The Most Wanted (21 page)

“I’m not.”

“I know you’re Jewish.”

“But I don’t keep kosher. Anyhow, how do you know I’m Jewish?”

“You remind me of my aunt from New Jersey. I grew up spending summers with their family at the shore.”

“The shore where?”

“The Jersey shore.”

“I thought you were from here.”

“I’m from here. But my folks got divorced when I was five. And all us kids spent all the summers out East. You sound like New Jersey.”

“Well, New York. And Long Island.”

“I’m a little rusty.”

“Still, pretty good for a Texan.” We sat there in a suddenly awkward silence. And then we both began at once, him to explain live-and-dead live oaks, me to ask about them. We looked into our glasses. That was one of the times I wondered how old Charley was. Twenty-five? Twenty-three?

“What I meant,” he went on, inhaling, with obvious pleasure, the steam from the noodle bowl the waiter placed between us, “trees aren’t really living things all through. If you take U.S. Ninety from here toward Uvalde and then head a few blocks west of the courthouse, there’s this metal garage built right around a live oak tree. That tree must be three hundred years old. But the part of it that’s living, right now, is all on the outside. If you could core deep into the heart of that tree and find the tiny piece of it that sprang up from an acorn centuries ago, that little, well, piece or strand of wood, that’s dead. It might be perfectly preserved, but it’s sure not living. The living parts of that tree are all on the outside. Maybe down one inch deep. Not very old at all. Not older than . . . than me.”

“But as a whole, the tree is alive. . . .”

“A coral reef is alive, too, and kind of in the same way. See, it’s always growing on the outside, but the remains of the life that came before are buried deep inside it. Like its memory. Of the past that isn’t really happening anymore. So a tree really has generations—”

“Like a family.”

“Exactly. Well, sort of exactly,” Charley slid the bandanna off his head, carefully smoothed and refolded it, and laid it beside his plate. His thatch of wiry blond hair sprang up in a way that would have looked laughable except for the expression on his face: pure concentration. “The living part has to go through droughts and storms. It has to heal the wounds and live for itself. But under that live part, which is all we see, is the heartwood, the shape of all the previous generations of the . . . of that system’s life.”

He carefully retied his bandanna on his head. “It’s sort of the way my father is inside me. All his bad ways and his good. He drank, and I don’t. But that’s inside me too. So is his father and
his
 . . . and my mother and her ancestors. Even the branches are stories. But the tree is still one creature. It’s not like a family made up of people. It might produce fruit from the sexual union with other trees, but those acorns must go on to become other trees.” He paused to eat some noodles. “But even though it’s an individual creature, it’s not like an ancient person, either, because it’s always producing that new skin, always finding a new way to reach up.”

My noodles, chin high, drooped cooling from my chopsticks.

“This probably falls under the category of way more than you wanted to know, and it’s probably boring—”

“It’s not boring,” I interrupted him. “I just . . . I don’t know how to respond. It’s not as though I ever thought about the comparisons between people and coral reefs and trees.”

“That’s what I think about all the time.” Charley smiled. “Well, maybe not all the time.”

The noodles dropped with a satisfying heat into my stomach, which seemed so ravenous it would jump me if I didn’t pay attention to it. The taste of the spices was hot as well, but in a different way, like incense, or flowers burning. I had to put the chopsticks down and rummage for my fork, to get more in at each bite. The waiter brought two bowls of dumplings—one a mealy yellow, one tinted the paprika red of Greek Easter eggs—and salmon fried in a batter made of crushed almonds. “This isn’t regular Chinese food,” I remarked to Charley.

“The chef here is . . . real flamboyant. An artist. He’s a good guy. Describes himself as a Cajun from Taiwan. Every few years, I build another couple of rooms on his house for the kids they’ve had in the interim.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“For him?”

“For anybody.”

“I’ve, well, I’ve had my own business since I was seventeen, believe it or not. I started right out of high school. So twelve years, more than twelve years now.”

“You said you went to college. . . .”

“Sure.”

“But you had your own business . . . ?”

“I went to college a couple of times a week. Landscape architecture, other things.” Charley offered me seconds of the pink dumplings, which I accepted, though the waistband of my jeans was beginning to cut the flesh. “You guys don’t have kids, do you?”

“Me and Stuart?” I asked. Of course me and Stuart; who else could he mean? “We don’t. Actually, we aren’t married. Yet.”

“Sure. Of course. I remember now. You just seem as though you’re married.”

“It shows, huh?”

“It’s no big deal. Forget about it.” Distracted for a moment by something off in his tone, I looked up; but his face was as still and placid as it was while he painted or broke down walls. “When are you getting married?” he asked then, with a smile that revealed a substantial overbite. He was cute. He was really cute, in that kind of obvious big-blond-guy way that had never quite made sense to me before.

“I’m not that sure we’ll have children,” I went on. I was feeling replete and drowsy, as ready for a nap as I would have felt at five in the afternoon after a lakeside six-pack picnic. I wanted to bundle the flannel shirt Charley had draped across the opposite chair into a pillow and fall asleep under the whisper of the oak leaves.

But that was when Charley told me that he had a daughter. “I felt a little ambivalent when I first found out,” he said.

“Oh, me too,” I agreed, missing a beat, still thinking we were discussing the pros and cons of having babies.

“Huh?”

“Uh, what did you say?”

He laughed at me. “That I was a little ambivalent when I found out we were pregnant”—my teeth hurt; I hate that usage—“. . . not so much because of the baby as because of the timing.”

“How did your wife feel?”

“She wasn’t my wife; she still isn’t. We didn’t discuss anything much, Lakin and me.”

“That’s . . . the mother?”

“Yeah. We were together for about nine months, no pun intended.”

“That wouldn’t have been a pun.”

“Well, no whatever intended.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a football cheerleader.”

I said, involuntarily, “Oh God.”

“Well, it’s not like Lakin was a stereotype. Really. But we just didn’t have much in common beyond the obvious. . . .”

“And the obvious was what led to your situation.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t get the wrong impression. I wasn’t just using Lakin because she was a . . . well, a vixen—though she was.” My sluggish reverie snapped like the stem of a wineglass, leaving me rattled but bright alert and unaccountably furious. I sat up straighter. “We agreed that our relationship was a present, not a future. I think those things are possible—”

“Like limited-term employment?”

“If both people agree.”

“So what happened?”

He actually blushed. “It seems . . . well, Lakin liked me. You know, she’s a good person. And she had a really good singing voice, and we’d go to these places where she’d get up and do a turn with the band, and I really encouraged her in that. . . .”

“And so?”

“And so I treated her well.”

“I see. You treated her well, so there was no future in it.”

“I mean, I treated her well, and so she got the impression that . . . the communication between us—that is, the level of—”

“You don’t have to say any more.”

“No,” said Charley, “I might as well finish it. Do you want that rice?” I shoved the bowl across to him. “She didn’t tell me until she was four months pregnant, because she didn’t want to jump the gun, you know, right away. We hadn’t seen each other for a while by then, and it had always been a situation in which we were very careful. . . .”

Just a moment before, I’d been thinking of Charley as kind of a cad, and sweet Lakin, whom I imagined looking like a Texas version of Nicole Kidman, as a victim of her own charms. But suddenly the tables turned. Surely Charley, with all his talk of ecosystems and sexual unions, couldn’t be such a dope about simple biology.

I watched him shoveling in his rice. I’d never seen anyone eat faster with chopsticks.

Maybe he could be such a dope.

“Do you think it’s possible that you were the only one who was careful, Charley?” I asked.

“I considered that,” he went on. “But Lakin was very sure, and she told me right up front, she didn’t want children right away.”

“And naturally you thought she was on the level. . . .”

“I had no reason not to.”

“Maybe you were the first man who’d treated her like a real person, and she didn’t want to let you go. Maybe she started out feeling one way, and things changed. Maybe that’s why she waited four months to tell you she was . . . I mean, Charley, it doesn’t take a reasonably intelligent person four months to figure out that she’s pregnant.”

“She wanted to be certain.”

“She wanted to be abortionproof,” I said flatly, simultaneously hearing myself, my jaded-bitch self, as I must have sounded to him. “She wanted you two to get married, I think.”

“Well, that wasn’t possible.”

“Right.”

“Nothing had changed. I mean, we had a friendship that was fun, but it wasn’t intended to be a partnership. I didn’t want that with Lakin. We didn’t have . . .”

“What? Shared values?”

“No, we did have shared values. We still do.”

“Well?”

“Well, we didn’t have the makings of the lifelong conversation, and . . . well, this sounds ridiculous, but she didn’t want kids. And I do. More than one. So I knew that we could enjoy each other for a while. . . .”

“But she had a kid, Charley. Your kid.”

“She didn’t want to. She didn’t plan to—”

“So far as you know.”

“So far as I know. She’s a good mother, but that’s not the same thing as wanting it, having it be something that’s got to be part of your life no matter what. Which is more like how I feel.”

“Are you in touch with the child?”

“Anne,” said Charley, slowly setting down his chopsticks and pushing up his bandanna to reveal the band of white that neatly framed his gardener’s tan. “I love my daughter. I support my daughter. I visit my daughter. Because I didn’t have a lifelong relationship with her mother, at least of one kind, doesn’t mean I don’t want to have one with my daughter. I might have other children someday. I expect to. And I’ll want to raise them with a woman I love. But she will always be my firstborn.”

“What’s her name?”

“Her name is Claude.”

“Claude.”

“It’s Claude. Because Lakin’s last name is Monet. You might think that sounds like a joke. Actually, I didn’t think it up myself, but I like it now.”

As I got up, he reached out in a kind of courtly, other-century way and guided my elbow. Stuffed and restless, I felt hanging in the air something in need of an apology, and I made a stab at one, which Charley waved away. I found myself wondering what had really gone on between Charley and Lakin, and I didn’t mean their cheerful, dumb-sounding friendship.

What I was thinking about was . . . the obvious.

We didn’t talk during the rest of the ride, and I left for the office as soon as the tire of his truck kissed the curb in front of my house. The rest of the day turned out to be a real pen-chewer, in which nothing got done.