A Stranger in This World (17 page)

“What’s this called?” she asked him. “I see couples sitting up close like this. Is there a name for it?”

“Riding bitch,” Walter said.

The song on the radio dissolved into a ruckus of singing and shouting and applause—Praise God! Can I praise his name?—and then the next began to take shape out of a few spare piano chords.

“Riding bitch,” Candy said, tasting the words in her mouth. Bitch. “If they sounded like that in my church, I’d still be going on my own.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Walter said, letting his hand idle down her shoulder so it rested on the top curve of her breast. “I’m sorry, Candy, but you wouldn’t be caught dead in church if they didn’t pay you.”

“OK, OK, OK, OK,” she said, not wanting to argue, preferring her thoughts to his company. She felt an invitation in the white flowering dogwoods to go follow them, a fairy-tale beginning, adventures in the greenwood. She closed her eyes and felt the wind on her face. The lead singer for the Gospel Harmonettes was shouting, in a high clear voice, that she was nothing but a stranger in this world.

Walter’s family’s house: pink speckled brick, with columns across the front. It sat alone on a naked dirt hillside like a billboard, caught in a pool of floodlights. It looked like it was about six weeks old and about an inch thick, propped up with two-by-fours at the back. What was she expecting? The
Legendary South, the Romantic: moss and rot; white-washed cypress porches; a spreading live oak in the yard; in the living room, maroon velvet fading to brown. But this thing looked like part of a Barbie set, new, cheap and pink. Even the landscaping looked fake, stiff little bushes and a green felt lawn, stolen from a model railroad.

The mother was worse: handsome, well-preserved, with teeth like the keys of a child’s piano. She came to greet them at midnight in full makeup and peach satin pajamas, clutching her robe around her to ward off the chill of the house. It was still ninety degrees outside. She spoke so slowly that Candy found herself finishing the thought before Walter’s mother could finish the sentence:

You must be …

It’s so good …

I’ve heard so much …

It’s terrible of Walter to make you drive …

Kabuki: things were being communicated, nuances of meaning between mother and son that Candy couldn’t grasp. Things were being said about her. What?

“I’ve put you in your old room,” Walter’s mother told him, “and I’ve put your friend in the spare room at the top of the stairs.”

“Why not the guest room?”

“Well,” his mother said, “I’ll leave you to work that out with your brother. I guess that he and Kaye have been having a little bit of a spat—he’s been camped out in the guest room for a couple of weeks now. You’re welcome to try to dynamite him out.”

Suddenly, disconcertingly, she turned her eyes on Candy.

“He stays up all hours,” she said. “Walter tells me you’re a late riser, too.”

She tilted her head like a curious bird, waiting for a response, Candy couldn’t imagine what.

Then back to her son. “The early bird catches the worm,” she said, “and at my age I need all the worms I can get. I’ll leave you two to work out the sleeping arrangements with Jimbo. It’s wonderful to see you, sweetheart.”

She embraced her son and went off, never again noticing Candy. “Let’s get ourselves something to drink,” she said. “I can still feel the road, like I’m vibrating or something.”

“It is so strange to be back here,” Walter said. “Especially with you here, and all.”

Candy followed him, wondering exactly what the hell he meant. They went through the mahogany darkness of the dining room, through hallways lined in soft beige carpet, absolutely clean, with a smell of pine air freshener. It was the kind of house that made her want to smoke cigarettes and spill the ashes. The kitchen at the back of the house was as clean and tidy as an operating room, and there at the kitchen table was her husband.

It was Greg.

Except that it wasn’t Greg, the second time she looked, but a man who was the same size, tall but solidly built, a man with the same dark military hair and the same long hands and something else—some way of moving or of holding his body. When she took the feeling apart this way it started to disappear, but when she just looked at him it came flooding back again and she was having a bright moment, the way a perfume she hadn’t smelled in a dozen years would spin her back in
time, like a sudden hole in the floor. Not-Greg was tipped back in a wrought-iron chair, watching a little black-and-white TV on the glass-topped table in front of him, Barbara Bain, Martin Landau—
Mission: Impossible
. Next to the television was a square bottle of Early Times bourbon and an ice bucket in the shape of a diver’s helmet that was larger than the television. The glass was in his hand, in Greg’s hand.

Candy knew it was a mistake but she couldn’t stop her heart from leaping toward him. The secret hopes that had stalked her, always—he’d ejected somehow; he’d been living in the jungle; it was all part of a secret government plan—all came true at once, all came out of the darkness and into the light of her mind. It was Greg, he was alive, their happiness could begin again. Then he turned toward her with the slow quizzical movements of the politely drunk.

“Walter,” he said. “I seem to be bothering your friend here. Why don’t you introduce us?”

“Candy Collins,” Candy said, walking toward him, giving him her hand. She let it rest in his for a moment too long, loving the familiar warmth of his hand, the way they fit, hand in glove. This is not appropriate, she thought. This man is not my husband.

“James Madison,” said Walter’s brother, “like the President, some very distant relation of ours according to our mother.”

“Who made it up,” Walter said.

“Who made it up,” agreed his brother. “You can call me Jim like everybody else. I think Mr. President would be excessive, don’t you?”

“I kind of like it,” Candy said.

“Whatever you want,” Jim said. “Are you a spy like Walter here?”

“I’m a translator,” Walter said.

“What have you been working on lately?” Jim asked, and both the brothers grinned at each other. Jim turned to Candy and said, “Exhibit A: he can’t tell us. He’s a spy, I’m warning you. Or maybe you’re a spook, too?”

This man is not my husband, Candy thought, and dreams can’t make him so. But it was lovely to look at him, lovely to pretend, and these were questions he would be asking if he came back: Who have you become? What have you done with yourself? It took her a minute to gather her answers into a small enough package. “I work in a bookstore,” she said.

“And she’s a singer,” Walter said, advertising her—and in that moment of promotion she saw the balance between them, Walter the younger brother trying to catch up with Jim the older, who would always be out ahead of him. And this was sad, this endless game of catch-up, except that Candy realized then that she didn’t care what happened to Walter, not at all. Not by comparison anyway.

“What kind of singer?” Jim asked, and Candy felt herself blushing.

“Lately I just sing in a church choir, every Sunday. They pay me.” This wasn’t enough, and Jim waited for more until she said, “I started out to sing in the opera.”

“I thought opera singers weren’t supposed to smoke cigarettes,” Jim said.

“Well, I’m not going to sing in the opera, not now. I’m not quite good enough.”

“She’s got a beautiful voice,” Walter said. Jim looked over
at him as if he suspected Walter was lying, and Walter said, “She does!”

“It’s like a trick,” Candy said, and she was talking directly through Jim and straight to Greg, wherever he was, explaining herself. “It’s like you work and work to develop your voice, and after a while it’s not even part of you anymore, it’s just this thing that lives in your throat. And you have to take care of it, and look out for its moods, and so on. And then you can sort of hear it sometimes, and then one day you just realize: not quite.”

The brothers looked at her like she had grown antennae out of her forehead. Then Jim said, “Let’s hear it.”

“I don’t want to wake everybody up.”

“We can go outside.”

“I want a drink first.”

Jim didn’t reply but grabbed the bottle of Early Times off the table and waved it at her and led them out the back door, Walter stopping along the way to get a can of beer from the refrigerator. Outside was blood-warm, bathtub-warm, ten million bugs off in the night. The green grass of the yard ended as abruptly as the edge of a rug, at a barbwire fence about thirty feet from the back door. Past the fence were a tree and a cow and the shadows of the other cows moving around in the darkness. The brothers arranged themselves around the picnic table and looked up at the stars. This is the life, they were telling her. This is the real thing, burbling whiskey from the bottle.

Candy lit a cigarette, sweat prickling on her skin from the nearness of Jim, and she was getting close to a place that was past pretending. There was a real thing called love and she had forgotten it, what it was like to say his name, to touch his back in the middle of the night, to lace her fingers through the short
hairs at the back of his neck, pressing his head closer while he kissed the nipples of her breasts. She felt a trembling that started in her ovaries and spread throughout her body. She took the whiskey bottle from Jim’s hand and drank, a sacrament. Then started to sing:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, to save a wretch like me …

“That’s beautiful singing,” Jim broke in, “but that song, I don’t know, maybe a little depressing.”

“That’s a beautiful song,” Walter said, and he looked toward Candy for approval. But she didn’t care about him at all. She was looking straight at Jim, and all of them saw.

“What would you like to hear?” she asked him.

“Sing the blues,” Jim said.

“I thought you didn’t like depressing music.”

“That Jesus shit is depressing,” Jim said. “The blues is a sweet thing, isn’t it?”

Neither of the others replied. Candy was trying to sort out where he was serious and where he was mocking, feeling the conversational sand shift out from under her feet—and she wanted him to admire her, wanted him to dream at night of how cool she was. More than anything she wanted to tell him where she was, not the body that anyone could see or the mess that she had made of her life but the tiny soul that was somewhere inside. All around her in the night, the bugs and birds were saying the same thing: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here … Come find me, come and meet me in the dark fields.

She sang “Lover Man,” as dark and bittersweet as she could. The usual thing when she was singing, her voice felt bigger than she was and after a minute she wasn’t there anymore and it was only the voice and the song, the music dissipating in the damp night air, the apathetic stare of the cows.

She liked herself best when she was almost nothing, slowly reassembling herself when the last notes had escaped her, feeling like she’d gone too far: Lover man, where can you be?

“Not bad,” Jim said. “A little stiff, but you’re good for a white girl.”

But he was being complimentary, and Walter was staring at her, and Candy had made some little mistake, some tiny mistake, and this was not going to amount to anything either, this evening or this trip. Or this lifetime, she thought, bowing to herself like Sarah Bernhardt. My tragedy, yeah, yeah, yeah. She looked at Jim, who didn’t look like a husband at the moment, hers or anybody else’s. “Excuse me,” she said. “I have this headache kind of thing. From the driving, I guess.”

“Two aspirin and a drink of whiskey,” Jim said. “It works for me, sooner or later.”

But he was showing off. The boys were disappointed because their audience was leaving, and it was no fun to practice alone, and Candy made up her mind. “I think I’ll just get some sleep,” she said. “I’ll be all right in the morning.”

“I’ll take you up,” Walter said.

“Sleep tight,” Jim said. He stayed outside with the whiskey bottle, listening to the bugs, looking at all the stars: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here …

Walter led her around the house to the front again and it was like starting over. He fetched their suitcases from the trunk of the Impala, humped them over the threshold and up the staircase to the darkness at the top of the stairs, leading Candy without minding her. My little bellboy, she thought. Candy
was a fan of motel rooms, not just the sleep-till-noon draperies and the little soaps but mostly the way she could be anybody she wanted to be in those blank rooms, or nobody at all, thinking of the scotch-and-TV seductions, the lonely salesmen who had laid their heads on the same pillow. A place to leave your life, be nobody for a while. The room that Walter left her in was a nobody room, a cold, clean little space over the stairway, back issues of
National Geographic
, a Bible and an antique pitcher-and-basin arrangement on top of the dresser with dried weeds sticking out of it. It was more like a bed-and-breakfast than a motel but the same feeling, the spotless carpeting and the virginal crisp sheets. Walter lit the bedside lamp, filling the room with pink light, and settled heavily on the end of the bed. “Do you want some company?” he whispered.

Candy started to laugh. “Have you been watching movies again?” she asked him. “Shouldn’t you have a rose between your teeth?”

“Am I doing this wrong?”

“No,” she said. “No, you’re doing this just fine, I like it. I’m just not in the mood.”

“For me?”

“For anyone. I’m sorry. And what if your mom found out? You might get grounded.”

Walter got up from the bed, gave her a fuck-you look as he left the room. He would have slammed the door but he really was afraid to wake his mom up. Candy thought, OK, he’s mad at me. She emptied one of the vases on the dresser of its faded dried flowers, wiped it clean with her handkerchief and rummaged through the depths of her suitcase until she found the dozen little airline bottles of brandy she left in there for emergencies. I declare this an emergency, she said to herself. Lit a
cigarette, the first one ever smoked in this room, and settled onto the bed and tried to read her mystery: the gun, the kiss, the trivial appointment. Somebody was about to be murdered or somebody had just been murdered, she couldn’t remember. Really, she couldn’t make heads or tails of it.