Something new began to happen in Equinox through the middle of October: houses began to change hands. You wouldn’t have noticed it at first; the people who were selling didn’t live in Equinox year-round, or lived there but worked somewhere else. They weren’t people you saw hanging around town. But they had been selling their houses to Happy Masters, and Happy Masters had been selling them to new people, people whom you did see around town, unfamiliar faces that were forever upturned, watching, as if they were expecting something to happen.
Who were these people? A look at the Happy Girls e-mail newsletter might have offered a clue, if you’d been on the mailing list.
SETTLE DOWN IN HAPPY’S NEW TOWN! [the item read.] Happy Girls fans, retirees, collectors—do you ever wonder what happened to good old hometown America? The America of paperboys and corner stores, walks in the park and afternoons on the lake? Maybe you’d like to live there—a tiny village full of friendly faces, gingerbread cottages, and sparkling waters. With rain in the springtime, sun in the summer, colors in the fall and the winter’s gentle snow.
That place is real, and it has a name: Equinox, New York. A quaint, untouched village on the shores of beautiful Onteo Lake. And it just happens to be the new and permanent home of Happy Masters herself, who is restoring it to its original beauty. Long-term rentals are becoming available now, at surprisingly low prices!
Come to Equinox, your new home—and meet your new neighbor, Happy Masters. Call for more information!
Moving vans had begun to appear in late September. Sometimes there were several parked along Main Street and on the little avenues that bookended the college. Moving vans weren’t exactly unusual in a college town, even a tiny one like Equinox, but there was no mistaking the sudden influx of strangers. They dressed conservatively, the men with their shirts tucked in to a pair of shorts or pleated tan pants, the women in yellow sweaters and pink slacks, or dark blue jeans without a sign of wear. They were white people, but rather tan, and they were overweight, but not appallingly so; their fat gathered around the middle rather than the rear, distinguishing them from their local counterparts, whose habitual consumption of soda and chips (as opposed to steaks and potatoes) gave their behinds a squarish aspect. You would encounter them at the market, or in the hair salon. If you happened to venture into the park, you might find them there, strolling on the (suddenly rather more groomed and less gloomy) gravel paths in perfect contentment, as though nobody had recently drowned themselves there. You might see them on the doorstep of Happy’s house, introducing themselves, or wandering around the campus with xeroxed maps in their uncallused hands.
One place you didn’t see them was the Goodbye Goose. You could see them from the Goodbye Goose, though, because they were all across the street in the Happyland Bistro, Happy’s new restaurant and bar. The Happyland Bistro opened the second week of October, capitalizing briskly on the town’s previously untapped appetite for gourmet pizza and snob pasta. Its bar, which extended out behind the main building, overlooked the lake, and there were endless mixed drink specials, and free popcorn, and karaoke. Happy had also hired a pianist and a singer from Nestor to do smooth jazz covers every Tuesday and Friday night; and a popular hairless retro-80s DJ packed the house on the first Saturday the place was open.
Of course, there weren’t that many newcomers, not yet. So this packed house had to have come from some other pool of citizens. On the second Saturday, as the DJ’s glib London accent boomed out from the bar’s open windows, Dave told Kevin Russell to go on across and see who in the hell was in there.
“Aw, go yourself,” Kevin said, putting away his fourth beer, which, like the first three, he had actually paid for himself. “Not like there’s much of a crowd here tonight.”
It was true. The bar was subdued for a Saturday. There weren’t many students here, and the ones that were, were drunk. Two girls had had an argument earlier, but they left. A couple of his regulars slouched in corners.
Dave wanted, for a moment, to kill his friend. Instead he walked around the bar, out the door, and across the street.
The Happyland Bistro was housed in a jaunty, brick-faced building with leaded glass windows and gaslamps (a now familiar motif) flanking a varnished oak door. Dave paused in front of the door, listening. The clatter and chime of dishes, the thump of synth pop, the roar of happy voices. He went inside. It was much worse. A passing waitress (nobody he knew) said, “Just one?” “I’m not here to eat,” Dave shouted. “Go on back to the bar!” she replied. But he didn’t. He could see fine from here. There were his yokels, champing on slices of prosciutto wheat-crust pizza. There were his lesbians, boogieing to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, slurping raspberry daiquiris in the middle of autumn. There were his untenured professors, letting it all hang out over a platter of nachos the size of a manhole cover. The smell of tomato sauce and roasting chicken and basil pesto filled the place, and everyone seemed happy, and nobody turned to see who had walked in.
Dave was hungry, but anger deformed his hunger into nausea. A tickle in his throat climbed higher and knotted itself into an ache. He tasted blood and his hair stood on end. He turned, went outside, and vomited into the yew bushes that lined the flagstone walk. Then he headed back toward his bar.
Halfway there, though, he turned back. He stood before the Bistro again, and this time his eyes fell upon the grassy alley that ran between it and the little gift shop—formerly Somethin’ Special, soon to be the Happy Girls Outlet Store—and down to the lake. He followed the worn path through the grass and eventually came to the disintegrating stone wall—also, to judge by the yellow caution tape, under renovation—that separated the neighborhood’s backyards from the beach. He picked up a smooth, round, heavy stone, rendered irregular by chips of mortar, and crept through the shadows back to the alley. There sat a gaggle of girls, his former regulars—one of them, a petite redhead, was the last E.C. student he screwed before calling it quits. He aimed for their pizza.
The sound of shattering glass, far from relieving the pain in his mouth, seemed instead to shake loose a headache. He ran to the beach, then north a hundred yards into the mayor’s orchard. From there he returned to the road, which he crossed, and then he came back to his own bar unseen, through yards and parking lots. He climbed the back steps and let himself in with his key. His head was throbbing, his jaw aflame. He staggered to the bar, grabbed the bottle of ibuprofen, and gobbled a handful while he caught his breath.
More of his customers had left, drawn by the commotion across the street. Kevin was gone, and a ten-dollar bill had been left tucked under his empty bottle. Beside it sat Janet Ping.
* * *
Dave’s reappearance was even more shocking than his absence had been. His hair was standing on end, as if held in place by some kind of mousse or gel. His face was flushed and swollen as a blood orange, and the white ibuprofen tablets stood out against hands smeared with dirt. He was panting and his eyes were wild and pink. He gulped down the pills and looked up and saw her there, and he seemed to shrink just a little—he took a step back, bowed his head, and shook it. Then he helped himself to a long draught of water and said, “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“What can I get you?” The voice quavering with the effort, she guessed, of staying calm.
“Were you—” she began, pointing with her thumb over her shoulder. “That is—do you know what’s going on over there?”
“I was down in the basement. Getting napkins. I mean looking for them. There weren’t any. No. I mean, what’s going on over there?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
He came around the bar, blinking in a constant and very rapid rhythm. They went together to the door and looked out. People were milling around outside the Happyland Bistro and walking up and down the passage between it and the future outlet store. Dave said, “Huh, don’t know.”
“Are you okay?” she asked him, because he clearly wasn’t.
“My jaw hurts,” he said. His pupils were very tiny.
“Sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
“Chablis. On ice.”
He stared at her a second, not appearing to see. “Huh?”
“You asked me if you could get me anything.”
Blink. Blink. “Uh! Okay.”
They returned to the bar. He prepared her drink. His hands were shaking. Some of the wine spilled on the bartop. She turned away until the drink was before her, and even then it was the wine she concentrated on.
“I thought you drank red,” Dave said.
“Well. White, too.”
“Like what’s-her-name.”
“I guess,” she said.
She had begged off going out tonight—too much schoolwork, she told the guys, though at E.C., you rarely had more work to do than you wanted. But when she was finished, she got a hankering for a drink, and with her new work-study job, she had plenty of money to pay for it. The guys had gone to the new place, Happy’s place.
“I thought you hated her,” Janet had asked.
“Reconnaissance,” April explained. “Anyway, loosen up!”
Still, she chose Dave’s tonight, with its bad lighting and broken furniture. Now, however, with Dave standing, trembling, before her, she wondered if she should have gone out at all.
The change in Janet’s life over the past few weeks had been dramatic. She had begun working three mornings a week for Happy, answering her cell phone, taking dictation, scheduling meetings. She made coffee for Happy and the Klams, who had returned to Equinox after two weeks away, and ran errands to and from the college and other places in town.
Happy commanded her with a forceful sweetness that reduced her knees to jelly. Far from disabusing her of any romantic notions, these personal encounters merely served to validate and intensify the mythological stature Happy had achieved in Janet’s mind; she seemed to Janet possessed of almost superhuman energy and confidence and inspiration. It was more than what she did, and what she asked Janet to do: it was her physical presence, her body. Though plump, she moved with balletic grace; though small, she conveyed the force of an army. Her eye was sharp as a sniper’s. When she walked into a room, its lines of force bent to her all at once; heads turned and eyes locked to attention.
None of this came through in photographs, where Happy’s round face and grayblond hair conveyed only a quasi-matronly cuteness, a sexy kind of put-on innocence. In person, Happy was like a nuclear reaction: she seemed to fission at the core, contained only by some unknowable, volatile process, while outside the air crackled with her creative, economic, and erotic power. Sitting across the desk from her, Janet sometimes thought she might snap in two.
And at the same time, she went to school, she hung out with her friends. She made excuses for not joining them—and the woman from the gas station—in front of Glenda’s Market after class every day, to shout accusations of murder and make customers uncomfortable. But she did attend the Sally Streit protests each morning, to demand that Reeve Tennyson bring the great woman to visit, and while he was at it pay some respect to the gay-lesbian-bi-transgendered community in general. It was not with much enthusiasm that Janet joined in; she didn’t much care what people thought of lesbians, and preferred that, insofar as she was one, they didn’t think much about them at all. And as for Sally Streit, the entire project seemed more than a little bit embarrassing—silly, in fact, even disgusting.
And other students would probably have agreed, at least before the protests began. But protests have a way of justifying themselves, of kindling passion where once there was none, of polishing desires and demands until they glowed with righteousness and inevitability—and so the protests (at least the Streit ones) grew, both in size and frequency, and pretty soon a visit from Sally Streit seemed not only like a reasonable thing to want, but an absolutely indispensable piece in the puzzle of emerging womanhood, which Reeve Tennyson seemed determined—for reasons, presumably, having to do with his own personal fear, moral constipation, and hatred of women—to withhold from the students of Equinox College. A few professors joined in, and then a few more, and soon the entire thing had taken on the quality of a genuine campus controversy, complete with heroes and villains. And still President Tennyson would not back down.
Janet told Happy all this one morning, for no good reason other than to let her know, without having to tell her directly, that she, Janet, was available for seduction. This tactic felt very grown-up to Janet, until she actually employed it, at which time it suddenly seemed childish—but Happy hadn’t noticed; she was lost in thought. About something else, Janet assumed, until she said, “And she does what on stage?”
Abashed, Janet hid behind her hair and told her again.
“Very interesting, Janet. Very interesting.” Happy’s hands folded, as if in prayer, and found her chin, and her eyes drifted off to a corner of the ceiling as she evidently thought things through. Janet felt the stirrings of hope—could it be that Happy, too, was a lesbian? Or thought she might be? This wasn’t what Happy said, though, when she spoke; she said, “You and your friends are absolutely right, Janet. President Tennyson is being unfair, keeping this valuable speaker from visiting campus.”
“Really?” Janet said.
“Perhaps he hasn’t heard of free speech? Or perhaps he simply doesn’t respect the needs of young women. At any rate, Janet, your sex lecturer will be coming to campus, I promise you that.” She opened her desk drawer.
“What do you mean?”
“An anonymous donor,” Happy said, opening a checkbook and clicking open a ballpoint pen, “is about to bring your Sally Streit to Equinox College. Here.”
She tore out a check and handed it to Janet. It was made out to CASH and it was for five thousand dollars.
“Bring that to the bank in Unionville. I’ll call ahead. Bring me the money. I’m going to put a stop to this obstructionist nonsense.”
“But how—”
“One of my crew will drive you.” And she unhooked a walkie-talkie from her belt loop and summoned a man to the house.
Janet didn’t know what Happy did with the envelope of hundred-dollar bills she handed her half an hour later, but somehow it was delivered to Reeve Tennyson, and a visit from Sally Streit was announced for the middle of November. As for the money’s origins, Janet swore not to tell. Her friends didn’t even know she was working for Happy—that had been her little secret, hers and Happy’s. And now they had another, even deeper one.
The students rejoiced, of course, at the news that they had won—though Janet did sense a bit of disappointment among her friends when the next day’s protest was cancelled. In bed, April said, “I wonder if Sally’s gonna show everybody how to do this—” But her voice seemed to wish that it was still complaining. “At least,” she reasoned, when their sex was done, “we’ve still got Glenda.”
Now, impulsively, Janet leaned over to Dave and said to him, “Dave, sell.”
“What?” He hadn’t been washing glasses or polishing the bar, as he usually did; he’d been standing there, watching her drink, watching her think.
“Sell your bar,” she said. “To Happy. She’ll let you work here. It can be the same, except you’ll have the money.”
Quietly panting, he leveled her a bloodshot look. “Are you working for her, Janet?”
“No,” Janet said. “Well, yes. Yes, but she didn’t tell me to come to you. I’m just—I just want you to do the right thing. It’s better for everybody.”
She felt, very powerfully, the force of his gaze; she felt noticed, as if by an animal in the woods. He didn’t answer, so she took another swig of the wine.
“Dave?” she said.
It seemed to snap him out of it. “I’m not selling,” he said, wiggling his jaw back and forth.
“She’s not so bad.”
Now he did pick up a dirty glass from the bar, and wash it, or start to. After a moment he just dropped it back into the water. He said, “You should go.”
“Dave?”
“Seriously, Janet,” he said, lowering his head down to the bar and resting it on crossed arms. “Seriously, get out.”
She slid off her stool and took a step back. “Okay,” she said, and she left.
When she was gone, he drank the rest of her wine, his own lips covering the place where hers had been. It was stale and sour and made his headache worse, and when he was finished he dropped the glass on the floor.
* * *
If April and the guys were disappointed by the relative dearth of protestable issues, their interval of disappointment was to be mercifully short. Ruth was awakened early the next morning by the sound of machinery outside her bedroom window, and rose in the semi-dawn to see a gigantic motorized claw climbing over the curb a few houses down, in front of the Equinox Inn. She reached for her glasses. Yes, it was real—it was scaling the little infilled hillock that separated the Inn from the sidewalk, and now it sat idling mere feet from the stone foundation.
And here came a dump truck—a huge one, the size of a small house. It too rumbled up over the curb, and crushed a bed of hydrangeas, their spindly branches bearing a few last red and orange and brown leaves. Its massive rear fender clipped the wooden sign that bore the Inn’s name, and the wood splintered, and the sign was torn in two.
Of course she had seen the yellow caution tape that had surrounded the Inn; everybody had. There was yellow caution tape all over Equinox, in front of every third building in town. She had seen the windows and light fixtures being removed, and the workmen carrying hunks of metal and coils of wire out through the front door. What did she know? It looked to her like a building under renovation. Not anymore.
The arrival of a towering crane, its wrecking ball cinched in place against its yellow neck, erased all doubt. They were tearing the thing down.
Ruth reached for a pair of jeans, a flannel shirt, and the telephone all at once. It looked like the college library would be closed this morning.