About a Girl (11 page)

But if he had been—or was still—prone to the various excesses of vice said to be particular to rock stars, they had left him otherwise unscathed. He had none of the aging libertine about him. He looked hard and stern, like a fisherman, or a soldier, someone who had spent all his life in repetitive, efficient action. If there was any trace of my own features in the slope of his jaw or the high planes of his cheekbones, those similarities did not give themselves up upon first examination. And it seemed unlikely that someone so dark-skinned would produce someone as pale as me, but my grandfather had been white as a mushroom, and genetics is still a science largely marked by mystery and guesswork. It occurred to me for the first time that I would have benefited considerably from preparing some introductory remarks. Where
had
my brain gone this summer? What was I
thinking,
coming here; how on earth had I ended up on the doorstep of a total stranger, escorted by a bizarre mind-reading hippie I’d known for all of two hours? “Um, hi,” I said. “I probably should have called first. But I think you knew—I mean, I know you knew—my—” I could not say the word. “Aurora.”

“Aurora,” he repeated. His voice was deep, and raspy, as if he did not speak aloud often. He looked at Kate, who remained silent, and then back at me again.

“She was my—she, um, had me. Like, birth.” His face was blank. I sallied forth in the face of his terrifying indifference. “I’m Tally—I know this is unorthodox, but I came a long way and I was hoping to—I thought maybe I could ask you a few questions.”

“How did you get here?”

“I found her on the ferry,” Kate said. “Take good care of her, understand?” She was looking at Jack with an unnerving intensity; I almost took a step back myself. But he stared her down without flinching, and she shrugged and looked away first. “I have to get back to work now. Come find me at the bar if you need anything.” I watched stupidly as she marched back to her truck.

“Thanks!” I yelled after her as an afterthought, but she didn’t turn around or acknowledge that she’d heard me. The truck roared to life and she was gone. I took a deep breath. “I was hoping—” I faltered; his expression made me want to crawl under a rock. “Kate said that you wouldn’t mind.” Kate had said nothing of the sort. If Jack threw me off his doorstep—and I would hardly have blamed him if he did—I was stuck in the middle of the woods, at night, in a place I knew nothing about, with no recourse whatsoever.

“Kate,” he said, and his tone was dangerous. He looked at me for the length of another excruciating silence, and then he sighed. “Fine,” he said. “Come in.”

I followed him into a big open white-walled room whose windows looked out over the water. Huge wooden beams held up the high ceiling, and the floor was made of rough storm-colored stone. It was furnished with a kind of elegant carelessness: a rectangular wooden table that could have comfortably seated twenty people, piled high with books and sheet music and instruments in varying states of string-sprung disrepair; a big low couch, upholstered in desert-hued patterns that made me think of Raoul’s Pendleton blanket, littered with beautiful old kilim pillows; a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves opposite the bank of windows, crammed to bursting with more books and papers and here and there gourds and stone statues and smaller, more obscure items that might have been instruments or totems or artifacts of some mysterious and ancient religion. It was the house of someone with a tremendous amount of money and good taste and no inclination to impress visitors; everything in it had been bought for a purpose that was utilitarian, not decorative, despite most of the objects’ inherent beauty. The room seemed like an extension of the person in front of me, who was already moving away, arranging a pile of papers on the big table, adjusting a battered old violin where it rested on a chair, drawing the curtains—I almost told him not to, I was so longing to see the stars, but of course it was his house. I had no idea what to say to him. If I had hoped for some teary and melodramatic confession of paternity at the sight of me, a warm and welcoming embrace, impassioned pleas for forgiveness, my hopes should have been dashed against the rocky shore far below us.

“You live in town?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I came from New York.”

“You came from New York
City
? Here? Why?”

“I never met Aurora,” I said in a rush. “She ran off, or something, she left me right after I was born, and all this time I never cared, but I’m going to college in a couple of months, and I thought—I mean, it seemed like something to sort out, before I leave. Who she is. And I thought you knew her, and I guess I just…” I trailed off. “I just came,” I finished, “here. To ask you. About her. You
did
know her? That’s why you’re still talking to me?”

“I knew her,” he said. “A long time ago, and not well. How did you find me?”

I opened my mouth to tell him about Mr. M, and my thoughts went staticky again; there was something wrong with the connection between my brain and my tongue. “A—friend,” I said. “My friend. Who’s your old friend, I think. He looked you up.” This sounded absurd as soon as I said it.

“I don’t have any friends.” There was a dark hum in the air between us, something thick and strange; I thought of Kate’s owl stare and Maddy’s yellow one, and for some reason Mr. M’s own eerie black gaze—his eyes were so dark you could not distinguish between iris and pupil, and it gave him an uncanny look. I made a helpless gesture with one hand. Jack shook his head as if he were trying to dislodge a mosquito.

“I can’t imagine why you came all the way out here. I don’t have anything to tell you about Aurora.” He would not meet my eyes.
You’re lying,
I thought.
You’re lying, and you know I know you’re lying.
I found that I could think clearly again; the air was less odd. I was, more than anything, exhausted. I yawned.

“Where are you staying?”

“I hadn’t gotten that far.”

“How long are you planning on being here for?”

“I don’t know.”

He raised one eyebrow. “Your—family? You have one? They know you’re here?”

“Of course I have a family,” I said, indignant. “And yes. They know. I mean, they will know. When I call them.”

He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Well,” he said. “It’s too late to send you packing, and your ride seems to have abandoned you. You can spend the night here, I suppose. And we’ll figure out what to do with you in the morning.”

“That’s very nice of you,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Kate gave me a hamburger.”

“At least she’s good for something,” he said. Not his girlfriend, then.

“How do you know her?”

“I’ve known her for a long time. Look, we can—talk—in the morning. You look tired.”

“Kind of,” I conceded.

He did not waste any more time on small talk; he pointed me down a wide hallway that led past a kitchen—as beautiful and well appointed as the main room of the house, all gleaming stainless-steel surfaces and burnished copper pots hanging from a wrought-iron rack over a butcher-block counter—several doors in a row that were shut tightly; and finally, another heavy wooden door, this one open, to a small room overlooking the sprawling tangle of Jack’s garden. Under the window, a twin bed, neatly made up with a soft patterned grey blanket; against one wall, an old oak chest of drawers; and another door that proved to be a bathroom. A skylight framed a patch of night sky. It was a lovelier room by far than my own beloved but faintly shabby bedroom in Brooklyn, with its familiar but uninspiring view of the side of the neighboring brownstone and its mismatched furniture.

I had never before given much thought to the acquisition and deployment of nice things; Aunt Beast would have been as content with an old barstool as an Eames chair, and Raoul and Henri, though they both loved to brighten the apartment with fresh flowers and were forever bringing home paintings or pretty throw rugs or other small, jewel-like accouterments that made our house the cheery, welcoming nest of disorder that it was, would never have spent real money on something so trivial as furniture. But Jack’s house had a cool grace to it that made me feel both envious and awed. I was no stranger to the homes of rich people; it wasn’t just money that made this place what it was. It was him. I wondered, with a sudden, delicious thrill, how many stars I would be able to see through the skylight. And of course, there was the whole out-of-doors to make into my observatory. No light pollution here. Assuming Jack let me stay here after tonight, which was assuming a lot.

“Sleep well,” he said, and then he was gone.

“Thanks,” I said to the closing door.

I set my bag on the floor and dug out the binoculars, and then a wave of exhaustion ran through me, so debilitating that it knocked me onto the bed, and I lay on my back like an upended beetle, staring up at Jack’s ceiling. I thought of Raoul and Henri and Aunt Beast, but there was no phone in the room and it seemed a tremendous feat to get back up again and go out into Jack’s house in search of one.
I’ve known her for a long time
—that was what Kate had said about Maddy, too; had they all known—I would just rest for a moment, and then I would take my binoculars outside and survey the constellations—I’d be able to see so much out here—and then I’d find a phone—and then sleep fell over me like a blanket, and all my thoughts ended there.

*   *   *

I woke up to the smell of coffee.
Henri,
I thought,
Henri made me coffee,
and I opened my eyes. The light in my room was not right—too clear and too insistent, and not hot enough. The blue square of sky overhead was all wrong, too, and I turned my head to the window—wash of green, blue water—what had happened to the apartment building next door?
You’re not home, you idiot,
said the voice, and then the day before came back to me. I sat up in Jack’s guest bed, blinking stupidly, and reached for my clothes, before I remembered I’d fallen asleep in them.

I made my way into Jack’s kitchen—I hadn’t even taken my
shoes
off the night before—in search of the coffee smell’s source, and of Jack. I found the former in a pot, next to a note written, presumably, by the latter:

Tally,

Will be on the boat all day.
[The boat? What boat?]
My apologies. Dinner? We can talk then. Stay as long as you like. Bike in the shed behind the house if you want to go downtown. Don’t worry about lock, no one will take it.

—J

I drank my coffee. Jack had said
stay,
but not
pillage the refrigerator,
and anyway I found upon inspection that its contents—a lone jar of hot sauce, a single pickle bobbing forlornly in a jar of brine, the moldy end of a loaf of bread—did not inspire much in the way of breakfasty thoughts. Hopefully he was better at dinner.

The shed was easy to find, half-hidden in the woods behind Jack’s garden, which was a tangle of some giant flower I did not recognize: stalks almost as tall as I was, and blossoms of densely packed petals curled into vivid orange and pink tubes. I made a mental note to ask him about them later. The last bits of morning fog were drifting off the grass in sinuous grey tendrils. Unlike his house, the shed was a chaotic nest of grubby disorder: cobwebs thickly netted a tangle of rakes and hoes, and rusty chunks of ancient machinery whose original purpose was undeterminable were half-obscured by a carpet of grey dust. Jack’s bike, resting precariously against something that looked like it might once have been a lawnmower, was in better shape. It was too big for me, but after a brief search I found a screwdriver on a workbench, next to a fat black spider that waved one leg at me jauntily before scurrying off, and with some effort lowered the bike’s seat to a manageable height.

I more or less remembered the turns Kate had taken the evening before to get out to Jack’s house. As long as I headed downhill, I didn’t think I could get too far off course. I did not relish the thought of the return trip. I’d been accompanying Aunt Beast for years on her regular laps of Prospect Park—recently, I’d even gotten fast enough to keep up with her, though, despite my namesake, I’d never win any races. But the faint sloping grade of the park road did not come close to the perilous inclines that led to Jack’s.

After I’d managed the jarring ordeal of the pothole-laced gravel road, the descent was a delight—flying headlong down hills with the clean summer all around me, fields and salt breezes and a startled, fat old dog that barked laboriously at me from a front yard where it was sunning itself. The main part of town was easy to find. At the far end of the main street was a smallish marina I hadn’t noticed the day before and a quaint motel advertising free cable and water views. I straddled the bike and watched sailboats bob in the harbor for a minute before turning around for a closer inspection of downtown.

I had no interest in Victorian antiques, stuffed toy rabbits in a variety of costumes, saltwater taffy, or a 1950s-themed diner whose miserable-looking employees were visible through the window sullenly delivering milkshakes to cabbage-white tourists in visors and garish Hawaiian-print button-downs. On my second pass of the street I discovered a used bookstore tucked between a jewelry store and a boutique offering striped socks, postcards, T-shirts sporting various epigrams on the pleasures of fishing, and scandalous lingerie. A wooden sign in the window bearing the moniker
MELVILLE & CO.
rested atop a pile of yellowed books. Inside, the store was a jumble; the overstuffed shelves, labeled with hand-lettered signs in crabbed script, had spilled over into teetering stacks of books piled haphazardly on the floor, and the front windows were so obscured by more stacks of books that only a thin slice of sunlight made its way through to illuminate the shop. A middle-aged white gentleman with disordered brown hair and round spectacles sat behind an oak table piled with even more books and did not look up as I came in. It was the sort of place I wanted to bottle and send to Raoul.
Raoul.
I hadn’t called them. I would call them later.