Lucky in the Corner (28 page)

After they’ve eaten, Nora insists on cleaning up. Jeanne puts Vaughn to bed in his crib in Fern’s room. The cold weather makes him a sleepy baby, early to bed.

James calls looking for Fern, but she doesn’t yet feel up to reassuring him that it was okay he wasn’t here today.

“Tell him I’m already asleep,” she says to her mother, then crawls into her bed, next to Vaughn’s crib, then gets up and goes through her closet and drags out her old cowgirl blanket from the deepest recesses of her childhood and puts it on top of the pile of everything else she usually sleeps under.

Outside, where there had been a lot of snow blowing around, everything has now turned still and bitter. Fern can see the moon high and pale yellow, a coin going into a slot of black sky. She thinks of Lucky, out there somewhere in the universe, heading into the unseeable. And then she slides into a dreamless sleep, which lasts a few hours, until the night blows wide open with a crash. Fern, still half-asleep, runs through the darkened rooms and wipes frost off a front window to see what has happened.

THE RENTAL CAR
they’ve given Nora is an SUV. It’s all they had left on the lot. It’s a huge sucker, a total embarrassment. She roams around looking for parking spaces big enough, sinks low in the seat and hopes no one sees her. Her replacement car is due next week. They towed in her old one to see if there was a chance of putting it to rights, but it was totaled. The frame, the guy at the collision shop told her, was basically a parallelogram now, as opposed to a rectangle. He drew two diagrams with a pencil, to help her grasp the concept.

Neither the cops nor the insurance people inquired about any possible connection between her and whoever did this.

“Holiday drunks,” one of the cops said, shaking his head as he filled out a report. Standing there with his paunch and his snap-holstered gun and a screeching walkie-talkie clipped to his shirt, he had such an air of authority on the matter that Nora almost started believing him along with everyone else.

After that, there was the hour or so of bad acting she had to do for Jeanne’s benefit. Fern, astonishingly, just picked up the script and improvised on it.

“Oh, Mom, you loved that car. I can’t believe people that drunk let themselves get behind the wheel. Of course, they probably don’t even know they’re driving.”

And when Jeanne brought up the curious fact of Nora’s being the only car hit, Fern reminded everyone of the damage (minuscule, but Fern didn’t mention this) done to the bumper of the car in front of Nora’s. She was trying to show Nora she had an ally. This alliance was completely unexpected. Nora didn’t know what to make of it. She wanted to grab Fern and kiss her all over her face, was so grateful for something good in the midst of all the bad that was coming down.

Vaughn, in spite of having awakened all of them on numerous occasions, did not appreciate his own sleep being interrupted. He squalled for another half-hour before they could all get back into bed and Nora could feign exhaustion, turn away from Jeanne, and pretend to sleep.

She was still awake two hours later, in the long winter lag time before dawn, when the phone rang. Unfortunately, the phone was not on Nora’s side of the bed. Rather, it rested on a stack of books of French feminist critical theory on Jeanne’s side, an easy reach for her, even half-asleep. And so Jeanne was the one to receive the call, the one to make the acquaintance of Melanie, Pam’s other lover.

Nora parks by Harold’s apartment building. She has been sleeping on his sofa for the past week. He has been generous to her in so many ways that she has wound up crying at some point in nearly every day. She hopes he is home now because she needs to talk again. Basically, she needs to talk about every ten minutes. She needs sympathetic ears, shoulders to cry on, and has found a small population of these. Stevie, who is always there for her, even when she doesn’t understand what Nora is doing. Geri in Admissions, although Nora suspects she would talk sympathetically with anyone who will stand outside the Administration Building and smoke with her. And Harold. He’s her mainstay.

When she comes in, he’s fresh out of bed, although it is early afternoon. This is his regular schedule, what with his work life being entirely on the swing shift. Nora finds him in the kitchen, fixing eggs over easy with roast duck. Duck is a staple in his diet. Apparently they always have leftovers at the restaurant.

He is wearing a short, navy terry cloth robe, his Arnold Palmer shave coat. This is part of a new, ironic drag that Harold finds amusing—fatuous manly accessories from the recent past. Soap on a rope, deodorants with virile brand names. In this apartment, he can be anyone he pleases. Himself, Dolores (Nora has finally met her), or the guy who uses all this stuff, whom she believes is Chad.

“Did you blow off work today?” he says. “Would you like some breakfast?”

“Thanks, no. I just had lunch. There’s nothing happening at work. Mrs. Rathko is about the only person down there. She says she’s using the holiday lull to redo her files on some color-coded system she read about. She subscribes to magazines like
Modern Administration.
I think she’s really lurking around to see how bad I look when I come in. I’m sure this is so delicious to her, my life collapsing around me.”

“Oh, I think it’s already collapsed. Now’s the part where you start to build it back up ”

“Do you think so? How come it seems to me like I’m just paralyzed and sleeping on your sofa and reading all your Hollywood bios?”

“Cautionary tales for you. Required reading, really. Before you make any next moves.”

“I wake up in the night,” she tells him. “A little free fall. I start thinking, What if this is only the beginning of Melanie’s mayhem? One night I’ll be going to my car at school. Late, after a meeting. I’ll feel her behind me, then the gun at the small of my back or the piano wire around my throat. Or I’ll be at home, reading in bed, and hear the crackle of starter flames on the front porch.”

“Stop.”

“What I’m saying is maybe I should be calling the police.”

Harold sits down at the table across from her with his plate. “What could you pin on her? She probably ditched the car she used. She wouldn’t have used her own. Plus it would mean dragging the whole lesbo love triangle mess to the cops, who would probably like it a little too much. Besides, I think she has probably made her big statement. And you’re staying away from her girlfriend, which is all she wants.”

Nora doesn’t say anything. Harold looks up suddenly from his eggs.

“You
are
staying away?”

“Oh yes. Not that I’m proud of it. She’s been leaving messages.”

The messages, she tells Harold, are of various stripes. “She’s so, so sorry, she takes all the blame for what happened, she never thought Melanie would go this far. She wants to pay any damages. Then a few days ago, she left a new number. She’s staying with a friend, up in Rogers Park I’m not supposed to give the number to Melanie if she calls. Then yesterday, there was this kind of wail from the middle of the desert: Why have I abandoned her?”

“Do you know?” Harold says.

“Oh, there would just be so many steps, and I can’t even imagine the first few. Calling her, okay. I can imagine that. Maybe meeting her at the apartment of her friend. Apparently she has eleven cats. That’s about as far as I can get. What comes after that? I sleep with her on the sofa bed with the cats crawling around our heads. What then?”

“You could just call. Or answer the next time she calls. You could just step up to the plate.”

Nora shakes her head. “I’m having some terrible failure of nerve. It’s not really worrying about her nutball girlfriend, about her coming after me with a hacksaw. Sawing me to death and putting the pieces in her refrigerator. It’s
me
I’m really afraid of. All those years ago, Jeanne saved me from this thing inside me, this tropism toward moronic passion or whatever. Say I run off with Pam, what happens a few more years down the line when the next Pam comes along? So, of course, I’m tempted to call. Of course, I’m not over her. But I think the best thing I can do is try to take the high road, be on my way, and not look back. I just wish I didn’t feel so shaky about everything, so unsure which impulses to trust. I know I seem like a basket case. Fern and James, when I come over, they fix me tea. Herbal tea. As if real tea would be too stimulating. Like I’m on the big lawn at the institution and they have to speak in soft voices around me. It’s not exactly what I want from Fern, but in a weird way it’s the nicest she’s been to me in years.”

“I think maybe this has cut you down to size for her, made you more approachable.”

“You know the worst part? Maybe I will have a little duck.” She goes to get a fork and plate. “The worst part is that this thing I do, this thing I thought I was through doing but apparently wasn’t. It’s like a little relativity equation. I take the matter that’s me and find someone I can use to blow myself into pure energy, into this place where all I am is desire. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that I really don’t know if what I find when I get way out there is my worst self, or my most authentic.”

A little later, Harold has to get ready to go to the restaurant. It’s New Year’s Eve, and there’s a special eight-course dinner. Plus a live brass oompah band to back up the singing bartenders.

“A
long
night of Bavarian merriment,” he says. “Can you see these grease spots on my cummerbund?”

“Do you want the truth?”

“I guess I don’t have time for the truth. The jacket will cover the worst of it. So, what are you going to do?”

“If I could be anywhere now, I’d be back home. I’d be making Jeanne that ghastly instant cappuccino stuff. You’d think she’d look down her snooty European nose at it, but instead she loves it. So that would be it—drinking a bad instant coffeelike beverage. Sitting in the kitchen, talking about tomorrow, which would just be another regular day.”

Harold doesn’t say anything.

“But you can imagine how far away and hard to get to that seems. Antarctica.”

“You could use the New Year’s thing. As an entrance ramp.”

“No, no. She’d never fall for it.”

But at eleven, Nora is driving up from Sam’s, where she bought a bottle of Pomerol. She also has flowers. Nothing was open, and so she has pulled six limp 7-Eleven roses from their plastic tubes and rubber-banded them into something like a bouquet. She will look like a fool to Jeanne, standing on her doorstep (formerly known as
their
doorstep) loaded down with corny romantic clichés. Like Elvis coming to court Priscilla on the army base. Frank Sinatra trying to make time with Ava Gardner in Hollywood. if Jeanne is even home, which she probably won’t be.

But when she comes up the front steps, Nora hears a barrage of gunfire inside and knows Jeanne is watching a video. Nora rings the bell and the noise stops abruptly and Jeanne opens the door.

Nora expects her to look haggard, like Madame X in the cheap hotel in Mexico City, like she’s been through something. But she doesn’t. She looks calm, unruffled.

She says, “Come in,” but Nora can’t find any inflection that would give a clue to her mood, nothing in her expression to tip Nora off.

The house, inside, also looks unruffled. All traces of the long, terrible Christmas they spent together here, after Fern and the baby cleared out, have disappeared. The pillows are fluffed up and back in place on the futon couch. The kitchen wall where the milk carton hit has been cleaned up. Even the air has a calm to it, enhanced by some chunky candles Jeanne has going on the coffee table.

The wine goes unopened. The flowers got dropped on the front porch next to the door. Nora didn’t have the nerve to bring them in.

The two of them sit in the living room.

“I know being sorry isn’t enough,” Nora says. “It’s too meager.”

“Yes, it is too little,” Jeanne agrees. “I am too angry. My anger would be too much bigger than your apology. And even if I weren’t so furious at you, there is so much I need. I need you to be sorry
and
not love anyone but me. And I know you can’t do that right now. And I want you to be the sort of person who wouldn’t have let this happen. That’s the worst of it, that you aren’t that person. I want to exact promises from you, but what value would they have?”

“All I can ask is that you let me show you.”

“But how much showing would it take? How long before you could hold me without me sniffing to see if I could smell someone else on you? If I stay with you, I’ll know you have the capacity for betrayal. No matter how much time went by, I would fear your treachery had only moved into the shadows. What is love but trust, and how can I have that now?”

Nora nods.

“I am not trying to put you through the hoops,” Jeanne adds.

“No, I know. Everything you say is true. I’ve left us with only less-than-great options. We could end it over this. I’ll understand if you want to do that. Or we could go on, but you’re right that it will never be like before. Not so easygoing. Blithe—blithe wouldn’t be available to us anymore. I know I’ve made that impossible.”

Jeanne sits staring at the flames of the candles, picking bits of warm wax off the sides. She has made several little cubes of wax, now set next to one another on the coffee table, dice without numbers.

“On the other hand,” Nora says. “You’d have me over a barrel. You could push me around for a
long
time. Make me go to Korean restaurants and eat all those little pickled things. You could play those spacey mood tapes that make me insane. You could make me visit your family.”

“Oh, my family would never see you now.”

Emotion is such a tricky element. Nora is completely surprised at how stung she is at this rejection by a small group of women she loathes. And on moral grounds. She is now someone who can be rejected on moral grounds.

“The water heater burst,” Jeanne says. “Tuesday. There was water everywhere.”

“I think it was pretty old,” Nora says. “I think it was already here and old when we bought the place.”