Aquamarine (20 page)

Anthony looks the part of her boyfriend. He has an ankh symbol dangling from one ear, is wearing a muscle T-shirt to expose his tattoo. Jesse tries, not very successfully, not to let this tattoo upset her. The picture is four claws tearing their way out through the skin from inside.

Although they look like they’re on leave from a coven, Anthony and Lynette act like they’re going steady. They kiss long, soft kisses, then stare into each other’s eyes for minutes on end while the conversation pauses as everyone else gives in to their involuntary fascination with them.

Lynette whispers to him a lot. At first Jesse thinks this is about real secrets and then notices that, for instance, Lynette will whisper to Anthony and he’ll nod and then pass her the salt. She cuts his meat for him, which is not so terrible as it might be. It is, after all, the Beef Baron, and he does, after all, have a bandaged hand.

It’s not easy to draw them into the table talk. Tom tries. He’s a P.R. guy, adept at entry-level chat. “So Lynette,” he says, swelling his voice, “I hear you have some pretty interesting dogs.”

She nods through a mouthful of sunflower seeds. Although it was the endless salad bar she recommended here, her own salad ends quite abruptly. It is ninety-nine percent sunflower seeds on about three pieces of lettuce. Finally, the crunching stops and she says, “We’re teaching them to talk.”

No one thinks of anything to say to this.

A band is setting up, five guys, a wide range of ages and styles. All of them are in white dinner jackets gone yellow at the seams. According to their drum, they’re the Rhythmaires.
Taptaptap
goes the trumpet player, an index finger thudding deafeningly on the microphone, followed by a feisty screech of amp backlash.

“Oh boy,” Jesse says.

“It’ll be funny,” Sharon says.

“We are the Rhythmaires,” says the trumpet player. “Specializing in pop, show tunes, country favorites, polkas, rock and roll, and lambada!”

Anthony holds his head as though all his wisdom teeth have impacted.

Sharon looks across the table at him and crosses her eyes. She takes Lynette’s hand and pulls her out onto the floor. Jesse knows Sharon doesn’t really like Lynette much, but is trying like crazy, for Anthony’s sake. As far as Jesse can tell, in the world lineup of goodness, there’s Mother Teresa, then there’s Sharon. When William came to visit in the spring, Sharon let him style her hair with the blow dryer nearly every morning (he is preoccupied with this lately; it has to do with a crush he has on the girl who cuts his hair in New Jerusalem), and went to school looking whatever way she did.

When Sharon and Anthony and Lynette are all out on the dance floor, fooling around to “New York, New York,” annoying the few old couples on the floor, who still take their fox trotting seriously, it occurs to Jesse that the kids—Anthony and Lynette, not Sharon—are probably high.

Tom and Jesse watch from the table. He orders the two of them brandies, which come in snifters nearly the size and thickness of dime store fishbowls.

“He’s a good kid,” Tom says, nodding toward the dance floor. As if saying this will make it so. “What is all this, really? A little trouble. A speck. It’s the sort of thing boys get into.” Jesse tunes out while he explains boys to her.

“Maybe you could take him up north,” she says. “Get him something at Bellini. Stockroom or something. I’d like to see him Say No to Lynette. I think she’s the French Connection.”

“Ah,” Tom says. He nods, as if slowly contemplating the wisdom of this suggestion. Jesse can see him synchromeshing through the gears to get to the reason he won’t be able to do this. Although he’d love to, of course.

“I’d love to, of course,” he says. “But I’m an old guy for parenthood, for babies. They get one virus after another and then Kyra’s down with it and then I am. I don’t think I can do babies
and
Anthony, if you know what I mean.”

Jesse drifts off and watches Anthony dancing with Lynette. It’s a slow number, “Moon River,” and they’re basically standing still in the center of the floor, just swaying slightly from side to side. Sharon is dancing with some guy in his thirties, who’s been sitting at the bar. He’s got on an overly colorful sweatshirt that makes him look like he’s just won the Grand Prix. He’s big, and he’s hulking over Sharon in a sexy way Jesse doesn’t like. Lighten up, she tells herself, and turns back to Tom.

He lets his hand catch his head and prop it close to her face. He’s about to get serious, she can tell. She tries to head him off with gossip. “My mother’s got herself a boyfriend.”

He nods as if he’s absorbing this information, then says, “You should consider it yourself, Jess. Really. You’re still young.”

Although about ninety percent of what Tom says makes Jesse go ballistic inside, she keeps a cool surface. Does he really think she leads a life of swim lessons and celibacy? He knows Oscar. It’s a small town. Tom and Jesse bought the last car of their marriage from him, the car Tom later drove north into his new life. What Tom doesn’t know about is Oscar and Jesse. She doesn’t bother telling him; she couldn’t score any points with it. He would just see it as one more indication of her being charmingly rooted forever in this sleepy backwater he himself has left behind.

“Guess who I ran into at the sportswear show?” he says after a while of staring out at the dance floor.

“Buffalo Bob.”

“Marty Finch.”

Jesse has had a bit too much wine and brandy to gather up all the cords of control she would like to have. She can only hope she’s doing a passable impersonation of someone whose heart is not slamming around inside her chest like a tuna.

“Oh.”

“We had this All-Time Greats banquet. I sent you an invite, remember? Brought in some big names. Schollander. Shane Gould. Spitz was supposed to show, but he didn’t. Anyway, good old Marty was there.”

Jesse tries to think of a question that would seem reasonable. “How did she seem?”

“Oh, full of it. She’s a trip. Still looks like a photo negative. You know, that platinum hair and Coppertone tan. She’s got a TV show down there. Not like the underwater detective thing. A talk show. Interviews celebrities.”

A couple of hundred questions leap instantly to mind. Jesse carefully picks the top one off the deck. “Did she ask after me?”

“It was a real crowd,” Tom says. “I only got to talk with her for a few minutes. You know.” He swooshes what’s left of his brandy around so it’s only a lining on the inside of the glass. “Do you ever think about it anymore?” he says. “Your big moment?”

Jesse tries to tell if he’s being sarcastic, capitalizing
Big
and
Moment,
but she decides he probably isn’t, that he sincerely wants to know. And it’s an okay question, really. People ask it from time to time. But still.

She shakes her head “no.” So often she finds lying just has the right feel to it.

Tom sleeps in Anthony’s bedroom and picks up after himself when he showers and shaves, something he never did when he lived here. He’s a model guest in the conventional ways. But he is intent on making his presence count, on getting everybody agitated. He leaves every morning, usually with Sharon in tow, to pick up Anthony and go cruising the intracoastal in a Sea Skiff belonging to an old friend from his days down here. Or he takes them to one of the pricier malls to shop for clothes. At night, they hit the dog track or jai alai.

“A few quality days with my kids is all I want,” he tells Jesse, who is invited along on these excursions, but the invitation is always cast in such a way that it’s clear demurring is the expected response.

The day before Anthony’s hearing, Jesse insists on coming along. Tom has been counting on settling out of court, but Handelman, the turbo lawyer, isn’t able to buy off the guy with the BMW, whose stereo was the third that had been ripped out of one or another of his dashboards. This guy, with whom they have a fifteen-minute meeting, is much closer to being Bernie Goetz than being the kind of guy who would give Anthony a pass. Handelman
does
get a continuance, but Anthony is going to have to go to court soon, and then probably to the work farm for a while.

“Still,” Tom tells them all as they drive back in the frigid air conditioning of the rental car, “I think things are going to work out just fine in the long run.” He says this with the assurance of a character in the final moments of a TV drama, putting a tidy resolution on the preceding hour. To celebrate the conclusion of this episode, he reaches back through the space between the front seats to give Anthony a high five slap. Mr. Good Dad.

“Meanwhile, back in the real world...” Jesse says, to no one in particular.

The next morning, when Tom’s packing to leave, folding his shirts with an amazing precision, a talent gained through years on the road of sales, he tells Jesse, “Anthony’s going to be all right. He’s beyond the drug thing now, he told me. It was just an experimenting phase. Lynette’s helping him. She’s a good kid, too. Don’t worry so much about everything.” Jesse knows this isn’t all. She distinctly feels a pronouncement poised in the air between them, but doesn’t move fast enough to duck it. “You know my philosophy,” Tom tells her. “Just give them too much love.”

She looks at him, haloed in the light coming through the open window, and regrets for the first time that this is a one-story house.

In the next few weeks it becomes clear that something is wrong with Anthony’s hand; a nerve was lacerated and isn’t really coming back. The surgeon recommends physical therapy, and Jesse begins to take Anthony three afternoons a week over to a place called SportsMed. He doesn’t have wheels anymore. When Lynette took a hard look at Anthony’s current situation, she decided he wasn’t going to be any fun at all, and took off, with the station wagon and the dogs.

Although he still speaks to her only in portion-controlled syllables, Jesse allows herself to think something better is beginning to happen between them. And then she thinks she’s kidding herself.

And then the storms come on, almost always at night, nearly a week’s worth of them. Either she can’t sleep on account of rumbling in the distance, a feeling of something looming at the edge of her consciousness. Or she can just get to sleep, barely, and then is pulled from it by a sharp crack of lightning, or by nocturnal events that come along with the storms, that begin to seem like part of the agitated weather, that start making it seem as though the nights are a pulsing underneath the smooth, flat surface of the days.

The first night event slides into the middle of a dream Jesse is having that’s like a murder mystery. It’s raining outside. There’s a bloody body on her floor. She’s not responsible, but knows no one will believe her. The doorbell rings. She doesn’t know whether to answer.

As she awakens, she begins to understand it’s not the doorbell, but the phone. She lies still, listening to it ring against the backdrop of a hard rain falling outside, dunning the flat roof above her. She wonders where the nightmare came from, then remembers the soap opera she was half watching in the SportsMed waiting lounge. A nurse murdering her contemptuous doctor lover. A nurse with a bad hand, like Anthony.

She lets the machine pick up. In the middle of the night, she has found this is best. It’s usually a heavy breather, or someone at a pay phone in an extremely loud bar looking for Audrey, who seems to have an active social life and a phone number a digit over from Jesse’s.

But this time it’s Hallie, sounding awful. Jesse reaches over and picks up, breaking in. “What?” Jesse says. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Something I ate, maybe. Muriel talked me into going to this Chinese place.” Hallie is suspicious of all ethnic cuisines, but particularly Chinese. She is certain they use cat meat. “Maybe it’s my appendix, but I think they took that out when they did the hysterectomy.”

“I’ll be right up,” Jesse says.

“Not in this rain.”

“It’s okay,” Jesse says. Hallie never asks for anything.

She pulls on the jeans and cutoff sweatshirt puddled next to the bed.

“What’s happening?” Sharon asks, tottering in, fresh from sleep and still off balance. She looks like she’s tripping along on little pig hooves. “Was it Ian?”

“Hallie. She’s sick. I’ll go up there.”

“Okay,” she says, not having really woken up. She crumples onto Jesse’s bed and is asleep before she hits the mattress.

The rain is a sort Jesse never saw before she came to Florida, a solid wall of water. She can almost feel its pressure against the windshield; it’s like going through a car wash. The few other cars ahead of her are just blurry red lights. She can’t go over ten miles per hour, both because she can’t see, and because the drainless streets are awash, water whipping across them, forming great rushing gulleys in low spots.

Finally—it takes her almost an hour instead of the usual twenty minutes—she gets to Hallie’s. She makes a mad dash across the lawn and starts to grope under her poncho for her key, but Hallie is already on the other side, opening the door. Her color looks gray against the blue plushy robe she’s wearing. Sweetie roams nervously around her legs.

“You poor, drowned rat. And now I feel silly yanking you all the way up here. I feel quite a bit better since I threw up.”

“No, I’m dry as toast under here,” Jesse says, pulling off the poncho, shaking it out on the porch, then hanging it on a doorknob. She leaves her sandals in the hallway, then follows Hallie in. “Besides, you saved me from myself. I was dreaming I was a murderer.”

“Funny. When I woke up with this, I was dreaming you were married to Liberace. I hated your furniture, but I didn’t want to tell you.”

Jesse sits down next to her on the folded-out sofa bed, then pats the sheets beneath them, which are soaked with night sweat. Hallie suddenly goes quiet and looks much worse.

“If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” she says with Missouri politeness. She goes into the bathroom and is there quite a while. When she comes out, Jesse is remaking the bed with fresh sheets. She helps Hallie sit down in her recliner and asks, “Do you think we should go to the hospital?”