“Happy Masters.”
A cough. A chuckle.
“Hello?”
She was in the office, sketching on a pad with a disposable pen. She preferred the cheapest possible ballpoint—if it looked good in ballpoint, then it was good, period. She was trying out a new girl, just for the hell of it—her name would be Soledad, she would be Cuban, a daring escape, a rescue at sea, her parents dead, etc., etc.—and was wondering what kind of hair to give her. Black, of course, but what length? And she had written and rewritten several times a paragraph describing her eyes—the way they were black like the moonless sky during the harvest festival in her tiny rural home town—and it sounded like crap, as if she were describing the doll itself instead of the girl it was based on. She was wondering if maybe she had lost it: that special Happy Girls something.
Well, she reasoned, so what? Her place was here now, in this town. Her town. Anyone could make up a story; Happy was making up a place, and bringing it to life. Out of wood and metal and glass, she was constructing a new and perfect reality—books and dolls were small potatoes in comparison. Besides, she had a stable of writers, of designers; of managers and lawyers and marketers whose job it was to perpetuate her vision. Why should she care if her mojo was flagging? She was past that part of her life, and onto something bigger, and better, and more complete. Something unique.
So how come she felt so thick-headed all of a sudden? Like a dolphin or killer whale, trying to write with flippers. “Hello!” she shouted again, into the headset, for her caller appeared to have vanished. The vestigial instinct to tap the hook button overwhelmed her: damn this digital age! She tapped the desktop instead.
But then, “I’m watching you,” said a low voice.
She put her pen down. Oh are you? she thought. This could be interesting. “Who’s this?” she said.
“Somebody who knows what you did.”
It wasn’t a voice she’d heard before. A man’s, gritty and close and not at all muffled. In spite of herself, Happy turned and peered out the window. The lake was still and empty, no boats visible on its calm cold surface. The leaves were gone from the trees and everyone seemed to be waiting for snow. Nobody stirred. It was nine in the morning.
“How did you get this number?”
“I have my ways.”
“Well. I guess now you’re going to tell me what it was I did?”
She could hear the phone being transferred from one hand to the other. “Murder,” enunciated the voice.
“Ah, yes, I’ve heard that one. You’re aware I was out of town? You know there was a suicide note? I can hardly help what people do of their own volition.”
“You hired someone to kill her. And then you buried the evidence—under the Inn.”
“I see. What evidence is that?” Happy said.
The question seemed to take the caller by surprise. “I don’t know. Evidence.”
“You know what? I’m beginning to lose interest in this call.”
“You won’t get away with it. The whole town knows.”
“Believe me—if there was anything to get away with, I would. Goodbye.” She hit END, then copied down the number from the screen and called her office in New Jersey. Her security man agreed to find out whose it was. Then she took off the headset and stared at her drawing.
A little boat at nightfall, barely held together, packed with people. But Soledad stands alone. She stares off into the distance, the wind picks up her hair. A tear forms in her eye but never falls. The solitude of tragedy. The tragedy of solitude.
Cuba: an island. Aloneness. Isolation. No man is an island? But she’s leaving the island. She came from money—a sugar plantation. The Communists took it away. Now she’s heading out, into the world. With her uncle. Uncle Riccardo…the star baseball pitcher. But a wave will come and sweep away her family. She’ll be found on the beach, half dead, by…by…
Somebody. Some stupid bitch white kid.
She pushed the sketchpad away. Soledad, Schmoledad. What was the matter with her? She got out of her chair and walked to a glass case in the corner. There was Ivy, dressed simply in the cotton shift Happy had found her in, standing with one hand slightly raised, the other at her side. A greeting, a gesture of thanks. She could remember what that doll had done to her, and the others that shared this case—her beloved Deps and Jumeaux. It wasn’t that she wasn’t inspired, of course; it was just that her ambition had shifted. People, places excited her now. Restoring them. Creating them. Getting them to do what she wanted. She had always assumed that money and fame would be enough, but it turned out she was wrong. You had to cajole, to insinuate. You had to make them want what you wanted. This had never been a problem with the dolls—somebody always wanted them. But for some reason she had encountered resistance here, in Equinox.
She didn’t understand. Why not have a nice town? That’s what it came down to. It’s better to live in a nice town than a crappy one. Yes, she had knocked down the Inn, but everyone had seen the artist’s rendering, what she proposed to build was better. There were no two ways about it—some things were better than other things, and her vision of Equinox was better than the Equinox she’d found lying here, abandoned practically, like a toy left by a child in the dirt. Like a doll, like Ivy.
And then there was that loon from the market—why wouldn’t the stupid story die, the way the old lady had had the common courtesy to do? People amazed her—when there was nothing to complain about, nothing to whisper or fuss over, they just went ahead and made something up. Like this thing with the library—she had offered to build a new one, a nice one, and here people were picketing her house, stepping on her flowers, because they wanted the status quo. They liked things the old way. They feared change.
Not, she thought, that the new people were any better. The pilgrims, the settlers, with their fat bellies and fanny packs and adjustable baseball caps—they showed up at least two or three times a day, expecting to be asked in, expecting to become friends. What were they thinking? Was this who she was changing the town for? These triple-chinned losers, who bought her books and dolls, and visited her web site, and traveled hundreds of miles so that they could live down the street? And the complaints! They complained to her about the water, about the college girls, about the unavailability of rental videos. They called to ask her—her, Happy Masters!—what to do about their clogged sewer lines, and their intermittent TV cable service, and the deer in the yard. Who worried about deer? Shoot them! Happy said. Eat them! And they thought she was kidding!
She sighed, and pressed her hand against the glass case (for even when no one was watching, Happy had a talent for histrionics—and who knew, maybe someone, her crank caller perhaps, was watching). It would be nice to enjoy small things again. Little girls, little stories. But she’d been there, she’d done that. She returned to her chair and let her head slump onto her crossed arms.
And allowed herself the rare indulgence of a memory. She didn’t know why the memories came when they did, but she had long ago decided not to resist them; like ghostly visitations, they seemed pregnant with significance. In this one, she lay half-asleep in the back of a car (and what did childhood memories consist of, she wondered, before the automobile?); the low, filthy skyline of Queens gave way to a highway’s poisoned treeline; and then mountains reared up, cutting off the sky and filling the car with unfamiliar scents. She must have been five. Her parents’ voices reached her from the front as she drowsed, nothing but a series of inflections, their words stolen by the open window. A kind of urban drawl for her father, the vowels sharpened and elongated, like machetes. She still heard it sometimes, in the city, from the mouths of the men she hired to fix things, deliver things. And her mother, never saying two words when one would do, a voice careful and gentle and full of suppressed humor. She didn’t know where they’d been going that summer day, but her father had had to stop suddenly and swerve (a deer, maybe? a branch in the road?), and her mother’s hand had been there to keep Happy from rolling off the seat and onto the floor. No one cried out, and it was over in a moment, the danger behind them. But her mother’s hand was there, the fingers long and white though hardly elegant—rather, they were thick and strong as a man’s, hands that washed clothes and cooked meals, sure, but also fixed the toaster, painted the shingles, and, if you begged, played granddad’s harmonica. She remembered her mother as strange, but well-loved. Unorthodox, but in a way that invited admiration, rather than envy.
Or maybe she was making that up. Maybe she was making it all up—memory did such things. It was almost fifty years ago. That was the car they would die in, at a city intersection, on the way back from buying a Christmas tree, while Happy lay in bed, feverish, under a neighbor’s care. A drunk driver had hit them—some bum down on his luck, no doubt. All of them killed, in that seatbeltless age. Happy remembered the bustle on the front stoop, the way their return lifted her spirits—and then the knock at the door instead of the key in the lock, and the policeman’s voice inquiring if this was the home of Eleanor and Richard Snover. They had only meant to cheer her up. Instead they had orphaned her.
The next day she belonged to Aunt Missy.
There was a peculiar quality, in Happy’s memory, to those years of terror and dread—twelve years, more than a quarter of her life. They existed in her mind like an unheated wing of a rambling house, a place you didn’t want to go, could only get to by rooting through drawers and closets for the key, but which required complicated detours to get around, and over time the detours, though inconvenient, became so familiar that you no longer remembered what it was like to walk freely through your own home. Sometimes you heard noises from the sealed rooms, or smelled some foul meal cooking, or noticed a wisp of dark smoke curling out over the transom, but you pretended not to notice. You pretended you lived in a regular house, and had regular habits, like a regular person.
Of course Happy hadn’t managed to forget. She remembered from time to time. The toys she wasn’t given, the whippings given to her alone. The cousins stripping her naked, scratching her back with their fingernails, twisting her arms. Coming home from school to find they had pissed on her bed, or ripped the pages from her books, or opened her diary, or stolen her door from its hinges. She had used to remember, once a month, Aunt Missy’s refusal to give her tampons, the way the cousins held her down as she bled. (Mercifully that memory came around less often these days, or at least less regularly.) She remembered burns on her palms, hair chopped off in the night, dog food on her dinner plate, bugs in her shoes.
And yet: “You’d be nothing without me,” Aunt Missy had said.
She sat up at last, emerging like a time traveler into the quiet reality of her office. The clock tower crookedly tolled; somewhere a chain reaction of honks rippled through a gaggle of geese. Her watch said five o’clock: she’d slept. From a drawer she produced a tissue and daubed at the puddle of drool she had left on the blotter. She yawned, blinked, rubbed her face. Five minutes later, she picked up her pen, and reluctantly, effortfully, began again to write.
* * *
“Good riddance, bitch,” Jennifer Treisman said, and hung up the phone. She turned around to find Vince staring at her, jeaned and shirtless, holding a sock in his outstretched hand.
“What!” she snapped.
“Uh…I’m outta socks except for one.”
“Well get some out of the dryer!”
“Uh, I looked. They’re wet.”
Jennifer gripped her head, as if trying to keep it from flying apart. “Just, I don’t know, wear dirty ones this one time, okay, Vince!”
“Okay.” But he didn’t move.
“What!”
“How come you were talking like a man?”
She grabbed the note pad from the telephone table and threw it across the room. Vince raised his hand to his face, but the pad fluttered to the ground at his feet. “How come you’re not dressed when school starts in five goddam minutes?!”
“Cause my socks…”
“Out!”
He scurried off to the rear of the house, clutching his one clean sock, and warned his brother not to go into the kitchen. Smart kid. She sat down at the kitchen table, lit a cigarette, and smoked it, tapping the ashes into the puddle of maple syrup left behind from Buddy’s waffle. What the fuck did he need so much syrup for? Christ!
When they tramped through on their way to the door, she let them kiss her goodbye. In a minute, they were gone. She went into the back room and returned with some raggedly cut box cardboard, a marker, and a weathered-gray tomato stake, and began working on a protest sign. Twenty minutes later Bud appeared before her, oily rag in hand, and cleared his throat. Then he cleared it a couple more times.
“Um, hey.”
She leveled him what she hoped was a devastating glare. “Hey, what.”
“Just, I dunno. I’m working on, you know, that Buick? And so, are you gonna, you know, pump gas today? Or…”
“Or what,” she said.
He cleared his throat before saying, “Not?”
His receding hairline created a honeyed glow above his head, like a saint in a painting. She squinted at him. “What if I say not?” she asked. “What if I say that if me and those lesbos don’t get that bitch out of town there isn’t gonna be a gas station for me to not pump at? What if I say I’m too goddam busy trying to save our white asses to be out in the cold pumping gas all fucking day?”
He wiped his forehead with his rag, leaving a long black streak. “Is that what you’re…saying?”
“Let’s say it is.”
Bud shrugged, nodded. “Yup, okay,” he said, and slinked sideways out the door.
* * *
Dave Dryer, meanwhile, was driving down to the hospital, north of Nestor. You could see it from Equinox—it was right there, on the other side of the lake—but it took an hour to drive to. The truck’s suspension was shot—it had the approximate jolt-absorbing power of a tricycle—and every bump in the road, every stray bit of gravel, was transferred directly to his mouth and magnified there a thousand times.
He seemed to be, for the first time in several years, experiencing some kind of medical crisis. His face had swollen during the night, and he had begun to spit blood. His eyes, when he gazed at them in the mirror, looked like they belonged to a squirrel or raccoon, and his tongue had the weight and gray smoothness of a rock dredged from a river.
To make matters worse, Janet Ping had visited the night before, to try to reconcile their differences. It seemed that her friends had dissed her when they found out she was working for Happy Masters. She figured that Dave would be more forgiving.
Well, duh. He let her in and gave her a drink, and she spilled her guts—confessed that she loved Happy, her friends were trying to make her choose between Happy and them, yada yada yada. Dave nodded, made comforting noises, and lusted after her: her face was almost perfectly round, a freckled moon; her shoulders were narrow and seemed to shiver at random intervals as she talked, despite his having the heat turned up to like 70. He drank along with her, firmly off the wagon now, and as he watched and listened and drank, the pain in his jaw dulled, and his anger (at Happy, at his father, at his customers, at Janet) seemed to melt and mingle with his woozy affection.
She told him about Sally Streit, the lesbian sex celebrity who was coming to campus. She said she found the whole thing disgusting.
“What,” he said, kind of sliding down a little on the sofa, so that his knee pressed against hers, “is so disgusting about it?”
“It’s a—there’s a lucture,” she slurred. “Ha! That’s good, a lucture.”
“A lickture,” Dave offered.
“A fuckture.” She snorted with laughter and poured more wine—the last of it—into her coffee mug. “It’s a lecture, and a demonstration. She supposely—supposededly—supposedly does stuff with the audience.”
“Like what?”
“Like makes them put on a dildo or something.”
They looked at each other and laughed. Dave slapped his knee. She slapped his knee, and then he slapped her knee.
So they started talking about dildos, had he ever seen one, had she ever used one, it was all completely hilarious, and they kept laughing, and kept slapping each other’s knees. And then she ruined everything. She said, “Oh, I’m just sick of it all.”
“Sick of what all?” he said.
And she said, “The whole lesbian shhthing. The whole girls unite, woman power thing.” She wiped her tired face with a rubbery hand. “I just want to have…normal friends. I want regular love.”
Which he took to mean she was going hetero. Which was apparently not what she meant, because when he tried to kiss her, he soon found himself pushed away to arms’ length, her arms. Upon her face there seemed to be an expression of alarm. Fear. “What!” he shouted, “What!”
“No, I didn’t—” she started to say.
“What!” She kind of pushed him, just gave him a little shove, and he…sort of pushed her back—sort of pushed her by the shoulders. She pitched back against the pillows and spilled what little was left of her wine. She let the mug fall—it rolled to the carpet and emptied itself there. And she put her hand over her eyes. And he found himself shouting at her.
“You didn’t what!” he said. “Didn’t you say—didn’t you mean—”
“No,” came the voice, from under the hand.
“—that you didn’t want to be a lesbian? I mean, Janet! Come on!”
“No,” she said, pretty much definitely crying now, speaking in an exaggeratedly even tone, like a shrink, “I’m sorry, I just meant—ssshhomething else. I meant another thing. I mean not being a lesbian, or rather being—I just, I meant the whole thing.”
He ought to have apologized, but instead he stood up. She gasped, as if she thought he would hit her, and that made him want to hit her. Instead he swept a lamp off the end table, and said, “Well what the fuck!”
And she got up, her hand still over her eyes, and maneuvered backwards to the door and tried to open it. But she couldn’t seem to find the knob, and she turned and pounded on the door, and then screamed. “Let me the fuck out of here! Let me the fuck out of here!”
“It’s open,” he groaned.
“Let me out!”
“Janet, the door is fucking open!”
She found the knob at last and ran out. He heard her crying all the way down the stairs, her large-soled shoes clomping on the wooden steps, the roaring in his head: yes, the throb had started up again, and the pain, and the tang of blood in his mouth. He went to the toilet, threw up, and lay down on the floor, where he spent the night. And now, still drunk, he was driving his truck to the hospital. Because he was in, he believed, serious medical trouble.
Or so he thought.
“No…” the emergency room nurse said, probing with a gloved finger, “it looks like you bit your cheek and tongue.”
“Hah?” he asked, and she recoiled, slightly.
“Have you been drinking?” she asked, removing her finger. It was about ten in the morning. She was thin, long-faced, large-eyed, and regarded him with obvious moral superiority, for which he could hardly blame her.
“Yeah.”
“Did you bump into something? Did anyone hit you?”
“No.”
“Well, the blood and the swelling are from something hitting your face. I see what you mean about the old dental work, but I don’t think that’s your problem this morning.” The gloves came off, snap, snap. “Or maybe that’s just making it worse.”
“Nobody hit me.”
“I’m going to give you a prescription for pain relief and to keep the swelling down, and a topical anesthetic. But if you want to talk about the other stuff, you have to see an oral surgeon.”
Her back was to him. He wanted to kick her ass. “I’m not making it up,” he said. “It hurts every goddam day.”
“Here,” she said placidly. She handed him a prescription and a business card. “Get the medicine. See the surgeon. And you don’t have to curse at me.”
“I don’t have any money.”
She leveled a stern look. “Well, get a job,” she said. “And I want you to stay here for the rest of the morning. Go to the cafeteria and get a coffee. Here,” she said, and took some change out of her pocket, “it’s on me. If I see you leave here before noon, I’ll call the cops.”
“The cops?”
“Driving drunk. Which you did on the way here, right?”
He said nothing.
“Right. So sit down and relax and have a cup of coffee.” And that was that.
In fact he fell asleep in the cafeteria, and it was more like two before he left—he supposed the bar would be opening late today. He stopped off at the Megashop and picked up his prescription and some groceries. He used a credit card, and endured the clerk’s frown of distaste—a quarter-inch of makeup, hair dyed and teased, and she was looking down on him. And why not? He probably smelled like a homeless shelter. When he got home he went straight upstairs, ignoring the bar (nobody, as it happened, was waiting to get in) and took his medicine and another nap. He got up and ate and opened the bar, and nobody came. For an entire hour, nobody at all came. People went to the Bistro across the street, but not a single customer came to the Goodbye Goose.
Around seven-thirty a few of them trickled in, just the drunks. No students. He served them, all on their tabs, and opened up the cash register. Underneath the drawer was a piece of paper that he had looked at many times. It had two numbers on it, a dollar amount and a phone number. Dave mentally multiplied the days since he received it by a thousand, and then he subtracted that from the dollar amount. He considered, decided, picked up the phone, and dialed. The painkillers had made him dizzy, made the world bend slightly at the edges, and they weren’t even working.
“Yes?” said Happy Masters.
“You win,” Dave said. “I’ll sell.”
Happy cleared her throat. “Who’s this?”
“Dave Dryer. A thousand times sixty-one, that leaves us with—”
“Ohhh, that,” Happy said. “Actually, Dave, you can keep your bar. I don’t need it.”
“What?” he said, though he’d heard perfectly.
“I have a bar, as I’m sure you noticed. No offense, but that offer is moot. Have a nice evening.” And she clicked off.
He hoped, hanging up the phone, to smash it into a thousand pieces, and he tried his best. But it was the old style phone, the heavy kind made of thick bakelite, and quite sturdy, so that all it did was make a very, very loud noise and move several inches to the left.