Crimes Against My Brother (17 page)

Annette turned to go and then turned back. “I think it’s her period,” she said. “It always gets to her!”

Embarrassed, he looked away. His hair was combed back on both sides and twisted at the front and top, like those boys from the 1950s. He put his right hand over his left elbow as if to protect himself from something and smiled clumsily.

Annette did that something: she touched his right arm quickly, squeezed it and then let go. He was staring at the spot on the arm she had touched, when she suddenly said that Sara owed her thirty dollars for a manicure and haircut, and she didn’t want to bother her now because she had so much on her mind, but she needed the money herself.

The lights shone like a draft or a funnel behind her, as if she stood directly inside some splendid radiance that allowed her dress to become almost transparent. It was at this moment she realized that he could not take his eyes off her.

“Well,” he said, coming to himself, “here.” And he immediately put his hand in his pocket and gave her thirty dollars. (He had a lot of money in his hand, but he did not hold it as Lonnie held his.)

“Oh,” she said. “Sara said she would pay it.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Then, seeing her peering here and there, he asked her to come in and see his store. He took her from one end to the other—up the stairs to the second and then the third floor. Everything was in order; everything had a price tag and a serial number—it all looked so impressive to her. From the top-floor window she could see all the way to the bridge, and beyond—to small lights twinkling far away in the darkness.

“Is that Bonny Joyce Road—that small speck way off?” she said in a capricious beautiful tone, turning her face toward his.

“No, it’s another ten miles down and beyond the islands.”

“Ah yes—but this river is where we spent our youth.”

“Yes.”

“And now our youth is gone—drifted away somewhere. I do not know where—but it has, hasn’t it?” she said. “Well, let’s go back downstairs,” she said, to indicate propriety.

It was a warm night and she lingered. So he locked up (childishly a bit pleased to have keys that hung off his belt) and they walked down the street together, he slightly ahead of her and not knowing what decorum was. He could hear the sound of his shoes on the sidewalk, the smell of darkness in the warm siding. She was Sara’s best friend, he told himself, so walking with her was fine—and even more than fine; it was somehow required. That was it: it was a requirement to walk with his fiancée’s best friend. There. He felt better saying this and sighed.

“Maybe I should go over to see Sara—is she running a temperature?”

“I think she’ll be fine,” Annette said. “Besides, she was sleeping when I left.”

It did not matter that this sounded false—or, in fact, it mattered in a good way. It surprised Ian how some small part of him wanted it to be a lie, for that indicated something else, something new and special, between them. He knew this was how shallow men thought—and he knew too that at times this is how all men thought when it came to someone else’s fiancée or wife.

They watched a nighthawk fly beneath the streetlight near Fransblo’s and heard a bicycle up the back lane.

She wore a short strapless summer dress. She had her nails painted pink and had a small ankle bracelet. She was, to him, spellbinding.

He noticed now how she had done Sara’s hair and nails to be exactly like hers, and how this suddenly defined the two women. More importantly, she wore the same perfume that he remembered her wearing that day she’d tossed her head and turned away from him.

She was, in fact, a small-town girl trying to look chic, and in a way this was flattering to him, flattering and poignant—it made her seem exposed in a melancholy way, teetering on the brink of an elliptical desire that could never be fulfilled, like those young country girls he remembered standing in white high heels in the lime-coloured dust of evening. He remembered so many women like that now—and all were remembered in a sudden affecting way—their dreams so elusive, and in the end unfulfilled. In some way he wanted to take all the burden of pain away.

He drove a Mustang and smoked cigarettes—all this was, in a way, self-deceiving. That is, he thought that in order to be perceived in a new way, he had to look like a new man, whether he was or not. Now, suddenly—and it gave him almost a fright—Annette looked at him with a glance that said she understood all of this. It was a glance that could make men go weak with autumnal desire. And men did and would. And Annette knew this in a second.

Caught in that moment, she said, “Do you know what I need the money for?”

“Not at all.”

“Well, the money isn’t to buy dope—I’m not a dope fiend,” she explained. That is, she knew quite well his reputation for being old-fashioned—and of course, in most ways she was too. She loved old songs that spoke of broken hearts and women who had been deceived.

He laughed uncomfortably and turned to wait for her.

She pulled up her skirt very slowly now, to beyond her thighs. “Legs waxed.” She winked. “I need to get them done as soon as I can—hopefully tomorrow.”

She dropped her skirt quickly, and blushed.

He stared at her legs and then turned his head.

“My legs look bad?”

“No” was all he managed to say. Anyone else doing this would have been more than obvious. Annette doing it was lively, and somehow wonderfully and innocently expected. That was her terrible potency—like a small pinprick from an exotic flower that caused a poisonous
heartache. He lit another cigarette with his Zippo clicking in his hand, that self-aggrandizing motion on a dark street that is always a moratorium on class. But he could not be blamed—he had struggled so hard to be one of the bright young men in town.

Her face was full and mischievous, and had a kind of remarkable maritime beauty, beauty hereditary and complemented by her accent, which was a mixture of French and Irish lilt. Ian thought of her as “new” in the way she moved and attracted him. Not new in the way the university kids were, with all their baffling and self-conscious concerns so bogus to him—but new because she was of a tradition that would never change. When he had known her before, she had acted nothing like this with him. She had really tormented him, like a cat might with a mouse. Now everything seemed to be done only for him. She took his cigarette, held it and took a dismissive drag, and handed it back to him as they walked. When he put it in his mouth, he was overcome by the idea that their mouths had met.

That is, she made him feel exactly as she wanted him to.

He was now worried she might change her mind again about him. And without knowing it, he was as infatuated as he had always been.

But she became coy and said nothing for a while. Then, as they turned along the lane toward his car, she told him he should improve his looks for Sara’s sake.

“What should I do to look better?”

“I would cut that big snip of hair right there,” she said, touching the twist he had at the front. “And maybe pin your ears back a tad.”

Then she started talking again, quicker than before. She had nothing but kind things to say about Sara Robb. “And her leg—her leg. If I had a leg like she had a leg, I would jump pell-mell off a bridge,” she said. This did not sound demeaning but kind.

But there was something else, almost immediately. He had noticed it when he’d first seen her while visiting Sara’s house. It was her insistence—in how she spoke to him, looked at him and then glanced at Sara and back at him—that said: I can have you anytime I want, married or not. Get
married and I will still have you. I remember the day I made you walk all the way to Hackett Brook—yes, you remember that day too! You couldn’t take your eyes off me back then, just like now. So she was telling him now, and once and for all, she could have him. And more than that, she was insisting it was only fair if he succumbed. And more to the point, he knew—and she knew he knew—that he would, sooner or later.

But what was most profound was the self-deceit. Both knew and said nothing.

He went to flick his cigarette into the darkness and she said, “No, here,” and took it once more and had a final drag before she crushed it with her foot. They had almost come to his car and his mind was racing. That is, he was confused about what to do next.

But bending down to pick up a piece of coloured glass to look at, bauble in her hand, she stopped walking and said, almost as if she was out of breath, “You scared me when you were a boy—back then.”

“I scared you how?”

She shrugged, looked at the glass and began to walk once more. “Well, I would have loved to have gone out with you, but you were so wild. Oh, you were so damn wild. Sara will probably tame you back down so women like me won’t be scared of you.”

Of course he knew she was saying this to please him, and it wasn’t true—Harold and Evan were far more wild than he. He had always been innocent without being stupid—but even this was flattering.

“God—you don’t remember me, but I remember you,” she said. That is, she completely reversed reality and made it sound utterly true. And Ian found it wonderful, like a soft reassuring moment in youth when one becomes suddenly glad and in love with life.

“Oh, you remember me with Harold—but you don’t remember me when I was so alone at night, sometimes waiting in my house for someone to come and see me.”

That is, Annette’s insistence was collaborative, for sin is always collaborative. It was as if she was willing him to agree with her plans, and he was too weak not to—just as she had done in high school with others.

Was it, then, a sin? For nothing had been done yet. But betrayal is always a sin—at its worst, it is in Dante’s furthermost reach of hell. This is what my students and I spoke about, discussed and argued about, many days in a small dark classroom in a cold red building at the top of the hill.

So to accomplish this sleight of hand, Ian pretended he did not remember her very well. He also pretended that this conversation was not out of the ordinary because Annette was Sara’s friend. She then mentioned other men, men he had heard of, who were part of the great collection of men who hung around the new bars in town, and who laughed and rollicked about other people’s failed dreams and marriages, as if tragedy itself was nothing.

She mentioned these men to see if he approved and then redirected her talk to something else. In this way she was placing him.

He had heard of these other men, Ripp and Tab and Dickie—but only on occasion, and they seemed distant and remote from anyone he or Sara could know or ever want to know. One of them, Ripp, often bullied people where he lifted weights, and someone said even the police were frightened of him—and he liked it when he heard that people were frightened of him. He wore white T-shirts showing his arms with their tattoos. He had an absolute conviction that it was wonderful to make others fear him. Ian, in fact, disliked him intensely.

Seeing his reaction, Annette simply laughed. It was her laugh that really placed him, that told him she already knew more about the world than he ever would.

“Well, don’t pretend, love—you are as wild as they. That’s what makes you so attractive to all the girls! Oh God, is that your car?” She wisped her hand along the top of the black hood and then took it away quickly. A certain flirtation began that was, in fact, the point where there could be no turning back. Ian was struck by how much she wanted him to realize this—and how much he desired her now, just as he had when he was fifteen. It was much more than desire. It was the idea that she was the one thing he’d longed for and needed since he was that boy from Bonny Joyce Ridge who’d vowed to be a success. But it even went
beyond all of that—he knew at this moment that she had settled on nothing less than his complete betrayal of his fiancée; or at least, he had a strong indication that this was what must happen. And both of them in their minds were planning this in intricate ways, without speaking or considering the consequences, while at the same time pretending that this was not at all what they were thinking of.

Suddenly he was angry. For how could she come back to him now, just when it was too late? Why hadn’t she said any of this before? And this made him upset with Sara. But by this time, none of it mattered. Really, by this time it wouldn’t have mattered if she was saying and doing everything just to spite Sara. In fact, he at one point felt she was, and still it did not matter; so, in fact, from the moment he and Annette began to walk together he was spiting Sara too, and he knew it. Nothing mattered except that now he had a chance with Annette; and he could not say he didn’t know what he actually knew and did not see what he actually saw: that is, her previous complete dismissal of him had been replaced by a subtle but lavish desire for who he now was.

Still clutching the flat green bit of bottled glass, she unexpectedly squeezed his hand. Both of their palms were cut by this. She squeezed his hand hard once more and then let it go.

“Oh my,” she said, “blood!”

She turned and walked away in the night, with her head down as if deep in thought, in remorse for love. She looked back once, stopped abruptly, looked at him, then turned and ran. It was as if she had just said:

Try to forget me.