Stillness in Bethlehem (17 page)

She crossed the street, walked down the sidewalk on that side very carefully so she wouldn’t slip on the patch of black ice that had begun to form on the surface, and then crossed the intersection that brought her to the front door of the
Bethlehem News and Mail
. Main Street was not quite straight. Gemma had to make a little arc to get where she was going, and when she got there and stood on the highest of the concrete steps, she could look back over her shoulder and see the park and the settings for the play as if they were on a distant stage, presented for her amusement. She knew the other place you could do that—the top floor of the Green Mountain Inn. If she’d been interested in the Nativity story, she would have rented one of those rooms and watched the spectacle from above. It was one of the worst drawbacks of living in the rectory that she had no view of the town at all.

She stamped her feet on Peter Callisher’s L. L. Bean flying-duck welcome mat, gave herself one more chance to change her mind, and then tried the door. It opened easily, in spite of the magnetic seal Peter had installed to save on heating bills and turn himself at least a light environmental Green. Gemma stepped through into the big room and looked around. Not many people were there. The paper would have been sent to the printers at noon, for distribution tomorrow. Timmy Hall was sweeping up. Amanda Ballard—whom Gemma had cordially hated from the moment they met—was filling out a form at the front desk. Cara Hutchinson was leaning against the counter and babbling. Peter was nowhere to be seen. Gemma shut the door behind her. Cold air had been pouring in around her calves.

“It was just absolutely the most wonderful thing,” Cara Hutchinson was saying, presumably to Amanda Ballard, although it was hard to tell. Amanda didn’t seem to be paying much attention. She must have been paying some, however, because Gemma could see she was agitated. Amanda was usually very careful to keep the hair over her right ear, so that the lack of earlobe and the stunted little end didn’t show, but when she got excited she forgot. She had forgotten now, and had her hair firmly behind both ears.

“You know,” Cara told her, “when I went up there today, I was half-convinced he was going to have me pose nude. I mean, he hadn’t said anything like that yesterday, but what did that mean? He might have assumed I’d understand. After all, everybody knows about artists. So I went up there and I’d absolutely made up my mind, I really had, that I was going to do it if that was what I was supposed to do. I am going away to college next year. I don’t intend to spend all of my life in some backwoods town that doesn’t understand Art. Never mind Literature. I was reading
The New York Review of Books
in the library the other day, and you wouldn’t believe the stares I got from practically everybody.”

“Mmm,” Amanda Ballard said.

“Well,” Cara took a deep breath, prepared to go on.

Amanda looked up, saw Gemma at the door and put down her pen. Gemma smiled. She did not say what she wanted to say, which was that if “practically everybody” had been staring at Cara Hutchinson in the library the other day, it wasn’t because Cara had been reading
The New York Review of Books
. It might have been because Cara was muttering to herself, which Gemma had seen her do when she read, but that was something else again. Amanda was rubbing the side of her neck with the flat of her hand and looking quizzical.

“Gemma,” she said. “Cara is Jan-Mark’s latest local model.”

“So I’ve gathered,” Gemma said.

“It’s really been the most wonderful experience,” Cara repeated, with a trace of a smirk in her voice that could have been detected by a deaf woman. “He showed me his wife’s office. His
late
wife’s office. He keeps it like a shrine.”

“She was a bad woman,” Timmy Hall said suddenly. “She was Evil.”

Amanda picked up her pen again. “All right,” she said. “I think we all have that established. I’m sorry, Gemma. All anybody ever talks about around here is Tisha and the shootings. And now that Gregor Demarkian is in town—”

“My old ladies keep talking about Gregor Demarkian,” Gemma said. “You’d think Peter Falk had arrived to shoot an episode of
Columbo
. Did Franklin Morrison really hire him to look into Tisha Verek’s death?”

“You can’t hire him,” Cara Hutchinson said. “He doesn’t take money, except sometimes he asks for donations to some Armenian refugee relief society or this homeless shelter in Philadelphia. The Archdiocese of Colchester gave twenty-five thousand dollars to the homeless shelter last year after all that mess with the nuns being killed around St. Patrick’s Day. Or maybe it was one nun. I don’t remember. But I’ll tell you—”

“He’s here to attend the Celebration, just like everybody else,” Amanda said, cutting Cara off. “You can read all about it in the paper tomorrow, Gemma. When Peter found out he was here, he put a story right on page one. About his being here, I mean, and with a picture. We tried to get an interview, but it didn’t work out.”

“He doesn’t give interviews,” Cara Hutchinson said.

“Did you want to see Peter?” Amanda asked. “He went upstairs to lie down, but he wouldn’t mind coming back again. He only lies down when he’s bored, anyway. I could call upstairs and get him.”

“I wish he’d let me write something for the paper,” Cara said. “It wouldn’t have to be about Art exactly. I mean, I know that won’t sell papers in Bethlehem, Vermont. It could be about Tisha’s office and be all hooked in with the shootings. She has the most interesting office, really, with all these pictures in it of children who killed people when they were children and then some pictures of the children grown up. It’s very interesting, really.”

“Gemma?”

Gemma had been staring at a little collection of Santa’s elves on the counter near Amanda’s elbow. Cara Hutchinson had always made her eyes glaze over, and this new obsession with Art, Artists and the Artist’s Wife just made the situation worse. Gemma straightened up. Since Cara obviously knew that Gemma and Jan-Mark had been having a relationship—since the whole town obviously knew—it ought to have occurred to her that Gemma had been in Jan-Mark’s house, and seen Tisha’s office, more times than Cara herself ever would, unless Jan-Mark decided to go all French and take up with his own underaged model. Cara was horse-faced and grating and less than half Jan-Mark’s age, but Gemma wouldn’t put anything at all past the stupid rutting fool. Whether that negated all the hours of deeply spiritual communion she and Jan-Mark had shared together, Gemma didn’t know.

“Gemma?” Amanda said again.

“Yes,” Gemma answered. “Yes. I’m sorry. I’m very tired. I do want to see Peter. I have something I need to talk over with him.”

“I’ll call him right down.”

“Thank you.”

Over on the other side of the office, Timmy Hall was leaning against a broom, contemplating the women set out before him. Gemma watched his gaze move from Amanda to herself to Cara and then pause, frowning furiously, as if what he saw angered him. Gemma sometimes argued in favor of women’s intuition—which she translated as “a natural biological affinity for extrasensory perception”—but she didn’t need women’s intuition or ESP or anything else to tell her what she was seeing now. The way Timmy Hall was looking at Cara Hutchinson made Gemma Bury’s blood run cold.

Candy George didn’t know exactly what change had come over her relationship with her husband Reggie, but she did know when the change had started to happen, and it intrigued her. Candy had rehearsed for the part of Mary in the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration play for months. Aside from giving her something else to think about besides her own misery—which was a relief—it hadn’t changed anything at all. What had was the experience of her first performance in public before real people. She had expected to be frightened, and she was. She had expected to be paralyzed, but she wasn’t. Candy George had indulged in a drug or two over the years, marijuana and beer, cocaine and animal tranquilizers. Sometimes the relentless pressing weight of her life got so bad, drugs were a form of medication, a temporary relief, like the morphine fed in small doses to men whose limbs had to be amputated on battlefields. Sometimes the night terrors got so bad she needed drugs simply to sleep. Night terrors were what she called the half-waking dreams she had, lying at Reggie’s side in the dark, neither in this place nor in any other, when her stepfather’s hand would come up out of the blackness and reach for the cleft between her legs, the tips of his fingers as rough as sandpaper, the warts on his knuckles hardened into razor-edged marbles made of pumice and steel. She would try to sit up and not be able to. She would try to call out and not be able to. She would tell herself it was a dream and find it made no difference. When it was over, she would get up and go into the kitchen and smoke a couple of joints. If Reggie caught her at it, he would beat her up. Like everything else in the house, the marijuana was supposed to belong to Reggie alone. He was allowed to dole it out but she was not allowed to take it without permission. That was true even of her own clothes. He told her what she could wear in the morning. He told her what to put on before she went to bed. He put his belt across her back if she tried to argue with him.

What had changed on that stage that first night of the Celebration was Candy George’s assessment of her possibilities in life, and she didn’t think she would ever be the same again. She had heard of heroin highs and cocaine highs and crack euphoria. She had tried heroin and cocaine and crack without ever being able to figure out what everybody else was talking about. Either her body put up too much resistance, or her mind did. That was why she had never become addicted, although a couple of her friends had. That was why she had never become an alcoholic, either, although from everything she’d heard she ought to be one. Her mother was one and her father was one and her stepfather was one and Reggie was definitely on the way. She could easily become addicted to the way she felt on stage. It was like stepping out of her life and into another one, Mary’s life. It was like going from being one of those girls who was so little use to anyone she had no right to anything at all, to being the most important woman in the history of creation. That was what her Sunday School teachers had taught her. Candy hadn’t paid much attention at the time. Now she thought they must have been right.
From this day all generations shall call me blessed, for God has done great things for me.
Candy had to say that every night right after the angel came to announce the birth of Christ, and from the first night of the first performance she had believed it absolutely. It swelled up in her like a molten silver champagne. It changed the shape of her body and the contents of her mind. It rearranged the bones of her face, so that instead of the ugliness she saw every morning in her mirror, she looked like what Peter Callisher said she looked like. She wasn’t particularly religious and didn’t want to be. She didn’t know if the world was controlled by a benevolent Father, a swirling mass of auras or nothing at all. She didn’t much care. All she knew was that somebody somewhere was about to do great things for her, that she was no longer the person she used to be, and that it was only a matter of time. A matter of time for what, she hadn’t figured out yet.

Neither had Reggie, but he had figured out that something was different, and therefore wrong, and he had been worrying at it for the whole of the last two weeks. Today he had stayed home sick from work, which he never did, and Candy suspected the reason was the argument she had had yesterday with Cara Hutchinson. In the old days, Candy would never have had an argument of any kind with Cara Hutchinson. She would have let Cara push and push, and if Cara had pushed hard enough and long enough, Candy would have given her what she wanted. Then if Reggie hadn’t liked it,
he
would have had the argument with Cara. That was how it was all supposed to happen, but yesterday it hadn’t. Yesterday she had told Cara Hutchinson no—in a voice that wasn’t too strong and wasn’t too firm and wasn’t too sane, either, now that she thought about it—and in spite of everything, she felt good about it. The everything she had to feel good about it in spite of included the position she was in now, at three o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, December 16th, and had been in since eight o’clock this morning. Eight o’clock was when Reggie decided she had ruined his breakfast, overcooked his eggs, undercooked his sausage, turned his coffee into goat’s piss. That was when he had leaped up from the table and grabbed the front of the dress he had told her to wear and ripped it right off. His nails had cut into the skin between her breasts and his fingers had caught on the underwire of her bra. Her bra had come off with the front of her dress. The snaps in the back had popped—which had made Reggie even more furious; he hated bras that snapped in back; he preferred the ones that fastened in the front, even though it was hard to get them in Candy’s size—and then the metal underwire had come loose and whipped across her nipples like an electric prod. By the time Candy had gotten her breath back, Reggie had gotten his belt off. He was standing over her like a robot sentinel, the belt pulsing through the air like a rattlesnake defying gravity. Reggie grabbed the collar tab on the back of the dress and ripped at that too, tearing what was left of blue cotton and elastic into shreds, bringing the belt down first on Candy’s back and then on the back of her legs. Candy knew what it was about. Even in her dizziness she couldn’t forget, and usually when she got dizzy enough she forgot everything. Reggie had come to hate having her in that damned Nativity play, but he was stuck. He cared so much about his public image. The police had been called to this house once because of their fighting. He didn’t dare do anything to make it obvious they might have been right to come. He was stuck with her in this play and with what being in this play was doing to her, and he hated it.

When it was over, he had made his usual request, demanded the thing he liked to demand above all else. Candy had welts on her back and calves and across her breasts. The dark areas around her nipples felt bitten and swollen and set on fire. Reggie had her put on a small white frilly apron that started at her waist and didn’t quite cover her abdomen. Then he had her put on the garter belt he had bought her and the silk stockings and the four-inch spike-heeled shoes. That was the way he had dressed her last year when he had taken the picture he had sent to the “Beaver Hunt” section of
Hustler
magazine. Before he’d set up the camera, he’d made her sit on the table and spread her legs. Candy had always thought of that picture as the very last word on her life, the thing that named her.
You are not a woman
, that picture said.
You are a hole
.