The Invisibles (25 page)

Inside the crowded bar, anxious to pay my cover and get alcohol in my bloodstream, I noticed a college-type girl in a green cotton dress standing by a row of stacked tables in the rear of the place. From across the room she looked so much like Elise that I knew I'd have to examine her for differences. Contrary to my expectations, the likeness increased the longer I looked. She had a chronic smiler's monkey cheeks, the short black hair and keen eyes, the same ripe little body. I felt a number of contradicting emotions
and knew it would be best to walk out and find another place to drink. At the same time, I'd been around long enough to know I'd regret never learning just how much like Elise she was. This look-alike was drinking something red, and by the noncommittal way she sipped and stood with her arms crossed and her head cocked, not quite watching the people on the dance floor, I gathered she was alone.

The resemblance was stunning — in appearance they were almost the same. This girl was a little thinner, with an unhealthy gauntness in her cheeks, as if my fiancée hadn't eaten during her stay in the underworld. She narrowed her eyes as she watched me stare. Later she would say she was amused by the way I stood close and gawked, a tall man with grown-out blonde hair and a blue Hawaiian shirt, who had forgotten his own very conspicuous presence. She should have been alarmed. The city was filled with addicts and creeps and rapists, and so long as they had money, the good guys and bad guys all wore the same uniform. But the sense of familiarity between us erased all difficulty and concern. She put her drink's tiny red stirring straw to her lips and took a long sip. She smiled ironically and offered to shake my hand.

“I'm Janine.”

“Okay,” I said, studying the lines in her neck, ignoring the hand. When she widened her eyes and laughed, it dawned on me how foolish I appeared. Her laughter was sharper, more cynical than Elise's. My fiancée's character had been entirely earnest and kind. The wry gaze of this young woman was reminder enough of their separateness. I smiled and shook her hand just as she was about to revoke the offer.

I got us drinks and she invited me to sit on her side of the booth. She was just twenty. From my perspective, a ten-year difference wasn't much, but she knew better. She kept pinching my arm and poking me through my shirt, calling me dirty.

“Do you always hit on younger girls?”

I'd forgotten how young Elise had looked. “Well, the bar is for adults.”

She shrugged. “Soon I'll be twenty-two and have to graduate and be serious.”

I cringed thinking what a pain in the ass I'd been at that age.

Two hours later we were sitting on the beach, alternating between talking and making out with medium intensity, part of the restraint arising from my sense of unreality. Meeting women had never been a great challenge, but this had taken almost no effort at all, as if Janine had come to the bar expecting to meet someone and, finding me before her, accepted fate's offering without question. In fact, she was concerned with this very subject, using the little breaks from smooching to inquire about my zodiac sign and whether I knew anything about a fortune-teller who had told her to stop by after the bars closed.

“I have never heard of Madame Tammy,” I confessed. “However, not knowing her doesn't prevent me from knowing it's probably a bad idea to go over there at night.”

“I'd expect nothing less from a Leo,” she said, looking up at the dense cloud mass hiding the stars. “You fire signs always want to take control.”

“I am what I am.”

“You're funny.”

“I am what I am,” I repeated. It was an old phrase of Elise's, an extremely funny and sexy thing when spoken by a forthright young lady who wants you naked immediately. I thought that if I said it enough around Janine she might start saying it. Imagining this gave me a sick, impish glee.

After a while the bars emptied and the beach filled with the shapes of people seeking privacy and others who wanted to observe
them. Janine and I both wanted to be alone, so she led me to where she'd parked.

During my time in Florida I rode shotgun in many a single woman's vacuumed front seat. I loved the smell of bachelorettes' cars, how by singing a woman driver revealed the sexiness of her girly music, how she smiled to carry off her find, how she might suddenly grab my hand or lean over at an intersection to start kissing. No other came close to exciting me like Janine did, and not only because she looked like Elise. Whenever it occurred to me how much fun I was having, she'd shoot me a mischievous look, as if she'd heard me thinking.

After trolling many a dark street, we ended up after-drunk in a neighborhood of bungalows on an indigent stretch of the beach. Wide-awake residents sat up in plastic chairs on their sunken lawns, pinching their mentholated cigarettes and watching. A starved-looking man in ratty jean cutoffs trotted a beach cruiser past my window. My fear of these people made me vigilant like a snorkeler who has swum up on a barracuda, but Janine showed no fear. She was searching the mailboxes for the fortune-teller's address.

“I hope you know where you're going,” I said, as we passed the Dead End sign. “We might have to back out of here pretty fast.”

“Hush now.” She looked for numbers on the dark little houses, which appeared tilted by the weight of the air conditioners in their windows. Cigarettes flared. Under her dress, I noticed, Janine wore a bikini spangled with stars. She leaned forward, and her nipples pressed through the thin material of the cups. I suddenly felt sure someone was in the backseat.

Seeing it was empty, I felt mildly disappointed.

“Don't worry so much,” she said.

“I am what I am,” I said quietly.

“There she is.” In the road there stooped a bony, visibly drunk old woman in apparently nothing but an extra-large Bud Light T-shirt that hung to her knees. Beneath a mess of springy pink hair her eyes were half-closed. She beckoned for us to follow.

Janine and I held hands all the way to the rotten welcome mat. A shark's jawbone hung on the door like a knocker, and inside the house was decorated as if gypsies had come to town years earlier and remodeled the place for her. Tapestries embroidered with mandalas were tacked to the walls. Beside the oil lamp burning on a small wooden table, near a dirty ashtray and the remains of a microwave dinner, lay a deck of Tarot cards.

Madame Tammy placed a medallion on her forehead and brought us cans of beer, saying in her deep, harsh voice, “Get yourselves a seat.”

Janine sat on the metal folding chair opposite the fortune-teller's place. She pressed her hands between her knees in anticipation. “So, Dennis.” She sank her teeth into my name, the way Elise had. “What do you think the future has in store for me?”

I put a hand over my eyes. “I see you discovering your vandalized car, then filling out a police report. Later, I see you bitching about it over breakfast in my camper.”

“You promised you would teach me to surf,” she said.

“I saw that, also. Telling the future, one has to be selective, or it comes out babble. You have to tell just the edge, like in a Hemingway story.”

“Smartass, if you can't zip it, wait outside,” Madame Tammy said, offering me a Pabst and pointing. “Having nonbelievers around sours my psychic zone.”

“I am what I am.”

“Who ain't?” The fortune-teller waved her gnarled hand at the love seat. “Park it.”

I had never seen a reading before. Madame Tammy put Janine's hands flat on the table. Then the old woman took up her Tarot deck and dealt out a dozen cards, face up. Janine leaned in close as the psychic brooded. Madame Tammy had somehow achieved clarity of mind, despite the hour, the alcohol, and the smoke. She sensed the cards' gravity and began to mumble.

“What is it?” Janine said. “Is it bad?”

“Just give me a second,” Madame Tammy said. “There's a good reading in here somewhere.”

Later, as we drove toward my place with an orange sun rising in the east, it wasn't clear whether Janine would stay. She drove too fast on the empty beach road, talking angrily, upset about the future predicted for her. It's just one more bad sign when the psychic refuses payment.

“Fucking Death? What the fuck is that all about?”

In this edition of cards he'd ridden a gaunt black horse, worn silver armor, had a skull for a head, and reached out a skeletal hand at a man lying in a pool of blood on the road. Madame Tammy had explained that the Death card wasn't necessarily bad, that the figure of Death often signaled an impending change.

“Everyone knows that Death isn't meant to be read literally,” I said. “They did years ago, anyway. It's like a metaphor.”

“I was in fifth grade ten years ago,” she said. “And if it's not a bad card, why is the guy on the road covered in blood?”

“Maybe he's hurt, and Death's doing the right thing. He's offering him a lift.”

Janine glared at me. “That doesn't help. I always get the bum deal. That's my fate. The cards were just a reminder of what I already know. I get upset about that.”

“You shouldn't.”

She narrowed her eyes and said, “I am what I am.” She said it in
a mocking tone, but the voice was enough hers that, for a fraction of a second, she became Elise, animated and talking. I can still see her that way, wearing clothes my fiancée would never have worn, driving a car the likes of which she'd never had, in a part of the country she hated, like a moment from a parallel world in which she still lived.

I grabbed Janine by the shoulder and kissed her mouth. She parted her lips to let me taste lip balm and sour beer, then grabbed the back of my head, kissing me and pulling my head down so she could see while she braked. The beach road was clear, and the sun was coming up on the condominiums on the beach and the neighborhoods of shabby houses. There was no one around to see us groping each other, locked in fantasies allowed by how little we knew of each other.

In the apartment of the man I'd come to think of as my fiancée's murderer, the police found a diary filled with observations about Elise. There were even photographs and transcriptions of conversations he'd had with her. It was evident from his notes that he had been a regular at the café where she waited tables in a white blouse and black pants, where she pinned her hair, looking almost like someone else. This other woman, this waitress, was the one the murderer loved, or so I told myself, believing he'd had no real intimacy with her, until a detective let me see his diary. Why the detective did this I do not know — he had a plain face with the look of just having dropped his smile — and I looked back on it as an act of cruelty, though of course my spite was mixed with gratitude. Maybe he thought it would jog my memory, make me reveal something crucial to the case. Or maybe he was attempting kindness, trying to say the murderer was my male inferior. But all the diary did was leave me with more questions. According to its pages, Elise knew her killer's name. She flirted with him and
told him details of our private life. She talked about our fights and made allusions to the sex we had. In trying to determine the amount of fantasy in the descriptions, I only grew more doubtful. Why hadn't she mentioned him? How much had she kept from me?

Most disturbing were the photographs. Some were several years old and could only have come from her apartment. The detectives had a theory that he'd found a way to get in and steal so few things that no one would notice. But I wondered whether she'd given them to him for some unimaginable reason. There were pictures of her parents and her sister, even one of me eating cereal from a mixing bowl once when I had a hilariously bad hangover. They were all pictures I was familiar with, ones she and I had looked at with enough attention to make them part of us. It seemed she would have noticed they were gone.

I did remember something then. It struck me as crucial to understanding what had happened, though the detective was not interested. My fiancée had been a beautiful woman and, before that, a very pretty girl. She told me once that all her life there had been men who breathed on the other end of the telephone line, who drove by her house at night, who followed her in public places and went out of their ways to put themselves in the line of her vision. There had always been men who showed up, uninvited, to visit her in places, at work and parties, at her parents' house when she was young and the driveway was empty of cars. She spoke about these men and boys with something like nostalgia, as if she both pitied and enjoyed their obsessions and missed them now that they were gone.

“Don't get so jealous,” she told me one time as we lay together on the couch. “They're nothing compared to you. You're not in competition with them or anyone.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” I asked.

She gave me one of her cryptic little smiles. “You actually caught me.”

Back at my camper, we didn't bother to go in. We were both more than primed, and I carried Janine through the dunes as she held her arms around my neck and kissed me. It was like something out of a romantic comedy, except we were going to fuck. It was high tide, and we found a spot between ghost crab burrows.

Afterward, Janine shook the sand out of her clothes and got dressed. She was tired and annoyed by how much sand had gotten into her hair and by the after-sex silence that had descended. She seemed nervous I would now reveal my true identity as a jerk.

“Let's go for a swim,” I said. “We'll have your first surfing lesson.”

She raised her eyebrows and gave me a slight frown. “I need to sleep right now. I get really cranky when I don't get enough sleep.”

This was very different from Elise, who had always been willing to stay up for another round, who had been my partner in putting many parties to bed. Janine scratched in her hair, knocking loose little deposits of sand, and scowled to show her disgust. She was at a loss for how to go to bed and was pouting severely until she saw my hammock hanging between two palms. She looked back, smiling tentatively. “Can I sleep in that without being eaten alive?”