The canvases were packed individually, in shipping cartons. Benton put them in the car and slammed the trunk shut.
“They’ll be all right?” the man asked.
“They survived the baggage compartment of the 747, they’ll do O.K. in the trunk,” Benton said.
“I love his work,” the man said to Nick.
“He’s great,” Nick said, and felt like an idiot.
Benton and Olivia had just arrived in L.A. Nick had gone to the airport to meet them. Olivia said she wasn’t feeling well and insisted on getting a cab to the hotel, even though Nick offered to drive her and meet Benton at Allen Tompkins’s house later.
The man who had also come to the airport to meet Benton was Tompkins’s driver. Nick could never remember the man’s name. Benton was in L.A. to show his paintings to Tompkins. Tompkins would buy everything he had brought. Benton was wary of Tompkins, and of his driver, so he had asked Nick to meet him at the airport and to go with him.
“How was your flight?” Nick said to Benton. All three of them were in the front seat of the Cadillac.
“It was O.K. We were half an hour late taking off, but I guess they made up the time in the air. The plane was only a few minutes late, wasn’t it?”
“Allen and I are flying to Spain for Christmas,” the driver said.
On the tape deck, Orson Welles was broadcasting The War of the Worlds. Cars seldom passed them; the man drove sixty-five, with the car on cruise control, nervously brushing hair out of his eyes. The last time Nick rode in this car, a Jack Benny show, complete with canned laughter, had been playing on the tape deck.
“An Arab bought the house next door, and he’s having a new pool put in. It’s in the shape of different flowers: one part of it’s tulip-shaped, and the other part is a rose. I asked, and the pool man told me it was supposed to be a rose.” The driver kneaded his left shoulder with his right hand. He was wearing a leather strap around his wrist with squares of hammered silver through the middle.
“Have you been to Marbella?” the driver said. “Beverly Hills is the pits. Only he would want to live in Beverly Hills.”
They were on Allen Tompkins’s street. “Hold it,” the driver said to Benton and Nick, taking the car off cruise control but slowing only slightly as he pulled into the steep driveway. He hopped out and opened the door on their side of the car.
Benton hesitated a moment before reaching into the trunk. Glued to the underside of the trunk was a picture of Raquel Welch in a sequined gown. With her white teeth and tightly clothed, sequined body she looked like a mermaid in a nightmare.
Benton was in California because Allen Tompkins paid him triple what he could get for his paintings in New York. Benton had met Tompkins years ago, when he had been framing one of his paintings, staying on after his shift at the frame shop in New Haven where he worked was over. Tompkins had asked Benton how much the picture he was working on would cost when it was framed. “It’s my painting, not for sale,” Benton had told him. Very politely, Tompkins had asked if he had others. That night, Benton called Nick, drunk, raving that a man he had just met had given him a thousand dollars cash. He had gone out with Benton the next night, Benton laughing and running from store to store, to prove to himself that the money really bought things. Benton had bought a brown tweed coat and a pipe. That joke had only turned sour when Benton’s wife, Elizabeth, commended him for selecting such nice things.
Now, seven years later, Benton was wearing jeans and a black velvet jacket, and they were sitting in Tompkins’s library. It was cluttered with antique Spanish furniture, the curtains closed, the room illuminated by lamps with bases in the shape of upright fish that supported huge Plexiglas conch shell globes in their mouths. The lamps cast a lavender-pink light. Three Turkish prayer rugs were lined up across the center of the room—the only floor covering on the white-painted floorboards.
“Krypto and Baby Kal-El,” Tompkins said, coming toward them with both hands outstretched. Benton smiled and shook both of Tompkins’s hands. Then Nick shook his hand too, certain that any feeling of warmth came from Tompkins’s just having shaken hands with Benton.
“I’m so excited,” Tompkins said. He went to the long window behind where Benton and Nick sat on the sofa and pulled the string that drew the drapes apart. “Dusk falls on Gotham City,” Tompkins said. He sat in the heavily carved chair beside the sofa. “All for me?” he said, raising his eyebrows at the crates. “If you like them,” Benton said. The driver came into the library with a bottle of ouzo and a pitcher of orange juice on a tray. He put it on the small table midway between Benton and Tompkins.
“Sit down. Sit down and have a look,” Tompkins said excitedly. The man sat on the floor by the crates, leaning against the sofa. Benton took a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and began undoing the first crate.
“I’m using my special X-ray vision,” Tompkins said, “and I love it already.”
Tompkins got up and crouched by the open crate, fingers on the top of the frame, obviously enjoying every second of the suspense, before he pulled the picture out.
“Money and taste,” the driver said to Nick.
“You could not remember the simplest song lyric,” Tompkins said to his driver, slowly drawing out the painting. “Money and time,” he sighed, pulling the canvas out of the crate. “Money and time,” he said again, but this time it was halfhearted; he was interested in nothing but the picture he held in front of him. Benton was always amazed by that expression on Tompkins’s face. It made Benton as happy as he had been years before when he and Elizabeth were still married, and it had been his morning routine to go into Jason’s bedroom, gently shake him awake, and see his son’s soft blue eyes slowly focus on his own.
It was three days after Benton had sold all his paintings to Tompkins, and Nick had gone to the hotel where Olivia and Benton were staying to try to persuade them to go to lunch.
The light came into the hotel room in a strange way. The curtains were hung from brass rings, and between the rings, because the curtains did not quite come to the top of the window, light leaked in. Benton and Olivia kept the curtains closed all day—what they saw of the daylight was a pale band across the paint.
Olivia was lounging on the bed in Benton’s boxer shorts and a T-shirt imprinted with a picture of the hotel, and when Nick laughed at her she pointed to his own clothing: white cowboy boots with gold-painted eagles on the toes, white jeans, a T-shirt with what looked like a TV test pattern on it. Nick had almost forgotten that he had brought Olivia a present. He took his hand out of his pocket and brought out a toy pistol in the shape of a bulldog. He pulled the trigger and the dog’s mouth opened and the bulldog squeaked.
“Don’t thank me,” Nick said, putting it on the bedside table with the other clutter. “A blinking red light means that you have a message,” he said. He picked up the phone and dialed the hotel operator. “Nothing to it,” Nick said, patting Olivia’s leg. “Red light blinks, you just pick up the phone and get your message. If Uncle Nickie can do it, anybody can.”
He tickled Olivia’s lips with an uneaten croissant from the bedside table. He was holding it so she could bite the end. She did. Nick dipped it in the butter, which had become very soft, and held it to her mouth again. She puffed on her joint and ignored him. He took a bite himself and put it back on the plate. He went to the window and pulled back the drapes, looking at the steep hill that rose in back of the hotel.
“I wish I lived in a hotel,” he said. “Nice soft sheets, bathroom scrubbed every day, pick up the phone and get a croissant.”
“You can get all those things at home,” Benton said, wrapping a towel around him as he came out of the bathroom. The towel was too small. He gave up after several tugs and threw it over the chair.
“The sheets I slept on last night illustrated the hunt of the Unicorn. Poor bastard is not only fenced in, but I settled my ass on him. Manuela does nothing in the bathroom but run water in the tub and smoke Tiparillos. Maybe on the way home I’ll stop and pick up some croissants.” Nick closed the window. “Christmas decorations are already going up,” he said. He took a bottle of pills out of his pocket and put them on the table. The label said: “Francis Blanco: 2 daily, as directed.”
“Any point in asking who Francis Blanco is?” Benton said.
“You’re hovering like a mother over her chicks,” Nick said. “Someday that bottle will grow wings and fly away, and then you’ll wonder why you cared so much.” Nick clasped his hands behind him. “Francis Blanco just overhauled my carburetor,” he said. “You don’t have to look far for anything.”
In spite of the joke about being Uncle Nickie, Nick was Benton’s age and four years younger than Olivia. Nick was twenty-nine, from a rich New England family, and he had come to California four years before and made a lot of money in the record industry. His introduction to the record industry had come from a former philosophy professor’s daughter’s supplier. In exchange for the unlisted numbers of two Sag Harbor dope dealers, Dex Whitmore had marched Nick into the office of a man in L.A. who hired him on the spot. Nick sent a post card of the moon rising over the freeways to the professor, thanking him for the introduction to his daughter, who had, in turn, introduced him to her yoga teacher, who was responsible for his gainful employment. Dex Whitmore would have liked the continuation of that little joke; back East, he had gone to the professor’s house once a week to lead the professor’s daughter in “yoga exercises.” That is, they had gone to the attic and smoked dope and turned somersaults. Dex had been dead for nearly a year now, killed in a freak accident that had nothing to do with the fact that he sold drugs. He had been waiting at a dry cleaner’s to drop off a jacket when a man butted in front of him. Dex objected. The man took out a pistol and put a bullet in his side, shooting through a bottle of champagne Dex had clasped under his arm. Later Dex’s ex-wife filed a suit for more money from his estate, claiming that he had been carrying the bottle of champagne because he was on his way to reconcile with her.
Nick hadn’t succeeded in getting Benton and Olivia to leave the hotel. He was hungry, so he parked his car and went into a bakery. The cupcakes looked better than the croissants, so he bought two of them and ate them sitting at the counter. It embarrassed him that Benton and Olivia couldn’t stay at his house, but the year before, when they were in L.A., his dog had tried to bite Olivia. Ilena, the woman he lived with, also disliked Olivia, and he half thought that somehow she had communicated to the dog that he should lunge and growl.
He peeled the paper off of the second cupcake. One of the cupcakes had a little squirt of orange and red icing on top, piped out to look like maize. The other one had a crooked glob of pale brown, an attempt at a drumstick.
Nick was a friend of long standing, and used to most of Benton’s eccentricities—including the fact that his idea of travel was to go somewhere and never leave the hotel. He and Benton had grown up in the same neighborhood. Benton had once supplied Nick with a fake I.D. for Christmas; Nick had turned Benton on to getting high with nutmeg. Each had talked Dorothy Birdley (“most studious”) into sleeping with the other. Benton presented Nick as brilliant and sensitive; Nick told her, sitting underneath an early-flowering tree on the New Haven green, that Benton’s parents beat him. In retrospect, she had probably slept with them because she was grateful anyone was interested in her: she had bottle-thick glasses and a long pointed nose, and she was very self-conscious about her appearance and defensive about being the smartest person in the high school.
It had been a real surprise for Nick when Benton began to think differently from him—when, home from college at Christmas, Benton had called to ask him if he wanted to go to the funeral parlor to pay his respects to Dorothy Birdley’s father. He had never thought about facing Dorothy Birdley again, and Benton had made him feel ashamed for being reluctant. He drove and stayed in the car. Benton went in alone. Then they went to a bar in New Haven and talked about college. Benton liked it, and was going to transfer to the Fine Arts department; Nick hated the endless reading, didn’t know what he wanted to study, and would never have had Benton’s nerve to buck his father and change from studying business anyway. In other ways, though, Benton had become almost more prudent: “You go ahead,” Benton said when the waitress came to see if they wanted another round. “I’ll just have coffee.” So Nick had sat there and gotten sloshed, and Benton had stayed sober enough to get them home. Then, when they graduated, Benton had surprised him again. He had gotten engaged to Elizabeth. In his letters to him that year, Benton had expressed amusement at how up-tight Elizabeth was, and Nick had been under the impression that Benton was loosening up, that Elizabeth was just a pretty girl Benton saw from time to time. When Benton married her, things started to turn around. Nick, that year, stumbled into a high-paying job in New York; his relationship with his father was better, after they had a falling-out and his father called to apologize. Benton’s father, on the other hand, left home; the job Benton thought he’d landed with a gallery fell through, and he went to work as a clerk in a framing store. In December, six months after he married Elizabeth, she was pregnant. Then it was Nick who did the driving and Benton who drank. Coming out of a bar together, the night Benton told Nick that Elizabeth was pregnant, Benton had been so argumentative that Nick was afraid he had been trying to start a fight with him.
“I end up on the bottom, and you end up on the top, after your father tried to talk your mother into shipping you out to his brother’s in Montana in high school, you drove him so crazy. Now he’s advising you about what stock to buy.”
“What are you talking about?” Nick had said.
“I told you that. Your mother told my mother.”
“You never told me,” Nick said.
“I did,” Benton said, rolling down the window and pitching his cigarette.
“It must have been Idaho,” Nick said. “My uncle lives in Idaho.”
They rode in silence. “I’m not so lucky,” Nick said, suddenly depressed. “I might have Ilena’s car, but she’s in Honolulu tonight.”
“What’s she doing there?”
“She’s with a tea merchant.”
“What’s she doing with a tea merchant?”
“Wearing orchids and going to pig barbecues. How do I know?”
“Honolulu,” Benton said. “I don’t have the money to get to Atlantic City.”
“What’s there?”
“I don’t have the money to eat caramel corn and see a horse jump off a pier.”
“Have you talked to her about an abortion?” Nick said.
“Sure. Like trying to convince her the moon’s a yo-yo.”
He rolled down his window again. Wind rushed into the car and blew the ashes around. Nick saw the moon, burning white, out the side window of the car.
“I don’t have the money for a kid,” Benton said. “I don’t have the money for popcorn.”
To illustrate his point, he took his wallet out of his back pocket and dropped it out the window. “Son of a bitch, I don’t believe it,” Nick said. They were riding on the inside lane, fast, and there was plenty of traffic behind them. What seemed to be a quarter of a mile beyond where Benton had thrown his wallet, Nick bumped off the highway, emergency lights flashing. The car was nosed down so steeply on the hill rolling beneath the emergency lane (which he had overshot) that the door flew open when he cracked it to get out. Nick climbed out of the car, cursing Benton. He got a flashlight out of the trunk and started to run back, remembering having seen some sort of sign on the opposite side of the road just where Benton had thrown his wallet. It was bitter cold, and he was running with a flashlight, praying a cop wouldn’t come along. Miraculously, he found the wallet in the road and darted for it when traffic stopped. He ran down the median, back to the car, wallet in his pocket, beam from the flashlight bobbing up and down. “God damn it,” he panted, pulling the car door open.
The light came on. For a few seconds no cars passed. Everything on their side of the highway was still. Nick’s heart felt like it was beating in his back. Benton had fallen up against the door and was slumped there, breathing through his mouth. Nick pulled the wallet out of his pocket and put it on the seat. As he dropped it, it flopped open. Nick was looking at a picture of Elizabeth, smiling her madonna smile.
He drove back to the hotel to get Olivia and Benton for dinner. The lobby looked like a church. There were no lights on, except for dim spotlights over the pictures. Nobody was in the lobby. He went over to the piano and played a song. A man came down the steps into the room, applauding quietly when he finished.
“Quite nice,” the man said. “Are you a musician?”
“No,” Nick said.
“You staying here, then?”
“Some friends are.”
“Strange place. What floor’s your friend on?”
“Fourth,” Nick said.
“Not him, then,” the man said. “I’m on the third, and some man cries all night.”
He sat down and opened the newspaper. There was not enough light in the lobby to read by. Nick played “The Sweetheart Tree,” forgot how it went halfway through, got up and went into the phone booth. It was narrow and high, and when he closed the wood door he felt like he was in a confessional.
“Father, I have sinned,” he whispered. “I have supplied already strung-out friends with Seconal, and I have been unfriendly to an Englishman who was probably only lonesome.”
He dialed his house. Ilena picked it up.
“Reconsider,” he said. “Come to dinner. We’re going to Mr. Chow’s. You love Chow’s.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to her,” Ilena said.
“Come on,” he said. “Go with us.”
“She’s always stoned.”
“Go with us,” he said.
llena sighed. “How was work?”
“Work was great. Exciting. Rewarding. All that I always hope work will be. The road manager for Barometric Pressure called to yell about there not being any chicken tacos in the band’s dressing room. Wanted to know whether I did or did not send a telegram to New York.”
“Well,” she said. “Now I’ve asked about work. Only fair that you ask me about the doctor.”
“I forgot,” he said. “How did it go?”
“The bastard cauterized my cervix without telling me he was going to do it.”
“God. That must have hurt.”
“I see why people go around stoned. I just don’t want to eat dinner with them.”
“Okay, Ilena. Did you walk Fathom?”
“Manuela just had him out. I threw the Frisbee for him half the afternoon.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“I can hardly stand up straight.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ll see you later,” Ilena said.
He went out of the phone booth and walked up the stairs. Pretty women never liked other pretty women. He rang the buzzer outside Benton and Olivia’s room.
Benton opened the door in such a panic that Nick smiled, thinking he was clowning because Nick had told him earlier that he was too lethargic. It only took a few seconds to figure out it wasn’t a joke. Benton had on a white shirt hanging outside his jeans and a tie hanging over his shoulder. Olivia had on a dress and was sitting, still as a mummy, hands in her lap, in a chair with its back to the desk.
“You know that call? The phone call from Ena? You know what the message was? My brother’s dead. You know what the hotel told Ena days ago? That I’d checked out. She called back, and today they told her I was here. Wesley is dead.”
“Oh, Christ,” Nick said.
“He and a friend were on Lake Champlain. They drowned. In November, they were out in a boat on Lake Champlain. Today was the funeral. Why the hell did they tell her I’d checked out? It doesn’t matter anymore why they told her that.” Benton turned to Olivia. “Get up,” he said. “Pack.”
“There’s no point in my going,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “I’ll fly to New York with you and go to the apartment.”
“Elizabeth would hate not to see you,” Benton said. “She likes to see you and clutch Jason from the hawk.”
“Elizabeth is at your mother’s?” Nick said.
“Elizabeth misses no opportunity to ingratiate herself with my family. They’re not at my mother’s. They’re at his house, in Weston, for some reason.”
“I thought he lived on Park Avenue.”
“He moved to Connecticut.” Benton slammed his suitcase shut. “For God’s sake, I’ve made plane reservations. Will you pack your suitcase?”
“I’ll drive you to the airport,” Nick said.
“God damn it,” Benton said, “I don’t mean to be ungracious, but I realize that, Nick.” Benton was packing Olivia’s suitcase. He looked at the bedside table and sighed and held the suitcase underneath it and swept everything in. He put a sign about the continental breakfast the hotel served back on the table.
“I really love you,” Olivia said, “and when something awful happens, you treat me like shit.”
Olivia got up and Nick put his arm around her shoulder and steered her toward the door. Benton came behind them, carrying both suitcases.
“You were lucky you could get a plane this close to Thanksgiving,” Nick said.
“I guess I was. Forgot it was Thanksgiving.”
“Maybe people don’t go home for Thanksgiving anymore,” Nick said.
Nick was remembering what Thanksgiving used to be like, and the good feeling he got as a child when the holidays came and it snowed. One Christmas his parents had given him an archery set, and he had talked his father into setting it up outside in the snow. His father had been drunk and had taken a fruit cake from the kitchen counter and put the round, flat cake on top of his head like a hat, and stood to the side of the target, tipping his fruitcake hat, yelling to Nick to shoot it off his head while his mother rapped on the window, gesturing them inside.
“I hope you enjoyed your stay,” the woman behind the desk said to Benton.
“Fine,” Benton said.
“How you doing?” Dennis Hopper said.
“Fine,” the woman behind the desk said. She reached around Benton and handed Dennis Hopper his mail.
The security guard was sitting on a chair drinking a Coke. He was staring at them. Nick hoped that by the time he got them to the airport Olivia would have stopped crying.
“Want to come East and liven up the wake?” Benton said to Nick.
“They don’t want to see me,” Olivia said. “Why can’t I go back to the apartment?”
“You’re who I live with. My brother just died. We’re going to be with my family.”
“I wish I could go,” Nick said. “I wish I could act like everybody else in my office—phone in and say I’m having an anxiety attack.”
“Come with us,” Olivia said, squeezing his hand. “Please.”
“I can’t just get on a plane,” he said.
“If there’s a seat,” she said.
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “Are you serious?”
“I’m serious,” Benton said. “Olivia’s probably as serious as she gets on Valium.”
“That was nasty,” she said. “I’m not stoned.”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. Olivia looked at him. “About the plane, I mean,” he said.
“She misunderstands things when she’s stoned,” Benton said.
They got into Nick’s car and he pulled out onto the narrow, curving road behind the hotel. “I’ll call Ilena,” Nick said. “Are we going to miss the plane if I go back into the hotel?”
“We’ve got time,” Benton said. “Go on.”
He left the car running and went back into the hotel. The security guard was making funny whiny noises and shuffling across the floor, and the girl behind the desk was laughing. She saw him looking at them and called out: “It’s an imitation of one of the rabbits in Watership Down.”
The security guard, amused at his own routine, crossed his eyes and wiggled his nose.
The house in Weston was huge. It was a ten-room house on four acres, the back lawn bordered by massive fir trees, and in front of them thick vines growing large, oblong pumpkins. Around the yard were sunflowers, frost-struck, bent almost in half. Nick squatted to stare at one of their black faces.
He had seen the sunflowers curving in the moonlight when they arrived the night before and Benton’s mother, Ena, lit the yard with floodlights; the flowers were just outside the aura of light, and he had squinted before he was able to make out what they were. It was morning now, and he was examining one. He ran his fingers across its rough face.
The reality of Wesley’s death hadn’t really hit him until he got to the house, walked across the lawn, and went inside. Then, although he hadn’t seen Wesley for years, and had never been to the house, Nick felt that Ena didn’t belong there, and that Wesley was very far away.
Ena had been waiting for them, and the house had been burning with light—hard to see from the highway, she had told Benton on the phone—but inside there was a horrible pall over everything, in spite of the brightness. He had not been able to get to sleep, and when he had slept, he had dreamed about the gigantic, bent sunflowers. Wesley was dead.
The movie they had shown on the plane, which they stared at but did not listen to, had a scene in it of a car chase through San Francisco, with Orientals smiling in the back seat of a speeding car and waving little American flags. It did not seem possible that such a thing could be happening if Wesley was really dead.
Ena was at the house because she thought that assembling there was a tribute to Wesley—no matter that in the six months he’d lived there he never invited the family to his house, and that the things they saw there now made Wesley more of an enigma And they had already begun to take his things. They obviously felt guilty or embarrassed about it, because when the three of them came in the night before, people began to confess: Elizabeth had taken Wesley’s Rapidograph, for Jason; for herself she had taken a dome-shaped paperweight, a souvenir of Texas with a longhorn cow facing down a cowboy with a lasso underwater, in a tableau that would fill with snow when the dome was shaken; Uncle Cal had taken a picture of Ena as a schoolgirl, in a heart-shaped frame. Ena had taken a keyring with three keys on it from Wesley’s night table. She did not know what locks the keys fit, because she had tried them on everything in the house with no luck, but they were small antique keys and she wanted to get a chain for them and wear them as a necklace. Wesley was dead, drowned in Lake Champlain, two life vests floating near where the boat capsized, no explanation.
Benton came out of the house. It was a cold morning, and it was early; Nick did not feel too cold because he had found a jacket on a hook by the back door—Wesley’s, no doubt—and put it on. Benton, in the black velvet jacket, hugged his arms in front of him.
“I just realized that I dragged you here from California,” Benton said. “What are you doing out here?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I came out to look around.”
“What did you find?”
“Pumpkins still growing in his garden.”
At the back of the lawn, past a tangle of leafless berry bushes, was a fallen-down chicken coop. The roof barely cleared their heads. There was a cement floor, and most of the walls were still standing, but they were caving in, or missing boards.
“Long time since this was in operation,” Benton said.
“Imagine Wesley out in the country,” Nick said.
Most of the back wall was missing from the coop. When they came to the end, Nick jumped down, about five feet, to the ground, and Benton jumped behind him. The woods were covered with damp leaves, thickly layered.
“Although the shape that coop was in, I guess he was hardly the gentleman farmer,” Benton said. “What do you think about the way Ena’s acting?”
“Ena’s edgy.”
“She is,” Benton said. He pushed a branch out of his face; it was so brittle that it snapped. He used the piece of broken branch to poke at other branches. “I went into Jason’s bedroom and thought about kidnapping him. I didn’t even have the heart to wake him up to say hello.”
“What time was it when you came out?”
They saw a white house to their left, just outside the woods, and turned back for Wesley’s house. Wind chimes were clinking from a tree beside the chicken coop—long green tubes hitting together.
Nick hadn’t seen the chimes when he walked back to the chicken coop earlier. They reminded him of the strange graveyard he and Wesley and Benton had gone through when they were in college and Wesley was a senior in high school, on a trip they took to see a friend who had moved to Charlemont, Massachusetts. It was Christmastime, after a snow, and Benton and Nick had been wearing high rubber boots. Wesley, as usual, had on his sneakers. They had sighted the snowy graveyard, and it had been somebody’s idea to walk through it. Wesley had been the first one out of the car, and he had also been the first to sight the broomstick slanted into the ground like a flagpole, with wind chimes hanging from the top of it. It was next to one of the tombstones. There was a deep path leading to it—someone had put it there earlier in the day. It looked crazy—a touch from Mardi Gras, nothing you would expect to see standing in a graveyard. The ground was frozen beneath the snow—the person had dug hard to put the broomstick in, and the chimes tinkled and clanked together in the wind. Wesley had photographed that, and also a tombstone with a larger-than-life dog stretched on top—a Borzoi, perhaps, or some odd cross—and the dog appeared to be looking toward a tree that cast a shadow. There was snow mounded on the dog’s head and back, and the tree branches it looked toward were weighted with snow.
“You know that picture Wesley took in the graveyard?” Nick said.
“The dog? The one you told him would make a fine Christmas card?”
Nick nodded yes. “You know what fascinates me about photographs? Did you ever notice the captions? Photographer gets a shot of a dwarf running out of a burning hotel and it’s labeled ‘New York: 1968.’ Or there’s a picture of two humpbacked girls on the back of a pony, and it says ‘Central Park: 1966.’ ”
“I remember those, too,” Benton said. “I wonder why he never showed them? Nobody else in this family is modest. Even Elizabeth tacks her drawings up alongside Jason’s.” Benton kicked some moss off his shoe. “It irritated the hell out of him that I’d put my camera on a tripod and wait for the right shot. Remember how he used to carry on about how phony that was?” Benton had stopped to look at some mint, sticking out between the rubble. “He idolized you,” Benton said.
“He’s dead and I work at Boulevard Records and handle complaints about chicken that doesn’t show up,” Nick said. “He didn’t idolize me.”
They were coming closer to the house, and the tinkling of the chimes was faint. They were walking by the pumpkin vines that wove across the ground in front of the tall black-green trees.
Nick was thinking of another one of Wesley’s photographs—one he had taken when he and Benton were still in college. The three of them had been in a booth in a restaurant in New Haven, on a Sunday, and Wesley had said, “Don’t move.” They were waiting for their order, and Nick’s hands were resting on the New York Times. The picture was pale gray and Nick had been absolutely astonished to see what Wesley had made his hands look like. One hand seemed to be clasping the other as though it was a strange hand. Both hands had been eerily beautiful, the newspaper out of focus beneath them—hands, suspended, with one cradling, or sheltering, the other. When Wesley showed him the photograph he had been so surprised that he couldn’t speak. Finally, having had time to think, he said something close to what he meant, but not exactly what he wanted to ask. “How did you get that softness?” he had asked Wesley, and Wesley had hesitated. Then he had said: “I developed it in Acufine.”
They went quietly into the house and stood by the heat grate in the kitchen. Nick took down a pan hanging from a nail in the beam over the stove and filled it with water for coffee. Then he sat on the kitchen table. The only real detail they knew of Wesley’s death was that the life vests had been floating near the boat. Ena had told them about it the night before. The life vests had stopped in time for Nick. She did not say anything about the color, but Nick knew as she talked that they were bright orange, and the water was gray and deep. One floated beside the boat, one farther off. He had to catch his breath when the image formed. He was as shocked as if he had been there when they recovered the body.
Benton was finding cups, putting the filter in the coffee pot. Benton turned off the burner. The bubbles grew smaller. Steam rose from the pan.
“We’re both thinking the same thing, aren’t we?” Benton said. “Capsized boat, life vests floating free, middle of winter.”
“ ‘Lake Champlain: 1978,’ ” Nick said.
Ena was knitting. The afghan covered her lap and legs and spilled onto the floor, a wide flame pattern of brown and tan and green.
“You look like a cowboy, Nickie,” she said. “Why do young men want to look like cowboys now?”
“Leave him alone,” Elizabeth said.
“I didn’t mean to criticize. I just wanted to know.”
“What am I supposed to dress like?” Nick said.
“My husband wore three-piece suits, and ties even on Saturday, and after thirty-five years of marriage he left me to marry his mistress, by whom he had a five-year-old son.”
“Forget it,” Uncle Cal said. He was leaning against the fireplace, tapping his empty pipe against the wood, looking at Ena through yellow-tinted aviator glasses. “Spilled milk,” he said. “My brother’s a fool, and pretty soon he’s going to be an old fool. Then see how she likes him when he dribbles his martini.”
“You never got along with him before he left me,” Ena said. “You can’t feign objectivity.”
“Don’t talk about it in front of Jason,” Elizabeth said.
Jason and Benton had just come inside. Benton had been holding a flashlight while Jason picked the mint Benton and Nick had discovered earlier.
“Pick off the leaves that the frost got, and then we’ll tie the stalks with rubber bands and hang them upside down to dry,” Benton said.
It had gotten colder outside. The cold had come in with them and spread like a cloud to the living room, where it stayed for a minute until the heat began to absorb it.
“Why do they have to be upside down?”
“So the leaves can’t speak and criticize us for picking them.”
“You don’t hear all that stuff about plants having feelings anymore,” Uncle Cal said. “That was a big item, wasn’t it? Tomato plants curling their leaves when the guy who’d burned them the day before stuck a book of matches in their face the next day.” He lit his pipe.
Squeals from the kitchen as Benton held Jason upside down. “Can you talk upside down?” Benton said. “Talk to Daddy.”
Jason was yelling and laughing.
“Put him right side up,” Elizabeth said, going and standing in the doorway that separated the kitchen from the living room.
Benton stood Jason back on his feet.
“Aw, Lizzie,” Benton said.
“Who’s Lizzie?” Jason said.
“She is. Lizzie is a nickname for Elizabeth.”
“No one has ever called me Lizzie in my life,” Elizabeth said.
Uncle Cal was putting logs in the fireplace. Above the mantel was a poster of the Lone Ranger and Tonto on horseback. Cloudy sky. Mountains behind them. The Lone Ranger was positioned directly in front of a tall cactus, so that it appeared the cactus was rising out of his hat.
“Lizzie is also the nickname for a lizard,” Benton said.
“It’s nice you’re so clever,” Elizabeth said to Benton.
“Lizzie loves me,” Benton said. He put his thumb to his lip and flipped it forward, blowing her a kiss.
“Beautiful, beautiful,” Uncle Cal said. He was admiring the fire, with strong yellow flames crackling out of the logs. Ena had explained to them that there was only wood for one fire, and she had decided to save it until the family could be together. It seemed impossible for everyone to be in the same room at the same time, though, so finally she had told Cal to lay the fire. Benton and Jason were in the kitchen; Olivia was upstairs taking a bath. She was humming loudly.
“I’m going to stay here a while,” Ena said. “No one should feel that they have to stay with me.”
“I’m staying,” Uncle Cal said.
“I’ve already called Hanley Paulson, and he’s delivering more firewood tonight. I can always count on Hanley. I think Wesley would have liked him, and the other people around here. Wesley didn’t move here just to take care of me.”
“Is there something wrong with you?” Uncle Cal said.
“No. Nothing is wrong with me. He wanted to be closer to me because sometimes I get lonesome.”
“Don’t tell me you ran down some sob story that made Wesley feel guilty for living in the city,” Benton said, coming to the doorway.
“Some people,” Ena said, staring at him with eyes hot from the fire, “think about the needs of others without having to be told.”
“Christ,” Benton said in disgust. “Is that what you did to Wesley?”
“I love it,” Uncle Cal said. “I wish I’d never blocked up my fireplace.”
“Take down the paneling,” Elizabeth said.
“And I wish I’d never painted my living room green,” Uncle Cal said.
Nick was playing solitaire. Elizabeth was sitting and looking bored, shifting her eyes from the fireplace to the empty doorway to the kitchen. When things were silent in there too long, she got up to investigate. Benton was holding Jason on his shoulders, and Jason was fastening the bunches of mint to the wooden ceiling beams with tacks.
“Come to kiss us?” Benton said to Elizabeth. “Legend has it that when you stand under mistletoe—or mint—you have to be kissed.”
She looked at Jason, grinning as he sat high above them, one bunch of mint left in his hand. She went over to Jason and kissed his hand.
“Kiss Daddy,” he said.
Benton was standing with his eyes closed, lips puckered in exaggeration, bending forward. Elizabeth walked out of the room.
“Kiss him,” Jason hollered, and kicked his feet, in damp brown socks, against Benton’s chest.
“Kiss him,” Jason called again.
Elizabeth sighed and went upstairs, leaving Benton to deal with the situation he’d created. Nick put an ace on top of a deuce and had no more cards to play. He went to the kitchen and poured a shot glass full of bourbon.
“Would anyone else like a drink?” Nick said, coming back into the living room.
“I swore off,” Uncle Cal said, tapping his chest.
“Give me whatever you’re drinking,” Ena said to Nick.
Everyone was ignoring Jason, crying in the kitchen, and Benton, whispering to him.
Nick went into the kitchen to get Ena a drink, and Jason broke away from Benton and tried to kick Nick. When Nick drew away in time, Jason made fists and stood there, crying.
“I’m your friend,” Nick said. He put half a shot of bourbon in a glass and filled it with water. He dropped in an ice cube.
“I go to bed at ten,” Uncle Cal said.
“Why can’t I?” Jason screamed in the kitchen.
“Because she’s a naked lady. Decency forbids,” Benton said. “It will take me one minute to tell her she’s been in there long enough.”
Olivia was singing very loudly.
“I want to come with you,” Jason said.
Benton walked out of the kitchen and went to get Olivia out of her bath. She was doing her Judy Collins imitation, loudly, which she only did when she was stoned. Obviously, she had taken a joint into the bathroom.
Uncle Cal followed Benton up the stairs. It was nine-thirty.
“Early to bed, clears up the head,” Uncle Cal said. He was sleeping in Ena’s room, on a Futon mattress he had brought with him that he tried to get everyone to try out. Jason liked it best. He used it as a trampoline.
“I don’t think Hanley is coming tonight,” Ena said. She had gotten herself another drink. The fire was ash. She got out of the chair and turned up the thermostat, and instead of coming back to the living room, she began to climb the stairs, calling to Uncle Cal that he should do yoga exercises in the morning instead of at night, because if his back went out, she wouldn’t know whom to call in the middle of the night.
The next evening Nick talked to Ilena. Manuela picked up the phone and started telling him about his messages. He cut her off. Then she told him about what had been delivered that day—as she described it, it was a milk-chocolate top of a woman’s body. She and Ilena had stood it up on the kitchen table, and the table was far enough away from the window that the sun wouldn’t melt it. Manuela told him not to worry. She read him the message on the card that was enclosed. It was from Mr. Bornstein, a man he vaguely remembered from some party in Beverly Hills. Mr. Bornstein was with Fat Productions. He had another company called Fat Chance.
llena got on the phone. “Hi, Nick,” she said.
“It’s winter here,” he said. “You should see it.”
“I wasn’t invited,” she said.
“You hate Olivia,” he said. “Anyway—it’s not the time to bring somebody new into the house when Wesley just died.”
“I wouldn’t have come,” Ilena said. “I just felt like sulk
“So what’s up?” he said. “You there sulking?”
“My cervix hurts. And somebody stole our hose. Unless you did something with the hose.”
“The garden hose? What would I do with it?”
“That’s what I thought. So somebody must have stolen it.”
“What would they want with it?” he said.
“Strangle a Puerto Rican, maybe.”
“How’s the dog?” he said.
“He missed you and wouldn’t eat, so Manuela poached a chicken for him. The chicken made him forget his grief.”
“Good,” he said.
“When are you coming back?”
“Pretty soon. Tomorrow or the next day, I guess. I was hoping it would snow.”
“That creepy man keeps calling. The one Benton sells his stuff to. He’s having a costume party, and he called yesterday to say that somebody was still needed to dress as Commissioner Gordon. Then he called this morning to say that some body named Turaj was going as Gordon, but he still needed to find somebody to be the mother of Kal-El. Tell me there’s not going to be a lot of coke at that party.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “I guess that’s where the snow is.”
“He’s so creepy. He gives me the creepy-crawls. I hope he doesn’t call here anymore.”
“Just tell him that I can’t do it.”
“That chocolate body in the other room gives me the creeps too.
“Other than that,” he said, “is everything all right there?”
“Manuela wanted a raise, so I gave her one.”
“Does that mean she’s going to clean the bathroom?”
“I told her you didn’t like her smoking cigars. She said she wouldn’t anymore.”
“Great. Sounds like everything will be perfect when I get back.”
“What would you know about perfection? I’m perfect, and you don’t appreciate me. I don’t even have an eroded cervix anymore.”
“I hope you feel better soon, Ilena.”
“Thanks,” she said. “See you when I see you. I might go to Ojai with Perry Dwyer and his sister this weekend.”
“Have a good time in Ojai,” he said.
They said goodbye and he hung up the kitchen phone. Elizabeth was leaning against the stove, staring at him. He waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. She went to the window and looked at Jason and Benton, playing tag in the circle of light in the back yard.
“He must be doing well,” she said. “He’s been paying child support.”
“He’s got quite a reputation on the West Coast.”
“Do you know the man he sells the paintings to?”
“I saw him again when Benton was in L.A.”
“Is he crazy, or does Benton exaggerate?”
Nick stood beside her and watched Benton chugging along, pretending to be running as fast as he could to catch Jason, then moving in comic slow motion.
“That’s like the picture,” Elizabeth said.
“What is?”
“That.”
She was pointing to his hands, folded on the window sill. He felt a tingling in his fingers, as if his hands were about to move.
“Benton told me that picture always embarrassed you,” she said. “You know—everybody in this family is embarrassed by beautiful things. That’s why Benton never shows Ena or Cal his paintings. Even Benton’s given in to it: he made fun of me for putting one of my watercolors up on the bulletin board alongside Jason’s. You’ve probably hung around all these people so long that you’ve fallen into the pattern.”
“I’m not embarrassed by it. It was just a picture he took one day when I was sitting in some diner.”
“You look like a holy person when you clasp your hands.”
She looked out the window again.
“What did you want to say to me when I was on the phone, Elizabeth?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I was being envious. I was thinking how nice it is that he has a friend who’ll fly from one coast to the other to pal around with him.” She coughed. “And I’ve always been a little jealous of you—that people study you, photograph you—and they don’t pay attention to me.” She put her nose against the window. “Saying that Lizzie was a nickname for a lizard,” she said.
Benton did not go to Westport with them because Jason acted up. Jason said that Benton had promised that the two of them could play tag. He was about to cry, and Benton had been trying since the day before to get back into Jason’s good graces.
After Nick had opened the door on the driver’s side of Elizabeth’s car, he realized that he had made a silly, macho move. She was sober, and he had been drunk since before he called Ilena. He should have let her drive the car.
Elizabeth was shivering, her scarf over her mouth, staring straight ahead. He couldn’t think of anything to say. It had been her idea to get out of the house and go get a drink, and he was surprised that he had agreed. Finally she said something. “Turn right,” she said.
He turned, and was on a narrow road he wished she were navigating. “Hard to believe we’re an hour outside New York,” she said. “It’s nice, when it isn’t pitch black. This road reminds me of a road that winds in back of my grandmother’s house in Pennsylvania.”
She reached over and pushed down a lever. The heat came on.
“What kills me is that she knows Hanley Paulson charges outrageous prices for firewood, and she still won’t consider having anyone else deliver it because Hanley is an old-timer, and she’s so charmed by people who hang on.”
She adjusted the heater to low. This time Nick remembered to look at the road, and not at what she was doing. He was trying to remember if he had just been told that his dog was, or was not, eating. A small animal ran in front of the car and made it to the other side. “Again,” she said, and pointed for him to turn right.
They went to a bar with a lot of cars parked outside. A man was inside, sitting on a stool, collecting money. “Zenith String Band,” he said, although neither of them had asked.
They sat side-by-side behind a small round table. One of the people on stage had broken a string, and another member of the band had stopped playing to pretend to beat him over the head with his fiddle. They ordered bourbon. A curly-haired girl handed another guitar up onto the stage, and everyone was playing together again.
“I hated it that he turned everybody against me,” she said. “He was so angry that I wouldn’t have an abortion, and look at the way he loves Jason. You’d think he’d be glad I didn’t listen to him, but he’s still making jokes, and I’m still the villain.”
She was speaking quite loudly. The people at the next table were looking at them and pretending not to. He knew he should do something to pass it off, so he gave them a little smile, but he was drunk and the smile spread too far over his face; what he was giving them was an evil smirk.
“What a family. Cal with his mansion on Long Island, never liking what the decorator does, having some goddam vegetarian decorator who paints the walls the color of carrots and turnips. He gives better Christmas presents to his decorator than he does to Jason. Poor Cal, out in East Hampton, and poor Ena, who’s staying in Wesley’s house when he’s dead because he wouldn’t have her there when he was alive. The only person in the family worth anything was Wesley.”
They sat in silence, drinking, until the set was over. It was slowly starting to sink in that he was not in California—that lantana would not be growing outside when they went out, that it would be dark and cold. He usually said that he loved California, but when he was back East he felt much better. He began to wish for snow again. When the musicians climbed down from the stage he asked for the check. He left money on the table, wondering if he was crazy to suspect that the people at the next table were going to take the money. Since no one ran out of the bar after them in all the time it took to start Elizabeth’s car in the cold, he decided that it was paranoia.
He thought that he remembered the way back and was glad that he did. Elizabeth’s eyes were closed. He put on the heater. Elizabeth put it off.
“It’s cold,” he said.
“Better ways to keep warm.”
He was looking at the speedometer, to make sure he was driving fast enough. It felt like he was floating. He accelerated a little, watched the needle climb. Drunken driving.
“Pull over,” Elizabeth said, hand over her mouth, other hand on his wrist. He did, quickly, expecting her to be sick.
Wind blew in the car as she jumped out and ran through the leaves unsteadily, over to a stone wall. He looked away as she bent over.
She came back to the car carrying a cat.
“I got myself something nice,” she said, shivering.
“It’s somebody’s cat,” he said.
“He might be your friend, but he’s a real bastard. Telling Jason that lizards are called Lizzie.”
“Get even with Benton,” he said. “Don’t get even with me.”
She looked at him, and he knew exactly where Jason got his perturbed expression, the look that crossed his face when his mother told him that Uncle Cal’s mattress was not a toy.
“That’s what they’re all doing,” she said. “They’re all at Wesley’s house getting even. Olivia singing in the tub to pretend that everything’s cool, Cal being nice to Ena because his last EKG readout scared him and he wants to be sure she’ll nurse him. Benton playing Daddy. That one really kills me.”
The cat hopped into the back seat. He looked at it. Its eyes were glowing.
“What I like about animals is that they’re not pretentious,” she said.
“You’ve taken somebody’s cat,” he said.
She was pathetic and ridiculous, but neither of those things explained why the affection he felt for her was winning out over annoyance. He couldn’t remember if she had propositioned him, or if he had just imagined it. He put his head against the window. It seemed like a situation he would have found himself in in college. It was a routine from years ago. He took her hand.
“This is silly,” he said.
He did not know her license-plate number, so he put down *?—#! on the registration form. Then, realizing what he had done, he blacked that out and wrote in a series of imaginary numbers.
The motel was on Route 58, just off the Merritt Parkway. He was careful to notice where he was, because he thought that when he went out to the parking lot, she might simply have driven away. He gave the woman his credit card, got it back, slipped the room key across the counter until it fell off the edge into his hand instead of trying to pick it up with his fingers, and went out to the parking lot. She was in the car, holding the cat. He knocked on her window. She got out of the car. The cat, in her arms, looked all around.
“I know where there’s an all-night diner,” she said drunkenly.
“You seem to know your way around very well.”
“I used to come see Wesley,” she said.
She said it matter-of-factly, climbing the stairs in back of him, and at first he didn’t get it. “And I know for a fact that he didn’t intend to use all the servicemen Ena used, and that when he had wood delivered it wasn’t going to be the famous Hanley Paulson who brought it,” she said, as he put the key in the lock and opened the door. “He might have left New York to nursemaid Ena, but he was only going so far. He was a nice person, and people took advantage of him.”
He held her. He put his arms around her back and hugged her. This was Benton’s ex-wife, Wesley’s lover, standing in front of him in a black sweater and black silk underpants, and instead of its seeming odd to him, it only made him feel left out that he was the only one who had no connection with her.
“Who was the man who drowned with him?” she said, as if Nick would know. “Nobody he cared about, because I never heard of him. I didn’t even know he was Wesley’s friend.”
The cat was watching them. It was sitting in a green plastic chair, and when he looked at the cat, the cat began to lick its paw. Elizabeth drew away from him to see why he had stopped stroking her back.
“Would you like to forget about it and go to the diner?” she said.
“I was thinking about the cat,” he said. “We ought to return the cat.”
“If you want to return the cat, you go return the cat.”
“We can do it later,” he said.
Later, he got hopelessly lost looking for the road where they had gotten the cat. He thought that he had found just the place, but when he got out of the car he saw that there was no stone wall. He carried the cat back to the car and consulted Elizabeth. She had no idea where they were. Finally he had to backtrack all the way to the bar and find the road from there that they had been on earlier. He got out of the car, carrying the cat. He dropped it on the stone wall. It didn’t move.
“It wants to go with us,” Elizabeth called out the window.
“How do you know?” he said. He felt foolish for asking, for assuming that she might know.
“Bring it back,” she said.
The cat sat and stared. He picked it up again and walked back to the car with it. It jumped out of his arms, into the back seat.
“What he says to Jason is very clever,” Elizabeth said, as he started the car. “I’d be amused, if Jason weren’t my son.”
When he found out that she and Wesley had been lovers, it had been clear to him that she was sleeping with him to exorcise Wesley’s ghost, or to get even with him for dying; now he wondered if she had told him to go to the motel to get even with Benton, too.
“If you want Benton to know about what happened tonight, you’re going to have to tell him yourself. I’m not telling him,” he said.
Her face was not at all the face in the picture of Benton’s wallet from years ago. Her eyes were shut as if she were asleep, but her face was not composed.
“I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m used to it,” she said. She rummaged in her purse and pulled her brush out and began brushing her hair. “If the family had known about Wesley and me, they’d write that off as retaliation, too. They love easy answers.”
They were on the road that led to the house, passing houses that stood close to the road. There was nothing in California that corresponded to the lights burning in big old New England houses at night. It made him want to live in this part of the world again, to be able to drive and see miles of dark fields. The apple orchards, the low rock walls, the graveyards. A lot of people went through them, and it did not mean that they were preoccupied with death. The car filled with light when a car with its high beams on came toward them. For a few seconds he saw his hands on either side of the wheel and thought, sadly, that what Wesley had seen about them had never come true.
“At the risk of being misunderstood as looking for sympathy, there’s one other thing I want to tell you about Benton,” Elizabeth said. “He used to put his camera on his tripod and take pictures of Jason when he was an infant—roll after roll. He’d stand by his crib and take pictures of Jason when he was sleeping. I remember asking him why he was taking so many pictures when Jason’s expression wasn’t changing, and you know what he said? He said that he was photographing light.”
Déjà vu: Ena with the afghan, Uncle Cal circling figures on the stock page, knocking his empty pipe against the old wooden chest in front of the sofa with the regular motion of a metronome, Elizabeth reading a book, her feet tucked primly beneath her, coffee steaming on the table by her chair.
“Went out and got drunk,” Uncle Cal said in greeting. “I couldn’t.” He tapped his shirt pocket. It made a crinkling noise. Pipe cleaners stuck out of the pocket, next to a pack of cigarettes.
Elizabeth was reading A Tale of Two Cities. She continued to read as if he hadn’t come into the room. The cat was curled by the side of the chair.
“Hanley Paulson isn’t coming,” Elizabeth said.
“We can go to lunch and leave him a note and the check,” Uncle Cal said.
“That would be just fine,” Ena said. “He’s not a common delivery person—he’s a friend of long standing.”
“Maybe someone told him Wesley was dead, and he isn’t coming.”
“I called him,” Ena said. “Not Wesley.”
“Wesley wouldn’t have paid seventy-five dollars for half a cord of wood,” Elizabeth said.
“Everyone is perfectly free to go out,” Ena said.
Nick went into the kitchen. He saw Benton and Jason and Olivia, all red-cheeked, with puffs of air coming out of their mouths. They were playing some sort of game in which they came very close to Olivia and ducked at the last second, so she couldn’t reach out and touch them. The sky was gray-white, and it looked like snow. Olivia was loosening the scarf around her neck and lighting one of her hand-rolled narrow cigarettes. Either that, or she had stopped caring and was smoking a joint. He watched her puff. A regular cigarette. Olivia’s jeans were rolled to the knee, and the bright red socks she wore reminded him of the large red stocking his uncle had hung by the mantel for him when he was young. “Let’s see Santa fill that,” his uncle had laughed, as the toe of the stocking grazed the hearth. In the morning, his usual stocking was in the toe of the large stocking, and his father was glaring at his uncle. His father did not even like his brother—how could he have wanted to send him to live with him?
Uncle Cal came into the kitchen and took cheese out of the refrigerator.
“I’m going to grill some French bread with cheese on top,” he said. “Will anyone share my lunch?”
“Give me whatever you’re having,” Ena said.
“No, thank you,” Elizabeth said.
“Not good for me, but I love it,” Uncle Cal said to Nick. “You?”
“Sure,” Nick said.
“You watch it so it doesn’t get too brown,” Uncle Cal said, smoothing Brie over the two halves of bread. “I’m going out for a second to clear my lungs.”
Nick looked out the window. Uncle Cal was bending forward, cupping his hands, lighting a cigarette. He had only taken one puff when a car pulled into the driveway.
“Is that Hanley’s truck?” Ena called.
“It’s just a car,” Nick said.
“I hope it isn’t someone coming to express sympathy unannounced,” Ena said. She was still wearing her pajamas, and a quilted Chinese coat.
Nick watched as a boy got out of the car and Benton went to talk to him. Benton and the boy talked for a while, and then Benton left him standing there, Jason circling his car with one arm down, one arm high, buzzing like a plane. Benton pushed open the kitchen door.
“Where do you want the wood stacked?” he called.
“Is that Hanley Paulson?” Ena asked, getting up.
“It’s his son. He wants to know where to put the wood.”
“Oh, dear,” Ena said, pulling off her jacket and going to the closet for her winter coat. “Outside the kitchen door where it will be sheltered, don’t you think?”
Benton closed the kitchen door.
“Where’s Hanley?” Ena said, hurrying past Nick. Still in her slippers, she went onto the lawn. “Are you Hanley’s son?” Nick heard her say. “Please come in.”
The boy walked into the kitchen behind Ena. He had a square face, made squarer by dirty blond bangs, cut straight across. He stood in the kitchen, hands plunged in his pockets, looking at Ena.
“Where would you like the wood, ma’am?” he said.
“Oh,” she said, “well, Hanley always stacks it at my house under the overhang by the kitchen door. We can do the same thing here, don’t you think?”
“It’s ten dollars extra for stacking,” the boy said.
When the boy left the kitchen, Ena went out behind him. Nick watched her standing outside the door as the boy went to his car and backed it over the lawn. He opened the back hatch and began to load the wood out.
“This is very dry wood?” Ena said.
“This is what he gave me to deliver,” the boy said.
Jason put his arms up for a ride, and Benton plopped him on his shoulders. Jason’s dirty shoes had made streaks down the front of Benton’s jacket. Uncle Cal put his arm through Olivia’s, and the two of them began to walk toward the back of the property. Nick watched Ena as she looked first toward Uncle Cal and Olivia, then to Benton and Jason, charging a squirrel, Benton hunching forward like a bull.
“Everyone has forgotten about lunch,” Ena said, corning back into the kitchen. She broke off a piece of the cooked bread and took a bite. She put it on the counter and poured herself a drink, then went back into the living room with the piece of bread and the glass of bourbon and sat in her chair, across from Elizabeth.
“Hanley Paulson would have come in for coffee,” Ena said. “I don’t know that I would have wanted that young man in for coffee.”
Nick tore off a piece of bread and went into the living room. Ena was knitting. Elizabeth was reading. He thought that he might as well get the plane that night for California. He got up to answer the phone, hoping it was Ilena, but Elizabeth got up more quickly than he, and she went into the dining room and picked it up. She spoke quietly, and he could only catch a few words of what she said. Since Ena could hear no better than he could, he did not think she was crying because the phone calls expressing sympathy about Wesley’s death made her remember. He felt certain that she was weeping because of the way things had worked out with Hanley Paulson’s son. It was the first time he had ever seen Ena cry. She kept her head bent and sniffed a little. Elizabeth was on the phone a long while, and after a few deep sniffs Ena finally raised her head.
“How do your parents like Scottsdale, Nickie?” she said.
“They like it,” he said. “They always wanted to get away from these cold winters.”
“The winter is bad,” Ena said, “but the people have great character. At least they used to have great character.” She began to knit again. “I can’t imagine why Cal would leave that fabulous house in Essex for that monstrosity in East Hampton. You always liked it here, didn’t you, Nickie?”
“I was hoping it would snow,” he said. “But I guess with just my cowboy suit, I’m not really prepared for it.”
Uncle Cal came into the living room and asked Ena if he should tip Hanley Paulson’s son. Ena told him that she didn’t see why, but Nick could tell from Uncle Cal’s expression that he intended to do it anyway.
“He wants to know if it’s all right to take a few of the pumpkins,” Uncle Cal said. Before Ena answered, he said: “Of course I told him to help himself.”
“We’re going to play baseball,” Jason shouted, running into the living room. “And I’m first at bat, and you’re first base, and Nick can pitch.”
Olivia came in and sat down, still in her coat, shivering.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Uncle Cal said to Ena. “He’s just taking a few pumpkins we don’t have any use for.”
“Come on,” Jason said, tugging Nick’s arm. “Please.”
“Leave him alone if he doesn’t want to do what you want him to do, Jason,” Elizabeth said. She had just come back into the room.
“Who was that on the phone?” Ena said. She took a drink of bourbon. Nick noticed that she had put a sprig of mint in the glass.
“That person named Richard. He read something from a book called An Exaltation of Larks.” Elizabeth shook her head. “He’s the one you call The Poet, isn’t he, Cal? Wasn’t the man who called two days ago and read that long poem by Donne named Richard?”
“It’s not a practice I’ve ever heard of,” Ena said. “I think it was the same man.”
“Come on,” Jason whined to Elizabeth. “Aren’t you going to come out and play baseball?”
“I wasn’t invited.”
“You’re so touchy,” he said. “You’re invited. Come on.”
Nick and Elizabeth got their coats and walked out the back door into the cold. Benton had found a chewed-up baseball bat in the back of the garage, and a yellow tennis ball. As they got into position to play, Hanley Paulson’s son passed through the game area, carrying an armful of pumpkins. The back hatch of his car was open, and there were already about a dozen pumpkins inside. He closed the hatch and started the car and bumped down the driveway, raising his fist and shaking it from side to side when Uncle Cal waved goodbye.
Looking at his watch, Nick wondered if it could be possible that the boy had stacked all the wood and gathered the pumpkins in only half an hour. It was amazing what could be accomplished in half an hour.
The night before Nick left for L.A., there was a big dinner. Ena cooked it, saying that it was to make up for the Thanksgiving dinner she hadn’t felt like fixing. Everyone said that this dinner was very good and that on Thanksgiving no one had been hungry.
“I would have made a pumpkin pie, but the pumpkins disappeared,” Ena said, looking across the table at Uncle Cal.
“What do you mean?” he said. “The kid took two or three pumpkins. There must be a dozen left out there.”
“He took all the pumpkins,” Ena said.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Uncle Cal said. “Where’s the flashlight? I’ll go out and get you a pumpkin.”
Uncle Cal and Ena were both drunk. She had not wanted to make a pie, and he did not want to go outside in the cold to shine a flashlight into the pumpkin patch.
“I was mistaken,” Ena said finally. “I thought you had given him all the pumpkins.”
“He got them himself,” Uncle Cal said. “I didn’t give him anything. I let him round them up.” He cut into his roast beef. “He was just a kid,” he said.
“Olivia hasn’t touched her roast beef,” Ena said.
“You talk about me as though I’m not here,” Olivia said.
“What does she mean?” Ena said.
“I mean that you don’t address me directly. You talk about me, as though I’m not here.”
“I realize that you are here,” Ena said.
“I’m enjoying this roast beef,” Uncle Cal said. “If Morris could see me now, he’d die. Morris is my decorator. Doesn’t eat meat. Talks about it all the time, though, so that you’d think there were plates of meat all over reminding him about how much meat there was in the world.”
“Your decorator,” Olivia said.
“Yes?” Uncle Cal said.
“Don’t be pissy,” Benton said.
“I don’t think anybody even remembers why we’re here. It seems to me that this is just another family gathering where everybody lolls around by the fireplace and drinks.” Olivia took a sip of her wine. Nick winced, because he had seen her taking Valium in the kitchen before dinner.
“That’s uncivilized,” Ena said.
“This is uncivilized,” Olivia said.
Nick had expected one of them—probably Olivia—to begin crying. But it was Jason who began to cry, and who ran from the table.
Elizabeth had left the table to go after Jason, and Benton had followed her upstairs without saying anything else to Olivia.
“You said what you thought,” Uncle Cal said to Olivia. “Nothing wrong with that.”
Olivia got up and stalked away from the table.
“She did what she felt like doing,” Uncle Cal said to Ena. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“Oh, nothing’s wrong with anything, is it?” Ena said to Cal.
“My heart,” he said. “You should see that last EKG. Looked like an ant’s-eye view of the Himalayas, where there should have been a pretty straight line. Of course you have a straight line, straight as a piece of string, you’re dead. It should have been bumpy, I mean—but not like it was.”
“Then what are you doing yoga for?” Ena said. “You’ll kill yourself twisting into all those stupid positions.”
“Probably going to be dead anyway,” Uncle Cal said, tapping his pocket.
“Stop being morose,” Ena said.
“Might stop being anything,” Cal said.
“Stop worrying about your health,” Ena said. “It’s what’s in the cards. Wesley was a young man, and he drowned.”
“That was an accident,” Uncle Cal said. “An accident.”
“It wasn’t any accident,” Olivia hollered from the living room.
“It was,” Elizabeth said. She had come downstairs again, and she looked like she was about to murder somebody.
“Elizabeth—” Nick said.
Elizabeth sat down and smoothed her skirt and smiled to show that she was all right, calm and all right. Then she began to cry.
Nick got up and put his arm around her, sitting on his heels and crouching by her chair. He said her name again, but it didn’t do any good. It hadn’t done any good the night before, either, in the motel room.
Upstairs, Jason was pretending to be a baby. Benton had gotten him into his pajamas and had taken the sheet from the bed and was holding Jason, sheet thrown around him like a huge poncho, facing the window. Jason was afraid, and he was trying to pretend that it was animals he was afraid of. He wanted to know if there were bears in the woods. “Not around here,” Benton said. Fox, then? Maybe—“but they don’t attack people. Maybe none around here, anyway.” Jason wanted to know where all the animals came from.
“You know where they came from. You know about evolution.”
“I don’t know,” Jason said. “Tell me.”
“Tell you the whole history of evolution? You think I went to school yesterday?”
“Tell me something,” Jason said.
Benton told him this fact of evolution: that one day dinosaurs shook off their scales and sucked in their breath until they became much smaller. This caused the dinosaurs’ brains to pop through their skulls. The brains were called antlers, and the dinosaurs deer. That was why deer had such sad eyes, Benton told Jason—because they were once something else.