head, bits of hair curling above his ears like gift ribbon. He had lived in this town until he was ten, then his family had moved east to New Jersey, where she had first met him, years ago. Now he had come back, like a salmon, to raise his own kids. He and his wife had two. “Little and Moist,” they called them. “Look, you’re in the boonies here. You got your Pinky Eliot or you got your guy who’s never heard of Pinky or any Eliot.”

She had been in the boonies before. To afford her apartment in New York, she often took these sorts of library fellowships: six weeks and four thousand dollars to live in town, write unpublishable poems, and give a reading at the library. The problem with the boonies was that nobody ever kissed you there. They stared at you, up, down, but they never kissed.

Actually, once in a while you could get them to kiss.

But then you had to leave. And in your packing and going, in tearing the seams, the hems, the haws, you felt like some bad combination of Odysseus
and
Penelope. You felt funny in the heart.

“All right,” she said. “What is his name?”

Laird sighed. “Pinky Eliot,” he said, thrusting his arms between his knees. “Somehow in this mangled presentation, I fear I’ve confused you.”

PINKY
ELIOT
had lost weight, though for sure he still weighed more than the teacher. He was about forty-five, with all his hair still dark. He was not bad-looking, elf-nosed and cat-eyed, though a little soccer ball—ish through the chin and cheeks, which together formed a white sphere with a sudden scar curling grayly around. Also, he had the kind of mustache a college roommate of hers used to say looked like it had crawled up to find a warm spot to die.

They ate dinner at the only Italian restaurant in town. She drank two glasses of wine, the cool heat of it spreading through her like wintergreen. One of these days, she knew, she would have to give up dating. She had practiced declarations in the mirror. “I don’t date. I’m sorry. I just don’t date.”

“I always kind of liked the food here,” said Pinky.

She looked at his round face and felt a little bad for him and a little bad for herself while she was at it, because, truly, the food was not good: flavorless bladders of pasta passing as tortellini; the cutlets mealy and drenched in the kind of tomato sauce that was unwittingly, defeatedly orange. Poor Pinky didn’t know a garlic from a Gumby.

“Yes,” she said, trying to be charming. “But do you think it’s really Italian? It feels as if it got as far as the Canary Islands, then fell into the water.”

“An East Coast snob.” He smiled. His voice was slow with prairie, thick with Great Lakes. “Dressed all in black and hating the Midwest. Are you Jewish?”

She bristled. A Nazi. A hillbilly Nazi gastronomical moron. “No, I’m not Jewish,” she said archly, staring him down, to teach him, to teach him this: “Are
you
?”

“Yes,” he said. He studied her eyes.

“Oh,” she said.

“Not many of us in this part of the world, so I thought I’d ask.”