The Darling (40 page)

At the time, there seemed nowhere else to go, so I drove to New Bedford. And no one else to turn to, so I turned to Carol. I wanted to erase as much of the last seven years of my life as possible. I wanted to be like one of those husbands who leaves the house for a loaf of bread and disappears for seven years and then one day shows up again on the doorstep and is welcomed back into the family, as if he’d never left it.

It was late when I pulled up in front, nearly ten o’clock, and there was no one on the street. The house was the same sad, sorry triple-decker in need of repairs and paint, with laundry drying on clotheslines out back, uncollected trash at the curb, and a pair of beat-up old cars on cinder blocks in the driveway. Empty beer cans and soda bottles and fast-food wrappers cluttered the stoop. The tenants who’d earlier sat out there drinking and socializing, now that their sweltering apartments were habitable again, had retreated to their TVs and bedrooms, leaving their refuse behind.

The tag under the third-floor mail slot still had Carol’s name on it—and mine, too: D. Harrington. I pushed open the door and stepped into the dark, musty hallway and reached automatically for the wall switch next to the door. I flipped on the low-wattage lights and followed them up two flights of bare stairs to the landing at the top, inhaling the familiar smell of moldy old linoleum, corned beef and cabbage, and stale cigarette smoke.

I knocked lightly at first. No answer. Maybe she’s asleep. I knocked again, more forcefully. Someone, a woman in high heels, approached from inside. That’s not Carol, I thought. A barefoot gal, Carol never wore shoes at home, let alone high heels. Someone’s replaced me, someone kinder than I, someone who, late at night, tells her the truth about herself.

A familiar, lilting voice called, “Who’s there?” It
was
Carol.

“It’s me. Dawn.”

“
Don?
Oh, my God!
Don!”
The door swung open, and she came rushing towards me. We flung our arms around each other and kissed on the lips, and then stepped back and looked at each other, grinned shyly like kids, and hugged again. “I can’t believe it!” she said. “Wow! Don! You look the exact same as you used to. Except your hair’s a lot longer.” She lifted my hair off my shoulders and hefted it in both hands, framing my face.

“It’s gotten pretty gray,” I said, and felt oddly conscious of my looks. “In this light you just can’t see it.”

Laughing, she pulled me into the apartment and locked the door. In high heels, she was as tall as I. Her hair had grown out, too, a mass of dark curls that she wore loose over her shoulders like a shawl, and she was wearing makeup, elegantly applied eye shadow and rouge, which was new, and a simple black dress with spaghetti straps. Very chic. I touched the tattoo of a rose on her bare shoulder. “I remember that,” I said softly. “Look at you. How beautiful you are. You must be just going out. Or just coming in?”

“These are my work clothes,” she said brightly.

“Oh.”

She saw my expression and hurried to explain that she was still working at the same restaurant, the old Clam Shack. She’d been promoted from waiting tables to assistant manager and hostess. “But it’s a kind of like a fern bar now, called The Pequod. I’ll tell you everything,” she said. “There’s so much news. And I can’t wait to hear all about you. I’m sure
you’ve
got news. I’ve even heard a little of it already,” she said and walked down the hall ahead of me.

“What? Who from?”

“You’ll see,” she answered and disappeared into the living room. I could hear the television, the chatter and buzz of a baseball game. “Guess who’s here,” she sang.
Bettina must be about nine now,
I thought.

But no child was there. The person slumped in the couch watching television was Zack. My one-time comrade-in-arms, my fugitive traveling companion.
Impossible
, I thought.
I’m dreaming
. But no, it was he, all right, the grand deceiver and unapologetic schemer, just as shocked to see me standing in the doorway off the hall as I was to see him slouched on Carol’s couch in front of the TV, a big blue can of Foster’s lager in one mitt, a bunch of pretzels in the other.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “The gang’s all here.” He smiled broadly, flashing those fabulous teeth and glittery blue eyes, then stood up and wrapped me in his long arms. He was unshaven and had put on weight and developed an early paunch, which made him seem not merely a very tall man, but a very large man.

Carol beamed like a proud parent. Zack aimed the remote at the TV and snapped off the sound. “So, babe, what brings you to our fair city?” He lighted a cigarette, sat back down, stretched out his long legs and crossed them at the ankles. He wore khakis and a tee shirt and sneakers, and looked like a factory worker after a long day on the line.

“I should be asking that of you,” I said.

“
Me?
I live here. Welcome to our humble abode,” he said, and then added, “Missus Sundiata.”

Mrs. Sundiata?
I laughed, as if he’d been uncannily witty, and quickly asked Carol, “Where’s Bettina? How old is she now?”

“Nine and a half, in fourth grade. Amazing, huh? She’s at my mom’s. She stays there ’cause we both work nights on Fridays and Saturdays. Me at The Pequod and Zack in his cab. We only just came in ahead of you,” she said. “You hungry? We were gonna order in Chinese.”

I said sure, and Carol kicked off her shoes and headed for the kitchen, and I followed. Zack hit the remote and went back to his game.

As soon as we were out of his hearing, I said, “So he’s actually
living
here? With you and Bettina?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of weird, I guess. But we’re okay together. For now, anyway. What do you want, fish or meat or what?” She pulled a Chinese restaurant flyer from a stack of take-out menus on the table by the phone. The kitchen smelled of fresh paint and looked clean and well kept. More so, certainly, than when I lived here.

“I don’t care. Anything. You know me.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know you.”

She dialed and ordered, and when she hung up the phone I asked her how long she and Zack had been together. “As a couple, I mean.”

“Only about six weeks. Since he got out.”

“Out?”

“I’ll let Zack tell you the whole story. It’s pretty complicated. But he was in prison over in Plymouth, the federal prison, sort of a minimum-security place.”

“Prison?”

“He’ll tell you. Six months was all. Anyhow, one day out of the blue he calls me up, and we talked, and then I started going out there to visit him. He didn’t have anyone else to visit him, and I felt sorry for him. Even though him and you ran out on me like you did. But he explained all that. I got over it.”

“I… I’m sorry about that, Carol. At the time—”

“Yeah, it’s okay. I’m over it. Anyhow, we started writing letters and all, and before you know it we’d gotten real close and all. So when he was released, it seemed sort of natural for him to move in with me. He’s been real sweet. He helped fix up the apartment and everything. He even got his old job back driving a cab. Different company, of course. The other company went out of business, so nobody remembered how he ran out on them. When you and him went to Africa back then.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “You do know Zack lied to me about that. We never really had to leave, or at least I didn’t. But I thought—”

Zack suddenly appeared beside me. “Fucking Yankees,” he said and grabbed a fresh can of beer from the refrigerator. “You filling in the details for ‘Dawn’?” he asked Carol.

“You tell me your story, Zack, and I’ll tell you mine,” I said.

He sat down at the table. “You’ll show me yours if I show you mine? Sounds fair. Except I already know yours.”

“C’mon, Zack, be straight with me.” I sat across from him and gave him a hard stare. Carol stood behind me with a friendly hand on my shoulder. “How do you know my story?” I asked him.

“A guy I met knows you.”

“And who might that be?”

“Okay, babe, I’ll tell you everything,” he said. He had done very well in Accra buying and selling Ghanaian arts and antiquities. He’d bought himself a house, set up two galleries and a warehouse for selling work wholesale to galleries in the U.S. and Europe. A year ago he’d come across a private collection of very old gold and bronze masks and plaques and other artifacts from Benin owned by a retired British army colonel who had stayed on in Ghana after independence. The colonel had died, and his widow had asked Zack to sell the collection abroad. For his trouble he was to receive a third of the selling price. “This was a major collection, man. Museum-quality stuff. Off the scale. Probably worth two, two point five million at auction. But you’d have to show provenance, pay the auction house a fat commission, pay New York and federal taxes, all that. By the time I got my piece, it’d be a small piece. Besides,” he said, “I didn’t have an export license and couldn’t move the stuff out of the country myself without a Ghanaian partner, who’d probably want half of whatever I got. So I guess I had what you’d call a
Maltese Falcon
moment.”

He had painted over the gold and bronze artifacts—masks, wall hangings, statuary, and pendants—with gray, latex-based housepaint that could be removed without damaging the objects. He carried the objects to the States in his luggage and a beat-up cardboard box tied with heavy twine. Claiming that the lot was made up of cheap souvenirs not to be resold, he declared its value at six hundred dollars, and thought he’d made it, until the customs officer pulled out a pocketknife and scraped the paint off the chin of one of the gold masks. Zack’s family had refused to help him or even see him, and since all his property and cash were in Accra, he couldn’t raise bail and spent a month in jail in Charlestown awaiting trial. He had to accept a public defender and got sent to Plymouth for six months. “If I’d had a decent lawyer, I’d have gotten a suspended sentence.”

“If you hadn’t been greedy, you’d never have been arrested,” I said.

The doorbell rang, and Carol hurried off to meet the delivery man at the bottom of the stairs. “End of story,” Zack said. “It could’ve been worse. It was mostly white guys convicted of white-collar crimes, short-termers in for tax evasion, kiting checks, insurance fraud. Small fish, most of them. People were catching up on their reading and taking mail-order courses in art appreciation.”

“What about Carol?” I asked.

“What about her? She’s been great, man. My port in a storm. She came out to see me every week, when no one in my family would bother making the trip. When I got out, she picked me up and brought me here and said I could stay with her and Bettina till I got back on my feet. The rest is history, man.”

“You started sleeping together, I suppose.”

“First thing, man. You’re not jealous, are you?”

“A little. Yeah.”

Carol returned with the food and spread it out on the table, and the three of us ate and drank beer. After a few moments, I asked Zack again how he knew my story. I wasn’t convinced he did know it. When I left Accra I’d not told a soul where I was headed. I’d never written from Monrovia to him or any of his friends or mine and didn’t believe that anyone who knew me in Liberia also knew him.

“Actually, I figured you’d gone back to the States. A-mer-i-ka. But then I met an old friend of yours,” he said. “In Plymouth. One of the inmates. He claims to know you and your husband well. Very well.”

“Who? What’s his name?”

“Charlie. But he hates being called that. Charles is his name. I used to call him Chuck, just to piss him off.”

“Charles?”

“Charles Taylor,” he said. “Remember him? He got sent up about a month before I got out, so we weren’t exactly buddies. But I pegged him right away for an African, and I thought maybe he’s from Ghana. You can always tell an African black guy from an American black guy, even without hearing him. They walk differently. Turns out he’s Liberian. And turns out he knows your old man very well. And knows you pretty good, too. You ever sleep with him?”

“No! For Christ’s sake, Zack!”

“Too bad. He lied. African guys, man, they want you to think they’ve fucked every white woman they ever said hello to. Anyhow, he told me a whole lot of other stuff, which I assume
is
true. Stuff about you and your kids and all, and about your husband, Woodrow, who Charlie thinks dropped a dime on him so he’d get nailed by the feds when he got to JFK. True?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said. “More pathetic, actually.”

Carol said, “I think it’s great you have kids, Don. I bet you’re a terrific mother.”

“Not so terrific,” I said.

“You know, you are a damned attractive woman,” Zack said suddenly, as if it had just that second occurred to him. “You both are,” he continued. “Two incredible-looking women!”

I looked at Carol. He was right about her, at least. She smiled, as if agreeing with Zack—about me, anyhow. A cascade of memories washed over me, memories of Carol when we first found solace and simple pleasure in each other’s arms. In different ways, even though most of my injuries had been internal and self-inflicted, we’d both in a sense been battered women. She’d been victimized by men generally; I’d been victimized by ideology. In each other, we’d both for the first time found someone we could trust. More than anything else, simple tenderness and intimacy were what we wanted then. We were too weak and shaken to be alone, and too wounded and confused to be with another person. Especially with a man. I’d invalidated and tried to overthrow all the old forms of tenderness and intimacy between men and women—missionary-position sexual relations, monogamy, fidelity, state-recognized and -regulated marital roles and responsibilities, even childcare—and afterwards found myself with nothing to replace those forms. I’d deliberately set out to shatter in mere months a social structure that had taken fifty thousand years to harden. It was like jumping from a ship that was in no danger of sinking and finding myself alone in a tiny rowboat in the middle of the ocean.

I’d chosen to abandon that ship, but Carol had been tossed off hers. The captain and crew had left her on a desert island, a castaway. One night I rowed solemnly, hopelessly, to shore, and there we were, the two of us, marooned together. I figured her for a working girl right off, barely twenty, heavy eye makeup, miniskirt, and fishnet stockings—the whole uniform. She stood at the end of the bar nursing a drink made with grenadine, trying to look exotic and available for a reasonable price to the crowd of half-drunk construction workers and fishermen bonding beneath the TV screens and around the pool table. A blow job in the parking lot, a quickie in the men’s room with the door locked, or an hour in a motel out on Route 28—it’s all the same to her, I figured, merely a way, the only way available, to pay the rent and buy food for herself and her kid and maybe get high enough to ignore for another day the way she makes her living. Until, of course, the drugs turn on her, and the way she makes her living becomes the only way she can get the money to get high. I could see by her stoned gaze, her flattened, self-amused affect, that she was on the verge of that turnaround.
In six months,
I thought,
she’ll be doing tricks strictly to get high
.