Love Nest (20 page)

“How’d it go?”

“It didn’t,” she said.

The top of his head hurt, as if from a sudden crack racing over the skull. “Worth talking about?”

“No.”

“Come in anyway.”

He took her coat, though she had meant to keep it on. While he hung it in the coat closet, she inspected herself in the mirror. She said, “How is she?”

“The same.” He seemed to aim his voice over her head. “Had this worked, it might’ve helped.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Come up and say hello to her.”

They ascended the stairs, his step slower than hers, one foot dragging, an unwilling weight. His belly buckled over the waistband of his pajamas.

“Have you noticed? I’m going to pot.”

“No you’re not.”

“I haven’t been working out.”

“You will.”

They entered the bedroom together. Harriet lay with her fair head against a triple layer of pillows and with both arms and a single foot outside the covers. The magazine rested in the sag of covers between her legs. Viewing Eve with only slight surprise, she said, “What a beautiful dress. Stunning, isn’t it, Alfred? Though I doubt I could get into it. I have much bigger bones.”

Bauer said, “Eve had to drop off some papers.”

“How wonderful of her to work overtime.” She patted the bed. “Sit down, Eve. I don’t see much of you now. Not like the old days.”

Bauer excused himself and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. Eve sat on the edge of the spacious bed, crossed her legs, and dropped her hands into her lap. She spoke gently. “How are you doing?”

“Junk going on in my head you wouldn’t want to know about,” Harriet said with a faint shrug.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“You got any juice with the spirit world? I could use some answers.” She wiped the hair from her face, including strands that had been adhering to her cheek. She smiled vaguely. “Are you still afraid of me? You used to be.”

“No, I was never afraid of you,” Eve said. “Because I knew I was never a threat to you.”

“That’s true.”

They heard the flush of the john, and moments later Bauer emerged from the bathroom and made his way to the distant side of the bed. “I’ve gained a few pounds,” he said, propping pillows and then sitting atop the velvety covers. “In the gut. The worst place.” Harriet seemed not to hear, much space between them, the Kennedy book in the middle of it. Her eyes were on Eve. Bauer extinguished the light on his side of the bed as if to diminish himself. “But I’ll work it off. No choice in the matter.”

Eve felt a dry palm press idly against her wrist. She looked Harriet square in the face and said softly, “Do you want me to stay?”

“It’s up to Alfred.”

Bauer had not heard the question but knew what it was. “No, dear, it’s up to you.”

“Then it’s up to Eve.”

Eve said, “I’m rather tired.”

“Yes, we all are.” Harriet closed her eyes in the instant. “Get her out of here, Alfred.”

Bauer accompanied her down the stairs and to the door and even walked her to her car, gingerly on bare feet, for there were sharp little pebbles on the drive, some glinting up through the dark as if a jeweler had tossed them there. Trees drooped their gigantic shadows. She said, “You’ll freeze.”

“It’s not cold,” he said. “It’s almost balmy.”

“She’s not right, Alfred.”

“I know that.”

“Will she get better?”

He shook his bald head with a weariness that seemed to come over him all at once. “That I don’t know.”

“Poor Harriet.” She touched the hair on his chest and then slipped her hand into the front of his pajama bottoms. “I wish this was mine. All mine.”

“You haven’t said that in a long time.”

“The time wasn’t right,” she said, dipping down. Pebbles tore through her stockings into the hard flesh of her knees. His voice grew husky.

“She might be watching.”

“She never minded before. Why should she now?”

S
he was staying at his house three and four times a week, showing up at will. She no longer slept on the couch but in a bed set up for her in the room that had been his parents’, though now it seemed a child’s, a lamp burning through the night, the door left open. When she talked in her sleep, he could hear her. He never went into the room, not even when she called out from a troubled dream, knowing that if he did he very likely would not leave. There was a magical look about her in the morning when she crawled out of bed and made her way down the stairs, her hair gloriously tousled and her bright eyes blinking through a blur. She expected a kiss on the cheek, and he got into the habit of giving her one.

She made breakfasts that were edible. Suppers, however, were a challenge. The only time she cursed was when she overcooked something.

The pneumatic attachment to the screen door in back no longer worked. When let go, it slammed shut with a noise loud enough to wake the dead. “Sorry, my fault,” she said, appearing in an old T-shirt and baggy shorts. “I’ll fix it,” she said, rooting out a screwdriver and pliers from a bottom drawer in the kitchen. Something was electrically wrong with the front doorbell, which rang when no one was there. Eventually she fixed that too, amazing him.

“Who taught you?”

“I don’t know, Sonny. I’ve often wondered.” She glanced about, slim hands on slim hips. “Any other little jobs? I want to earn my keep.”

Just her being there gave something to him, though he did not tell her so. He suspected she knew.

“Want me to clean? I’ll clean.”

“I have a woman who comes in once a week,” he told her.

“House doesn’t look it.”

“She’s in Maine for the month.”

“Fire her. I’ll do the job.”

“That wouldn’t work.”

“How do you know?”

She mowed the lawn and brought the smell of grass into the house, along with blades of it on her sneakers. She picked and chewed wild spearmint growing on the sun side of the garage and carried in the scent on her fingers and breath. “I could live here and be happy,” she said.

“You only think you could.”

“I’d be great for you, Sonny. Don’t you know that?”

“I’m old enough to be your father.”

“Only if you had married young. And you didn’t.”

“You’re playing house,” he said. “In a few months you’d get tired of it.”

“I swear I wouldn’t.” She chewed more spearmint and raised her lips. “Kiss me and see how good I taste.” He passed, and she said, “I’m known for my audacity and stubbornness. Character traits, Dr. Stickney says. Do you mind them?”

“In time,” he said, “I think I would.”

“Dr. Stickney also says you — not you in particular, Sonny, but somebody like you — shouldn’t allow yourself sympathy for me because I won’t be easy to brush away. He says I’ll cling. Pieces of me will stick. I told him that’s what I want. Do you know what else I want?” She stretched out a hand, shapely fingers pressed together, thumb extended. “A key.”

“Why?”

“I never had one in any of those foster homes. If I was out and nobody was in, I had to wait. Didn’t matter what the weather was or how dark it got.”

“You have your own place now, your own key. You don’t need one here.”

“Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“In case I’m out in the cold.”

He gave her one. “It’s for now,” he said, “not forever.”

Forever meant nothing to her, for she did not believe in it. She believed the world was going to blow, if not in this decade then the next and if not by the Russians then by Reagan or someone like him. “Deep down isn’t that what everybody thinks?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I refuse to think that deep down.”

“Sue won’t either. She says it’s best not to.”

“Sue?”

“One of my roommates. I’ve told you about them. And them about you.”

“I’m not sure I like that. What do they think of your spending so much time here?”

“They want me to be happy.”

“And you’re happy here?”

“Absolutely. Sometimes it’s almost like we’re married, isn’t it?”

“No,” he said, “not in the least.”

Occasionally, sitting with her legs tucked under on the couch, she watched television but found little that amused her or contributed to her sense of reality. Only the better movies held her interest for an appreciable time. Her favorite actor was Jack Nicholson, the kind of man, she mused, who looked as if he did not wash under his arms.

“I hope that’s not what turns you on.”

“No, but it’s real,” she said.

He was standing near the couch. He let his eyes sink into her. “How real are you, Melody?”

“I bleed every month. That’s real.”

He did not mean to ask the next question. It simply flew out of his mouth. “Ever have an abortion?”

“Yes,” she said. “When I was twelve.”

• • •

The final week of August brought a heat wave, temperature approaching one hundred, humidity unbearable, records challenged. With the heat searing through his clothes and soaking his skin, he arrested a bare-chested youth in cut-off jeans who was selling sandwich bags of marijuana behind the bowling alley. The youth said, “If I ran, you couldn’t catch me. Would you shoot?”

“I don’t have to,” Dawson said. “I know your father.”

“No you don’t. You got me mixed up with my brother.”

The youth’s girlfriend was with him, her hair butchered in the punk style. She said, “You’re supposed to be a right guy.”

“I have my moments,” Dawson said, “but this isn’t one of them.” He busted her too, for possession.

Much later in the day he went to the home of a retired marine officer suspected of sideswiping two parked cars in the Shawsheen Plaza and then kissing off a VW camper that was coming the other way. The house, long and low, looked like a regimental barracks. He was confronted first by the bark of a dog and then by the massive plainness of the man’s stout wife, who was wearing garden gloves and nervously trimming a rose hedge, sweat drooling down her naked arms. “He’s on medication,” she said. “Come back tomorrow.” Dawson looked beyond her. The man, posted behind a screen door, said, “I didn’t hurt anybody. I did more damage to my car than to theirs.”

“We’ll let the insurance companies handle that. We’ll talk about the rest down at the station.”

“I can’t do that,” the man said.

The woman whispered, “He thinks he’s confined to quarters. You see, he’s punishing himself.”

Dawson squared his shoulders and said, “Come out, sir. That’s a direct order.”

At the station the desk sergeant, who had a headache from the heat and a knot in his stomach from paperwork, said, “Can I ask you a question, Sonny? Day like this, why the hell you makin’ pinches? I mean, Christ, this kinda weather, I’d think you’d be takin’ it easy.”

Dawson said, “I’m proving myself.”

“You got nothin’ to prove. Everybody loves you. You want, c’mere, I’ll give you a kiss.”

Billy Lord, who had just checked in with a couple of other officers, said, “How about giving me one instead? Might clear up this cold sore I’m getting. Hope it ain’t AIDS.”

“It could be,” the desk sergeant said. “Where’ve you had your mouth?”

“On your sister,” said Billy, rolling flat eyes. “I got tired of your wife.”

Dawson repaired to the basement, to his cubicle office, where the former marine officer was sitting beside the desk in a metal chair, his dry hands resting as dead things in the lap of his thin trousers. His slicked-back black hair, which was dyed, looking like a shoe shine, and a single unending line streaked across his brow like a fine wire keeping his large ears up. He sat erect at the sight of Dawson and said, “Shouldn’t I be in a cell?”

“No need for that, sir. Your wife will be here soon with the bondsman.”

“She’s a good woman, Sergeant. Keeps her area clean.” With a trembling hand he pawed into the flap pocket of his damp fitted shirt, white hairs steaming through the spaces between the buttons. “Mind if I smoke?”

Dawson sheltered a flame for the man’s unfiltered cigarette and used the opportunity to look into his deep-set eyes. The pupils were enormous. “What kind of medication are you on, sir?”

“Couldn’t tell you. Pills are all laid out for me three times a day. Big buggers, some of ’em.” He coughed, his face ghostly. “Whole world’s on medication, so I don’t feel different.”

“You don’t look good. You want water or something?”

“I’m fine.” His loaded eyes heaved forth. “You should wear your uniform, Sergeant. You got the leanness for it. Twenty-six years I was in, had every color woman in the world. That’s what I miss the most. The whores. Some you wouldn’t give two cents for, but some, Sergeant, you never forget.” His shoulders quivered as if he were having a small epiphany.

“I’ll get you water,” Dawson said to him, but he held up a hand.

“There was one, Sergeant, so sweet and special and young, fourteen at the most, I wanted to adopt her. But the wife wouldn’t hear of it.” The air went out of him. “Got any like that around here?”

Dawson took an extra breath. “Not in this town, sir. We don’t allow it.”

• • •

Done for the day, he did not go home. Instead he drove through the swelter of the town, the sun hanging low, the heat sticking in, and got onto Interstate 495, where he saw flashes of heat lightning. In less than a half hour he crossed the New Hampshire line and fifteen minutes later reached the coast, a beach in Rye, and wedged his car into an unlikely space off the hot road. The beach, which numbered among the smaller ones, was a bivouac of bright umbrellas, with a youthful crowd swarming the water’s edge and a speedboat frothing over distant waves. An ocean breeze drifted up.

He stripped to his chinos, rolling the legs up to his knees, and stashed his weapon and wallet in the trunk of the car. Halfway down the beach, he paused to relish the breeze against his chest. A man in a fisherman’s cap and swim trunks, his face and body pleasantly old, smiled with strong teeth and said, “Careful you don’t burn.”

“Sun’s low.”

“Don’t matter.”

He strode closer to the surf along a path between masses of cast-up pebbles as smooth as bird eggs. The sun blistered behind a plodding cloud. A woman with drawn-apart breasts running loose under her zebra-striped bathing suit asked him the time. He was not wearing his watch, but he gave her a good guess. “I didn’t think it was so late,” she said, gazing at his relative paleness. Her eyes crinkled with concern. “The sun’s still strong.”

“Yes, I’ve been warned.”

Somewhere on the beach kids were smoking dope. He could smell it, for the breeze had shifted. She sniffed it too. “You can’t stop them,” she said with careless resignation. “They all do it, my daughter included. If not here, then somewhere else.”

She moved off smartly, the stripes of her suit apportioning her body with a vibrancy it did not quite deserve. She took shelter under an umbrella, and he wandered farther down the surf, fewer bathers, a multitude of sea birds, and goosestepped into the water, which was not as warm as he expected. A cold current sliced through his legs and soaked his chinos, outlining his loose change and the keys to his car. When a wave wet him everywhere, he came out and lay on pebbles to dry off, his face to the sun.

He fell asleep for at least ten minutes, though no more than fifteen. He woke with a start and sat up with an ache. Bright voices of girls surrounded him, a bevy of nymphets in the scantest of suits, chattering away as if he were not there. At times their language was offensive, downright vulgar. Somebody they did not like was a fucking asshole. Somebody’s mean mother was a cunt. Suddenly a hand swept at him like a hot ray.

“You’re burning,” said the woman in the zebra stripes, which were now providing her soft belly swell with an illusionary rippling of muscles. Her hand, which had never actually touched him, floated away. “Mostly your chest,” she informed him gravely. He looked down at himself, and when he looked back up she was gone.

The girls had drifted closer to the surf, and some were venturing into it. Some were talking to a lifeguard, a husky towheaded youth who idly reached deep into his trunks and shifted his genitals. One girl had dropped onto the sand and was lying on a propped elbow with her salt-scaled legs angled into an attitude of running. Dawson, though he sensed somebody approaching him from behind, could not take his eyes off her. She looked nothing like Melody in the face, but the dark auburn of her luxuriant hair was the same, and the long loping line of her body was similar. A voice thudded down at him.

“Look at ’em long enough, they’ll drive you crazy.” It was the man in the fisherman’s cap. “They’ll also put you in jail if you’re not careful.”

Dawson rose to his feet, his chinos soggy and clumsy. He stood taller than the man but only because he was on a higher rise of pebbles.

“Rule of thumb is pick on somebody your own age. Gets you in less trouble.” The man smiled with his strong teeth. “Name’s Paul,” he said and stuck out a hand.

Dawson shook it. “Sonny.”

“Cop, ain’t you?”

“How’d you know?”

“I was watching when you drove up. I saw what you put in your trunk. I used to carry one myself, thirty-two years, town of Rye. In fact, I was chief. Guess I know about everybody in town, including the summer crowd. That girl lying down there in the bitty bathing suit, her family’s been coming here since she was four. She’s fifteen now, do you believe it? They bloom fast nowadays.”

“Too fast.”

“Glad you realize that.”

Dawson felt a weary give to his shoulders and a guilt he did not expect. “You’re reading me wrong.”

“I just don’t want you to get yourself in trouble. One cop to another.”

With no desire to argue or defend himself, Dawson said, “I’ll be leaving now.”

“Yes, Sonny. A damn good idea.”

• • •

No lights were visible in his house, but her little car was in the drive, which surprised him. Her place in Boston, she had told him, had air-conditioning; his did not. He moved quietly out of his car into the dark air, which was breathless and clammy. It was worse inside the house, for the heat of the day had collected. In the kitchen he switched on a light and called her name and heard only insects ticking away outside the window. Stiffly he climbed the stairs and peered past the open door into the room that had become hers. The little night lamp was unlit. He took one step in and stopped. Moonlight shredding in through a tree patterned her. Clad only in her brief underwear, she lay on the bed in the same attitude as the girl on the beach.