Zoë looked at him sympathetically. "I suppose it's hard for love to recover after that."
His eyes lit up. He wanted to talk about love. "But I keep thinking love should be like a tree. You look at trees and they've got bumps and scars from tumors, infestations, what have you, but they're still growing. Despite the bumps and bruises, they're… straight."
"Yeah, well," said Zoë, "where I'm from, they're all married or gay. Did you see that movie Death by Number?"
Earl looked at her, a little lost. She was getting away from him. "No," he said.
One of his breasts had slipped under his arm, tucked there like a baguette. She kept thinking of trees, of gorillas and parks, of people in wartime eating the zebras. She felt a stabbing pain in her abdomen.
"Want some hors d'oeuvres?" Evan came pushing through the sliding door. She was smiling, though her curlers were coming out, hanging bedraggled at the ends of her hair like Christmas decorations, or food put out for the birds. She thrust forward a plate of stuffed mushrooms.
"Are you asking for donations or giving them away," said Earl, wittily. He liked Evan, and he put his arm around her.
"You know, I'll be right back," said Zoë.
"Oh," said Evan, looking concerned.
"Right back. I promise."
Zoë hurried inside, across the living room, into the bedroom, to the adjoining bath. It was empty; most of the guests were using the half bath near the kitchen. She flicked on the light and closed the door. The pain had stopped and she didn't really have to go to the bathroom, but she stayed there anyway, resting. In the mirror above the sink she looked haggard beneath her bonehead, violet grays showing under the skin like a plucked and pocky bird. She leaned closer, raising her chin a little to find the bristly hair. It was there, at the end of the jaw, sharp and dark as a wire. She opened the medicine cabinet, pawed through it until she found some tweezers. She lifted her head again and poked at her face with the metal tips, grasping and pinching and missing. Outside the door she could hear two people talking low. They had come into the bedroom and were discussing something. They were sitting on the bed. One of them giggled in a false way. She stabbed again at her chin, and it started to bleed a little. She pulled the skin tight along the jawbone, gripped the tweezers hard around what she hoped was the hair, and tugged. A tiny square of skin came away with it, but the hair remained, blood bright at the root of it. Zoë clenched her teeth. "Come on," she whispered. The couple outside in the bedroom were now telling stories, softly, and laughing. There was a bounce and squeak of mattress, and the sound of a chair being moved out of the way. Zoë aimed the tweezers carefully, pinched, then pulled gently away, and this time the hair came, too, with a slight twinge of pain and then a great flood of relief. "Yeah!" breathed Zoë. She grabbed some toilet paper and dabbed at her chin. It came away spotted with blood, and so she tore off some more and pressed hard until it stopped. Then she turned off the light and opened the door, to return to the party. "Excuse me," she said to the couple in the bedroom. They were the couple from the balcony, and they looked at her, a bit surprised. They had their arms around each other, and they were eating candy bars.
Earl was still out on the balcony, alone, and Zoë rejoined him there.
"Hi," she said. He turned around and smiled. He had straightened his costume out a bit, though all the secondary sex characteristics seemed slightly doomed, destined to shift and flip and zip around again any moment.
"Are you OK?" he asked. He had opened another beer and was chugging.
"Oh, yeah. I just had to go to the bathroom." She paused. "Actually I have been going to a lot of doctors recently."
"What's wrong?" asked Earl.
"Oh, probably nothing. But they're putting me through tests." She sighed. "I've had sonograms. I've had mammograms. Next week I'm going in for a candygram." He looked at her worriedly. "I've had too many gram words," she said.
"Here, I saved you these." He held out a napkin with two stuffed mushroom caps. They were cold and leaving oil marks on the napkin.
"Thanks," said Zoë, and pushed them both in her mouth. "Watch," she said, with her mouth full. "With my luck, it'll be a gallbladder operation."
Earl made a face. "So your sister's getting married," he said, changing the subject. "Tell me, really, what you think about love."
"Love?" Hadn't they done this already? "I don't know." She chewed thoughtfully and swallowed. "All right. I'll tell you what I think about love. Here is a love story. This friend of mine—"
"You've got something on your chin," said Earl, and he reached over to touch it.
"What?" said Zoë, stepping back. She turned her face away and grabbed at her chin. A piece of toilet paper peeled off it, like tape. "It's nothing," she said. "It's just—it's nothing."
Earl stared at her.
"At any rate," she continued, "this friend of mine was this award-winning violinist. She traveled all over Europe and won competitions; she made records, she gave concerts, she got famous. But she had no social life. So one day she threw herself at the feet of this conductor she had a terrible crush on. He picked her up, scolded her gently, and sent her back to her hotel room. After that she came home from Europe. She went back to her old hometown, stopped playing the violin, and took up with a local boy. This was in Illinois. He took her to some Big Ten bar every night to drink with his buddies from the team. He used to say things like 'Katrina here likes to play the violin,' and then he'd pinch her cheek. When she once suggested that they go home, he said, 'What, you think you're too famous for a place like this? Well, let me tell you something. You may think you're famous, but you're not famous famous.' Two famouses. 'No one here's ever heard of you.' Then he went up and bought a round of drinks for everyone but her. She got her coat, went home, and shot a gun through her head."
Earl was silent.
"That's the end of my love story," said Zoë.
"You're not at all like your sister," said Earl.
"Ho, really," said Zoë. The air had gotten colder, the wind singing minor and thick as a dirge.
"No." He didn't want to talk about love anymore. "You know, you should wear a lot of blue—blue and white—around your face. It would bring out your coloring." He reached an arm out to show her how the blue bracelet he was wearing might look against her skin, but she swatted it away.
"Tell me, Earl. Does the word fag mean anything to you?"
He stepped back, away from her. He shook his head in disbelief. "You know, I just shouldn't try to go out with career women. You're all stricken. A guy can really tell what life has done to you. I do better with women who have part-time jobs."
"Oh, yes?" said Zoë. She had once read an article entitled "Professional Women and the Demographics of Grief." Or no, it was a poem: If there were a lake, the moonlight would dance across it in conniptions. She remembered that line. But perhaps the title was "The Empty House: Aesthetics of Barrenness." Or maybe "Space Gypsies: Girls in Academe." She had forgotten.
Earl turned and leaned on the railing of the balcony. It was getting late. Inside, the party guests were beginning to leave. The sexy witches were already gone. "Live and learn," Earl murmured.
"Live and get dumb," replied Zoë. Beneath them on Lexington there were no cars, just the gold rush of an occasional cab. He leaned hard on his elbows, brooding.
"Look at those few people down there," he said. "They look like bugs. You know how bugs are kept under control? They're sprayed with bug hormones, female bug hormones. The male bugs get so crazy in the presence of this hormone, they're screwing everything in sight: trees, rocks—everything but female bugs. Population control. That's what's happening in this country," he said drunkenly. "Hormones sprayed around, and now men are screwing rocks. Rocks!"
In the back the Magic Marker line of his buttocks spread wide, a sketchy black on pink like a funnies page. Zoë came up, slow, from behind and gave him a shove. His arms slipped forward, off the railing, out over the street. Beer spilled out of his bottle, ra
ining twenty stories out over the city below.
"Hey, what are you doing?!" he said, whipping around. He stood straight and readied and moved away from the railing, sidestepping Zoë. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Just kidding," she said. "I was just kidding." But he gazed at her, appalled and frightened, his Magic Marker buttocks turned away now toward all of downtown, a naked pseudo-woman with a blue bracelet at the wrist, trapped out on a balcony with—with what? "Really, I was just kidding!" Zoë shouted. The wind lifted the hair up off her head, skyward in spines behind the bone. If there were a lake, the moonlight would dance across it in conniptions. She smiled at him, and wondered how she looked.
* * *
Places to Look for Your Mind
the sign said "welcome to America," in bold red letters. Underneath, in smaller blue, Millie had spelled out John Spec. Comma, John Spec She held it up against her chest like a locket, something pressed against the heart for luck: a pledge of allegiance. She was waiting for a boy she didn't know, someone she'd never even seen a photograph of, an English acquaintance of her daughter Ariel's. Ariel was on a junior semester abroad, and the boy was the brother of one of her Warwickshire dormmates. He was an auto mechanic in Surrey, and because he'd so badly wanted to come to the States, Ariel had told him that if he needed a place, he could stay with her parents in New Jersey. She had written ahead to inform them. "I told John Spee he could stay in Michael's old room, unless you are still using it as an 'office.' In which case he can stay in mine."
Office in quotation marks. Millie had once hoped to start a business in that room, something to do with recycling and other environmental projects. She had hoped to be hired on a consultant basis, but every time she approached a business or community organization they seemed confounded as to what they would consult her for. For a time Millie had filled the room with business cards and supplies and receipts for various expenses in case she ever filed a real tax form. Her daughter and her husband had rolled their eyes and looked, embarrassed, in the other direction.
"Office." Ariel made her quotation marks as four quick slashes, not the careful sixes and nines Millie had been trained long ago to write. There was something a bit spoiled about Ariel, a quiet impudence, which troubled Millie. She had written back to her daughter, "Your father and I have no real objections, and certainly it will be nice to meet your friend. But you must check with us next time before you volunteer our home!" She had stressed our home with a kind of sternness that lingered regretlessly. "You mustn't take things for granted." It was costing them good money to send Ariel abroad. Millie herself had never been to England. Or anywhere, when you got right down to it. Once, as a child, she had been to Florida, but she remembered so little of it. Mostly just the glare of the sky, and some vague and shuddering colors.
People filed out from the Newark customs gate, released and weary, one of them a thin, red-haired boy of about twenty. He lit a cigarette, scanned the crowd, and then, spying Millie, headed toward her. He wore an old, fraying camel hair sports jacket, sneakers of blue, man-made suede, and a baseball cap, which said Yankees, an ersatz inscription.
"Are you Mrs. Keegan?" he asked, pronouncing it Kaygan.
"Um, yes, I am," Millie said, and blushed as if surprised. She let the sign, which with its crayoned and overblown message now seemed ludicrous, drop to her side. Her other hand she thrust out in greeting. She tried to smile warmly but wondered if she looked "fakey," something Ariel sometimes accused her of. "It's like you're doing everything from a magazine article," Ariel had said. "It's like you're trying to be happy out of a book." Millie owned several books about trying to be happy.
John shifted his cigarette into his other hand and shook Millie's. "John Spee," he said. He pronounced it Spay. His hand was big and bony, like a chicken claw.
"Well, I hope your flight was uneventful," said Millie.
"Oh, not really," said John. "Sat next to a bloke with stories about the Vietnam War and watched two movies about it. The Deer Hunter and, uh, I forget the other." He seemed apprehensive yet proud of himself for having arrived where he'd arrived.
"Do you have any more luggage than that? Is that all you have?"
"'Zall I got!" he chirped, holding a small duffel bag and turning around just enough to let Millie see his U.S. Army knapsack.
"You don't want this sign, do you?" asked Millie. She creased it, folded it in quarters like a napkin, and shoved it into her own bag.
Over the PA system a woman's voice was repeating, "Mr. Boone, Mr. Daniel Boone. Please pick up the courtesy line."
"Isn't that funny," said Millie.
On the drive home to Terracebrook, John Spee took out a pack of Johnny Parliaments and chain-smoked. He told Millie about his life in Surrey, his mates at the pub there, in a suburb called Worcester Park. "Never was much of a student," he said, "so there was no chance of me going to university." He spoke of the scarcity of work and of his "flash car," which he had sold to pay for the trip. He had worked six years as an auto mechanic, a job that he had quit to come here. "I may stay in the States a long time," he said. "I'm thinking of New York City. Wish I hadn't had to sell me flash car, though." He looked out at a souped-up Chevrolet zooming by them.
"Yes, that's too bad," said Millie. What should she say? On the car radio there was news of the garbage barge, and she turned it up to hear. It had been rejected by two states and two foreign countries, and was floating, homeless, toward Texas. "I used to have a kind of business," she explained to John. "It was in garbage and trash recycling. Nothing really came of it, though." The radio announcer was quoting something now. The wretched refuse of our teeming shores, he was saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was saying.
"Now I'm taking a college course through the mail," Millie said, then reddened. This had been her secret. Even Hane didn't know. "Don't tell my husband," she added quickly. "He doesn't know. He doesn't quite approve of my interest in business. He's a teacher. Religious studies at the junior college."
John gazed out at the snag of car dealerships and the fast-food shacks of Route 22. "Is he a vicar or something?" He inhaled his cigarette, holding the smoke in like a thought.
"Oh, no," said Millie. She sighed a little. Hane did go to church every Sunday. He was, she knew, a faithful man. She herself had stopped going regularly over a year ago. Now she went only once in a while, like a visit to an art museum, and it saddened Hane, but she just couldn't help it. "It's not my thing," she had said to her husband. It was a phrase she had heard Ariel use, and it seemed a good one, powerful with self-forgiveness, like Ariel herself.
"The traffic on this route is almost always heavy," said Millie. "But everyone drives very fast, so it doesn't slow you down."
John glanced sideways at her. "You look a little like Ariel," he said.
"Really?" said Millie brightly, for she had always thought her daughter too pretty to have come from Hane and her. Ariel had the bones and eyes of someone else, the daughter of royalty, or a movie star. Mitzi Gaynor's child. Or the Queen's. Ironically, it had been Michael, their eldest, who had seemed so clearly theirs.
"Oh, yes," said John. "You don't think so?"
usually in spring Millie hurried guests immediately out into the backyard so that they could see her prize tulips—which really weren't hers at all but had belonged to the people who owned the house before them. The woman had purchased prize bulbs and planted them even into the edge of the next-door neighbor's yard. The yards were small, for sure, but the couple had been a young managerial type, and Millie had thought perhaps aggressive gardening went with such people.
Millie swung the car into the driveway and switched off the ignition. "I'll spare you the tulips for now," she said to John. "You probably would like to rest. With jet lag and all."
"Yeah," said John. He got out of the car and swung his duffel bag over his shoulder. He surveyed the identical lawns, still a pale, wintry ocher, and the small, boxy split-levels, their stingy porches fronting the entrances like goatees. He
looked startled. He thought we were going to he rich Americans, thought Millie. "Are you tired?" she said aloud.
"Not so bad." He breathed deeply and started to perspire.
Millie went up the steps, took a key out from behind the black metal mailbox, and opened the door. "Our home is yours," she said, swinging her arms wide, showing him in.
John stepped in with a lit cigarette between his teeth, his eyes squinting from the smoke. He put his bag and knapsack down and looked about the living room. There were encyclopedias and ceramic figurines. There were some pictures of Ariel placed high on a shelf. Much of the furniture was shredded and old. There was a Bible and a Time magazine on the coffee table.
"Let me show you your room," said Millie, and she took him down a short corridor and opened the door on the right. "This was once my son's room," she said, "but he's—he's no longer with us." John nodded somberly. "He's not dead," Millie hastened to add, "he's just not with us." She cleared her throat—there was something in it, a scratch, a bruise of words. "He left home ten years ago, and we never heard from him again. The police said drugs." Millie shrugged. "Maybe it was drugs."
John was looking for a place to flick his ashes. Millie grabbed a potted begonia from the sill and held it out for him. "There's a desk and a filing cabinet here, which I was using for my business, so you can just ignore those." On the opposite wall there was a cot and a blond birch dresser. "Let me know if you need anything. Oh! Towels are in the bathroom, on the back of the door."
"Thanks," said John, and he looked at his watch like a man with plans.
"leftovers is all we've got tonight!" Millie emerged from the kitchen with quilted pot-holder mittens and a large cast-iron skillet. She beamed like the presenters on the awards shows she sometimes watched; she liked to watch TV when it was full of happiness.