Mysteries of Motion (26 page)

“I ate,” he said, listless. “After they left. The restaurant. Safest place.”

She recoiled. Garments hung behind her pressed against her, clustering. “You—ate?”

“He took them for four hundred thousand,” he said. “I introduced him. I never thought he couldn’t pay.” His head swiveled away, then back. “I didn’t have my gun, you know. By the way—where is my gun?” He fisted her lightly above the breast, half grinning winsomely. Vivie had always been stealing his gun, for his own protection. His sister was becoming the surrogate in spite of herself. He knew.

“I’ll have to turn on the bedroom light.”

“Okay, dolly. I’ll stay here.”

In the bedroom, taking the gun from the corner where she’d blindly stashed it again, she was arrested by the calling card lying on the bed. Smiling, she picked it up. So that’s how he spells his name, without an
h.
And yes, there it was—the address: One Gulf & Western. She gave it a peculiar smile. She knew well enough that you couldn’t see it from here.

How clean the card looks, how businesslike, almost chill. Just the name and the address, not even the company. A million miles away, and who knows how many dollars, from lives full of—clean breaks. She left it on the bed. Dousing the light.

Ollie was looking up at all her old files, stacked on shelves built around pipes which led upstairs to his kitchen. Not a good place for them, as she knew. “Here—” she said behind him.

He whirled around. “Jesus…Oh…I’m all jumps…Thanks.” The gun went in a sweater pocket at a crazy angle. At once he was nonchalant. “Now, promise me. Two hours, no more, you be out of here, okay?”

“Why should I?”

“It has to do with me, girl. I told you. They can’t conceive of loyalty.” The word purled. “Sure as Christmas, they’ll come.”

“For you. Not for me.”

He stamped his foot. “Jolly damn.” An island oath. Vivie’s.

“It’s your mouth they want to shut.”

“Mouth?” He shuddered. “They are not so discriminating.” Drawing her into the closet, he bunched her hands in his. “Honey—” It was almost an embrace. “For the house. They’ll go for the house.” He was sweating. “I have it on good authority. We have till 5
A.M.
”

It was the “we” half-convinced her, and that he was shivering. The clothes she and he were pressed against smelled hot of her own scent, lost between their two bodies, which were front to front as if to copulate, though he and she had always been sibling dead to each other. She saw that his face at last had no girlish pout anymore. Ten years from now, at fifty-odd, he would be what? She had no doubt he would be alive, somewhere. But this was the way she would see him, the two of them, closeted. She saw the buckle of his shoe.

He’s all provocation. Yes, why not? They’ll bomb the house.

He watched her glance out at the room, at her bookshelves and up at the files. She saw herself blown out of here into that freedom from possessions which so few could achieve on their own.

“Look, sis. You want the house, you can have it. There’s enough insurance, you want to repair later. The land is yours, from now on. I shan’t ever claim, I swear. But you must go now.”

Moving her head carefully not to knock the bulb, she broke away from him and flicked on every light in the house. Shrinking back from the glare, his face worked like a bladder. She saw the Garuda he would be.

“Never, then?” she said. “Ever? No money from me to you? No letters for it. For bail, for anything? Not from jail, not from anywhere. Understand? I’m not to be Vivie to you? Ever?” She wasn’t fool enough to ask his promise. Only enough to promise herself what maybe Vivie after all foresaw. That the stone itself, by its own doing, might relieve her of it.

“A—real clean break?” His big lip actually quivered. When she said nothing he whistled. “I’ll—miss that rocker.”

“You want to wait with me here instead?” she said, dry. “Bull it through, together?”

He did blanch at that. So it was true then. They would come.

“Do as I say.” The dead voice he must beat his girls with. He never damaged the goods. “Veronica.” Of a sudden he quirked at her winningly. “Please?”

Fascinated, she nodded. The alternative love and cruelty that members of his profession had to supply must make them supple as wands.

He heaved a sigh. “Five o’clock then, better make it. Five-thirty at the latest. And—” he hesitated. “And—don’t go upstairs.”

On his way out, he went right past the rocker. Not that he wouldn’t miss it. Just that he had many sentiments.

From the door he leaned back in. “You’re always going off on your own anyway, aren’t you?” he said lightly.

“Fix that gun in your pocket,” she said. “Liable to shoot yourself in the heart.”

She didn’t watch him from the window as Vivie would have done. He always got away, into rabbit holes near or far. His problem was staying away—from the crooked ruts he loved, for which he would violate any parole, even self-imposed. As those boys were sure to know. Never a sincere criminal, never able to convince them of it, he was most in danger from the bad company he admired, over whose superstitions he yet had a certain sway.

I’m getting tired of this window, she thought. I’d have had to leave it soon anyway. I’m tired of what it puts on me. Not that she ever expected to escape from what life had put on her, any more than Ollie could. But she was tired of this version of it. If she forgot her race more than most—or more than she should, some said—it was because in her work she saw how people were divided socially by primitive inner gaps as deep or even deeper than any the world put on them in the form of money or bloodlines, or skin.

There was the gap between the sick and the well. There was the gulf between those who had their dead already behind them, and those who didn’t yet. The gap she was thinking of, and it was a social one, lay between those who had or hadn’t clung to their own people. The final rabble, avoided even by one another, were those whose close family members, once strayed, were not merely lost but no longer counted upon. For there were tragedies of loss and shame the world over, but in the right sort of tribe even such lost persons were held consciously in the fold, ticked off by story or memory—accounted for. The worst blot was not to know where a family member was.

Ollie had made Vivie and her feel that way. Even though he was always coming back, they could seldom say where he was, even if they knew. One day, by some underworld twist they might never hear of, he was doomed not to pop up again. That was the real reason Vivie had held off from those Bejan island clans always proudly mapping their tributaries present and absent. It might be why, in her own travels, Europe centerstream didn’t please her, and why she had fled the wedged villages of France. And hadn’t been made comfortable by skin alone, in some parts of Africa.

Take up your bag now, baby. Kept always at the ready, packed with those cosmetic and medical needs which increased each year like one’s weight, plus those charmingly interchangeable clothes which chemists now pressed upon one like an ideology—she half despised it. She glanced swiftly about her, her heart missing a beat, and ran to the desk. Always at the last minute before leaving here, she almost forgot. As if she wanted to leave it here, the one lover to be permanent. Stuff it in the bag now, the original manuscript. A copy, kept updated, was in the bank. The key to the bank went into her purse, its duplicate being with Tom, who’d said when she gave it, “Mentally, I’m your nearest relative.” She took the original with her everywhere.

Not that she fully believed her stepbrother—but Ollie was never trustworthy enough to be disbelieved on all points. She’d go to her office, where she often spent the hours from midnight on, until time to take a morning plane. There was a whole such afterlife in high office buildings all over the world—as if those huge unwalled fortresses could no longer be left to the ministrations of night cleaners, as if the world no longer could be.

Often she saw hired limousines arriving or drawing away with clients for whom the dawn hour might be either late or early. Tom had urged her to use a chauffeured car at such hours, but she never had; at times she had to be poorer than some, humbler than some, in order to be her old self, still embarking. Last two times up to Montreal, she’d taken the train along the Hudson, watching for the small, yellowed island—was it before Poughkeepsie or after?—on which lay Bannerman’s durably ruined castle, whose roofless crenellations and broken spaces were what her overannotated poem might come to be. This time there were plane tickets in her purse. Then would come those children chirruping in the square, and in other city parts she would search out. Work was the best travel.

Good-bye, desk. As she turned away, the rocker’s viciously short prong caught her ankle; it had been kicking them all for years. “No—you can’t come back!” Vivie yelled from it into the phone, to Ollie in New Orleans, down there on his third lam in a year, fifteen years ago, the time he’d secretly invited his young sister to go along. “No, I’ve rented it to somebody,” Vivie’d said, duller. “The whole house.” This time, she’s really trying to get rid of him, the younger Veronica had thought, from behind. “Vivie. Listen. He only asked me along for company. I could’ve always come back.” Vivie had reached out—and slapped. Later, the tenant complained that their “son from South America” had had the nerve to let himself in and out of the place, with his key. Ollie, taxed with this on one of his hideaway calls, had yelled back, “You think I want to—that ratty old house? You think I like to go in there?” Why had he then, his sister had asked when they all three were together again. “What did you do here? When you sneaked in.” He’d wrinkled his nose. No turban as yet. A broad leather hat, butternut soft, that she’d envied. “I dunno. Those velours drapes, ever sniff them?” he’d said, pointing. “I came and sniffed.”

Half across the room she could smell them now, heavy with the niches and coral glints of childhood. In the reaches which had lapped around Vivie, around their three. She walked over to them now, to draw them closed. Saw her own hand gripped on the tassel, where it always lingered. “What a fool I am,” she said aloud, and ran to get her own passkey. “What a—fool.” And ran out the door and up the stairs.

Loud colors get so shabby, when executed in paint. White floors get so dirty. Moorish arches hang by their matchstick portals, made in a Brooklyn woodyard. Rattan tables get picky here, soggy there. The looped bedcover droops from the sofa bed like a fallen breast. The girls have cleared out, leaving a pink cloy of face powder and champagne. Not the cleaning woman’s day. Ollie, who could always rise to an occasion once a plan had altogether failed, had thought of everything.

She found what she was looking for in the kitchenette, wired to the oven clock. She’d never seen a time bomb before. Nor likely had Ollie. The thing hung from the oven door like a sick black bat. It looked like all of Ollie’s contraptions, as if it just might work. If she turned back the clock, though? She crept forward, not daring to. She gave the clock a bitter smile. It was set for seven o’clock. There was also a smell of gasoline.

Was he trying to pull a fast one on those louts—to make them think some ally had already taken care of him? She’d never seen any of this new crowd more than in a brush on the stairs, but knew from Ollie’s boasts what they were like—like all his crowds, routinely too smart for him. Or was he doing it for the insurance—odd of him to know how much? For which, as total owner, she’d be such a plausible front. To be applied to, later.

She bowed her head, in Vivie’s old attitude. Repetitive grief was gulled grief. Her head whipped back. Call the bomb squad—why not? Up near the curved ceiling there was now a weight lift and a leg exerciser hanging from hooks on which the shelves for her father’s books used to be. So long dead, he and her own mother, so honorably. Did such deaths still fund hope? Was it possible that Ollie had been funded by Vivie’s? For she did half-feel that admiring tug of the heart-brain when a life reverses itself in front of your eyes, as possibly a better one than thought.

She drew away, carefully stepping backward, shutting the outer door infinitesimally slow behind her, as if it led to a house of cards. Not because of the bomb only. Ollie’s good instincts were not like other people’s. Even his reforms could have a ramshackle guile. Yet it was possible, the way even a swami’s dreams of self-magic can be. Possible that he too, her brother Ollie-Ali, was at last tired of this house’s version of his life.

Leave his gamble to simmer there, then. At the worst she would be an accessory after the fact—for both of them.

Minutes later she was ready to go, dressed in a floating but serviceable gray, whipping a gray scarf around her head and neck, even enjoying the self-drama of rising from these dead steppingstones out into the cloudy walkabout, with her spirit handy to her flesh and vice versa—when the phone rang.

A preliminary? One of Ollie’s crowd, checking it out? Taking care of it ourselves, boys. Won’t answer it.

Or her brother. Reneging again. Vivie was never able either. Not to answer.

“Yes?”

A choking. Or a groan. From a wounded throat.

It’s the one they thought they killed, flashed through her. Ventura. Calling from somewhere, for Ollie. Or Ollie, himself? They got to him. The phone cord twined from her, blood-clotted.

“Will you—eat with me?” the man said.

The phone slid from her. She bent to pick it up, the house sliding neatly after and from under her, without ever a bomb. The drop came when you looked up and saw where other people still normally were. Up there, up. In that dialogue where I was only two hours ago. What can I answer him?

Her name was coming to her like a pulse, breathed in her hand. She brought it to her ear.

“Veronica. You all right?”

I’m all right, in my own way. But if I open up to you, I’ll whimper.

“Please, I know you’re there.”

She swallowed. “Tell me your name? Again?”

That was a strange sound he made.

“Mulenberg. John Mulenberg.”

She saw him clearly, everything he was. If he were standing here in his full strength the floor would humanely provide itself under her again. And she would delude herself that she could get to him for more than a night.