The Tell (4 page)

“Yes, senility used to be a real scream. People take it much too seriously now, Alzheimer's is a real conversation killer.” Wilton refilled their glasses. “Alcoholism used to be a laugh riot, too. And I should know—my father was a barrel of monkeys.”

A small crack opened, allowing them to peek into the man's history—and they were meant to look. Mira chased a fleck of green across her plate with her fork. Wilton rolled up one sleeve with exaggerated care. On the inside of his almost hairless arm, scars crisscrossed the skin in fine embroidery. Candlelight made the damage look like scribbles.

“What you didn't see,” he said, laying his arm out like a pale offering, “was what happened when I came down on the bottles. They were supposed to be plastic—but they weren't.”

Mira ran her finger down the raised lines. Her lips moved as she read the scars. Owen was struck by the idea of how Wilton had paid for their amusement, but more so by how Mira was touching this man with intimate curiosity. A tickle danced at the base of his skull. He hated the feeling. Mira drew her hand back and put it on her lap. Wilton's eyelids drooped. He looked sated.

“Let's move into another room,” Mira announced into the charged silence. She stood and grabbed the second bottle of wine. “This huge house and we only live in a small part of it. We like the idea of space, but then we don't know what to do with it when we have it. We might as well live in a cell.”

Moving down the weighty oak hallway to the front of the house, Wilton stopped to consider the art, the details of the architecture, the newel post and panels, the table lamp that cast a glow over life's mess: a spattering of papers, keys, change, a collection of Mira's fluorescent orange parking tickets. He tapped the lamp's glass shade and looked at the colors it threw onto the high ceiling. A Merchanti, he said, and sucked air in through his teeth. He appeared to know his stuff—or was pretending to. Who or what the hell was Merchanti? Owen wondered. There were two expansive rooms at the front of the house. One contained a seldom-played piano and a stiff arrangement of furniture. In the other, where they gathered, Mira turned on a single, low lamp. When she and Wilton sat on the velvet couch, the cushions exhaled the endless dander and dust of Mira's dead relatives. You couldn't escape it in this house, a DNA windfall. Owen sensed the room's permanence in the solid, patrician arms of his seat, a chair that had been in its spot much longer than he had and would still be there long after he was gone. The many objects in the room regarded the three of them with superior disinterest. During the day, sun poured into this room, but to Owen, the house would always be a little cold and dark.

Mira worked the corkscrew. Her green shirt, dotted with paint, swooped low at the neck and the rise of her chest shimmered with the faintest mist of sweat. She was beautiful in a way that didn't always strike people immediately. What they first noticed was that her eyes were exaggerations, stretched wide, and that she had an overstated, ardent mouth. Owen knew she was embarrassed by her mouth's fullness at times, by how people assumed its ripe offering was her, and she pressed two fingers to her lower lip to hide herself. She gave herself away like this, her private moment of retreat. But when you watched her in action, relaxed like this—as Wilton watched her now—you saw a face that was somehow more than any other. Mira was more than any woman Owen had ever known, more intent, determined, more completely herself and still at times not known to him. Which is how he knew it should be with a woman you loved. To know her completely would be the end of trying.

“Tell me more about Brindle,” Wilton said, still watching her.

“Oh, I don't know,” she laughed evasively. “You really want to hear about that?”

Wilton nodded, and Mira's flattered mouth was glossy with wine, the lower lip exposed. The cork made a satisfying pop to match an enthusiasm about Brindle that came on like a summer storm and filled the room. Owen hadn't seen her this expansive and loose in a while, certainly not since the break-in. She talked about the school's fundraiser coming up next month, the life-drawing class for the residents of an assisted-living facility bused in from Lincoln, and the ceramics class for the boys from Noah House who arrived in the battered van two afternoons a week, sometimes so agitated that she could only guess at what had happened at school or at home. They were always hungry, so she fed them and gave them clothes when they didn't have enough. Some had terrible stories.

“You have no idea,” she said.

Wilton shook his head. “I'm sure I don't.”

“You can't imagine,” Owen said.

He knew that Mira thought of those who had passed through Brindle and her curative, instructive hands in the same way a salesman marked his successes on a map with colored pins, conquests that dotted the city. You looked for density, entire shaded areas, progress. He admired how certain she was of her work and her impact, when on many days, he doubted his own effectiveness in the classroom. He was probably not meant to teach children; he still didn't know what he was meant to do.

Wilton sighed theatrically. “Good work must make all the difference in a life. Personally, I have no ambition myself.” He smirked, but his expression suggested a resigned truth about himself. “I'm just a man who was once on television. And what's that ever done for anyone? Television's for shit. That's not the real kind of good work.”

“Good work?” Mira said. “I don't know that I do good work. Necessary work, maybe, though very small in the scheme of things. Way too small.” She sipped her wine. “The trouble is, there's never enough money to do even this miniscule part. And it's getting tougher and tougher out there every day. And the way things are now? All those multicolored kids with the funny accents and all those shaky recovering drug addicts—they just don't bring in the bucks like they used to. My donors are suffering from compassion fatigue. And the older they get, the less they care. Old people love their pennies all over again. They hide them under their pillows at night.” She sat back and rested her feet against the edge of the low table. On the wall behind her were drawn portraits of the Thrashers with their arrowed noses and platinum eyes. They were gazelles, regal, elegant, a haughty species on the plains of Providence. Mira was one of them, the last of the herd for now, an orphan without siblings, a woman without children. Car lights washed over Mira and Wilton, turning them ghostly for an instant.

“Amazing to have grown up with all this,” Wilton said, and opened his hands to the room. “This was my fantasy as a kid. To grow up in a place full of beautiful things.”

“But look at it,” Mira said, without looking at any of it. “A million things to know about and I am no expert. It's enough to remember to clean the stuff occasionally and lock the door.”

Sometimes Mira, struck by an urgent, wordless mood, whipped around the place in her bathrobe, with her hair wild, wielding an ancient feather duster. Nothing in the house had been chosen by her, but it was all profoundly hers at the instant of her parents' deadly car accident, and she was mostly cold to it. She didn't think in terms of liking something for its associations or memories; she wasn't sentimental or nostalgic in that way. She was captive and curator, weary but responsible. Her tenure in the house was for now; someone else's would follow. Her children, when she was ready to have them, she said.

“But to be surrounded by it,” Wilton insisted. “It would change the way you see the world. It might look like a more forgiving place.”

“Or less forgiving,” Owen said.

Mira gave Wilton a long and serious gaze. “We're not rich, if that's what you're thinking.” Her eyes shifted for an instant to Owen, who saw that she was well on her way to being drunk. “Really, we don't have any money, almost none. Owen teaches in a public school, and I don't exactly make a profit at Brindle. We eat lots of spaghetti, and we keep the heat really low. What? It's true, O. Don't look at me like that.”

She wasn't wrong: they were always short and too much was left untended. Their cars were lousy, rusted, close to death, and the house ate cash and time. Their clothes were old. Brindle was always hungry, too. What Owen earned—including the many evenings he spent out each week tutoring kids—disappeared. He was tired of being so strapped, so conscious of every dollar. But it was ridiculous, insulting even, to cry poor sitting in this house and in this room that reeked of deeply rooted affluence. And to worry about Brindle the way she did when a single item, maybe that Merchanti lamp, might float the place—or an entire family—for a good while.

“You know you could always sell something,” he suggested.

“Let's not get into this again, O, okay?” she said. “It's boring. A stupid conversation.”

“But you could, Mira. You could sell something. Who would stop you?” Though he pushed at her now, a little reckless from too much wine himself and her stubbornness on this point, he knew it was a subject he couldn't really touch. What was here, after all, did not belong to him. “Sell the fucking lamp out there, for instance. No more spaghetti.”

“Stop, please,” she said. “Enough. I'm sorry I brought it up.”

Wilton looked from one to the other, then leaned against Mira and lowered his voice to a seductive hush. “I have lots and lots of money. I have way too much. It's obscene. Residuals are recession-proof.” He threw up his hands over and over as if he were tossing a million bills into the air. “Oodles and oodles of it. Cascades. Avalanches.” He paused. “Duck! Here it comes!”

Owen had the feeling that Wilton had seen the gap open up between Mira and him, measured it, and then maneuvered himself into the space between. He wanted to kick the guy out now and get rid of him. He didn't like what was happening to his wife, who was acting out this goofy play with a man she didn't even know. But Mira was delighted by Wilton's miming, put her head back, and let the imaginary money wash over her. Owen pushed himself out of the armchair. He'd had enough. The late hour and the wine were going to hit him at some point tomorrow in the classroom, and his gaze would float over the heads of his students, looking for somewhere soft to land. Even the kids who never paid attention, the ones who slumped on their desks in the morning as their breakfast of Doritos and Sprite worked its soporific magic, would notice his missed beats. He remembered the papers he'd meant to finish and raised his arms over his head in a stretch, showing his length. His shirt lifted to expose inches of his skin above his belt. He meant this display to be nothing subtle to Mira—or to Wilton.

“Time to wrap it up,” he said. He tried to meet Mira's eye but she looked away, though it was clear she understood exactly what his gesture was about: I want you to leave this man and come to bed with me.

“I have to be up in a few hours,” Owen said to Wilton. “You have to go home now.”

“That's rude,” Mira said, and laughed.

“No. Of course it isn't. It's late. I understand.” Wilton sprung from the couch. “Sometimes I forget people actually get up in the morning, get going, have jobs and do things, be productive.” Nothing was slumped or wrinkled about him, nothing tired. “That was a wonderful dinner. You don't know how long it's been since I had a meal at anyone's table, in anyone's house. I'd forgotten how significant it is. And I'm just a man who barged in, out of nowhere. My excellent luck, it seems.”

“What will you do tomorrow?” Mira asked. Her voice had an almost plaintive edge to it.

Wilton slipped his hands into loose pockets. “You're wondering about my plans, why I'm here.”

“Yes, but it's none of my business,” Mira said. “Forget it.”

“No, it is your business. I'm you neighbor, you should know these things.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “I have a daughter, Anya. She's moving here in a few weeks, starting medical school.”

“She'll be living with you?” Mira asked.

“Well, not at first. I hope at some point soon, but for now, no. To start, I'm just hoping to see her from time to time.” There was more to say, but not tonight, his indulgent expression suggested, another dose of seduction soon to come.

Owen inched Wilton to the front door and walked with him to the sidewalk. Whittier Street was overhung by oak and linden branches. The musk of aroused boxwoods and now the drifting perfume of the lilacs in the yard, was the season's return and softened Owen toward Wilton. There was something about the man that made Owen think he might understand how the murk of sadness could blur the stars. When he was a kid on a night like this, he told Wilton, he would smell the slime of tadpoles and hear the ferns unfurling around the pond where he grew up and believe that everything was possible in his life. Later, a night like this had shown him how that possibility could be over when a friend had died. He looked away from Wilton, disarmed by how easily he'd offered this piece of private history to a man he wasn't even sure he liked or trusted.

“You're young. Life's still all ahead for you,” Wilton said, and put a companionable hand on his shoulder. “I think you and Mira are pretty remarkable people.”

“You don't know us.” Owen balked at the easy flattery.

The houses surrounding them were dark and fortified in sleep, except for Alice Jessup's. Alice was over a hundred, Owen said as they walked past Wilton's, a friend of Mira's grandmother who was now attended by round-the-clock nurses who placed alien green nightlights in the hallways as if to give their charge a glimpse of her spectral future. At the end of Whittier, on the corner of Hope, chain link confined the high school. The clock was frozen in its peeling tower. Owen pointed across Hope and deep into the expensive, leafy neighborhood where Spruance Middle School sat like a stripped and broken car on a grassless hill. It had been abandoned by its neighbors years ago, he told Wilton, and was now populated by poor kids who were bused in from harder parts of the city. Children who weren't white, he meant.