The Tell (24 page)

“I'm there in that room every day, and I care about what goes on.”

“You care. That's nice.” Mike smiled and put his arms behind his head. “Very sweet.”

“Maybe I don't want to get out,” Owen said. “Ever thought of that?”

“Okay, you can bullshit yourself all you want, but tell me this—what are you actually teaching those kids?” Mike asked.

Owen hesitated. “Hope.” He wasn't sure he'd ever said it out loud before. It was what Mira believed it was all about. Since she'd stopped going to the casino, her zeal for Brindle had reignited. At dinner now, on the nights she didn't stay late, they swapped stories about their students. They were careful with each other, and it had some of the feel of early, swirling romance. He was hopeful about his marriage, too. “It's about teaching the kids to have expectations for themselves. Because no one else has expectations for them.”

“Come on. You sound like my fucking poster. You sound like a campaign slogan. When did you get so sentimental? Be serious.”

Owen laughed. He liked Mike's challenges. “I am serious. I'm getting them to tell the stories of their lives and of their parents' lives. It's just too bad that any conviction sounds false these days. Earnestness is just a ruse now, right? Or is it just you who's gotten so cynical?”

Mike leaned forward. “End of the year, they're going to close Spruance.”

“That's an old story. I'm not sure I believe it anymore.”

“Believe it,” Mike said. “It's going to happen, and you'll be farmed out to who knows where. Seniority could kill you. You'll become one of those permanent roaming subs, five different schools a week and no one even says hello to you. You'll be a zombie—waiting for his pension.”

Because Mike had lived in Rhode Island forever, he had access to information others didn't. Like Mira, he picked up news just by tasting the particulates in the city's air. Owen pictured the school building sitting empty on its barren rise, like a junked car on cinderblocks.

“I've called you a hundred times and I never get you—or Mira either. I leave messages and you don't call back,” Mike said. “What's going on with you?”

To his left, Owen saw the twinkling end of a construction crane. The skating rink was opalescent and emptying out in the heavier rain, but two skaters persisted. “I've been busy. It's letting up now. No more missed sessions, I promise.”

“All these years and that's what I'm going to get from you? That you've been busy? Look, I've been married forever. I know the deal. You have that look—scared and pissed off. Go ahead—tell me I'm wrong.” Mike put his hands flat on the crowded desk among the papers and the granola bar wrappers. “Tell me.”

“We had a bump. But we're okay.”

“A bump. How benign. But if you say so. I give up.” Mike shook his head. The front door of the suite opened and set off a chime in the outer office. “Listen, I have to see this person—interviewing for an assistant—and I haven't even read her résumé yet. Where the hell is it?” Mike pushed through some papers and then walked Owen to the door. “Think about the offer. It's a good one. Call me.”

“I will.”

“No, you won't. And I'll have to hunt you down, but that's okay. I'm used to it. You're a piece of work. I shouldn't put up with you, but I do.” He gave Owen a sloppy handshake.

In the reception area, a woman read the letters on the wall. Her long wool coat, the color of mice, had jagged wet patches at the shoulders and water wicking up at the hem. Her damp hair fell in a familiar, golden swoop on her shoulder. “Joy?”

“Oh.” A blaze rose in her face. “Owen.”

“You know each other?” Mike asked.

“Of course. Joy works for Mira,” Owen said, but confusion had begun to bloom in his chest. Joy wouldn't look at him. “At Brindle.”

Mike looked from one to the other and claimed he needed a few minutes to do something in his office. He left them alone but didn't shut his door.

“Joy, what's going on? Are you looking for a job?” Owen asked. “Does Mira know?”

“What?” Water collected on the rug under the tip of her umbrella. “Mira laid me off. Three weeks ago.” Her lower lip trembled. “Didn't she tell you?”

Mira hadn't told him. His head buzzed, and he was having a hard time understanding what Joy was saying to him now—that it was about money, that Brindle was broke, that Mira couldn't pay her or the teachers anymore. How was that possible?

Joy gave him a cold look. Sometimes Mira would be gone in the middle of the day and couldn't be reached, she explained. The kids showed up from Noah House and Mira wasn't there to work with them. There was nothing to feed them or their disappointment, and they ran around the place, hungry for everything.

“I'm sure she just got caught up in something,” he said. His impulse to cover for Mira made him reel.

“She takes Brindle's money, and she knows I know,” Joy said. “I know where she goes, too. She plays the slot machines.”

“That's not true,” he insisted.

“Yes, it is. With that friend of hers. The famous actor.”

“He's not famous.”

Joy's mouth tightened in a way that brought back the moment at the fundraiser when he'd embarrassed her about Wilton. If he'd expected she was going to cry for herself here, the humiliation was all his. She was steely, while a man lied to by his wife is the expendable, foolish one, the one to feel the most sorry for. Joy looked at her wet boots, the leather stained with tide lines of salt, and then she went into Mike's office.

Owen left downtown and drove to India Point Park. The wind rocked his car. It was too cold to get out, and he couldn't see much of the bay except for a frill of fluorescence and an occasional whitecap. Other cars were parked like his at contemplative angles to the surf, and he suspected that many chapters of the human heart were being written in that squally hour. It was no easier to admit the truth about yourself than it was to admit the truth about the one you loved. But he was a coward and Mira was a liar. She'd stolen from Brindle; she was reckless and out of control. He'd convinced himself of the return of their happier life, and maybe Mira had convinced herself of it, too, but none of it was real. She'd lied so often that the lies had become the truth for her. What had looked like caution between them now appeared as evasion.

If tonight was the life-drawing class, as Mira had reminded him that morning, and Wilton was a member of it, what was his pad doing in the backseat of Owen's car like some kind of stowaway? Was there even a class anymore? Was there even a Brindle? He reached back for the pad and threw it out, propelled by his long, furious roar. The wind lifted the pages over the water, and then they disappeared into the dark. His throat was raw. When he got home hours later, after stopping to drink and watch a basketball game in a bar on Wickenden Street, Mira was in bed with her head turned away from the door, one arm hanging to the floor, the fingers curled into a soft fist. He wasn't sure she was still asleep, but it didn't matter. He kneeled on the floor by her head. The alcohol tingled his sinuses and made his eyes tear. He could stay like this forever and he'd still never know his wife.

He lifted his face to see the moon slip in at the top right corner of the window. The light revealed generations of Thrasher fingerprints on the panes. Everything else was indistinct but this instant, and those fingerprints, and his wife's steady breathing. This was not his house. Maybe this was not his wife. He pressed his cheek to the floor that was composed of a million ancient splinters pressed together. He felt the permanence of the house below him. He smelled the stink of smoke and grease on Mira's skin and knew that this scent would have the power to knock him over years later.

Another night, and Mira was gone. Owen had come outside to witness the eerie late January phenomenon he loved—a smudgy, reluctant moon behind purpling clouds. It made him think the earth was in freefall—and saved at the last moment. The marvel would only last a few nights, and then it would be gone until next year.

“Hey, Owen. Are you always lurking back here in the dark?”

He turned to see Anya on her father's porch. “Look up,” he said. “Look at the moon.”

She did and was unmoved by it. “I wanted to surprise Wilton.”

“Not home,” Owen said.

“Besides, I needed a break from studying before my head explodes.”

Piles of student work on Owen's desk had not been touched for weeks. “I was thinking about making something to eat. You hungry?”

“I'm always hungry.”

She came off the porch and pushed through the heavy snow. Random divots glowed. Inside, she took off her coat. Like her father, her long body in a chair gave the impression of lassitude. In truth, they were both alert to everything. She was wearing a yellow-and-black-striped wool cap that was tight on her skull. Wilton had bitterly mentioned the hat because he was sure it belonged to Anya's boyfriend. Not that he even knew if she had one or not. Owen complimented her on her pink sweater. Color on her was surprising and made her look even younger.

“A present from Wilton,” she said and plucked the material at the neck. “Every single year, a cashmere sweater for my birthday. I thought it would be a nice gesture to wear it—this is the first time—but it's so itchy. I think I'm allergic to cashmere. Is that even possible? And this color. It's girlie-girl, so not me.”

“Girlie-girl,” Owen repeated. The moon had made him reckless. “Like bubblegum.”

“More like undercooked pork.” Anya looked around. “Is Mira here?”

He bent into the refrigerator and spoke to its empty shelves. “Actually, Mira and your father went to a casino.”

“A casino? Why?”

“I don't know—why does anyone go to a casino?” He shut the refrigerator. “Mira plays the slots and your father has a drink and talks to his fans, and then they come home at a nice, reasonable hour. They go all the time.”

Her head angled to the left. “You're joking, right?”

“Not joking at all. You can ask them about it yourself, but they may not tell you the truth. At least Mira won't.” He laughed queasily.

Anya scratched under the bumblebee hat. “Is this funny? It doesn't sound funny to me.”

“It's not,” he said. “It's just the opposite. I don't know why I laughed.”

Anya looked baffled, her mouth drawing in as if to contain her doubt. It would be easy enough for her to assume Wilton and Mira were sleeping together and the casino was just a moronic alibi they gave. If only that was all this was, a series of dumb, unoriginal fucks they'd get bored with eventually. They were in love with each other, in a way, after all. Owen thought maybe he had been a little in love with Wilton, too, for a time. How could you not love the one you confessed to and who confessed to you? The one who seemed to belong only to you when you were with him?

“Mira plays the slot machines?” Anya asked.

“Devotedly.”

“She doesn't seem like the type, you know—confident, beautiful, totally together. The kind of woman who makes other women feel like a useless mess. I'd think she'd just find the whole thing way too tacky and ugly. I mean, look at all this, the house, you.”

“Right, look at me.”

Anya fiddled with his keys on the table; the conversation suddenly felt very intimate to him. She plucked at her sweater again. The skin at the cashmere neck had blossomed into red blotches. He sat down and pulled her striped hat off, surprising her. Static snapped around her head. She'd cut her hair short, revealing the graceful, emphatic line of her jaw. She looked at the hat in his hand. Owen brought it to his nose and inhaled. Sweet, sweaty, dampish wool.

“What are we eating?” she asked, and grabbed her hat back.

“Nothing. Turns out there's not much here.”

“We'll go to Wilton's then,” Anya said, bright with her idea. “There's always food there, and he said I should go in any time I want. To make myself at home, he said.”

They put on their coats and at Wilton's door, Anya lifted up the front mat for the key. Owen remembered the first night he'd told Wilton, who still had his California vigor back then, that this was a bad idea. One of Alice Jessup's nurses stood across the street having a cigarette, one foot up on a snow bank in the bitter cold, watching them. Otherwise, the street was empty, moonscaped by ice. The smudged moon had disappeared. There was an almost clinical smell inside the house, and the chill had nothing to do with the heat that blasted through the grates, but with the aura of impermanence. No meals had been cooked here, no wine spilled, no cushions puckered from body weight. No art, no sex, no tears, no parties, no books, no life. Just waiting.

Owen hadn't been inside for a couple of months, and now in the front room, an uninviting, boxy couch faced a very large television. A masterful remote was the only object on a glass table. In the kitchen, a single mug was in the sink. There was a lime-colored blender with packing material still around it, a toaster without any fingerprints or crumbs loitering at the base, no teakettle, no can opener, no pictures, no junk, no shoes at the back door, no tossed rag, no bottle of aspirin or vitamin C. Only boxes and boxes from UPS and FedEx, some opened, others not.