The Life Before Her Eyes (16 page)

She opened the drawer and looked in.

It wasn't exactly in order, but there were his things. A tape measure, too. A pair of scissors.

She closed the door and pulled the chair in to his desk, which was piled high with books. Most of them were tattered, ancient. Some were in Italian. Some in Medieval English. At least three of them were in Latin. One must have been Greek.

She pushed a book away from the notepad on Paul's desk and looked down at his familiar, beloved handwriting ... loopy and jagged at the same time. He always wrote in black ink.

...Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man...

Next to it, he'd written the date at the top of the page, and because it was yesterday's, Diana imagined that this was the beginning of notes for his lecture.

It gave her an idea for a gift.

There was a place where they etched names and inscriptions on glass plates or mugs or ashtrays. Precious Moments. She'd had a wine glass engraved for him years before, for his fiftieth birthday:
For the man I will always love, on his 50th birthday.

She'd have a matching one engraved with these words to celebrate his lecture.

She tore the piece of paper from the pad.

T
HE SUN HAD COME OUT.
T
HERE WERE PUDDLES OF
glare in the garden where the light bounced off the gathered rain, and steam rose from them. It would be a warm and humid afternoon if it stayed clear. One of the first really summery days of the season. Laundromat weather, Paul called it.

The rain had beaten the daisies down, and they looked weak. Diana couldn't remember why she'd disliked them so much. Perhaps there were just too many of them now that they'd begun to spread. She'd separate them, dig some up, transplant them to the sunny side of the garage, where the tulips had already lived and died for the year. She could work around the bulbs. Next spring one brilliant batch of flowers would follow the other. Diana was no gardener, but she'd been watching flowers bloom and the long enough to have some idea of how she might time them to keep something
blooming in any given spot from May to September, if the spot got sun.

Maybe it hadn't been the daisies that had bothered her. It was just their crowded conditions. Still, slumped from the rain, they already seemed to be stirring, turning their faces toward her, or toward the sun.

She looked away from them and noticed her neighbor Rita Smith.

Diana waved, and Rita Smith waved back from over in her own yard, where she was hacking away with a pair of long shears at a forsythia bush. It was something Rita did every year after the yellow blossoms faded. Branches and leaves were littered all over Rita's front yard.

Neither woman smiled at the other. For years they hadn't spoken more than a couple of words to one another ... since the afternoon Timmy had found and massacred a nest of baby rabbits in Rita's backyard.

Timmy, Diana had tried to explain, was just doing what cats do.

Timmy, said Rita—who was not much older than Diana, but childless, husbandless, and at least fifty pounds overweight—ought to be kept indoors, where he couldn't kill helpless and innocent things.

Keeping Timmy indoors was out of the question, Diana had tried to explain. Timmy was an outdoor cat. And he was old. There was no way such a change in Timmy's lifestyle could be achieved....

Rita had ended the conversation abruptly by saying, "Please keep your cat off my property," her jowly face turning pink.

Diana had lifted a shoulder and shook her head, trying to indicate that it was impossible.
How
could she keep Timmy
out of Rita Smith's yard? He couldn't be put on a leash. She couldn't spend every minute of the day monitoring his whereabouts.

But in the end, it didn't matter. Not much later, as if Rita were some kind of witch, Timmy had begun to age rapidly. His outdoor adventures were limited to lying in the daisies, breathing shallowly.

And then he died.

But her neighbor held a permanent grudge against Diana.

And now Timmy was back. Diana bit her lip. She couldn't help smiling to herself. She thought that she'd noticed Rita Smith glance disapprovingly at the short denim skirt she was still wearing, or maybe she was looking disapprovingly at Diana's long and slender legs, smooth in the sunlight.

Fuck you,
Diana thought.

They drive to the mall.

It's the middle of the afternoon, a weekday, and the mall is nearly empty. Outside, the sun is magnificent in the sky—high and fiery and pouring golden light all over the tarry summer streets and the cars, which send up sharp edges and arrows of light as they pass under that sun and the perfectly blue sky it's burning in.

Inside the mall it's a parody of a summer day. The sound of water splashing against rocks. The breathy music of flutes floating on the air-conditioned air. A fluorescent whiteness cleansing everything as if in preparation for surgery, or burial, or birth—a chemical, medical whiteness.

In the basement of Briar Hill High, there is a recycle room, and the students have to take turns lugging bins and bundles of
recyclable waste there each week. Both girls have taken their turns in that room, which is cold but also sweaty and full of moths—fat brown ones that don't move. They look mummified, or freeze-dried, wings folded up on top of the cardboard boxes and stacks of gray newspaper. It's impossible to tell if those moths are dead or alive, or something else—lost in some sort of deep moth sleep.

And what would they be dreaming?

The mall, empty, on a day this bright and sunny might be a dead moth's dream.

The girls are wearing shorts and skimpy tops and sandals, and they feel coldly naked in the mall when they first enter it Conspicuously out of place. The heels of their sandals sound hard and loud on the linoleum. The mall is so empty, it's hard to know where to walk. They keep veering away from one another accidentally, then back again.

The mall is full of things they already own—cheap, bright things. Tube tops, tennis shoes, denim skirts, jeans.

Stuffed animals, board games, CDs, perfume, lipstick, cubic zirconia earrings.

The salespeople are bored. They want to be outside, in the real sun, the actual world. They stand around and watch the girls passing through the merchandise, fingering a few things, laughing, and they don't offer to help.

"Let's get out of here," one of the girls says to the other.

The other laughs and turns around, walking fast in the direction from which they've come.

They run awkwardly on the slippery linoleum until they reach the glass doors to the parking lot, then hurry back out into the world.

"That was creepy," one of the girls says, starting the car.

The other turns on the radio and says, "God, it's good to be
alive
again."

They laugh, and drive off.

T
HE AREA OF RESTAURANTS, BOOKSTORES, CLOTHING
boutiques, and coffee shops near campus was nearly empty.

Class had been over for a month, and most of the students had gone to wherever it was they went between semesters. Only the summer school students, and the ones who worked or played in the area, had stayed behind. It was the time of year that Diana liked Briar Hill best A kind of limbo. Beautiful weather, flowers in bloom, but no one there to clutter it up. And she liked the kinds of students who stayed behind. They looked relaxed. The girls wore long skirts. The boys wore cutoffs. They had stringy hair and smoked clove cigarettes. On the commons lawn at that moment, two such stringy-haired boys were throwing a Frisbee. Their naked torsos glistened in the sun. Though those boys were old enough to go to war, they were playing a child's game with total concentration under a sun the color of margarine that afternoon. They ran and leaped, chasing the bright piece of plastic that sailed between them on the breeze.

The absurdity of it made Diana smile.

She found a parking spot easily, which was another benefit of summer in Briar Hill, and she fed a few coins to the parking meter, then crossed the street to the Precious Moments store, where she would have the wine glass engraved for Paul.

She had her page of notebook paper folded in her purse.

...Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man...

There was a smell in the air that reminded her of semen. Some kind of tree, she supposed. The leaves on that tree. She'd
smelled it a million times before and had often wondered if she was the only person in the world who'd made such an association. To her the connection seemed obvious. In the summer the leaves of that tree—she looked around her but couldn't tell which tree it would have been—shed something clean and physical smelling into the breeze. No one could argue that the flowers smelled like sex,
were
like sex ... cupped, honeyed, opening themselves to the world...

But she'd never heard anyone mention the obvious, permeating aroma of sperm diat was released by the trees.

Diana exhaled in disappointment when she saw the out-of-business sign in the store window.

Since when?

She went to the door, anyway, and tried to open it, but it was, of course, locked.

She read the sign again.

OUT OF BUSINESS

Then she put her face to the glass door and peered in.

It was dark inside, though Diana could see that it was still full of glass gifts. Apparently it hadn't been out of business long enough to sell off the inventory.

She went over to this window at the front of the store, put her hands around her face to block the sun, and looked.

The store seemed to be empty of people, but the glass inside appeared dustless. So many clear and fragile things. The light from the sun behind her caused her own shadow to fall inside the store and stretch from the window to a shelf full of exactly the kind of wine glass she'd wanted to have engraved for Paul.

The wine glasses shone brightly, as if to taunt her.

Everything in that darkness did.

It was like looking at the complicated inner workings of a Swiss watch.

Crystals and brilliance.

Or the inside of a television. A computer. An ice cave. A pure heart A vacant mind. Heaven...

Or a hospital laboratory. Hundreds and hundreds of tubes and vials, clean and scrubbed on the shelves.

Then her shadow moved inside the store. It crossed the wooden floors and reached its hand up and took down one of the wine glasses from the shelf, then turned toward Diana with the glass in its hand.

Diana began to breathe faster, but she pressed her face closer to the window until she could see what it was:

Not a shadow, but a young woman. Her face stepped out of Diana's shadow into the light, and she, too, looked startled when she saw Diana.

The young woman was blond and long-legged and looked enough like Diana to have
been
her if not for the space of two decades between them. Like Diana, she was wearing a short denim skirt. But she was also wearing a cropped T-shirt, and her midriff was bare. There was a ring in her belly button, and another just above her eyebrow.

When she saw Diana, the young woman hurried from the shelf to the glass door and unlocked it There was the sound of bells when the door opened.

"Ma'am? Can I help you?"

The young woman was much more beautiful than Diana had realized before she saw her closely. Her skin was flawless in the bright light, and so pale that a cool blue vein could be seen at her temple. Her hair was the kind of flat, flaxen blond that looked like a sheet of water in the sun.

"I was just surprised to see the store was out of business," Diana said. "I was hoping to have something engraved. One of those." Diana nodded at the wine glass in the girl's hand.

"I'm sorry," she said. "We just closed, like two days ago. They hired me to, like, inventory and clean up."

"Oh," Diana said. "No chance I could maybe just buy one of those?..." She nodded again at the wine glass in the young woman's hand. "It matches one I bought for my husband some years ago. Maybe I could have it engraved somewhere else."

The girl looked at the wine glass and then at Diana. "Here," she said, handing it to Diana, "you can have it."

"Oh, I—" Diana hesitated but she reached out to take the glass, afraid that the girl would let go of it, that it would smash between them on the concrete.

"It's just a wine glass," the young woman said, as if Diana had mistaken it for something else.

The girl's teeth were like a string of pearls, so perfect when she smiled. The teeth of someone who'd never sipped coffee or eaten cherry pie. Then she closed the door and locked it.

Diana carried the wine glass carefully back to the minivan. It seemed so weightless and fragile in her hand, much more so than the one she'd had engraved years before. Maybe it wasn't a match. This glass felt like air, like nothing, in her hand.

It didn't matter. She'd have it engraved. It was the thought that counted.

Diana unlocked the passenger's side door to the minivan and placed the wine glass carefully down on the backseat. She had nothing—no tissue paper, no bubble wrap—to protect it with, but she thought she'd just leave it there for now, go to the bookstore and buy a newspaper, read the newspaper at the coffee shop, then come back and wrap the glass in the paper before she drove off to pick up Emma.

She was just locking the minivan again, opening her purse to fish out a few more coins for the meter, when she saw him out of the corner of her eye.

Paul.

It wasn't a coincidence, of course. His office was only a block over from here in a huge white-pillared building called Angel Hall.

He was walking in the opposite direction of that building and didn't see Diana. He was on the opposite side of the street. He was talking as he strode along the sidewalk ... moving his hands as he did when he was explaining something or was excited. It was one of the first things Diana had been attracted to ... one of the first things she'd noticed about him from the fourth row of the classroom where she sat watching and listening.