“Marty?”
They were supposed to be the descendants of horses that survived the sinking of a Spanish galleon in the age of plunder, those ponies, but Green had read recently that natural historians now doubted this. It was much more likely that the ponies had been deliberately driven onto their island by local farmers looking for convenient pastureland. Green wondered if by the end of his life, or perhaps sooner, every single beautiful lie he had been told during the course of his childhood, great or small, would have been exposed.
“Marty? It’s Ruby. Klein.”
Green turned. Ruby came scraping and clattering down the drive in her witch boots, trailing cigarette smoke, holding a can of Pabst, looking amazed. She had a long, handsome, heavy-chinned face, flawless skin tinged faintly blue like skimmed milk, with the plump purple-jellybean mouth. Evidently her natural endowments were insufficient—or perhaps superfluous—for her purposes. Not only were her lips heavily painted but her eyelashes were rimed like a chimney sweep’s bristles with thick black flakes of mascara, and she had pierced the ridge of her left eyebrow, both nostrils, and every available centimeter of both earlobes. Several ounces of sterling were involved, and there was an unmistakable promise, not just in this but in something halting and surreptitious in her walk, of hidden posts, clasps, and metal rings concealed elsewhere on her body. Her machete-cut hair scraped against his cheek as she lurched wholeheartedly into his arms. Green held her for as long as he could bear, then let go. His heart seemed to shrink in his chest, to collapse itself into a tight, tiny black fist of shame. Her brilliant loose smile was a reproach, her beauty a reminder of all that was ugly inside him.
“Look at you,” he said. The last time he had seen her, she was seven, dressed for an ice-skating class, wearing a pair of mittens strung through the sleeves of a pink coat trimmed with white fake fur. “Ruby. My.”
“I’m kind of drunk; you probably noticed.”
Green had schooled himself never to tell lies. It was a constant battle with his natural impulses.
“I did,” he said.
“I’m so pissed. My father is coming.” She pronounced the word father by deepening her voice to a Mister Ed baritone and nickering it, rolling her eyes. “I haven’t seen the bastard in five years. Last time I saw him, I scratched his bastard face. There was skin under my fingernails.”
“My goodness,” said Green. He had never met Emily Klein’s ex-husband, though tucked away in some inner closet drawer he found a small shoe box in which scorn for Dr. Harvey Klein, who had left his pregnant wife and daughter and fled to Texas with his receptionist, lay wrapped in yellowing tissue paper. Still, the expression of naked parricidal impulses within the hearing of his own loving daughter made him uneasy. He cleared his throat and pushed Jocelyn forward, a bit like Van Helsing brandishing a cross, both as a reproach to Ruby and as a form of protection against her.
“Hi, cutie,” Ruby said. She bent forward, hands on her knees, in an effort to put herself at eye level with Jocelyn. Green’s daughter turned her face away and buried it in the billow of his trouser leg. He was wearing a pair of loose linen Florida pants, the color of a boiled shrimp. “What’s your name?”
“This is Jocelyn,” said Green. “My little girl. We’re on our way back to her mother’s in Philly. In fact—this is embarrassing—well, I just realized that she’s expecting us today and not—”
“Your mom said you might show up,” Ruby said, her eyes still searching out Jocelyn’s in the pink folds of Green’s pants. A strand of hair fell across her face. She peeled it back and tucked it behind her right ear. It sprang loose. “She called.” She pointed at Jocelyn with a fingernail painted a dark purple the exact shade of a hammer-blow bruise. “She said you were a little angel.”
This information made no apparent impression on Jocelyn. She had worked a large patch of Green’s pant leg into her mouth and was chewing on it with alacrity.
“Jocelyn,” Green said, breaking one of his personal rules of fatherly conduct, which was never to employ his child’s name, alone, to reprimand her. Green was writing a book of rules of fatherly conduct. “A child’s name is a gift,” he had written in his manuscript, which was under contract to a New York publisher, “an object of power; in many cases, with the passing of years and the accretion of character traits and personality quirks, a richly descriptive adjective. It must never be, however, an expression of reproach.” The irony of Green’s writing a textbook on fatherhood while at the same time spending a total of less than two months a year with his own daughter was not lost on him. Few if any ironies ever were. Ironicism, by the way, was another typical resource of fathers proscribed by the rules in Green’s book.
“She told me you were in Europe someplace,” Green said to Ruby. It was only, in fact, because his mother had led him to believe that Ruby would not be present that Green had accepted the suggestion from his mother, who lived now in Denver, that as long as he and little Jocelyn were going to be passing through Washington, D.C., they might as well drop by the Kleins’ party and see Emily Klein, whose ovarian cancer appeared to be on the verge of killing her.
“Yeah, with my band,” Ruby said, rolling her eyes. “Ex-band. Fuckin’ losers. I came home early. The tour fuckin’ blew, oh, my God. Shit Jesus, it’s hot out here. What are you guys doing? You ran out of there like someone was chasing you.”
It was a mark of Green’s bewilderment that he allowed this torrent of foul language to flow over his child without comment, without even the minimally disapproving eyebrow arch that he reserved in situations where the swearer was, for example, an extremely large and menacing man.
“Oh,” he said. “Yes. I don’t know. Let’s go in. We were just…”
“Damn, I was so glad when you walked in there,” she said. “That whole scene is so fuckin’ tedious; all Seth’s friends are such morons—”
“Tedious,” Green said. He returned the car keys to his pocket. He would never make it out to see the wild ponies of Assateague Island, and this knowledge, for some reason, stirred in him a wave not so much of sadness as of self-loathing, as if he had already promised to take Jocelyn there and was now going to be forced to renege. “I’m afraid I’m pretty tedious myself these days.”
“Tedious is, like, not an absolute,” Ruby said, licking her lips. “There are degrees.”
Green recognized the humor in her remark and produced what he hoped would pass for a plausible smile. Everything he saw was bordered with a sparkle of nausea, and the blood boiled in his ears like the ocean. He picked up Jocelyn and settled her onto his forearm. “I’ll do my best to be entertaining.”
Ruby took his arm and pulled him toward the house.
“That’s what I always liked about you,” she said.
One night when he was thirteen years old, Green had put Ruby Klein into her bed and waited for her to fall asleep. On Friday and Saturday nights, when Emily Klein and Green’s mother—girlhood chums from Richmond whose divorces had beached them within a mile of each other in Rockville, Maryland—went out to drink wine and meet men, Ruby Klein was often left in Green’s care. Ruby was four, shy, docile, afraid of darkness, and Green’s feeling for her had always been one of impatient indifference tempered by occasional moments of embarrassed gratitude. He was a little-esteemed boy, and she looked up to him. He was often lonely, and she was always there. Then Green had begun to be driven mad by the idea of sex. He found books published by the Grove Press that described perversions and lewd acts that in the mind of an adult would easily have been judged inhuman, fanciful, or at least ill-advised. He masturbated on buses, in public rest rooms, lying across his grandmother’s bed. A desire overcame him to have sex with almost every woman he knew, from his mother and Emily Klein, to the French teacher Ms. Ball, to a retarded girl named Rojean whom he often saw after swim-team practice happily hosing down the pool deck in her tight red Speedo. The books he had discovered at the back of his mother’s closet gave him the impression that such polymorphous and i
ndiscriminate behavior was not only possible but appropriate and common. On this one night, then, he had felt himself aroused by the glinting down on the neck of little Ruby Klein, by the tracery of pale blue veins at her armpits, by the sound of her water in the toilet. When he determined that she had fallen asleep, he drew the covers back and lifted the hem of the overlong T-shirt she wore and contemplated her pale belly and her tiny boy’s nipples. He bent forward to kiss her at the junction of her skinny thighs.
“Marty, what are you doing?” she had asked him, in a soft, strangely adult voice.
He pretended to her that he had been afraid she was developing a rash; he said it was something they had eaten. He dressed her and covered her and kissed her on the forehead as a hundred times before.
“Now be quiet,” he said. “And go to sleep.”
The madness had seemed to abate somewhat after this. He was shocked by his own audacity and unable to relinquish a certainty of having done, for the first time in his life, something genuinely bad. Shortly afterward his mother had moved them out to Denver, and although no one treated him any differently than before, he often wondered if he were not responsible for this imposition of a thousand miles between him and Ruby. Eventually he had made love in the conventional fashion to a girl his own age and had been introduced to the joys and limitations of conventional sex in the company of women he had professed to love. He studied psychology in college and graduate school, an education that provided him with any number of interesting, credible theories that might have explained the Saturday night in Ruby Klein’s bedroom years before.
He did not, however, seek such an explanation. He did not think of that night at all. He got married and fathered a girl and went into practice as a family therapist in the flat wastes of Broward County. He got divorced and took new lovers, and then one day awoke to discover that he had turned thirty-one.
The front lawn, hemmed in by a concrete driveway and a cracked slate patio that wrapped around two thirds of the house, was the setting for a hard-fought contest between dandelions and death. A pair of broad stumps, like the lids of two buried jars, marked the place where great trees must once have stood, cooling the house with their leafy shadows. Emily Klein’s rented house—she had been forced to sell the big neocolonial in Winding Way Woods when Harvey Klein refused to comply with his alimony and child-support obligations—was a modest box of Roman brick, in faded Froot Loop colors, tangled in a bramble of burnt-out Christmas lights, with a big, black iron cursive letter L bolted to the side of the chimney. It had an asymmetrical shape, a ribbon window in the living room, and a jutting flat roof and, like many modernist houses that have long been inhabited by humans, a defeated aspect, a look of having been stranded, of despairing of the world for which it had been intended but which never came to pass.
Just beside the front steps, some long-ago hobbyist had set a goldfish pond. It was a small, irregular circle of greenish cement, encrusted at its edges with globules of brownish cement that had been molded and striated to suggest natural rock formations. As during their first journey up to the front door, Jocelyn was arrested once more by the sight of this forlorn puddle, with its skin of algae, dandelion fluff, and iridescent oil, and its lone occupant, a listless twist of gold floating like a discarded candy wrapper near the surface. She squatted beside it, wobbling, hands on her knees, and pointed toward the somnolent fish, the toe of one shining shoe dangerously near to the water. His daughter had a remarkable capacity for fascination with anything filthy, broken, or pathetic, from derelicts to dog dung, which in the book he was writing Green would have accounted as evidence of sensitivity and imagination but which in practice irritated and disturbed him.
“Daddy, what’s that?”
“It’s a bowl of tapioca pudding.”
“No, it’s a goldfish.”
“Oh,” said Green, through his teeth, wrestling her from the water’s edge, “so it is.”
“How long have you had her?” said Ruby, as Green scooped up his daughter again and this time toted her struggling form into the house.
“Three weeks,” said Green, attempting to mask his utter exasperation with a show of utter exasperation. Then he regretted his response. Ruby’s tone had been conspiratorial, implying sympathy with the trial of shepherding a toddler and with the fatigue it must be causing him, but the premise of her question was not merely that, since he was a divorced father with limited access to his daughter and hence limited experience with her, there must be a finite limit to his tolerance of her misbehaviors, but also that, on a more fundamental level, he must view Jocelyn as inherently inconvenient, annoying, even undesirable, as if she were a flu he had picked up and could not shake, or a cast on his leg. Once again Green found himself confronted with making the painful admission that he did not love his daughter in any way that was meaningful or passionate or useful to her. Their three weeks together had crawled by in an endless, desperate quest on his part to fill her hours with healthy amusements of the sort he recommended in his book and in a constant, successful effort on hers to exhaust the potential for amusement of each, with thrilling intensity and utter finality, within fifteen minutes. She was a well behaved enough child, remarkably so given the circumstances of her life, but every time she went into hysterics or pushed things too far or merely refused to surrender the wonder of consciousness at the end of the day, Green had found himself miserably, devoutly wishing for the visitation to end. The long drive up from Florida had been a nightmarish marathon of squirming, gas-station lavatories, and the sound-track albums from animated movies whose values, and lyrics, he deplored. Now he was having regrets. He ought to have driven them out to the ocean, to see the horses. He ought to have offered to keep her for the entire summer. He ought to have spent the rest of his life married to Caryn and pretending that he loved her even though, as he now must acknowledge, all the love of which he was capable had somehow been sacrificed in that one dark kiss eighteen years before.
Inside the house, the climate was hot, malarial, absolutely still. All the doors and windows were open, and flies chased one another from room to room. Rap music, or what sounded to Green like rap music, was playing loud enough in the backyard to make the glass in the living-room picture frames hum like tissue on a comb. The adoption of rap as the theme music of teenage white boys was one of the clearest symptoms, along with pierced eyebrow ridges, of the substitute world that had eventually shown up to claim the future in which the Kleins’ stark and crumbling house now languished.
Seth Klein’s graduation party was largely an affair of such white boys. Although it was hard for Green to tell them apart, and a certain amount of perceptual cloning may have exaggerated their numbers in his gaze, there were perhaps twenty-five of them. They threatened the ceilings with their brush-cut heads and angled their bodies out over the teenage girls, of whom there seemed to be substantially fewer in attendance. There were also a number of relatives, friends of the family, and inexplicable near-strangers like Green himself, with paper plates that they balanced on their laps or used to fan themselves against the heat. The only one Green knew, though time and illness had altered her in ways that made his stomach tighten, was Emily. He had no idea which boy might be Seth.
“Well,” said Emily. She canted her head to one side and looked askance at Green, exactly as she might have done twenty years earlier, when he tried to persuade her that there had once been another letter in the alphabet, called thorn, or that the television reporter Roger Mudd was a direct descendant of the Dr. Mudd who went to prison for setting John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg. She had always treated him like a bullshit artist, Green remembered, long before he’d ever had something to lie to her about, and the more sincere he became in his efforts to convince her of whatever unlikely truth he was trying to expound, the greater her doubt of him would grow. Now her thick hair, always, like Ruby’s, a mass of unplaited dark rope, was gone. In its place grew a sweet pale tuft of dark blond baby down. She had been plump and drinking and frowsy
the last time Green saw her, at a fortieth-birthday party for his mother in Las Vegas ten years earlier, but the cancer had honed her and brightened her eyes. She did not look well, but being sick brought out something in her, a peppery, droll quality that went back to Green’s earliest memories of the first woman he had ever desired. “So what was that all about?” She looked Green up and down, then tried to peer around his back. “What did you forget?”
“He didn’t forget anything,” said Ruby. “He was just afraid of me.”
“And I was afraid of her, too,” said Jocelyn, loyally.
“That shows real sense,” Emily said. “Your reputation precedes you, Rube.”
“Ha. How are you?” said Green.
She shrugged. “Not great. Not dead.” She smiled, and her crooked teeth, with their coffee and tobacco stains, seemed to afford a glimpse of her yellowing skull, tinged with the residues of soil and water. He smiled back, feeding himself neat little dietetic packets of raw, unrefined panic. The cancer in Emily Klein—surely that was not his fault, too? But something inside him—a schizophrenic or a clergyman would have called it a voice—told him that it was. That it was all his fault—rap music, labial piercing, his divorce, everything that had come to pass since that long-ago night in Ruby Klein’s bedroom. What had become of little Ruby Klein? He felt like the poor time-traveling dolt in the Bradbury story who returned from stepping on a butterfly in the Triassic to find his own epoch altered abruptly, inevitably, with signs misspelled and everyone under the foot of a murderous and ignorant tyrant. How could one ever begin to repair the damage that he had so obviously done?
“I’m sorry,” he said at last.