The Tell (25 page)

“It's hard to tell if he's coming or going,” Owen said. “What is all this stuff?”

Anya's eye was caught on a box of giant oranges, each piece in a tissue paper nest. “He tells me that he doesn't need anything, that his life has always had too much crap in it. But then he orders all this shit he doesn't even bother to open. Or eat. Makes you wonder why he bought such a big house.” She picked up an orange. “What's he thinking?”

“He's thinking, it's all for you, the house and everything in it. He thinks you might live here with him,” he said. “That's always been his plan. He has no work, no purpose except for you. What did you think this was all about?”

“I don't know. But I'm not going to live with him. That will never happen. He's delusional. What's he going to do, buy a new house every time I move?”

“Maybe. He's an optimist. You're the only thing he wants.”

“Am I a thing? Like the blender? Well, he wants too much.” Anya began to poke around angrily in the cabinets. “I didn't see him for all these years, and now he thinks this is going to happen? We'll be a happy little family?” Her sweater lifted to expose a sliver of skin above the waistband of her jeans.

“Yes, a happy little family.”

She shook her head. “You know, my brothers would love a house like this. They could turn it into a gym or a skate park. This house needs lots of kids, not just one person. It's such a waste.” She opened the refrigerator and pulled out pickles, cheese, and vacuum-sealed envelopes of meats. “Wilton's hopeless as a father. I hope you know that.”

“I think I do.”

“Everything there is to do wrong parentwise, I'd say he did. And still does. Did you see him on Thanksgiving? I could barely breathe.” She slapped down the last package on the counter, took a knife out of a well-stocked block, and sliced into a salami. She examined the first claret piece flecked with white fat and green peppercorns. “You know he abandoned me basically, just dropped out of the picture one day. I was young, and I don't remember it, really—I was just aware that all of a sudden he was gone.”

“Your mother took you to another state.”

“God, don't defend him! Is that what he said? That it's because we moved? He wasn't interested in being my father and that's the truth. And now, when he doesn't have a career, he's a has-been's has-been, he decides that it's time? It's like he's got some terminal disease and we're in a bad movie and have to reunite so he can die in peace.” She paused and thrust her jaw out. “He never asked if I wanted him here.”

“You wrote him a postcard.”

“One postcard. That's it. I wrote that I needed some money for school. I never hid that.” She sliced more rounds of salami until she'd sliced the entire sausage. “My mother thought it was better that he was out of the picture anyway. She thought it would be too confusing for me, but I could have handled it. People handle much more than that every day. My story is not the worst. I don't feel sorry for myself.”

It was distressing to know the truth about what had happened in her life when she didn't know the truth herself. The real story was wounding, but any more so than what she already believed?

“Then why did you come tonight?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she said. “I really don't. I don't know what I'm supposed to do.”

She pierced the plastic pouches of cheese and smoked salmon and then examined the messy bounty on the counter. They fished around in jars of pickles and slippery marinated mushrooms, cut into a loaf of bread shipped from Virginia, and made enormous, dripping sandwiches. It occurred to Owen that Wilton must have been throwing out uneaten food for months, waiting for the guest who never showed up. They took a bottle of wine and their plates to the couch in the living room. When Anya turned the television on, Owen was grateful that it still had the power to suck up his attention. Men in skimpy bathing suits jumped from one inflatable lily pad to the next, each falling with an ignominious splat. Anya's laugh was low and throaty. She lowered a marinated red pepper onto her tongue and swiped the oil from her lips. She halfheartedly blotted where she'd dripped onto the pale wool of the couch.

“Can I ask you about something?” she said. “Is Mira an addict? Is that what you were saying before?”

He nodded, he shrugged, he held up his open palms, he was full of mixed signals. When he touched Anya's cheek, she froze. He wanted to put a hand on the back of her long neck and on her allergic clavicle, on her long thigh until he felt the inner seam of her pants. The peril was dizzying.

Anya stood and went into the kitchen. He was left with two men trying to ride a giant tree trunk down a muddy hillside, his own hand in midair. He thought it was time for him to leave.

“Take your glass,” Anya said, reappearing to turn off the television. She gestured with a new bottle of wine. “I want to show you something.”

“I should go. You're a little drunk.”

“So are you. Come on.”

Maybe that's all this is, Owen told himself, too much expensive wine, too much salami. He followed her upstairs. Her pants creased beckoningly as she climbed, the air stirring around her. They might be caught by a returning Wilton, but what were they doing but making themselves at home? And wasn't that what he'd always wanted, Anya here? They stood in the doorway of an empty room with a fireplace at one end. There was a single log in the grate, an old newspaper thrown on top. He told Anya that this room was where the previous owner had slept and died. She located the spots where the legs of the bed had stamped the wood over the years. She lay on the floor in the imagined bed, her hands by her side. She wanted to see what the woman had looked at all those years—two cracks merging into an X on the ceiling. In the next room there was a glass-and-chrome desk, a simple wooden chair, a laptop, a mug of pens, neatly stacked blank paper, an address book, and in the corner, a towering stack of the white Styrofoam boxes Wilton's steaks came in.

“I have no idea why he keeps these,” Anya said, pinging one with a finger. “But I have no idea why he does most things. He's a very strange guy.”

They went into Wilton's bedroom, which Owen hadn't seen before. Had he pictured such a vast bed with a troubled tangle of sheets? There was no telephone by the bed, no clock or dirty socks in the corner. No bathrobe, pills, or spare change. Nothing on the walls. There was only a television, bigger than the one downstairs, and beside it, a pair of scuffed slippers on the bare floor.

“I think he spends hours and hours watching television,” Anya said. “Watching himself, mostly.”

She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled herself up to the wall that served as the headboard. There was something monastic about the room and the entire empty, echoing house. Anya looked small on the bed, a lone passenger on an ocean liner. Her feet wiggled in striped socks. She touched her earrings. “See these? Wilton gave them to me last week. Waited outside my apartment to ambush me with them.” Gold teardrops. “They belonged to his mother, or so he says. I never met the woman.” She stared at the blank screen and sipped her wine. “My own grandmother. She's not alive anymore, apparently. I've never met anyone in his family. I don't even know if he has one. Isn't that weird? My mother doesn't know either. Maybe he exists, but was never actually born.”

“Sprung from the ether,” Owen said.

Anya wavered between anger, curiosity, and sadness when she talked about her father. Owen imagined it had always been a tough balance for her to maintain, and that it had made her unpredictable. Her friends would say they didn't really understand her. She scratched her irritated neck. Owen went to the other side of the bed and sat down so his back was to her. He faced his own bedroom across the way. He'd left a lamp on and saw the books on the shelves, the restless blankets, clothes everywhere. He couldn't remember when he and Mira had last spoken there, or what they had said to each other.

Anya turned on the television. A movie—two men in the cockpit of an ascending airplane—was huge and bright. It was like being in the front row at the drive-in. He drank from the bottle of wine as the plane dipped and turned. His bones softened pleasantly. He moved next to Anya and stretched out his legs.

“You should take your sneakers off,” she said. “So you don't get the sheets dirty.”

But the sheets already gave off a sour odor and were tinged gray, signs of an unwashed and transitory life. Wilton could leave all of it in a moment, attached to nothing, attached to Anya by a filament. Owen didn't take off his sneakers. Anya sloshed wine into her glass. Splashes spread into stains on the sheets.

“This is what I wanted to show you,” she said and worked the remote. Beeps and twitters emanated from the set, until a roster of all the episodes of
Ancient Times
appeared.

“The sacred archives,” Owen said.

“He watches them over and over. Look, you can see which one he watched last.”

The show's theme music came on with its circus-freak melody, and he hummed along. Bruno Macon, young and tight-skinned in a dandyish seersucker suit and polka-dot bow tie held a wriggling mouse by the tail. Owen vaguely recalled the episode, though he couldn't say what came next. Did he remember this from his childhood or from a night Mira had turned it on? It was like being able to see only an inch in front of your face. Bruno gazed into the mouse's eyes and chattered away. Anya held the remote in the air as if she might suddenly decide to obliterate her father. Wilton turned away from the mouse and looked out at them from the screen. He saw Owen with his daughter, saw how Owen was sensing the heat of Anya's leg against his. His eyes widened. He screamed and dropped the mouse.

Owen touched a scar under Anya's chin. “How did you get this?”

“Every kid in America has a bathroom scar. Smack against the sink.”

He wanted to lick the drop of wine at the corner of her mouth. There were a million reasons not to kiss her, but he kissed the wine in the crease of her lips. He kissed the other side of her mouth. He touched her neck where it was irritated. She held her breath, then rolled away from him. She stood with her hands on top of her head as though she was trying to keep her ideas from flying away.

“We have to clean up before Wilton comes home.” She gestured impatiently for him to get up. “Now.” She blotted the wine stains with a napkin. “What are you doing? Get up, get up!”

The feeling of the kiss trickled away like the end of a flash flood. He wanted to call Anya back to the bed. What if Wilton did discover them? Let him find the two of them on his bed. But Anya was turbulent and insistent—he'd done this to her, riled her up—and he followed her downstairs. They screwed the lids on the jars, swept the crumbs into the sink and washed them down the drain. But they'd opened the packages and sliced into the bread and spilled red wine. Anya could clean up, but she couldn't erase the evidence that she had been there. She might mean for her father to know he'd missed another opportunity, while the real opportunity still terrified her too much.

“I'm sorry about before,” he said. “I shouldn't have done that. Kissed you. I wanted to, though. I wanted to very much.”

She gave him a measured look and put the key back under the outside mat. “Maybe, but you were thinking about someone else.”

He never thought he'd be the kind of man who waited in the dark for his wife. Tonight, a week after he'd kissed Anya, he wasn't sure if he was going to appear in the hallway when Mira thought she wasn't being watched, when she assumed he was reading, or working on his students' papers, or even sleeping if it was late enough, giving off his bready scent under the blankets, or if he was going to rush her and slam her against the wall. Press his hands against her shoulders, maybe her throat. Hurt her, make her wince and cry, drop her keys, drop to her knees. The house would shudder with his violence.

But a thunderous bursting out of the dark was not his style, not something he would do, yet the option still waited for him like a fine suit in the upstairs closet. He was just looking for the right occasion to wear it. He saw violence's upper hand everywhere. It was at school—Kevin had pierced the upper arm of classmate with a pen and been expelled—and on the news, in the world, and he noted its sheer chaotic precision. Violence wasted no time on interpretation or discussion. It just did its fearsome thing. But he'd seen too much of it already—he wouldn't take it for himself.

On this Tuesday, three weeks after he'd seen Joy at Mike's office, he'd been sitting in the dark for hours. He'd turned off all the lights. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, but Mira would be blind when she came in. He would be able to see what her expression really was, not the one she tried to appease him with when she lied about where she'd been, when she lied about Brindle and everything else. She'd be tired, too—she was always tired these days, too tired to fight, to talk, to face him. It was the February cold, the ice, the wind that did it, she'd say, a long day. Wouldn't he just leave her alone for a minute? It was her period, it was Brindle, it was her students, her insomnia. Even in the dark, he would be able to detect the glitter of excitement on her skin, even as she tried to wipe it away with the hem of her shirt. In the mornings now, he'd watch her pick up the clothes she'd taken off the night before and inhale their odor the way you might when you hoped to detect the scent of a lover. Hers was an innocuous sniff though: she had no real lover, but he was as jealous as one.