Middle Age (40 page)

This was ambiguous. Marina didn’t understand. But Marina was

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J C O

reluctant to press the issue. “Well. I’ll be happy to lend you what you need, Lorene. Please.”

Lorene stared at her hands, a dull flush rising into her face. Her fingernails were polished, but the maroon polish had begun to chip. On both hands she wore a number of rings. She shook her head as if trying to clear it. “I don’t accept, like, charity.”

“It wouldn’t be charity, Lorene. It would be a loan.”

“Ma’am, you’re real nice. You’re kind. But I guess not, O.K.?”

“My name is Marina,” Marina said, smiling.

“Well. Marina.” Lorene tried to smile, too.

All this time Lorene was brushing her hair out of her face, and glancing behind Marina’s head, her close-set dilated eyes perpetually moving.

She was restless as a trapped wild creature. Marina tried to draw her out but she was distracted, and seemed only partly aware of their conversation.

The effort of talking to this girl was like pushing a large unwieldy boulder up a hill, but Marina was determined not to give up easily.

“That man, the one who was threatening you—what sort of police officer is he?”

Lorene stared at Marina, frightened. “Who said that?”

“You did.”

“I did! Hell.”

What this meant Marina couldn’t interpret. In an instant Lorene’s childlike face was closed like a fist.

Marina said, “You aren’t married to him, are you?” and Lorene laughed scornfully, saying, “Married to
him
? That’d be the day,” and Marina said,

“If he’s threatened you, you could get a court injunction to be protected against him.” Marina spoke adamantly though in fact she wasn’t so sure of this.

Lorene snorted in contempt. “ ‘Court injunction’! Against guys like him! Know what them things are, ma’am—
bullshit
.”

Marina recoiled from the girl’s fierce scorn. She asked if Lorene would like more coffee and Lorene said irritably, “No, thanks!” and then, “O.K., maybe.” The waitress came by. Marina gave their orders. She had the distinct impression that Lorene was waiting sulkily for her to do something; or for something to happen; she was both restless and passive, licking her lips, brushing her frizzed hair out of her face. Through a wall mirror Marina glimpsed a man of about forty in an unzipped windbreaker, wearing a baseball cap, staring distractedly at Lorene as he passed their booth. He
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seemed not to know her, only just to be attracted by her. His gaze passed through Marina Troy as if she were invisible.

Marina was saying, “It’s such beautiful countryside in the Poconos.

Except it’s becoming so developed . . .”

Lorene stared at Marina, as if unhearing. Marina’s oddly ebullient words seemed to come to her slow as balloons. “ ‘Developed’—yes, I guess. I don’t notice too much.” The waitress brought them more coffee, and Lorene quickly emptied another two sugar packets into her cup. “It’s hard to remember, like, how anything
was
.”

“Have you lived here all your life?”

Lorene lifted the coffee cup to her thin-lipped mouth. The coffee was steaming but she was impatient to drink. Distracted, she seemed about to ask
lived where?
but managed to murmur, “Yes. I guess.” But a moment later, with an annoyed laugh, she said, “No. Just a few years.” She seemed about to add more, but hesitated.

Marina said, “Where I live, in Damascus County, it’s very hilly. It’s beautiful but remote. My road is an unpaved road.”

Lorene said, with just perceptible disdain, “Why anybody’d move here if they could live somewhere else, I mean like year-round,
I
can’t figure.

It’s O.K. in the summer, sure. And if you like to ski. But just to live here, Christ!” She laughed breathily to signal to Marina she didn’t mean to be insulting or confrontational, only just matter-of-fact.

Marina said, a little stiffly, “A friend left me the property. It’s a beautiful property.”

Lorene said, rousing herself to take an interest, “Oh, yes? Who?”

“A man. He was very special to me.”

Lorene’s eyes widened in sympathy. “Uh-uh! ‘Was.’ He’s—passed away, I guess?”

Marina nodded. That quaint tactful phrase.
Passed away
. She was grateful for it.

Lorene said, sniffing, but with an air of reproach, “My dad, too. Two years ago, around now. Christmas. Why I’m so fucked up, I guess. Lung cancer, and it met-as-tized to the brain. That’s ugly. Daddy didn’t leave us much to want to remember, y’know? Poor guy couldn’t kick the habit.”

Lorene lifted the cigarette she’d been half-consciously shredding.

Marina said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Lorene. Please accept my condo-lences.’’

Lorene said, embarrassed, “Well. It was, like, two years ago.”

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J C O

“Still. You must miss your father.”

“
Your
friend? You were, like, in love?”

“Yes.”

How suddenly blunt Lorene was, as a child might be blunt, and not rude. Marina was grateful for this, too. She smiled, not wanting to cry.

Her face burned pleasantly.
No one has spoken to me like this
.
No one in years
.

Lorene asked with genuine curiosity, leaning forward, hair swinging in her face, “What happened to him, Marina?”

Marina said quietly, “He died. In an accident on the Hudson River last summer.”

How strange it seemed to her, in a way wonderful: she could speak of Adam’s death in such a way, to a stranger. As if it had been an event, fixed in time. Not a condition but a single event, Adam Berendt’s death.

“Like, swimming? Or in a boat?”

“A beautiful white sailboat,” Marina said, with sudden emotion. Her eyes brimmed dangerously with tears but she felt her heart swell. “He dived overboard to save a drowning child. It was reckless, under the circumstances. The girl was going to be rescued by others. But Adam, he had to be the one! And it killed him.”

“God. You were there? You
saw?
”

Marina hid her face, for the moment overcome.

As if she were skilled in loss and in speaking of loss Lorene said quickly, “That’s real sad, Marina. It must’ve been real awful, like a nightmare. How old was he?”

Marina hesitated. “My age.”

She knew that Lorene was rapidly assessing her age. A woman in her thirties who maybe looked younger than she was. Or maybe older.

Marina hadn’t wanted this impatient young woman to dismiss her lost Adam as an old man.

Thinking afterward,
Of course I’d be old to her too
.
Anyone of another generation
.

Marina dried her eyes, and turned the conversation to more practical matters. What should Lorene do? She, Marina, felt the burden of a not-unpleasant responsibility. Like an older sister. For once. She brought up the subject of the bus ride to Pittsburgh, the return to Lorene’s family, and offered to “lend” Lorene fifty dollars; and Lorene declined the offer; and Marina persisted; and finally, deeply embarrassed, Lorene gave in. “Well.

O.K. I guess. But I will pay you back, Marina, I promise. You give me your address, O.K.?” She smiled a quick, pained smile. Her eyes shone with
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gratitude and resentment in about equal measure. Marina counted two twenty-dollar bills and three five-dollar bills out of her wallet, and added a ten-dollar bill, excited by her own generosity; on a fresh napkin she carefully printed her name and address—

Marina Troy

R.R. #3, Box 139

Damascus Crossing, PA 18361

Self-consciously as if she feared she was being watched, Lorene accepted the bills from Marina, without counting them; the napkin she folded neatly, as if it were precious, placing it with the bills in a pocket of her suede jacket. Almost inaudibly she murmured, “Thanks!”

Marina said, “But where will you spend the night, Lorene? If the bus doesn’t leave until morning?”

There was that to consider. Lorene’s gaze went blank.

“I need to try that number again,” Lorene said with sudden animation.

“Like I said.”

You could stay with me, Lorene
.

I know you won’t
.
But you could stay with me
.

Their eyes met. Lorene looked away, fiercely blushing. Again things became confused. Lorene was eager to get to the phone, but slid out of the booth as if reluctantly, her small eyes very dark, glassily dark as marbles, and an odor of perfumy perspiration lifting from her skin. On her feet, hovering over Marina, impulsively she leaned down, murmured, “Thanks, Marina!” and kissed Marina wetly on the corner of the mouth. Then she was gone.

Marina sat unmoving, as if she’d been struck.

Her mind was a flurry of wings. Moths’ wings. The kiss burned at the corner of her mouth.

I  , recalling that disjointed, confusing evening in her life Marina would think calmly
Of course
.
Why was I surprised?
But at the time, to her chagrin, she had no thought of the girl who’d called herself Lorene walking out of the East Hills Diner and leaving her forever. In fact she was keenly alert waiting for Lorene to return; watching in the mirror for the big-boned streaked-blond girl in the suede jacket to loom up behind her.

Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. Marina began to suspect that something

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might be wrong. On the table top, across from Marina, were spilled sugar and a shredded cigarette and a crumpled napkin smeared with maroon lipstick.

Marina went to look for Lorene by the public phone at the front of the diner, but Lorene wasn’t there. No one was using the phone. Nor was Lorene in the women’s rest room. In a haze of alarm and mounting worry, Marina walked quickly through the crowded restaurant, looking for Lorene. She saw several girls who resembled Lorene, or the girl who’d identified herself to Marina as “Lorene,” but she did not find the girl she sought.

Anxiously Marina asked their waitress if she’d seen Lorene leave the diner and the waitress said, “Your friend? I guess so. She left with some guy. Maybe ten minutes ago.”

Marina swallowed hard.
Some guy!

In dread she asked what this guy looked like.

The waitress shrugged. “Just a guy.”

“Did he have a moustache? A beard? A crimson jacket?”

The noise level in this part of the diner was so high, the waitress had to cup her hand to her ear. “A what-color jacket?”

“Crimson. Red.”

“Yeah, ma’am. He sure did.”

The folly
.
The shame! And worse to come
.

The adventure didn’t end in the East Hills Diner but in the parking lot
.

Where I discovered that all four tires on the Jeep had been expertly slashed
.
And
the windshield cracked like a crazed star where he’d slammed a baseball bat,
probably, against it
. Bitch! Cunt! Dyke!
Almost, I could hear him
.
Fortunately
the windshield wasn’t shattered so I could drive back to Damascus Crossing that
night, late that night, after the tires were replaced
. (
For almost six hundred dollars
.)
Just laugh at me, don’t pity me!

Let’s just say Marina Troy got what she deserved.

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I     of December, at the turn of the year, that the warm furred creature came in stealth to settle upon her chest. That smothering weight. Heavy, and heavier.
Can’t breathe
.
Help me!
In the night the dark-furred thing with a snout that smelled of blood, pushing wetly
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against Marina’s mouth. Nudging, kissing. The heavy warm dark-furred smothering thing with teeth, claws.
Thwaite, Thwaite!
came the muffled guttural cry. In desperation Marina recoiled in her sleep, threw the thing off herself, woke nauseated and repelled. “What is happening to me! I can’t bear this.” She was going mad.
Thwaite
was madness, and
Night
was madness. She climbed out of her messy bed as you might climb out of a shallow messy grave.

Barefoot and shivering she went to the studio at the rear of the drafty house. The things, Adam’s things, were waiting for her. She switched on the light, exposing them in crude glaring light lacking the mitigating filmy shadows of romance. She saw them for what they were: ugly aborted

“sculptures” she’d been laboring at, with such hope, for months. The vanity of her effort swept over her like a wave of dirty water. The futility. The delusion. Almost she wanted to laugh, she’d failed utterly. The fragmentary artworks Adam Berendt had left behind in this house haven’t been completed by Marina Troy, but sabotaged. Clearly Marina Troy knew nothing of Adam Berendt, the man was finally a stranger; Marina had no access to his vision, as she’d had no access to his heart. She was only herself.

O M W:

T T

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E
verything in the universe is a coincidence!
Adam Berendt once said.

Or nothing is
.

Yet it couldn’t be merely coincidence that the day Lionel Hoffmann at last confessed his secret to his wife, Camille, was the eve of the day Shadow entered Camille’s life.

“C, I  something to tell you.”

I have something to tell you
. These words. Dread-words. Chill-words.

Words no middle-aged wife wishes to hear uttered numbly, yet with a ghastly hopeful smile, by her middle-aged husband.

I have something to tell you
. Lionel Hoffmann spoke awkwardly, guiltily.

He was not a man to speak falteringly yet he spoke falteringly now. How absurd that his eyes should water, and his sinuses ache, as if he were having an allergy reaction . . . Though he’d prepared this scene for weeks.