HIS MOTHER WAS DEAD in the next room, and Lee Tourneau was a little drunk.
It was only ten in the morning, but the house was already an oven. The fragrance of his mother’s roses, planted on the path leading up to the house, drifted in through open windows, a light floral sweetness that mingled in a rather disagreeable way with a rank odor of human waste, so the whole place smelled just exactly like a perfumed turd. Lee felt that it was too hot to be drunk, but also that he could not bear the stink of her sober.
There was air-conditioning, but it was switched off. Lee had kept it off for weeks, because his mother had a harder time breathing with the humidity weighing on her. When Lee and his mother were alone in the house, he would kill the air conditioner and put an extra comforter or two on top of the old cunt. Then he’d cut her morphine, to be sure she could really feel it: the weight and the heat. God knew Lee could feel it. By late afternoon he would be padding around the house naked, sticky with sweat, the only way he could stand it. He sat cross-legged by her bedside reading about media theory while she struggled weakly under her covers, too out of it to know why she was boiling in her parched yellow skin. When she shouted for something to drink-“thirst” was about the only word his mother still seemed to know in her last days of senility and kidney failure-Lee would get up and fetch cold water. At the sound of ice clinking in the glass, her throat would start to work, in anticipation of slaking her thirst, and her eyes would begin to roll in their sockets, bright with excitement. Then he would stand over her bed, drinking it himself, where she could see him doing it-the eagerness draining out of her face, leaving her confused and forlorn. It was a joke that never got old. Every time he did it, she was seeing him do it for the first time.
Other times he brought her salt water and forced her to swallow it, half drowning her. Just a mouthful would cause his mother to writhe and choke, trying to spit it out. It was a curious thing, how long she survived. He had not expected her to make it to the second week of June; against all odds she clung to her life right into July.
He kept clothes in a pile, on the bookshelf outside the guest-room door, ready so he could get dressed in a hurry in case Ig or Merrin made a surprise visit. He would not allow them to go in and see her, would tell them she had just fallen asleep, needed her rest. He didn’t want them to know how hot it was in there.
Ig and Merrin brought him DVDs, books, pizza, beer. They came together or they came separately, wanted to be with him, wanted to see how he was holding up. In Ig’s case Lee thought it was envy. Ig would’ve liked it if one of his own parents were debilitated and dependent on his care. It would be an opportunity to show how self-sacrificing he could be, a chance to be stoically noble. In Merrin’s case he thought she liked to have a reason to be in the hot house with him, to drink martinis and unbutton the top of her blouse and fan her bared breastbone. When it was Merrin in the driveway, Lee usually answered the door with his shirt off, found it thrilling to be in the house, half dressed, just the two of them. Well, the two of them and his mother, who didn’t really count anymore.
Lee had instructions to call the doctor if his mother took a turn for the worse, but he thought in her case dying actually represented a turn for the better. With that in mind, the first person he called was Merrin. He was naked at the time, and it was a good feeling, standing there in the dim kitchen with nothing on, Merrin’s solicitous voice in his ear. She said she just needed to get dressed and she’d be right over, and immediately Lee imagined her almost undressed herself, in her bedroom at her parents’ house. Little silk drawers, maybe. Girlish panties with pink flowers on them. She asked if he needed anything. Lee said he just needed a friend.
After he hung up, he had another drink, rum and Coke. He imagined her picking out a skirt, turning this way and that to admire herself in the mirror on the back of her closet door. Then he had to stop thinking about it, was getting himself a little too turned on. He thought maybe he ought to get dressed himself. He debated with himself about putting on a shirt and finally decided it wouldn’t do to be bare-chested this morning. Yesterday’s stained white button-down and jeans were in the laundry cubby. He considered going upstairs to get something fresh, then asked himself WWID and decided to put on the old things. Wrinkled, unwashed clothes sort of completed the picture of painful loss. Lee had managed his own behavior for almost a decade by asking WWID, and it had won him his life and kept him out of trouble, had kept him safe, safe from himself.
He thought she’d be along in another few minutes. Time to make some more calls. He called the doctor and said his mother was at rest. He called his father in Florida. He called the congressman’s office and spoke with the congressman himself for a minute. The congressman asked if Lee wanted to pray with him, to have a silent prayer together, right there on the phone. Lee said he did. Lee said he wanted to thank God for giving him these last three months with his mother. They really had been precious. The two of them were quiet for a while, both of them on the phone but saying nothing. Finally the congressman cleared his throat, a little emotionally, and said Lee would be in his thoughts. Lee thanked him and said good-bye.
Last of all he called Ig. He thought maybe Ig would cry when he heard the news, but Ig pulled one of his not-infrequent surprises and was calm, quietly affectionate. Lee had spent the past five years in and out of college, had taken courses in psychology, sociology, theology, political science, and media theory, but his real major was Ig Studies, and yet in spite of years of diligent coursework he was not always able to anticipate Ig’s reactions.
“I don’t know how she found the strength to hang on so long,” Lee said to Ig.
And Ig said, “From you, Lee. She found it in you.”
There wasn’t much Lee Tourneau found funny, but at this he barked with laughter, then turned it into a harsh, shuddering sob. Lee had discovered, years before, that he could cry whenever he needed to and that a crying person could steer a conversation in any direction he wanted to take it.
“Thank you,” he said, something else he’d learned from Ig over the years. Nothing made people feel better about themselves than being thanked, repetitively and needlessly. Then, in a hoarse, choked voice, he said, “I have to go.” It was just the right line, perfect for that particular moment, but it was also true, since he could see Merrin pulling into the drive, behind the wheel of her daddy’s station wagon. Ig said he’d be over soon.
Lee watched her through the kitchen window while she walked up the path, plucking at her blouse, dressed smart in a blue linen skirt and a white blouse, unbuttoned to show her gold cross. Bare legs, navy slingbacks. She had thought about what to put on before she came here, had thought about how she wanted to be seen. He finished the rest of his rum and Coke on his way to the door, opened it as she was raising her hand to knock. His eyes were still burning and watery from his conversation with Ig, and he wondered if he ought to blink some tears down his cheeks, then decided not to. It was better to look like he was fighting it than to actually do it.
“Hey, Lee,” she said. Merrin looked as if she were fighting tears herself. She cupped his face with one hand, and then drew herself to him.
It was a brief hug, but for a moment his nose was in her hair and her small hands were against his chest. Her hair had a keen, almost sharp smell of lemons and mint. Lee thought that was the most fascinating aroma he’d ever smelled, better even than the smell of wet pussy. He had laid plenty of girls, knew all their smells, all their flavors, but Merrin was different. Sometimes he thought if she just didn’t smell that way, he could stop worrying about her.
“Who’s here?” she asked, as she came into the house, her arm still around his waist.
“You’re the first one…” Lee said. He almost finished it-the first one I called-then knew it would be the wrong thing, would be too…what? Unusual. Wrong for the moment. Instead he finished, “…to get here. I called Ig, and then I called you. I wasn’t thinking. I should’ve called my father first.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“Just a few minutes ago.”
“Well. That’s all right, Lee. Do you want to sit down? Do you want me to call people for you?”
He was leading her to the guest bedroom where his mother was. He didn’t ask if she wanted to go, just started walking, and she went along with her arm around his waist. He wanted her to see his mother, wanted to see her face.
They stopped in the open doorway. Lee had propped the fan in the window and turned it on full blast as soon as he knew she was dead, but the room still contained a dry, fevery heat. His mother’s withered arms were curled against her chest, her skinny hands hooked into claws, as if she were trying to push something away. She had been, had made a last fitful effort to try to shove off the comforters at around nine-thirty, but she was too weak. The extra comforters were now folded and put away. A single crisp blue sheet lay across her. In death she had become birdlike, looked like a dead chick dropped from a nest. Her head was tipped back, and her mouth was open, yawning wide to show her fillings.
“Oh, Lee,” Merrin said, and squeezed his fingers in hers. She had started to cry. Lee thought maybe it was time for him to cry, too.
“I tried putting a sheet over her face,” Lee said. “But it didn’t look right. She fought for so long, Merrin.”
“I know.”
“I don’t like how she’s staring. Will you close her eyes?”
“All right. You go sit down, Lee.”
“Will you have a drink with me?”
“Sure. I’ll be right along.”
He went to the kitchen and mixed her a strong drink and then stood at the cabinet looking at his reflection and willing himself to start crying. It was harder than usual; he was, in truth, a little excited. As Merrin entered the kitchen behind him, tears were just beginning to spill down his face, and he bent forward and exhaled savagely, a noise much like a sob. Forcing those tears out was hard, painful work, like squeezing out a splinter. She came toward him. She was crying, too. He could tell by the soft struggling sound of her breath, although he couldn’t see her face. She put a hand on his shoulder. She was the one who turned him to her, as his breath began to catch and then come out of him in hoarse, angry sobs.
Merrin put her hands behind his head and pulled him close and whispered to him.
“She loved you so much,” she said. “You were there every day for her, Lee, and it meant everything to her.” And so on and so forth, a lot of stuff like that. Lee wasn’t listening.
He was taller than her by almost a foot, and to be close she had to pull his head down. He pressed his face to her chest, to the cleft between her breasts, and shut his eyes, breathing in the almost astringent mint smell of her. He took the hem of her blouse with one hand and tugged it down, pulling it tight against her body, but also deforming the opening, to show the lightly freckled tops of her breasts, the cups of her bra. His other hand was on her waist, and he moved it up and down over her hip, and she didn’t tell him to stop. He wept against her breasts, and she whispered to him and rocked with him. He kissed the top of her left breast. He wondered if she noticed-his face was so wet that maybe she couldn’t tell-and started to lift his face, to see her expression, to see if she liked it. But she pushed his face back down, holding him to her bosom.
“Go ahead,” she whispered, her voice soft, an excited whisper. “Just go ahead. It’s all right now. There’s no one here but us. There’s no one to see.” Holding his mouth to her breast.
He felt himself stiffening in his pants and became aware then of the way she was standing, his left leg planted between her thighs. He wondered if it had turned her on, the dead body. There was a strain of psychology that felt the presence of a corpse was an aphrodisiac. A corpse was a get-out-of-jail-free card, permission to do a crazy thing. After he had screwed her, she could assuage any guilt she felt, or thought she was supposed to feel-Lee didn’t exactly believe in guilt, he believed in fixing things to satisfy social norms-by telling herself they were both carried away by their grief, by their desperate needs. He kissed her breast again and a third time, and she didn’t try to get away.
“I love you, Merrin,” he whispered, the right thing to say, he knew it. It would make everything easier: for him and for her. As he said it, he had his hand on her hip and was swaying, forcing her to totter back on her heels so her rump was pushed up against the kitchen island. He had a fistful of skirt, pulling it up to midthigh, and his leg was well between her thighs, and he could feel the heat of her crotch against it.
“I love you, too,” she said, but her tone was off. “We both do, Lee. Ig and I.” A strange thing to say, considering what they were doing, strange to bring Ig into it. She let go of the back of his head and dropped her hands to his waist, put them lightly on his hips. He wondered if she was feeling for his belt. He reached up to take her blouse, meaning to pull it open-if he busted a couple buttons, then so be it-but his hand caught the little gold cross around her throat, and at the same time a completely unplanned convulsive sob passed through him. His hand jerked at the cross, and there was a soft metallic chiming sound, and it came loose and slipped down the front of her blouse.
“Lee,” she said, pushing him back. “My necklace.”
It fell softly against the floor. They stood looking down at it, and then Lee bent and got it and held it out to her. It shone in the sun and lit her face in gold.
“I can fix it,” Lee said.
“You did last time, didn’t you?” she said, and smiled, her face flushed, her eyes weepy. She fidgeted with her blouse. A button had come undone, and he had left the top of her breast wet. She reached forward and put her hands over his, closed his fingers around the cross. “Fix it and give it back to me when you’re ready. You don’t even have to use Ig as the middleman this time.”
Lee twitched in spite of himself, wondered for a moment if she could mean what he thought she meant by that. But of course she did, of course she knew exactly how he’d take it. A lot of what Merrin said had double meanings, one for public consumption and the other just for him. She’d been sending him messages for years.
She cast a discerning eye over him and said, “How long have you been in those clothes?”
“I don’t know. Two days.”
“All right. I want you to get out of those things and in the shower.”
He felt his heart tighten; his cock was hot against his thigh. He looked at the front door. There wasn’t time for him to wash up before they had sex.
“People are coming,” he said.
“Well. No one is here yet. There’s time. Go on. I’ll bring you your drink.”
He walked ahead of her down the back hallway, as hard as he’d ever been in his life, grateful his underwear was holding it down against his leg. He thought she might follow him into the bathroom and reach around and unbutton his pants for him, but when he stepped in, she closed the door gently behind him.
Lee undressed and got into the shower and waited for her, the hot water hammering against him. Steam billowed. His pulse was quick and forceful, and his absurd erection wavered in the spray. When her hand reached around the curtain with his drink, another rum and Coke, he thought she would step in after it, clothes off, but as soon as he took the drink, she pulled her hand back.
“Ig’s here,” she said. Her voice soft and full of regret.
“Made it in record time,” Ig said from somewhere behind her. “How are you, man?”
“Hello, Ig,” Lee said, the sound of Ig’s voice as unwelcome as if the hot water had cut out all at once. “Doing okay. Given the circumstances. Thank you for coming.” The “thank you” didn’t come out quite right this time, but he decided Ig would hear the edge in his voice and write it off as emotional strain.
“I’ll bring you something to wear,” Merrin said, and then they were gone; he heard the door shut with a click.
He stood in the hot water, half in a rage at the idea that Ig should be here already, wondering if he knew something-no-had an idea that-no, no. Ig had come at high speed because a friend needed him. That was Ig to the core.
Lee wasn’t sure how long he’d been there before he realized that his right hand was hurting. He looked at it and found he was holding the cross, the gold chain wrapped around his hand, cutting into the skin. She had looked him in the eye, with her blouse half unbuttoned, and offered him her cross. She could not have offered herself to him any more plainly, his leg between her thighs while she surrendered it to him. There were things she did not dare say outright, but he understood the message she was sending him, understood her perfectly. He looped the chain of the cross around the showerhead, watched it swing, flashing in the late-morning light, flashing the all clear. Soon Ig would be in England and there would be no more reason for caution, nothing to stop them from doing what they both wanted.
AFTER HIS MOTHER DIED, Merrin called and e-mailed more frequently, under the pretense of checking to see how he was doing. Or perhaps that really was what she thought she was doing-Lee could not underrate the average person’s ability to deceive himself about what he wanted. Merrin had internalized a lot of Iggy’s morality, and Lee thought she could only go so far, could only hint so much, and then he would have to take the lead. Also, even with Ig away in England, they wouldn’t necessarily have a clear path at first. Merrin had settled on a set of rules about how people of high status acted. She would have to be persuaded that if she were going to fuck someone else, it was actually in Ig’s best interests. Lee understood. Lee could help her with that.
Merrin left messages for him at home, at the congressman’s office. She wanted to know how he was doing, what he was doing, if he was seeing anyone. She told him he needed a woman, he needed to get laid. She said she was thinking of him. It wasn’t hard to see what she was working up to. He thought often she called after having a couple drinks, could hear it in her voice, a kind of sexy slowness.
Then Ig went to New York City for his orientation with Amnesty International, and a few days later Merrin began pestering Lee to come see her. Her roommate was moving out, and Merrin was going to take her bedroom and would have twice as much space. There was a dresser she had left at home, in Gideon, that she wanted, and she e-mailed Lee, asked if he would bring it down the next time he got to Boston. She told him her Victoria’s Secret things were in the bottom drawer, to save him the trouble of searching for them. She told him he could try on her fancy underwear, but only if he took pictures of himself and sent them to her. She texted him, said if he brought her the dresser, she would fix him up with a girl, a blonde, just like him, an ice queen. She wrote that the sex would be great, just like beating off in front of a mirror, only better, because his reflection would have tits. She reminded him that with her roommate gone there was an extra bedroom at her apartment in case he got lucky. Letting him know she would be alone.
By then Lee had learned to read her coded messages almost perfectly. When she talked about this other girl, she was talking about herself, what they had to look forward to. Still, he had not decided to bring the dresser, was not sure he wanted to meet her while Ig was in America, even if he was a few hundred miles away. They might not be able to keep their impulses in check. Things would be easier with Ig gone.
Lee had always assumed it would be Ig who discarded Merrin. It hadn’t crossed his mind that she might want out, might be bored and ready finally to be done, and that Ig’s going away for six months was her chance to make a clean break. Ig came from money, had a last name with some cachet, had a connected family, and it made sense for him to play the field. Lee had always assumed that Ig would dump her around the time they graduated from high school, and that would fix that; Lee could have his turn with her then. She was going to Harvard, and Ig was going to Dartmouth. Out of sight, out of mind, that was what Lee figured, but Ig figured different, was down in Boston fucking her every weekend, like a dog marking his territory.
All Lee could think was that on some level Ig held on to her out of a perverse desire to hold her over Lee. Ig was glad to have Lee as his sidekick-the reformation of Lee Tourneau had been Ig’s high-school hobby-but he would want Lee to know there were limits to their friendship. He would not want Lee to forget who had won her. As if Lee did not remember every time he closed his right eye and the world became a dim shadowland, a place where ghosts crept through the darkness and the sun was a cold and distant moon.
A part of Lee respected how Ig had taken her away from him, back when they both had an equal shot at her. Ig had simply wanted that red pussy more than Lee, and under pressure he had become someone different, someone wily and smooth. With his asthma and bad hair and head full of Bible trivia, no one would ever think of Ig as ruthless or cunning. Lee had stayed close to Ig for most of ten years, following his lead. He thought of them as lessons in disguise, lessons in how to appear harmless, safe. Faced with any ethical quandary, Lee had learned it was best to ask, What Would Ig Do? The answer, usually, was apologize, abase himself, and then fling himself into some entirely unnecessary act of make-nice. Lee had learned from Ig to admit he was wrong even when he wasn’t, to ask for forgiveness he didn’t need, and to pretend he didn’t want the things he had coming to him.
For a brief time, when he was sixteen, she had been his by right. For a few days, he had worn Merrin’s cross around his neck, and when he sometimes pressed that cross to his lips, he could imagine he was kissing it while she wore it about her throat-the cross and nothing else. But then he let her cross and his chance at her slip through his fingers, because even more than he wanted to see her pale and naked in the dark, he wanted to see something shatter, wanted to hear an explosion loud enough to deafen him, wanted to see a car erupt into flame. His mother’s Caddy maybe, with her in it. The very thought made his pulse racy and strange in a way fantasies of Merrin couldn’t match. So he gave her up, gave her back. Made his fool’s deal with Ig-a deal with the devil, really. It had not just cost him the girl. It had cost him his eye. He felt there was meaning in this. Lee had done a miracle once, had touched the sky and caught the moon before it could fall, and ever since, God had pointed him toward other things that needed fixing: cats and crosses, political campaigns and senile old women. What he fixed was his forever, to do with as he liked, and only once had he given away what God put into his hands, and he had been blinded as a reminder not to do it again. And now the cross was his once more, proof, if he needed it, that he was being guided toward something, that he and Merrin were being brought together for a reason. He felt he was supposed to fix the cross and then fix her in some way, maybe simply by setting her free of Ig.
Lee might’ve kept his distance from Merrin all summer, but then Ig made it easy for him to go see her, sent him an e-mail from NYC:
Merrin wants her dresser but doesn’t have a car and her dad’s got work. I said ask you to bring it down and she said you aren’t her bitch, but you and I both know you are, so bring it down next time you get to Boston for the congressman. Besides, she has snared an available blonde for you. Imagine the children this woman will bear you, little Vikings with eyes like the Arctic Ocean. Go to Merrin now. You cannot resist her summons. Let her buy you a nice dinner. You’ve got to be ready to leap in to do her dirty work now that I’m heading off.
Are you hanging in there?-Ig
Lee didn’t understand the last part of Ig’s e-mail for hours-Are you hanging in there?-puzzled over it all morning, then remembered that his mother was dead, had been dead for two weeks. He was more interested in that line about leaping in to do Merrin’s dirty work, a kind of message in and of itself. That night Lee suffered overheated, sexually complicated dreams; he dreamed that Merrin was naked in his bed, and he sat on top of her arms and held her down while he forced a funnel into her mouth, a red plastic funnel, and then poured gasoline into it, and she began to buck under him as in orgasm. He lit a match, holding the matchbook in his teeth to keep the strike strip steady, and dropped it down the funnel, and there was a whoosh, and a cyclone of red flames rose from the hole, and her surprised eyes ignited. When he woke, he found the sheets soaked, had never before had a wet dream of such power, even as a teenager.
Two days later it was Friday, and he drove to Merrin’s to get the dresser. He had to move a heavy, rusting toolbox from the trunk to the backseat to make room for it, and even then he had to borrow straps from Merrin’s father to keep the lid down and the dresser in place. Halfway to Boston, Lee pulled over at a rest area and sent her a text message:
Coming down to Boston tonight, got this heavy SOB in the trunk, you better be there to take it. Is my ice queen around, maybe I can meet her.
There was a long wait before Merrin replied:
ah, sht Lee you are the best dam man for cuming to c me but shouldve told me you were on the wy no icequeen tonite shes workin guess youll have to make do with me.
MERRIN ANSWERED THE DOOR in sweatpants and a bulky hoodie, and her roommate was there, a butchy Asian girl with an annoying snicker. She was pacing around the living room, talking on a cell phone, her voice nasal and painfully cheerful.
“What do you have in this thing anyway?” Lee said. He leaned on the dresser, breathing hard and wiping sweat from his face. He had wheeled it in, strapped to a dolly that Merrin’s dad had told him to take with him, banged it up seventeen steps to get it to the landing, nearly dumping it twice. “Chain-mail underwear?”
The roomie looked over Merrin’s shoulder and said, “Try a cast-iron chastity belt.” And wandered off, trailing goose-honk laughter.
“Thought your roomie moved,” Lee said when she’d got out of earshot.
“She’s going away the same time Ig does,” Merrin told him. “San Diego. After that I’ll be all alone here for a while.”
Looking him in the eyes and smirking a little. Another message.
They wrestled the dresser in through the door, and then Merrin said just leave it and went into the kitchen to heat up some Indian food. She brought paper plates to a round, stained table under a window with a view of the street. Kids were skateboarding in the summer night, gliding out of the shadows and into the orange-tinted pools of light cast by the sodium-vapor streetlamps.
Merrin’s notebooks and papers were spread all over one side of the table, and she began putting them in a pile to get them out of the way. Lee bent over her shoulder, pretending to look at her work while he drew in a long, sweet breath of her scented hair. He saw loose sheets of ruled notebook paper with dots and dashes arranged on them in a grid.
“What’s with connect-the-dots?”
“Oh,” she said, collecting the papers and sticking them in a textbook and putting them up on the windowsill. “My roommate. We play that game, you know that game? Where you make all the dots, and then connect them into squares, and whoever has the most squares wins. Loser has to do laundry. She hasn’t had to wash her own clothes in months.”
Lee said, “You should let me have a look. I’m good at that game. I could help you with your next move.” He had only caught a brief glimpse of it, but it didn’t even look like the grid had been drawn correctly. Maybe it was a different version of the game than the one he knew.
“I think that would be cheating. You’re saying you want to make a cheater out of me?” she asked.
They held each other’s stares for a moment. Lee said, “I want what you want.”
“Well. I think I should try to win fair and square. No pun intended.”
They sat across from each other. Lee looked around, considering the place. It wasn’t much of an apartment: a living room, a kitchenette, and two bedrooms on the second floor of a rambling Cambridge house that had been divided into five units. Dance music thumped below.
“Are you going to be able to cover the rent with no roommate?”
“No. I’ll have to find someone to shack up with eventually.”
“I bet Ig would help with the rent.”
She said, “He’d pay the whole thing. I could be his kept mistress. I had an offer like that once, you know.”
“What offer?”
“One of my professors asked me out to lunch a few months ago. I thought we were going to talk about my residency. Instead he got us a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine and told me he wanted to rent me a place in Back Bay. Sixty-year-old guy with a daughter two years older than me.”
“Married?”
“Of course.”
Lee sat back in his chair and whistled through his teeth. “Ig must’ve shit himself.”
“I didn’t tell him. And don’t you say anything about it either. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Why didn’t you tell Ig?”
“Because I’m doing coursework with the guy. I wouldn’t want Ig to report him for sexual harassment or something.”
“Ig wouldn’t report him.”
“No. I guess not. But he would’ve wanted me to drop coursework with him. Which I didn’t want to do. However he acts outside the classroom, the guy is one of the best oncologists in the country, and at the time I wanted to see what he could teach me. It seemed important.”
“It doesn’t seem important any more?”
“Hell. I don’t need to graduate first in anyone’s class. I have mornings when I think I’ll be lucky just to graduate at all,” she said.
“Ah, come on. You’re doing great.” Lee paused and said, “How’d the old bastard take it? When you told him to get screwed?”
“With good humor. The wine was nice. Early nineties from a little family vineyard in Italy. I have a feeling he’s bought the exact same bottle for a few other girls. Anyway, I didn’t tell him to get screwed. I told him I was in love with someone and also didn’t think it would be appropriate while I was studying with him, but under other circumstances I would’ve been glad to entertain the idea.”
“That was kind of you.”
“It’s true. If I weren’t his student and if I’d never met Ig? I could imagine going out with him to a foreign film or something.”
“Get the hell out. Didn’t you say he’s old?”
“Old enough to qualify for AARP.”
Lee sank back into his chair, feeling something unfamiliar: disgust. And surprise. “You’re kidding.”
“Sure. He might teach me about wines. And books. And stuff I don’t know about. What life looks like from the other end of the telescope. What it’s like to be in an immoral relationship.”
“It’d be a mistake,” Lee said.
“I think maybe you have to make a few,” Merrin said. “If you don’t, you’re probably thinking too much. That’s the worst mistake you can make.”
“What about the old dude’s wife and daughter?”
“Yeah. I don’t know about that part. Course, it’s the third wife, so it’s not like she’d be terribly shocked.” Merrin narrowed her eyes and said, “You think every guy gets bored sooner or later?”
“I think most guys fantasize about what they don’t have. I know I’ve never been in a relationship in my life where I wasn’t fantasizing about other girls.”
“At what point? When in a relationship does a guy start thinking about other girls?”
Lee tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling, pretended to think. “I dunno. About fifteen minutes into the first date? Depends if the waitress is hot.”
She smirked, then said, “Sometimes I’ll see Ig looking at a girl. Not often. If he knows I’m around, he keeps his eyes in his head. But, like, when we were down to Cape Cod this summer and I went to the car to get the suntan lotion and then remembered I’d stuck it in my windbreaker. He didn’t think I’d be back so soon, and he was looking at this girl on her belly, with the back of her bikini top undone. Pretty girl, maybe nineteen, twenty. When we were in high school, I would’ve raked him up and down for looking, but now I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. He’s never been with anyone except me.”
“Is that right?” Lee asked in an incredulous tone, although he already knew.
“Do you think when he’s thirty-five he’ll feel like I trapped him too young? You think he’ll feel like he was cheated out of fun high-school sex and be fantasizing about the girls he missed out on?”
“I’m sure he fantasizes about other girls now,” said Merrin’s roommate, passing through with a Hot Pocket in one hand, holding the phone to her ear with another. She continued on into her room and slammed her door. Not because she was angry, or even aware of what she was doing. Just because she was the kind of person who slammed doors without noticing.
Merrin sat back in her chair, arms crossed. “True or false. What she said?”
“Not in a serious way. Like him checking out the girl on the beach. He might enjoy thinking about it, but it’s just a thought, so what’s it matter, right?”
Merrin leaned forward and said, “Do you think Ig will do a little sleeping around in England? To get it out of his system? Or do you think he’d feel like he was stepping out in an unforgivable way on me and the kids?”
“What kids?”
“The kids. Harper and Charlie. We’ve been talking about them since I was nineteen.”
“Harper and Charlie?”
“Harper is the girl, after Harper Lee. My favorite one-book novelist. Charlie if it’s a boy. ’Cause Ig likes when I say, ‘Solly, Cholly.’” The way she said it made Lee not like her so much. She looked distracted and happy, and he could tell from the suddenly distant look in her eyes that she was imagining them herself.
“No,” Lee said.
“No what?”
“Ig won’t sleep around on you. Not unless you slept around on him first and made sure he knew it. Then I guess, yeah. Maybe. Reverse this for a minute. Do you ever think maybe you’ll be thirty-five and feel like you missed something?”
“No,” she said with a flat, disinterested certainty. “I don’t think I’ll ever be thirty-five and feeling like I missed out on anything. That’s an awful idea, you know.”
“What is?”
“Screw someone just to tell him about it.” She wasn’t looking at him but staring out the window. “The thought kind of makes me sick.”
The funny thing is, she looked a little sick right then. For the first time, Lee noticed how pale she was, dull pink circles under her eyes, her hair limp. Her hands were doing something with her paper napkin, folding it into smaller and smaller squares.
“Do you feel okay? You look a little off.”
The corners of her mouth twitched in a half smile. “I think I’m coming down with something. Don’t worry about it. As long as we don’t tongue each other, you won’t catch it.”
He was fuming when he drove away, an hour later. That was the way Merrin operated. She had lured him down to Boston, led him to imagine they would be alone together, then answered the door in her sweatpants, looking like warmed-over shit, her roomie wandering around, and they had spent the night talking about Ig. If she hadn’t let him kiss her breast two weeks ago and given him her cross, he would’ve thought she had no interest in him at all. He was sick of being jerked around, and sick of her talk.
But as he crossed the Zakim Bridge, Lee’s pulse began to slow and he began to breathe more normally, and it came to him that Merrin had never once mentioned the ice-queen blonde, not the whole time he was there. This was followed by another notion, that there was no ice queen, there was only Merrin, seeing how much she could get him worked up, keeping him thinking.
He was thinking, all right. He was thinking Ig would be gone soon enough, and so would her roommate, and sometime in the fall, he would knock on her door, and when she opened it, she’d be alone.
LEE HAD HOPED FOR A LATE NIGHT with Merrin, but it was just after ten when he crossed the border into New Hampshire and noticed he had a voice mail from the congressman. The congressman spoke in his slow, tired, migraine voice and said he hoped Lee would stop by tomorrow morning to talk over some news that had come in. The way he said it made Lee think he’d be just as glad to see him tonight, so instead of getting off I-95 to drive west to Gideon, he continued north and took the exit for Rye.
Eleven o’clock, Lee pulled into the congressman’s driveway of crushed white seashells. The house, a vast white Georgian with a columned portico, sat on an acre of immaculately groomed green lawn. The congressman’s twins were playing croquet with their boyfriends, out in the front yard, under the floodlights. Champagne flutes stood on the path next to the girls’ high heels; they were running around in bare feet. Lee got out of the Caddy and stood next to it, watching them play, two limber and brown-legged girls in summer dresses, one of them bent over her mallet and her date reaching around from behind, offering his help as an excuse to spoon against her. The laughter of the girls carried on air that smelled faintly of the sea, and Lee felt himself again in his element.
The congressman’s girls loved Lee, and when they saw him coming up the walk, they ran straight to him. Kaley put her arms around his neck, and Daley planted a kiss on the side of his face. Twenty-one and tanned and happy, but there had been hushed-up trouble with both: binge drinking, anorexia, a venereal disease. He hugged them back and kidded and promised to come out and play croquet with them if he could, but his skin crawled at their touch. They looked smooth and fine but were as rancid as chocolate-covered cockroaches; one of them was chewing a stick of spearmint, and he wondered if it was to cover up the odor of cigarettes, weed, or dick. He would not have slept with both of them together at the same time in trade for a night with Merrin, who was, in some ways, still clean, still possessed of the body of a sixteen-year-old virgin. She had only ever slept with Ig, and knowing Ig as Lee did, that hardly counted. Ig probably kept a sheet between them the whole time.
The congressman’s wife met Lee at the door, a small woman with feathered gray-and-black hair, thin lips frozen into a stiff smile from all the Botox. She touched Lee’s wrist. They all liked to touch him, the congressman’s wife and his children, and the congressman, too, as if Lee were some totem of good luck, a rabbit’s foot-and he was, and he knew it.
“He’s in his study,” she said. “He’ll be so glad to see you. You knew to come?”
“I knew. Headache?”
“Awful.”
“All right,” Lee said. “No worries. The doctor is in.”
Lee knew where the study was and made his way there. He knocked on the pocket door but didn’t wait to be told to enter before sliding it back. The lights were off, except for the television, and the congressman was on the couch in the dark with a wet washcloth folded into a band and laid across his eyes. Hothouse was on the TV. The volume was turned all the way down, but Lee could see Terry Perrish sitting behind his desk, interviewing some skinny Brit in a black leather jacket, a rock star, maybe.
The congressman heard the door, lifted one corner of the washcloth, saw Lee, and smiled with half his mouth. He dropped the washcloth back into place.
“There you are,” the congressman said. “I almost didn’t leave that message, because I knew you’d worry and come see me tonight, and I didn’t want to bother you on your Friday evening. I take up too much of your life as it is. You should be out on the town with a girl.” He spoke in the soft, loving tones of a man on his deathbed speaking to a favorite son. It was not the first time Lee had heard him talking so, or the first time he’d tended to him while he suffered one of his migraines. The congressman’s headaches were closely associated with fund-raising and bad poll numbers. They’d been coming in bunches lately. Not a dozen people in the state knew it, but early next year the congressman would announce that he intended to run for governor against an incumbent who had won the last election in a landslide but had slid badly in the polls in the years since. Any time her approval rating ticked up more than three points, the congressman needed to dry-swallow some Motrin and go lie down. He had never leaned on Lee’s calm so much.
“That was the plan,” Lee said, “but she bailed on me, and you’re twice as cute, so no loss.”
The congressman wheezed with laughter. Lee sat on the coffee table, cattycorner to him.
“Who died?” Lee asked.
“The governor’s husband,” the congressman said.
Lee hesitated, then said, “Boy, I hope you’re kidding.”
The congressman lifted the washcloth again. “He has Lou Gehrig’s. ALS. Was just diagnosed. There’ll be a press conference tomorrow. They’ve been married twenty years next week. Isn’t that the most awful thing?”
Lee had been ready for some bad internal-polling numbers, or maybe to learn that the Portsmouth Herald was going to run an unflattering story about the congressman (or the girls-there’d been more than a few of those). He needed a moment to process this one, though.
“God,” Lee said.
“What I said. It started with a thumb that wouldn’t stop twitching. Now it’s both hands. The course of the disease has apparently been quite rapid. You know not the day or the hour, do you?”
“No, sir.”
They sat together in silence. The TV played.
“My best friend in grammar school, his father had it,” the congressman said. “The poor man would sit there in his easy chair in front of the TV, twitching like a fish on a hook, and sounding half the time like he was being choked to death by the Invisible Man. I am so sorry for them. I can’t imagine what I’d do if one of the girls got sick. Do you want to pray for them with me, Lee?”
Not even a little, Lee thought, but he got on his knees at the coffee table and put his hands together and waited. The congressman got down on the floor next to him and bowed his head. Lee closed his eyes to concentrate, to work it through. It would boost her approval rating, for starters; personal tragedies were always good for a few thousand sympathy votes. Also, health care had always been her best issue, and this would play into that, give her a way to make the subject personal. Finally, it was difficult enough as it was to run against a woman, hard not to look like a chauvinist, a bully. But running against one who was heroically caring for an infirm spouse-who knew how that would play out over a campaign? Depended on the media, maybe, what angle they decided to work. Was there any angle that didn’t wind up as a net plus for her? Maybe. Lee thought there was at least one possibility worth praying for-at least one way to fix it.
After a while the congressman sighed, an indication that prayer time was over. They continued to kneel together, quite companionably.
“Do you think I shouldn’t run?” the congressman asked. “Out of decency?”
“Her husband’s illness is one kind of tragedy,” Lee said. “Her policies are another. It’s not just about her. It’s about everyone in the state.”
The congressman shuddered and said, “I’m ashamed to even be thinking about it. As if the only thing that matters are my goddamned political ambitions. Sin of pride, Lee. Sin of pride.”
“We don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe she’ll decide she needs to step down to care for him, won’t run next time out, in which case better you than anyone else.”
The congressman shuddered again. “We shouldn’t talk this way. Not tonight. I really do feel indecent. This is a man’s life and health. Whether I decide to run for governor or not is the least important thing in the world.” He rocked forward on his knees, staring blankly at the TV. Licked his lips. Then said, “If she did step down, though, maybe it would be irresponsible not to run.”
“Oh, God, yes,” Lee said. “Can you imagine if you didn’t go for it and Bill Flores was elected governor? They’d be teaching sex ed in kindergarten, passing out rubbers to six-year-olds. Okay, kids, raise your hand if you think you know how to spell ‘sodomy.’”
“Stop,” the congressman said, but he was laughing. “You’re awful.”
“You weren’t even going to announce for five months,” Lee said. “A lot can happen in a year. People aren’t going to vote for her because her husband is sick. The sick spouse didn’t help John Edwards in this state. Shoot, it probably hurt him. He looked like he was putting his career ahead of his wife’s health.” Already thinking that it would look even worse, a woman giving speeches while her husband did a spastic dance in a wheelchair next to the podium. It would be a bad visual, and would people really want to vote for two more years of that on their TV? Or a woman who thought winning an election was more important than caring for her husband? “People vote the issues, not out of sympathy.” A lie; people voted their nerve endings. That was how to fix it, to quietly, indirectly use her husband’s illness to make her look that much more uncaring, that much less like a lady. There was always a way to fix it. “It’ll be old news by the time you get into things. People will be ready to change the subject.”
But Lee wasn’t sure the congressman was listening anymore. He was squinting at the TV. Terry Perrish was slumped back in his chair, playing dead, his head cocked at an unnatural angle. His guest, the skinny English rock star in the black leather jacket, made the sign of the cross over his body.
“Aren’t you friends with him? Terry Perrish?”
“More his brother. Ig. They’re all wonderful people, though, the Perrish family. They were everything to me, growing up.”
“I’ve never met them. The Perrish family.”
“I think they lean Democrat.”
“People vote for friends before party,” the congressman said. “Maybe we could all be friends.” He punched Lee in the shoulder, as if at a sudden idea. He seemed to have forgotten about his migraine. “Wouldn’t it be something to announce the run for the governor’s seat on Terry Perrish’s show next year?”
“It would. It sure would,” Lee said.
“Think there’s any way to fix it?”
“Why don’t I take him out the next time he’s around,” Lee said, “and put in the good word for you. See what happens.”
“Sure,” the congressman said. “You do that. Paint the town red. Do it on my dime.” He sighed. “You cheer me up. I’m a very blessed man, and I know it. And you are one of those blessings, Lee.” He looked at Lee with eyes that twinkled in a grandfatherly sort of way. He could do it on cue, make those Santa Claus eyes. “You know, Lee, you aren’t too young to run for Congress yourself. My seat is going to be empty in a couple years, one way or another. You have very magnetic qualities. You’re good-looking and honest. You have a good personal story of redemption through Christ. You tell a mean joke.”
“I don’t think so. I’m happy with the work I’m doing now-for you. I don’t think running for office is my true calling,” Lee said, and without any embarrassment at all added, “I don’t believe that’s what the Lord wants of me.”
“That’s too bad,” said the congressman. “The party could use you, and there’s no telling how high you could climb. Heck, give yourself a chance-you could be our next Reagan.”
“Nah,” Lee said. “I’d rather be the next Karl Rove.”
HIS MOTHER DIDN’T HAVE A LOT to say at the end. Lee wasn’t sure how much she knew in the final weeks. Most days she spoke variations of only one word, her voice crazed and cracking: “Thirst! Thirst-ee!” Her eyes straining from their sockets. Lee would sit by the bed, naked in the heat, reading a magazine. By midday it was ninety-five degrees in the bedroom, maybe fifteen degrees hotter under the piled comforters. His mother didn’t always seem to know Lee was in the room with her. She stared at the ceiling, her weak arms struggling pitifully under the blankets, like a woman lost overboard, flailing to tread water. Other times her great eyes would roll in their sockets to point a pleading, terrified look in Lee’s direction. Lee would sip his iced tea and pay no mind.
Some days, after changing a diaper, Lee would forget to put on a new one, and leave his mother naked from the waist down under the covers. When she peed herself, she would begin to call “Wet! Wet! Oh, God, Lee! Wet myself!” Lee was never in a hurry to change her sheets, a laborious, tiresome process. Her pee smelled bad, like carrots, like kidney failure. When Lee did change the sheets, he would ball up the wet linens and then press them down over his mother’s face while she howled in a confused and strangled voice. Which was after all what his mother had done to him, rubbing his face in the sheets when he wet them. Her way of teaching him not to piss the bed, a problem in his youth.
His mother, however, had a single lucid moment toward the end of May, after weeks of incoherence-a dangerous moment of clarity. Lee had awoken before dawn in his bedroom on the second floor. He didn’t know what had stirred him, only that something was wrong. He sat up on his elbows, listening intently to the stillness. It was before five, and there was a faint show of false dawn graying the sky outside. The window was open a crack, and he could smell new grass, freshly budded trees. The air wafting in had a warm, humid weight to it. If it was warm already, the day was going to be a scorcher, especially in the guest room, where he was finding out if it was possible to slow-cook an old woman. Finally he heard something, a soft thud downstairs, followed by a sound like someone scraping shoes on a plastic mat.
He rose and padded quietly downstairs to check on his mother. He thought he’d find her asleep, or maybe staring blankly at the ceiling. He didn’t think he’d find her rolled on her left side, fumbling with one withered claw for the phone. She had knocked the receiver out of the cradle, and it was hanging to the floor by the coiled beige wire. She had collected a bunch of the wire in one hand, trying to pull the receiver up to where she could reach it, and it was swinging back and forth, scraping the floor, occasionally batting lightly against the night table.
His mother stopped trying to collect the wire when she saw Lee standing there. Her harrowed, sunken face was calm, almost expectant. She had once had thick, honey-colored hair, which for years she’d kept short but full, her curls feathering her shoulders. Farrah Fawcett hair. Now, though, she was balding, thin silver strands combed sideways across her liver-spotted dome.
“What are you doing, Mom?” Lee asked.
“Making a call.”
“Who were you going to call?” As he spoke, he registered the clarity in her voice and knew that she had, impossibly, surfaced from her dementia for the moment.
His mother gave him a long blank stare, then said, “What are you?” Partially surfaced anyway.
“Lee. Don’t you know me?”
“You aren’t him. Lee is out walking on the fence. I told him not to. I said he’d pay the devil for it, but he can’t help himself.”
Lee crossed the room and set the phone back in the cradle. Leaving an operating phone almost in arm’s reach had been idiotically careless, and never mind her condition.
As he bent forward to unplug the phone from the wall, though, his mother reached out and grabbed his wrist. Lee almost screamed, he was so surprised at the ferocious strength in her gaunt and gnarled fingers.
“I’m going to die anyway,” she said. “Why do you want me to suffer? Why don’t you just stand back and let it happen?”
Lee said, “Because I wouldn’t learn anything if I just let it happen.”
He expected another question, but instead his mother said, in an almost satisfied voice, “Yes. That’s right. Learn about what?”
“If there are limits.”
“To what I can survive?” his mother asked, and then went on, “No. No, that’s not it. You mean limits to what you can do.” She sank back into her pillows-and Lee was surprised to see she was smiling in a knowing sort of way. “You aren’t Lee. Lee is on the fence. If I catch him walking on that fence again, he’ll feel the back of my hand. He’s been told.”
She inhaled deeply, and her eyelids sank shut. He thought maybe she was settling down to go back to sleep-she often slipped into unconsciousness quite rapidly-but then she spoke again. There was a musing tone in her thin, old voice. “Ordered an espresso maker from a catalog one time. I think it might have been the Sharper Image. Pretty little thing, lot of copper trim. I waited a couple weeks, and it finally showed up on the doorstep. I sliced open the box, and would you believe it? There was nothing in there but packaging. Eighty-nine dollars for bubble wrap and Styrofoam. Someone must’ve gone to sleep in the espresso-machine factory.” She exhaled a long, satisfied breath.
“And I care…why?” Lee asked.
“Because it’s the same with you,” she said, opening her great shining eyes and turning her head to stare at him. Her smile widened to show what teeth remained, small and yellow and uneven, and she started to laugh. “You ought to ask for your money back. You got gypped. You’re just packaging. Just a good-looking box with nothing in it.” Her laughter was harsh and broken and gasping.
“Stop laughing at me,” Lee said, which made his mother laugh more, and she didn’t stop until Lee gave her a double dose of morphine. Then he went into the kitchen and drank a Bloody Mary with a lot of pepper, his hand shaking as he held the glass.
The urge was strong in Lee to pour his mother a scalding mug of salt water and make her drink the whole thing. Drown her with it.
Instead, though, he let her be; if anything, he looked after her with particular care for a week, running the fan all day, changing her sheets regularly, keeping fresh flowers in the room and the TV on. He was especially careful to administer the morphine on schedule, didn’t want her going lucid again when the nurse was in the house. Telling tales out of school about her treatment when she was alone with her son. But his anxieties were misplaced; his mother was never clear in the head again.
HE REMEMBERED THE FENCE. He did not remember much about the two years they lived in West Bucksport, Maine-did not, for example, even remember why they moved there, a place at the ass end of nowhere, a small town where his parents knew no one. He did not recall why they had returned to Gideon. But he remembered the fence, and the feral tom that came from the corn, and the night he stopped the moon from falling out of the sky.
The tom came out of the corn at dusk. The second or third time it appeared in their backyard, crying softly, Lee’s mother went outside to greet it. She had a tin of sardines, and she put it on the ground and waited as the cat crept close. The tom set upon the sardines as if he had not eaten in days-and maybe he hadn’t-swallowing silver fish in a series of swift, jerky head motions. Then he twined smoothly between Kathy Tourneau’s ankles, purring in a satisfied sort of way. It was a somehow rusty-sounding purr, as if the cat were out of practice being happy.
But when Lee’s mother bent to scratch behind his ears, the tom slashed the back of her hand, laying the flesh open in long red lines. She shrieked and kicked him, and he ran, turning over the sardine tin in his haste to get away.
She wore a white bandage on her hand for a week and scarred badly. She carried her marks from the run-in with the tom all the rest of her life. The next time the cat came out of the corn, yowling for attention, she threw a frying pan at it, and it vanished back into the rows.
There were a dozen rows behind the Bucksport house, an acre of low, ratty corn. His parents hadn’t planted it and did nothing to tend it. They weren’t farmers, weren’t even inclined to garden. Lee’s mother picked some in August, tried to steam a few ears, but none of them could eat it. It was tasteless, chewy, and hard. Lee’s father laughed and said it was corn for pigs.
By October the stalks were dried out and brown and dead, a lot of them broken and tilting. Lee loved them, loved the aromatic scent of them on the cold fall air, loved to sneak through the narrow lanes between the rows, with the leaves rasping dryly around him. Years later he remembered loving them, even if he couldn’t exactly recall how that love felt. For the adult Lee Tourneau, trying to remember his enthusiasm for the corn was a little like trying to get full on the memory of a good meal.
Where the tom spent the balance of his day was unknown. He didn’t belong to the neighbors. He didn’t belong to anyone. Lee’s mother said he was feral. She said the word “feral” in the same spitting, ugly tone she used to refer to The Winterhaus, the bar Lee’s father stopped at every night for a drink (or two, or three) on his way home from work.
The tomcat’s ribs were visible in his sides, and his black fur was missing in hunks, to show obscene patches of pink, scabby skin, and his furry balls were as big as shooter marbles, so big they jostled back and forth between his hind legs when he walked. One eye was green, the other white, giving him a look of partial blindness. Lee’s mother instructed her only son to stay away from the creature, not to pet him under any circumstances, and not to trust him.
“He won’t learn to like you,” she said. “He’s past the point where he can learn to feel for people. He’s not interested in you or anyone, and never will be. He only turns up hoping we’ll put something out for him, and if we don’t feed him, he’ll stop coming around.”
But he didn’t stop. Every night, when the sun went down but the clouds were still lit with its glow, the tomcat returned to cry in their backyard.
Lee went looking for him sometimes, as soon as he got home from school. He wondered how the tom spent his day, where he went and where he came from. Lee would climb onto the fence and walk the ties, peering into the corn for the cat.
He could only stay on the fence until his mother spotted him and yelled for him to get down. It was a split-tie fence, splintery wooden logs slotted into leaning posts, which enclosed the entire backyard, corn and all. The top rail was high off the ground, as high as Lee’s head, and the logs shook as he walked across them. His mother said the wood had dry rot, that one of the ties would shatter underfoot, and then it would be a trip to the hospital (his father would wave a dismissive hand in the air and say, “Whyn’t you leave him alone and let him be a kid?”). But he couldn’t stay off it; no kid could’ve. He didn’t just climb on it or walk across it as if it were a balance beam, but sometimes he even ran across it, arms stuck out to either side, as if he were some gangly crane attempting to take off. It felt good, to run the fence, posts shaking underfoot and the blood pumping in him.
The tom went to work on Kathy Tourneau’s sanity. He would announce his arrival from the corn with a plaintive, off-key wail, a single harsh note that he sang over and over again, until Lee’s mother couldn’t stand it anymore and burst from the back door to throw something at him.
“For God’s sake, what do you want?” she screamed at the black tomcat one night. “You aren’t getting fed, so why don’t you go away?”
Lee didn’t say anything to his mother, but thought he knew why the cat reappeared every evening. His mother’s mistake was, she believed that the cat was crying for food. Lee, though, thought the tom was crying for the previous owners, for the people who lived in the house before them and who treated him the way he wanted to be treated. Lee imagined a freckly girl about his age, in overalls and with long, straight red hair, who would set out a bowl of cat food for the black cat and then sit at a safe distance to watch him eat without troubling him. Singing to him, maybe. His mother’s idea-that the cat had decided to torture them with incessant, shrill crying, just to see how much they could take-seemed an unlikely hypothesis to Lee.
He decided he would learn to be the tomcat’s friend, and one night he sat out to wait for him. He told his mother he didn’t want dinner, that he was full from the big bowl of cereal he ate when he got back from school, and could he just go outside for a while? She allowed he could, at least until his father got home, and then it was right up into his pajamas and bed. He did not mention he planned to meet the cat or that he had sardines for him.
It got dark fast in mid-October. It was not even six when he went outside, but the only light left in the sky was a line of hot pink over the fields on the far side of the road. While he waited, he sang to himself, a song that was popular on the radio that year. “Look at ’em go-o-o,” he whisper-sang, “look at ’em ki-i-ick.” A few stars were out. He tipped his head back and was surprised to see that one of these stars was moving, tracing a straight line across heaven. After a moment he realized that it had to be an airplane, or maybe a satellite. Or a UFO! What an idea. When he lowered his gaze, the tom was there.
The cat with the mismatched eyes poked his head from between the low stalks of corn to stare at Lee for a long, silent moment, not crying for once. Lee withdrew his hand from the pocket of his coat, moving slowly, so as not to scare it.
“Hey, bud-dee,” he said, dragging out the last syllable in a musical sort of way. “Hey, bud-dee.”
The sardine tin made a sharp metal cracking sound as he popped it open, and the tom flitted back into the corn, was gone.
“Oh, no, buddy,” Lee said, jumping to his feet. It was unfair. He had planned out the whole encounter, how he would lure the cat close with a soft, friendly song and then put the tin down for him, making no move to touch him tonight, just letting him eat. And now he was gone, without giving Lee a chance.
The wind lifted and the corn rustled uneasily, and Lee felt the cold through his coat. He was standing there, too disappointed to move, just staring blankly out at the corn, when the cat leaped into sight again, jumping onto the top rail of the fence. He turned his head to stare back at Lee with bright, fascinated eyes.
Lee was relieved the tom hadn’t run off without a look back, was grateful to him for sticking around. Lee made no sudden moves. He crept, rather than walked, and did not speak to the cat again. He thought, when he got close, that the tom would drop back into the corn and vanish. Instead, though, when Lee had reached the fence, the cat took a few steps along the top rail, then paused to look back again, a kind of expectancy in his eyes. Waiting to see if Lee would follow, inviting him to follow. Lee took a post and climbed to the top rail. The fence shook, and he thought now, now the cat would jump and be gone. Instead the tomcat waited for the fence to stop moving and then began to stroll away, tail in the air to show his black asshole and big balls.
Lee tightroped after the tomcat, arms held out to either side for balance. He did not dare hurry, for fear of frightening him off, but moved at a steady walk. The cat strutted lazily on his way, leading him farther and farther from the house. The corn grew right up to the fence, and dry, thick leaves swatted and brushed Lee’s arm. He had a bad moment when one of the rails shook wildly underfoot, and he had to crouch down and put a hand on a post to keep from falling. The cat waited for him to recover, crouching on the next tie. He still didn’t move when Lee stood back up and crossed the wobbling log to him. Instead he arched his back, ruffling up his fur, and began to purr his strained, rusty purr. Lee was nearly beside himself with excitement, to be so close to him at last, almost close enough to touch.
“Hey,” he breathed, and the tom’s purring intensified, and he lifted his back to Lee, and it was impossible to believe he didn’t want to be touched.
Lee knew he had promised himself he wouldn’t try to pet the tomcat, not tonight, not when they were just making first contact, but it would be rude to reject such an unmistakable request for affection. He reached down gently to stroke him.
“Hey, bud-dee,” he sang softly, and the cat squeezed his eyes shut in a look of pure animal pleasure, then opened them and lashed out with one claw.
Lee jerked upright, the claw swishing through the air not an inch from his left eyeball. The rail clattered violently underfoot, and Lee’s legs went rubbery, and he fell sideways into the corn.
The top rung was only about four feet from the ground in most places, but along that part of the fence the earth sloped away to the left, so the fall was closer to six feet. The pitchfork that lay in the corn had been there for over a decade, had been waiting for Lee since before he was born, lying flat on the earth with the curved and rusted tines sticking straight up. Lee hit it headfirst.
HE SAT UP A WHILE LATER. The corn whispered frantically, spreading false rumors about him. The cat was gone from the fence. It was full night, and when he looked up, he caught the stars moving. They were all satellites now, shooting in different directions, dropping this way and that. The moon twitched, fell a few inches, twitched again. As if the curtain of heaven were in danger of falling, and revealing the empty stage behind. Lee reached up and straightened the moon and put it back where it belonged. The moon was so cold in his hand that it made his fingers numb, like handling an icicle.
He had to get very tall to fix the moon, and while he was up there, he looked down on his little corner of West Bucksport. He saw things he could not possibly have seen in the corn, saw things the way God saw them. He saw his father’s car coming down Pickpocket Lane and turning up the gravel road to their house. He was driving with a six-pack on the passenger seat and a cold one between his thighs. If Lee wanted to, he could’ve flicked his finger against the car and spun it off the road, tumbling it into the evergreens that screened their house from the highway. He imagined it, the car on its side, flames licking up from under the hood. People would say he was driving blind drunk.
He felt as detached from the world below as he would’ve been from a model railroad. West Bucksport was just as delightful and precious, with its little trees, and little toy houses, and little toy people. If he wanted to, he could’ve picked up his own house and moved it across the street. He could’ve put his heel on it and flattened it underfoot. He could wipe the whole mess off the table with one stroke of his arm.
He saw movement in the corn, an animate shadow sidling among other shadows, and recognized the cat, and knew he had not been raised to this great height just to fix the moon. He had offered food and kindness to the stray, and it had led him on with a show of affection and then lashed out at him and knocked him off the fence and might’ve killed him, not for any reason but because that was what it was built to do, and now it was walking away as if nothing had happened, and maybe to the cat nothing had happened, maybe it had already forgotten Lee, and that would not do. Lee reached down with his great arm-it was like being on the top floor of the John Hancock Tower and looking down the length of the glass building at the ground-and pushed his finger into the cat, mashing it into the dirt. For a single frantic instant, less than a second, he felt a spasm of quivering life under his fingertip, felt the cat trying to leap away, but it was too late, and he crushed it, felt it shatter like a dried seed pod. He ground his finger back and forth, the way he had seen his father grind out cigarettes in an ashtray. He killed it with a kind of quiet, subdued satisfaction, feeling a little distant from himself, the way he sometimes got when he was coloring.
After a while he lifted his hand and looked at it, at a streak of blood across his palm and a fluff of black fur stuck to it. He smelled his hand, which had on it a fragrance of musty basements mingled with summer grass. The smell interested him, told a story of hunting mice in subterranean places and hunting for a mate to screw in the high weeds.
Lee lowered his hand to his lap and stared blankly at the cat. He was sitting in the corn again, although he didn’t remember sitting down, and he was the same size he’d always been, although he didn’t remember getting any smaller. The tomcat was a twisted wreck. Its head was turned around backward, as if someone had tried to unscrew it like a lightbulb. The tom stared up into the night with wide-eyed surprise. Its skull was battered and misshapen, and brains were coming out one ear. The unlucky black cat lay next to a flat piece of slate, wet with blood. Lee was remotely aware of a stinging in his right arm and looked at it and saw that his wrist and forearm were scratched up, scratches grouped together in three parallel lines, as if he had taken a fork to himself, gouging at his flesh with the tines. He couldn’t figure out how the cat had managed to scratch him when he had been so much bigger, but he was tired now and his head hurt, and after a while he gave up trying to figure it out. It was exhausting, being like God, being big enough to fix the things that needed fixing. He pushed himself to his feet, his legs weak beneath him, and started back toward the house.
His mother and father were in the front room, fighting with each other again. Or, really, his father was sitting with a beer and Sports Illustrated and not replying while Kathy stood over him, yattering at him in a low, strangled voice. Lee had a little flash of the perfect understanding that had come over him when he was big enough to fix the moon, and he knew that his father went to The Winterhaus every night, not to drink, but to see a waitress, and that they were special friends. Not that either of his parents said anything about the waitress; his mother was furious about a mess in the garage, about him wearing his boots into the living room, about her work. Somehow, though, the waitress was what they were really arguing about. Lee knew, too, that in time-a few years, maybe-his father would leave, and he would not take Lee with him.
It didn’t bother him, the way they were fighting. What bothered him was the radio, on in the background, making a clashing, dissonant sound: like pots thrown down a staircase, while someone hissed and sputtered, like a teakettle coming to the boil. The sound of it grated on him, and he swerved toward the radio to turn it down, and it was only as he was reaching for the volume that he recognized it was that song “The Devil Inside.” He had no idea why he’d ever liked it. In the weeks to follow, Lee would discover he could not bear almost any music running in the background, that songs no longer made sense to him, were just a mess of aggravating sounds. When a radio was on, he’d leave the room, preferred the quiet that went with his own thoughts.
He felt light-headed climbing the stairs. The walls sometimes seemed to be pulsing, and he was afraid if he looked outside, he might see the moon twitching in the sky again, and this time he might not be able to fix it. He thought it might be best if he lay down before it fell. He said good night from the stairs. His mother didn’t notice. His father didn’t care.
When Lee woke the next morning, the pillowcase was soaked with dry bloodstains. He studied it without alarm or fear. The smell, an old copper-penny odor, was especially interesting.
A few minutes later, he was in the shower and happened to look down between his feet. A thin thread of reddish brown was racing in the current and whirling down the drain, as if there were rust in the water. Only it wasn’t rust. He lifted a hand absently to his head, wondering if he had cut himself when he fell from the fence the night before. His fingers prodded a tender spot on the right side of his skull. He touched what felt like a small depression, and for a moment it was as if someone had dropped a hair dryer into the shower with him, a hard jolt of electricity that made the world flash, turn into a photographic negative for an instant. When the sickening shocked feeling passed, he looked at his hand and found blood on his fingers.
He did not tell his mother he had hurt his head-it didn’t seem important-or explain the blood on his pillow, although she was horrified when she saw the mess.
“Look at this,” she said. “This is ruined! Completely ruined!” Standing in the middle of the kitchen with the blood-soaked pillowcase in one hand.
“Lay off,” said Lee’s father, sitting at the kitchen table holding his head between his hands as he read the sports. He was pale and bristly and sick-looking but still had a smile ready for his boy. “Kid gets a nosebleed, you act like he killed someone. He ain’t murdered anyone.” His father winked at Lee. “Not yet anyhow.”
LEE HAD A SMILE READY for Merrin when she opened the door, but she didn’t appreciate it, hardly looked at him.
He said, “I told Ig I had to be in Boston today for the congressman, and he told me if I don’t take you out someplace for a nice dinner, he won’t be my friend anymore.”
Two girls sat on the couch watching TV, the volume turned up on a rerun of Growing Pains. Piled between them and at their feet were stacks of cardboard boxes. Slants, like Merrin’s roommate. The roomie sat on the arm of a chair, hollering cheerfully into her cell. Lee didn’t think much of Asians in general, hive creatures fixated on phones and cameras, although he did like the Asian-schoolgirl look, black buckled shoes and high socks and pleated skirts. The door to the roomie’s bedroom was open, and there were more boxes piled on a bare mattress.
Merrin surveyed this scene with a kind of wondering hopelessness, then turned back to Lee. If he had known she was going to be as gray as dishwater, no makeup, hair unwashed, in her baggy old sweats, he would’ve skipped a visit. Total turnoff. He was already sorry he’d come. He realized he was still smiling and made himself stop, felt for the right thing to say.
“God, are you still sick?” he asked.
She nodded absently and then said, “Want to go on the roof? Less noisy.”
He followed her up the stairs. They didn’t appear to be going out to dinner, but she brought a pair of Heinekens from the fridge, which was better than nothing.
It was going on eight o’clock, but still not dark. The skateboarders were down in the road again, their boards clattering and banging on the asphalt. Lee walked across the roof deck to look over the edge at them. A couple had fauxhawks and wore ties and button-down shirts that were buttoned only at the collar. Lee had never been interested in skateboarding as anything more than a look, because you came off as alternative with a board under your arm, a little dangerous, but also athletic. He didn’t like falling, though; just the idea of falling made one whole side of his head go cold and numb.
Merrin touched the small of his back, and for just a moment he thought she was going to push him over the side of the roof, and he was going to twist and grab her by her pale throat and pull her with him. She must’ve seen the shock on his face, because she smiled for the first time and offered him one of the Heinekens. He nodded thanks and took it and held it in one hand while he lit up with the other.
She sat on an air-conditioning unit with her own beer, not drinking it, just spinning the wet neck around and around in her fingers. Her feet were bare. Her little pink feet were cute anyway. Looking at them, it was easy to imagine her placing one foot between his legs, her toes gently kneading his crotch.
“I think I’m going to try what you said,” she told him.
“Voting Republican?” he asked. “Progress at last.”
She smiled again, but it was a morose, wan sort of smile. She looked away and said, “I’m going to tell Ig that when he goes to England, I want to take a relationship vacation. Like a trial breakup, so we can both see other people.”
Lee felt as if he had tripped over something, even though he was standing still. “When were you planning to lay this on him?”
“When he gets back from New York. I don’t want to tell him on the phone. You can’t say anything, Lee. You can’t even hint.”
“No. I won’t.” He was excited and knew it was important not to show it. He said, “You’re going to tell him he should see other people? Other girls?”
She nodded.
“And…you, too?”
“I’ll tell him that I want to try a relationship with someone else. I’m not going to tell him anything more than that. I’ll tell him that whatever happens while he’s away is off the books. I don’t want to know who he’s seeing, and I won’t be reporting in to him about my relationships. I think that’ll…that’ll make things easier all around.” She looked up then, a rueful amusement in her eyes. The wind caught her hair and did pretty things with it. She looked less ill and wan out under the pale violet sky at the end of day. “I feel guilty already, you know.”
“Well. You don’t need to. Listen, if you really love each other, you’ll know it for sure in six months, and you’ll want to get back together.”
She shook her head and said, “No, I…I do think this is looking a little more than temporary. There are some things I’ve learned about myself this summer, some things I know, that have changed how I feel about my relationship with Ig. I know I can’t be married to him. After he’s been over in England for a while, after he’s had time to meet someone, I’ll finish it for good.”
“Jesus,” Lee said softly, playing it again in his head: There are some things I’ve learned about myself this summer. Remembering what it was like in the kitchen with her, his leg between hers, and his hand on the smooth curve of her hip, and her soft, fast breath in his ear. “Just a couple weeks ago, you were telling me what you were going to name the kids.”
“Yeah. But when you know something, you know something. I know I’m never going to have kids with him now.” She seemed calmer, had relaxed a little. She said, “This is the part where you step up to defend your best friend and talk me out of it. You mad at me?”
“No.”
“Do you think less of me?”
“I’d think less of you if you pretended you still want to be with Ig when you know in your heart there’s no future for the two of you.”
“That’s it. That’s exactly it. And I want Ig to have other relationships, and be with other girls, and be happy. If I know he’s happy, it’ll be easier for me to move on.”
“Jesus, though. You guys have been together forever.” His hand almost trembled as he shook a second cigarette from his pack. In a week Ig would be gone and she would be alone, and she would not be reporting in to him about who she was fucking.
She nodded at the pack of cigarettes. “One for me?”
“Seriously? I thought you wanted me to quit.”
“Ig wanted you to quit. I was always kind of curious, but, you know. Figured Ig would disapprove. Guess I can try them now.” She rubbed her hands on her knees and said, “So. Are you going to teach me how to smoke tonight, Lee?”
“Sure,” he said.
In the street a skateboard banged and crashed, and some of the teens shouted in a mixture of appreciation and dismay as a boarder went sprawling. She looked over the edge of the roof.
“I’d like to learn how to skateboard, too,” she said.
“Retarded sport,” Lee said. “Good way to break something. Like your neck.”
“I’m not too worried about my neck,” she said, and turned and stood on her tiptoes and kissed the corner of his mouth. “Thank you. For talking me through some things. I owe you, Lee.”
Her tank top clung to her breasts, and in the cool night air her nipples had crinkled, dimpling the fabric. He thought of reaching up and putting his hands on her hips, wondered if they could get started with a little touch and feel tonight. Before he could reach for her, though, the roof door banged open. It was the roommate, chewing gum, looking at them askance.
“Williams,” said her roommate, “your boyfriend is on the phone. I guess him and his Amnesty International friends waterboarded each other today, just to see what it feels like. He’s all excited, wants to give you the rundown. Sounds like he’s got a great job. Did I interrupt something?”
“No,” Merrin said, and turned back to Lee and whispered, “She thinks you’re one of the bad guys. Which, of course, you are. I should go talk to Ig. Rain check on dinner?”
“When you do talk to him-are you going to say anything about-us, the stuff we’ve talked about-”
“Oh, hey. No. I can keep a secret, Lee.”
“Okay,” he said, dry-mouthed, wanting her.
“I have one of those butts?” said the fat, butchy slant, coming toward them.
“Sure,” Lee said.
Merrin flapped one hand up in a little wave, crossed the roof, and was gone.
Lee shook a Winston out for the roommate and lit it for her.
“Heading to San Diego, huh?”
“Yeah,” said the girl. “I’m moving in with a friend from high school. It’s going to be cool. She’s got a Wii and everything.”
“Does your old high-school friend play the game with the dots and the lines, or are you going to have to start doing your own laundry?”
The slant squinted at him, then waved one chubby hand, swiping away the curtain of smoke between them. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
“You know that game, where you put a whole bunch of dots in a row and then take turns making lines, trying to build squares? Don’t you play that game with Merrin to see who does the laundry?”
“Do we?” said the girl.
HE LOOKED BACK AND FORTH with his one good eye, searching the parking lot for her, everything lit up by the weird, infernal glow of the red neon sign that towered above all-THE PIT-so the rain itself fell red through the hazy night, and then there she was, out under a tree in the rain.
“There, Lee, right there,” Terry told him, but Lee was already pulling over.
She’d told him she might need a ride back from The Pit, if Ig was very angry, after “The Big Talk.” Lee had promised he’d drive by to check on her, which she said he didn’t need to do, but smiling and looking grateful, so he knew she really wanted him to. The thing about Merrin was that she didn’t always mean what she said but often said things that were in direct opposition to her intentions.
When Lee saw her, in her soaked blouse and clinging skirt, her eyes reddened from crying, he felt his insides contract with nervous excitement, the thought in him that she was out there waiting for him, wanted to be with him. It had gone badly, Ig had said terrible things, had finally cast her aside, and there was no reason now to wait; he thought there was a good chance when he asked her to come home with him, she would agree, would say yes, in a gentle, accepting voice. As he slowed, she saw him and raised one hand, already stepping toward the side of the car. Lee regretted not taking Terry home before coming here now, wanted her alone. He thought if it were just the two of them in the car, she might lean against him in her wet clothes for warmth and comfort, and he could put his arm around her shoulders, maybe work his hand into her blouse.
Lee wanted her up front and turned his head to tell Terry to get in back, but Terry was already up, about to pull himself over the front seat. Terry Perrish was trashed, had smoked half of Mexico in the last couple hours, and moved with the grace of a tranquilized elephant. Lee reached past him to open the passenger-side door for her, and as he did, he put his elbow in Terry’s ass to move him along. Terry fell into the back, and Lee heard a soft, metallic bashing sound as he came down on the toolbox open on the floor.
She got in, pushing the wet strings of her hair out of her face. Her small, heart-shaped face-still the face of a girl-was wet and white and cold-looking, and Lee was seized with an urge to touch her, to gently stroke her cheek. Her blouse was soaked through, and her bra had little roses printed on it. Before he knew he was doing it, he was reaching out to touch her. But then his gaze shifted and he saw Terry’s joint, a fat blunt as long as a ladyfinger, sitting on the seat, and he dropped his hand over it, palmed it before she could see it.
Instead she was the one who touched him, lightly putting her icy fingers on his wrist. He shivered.
“Thanks for picking me up, Lee,” she said. “You just saved my life.”
“Where’s Ig?” Terry asked in a thick, stupid voice, ruining the moment. Lee looked at him in the rearview. He was hunched forward, his eyes unfocused, one hand pressed to his temple.
Merrin pushed her wrist into her stomach, as if just the thought of Ig caused her physical pain.
“I d-don’t know. He left.”
“You told him?” Lee asked.
Merrin turned her head to look out at The Pit, but Lee could see her reflection in the glass, could see her chin dimpling with the effort it took not to cry. She was shivering helplessly, so her knees almost knocked.
“How’d he take it?” Lee asked, couldn’t help himself.
She gave a quick shake of the head and said, “Can we just go?”
Lee nodded and pulled out into the road, swinging the car back the way they’d come. He saw the rest of the evening as a set of clearly ordered steps: drop Terry at home, then drive her to his house without discussion, tell her she needed to get out of her wet things and into a shower, in the same calm, decisive voice she’d told him to get into the shower the morning his mother died. Only when he brought her a drink, he would gently draw the curtain aside to look at her in the spray and would already be undressed himself.
“Hey, girl,” Terry said. “You want my jacket?”
Lee shot an irritated look into the rearview at Terry, had been so preoccupied with thoughts of Merrin in the shower that he’d half forgotten Terry was there. He felt a low current of loathing for smooth, funny, famous, good-looking, and basically dull-witted Terry, who had ridden a minimal talent, family connections, and a well-known last name to wealth and his pick of the finest pussy in the country. It made sense to try to twist Terry’s faucet, see if there wasn’t a way to make him pour some celebrity the congressman’s way, or at least some money; but in truth Lee had never much liked him, a loudmouth and an attention hog who had gone out of his way to humiliate Lee in front of Glenna Nicholson the very first day they met. It sickened him, watching the oily fuck turn on the charm for his brother’s girlfriend, not ten minutes after they broke up, as if he were entitled, as if he had any right. Lee reached for the air conditioner, annoyed with himself for not turning it off sooner.
“’S all right,” Merrin said, but Terry was already handing his coat forward. “Thank you, Terry.” Her tone so ingratiating and needy that Lee wanted to backhand her. Merrin had her qualities, but fundamentally she was a woman like other women, aroused and submissive in the face of status and money. Take away the trust fund and the family name and Lee doubted she ever would’ve looked at sorry Ig Perrish twice. “You m-must think-”
“I don’t think anything. Relax.”
“Ig-”
“I’m sure Ig is fine. Don’t worry yourself.”
She was still trembling, hard-a little bit of a turn-on, actually, the way her breasts were quivering-but she pivoted to reach a hand into the backseat. “Are you all right?” When she drew her hand back, Lee saw blood on her fingertips. “You ought to have some g-gauze for that.”
“It’s fine. No worries,” Terry said, and Lee wanted to backhand him. Instead he pushed down on the pedal, in a hurry to dump Terry at his house, get him out of the picture as quickly as possible.
The Cadillac rose and fell, swooping along the wet road and swaying around the curves. Merrin hugged herself under the robe of Terry’s coat, still shivering furiously, her bright, stricken eyes staring out from the tangled nest of her hair, a mess of wet red straw. All at once she reached up and put one hand against the dash, her arm stiff and straight, as if they were about to pitch off the road.
“Merrin, are you all right?”
She shook her head. “No. Y-yes. I-Lee, please pull over. Pull over here.” Her voice was thin with tension.
When he glanced at her again, he saw she was going to be sick. The night was shriveling around him, slipping beyond control. She was going to puke in the Caddy, a thought that frankly appalled him. His favorite thing about his mother’s illness and subsequent death was that it left him sole right of the Cadillac, and if Merrin threw up in it, he was going to be pissed. You couldn’t get the smell out no matter what you did.
He saw the turnoff to the old foundry coming up on the right, and he veered off the road into it, still going too fast. The front right tire bit into the dirt at the shoulder of the road and flung the back end out to the side, not the thing you wanted to do with a sick girl in the passenger seat. Still decelerating, he pointed the Caddy up the rutted gravel fire lane, brush swatting at the sides of the car, rocks pinging against the undercarriage. A chain stretched across the road rose in the headlights, rushed toward them, and Lee kept the pressure on the brakes, slowing steadily, evenly. At last the Caddy whined to a soft stop, bumper right against the chain.
Merrin opened the door and made an angry retching sound, almost like a wet cough. Lee slammed it into park. He felt a little tremulous himself, with irritation, and made a conscious effort to regain his inner calm. If he was going to get her into the shower tonight, he was going to have to take it a step at a time, lead her by the hand. He could do it, could steer her where they were both headed anyway, but he had to get control of himself, of the wilting night. Nothing had happened yet that couldn’t be fixed.
He stepped out and came around the car, the rain plopping around him, dampening the back and shoulders of his shirt. Merrin had her feet on the ground and her head between her knees. The storm was already tapering off, just dripping quietly in the leaves overhanging the dirt road now.
“You all right?” he asked. She nodded. He went on, “Let’s take Terry home, and then I want you to come over to my place and tell me what happened. I’ll fix you a drink, and you can unload. That’ll make you feel better.”
“No. No thank you. I just want to be alone right now. I need to do some thinking.”
“You don’t want to be alone tonight. In your state of mind, that’d be the worst thing. Hey, and look. You have to come to my place. I fixed your cross. I want to put it on you.”
“No, Lee. I just want to go home and get into some dry things and be by myself.”
He felt another flash of annoyance-it was just like her to think she could put him off indefinitely, to expect him to pick her up from The Pit and dutifully drive her where she wanted to go with nothing in return-and then he pushed the feeling aside. He eyed her in her wet skirt and blouse, shivering steadily, then went around to the trunk. He got his gym duffel, brought it back, and offered it to her.
“Got gym clothes. Shirt. Pants. They’re dry and they’re warm, and there’s no sick on them.”
She hesitated, then took the strap of the bag and rose from the car. “Thank you, Lee.” Not meeting his eyes.
He didn’t let go of the bag, held on to it, held on to her for a moment, kept her from striding away into the night to change. “You had to do it, you know. It was crazy, thinking that you could-that either of you could-”
She said, “I just want to change, okay?” She tugged the bag out of his hand.
Merrin turned and walked stiffly away, her tight skirt stuck to her thighs. She passed through the headlights, and her blouse went as clear as waxed paper. She stepped around the chain and continued on into the dark, up the road. But before she disappeared, she turned her head and gave Lee a frowning look, one eyebrow raised in a way that seemed to ask a question-or offer an invitation. Follow me. Then she was gone.
Lee lit a cigarette and smoked it, standing next to the car, wondering if it would be all right to go after her, not sure he wanted to head into the woods with Terry watching. But in a minute or two, he checked and saw that Terry had stretched out across the backseat with an arm over his eyes. He had rapped his head good, had a red scrape close to the right temple, and he’d been pretty out of it even before that, as baked as a Thanksgiving turkey. It was funny, being out here at the foundry, where he had first met Terry Perrish the day he blew up the big frozen bird with Eric Hannity. He remembered Terry’s joint and felt in his pocket for it. Maybe a couple tokes would settle Merrin’s stomach and make her less shrill.
He watched Terry another minute, but when he didn’t stir, Lee flipped his cigarette butt into the wet grass and started up the road after her. He followed the gravel ruts around a slight curve and up a hill, and there was the foundry, framed against a sky of boiling black clouds. With its towering smokestack, it looked like a factory built to produce nightmares in mass quantities. The wet grass glistened and shook in the wind. He thought perhaps she had walked up to the crumbling keep of black brick and shadows, was changing there, but then he heard her hiss at him from the dark, to the left.
“Lee,” she said, and he saw her, twenty feet off the path.
She stood below an old tree, the bark peeling away to show the dead, white, leprously spotted wood beneath. She had pulled on his gray sweatpants but was clutching Terry’s sport jacket to her thin, bare chest. The sight was an erotic shock, like something from a lazy afternoon masturbation fantasy: Merrin with her pale shoulders and slim arms and haunted eyes, half naked and shivering in the woods, waiting for him alone.
The gym bag was at her feet, and her wet clothes were folded and set to one side, her heels placed neatly on top of them. Something was tucked into one shoe-a man’s tie, it looked like, folded many times over. How she did like to fold things. Lee sometimes felt she had been folding him into smaller and smaller slices for years.
“There’s no shirt in your bag,” she said. “Just sweats.”
Lee said, “That’s right. I forgot.” Walking toward her.
“Well, shit,” she said. “Give me your shirt.”
“You want me to take off my clothes?” he said.
She tried to smile but let out a short impatient breath. “Lee-I’m sorry, I’m just…I’m not in the mood.”
“No. Of course you aren’t. You need a drink and someone to talk to. Hey, I’ve got weed if you really need something to relax.” He held up the joint and smiled, because he felt she needed a smile right then. “Let’s go to my house. If you’re not in the mood tonight, another time.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, frowning, eyebrows knitting together. “I mean I’m not in the mood for comedy. What kind of mood are you talking about?”
He leaned forward and kissed her. Her lips were wet and cold.
She flinched, took a startled step back. The jacket slipped, and she caught it to hold it in place, keep it between them. “What are you doing?”
“I just want you to feel better. If you’re miserable, that’s at least partly my fault.”
“Nothing’s your fault,” she said. She was watching him with wide, wondering eyes, a terrible kind of understanding dawning in her face. So like a little girl’s face. It was easy to look at her and imagine she was not twenty-four but still sixteen, still cherry. “I didn’t break up with Ig because of you. It has nothing to do with you.”
“Except that now we can be together. Wasn’t that the reason for this whole exercise?”
She took another unsteady step back, her face becoming incredulous, her mouth widening as if to cry out. The thought that she might be about to yell alarmed him, and he felt an impulse to step forward and get a hand over her mouth. But she didn’t yell. She laughed-strained, disbelieving laughter. Lee grimaced; for a moment it was like his senile mother laughing at him: You ought to ask for your money back.
“Oh, fuck,” she said. “Oh, Jesus fuck. Aw, Lee, this is a really bad time for some kind of shitty joke.”
“I agree,” Lee said.
She stared. The sick, confused smile faded from her face, and her upper lip lifted in a sneer. An ugly sneer of disgust.
“That’s what you think? That I broke up with him…so I could fuck you? You’re his friend. My friend. Don’t you understand anything?”
He took a step toward her, reaching for her shoulder, and she shoved him. He wasn’t expecting it, and his heels struck a root, and he went straight down onto his ass in the wet, hard earth.
Lee stared up at her and felt something rising in him, a kind of thunderous roar, a subway coming through the tunnel. He didn’t hate her for the things she was saying, although that was bad enough, leading him on for months-years, really-then ridiculing him for wanting her. What he hated mostly was the look on her face. That look of disgust, the sharp little teeth showing under her raised upper lip.
“What were we talking about, then?” Lee asked patiently, ludicrously, from his spot on the damp earth. “What have we spent the whole last month discussing? I thought you wanted to fuck other people. I thought there were things you knew about yourself, about how you feel, that you had to deal with. Things about me.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, Jesus, Lee.”
“Telling me to meet you for dinners. Writing me dirty messages about some mythical blonde who doesn’t even exist. Calling me up at all hours to find out what I’m doing, how I am.” He reached out with one hand and put it on that neat pile of her clothes. He was getting ready to stand up.
“I was worried about you, you dick,” she said. “Your mother just died.”
“You think I’m stupid? You were climbing all over me the morning she passed away, dry humping my leg with her dead in the next room.”
“I what?” Her voice rose, shrill and piping. She was making too much noise, Terry might hear, Terry might wonder why they were arguing. Lee’s hand closed around the tie tucked into her shoe, and he clenched it in his fist as he started to push himself to his feet. Merrin went on, “Are you talking about when you were drunk and I gave you a hug and you started fondling me? I let it go because you were fucked up, Lee, and that’s all that happened. That’s all.” She was beginning to cry again. She put one hand over her eyes, her chin trembling. She still held the sport coat to her chest with the other hand. “This is so fucked. How could you think I’d break up with Ig so I could screw you? I’d rather be dead, Lee. Dead. Don’t you know that?”
“I do now, bitch,” he said, and jerked the jacket out of her hands, threw it on the ground, and put the loop of the tie around her throat.
AFTER HE HIT HER with the stone, Merrin stopped trying to throw him off, and he could do what he wanted, and he loosened his grip on the tie around her throat. She turned her face to the side, her eyes rolled back in their sockets, her eyelids fluttering strangely. A trickle of blood ran from under her hairline and down her dirty, smudged face.
He thought she was completely out of it, too dazed to do anything except take it while he fucked her, but then she spoke, in a strange, distant voice.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“Yeah?” he asked her, pushing with more force, because it was the only way to stay hard. It wasn’t as good as he thought it’d be. She was dry. “Yeah, you like that?”
But he had misunderstood her again. She wasn’t talking about how it felt.
“I escaped,” she said.
Lee ignored her, kept working between her legs.
Her head turned slightly, and she stared up into the great spreading crown of the tree above them.
“I climbed the tree and got away,” she said. “I finally found my way back, Ig. I’m okay. I’m where it’s safe.”
Lee glanced up into the branches and waving leaves, but there was nothing up there. He couldn’t imagine what she was staring at or talking about, and he didn’t feel like asking. When he looked back into her face, something had fled from her eyes, and she didn’t say another word, which was good, because he was sick and tired of all her fucking talk.