Waveland (12 page)

“Your husband gets killed,” Greta said.

“We should talk,” he said.

“I shouldn't say that,” Greta said.

“You're among friends.”

“I am, aren't I?” she said, gripping his shoulder in a surprisingly stout way. “Still, it's not something to take lightly, not a good idea to treat things that way.”

“Maybe it's healthy,” Vaughn said.

“Okay. We can drive around and I can point out the sites where my husband beat me. ‘Here's where he came after me with a belt when I burned the steak,’” she said, mock-pointing.

“Ah, the memories,” Vaughn said.

“The good news is that in the end he took one for the team.”

“Greta—”

“Sorry.”

She stayed with Vaughn for a while longer, then said she was tired and wanted to sleep, so kissed him most circumspectly and went off to her room.

Vaughn didn't feel much like sleep. He wandered down to the kitchen thinking that he really wanted to go back to Greta's house and watch television until daylight, then sleep until the afternoon. It was too spooky being back in his house. It had been dumb to come. Surely his being there was worse for her, especially if she was still having trouble going on. He thought it might keep Tony away, but with Gail going off in the middle of the night, that wasn't working. Gail was always a bit erratic, a little scary, prone to act quickly, as if hit with a cattle prod. It had been hard to figure her out when they were married, and it was harder now. Sometimes she seemed
brilliant, gifted; sometimes she just seemed nuts. The stunt with Tony was typical, right up to where he beat her up—that was new. Still, a hopelessly wrong guy was par for the course. She'd done that before when they had trouble. There was the sign painter, a big heavy set guy with arms like Popeye; he turned out about the opposite of the way he looked. There was an alcoholic who wasn't allowed to drive but owned a big black truck in which he and Gail sped up and down the beach highway for a while, her at the wheel. One summer she even brought home a guy she met at the beach in Florida, a shave-his-head type with a cocky grin and artificial manners.

Vaughn had been no saint. The worst was a woman at the office in Dallas. He and Gail were doing a trial separation. So he was with this other woman all the time. She was attractive, a designer at the firm. They spent nights together. They spent weeks together. They had sex. They went to dinner. They went to movies, to the zoo, for drives into rainy nights, to old restaurants with big wooden booths and white tablecloths. It looked like romance, but the truth was that Vaughn couldn't make himself care for the woman. She smelled odd. She didn't look right in the bed. She didn't act right. She didn't say the right things. She had a hard, brittle voice. He missed Gail. At the worst times he wept, and the woman held him. Try to imagine that now.

They talked. She told him about her father, how her mother had abandoned her to her father. An ugly story, complete with details about her father slipping into the bathroom when she was a teenager coming home from a date, slipping his furry fingers into the waistband of her panties. The woman only wanted a decent relationship, and Vaughn gave her none of that. Eventually he and Gail patched things up.

Years later he ran into the woman at a conference in Chicago. She was married and hoping to start a family. She and Vaughn had some drinks and a desultory tryst, sex in the hotel, all the usual; and in the aftermath some friend of her husband's saw them walking out of the hotel. He threatened to blow the whistle, so she ended up going to dinner with him. Vaughn left the conference early, never found out what happened.

He tried calling her a few weeks later, tried a couple of times, but she was done with him. The calls were short and deadly.

He thought now that they were probably too easygoing about such things in their marriage. The affairs were expected, assumed, allocated even, probably as much a matter of protection as anything—the air bags of their marriage. If you knew a wreck was coming, it didn't hurt to plan ahead. On the other hand, maybe the planning made the wrecks a little more likely, a little more frequent.

Vaughn was rinsing a knife after making himself a peanut butter sandwich on raisin bread. The bread was older than it should have been. The knife had made a piercing metallic sound drawn against the other knives when he pulled it from the drawer. It was part of the silverware set she'd ordered from the Museum of Modern Art. Very handsome, now very old. He folded the sandwich up inside a doubled Bounty paper towel, caught the light switch with the sandwich as he left the kitchen. He walked through the dark house looking at the stuff he'd once owned with Gail—the furniture, the pictures, the knickknacks on the shelves. Nothing much had moved in the year since he left, and yet he felt as though he was in one of his neighbors' houses—somebody he did not know well
or want to know well, just another person of about the same age, the same financial condition, the same limited vision. He shook his head at the stuff. The furniture was nondescript, the lamps were knockoffs of better lamps they couldn't afford or thought foolishly expensive. The couch—why had he even bought a couch? Useful, maybe, but impossibly ugly, certainly. Where had the training gone, the belief, the desire to furnish the house well, to buy only beautiful things? When had the fatigue set in, and comfort and ease become more important than quality and provenance?

He knew that
everybody
had crap in their houses, that all the houses he'd endlessly studied for so many years in
Architectural Record, Domus
, and dozens of other magazines that were the backbone of his real architectural study, were just fantasies, set pieces, tableaux, even if the world they suggested was one he had spent much of his life longing for the way a kid longs for the treats of Christmas morning.

Vaughn went upstairs eating his sandwich. He couldn't remember what it felt like to be desperately in love. He felt almost nothing for Gail by now, though he knew his role and duty, and accepted those without question. He was comfortable seeing to her when she needed a hand. With Greta there was something more, something about prospects, just the suggestion of possibility—a small, certain warmth; less responsibility, more ease.

He sat on his bed and tried to remember feelings he'd had but drew a blank. He could remember being in love with Gail many years before, but like so many things, the memory was by now just the name of the thing.

You don't plan to lose that stuff, those feelings, but you become a different person over time, with different borders
and parameters, different ideas, different ways of functioning. What you used to do you don't do anymore. You can't. You won't. So maybe the wife or girlfriend gets something short of your full romantic capacity. And you do, too. Pretty soon romance is diagrammatic.

He was thinking about that word
diagrammatic
when there came a little tick on his bedroom door, and then the knob turned and the door opened and Gail was standing silhouetted against the hall light.

“Can I come in?” she said.

“Sure,” he said.

The only light in the bedroom was coming from the hall. Gail picked her way across the room, sat on the edge of the bed.

“Where did you go when you went out?” he said.

“I just went out for a while,” she said. “I had some things to do. I had to think.”

“What about?”

“What do you think I was thinking about?” she said.

“Puppies?” he said. Even though he couldn't see her shaking her head, he could see her shaking her head. “Sorry,” he said.

“I was thinking about you and me, and your girlfriend,” she said. “And Tony. And about what happened.”

“With Tony?” he said. “Or with us?”

“Both,” she said. “Tony and everything else. I was thinking about me and this house. I went out for a drive. Sometimes I like to get out.”

“In the middle of the night,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “In the middle of the night. It's quiet. It's
dark. There aren't so many people. You can drive around unencumbered. I smoke in the car.”

“I don't think you ought to smoke,” he said.

“I don't in the house. You never let me smoke in the house, and I don't like to smoke much anyway, but in the car I like to smoke. I like the sound of the engine, the feel of the air conditioner, the smell of the smoke, the smell of my breath as I draw it in and blow it out.”

“All of that?” he said.

“I want you to stay with me,” she said.

“I'm here. We're here. We've come to stay for a while,” he said.

“No, I mean I want
you
to stay.”

“Permanently?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“I don't see how I can do that,” he said. “Not now.”

“It's only been a year,” she said.

“A year is a long time,” he said.

“Just give it a try,” she said. She reached out and touched his hand and started playing with it the way she always played with his hand. “Greta can stay, too,” she said. “Maybe. Maybe all three of us can live here. We'll just be friends. That's mostly what we were, right?”

“Well, more than that. We were friends, lovers, partners. Husband and wife,” he said.

“But it really came down to friends. After all the fucking was done.”

“That's not quite true,” he said. “Not even after the fucking. There was something else—some tenderness.”

“There was a lot of tenderness,” she said.

“Right. That's what I mean.”

“So where's that now?” she said.

“You got a cigarette?” he said.

“Not in the house,” she said. “Where's that tenderness now?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Gone away. Too old for tenderness.”

“Pish,” she said.

“Why does everybody say that?” he said. “Pish. Everybody I know says pish now.”

“You don't know so many people, do you?” she said.

“Guess not,” he said.

She crooked a finger at him and led him out of the bedroom, down the hall, into their old bedroom. It looked different, both better and worse. Looked like it was right out of West Elm or something—lots of semi-designer furniture carefully placed, good-looking fabrics, lots of earth colors. It was, above all, tasteful, even sort of serene. He was surprised how much he liked the way she'd fixed it up. In the whole house it was the only room she'd changed.

“I do, actually, have cigarettes,” she said, opening a drawer in one of the nightstands.

“Came to my senses,” he said, standing by the French doors. He pulled back the drapes on either side. The light was just coming into the sky outside. Off to the right, where the lake made a dogleg, the water was all mirrored up. He could hear the birds waking up or whatever it is they do that makes them chirp and cry in the mornings. There was a sliver of white moon way off to the west.

“This is nice,” he said. “You're nice, Gail.” She crossed the room and stood beside him at the window, and they looked out at the lake and the pier, painted
white, and the church beyond the houses on the other side of the lake, with its white steeple pointing up into the thinly lit sky. She pushed open the French doors out onto the balcony, and they stood there in the doorway for a few minutes. She hooked her arm in his, rested her head on his shoulder. Ducks were silhouetted against the reflected lake light.

“I don't need so much,” she said.

“A good thing,” he said. “I don't have much.”

“Don't be mean,” she said.

“I'm not being mean,” he said. “I'm just, like, honest. You kind of caught me at a bad time here.”

“Tonight?” she said.

“Rest of my life.”

“Good to know,” she said. She intertwined her fingers with his and wrapped her left hand around his arm, leaned harder. “It could be a lot worse.”

“I'm supposed to be telling you that,” he said.

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “I'm just helping you out.” She stepped out on the balcony and lit up a cigarette. He followed her.

The balcony faced north and they were close to the lake, so they had horizon all the way east to west. There were chairs. The chairs were wet. Neither of them mentioned it. They sat together without saying anything for a while. The light in the east came up as if on the world's biggest rheostat. It was something to see. Dusky blue at the horizon turning rose, then orange, then pink, then a little green before the whole lighter blue of the sky running up forty-five degrees and turning darker again. Stars still sat up there in the darkness. Vaughn and Gail could just make out each other, hands and feet, the railing, the chairs. They stared out over the water.
There were trees all around the lake so their horizon was black silhouettes against the less dark sky. Occasionally a bird shot over the house. Vaughn heard wings beating the air. Gail tapped his arm and pointed to the lawn on the other side of the garage, in the strip of land that ran down to the pier, where six ducks, dark against the brown of the grass, hustled around pecking for food, straightening their feathers.

“They were just kids a couple weeks ago,” Gail said. “The four on the left. Now look at them.”

Above the pier the pink from the lowest tier of light had come down to rest at the other edge of the lake so that the treetops were now reflected along the shore, and above them, in the water, the pink sky, the lighter blue. A heron swung by out of nowhere, cutting diagonally across in front of them and sailing to a spot on the far side of the lake.

“It's not so bad, is it?” Gail said.

“It's
Rome Adventure,”
he said.

“The movie or the book?”

“I don't think there was a book.”

“Oh, my god,” she said. “Forgive me.”

“You're forgiven, but let's don't mention it again,” he said.

“Christian Bale and Madonna,” she said. “I don't know.”

“Keep going,” he said. “You'll get there.”

“Dakota Fanning,” she said, pointing the glowing ash of her cigarette at him.

“Now you're cooking,” he said.

“You've still got that
young
thing,” she said.

“Not really. Not too young.”

“A guy at the office who's sixty-five has a two-year-old daughter.”