The Keep (9 page)

He’s the only one not laughing. That was fine, he says. Up until the
oh, fuck.

So forget I said,
oh, fuck.
I won’t write
oh, fuck.

Mel pins his blank, mean little eyes on me. Ray, he says, like he’s talking to a kitten. Before, you were painting a picture. You had atmosphere and all that. Now you’re just going through the motions. Your heart’s not in it, man, you’re not painting a picture anymore and that shit makes me
uncomfortable.
Excuse the French, Miss Holly.

We’re going in circles, Holly says. I say we move on.

No one’s going to move on until Mel gives the say-so. He looks at me. Keep it coming, Ray.

I’m done, I say. Better ask the clown. I don’t even look at Tom-Tom.

Mel says something, but his voice is like a butterfly wing moving, and I can’t hear. Holly takes a step toward the desk, which is where she keeps the pendant with the emergency switch that they all wear around their necks. Holly takes off the pendant as soon as she walks in the room each week. She puts it on the desk, I guess to show that she trusts us. Now she hesitates. If she pushes that button, class is over, and she hates to lose a class. You can tell. Every one is precious to her.

Take your seat, Tom, Holly says, because now he’s on his feet.

Just stretching my legs, Tom-Tom says, and grins his hateful lizard grin at Holly, and I think how small she is in those baggy pants she wears and right then I see how the point of that outfit is to make her look and feel like a man or even a boy, to hide the female under there so she won’t feel weak. By the time Tom-Tom swings around at me, it’s too late. Holly’s nowhere near the pendant and Mel’s up too, moving fast for a fat guy.

I could stop this thing a hundred different ways. Even now, with everyone in motion. It’s that way with violence: a slow quiet opens around it and suddenly there’s all this space to move and rearrange things or shut them down. Or maybe that’s just how it seems later on, when you wish things had gone a different way. I feel Mel and Tom-Tom watching me, waiting for a sign even while they move, but I’m giving them nothing. Because I want it. Something inside me is pulling this way. I feel the mystery of it as Mel takes my desk in his hands and flips it upside down and my head smacks the floor and I lie there with my eyes shut and those electric sparks flying around against the black: I’ve made something happen and it’s happening, now, and I don’t know what it is.

She’s scared, I can smell it. She kneels down and puts her hand on my head and I feel her skin, her palm and thin warm fingers on my forehead and attached to those fingers is a body with life pushing out from inside it. Holly Farrell. Her hand on my head. It’s the weird and terrible way of this place that a little thing, a hand on a head, can matter so much.

I wait as long as I can. Then I open up my eyes and look at her. She looks back: soft worried bloodshot eyes. Pale blue.

Enough drama, she says. Up. And she goes to meet the COs at the door.

Class ends early that day.

Eventually Howard left for town. When he was gone, Danny tracked down the room where he’d slept, gathered up the parts of his satellite dish, and hauled them back through the garden to the round pool. He circled it, trying to figure out which spot would give his dish its straightest shot at that nice blue oval of sky. Now that he was alone, Danny noticed how clear and hot the sunlight was, full of buzzing insects. Also how weeds had squeezed up between the panels of marble around the pool and made them uneven, like they were floating on water. There was a marble bench next to the pool, and facing it from the other side was a sculpted head with a dried-out spigot for a mouth. Danny realized it was Medusa, her angry noggin wrapped up in marble snakes.

The pool stink didn’t bother him now, maybe because he was about to get on the phone. How could a satellite phone affect Danny’s sense of smell? someone’s probably asking. Well, he’d lived a lot of places since moving to New York: nice ones (when it was someone else’s place), and shitty ones (when it was his place), but none of them had ever felt like home. For a long time this bothered Danny, until one day two summers ago he was crossing Washington Square talking on his cell phone to his friend Zach, who was in Machu Picchu in the middle of a snowstorm, and it hit him—wham—that he was at home
right at that instant.
Not in Washington Square, where the usual crowd of tourists were yukking it up to some raunchy comedian in the empty fountain, not in Peru, where he’d never been in his life, but
both places at once.
Being somewhere but not completely: that was home for Danny, and it sure as hell was easier to land than a decent apartment. All he needed was a cell phone, or I-access, or both at once, or even just a plan to leave wherever he was and go someplace else really really soon. Being in one place and
thinking
about another place could make him feel at home, which was why knowing he was about to get on that phone made the pool smell seem faint, a thing he’d already left behind.

He picked a spot near Medusa and went to work. Danny was no engineer, but he could follow a manual and get a job done. He set up the physical contraption, a long folded-up umbrella that was the actual dish, plus a tripod, plus a keypad, plus the phone itself, which was heavy and fat like cell phones ten years ago. Then he started in on the programming, backing up after each dead end: wrong country codes, foreign operators, recordings in languages he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. He was hearing
something,
he was connected to
someone,
and the joy of that after almost seventy-two hours of total isolation got Danny through the snags with a smile.

An hour later he was punching in the password to his New York voice mail, half dizzy from that carbonation he got in his chest whenever a long time had passed since he’d checked it. Each new message starting up made Danny’s heart stretch like it was reaching out for something. And each time, once he realized what the message was, he got a shove of disappointment. Mom: Where are you now? in that worn-out voice he’d gotten so used to it barely made him feel guilty anymore. Bill collectors he ID’d in two words or less and deleted. His sister Ingrid, the spy (how else would his parents have figured out that the restaurant where he was maître d’ing was a “total mobster hangout” within twenty-four hours of her last visit?),
Just checking in.
Yeah, right. A dozen friends reporting on bars and parties and clubs, all of which was fine but none of which was
the thing.
Danny had no idea what the thing was. All he knew was that he lived more or less in a constant state of expecting something any day, any hour, that would change everything, knock the world upside down and put Danny’s whole life into perspective as a story of complete success, because every twist and turn and snag and fuckup would always have been leading up to this. Unexpected stuff could hit him like the thing at first: a girl he’d forgotten giving his number to suddenly calling up out of the blue, a friend with some genius plan for making money, better yet a person he’d never heard of who
wanted to talk.
Danny got an actual physical head rush from messages like these, but as soon as he called back and found out the details, the calls would turn out to just be about more projects, possibilities, schemes that boiled down to everything staying exactly like it was.

Danny programmed his New York voice mail to route his calls straight into the new phone. Then he set up his new voice mail and started dialing: Zach, Tammy, Koos, Hifi, Donald, Noon, Camilla, Wally. Mostly he left messages—the point was to shoot his new number into as many phones as possible, and getting that done let off a pressure that had been building in Danny for the many hours he’d been out of touch. He reached actual people maybe one-fifth of the time, and the conversations went something like:

Danny: Heywhatsup.

Friend: Danny-boy. You back in town?

Danny: Any day, now. Any day.

Which was false—he didn’t even have a return ticket—but Danny knew the best way to stay front and center in people’s heads was to act like you’d barely left no matter how far away you were. And while he got caught up on seventy-two hours’ worth of gossip, he soaked in the roar of New York that leaked in
around
the gossip, which made a perfect balance against the pool and trees and quiet buzzing. He was at home.

He waited awhile before he dialed Martha Mueller’s number at work. He liked to warm up a little first.

Martha: Mr. Jacobson’s office. Her landline gave him his best connection yet, Martha’s scratchy voice so deep and soft in Danny’s ear it was like she was talking from inside his brain.

He said: Martha.

She lowered her voice: Baby, are you out of here?

Way out.

Those guys drove by my place again this morning. In the black Lincoln. I told them you were gone.

Tell me word-for-word what you said.

I said, “He’s gone. Now leave me the fuck alone.” Something like that.

I wouldn’t say
fuck
to those guys.

Too late.

And what did they say?

“Cunt,” I think. They were already rolling up the window.

Danny: Were you scared? He liked the idea.

Martha snorted. If I were twenty-two and blond, I’d be scared.

She was forty-five, by far the oldest girl that Danny had ever slept with. He’d met her in an ATM line and followed her to a bus stop. First it was just her perfume, although it turned out Martha didn’t wear perfume, she mixed fresh sage in with her underpants. She had red hair with a lot of gray in it. Three weeks ago she’d pulled the plug on Danny, saying the picture they made together was grotesque. They’d hooked up a few more times anyway—she was wild and dirty in bed. From Martha,
Get away, you fucker
was a come-on.

Danny: Martha—

Stop.

She was right, he was going to say it. And he did: I love you.

Please.

And you love me.

You’re losing it.

He could hear her lighting up. She was a longtime secretary-actress. When the office where she’d worked for fifteen years went smokeless, she kept lighting up until they fired her, then used her unemployment to land a job at Philip Morris.

Martha (exhaling): It’s not love, it’s some kind of erotic delusion.

Danny: That’s what love
is.

Martha: Admit you’re bored, Danny.

With you?

With this conversation.

Normally it led to sex. Danny noticed he was grinding his teeth, and it crossed his mind he could jerk off right here, with her rough voice in his ear. But one look at that rancid pool and the urge dried up.

Danny: I’m the opposite of bored. I could go on forever.

He loved her. She had a sly, proud face and a fuzz of invisible hair over every part of her. She made the girls he’d slept with before—models or might-as-well-be models (would be, could be, wished they were, mistaken for, proud they weren’t, etc.), girls with elastic faces who ate a lot of popcorn and green peppers and nodded respectfully whenever he went on about his moneymaking schemes, whereas Martha said once, You can find out it’s bullshit by wasting a chunk of your life or just admit it’s bullshit right now and drop it—made them seem interchangeable. And some miracle had led Danny through that clutter of identical girls to Martha.

Martha: How’s the knee?

Hurts.

You get it looked at?

When would I do that?

It made a funny pop.

I don’t remember a pop.

When the fat guy had you in a headlock and the other one was stomping on your—

Okay, okay. But Martha—

I’ll hang up.

Don’t!

The balance was starting to slip. Being at home meant being in an even mix of locations, like a seesaw with two kids on it that weigh exactly the same. Being
only
where you were was incomplete, but being
not at all
where you were (because you were getting upset by the conversation you were having on your cell phone) was flat-out hazardous. That’s when you walked in front of cars. And Danny was getting upset. He’d started to pace.

Martha: I’m forty-five. My tits are sagging—I own cats, for God’s sake! And now it turns out
in vitro
doesn’t work for women my age, it’s all egg donor, if that, which means I’ll never have kids or at least not my own kids, and men—young men, especially—basically want to spread their seed. You can’t argue with that, Danny, it’s a biological fact.

Danny: But you don’t want kids! And I don’t want kids! I love the fact that you can’t have kids because that means I’ll never have to have any. From my end, it’s a plus!

Martha: You say that now.

Danny: When else can I say it? Now is when we’re talking. All I’ve got is now!

Martha: But you’re still a kid yourself.

Danny stood still. These were the words he never got tired of hearing—words he waited for, hoped for. Hearing them from Martha now was like being skewered. Danny started pacing again, but right away his feet caught on something and he lost his balance—shit, he’d forgotten where he was and now that putrid pool was leering up at him; he was falling toward it! Danny flailed wildly the other way and somehow vaulted onto the marble, his left shoulder taking the whole impact of his weight. Pain shot tears into his eyes.