Fragile (6 page)

She turns to face him, her lips parted by something she's already planning to say, but the key card he extends to her makes the word stop coming and her mouth twist into a smile. She's slightly startled by what he has done, her eyes blinking once, twice, but she doesn't hesitate—she opens her hand to accept the key. As he hands it to her, he has the impression that he is fulfilling some obligation of polite courtesy that a man must extend to a woman in this particular situation—that, having been conjoined by fate inside the same tight, enclosed space and having received the gift of the woman's flirting words and smile, he is duty-bound to invite her back to his room in order to avoid appearing rude. But even as she takes the key, Tris's mind is performing a back flip at the apex of its precipitous dive from this height of presumption. All the old rules and proscriptions, admonitions and commandments he has absorbed since his earliest days combine to form a chorus of guilt that says:
How can you do this? You have never been unfaithful to your wife. You are a good person.
In the backwash of the next heartbeat, his mind has achieved a nimble solution and his smile is tinged with self-righteous regret as he says, “I need to make a couple of phone calls, but come by in a few minutes if you'd like to join me for a drink. I'm in 1836,” he says, completing the gesture, carrying out all his duties, knowing full well that he has given her the wrong room number of reasons to keep this man out of the house, a stranger with these girls here. Even as the door is opening and he steps in, the smell of aftershave, cologne, a wave of bristly whiskers shorn and perfumed, a sweet sour
smell of flowers dying. His face is dark, a shadow hangs upon his smile, his crooked teeth. He says “Look who's here, hello Zoe,” even as the girls come closer, but still they stay away. They know him, know he is someone to make them not frightened, but only give him a shy smile. He is a remembered stranger.

“Come here girls and give me a big hug.”

They go, but only Zoe goes first with short small steps. He stoops down and brings her to his chest, dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a plaid shirt, a country gentleman in for a visit, but how did he know? The bells of St. Monica sound out loud from across the block: one, two, three times, the stroke of the big iron bell, we used to run to the tower and watch it toll back and forth, its slow swinging like being in the hammock back and forth, it seemed to pause at the top of each end of the swing and hang there, slow and without effort, when you get to the top the earth will pull you back down. The big iron tongue clanging seven, eight, nine, it is nine already, the August light goes too soon. The youngest girl releases herself from him and the oldest one steps forward, leans in, and lets herself be held by small degrees. He reaches over and around her shoulders and pulls her close, and still she shies away.

“I came to see you girls, stopped by for a visit,” he says, arching his back to its full height again. “I brought you something from the stables. See,” he says, and hands her a rusted brown horseshoe. “I know you like horses.”

The youngest one turns away and says, “I want to go out to the swing again, can we?”

It is only just outside, only the bells have stopped tolling, and the last fragment of their sound is still sending across the houses and trees, sending its note to you, its solemn hollow note says I am still here, I will always be here with you, we will always be together. The rope was frayed at the end when you pulled it and nothing happened, too heavy, then we both jumped up and grabbed on as high as we could fall down in a heap of writhing lust for each other right here in the damp alley behind the kitchen but that would not be right, not keeping with the plan for tonight, Holly thinks, what has happened to the plan? She was going to be in control tonight, in control of the cruel wanting need she has, but here she is with a man in her arms pressing her self against him, running her hands up his back, his broad strong back, rubbing her breasts against him. He bends to her and puts his mouth on her. His hands are on her ass, finding their way there, and she must get it under control. She says, “No, wait,” and pulls her self away from him. “Not here.”

She can make herself wait for him, she must prove it, to herself. She will wait for him until midnight or later, until after he closes. It is a test she must not fail, she is trying to gain control of her self, to push away the latticework of her need, to crawl out from inside it.

“Isn't there someplace we can go?” he says, his voice low, nearly a whisper. “I have a few minutes. They can handle it while I'm gone.”

Through the filminess of her dress, he latches on with two fingers to the taut elastic of her panties and drags it up her bottom, like pulling a cord that turns on the electricity to a certain finely tuned instrument. Her mind is swept by a cold blankness that clarifies her thinking. She grabs his hand and removes it from her, then leads him down the alley, damp with humid night air and the dull resonance of reverberating bass notes seeping from the bars and nightclubs. One of the clubs actually has its main entrance on the alley, a bright doorway where a cluster of young drunks staggers beneath a neon sign that flashes T
HE
C
ASBAH
. A bald, puffy-looking bouncer in a leather jacket calls out to them as they hurry past.

“Fifty cent pitchers and two dollar shots! No cover for the lady.”

Holly has been in the Casbah before, trolling. Now that she thinks about it, she may have met Rick there—it's only been three weeks, but it seems like a very long time ago. She tugs on his hand to make sure he knows not to go in. There are iron bars on the windows of the buildings that back onto the alley. A scrawl of graffiti mars the wall of one of them, an illegible design that looks like a group of letters but might also be a pitchfork topped with a crown. There are more people here, mostly young, in their teens and twenties, packs of them crowding the sidewalk, girls outnumbering boys. Holly thinks of them as predators, searching, seeking, their laughter somehow sinister. At the light where they wait to cross the street, a huddle of girls in jeans and tube tops surrounds a woman in a white wedding dress, complete with headpiece and a long, gauzy train. The
light changes and the women lurch into the busy street, laughing, as they struggle to avoid the idling cars and keep the train of the dress off the pavement.

“I think I know them,” Rick says, glancing over his shoulder. “It's Mitzi Kluger's bachlorette party.”

Holly doesn't know them—doesn't want to know them. The red door to her shop is there, ahead of them, a few feet away. She digs the keys out of her purse, fumbles for the one that opens the shop. She tries to jam it into the hole, misses in her hurry, gouging the red paint. Tries again and feels it slot in, tongues of grooved metal interlocking. Turns the key and they are inside, the echoing chamber of the stairway leading to the second-floor shop lit only by the diffuse light of the moon reflected through broad panes of glass high above them. She leads them up quickly, feels his face a few steps behind her, seeking, directly at the level of her thighs. With the moon bouncing around the many mirrored surfaces of the salon, there is enough light to make their way. She has spent so many hours of her life here, she could lead them even if there were only darkness. She takes him to her station, her sanctuary, the place where she performs her best work. They have screwed in the back seats of cars, against the wall of a building in the alley, in his apartment, and once on the hard dry dirt of a jogging path in a city park, but this is the best yet; leading him to her sanctuary. At first she thinks of the chair in which her customers sit to have their hair cut, then she has a better idea: The chair where she washes their hair tips all the way back.

She stands next to the sink, turns to face him.

“Wait …” she says, trying it out, testing it, her mind still wanting to put it off a moment longer.

He grabs her by the wrists and pins the small of her back against the edge of the table that holds her brushes and combs, presses her down onto it, scattering the framed pictures of the girls to the floor. She struggles against him, lifts her knee into his groin and pushes him away. In the small opening this creates, she slips out from under him, yanks her arm loose, feels his fingernails claw at her skin, and even as she twirls away from him, he latches on to her hand and leads me out past the snap dragons and the azaleas, the cone flowers and the stone dish of the bird bath, all faded pale in the new shadows of the moon, their colors dim and washed away, the whirring of the cicadas shimmering over the traffic sounds, the swish of the cars going by and the calls of the Mexicans out in the street singing their dancing words to each other. The bench of the swing holds us, her small body tucked against mine.

“Higher,” she says, “make it go higher.” We kick, kick at the back of the arc, and the wind races through our ears,
down in the valley, valley so low,
we sang,
hang your head over, hear the wind blow.
We sang this Tris, our legs kicking up higher, higher.
If you don't love me, love whom you please, throw your arms round me, give my heart

ease back into the chair, feeling it slide down beneath her, tilting her head back onto the smooth lip of the sink, the U-shaped channel where the neck is supposed to go, like putting her head into a type of harness. Now he has her there, wrists pinioned against
the arms of the chair, he throws his weight on top of her, the bulk of his chest pressing her down. His mouth is seeking, she feels his lips against her collarbone, then further down, to the flattened exposed flesh of her right breast. He always goes for the right one first; she arches her back to meet him. In the basement office her stepfather led her, said
I have something to show you.
His secret place, his sanctuary. And he opened the drawer of his metal Sears desk, brought out a small leather-bound book. Red. Its cover was bright red with gold lettering embossed into the spine, like a holy book. Rick is pulling her blouse off now, she tilts herself up in the chair and complies, undoing the bra, she helps him, his hands fiddling with the latches, tangled up with hers. The pages he flipped through in no particular hurry, not especially eager, like a lesson in school. He was going to show her something, and she knew it was somehow not right, a vibration in the air between them, hanging there, like two dissonant notes in a chord on the piano. But she wanted so much to please him, she leaned over his shoulder and there—on the glossy slick page of the book, a photograph in black and white. He paused and they saw it together, without comment, he turned the next page and another photo, he said
This is what it looks like, have you ever seen it before,
as if he were telling her a story. And still she trusted him to be there inside the house alone with the other girl, they seem to know him, he said I brought you something from the stables, the horseshoe rusty and brown. I came to see you girls, stopped by for a visit. The youngest one turned away. She says, “Look at the moon,” and
it's still rising past the roof of the house, it swings up and away, then down and back towards us again. “Look at the moon.” Almost full, a bright orange ball looming up in the sky, not a harvest moon yet. What do they call a full moon in August, is it a harvest moon? Up and away it swings, then down and back it approaches us, then pulls away. The feeder and birdbath are swathed in yellow light, now more golden than before. The flowers in Elmer's bed shimmer in the light. The other girl has been inside some time now, his crooked teeth and the sweet sour smell of his cologne. “Honey, let's stop now, it's getting late. We better go inside her, he pushes himself close and her legs go wider, knocking against the hard metal arms of the chair, she feels her self locked into place beneath him, underneath him, within him, she rocks her back up to meet him. They are together now, at last, she has given her self to him, the bones at the base of her skull knocking against the hard ceramic lip of the sink, she feels as if she is pouring her self up out of this basin into him. There is nothing more she can do for him, she is giving all that she has to give and when he closed the red book with the startling odd pictures in it he took her hand and placed it where it wasn't supposed to be, where she never should have left that girl inside the house with him alone, what was I thinking? I'm an old maid who has no understanding of the world, only my own little slice of it, my own little tunnel, a cave I live in, my house, my garden, and the shame of it is I have chosen this way, this enclosure, this structure I have built around myself like a
framework of steel that sustains me, holds me together. My memories, my visions hold me together. I have nobody but you. The girl tries to go ahead of me, but I hold onto her hand and keep her beside me. We go up the steps, and I pull open the screen door, and the moonlight bounces off the mirror beyond his shoulder, bounces its golden light at her as she loses her self within him, as the red book goes away for a moment it is all washed away, all the guilt and shame and anguish he bestowed upon her, all the fear wrapped up in her need to please the person who was supposed to take care of her, all wound up in a distortion like the weird tremors of light that move back and forth, back and forth from the mirror, a secret a child knows but can never say. Her head bangs hard against the ceramic lip of the sink, pounding the pain out of her, yet even so the smell of him flooding back to her mouth, smell of fish and wet hay flooding her way through the kitchen, the dishes not done, the sauerkraut still in the can, past the door to the dining room where there is no sound. I am missing my shows tonight for these girls. Usually the sound of the television fills the house, keeps the darkness outside, but nothing now. The room is dark except for the rectangle of light that comes from the living room, illuminating the breakfront.

“Wait,” I say to the girl in a whisper. I put my hand out to the wall to feel it, to hold me steady. The wallpaper is smooth and cool. I tell her with the force of my other hand to stop a
moment, stay behind me, then I peer my head around the doorway into the living room.