Phantom (12 page)

A woman entered the bar and, after a quick
glance around, sat on a stool next to Michael. Right on time, he
thought. Just as he had cued the arrival of the noisy trio by
remarking how quiet it was, so their little story had cued the
entrance of this shady lady. The only cue in the bar that wasn't
working was the exclamation point: so far it had failed to produce
a single laugh. Ted must have known the woman because he brought
her a rye and ginger without having to be told. Then he stared at a
large jar full of pickled eggs, perhaps trying to guess their
number.

"Hi," the woman said with a smile.

"Hi," Michael said.

"The place is busy tonight."

"Quite a crowd," Michael agreed with a touch
of sarcasm. It was easier and safer to take a look at her in the
mirror behind the bar. She had the bright, artificial face of a
child's doll. It probably took her longer these days to assemble
all the components, but she hadn't reached the stage where no
matter what she did she would always look frayed. That might be the
next comer, but she hadn't quite got to it yet.

"My name is Vy," she said. "Short for
Viyella, as in Viyella shirts—how's that for a name? Everybody
calls me Vy. What about you?"

"Dave," Michael said. It was his middle
name.

"That's a nice solid name,"
Vy said. "I find names fascinating, don't you? My first husband was
named Orlando and everybody called him Or, which sounds funny but
actually suited him very well. He could never figure out what kind
of person he was going to be or what he was going to do. He was a
kind of human
or
,
stuck between all kinds of alternatives and directions, never
knowing which of them to take up. He was an
or
all the time I knew him. Probably
still is, the poor bastard."

The more Vy talked, the less Michael wanted
to hear. He asked just one polite question-—"Do you live in
Lynnhaven?"—and that was all Vy needed to grab the conversational
reins.

"Lynnhaven's a funny old town," Vy said.
"Cute and dumb, you know? It's kind of nice, I suppose, but it sure
isn't the liveliest place in the world. In fact, it's pretty darn
slow when you come right down to it."

Michael nodded agreeably. There was no point
in telling her that was one of the reasons he liked the town.

"I've been thinking of leaving," Vy went on.
"But I don't know where I'd go, that's what's keeping me here. I've
been like this for the last six months—how's that for indecision?
Ever since Ralph died. Maybe I'll go to Arizona or Oregon, I hear
they're still real natural. But then, I remember reading something
about the Mafia taking over Arizona. I guess it's only a matter of
time." .

She's not shady, Michael decided. She's just
a birdbrain. Now it seemed to him that, yes, this was a silly
little excursion he was on. He had a wife and son and plenty of
booze at home, so what was he doing in a nameless joint like this?
What was he looking for? Nothing, really. Just a pleasant walk, a
beer in a local bar and another pleasant walk home. That was
enough. Enough to remind him of what he was lucky to have. The
world was full of bruised souls and stunted personalities, like Vy
and Ted and those potted plants over there. People with not a whole
lot going for them. Even Linda, his own wife—where would she be
without him? She was a good person, and full of love, but could she
hold herself together alone if she had to? Did she have the
necessary inner strength? Michael wondered. Of course, Ned would be
there, but a child can be as much a drain as a help. If anything
ever happened to Michael, Linda would need all the help she could
get. Including, eventually, another man. She just wasn't the kind
of person who could make it alone. Perhaps Michael should increase
his life-insurance coverage, so that Linda would have plenty of
cushion if the unthinkable ever came to pass. You can never be too
secure.

" ... on the rebound," Vy was saying. "So
Bruno and I got married, just like that. That's the kind of people
we were. But the whole thing lasted only one week. We went to Haiti
for our honeymoon, which was handy because you can get a divorce
there too, pronto, which we did. Don't ask me why, who knows about
marriage? It's a funny business, that's all I can say. Anyhow, I
found out later that Bruno was running guns into Nicaragua and he
got very rich. Just my luck. He sold guns to both sides, all
sides—that's the beauty of free enterprise. But what a way to make
a living. I finally understood why he was such a nervous guy."

Vulnerable, Michael thought. Yes, that was
one part, a large part, perhaps, of what had attracted him to
Linda. She was one of life's vulnerable people. She needed to be
looked after and protected. She was his special project for life,
and just thinking about it gave Michael a good feeling inside.

"Funny the things you think of when you're
in a bar with strangers," Michael said absently. "Things that never
occur to you at any other time or place."

"You're telling me," Vy agreed.

Michael looked at the woman again. Not bad,
really, he had to admit. Something of a good shape there, too. He
might almost find her attractive. If he thought about it for a
while.

Good thing he was a happy man.

* * *

9. Under the Half
Moon

Before bed.

Sitting by the window.

He and the spa were a film playing over and
over again in his mind.

Then the scarecrow moved in the light of the
half moon.

Broomstick arms, first one, then the other,
swung around to wave and point.

At Ned.

* * *

10. Linda

She was waiting for a sign.

Her husband thumbing through
the latest issue of
Business
Week
? Her son quietly watching "Buck
Rogers" on TV? The slosh and hum of the dishwasher in the kitchen?
No, none of these.

Linda thought the problem might be that she
was still overly romantic. Too much Wordsworth in college, or
something like that. You could spend a lifetime waiting for a sign
that the ideal, the idyllic, the dream had begun. But it would
never happen. Even when every circumstance seemed to be right and
the dream within your grasp .... How hard it was to close your
fingers around it. Memories? You could try to cast them in a magic
light, but at the same time you knew they were only ordinary.

But Linda was waiting for another kind of
sign. One that would herald the arrival of trouble. It was not
something Linda looked forward to, but neither was she so foolish
as to assume it would never come. Having only one child heightens
your awareness of dangers. The sign, if and when it came, could
mean anything, but what she feared most was illness. Although Ned
seemed to be a perfectly healthy boy he could be carrying her own
physical weaknesses in him like a time bomb.

There are many myths and misconceptions
about asthma. Friends in Washington had told Linda she was crazy to
move to the shore, that the damp sea air would kill her. Go to
Arizona, they urged her. But asthma affects different people in
different ways, and Linda had learned the hard way that a dry
atmosphere was much more likely to trigger an attack in her. Even
here, in Lynnhaven, they had to have humidifiers on both floors of
the house. Another annoying notion was that asthma was purely a
mental problem. She had lost count of the number of smug people who
had nodded sagely and recommended a good psychiatrist to her. Of
course, stress influenced it, but asthma was still a very real
physical affliction. The sanest, most well-adjusted people in the
world could suffer devastating attacks. But the most distressing
misconception was that asthma developed in childhood. If that were
true Linda could have begun counting the days until Ned would be
safe. A few more years and he would be into adolescence. But asthma
could and did surface at any time in a person's life. In many cases
it didn't emerge until one was fully adult. So, every day that
passed with Ned in good health did offer some relief for Linda, but
also seemed to renew the threat. You can never be sure, you can
never be safe.

And asthma was only one of many
possibilities. A child might suffer and die from a million
different things. Drugs and street violence might have been left
behind in Washington (at least, she hoped so), but Lynnhaven was
still something of an unknown quantity, and it would be a mistake
to regard it as a true sanctuary. A cut from a rusty fish hook, a
cut so small Ned wouldn't even mention it, could bring on
tetanus.

Linda recognized the old trap and once more
pulled herself out of it: the more you worried about things, the
more things you found to worry about. And down that road lay the
twin pitfalls of fatalism and paralysis. Linda knew that the proper
attitude was one of vigilance.

Michael was so calm about these things. They
didn't seem to bother him at all. She would like to be that way, to
be able to take each day as it came, naturally and competently.
That's what Linda had always admired about her husband, even years
ago when he had still had a lot of boyishness about him. It was a
measure of competence she felt all too lacking in herself. Nor was
Michael one of life's sleepwalkers. He knew who he was and what he
was doing, and he built his life on that foundation. It was a sense
of certainty that Linda clung to, even if it did infuriate her at
times.

Maybe the trouble was that she and Michael
seemed to have so little time together alone. The last time they
had been away by themselves was—God, five or six years ago, when
they had left Ned with his grandparents in Buffalo and gone to
Montserrat for a week. Since then, not even a hasty overnighter in
a Maryland motel. Yes, it would definitely be good for them to get
away for a while. But it was not going to happen this year, she
knew. They had already spent a lot of money on the house and there
was still a good deal of work to be done.

They had come a long way, she and Michael,
since the days when they'd been students together at Boston
University. From there they'd gone to Pennsylvania, where Michael
did graduate work. Then Washington, the exciting adventure that,
somewhere along the line, had downshifted into everyday life. Linda
hated to think of her old art history texts, dusty now and packed
away in cartons in the cellar. She couldn't remember the last time
she had gone to an exhibition or picked up a new art book. With
Michael, the change could be seen in the way he had taken to the
dull security of his government job; he no longer talked about
moving to one of the prestigious private firms, much less branching
out on his own.

It's called life, Linda reflected. Sooner or
later, one way or another, you have to strike a truce and settle
in.

Now, Lynnhaven. The move from the city. A
whole house, not just an apartment. Four acres of land. The next
rung on the endless American ladder that goes-where? Maybe that's
what it's really all about: the movement, the semblance of change
that eventually took the place of change itself. But how could
Linda fault it? What more did she want?

Friends. Now that she thought about it,
Linda wondered if she hadn't really been speaking about herself
when she told Michael that Ned needed friends. Here she was with a
child to watch over and a marriage as comfortable as an old
chair—but no neighbor close enough to do things with, to talk to,
no friend of her own.

In Washington there had been acquaintances,
other wives and some good neighbors in the apartment building. But
the move to Lynnhaven had reduced contact with those people to
occasional telephone calls and vague promises at both ends of the
line to get together soon. Is something happening to me? Linda
wondered. Do you suddenly become old and boring when you move from
a city to a small town? One thing she knew for sure: when you move
you lose touch in many ways.

Even with Janice, and that was perhaps the
most distressing part. Janice Roberts was Linda's best friend in
Washington, and yet in just a few months it seemed they were
becoming strangers to each other. They still talked on the
telephone, but the conversations now tended to be short and
newsy-almost to the point of being impersonal. It was worrying, but
Linda tried to convince herself that they were just going through
one of those temporary lulls that occur in all relationships once
in a while.

Linda and Janice knew each other from
college in Boston, but their friendship didn't really blossom until
they met again by chance in Washington. Janice had landed a job
with a small but up-and-coming public relations firm and had
settled into a tiny apartment on the fringe of Georgetown, not far
from where Michael and Linda were living. As well as being old
schoolmates, the two women complemented each other in certain ways.
Janice was living alone and making a career for herself, while
Linda was married and looking forward to raising children. It was a
friendship remarkably free of tension or competitiveness. Linda and
Janice were both happy with their own situations, and so they were
able to admire each other's strengths and abilities without
envy.

In Washington Linda and Janice did things
together regularly, whether it was visiting a gallery or seeing a
new film or play, or simply meeting for lunch and a bit of
shopping. Even after Ned was born they were still able to get
around almost as often as before, since Michael didn't mind taking
care of the infant for a few hours on a week night or a Saturday
afternoon. And Janice would baby-sit from time to time so that
Michael and Linda could go out together. Michael and Janice got
along well enough. Although he thought she was somewhat pretentious
and she found him rather stuffy, there was no antagonism between
them.