Crooked Little Heart (40 page)

She rested her head back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling. Time moved slowly, silently.

“Thank you,” she said. Neither of them said anything for some time. “But if you want me back,” she continued finally, “you have to let me go. Maybe that’s not what you have in mind. Maybe you just want me to absolve you and to snap out of this thing. But what I want is for you to release me from the tyranny.”

“What tyranny?”

“The tyranny of your attention and will.”

James continued to lie on his side in silence, knees against his wife’s. After a while she reached out her hand and stroked his soft wild hair. Then some familiar brown-bag miracle occurred, one that had occurred before after fights and estrangement, where she began to feel as if water had been wearing away at the stone of their being stuck and that finally there was a little channel flowing through her—of resignation, and a fierce desire for ease.

“Want to take a nap with me?” she asked.

“I’m just going to lie with you a moment. Then I’m going to get to work.”

After he left she pulled the covers up over her head. There was no air under the covers, but she did not want to surface. Rae dreamed that marriage would save or fix her, like James dreamed that fame and fortune would fix him. And life with Andrew had felt like that, like she had been saved and whole, like there were few sharp edges. But Andrew had been so easy, unambitious and mellow. They drank together and so were often slightly anesthetized. Things were less real, more like a dream—and there were no teenagers in the family.

She could hear James working in his office. Under the sheets, she opened her eyes and could see that there was light on the other side of where she was.

If marriage was a comforting garment you could wrap around you, a fight could rip it loose and leave you standing bare and alone in a high wind, the high wind of the messes of your marriage, all that was frayed and grubby. Too many harsh words spoken, and too much unsaid, too many compromises snatched at the garment, leaving it grubby and frayed. It was so hard, though, after a fight, because one hardly had the strength or desire even to bend down and pick up the garment at your feet. But then when you did, it would feel warm and heavy and have the smell of your beloved, which is so incredible and familiar and also a little rank, with the mammalian essence of life and the sweat of battle.

R
OSIE
was walking the six blocks home from Simone’s one night not long after. Simone had really begun to show. She had pulled up her baggy T-shirt that morning so Rosie could admire the hard mound of belly below breasts that were already swollen. Rosie had been unable to breathe again until Simone pulled the shirt back down. Veronica was talking about taking them to live in Squaw Valley, having the baby there, away from the prying eyes of the people of Bayview. Jason, the baby’s father, had not called Simone once, although Veronica had recently gone with a lawyer to visit his parents. It was agreed that after the baby was born, if blood tests proved that Jason was the father, his family would give Simone some money every month.

She couldn’t stand that Simone would have a baby to love, that she herself would no longer be needed, although Simone assured her that everything would be exactly the same as before—“except,” she said brightly, “we’ll have a
baby
.” Rosie smiled. Yeah, sure. A horrible thought crossed her wild mind, an image of Simone bleeding profusely, losing the baby, miscarrying, just being old Simone again with Rosie.

She left, wanting to be alone, needing to walk and to be outside.

She hated to go home these days, her mother so quiet, James always hunched over his desk, working, and there was always the worry that the sportsmanship committee had called or written about the cheating, that they had tracked her down.

Dusk was settling on the town like a spell. San Francisco was coming to light: the lights of the bridges were on, like Christmas tree lights or necklaces; the lights of the buildings shone yellow, and the sky and the water of the bay shone orange, both reflecting the sun going
away—orange like the saffron robes of Zen monks you saw around town sometimes. Everything glowed—the bay, the city, the sunset, the darkness of sky behind it. The only sound she heard was her own footsteps. Everyone was at home eating. James was playing basketball with Lank and the guys tonight. Maybe Rae was around; approaching the Greyhound bus depot, Rosie thought about calling her, so she wouldn’t have to go home to an empty house. But she didn’t have a quarter. She shouldn’t have walked through this part of downtown. It was the crummy part, no little boutiques or cafés, just the depot and a gas station that was closed and a laundromat. The streetlights had just come on, giving the sidewalks a ghostly, metallic sheen. She walked along feeling like she was on a street at twilight in some space station where people weren’t doing so well. She kicked a rock out of her path, glanced through the windows of the old bus depot. Her eyes widened with alarm.

There was Luther, sitting by himself on a bench in his raggedy windbreaker and dull black shoes, reading a
Chronicle
, waiting for his bus.

She stopped and stepped backward so that she was no longer in front of the windows. Her heart raced, and she leaned forward to spy more efficiently.

He didn’t look up, as she had expected him to. Frame it, she heard him whisper. So now she framed him. The greenish overhead lights inside the depot shone down, cast a garish illumination on everyone inside; all the people looked just awful, like they’d just been told they all had cancer, even the little kid in his mother’s arms, who was looking up at the propellers of a broken wooden fan, spinning slowly on the ceiling. But she bore down on Luther with her vision, so the background disappeared, and she no longer saw the bank of game machines that stood against one wall, two pinball, one Asteroids; no one was playing. And she just looked at him. In profile, from a distance, he was actually sort of good-looking, a little like Paul Newman at the end of
Butch Cassidy
, right before he and Butch step out into the gunfire. She breathed in loudly, exhaled with her mouth pursed, like someone in labor, and she felt a tug in her groin. A feeling she didn’t know was there came over her: a tenderness toward him, a sense of his dejection. Darkness was settling in on the street where she stood, and it bathed her, as his creepiness bathed her, as a stirring of maternal love bathed
her too, making her feel womanly now, like a person with curves and composure. It made her feel grown up, no longer geeky, and without giving it much more thought, she walked to the front door of the depot and, head high, walked on in.

The stench of ammonia enveloped her as she left the fresh air of the wide street; it was all she could smell at first. And then as she stood inside for a moment, unseen by Luther, she isolated other smells, of high school locker rooms she had changed in before and after matches all over the state, and a stale apple smell of spilled whiskey or wine, like the kitchen and her mother’s room used to smell in the old days. Tobacco. An officious metal fan rotated back and forth on top of the cigarette machine, blowing the bad stinking air around everyone’s heads, and the men’s room opened, sending out a sudden sharp reek of urine that took Rosie by surprise. Luther still didn’t look up from his paper. Why should he? She moved toward him. The worst smell of all was coming off his body, coming off his legs, she thought. She cleared her throat. Finally he looked up.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey yourself,” he replied; he did not seem particularly surprised to see her. He gave her a shy crooked smile. “What are you doing here? You should be at home.”

“That’s where I’m going,” she said. She looked around at the other customers just for something to do. “Where you going?”

“Home.”

“Where’s your home?”

“The American. On Mission.”

“Oh. In San Francisco.”

Luther nodded.

She toed the linoleum. She could hardly breathe. He smelled like sweat and the stale apple smell. She stood with her head tucked down so that her ear almost touched her shoulder. Someone who’d never met her before might have thought this man was family, an uncle perhaps, down on his luck but loved by this loyal lean girl in tennis shoes that cost what this man spent on food in a month.

Rosie chewed on her bottom lip and looked toward the broken fan on the ceiling.

“Do you have anybody in your family?” she asked hopefully.

“Sort of.”

“Any kids?”

“Well, not who’s still a kid.” His voice was low and gravelly, like he had a frog in it, could clear it if he wanted to, but he didn’t seem to want to or he knew that it wouldn’t help. “I have a grown-up. A daughter in Oregon, maybe your momma’s age.”

“You don’t call her on the phone and stuff?”

“She’s probably married twenty years by now.”

Rosie lowered her head and raised her eyes. “When d’ja see her last?”

Luther laughed and shook his head. “Thirty years ago? Something like that.”

“She was still a little girl?”

“She was twelve. Twelve and a half.”

Rosie gasped. “Oh, my God; that’s so horrible. I mean, no offense.”

“None taken.”

“What was she like, your daughter? What was her name?”

“You sure ask a lot of questions.” Smiling a private smile, he fished a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his windbreaker, shook one out, and lit it. He turned his head when he exhaled so as not to blow smoke into her face.

“Her name was Jane. Janie. Beautiful girl. Champion athlete, just like you. Great swimmer, good runner, too. Faster than the boys her age. Good girl, good mommy. Bad daddy.”

Rosie considered this. “My mom quit drinking five years ago.”

“Isn’t that wonderful?” She looked up into his face suspiciously, afraid he was being sarcastic or that he found her self-righteous, but he looked friendly. Even though he was dirty, his skin was nice and dark and he looked sort of wise. She was only a little afraid.

Rosie tried to think of something to say, but Luther spoke first.

“I never seen you play better than you did that third set in Menlo Park. You keep playing like that, you gonna go to the nationals next year.”

Rosie flushed with pleasure.

“You gotta bring your serve up, though. You’re framing everything now on your ground strokes, volleys, that’s good. But your second serve is no good; that’s killing you. Can I show you something?” Rosie nodded, tilted her head. “No,” he said. “Not here. I need to take you somewhere.”

Rosie shook her head.

“I have to go home now.”

“You won’t be sorry if you let me show you,” he said. The swirl of fear began inside her, like she was riding the House of Horrors train, faces coming at her around every corner: her crazy mother up in bed; James, miming concern; Simone swelling up like a sea calf. Luther here, talking soft and low.

She did not look at him, but she stared out the open front door like there might be someone standing there with a card that said, Do it, or Don’t. But no one was there because no one ever was these days, and she saw her mother waiting for her at home in bed, mad and worried, and at that moment Rosie felt like a disembodied voice, like the housing for a dead grown-up spirit who looked back over her shoulder at Luther, like he was waiting for her at a soda shop table with a milkshake and two straws, and she shrugged.

T
HEY
walked slowly down the empty street, four or five blocks from the Greyhound bus depot, ambling along like two long-lost friends. She had to tip her head up to see his face. He was much bigger than James, five or six inches taller, maybe the same height as Lank but weighing even more. The air was hot and smelled of flowers and the sea. She heard crickets, a night bird, a dog, their footsteps on the sidewalk, music coming out of this house, a commercial for dish soap from that one, Luther’s labored breathing. Boy, she thought, if Mom could only see me now.

She heard the sulfur snap of a match and smelled a new cigarette, and she wanted to tell him he should quit, her mother had, but the silence felt so cool and rich and it had been a long time since she had felt this feeling of really being somewhere in her body, on this earth, walking with this dark crazy man.