All Things Cease to Appear (17 page)

No, you don’t want to draw me.

You’ve got a good face. She’d already started, her hand moving around the page, parts of him taking shape. We don’t look at each other enough, she said. People never do.

That wasn’t true; he looked at her all the time, she just didn’t know it.

When you really look at someone’s face, you see a lot.

Like what?

In you? I see strength.

Then you have a good imagination, he said, and she looked disappointed. If he had strength, he would’ve figured out how to get out of this town by now.

He lay back on the grass, up on his elbows with his legs stretched out, smoking, watching her. When she moved a certain way he could see the strap of her bra, her long neck.

What do you want to do? With your life, I mean?

I’m a musician. It felt good to say out loud. I play the trumpet.

A musician. She tilted her head, watching him, her hand constantly moving.

Yes, ma’am.

Will you play for me?

Maybe.

Maybe? She smiled, surprised, her eyebrows raised.

I guess I could be convinced.

She looked at him. I’d really like that, Eddy.

She turned the pad of paper around and showed him the drawing. She had gotten his face, his hard eyes. Made him look better than he really did, he thought. Hey, that’s pretty good.

I’ve captured you, she said.

Yes, I believe you have. Now he was sketching her in his mind, her small shoulders, her flat chest, her tiny nipples. She was angular, girlish.

You have a good face, she said. I bet all the girls tell you that.

He shook his head, shaking off a dream; he felt like he knew her.

—

THE POINT WAS,
sometimes you just know someone. That’s what he’d come to realize about the thing between them. Something warm and bright was filling him up like his mother’s cooking, making him strong again.

Maybe she’d come out to hang the wash. He’d watch her back, her arms reaching up, her elbows as knobby as garden snails.

Across the fields that had been his grandfather’s and his great-grandfather’s before that, the wind spoke to him.
Wait,
it said.

The old farm, once full of cows, sheep, pigs, even two old quarter horses his pop had gotten cheap. His old man could do horse tricks. He could stand up on their backs and twirl a rope. He was a cowboy; he was a scholar. Smartest man he ever knew and couldn’t make a dime. Opera always in the house. And the smell of Mother’s cooking. Onions, fried potatoes, bacon.

Now Catherine’s daughter was sleeping in his old room. He wouldn’t tell her. He wouldn’t tell her what had gone on in that house, how his father would come after them, turning over chairs and tables, how his mother would cry up in her room or sometimes sit in one place shaking just a little, like somebody who was scared.

At night, it was too hot at Rainer’s to be inside. He’d walk through town. You could see into all the crummy little houses. People out on their stoops, smoking, just passing the time. Living their lives, making mistakes, bad decisions, yelling at each other, or sometimes you saw the joy, the moments of brightness.

It could make you love this world.

The night before she’d left them behind—because that’s what she did—she asked Eddy into her room. You’re the oldest, she said to him, her voice distant, spare. You look out for your brothers, Edward. Make sure nobody hurts Wade. He’s big and strong, but he’s too kind. She took his hand briefly. You see to it that Cole goes to college. He can’t stay in this town.

Yes, Mother.

I’m counting on you, Eddy.

I know it.

He sat there; he couldn’t look at her. You get some sleep, she told him. Good night, now.

He left her there, thinking how his parents’ room and everything in it was a place he could never understand. His mother as a woman; his father. How they were together as husband and wife. Whatever they had that kept them there. Their quiet violence. What she took from him. What she endured. The old highboy where she kept her things, a monument to missed chances. Birth certificate, high-school diploma, acceptance letter from a nursing school, a tooth.

—

HE HAD THIS JOB
working nights at the inn as a busboy. That’s where he met the girl, Willis. She was younger, maybe twenty, but was the type that had all the answers. She liked getting the goods on people. The first thing she said to him was, You look like an undertaker. To which he replied, They make me wear this. She carried around this book of poems by E. E. Cummings, thick as a dictionary, that she stole back in high school from her school library—she said she wanted to be a poet.

The inn paid pretty good and was a popular place. People came from all over, driving up from the city or down from Saratoga, and everybody wanted to get in, and every weekend the place was jammed. Usually, he could get a plate of food after hours. Lamb was their dish. Sometimes even a cold beer. On breaks, they’d go outside and smoke and she’d tell him a made-up poem. She’d recite, with a nervous tremor in her voice,
The moon is bright above the crazy trees,
or some crap like that.

Willis could be hard to figure. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but something about her drove him a little crazy. Maybe the way she moved, like a Spanish dancer with something on her head, straight-backed, elegant. She had a mole on her face and black-caterpillar eyebrows, eyeliner thick as crayon. She said she was from the city, and whenever she announced this to somebody she jerked her head so her hair flew back out of her face over her shoulder. They’d do shots on their break, out in the parking lot. Once they did flamers. She’d get a little drunk and start crying about her mother, saying she was the worst daughter you could ever have, and she’d get all soggy, with her mascara running all over the place and snot dripping out of her nose and her lips all slippery, and the only thing he could think to do was kiss her. She’d gone to college out west and was in town for a while, working at the inn. Claimed she’d gotten hired on account of her riding skills, for all the rich people in Chosen with expensive horses they couldn’t ride. She said she wanted to learn how to farm so one day she could have her own little place and grow stuff. That’s all she wanted. They were in the junkyard when she told him this, in the back seat of a limousine that had confetti all over the seats and floor, and kind of a puke smell, and you just knew something had happened in it, something bad.

Life was mysterious, he knew. People never said what they really meant and it always caused more trouble than it was worth. Eddy thought it was a defining characteristic of human beings. You didn’t find that kind of thing with animals. Sometimes, late at night, when it was very quiet, he’d imagine that all the words people never said, the true and honest ones, slipped out of their mouths and danced around wickedly over their stupid, sleeping forms.

You couldn’t control much in this life. His brothers were counting on him for something—he didn’t really know what, none of them did. But something important. That might make them feel better.

It was hard to say what people needed once they’d been hurt. Still, he didn’t mind the burden. If anyone should carry it, it was him. He could bear it. His mother had known it. He knew it, too. He hoped he could do some good.

—

IT WAS
a small kitchen at the inn, and even with all the windows open and the fans going the air was blazing. You’d see the blue flames and the sizzling pans. Eddy was only a busboy, but they treated him like someone special. As a townie, he had their respect. Plus, he was fast. He cleared the tables and came back like a ghost; nobody even noticed.

Everybody knew the town was changing. You could spot the New Yorkers a mile away in their expensive clothes, the women with their pocketbooks, their sunglasses, like they were famous, or just better. They had an attitude—what his old high-school teachers would call arrogance before making you stand out in the hall all period. You could feel the world changing. Money pouring in. The rich people getting richer, and everyone else, like him, going nowhere.

One night, the Clares came in for dinner. They’d asked his brother to babysit, so Eddy had dropped him over there before work. Cole complained about it and said babysitting was for girls, but Eddy reminded him of the good money he was making. They’re new here. They don’t know anybody else. And she likes you.

They were with another couple, some old guy whose wife used a cane. Catherine had on a blue dress that showed off her shoulders and her hair was pulled back kind of fancy, not her usual blond scribble. Mr. Clare wore a starchy white shirt and a bow tie, like he’d been gift-wrapped. Eddy couldn’t figure out what a sweet girl like her was doing with an asshole like him. More than once, Eddy had watched her transform into the person who was Clare’s wife, when she’d hear his Fiat down the road and start cleaning up the place like she needed to hide something, including her true self. Eddy wondered what it was like to be in his shoes: to have a wife like her in your bed every night, to drive a car like that. He thought it must be pretty good.

Willis was their waitress, and for some reason she seemed pretty upset the whole time, slamming the plates down and acting like a rattling teapot about to blow its lid off. He worried she might spit in their food. At one point he took hold of her arms and made her look at him, and she was all flushed from the heat of the ovens, and her eyes, which were almost black, had tears in them. I made a mistake, she said. I did something awful.

Hey, he said, and kissed her forehead.

She stood there with her cheeks bright red and sweat marks under her arms, putting out the bread plates, the squares of butter, and you could see her tattoo peeking out from under her sleeve, black tears falling down her wrist. They took a break at the same time and went out into the cool air and smoked under the black leaves. The leaves tittered in the wind and you could see this streak of orange in the darkening sky. Willis had a hard little mouth, like the smallest flower. It was the shape your blood took when you got cut. She smoked and shook her head, nodding at the screen door, the buttery light inside the kitchen. Guy’s a prick.

Who do you mean?

You know.

He didn’t want to know. He didn’t press her and that was the end of it.

Later, after they were done, she took him to her room to get high. When you worked in a kitchen you went home greasy, the smell of food on your clothes, your skin. They walked side by side down the empty road. It was a barn fixed up like a dorm and some of the help lived there. These were summer people, mostly, students and the like, who’d go back to their real lives before the first frost. They lay on her bed under the open window and you could smell the sweet stink of the sheep and you could see the moon.

I wish things were different, she said, that people were nicer, you know? I wish people were nicer to each other.

He looked down at her face and saw that she was really just a kid. She let him kiss her a few times. Her mouth was warm, salty, and when he kissed her with his eyes closed it was like being inside a dark little city.

I’ve done things, she said. Stuff I regret.

Like what?

With men. She looked at him with her big eyes.

You don’t have to—

I want to. I want you to know me. I want you to know who I really am.

She turned onto her side and rested her head in the palm of her hand. Her body was like the coastline of some exclusive island, a place only certain people got to see, with white villas perched over the blue sea.

She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out hard with disgust. I’ve been having sex since I was thirteen.

Everybody makes mistakes, he said. You have to put that stuff behind you. It was something his mother would say.

I’ll try, Eddy. She touched his arm as lightly as a bird landing on a branch, and he somehow felt patronized. Then she said, I don’t want to hurt you.

He wondered why she’d say that. You won’t, he told her, but he already knew it was a lie. Don’t worry about me. I’m a pretty tough customer.

She started kissing him all over, but he pulled her up. He didn’t want her doing any favors for him like she did for everybody else. He kissed her tenderly, and she giggled like a kid and hid her face in the crook of his arm. And then they were wrestling and she was like a boy, like one of his brothers, skinny and fierce, and he could be rough with her and it wasn’t sex, he didn’t even take off her pants—it was something else, something hungry and physical that confirmed that neither one of them would ever really be satisfied. They both knew it and he could see this quiet revelation in her eyes and it got to him and he felt a little sick.

They fell asleep together, and in the morning, before it was even light, they crept down the stairs. He took her to the field of dead cars. They climbed up on the old bus and he played her a slow, somber tune and it came up out of him like something primal. It was the sound of his own yearning heart. She lay back on the cold metal, looking sleepy, wrapped up in his old coat, and he crawled up beside her and they looked up at the sky. She didn’t say much about her life except that she’d hitched out here from California, which he suspected was a lie, and that her father was a big-deal lawyer who represented gangsters, criminals. I grew up with pictures of dead people all over the house. There’s a lot of interesting ways to kill somebody. Eddy thought this was sad and felt bad for her. Her father wasn’t home very much, she said. There’s plenty of bad people out there.

Women were mysterious creatures, he thought. She could be nice one day and then ignore him for no good reason. Days would pass and he wouldn’t see her. He didn’t understand it. He’d see her at work and she’d scarcely say a word to him.

One evening he asked, What’s wrong with you?

Nothing. Leave me alone.

Come here.

Get off me.

He had to wonder if she was seeing someone else. She didn’t look right. She carried around this big leather sack with books in it. She said she wanted to go back to school. I’m not myself here, she kept saying. Her skin was ashen, a little yellow, smudges of old makeup under her eyes. He’d try to ask her, but she’d just pull away.