“Honey,” Stefan says patiently, “you’re not supposed to begin questions by saying, ‘You know what?’ The person you’re speaking to couldn’t possibly know what, if you haven’t asked the question yet.”
She puts on a serious face. “How many kidneys do I have?” she says.
“Two,” he says. “Why?”
“That’s what I thought,” she says. “But if you have only one, you can still live, right?”
“Yes,” he says. “Do you know someone at school who has only one kidney?”
“You know what?” she says.
“I don’t know what because you haven’t told me yet, or asked me a question,” Stefan says. He looks down reflexively to see if her shoelaces need to be tied, though she has worn red loafers for a month. They are walking across the parking lot, headed for the Safeway. He will buy whatever is time-saving: boneless chicken; stew beef, already cut into irregular little squares and triangles; bottled fruit juice instead of concentrate.
“The fact is,” she says, with her still-serious face, “somebody in my class saw a movie about kidneys, and he told us all about it. And we’re supposed to decide if we’d give a kidney if it might save somebody’s life.”
“A movie about kidneys?”
“But if they’re damaged, they’re no good. I think you have to get them from someone in your family.”
“Was this movie shown at school?”
The women around him, pulling shopping carts out of long interlocked lines of carts, head into the store zombie-eyed. They avoid each other by inches, as if governed by radar.
“Bobby Tompkins saw the movie,” Julie says. “He brought the box to school.”
“The box?”
“The box the movie came in. In the movie somebody was dying, but she got a kidney, but I think she died anyway.”
The tomatoes are unripe. The avocados are hard. He picks up a bag of apples. Above them is a cardboard sign lettered ALAR FREE. He passes a display of white-tipped strawberries. He lifts a half gallon of orange juice out of a tray filled with melting ice chips.
“Daddy,” she says, “our bunny at school died. Mrs. Angawa had us write notes of sympathy to its mother, the fourth-grade rabbit.”
“Oh,” he says. “I’m sorry to hear that. You wrote sympathy notes?”
“You know what?” she says.
He does not correct her. He has decided on a rule. A rule stated silently to himself, so he will keep his sanity: attempt to educate the child no more than twice on one subject in one day’s time.
“What?” he says.
“When the notes of sympathy got delivered to the bunny’s mother,” she says, “the two people who did the math problem first got to deliver them.”
“That’s good,” he says. Oreos are on sale. A tower of Oreos. He likes them as much as rabbits like carrots, but he’s watching his weight.
“Mrs. Angawa saw the movie Bobby Tompkins saw,” Julie says. “She said we didn’t have to write the mother in the movie—the mother’s daughter died, I think—because we didn’t know the mother or the daughter.”
“That’s right,” he says. “You certainly can’t spend your life writing letters.”
“But Daddy,” she says, “the janitor’s brother died and that’s why the janitor’s not at school. We have to put our trash in a bag at the end of the day, and Mrs. Angawa ties it up. When the janitor gets back, he’ll take the trash away.”
“The janitor’s brother?” he says. He wheels backward and puts a package of Oreos in the cart.
She nods solemnly. “We all signed a letter to the janitor saying we were sorry his brother died. He lived with his brother. I don’t think they have any mother and father.”
“At some point they had to have a mother and father,” Stefan says. “Everybody has a mother and father. That’s the only way we can be here. The mother and father might be dead, but they had to have a mother and father.”
“Then why did the brothers live together?”
“The janitor and his brother?” he says. “Oh, I don’t know. People have roommates who aren’t family members, too. It costs a lot to live alone.”
“Mrs. Angawa and Mr. Angawa had the janitor come to dinner, and Mrs. Angawa said he cried because his brother was dead.”
“I don’t see why she had to go into it with you,” he says.
“She said the janitor was very sad.”
“Well, I think we just have to carry on. There are many times when we feel sad, but we just have to carry on. You watch: the janitor will come back to school.”
“We have three bags of trash,” she says.
This makes him laugh.
“What’s funny?” she says.
He puts hamburger patties, already shaped, into the cart.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I wasn’t laughing at you. I was remembering living in New York when there was a garbage strike. There were mountains of trash. It was a crisis. It was like that book I used to read you, about the day all the tadpoles turned into frogs and the whole lake turned from blue to green.”
“That was a baby book,” she says.
He puts a quart of milk in the cart. They both look at a woman putting a container of Parmesan cheese on top of a container of cottage cheese and walking away.
“Lucy played kidney with Bobby Tompkins,” Julie says.
“What?” he says, feeling his heart miss a beat.
“He operated on himself and gave her his kidney.”
He grips the shopping cart tightly. The woman who put the Parmesan cheese on the wrong shelf is examining the label on a bottle of wine. She shakes the bottle a few times, then puts the bottle on the floor and walks away.
“Did that game upset Lucy?” he says, trying to keep his voice even.
“She said he just wanted to tickle.”
He puts his hands on each side of his body. “This is where the kidneys are,” he says. “Is this where Bobby Tompkins put the kidney he gave her?”
“She said he tickled her here,” Julie says, putting her right hand under her left armpit. “And you know what else, Daddy? He said he could make boogers grow there.”
“Boys are all wound up at that age,” Stefan says vaguely. He sighs, feeling sure an awful moment has passed.
“Bobby Tompkins’s mother spanked him right in front of us at school, Daddy, when she came to pick him up and he had the scar on his forehead from doing brain surgery.”
“Brain surgery?” he says, heading toward the checkout line for twelve items or less.
“He drew on his forehead with a Magic Marker and pretended he took his brain out and threw it at Lucy,” Julie says. “He bothers her. She told Mrs. Angawa, too.”
“Be glad he didn’t really have brain surgery,” he says. “Mrs. Angawa would have had you all writing letters to him in the hospital.”
“Why?” she says. “Because she likes Bobby Tompkins?”
“No. Because she likes to stay on top of situations. It’s like she’s teaching etiquette, instead of running a first-grade class.”
“What’s etiquette?”
He picks up a tabloid and thumbs through. There is an article about a space alien found in a jar of mayonnaise.
“I know you like Mrs. Angawa very much,” he says, “but I’m a little skeptical about what she has you doing all day. You do read books, too, don’t you?”
“Daddy,” she says, sighing with exasperation. “It’s school.”
She sounds like his wife, saying, “Stefan, it’s work.” Spraying on Chanel No. 5 and back-combing her hair, her face coming so close to the mirror she gets cross-eyed. “You think I like dressing in a suit every day?” she says. Her high heels cost one hundred dollars. Her earrings are quarter-carat diamonds. “Without a few perks, I’d die,” she says, fluffing her hair away from her ears and spritzing with spray. “As it is, I don’t know how long I can go on with this.”
Similarly, she had doubted whether they should marry. And whether, even if they did, she should give birth to the baby she was carrying. At the end of the first year, she didn’t know if she should stay in the marriage. At the end of the second year, he quit his job, set up a home office, and let her go out to become the primary income earner. For quite a while, things seemed better. She was promoted, then moved from one agency to another. Along the way, she acquired the diamond earrings and began to dab powder and rouge on her face every morning, then pat most of it off with little cotton pads. It was her habit to spray her face, once, with an Evian mister. Just that morning, when cleaning the bathroom counter, he had picked up the little metal mister and looked at it. First he leaned toward the mirror. Then he moved his head back a few inches and looked at his own earlobes. He even felt them, with his thumb and first finger. He looked down at his running shoes. He shook the sprayer lightly, closed his eyes, and pushed down on the top. He could not have been more surprised if a fire hose had been trained on his face. The sensation was so sensual, the feeling so sybaritic, he winced. He opened his eyes, startled, expecting to see another person in the mirror: someone younger, handsomer, loved. In that second, it became absolutely clear that he was entirely alone. The house quiet, his daughter in school, his wife at work. And it was as if all the tears he never allowed himself to cry had just appeared, in minuscule form, to hit him in the face.
“Sir?” the cashier says. “Did you get the bananas weighed?”
He shakes his head no, guiltily. He forgot. But as she pivots to take them to be weighed herself, he thinks: Maybe she likes the diversion; maybe she likes the few seconds of freedom from standing and facing the cash register.
“You’re not supposed to stare,” Julie says.
She is right; he was staring after the checkout girl.
“Francine,” Stefan says, sliding into his side of the bed, “let me ask you something. I’m not looking for a fight, I just want to ask you something.”
“What do you want to ask me?” she says. He can hear the suspicion in her voice. Her hair is pulled back in a fabric-covered rubber band. She has removed the diamond studs from her ears. She looks about twenty-five. She is ten years older than that.
“Believe me when I say I don’t care what you do with your money,” he says. “But don’t you think it’s strange you have to spend so much on makeup and jewelry and clothes to get a job done? Doesn’t it seem a little expensive to you?”
“Everybody who works where I work is extremely intelligent,” she says. “Personal style is what gets noticed. I don’t dress that way in order to get the job done. I dress that way and look that way in order to get promoted. One more promotion is the credential I need to get out of there.”
He shifts onto his elbow. “You’re going to leave this job too?” he says.
“I could make ten thousand dollars more, the next time I jump ship. As long as I’m working for money, I might as well work for real money, right?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “We have enough money, don’t we?”
“What I’m saying,” she says, “is that if I can make more money for doing the same kind of work, I ought to go ahead and make it, shouldn’t I?”
He bites his bottom lip, thinking. “Will there come a time when you’ve risen high enough that you can brush your hair and just put on a dress to go to work?”
She laughs one little laugh. “What’s your sudden concern with fashion?”
“It isn’t a concern with fashion. It’s concern because you get up earlier than you used to so you can use the curling iron on your hair and put on makeup.”
“I’m quiet,” she says. “I don’t disturb you.”
Before she goes to bed, she grinds the coffee beans and leaves the powder in the container until morning. She slips out of bed on the first bing of the alarm. She showers, instead of drawing a bath. It is true she makes no noise. It was a long time before he realized she was spending so much time getting ready for work in the morning.
“But do you like it or hate it?” he says. “Spending that much time on your appearance is new to you. What’s made you do it?”
“I think I actually spend about the same amount of time. For example—since you’re so interested—I’ve started to use a personal shopper to select my clothes, which saves me many hours every month. If you factor that in, getting up at six-thirty instead of seven sort of evens out.”
“A personal shopper?”
She sighs. “I don’t flaunt myself. I don’t go to bed with people to move up the ladder. I just make sure I’m noticed. I have no less respect for myself for taking the time to make sure I’m noticed as I should be.”
“Francine,” he says.
“You love to be a little exasperated with me,” she says. “Think about it. Isn’t that the nature of the attraction?”
“There are different kinds of exasperation,” he says. “Not being willing to marry the father of your child, even though you admit he’s the love of your life and you’re three months pregnant—Francine, I don’t know if I’d even call what I felt then simple exasperation. It seemed like you were intent on punishing both of us.”
“Why do we always have to go back to that? That was years ago. We’re married. We have the child. Whatever I thought, I decided to do what you said, didn’t I?”
“Are you sorry you did it?”
“Stefan, this all happened years ago. The thing I love about you is that our problems always get worked out. It was a problem that I didn’t like staying home with Julie, and we found a way to adjust our lives, didn’t we? As far as I can tell—when you’re not worrying because I put on makeup before I go out—you’ve managed to run your business quite effectively out of the house, and anyone can see that Julie has prospered.”
“And that’s that?”
“What’s what? I thought you weren’t looking for a fight.”
“I’m not. I’m wondering what you felt, when you were so reluctant to marry me.”
“It might have been simple fear of something new, did you ever think of that? Look: I love you. You’re my husband. It would have been a tragedy if we hadn’t had that child. I was wrong and you were right.”
“Do you really mean that, or are you just saying that?”
“I mean it,” she says. “Do you believe anything I tell you? Sometimes it seems like you don’t, which doesn’t make answering your questions a particular pleasure.”
“I wasn’t disputing you,” he says. “I thought maybe we could have a discussion.”
“You thought I’d like to try to remember how I felt six years ago, when we didn’t have enough money between us for anything but a Saturday night pizza? When I woke up every morning with my head spinning? I thought it was a gas leak. A gas leak in that sad little apartment you had on Sixteenth Street. Remember the stewardesses coming in late at night, swallowing aspirin in the elevator, stepping out of their shoes, those baggage carts they were always pulling in and pulling out? It was like those people were damned souls in hell, Stefan. And they were all around us in that building, along with the jackhammer that started at the crack of dawn. I thought what was around me was making me sick. I never thought for a minute I was pregnant.”
He listens, absolutely stunned. Maybe she had mentioned the stewardesses once or twice, but he had no idea they had affected her that way. He could remember her crying on the mattress on the floor—that was what he had, instead of a bed—in fact, he could even remember exactly what she had said the night of the day she found out she was pregnant. He could not remember what he had said to her—something to try to convince her that this was not the end of the world, it was far from the end of the world—but he could remember her turning to him, see the lines mashed on her face by the sheets, her tearstained cheeks, what she said: “You’re right, I’m kind. I’m kind, but I’m not maternal. There’s all the difference in the world between being kind and being maternal.”
Now she was on her side, her face again turned away from him. Her hair had some curl in it, but it looked entirely different from the way it would look in the morning. He took a lax little curl in his hand and kissed the ends of her hair. She put her hand over his. She had told the truth: she was not maternal, but she was kind.
Because Francine is working late—the computers have been down half the morning, so she is working frantically in order to finish a presentation she must make the following day—Stefan goes alone to the meeting with Mrs. Angawa.
It is a cold January day, the sky as gray as cardboard. Big wet snowflakes float around the car, but turn to water the second they hit the windshield. The day before, he had almost kept Julie home, but at the last minute she decided she wanted to go to school because she missed the new bunny. He hopes this bunny has a long and happy life. All it has to do is live until Easter, and it will be given to children at the orphanage. Why is it his daughter’s days seem so tinged with sadness? Has he just forgotten? Was he also, at her age, aware of people dying, and animals dying? Has he just forgotten?
He parks in the plowed lot of the small grocery store on the corner just past the school. Better that than try to parallel park and get stuck in the ice. He ignores the sign that says parking is for customers only, plunges his hands in his pockets. As several fingers go through a tear in the bottom of one pocket, he is suddenly reminded of the straw finger-grips that were so popular when he was Julie’s age: you’d put one finger from each hand in opposite ends and pull, which would tighten the straw and make it impossible to withdraw either finger. You had to keep pulling, though, or the straw would go lax and your fingers would fall out. Such simple games then. A simpler time. No one would have thought to lock up his bike when he went into a store.
In October he and Francine went to Parents’ Night. He remembers the small corridor leading to Mrs. Angawa’s classroom, walks slowly to see if Julie’s name is signed to any of the crayoned pictures lining one wall.
“I’m very pleased to see you,” Mrs. Angawa says, springing up from her desk when he walks into the room. She walks toward him so quickly he fears they may collide. She takes his outstretched hand and shakes it. Since he stopped working, he rarely sees enthusiastic people.
She sits down, gesturing to the wooden chair beside her desk. There is a cushion on the chair. He settles himself on Mt. Fuji.
“I write you notes every month, but one-way communication is no good. If parents come to see me, many things may come up,” Mrs. Angawa says, cupping her hands over her knees.
“Of course,” he says. He can hardly argue with the logic of this. When Mrs. Angawa says nothing, but searches his face, Stefan says, “Every day I hear what Mrs. Angawa thinks. You’ve really impressed Julie. We’re very happy with her progress with reading and spelling, too.”
“Well, sure, she’s a very good speller.” Mrs. Angawa moves her chair back from her desk and crosses her legs.
“Everything is fine as far as we’re concerned. I suppose that since you haven’t said anything in your notes that concerns us, we might not have much to go over,” Stefan says.
“I don’t write everything in my notes,” Mrs. Angawa says. “For instance, we never grade children your daughter’s age. We’re just supposed to make remarks. Well, there are not too many remarks to make when a child is as good a student as your daughter, which is why I have said in my notes that maybe she seems just a little shy.”
“I think she is shy. She’s a very serious child. Also, she’s an only child. I think she’s used to … quiet.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Angawa says. “It’s not so noisy in here. I tell them to pipe down if there’s any unnecessary noise. I’m not a softie.”
“No, of course not,” he says. “I wasn’t being critical, at all. I just wanted to make the point that Julie may be quiet because she’s used to quite a bit of quiet at home.” He uncrosses his legs, shifts in the chair again. “I don’t mean that we don’t talk,” he says. “In fact, the other day in the store she had such a monologue going she could have been on stage.”
“She doesn’t say anything, and then it all comes out in a rush!” Mrs. Angawa says.
“You mean it’s that way in school? Is that a problem?”
“As long as someone says what she has to say, it’s not a problem as far as I’m concerned.”
“But as far as others are concerned?”
“Maybe she bores the boys a bit when she talks for a long time.”
He laughs uncomfortably. “Are you telling me something about her behavior, or—”
“Or something about boys? I can certainly tell you that boys at this age are not developmentally equal to the girls. And my personal belief? That there must be tolerance for the way people choose to express themselves.”
“Then she doesn’t go on too much? You’re not saying that she, you know, sounds like she’s giving a monologue?”
“You used that word before,” Mrs. Angawa says. “I don’t think of it as a monologue, I just think her thoughts are kept silent longer than most people would keep their thoughts to themselves, and they all come tumbling out.”
“This isn’t the way any other child expresses herself?”
“But aside from—aside from boring some of the boys when she speaks, do you consider it a problem that …”
“Sure, maybe for her.”
“Do people tell her to shut up, or something?”
“In my classroom? I teach them all to be polite. No one in this classroom would tell anyone else in this classroom to shut up. Please don’t worry about that. This is a small matter. I only bring it up because you may want to think about what causes Julie’s way of speaking.”
“Sometimes my wife speaks at great length,” he says. “The other night she wouldn’t really converse with me, even though I kept trying. She wasn’t refusing to answer, but we weren’t on the same wavelength. I—this doesn’t seem to the point. What I started to say is that often my wife comes out with something that’s quite long in the telling. Maybe Julie gets it from her.”
“There! Now we know what that’s about!” Mrs. Angawa says.
“But my wife—my wife isn’t there that much. I don’t mean that she’s never home, but my wife works, and I stay with Julie, and I’m not entirely sure …”
“They’re all great mimics,” Mrs. Angawa says. “Julie sees her mother doing that, she mimics her.” Mrs. Angawa opens a small notebook on her desk and flips a few pages. “Julie is very interested in good spelling. She is eager to learn new words. It is very good that she likes writing very much.” She closes the book. “What would we do if she wanted to talk, but she didn’t want to write? This is a problem I have with two of the students at the present moment.”
“Bobby Tompkins?” he says, hoping to change the subject for a moment. “I understand he’s something of a problem.”
“To your daughter?”
“No. To the class in general. I gather he Magic Markered his forehead to perform brain surgery recently.”
Mrs. Angawa looks surprised. “Is that why he did it?” she says. “I thought it might have been an accident. You don’t know the number of times each day someone stabs himself with a pencil, purely by accident. I didn’t know that he was performing brain surgery. I know that he whispered to your daughter, though. He seems to rely on your daughter. He is a little dependent. He does things to get attention, and I don’t think it’s so bad that sometimes he manages to get that attention.”
“And what about—what about the movie about a kidney transplant, or whatever it was?”
“He brings up inappropriate things at Show and Tell. He watched an adult movie, Steel Magnolias, and it upset him very much. He needed to talk about it the next day, and several children, including your daughter, became fascinated. I had to take several minutes to talk about organ transplants, to expand the topic a little and try to dispel their fears.” Mrs. Angawa opens her desk drawer. “By the way,” she says, “your daughter did not want her picture hung in the hallway, because she is shy, but I want to show it to you, because it is quite good. The students who feel they do not want their work displayed, for whatever reason, are never subjected to embarrassment.” She flips through several drawings before carefully extracting Julie’s.
It is a scene of mountains and a lake. Not until he breathes a sigh of relief does he realize that he had braced himself to see something disturbing.
On the way out, after shaking Mrs. Angawa’s hand, he turns suddenly, much to his own surprise, and asks where the rabbit is. “Julie talks about the rabbit so much, I feel it’s a member of the family,” he says.
“Oh, yes, bunny has really captured her imagination,” Mrs. Angawa says. “Now promise me you will believe me. The streetlights disturb bunny at night, so the janitor advised me to put the cage in the coat closet. I don’t want you to think I’m cruel to a bunny! First thing in the morning, I come in and take him out and put his cage in the nice sunshine. These days, everybody is always on the lookout for cruelty. As every child can tell you, I cried and cried when the previous bunny died. What they don’t know is that I’ve had nightmares that the same thing may happen to this one. Every morning I hurry in, praying that bunny is fine.”
She opens the door. The rabbit is in a large cage, stretched out by a water dish.
“Pretty bunny, we will all see you tomorrow,” Mrs. Angawa says, making kissing noises. She closes the closet again. “One night after the first bunny died I was so upset I had a premonition of this bunny’s death. My husband and I had been to the movies, and we ran into the school janitor there. I told him how worried I was, and all three of us went to the school then and there—I was so sure there was trouble with bunny. There the three of us were, ten-thirty P.M., looking at a sleeping bunny. My husband was in an internment camp during the Second World War. He thinks that everything you count on is sure to go wrong, but he has found his opposite in me, because I believe things will often change for the better. This bunny is going to be all right. The other one must have had a mysterious illness.”
He looks behind him, at the closed closet door.
“Mr. McKee, the janitor, lives in the apartment building next to ours,” she says. “He was also in the Second World War, stationed in the Philippines. All he talks about are the misadventures on the boat taking the men to the Philippines. Once there, they liked to give the monkeys cans of beer so they would swing drunk through the trees.”
He frowns, wondering what she could be getting at.
“Usually the people who make you stop and listen to a story are the ones who deliver their story with a little humor. That’s all right, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the real story being told. With Mr. McKee, I have been waiting the ten-plus years I’ve known him to hear the real story of what he did and what he saw during the war.”
“I see,” Stefan says. Every time the minute hand moves, the clock ticks loudly. The odor of chalk clings to the building like cigarette smoke in a bar.
“I believe that sometimes you have to be patient and listen for a long time before you hear the true story,” Mrs. Angawa says. “People talk quite a lot, but you often have to wait for their true stories. To be more specific, I think that it is all right to let Julie go on a bit. Eventually we will hear stories beneath those stories.”
When he met Francine, it was spring. She was taking acting classes at night and selling ladies’ nightwear at Lord & Taylor during the day. One of the stockbrokers at the company where Stefan worked was married to a dancer. The man, Bryant Heppelson, insisted that the one thing Stefan must absolutely take his word on was that he had met the most amazingly talented, beautiful woman he had encountered since he fell in love with Melly when they were both fourteen. Not only must he take his word, but he must experience her—at dinner at their apartment. Stefan had nothing better to do on Saturday night, so he went.
Francine and Melly (Melly was Bryant’s wife) had met through an ad posted on the bulletin board at the building in Brooklyn where Melly studied dance and Francine went to acting classes. Melly had a car in the city—an unimaginable thing!—and wanted to transport people to Brooklyn, partly for the extra cash and partly because she was afraid to drive alone at night. In the year they had been shuttling back and forth, the two women had grown as close as sisters.
During dinner it came out that Francine had grown up in the Midwest. She had gone to college on a scholarship. When Bryant joked about her ruthless ambition, she had asked whether pairing that adjective with the word “ambition” wasn’t a rather embarrassing reflex some men had. From the kitchen, Melly hollered out that with Francine’s talent, it was a good thing she took herself seriously.
Melly and Bryant lived in a basement apartment in the Village, and even though it was April, it stayed damp and cool. A portable heater was plugged in and sat angled out from the corner, blowing a stream of warm air over them as they sat in butterfly chairs covered with black canvas. It was before people began to get rid of their graduate school furniture, though by then the framed Peter Max posters were usually leaned against a closet wall, or steam-puckered from having been hung in the bathroom.
He could remember talk about dancers’ foot injuries—asking how the tape was used, whether permanent damage couldn’t be done by dancing in spite of pain. Some analogy was made by either Francine or Melly between binding one’s feet to dance and acting a painful scene that pertained to your own life. With more wine came more wild comparisons. Silly toasts were made by one person to some other person’s poorly paraphrased ideas. The conversation alternated, as so many conversations seemed to, outside the workplace, between lofty idealism and a mockery of that idealism that was meant to sound very pragmatic, very of-the-world and of-the-moment. The half-gallon bottles of Gallo Hearty Burgundy from grad school parties had disappeared, replaced by bottles of muscadet or cabernet. At some point between dinner and dessert a bottle of California champagne materialized in a silver champagne bucket. Melly shook her head, blushing and saying it was a wedding present she had tried to return, but it had been given to them without a box. When Francine’s best friend had been married, Francine said, she and her husband had returned all their wedding presents and, with the cash, bought toys for the children of their friends and relatives. They all shook their heads about hippie foolishness. A long story was told by Melly about twin girls who had lived next door to her parents in San Francisco, who were having an LSD party the night their parents came back early, unexpectedly, from Lourdes, carrying in their still-dying brother. Bryant brought the conversation back to earth by saying that as a child he had been hospitalized with meningitis, and that anyone forced to take Percodan at age five and hallucinate night and day would sooner sign up for the Army than ingest a psychedelic drug. Melly raised an eyebrow, and asked why he hadn’t served in the Army. “Because of my homosexuality,” he said. “That and not bathing or sleeping for three days before the physical.”
It was decided that because Francine’s brother was borrowing Melly’s car the next morning, it would be easiest for Francine to drive Stefan home and keep the car. Since moving to New York from Massachusetts, Stefan had not been in a private car, and sitting in the passenger’s seat, he felt almost loving about it. He leaned back and closed his eyes.
“I’m pretty drunk, too,” Francine said.
He opened his eyes, startled more that she had seen him in an inexplicable near-reverie than by what she had said. He offered to drive. She hesitated only a moment before agreeing, but asked him not to tell Melly she had turned over the keys.
“You don’t think Melly would trust me to drive?”
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s that Melly thinks I’m so competent.”
“I don’t think they were trying to get us to function at our very best by serving three bottles of wine and champagne,” he said.
“She was trying to make it festive, so you’d like me.”
“What?” he said. He had not turned on the ignition. They were in an outdoor parking lot, around the corner from Melly and Bryant’s apartment. She had opened the padlocked gate with a key; the gate was swung back, so the car could exit. Barbed wire coiled around the top of the ten-foot fence. He thought of all the barbed wire he had seen in war movies—except for war movies, and in cities, he had never seen barbed wire—and then he thought that he, too, had lied his way out of the war, though no one had asked, and that at this very moment there was something ironic about two well-dressed, up-and-coming young people sitting in a parking lot in New York City, looking as if they’d been captured as prisoners of war.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Francine said. “There was somebody in acting class, for a while, but he was interested in somebody else. Somebody who lived in L.A. Not long after I met him, he went to L.A., saying he might come back a married man, but he came back alone. I thought: Oh, now it can work out between the two of us. At the end of that week I was paired with him in a scene. It was Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead. I was Rosencrantz. We stood on the teacher’s sweatshirt, which was the boat, and as we talked, his eyes moved one way and mine moved another. I could feel him really, truly drifting away from me. His voice went dead. Everything I said, by comparison, seemed chatty. He was stealing the scene by being absolutely monotonal. People were riveted. His eyes really were on the horizon. He was really seeing something. He just happened to be remembering his lines while he looked at whatever it was. After class some of us went out for coffee, but he didn’t come along. He said to me, ‘I guess I just found out I don’t love you, either.’ He never came back to acting class. He made it to Off Broadway, but he never came back to that acting class.”
As she spoke, a man wearing a torn jacket and carrying a bottle wandered into the parking area. For a few moments he seemed shaky on his feet, and confused. Then he squinted at them in the car and took a few steps toward them. He stopped. He bent and made a sweeping motion with his arm. Then he straightened up and took a drink from the bottle, turned, and walked almost soberly out of the fenced-off parking area. He stood beside the door and waited while Stefan started the ignition, put the car in gear, and rolled out the gate. “It’s okay; he’s just a harmless drunk,” he said. Intent on not making eye contact with the drunk, he got out quickly, swung the gate closed, and padlocked it, keeping his head averted.
“You’re a lucky man,” the drunk said. His words came out clearly. So clearly that Stefan looked at him, surprised.
The drunk shrugged. “Nothing more I can tell you,” he said. Then he walked away, his head held a little too archly to convey the impression that he was really strutting off elegantly, yet still managing a convincing imitation of a sober man.
Stefan stood there, certain that the man would turn around. He would want money, or he would need, suddenly, to insult him. He might have a knife, and threaten him. He would certainly do something.
He did not. Instead, he turned the corner and disappeared. Stefan’s sudden calm wasn’t because of the man’s disappearance, though; it was because while he was focused on one problem, another problem had come into his mind and had been instantly solved.
When he got back in the car, he would simply kiss her. That was the most appropriate response to her story.
Late in the afternoon, in February, the phone rings. Francine is at a public phone, murmuring quietly in case anyone passing by might overhear. She has gotten the promotion. Much sooner than she expected, she was called into the boss’s office and commended for the presentations she had made that month. She had been responsible for nabbing one particularly lucrative new client. No doubt about it; the new client said point-blank that he had chosen them because of Francine’s powers of persuasion. She does a British accent when she whispers “pahs of p’suasion.” She giggles, and he hears a tap-tap-tap. Though she spends much of the day working on a computer, her Mont Blanc fountain pen is her good luck charm. She thinks with it in her hand, taps it when she is considering a new idea.
A double entendre? he wonders. Surely she also realizes that the phrase “powers of persuasion” has a sexual ring. But the tittering is all little-girl giggling. Her voice gets even quieter. “This is something I didn’t tell you,” she says. “They’ve given me a ten-thousand-dollar raise—well, a five-thousand-dollar bonus and a five-thousand-dollar raise, but if I stay on course, they’ll do the same next year. Stefan, I didn’t tell you that if I’d had to take the other job, it would have involved travel. Now I can stay right where I am and be well rewarded for doing it. Isn’t it the best luck? Sweetheart, aren’t you happy?”
“I’m very happy,” he says, more relieved than happy. She was going to travel? What would that have meant?
“What about getting a sitter so we can go out tonight to some expensive restaurant? I’ll buy us Dom Pérignon.”
Tap-tap-tap.
He has a thought. “What about doing something that’s fun?” he says. “You don’t want to sit around some restaurant for hours all dressed up, do you? I mean, if that’s what you want, I would certainly like to host the celebration. But I thought maybe the two of us could do something else …”
No more tapping of the pen.
“What did you have in mind?” she says cautiously.
“Nothing in particular, but let me think a minute. Let’s see if we can’t come up with something that might be amusing. Something a little more like childish good fun.”
“I suppose you’re going to say you want to go bowling,” she says.
“Jesus!” he says. “That’s perfect. Not bowling, of course, but what about going ice-skating? First we could have a bottle of Dom Pérignon, and then we could go ice-skating.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“Why not?” he says. “We’re always saying we don’t want to get stuck in roles. What do you say we go to that weird new bar that’s all glass and neon—the one we passed by this weekend, that you said looked super-hip. We’ll go there first and put down a bottle of champagne.”
“I can lace your skates and look up your skirt,” he says.
She laughs. An I-don’t-care-if-I’m-overheard laugh. “Seriously?” she whispers.
“It wasn’t exactly back in the Stone Age when we used to have fun,” he says. “The softball team at your brother’s place in the Hamptons was only the summer before last. You were a fierce first baseman. You can skate, can’t you?”
More giggling. “We’ll see who can outskate whom,” she says.
“Yeah, well, after you’ve put away half a bottle of champagne, then we’ll see if your pronouns are so exact.”
“What’s gotten into you?” she says.
“I’m happy for you. I agree: we should celebrate. I’ll get a sitter and we can go out and skate until the place closes down.”
He hangs up and flips through a notepad on the counter. Then the thought comes to him that perhaps Julie could spend the night at Cassie’s house, where he dropped her off to play after school. Cassie’s mother was nice enough. What problem could it be to add one six-year-old girl to a house of four children for one night’s sleepover?
He calls, and Gennine says that of course Julie can stay. He has to promise that if she wants to come home in the middle of the night, though, he will drive there to pick her up. She absolutely refuses to drive children home in the middle of the night.
He speaks to Julie, who is delighted with the plan. She is out of breath, in a hurry to get back to whatever she was doing.
Gennine takes the phone back. She asks what time he will be by in the morning, or whether she should drive both girls to school. He says he will be happy to round them up and drive them; he’ll come at ten after eight.
“If my husband ever extended himself in the least with our children, I think I’d faint,” she says good-naturedly. “I’ll be happy to take you up on your offer. If you don’t mind, I’ll have all of them pile into your car tomorrow.”
“No boys!” Cassie shrieks in the background. “They have to take the bus to school, Mommy.”
“She’s as mean to her brothers as they are to her.” Gennine sighs. “How I envy you for having only one child. How we all envy you for the way you’ve worked things out.”
It surprises him that anyone has given thought to his and Francine’s division of responsibility. When he first met Gennine, he was amused because she was something of a flirt, but what she has just said makes him revise his opinion. Perhaps it wasn’t that, but an openness in expressing her admiration for them, conveyed in constant smiles rather than by words.
He tells himself silently, as he often does, that what makes Francine happy makes him happy. Because that is certainly the way it should be, and if he doesn’t let envy or misgivings creep in, if his own problems don’t get tangled up with hers, he can simply share in her happiness.
Feeling almost elated—though he has to fight the thought that his high spirits are because he’s sure he can outskate her, rather than because he’s happy she got the promotion—he puts on a jacket, starts the car, and backs out of the driveway, heading off toward the shopping center. He looks at the empty passenger’s seat and wonders if Julie’s absence is what is making him feel suddenly younger. He clicks a Ziggy Marley tape into the tape deck—something he bought on impulse a month or so before, remembering Bryant Heppelson’s love of reggae—and lets the music transport him back to New York, to a time when he really was much younger. He squints in the strong afternoon sunlight, imagining he is Bryant driving all those hours to Vermont to sing his heart out in a garage band. At a red light he closes his eyes and conjures up Vermont: the road winding above Bristol Falls, the Middlebury ski area; all that green, and blue skies. But just as quickly he realizes that he is picturing the few parts of Vermont he has seen; he doesn’t even know where in Vermont Bryant traveled to. In fact, he’s out of touch with Bryant, except for the annual Christmas card exchange. Bryant and his wife moved to Connecticut the year before. Too much crime and unhappiness in the city to raise children there, he wrote on the card. In the picture he enclosed, Melly looked much the same, though she was flanked by two towheaded boys, three and four. Who could say where that hair came from, with Bryant’s brown hair and Melly’s hair its natural auburn, instead of the pale blond she used to dye it. The photograph had fluttered out of the card and landed on the rug, face up, and Francine had snatched it up as if it were some secret, then looked at it, puzzled, and said: “Oh yes. Of course. Of course they had a second child …” Then she had put the picture to her lips and kissed it.
At the shopping center, he parks and walks to the expensive lingerie store that recently opened. There is no one inside except a teenage clerk. He can read her mind, as he walks to a rack of panties and flips through.
Francine wears size five, and because so many are so pretty and he can’t decide, he selects three: black with appliquéd white lace hearts; a pair of sheer pink, with just a string through the crotch; white ones that would be prim except for the low-cut front, with tiny daisies embroidered there.
He pays cash and has the girl cut off the tags. He gives them to her to tear up and puts the pants in his pocket, knowing he’s shocking her. When Francine gets home, he will shock her, too, by giving her the pants. Or maybe he will wait until they are in the bar and have had a few sips of champagne, then pass them to her under the table and ask her to change into a pair in the ladies’ room.
In the skating rink he feels almost heady with the perfection of their marriage. In the wild circling of the ice-skating rink something shakes loose inside him—some fear, or fears, that he had been holding inside, that he suddenly sees he can just banish.
He finds that he doesn’t want to outskate her, but that he wants his arm around her waist; he feels as romantic, amid the flushfaced teenagers, as a figure in a Currier and Ives painting, gliding on a frozen lake with the most beautiful girl in the world. He says to her, making them both smile, that after one more turn around the rink, long scarves will suddenly materialize around their necks to float backward in the breeze. In his mind’s eye, they already exist in perfect miniature: a painting reduced to greeting-card size, or little figures in a snow dome, who appear to be in motion once the flurry of snow begins to sift down around them.
She had told him, in the bar, that she had a real bias against Brits; she had to force herself to act sanely in spite of her embarrassing prejudice, because to her they were always too pale, and stuffy, and stuck in their ways of thinking. She couldn’t believe he’d think she’d be receptive to Nigel Mawbry’s flirting.
They take a breather and drink Cokes from paper cups at the refreshment stand. An older couple, the man with white, wavy hair, his wife with a still-girlish figure, stand sipping hot chocolate from paper cups. There are one or two couples their age, Stefan realizes, once he’s out of the center of action, surveying it.
Francine’s nose is red. Little ringlets of hair lie plastered to her forehead. He touches the rim of his Coke cup to hers, and they both smile. “Maybe bowling would be fun, too,” she says. “I give you credit for coming up with a very good idea.”
“Need me to fix your skate laces?” he says, nodding his head toward one of the tables.
She swats his shoulder. “The place you got the panties,” she says. “Did the girl really blush when you put them into your pocket? How could you do such a thing?”
When she goes to the bathroom, he pretends he is going to follow her in. A teenage girl looks over her shoulder at him. He tells Francine about that, too, when she comes out.
“I remembered my old high school trick of putting my tube of lipstick in my brassiere,” she says, smacking her brightly painted red lips together. “It all comes back to me.”
“Let me see where it is,” he says, touching his fingertips to her breast and moving closer.
“Stop!” she says. “People will look!”
“I can still scandalize you,” he says. “That’s wonderful.”
“I can still kiss lipstick on your cheek and make both of us look foolish,” she says. “Better watch out.”
Again, they glide onto the ice. The music sounds like music from a carousel. She gives him a little hug before they start to gain speed. As they circle the rink, they begin to say which person they’re passing resembles which animal. The old man with white hair they saw before looks, in profile, exactly like a camel.
“That one’s Melanie Griffith!” Francine says, a little too loudly, as they whiz past.
“Melanie Griffith’s not an animal,” he says.
“I don’t care!” she says. “She does look just like Melanie Griffith.”
“She does look just like Melanie Grifith,” he echoes.
“She does,” Francine says.
“She does,” he says.
She bends forward as he lightly squeezes her ribs.
“I want to come skating all the time,” he says. “Agree, or I’ll never let go of you.”
“Who are you fooling? You know a good thing when you see it. You were never about to let me go. Kissing on the first date!”
“You provoked me.”
“Fucking on the first date,” she says.
“You asked me up. You were being provocative.”
She looks at him, the smile fading slightly. “Me?” she says. “Provocative?”
“The story you told,” he says.
“What story did I tell? About how boring it was to grow up in Illinois?”
He is panting. A wisp of hair flaps against his wet forehead.
“Not that,” he says. “The story about acting class. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.”
She frowns, slowing the pace. Her nose is bright red. Her cheeks are also flushed. “Oh, yes,” she says. “That’s right. That acting exercise. We were supposed to connect while not connecting. Actually, it was pretty easy material to do that with.”
“You were supposed to not connect?”
“I think so,” she says. “It was years ago.”
“It was something more provocative,” he says. “You said he had been your lover, and that doing the scene, you could feel him really moving away from you. Genuinely moving away.”
She shrugs. “He was my lover, if you call a couple of nights ‘my lover.’ But no: I think it was just that we did the scene very well. I think I was bragging.”
You were telling me that you felt very alone,” he says. “Wasn’t that the point of the story?”
“Subconsciously, it might have been. That would figure, wouldn’t it? That I’d think I was bragging, and you’d see that I was lonely?”
They are skating slowly. Melanie Griffith whizzes by, all smiles, her girlfriend in pigeon-toed pursuit. Their hair is so lacquered it doesn’t move at all. The girl in the rear wears a metal belt that clanks slightly as she makes the turn. He begins to notice that earrings dangle from some of the skaters’ ears, that many of the men have their jaw set a particular way.
“It wasn’t a come-on?” he says. “It seemed … I thought you were admitting you’d been thrown a curve. You seemed so vulnerable.”
She shrugs and smiles. “Is that an awful way to be perceived?” she says. “I really can’t remember the point of the story anymore, but I did think you were cute. You had no idea how to pour champagne, and it foamed over the top of my glass and ran down my fingers.”
He frowns. “Really? I don’t remember that.”
“That’s a good thing,” she says. “Listen. We were both more unsophisticated than we let on.”
“What do you think we are now? Truly sophisticated?”
“I didn’t notice you pouring too fast tonight,” she says, smiling.
“Seriously,” he says. “Is that what you think?”
“I think we both know more than we let on. That’s why you were worried about stupid Nigel—because you knew I wouldn’t let on if we were having an affair. Which we are not. And that’s why I perked up when you talked about what’s her name. The woman who has Julie tonight. Because you said her first name so familiarly.” She tightens her grip around his waist. “There’s no point in pretending,” she says. “Of course we realize that each of us knows more—goes through more—than we care to let on.” She looks at him. “What’s the matter?” she says. “You asked for a serious answer.”
Two hours later—after stopping for a brandy on the way home, after showering together and fooling around in the tub, and after rushing, half-wet, into bed and making love—he gets up when he hears her breathing lightly and regularly and goes into the bathroom, carrying the alarm clock with him. He sets it in the light of the bathroom, wincing as the little hand stops at seven o’clock. Then he pushes the button up and puts it on the bathroom counter while he splashes his face with water. He opens the medicine cabinet and takes two aspirin from the bottle, swallowing them with water cupped in his hands. He runs his wet hands over his temples, letting the rest of the cool water trickle down his face. Then he looks at his face appraisingly in the mirror. He might be able to outskate her, through the sheer power of his legs, but she is able to outdrink him. She is on her side, asleep in the dark room, and she will no doubt be fine when she awakes in the morning, too.
As he gets back in bed, sliding the alarm gently onto the night table and feeling the button again to make sure it’s set, he realizes that the damp covers are going to make it difficult to relax and go to sleep. He intuits, somehow, that if something bad has not already happened—and he supposes it has not—something bad might still be on the horizon. He has seen enough movies, read enough books, to know what happens to restless sleepers, in damp beds, who have had too much to drink.
Something bad will happen. It is what he has been fearing for years, and what he continues to fear.
It does not happen until months later, when he has stopped thinking it is imminent. He has gone back to driving without his seatbelt, sometimes, when Julie is not in the car to impress. Mentally, he has checked off the possibilities that might have materialized: that Gennine would escalate her flirtations (she has not); that Nigel would be intelligent and handsome (he is, as Francine has said, boorish and pale, with a distracted gaze that would be funny if there were any energy behind it). Francine’s job is not too much work for her to accomplish; he does not resent doing errands any more than usual. Over the weekend, Francine and Julie collaborated on a crayon drawing of the three of them: a nuclear family, the daddy taller than the mommy, the child squarely in the middle, their primary orange skin tones particularly touching. The radon test came back negative; the sound of someone entering the house was only a shutter that had blown loose in the wind.
When the phone call comes early in the morning, things have been going along smoothly. He has recently been accomplishing things with ease.
The woman who calls, one of the mothers he has not met, tells him that Mrs. Angawa is dead. She was struck by a hit-and-run truck while crossing the street. She had gotten up early and gone to get breakfast things for Mr. Angawa. A paperboy gave a description of the truck. It was believed that Mrs. Angawa, struck from behind, died instantly.
He looks at the rumpled bed sheets. Francine also had risen at the crack of dawn, but she had been going to the hairdresser’s, to get a permanent. Her stylist had agreed to show up early, so Francine could get a jump on the day. Some things were worth tipping big for, she had told him the night before. He hated it when she made statements like that—statements that had nothing to do with what sort of person she was. Sometimes, he is sure, she pretends to be jaded to see what reaction she can elicit. At the ice-skating rink, though he had been almost flooded with thoughts near the end, one thing had come to him clearly: Remember that you married an actress, he had thought. She had been trained as an actress.
Mrs. Angawa is dead. Immediately he reassures himself that although it is a tragedy, she was not an intimate friend. She was someone he had a rather odd conversation with months before—a protracted conversation about Julie and the way she spoke, although it is clear that since befriending Cassie Wallace, Julie has a new, private, autonomous identity that doesn’t depend on the way her parents see her, or even on the way Mrs. Angawa might have seen her.
There will be no school that day, of course, the woman says. The following day a psychologist will be in the classroom, and after a discussion period the children will be introduced to the substitute teacher. If he feels he will have trouble talking to Julie about the tragedy, the psychologist will be sitting by his phone for the next hour or so, advising parents. The woman clears her throat. “I’m sure this is a shock,” she says, “but can you give some indication that you’ve heard me?”
He has been thinking of Mrs. Angawa, in her professional, singsong way, saying something like: “Julie is a very good student. She is very good at spelling. She likes to write.” It was like a mantra, a positive recitation that could be chanted in worried parents’ faces, to calm them. She was struck from behind? It was dawn, just past dawn, was that what the woman said?
“Yes,” she says.
She was out getting groceries.
It seems clear that that is so often the way. That in some very inconspicuous moment, a person can be overwhelmed.
He thanks the woman for calling. “It can’t be easy to announce a tragedy,” he says, his voice still hoarse from sleep. The alarm clock ticks almost silently. In the other bedroom, Julie is sleeping. He will let her sleep until she wakes up. There is no reason to awaken her with bad news. There is no school. Let her sleep.
He thanks the woman again for letting him know. As he stretches across the bed to replace the phone in its cradle, his hand snags a pair of pink panties under Francine’s pillow—one of the pairs he gave her the night they went ice-skating, which she had worn to bed the night before, lifting her nightgown over her head and wiggling provocatively before climbing into bed. He looks at them as if they were the strangest thing in the world. So little material, for so much money—that’s one way to look at it. They seem more bleak than silly, considered in context with the goings-on of the real world.
His mother used to say: Always wear clean underwear, in case you end up in the emergency room. For a split second, he tries to imagine what sort of panties Mrs. Angawa might have been wearing when she was struck.
He thinks: I am focusing on details because I don’t want to think about the larger picture.
He gets out of bed.
He makes the bed, which he does not usually do. He smooths the duvet. Touching it, he suddenly thinks of the rabbit.
He sits on the newly made bed, his hand over his mouth. What a thought just came into his head: the rabbit will be in the dark closet all day if someone doesn’t think to take the cage out.
But the whole school isn’t closed, he reminds himself. One of the other teachers …
There is no harm in calling. When people are upset, they might not focus on what needs to be done.
He thinks about calling Francine at the hairdresser’s.
He goes downstairs, pulling on his robe, tiptoeing and skipping the third stair, which creaks. He walks to the kitchen, gets the telephone book, and looks up the name of the shop. He dials the number. It rings four times. On the fourth ring, a recorded message comes on, giving the shop’s hours of operation. It will not be open for two more hours. He hangs up.
Sun is streaming into the kitchen. He goes to the stove, shakes the kettle, feels that there is enough water, turns on the burner, and leans against the counter. The room goes slightly out of focus. What would I do if it happened to Francine or Julie? he thinks, as the room shimmers.
He thinks of how precious every scrap of paper Julie ever colored on would become. How precious every doll would become. And Francine: what it would be like to run his fingers along the padded shoulders of the silk blouses, all in a row. How he would feel taking the top off her tube of lipstick, how it would break his heart to pick up her bottle of perfume from the bathroom counter.
In a sweat, he sees clearly that he and Francine have made a mistake. That the way they’re living, with only an occasional moment for time out, is wrong. It comes to him—in the way analysands get good at understanding their dreams—that he imagined the two of them as tiny figures in a painting because he sensed they were not living up to their potential. He conceived of them as bits of human-shaped plastic in a snow dome because they have been immobile, trapped, going nowhere. They’ve wanted to think they were adventurous, but what adventure have they gone on? First he convinced her to marry. To have the child. Then she convinced him to quit his job. To stay home while she worked. They changed roles, but aren’t they still two little people going nowhere? What have they been doing but applauding themselves, and each other, for the slightest effort?
By the time the kettle whistles, he has regained some equilibrium. Certainly a death so close to home would make anyone question the way he has been living. Everyone would have to admit there were flaws in his life. What exactly had he been thinking just a second ago? He had made the image of a snow dome a metaphor for their lives. It was as ridiculous as his epiphanies on acid, years before. He is standing in a two-thousand-square-foot house, not on the two-inch base of a snow dome. It is just a crazy irony that out the window it has begun to snow.
Lifting the kettle from the burner, he begins to talk himself down, to convince himself that they are average. That things are essentially fine. Quick images come to him of their early days together: Francine, curled on her side, crying on the mattress in the apartment on Sixteenth Street. But on top of that image he superimposes the image of the upstairs bed, queen-sized, neatly made. Then he sees Francine pantomiming in acting class, the one time she invited him to sit in and watch. On top of that image he lays a memory of Francine looking into his eyes, the neon sign flashing behind her head, talking animatedly as she drinks champagne. He closes his eyes. The then-and-now game could go on all morning. Forever. It could go on as long as he let himself think about things.
He picks up the phone book again. There is, as he suspected, only one Angawa listed. He looks at the address. Then he flips to McKee. There are seven, but the third McKee lives on the same street as Mr. and Mrs. Angawa.
He dials the number and almost hangs up without saying anything, he is so startled by Mr. McKee’s thick, sleepy voice saying hello, as something topples from a table.
That is how he comes to be the bearer of bad news. Mr. McKee has been asleep. No one has yet called to tell him.
Francine takes the day off and stays home to comfort Julie. She smells faintly of chemicals. With their red eyes, mother and daughter look very much alike.
A little after five, Stefan goes to the bar where he has arranged to meet Mr. McKee. Mr. McKee’s first name is Tony. He holds out a big rough hand and shakes Stefan’s hand without looking into his eyes. He is wearing a brown plaid jacket. Both elbow patches need to be resewn. Tony McKee has already had a few drinks. The whole school was given a half day, he says. He is not a drinking man, but if ever there was an occasion for drink, it is a day like the day that just passed.
“What can I do for you?” McKee says, as Stefan slides onto the bar stool next to him.
“Forgive me,” Stefan says. “I don’t know exactly why I’m here. The one time I had a real talk with Mrs. Angawa, she mentioned you very fondly. I think I’m here just to let you know she cared about you.”
McKee takes a sip of beer. The bartender stands in front of Stefan and raises an eyebrow. “Same thing,” Stefan says, looking at McKee’s Budweiser. McKee is running his hand over his forehead.
“I know you were neighbors,” Stefan says. “What about Mr. Angawa? How is he doing?”
McKee shrugs. “I don’t see them on a daily basis, you know. I live next door, and she always sought me out. She was a real lady, a very kind person. But Hideo—he was a hard one to figure. In fact, half the time he wasn’t around.”
“He traveled?”
McKee looks at him. He seems to be judging Stefan’s sincerity. “Traveled? No, he didn’t travel. He just took off.”
The bartender puts another bottle in front of McKee and walks away.
After staring at the bottle silently for a long time, McKee turns toward Stefan. “You got a kid in the school, right? Brokenhearted to lose her teacher.”
“Yes. She and her mother are writing a good-bye note. She wanted to write a farewell note to Mrs. Angawa.”
McKee twists off his beer cap. “Tell me again, is there something I can do for you?”
“Actually, you’re going to think this is crazy, but I have some concern for the rabbit. Do you think someone went into the classroom to take care of the rabbit?”
McKee frowns deeply. Again, he searches Stefan’s face.
“In the closet,” Stefan says, gesturing as if the closet were in some corner of the bar. “The rabbit. In the closet, for the night.”
“You’re wondering if anybody remembered the bunny rabbit?” McKee says. “I take it you’re being perfectly serious?”
Stefan nods. He shrugs then, to let McKee know he realizes his concern is a little ridiculous.
McKee leans closer to Stefan. “She was a real lady, and it ain’t none of my business,” McKee says, “but one time she told me she had a secret love, and when you called this morning, I put two and two together and wondered if that might not be you.”
“No, no,” Stefan says. “We only talked once, actually. In passing, on Parents’ Night, but only once in person. She was a very special lady, but no: there was nothing like that between us.”
“And the situation is, you have a little girl who’s in her class, and the little girl is worried about the bunny rabbit.”
Of course! Why hadn’t he thought of that? “Exactly,” he says, almost pouncing on McKee’s words. “She won’t rest easy unless she knows the rabbit’s taken care of.”
McKee runs his tongue back and forth over his front teeth a few times. “Kids,” he says. “Ain’t they somethin’?”
McKee shifts on the bar stool. “Of course, worries can get the best of all of us,” he says. “One night not so long ago, Mrs. Angawa had a mental picture of it dead, and I tell you, when she and I went into that room and the bunny rabbit was just lying there in that cage, my heart fell into my boots. I was so spooked by her being so sure it was dead that it took me a minute to realize that the bunny rabbit was sleeping, just like you might expect. Stretched out sleeping, and we woke it up.” McKee shakes his head and laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “I don’t guess Bugs Bunny’s gonna die for lack of a drink of water. Of course, he might not have a drink of water left.” He runs his hand over his chin. Stefan realizes that either McKee has not shaved that day or his beard grows in quite quickly. “But if it would make your little girl feel better in the midst of this tragedy, I don’t guess there’s any harm in openin’ up and seeing if the bunny rabbit’s okay.” McKee narrows his eyes. “Your name, Stefan,” McKee says. “Is that an Italian name?”
“Named for my grandfather,” he says. “My grandmother never wanted to leave Ravello. My mother was her only child. She named me Stefan, after my grandfather.”
“Never was in Italy, myself. I was in the Philippines during the Second World War,” McKee says.
“You were?”
“I was. You know what I accomplished for the United States of America? I was head bartender for the monkeys. Made every man leave one big swig at the bottom of his beer can, and I’d hand them up into the trees. Sometimes they’d lose their grip and fall right down.” McKee looks at his beer. “Kids,” he says. “We was stupid as shit.”
Stefan takes a sip of beer.
“You wasn’t in Vietnam, I take it,” McKee says.
“No,” Stefan says, shaking his head. He takes another sip of beer. There is a long, awkward silence.
“Let me just say one more time that I wouldn’t care who Mrs. Angawa had any kind of relationship with, but I sure would hate to be dragged into the situation because of my going into her room at night with you, using my key,” McKee says.
“I swear to you,” Stefan says. “There was nothing between us. We’ll go in, and I’ll go directly to the closet.”
McKee laughs. “That sounded funny,” he says. He slaps Stefan on the back. “Hell,” he says. “Let’s not discuss what is and what ain’t the case all night. We’ll go to the school and look in on Bugs Bunny.”
Stefan turns over McKee’s tab and his own. A twenty will more than cover both. He puts a twenty on the counter.
“Should I follow in my car?” Stefan says.
McKee pauses. “You know, that might not be a bad idea,” he says. “I might just continue on from there to somewhere down the line.”
“Right behind you,” Stefan says.
McKee gets in his truck. Stefan gets in his car.
It is so quiet inside the school that Stefan breathes shallowly, hesitant to make a sound. McKee strides ahead, shining the small beam of a flashlight he’s taken from his truck. At the end of the corridor they turn right, then stop at the first door. The light from the streetlamp makes the old glass in the top of the door shine like mirrored sunglasses. McKee unlocks the door. A rectangle of light slants across the floor. Again, the smell of chalk dust is as intense as smoke. Something in the room gives off a faint, burned smell. McKee sniffs also.
“This school ain’t made my allergies kill me, nothin’ ever will,” he says. “Hereditary asthma. Better since the doctor gave me an oxygen inhalor for bad moments.”
The room seems cavernous and mysterious compared with the narrow anonymity of the hallway. McKee sits on one of the desks. He shines the flashlight toward the closet, in the direction where Stefan will walk. Only when Stefan comes close to the closet door does the beam begin to whiten and dissipate. When he opens the door, there is blackness inside, and he can only vaguely make out the shape of the cage and the table it sits on. “McKee,” he says quietly, “would you mind shining that light in, or could I borrow—” He turns and sees McKee opening the top drawer of Mrs. Angawa’s desk. He has opened it with a tiny key on the same keyring he used to open the door.
McKee’s face is lit from below like a jack-o’-lantern’s, as he feels around in the drawer. “I lied to you,” he says. “Wasn’t any secret love but me, as far as I know, but I thought I’d open up and see if you really headed for that closet, or wanted to do what I’m doin’, repossessing some letters you and Mrs. Angawa might have exchanged.” He puts the packet of letters in his inside coat pocket, smiling. “I trust that since I can rely on you not sayin’ we was in here after hours, I can rely on your silence about this little matter as well.”
“Sure,” Stefan says, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice. “Absolutely. Certainly.”
“And now to part two, where we check the bunny rabbit,” McKee says.
When McKee stands close to him, shining the beam into the closet, Stefan can smell the alcohol on his breath.
“When you said that about what I meant to her, I figured you either knew, or you knew without really knowin’, if you know what I mean. Didn’t seem any coincidence you’d call me,” McKee says.
“No,” Stefan says, without being sure what he is denying. “No. I mean, I didn’t know anything but what I said to you. That she said she’d seen you socially, and—”
“Yeah,” McKee says. “She saw me socially.”
A scraping sound makes Stefan whirl around. In the cage, in the pool of light, the rabbit suddenly stands, its bright eyes flashing.
“Looks fine,” McKee says, his voice almost kind. “Let’s see does it have water.”
He stands beside Stefan, moving the light so it shines into the corner of the cage. The dish of water glows much the way the glass pane in the door shone when approached from the corridor.
“One bunny rabbit, perfectly fine,” McKee says.
“Okay, wait a minute,” Stefan says. “Maybe just so whoever comes in here tomorrow can’t possibly overlook it, we should lift the cage out into the room.”
“You think a whole classful of schoolchildren are gonna forget they got a bunny rabbit, when your own daughter can’t sleep, she’s so worried it ain’t got water?” McKee snorts.
“Yes, well, who knows,” Stefan says. McKee continues to shine the light as Stefan lifts the cage from the table and walks with it to Mrs. Angawa’s desk. He puts it squarely on top. The light from the streetlamp streaks through the center of the cage. He moves it back, angling it so most of the cage is in darkness.
“Let’s give it fresh water,” McKee says. He looks around. He dumps Mrs. Angawa’s pencils, all sharpened to a perfect, sharp point, onto the top of the desk and carries the cup into the hallway. Stefan listens while his footsteps recede.
“I had a premonition, too,” Stefan whispers to the rabbit, putting his fingers through the cage until the tips of his fingers touch its white coat. “A premonition that you were dead, which would have been one more thing than the children could stand. But I guess that premonition was wrong.”
He sits on a corner of the desk facing into the empty classroom, legs crossed, chin cupped in his hands.
“Here you go, bunny rabbit,” McKee says, coming back into the room. He has dropped the flashlight through a belt loop. When he gets to the cage, he opens the door carefully and slips his hand in. Slowly, he pours water out of the cup.
“Should have dumped the old water out, but this’ll be good enough,” McKee says, tapping the empty cup several times on the side of the bowl. It is the same sound—or similar to the sound—Francine made recently, standing by the public phone, telling Stefan how her life was turning out.
“Missed my guess about you,” McKee says, slapping Stefan on the back. “What do you say I buy you a beer before you go home. Might take a load off my chest if I could talk about it. She really was a nice lady, you know. Ain’t no story I’d tell that wouldn’t be sure to prove that.”
As McKee closes the door behind them and locks it, Stefan hears the rabbit lapping water.
“McKee,” Stefan says, walking beside him, “all my life I’ve felt like I was just making things up, improvising as I went along. I don’t mean telling lies, I mean inventing a life. It’s something I’ve never wanted to admit.”
“Oh, I knew you wasn’t talkin’ about lies,” McKee says. “I knew just what you meant.”