Hamlin, back from a late lunch, lands himself at his desk like he’s got a job to do. His own ancient oak swivel chair receives him without wheeze, or wobble, or whatnot. Pimletz, waiting for someone to talk to, figures his efficient colleague must oil the springs himself, tighten his own screws, maybe even cart the contraption out for repairs. There’s no explaining the noiselessness of the thing. Jesus, Hamlin certainly keeps that chair purring. On it and swiveling, the man goes about his business like it should be set to string music: he logs back on to his terminal, speed dials an aide to the police commissioner, triages his message slips, milks and sugars his half cup of coffee, kicks off his shoes. He does these things in a strange, seamless choreography, rolling here and there and back, here and there and back, riding the grooves he’s made in the floor with the years.
“You about done?” Pimletz says, one desk away.
“No,” Hamlin replies, head down, his mind every place but the interruption. “You’re about done. You. Me, I’m just getting started.”
Great, Pimletz thinks. Guy probably slams me in his sleep. It’s like a reflex with him, but he goes at Hamlin again, and, like a fool, he goes at him from inside the conversation he’s been having with himself since he got off the phone with New York. “So what do you think?”
This gets Hamlin’s attention, this starting in at mid-stream. He steps down his stockinged feet (gold-toed!) to stop his chair from rolling and swivels to face Pimletz. The chair responds like a show dog. “A lot of things, actually,” he says, gearing for another slam. “I think it’s strange that nobody makes tomato pie. Why is that, you think? I think Ted Kennedy is looking more and more like a float in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I think national health care reform is a fucking pipe dream. I think, for Halloween, I’ll be going as George Pataki.” Volley, volley, volley. . . . He pauses, runs a spot check on his sarcasm levels, absorbs the blank look on Pimletz’s face, continues. “And I think the day Drew Barrymore is worth twelve million dollars a picture is the day the women’s crew team over at Harvard starts jumping rope with my dick. These the kind of thoughts you’re looking for?”
To the rest of the world, Pimletz may appear thick, but there aren’t so many layers to him he can’t see the point. He rips into himself for being so stupid, starts back in at the top. “Okay,” he announces. “Wood. You saw the obit in this morning’s paper. We talked about it, remember?”
Hamlin nods. “So it was both Nixon girls? Julie and Tricia? The Doublemint twins.” Beat. “Talk about your whitebread sandwiches. This is what you’re telling me?
“No,” Pimletz tries. “Hear me out.” You sonofabitch.
This is tough for Hamlin, to sit on his chances, but he rolls back his chair a few feet, indicating to Pimletz that the floor is his.
Pimletz: “So I get this call, hour ago, maybe two. Guy from New York. Senior editor at Asterisk Books.”
Hamlin, bounding from his chances and onto Pimletz’s floor: “Wanted to talk to you about the Wood book.”
Fuck, this guy knows everything. “You know about the Wood book?”
“Come on, Axel!” Hamlin shoots back. “Pay attention. It was in your goddamn obit.”
“Oh,” Pimletz says, and guesses it was. Right.
By the time poor Pimletz gets his story out in a form poor Hamlin can comprehend, poor Wood surely has begun to decompose. Pimletz tells what he knows about the shape of the manuscript, the outline, Wood’s notes, the situation with his wives and entourage, tells how what the editor is looking for is someone to capture the New England aspects of Wood’s character. He tries to cover everything. “Warren Stemble,” Pimletz says, as if the name might mean something.
“Never heard of him.”
“No, but he checks out.” (As if Pimletz did any actual checking.) “Wants me to come talk to him. Tonight. Maybe catch a late dinner.”
“And what?”
“And you’re telling me this because?” Always, Hamlin is leaving room for Pimletz to work for his point.
“I’m telling you this because I want to see what it looks like to you. I’m telling you this because who the hell else am I gonna tell? I’m just telling you.” An uncomfortable note hangs between them, and Pimletz moves to play over it: “I mean, you’re always saying it pays to have the conversation, right? It pays to go to New York, hear what this guy has to say?”
Hamlin stands, re-shoes his feet, fills the few paces between himself and Pimletz, pats his associate on the head like a small child. “Ooooh, Axel,” he mocks. He pinches his cheeks. “Look at you. Such a big boy. Jetting down to New York to take a meeting.”
These had been Pimletz’s thoughts, although not exactly. In his own head, he does without the condescension, but he can’t shake the abrupt turns his life might be taking. He can still count the number of times he’s been on a plane (fourteen, not including his annual puddle-jumps to the Vineyard to stay with cousins, off-season), so it’s not even close to an everyday thing for him. Think of it: down and back to New York just for dinner. He’s never been the kind of guy to go down and back to New York for any reason at all. Even the idea of it is intimidating, and now, through Hamlin’s taunts, it also seems ridiculous.
“What?” he says, suddenly unsure of his plans. “Tell me. This is something we should do over the phone? Me and Stemble? You think this is something we can talk about over the phone?”
“What the fuck difference does it make, you meet with this guy in New York or on the phone? Go. Have dinner. Move and shake.”
“So it could be something?”
“Shit, yeah, it could be something.”
“Like?”
“Dinner, for one thing.”
“No, I mean, there could be something here?”
“Listen to me, Axel,” Hamlin says, underneath a long sigh. “Best I can tell, you’ve got no shot here. At the paper. Be honest with yourself and you’ll say the same. You’ve been doing this for like a hundred years. With a rotary phone, you were doing this. With carbon paper and copy boys, you were doing this. Great, so you’ve got it down, but it’s also got you, and if you’ve got a chance to break out of this grind, well, then, you’ve got to take it. How can you not take it?” He takes in a long breath, lets his words find their mark. “Man,” he finally says, “anything’s better than cranking obits. It’s a long time, Axel. You want to be a writer, be a writer. Doesn’t matter what you write, long as you write something else.” He means to be constructive, but he can’t help himself. “If I were you, a fucking grocery list would start looking good to me.”
“I’m not a hack,” Pimletz asks, tentative, “if I take a job like this?”
“Yes, you’re a hack,” Hamlin rides, “but you’re a hack now. Been a hack long as I’ve known you. Fuck do you care if ghosting some dead guy’s memoirs isn’t the most prestigious gig in the world?”
Pimletz weighs the truths in what Hamlin’s saying against the perception he has Velcroed to his self-esteem all these years. Yes, he defines himself as a writer, but he is no writer. Yes, he toils, ostensibly, at journalism, but he is no journalist; he has a profession, but he is no professional. He works for a newspaper is about the best he can say for himself, and this may be his one shot ever to say anything more. Or different. Hamlin’s right, he can’t do this shit forever, even though he probably will. He considers these things—everything, all at once—but his face is blank, without aspect.
Hamlin watches for Pimletz’s reaction, but he picks up nothing. Jerk-off never shows his hand, probably doesn’t even know what he’s holding. For all Hamlin can tell, Pimletz is thinking about Olestra, the environment, the federal trade deficit, what the short trip to New York might cost in terms of what he’ll miss on television. “So you’re going?” Hamlin finally prods, not wanting to leave things loose.
“I’m going,” Pimletz says, playing at determined, but beneath his surface resolve is another layer. Fuckin’-A, he’s going. That, or he’s gone.
Place has emptied, pretty much, save for this interesting Harlan person, just passing through. Gets dark early these days, and most of the Two Stools regulars are quick to get back out on the water, see about their traps, set ’em down again before nightfall. Nothing like the long, shiftless stretch of summer, when a cup of coffee after lunch can reach to just this side of the six o’clock whistle.
This new fellow, though, this Harlan . . . well, he seems content to fritter away his entire afternoon. Isn’t that something? Grace, she keeps to herself, but she’s got an eye on this one. Oh, she relishes this time of day, this time of year, knows it better than anybody, but even the tiniest shift in routine can set her to wondering: this stranger, in back, nursing his coffee until it heals. Doesn’t take more than that.
She tries to put her mind on something else, but it won’t move. She sits uncomfortably on the two stools by the cash register, half working her receipts. She wills herself inside the stillness, the contrast from the rest of her day. She wants everything else to melt away. She wants the feeling of being in the eye of a storm.
Jerry Springer’s on, although just barely, coming as he is through the portable black-and-white, rabbit ears pointed south and west for the signal. There’s not much to look at through the fuzzed reception, but the audio’s coming in clear enough. Today’s panel: unattractive women (some with teeth missing!) who’ve cheated with their husbands’ best friends. From the tone of his voice, Jerry’s never heard of such a thing, but Grace doesn’t get the fuss. In a small town, everybody knows everybody. Who else is there? Why, she can think of a half dozen of her customers, right off the top of her head, who have driven their marriages (or someone else’s) to the same place.
She’s half-listening, half-working, half-lost in thought. Three halves in all. Grace laughs at the way things just never add up. Like with her receipts, she’s always coming up short, even when her regulars are paid up in full, even when there’s nothing to figure.
There’s a cup of lemoned hot water on the counter in front of her, cornered by the elbow of Grace’s massive left arm. It’s like she’s guarding it. And here’s a funny thing: she brings her face to the cup when she’s got the taste for a sip, rather than the other way around. Been drinking her tea and coffee and hot lemoned water like this since forever, never thought it strange until a girlfriend pointed it out, couple years back, in her kitchen, and, even now that she’s been made aware of it, she can’t quit the habit.
Wood’s never seen anyone go about their sipping in quite this way. He considers himself a student of human behavior, an estimation he developed after a brief stint at the Actors Studio, under Kazan. An actor observes, Wood was taught, and so he observes. Always. Observing, more times than not, he can find something off in behavior others regard as not worth noting. He’s spent some time on this. Life is all about nuance, he believes, and best lived in the details. Most folks bring the cup to their lips, maybe meet it halfway, but this Grace leans herself full onto the counter and laps at the cup like a cat at a saucer. She doesn’t touch the cup with her hands at all, except (eventually) to tilt it slightly, to help the liquid to her lips. This is her essence, what he finds in her details.
There’s a lot about this woman that strikes Wood now as extraordinary. He watches from a makeshift table at the back of the restaurant between more customary sips of his own. Her movements are not without effort, he notices, but she manages them with a kind of artfulness—he’s back on those dancing hippos from Fantasia—a grace that belies her size and yet justifies her name. Where she gets it, he can only imagine. And what it’s doing to him? Well, he can only imagine that too. It’s been just a couple hours, but already this Gracie Two Stools is all he can think about: the way her fleshy arms wipe down the tables between customers, the trace of perspiration at her upper lip, the give and take with her crew, the whole damn package. It surprises him, this rash attraction, especially with the way he’d been thinking he’d run out of drive, but it isn’t in him to question something so basic. It’s almost primal. She’s pretty enough, and sure enough of herself, and she smells altogether wonderful.
Ah, yes, this last gets him going most of all—or, at least, most recently. Someone should bottle the way this woman smells. When she passes with a fresh hit of coffee, she leaves behind the not-incompatible scents of just-baked bread, and bacon, and fabric softener, and (for some reason) lilacs, which mix with the coffee and her own sweetness to leave Wood solidly distracted. He’s all coiled up with what’s going on in his head. He’s thinking, maybe if I just sidle up from behind while she’s distracted by her paperwork, press myself against her, spin her around to where she’s facing me. Then he’s thinking, well, no, he can’t quite spin her around, not with Grace camped like she is on two stools at the same time, not without spilling her to the floor, but he still likes the idea of sneaking up on her. There’s no one else around, the short-order Lennys are off for the few hours until dinner, everyone else is out doing what they can to make a buck. He’s got the place and its owner to himself.
From the television: “You, the man with the tie? You’re not bad looking, you got a good job, you could do better.”
“Her, on the left, she nothin’ but trash!”
“Wouldn’t talk if I was you.”
“Let’s keep it civil, folks.”
“Don’t be runnin’ your mouth ’bout what you don’t know.”
“Tell it, girl.”
Applause.
He slinks up from behind, presses against the fat of Grace’s ass, reaches for her hair. He moves in a kind of zone without thinking. She doesn’t notice the pressing—not at first, there’s just too much of her—but she’s distracted by the hair. Startled. Let her tell you, she loves it when they touch her hair. Oh. My, oh my. She rests the pencil she’s been using to scratch out her figures on the counter in front of her, closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to think about what might happen next.
“Well?” Wood says softly, a beat before the exchange can turn clumsy. His not thinking has turned to where he is now keenly aware of how exposed he’s left himself, how close to being found out. No way he should be connecting with another human being—not now, not like this. Disappear, he cautions himself. Disappear.
“Well, what?” she answers, her eyes still closed. She’s lost in some serious not thinking of her own, and in the gentle tug and pull of her hair, and in what should be her response to this most recent development.
Wood steps around the stool, wedges himself alongside, reaches for Grace’s chin, coaxes her to face him. If he can’t spin the whole of her, he’ll settle for the highlights. She turns, and he catches, for the first time, the soft peach fuzz of her cheeks, the light of her smile, the taste of her breath: lemon, heat, grease from the deep-fry, overworked Trident (spearmint). “Well, hello.”
Grace, flustered, considers how to play the moment. Okay. He’s an interesting man, this Harlan Trask. Interesting, she guesses that’s the right word. Unusual. Something about him. Different than the guys she sees up here, that’s for sure. The way he plays at her hair is like nothing she would have imagined, although the simple fact of his playing with her hair is also like nothing she would have imagined. This never happens. Guys up here just don’t see her like this, so it follows that she never sees herself in this kind of situation. Only now that she has, and is, she doesn’t want it to play out on its own. She wants to contribute something, to be herself, to give over fully to this moment, and yet she doesn’t want to think things through to where she loses the spontaneity. “So,” she says, also softly, “you’re short on cash? You lookin’ to work off your tab?”
Good, she thinks, having offered her contribution. Exactly right.
He smiles, keeps at her hair. “Lunch,” he says. “Need to work off what I ate.”
She laughs, then teases. “What ate? You’ve been mostly coffee all day long.”
“Just an expression.”
“A girl could lose her shirt offering a bottomless cup to someone like you.” Also, good.
Wood thinks so too. He could get used to this one. “Kinda what I had in mind,” he says. He reaches for the top button of her once-white blouse, and when she doesn’t move to stop him, he unfastens it and slides down to the second. By the third, he catches the precipitous drop made by the space between her enormous breasts and the rest of her shirt, still unbuttoned. Could hide a textbook in there, he thinks. An encyclopedia.
Grace, not without interest: “You goin’ somewhere with this?”
“Hope to,” Wood replies. “Before long.”
“I see.”
“Bet you do.” Wood has no idea what he means by this, what she means, if together they mean anything at all. Just words. For his part, he means to keep her talking. That’s basically it. Talking and interested. There’s nothing but silliness between them—a Paul McCartney song without the melody—but as long as he keeps up his end, he’ll find his opening. This he knows.
Grace knows it too, only she finds one first. She hoists herself down from her stools and saunters to the front door, as ladylike as she can manage. She can feel Harlan Trask’s eyes all over her, but she moves as if she’s not being watched. Tries to, anyway. She reaches to a shelf above the doorjamb and pulls down a frayed rectangle of cardboard with the message, ERRANDS, BACK IN TEN, block-lettered on one side. The sign is fixed to a triangled string tacked to a shelf above the door, and she leaves it to hang against the glass, at eye level, facing the street. She drops the blinds behind the door and twirls them shut, then does the same at the half-dozen picture windows at the front of the restaurant. She moves self-consciously back to the counter.
“Quittin’ time?” Wood says, reaching for the tucked parts of her blouse.
“More like a break.” She slides confidently up against him, presses her dry lips against the scratch of his beard, and when he opens his mouth to receive her she’s overwhelmed by the taste of coffee. Figures. And she doesn’t mind!—the scratchiness or the coffee—which figures also.
He kisses back, struck by her cool-warm wetness. And the gum.
“Upstairs,” she says, gently pushing him away. She indicates the swinging doors to the kitchen and beyond. “There’s a back way. No place for us to get comfortable down here.”
“You live up there?” Wood says, grabbing Grace’s meaty hand, letting her lead.
“Just a small apartment,” she says, climbing the stairs. “One room and a bath. No need for a kitchen.”
“Not a bad commute.”
He likes to talk, this one. Grace supposes he’s the kind of man who’s terrified of the normal silences that form between normal people, the kind of man for whom small talk runs big. Sally Jesse did a whole show on this just the other day. “Jesus, you,” she says, opening the door to her place, closing it behind them. She leans into him again, wanting to take charge the way the Sally Jesse expert recommended. “Shut up and fuck me.”
Wood, happy to comply, maneuvers his prize to the unmade bed, and by the time he climbs aboard—it and its owner—he realizes he’s in for a bouncy ride. In truth, he had no idea what to expect. This Grace appeared big enough when she was wrapped in unnatural fibers and questionable blends, but there are whole sections to her he’s never encountered on a woman. Never even considered. Naked, she looks like a giant genie let loose from a bottle, and he contemplates the crumpled-up clothes at the foot of the bed and wonders how she ever fit inside. (He thinks, also, of the blue-cartooned genie from Aladdin, and the voice-over gig for which he reduced himself to audition.)
For a moment, initially, his mind is everywhere but on this sweet, gentle giantess waiting to receive him, although he is soon enough absorbed—by the possibilities, yes, but mostly by the woman herself. He’s never seen such fleshiness! Such abundance! He allows himself to be swallowed up by her folds and crannies. He buries his face in her chest and worries jokingly for his own safety, first to himself, and then out loud. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes,” he says, pretending to come up for air, “call in the National Guard.” He hopes she takes this the right way.
She nearly does. She also takes it as a cue for some playful teasing of her own. “You call this a cock?” she says, reaching for him.
He’s embarrassed, a little, but he joins in when he sees the turnabout in her heckling. And the truth. Next to her, his very nearly erect penis looks very nearly like nothing at all. “Just look at me!” he cries out, truly amazed. “I’m a fucking toothpick!”
She flips him over on his back, works her way smoothly down his torso, and collects him, full, in her mouth. She moves, Wood has room to think, like a woman her size should not be able to move: like a dancer, a cat, a snake. A dancing hippo. His thoughts shift to what he’s doing—here, now, like this—then on to where he’s going, where he’s been, what he’ll do next. He’d forgotten about his circumstance, his supposed death, but now he’s back on it. It just comes to him, comes and goes, been that way all day. It’s not yet a part of him, and yet here, in this moment, on the unmade bed of this too-large woman, it finally takes hold. He is here and gone and back. He is reborn, reclaimed, and absolutely untethered. At fucking last.
Nothing can touch him, he thinks. No one.
“Gracious,” he says, playing with the name of this moment’s lover and again with her hair. “Goodness, Gracious.”
There’s been this thing between Pet and Norman going back to, like, day one, since about the time the boy first jizzed his shorts. Not a big thing, not anything at all really, but a thing just the same. Lately, this thing has been with them whenever they’re in the same room. They each recognize it, Pet feels certain, but neither one has chanced to give it voice or action.
Anyway, this is how she sees it, and when Norman, dressed in a towel, steps innocently from the guest bathroom to the living room couch on which he’d left his overnight duffel, it’s all she can do to stay focused. Used to be she could slap herself back to reality, but now, with Wood gone, it’s more than she can take. She’s sitting there, thumbing the pages of a perfumed fashion magazine, trying not to think, when she gets this eyeful. Lord. In the middle of everything else, she has to confront this and the dreadful weirdness that comes with it. Like this is what she needs right now.
It’s not like it’s her fault or anything, not like she can help it if the kid looks just like his father. Look! It doesn’t make her a bad person—does it?—if the sight of him, wet still from the shower, gets her going the way only Wood could get her going. There’s nothing morally wrong with a runaway thought. She didn’t ask for any of this. And besides, she never knew Wood as a young man; it’s only natural she would wonder what he was like, right? Come on, he was fiftysomething when they met, old enough to be his own fucking grandfather. There was this image of him, the one she had throughout her growing up, and then, finally, there was him. She’d seen Wood’s early movies over and over, and once she met him, she longed for what she’d missed, and wetsweetnaked Norman is simply a manifestation of her longing. That’s all. Nothing wrong with that.
“Hey,” Norman says, reaching for his bag, catching Pet’s stare.
“Hey.” Hey. That’s all. Hey, get the fuck out of here and give me a minute to save me from myself. Hey, take me with you to how it might have been with your father. Norman grabs his bag and retreats to the back room with the pull-out sofa to get dressed. Pet watches him leave and tries to harness her thoughts. Come on, she tells herself. Come on, come on, come on. This is nothing. This is everything. Her head runs to where she sees this non-thing with Norman as not unlike the real thing she reads about in the tabloids. That’s it, it’s like Woody Allen and that thing he had with Mia Farrow’s kid, what the hell is her name? This is how it is with Pet, over such as this; she tends to filter the stuff of her own life against the sensational headlines of a lifetime (or a week ago), and here is where she lands with this one.
Okay, right, fine, so she’s Woody Allen, lusting after her lover’s kid. At least now she’s got a frame of reference. Pet and Norman. Woody and Mia’s kid. It’s the same thing, complicated by biology, and by the fact that Norman’s mother happens also to be Pet’s closest friend, and by the fact that Wood is gone, and by the fact that Woody Allen probably has a bit more going on upstairs than she does. Okay, so it’s not the same thing at all.
“Jesus, Pet, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Anita, back from the kitchen, from cleaning up after lunch. Leave it to Anita to find cliché in high drama. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.
Yes, Pet wants to say. Yes, I have. Our ghost. Our Wood. Right here in this room. Yes. She wants to tell her friend everything, but she catches herself. Now is not the time, she’s caught enough to realize. Never is the time. Shit, Anita is Norman’s mother, no way Pet can tell her where she is with this. “Just sitting,” she says instead. “Trying, you know, to get my mind off things.”
“I know,” Anita says. “I just cleaned out my spice cabinet. I’m actually thinking of running down to the store for shelving paper. Can you believe it?”
Pet can’t recall ever thinking of running down to the store for shelving paper. What kind of store even carries shelving paper? Hardware? Grocery? Office supply? “Want company?” she says.
“I’ve lost the impulse. Think maybe I’ll just stay here by the phone.”
“Good. I had no intention of actually going with you.”
“Nils was saying maybe we should drive up to Maine to where the accident was, maybe see about the cabin, if there’s anything we can do.”
“You think?” It had never occurred to Pet to do anything but sit right there flipping through perfumed magazines for the rest of her life.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Pet doesn’t respond, leaves it to Anita to figure their next move—truly, she doesn’t have a decision left in her—but after a few beats, feels compelled to move things along. Any direction will do. “What kind of shampoo do you use?”
“What?”
“Shampoo.” She rustles her hair to illustrate, like she’s signing to Marlee Matlin, whom she met once at a square dance for the homeless. “Left mine at home.” Somewhere between Norman’s exit and Anita’s entrance, it occurred to her that a shower might be a good thing, a way not to think about Norman, or Wood, or what’s happened. She doesn’t recall processing the idea, but here it is. Again, without sign language: “I’ve got a hotel bottle of something in my bag, but that stuff dries me out.”
“I keep a whole assortment. In this weather, I’ve been using some natural crap from this place in Cambridge. Supposedly milk and honey in it.”
Pet imagines some foul-smelling curdled ooze. “Gross,” she says.
“It’s actually not bad,” Anita offers, patting her hair like a model in a commercial, pretending at perky. “Leaves me sure and shiny.” She crosses the room to Pet, head down, like a battering ram: “Smell.”
Pet smells. “Actually, not bad.”
“There’s like a vat on the shower floor, upstairs.”
“Yeah?”
Pet leaves the room committed to the notion that a shower and shampoo will carry her past the day’s uncertainties, only by the time she reaches the staircase Norman has reemerged from the back of the house, looking for his mother. Pet, redirected, lingers at the foot of the stairs, choosing to overdose on pure family dynamic, from the source, instead of bottled milk and honey.
“What’s this about Maine?” the kid says to his mother. “We going?”
“I don’t know,” Anita says. “What do you think? Nils is thinking maybe we should.”
“Screw Nils,” Norman says, with a shade more disdain than the moment requires. “You think it’s a good idea, then we should go. Pet thinks it’s a good idea, then we should go. But don’t tell me about Nils.”
“Norman,” Anita admonishes. “This is his house, remember?” She had thought her son might have gotten past his little differences with Nils by now.
“Of course it’s his house. How can I not know this is his house? There are like a million pairs of clogs in my room. All these carpet remnants.” Norman lifts the square of industrial weave at his feet—brown, with rainbow flecks—to illustrate his point.
Anita’s smile is like a patronizing pat on her son’s head. “They’re not clog clogs,” she tells. “You can’t wear them or anything. They’re just decorative. He collects them. They’re handmade.”
“Great. That explains it.” Silly him.
Pet listens in and thrills at the tension. It’s a regular soap opera, what goes on in this house, with her in the other room. Also, she thrills at the way Norman validates her being here by including her in his argument. She gets a vote. She matters. She sees the way he treats Nils. It’d kill her to be cast in the same role.
Anita: “So?”
“So, I guess. Yeah. I mean, if that’s what everyone wants.”
“I didn’t say it’s what everyone wants, just it was something Nils suggested. I’m just putting it on the table.”
Norman hates it when his mother puts things on the table, which usually means she wants to gather support for whatever it is she already has determined. With his mother, you either put things on the table or in your computer or on top of the “in” box. “Let Pet decide, then,” he says. “I’m not exactly up for any big decisions.”
“Oh, and like I am?” Pet, from behind the living room wall, on the staircase landing.
“Pet, you’re a child,” Anita reprimands. “Eavesdropping. Nice.”
She gets back a laugh. “I’m not eavesdropping,” Pet insists, not quite sincere, still in hiding behind the wall. She puts on a wee voice. “It’s a small house. I couldn’t help overhear.”
Norman pokes his head around to where Pet is crouched on the bottom step. “Pet’s in trouble,” he sing-songs. “Pet’s in trouble.”
“Oh, Norman, shut up,” Anita says, following her son to the stairs. She’s about run out of good cheer.
“Norman’s in trouble,” Pet taunts back. “Norman’s in trouble.” She stands, makes to climb the stairs, turns and shakes a finger at Norman: “You wait till your father gets home, young man!”
She’s a sitcom mom, lampooned, only as soon as she says it, she wants to change her lines, replay the scene. Wait till your father gets home. What’s that? She struggles for a way to un-say the words, but Anita’s not waiting for any explanation. She flashes her friend a look that could chill soup. She’s not like this, Anita, not usually, but this is not usually. She surprises herself with her reaction. The line strikes her first as no big deal, just a slip of the tongue, but then she hears it from Norman’s perspective and she gets all twisted up inside. She goes a little crazy on his behalf. She bounds up the first few steps to where Pet is now standing and leans into her at the waist.
It’s a good, clean hit, and Pet is abruptly rag-dolled over Anita’s shoulder with the force of it. Then she straightens and slumps to her seat, where she tries to reclaim her wind and her bearings. “Jesus, Nita,” she says.
“Don’t ‘Jesus Nita’ me.”
“Mom,” Norman intercedes, pinning his mother’s arms to her sides in a tight hug. “It’s cool. Be cool. Everything’s cool.” He can feel his heart, up against his mother’s collarbone, racing, like, a million beats a minute. Anita can feel it too, and she wishes her own beat in synch with her son’s. That would be nice, she thinks, to feel what he’s feeling, to be in synch.
But it’s too much for Anita. All of it—too much, too soon, too everything. Instead of racing, her heartbeat goes flat, near as she can tell. She feels suddenly faint, overcome. She doesn’t black out, but she’s close enough to know how it might feel. Oh, yes, this. . . . She goes with the feeling and lets herself fall against Norman, limp. He tries to lower his mother gently to the steps alongside the slumped Pet, only when the dead weight of her is more than he can handle, he is pulled down as well, so that eventually all three of them are slumped and draped across the middle steps like the victims of a shooting spree.
They lie in this haphazard way for what feels to Norman like a long time, underneath the sounds of their breathing and the unfocused thoughts of what just happened. What an odd picture they must make. They are puzzled together in roughly the same formation Norman remembers from the adolescent game of Ha!—a human circle linked head to stomach, head to stomach, all the way around, allowing laughter (or tears, or whatever) to pass from one body to the next like a contagion. Ha! Used to play it with his friends in the atrium at the mall on rainy weekend afternoons when he was about thirteen, when the thought of lying his head on a girl’s stomach was the biggest thing in the world. Now it’s just his mother and Pet, but he gives it a try. “Ha,” he says, without much conviction.
His mother and Pet, lost in their own reflections, do not respond. Anita’s got her strength back, but she’s not up for doing anything with it.
“Ha!”
Nothing still.
“Ha!” This time Norman’s canned laughter turns somehow genuine, and he is collected by it—hahahahaha—and transported to another frame. Really, he can’t help himself. His laughing gets bigger and bigger to where he is doubled up in such uncontrollable fits that it begins to hurt. There’s no explaining it, but there’s also no stopping it, and soon Pet and Anita can’t help but join in. (It never worked like this when he was a kid!) They’ve got no idea what they’re doing, or why, but they are taken in. It’s like a wave, a shared release: the three of them, laughing, wiping away tears, desperate to ease the same pain.
Nils, in from the carport, where he’d been sorting his screws, happens onto this scene like an immigrant to some strange shore. Norman’s right, they do make an odd picture, and Nils struggles to filter what he sees against what he knows: his wife, her son, her best friend, splayed across the steps, giggling helplessly like children, waiting for the other shoe to drop on Wood. They all know what’s coming; what they don’t know is when or how. It’s like they refuse to acknowledge the poor man’s fate. Listen to Nils. In death, a bastard like Terence Wood is elevated to pity. He works to understand it, Nils, the way these people are coping. He’s missing something: how they’ve contorted into such an unlikely position, how things like appearance and propriety don’t seem to matter, how they can laugh at a time like this. It makes no sense. A death in the family is a solemn thing. A tragedy like this, time should just stand still.
“Nilsy!” Pet cries, when she notices him at the foot of the stairs.
The others turn to look, and their doubled-up laughing swells by the powers of three and four. The sight of poor, staid Nils strikes them all as about the funniest thing they’ve ever seen.
Anita tries to stifle her laughing, but even she can’t control herself. She doesn’t want her husband to think they’re making fun of him—it’s not like that—but even if she could find the words, there’d be no place to put them. She tries to calm herself, to slow her thoughts, but, for some reason, she starts gesticulating madly, patting the air in front of her like a spastic traffic cop. When she realizes what she’s doing, she makes to halt Nils and his passing judgment, but in that same realization is the knowledge that she is having the opposite effect.
“Anita,” Nils says, making his disappointment known. He doesn’t know what to make of her mad gesturing except to think it strange.
“Anita,” Pet mimics. “Get a fucking grip!” She notices, for the first time, Norman’s head on her stomach, and, in this instant, her laughter subsides. She wants to run her fingers through the boy’s hair, touch them to his lips. She can’t remember a time he’s been in her lap like this, wonders if he even notices, if this whole set-up means anything to him. She leans close, wanting to smell his hair, the back of his neck.
“Oh, Nils,” Anita says, finally composed, hands still at her sides. She’s nearly out of breath. “I’m so sorry. It’s not what you’re thinking.”
What could he possibly be thinking?
Pimletz, shuttling to New York to take a meeting. Last time he took the shuttle, it was run by Eastern, but the wings of man have long since been clipped. Now it’s Delta, or USAir, one of those. He has to consult his ticket to make sure. On his own dime, he’d have taken the train, maybe even the bus, but this Stemble guy said he’d reimburse him for the fare, and time was tight, and no way he’d have gotten there and back the same night on the ground. Anyway, there’s a kind of heightened sense of importance, flying. No reason Pimletz need deny himself a taste of the high life—especially if someone else is paying for it. Especially if he wants to matter.
It’s been a while. Last time Pimletz took the shuttle, Ed Koch was still mayor. He remembers because Koch was on the same plane, couple rows back, a good head taller than anyone else on board. Kissinger, too, on the same flight, other side of the aisle, average height. The former secretary of state was giving a talk at the Kennedy Center, at Harvard, there was an item in that day’s Record-Transcript. Nothing in the paper about what Koch was doing, and Pimletz had to fight back the impulse to ask.
Still, Koch and Kissinger on the same plane, what were the odds on that?
No one worth noting on today’s flight, not that Pimletz can tell. He’s wondering if anyone’s looking at him, thinking if maybe he’s someone important, the way he’s been studying everyone else. He longs to tell someone his business, to justify his being here, to leave the guy next to him with a story to tell. Yeah, interesting fellow, that Axel Pimletz. Writes for the Record-Transcript. Surely you’ve seen his name. That’s right. He’s Terence Wood’s biographer. Going down to meet his publisher, have some dinner, maybe a couple drinks.
Guy next to him appears to be no one special, no one better. Pimletz thinks maybe he should engage him in conversation—interact!—but he’s never been any good at that sort of thing. He worries that his breath, up close, is not what it should be, that he hasn’t done such a good job on his ears, past couple days, that he’ll run out of small talk before anyone recognizes it for what it is. You know, what does he have to say to these people? He grabs the in-flight magazine from the seat back in front of him and turns away with it toward the aisle to avoid the possibility of confrontation.
“Sir,” he hears, from an officious voice, “we’ll need to pass.”
It does not occur to Pimletz that he might be the designated “sir.” Why should it? People are always addressing each other respectfully, in ways that have nothing to do with him. With Pimletz, it’s always more like, “Hey, you!”
“Sir,” he hears again.
This time he looks up from his not reading and sees a beat-up drink cart at his shoulder being slowly wheeled and badly steered by a beat-up flight attendant who looks way too old for the job. She must be fifty, easy, and pushing not only the drink cart, but the FAA limits on makeup and hairspray, as well. One look at her and everything about this airplane seems suddenly too old for the job. Even his armrest, Pimletz now notices, has logged a few too many miles. The worn plastic cushion is duct-taped to the rest at his elbow; the hole where the recline button used to be stares back at him like an empty eye socket; there’s muted, tinny sound spilling from twin headphone jacks. He takes in all of these things, wondering at entropy, at how circumstances evolve, in the same moment he works the exchange with the too-traveled flight attendant. He straightens, pulls his legs in from the aisle, leans away. “Don’t mind me,” he says, good-naturedly.
She doesn’t, apparently. She’s in too much of a hurry to wait for Pimletz to finish rearranging himself in his seat, rolls the cart directly over his left foot, and scrapes the sharp metal corner against his pant leg, tearing the fabric and leaving a good-size abrasion on his calf.
“Sonofabitch!” Pimletz whisperhollers, reaching for his wound, thinking what it’ll look like tomorrow. It doesn’t really hurt, not in a releasing adrenalin kind of way, but he is surprised. And indignant. Just the idea of it gets him. What kind of flight attendant rolls her drink cart into customers? This doesn’t happen to other people. This doesn’t happen to Ed Koch or Henry Kissinger. She’s already a couple rows up, hasn’t even turned to see if he’s okay. It can’t be she didn’t notice. How can she not have noticed? Pimletz doesn’t know what to do about it, if he should do anything, maybe contact this woman’s supervisor, keep the skies safe from runaway drink carts and beat-up airline employees.
Indignant, Pimletz does nothing but sit and stew. What is it with these people? What is it with him? He wonders if maybe there isn’t something in his demeanor lets people roll all over him, literally and otherwise, if maybe he sends out some kind of signal, some show of weakness, some veiled Kick Me! sign he can’t quite make out. He thinks about this, rubbing at his calf, seeing if the tear in his pants is something Warren Stemble might notice, trying not to call any more attention to himself. Rubbing, he thinks that perhaps his musings on how the world has tilted since his last shuttle flight have more to do with him than with any dramatic shifts in air travel, that what really matters is how time has marched on without him.
As the world turns, Pimletz holds fast. This is mostly true, even though he has changed in his own way. He has to remind himself. Absolutely, he’s changed. He just hasn’t kept pace.
Last time he took the shuttle, Pimletz had a reason to get up each morning. He was not yet mired in complacency and routine. There was a God, and there was Eastern, and there was hope. Now everything’s all turned around. Yes, perhaps there still is a God, but Pimletz can strike the other two. Yes, he’s in the same job, and in the same apartment, and yes, he somehow manages to get up each morning, but it’s not the same. Last time he took the shuttle, he had something to look forward to.
Pimletz doesn’t know when he became the kind of man with more life behind him than in front, when it started to matter, why it matters now. He doesn’t know what he did with all those years. Well, he does know, now that he’s dwelling on it: nothing, jack-shit, bupkus. It’s just that he doesn’t know how he got away with it for so long.
Pet—milk-and-honeyed, fine-and-not-fine—steps from the shower and into a thirsty red towel, then onto a mocha and mauve shag remnant her friend seems to want her to use as a bathmat.
Okay, so this is a given around here. For all of her finer qualities, Anita doesn’t keep much of a house, that’s for sure. Pet doesn’t want to say anything, but she can certainly make an observation. Like with this bathmat. It’s not just an isolated thing, she’ll have you know. Anita’s got this odd collection of carpet remnants strewn all over the place, in every fucking room, in colors and styles that have nothing to do with the rest of her decorating, and whenever Pet steps her naked feet to the synthetic fabrics, she wonders at Anita’s thinking. Also, she wonders at these used carpets, at their histories. Mocha and mauve! Who the fuck picked this one out in the first place? And, believe Pet, this one’s not the worst of them. The fact of them, now that she thinks of it, that’s the worst part. That they’re here at all. Nils salvages these scraps from his cleaning jobs, and Anita sprinkles them about like crumbs. Pet doesn’t get it, decides maybe it’s a New Hampshire thing, a thrift. And it’s a thrift gone to extremes. There’re more remnants than Anita knows what to do with. Nils keeps a pile of them out in the garage, squared and stacked, and somewhere in his head he’s got a story to go with each one. Don’t get him started. Either you’re stepping on a section of Mrs. Needle’s paisley weave, the victim of a frozen hot water pipe in the blizzard of 1993, or you’re on a piece of primary-colored, broad-loomed hopscotch board left over from an overly thorough delousing at Nashua’s cooperative nursery school. That’s how it is in this house. It’s just been a day, but Pet already has passed more than a few idle moments mapping her escape from each room. She’s got it figured so she can hopscotch over every square foot, like a child traipsing across stepping stones, without dipping her toes on any primary flooring, and when she tires of this she might also navigate her way in the negative, leaving the remnants untouched.
Truly, Pet’s not much of a thinker—she’ll be the first to tell you—and here she is with too much time to think. This right here is the problem, but she can’t see what to make of it. There’s not much else to do but sit and think and wait, which is why she’s all for Nils’s idea of heading up to Maine. Why not? It’d be something to do, right? Some way to distract herself from the emptiness and uncertainty, get her mind off Norman and back on Wood, where it should be. God knows this shower didn’t help.
She looks into the mirror and considers the lines on her face, the red in her eyes. She hasn’t been crying much, but she’s all bloodshot and flat. Her eyes don’t give her away, the way she’s been told they often do. Right now, they don’t reveal a thing; even she’s got no idea what’s behind them. And the lines! Jesus, she’s like one of those Hirschfeld caricatures, those drawings in the Sunday Times. She can count the fucking NINAs on her face. When did this happen? Where was she?
She cracks the mirrored doors of Anita’s medicine cabinet and searches the shelves for facial cream. All she finds are some old jars of CVS house brand—another thrift!—so she leaves them untouched. Better to let grief and nature run their course than to risk what’s left of her skin to generic lotion.
The medicine cabinet doors are accordioned in such a way that Pet picks up her reflection exponentially, and in the fractured images she grows confused, frightened. There’s more of her than she wishes to consider. She steps back from the mirror and lets the red towel drop to the ground. She examines her many breasts, refracted, not all that closely at first, but enough to catch the effect. She’s onto the idea of them, as much as she is the specifics. She wonders how many breasts she might find in the too many folds of mirror. She starts to count, but leaves off at twenty-seven, twenty-eight. She’s disoriented, can’t remember if she’s doubling back, if she’s covered this set already. She ends up with an odd number.
It is a weird thing to see yourself like this, naked, over and over, into infinity. Pet has to blink her eyes to refocus, to step back farther, and finally to reach up and push the mirrored door closed before she bangs her head against the glass in frustration. There is just too much of her, too many. She shudders her head clear. Think, she coaches herself. Think.
Thinking a little, she finds the switch to the makeup lights rimming the mirror, leans in close. She’s got the mirrored cabinet pressed flat; there’s only the one image now, but she wants to take it all in. The light is good. She needs to see what’s going on here, to really see. My God, these lines on her face are pretty much stenciled in, she notices up close. She’s way past the point where even the most expensive creams will do any good. And these tits! Christ, they look like they’ve been put through a fucking car wash and wrung dry. They’re the tits of one of her mother’s friends from down at the beach club from when Pet was a girl: Aunt Wynnie—not her real aunt, just someone who was always around. She’s gone all sorry-looking, Pet, all of a sudden, all over, but here is where it gets her. She can even spot hairs growing from the aureole of her left breast. Hairs! Five or six of them, not clumped together, but black as night and wiry as the frayed edges of a Brillo pad.
Jesus.
She cups herself with both hands, pushes up to where she’s her own personal WonderBra. She lets her imagination go. She casts herself as one of those Dangerous Liaisons actresses—Glenn Close (yes? Michelle Pfeiffer would be pushing it), only a bit younger, all busting out and ready for anything. She pouts her lips, like from the other era. Then she lets herself drop and her entire body seems to sag with the lack of support, the lips included. Her posture’s for shit when she’s deflated like this. She straightens willfully, rolls back her shoulders, juts out her jaw. People are always telling her she should have modeled, but here, at least, she adopts a model’s pose. There, she’s thinking. There. Okay.
Actually not bad.
Pet looks deep into the mirror and what she gets back is a face heavy with living, a body worn by time. It’s someone else, someone older, someone whose husband just drove off a cliff. She thinks back on the vibrant young woman she has always defined herself as and marvels at the transformation. She doesn’t remember looking like this yesterday. She doesn’t remember growing Aunt Wynnie’s tits. She didn’t sleep much last night, but it’s more than that. She wonders if it’s all Wood, the way she looks now, if the thought of him gone has sapped the glow from her appearance. Lately, she’s done a lot of reading on mood and body image and positive emotional health, and she’s thinking maybe this is the way she processes her grief. Maybe that’s all it is. She’s not weeping or wailing or anything, but the way she feels has manifested itself in the way she looks. This is how it happens with some people.
Then it hits her: she doesn’t have to look like this. Wood, here or gone, wouldn’t stand for it. Pet doesn’t have to have lines on her face or hairs growing from her tits. She doesn’t have to drag her ass around looking like shit. It’s not the feeling like shit part that’s a problem, it’s how she looks.
She comes up with a loose plan. She reopens the folding doors of Anita’s medicine cabinet. She’s looking for tweezers. She means to pull the wiry hairs from her tits, but she’s distracted by a disposable razor—black, it must be Nils’s—and an ancient-looking dispenser of Edge shaving gel, the rim at the top gone to rust. She moves to Loose Plan B. Where it comes from, she’s got no idea; where she’s going with it, only some. She reaches for the Edge, shakes the can, listens for the rattle, squirts some of the stuff into her left palm. Still works, comes out green and runny. She checks for a date on the can; she’s thinking maybe the congealing properties have somehow expired, but after it sits in her hand for a bit, the gel appears to harden. She works it until it turns white and creamy.
Then she goes to it. She steps to the sink, close enough so her mound of pubic hair is pressed flat against the cold counter tile, and runs a slow stream of water into her cupped right hand, dabbing at herself, again and again, until she is wet enough to take the cream. She rubs the Edge into her hairs until she is well lathered, working slowly, careful not to make a mess of Anita’s bathroom. She needs another few dollops to complete the job, and when she is through, she steps back to admire her neat preparation in the glass.
Well. Pet’s never seen herself like this down there: a near-perfect V, filled in. The German lady who waxes her works with a sheet and no mirrors, so this is a first. This is a one and only. Talk about weird. One minute she’s her mother’s friend from the beach club, and the next she’s one of her own friends at ten or eleven in the bath playing with Crazy Foam, waiting for puberty.
She rinses Nils’s razor under the faucet until the water starts to steam. She leaves the water to run, hot. Then, almost without thinking and yet somehow with great care, she slides the blade in a straight line through the cream, then again. She worries if she should shave in a down-and-away motion or up and back, figures it probably doesn’t matter. Either way, it’ll do the job, long as she doesn’t cut herself. Actually, it’s her lips she’s worried about, the soft folds, so she’s careful to leave off just under the pubic bone. South of that, she’ll leave to a professional. Or just leave.
She shaves until there is nothing left but a racing stripe down her middle, a Brillo-y line about one inch wide and running straight to her core. That’s how it strikes her at a glance, like she’s reaching down to find herself, to discover something. She rubs away what’s left of the cream, fluffs out her hair, steps back once more to examine herself in the folds of glass. Her next thought is she looks ridiculous, but she tries to come at it from another way. She looks at her stripe as a Mohawk, a genuine Down There Mohawk. In her head, she makes herself a fierce warrior, a savage. For the moment, to Pet, this radical pubic hairstyle is not just a fashion statement, but also a statement of purpose, a reflection of how she feels. How she wants to feel is empowered, ennobled, resolved, but she’s back to feeling ridiculous. Also conflicted, disbelieving, supernatural. She’s all over the fucking place, and, when she realizes her new ’do has done nothing to root her in one reality or another, she reaches again for Nils’s razor to finish the job.
She reclaims a smear of already-gelled Edge and reapplies the cream to what’s left of her pubic hair. The used cream is runny, but she’s hoping it’ll do the job. This time she makes one last swipe toward the bottom of her long road—enough, say, to remove the ’stache from a Hitler or Chaplin—leaving off just where her mound of hair returns to full flower. She makes it like a firebreak cut into a hill: there’s this stripe of hair, then a bare inch or so, then the full-flower patch surrounding her pussy.
Done.
Now when she steps back the effect is startling. Now it’s something. She does a lousy model’s twirl, indicates her new bush like one of the Price Is Right girls displaying a wall of EZ-Brick, a Brand New Car! She steps one foot ever so slightly forward in a tentative pose. With the cream rubbed away and her hairs refluffed, it looks to Pet like she’s wearing a furry exclamation point. She smiles, finally. These things just happen to her. A goddamn exclamation point. How about that? Wood would basically shit. And that Hirschfeld character from the Times, he’d go just about blind, trying to hide his NINAs now.
She’s pulled from her musings by a knock on the door.
“Pet, honey, it’s me,” Anita calls, from the other side. “I need to grab a couple things. Looks like we’re mobilizing.” She flings open the door.
“Hey,” Pet says, moving quickly to cover herself. “Some people knock, you know.”
“Knock, knock,” Anita suggests, reminded of the endless childhood riddle.
Pet plays along. “Who’s there?”
“Anita.”
“Anita who?”
“Anita grab a couple things. Looks like we’re mobilizing.” She takes a moment to turn sardonic. “Stop me if I’m repeating myself.”
“Real fucking funny,” Pet begrudges. “Like that’s the first time you ever used that one.”
Anita turns serious and pissed. “You been in here for like a month.” Seriously pissed.
“What, you want me to reimburse you for the hot water? Nils is outside reading the meter?”
“No,” Anita says, turning to concern. “It’s just, you know, a long time. I was starting to worry.” Serious concern. She looks around. “What the hell you doin’ anyway, all this time?”
Pet drops the towel in answer, and Anita turns in the direction of the heavywet thwomp! on the floor and sees her friend’s strange handiwork. Pet does another pose, this time for an audience, only this time her hand gestures are closer to Vanna White than to the Price Is Right girls. This time, in her head, she’s a star.
Anita struggles to understand everything that’s going on: her best friend naked, their husband dead, her family downstairs, all of them wondering how to move forward, when the rest of their life will kick in. There’s all this shit, all this not moving, and now, on top of it, there’s this unusually shaved pussy commanding her full attention. It stares back at her like a cheap toy.
“Why an arrow?” she wants to know. She can’t think of anything else to say. She’s thinking maybe there’s some psychology to what Pet’s doing, maybe the arrow pointing down has to do with her spirits being down, maybe she’s laid out a map to reclaim her soul. Something.
“What arrow?” Pet asks. “It’s an exclamation point!” She says this with the same emphasis she hoped to convey with her haircut.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, you know, ta-da! Exclamation point! Yes!” Another model’s pose, like at a car show.
“So, this is a good thing?” Anita asks, making sure. “What you’re doing, this is a positive thing? You’re not going slowly crazy on me?”
“Absolutely, it’s a positive thing. It’s my own little exclamation point. Since when is an exclamation point not a positive thing?”
Anita steps closer to inspect the design. “You sure it’s not an arrow?” she says. “To me, it’s an arrow. That’s what I’m seeing.” In the brief moment she had to consider it, she felt sure this was the design Pet was after. Look, the way the hair returns to its natural mini-V, right there, where it matters. Definitely an arrow.
“I should know if it’s an arrow or an exclamation point,” Pet insists. “Right? If anyone should know, it’d be me.”
Anita steps closer still, touches her friend gingerly where her skin has been rubbed raw, where her hair used to be. “Jesus, Pet, you could have cut yourself,” she says. She notices her husband’s disposable Bic on the sink. “Could’ve at least found yourself a decent razor. Nils uses these things into the ground.”
“It’s just irritated,” Pet dismisses. “I’ll be fine. Maybe some cream.”
“Look how red you are.”
“It’s fine.”
Anita still can’t believe what she sees. “My God, Pet, what were you thinking?” she says. She rubs herself, in sympathetic pain. “Next you’ll go off and have your clit pierced.”
Well, I wasn’t thinking, Pet wants to say. Not at all, and that’s probably the point. I’m just moving, acting, doing. There’s no other way to be, now. All we can do is get sucked along, just be. Do. That’s all that’s left. Who the hell has time to think anymore?
“Come on, Nita,” she says instead, just being, reaching again for the Edge. “I’ll do you. Take your mind off things.” She shakes the can until the rattle fills the small room like silly thunder.
Great, Anita thinks, this is just what Nils needs to see later. This is just what we need to be doing—dulling his already-dull blade with our pubes, giving ourselves a kinky makeover. Then she thinks, you know, what’s the big deal? It’s just hair. She’s up for being sucked along, like her friend. Do. It’s as good an idea as any. Of course, an exclamation point wouldn’t suit her mood. She’s never been an exclamation point kind of person. A question mark, that’d be Anita’s call. If that doesn’t just fit: a giant WHAT? to let the world know she’s got no fucking clue.
He’s not quite himself, Wood.
Hell, he’s not quite anyone. In less than forty-eight hours, his life has been recast and undone. True, it’s been Wood’s own recasting, his own undoing, but everything seems to be running away from him just the same. It’s like he’s got no say anymore, like he doesn’t matter. He guesses that was the idea, but his life has taken a life of its own, and he’s not even left playing the same role. He is here, in the upstairs apartment of an overweight waitress, momentarily alone in her bedroom area, listening to a heavysteady stream of what sounds like horse piss coming from the pocket door to the bathroom at the foot of her bed.
True as well, this last is not an unpleasant realization to the overindulged (as ever) Wood. Recast, undone . . . it doesn’t matter. The essentials are the same. Absolutely, the thought of his enormous new friend squatting mightily over her dwarfed toilet has an undeniable appeal. It runs alongside competing thoughts of his son Norman, his wrecked car, his first wife Elaine, the turmoil he imagines in the preproduction offices of his next picture, the calm he feels at being left alone, at last. Also, Anita and Pet—as much a part of him as they are now of each other.
Probably the biggest thought is for the general uncertainty he has unleashed around him, all of which looms as this wild cacophony, while Wood—somewhere in silence, somewhere in the middle—struggles to understand the foofaraw. He listens to Grace, pissing, and, in the sound of her water meeting the town’s, he finds genuine release. There’s a peace and quiet inside the moment that he hasn’t known for way too long. Just last month, he paid $139.95, plus postage and handling, for a white noisemaker—the deluxe model Heart and Sound Machine from the new Sharper Image catalog—with settings to simulate the soothing sounds of rain on the roof, waves on the shore, critters in the night forest, to which he might lose himself and the world around him enough to facilitate sleep. Yet, there was no setting to match the sound of Grace pissing. Too bad. To listen to her now is to lose the wild cacophony, to drift off into the rhythms of silence, into nothing. If she can keep it up (and for a while it seems she can), he might just sleep for the next hundred years. As it is, he lightly nods off, flitting at the edges of a sound sleep for just a few beats, but long enough to become disoriented until Grace finally runs out of need. In the cruel sound of her flushing, Wood is returned to his shifting reality.
He wills himself alert, reclaims his bearings: ah, yes, here. This is where I am. This is what’s happened. This is me now. He looks about, takes it all in, plans to think ahead. The one-room apartment is decorated with framed posters advertising out-of-town art shows and a lobby poster for Scorcese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which Wood figures must be the Easy Rider of waitress movies. There’s not much in the way of furnishings: tattered loveseat, a single straight-backed chair, full-size bed (a mattress, box spring, and frame, just), Formica coffee table, two mismatched floor lamps, the windows dressed only in shades. There’s a counter and two stools pulled close enough they might be kissing; the counter tops are showroom clean, save for some loose packets of Equal sugar substitute, the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, an open box of Kellogg’s Corn Pops, some personal mail. The room is dominated by Grace’s one apparent extravagance: a kick-ass Mitsubishi entertainment system, complete with wide-screen television, side-by-side four-headed VCRs (for dubbing), high-definition DVD player, and fully integrated stereo.
The tiny apartment is in only slight disarray, most of which seems Wood’s doing: kicked pillows, rumpled linens, a happy forest of pink stuffed animals floored by an errant elbow from a shelf alongside the bed. His clothes are bunched in a ball in the far corner of the room, and, in their bunched position, they appear somewhat ratty, uninspired, out of fashion. Now that he’s noticed them, he can’t find any accompanying plans to put them back on. Oh, he’ll be out of the apartment soon enough, and back about his strange new business, but he is in no hurry. He stays under Grace’s sheets, waiting for her to return from her ablutions, trying to keep warm (it’s like the whole town’s in need of insulation), angling for a way to parlay his good fortune at being here into a shower, possibly a change of clothes. He’s worrying what kinds of stories he’ll need to pin on Harlan Trask in order to win Grace’s accommodation.
Grace, meanwhile, loiters at the other side of her pocket door, wanting to allow this Harlan person time to get dressed—maybe even to leave, if that’s what he wants. No reason to expect anything more. She’s seen enough Sally Jesses to know this is the way things usually go. It’s the way of the world, and she should just get used to it. Besides, it wasn’t like it was even his idea or anything, this getting together in the middle of the afternoon. Well, it was, but it was also hers. It was a mutual thing, a consenting adults thing. Matter of fact, if she wants to get particular, it was mostly Grace’s doing. She’s a big girl, she’s got her own impulses, and if she’s big enough to act on them she’ll have to find room for the notion that there’s someplace else the guy needs to be. There’s actually someplace else she needs to be, too: downstairs, fixing for the dinner crowd, touching back down on the rest of her life.
“You’re still here,” she announces, sliding open the pocket door, noticing Wood between her sheets. She is pretending at surprise and truly surprised, both.
“Something I need to ask you,” he says, patting the bed at his side, smoothing a place for Grace to sit. He wants to get through this.
“Something big?” Grace wants to know, not moving from the doorway.
Wood hedges. “To me, you know, I guess it’s pretty big, huge, but that’s me. That’s where I’m coming from. You, I don’t know. You, I’m hoping maybe you’ll see it like a little thing.”
Grace is interested as hell, but determined to play it cool. She read a book once, Interacting to Advantage, in which the author told how she should present herself without giving anything away. Her mood, her emotions, anything. Doesn’t matter that she’s shared an intimacy with this man, that they’ve exchanged bucketfuls of bodily fluids. It should, but she won’t let it. Sport fucking, her regulars call it, no more meaningful than bumping carts with your neighbor at the Stop ’n’ Shop: oh, excuse me, nice to see you, yes, love that little thing you’re able to do with your hips, let’s get together again soon. She wants to come across as guarded, indifferent, like it tells in the book. She knows enough to know that you never know—right?—and that this is the only way she’s got to keep from being too exposed. “Now?” she says, trying on indifference. “You need to tell me this right now?”
“Or later, doesn’t matter.” Wood allows himself an actor’s pause (if anyone’s entitled, it should be him) before lapsing into melodrama: “But soon, though.”
She buys into it, full price. “What?” she says softly. “What is it?” She has to know.
“Basically a favor. That’s all. Don’t mean to make it sound like such a big thing, but I’m at a place in my life where I could really use a good turn.” Of course, he does mean to make it sound like such a big thing. That’s his plan exactly. He bites back his lip as if to hold off tears, congratulates himself for the “place in my life” phrasing. The way she watches Jerry Springer and all, this Grace is probably a sucker for pop psychobabble. He’s thinking maybe he can muster some crying if he sees that it’s needed. Matter of fact, he gets close to it here: “I’ve forgotten what it feels like to lean on someone else.”
Grace, suckered, reaches for his hands, sandwiches them between her own, waits for the rest.
Here it comes, closer still: “Grace, it’s like this. I need a place to crash for a while. Crash, settle down, whatever. I need to get back on my feet.” He dabs at his eyes with the top sheet.
“What can I do?” She knows, but she wants to hear.
“I’m wondering if I can’t maybe stay here a while, get myself a job. Like I said, get back on my feet.” He doesn’t wait for a response, figures it’s best to keep talking. “I’m not looking for a hand-out or anything, just a place to stay, maybe a couple weeks, until I can put together some money, get a place of my own. I’ll pay my own way, soon as I get some money coming in, it’s just that all the rooms to let in town, they want the money up front. Like a week’s worth. You know these people.” She nods to confirm that she does, but he keeps talking. “They need to make their nut for the winter, I can see that, but that kind of money I don’t have. Not anymore.” He touches her hair. She seemed to like that. He’s to where he’ll try anything. “I know you don’t know me or anything. I mean, who the hell am I, right? But I think you can sense I’m a good person. Two people don’t share what we just shared without trusting each other, at least a little. All I’m asking is that you keep trusting me, maybe trust me a little bit more. I just need a shot.”
She has questions. She doesn’t want to scare him off, but there are things she’s dying to know. Like, why here, in Maine? Why her? To look at him, you’d never guess he had no place to go, no money in his pockets. He’s well-groomed, articulate. Clothes could use a wash, now that she thinks of it, but they were nice looking once. And recently. Him, too. Still, the package doesn’t fit with her idea of desperation. Something must have happened. Something worth knowing. “You want to tell me about it?” she says, softly still.
“Long story short?”
“For now.”
He comes up with something. He works from the script, sticks to Harlan Trask’s story, but there are whole chunks missing from memory. Anyway, what Wood does recall doesn’t entirely fit. In the picture Front to Back, Trask uproots his young bride to Canada to avoid Vietnam, leaving his conservative father with an office products business he can no longer manage and the indignity of having a draft-dodger for a son and partner. Wood no longer remembers where in Middle America the story was set—Idaho, Iowa, one of those—except that it was the sort of place where youngsters did what they were told, where patriotism was absolute. Here, for Grace, he’s got to embroider things to get what he wants. He borrows the backstory, but that’s about it. He throws in a bit about losing his wife to cancer, no children, and, from there, it’s just a short leap to the White House pardon, to a less forgiving reception back home, to vagabonding the country, running from what happened, looking to put down some new roots. It’s not hard to see how just a few wrong turns might have led to this sorry place.
“Harlan,” she says, pulling close. “I had no idea.” She’s thinking, if this is what he wants to tell me, then this is fine.
“I’m okay,” he says. “I’m really fine. I just need a break, is all. A change of clothes.”
“A fresh start. Like you said, someone to believe in you. Everything’ll just fall from there. You’ll see.”
“You think?” He starts to dab at his eyes with the sheets again, maybe ask for tissues, but he catches himself. Doesn’t pay to overdo it.
“Yes, I think.” Grace has all the answers. She tells him what. She’ll get dressed, get the dinner menu started, leave him alone up here just to relax. There’s meat loaf tonight on special, and that’s always a job and a half. Harlan can just use the time to rest and think. Lord knows he must be tired. Just look at him. Probably a shower’d do a world of good. She’s got some sweats in her closet, he can help himself, they should fit. He needs to get past the color, is all. They’re lilac purple, she’s sorry to say. Not exactly gender neutral, but who’s gonna know? She’ll send one of the Lennys up later with a plate of food. Something hearty, she promises, with built-in seconds. She’d come up herself, but she hates to leave the place during the rush. She’s not exactly the poster girl for delegating responsibility, she hopes he understands. Anyway, she should be done around ten, maybe eleven, it’s not a late crowd around here, and after she closes up they can talk things through some more, see how tomorrow’s gonna look, and the day after that. “One day at a time, Harlan,” she says. “Remember that show?”
He does, but only because Papa John’s kid played one of the leads back when they used to run together. The man was always meaning to drag his friends down to one of the tapings in a charade of pride and doting, but it never happened, leaving Wood with no knowledge of the show other than the casting. Nobody watched television, then, at least nobody in the business, but they all read the trades, and news of Papa John’s kid landing a CBS sitcom spread like a bad chain letter.
“That it, then?” Grace says, sensing he doesn’t want to talk television. “Anything else you might need?”
Wood stands, pulls close. “No,” he says. “I’m good.” And he is. He lets the sheet drop to the floor, leans into Grace and places gentle butterfly kisses on her brow, her nose, her lips, the fleshy gobble of her chins. He means to overcome her with these tiny, soft kisses, with his famous naked self, but to Grace he’s merely naked. To her, this is more than enough, but Wood was hoping for more of an impact. Either he’s losing his touch, or she’s had enough, or he’s had whatever effect on her he’s going to have. Maybe there’s some place else she needs to be. Probably she’s thinking about dinner, opening up downstairs.
“Car,” she suddenly announces. “What you need is a car. Get out. See the sunset. Take in the town.”
A car? He hadn’t even thought to ask. “You think?” he says.
“I definitely think,” she insists. “It’ll be the best thing. You won’t feel so trapped up here waiting for me to close up downstairs.” She grabs a set of keys from a hook by the front door and hands them to Wood. “It’s the Brat out back,” she says.
“What color?”
She has to think about this. “You know, I’m not sure,” she allows. “That’s so weird. Gray, basically, I’m pretty sure. Maybe blue-gray. It’s always dark when I drive. That tells you how often I get out of the restaurant, right? Anyway, it’s the only one in town. You won’t miss it.”
“A Brat?” He likes that she calls her place a restaurant.
“A Brat. You know, like a pickup. It’s got those two seats in the bed, facing back. Totally useless. Very big in the seventies.”
Wood nods. So was he. Big in the seventies. True, there’s not much he remembers from that time other than his bigness, but there’s not much he remembers from the night before last. He couldn’t even swear to the color of his ditched Pathfinder.
“Still runs great,” she continues.
He puts the keys on the counter and pulls Grace back to where she was. “Not going anywhere just yet,” he says, a famous catch-phrase from The Half Shell, delivered with trademarked inflection. Right away, he wants to draw it back. What’s he thinking, mimicking his own material now? The line was the closest he ever came to a classic here’s-looking-at-you-kid moment on the big screen. For a while, there were T-shirts and bumper stickers all over the place echoing the sentiment—and here he is, falling back on it like he was at some party. Go ahead, make his day. Jesus. He covers his blunder with another round of gentlesweetallover kisses, hoping she won’t notice.
She doesn’t, but the kisses are at last getting to her. It astounds her, all this kissing. “There’s not like a quota?” she says, gentlysweetly pushing him away.
Wood is still worried about the catch-phrase, doesn’t get what she means.
“Kisses,” she says. “You’re not gonna run out or anything?” She grabs at his balls and kisses back, hard, wet, over and over. She works her hands around to his ass cheeks and presses herself against him; when she feels his excitement, she steps back. She hadn’t meant to get him going again; she’s really got to get back downstairs to see to her regulars. “Here,” she says, reaching for his hand, guiding it to his cock. “Hold that thought.”
She spins to leave, this Grace, and Wood’s thinking, okay, so this is what I’m into here. This is what I’ve got to work with.
All this, and a car.
“Tell me about yourself, Axel.”
Pimletz doesn’t know where to begin. It’s just been fifteen minutes, but already Warren Stemble has gotten two drinks into him. Vodka martinis. This is what publishers drink, apparently, and how quickly they drink it. Fifteen minutes, two drinks, and a load of shit. This must be the formula, and Pimletz fumbles through the mix. He’s not used to all this drinking and talking. Either one on its own would be a challenge.
“Nothing to tell, really,” he manages, “more’n you seem to already know.”
“I don’t know shit,” Stemble dismisses. “Just enough to get you down here.”
Oh. He knows he’s being foolish, but Pimletz had been hoping that for some reason this guy had been following his career. (Yeah, right. The only thing following his career is his retirement, and even that’s in doubt.) “Well, Mr. Stemble,” he says, “I don’t know shit myself.” He’s drunk, a little. He’s trying to gather his thoughts in a neat little line so that he might retrieve them as needed.
“Warren.”
“Warren,” Pimletz laughs. “Still don’t know shit, but I can certainly call you Warren.” He laughs again, louder than he needs to. It’s not even funny.
The silence that surfaces between the two men would be awkward, were it not for the two martinis. As it is, it is simply there.
“What are you reading?” Stemble asks, making to fill it.
Pimletz hadn’t realized that he was. “What?” he says. This is hard for him. Reading? He figures these publishing guys are pretty proprietary about the printed word, but there’s no reading matter in Pimletz’s view other than a tented cardboard advertisement for blendered tropical drinks, which he now holds out for his host’s inspection. He attempts a joke: “Don’t spoil the ending.”
Stemble doesn’t get it. Or he does and it’s not worth having. “On your night stand,” he clarifies, “on the plane down, on the crapper. Everyone’s got a book going. Me, I’ve got three or four. I can’t keep track.”
Oh, what am I reading? They expect me to read and write, these people, to have a book going. Hamlin would say that costs extra. Pimletz does a quick review of his recent readings and figures the newspaper doesn’t cut it. “The new Grisham,” he finally manages, hoping this might cover him. All he knows of the new Grisham is that it probably resembles the old Grishams, which he also hasn’t read. He hasn’t even seen the movies, but he gets the idea.
“We published his first book,” Stemble offers, “before anyone knew who he was.”
Pimletz gets that this is a good thing, although he’s not certain why. “I’m a bandwagon kind of guy,” he says, permitting the drinks and the lie to reveal more about him than he would bare on his own. “Ten million people can’t be wrong.”
“Does that include foreign?”
“What?”
“The ten million readers. Is that just domestic?”
Pimletz has no answer. It was just an expression, and now he can’t decide whether to play it out or come clean. What does he know from sales figures? “We should have such worries with Terence Wood,” he instead suggests, boldly inserting himself into the deal before it is formally offered, while, at the same time, neatly side-stepping the manner of his embellishment. Neither response is particularly like him, and yet to accomplish both—on the same pass, and under the influence of two vodka martinis—is a kind of triumph. He allows himself a slight smile and a tinge of confidence, but he’s not enough used to either to pull them off.
“Indeed,” Stemble says, raising his glass in toast, and showing himself to be the kind of person for whom the word “indeed” indeed has a place.
“Indeed,” Pimletz tries, toasting back, the word rising from the desperate atmosphere of the bar to where it just might pass for hope and possibility.
Indeed.
They decide on Pet’s rental—a two-door Omni coupe, cherry red. Anita’s car is in the shop, Norman’s roommate’s car is way too small, and Nils’s truck is so totally not what Pet has in mind.
Nils, driving: “You’re sure you listed me as one of the drivers?”
“They give me a form, there’s a space for additional drivers, I put down you and Nita,” Pet assures. “Doesn’t cost me anything. Who else am I gonna put?” She gives Norman a look across the back seat that says, yeah, right. She’ll tell poor Nils anything.
“Good,” Nils says. “That’s good. I don’t want trouble with the insurance.”
“Nils is very particular about insurance,” Anita translates from the front passenger seat. “It’s one of his things.”
“Which is why I made sure to put him down on the form,” Pet pours it on. “Do I know my Nilsy or what?” She reaches forward to tousle her Nilsy’s hair, and he flinches from her touch.
They are lost, most of them, in the mundane logistical matters of the moment: directions, insurance, what to listen to on the radio, dinner. And yet, from within these mundane matters, from time to time, they are each hit by what has happened, where they are going, what they expect to find there. It comes and goes, and, when it comes, they move so uncomfortably against it that it gets pushed aside. The weight of Terence Wood’s death is too much for them, to where it can only be processed in little bits, by not thinking about it. It will come to them, in time, when it needs to; until then, it is left to fill the interior of Pet’s rented car in such a way that it only occasionally sets down in their heads. It’s there, and then it’s not. It’s a part of them, and then it’s gone.
Nils, driving, is the closest to acceptance. He is a practical man, removed enough from Wood to acknowledge what has happened, but even he has his moments. He allows himself to worry about the insurance because it is easier than worrying about Anita, what she must be feeling. He allows himself to forget because he doesn’t like what the remembering has to tell him, the way it makes him look to his lovely wife, the way he looks to himself in the reflection. If Terence Wood can be said to have been larger than life, then surely Nils Veerhoven must be smaller, and surely Anita will now recognize the correlation. It was tough enough competing with the bastard when he was around, and now there’s the way he will be exaggerated in memory.
For Pet and Nita, there is a pocket of comfort in these momentary denials or, at least, a hold on how things were. If they choose not to believe it, then perhaps it hasn’t happened. If they focus on something else, the rest will go away. This is not a conscious thing, this inability to accept Wood’s death, this not thinking, but they are both taken by it. And linked. For a while, last night, they were able to talk about what they were feeling, to reach deep for what it means and where it leaves them, but they have since turned away from it and from each other. From Wood, even. They will talk about everything but their shared loss, even though there is no one else for whom the loss could possibly mean the same. There’s Elaine, but she’s so far removed from Wood’s recent life and times that she’s hardly a thought.
There is also Norman. Anita can’t fathom the way this must be registering for him. She hates that they hadn’t been close, Wood and Norman, the way fathers and sons are meant to be close, but then there’s always been something between them beyond her understanding. They have this strange shorthand, the two of them, a telepathy. All right, so maybe they are close, but their closeness, if that is what it is, has nothing to do with proximity. They don’t spend time together, not really, but they have come to define each other. Anita sometimes thinks Norman can actually feel his father’s legacy, that the weight of who he is and where he comes from has some kind of structural impact on her son’s existence. It’s why he’s in film school. It’s who he is. Certainly, they look alike, the two of them, but she sees it also in the way her Norman carries himself when his father is around, or even when he isn’t. He’s a skinny kid, and tall, but he takes on a hulking demeanor that is more than he was meant to carry, and he looks the part for the moment. It’s a striking transmutation and exactly right. He’s thin, and shy, and unassuming, but when he’s with his father, or in his orbit, or even just at one of his pictures, he takes on new dimensions. He goes from decorous to devilish in, like, nothing flat. She wonders what will happen to all of that now. She wonders if anyone else sees what she sees.
For Norman, the wondering is all about these other people here in the car with him. He doesn’t get why it is he has to deal with Nils. What’s that all about? Pet he doesn’t mind, actually likes it when she’s around, but Nils is like a tourist. The guy’s got no fucking clue and no claim. Back at the house, Nils called him over and whispered something about wanting to be there for his mother, and Norman was like, yeah, well, where the hell else you gonna be? Why are we even talking about this? Norman’s in and out of acceptance just like everyone else, but when it hits him, it hits him hard. Like now. He gets a picture in his head of what has happened, and he works it against the noise about the insurance and Nils’s generally annoying presence, and what he’s left with is a giant frustration. It’s pretty fucking huge, like nothing he’s ever known. He doesn’t know what to do with it, but he has an idea. Just like this, it comes to him. He pulls his knees to his chest and then he kicks, hard, against the back of the driver’s seat, whiplashing Nils to where his chin is knocked against the steering wheel and his glasses thrown to the dash.
“Pull over!” Norman screams, slipping into one of his father’s famous tantrums.
“Norman!” his mother shoots back, without much conviction. She spots the devil in her son for what it is.
Nils rubs at the sharp pain in his chin and pulls to the side of the road—not because the boy told him to, and not because of Anita’s apparent upset, but because, at the moment, he is too stunned to do anything else. Forget driving. He wonders if the thing to do is comfort his wife or lean into Norman for his outburst. Another option: get out of the car and walk, leave these people to themselves.
“Finally,” Pet says, “some fireworks.” She smiles at the excitement.
Norman throws open his door, steps from the car before Nils brings it to a full stop, and with the momentum, storms to the front of the car and glares at his mother’s new husband through the tinted windshield. His mother and Pet are frozen by his fit. Nils is just waiting for the rest of it. So is Norman. This is his father’s doing. Norman moves without thinking. He kicks suddenly at the front headlight with his sneakered feet, and, when the glass does not shatter, he goes at it again. And again.
“Insurance,” he rambles, scanning the shoulder of the road for an object that might do the job for him. “Insurance. I’ll give you insurance.” There. A rock. Boulder, almost. He lifts it with two hands and walks it to the driver-side headlight. He goes so slowly about his business that someone might make it theirs to stop him, but no one is moving. He presses the rock to the light, hard, as in a pounding motion, but it won’t give. Then he steps back and shot-puts his find at his target, which finally shatters, and, from the sound of the shattering, seems to have been made from heavy-duty plastic. No wonder. Anyway, Norman’s just about made his point. He picks the rock back up and lofts it onto the hood of the car, where it leaves a good-size dent and a good-size thud and a couple good-size scratches. That should do it.
“See if that’s covered,” he says, loud enough for them to hear inside the car. Then he cleans his hands against his pants, slinks calmly back into his seat, and wills himself whole.
Pet bursts into applause and laughter, and Anita reaches over from the front seat to slap her into silence, biting back her own smile.
They sit there, the four of them, for so long Nils can’t think of a thing to say or do except to ease the car back onto the road.
Anita, who has been looking back at her son, wondering how it is he’s become so much like his father and when, turns ahead with the car’s movement. She grabs Nils’s right arm, to get his attention. “Rock,” she says, pointing out the window to Norman’s boulder, still on the hood. “Honey.”
“Fuck the rock,” Nils says, pulling onto the highway, picking up speed. He turns sunburn red with his exclamation. He doesn’t usually talk like this. Once more, softer, as in an apology: “Just fuck the rock, okay? Excuse me, but that’s all I have to say.”
“Nilsy,” taunts Pet, unfrozen and back at it. “Such language.”
As advertised, Grace’s Brat has two black plastic seats, all-weather, facing back, right there in the truck bed—probably the most useless things Wood’s ever seen. Who the hell came up with these?
Still, he climbs in, sets himself down along the curves of the seat backed against the driver’s, and tries to understand how he’d missed such a significant moment in the history of automotive design. Seat’s working overtime to hold him (it’s not exactly built for hulking presences, still tortured or no), but Wood’s not so uncomfortable he can’t adjust. There. Better.
He pulls the top on a can of Coors Light pinched from Grace’s fridge upstairs, sucks the foam from the arrowed opening, considers his new circumstance. He’s got all night and a lot to consider. He still can’t get his hands around what he’s set in motion. All he knows is he’s got no place to be, nothing to do, and in this he finds contentment. Fuck, he’s not jumping for joy or anything, he’s not spinning cartwheels, but there’s a mighty weight gone, the kind of weight he never fully measured until it was lifted. He feels twenty years younger, twenty pounds lighter, twenty times richer. He doesn’t dwell on what the rest of the world has made of his apparent death, only on what he has managed, and what he has managed is something. What he has managed is to get through the better parts of a day without thinking about his asshole agent, his next project, his back taxes, his divorce lawyers, his too-high profile, his goddamn cellular phone, his hangers-on.
Well, okay, so this is not entirely true. He’s thought of these things, all of them, and a whole lot more besides (he’s even thought about calling his machine at home to check for messages), but what he hasn’t done is think about them too seriously or for too long. Before his disappearing act, when something or someone commanded Terence Wood’s attention, he neglected it at great risk to his karma and equilibrium and general good feeling. Now, he simply puts his mind on idle, like it was an appliance setting, and, when he happens on an unpleasant thought, he quickly jumps to something else. There’s nothing to hold him down.
He needs to act it out to understand it. He stands in the cab, rubberstretches his arms at his sides, goes all floppy, like a dropped marionette. Then he slinks back into the uncomfortable seat. He’s got no strings to hold him down. This is his idea of improvisation. He takes a long draw from the Coors Light. This is what untethered looks like. This’ll show that fuck from Chicago with his thumb up his ass. This is me, hopelessly lost, without tether.
Only thing Wood can’t get past is Norman. He hadn’t figured on this, although if he’d thought about it at all he’d have come to it eventually. Everything else he can do without, but he can’t face losing the connection with his kid. That, and he’s got poor Norman thinking his old man has met a ghastly end off the side of a cliff. How could he do this to his own child? To strip him of his father just because his father wanted to shake things up? He can’t forgive himself, or justify his grand act, or even understand it, but he wonders if he might make repairs. Yes, he’s got to find a way to get to Norman, he suddenly thinks, to make him get what’s happened in a way that doesn’t leave him hating him for the rest of his life or running to tell his mother. He can’t decide which would be worse. He’s got to bring the boy back into his life, into his secret, before the thought of his dying takes hold. He can’t do that to his own son. Okay, so he already has, but he can’t let it stand, not for too much longer. If he does, and he’s found out, he’ll be left doing Rogers and Hammerstein in dinner theater, which he guesses is a kind of hell. Plus, he can’t sing for shit.
He resolves to make things right with Norman and soon, although, for the moment, he’s got no idea how to accomplish this. With his resolve comes an impulse to move, and so he downs the last of his last beer, hops down from the bed and into the cab, and fires up Grace’s truck like it has some place to go. It does, for a time, until Wood, not thinking, veers wildly from the side of the road into one of these little protected marsh areas he’d seen along the coast, here and there, during the day. They’ve got these too-tall egret nests every couple hundred yards along this stretch of town, built and lovingly maintained by the local wildlife weirdos. There’s not much in the way of street lighting, but he can make out the resulting skyline in the night air. In his headlights, at varying high speeds, the towered nests look like telephone poles against a stark Texas landscape. Of course, there are signs and shit to help tell the difference, but these don’t register in the darkness. About the only thing that does, and this Wood remembers from his wanderings on foot this morning, is that there are way more nests than egrets, and yet he manages to run Grace’s Brat head-on into one of each.
Wood, hitting and running, continues on his nocturnal chase, not sure where he’s headed, not thinking anything of the strange ka-thunk! beneath his tires, the snapped base of the nest stand as it rips from the ground and flips over the length of the speeding pickup.