Trying to deny what happened at the carousel, Kate and I made furious and exhausting love that night. She wrapped her legs around mine and held me inside but even as I shook and shook, Kate’s hidden self stared out through narrowed eyes, determined that I would never truly enter, and we battered ourselves against each other, the equal pressure keeping an invisible door between us closed.
Finally we lay on our backs, panting in cross rhythms that slowly eased into silence, and then Kate pulled one tissue after another from the cardboard box. I winced at the rasping sound, which ran through me like the cry of some creature roaming through the neighborhood backyards, avoiding the sudden sweep of a flashlight. We wiped ourselves off as if sopping up damning evidence. Then we flung it away.
Listening to Kate yawn and settle above the damp sheets, I turned to her in the darkness. The warmth of her body almost touching me, I could hear the slow pulse of her breathing, feel its faintly moist draft. I inhaled deeply, trying to catch what had just coursed through her lungs and nostrils, and I held that breath inside as long as I could while it mingled with mine. Then I released it in the moment before her next intake of breath, and I continued this secret exchange, foolishly hoping it could somehow hold us together.
When I woke the next morning and padded over to the blinds, I stopped and knelt down in the dim light. Scattered across the carpet were last night’s tissues. But they no longer resembled flowers. I reached out for one of the little twisted balls and held in my hand its convoluted, unpredictable angles. When I flicked at one of its folds, a dried crust flaked away.
*
The desire to insure anyone or anything began to seep away from me. Instead, the sound of a police siren, a fire alarm gave me an intense, momentary joy. Let disaster come. One day I visited a prospective client who wanted extensive coverage on his recycling center. The owner—a Mr. Bianci—was proud of his business and gave me a tour through skyscrapered stacks of old newspapers. But I couldn’t exult in this environmentally sound enterprise and instead struggled to hide my unease at the countless discarded things. All the people who’d read about the latest property tax increase or inner city murder, or laughed at Dagwood’s morning dash out the door, all those people had let these newspapers go and then went on with their lives. What was left was emptiness—ragged towers of ink-stained wood pulp waiting to be crushed and reconstituted. I knew at once I wouldn’t agree to extend the slightest amount of coverage to this man’s business—let him find it elsewhere. I’d prefer that those huge paper stacks go up in flames.
The following morning’s horoscope, as if in reproach, offered advice that I couldn’t help reading again: Do not be afraid to find value in what has been abandoned. So when I drove to work and noticed a YARD SALE sign tacked to a telephone pole, I followed the printed arrow. After parking at a scruffy front lawn I wandered through an array of card tables loaded with junk: toys that children had wearied of, framed pictures no longer worthy of a wall, shoes outgrown, half-read paperback books, appliances worn from overuse.
I poked through this discarded bric-a-brac with little pleasure, until I held a rusted toy truck: the letters on its cab were so faded that they seemed to be sinking into the surface, and I found myself imagining how Kate might have captured this with her subtle, penciled hues. Then I picked up an ancient blender, turned it this way and that and could almost see Kate’s version—the plastic jar’s faded scratches artfully heightened so that it seemed to dream of its own lost swirling.
I began searching out yard sales and pretending that Kate was beside me, our old collaboration finally reclaimed. I examined objects for hints of anything that might inspire her, even if that meant pacing through a musty house during an estate sale, as I found myself doing one Saturday morning. Tired of watching antique dealers appraise each piece of furniture, I wandered into the kitchen. There on the bare formica counter sat a white plastic ashtray similar to the one I’d used as a boy to hold stray buttons. Around the curving, outer rim of this ashtray, however, was an ordered line of burn marks. I picked it up and examined its odd disfigurement—a necklace of dark, circular scars.
A sudden hand plucked it away. Startled, I turned to a woman whose lined, pale face was embarrassed by her abrupt action, yet she spoke with determination. “This isn’t for sale.”
“Excuse me,” I managed, “I didn’t mean to … It just reminded me of an ashtray that I once had.”
Her face seemed to collapse for a moment, then she fingered the plastic rim. “This?” she replied. “There’s no other like this.”
She made no move to leave, and because she stared at the ashtray with eyes that somehow gave it life, I said, “I think I understand.”
She flinched at my words. “You think you do? I’d say not. This has its … its own tragedy.”
“Mine did too,” I murmured, recalling my ashtray of buttons, my entire collection of discards’ ineffectual magic against my mother’s spiraling troubles.
The woman must have caught the truth of what I’d just said because she hesitated, examining my face. Sighing, she began to speak quietly, almost as if I weren’t beside her. “It was one of my son’s favorite things when he was a little boy. All those expensive toys we bought, but this—this he loved to wear on his head like a crown, pretending he was a king.”
She regarded the ashtray with suddenly uncomprehending eyes, as if it had now become alien. “He was a wonderful child. He could have become whatever he wanted. But he died in that Vietnam war.” I offered faltering sympathy until she cut me off. “And this … I don’t even know why … why I’m telling you this, but—don’t you move away, you listen—this, this is worse: every year after that, on our son’s birthday, my husband would drink too much and put out one of his cigarettes right here, on the rim. ‘Jewels in the crown,’ he called them.”
The woman stood so still I didn’t dare speak, but when she turned to me again she must have recognized my willingness to listen, for she said simply, “Now they’re both dead.”
Again, she had little patience with my polite words of condolence. “All that’s over now, over,” she said and then stopped, surprised at her own words. “Yes, that’s right. Why should I want to see this thing again?” She held out the ashtray, her voice now edged with a terrible resolve. “You want this? You can have it.”
“No, really, that’s all right—”
“Take it.” She shoved the ashtray in my hands. “Take it.”
“Th-thank you,” I said, the ridge of burn marks rough against my hands. “What, what should I…”
But this unhappy woman was no longer aware of me—she stared out the kitchen window, her lips moving slightly, silently, and I wondered who she spoke to now: her son, her husband?
I left her to that private conversation. Lingering in the living room among the milling groups of buyers, I prepared myself to return the ashtray if she changed her mind, though I hoped I wouldn’t have to: my hands gently cupped that wavering line of blackened craters, each little circle a mouth offering eloquent secrets. After an hour, when she still hadn’t appeared, I finally walked to my car, understanding that what I held was more than an ashtray, and now I was its caretaker.
*
So once again I became a collector. What I sought out, though, was a different variety of archaeology from the sort Kate practiced at her drawing desk in the evenings: I recovered what wasn’t yet buried. I haunted yard sales and estate sales, attended auctions and listened to the caller’s rapid urgent voice coaxing the price higher. Over the following weeks I managed to find a sugar bowl, a pencil holder, a shoehorn, a stepstool and even the single plastic arm of a doll, each containing its own story, for I discovered that if I inspected an object carefully enough, someone might stand beside me, willing to reveal its secret.
Sometimes I stared into my bathroom mirror and searched my ordinary features for whatever drew such yard sale confessions. Did those strangers sense what I needed and therefore tried to give me what might help? I thought of Kate, how I longed for her approach, and realized that pursuit had all along been my mistake. She had to come to me. So I collected more objects and placed them strategically around the rooms of our house. They were my own silent singing, like the statues of Indian whale hunters that I’d learned about in school long ago. One day Kate might actually be moved to capture the intricacies of one of these objects and then, instead of offering a caption, I’d confess to her its hidden life.
“What’s this?” she asked once, her hand gently sweeping over a doily I’d arranged on an end table. Its snowflake pattern had once belonged to a newly blinded child: for a time it was her own personal Braille and late-night solace.
I looked up from my book at Kate and this was the moment I’d been hoping for, the possibility of a return to another time. Yet caution ruled my casual reply. “Oh, just something I picked up. An interesting texture, don’t you think?”
Kate’s fingers played at a delicate corner, testing its complex weave. I waited for her reply. A subtle gleam of recognition surfaced in her eyes and her lips moved slightly, as if struggling to speak. Her hand continued stroking the doily until a nail caught at the nubby pattern. She hesitated, finally pulling it free, and then her face became its own veil, in the shape of her familiar features. She only allowed herself a polite nod of appreciation and stepped from the room.
If my wife ever drew one of my objects I never knew it. Before long my anticipation hardened into a proprietary pride—at least those presences spoke to me. There were evenings when, as Kate watched a crime drama or paged through a magazine beside me, I scanned the room and silently savored my objects’ stories one by one, inevitably leading to the tale of the wooden stepstool that now rested before our bookshelves. It once belonged to an elderly man who stood on it when his memories threatened to overwhelm him, who reached up and let his palms press against the ceiling as if the rigid pressure in his arms held something unspeakable in place. I could feel my own arms tremble from that imagined exertion. And so slowly, before I understood how much I relied on these private moments, each of my objects became a secret I kept from Kate.
*
A postcard from my sister arrived one day, her first message since the day of my wedding: “Hi. I’m in my third month of Who’s Next?, a comedy/ mystery: it’s a mystery why anyone thinks it’s a comedy, and it’s a laughable mystery. Cheers, your sib.”
How dare she write to me so casually after what she’d done? Yet those breezy words were at odds with her handwriting: each narrow loop and slash evoked Laurie’s wild, improvised dancing years ago.
I heard Kate’s footsteps.
“Did the mail come?” she asked.
“Uh-huh. Nothing interesting,” I replied, hiding my sister’s postcard behind a clutch of junk mail, turning it into another secret.
Over the next few days Laurie’s dashed-off scrawl grew inside me, but now its subversive, infectious energy reminded me of her terrible grin as she’d led the wedding guests in those rounds of tapping champagne glasses, and once again I could hear the delicate chiming that altered my marriage before it had even begun. Yet if Laurie had known how to make Kate curl inside herself, then maybe she also knew of some way to unfurl her.
I bought a plane ticket to the small city where Laurie was performing and concocted an excuse for Kate about some pressing business. Soon I was soaring above the airport, glancing out my window at patchy clouds and the drifting shadows they cast on the ground below: long stretches of dark ovals sailed over farmland like a pod of whales, while other shapes suggested the slow geologic drift of undiscovered continents. A single huge, shadowy crescent might have been the jaws of some indefinable creature sneaking up on an unsuspecting town, just as I was traveling toward this sister of mine I hadn’t forgiven. I almost believed that I cast those shadows below.
I settled into a hotel far from the theater, to avoid any chance meeting with Laurie before the show. I wanted to see my sister perform on an evening that was no more out of the ordinary than any other night. I made it to the theater with enough time to study the playbill and discovered that Who’s Next? allowed the audience to choose the ending. Flipping to the back pages, I read Laurie’s bio: she’d appeared in versions of popular plays and musicals in small cities across the country. No hint of a relationship that might keep her from traveling. I turned to the cast of characters and saw that Laurie played a maid, and when the curtain finally rose, there she stood onstage before the gaudy interior of a mansion, dusting antique furniture. If I hadn’t known my sister’s role, I might not have recognized her from this distance, with her curly hair now straightened and black.
“Millicent!” an older man’s offstage voice called out.
“Coming,” Laurie replied brightly, her stagy voice an odd version of the one I knew. She walked across the set, just as two suspiciously quiet characters—a well-dressed young man and, of course, a butler—entered from the opposite side.
As the play progressed, Laurie served the other characters with a dutiful efficiency, yet her square-cut uniform and air of innocence was undermined by stiletto high heels. She was, I thought, a prime suspect, and by the final scene Laurie was the only surviving staff member of the large mansion. Legs firmly planted between the recently deceased bodies of the butler and the cook, she stood at the front of the stage while a disembodied voice declared over the p.a. that the time had come to vote.
Though I suspected the young fellow whose parents had been disinherited might be the culprit—if I remembered correctly, only he was present when each victim flopped to the floor, gasping for breath—I joined the applause for Laurie. I clapped and clapped and clapped, and even after others in the audience had stopped, still I went on. I wanted Laurie to be guilty, I wanted to see her confess before being hustled offstage to prison.
But the audience’s nod went to Walter, the hunched and frail grandfather and head of the family who, he reluctantly revealed, had shot tiny dissolving darts of slow-acting poison from the footrest of his wheelchair, aiming under the dinner table to kill his only slightly less wrinkled younger brother Harold.
“But I kept missing,” the old man moaned, wheeling his chair in circles as the other actors ducked. “I had nothing against Raymond—he was the finest butler in a hundred miles. And Jacques, who could rival his goose liver tarts? I was even sad to see cousin Sophie die, conniving bitch that she was. …”
“So why did you try to kill your own brother?” the hapless, greasy-haired detective asked, pointing to Harold, who cowered behind a suit of armor.
“He was trying to blackmail me.” Parking his wheelchair center stage, the old man’s voice cracked with emotion as he continued: “He threatened to expose my relationship with Millicent!”
All eyes turned to Laurie, who shed her modest demeanor with one piercing cry as she rushed to Walter’s side. She ripped the top buttons from her uniform, revealing a sexy black teddy. “It’s true, we love each other so,” she proclaimed huskily. “Every wrinkle, every liver spot makes me seethe with passion.” Laurie wriggled in elaborate ecstasy, both hands kneading the old man’s chest and shoulders.
“All you want is the family fortune!” Harold howled, brandishing the suit of armor’s gilded sword. Before anyone could stop him, he impaled his older brother and crowed triumphantly, “Now it’s too late.”
“Too late for you,” Laurie glowered, her erotic glow now cooling to a cruel smile. “His will leaves everything to me. You,” she hissed to the detective, “arrest the guilty party, clear away the bodies, and leave my house.”
The stage erupted in conflicting, angry voices, and within minutes, after every remaining plot complication had been tidily disposed of, all the characters—both the survivors and the resurrected—stood at the edge of the stage and bowed again and again as they received our applause. But even from my distant seat, Laurie’s smile betrayed little pleasure at the evening’s success.
I made my way backstage and almost immediately saw her conferring with a stagehand—an unfriendly exchange, certainly, from the way her hand cut the air into brisk little slices. I was able to approach without Laurie noticing. Close up, she appeared even less like my sister than when I’d sat in the audience—her dark-lined eyes and heavily powdered face were a caricature designed to reach the farthest seats. And then she turned that foreign face to me.
“Michael?” She puckered her lips and whistled two long notes of surprise. Quickly recovering, she announced to the stagehand in a singsong voice, “My brother—once he was lost, but now is found.”
The man nodded, unimpressed, and Laurie waved good-bye to him. “Well, David, I release you—for the moment.”
He strode off with a shake of his head, and my sister and I attempted an awkward embrace—tentative prelude, perhaps, to confessions and apologies that might lead to reconciliation.
“Now I’m annoyed I wasn’t picked tonight—my ending’s the best. But tonight, apparently, I failed to connect with my audience.” Her face twisted in mock anguish. “If I’d known you were here, I would have tried to look as suspicious as possible.”
Some cast members had already disguised themselves in street clothes and were on their way out. Laurie pulled me along toward the butler—now a middle-aged man in jeans—who regarded her with barely veiled impatience as she introduced me with the mannerisms of a southern belle.
With each new introduction Laurie added or shed accents: first a naive little schoolgirl, then some hardened dame, then a shy woman who could barely manage the words of greeting. Who’s next indeed. Where was Laurie in this shifting landscape? Her relish for this backstage performance clearly wasn’t shared by her fellow cast members. Ignoring her patter, each one searched my face intently for something more than family resemblance: perhaps some clue to my sister’s behavior?
Finally she took my arm in hers, declaring, “To the dressing room.”
“Well, everyone seems quite friendly,” I said, embarrassed that I had nothing more to offer than this dishonest chitchat.
She shook her head and confided, sotto voce, “Ah, but I’ve gone through them all. There’s not much that interests me in this bunch any more.”
Opening the door to the now deserted dressing room, Laurie gestured to the many chairs facing a long mirror bordered with tucked-in photos, handwritten notes and review clippings. She sat down before her section of mirror—bare of any memorabilia—and said with a flourish, “Here you are, Michael: my few square inches of stardom’s real estate.”
Laurie dabbed at her made-up face with a cotton ball. “So, what are you here for?” she asked, finally offering me a voice without practiced inflections.
Uncertain whether to trust this opening, I said, “Well, I was in town, so I decided to catch—”
“C’mon, Michael, I know that what I do makes your skin crawl,” she said, now imitating Mother’s taxicab bravado. She dipped her fingers into a jar of facial cream, rubbed some onto her cheeks, and asked in a chipper voice, “Or have you had a change of heart?”
“Look, I enjoyed the show, Laurie.”
She had nothing to say to this. After a few moments she asked, “So, how’ve you been all these years?”
“Fine. Business has never been better, actually, despite a weakness in the economy …” and I continued to speak in a tone I never used with my clients, chatting up the latest policies, the different levels of deductibles. Laurie kept scrubbing away and seemed not to notice my insurance agent performance. When she was done with her face, she stood and without a word deftly slipped the straps of her teddy off her shoulders. It fell to her waist, exposing her breasts. If you’re going to pretend we’re not brother and sister, she seemed to say, nonchalantly tugging the sleek fabric down to her hips, then let’s see how far this will go.
I turned away and listened to the rustling of her clothes. Tacked onto a bulletin board was a list of Dressing Room Do’s and Don’t’s, beginning with “Private property is just that, even if it’s not locked up.” I read them one by one until, quickly glancing over at Laurie, I saw her neatly fitted into jeans and a blouse, combing her hair.
She turned to me, all innocence. “My mind must have wandered. Were you saying something?”
“Nothing worth repeating,” I replied, and Laurie laughed with full-throated pleasure.
Still wary, I hesitated, then said, “I came here to, well, to talk. We have a lot to talk about.”
Laurie nodded, willing to accept this without a smart remark, her scrubbed face now her own. “So, let’s talk. Here’s something I’ve always wanted to tell you. Remember when we were kids and we’d draw pictures together?”
I nodded. I could see Laurie kneeling beside me, her fingers smeared with the colors of her paint kit, her eyes sometimes far away before adding another brushstroke to her tablet.
“You know how I liked drawing faces? I’ll tell you why. After bedtime I’d lie awake and make up stories about the people I drew.”
“Stories? I never knew you did that.”
Laurie laughed. “Well, I never told you. I gave them their own lives and then I tried them on, pretending each character was me, just like Mom had done. Actually, I liked those stories better than anything we ever drew. But then—do you remember this?—you convinced me to try drawing other things, and I realized I could make up stories about being a flower, a train, a lion, or anything else in the world. Mom only became other people, but I could do her one better, I could become anything. That’s when I first realized I wanted to act.”
My sister’s revelations were laced with so many bitter ironies that at first I couldn’t speak. “So,” I finally said, “I’m the one who got you started?”
The self-reproach in my voice wasn’t lost on Laurie. She turned her cold gaze away from me and followed the long line of the mirror, the empty chairs of her fellow actors. “Oh, you’ve been my inspiration in so many ways, Michael. That night I visited you at college, remember? Why was I there, anyway? Well, for your advice, so I could do the exact opposite of whatever you said. I had that low an opinion of your track record.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What I mean is, you were such a screw-up, if you’d encouraged me to be an actress I would’ve stayed in school.”
“Oh, get off it. You would’ve become an actress no matter what I said.”
“You’re right,” she said, head tilted archly, her voice brightening with the need to convince. “And you know why? Because I like doing this, it makes my life snappy, playing all these different characters. Safety in numbers, I always say. And I don’t have any husband or kids to fuck up.”
“You make living alone sound so attractive.”
“Who’s alone? Every cast is one big happy family.”
“Like this one? I thought you were already bored with them all.”
I’d exposed the imperfect surface of her artifice. “You think I’m not happy?” she asked, face hardened to a grimacing mask. “You think I’m not happy?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice barely a murmur. “Are you?”
She picked up a prop from the table, an ink bottle, and pulled off its glass cap. “Of course you don’t know! When have you ever known about anything, Mister In-the-Dark.”
I flinched, hands up to protect myself, but Laurie spun away and shook the open bottle at the mirror again and again, covering my reflection with a dark blotch.
Facing me again, she said, “Here’s something else you never knew. I’m the one who broke all those things in the house. All the things Dan got blamed for.”
“What—you?”
“Me. I did it to spite Dad for ignoring us all the time, the stupid shit. But when Dan got blamed and I saw the way Dad got to him, I was too afraid to admit it was me. Now that made me angry, really angry, so I kept it up. I wanted to see how far it would go, even though I was sure that sooner or later the bastard would catch me. When you got Dan that job, you got me off the hook. But then Dad cooked your goose, didn’t he?”
Laurie sobbed into her hands, her shoulders trembling as she squeezed out, “Oh god, oh god—I’m sorry, I’m, I’m sorry, Michael, I really am.”
“Laurie, please,” I began, turning her toward me.
Her face dry, her eyes carefully appraised my shock at her performance. Had her entire story been an impromptu script, a star vehicle designed to torment me? I pulled away to leave, then heard her voice, now feigning concern, ask, “By the way, how are you and Kate?”
She’d been softening me up for the kill, but it was long past the time that I’d offer this woman any more grist for her soap opera mill—instead, I’d display my own performance skills. Hadn’t I practiced my own face of patience with Kate for so many months now? I turned, my eyes filled with gratitude that Laurie had finally broached a topic that brought me happiness, and I easily said the words I knew would foil her: “Kate and I are fine, really fine.”