Lisey’s Story (5 page)

No. She didn't think so. What she thought was that this clipping and the jotted, fulsome note were Dashmiel's petty revenge on Scott for . . . for what?

For just being polite?

For looking at
Monsieur de Litérature
Dashmiel and not seeing him?

For being a rich creative snotbucket who was going to make a fifteen-thousand-dollar payday for saying a few uplifting words and turning a single spadeful of earth?
Pre-loosened
earth at that?

All those things. And more. Lisey thought Dashmiel had somehow believed their positions would have been reversed in a truer, fairer world; that he, Roger Dashmiel, would have been the focus of the intellectual interest and student adulation, while Scott Landon—not to mention his mousy little wouldn't-fart-if-her-life-depended-on-it wife—would be the ones toiling in the campus vineyards, always currying
favor, testing the winds of departmental politics, and scurrying to make that next pay-grade.

“Whatever it was, he didn't like Scott and this was his revenge,” she marveled to the empty, sunny rooms above the long barn. “This . . . poison-pen clipping.”

She considered the idea for a moment, then burst out into gales of merry laughter, clapping her hands on the flat part of her chest above her breasts.

When she recovered a little, she paged through the
Review
until she found the article she was looking for:
AMERICA'S MOST FAMOUS NOVELIST INAUGURATES LONG-HELD LIBRARY DREAM.
The byline was
Anthony Eddington,
sometimes known as Toneh. And, as Lisey skimmed it, she found she was capable of anger, after all. Even rage. For there was no mention of how that day's festivities had ended, or the
Review
author's own putative heroism, for that matter. The only suggestion that something had gone crazily wrong was in the concluding lines: “Mr. Landon's speech following the groundbreaking and his reading in the student lounge that evening were cancelled due to unexpected developments, but we hope to see this giant of American literature back on our campus soon. Perhaps for the ceremonial ribbon-cutting when the Shipman opens its doors in 1991!”

Reminding herself this was the school
Review,
for God's sake, a glossy, expensive hardcover book mailed out to presumably loaded alumni, went some distance toward defusing her anger; did she really think the
U-Tenn Review
was going to let their hired hack rehash that day's bloody bit of slapstick? How many alumni dollars would
that
add to the coffers? Reminding herself that Scott would also have found this amusing helped . . . but not all that much. Scott, after all, wasn't here to put his arm around her, to kiss her cheek, to distract her by gently tweaking the tip of one breast and telling her that to everything there was a season—a time to sow, a time to reap, a time to strap and likewise one to unstrap, yea, verily.

Scott, damn him, was gone. And—

“And he
bled
for you people,” she murmured in a resentful voice that
sounded spookily like Manda's. “He almost
died
for you people. It's sort of a blue-eyed miracle he didn't.”

And Scott spoke to her again, as he had a way of doing. She knew it was only the ventriloquist inside her, making his voice—who had loved it more or remembered it better?—but it didn't
feel
that way. It felt like
him.

You were my miracle,
Scott said.
You were my blue-eyed miracle. Not just that day, but always. You were the one who kept the dark away, Lisey. You shone.

“I suppose there were times when you thought so,” she said absently.

—
Hot, wasn't it?

Yes. It had been hot. But not
just
hot. It was—

“Humid,” Lisey said. “
Muggy.
And I had a bad feeling about it from the get-go.”

Sitting in front of the booksnake, with the
U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review
lying open in her lap, Lisey had a momentary but brilliant glimpse of Granny D, feeding the chickens way back when, on the home place. “It was in the bathroom that I started to feel really bad. Because I broke

She keeps thinking about the glass, that smucking broken glass. When, that is, she's not thinking of how much she'd like to get out of this heat.

Lisey stands behind and slightly to Scott's right with her hands clasped demurely before her, watching him balance on one foot, the other on the shoulder of the silly little shovel half-buried in loose earth that has clearly been brought in for the occasion. The day is maddeningly hot, maddeningly humid, maddeningly muggy, and the considerable crowd that has gathered only makes it worse. Unlike the dignitaries, the lookie-loos aren't dressed in anything approaching their best, and while their jeans and shorts and pedal-pushers may not exactly make them comfortable in the wet-blanket air, Lisey envies them just the same as she stands here at the crowd's forefront, basting in the suck-oven heat
of the Tennessee afternoon. Just standing pat, dressed up in her hot-weather best, is stressful, worrying that she'll soon be sweating dark circles in the light brown linen top she's wearing over the blue rayon shell beneath. She's got on a great bra for hot weather, and still it's biting into the undersides of her boobs like nobody's business. Happy days, babyluv.

Scott, meanwhile, continues balancing on one foot while his hair, too long in back—he needs it cut badly, she knows he looks in the mirror and sees a rock star but she looks at him and sees a smucking hobo out of a Woody Guthrie song—blows in the occasional puff of hot breeze. He's being a good sport while the photographer circles.
Damn
good sport. He's flanked on the left by a guy named Tony Eddington, who's going to write up all this happy crappy for some campus outlet or another, and on the right by their stand-in host, an English Department stalwart named Roger Dashmiel. Dashmiel is one of those men who seem older than they are not only because they have lost so much hair and gained so much belly but because they insist upon drawing an almost stifling gravitas around themselves. Even their witticisms felt to Lisey like oral readings of insurance policy clauses. Making matters worse is the fact that Dashmiel doesn't like her husband. Lisey has sensed this at once (it's easy, because most men
do
like him), and it has given her something upon which to focus her unease. For she
is
uneasy, profoundly so. She has tried to tell herself that it's no more than the humidity and the gathering clouds in the west presaging strong afternoon thunderstorms or maybe even tornadoes: a low-barometer kind of thing. But the barometer wasn't low in Maine when she got out of bed this morning at quarter to seven; it had been a beautiful summer morning already, with the newly risen sun sparkling on a trillion points of dew in the grass between the house and Scott's study. Not a cloud in the sky, what old Dandy Dave Debusher would have called “a real ham-n-egger of a day.” Yet the instant her feet touched the oak boards of the bedroom floor and her thoughts turned to the trip to Nashville—leave for the Portland Jet-port at eight, fly out on Delta at nine-forty—her heart dipped with dread and her morning-empty stomach, usually sweet, foamed with unmotivated fear. She had greeted these sensations with surprised dismay,
because she ordinarily
liked
to travel, especially with Scott: the two of them sitting companionably side by side, he with his book open, she with hers. Sometimes he'd read her a bit of his and sometimes she'd vice him a little versa. Sometimes she'd feel him and look up and find his eyes. His solemn regard. As though she were a mystery to him still. Yes, and sometimes there would be turbulence, and she liked that, too. It was like the rides at the Topsham Fair when she and her sisters had been young, the Krazy Kups and the Wild Mouse. Scott never minded the turbulent interludes, either. She remembered one particularly mad approach into Denver—strong winds, thunderheads, little prop-job commuter plane from Death's Head Airlines all over the smucking sky—and how she'd seen him actually pogo-ing in his seat like a little kid who needs to go to the bathroom, this crazy grin on his face. No, the rides that scared Scott were the smooth downbound ones he sometimes took in the middle of the night. Once in a while he talked—lucidly; smiling, even—about the things you could see in the screen of a dead TV set. Or a shot-glass, if you held it tilted just the right way. It scared her badly to hear him talk like that. Because it was crazy, and because she sort of knew what he meant, even if she didn't want to.

So it isn't low barometer that's bothering her and it certainly hadn't been the prospect of getting on one more airplane. But in the bathroom, reaching for the light over the sink, something she had done without incident or accident day in and day out for the entire eight years they'd lived on Sugar Top Hill—which came to approximately three thousand days, less time spent on the road—the back of her hand whacked the waterglass with their toothbrushes in it and sent it tumbling to the tiles where it shattered into approximately three thousand stupid pieces.

“Shit fire, save the smuckin
matches!
” she cried, frightened and irritated to find herself so . . . for she did not believe in omens, not Lisey Landon the writer's wife, not little Lisey Debusher from the Sabbatus Road in Lisbon Falls, either. Omens were for the shanty Irish.

Scott, who had just come back into the bedroom with two cups of coffee and a plate of buttered toast, stopped dead. “Whadja break, babyluv?”

“Nothing that came out of the dog's ass,” Lisey said savagely, and was
then sort of astonished. That was one of Granny Debusher's sayings, and Granny D certainly
had
believed in omens, but that old colleen had been on the cooling board when Lisey was barely four. Was it possible Lisey could even remember her? It seemed so, for as she stood there, looking down at the shards of toothglass, the actual
articulation
of that omen came to her, came in Granny D's tobacco-broken voice . . . and returns now, as she stands watching her husband be a good sport in his lightest-weight summer sportcoat (which he'll soon be sweating through under the arms nevertheless).

—
Broken glass in the morning, broken hearts at night.

That was Granny D's scripture, all right, remembered by at least one little girl, stored up before the day Granny D pitched over dying in the chickenyard with a snarl in her throat, an apron filled with Blue Bird feed tied around her waist, and a sack of Beechnut scrap slid up her sleeve.

So.

Not the heat, the trip, or that fellow Dashmiel, who only ended up doing the meet-and-greet because the head of the English Department is in the hospital following an emergency gall-bladder removal the day before. It's a broken . . . smucking . . .
toothglass
combined with the saying of a long-dead Irish granny. And the joke of it is (as Scott will later point out), that is just enough to put her on edge. Just enough to get her at least semi-strapped.

Sometimes,
he will tell her not long hence, speaking from a hospital bed (ah, but he could so easily have been on a cooling board himself, all his wakeful, thoughtful nights over), speaking in his new whispering, effortful voice,
sometimes just enough is just enough. As the saying is.

And she will know exactly what he's talking about.

Roger Dashmiel has his share of headaches today, Lisey knows that, though it doesn't make her like him any better. If there was ever an actual script for the ceremony, Professor Hegstrom (he of the emergency gall-bladder attack) was too post-op muddled to tell Dashmiel or anyone
else what or where it is. Dashmiel has consequently been left with little more than a time of day and a cast of characters featuring a writer to whom he has taken an instant dislike. When the little party of dignitaries left Inman Hall for the short but exceedingly warm walk to the site of the forthcoming Shipman Library, Dashmiel told Scott they'd have to more or less play it by ear. Scott had shrugged good-naturedly. He was absolutely comfortable with that. For Scott Landon, ear was a way of life.

“Ah'll introduce you,” said the man Lisey would in later years come to think of as the southern-fried chickenshit. This as they walked toward the baked and shimmering plot of land where the new library would stand (the word is pronounced
LAH-bree
in Dashmiel-ese). The photographer in charge of immortalizing all this danced restlessly back and forth, snapping and snapping, busy as a gnat. Lisey could see a rectangle of fresh brown earth not far ahead, about nine by five, she judged, and trucked in that morning, by the just-starting-to-fade look of it. No one had thought to put up an awning, and already the surface of the fresh dirt had acquired a grayish glaze.

“
Somebody
better do it,” Scott said.

He spoke cheerfully, but Dashmiel had frowned as if wounded by some undeserved canard. Then, with a meaty sigh, he'd pressed on. “Applause follows introduction—”

“As day follows night,” Scott murmured.

“—and yew'll say a woid or tieu,” Dashmiel finished. Beyond the baked wasteland awaiting the library, a freshly paved parking lot shimmered in the sunlight, all smooth tar and staring yellow lines. Lisey saw fantastic ripples of nonexistent water on its far side.

“It will be my pleasure,” Scott said.

The unvarying good nature of his responses seemed to worry Dashmiel. “Ah hope you won't want to say
tieu
much at the groun'breakin,” he told Scott as they approached the roped-off area. This had been kept clear, but there was a crowd big enough to stretch almost to the parking lot waiting beyond it. An even larger one had trailed Dashmiel and the Landons from Inman Hall. Soon the two would merge, and Lisey—who ordinarily didn't mind crowds any more than she minded turbulence
at twenty thousand feet—didn't like this, either. It occurred to her that so many people on a day this hot might suck all the air out of the air. Stupid idea, but—