In Perfect Light

  “It’s not that simple, is it, Linda?”

  “No, it isn’t. But legally—” She stopped as if she was composing her next line in her head. Never rash. Too much rashness in the world. He liked her. “He’s free to be adopted. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Free to be adopted,” he repeated. A sad kind of freedom. Or maybe not sad at all. Or maybe not a freedom. Or—

  “Listen, Mister?”

  “What?”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Look, you’re not required to meet her. A lot of people would counsel against it.”

  “What would you counsel, Linda?”

  “There isn’t a right answer here.”

  “There probably is a right answer. We just don’t know what it is.”

  “I like you, Mister.”

  “I like you, too, Linda.” For an instant he wished he smoked. As if a cigarette was capable of aiding the situation. In old movies, cigarettes always helped. Helped to keep men from screaming—kept them from becoming violent, kept them silent and serene and self-composed.

  “Mister, you’ve left me again.”

  “Sorry. When would she like to meet?”

  “Soon as possible. I think she just wants to put all this behind her. And I think, if you decided to meet her, it would help. Her, I mean. But let me just say this, okay, let me—look, frankly I’m more worried about you and Vicente. Her life—look, I don’t mean to be crass, but it’s not your job to worry about her. Are you getting this? Mister? Are you there?”

  “I’m here. I’m just stewing. I can be a pretty good stewer.” He could be. He got that from Grace.

  “I know.”

  He felt his heart still racing. He pictured him and Liz walking down the street. He pictured Vicente walking next to them, reaching out. His heart was quieting. He was holding Vicente’s hand. It was morning. They were in a park, and he was studying the look on Liz’s face as she kissed their son. In the light.

  Yes, that’s what he’d said. Yes. He’d see her. So he’d know what she was like, what she talked like, what she looked like, so he could look into her eyes and maybe see her son, the one she was giving away. Maybe she would be holding something in her voice, a clue that would tell him why she was letting go of this boy, this son of hers, this beautiful boy. She was letting him go. It was like letting go of the sky. But it was more complicated than that. Somewhere along the line something had gotten broken, something in the way the world handled her had damaged her heart or her mind or her body. That’s the way it happened—the breaking world was careless and cruel, and it took bodies and molded them in its own image, bodies and hearts and minds all shattered and the million shards were scattered everywhere on the globe, and this woman and her son, hell, they were just the smallest piece of the picture. And it couldn’t be fixed. That’s why she was giving him away. Some people, they were broken, broken all to hell—and they still kept their kids, kept them and fed them and twisted them and bent them and made them into grotesques, little images of themselves. She was putting a stop to it. Wasn’t that the right thing to do? Wasn’t it? It stops here. The whole damn thing stops here. There was something good in her. That’s why she was letting go of the sky.

  The Angel of God

  Mister is standing at a window, watching Vicente’s birth mother disappear down the street.

  William Hart is waking up—dizzy—his head spinning like a top. He tries to remember where he is. Yes, in an apartment, yes, a new apartment, and yes, he remembers now, he’d gone out for a drink, and that man had attacked him, hit him and hit him, but there was something familiar—and somehow he’d driven home, though he can’t remember—and yes, he’s remembering cleaning himself up, a loose tooth, blood on his cut lip, the taste of it mixing with the scotch he was drinking to dull the pain. Yes, he remembers now.

  The light is disappearing from the room. I have to get the light back in the room. Yes, that is what I have to do. He stumbles to the mirror and sees his face, swollen and ashen. He feels a throbbing in his head, then feels his knees buckle under him. He struggles to stand, but the pain owns him now. He crawls to the door, manages to turn the knob. He pulls himself out into the hallway have to scream for help but he has lost his voice. He lies there, the world spinning—then it slows—then it stops. Everything is so calm. He can hear his own breathing. He looks toward heaven and thinks he sees a boy. That boy, that beautiful boy. That Angel. He’s come for me. The angel of God has come for me at last.

  The darkness is gone. He smiles at the light hovering over him. Pray for us, Oh Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Everything is so clear. The light has been looking for him all his life. Finally, it has found him.

  What’s a Mother?

  A neutral setting, safe, nice office, small, three comfortable chairs that looked like they belonged in someone’s living room, chairs that said, Sit, sit, this is home, but it wasn’t, wasn’t home at all. A small conference table with expensive wooden chairs around it, the tables and chairs shining in the light of the room as if they were posing, beckoning an artist to paint their fleeting perfection in a still life. Things. Things were more perfect than people. Even the Diego Rivera reproduction was perfect—an original to the casual observer who’d never heard of the artist. Real. Sure.

  He stared at his trembling hands. He sat on the chair, then got up and paced the room, then sat back down. He’d come early. Because he was nervous, because he didn’t want to keep anyone waiting, because he hated to be late. For an instant, he hated Grace for teaching him there was virtue in being prompt. So un-Mexican. What are we, gringos, Grace?

  He looked toward the door as it opened and smiled at Linda.

  “You look nervous.”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Don’t be.”

  He smiled at her. Nervous.

  “She’s in the waiting room. She said she’d like to talk to you alone. I think—”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  She smiled back at him as she left the room. He took a breath. He ran his fingers through his hair, combing himself. His hair was always out of place, like he hadn’t combed it after his shower, like he’d been up all night, like there was a fire burning inside and his hair was nothing but flames, a sure sign that he was about to self-immolate. God, he’d never even learned to comb his own hair. How in the hell did he think he could manage a three-year-old boy? A three-year-old boy who didn’t talk. A three-year-old boy who—She walked into the room. She sat down on one of the comfortable chairs, one of the chairs that said sit. She pulled out a cigarette from her purse, looked for an ashtray, saw one on a small table next to a vase of fake daisies permanently in bloom. She walked across the small room, took the ashtray, and set it down on the conference table. She lit her cigarette, Marlboro Lights, same brand he’d smoked once. She kept looking at him, saying nothing, studying him. Just like he was studying her. She took another drag from her cigarette, then blew the smoke out slowly through her nose. “Want one?”

  He shook his head, then decided to sit at the table. Across from her.

  “You ever smoke?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t trust ex-smokers.”

  “How come?”

  “They’re superior. They look at smokers and think, Dumbass, don’t you know that shit will kill you? Don’t you care enough to quit? Aren’t you strong enough? Smart enough? No, I don’t trust ex-smokers. They’re like fucking prostitutes who’ve found God. You know, people who find God, they like to shove him down other people’s throats. God’s worst enemies, if you want to know what I fucking think.” She looked at him. It was his turn. To say something.

  “It wasn’t that hard for me to quit. I never made a good addict.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was sneering at him or if she laughed because she thought it was an interesting thing to say. Not that what he said was interesting or charming or
intelligent.

  She stared at her polished nails. “I spend more time making sure my nails are perfect than I spend on my kid.”

  Mister didn’t say anything. He just looked at her.

  “You don’t like me.”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “You think you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I’m a dancer. Course, you know that, don’t you?”

  “You don’t look like a dancer.”

  “You think I don’t look like a dancer because I’m wearing a nice dress and I’m all made up? I could be a secretary. I could be a CPA. I could be a lawyer. I could be a professor. To look at me, I could be any one of those things, couldn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I fucking couldn’t. You should see me with my clothes off as I dance on a stage for a man who imagines that all I want is to feel him inside me. I make him believe that. Not that it’s all that hard. Most men want to fucking believe every woman wants a piece of him.”

  “Not all men.”

  “That’s right. I forgot. You’re better than those men. Most of them still smoke.”

  “I’m not better. I just have a different idea of having a good time.”

  She laughed. He didn’t wonder any more what the laugh meant. “So what do you do for kicks—mow the lawn?”

  He looked at her. She was beautiful. Perfect. Except she was angry and callous and her voice, which might have been as beautiful as her face, was petulant and angry and shrill and it made her seem almost grotesque. Maybe it had to be that way. Maybe she’d had to fight for everything, so the fight in her was permanent—like a scar or an immutable tattoo. Mister looked at her and tried to smile. No harm in that, no harm in rolling with the punches. “Well, mowing the lawn—that’s a pretty good time. Some days, I get high on the fumes of freshly cut grass.”

  “That kind of humor doesn’t appeal to me.”

  Mister nodded. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Ask away.”

  “Why did you want to meet me?”

  “What? You want me to be nicer? Did you want me to love you? To fall on my knees? To thank you endlessly?”

  “I didn’t want anything. I came because you asked.”

  “Don’t do things for people just because they want you to. You can get into some real trouble by doing shit like that.” She touched the bottom of her lip. “I just wanted to see what you were like.” She studied him, not caring that the way she was looking at him made him uncomfortable. “What’s it like to be looked at like that?” She smiled. “Does it feel good?”

  “Great,” Mister whispered. This is not what he wanted.

  “You’re just the kind of guy I thought you’d be.” She put out her cigarette.

  “What kind of guy is that?”

  “Soft. Decent.” She got up to leave. “Educated Mexican who looks and acts more American than most gringos. And you speak Spanish.”

  “Sure.”

  “And you’re married to a gringa, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that makes us even, I guess. Vicente’s father’s a gringo, too. Makes it all nice and neat.” She took out another cigarette. “Bet you out-gringo the gringos. And I bet you speak a good Spanish, not that fucking in-between crap the rest of us speak.”

  Mister said nothing. She was throwing stones. Why not? He kept his mouth shut.

  She looked him over, from top to bottom. “He’ll be fine. That’s all I wanted to know.” She looked at him. “Look, whatever your name is—”

  “My name’s—”

  “Skip it. I never ask my clients’ names. And I never kiss them on the lips. I don’t believe in pretending to be intimate. The only thing you need to know about me is that I shouldn’t be a mother. I knew that before anybody ever told me. You think I need the moral police to tell me that? You think I need a judge? You think I need a caseworker who doesn’t know his head from his ass?” She lit another cigarette. She looked at the chair, then decided to stand. It was better. To stand. She was leaving, anyway. “It’s not hard to give him up,” she whispered. “I’ll just screw him up. I don’t need anyone to fucking tell me that.” She turned toward the door.

  “You know what decent is?” Mister hadn’t planned on talking—but sometimes his own words took him by surprise.

  She turned around and stared at him. She ignored his question, like she hadn’t heard it, like she’d only heard a sound and was turning around to see what it was, maybe a rat in the room or a cockroach or a moth flinging itself against a lightbulb. She looked right past him, never said a word. But she looked at him like she wanted to remember. Was that it? It was as if she wanted to put her anger away, if only for one damned, irrepeatable, blessed second. She was beautiful and perfect in that one second. “He talks,” she said.

  “What?”

  “He talks. When he wants to.”

  Mister nodded his head. “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  She reached for the doorknob.

  “Do you know what decent is?”

  “A woman like me doesn’t know anything about decent.” This time, she didn’t bother to face him.

  “Decent is letting go a son because you love him.”

  “Don’t break my heart,” she said. Almost soft, but the rage coming back into her voice when she said heart—like a wave that is about to crest and crash against the shore. “Don’t break my fucking heart.”

  He could still smell her as he sat in the office. Nothing cheap about her perfume, nothing cheap about the way she dressed or the way she talked. She had her own kind of unmistakable grace. Somewhere along the line, something really bad. Really bad. Maybe she’d already figured out her own end and was powerless to change the way the story ended. She’d die of the drugs she took, in an empty room, in an empty house, the stench of wanting men all around her. She would die of a liver disease from too much booze, her eyes yellow, her teeth rotting, her skin gray as a winter sky. She would die of something a man gave her. Or she would die of a bullet piercing her heart, a man shooting her for reasons that were inane and banal and insipid and predictable. Or maybe she’d catch herself one day, and shake herself awake and say, enough. She would put on her clothes in the middle of a show, kick some dirty middle-aged man right in the teeth as she walked off the stage, and she would just stop, stop dancing, stop doing the drugs, stop with the whole damn thing, reform herself, live the straight and narrow life in a humble, ordered house. Maybe she would marry. A man who would know and understand what she was. Maybe she would have another child—one day another child—and she would be a mother, a good mother, a mother who loved and cared and nursed and fed and clothed and sang lullabies. Or maybe she would simply live alone, in mourning, and wake up every day screaming Vicente’s name. She would go to bed each night, exhausted, whispering his name. The scar of his memory killing her. Slowly. Every day.

  Mister shook his head. He walked to the window and looked down at the street. He could see her walking away on the sidewalk. She could have been a secretary. She could have been a CPA. She could have been a lawyer. For an instant she seemed to be nothing more than light.

  And then she just disappeared.

  He felt a hand on his back. He turned and smiled at Linda. “It was okay,” he whispered. He looked away from her and looked out at the day, the sidewalk hot with the heat of the desert sun. He saw himself, a boy. Barefoot. Walking on the sidewalk. That’s what he’d done on summer days when he was a boy—he’d walk out of his house barefoot, and see how far he could walk before he could no longer stand the heat of the cement. Once it had been so hot that he’d gotten blisters on the bottoms of his feet. Grace had rubbed ointment on them and lectured him. He’d kissed her—and kissed her and kissed her. Kisses had come so easily to him. When he was nine.

  “What are you looking for out there?”

  “History.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He smiled a
nd turned away from the window.

  Dead, You Say?

  William Hart is moaning on the hallway floor of his apartment, his eyes fluttering. The frightened neighbor calls 911. When a detective comes, he shakes his head as he looks down at the body. “Looks like someone beat the holy hell out of this guy. Mother of God. I’d say this guy bled to death—of internal injuries. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. Poor bastard should’ve gone for help.”

  The detective begins to look. He likes to look. That’s what makes him good at what he does. In Hart’s apartment there is a new computer, the boxes still in the room. He finds a napkin in the man’s shirt pockets, from a bar. The Tap. He discovers his ID and the business card of a parole officer whose name he recognizes. He gives the parole officer a call, “You know this guy, this William Hart?”

  “Registered sex offender, just moved into town.”

  “What’s he into?”

  “Little boys.”

  “Why’d they let him out?”

  “Can’t keep ’em in forever. Has an appointment this afternoon.”

  “He won’t be keeping it.”

  The detective drives to the Tap. He talks to the bartender. The bartender says, Yes, some guy, he starts beating the holy shit out of this other guy—took four guys to pull him off. But the other guy, the one who’s beat up all to hell, he kept on saying, No cops, no cops. Beat up all to shit, dead, you say? Holy fuck. And no, he’d never seen the guy, but he was talking to another guy—Al Mendoza—a regular. He works with computers at the university. Yeah, sure, next time I’ll call the cops.

  Grace at Work

  Grace sat—nearly motionless—at her desk. The light streaming in through her large window was the same light that was streaming in through the waiting room where Mister was pacing back and forth. Four blocks from each other, but each of them alone. For the moment. But it was Grace who was calmer and more focused. It was Grace who had the capacity to let go of her preoccupations and turn her attention to the things that calmed her. The light—that could always calm her. After forty-nine years of living in the desert, she had become an aficionado of light and how it reshaped the surfaces of her environment—how it fell on the desert floor, how it hit the rooms in her house, how her garden glowed at certain moments of the day, how it softened her office. That had been the very reason why she’d chosen this space for her work. She had wanted something that faced the morning. She had passed up a bigger office because it faced west, and she’d decided to spare herself the punishing light of the afternoon. Unforgiving, that light.