Bag of Bones (35 page)

Go on!
Jo's voice cried. My version of her voice was usually calm and collected; this time it was shrill.
Stop dithering and go on!

I reached for the IBM's rocker-switch, now remembering the day I had dropped my Word Six program into the PowerBook's trash.
Goodbye, old pal,
I had thought.

“Please let this work,” I said. “Please.”

I lowered my hand and flicked the switch. The machine came on. The Courier ball did a preliminary twirl, like a ballet dancer standing in the wings, waiting to go on. I picked up a piece of paper, saw my sweaty fingers were leaving marks, and didn't care. I rolled it into the machine, centered it, then wrote

Chapter One

and waited for the storm to break.

T
he ringing of the phone—or, more accurately, the way I
received
the ringing of the phone—was as familiar as the creaks of my chair or the hum of the old IBM Selectric. It seemed to come from far away at first, then to approach like a whistling train coming down on a crossing.

There was no extension in my office or Jo's; the upstairs phone, an old-fashioned rotary-dial, was on a table in the hall between them—in what Jo used to call “no-man's-land.” The temperature out there must have been at least ninety degrees, but the air still felt cool on my skin after the office. I was so oiled with sweat that I looked like a slightly pot-bellied version of the muscle-boys I sometimes saw when I was working out.

“Hello?”

“Mike? Did I wake you? Were you sleeping?” It was Mattie, but a different one from last night. This one wasn't afraid or even tentative; this one sounded
so happy she was almost bubbling over. It was almost certainly the Mattie who had attracted Lance Devore.

“Not sleeping,” I said. “Writing a little.”

“Get out! I thought you were retired.”

“I thought so, too,” I said, “but maybe I was a little hasty. What's going on? You sound over the moon.”

“I just got off the phone with John Storrow—”

Really? How long had I been on the second floor, anyway? I looked at my wrist and saw nothing but a pale circle. It was half-past freckles and skin o'clock, as we used to say when we were kids; my watch was downstairs in the north bedroom, probably lying in a puddle of water from my overturned night-glass.

“—his age, and that he can subpoena the other son!”

“Whoa,” I said. “You lost me. Go back and slow down.”

She did. Telling the hard news didn't take long (it rarely does): Storrow was coming up tomorrow. He would land at County Airport and stay at the Lookout Rock Hotel in Castle View. The two of them would spend most of Friday discussing the case. “Oh, and he found a lawyer for you,” she said. “To go with you to your deposition. I think he's from Lewiston.”

It all sounded good, but what mattered a lot more than the bare facts was that Mattie had recovered her will to fight. Until this morning (if it
was
still morning; the light coming in the window above the broken air conditioner suggested that if it was, it wouldn't be much longer) I hadn't realized how gloomy the young woman in the red sundress and
tidy white sneakers had been. How far down the road to believing she would lose her child.

“This is great. I'm so glad, Mattie.”

“And you did it. If you were here, I'd give you the biggest kiss you ever had.”

“He told you you could win, didn't he?”

“Yes.”

“And you believe him.”

“Yes!” Then her voice dropped a little. “He wasn't exactly thrilled when I told him I'd had you over to dinner last night, though.”

“No,” I said. “I didn't think he would be.”

“I told him we ate in the yard and he said we only had to be inside together for sixty seconds to start the gossip.”

“I'd say he's got an insultingly low opinion of Yankee lovin,” I said, “but of course he's from New York.”

She laughed harder than my little joke warranted, I thought. Out of semi-hysterical relief that she now had a couple of protectors? Because the whole subject of sex was a tender one for her just now? Best not to speculate.

“He didn't paddle me too hard about it, but he made it clear that he would if we did it again. When this is over, though, I'm having you for a
real
meal. We'll have everything you like, just the way you like it.”

Everything you like, just the way you like it.
And she was, by God and Sonny Jesus, completely unaware that what she was saying might have another meaning—I would have bet on it. I closed my eyes for a moment, smiling. Why not smile? Everything she
was saying sounded absolutely great, especially once you cleared the confines of Michael Noonan's dirty mind. It sounded like we might have the expected fairy-tale ending, if we could keep our courage and hold our course. And if I could restrain myself from making a pass at a girl young enough to be my daughter . . . outside of my dreams, that was. If I couldn't, I probably deserved whatever I got. But Kyra wouldn't. She was the hood ornament in all this, doomed to go wherever the car took her. If I got any of the wrong ideas, I'd do well to remember that.

“If the judge sends Devore home empty-handed, I'll take you out to Renoir Nights in Portland and buy you nine courses of French chow,” I said. “Storrow, too. I'll even spring for the legal beagle I'm dating on Friday. So who's better than me, huh?”

“No one I know,” she said, sounding serious. “I'll pay you back for this, Mike. I'm down now, but I won't always be down. If it takes me the rest of my life, I'll pay you back.”

“Mattie, you don't have to—”

“I
do,
” she said with quiet vehemence. “I
do.
And I have to do something else today, too.”

“What's that?” I loved hearing her sound the way she did this morning—so happy and free, like a prisoner who has just been pardoned and let out of jail—but already I was looking longingly at the door to my office. I couldn't do much more today, I'd end up baked like an apple if I tried, but I wanted another page or two, at least. Do what you want, both women had said in my dreams. Do what you want.

“I have to buy Kyra the big teddybear they have at the Castle Rock Wal-Mart,” she said. “I'll tell her it's
for being a good girl because I can't tell her it's for walking in the middle of the road when you were coming the other way.”

“Just not a black one,” I said. The words were out of my mouth before I knew they were even in my head.

“Huh?” Sounding startled and doubtful.

“I said bring me back one,” I said, the words once again out and down the wire before I even knew they were there.

“Maybe I will,” she said, sounding amused. Then her tone grew serious again. “And if I said anything last night that made you unhappy, even for a minute, I'm sorry. I never for the world—”

“Don't worry,” I said. “I'm not unhappy. A little confused, that's all. In fact I'd pretty much forgotten about Jo's mystery date.” A lie, but in what seemed to me to be a good cause.

“That's probably for the best. I won't keep you—go on back to work. It's what you want to do, isn't it?”

I was startled. “What makes you say that?”

“I don't know, I just . . .” She stopped. And I suddenly knew two things: What she had been about to say, and that she wouldn't say it.
I dreamed about you last night. I dreamed about us together. We were going to make love and one of us said “Do what you want.” Or maybe, I don't know, maybe we both said it.

Perhaps sometimes ghosts were alive—minds and desires divorced from their bodies, unlocked impulses floating unseen. Ghosts from the id, spooks from low places.

“Mattie? Still there?”

“Sure, you bet. Do you want me to stay in touch? Or will you hear all you need from John Storrow?”

“If you don't stay in touch, I'll be pissed at you. Royally.”

She laughed. “I will, then. But not when you're working. Goodbye, Mike. And thanks again. So much.”

I told her goodbye, then stood there for a moment looking at the old-fashioned Bakelite phone handset after she had hung up. She'd call and keep me updated, but not when I was working. How would she know when that was? She just would. As I'd known last night that she was lying when she said Jo and the man with the elbow patches on the sleeves of his sportcoat had walked off toward the parking lot. Mattie had been wearing a pair of white shorts and a halter top when she called me, no dress or skirt required today because it was Wednesday and the library was closed on Wednesday.

You don't know any of that. You're just making it up.

But I wasn't. If I'd been making it up, I probably would have put her in something a little more suggestive—a Merry Widow from Victoria's Secret, perhaps.

That thought called up another.
Do what you want,
they had said. Both of them.
Do what you want.
And that was a line I knew. While on Key Largo I'd read an
Atlantic Monthly
essay on pornography by some feminist. I wasn't sure which one, only that it hadn't been Naomi Wolf or Camille Paglia. This woman had been of the conservative stripe, and she had used that phrase. Sally Tisdale, maybe? Or was my mind just hearing echo-distortions of Sara Tidwell? Whoever it had been, she'd claimed that “do what
I
want” was the basis of erotica which appealed to women and “do what
you
want” was the basis of pornography which appealed to men. Women imagine speaking the former line in sexual situations; men imagine having the latter line spoken
to
them. And, the writer went on, when real-world sex goes bad—sometimes turning violent, sometimes shaming, sometimes just unsuccessful from the female partner's point of view—porn is often the unindicted co-conspirator. The man is apt to round on the woman angrily and cry, “You wanted me to! Quit lying and admit it! You
wanted
me to!”

The writer claimed it was what every man hoped to hear in the bedroom: Do what you want. Bite me, sodomize me, lick between my toes, drink wine out of my navel, give me a hairbrush and raise your ass for me to paddle, it doesn't matter. Do what you want. The door is closed and we are here, but really only
you
are here, I am just a willing extension of your fantasies and only
you
are here. I have no wants of my own, no needs of my own, no taboos. Do what you want to this shadow, this fantasy, this ghost.

I'd thought the essayist at least fifty per cent full of shit; the assumption that a man can find real sexual pleasure only by turning a woman into a kind of jackoff accessory says more about the observer than the participants. This lady had had a lot of jargon and a fair amount of wit, but underneath she was only saying what Somerset Maugham, Jo's old favorite, had had Sadie Thompson say in “Rain,” a story written eighty years before: men are pigs, filthy, dirty pigs, all of them. But we are
not
pigs, as a rule, not beasts, or at least not unless we are pushed to the final extremity.
And if we are pushed to it, the issue is rarely sex; it's usually territory. I've heard feminists argue that to men sex and territory are interchangeable, and that is very far from the truth.

I padded back to the office, opened the door, and behind me the telephone rang again. And here was another familiar sensation, back for a return visit after four years: that anger at the telephone, the urge to simply rip it out of the wall and fire it across the room. Why did the whole world have to call while I was writing? Why couldn't they just . . . well . . . let me do what I wanted?

I gave a doubtful laugh and returned to the phone, seeing the wet handprint on it from my last call.

“Hello?”

“I said to stay visible while you were with her.”

“Good morning to you, too, Lawyer Storrow.”

“You must be in another time-zone up there, chum. I've got one-fifteen down here in New York.”

“I had dinner with her,” I said. “Outside. It's true that I read the little kid a story and helped put her to bed, but—”

“I imagine half the town thinks you're bopping each other's brains out by now, and the other half will think it if I have to show up for her in court.” But he didn't sound really angry; I thought he sounded as though he was having a happy-face day.

“Can they make you tell who's paying for your services?” I asked. “At the custody hearing, I mean?”

“Nope.”

“At my deposition on Friday?”

“Christ, no. Durgin would lose all credibility as guardian
ad litem
if he went in that direction. Also,
they have reasons to steer clear of the sex angle. Their focus is on Mattie as neglectful and perhaps abusive. Proving that Mom isn't a nun quit working around the time
Kramer vs. Kramer
came out in the movie theaters. Nor is that the only problem they have with the issue.” He now sounded positively gleeful.

“Tell me.”

“Max Devore is eighty-five and divorced. Twice divorced, in point of fact. Before awarding custody to a single man of his age, secondary custody has to be taken into consideration. It is, in fact, the single most important issue, other than the allegations of abuse and neglect levelled at the mother.”

“What are those allegations? Do you know?”

“No. Mattie doesn't either, because they're fabrications. She's a sweetie, by the way—”

“Yeah, she is.”

“—and I think she's going to make a great witness. I can't wait to meet her in person. Meantime, don't sidetrack me. We're talking about secondary custody, right?”

“Right.”

“Devore has a daughter who has been declared mentally incompetent and lives in an institution somewhere in California—Modesto, I think. Not a good bet for custody.”