Heathern Page 7

  "Plus the floor upstairs. They call it a duplex but it's enough for thirty. It's Thatcher's place, really. A gift until he wants it back."

  The previous owners favored the sort of decor that resulted in its having appeared in expensive journals, years before. Most of the rooms were the width of the house, divided by walls painted in Navaho white and floored with blond wood. Lester wandered through the living room, narrowing his eyes against the glare of the furniture, and studied an abstract I had hanging above the fireplace. Looking anew into its painted swirls I wondered how my friend had known what angels swarmed over heaven.

  "It's called 'Driven to Pieces in Pursuit of Love,"' I said. "A girlfriend of mine painted it. She did a number of works that no one ever bought. Except this one."

  "It's awful dark," he said. "She did this recently?"

  It was dark; the angels smothered in vast clouds of dust, tumbling wing over wing as they spiraled into the deep. "She bought a factory loft in Tribeca," I said. "Her fiance came down to see the place. She stepped into the elevator to take him up to the roof to show him, but the elevator wasn't there."

  "I'm sorry," Lester said.

  "She'd be even unhappier now than she was then," I said. "You want a drink?"

  "Bourbon'd be good," he said. "A little one."

  "I wouldn't want to corrupt."

  "Don't worry," he said. We entered my apartment's Food Preparation/Interpersonal Interaction Core; here the designers had so unyieldingly followed a black and white pattern in both fixture and wall that, entering the room, one felt to have fallen into a crossword puzzle. There were burners and microwaves and convection ovens; cabinets and blenders and gadgets enough to supply large restaurants. In a cabinet I kept one knife, one fork, one spoon, and two plates.

  "I've never seen a refrigerator this large," he said, staring at its bulk; Bulganin refrigerators were the finest made, I'd heard, but I suppose Russians understood ice. It was large enough to hold half a steer. "Entertain much?"

  I poured our drinks into the two glasses I kept ready for socializing. "Bernard tells me I more often depress." When I handed Lester his bourbon he took small sips, as if drinking too rapidly might sear shut his mouth. "Strong enough?"

  "I don't drink much," he said, sitting on a black stool, leaning against a white countertop. "I don't see what got him so interested in me. It's not as if I just started doing this."

  "I have no idea," I said. "I think he thinks he can use you to intimidate."

  "Intimidate who?"

  "A limitless number of candidates."

  "Seems he sees too many squirrels in the trees," said Lester. "What does he think I am, anyway?"

  "It should be obvious," I said. "It was obvious; he only wanted to hear me say it. "He thinks that if you're not the messiah, he can use you as such."

  "To intimidate," Lester said, smiling, not appearing happy. He ran his fingertip around his glass's rim as if to make it sing.

  "He's been playing it cagey. He's impossible to figure out after a point, he doesn't even tell his wife what he's up to-

  "Would it be more to my advantage to be the messiah or to pretend to be the messiah?"

  "Same difference," I said. "He'll keep working on you."

  "She seems preoccupied with something besides me," he said. "What else is going on that might tie in to his plans?"

  "A member of our organization was murdered without our consent," I said. "He's already decided who's guilty, and you never know what the punishment'll be until-"

  "Murdered?" Lester said.

  "It's business," I said. "What do you expect?"

  "That's why you were so afraid," he said. "When you thought somebody was shooting at us."

  I nodded.

  "Then he's meeting a Japanese representative on Tues day. Bernard's cooked up some treaty of alignment. Thatcher isn't keen to go along. He tends to see connections where none exist, and I think he's seeing a connection between the murder and the alignment. The Drydens are dysfunctional unless they're lurching from crisis to crisis-"

  "Then sometime I might wind up as part of a connection too?" Lester asked.

  For several moments I stared into my drink's melting ice, gazing into smooth translucence as if to read the future; saw nothing that comforted or disturbed. "You might. I might. You never can tell."

  "That must make for uncertainty ..."

  I nodded. "Once he gets his paws on you he'll adhoc it for awhile, until something gets rolling. Figure he'll set his sights low to start."

  "It's good to have low expectations," said Lester. "Messianic hopes are the worst kind. He's bound to be disappointed."

  "He doesn't like to be disappointed," I said. "Show him the angels. That'd shut him up."

  "He couldn't see them," said Lester. "Not even if he wanted to. Are you sorry you saw them?"

  "I'm not sorry," I said. "I'm not glad."

  "They were glad to see you."

  "Must be pretty boring up there, then," I said, standing and rinsing my glass in the sink; pondering for an instant if I should fix myself another one before picking up the bottle, and pouring again. "I'm sure Bernard'll be stuck with the details, if you were to go along. He always has to tie up the loose ends."

  "What do people expect of a messiah?" Lester asked. "People in general, I mean. What do you think?"

  "How should I know? It's nothing I've ever thought about," I said. "Somebody to clean up the mess, I suppose. Bring about a better world. Cure disease, rebuild cities, sweep the streets." My soul's Bernard eased out again before I felt it breaking the surface; I barely contained my laugh as I enumerated. "Wash the dishes, fix the sink, make the bed--

  "People can do those things," said Lester. "The big things and the small."

  "But they won't. They don't even try anymore. Too afraid they'll fail, I suppose, and so they stop caring, or pretending to care-"

  "As I understand it," said Lester, "They love us most when we try and fail."

  "Lessens the competition," I said. "It'll never happen in any event, so there's no point discussing it." I marveled at how manipulative I could be; watched his face to see what reaction might appear there. It wasn't that I was drunk, for I wasn't; I only wanted to test him as he seemed to be forever testing me.

  "The messiah will come," he said. "Not the one anybody wants or expects."

  A memory rose up in my mind; I saw again the books in my parents' den, their books and the dusty volumes passed down from my mother's grandfather, shoved into the highest shelves, unread for years. One afternoon when I was thirteen I remembered climbing up and poking around, seeing what I might find there. He was a rabbi; most of his old books were in Hebrew and I could never read those. Some were in English, and I recalled coming across a paragraph concerning Waldo Frank as I idly flipped pages, the dust rising, steam from a lone riders' white donkey. Frank believed that when the messiah came the messiah would come as a woman; it occurred to me what an unfathomable, yet charming concept that seemed. The rest of the book was drier than the dust that covered it; I replaced it on the shelf, and ran outside to soak up sunlight and let the wind blow the dust from my skin.

  "How do They feel about the messiah?" I asked. "Have They told you?"

  "They know that when the messiah comes They'll reunite, but They don't know what'll happen after that. They know that everything will change, but They don't know how, and so They've never been in any rush-"

  "So They'll keep putting it off."

  "It's almost time," he said. "They've had all Their doubts confirmed, at this point. It must give Them pause. You could say the messiah's Their doomsday device."

  Picking up the CD's remote I switched on the radio, tuned as always to WNEW-AM; "Highway 61" rang out through the apartment's speakers, and I quickly switched it off.

  "Want another drink?" I asked; he shook his head. "Want to see the rest of the place?"

  As we walked through I showed him the backyard garden, the dining room, the two bathrooms on the firs
t floor. Pictures of my parents hung on the stairway's wall, and he examined them.

  "You favor your mother," he said. The shot he saw was taken on their twentieth anniversary, when she was a year younger than I was then.

  "She colored her hair," I said. "She went gray early on."

  "They live in town?"

  I preserved what remained of them: odd pieces of small furniture, some books, my dishes; a family album, images trapped in black and white amber. My father stood in Penn Station's iron greenhouse with his fellow soldiers in those old photos; my mother skipped rope on Pitkin Avenue, in Brooklyn, in long-erased Brownsville. Sometimes I found photos of myself that I couldn't recall being taken, shots where my color was grayed by distance and time, and I looked no more than a child hired for an ephemeral event. For so long I remembered my dreams so much more clearly than I remembered my past.

  "They're dead," I told him. "I grew up in Short Hills, in Jersey. They sold the house a few years after Dad retired."

  He'd bought it for ten thousand, sold it for seven hundred thousand; were I to have repurchased it myself, that day, I would have paid the same number of dollars as he paid but the cost would have been so much greater. It was a comfortable house, near the arboretum and the train station; in those woods I knew my first boys. In the backyard was a gas grill, layered with the ash and soot of a thousand barbecues; I remembered staring into its flames as a child, thinking how cool those icy blue feathers looked.

  "I guess they were old ..."

  "They were young," I said. "They moved to a retirement community. In Florida. After the revaluation they lost their savings. They couldn't afford the maintenance on their co-op and they got an eviction notice. I didn't know until later. They must not have wanted me to worry, and I never thought-"

  "Joanna, it's all right ..."

  "Let's go upstairs," I said. He preceded me on the ascent. The second floor's vacuums were broken, and dust settled over us as might sea-mist at the shore. "They didn't tell me. It was such a-"

  "Joanna?"

  "Such a-" I began again, unable to think of a suitable conclusion.

  "Are you all right?"

  "Fine," I said. "I'm fine. They were fine. Their lives went so smoothly. Too smoothly. I'd learned not to worry about them."

  "Joanna, it wasn't your fault, whatever happened-"

  "I should have been there," I said, stopping, leaning against the wall; I'd not let myself think about it since it happened. They'd decided upon their course of action with the logic they brought to all situations; decided to kill themselves, and so obtained poison from a reliable source. "Why didn't they tell me?"

  "Joanna, it's all right," he said, holding me as if to keep me from shaking. Every Saturday night they fixed a candlelight dinner for themselves, once I was old enough that I might make my own arrangements. I remembered so often leaving the house, seeing them sitting there, staring into each other's eyes as if they'd been married the day before. Perhaps, that night, they'd hoped to draw such romance as they could from their final tableau; more likely the electricity had been cut off, and they needed candlelight in order to measure out their doses. A candle caught the bedroom drapes on fire, the fire department said; they'd passed out before blowing out the lights.

  "I didn't know," I said. Mom could have slept through it; Dad got halfway across the living room. "The fire department sent me a bill for their services the next day on the fax. That's how I found out-"

  "It's all right," Lester repeated, not letting me go. "It's all right. Go ahead and cry-"

  "I can't," I said. "I haven't been able to in years. Not really."

  They wanted their ashes sprinkled over Coney Island, where they'd met. Early one morning, the next week, Avi drove me out to the beach and stood guard to make sure no one else came near. I walked out to the surf; almost jabbed my foot on a needle. The wind was blowing; I tried to wait until it settled, but a gust came along as I let go of the ashes and they blew back onto the beach, mixing with the gray sand until I couldn't tell where they'd gone.

  "You're crying now," he said; they ran down my cheeks.

  "No-"

  "You are-"

  "Not really," I said. "Come on," I said, pulling away from him, wiping my face dry. "I'm sorry. Let's go on. Up here."

  At the top of the stairs we turned, and walked down a short hall. "This is my bedroom," I said as we walked in, seeing my bed, my dresser and the television as I'd left them. When I turned on the lights I turned on the set as well, hoping that something distracting might be playing. A commercial was on; to sell watches the narrator quoted the second law of thermodynamics as an old Otis Redding song drifted over the images of women nearly nude and dyed blue. I couldn't deal with such neopost so late, and turned it off.

  "Better?" he asked. I nodded. "You have a beautiful home."

  "Thatcher has a beautiful home," I said. "I didn't mean to get so upset. It's just-"

  "I shouldn't have brought it up," he said, touching my face. "Don't worry. Everything's all right."

  "I haven't been able to cry for so long," I said, sitting on the bed. "I was all dried up. It hurt too much to feel so much. I couldn't. I'm sorry-"

  "You can cry around me," he said. "Joanna, there's nothing wrong in that-"

  "I haven't cried since that last night with Avi," I said. "Not since then. Thatcher'll never see me cry."

  Lester sat down next to me, keeping distance enough that while I could take comfort from his nearness I wasn't pressed into some unwarranted embrace. As I tried to calm myself I took deep breaths, drawing as much air into my lungs as I could; feeling, as Jake surely had, that I had killed without reason. "You and Avi must have been very close," he said.

  "It's funny," I said, "we broke it off just as we were getting closest. That's how it always seems to work when you get to know someone too well, I think. Peel off one too many layers of skin and then you can't bear the touch any longer." I stood, straightening my skirt, and walked across the room to my closet where, ducking behind the door, I could peer into the mirror there to see what a shambles I had made of my face. With tissue and cream I removed my makeup, kicking off my shoes as I stood there, out of Lester's sight. "So where do you live?"

  "Around," he said. "It's good to keep moving."

  "You're originally from Tennessee?"

  "Kentucky," he corrected. "Everybody up here always confuses them. I grew up near Lexington. My mother's folks came from over the mountain."

  "What's it like down there?" Some of Thatcher's friends owned horse farms in the state, and at every business function were prone to weave shimmering tales of the plantation life. I'd always suspected they'd poured us watered bourbon. "It always looks so pretty in the pictures."

  "I haven't been there in years," he said. "I don't know what's left. It's probably like everywhere else by now."

  "When I moved out," I said, unbuttoning my blouse, "I didn't go home again for months. I understand how it is." When he said nothing in reply I wondered if I possibly could understand. "Why do they call it the Bluegrass?"

  "Don't know. It's the same grass as in Central Park, I think. Just as brown."

  I shut the closet door, coming into his sight once more wearing only my slip and undergarments. Could a messiah desire, I wondered; I didn't see why not. He didn't look away as he saw me, but neither did he seem pleased; his cheeks flushed red, as if he'd received a sudden transfusion. "Are your parents still down there?"

  "Yes," he said. "They built a Toyota plant across the road from where our house was, I heard. It must be closed if it hasn't gone out of business, I suppose. Probably Dryco will reopen it one day-"

  "Probably," I said, walking toward him.

  "Do you want me to leave the room while you change clothes?"

  "No." So often during my life I knew a suspicion, that for periods of time not all of my actions were my own; that a loved one's dybbuk rose from the void to settle for awhile in my body, and know the life inside my head. Reaching down,
I began unbuttoning his shirt, staring at my hands, seeing another's. He remained so still that I might have been undressing a mannequin.

  "You're very pretty, Joanna," he said.

  "You don't think I'm fat?" Thatcher once told me he could set a teatray on my ass and I'd never notice until I sat down, and he intended it as a compliment. "I don't take very good care of myself."

  "It wouldn't matter-" he said. He showed a certain reluctance as I pulled his shirt from his body, but made no move to stop me. In clothes he seemed slim; now I saw how wiry he was, how tightly his muscles were drawn across his bones. Then, seeing his right side, I backed quickly away, feeling as he must have felt in the hall, when he asked about my parents. From his waist to his armpit his skin appeared as strip-mined as any Kentucky mountainside, pitted where it should have been smooth, smooth where it should have been rippled. The original design was forever lost.

  "Who shot you?" I asked; Avi had similar scars. For the first time since we'd met he averted his own eyes.

  "It was deer season," he said, laughing. "Hunter mistook me for a cow." So many men lie as if to their mothers, stammering out denials with such bravado and so blatantly that one could only imagine that they dreamed of being caught.

  "Lester-"

  "It was a while back," he said. "Didn't hit anything important. The newspapers called me the miracle child."

  "What happened?"

  He shook his head; for the moment I let the subject drop. "You're lucky you lived," I said; he seemed uncertain how he might respond, and so said nothing. He wore the semblance of a smile on his lips, as if, having heard an old family joke for the umpteenth time, he had done his duty by responding as if he'd heard it all anew. I sat in my dresser's chair, facing him.

  "We can't, Joanna," he said. "I wouldn't feel right."

  It should have been understandable, and was, and I was sorry all the same. He shrugged, and folded up his shirt. "It's all right ..." I said.

  "Their means are difficult, whatever Their ends," he said. How long, I wondered, had he told himself there was a purpose before he finally believed it? Against his better judgment had he wound up hoping, after all, instead of knowing? As I looked at him I watched him shiver, as if the room was as cold as Thatcher's. Maybe somebody walked over his grave.