The Hazards of Good Breeding (17 page)

Jack flips the radio on and tunes in to the news. A fire in Belmont, a suicide gunman in Jerusalem, a new development in prostate cancer research. He is not really listening. Instead of exiting Route 2 in Lexington, though, he finds himself going on to 128, which will take him south toward Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. He flips the radio back off and without it, the car seems exceptionally quiet. There is the hum of air-conditioning, the faint crinkle of leather when Jack shifts gears, and, indistinctly, the sound of his own breathing.

The change in scenery as he enters Mattapan is abrupt: as soon as Jack has crossed the Neponset River, the squat, working- class suburban houses with window awnings and boxwood bushes give way to concrete and cheap pink bricks, auto repair shops, and metal-grate-covered storefronts. As he nears the border between Dorchester and Roxbury, Jack begins reading the street signs. Route 28 is Blue Hill Avenue here—which is where that woman was pulled out of the car last year and brutally murdered. He hits his automatic door lock, but slows down to take in his surroundings. Everywhere there are convenience stores advertising beer and spirits, wire fences and empty lots fluttering with newspaper, broken plastic bags, wind-worn candy wrappers. Ahead of him, the Hancock Building, with his office in it, swings into view on the horizon—a solitary glass rectangle that looks, from this unfamiliar angle, like the only building in the Boston skyline.

Tennis, Hiawatha, Dorset
. The street names become increasingly incongruous. It is a ridiculous thing to be doing—driving through Roxbury searching for—what? What does he even expect to do when he finds Rosita's house? He has seen the neighborhood. He should turn around right here. But his foot stays on the accelerator, firm and accurate. It crosses his mind that this disconnect between brain and body might be what it is to go insane. But the thought is like a tiny, irrelevant pair of arms waving in the rearview mirror. And then suddenly there it is, an ordinary green sign marked
CENTER
. It is both strange and familiar, like a note in his own handwriting he has found lying on the sidewalk.

The street is lined, on either side, by classic Boston triple-deckers with bars on the windows and saggy, derelict-looking porches, barren yards lined with chain-link fences or, occasionally, low, arched garden wire. It is unnaturally silent. There are only a few cars parked, and the shades in many windows are down. At the far end of the block there is a low, gray brick housing project with the words
FOUR PLAY
spray-painted over the doorway. Jack drives slowly, peering through security bars to make out door numbers. Thirty-seven is about halfway down on the left—a white aluminum-fronted triple-decker with dark, wormy-looking shingles along the side. Instead of a porch, there is a concrete stoop covered with plastic tubs, metal trays, and soggy spattered canvas cloths. In the first-floor window, a cardboard ghost from some long-gone Halloween is pressed between the pulled shade and the glass, as if it has been flattened in the process of escaping.

Jack puts the engine into idle, just for a moment, and keeps his hands firmly planted on the steering wheel. There is a spindly row of tomato plants along the back of the small yard, supported by neat green stakes and covered with a film of dust, and in the middle of the house, on the second floor, a blank, out-of-place-looking picture window. So this is the house. Funny that it has never occurred to him before to go find it. It feels hot even with the air-conditioning blasting and there is an odd, airless feeling in Jack's lungs as if they have forgotten how to absorb oxygen.

He is not sure how long he has been sitting, staring out at nothing, really, when he becomes aware that a van has pulled up behind him and a young man—a boy, really—has jumped out the passenger-side door and gone around to open the back doors. Jack has no idea how to account for his thoughts; it is as if they have been running through some subterranean obstacle course, from which he can hear only a distant thumping and clicking. He squeezes his eyes shut to bring things back into focus. He has work to take care of, papers he wants to look over before work tomorrow. When he opens his eyes again, he is aware of a man in overalls standing in the middle of the street with a bucket in each hand. Jack puts the car into reverse to edge out and looks over his shoulder. The man is standing absolutely still, staring. He is stocky and brown skinned and—Jack realizes with a jolt—absolutely familiar. Rosita's brother-in-law. At what seems to be the same moment the man takes a step closer and swears in Spanish. For the first time in years, since he was a boy, really, Jack experiences a kind of physical panic—his palms sweat and his mouth is dry and there is an explosive rattling feeling in his head, which can only think,
Get out, get out, get out
. As he pulls away from the curb, he can see the man in the rearview mirror—can hear him, actually, before he can see him. “Now you come,” he is calling, in heavily accented English. “
Now
you come!”

Inside Jack, under the dry, terrifying rattle of his brain, there is the rumbling, tectonic shifting of whole bodies of experience he has submerged, and below this, the profound ring of recognition.

13

T
HE MOMENT
R
OCK WALKS
in the door he can smell the pot smoke. His pot smoke. Or rather the smoke from his pot which he is not smoking. He is quite sure it's his. That distinctive wet leaf, almost mud smell that comes from the crop Don just got in.

As Rock closes the door behind him there is a loud gaspy laugh from the kitchen—Denise. Is Denise smoking his pot? With his keys dangling above the key dish, Rock freezes.

“Hello . . . ?” comes a male voice and Rock hesitates for a moment. Ste-fahn, a.k.a. Wendel. The guy
is
sleeping with Denise. Rock considers opening the door up again and backing out silently, shutting it softly behind him. But he can't do this—he'd probably end up knocking over the umbrella stand or slipping on the doormat; they would certainly hear him. “Anyone out there?” the voice comes again, followed by more hysterical, wheezy Denise laughter.

“It's Rock,” Rock says.

“Oh, shit,” Stephan says under his breath, but loud enough that Rock can hear him.

“Hi, Rock!” Denise calls brightly, and breaks into more laughter.

Rock drops his keys into the bowl and stands for a moment, staring at his own face inanely in the mirror above the mail table. He looks, quite visibly, panicked.

“How was your day?” Denise calls in the same bright, giggly voice. “Come in here and tell us.”

There is nothing to do but follow orders. Rock arranges his features into a casual but somewhat haughty expression and makes his way around the wicker obstacle course into the kitchen. Stephan is sitting next to the microwave on the counter and Denise is at the table with a pint of ice cream in front of her and her glasses propped up on her head, her eyes red and tearing with laughter. “Want some?” she offers, holding up the ice cream. “You know Stephan, right?”

“Right,” Rock says. And again Denise starts laughing.

“I'm sorry,” Denise says, fanning her face. “Stephan was just saying—he was just—” She is laughing too hard to finish.

“What are you smoking?” Rock says, walking over to the window and lifting it a few more inches.

“Oh, what do you think?” Denise says, wiping her eyes. “We're all adults here.”

“I'll replace it, man,” Stephan says. “I just didn't have any shit with me today.”

Rock stares at Denise. Can this be real? He was actually right? His future stepmother and this guy,
Wendel
, are sitting in his father's kitchen smoking his, Rock's, pot? “You went through my stuff?” he asks.

“
Please
,” Denise says, gesturing across the room. “You left your little cigar box sitting on the counter.”

Rock tries to think if this is possible. Would he have brought it downstairs? Is that why he couldn't find it?

Denise sighs melodramatically and puts the lid back on the pint of ice cream. But then, before she can stand up to put it back in the freezer, she is doubled over again, snorting with laughter. “I just keep picturing—I keep picturing—”

Stephan looks alarmed sitting on the counter.

“A little Dunlap monster baby.” She makes a terrifyingly stupid facial expression and holds her two pointer fingers above her head like horns or antennae.

“A Dunlap what?” Rock asks.

“Because Jack Dunlap's such a monster,” she gasps out.

“Should we order some pizza?” Stephan asks.

“He's having a baby?” Rock says at the same time.

Denise sits back in her chair and stops laughing. The refrigerator chooses this moment to stop humming. “Oh, what the hell,” she says, looking more like the usual, pissed-off, no-nonsense Denise again. “Yes. With Esmerelda's sister.”

For a moment Rock has no idea who this is, but then it hits him. She was here two days ago. Denise and his father's cleaning lady. He finds he actually has to back up, lean against the sink for support.

“It's all my fault,” Denise says, straightening up, finally, still holding the ice cream. “I introduced them when I found out he needed a babysitter, but, I mean, I didn't really
know
him, I knew from the BCD board he could be an asshole, but I didn't
know
—I just figured I'd be a Good Samaritan! I had no idea I was sending that poor girl off to be, God knows, maybe even raped, who knows what circumstances she got pregnant in. He fired her, after all . . .”

Rock is finding it very difficult to absorb this information. He is picturing chubby Esmerelda, who must be nearly fifty, in the forest-green housedress she changes into to clean in, and her black high-top Reebok sneakers. But not her. Esmerelda's sister. Another picture comes into his head—less defined. A slimmer woman with black hair pulled back tightly. Painted nails. A striped T-shirt. Whom he has not seen since last Christmas.

“Their old babysitter?” he says. The edge of the sink is pressing painfully into his lower back. “How do you know?”

Denise closes the ice cream into the freezer and turns back around to face him. “Get with the program, Rock—how do you think I know?” she says. “She's Esmerelda's sister. I
do
actually communicate with my employees.”

The whole time, Rock realizes, Stephan has been sitting absolutely still with a frozen, dismayed expression on his face, feet dangling against the cereal cabinet. He is wearing, of all impossible things, a
SAVE THE WHALES
T-shirt.

“Oh, I see,” Rock says, turning to him. “This is one of the ‘rumors you're following'—I guess it would make for pretty interesting material.”

“Hunh?” Stephan says, blanching, but then shrugging and recovering his expression. “Whatever. I'm just after good footage, not behind-the-scenes intrigue.”

“Mmmm,” Rock says. He feels suddenly almost physically angry. Denise and this whole childish stoned act, sitting here with another man, slandering Jack Dunlap, a man she couldn't possibly understand if he came with a manual, while her fiancé, Rock's father, is off on some miserable solo vacation! She is so goddamn righteous and self-satisfied and convinced of her own great sense of justice and morality in the world when she can't even figure out how to have a normal, uncondescending conversation! Of course she is blind to the emotional import of this rumor she is spreading. She sees the world in bright, uninteresting, politically correct Technicolor. And here is this poser idiot just lapping up her bullshit with his ass parked on her fiancé's kitchen counter.

“Well, I'll let you two get on with your fun and games here,” Rock says, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “Help yourself to whatever's left in my box. I know, Denise, you're always so generous.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Rock can hear Denise saying. There is the scraping of a chair across the floor as if she is getting up to follow him. “Rock—”

But Rock has already grabbed his keys from the dish in the front hall and is out the door, beyond the wicker, and into the night.

O
N
P
EA
I
SLAND,
Jiri, the Czech culinary s
tudent, has set up a barbecue on the square of lawn between the house and the south dock at Lucy's request—an operation which he and Margaret are both fairly put out by: Margaret, because it means carrying the food all the way from the kitchen out to the grill, and Jiri, because he has not gotten to the grilling unit of the Cambridge Culinary Institute's training program yet. Pete has stepped in to supervise as barbecue-expert-in-residence. This is less to get things moving in the right direction than it is to entertain the Eintopfs, who are working on a pitcher of homemade margaritas and calling Pete “Roy Rogers” and, more mysteriously, “Cowboy Bob.”

Faith has been delegated to cut tomatoes for the hamburgers, which she is actually enjoying because it allows her to stand inside, at the kitchen window, looking out along the nubbly coast of the island to the bright orange yoke of the sinking sun. The water is calm tonight. One of those giant, low-slung tankers from China or Taiwan, or some other exotic, industrial place, is inching south along the horizon. Watching the dark, surely rust- and barnacle-stained bulk of it making its slow, almost imperceptible progress gives Faith a lonely feeling, as if she is out there on it, a speck of life on a flake of metal, over miles and miles of ancient, sluggish sea.

To the west, far in the distance, a sliver of purple mainland is visible beyond the tip of the island. Massachusetts. Somewhere in its smooth contours, Concord and the track of land her son had mapped with such meticulous precision lies waiting like a riddle. Above this, the sky is turning a delicate, forgetful shade of lavender.

“Soup's on,” Faith hears Pete calling, and someone else begins ringing the little dinner bell that hangs beside the porch door. It makes a stifled, tinny little sound that elicits peels of laughter from the lawn. The smell of barbecue smoke wafts in through the open window and, to Faith's surprise, her stomach grumbles.

“Hi ho, hi ho,” one of the Eintopfs begins singing on the lawn, “it's off to our deaths we go.” More laughter, especially from Pete. A buoy clangs in lonely, accidental answer to the dinner bell. They will come looking for the tomatoes soon. Faith cuts the last one into sloppy slices and drops them on the plate. She pats her hands off on the dishtowel and runs one through her hair, gathers her face into an alert, hopefully enthusiastic look, and swings, bearing tomatoes, through the kitchen door.

By the time the last of the charred burgers have been enjoyed and everyone has said good night to a chagrined-looking Jiri, whom Pete has been calling “Tonto,” having, presumably, turned Cowboy Bob into the Lone Ranger, a relieving lull falls over the night. The Eintopfs are sitting around in small groups on the porch and the flat rocks that jut out over the water, nursing red wine and lukewarm glasses of bourbon. The icy, youthful taste of margaritas is already a thing of the past; over the course of the evening everyone seems to have settled creakily back into the ambiguous embrace of middle age. Their time on Pea Island is half over. Faith can feel them groping anxiously for the thoughtful, probing conversations, shared confessions, and soulful moments they have promised themselves to have—that they are counting on carrying through the winter like private torches they can light while raking the leaves or driving their sons to soccer practice or lying, sleepless, in their beds.

Twice in the last forty minutes Faith has had to excuse herself from conversations that seem about to take the plunge into territory that will require long supportive embraces followed by sensitive searching looks at breakfast, tender good-byes tempered with wry but insightful comments, possibly even letters and cards to “check in,” none of which are Faith's specialty. Plus the sharing of their woes would have to be reciprocated by sharing of her own. And what would she say—
I have a ten-year-old son I barely know anymore? Who, along with my ex-husband and daughter, possibly hates me? Who, if I'm lucky, I will get custody of on
vacations
next year?
It sends a shiver through her even though she intended it to sound, in her own mind, comical and melodramatic.

Having detached herself from Lucy and two of the more vulnerable-looking Eintopf women, she looks around for Jean Pierre or Rock Coughlin, neither of whom is anywhere to be seen. From the rocks there is a burst of hard, cynical-sounding laughter; the kind that starts with a bang and then trickles down an octave, like a spilled drink.

The kerosene lantern sends flickery orange light and dark shadows out over the lawn and the wind is surprisingly warm and soft; it is a lovely night to be outside. Faith walks back out the side door of the house and down the sloping lawn to the dock, which is nearly invisible in the dark. There is no moon out, just a scattering of distant stars, half hidden by low cloud cover. From here the Eintopfs are obscured by the highest part of the rock ledge and their voices are almost inaudible. The loudest sound is that of the ocean lapping at the dock and the gentle creaking of planks.

Faith is almost on the dock before she realizes there is a form at the end of it, lying flat across its width, knees bent over the edge and feet dangling into the water.

“Oh,” she says aloud, catching her breath.

The form struggles up on one elbow and then waves. “Faith-ey” it says, the
ey
like a distinction—Faith E., as opposed to, for instance, Faith
F
. It is Jean Pierre.

“You scared me,” Faith says.

“I scared you!” he laughs. “You are the one walking like a ghost—poof—here you are.”

“Well, I didn't know anyone was down here,” Faith says, still standing at the end of the dock.

“Come look up with me.” He pats the dock beside him.

“I didn't mean to disturb you. . . .” Faith hesitates, and then, at the exasperated scoffing sound he makes, steps onto the dock and walks toward him, her heart giving a frivolous little skip. When she is beside him, she slips off her flip-flops and slides them carefully between herself and Jean Pierre. Then she rolls up her pant legs and hangs her feet into the water. It feels surprisingly warm. Jean Pierre has lit up a cigarette and is lying on his back again, smoking it. The end glows bright when he inhales and then dims, arcing from his lips through the night.

“Not so many stars,” Faith says, although, now that she is looking, she can see a blurry band of brightness across the lower half of the sky. The Milky Way, maybe? She would like to think so. It has such an appealing, homey sound, as if the universe is part of a gentle fairy tale.

“But enough, I think.”

She darts a glance over at Jean Pierre to see if he is making fun of her, but his face looks smooth and serious in the starlight. She lets the water slip up over her ankles. “How long have you been down here?”