No Book but the World: A Novel (16 page)

DENNIS

W
HEN
A
VA ARRIVED HOME
after a week in Perdu, she looked physically reduced in a way Dennis couldn’t put his finger on. Less like she’d lost weight than like she’d lost density. When he lifted her in an embrace, it was like lifting pumice.

“How are you? I missed you.” He set her back down and peered into the pale oval of her face. “Hey,” he said. He touched the corner of her mouth as if it were the location of a secret on-button. That was an old joke between them, and she smiled. “How was your drive?”

She considered the question, did not answer, and after a moment went on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.

“Are you hungry?” It was eight. He’d already eaten: first a hamburger and later some leftover antipasto and then some salsa and chips. With Ava away, he’d been sort of drifting from snack to snack all week; now he tried to think what real food they had in the house.

“Just tired.” She bowed her head and leaned slowly forward until her face landed on his chest. He could feel her nose pressing into his sternum. A pantomime of tired: this was her little slapstick.

With one hand he lifted her hair off her neck, with the other traced the knobs of her vertebrae there. “Do you want some tea? A drink?”

She straightened. “A shower.” She said this apologetically, also determinedly, and headed up the stairs.

They had talked little while she was away. Once a day or every other day, but briefly, and even then in conversations punctuated by silences. He knew she’d met with the lawyer, knew she’d managed to visit Fred twice. She said the cell reception was spotty up there, that the landline at the inn wasn’t private. She said it wasn’t even really an inn, more just someone’s house.

“Like that B-and-B we stayed at, that time in Maine?” Dennis asked. “With the Weimaraners and those zucchini pancakes?”

No not really, she said. Not like that.

“And Fred?” Dennis asked. “How did he seem?”

This part of the conversation occurred a few hours later as they lay in bed, her head, still damp from the shower, resting on his shoulder, spreading a circle of chilliness through his undershirt. “Ayv? How was it seeing him?”

She said something tiny beneath his chin.

“What, Ayv? I didn’t hear.”

“Bad.”

“Why bad?”

She nipped him through his shirt, and despite the gravity of the topic he smiled. It was a classic Ava reprimand: nonverbal, to the point.

“I mean bad in what way?”

But now she rotated her head so her face lay flush against him, her mouth effectively stoppered in the crevice between his chest and his arm. This gesture, too, he felt, was not without some bleak humor. Ava had little gift for verbal jousting or repartee, really for witticism of any kind—except a particular strain of deadpan physical comedy. It had taken Dennis a long time to pick up on her latent clownishness, and when he realized it for what it was, it had sent his growing affections for her through the roof.

In the beginning, when he had first begun to think of her as something other than Kitty’s brown-haired, brown-limbed, woodland-creature friend, he’d liked how still, how inward and even recessive Ava could be. It suggested a kind of integrity, the absence of a need to perform. Not that he thought about it precisely in those terms.

He’d been twenty-one the summer Ava first blindingly caught his eye. About to start his senior year at Columbia, he’d been saving money by living at home; it was the longest stretch, actually, he’d ever lived at Batter Hollow. Ava, fourteen, seemed unaware of her effect on him, the fact that where once she’d blended unremarkably with the other denizens of Batter Hollow, a hodgepodge of shadows at the periphery of his family’s glow, this summer she emerged for him, appearing suddenly as neither a woman nor a little girl but as something unclassifiable: simply, conspicuously
herself
. Dennis found this quality not just arresting but frankly and vexingly erotic, a response he could not—for all his considerable self-reproach in bed at night and in his morning shower and in the afternoons when he’d retreat from the day’s heat, sprawling in front of the window fan in his loft bedroom in the Art Barn, fortified by a couple of FrozFruit bars and his dog-eared copy of
The Dancing Wu Li Masters
—successfully quash.

That was the summer he made the giant four-square court, though neither four nor square accurately described it. The old court, located down below the meadow on cracked blacktop, had seen plenty of action back in the days of the school. Even in more recent times, it remained popular. Dennis had played four-square down there with Kitty and Ava and Fred, as well as Noah Salinas-Buchbinder and the Gann kids, whenever he’d been home on school vacations. Occasionally Jim and Katinka would join in, too. But the painted boundaries of the four squares had become so faded and chipped away, that if you didn’t want to spend half the game arguing whether the ball had bounced out of bounds, you had to remember to bring chalk each time. The free-spirited, communal Batter Hollowans, Dennis was quick to realize after his family moved there, bore no less competitive drive than his team-spirited, clannish Clembrook classmates. If anything, he mused, taking particular note of the Gann kids, with their feral mops of coppery hair and their freckled, near-translucent skin, the way they shoved and shouted at one another during these disputes, the absence of boundaries—whether painted or figurative—might encourage even greater ferocity.

It was precisely one such quarrel, resulting in the youngest Gann getting a bloody nose (whether fault lay with her brother’s elbow or her own unbridled emotionalism was to remain forever unresolved) and running up the hill toward the Classrooms, crying for her mother, that inspired Dennis to redesign the court. “Would you guys want it bigger?” he polled all interested parties. “Not bigger squares but more of them, so you wouldn’t have to wait as long to get in?”

“I would,” said the second-youngest Gann, who tended to put in the second-most time waiting on line to play, and with a few more nods all around, Dennis’s proposal was ratified.

He devised a round court with a central circle for the king, surrounded by six numbered wedges for the other players, each working their way up toward the king’s spot. With a piece of sidewalk chalk, a compass fashioned out of a length of clothesline and a broom, and Kitty and Ava enlisted as helpers, he plotted first the outer circumference, then the king’s inner circle, and finally, using some rudimentary geometry and a paper plate folded in sixths (“Fractions!” shrieked Kitty and Ava with earsplitting zeal), divided the remaining doughnut shape into equal sections. The circle’s diameter was nearly the full width of the blacktop. With an old can of purple house paint, and Kitty and Ava as his able sous chefs (so they dubbed themselves, pronouncing it like Dr. Seuss, a point on which Dennis did not correct them), he rendered indelible the lines they’d traced in chalk.

Now, after a hot morning’s work, the three of them sprawled in the shade at the edge of the blacktop, surveying the results. Or Ava surveyed the results. Kitty surveyed her own legs, picking at dried speckles of purple paint, while Dennis surveyed, as unobtrusively as possible, Ava. She wore a pair of black gym shorts and a gray T-shirt that might have been a boy’s, and the plainness of her dress only accentuated what Dennis had recently come to realize was her stealth beauty. She wore her dark hair long and loose, and it glowed in the July sun like the grooves in a vinyl LP. Her feet were bare, her toenails unpolished, her soles dirty. Her only jewelry was a sailor’s rope bracelet, equally dirty, on her left wrist.

Dennis wanted to bite it. He hoped this did not make him a pervert. The trouble with fourteen, he thought defensively, was that although she was barely a teenager, she looked like the girls—women—he knew at Columbia. She seemed, since the last time he’d seen her, during his winter break (
had
he seen her then? . . . yes: he was able to dredge a memory of the girls coming in from a sledding afternoon, waddling into the Art Barn kitchen in their puffy snow pants, heating hot chocolate on the gas burner, blowing their noses boisterously, leaving milk and cocoa powder slopped all over the stove), to have shucked off some kind of chrysalis, emerging to stand as tall now, and as—what was the word?—
developed
as many of his female classmates. Perhaps feeling his gaze, Ava turned from where she sat and acknowledged him with a look of such guileless geniality that he scrambled to his feet and began balancing the broom handle on his palm.

“The first time we saw you, we thought you were in a circus,” said Ava.

He had no idea what she was talking about, which he conveyed by pulling an exaggeratedly daffy face without taking his eyes off the broom.

“Literally like the first day you came. You were moving furniture and stuff into the Art Barn, you and your dad and this other guy—bald? Short?”

“Uncle Chris?” said Kitty.

Ava shrugged. “We thought you were like acrobats,” she went on, and Dennis was keenly aware of her watching him, and of the fact that he’d removed his shirt earlier, in the heat. With great concentration, he transferred the broom handle to his chin. “One of you,” she continued, “I think it was you!—juggled a lamp.”

“Where was I?” demanded Kitty.

“You were in the tree,” said Ava, and Kitty said, “What tree?” and Ava said, “Sassafras, ass,” and Kitty said, “Oh my God! I
remember
that! And Freddy totally hit me in the face!” and Ava said, “And I died,” and Kitty said, “Poor Bird—but it was my face!” and the two of them were in stitches and Dennis had no idea what they were talking about; they’d slid far from him into the land of girl, where they conversed at girlspeed in girlcode about girlthings.

That was pleasant, too, and probably just as well. Crickets or whatever played their tiny string instruments, and the day smelled sweet and empty as funnel cake, and the broom bobbed against a sky that spooled out above them, blue.

“Sick! Can we use it?” One of the older Gann kids had wandered down, either Drew or Al; they looked too alike for Dennis ever to feel safe guessing.

“No,” he said, letting the broom fall from his chin, pleased at how long he’d managed to balance it there, chagrined that Ava hadn’t seemed to notice.

“Why not?”

“Got to dry first.”

The Gann, hands on hips, circled the freshly painted court appreciatively. He was about sixteen or seventeen, Dennis figured, with a heavy ledge of a brow, a pug nose, a jutting chin and a mane of rough red locks; his appearance was almost vulgarly masculine, and evoked in Dennis an embarrassing, primal competitive urge. Though nowhere near as tall as Dennis, the Gann kid was noticeably more built, a fact that could not escape notice since he was wearing, yes, a muscle shirt. It showed off his sculpted upper body to great effect.

“Seven players?” asked the Gann. “Who goes in the middle?”

“See the crown?” Dennis pointed at the little three-pronged coronet he’d painted in the center of the king’s circle.

“Sick.”

Dennis couldn’t help being gratified by the praise. “It should be usable in a few hours,” he offered. “Say after dinner.”

“You girls going to play?” asked the Gann, turning toward the corner of the blacktop where they lolled, their legs splayed indifferently before them.

Kitty shrugged. “Probably.”

The Gann sucked his teeth.
“Probably?”

“I might have to wash my hair,” she said in a passable Mae West, churning her shoulders, and the girls brought their heads together, his sister’s the color of ginger ale, Ava’s the rich brown of a cola, and released their intoxicating bubbles of laughter. Dennis was beset by a medley of responses: a thirst and a revulsion, as well as a confounding surge of sympathy for and resentment of the Gann who’d triggered in them this maddening mood, in which they became as irresistible as they were unreachable.

The Gann, however, seemed undaunted. “What about you?” he said, prodding Ava’s ankle with his own bare foot.

“Maybe,” she replied, and it might have been no more than a mindless aping of Kitty, but Dennis caught in her voice a flirtatious note he’d never before heard Ava use. “If you don’t kick me.”

“Who’s kicking?” The Gann prodded her again.

“Gross, your feet are filthy.”

“‘Filthy,’ what are you, British?”

“Seriously, do you ever wash? Ever smell your feet?” And from where she sat, she lifted one tawny leg and toed him in the shin.

“Dude, smelled yours?” He clasped her ankle and held it, even as she tried to pull it back. They tussled a little, Ava trying to shove the Gann off balance, the Gann using her foot in order to maintain it.

“All right, all right,” said Kitty after a minute, “get a room, why don’t you?” and Dennis, fairly horrified at Kitty’s making explicit what a moment before might have existed only in his head, had to turn away.

That was when he saw Freddy standing in the upper meadow watching them—how long had he been there?—and in the next instant come charging headlong down the slope, a darkly thudding blur, Freddy who at twelve was large and dense and unanswerable. He didn’t exactly attack the Gann. It was hard to say what his intention might have been. He did not strike out with his hands, nor did he shoulder-tackle or head-butt; simply, he ran full-force into the older boy, his entire body the weapon—again, if that was even the intention. Dennis could not have said for certain that it wasn’t just plain clumsiness, some kind of high spirits gone awry.

Both boys went down hard, the Gann landing with an alarming crack on the asphalt, Freddy landing on top of him with a more cushioned-sounding oomph.

“Jesus!” yelled Kitty. She and Ava leapt to their feet. Ava grabbed Freddy’s wrist and tugged him hard until he rolled off the Gann and then sat, slumped and sedentary, arms loose at his sides, neck bent so that the cotton wool of his dark hair flopped forward, obscuring his face. It was impossible to say whether he was sorry or sulking or scared or, for that matter, satisfied.

The Gann didn’t get up. His eyes were closed. One arm seemed to be twisted under his body, and when Dennis crouched beside him—“I don’t think you should move him,” Kitty said sharply, though he had not been planning to—he saw, mixed in with the tangled red hair squashed between the boy’s face and blacktop, an alarming dampness that was darker red.