Watch You Die (13 page)

“Joe and I work together, sort of. We work at the same place. I’m told the
Times
doesn’t like publicity – ironic, isn’t it? And right now I’m working on a story about something that’s fairly sensitive, something my editor hesitated putting me on, and I don’t want to blow it.”

“Bones at the Atlantic Yards?”

“You read it?”

“It was intriguing. I could see that it might cause a stir.”

“It did, and it’s ongoing, and I don’t want to blow it by overreacting to this thing with Joe. You can understand that, can’t you? You must run into politics at school sometimes.”

“All the time. I do understand. But this Joe guy—” He looked at the wrapped box. “Open it.”

I ripped the paper straight down the middle. It was a plain box, which I opened at one end. I slid out a
frame
made of a fine inlaid wood, highly polished. Behind a sheet of glass was a photograph of Joe, smiling sweetly, his eyes crinkling up at the corners. It was a professional portrait, posed in front of a pale blue backdrop. The queasy feeling returned, only this time with a sharp edge.

“He must think you like him back.” A stiff smile appeared on Rich’s face and I wanted to wipe it off, to replace it with the tenderness with which he had looked at me, and kissed me, a few minutes ago.

“I can’t tell you how hard I’ve tried to fend this guy off. If he thinks I like him back, it’s a fantasy. A delusion. This is nuts.”

“Well, the frame itself is really beautiful,” Rich said.

But I couldn’t see the frame, just the image of Joe inside it. I got up and took it to the kitchen trash, stamping on the pedal so the top lifted with a clank. I threw in the frame, box and photo all together and let the metal lid slam down. Then on second thought, I reached back in for the cardboard box and transferred it to our recycling bin. Rich was standing in the doorway, watching me, his arms folded over his chest. A little smile crooked up one side of his mouth.

“Am I supposed to recycle the glass, too?” I asked him.

He laughed at me, how I was mixing practicality with drama.

“Probably.”

So I took the frame out of the garbage and laid it on its face on the kitchen counter. Rich came up beside me and took over the task of disassembling Joe’s gift, removing the backing and the photo to get to the glass.

“Maybe you should keep the frame,” he said. “There’s really nothing wrong with it, in and of itself. It looks expensive.”

“He probably stole it.” I picked up the photograph of Joe and ripped him in half, straight down the middle. “Take
that
, and that and that and that,” ripping again and again until a pile of torn paper littered the countertop. Rich helped me move the pieces into the trash. I realized there was a negotiation of sorts going on between us, that he had been bothered by the appearance of a gift from another man and I was going a little overboard to prove how little Joe meant to me.

“Maybe I
will
keep the frame,” I said. “I just got Nat’s school picture back and I’ve been meaning to buy something to put it in.”

“Eight by ten?”

“Deluxe package. I’ve got every size print imaginable including eight wallet photos. You don’t want one, by any chance?”

“It might not go over well at school if I carry a picture of a student in my wallet, you know?”

Of course it wouldn’t and I laughed but the truth was I really didn’t have anyone to give all those pictures too. I had ordered the deluxe set just to get the eight by ten, out of habit, because that was what a parent did. Hugo and I had once discussed not participating in the school photo racket – with our good digital camera we could take as many of our own pictures of Nat as we wanted – but it felt somehow like a parental requirement to shell out that annual fifty bucks for the bad photographer to pose your child in front of a stilted backdrop and transform him into a grinning mannequin. I no longer questioned it; I just filled in the order form and wrote out the check.

“But a picture of Nat’s mother –
that’s
something I might carry in my wallet.”

That took me by surprise, jolting me out of the nervousness Joe’s “gift” had returned me to and away from thoughts of refuse and recycling and parental habits and
this is a nice frame after all
and
where did I put that eight by ten of Nat anyway
. Rich walked over to me at the counter, where I had reassembled the frame, and took me in his arms.

The frame itself
. Clear glass free of any image, just transparency. It was the simplest thought to keep it, not to waste something beautiful. My head tilted back
as
Rich lowered his face to kiss the front of my neck. His hands moved along my sides, tracing my ribs, waist and hips where they rested. Standing in the kitchen, our bodies aligned; mouth to knee, I felt every inch of him; and I was lost to a feeling that it was impossible for us not to make love. My own hands moved slowly down his back, which felt curved and strong as he held and discovered me, until my fingertips crept under his belt and found his skin. Tender, soft, alive, human skin. Our mouths found each other again and there was no turning back.

I didn’t expect Nat home until 10 a.m. at the earliest so Rich and I slept late, naked and supple in each other’s arms. We had alternately made love and talked until almost dawn, an experience I had thought was reserved for young lovers and I now learned belonged to lovers of any age. I was thirty-nine, Rich was thirty-seven. We had wrinkles and grey hairs and pouches and scars and yet we had had a night so romantic we might have been teenagers. We lay in bed, facing each other, actually gazing into each other’s eyes.

Eventually we showered, dressed and shared a breakfast of toast and fried eggs which he cooked at my stove and cleaned up at my sink. I felt like saying, “You’ve got the job,” but held my tongue. I didn’t want to break the spell with flippancy, not yet.

What finally evaporated our lovely haze was the ringing phone. Nat. He was on his way home.

“Got a back door?” Rich asked.

“Yes, but you’d be trapped in the yard.”

We kissed. He had brought nothing but himself and what he was wearing. I walked him to the front door where we said goodbye. He promised to call and then added, “Let me know if that guy bothers you any more, OK? Especially if he shows up here again. Don’t suffer in silence.”

That made me laugh. I hadn’t exactly been silent about Joe; I had told Sara and Courtney and Elliot and now Rich.

“Thanks. I will.”

“Promise?”

I kissed him. “Promise.”

I resisted an urge to watch him as he walked away. What if the neighbors saw him leaving? What would they think? Would I become the neighborhood hussy? All that ran through my mind but then as I locked the door I reassured myself that in the city people didn’t pay that much attention to each other. No one would care if their widowed neighbor had a lover.

A lover.
I had a lover
.

Nat brought me a Yankees cap. “Go ahead, Mom. Wear it.”

I stuck it on my head and we cheered half-heartedly. It was an inside joke. Living on the Vineyard, in Massachusetts, it was all about the Red Sox and you learned quickly that wearing Yankees or Mets paraphernalia was considered a provocation. Ditto, in reverse, wearing Red Sox in New York. Hugo and I were never particularly into sports but Nat, strangely, was and so I became aware of the New York–Boston rivalry. Nat wore his Red Sox jersey around the Vineyard and only took out his Yankees shirt when visiting my mother in New York. Now that we lived here, it seemed he planned a transformation.

“We’re here now, right?” he said. “I mean the Yankees aren’t bad.”

“You had fun last night?”

“Totally.”

“How was it sleeping at Henry’s?”

“I don’t know how much we actually slept.” He grinned, knowing that sleepover antics bugged me because next-day exhaustion made it almost impossible to concentrate on homework which Nat had a bad habit of putting off so it tended to pile up on the weekends. “Don’t worry, Mom. I caught a few Zs. Bring on that science project and that English paper and those twenty math problems and studying for that social studies test on Monday morning.” He collapsed, mockingly, on the floor. I
willed
myself to not get sucked into it, hung my Yankees cap on a hook by the front door and walked away.

And then, I couldn’t help myself. Halfway up the stairs I turned around and asked, “Have you brushed your teeth at all since yesterday morning?”

He played dead, or sleeping, on the floor. He looked so big lying there, sprawled out in his jeans and sneakers and Yankees jersey like a giant toddler. His hair was a total mess. I loved him so much. He didn’t answer. I’d give it an hour or so before making lunch; maybe then he’d be a little more tuned-in to being back home.

I lay on my bed and opened my laptop on my stomach. Could I really smell Rich on my sheets or was I imagining it? Breathing deeply, I tried to recall every sensation of last night. The silky feel of our skin together. His velvety tongue. The exhilaration of sex and the shock and pleasure of the first moment he entered me. The sense, as it was happening, that nothing about this was wrong, everything about this was right. The sheer pleasure of it. And afterwards his wide-open eyes unblinking as he gazed at me across a shared pillow.

Hickory. That was his smell. I closed my eyes and recalled it.

The sound of Nat’s footsteps clomping up the stairs brought me back to the moment. As he
passed
my room he popped in to see what I was doing, and, finding me prone beneath my laptop as I often was, he turned around and left. A moment later I heard the shower running. Good. He was starting to tend to his personal hygiene without being asked and yet I was having trouble letting go of my role as his motivator even though it had gotten to the point that reminders not only didn’t help but seemed to diminish his motivation. He was a teenager now and needed
space
. I would have to work on that.

I booted up my laptop and went straight to email. A bunch of messages streamed into my inbox, mostly junk which I systematically deleted. But there was one from Sara, sent right after we talked on the phone yesterday evening, so I opened it.

“Hi, Sweets, have fun on your date? Babysitter’s on her way so I’ve gotta get moving. Don’t want to be late for the movies on our annual night out! hahaha. Dinner too I hope if we can make it. Tomorrow is that wedding over on the Cape so we’re out early and back late. Talk Sunday OK? Can’t wait to hear
everything
. xoxoxoxox Sara”

I answered one more email, from Courtney, who asked, “Any contact yet?” She meant Abe Starkman. I sent her a quick answer that I hadn’t heard from him. “But I did hear from Joe Coffin … he left a FRAMED PHOTO OF HIMSELF on my front
door
!!! I guess even after eight hours in the mailroom the guy can’t stop delivering stuff …”

I almost hopped onto the Web to do a little preliminary research on something that had been bugging me about long-buried bones – I’d been wondering just how much information could be extracted from them in a lab – but decided not to let work suck up even an hour of the weekend, not when I could spend time with Nat instead.

Since Hugo died I had made a real effort not to spend so much time mentally and physically away from Nat, not to be so busy all the time, cherishing instead the connections we forged by spending time together even if just bodily in the same room. For me that meant not working on the weekends because once I stuck my head into a story there wasn’t much anyone could do to distract me until I’d reached the end of a thought or sentence or paragraph or page or article. When he was younger, in our house on the Vineyard, Nat had complained about how my back was so often turned to him while I sat at the computer. I had thought that being home after school was enough. But it wasn’t, quite. He needed my attention to be available and not be confronted with my back when he had a question or decided to tell me
really
how school had gone that day. I suspected that this was a big part of why I hadn’t given myself a desk in our new home. I had intended to but hadn’t
gotten
around to it, instead planting myself on my bed when I needed to use the laptop. This way he would never come looking for me and find my back instead. And really, lying down and typing wasn’t so bad once you got used to it. I was beginning to feel a little bit like the writer Colette who was said to have written all her novels in bed. Ditto Edith Wharton. Who else, I wondered, lying beneath my laptop, had supplied the world with great art from the comfort of her mattress?

I closed the laptop and went rooting through my room in search of Nat’s packet of school photos. My room, Nat’s room … nothing. I finally found it on the kitchen counter in a pile of mail that had accumulated over the past two weeks. I was good about plucking out bills and important papers and putting them into a special drawer I’d reserved for things I couldn’t afford to lose track of but the rest of the paperwork that flowed into the house could end up just about anywhere.

Nat looked so goofy in the photo, with his stiff school-picture smile and his hair frazzled out above his shoulders. A bright red pimple sat smack between his eyes where his bushy brows had started to grow together. The downy beginnings of a mustache looked like a shadow over his lip. It had darkened in the weeks since the photograph was taken. My beautiful boy. I kissed my fingertip and
touched
it to his cheek, then placed the photo face down atop the glass in the open frame. It really was quite a beauty and I was glad Rich had convinced me to keep it. So what if it came from Joe? It was just a frame, an object, and meant nothing in and of itself.

The photo installed, I propped the frame on the living room mantle. Ours wasn’t as stately as Rich’s but it served nicely as a place to put special things. We had made a nice display of family photos and a few choice knickknacks.

“What’s that?” Nat asked, having run thumping down the stairs and emerging in a burst of energy into the living room.