Bluebeard's Egg (19 page)

Cynthia has a short attention span. She’s looking at her hands, spread out on the sheet now. The nails are peach-coloured, newly polished. “I used to be pretty, when I was younger,” she says.

Will wants to shake her. She’s barely eighteen, she doesn’t know a thing about age or time. He could say, “You’re pretty now,” or he could say, “You’d be pretty if you’d put on some weight,” but either one of these would be playing by her rules, so he says neither. Instead he says good-bye, pecks her on the cheek, and leaves, feeling as defeated as she wants him to feel. He hasn’t made any difference.

Will parks his silver
BMW
in the parking space, takes the key out of the ignition, puts it carefully into his pocket. Then he remembers that he should keep the key handy to lock the car from the outside. This is one of the advantages of the
BMW:
you can never lock yourself out. He drove a Porsche for a while, after his marriage broke up. It made him feel single and ready for anything, but he doesn’t feel like that any more. His moustache went about the same time as that car.

The parking space is off to the left of the farmhouse, demarcated by railroad ties and covered with white crushed gravel. It was like that when he bought the place, but that’s what he probably would have done anyway. He keeps meaning to plant some flowers, zinnias perhaps, behind the railroad ties, but so far he hasn’t got around to it.

He gets out, goes to the trunk for the groceries. Halfway to the house he realizes he’s forgotten to lock the car, and goes back to do it. It’s not as safe around here as it used to be. Last year he had a break-in, some kids from the town, out joy-riding. They broke plates and spread peanut butter on the walls, drank his liquor and smashed the bottles, and, as far as he could tell, screwed in all the beds. They were caught because they pinched the television set and tried to sell it. Everything was insured, but Will felt humiliated. Now he has bolt locks, and bars on the cellar windows, but anyone could break in if they really wanted to. He’s thinking of getting a dog.

The air inside the house smells dead, as if it has heated and then cooled, absorbing the smells of furniture, old wood, paint, dust. He hasn’t been here for several weeks. He sets the bags down on the kitchen table, opens a few windows. In the living room there’s a vase with wizened daffodils, the water stagnant and foul. He sets the vase out on the patio; he’ll empty it later.

Will bought this place after his marriage broke up, so he and the boys would have somewhere they could spend time together in a regular way. Also, his wife made it clear that she’d like some weekends off. The house was renovated by the people who lived here before; just as well, since Will never would have had the time to supervise, though he frequently sketches out plans for his ideal house. Not everything here is the way he would have done it, but he likes the board-and-batten exterior and the big opened-up kitchen. Despite some jumpiness lingering from the break-in, he feels good here, better than he does in his apartment in the city.

His former house is his wife’s now; he doesn’t like going there. Sometimes there are younger men, referred to by their first names only. Now that the boys are almost grown up, this doesn’t bother him as much as it used to: she might as well be having a good time, though the turnover rate is high. When they were married she didn’t enjoy anything much, including him, including sex. She never told him what was expected of him, and he never asked.

Will unpacks the groceries, stows away the food. He likes doing this, slotting the eggs into their egg-shaped holes in the refrigerator, filing the spinach in the crisper, stashing the butter in the compartment marked
BUTTER
, pouring the coffee beans into the jar labelled
COFFEE
. It makes him feel that some things at least are in their right places. He leaves the steaks on the counter, uncorks the wine, hunts for some candles. Of the pair he finds, one has been chewed by mice. Hardened droppings are scattered about the drawer. Mice are a new development. There must be a hole somewhere. Will is standing with the chewed candle in his hand, pondering remedies, when he hears a car outside.

He looks out the kitchen window. Since the break-in, he’s less willing to open the door without knowing who’s outside. But it’s Diane, in a car he hasn’t seen before, a cream-coloured Subaru. She always keeps her cars very clean. For some reason she’s chosen to back up the driveway, in memory, perhaps, of the time she got stuck in the snow and he told her it would have been easier to get out if she’d been pointing down.

He puts the candle on the counter and goes into the downstairs bathroom. He smiles at himself, checking to see if there’s anything caught between his teeth. He doesn’t look bad. Then he goes out to welcome Diane. He realizes he hasn’t been sure until now that she would really turn up. It could be he doesn’t deserve it.

She slides out of the car, stands up, gives him a hug and a peck on the cheek. She has big sunglasses on, with silly palm trees over the eyebrows. This is the kind of extravagance Will has always liked about her. He hugs her back, but she doesn’t want to be held too long. “I brought you something,” she says, and searches inside the car.

Will watches her while she’s bending over. She has a wide cotton skirt on, pulled tight around the waist; she’s lost a lot of weight. He used to think of her as a hefty woman, well-fleshed and athletic, but now she’s almost spindly. In his arms she felt frail, diminished.

She straightens and turns, thrusting a bottle of wine at him, and a round of Greek bread, fresh and spongy. Will is reassured. He puts his arm around her waist and hugs her again, trying to make it companionable so she won’t feel pressured. “I’m glad to see you,” he says.

Diane sits at the kitchen table and they drink wine; Will fools with the steaks, rubbing them with garlic, massaging them with pepper and a pinch or two of dried mustard. She used to help him with the cooking, she knows where everything’s kept. But tonight she’s acting more like a guest.

“Heard any good jokes lately?” she says. This in itself is a joke, since it was Diane who told the jokes, not Will. Diane was the one Will was with when his marriage stopped creaking and groaning and finally just fell apart. She wasn’t the reason though, as he made a point of telling her. He said it could have been anyone; he didn’t want her to feel responsible. He’s not sure what happened after that, why they stopped seeing one another. It wasn’t the sex: with her he was a good lover. He knows she liked him, and she got on well with the boys. But one day she said, “Well, I guess that’s that,” and Will didn’t have the presence of mind to ask her what she meant.

“That’s your department,” Will says.

“Only because you were so sad then,” says Diane. “I was trying to cheer you up. You were dragging around like you had a thyroid deficiency or something.” She fiddles with her sunglasses, which are on the table. “Now it’s your turn.”

“You know I’m no good at it,” Will says.

Diane nods. “Bad timing,” she says. She stands up, reaches past Will to the counter. “What’s this?” she says, picking up the chewed candle. “Something fall off?”

They eat at the round oak table they bought together at a country auction, one of the local farmers closing up and selling out. Diane has dug out the white linen table napkins she gave him one year, and has lit both candles, the chewed and the unchewed. “I believe in festivity,” she said.

Now there are silences, which they both attempt to fill. Diane says she wants to talk about money. It’s the right time in her life for her to become interested in money, and isn’t Will an authority? She makes quite a lot, but it’s hard for her to save. She wants Will to explain inflation.

Will doesn’t want to talk about money, but he does it anyway, to please her. Pleasing her is what he would like to do, but she doesn’t seem too pleased. Her face is thinner and more lined, which makes her look more elegant but less accessible. She’s less talkative than she used to be, as well. He remembers her voice as louder, more insistent; she would tease him, pull him up short. He found it amusing and it took his mind off himself. He thinks women in general are becoming more silent: it goes with their new pale lips. They’re turning back to secrecy, concealment. It’s as if they’re afraid of something, but Will can’t imagine what.

Half of Diane’s steak lies on her plate, untouched. “So tell me about gold,” she says.

“You’re not hungry?” Will asks her.

“I was ravenous,” she says. “But I’m full.” Her hair has changed too. It’s longer, with light streaks. Altogether she is more artful.

“I like being with you,” Will says. “I always did.”

“But not quite enough,” Diane says, and then, to make it light, “you should put an ad in the paper, Will. The personals,
NOW
magazine. ‘Nice man, executive, with good income, no encumbrances, desires to meet …’ ”

“I guess I’m not very good at relationships,” Will says. In his head, he’s trying to complete Diane’s ad. Desires to meet what? A woman who would not look at herself in the glass of the picture behind him. A woman who would like what he cooks.

“Bullshit,” Diane says, with a return to her old belligerence. “What makes you think you’re that much worse at it than anyone else?”

Will looks at her throat, where it’s visible at the V-neck of her blouse. He hasn’t seen an overnight case, but maybe it’s in the car. He said no strings attached.

“There’s a full moon,” he says, “We should go out onto the patio.”

“Not quite,” says Diane, squinting up through the glass. “And it’s freezing out there, I bet.”

Will goes upstairs for a plaid blanket from the boys’ room to wrap around her. What he has in mind is a couple of brandies on the patio, and then they will see. As he’s coming back down the stairs, he hears her in the bathroom: it sounds as if she’s throwing up. Will pours the brandies, carries them outside. He wonders if he should go in, knock on the bathroom door. What if it’s food poisoning? He knows he should feel compassion; instead he feels betrayed by her.

But when she comes out to stand beside him, she seems all right, and Will decides not to ask her about it. He wraps the blanket around her and keeps his arm there, and Diane leans against him.

“We could sit down,” he says, in case she doesn’t like the position.

“Hey,” she says, “you got me flowers.” She’s spotted the withered daffodils. “Always so thoughtful. I bet they smell nice, too.”

“I wanted you to hear the frogs,” Will says. “We’re just at the end of the frog season.” The frogs live in the pond, down beyond the slope of the lawn. Or maybe they’re toads, he’s never been sure. For Will they’ve come to mean spring and the beginning of summer: possibilities, newness. Their silvery voices are filling the air around them now, like crickets but more prolonged, sweeter.

“What a man,” Diane says. “For some it’s nightingales, for some it’s frogs. Next I get a box of chocolate-covered slugs, right?”

Will would like to kiss her, but the timing is wrong. She’s shivering a little; against his arm she feels angular, awkward, as if she’s withholding her body from him, though not quite. They stand there looking at the moon, which is cold and lopsided, and listening to the trilling of the frogs. This doesn’t have the effect on Will he has hoped it would. The voices coming from the darkness below the curve of the hill sound thin and ill. There aren’t as many frogs as there used to be, either.

Scarlet Ibis

S
ome years ago now, Christine went with Don to Trinidad. They took Lilian, their youngest child, who was four then. The others, who were in school, stayed with their grandmother.

Christine and Don sat beside the hotel pool in the damp heat, drinking rum punch and eating strange-tasting hamburgers. Lilian wanted to be in the pool all the time – she could already swim a little – but Christine didn’t think it was a good idea, because of the sun. Christine rubbed sun block on her nose, and on the noses of Lilian and Don. She felt that her legs were too white and that people were looking at her and finding her faintly ridiculous, because of her pinky-white skin and the large hat she wore. More than likely, the young black waiters who brought the rum punch and the hamburgers, who walked easily through the sun without paying any attention to it, who joked among themselves but were solemn when they set down the glasses and plates, had put her in a category; one that included fat, although she was not fat exactly. She suggested to Don that perhaps he was tipping too much. Don said he felt tired.

“You felt tired before,” Christine said. “That’s why we came, remember? So you could get some rest.”

Don took afternoon naps, sprawled on his back on one of the twin beds in the room – Lilian had a fold-out cot – his mouth slightly open, the skin of his face pushed by gravity back down towards his ears, so that he looked tauter, thinner, and more aquiline in this position than he did when awake. Deader, thought Christine, taking a closer look. People lying on their backs in coffins usually – in her limited experience – seemed to have lost weight. This image, of Don encoffined, was one that had been drifting through her mind too often for comfort lately.

It was hopeless expecting Lilian to have an afternoon nap too, so Christine took her down to the pool or tried to keep her quiet by drawing with her, using Magic Markers. At that age Lilian drew nothing but women or girls, wearing very fancy dresses, full-skirted, with a lot of decoration. They were always smiling, with red, curvy mouths, and had abnormally long thick eyelashes. They did not stand on any ground – Lilian was not yet putting the ground into her pictures – but floated on the page as if it were a pond they were spread out on, arms outstretched, feet at the opposite sides of their skirts, their elaborate hair billowing around their heads. Sometimes Lilian put in some birds or the sun, which gave these women the appearance of giant airborne balloons, as if the wind had caught them under their skirts and carried them off, light as feathers, away from everything. Yet, if she were asked, Lilian would say these women were walking.

After a few days of all this, when they ought to have adjusted to the heat, Christine felt they should get out of the hotel and do something. She did not want to go shopping by herself, although Don suggested it; she felt that nothing she tried on helped her look any better, or, to be more precise, that it didn’t much matter how she looked. She tried to think of some other distraction, mostly for the sake of Don. Don was not noticeably more rested, although he had a sunburn – which, instead of giving him a glow of health, made him seem angry – and he’d started drumming his fingers on tabletops again. He said he was having trouble sleeping: bad dreams, which he could not remember. Also the air-conditioning was clogging up his nose. He had been under a lot of pressure lately, he said.

Christine didn’t need to be told. She could feel the pressure he was under, like a clenched mass of something, tissue, congealed blood, at the back of her own head. She thought of Don as being encased in a sort of metal carapace, like the shell of a crab, that was slowly tightening on him, on all parts of him at once, so that something was sure to burst, like a thumb closed slowly in a car door. The metal skin was his entire body, and Christine didn’t know how to unlock it for him and let him out. She felt as if all her ministrations – the cold washcloths for his headaches, the trips to the drugstore for this or that bottle of pills, the hours of tiptoeing around, intercepting the phone, keeping Lilian quiet, above all the mere act of witnessing him, which was so draining – were noticed by him hardly at all: moths beating on the outside of a lit window, behind which someone important was thinking about something of major significance that had nothing to do with moths. This vacation, for instance, had been her idea, but Don was only getting redder and redder.

Unfortunately, it was not carnival season. There were restaurants, but Lilian hated sitting still in them, and one thing Don did not need was more food and especially more drink. Christine wished Don had a sport, but considering the way he was, he would probably overdo it and break something.

“I had an uncle who took up hooking rugs,” she’d said to him one evening after dinner. “When he retired. He got them in kits. He said he found it very restful.” The aunt that went with that uncle used to say, “I said for better or for worse, but I never said for lunch.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Christine,” was all Don had to say to that. He’d never thought much of her relatives. His view was that Christine was still on the raw side of being raw material. Christine did not look forward to the time, twenty years away at least, when he would be home all day, pacing, drumming his fingers, wanting whatever it was that she could never identify and never provide.

In the morning, while the other two were beginning breakfast, Christine went bravely to the hotel’s reception desk. There was a thin, elegant brown girl behind it, in lime green, Rasta beads, and
Vogue
make-up, coiled like spaghetti around the phone. Christine, feeling hot and porous, asked if there was any material on things to do. The girl, sliding her eyes over and past Christine as if she were a minor architectural feature, selected and fanned an assortment of brochures, continuing to laugh lightly into the phone.

Christine took the brochures into the ladies’ room to preview them. Not the beach, she decided, because of the sun. Not the boutiques, not the night clubs, not the memories of Old Spain.

She examined her face, added lipstick to her lips, which were getting thin and pinched together. She really needed to do something about herself, before it was too late. She made her way back to the breakfast table. Lilian was saying that the pancakes weren’t the same as the ones at home. Don said she had to eat them because she had ordered them, and if she was old enough to order for herself she was old enough to know that they cost money and couldn’t be wasted like that. Christine wondered silently if it was a bad pattern, making a child eat everything on her plate, whether she liked the food or not: perhaps Lilian would become fat, later on.

Don was having bacon and eggs. Christine had asked Don to order yoghurt and fresh fruit for her, but there was nothing at her place.

“They didn’t have it,” Don said.

“Did you order anything else?” said Christine, who was now hungry.

“How was I supposed to know what you want?” said Don.

“We’re going to see the Scarlet Ibis,” Christine announced brightly to Lilian. She would ask them to bring back the menu, so she could order.

“What?” said Don. Christine handed him the brochure, which showed some red birds with long curved bills sitting in a tree; there was another picture of one close up, in profile, one demented-looking eye staring out from its red feathers like a target.

“They’re very rare,” said Christine, looking around for a waiter. “It’s a preservation.”

“You mean a preserve,” said Don, reading the brochure. “In a swamp? Probably crawling with mosquitoes.”

“I don’t want to go,” said Lilian, pushing scraps of a pancake around in a pool of watery syrup. This was her other complaint, that it wasn’t the right kind of syrup.

“Imitation maple flavouring,” Don said, reading the label.

“You don’t even know what it is,” said Christine. “We’ll take some fly dope. Anyway, they wouldn’t let tourists go there if there were that many mosquitoes. It’s a
mangrove
swamp; that isn’t the same as our kind.”

“I’m going to get a paper,” said Don. He stood up and walked away. His legs, coming out of the bottoms of his Bermuda shorts, were still very white, with an overglaze of pink down the backs. His body, once muscular, was losing tone, sliding down towards his waist and buttocks. He was beginning to slope. From the back, he had the lax, demoralized look of a man who has been confined in an institution, though from the front he was brisk enough.

Watching him go, Christine felt the sickness in the pit of her stomach that was becoming familiar to her these days. Maybe the pressure he was under was her. Maybe she was a weight. Maybe he wanted her to lift up, blow away somewhere, like a kite, the children hanging on behind her in a long string. She didn’t know when she had first noticed this feeling; probably after it had been there some time, like a knocking on the front door when you’re asleep. There had been a shifting of forces, unseen, unheard, underground, the sliding against each other of giant stones; some tremendous damage had occurred between them, but who could tell when?

“Eat your pancakes,” she said to Lilian, “or your father will be annoyed.” He would be annoyed anyway: she annoyed him. Even when they made love, which was not frequently any more, it was perfunctory, as if he were listening for something else, a phone call, a footfall. He was like a man scratching himself. She was like his hand.

Christine had a scenario she ran through often, the way she used to run through scenarios of courtship, back in high school: flirtation, pursuit, joyful acquiescence. This was an adult scenario, however. One evening she would say to Don as he was getting up from the table after dinner, “Stay there.” He would be so surprised by her tone of voice that he would stay.

“I just want you to sit there and look at me,” she would say.

He would not say, “For God’s sake, Christine.” He would know this was serious.

“I’m not asking much from you,” she would say, lying.

“What’s going on?” he would say.

“I want you to see what I really look like,” she would say. “I’m tired of being invisible.” Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would say he was coming on with a headache. Maybe she would find herself walking on nothing, because maybe there was nothing there. So far she hadn’t even come close to beginning, to giving the initial command: “Stay,” as if he were a trained dog. But that was what she wanted him to do, wasn’t it? “Come back” was more like it. He hadn’t always been under pressure.

Once Lilian was old enough, Christine thought, she could go back to work full time. She could brush up her typing and shorthand, find something. That would be good for her; she wouldn’t concentrate so much on Don, she would have a reason to look better, she would either find new scenarios or act out the one that was preoccupying her. Maybe she was making things up, about Don. It might be a form of laziness.

Christine’s preparations for the afternoon were careful. She bought some mosquito repellant at a drugstore, and a chocolate bar. She took two scarves, one for herself, one for Lilian, in case it was sunny. The big hat would blow off, she thought, as they were going to be in a boat. After a short argument with one of the waiters, who said she could only have drinks by the glass, she succeeded in buying three cans of Pepsi, not chilled. All these things she packed into her bag; Lilian’s bag, actually, which was striped in orange and yellow and blue and had a picture of Mickey Mouse on it. They’d used it for the toys Lilian brought with her on the plane.

After lunch they took a taxi, first through the hot streets of the town, where the sidewalks were too narrow or nonexistent and the people crowded onto the road and there was a lot of honking, then out through the cane fields, the road becoming bumpier, the driver increasing speed. He drove with the car radio on, the left-hand window open, and his elbow out, a pink jockey cap tipped back on his head. Christine had shown him the brochure and asked him if he knew where the swamp was; he’d grinned at her and said everybody knew. He said he could take them, but it was too far to go out and back so he would wait there for them. Christine knew it meant extra money, but did not argue.