Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories

  The pickpocket groaned and rolled toward the wall, mumbling to himself. The girl turned to look at him and then at the boy, who drifted over to the other side of Mallon’s chair. The girl leaned back against Mallon’s knee, bouncing off him rhythmically, impersonally, as a child will do when caught by some distant thought or object of interest. Out of pure instinct he put his arm around her waist and pulled her onto his lap, then looked at the boy standing there alone and gathered him up too. This felt entirely natural, apparently to them as well; light and noodly, they settled against him, heads on his chest. From above they looked identical. A pleasant, loamy smell rose up from their hair. The pickpocket rolled onto his back again and started to snore. “Miri,” the boy whispered, then began to imitate him with wickedly accurate smacks and snorts. The girl was shaking. She put her hands over her mouth but laughter exploded through her fingers.

  Mallon let his head fall back. He was tired and the chair was comfortable and the boy and girl were warm and familiar against him. He closed his eyes. The boy didn’t keep up the funny stuff for long. He grew still and so did the girl. Mallon could feel them breathe, young, shallow breaths, oddly synchronous. The idea came to him that maybe they were twins. Dully considering the mystery of twins, he remembered for the first time in years a pair of boys he’d grown up with—Jerry and Terry, or was it Jerry and Larry?—but lost his thread and was content to let it go and be afloat, carried along by the pickpocket’s snores until he could almost hear them as his own. Later, he wondered how long this lasted. Not long, he guessed, though when he felt the children leave him and grudgingly opened his eyes he was as fresh as if he’d slept for hours.

  The old woman was standing in front of the chair. “That man out there wants you,” she said.

  They were back on Via Tiburtina, still a good distance from central Rome and his hotel, the fare up to one hundred sixteen euros, when Mallon clapped his hand to his chest. The driver caught the motion and raised his eyes to the mirror. Mallon, looking out the rain-glazed window, let nothing show. The moment passed. He yawned ostentatiously, then under the pretense of shifting and stretching he patted himself down and confirmed that his billfold was gone.

  They drove on into lashing rain and the glare of headlights. It was only just past six but the sky was black and flickered with lightning. Mallon’s mouth was dry. He took a breath so deep that the driver glanced up again when he let it out.

  “I have a problem.”

  The driver’s eyes snapped back and forth between the road and the mirror.

  “I’ve lost my wallet.”

  “What?”

  “My wallet is gone.”

  “You are saying you have no money?”

  “Not with me, no. I can get some at the hotel. The manager will advance it against my bill.”

  The driver leaned forward, peering into the slant of rain, and flicked on the turn signal.

  “I may not be able to get it tonight, but I can get it tomorrow, for sure. It depends on whether the manager is in. Signor Marinelli. He knows me.” Mallon sounded to himself like a prattling fraud, but he added, “I will pay you.”

  “You knew,” the driver said.

  “What? What did you say?”

  No answer. The driver eased the cab onto the shoulder of the road and brought it to a stop. There was something terrible in his deliberateness, his silence, the rigid set of his neck. He sat there, hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead. “Mr. American,” he said, and made a noise between his teeth. Cars went by. The rain drummed on the roof. Mallon wanted to say something but was afraid to—as if the driver’s hatred were a gas that would blow at a word. He felt he’d somehow lost the right to speak.

  “Get out,” the driver said.

  By the time Mallon unfolded himself from the cab and closed the door his pant legs were already wet and clinging. Only as the driver pulled away did he remember the umbrella. Rain streamed down his face. He took his suit jacket off and draped it over his head, holding the collar forward like a bill, and trudged along the shoulder for a while, then walked backward when the wind gusted into his face. Something caught his foot and almost pitched him over. A half-buried block of cement had torn the heel off his shoe. He picked up the heel, looked it over, then tossed it aside and kept walking.

  What was the driver getting at? You knew? Knew what? And why at those words had he felt caught out, laid bare? The driver couldn’t have known what Mallon knew, but Mallon knew what Mallon knew. He’d come awake to it only at this accusation, but he knew, all right, and had known at the very moment back in that room, at rest yet not asleep, the hand slipping across his chest, between jacket and shirt, then the discreet caress of the billfold sliding free and the lightness that followed, as if it had been a weight of lead. That lightness—the strangest thing!

  Thunder rumbled somewhere. The blown rain plastered Mallon’s shirt to his back and glittered in the headlights of the cars rushing toward him. On a whim he stuck out his thumb. He hadn’t hitchhiked since college, and not much then. Maybe the tie would help. Or maybe it would seem wrong, too calculated or cunning—a danger sign. And of course he was soaking wet, as anyone could see. Would he offer himself a ride? He soon gave it up and turned around and saw the taillights of a car not far ahead, a man hurrying toward him with an open umbrella.

  It was the driver. He walked with a dipping limp on short legs. He came up to Mallon and held out the umbrella, which billowed and heaved in the wind.

  “Too late for that,” Mallon said.

  “No, please.” He held it uselessly over Mallon’s head. “Come, please. Come.” He escorted him back to the cab and opened the door. “Please,” the driver said again when Mallon hesitated.

  He got in. “I will pay you,” he said.

  “No. No fare. Look!” He touched the meter. It was off.

  “Nonsense. Of course I’ll pay you.”

  “No—a gift. But please no report, okay?”

  Mallon saw the man’s eyes in the mirror. “Ah,” he said.

  “No report?”

  “No report. But I’m still going to pay you.”

  “My gift to you. American, right? California?”

  Mallon took the easy way out and said yes. Illinois just confused people; he hadn’t been there in years anyway.

  “What car do you have? Chevrolet? This taxi, it belongs to my wife’s father. Michele. He’s sick. No money, you know?”

  The driver chattered on: his father-in-law’s sickness, his sister’s sickness, a problem with the taxi license. As he talked he checked the mirror for Mallon’s response. He sounded like a project director making excuses, wheedling for a passing grade. Mallon was bored and disappointed. So much for the fierce mountain clansman, the implacable avenger he’d imagined and feared.

  Mallon’s wet clothes had turned clammy. His feet were swimming in the ruined shoes. No matter—he had another pair in his room, and another suit, and still more at home. Of course the hotel manager would greet him with cries of sympathy and give him whatever he needed until Geneva wired him money in the morning. He was minutes away from a hot shower. He would step out of it into his air-conditioned room and stand by the window. The terry bathrobe was thick and soft, and he would settle into it, hands deep in the pockets, as he watched the people on the street below. He could already see himself doing this. By tomorrow afternoon he’d have a new passport, new lines of credit, the works. He knew that many men, even most men, losing what he had lost today—their money, the very proof of their identity—would find themselves helpless in the world. He was not one of them. He would not be allowed such a fall. And for all his brooding over the alienations inflicted by comfort and privilege, would he have it any other way? No, he supposed not. He was certainly ready for this little adventure to come to an end.

  By the time they pulled up in front of the hotel the storm had passed and the doorman was shielding his eyes against a flare of evening light from the top of the street. The driver beat him to Mallon?
??s door and held it open, offering his hand as if to a woman. Mallon ignored it, emerged damp and blinking.

  “Okay?” the driver said. “The umbrella, where is your umbrella?” He leaned past Mallon into the cab. “There! Friends, okay?”

  “No report,” Mallon said.

  “Mr. California!” the driver said. “Hollywood, right?”

  “Of course,” Mallon said. “Hollywood.”

  Deep Kiss

  When Joe Reed was a boy of fifteen, his craziness over a girl became such a burden to his family, and such a curiosity to the small town where they lived, that his mother threatened to pack him off to his married sister in San Diego. But before this could happen Joe’s father died and his mother collected a large sum from Northwestern Mutual, sold the family pharmacy, and moved both Joe and herself to California.

  Thirty years passed. In that time he heard nothing from the girl, Mary Claude Moore, but now and then word of her reached him through people back in Dunston. She dropped out of high school in her senior year, had a baby, got married, divorced, then remarried a few years later. That second marriage was the last thing Joe knew about Mary Claude until he learned of her death.

  He’d dropped by his mother’s house one Sunday afternoon. She couldn’t keep the house up anymore, alone as she was, and failing, and she’d finally agreed to buy into an assisted-living “community”—oh how she hated that word, how icily she served it up. Joe had come by to make sure everything was in order for the realtor’s walkthrough later that week. They had coffee together and that was when she told him about Mary Claude and gave him the letter. He didn’t want to be thinking about what his reaction looked like, or ought to look like, so he excused himself and took the letter outside, to the backyard.

  According to the newspaper clipping his mother’s friend had enclosed, Mary Claude appeared to have fallen asleep at the wheel and drifted into the oncoming lane of traffic. She’d been killed outright and so had the driver of the car she hit, a dentist from Bellingham heading home from a weekend of fishing. That was the newspaper account. The unofficial version, which his mother’s friend disparaged but passed along anyway, was that Mary Claude had been having a fling with a real estate agent named Chip Ryan. He drove the same unusual car as the dentist, a red Mercedes station wagon, and Mary Claude had an equally distinctive old Mustang convertible, powder blue. Both of them lived outside town and frequently passed each other coming and going. The story was, whenever they met on an empty stretch of road they played a game where they switched lanes at the last moment. A sort of lovers’ game. Mary Claude had mistaken the dentist’s car for Chip’s, and that was that.

  Joe could hardly make sense of the story. His mother’s friend doubted it was true, but conceded it certainly was a puzzle how Mary Claude could have fallen asleep just a hundred feet past a series of tight curves. Still, she wrote, there were probably other explanations that wouldn’t insult her memory and give needless pain to her family.

  The newspaper article said that Mary Claude and her husband owned a tavern. They must have done well; not long before all this, the chamber of commerce had named them Businesspersons of the Year. She was survived by her husband, three children, two grandchildren. For some reason the paper hadn’t run a picture of her with the piece. Joe was glad of this omission.

  Joe had lived another, submerged life, parallel to the one known by those around him. In this other life he hadn’t left for California but had stayed on in Dunston with Mary Claude. He fell into this dream during the first months after the move, in the immensity of summer on a sunstruck street where old people peered anxiously from behind their parted blinds and sprinklers ran at night on lawns visited only by the Mexicans who mowed them. When his mother left her darkened bedroom long enough to chase him outside, Joe took the Saturday Evening Post to a pool in a nearby park and watched the girls oil each other and shriek when loitering bravos splashed water on them. He lay on his stomach and stared at the Post and lived his ghost life with Mary Claude.

  After Joe started school, his mother took an accounting job at an office-furniture store. A few months later she and another woman formed a partnership and bought the owner out. Joe’s mother began to dress smartly. She wore her hair straight instead of piled up on her head, and let a gray streak show through. One night at dinner she said “Joe!” so insistently that he realized she’d been speaking to him without his knowing it, and when he looked at her she said, “You can’t bring him back, son. You have to let him go.” Joe was embarrassed at the depth of her misunderstanding, but he played along and let her think she’d read his mind.

  The high school was new and bright and vast. In the echoing hallways the voices of the students mingled in a roar that Joe came to hear as an aspect of the silence in which he passed his days. He sometimes went home without having spoken a word to anyone. It seemed to him that he might go through the whole year that way, and the next year too, until he graduated, but before long he became friends with his biology lab partner, who took him to parties and introduced him to girls. When Joe got his driver’s license that spring he began dating Carla. He aced his courses and played Officer Krupke in West Side Story. In the fall of his senior year he and Carla left a dance early and went to a motel. It was the first time for both of them, and a failure. They tried again a few days later in Carla’s bedroom and had better luck, and by Christmas Joe was starting to see Courtney on the sly. He didn’t really prefer her, but it seemed inevitable that sooner or later either he or Carla would be unfaithful, and he wanted to be the one. This became far more complicated than he’d expected. Joe was soon exposed and denounced by both girls as a heartless cheat, which did not, it turned out, entirely discourage other girls from going out with him.

  And through all this he continued his phantom life with Mary Claude. He was with her on a blanket in a moonlit clearing or in a car parked above the river with Ray Charles on the radio, her fingertips grazing the back of his neck, her mouth open to his, her caramel taste on his lips and tongue and deep in his throat. Only the kiss was a memory; only the kiss was real. He’d hardly been anywhere with Mary Claude except when they could sneak off at school, and a few times in town. But from the kiss he made everything else, or everything else made itself, for that was how it happened—without any effort of imagination or sense of unreality, he watched his life with Mary Claude go on as he had once believed it would. The scenes grew more particular as time passed, each new one framed by those that had gone before, and always with a kiss at the heart of it.

  At Berkeley Joe went out with Lauren, and when she left for a year at the Sorbonne there was Toni, then Candace. He and Candace shared a house with two other couples until they graduated and afterward rented an apartment of their own through Joe’s first year of medical school. Then Candace went to New York to visit her family and never came back. She sent Joe a letter in which she asked his forgiveness for the problems she’d caused through her alcoholism, which she was now in the process of confronting. She said she couldn’t return to the life she’d led in Berkeley, as he surely understood.

  No, Joe didn’t understand. They’d had their troubles, the two of them; he’d been going all out and so had Candace, waitressing nights as she worked toward a degree in dance therapy. Of course there were problems, but nothing all that serious, and he certainly didn’t begrudge her a little relaxation. Yet when Joe’s mother heard about Candace leaving, the first thing she said was that she hoped she’d get some help for her drinking. Joe hadn’t mentioned the letter.

  Until he finished his training and met the woman he would marry, Joe had no more love affairs, just occasional sessions with women working too hard themselves to want much more of him. The practicality of these arrangements gave the whole enterprise a starkly biological cast, which made Joe nervously conscious of his masculine duty and thus left him unmanned with oppressive frequency. By the time he started his residency, in Seattle, he’d entered a state of near quarantine that made his shadow life mor
e moony and detailed than ever.

  Dunston was just three hours north of Seattle. Joe sometimes thought of driving up on a free afternoon, but never did. By then he’d heard that Mary Claude was married again. There was no purpose in making the trip except to see her, and he was afraid she wouldn’t want to see him, and also afraid that she would. It was too late for that. She had a daughter and a husband and a house to run, she had work to do. So did he—useful, exacting work. It depended on a clarity Joe knew he couldn’t rely on, that he had to improvise day by day. He’d lost it before and could not risk losing it again.

  When Mary Claude was killed, Joe had been married for seventeen years. His wife, Liz, was a pediatrician in the same clinic where he practiced as an internist. They had a son in his junior year of high school, a daughter a year younger. The boy was a gifted cellist, unworldly, an aesthete. Their daughter was more calculating but fiercer in her attachments once she’d made them. Joe began taking her rock climbing when she was still in grade school and found her to be the most fearless and inventive partner he’d ever had.

  Then came a time when his daughter ceased to confide. Both daughter and son developed private sources of amusement, and Joe began to detect a certain condescension in their handling of him. His children were slipping away into the deep forest; he tried not to hurry them with the panic he felt at the gathering signs of their departure.