The Tell (12 page)

Only the grape tomatoes were ripe. Owen cut a handful in half and sprinkled them with sea salt. He showed Mira how red and muscular their insides were, like chambers of the heart. For hours the sky had slouched under the threat of rain; the kitchen was moody with a purple hue and the fan's incompetent breeze. Earlier, Owen had watched Wilton set up the new chairs on his porch, angling them one way, and then a few minutes later coming out again to angle them differently. He'd been over twice already, once with the four steaks in their bloody vacuum-sealed packages, once with enough wine for ten people. His lips were pale and dry. A few curls hung damp at the back of Mira's neck as she looked over at Wilton's now, alert for any sign of Anya, who was already forty-five minutes late. She ate a tomato, a baby's heart. Owen kissed her shoulders, inhaled her smell of salt and almond soap.

“Let's go make a kid,” he whispered. “Let's do it right now.”

“Right now?”

“Why not? We can do it fast. We can do it on my desk. Push everything onto the floor. Come on. Let's be risky. I thought you liked risk.”

He reached for her, but she wriggled away and began to set the table. We can't because we're supposed to be getting ready for dinner, she said, because Wilton and Anya are coming over any minute, because we still have things to do, because you need to finish cutting the tomatoes, because, she said. Because you have terrible, unfair timing. He tried to read her true reason in the way she first placed the forks and knives around the plates, and then in the way she slapped down the napkins and filled a pitcher to overflowing. She was full of ambivalence and knocked over a glass that shattered on the floor.

“I don't understand why Wilton doesn't just call her and ask if she's coming or not,” she finally said, as if to preempt Owen's pushing. She got the broom and reached it under the table. “It's simple. Yes or no. Coming or not. He's just prolonging the torture. Like he likes it.” She swiped angrily at the floor. Sweat sparkled on the back of her neck.

“Give me that,” he said. “You're not wearing shoes. You're going to cut yourself.”

She continued sweeping. “Wilton's so hopeful, and now it looks like Anya's changed her mind about tonight. I feel terrible for him.” She motioned for Owen to hold the dustpan. “The girl's put him off so many times, always ready with an excuse, and he puts up with it. He keeps trying, but the whole situation's not right. It stinks.”

“Maybe he doesn't know what he wants,” Owen said.

“Spoken like a true man.” Her jaw was set at a furious angle. He wasn't going to tangle with her now. “You tell me then. What does he want?”

But didn't Mira have a false version of the story, one that put Wilton in the softer frame of the supplicant, the innocent, a man who missed his only child? She had no idea of the truth. From the way she looked at him, he was sure she detected his evasion. He didn't like this skirting and hedging that was new between them, this shapeless obstacle, and he went outside to check on the crumbling embers in the grill. In the near dark of his perfect yard, Wilton was a wandering ghost in his usual all-white. When Owen called to him, he stepped over the fence and held his hands over the fire even though the night was stifling.

“It just might be that she's not coming tonight,” Owen suggested.

Wilton nodded. “That's pretty clear by now.”

“Have you called her?”

“I don't see the point.” His voice was thick with disappointment. “If she wanted to come, she would. What's there to say? I don't want to beg.”

The embers shifted, incinerating the night's plans. “I should cook before the fire goes out,” Owen said. “You hungry?”

“I've lost my appetite. You understand.” He looked at Mira, who was standing in the doorway listening to them. “You two eat without me.”

He moved in slow motion. Even his door closing made a mournful gulp behind him. Owen and Mira sat on the kitchen steps and ate with their plates balanced on their knees. What was there to say about tonight or about Wilton's distress? It leaked out from between the clapboards of his house. It robbed the food of any taste. The meat was tough and stringy and turned Owen's stomach.

And then Wilton appeared again, this time dragging the four new chairs from his porch. Four steaks, four chairs, four melons, four artichokes, wine for four, but the fourth person hadn't appeared.

“You should have somewhere better to sit than the stairs,” he said, and set the chairs up on the uneven bricks. “I hope it's not too late for me. Half an hour ago I wouldn't have been very good company. But I'm fine now.” His eyes were turned up high and clear. He'd been crying and didn't try to hide it. “I've waited a long time. I can wait some more.”

“I'm sorry, but that was a shitty thing for Anya to do,” Mira said. She'd gone inside to get Wilton a glass of wine. “I wouldn't put up with it from anyone.”

“She's not just anyone,” he told her. “She's my daughter. It's different. You'll understand when you have one. You two will have such pretty children.” He sat down and looked into his glass. “We put up with everything from the people we love. We'll wait forever, and we always welcome them back no matter where they've been or what they've done or how long it's taken them to get here. We'd only want them to do the same for us. Maybe you don't understand, but this is the end of love for me, the very last chance.”

It was a sobering idea—that there might be an end of love some day, that you'd no longer see it in your future. It was only human to believe there'd always be more, there'd always be another chance for it, even at the very end of life.

“That's not true.” Mira put her hand on Wilton's knee. “Let me get you something to eat.”

“No, you sit. I'll do it. God knows, I know my way around by now.”

As Owen measured the hour, he thought about how Wilton stirred something in them, questions and ambitions and desires. Wilton took the torment of his daughter's silence like a loud penitent, and how could you not respond to that? Owen considered, too, how there are people who appear in your life in bursts so brilliant they're almost too much to look at. And then they burn out and you're left rubbing your eyes to fill the empty space.

W
hat's going on with you?” Owen asked Mira, when their boat was at the pond's center. The sun dripped syrupy into the water on this Sunday of Labor Day weekend, the first half week of Spruance already come and gone. “You look unhappy.”

She gave him a considered gaze. “I was just thinking how the summer went too fast, another one gone too soon. The older I get, the faster they go and the less I get done. I can barely get my hands on anything before it slips away.”

He sprinkled a handful of water over her bare feet and she smiled in the cooling pleasure of it. Years ago, in the month before they were married and out in this same boat, he'd first tried to show Mira a dweller rising from the bottom of the kettle pond. The dwellers, women in dresses of weeds, came in and out of view as their feathered hems and hair moved in the currents. He'd been enchanted by them as a kid, only slightly less so now. The dwellers had always been about his mother; she was one of them, they were made of her, this is where she'd gone when she'd died when he was not even two.

“Look now,” he told Mira, “a tall one in a column of sun.” But he could tell that what she saw was her own reflection trying not to disappoint him. She slapped a mosquito at her neck.

“There, right below us,” he urged her, his voice edged with frustration. “See it?”

She inched to the center of the seat and offered up her open hands. She squinted at him like he was a distant street sign and she wasn't exactly sure where she was supposed to be going. “Maybe it's time I just took your word for it. Or maybe I'm seeing it and I don't even realize.”

The dweller had ghosted away, or the boat had moved past it. You might feel you'd come to a dead stop in the water, but that wasn't ever the case. You turned and drifted until you found yourself near the opposite shore. Spots on the perimeter of the pond—the few houses already closed for the season, some vulgar new construction, towels draped over a line, his father's many cats like sentinels in the bushes, the dog Rey swishing his tail in the sand—were hours and minutes on a clock. Maybe these imaginings, these morsels of private logic, weren't ever translatable. Once put into words and exposed to the air, they would lose their shape.

Mira wanted to appease him but not give in. The source of his real displeasure was no secret. Since the night Anya had not showed up for dinner, Mira had started to go to Eagle Run Casino in Connecticut with Wilton during many of the evenings that Owen was out tutoring. They had nibbled around the edges of a full-blown fight about it on the drive from Providence; they'd been nibbling at it for many weeks now. She'd offered him her reasons for going—to keep Wilton company, bereft without his daughter; to spend a few hours gawking at people; to stretch the summer out to its last air-conditioned end; to play a few harmless games on the slots. Not a big deal. Owen had struggled to dislodge the picture of his fiercely intelligent wife brainless in front of the machines, under the halogen stars she'd told him about, one among the pastel and denim mobs she'd described—but it was something more than that. She came home stinking of cigarettes and the bitterness of other people's losses, but also the sour sweat of her own strange excitement. She was too animated on those occasions, too full of stories and observations about a place that sounded like hell to him. Smokers dragged their oxygen tanks behind them. Old ladies came in groups of three and four, their hands trembling. Buses speeding in from Chinatown disgorged a hundred eager players. She'd described for him how Wilton sat at the bar by the waterfall flirting with women and fans while she played the machines, how his face was open and tilted up as though taking in celebrity's false sun hanging from the rafters. This waiting to be recognized—by his fans and by his still elusive daughter—was Wilton's work and fuel these days. It made him happy. Was there something wrong with that? Mira asked Owen in return why he was so uptight about the place and her going there, especially when he refused to check it out for himself, even once. She said he was being close-minded and a snob.

But now the pond encouraged harmony and kissed the underside of the boat, warming the wood under their feet. As Mira rowed, he was rocked by the rhythm of the dipping oars and the warm vegetal smells of the pond. He liked the straining tendons in her neck, and the cleaved line of taut violet bathing suit between her legs. Wouldn't Brindle start again in a few weeks, and wouldn't she be too busy then to go to the casino anymore? He leaned forward and touched her knees in conciliation.

“Are you ready to swim?” she asked.

“Pretty soon. Maybe someday you'll let me teach you how. You'll see how incredible it is. You'll believe me then.”

She rowed them to the far edge of the pond and the floating dock he liked to dive from. The dock belonged to Porter, who'd been his father's friend and the only other year-round resident on the pond, until he died that past November. The dock had always been Owen's to invite others onto. In his childhood summers, he would set himself up on the bleached wood, challenging kids from the rental houses to diving and swimming contests, and later on, asking girls to meet him there at night, where they both shivered with their tops off while the moon exposed them and mosquitoes attacked fresh skin. The muddy, fishy smell and the soft warmth of water trapped in a bowl of leaves had made him crazy with longing. But he'd never had sex on the dock, though it was still what he'd like to do one day. Maybe now, even: he and Mira hadn't made love in a month, and sometimes he pretended to be asleep when she came back late from the casino.

When they were feet away, they saw two people on the dock absorbing the last vain hour of sun. The couple was naked, identically ripened to a persimmon glow. The man's erection stood up like an unreliable sundial.

“He's obviously having a good dream,” Mira whispered and began to turn the boat around when it tapped dockside. “I bet you it's not about her.” Her maneuver was clumsy, and the man flipped over while the woman stayed still.

“Hey, how about a little privacy here?” he barked. His face was fleshy and aggressive.