About a Girl (12 page)

I poked happily amidst the stacks, careful not to upset them. But if I was going to be here a while—how long
was
I going to be here? At least a few days?—it would not do to uncover all the bookstore’s secrets on my first visit. Kate’s bar was downtown, but I couldn’t remember exactly where, and had missed it on my compass of the main street. I had nothing else to do, and anyway maybe she’d have something to tell me about why Jack had vanished into the ether the moment I arrived. I was not thinking about Maddy. I was
not
. I made my way back up to the proprietor’s desk.

“Excuse me—do you know where Kate’s bar is?” He looked up at me at last, and although his manner was curt, his eyes were friendly, and I found myself liking him immediately. He reminded me a little of Mr. M.

“Scylla and Charybdis, you mean?”

“What?”

“It’s called Scylla and Charybdis.”

“What on earth is that?”

He lowered his spectacles and looked over them at me with a despondent expression. “What in god’s name do they teach young people these days? Nothing at all? Scylla and Charybdis were two extremely unlucky ladies.” He got up and disappeared behind a shelf, and I heard him rummaging around for a moment before he emerged holding a decrepit paperback with its front cover missing and several of its pages on the verge of falling out. “With my compliments,” he said, handing it to me. “The knowledge that I am lessening the weight of ignorance in the world will be payment enough.” I looked at the title page, yellowed and torn: Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
.

“My uncle is always telling me to read this,” I said. “But to tell you the truth, I mostly read science fiction and books about physics. I don’t like poetry.”

“That’s like saying you don’t like food, or are inconvenienced by breathing,” he said, unperturbed, “but you are a child, and so have some small excuse for your idiocy.”

“I am not an idiot or a child,” I said crossly. “I am eighteen years old and quite intelligent, and anyway that’s an unpronounceable name for a bar.”

“It doesn’t matter. There’s only one bar, and so no one has to pronounce it.”

“Fine,” I said. Aware I was being ungracious, I made an effort to curb my temper. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. The bar is across the street. Surprised you missed it,” he said, and returned to his book. Thus dismissed, I went back out into the blazing sunlight.

While I was in the bookstore, an enormous tawny dog with an inky muzzle had draped itself languorously across the stone steps of Kate’s bar. “That’s Qantaqa,” Kate yelled from inside as my shadow fell across the doorway. “Just kick her out of the way and come on in.”

“Get,” I said uncertainly to the dog, who weighed as least half as much as I did. It looked up at me and yawned.

“Qantaqa!” Kate bellowed. “Get on out of the way, you fat-ass!”

The dog got to its feet with the injured dignity of an old drunk and lumbered a couple of feet to the left, where it resettled itself with its chin on the steps and gazed up at me reproachfully. Going back into Kate’s bar, in broad daylight, unaccompanied, made me unaccountably nervous, but perhaps being underage was something like being a vampire; as long as Kate had invited me in, I ought to be welcome. I stepped past the dog and settled myself on a wooden stool. “Hi,” I said to Kate. “That’s a funny name for a dog.” Maddy was nowhere to be seen, I noted, with a surge of disappointment.

“She went to buy cigarettes,” Kate said and, unbidden, pushed a bottle of beer across the wooden bar toward me. I debated confessing what Aunt Beast referred to as my puritan streak (“Unnatural,” she said, “in a growing girl, but at least it means I don’t have to keep an eye on you”) before deciding against it and taking a cautious sip, which I nearly spat out. If people drank this stuff for fun, I could not imagine why. The physicist George Gamow once noted that the quantum principle was not unlike a person being able to drink either a pint of beer or no beer at all, but entirely incapable of drinking any amount of beer in between zero beers and a pint. Kate did not seem like a person who would have much interest in this anecdote. I took another sip; the second one was not as bad as the first.

“How’s Jack?” Kate asked. “You have your talk?”

“Absent,” I said. “He went to bed right after you dropped me off and I didn’t see him this morning.” There was something I was supposed to remember about Jack, I thought, something that night—

“He’s a hard one to pin down,” Kate said. The door to the bar opened again and there she was—same black clothes, yellow eyes gleaming, Qantaqa surging to her feet like a physical manifestation of my own delight. “Down, you goof,” she said gently, knuckling the dog—hers, obviously—behind the ears. Qantaqa subsided, remaining on the steps as Maddy slid onto a stool near me in a cloud of lavender-scented black hair, smacking the pack of cigarettes against her left hand. For all the shabby clothes, there was something about her that suggested grace that couldn’t be unlearned; her back was as straight as a dancer’s and she held her head high. Kate had already gotten down the bottle of whisky.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” Maddy said. There was a silence. I stared at my beer bottle in a frenzy of anxiety. “It rains diamonds on Saturn,” I blurted. Kate and Maddy both looked at me in astonishment.

“Does it,” Kate said politely.

“Because of the lightning storms,” I said. I had dug my hole; might as well keep going. “They turn methane into carbon and then it hardens in the atmospheric pressure. I mean, no one has seen them, obviously, it’s just a theory, but it seems…” I trailed off. “It seems possible,” I finished weakly. I took another drink of my beer.

“Imagine that,” Maddy said. I thought at first that she was making fun of me, but her yellow eyes were clear and she’d tilted her head in my direction. There was something almost tendrilly about her voice, like the wisps of fog that had crept through Jack’s yard that morning, something grey and breathing that slipped under my skin and wrapped ghostly fingers around my heart. I forced myself to look back at my beer; without noticing, I’d picked off most of the label in a fit of nervous energy. All I wanted was for her to keep talking to me.

“You and Kate know each other from the bar?” I asked.

“Oh, we go way back,” Maddy said.

“Few thousand years,” Kate said. Maddy shot her a strange, incomprehensible look, and then smiled, but I thought,
She doesn’t know what that means, either.

Some tourists entered in a noisy babble; I didn’t have to be from here to recognize what they were immediately. Tourists are the same the world over; I could imagine these exact people, in these exact clothes, shrieking with laughter and photographing themselves going through the subway turnstiles in Union Square at rush hour while people clotted up behind them, apoplectic with rage. Kate was polite as she took their orders, but when she turned her back on them I saw her expression was tinged with menace.

“We’re thinking of relocating here,” the tourists’ patriarch informed us.

“How nice for you,” Kate said.

“It’s so lovely,” agreed his wife, spray-tanned a virulent pumpkin color, batting lashes mascaraed into unnerving spikes.

“This time of year,” Kate agreed.

“The winters can’t be so bad,” said the patriarch. In startling contrast to his wife, he was pasty as a block of tofu, save a fluorescing patch of peeling sunburn that spread unevenly across his cheeks; it was not hard to imagine him clammy to the touch.

“No,” echoed his wife. “Not so bad. What’s a little rain? Forty or fifty degrees sounds downright balmy.” She giggled.

“The winters here have destroyed far better men than you,” Maddy said in a conversational tone. The patriarch looked at her, puzzled. I hid a smile behind my hand.

“Sure,” he said. “I bet you’re right. I bet we’d just love it here.” The tourists collected their beers, eyeing Maddy nervously, and transported them to a table by the windows overlooking the water.

“Dipshits,” Kate said under her breath. “Can’t shoot ’em, can’t stay in business without ’em. It’s enough to make me take up secretarial work in the city.”

“Is it really that bad here in the winter?” I asked when I was sure the tourists were out of earshot.

“It’s like living with a rain cloud ten feet above your head,” Kate said. “It gets dark at four. It’s so damp everything molds. The wind comes in off the water and freezes you straight through. The only colors you’ll see are fog and wet tree. For nine months solid.”

“It can’t be as bad as where I’m from,” I said. “We have blizzards. It gets down to ten or twenty degrees sometimes. If you spend the night outside without a coat it can kill you.”

“What we have out here,” Kate said, “is despair, which is a different thing than cold, and a much slower and more miserable death.”

“The reason Kate does so well,” Maddy said, “is that everyone who lives in this town year-round is an alcoholic. Where are you from?”

“New York,” I said. “How about you?”

“A lot farther than that,” she said. I waited, but that was apparently the closest I was going to get to an answer. If she was curious what I was doing there, she didn’t ask, and I didn’t feel like offering. There was something about her that was as unsettling as it was compelling; those eyes, that face, the way she moved, like an animal that had been in a cage too long. I couldn’t stop looking at her, but she did not seem to have anything else to say—had lost interest in me altogether, as far as I could tell. She lit a cigarette and looked out the window, away from me.

“Want another one?” Kate asked, nodding toward my bottle, which I had emptied without noticing.

“No,” I said, “thank you.” I had no excuse left for sitting at her bar, so I got up. I dug in my pocket for my wallet, but she shook her head.

“On the house,” she said. “Welcome to the country, city mouse.”

“Thanks,” I said again. Everyone I came across seemed committed to giving me things for free; I could not imagine anything more unlike New York. Maddy did not say goodbye—did not so much as look up—when I left, and I did not like how this fact made me feel. I had had just about enough feelings for the rest of my life. The beer had made me stupid, but I found I did not mind.

I wasn’t ready for the silent loneliness of Jack’s house, and so I wheeled his bike to where the main street dead-ended into the harbor, leaned it up against a telephone pole—so far, he’d been right about no one trying to steal it—and walked down a narrow, sandy path through sharp-bladed grass that came to my knees in green spears.

The beach here was alive with unexpected things, nothing like the syringe-strewn and admittedly filthy sands of Coney Island, where Aunt Beast had taken me to ride the Cyclone and eat cotton candy in the summers when I was small, and where Shane and I would sometimes go when we were older with pilfered beer (for him) and Dr Pepper (for me) to bake ourselves in the hammering July sun. Drifts of seaweed were heaped up and down the shoreline, miniature clouds of bugs humming over them and hopping madly on various bug errands. I was alarmed by some slick emerald-green animal I didn’t recognize, long and skinny and snakelike, and jumped back in fright; but it didn’t move as I got closer, and I thought it must be dead. I turned over a rock and a tiny crab, no bigger than my thumbnail, brandished its miniature pincers at me before scuttling away to safety.

When I tired of adventuring amidst the flora and fauna I sat on the beach and looked at the distant mountains, all a purple smear save a single white-sided peak that stood taller than its fellows—the mountain I’d seen from the plane? But no, the direction was wrong, and that one had been even bigger. It had begun to occur to me that the objects we were accustomed to referring to as “mountains” on the east coast much more closely resembled large hills, and that “forest” had something of a different definition in this part of the country as well. I caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up, expecting another beachcomber; instead, it was a deer and her tiny, drunken-legged fawn, spotted white and stumbling along at its mother’s heels as though it had just learned to walk the day before. I sat forward to see them better and both deer turned to look at me, the doe calm, the fawn wide-eyed and panicked. It scampered after its mother, who sauntered away from me in a desultory manner, nibbling at a low-hanging branch before picking her way daintily back into a stand of trees that grew down to the stony shore. The fawn, with one last look in my direction, huge ears flicking back and forth, leapt after her with an endearing, inept lurch.

The back tire of Jack’s bicycle had gone flat. I remembered the way to his house, at least—it would be a long walk, but not an unpleasant one, and I could do with the exercise. I didn’t have much choice but to make the best of it. I wheeled the bike away from the businessy bits of town and back uphill, past houses with big, pretty gardens. Raoul would have loved all these flowers—
phone call
. I hadn’t called them yet. “I’m sorry!” I said aloud, as if that would help. They were likely killing themselves with worry, no matter what sort of note I’d left them—even if I
was
eighteen—and then I thought, unbidden, of Maddy. Yellow-eyed girl and her yellow dog; the tangle of her hair; her brown hands on the bar—long slender fingers, knuckles dotted with white scars—and as if I’d summoned her with the force of my will, a truck pulled up next to me, big yellow dog with its head out the open window, yellow-eyed girl in the driver’s seat, and I forgot all about calling my parents. “Hey,” she said. “Need a ride?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be great.”
Keep it cool,
I thought,
keep it cool, keep it cool
. Her truck was, like Kate’s, a battered old thing that looked as though someone had driven it to the moon and back again several times, at least once through a dust storm. I put my bike in the bed and climbed in the cab next to Qantaqa, who listed up against me happily, panting in my ear. Her breath was not pleasant; neither was Dorian Gray’s, of course, but he had a lot less of it and a much smaller head besides. I found myself unaccountably panicky and wiped my sweaty palms on my shorts.