The Grief of Others (36 page)

“What?” he said.

“What do you
mean
, ‘what’?” Her eyes widened as though she were not only incensed but incredulous.

Would she dash in his face the water that remained in her glass? Would she slap him? He had the strong impression that she was, in fact, about to kiss him. So compelling was his conviction that his mind seemed to wander forward a few moments in time and supply the projected sensations: her knuckles hard against his chest as she grabbed a fistful of his shirt, her lips pressed hotly to his, his own mashed up tight against his locked, recalcitrant teeth. His spine, his arms, his legs, all gone rigid, tightened against the implication—but here his mind complicated matters by conjuring an additional tightening in his groin.

Blushing, he stammered, “Wh-what are we fighting about?”

“You just called me a liar.”

“I didn’t.”

“A fake.”

“Well,” he said. He thought a moment. “Yeah.”

She reacted to this admission not by striking or kissing him, but rather appeared to shed, in an instant, all anger, all indignation. It was as though he’d pressed a secret button, so quickly did the change come over her. She set down her glass, seized one of his hands, and began to plead, almost, it seemed, to bargain.

“But I’m not fake, Gordie, really I’m not,” she was saying. “That’s how they make me feel, but it’s not my fault he’s my father. I try, I try, to be nice, and good, and, and, and
liked,
and I know they do like me, but—they don’t. Or they don’t really let me . . . trust me . . . They don’t
talk
about things. Did you know they had a baby die? Last year. And they don’t even mention it, never even told me. I mean, Biscuit, she told me, tells me some stuff. But you’d think! And Ricky and I have had all these talks about pregnancy and babies and everything, and then I go and find out she never even mentions this important thing to me, and they’re always whispering together, Ricky and John, and they go silent and all stony-faced when I come in the room. And I . . . my God, I mean I
buy
things, you know, and wash the dishes, that kind of thing, try to help, be
helpful,
like with the boxes, I’m trying to help, help
you
. And it’s the least he can do, after all these—Isn’t it? Don’t you think?—really, to help with this one thing I ever asked, not even for me but for someone else, a friend, and after all it’s his line of work, I mean he
knows
people. . . .”

She kept talking, or babbling, and he listened, following some of it but not all, noticing in any case less her words than her tone of distress, and also the distressed way she was kneading his hand, pinching up—as if absentmindedly—the loose skin around his knuckles, then smoothing out his joints, tracing the lines on his palm, separating his fingers, sliding her own between them, imploring him. She seemed, for the first time since he’d met her, much younger, rather than older, than her twenty-three years. She seemed about fifteen. Even her voice sounded younger: tentative and high. She was not crying but was in a state that seemed to him like crying, her words, her unstructured, nonsensical speech continuing steadily in the manner of tears.

He’d struck a chord he’d had no intention of striking. She was a stranger—she’d never legitimately progressed beyond that point, no matter how much he might have liked pretending so over the past several weeks—a stranger who seemed at this moment both more and less authentic than ever. But when he folded his arms around her he felt not at all stiff, and barely strange. He was like Ebie coming out onto the balcony and resting her head on his thigh: a body that knew exactly what to do—not forever, not in all situations, but in this moment, for this time. He held Jess and took note of his ease, which was at once novel and native. How amazing. “Shh,” he said. “Shh.”

A
s she explained to Ricky, Jess wasn’t worried. In fact she felt a little silly mentioning it. In fact she had
not
mentioned it at first, not for several hours after going to the bathroom at Gordie’s house and wiping and seeing the blood on the toilet paper. One reason she wasn’t worried, as she explained to Ricky two or three times (it seemed worthy of repetition; an important, determining fact), was that the blood wasn’t bright red. It was only a pale brown stain, like what you see (she said) when you’re about to get your period but it hasn’t really started yet. Another (this had seemed even more decisive a fact) was that each time she’d gone back to the bathroom since, there’d been no sign of blood, neither on her underwear nor on the toilet paper. Also, she’d read somewhere, hadn’t she (in one of the books on Ricky’s shelves most likely, one of the pregnancy books to which Ricky had specifically and generously drawn her attention), that a little harmless spotting in early pregnancy was common, or at least not unheard of.

All of this Jess told Ricky in an embarrassed and strangely excited rush, in the upstairs hall that night, not long after Gordie had given her a lift home. To Gordie she’d said nothing. She’d taken stock in his little bathroom with its pill-pink fixtures and fluorescent lighting, staring at the piece of toilet paper with a kind of detachment that was at odds with her racing heart—first seeing: a mechanical, strictly synaptical act; then absorbing: the process of sight becoming reality; then evaluating: trying to assess the image’s possible import—in steps as distinct and methodical as that—the information contained in the definite but faint smear of blood, as innocuous in color as a residue of coffee around the rim of a mug. She had, after several moments, risen and flushed the toilet and washed her hands and washed her face and examined in the medicine-cabinet mirror her own face, which appeared the same as it always had, and as she always envisioned herself: practical, plain, steady of gaze. Then she’d walked back into the living room, where Gordie was kneeling before a low shelf of his dad’s boxes, and, kneeling beside him, did not mention the blood but resumed the conversation they’d been having about dollhouses and letter carriers, babies and art.

It had seemed important to go on responding, if obliquely, to his charge of falsity, and several times during their conversation she edged close to telling him about her mother and father, how they hadn’t really kicked her out; how they wanted her home again; and how she missed them, and wasn’t sure herself why she was sticking around the Ryries, what it was she was waiting for, hoping for. She came close to telling him, too, how Paul had kissed her earlier that afternoon—wasn’t it terrible?—and how she was ashamed for him, and also sorry for him. But that wasn’t quite right. The truth (though she did not come close to telling Gordie this) was that she was ashamed of herself for letting it unfold as it had: the progression from mandolin to hat to wrestling match to bed. Panting and laughing, laughing and panting, pink and breathless and the bedsprings squeaking—as though she had been curious about her own power, had wanted to see if she could bring him to that point.

Nor did she tell Gordie how she lay every night on the air mattress beside Biscuit’s bed making up stories, fashioning lies. A white vinyl purse, a sequined insect. Canadian coins. Mints. A chipmunk tame enough to eat from their hands. How effortlessly she’d gotten Biscuit to collude in those lies, to enjoy them, initiate them; how they invented together, night after night, weaving, in the glow of the night-light, a fake history: half sister and half sister both hungry for threads.

Nor did she tell him how splendidly, wickedly easy it had been to gain Ricky’s affection; that simply by showing up pregnant she had gained a foothold on this most daunting task. More than a foothold—she’d reaped bequests. A turquoise bottle of prenatal vitamins; a mobile that played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” while cloth moons and stars perambulated; a half-shelf of books advising what kind of fish not to ingest, what kind of oil to massage into stretch marks, what to name one’s baby. All of these offered with an almost eager flourish, as though Ricky had been expecting her, or at any rate aching for someone to whom she might pass these things along.

Even had she wanted to, she would not have had the means to tell how John, for all that he was unfailingly courteous, seemed in subtle fashion to disparage her, or despair of her. Or maybe what she sensed was simple distrust. She sensed it not in spite of his courtesy but as a result of it, the quality of his courtesy toward her being so careful, so considered. A few times she’d caught him looking at her with nothing in his expression—not admiration, or regret, or wonder, or even
interest,
really—but a kind of wary bemusement. Jess did not have words to describe this, not even to herself, nor to describe the pain it caused, a pain made sharper by this dearth of language.

Instead of telling him any of these things, Jess had found herself talking about the baby, that invisible, impractical, incontestably real presence within her, as if it were the best, the ideal, response to Gordie’s accusation of phoniness. “In another month, about, I’ll be able to feel it move,” she mentioned, and, “The button on my jeans is definitely getting hard to fasten.” She noticed how rapidly each mention of the subject induced in Gordie an air of deference, a kind of carte blanche respect verging on awe and which seemed to assume her own superior fortitude, her sparkling, staggering grit. And she saw how it would be this way, how having a baby young and solo would assign her, in the minds of observers, certain qualities—or not simply qualities, but a certain command. She felt rich with it, fat and pleased with the creamy, private thought. She imagined herself with the baby—visible at last!—itself fat and creamy in her arms as she went about her business, walked down the street, mailed a letter, stood in line to buy, what?—milk, crackers, bananas—and no one able to accuse her of being fake.

Reminding Gordie she was with child suited her purpose in another way, too, since pregnancy seemed (antithetically, when you thought about it) to exempt a woman from her sexual status, and therefore from behaving in any way that could be construed as flirtatious. With their tiff in this way safely put to rest, Jess had stuck around to help Gordie bring out the rest of the trash bags, after which they wound up ordering pizza (she was, she thought, just as glad not to sit opposite Paul at supper tonight), and then they had worked to identify the dozen boxes they imagined John’s colleague’s friend’s etc. would find most interesting, or relevant, or meritorious from an artistic point of view or whatever. After some congenial debate, they packed their selections into the back of Gordie’s dad’s station wagon and delivered them to the Ryries’.

It was by then a little past nine. John had helped carry the boxes in. Biscuit, pajamaed, had clunked to her knees and flung her arms around Ebie, submitting to copious, adoring slobber. Ricky had put the kettle on, and they’d all wound up in the kitchen except Paul, who chose to remain in the den, his porkpied head a stolid silhouette against the aquatic glimmer of the TV screen.

It wasn’t until Jess was getting ready for bed that it happened a second time—she wiped and there was blood on the toilet paper, again not red and again not much, though more this time than last.

For several seconds she just stood in the darkness outside John and Ricky’s room, underneath the closed door of which a bar of light shone, and argued sternly with her thudding heart against leaping to conclusions. Then she knocked.

“Yeah?” It was John.

“Um . . . Ricky?” Jess asked softly.

A pause.The sound of pants. A man’s pants. Funny that such a thing had its own inimitable sound.The cuffs mutedly smacking the floor, the heaviness of the fabric being drawn up, the jostle of coins in the pocket. Involuntarily, wistfully, Jess pictured her own father, his distracted look as he dressed for work, his thoughts forever remote from things like pants.

“What’s up?” John’s face appeared in the door. He wore jeans. His broad chest was covered in tufts of curly black, streaked heavily with gray, much more so than the hair on his head.

“I’m sorry.” She was whispering. “Could I just talk to Ricky a sec?”

He raised his eyebrows, stroked the wiry beard on one side of his face, then turned, opening the door wider as he did. Ricky was not in bed, as Jess had imagined, but sitting on the window seat, her knees pulled broodily to her chest. When she saw Jess she sprung up at once and pulled a robe over what she’d been wearing: not much, Jess glimpsed. Ricky came to the door, exchanging first glances, then places, with John.

“Do you mind if . . . well, in private?” begged Jess.

Ricky closed the door behind her and they moved toward the linen closet, away from all the bedrooms. There was one window at this end of the hall, set high in the wall, and through it a mingle of streetlight and moon washed her features as she listened to Jess whisper her news. Her robe, white terry, looked like snow in the light. She offered no reassurance but laid a hand very kindly on Jess’s cheek, and that is what started Jess shaking.