Man in The Woods (13 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

The next night Paul’s sister, Annabelle, comes to dinner with her Lebanese-Iranian husband, Bernard Maby, who has, in addition to ongoing immigration problems, the distinction of being twenty years her senior. But the age difference between his sister and her husband does not surprise Paul. Lovesick as a teenager, full of temper and desire, Annabelle was disdainful of the boys her own age, finding them superficial, untrustworthy. She listened to Tony Bennett records, she nursed feverish crushes on male teachers—it was only luck that none of them were vain or unkind enough to take her up on her advances. In her caramel-colored bedroom, the pinups were not rock stars or peace symbols or big-eyed giraffes in the wild, but manly old movie idols such as Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart and even Telly Savalas. In their shared childhood, Paul was more closely connected to their father, for all the good it did him, and Annabelle was fused to their mother, which might have been even more unlucky than pinning your affections to the lapel of someone out the door. Like her pajama-clad mother, Annabelle was far from secretive about her own unhappiness, but the actual manifestations of her moroseness were her own. She was furiously pedantic, correcting your grammar, assuming the role as the arbiter of personal conduct and matters of honor as they were played out in a Connecticut high school. She felt the rules governing personal behavior had reached their apotheosis during the reign of Queen Victoria.

After high school, Annabelle had managed to leave Kent for Mitchell College, in New London, where she spent two years before debilitating migraine headaches—convulsive, vertiginous, and terrifying—ended college for her. By then, their mother was dying of bladder cancer and Annabelle returned home to spend half of each day taking care of her mother, and the other half in a darkened bedroom with a washcloth over her eyes. Paul was already gone, on his way by then to New Mexico, to California, and on to Alaska, and it seemed to Annabelle that he had lost all interest in her. She did her best to track his movements and when their mother died—at home, as was her wish—Annabelle scraped together money to send to Paul so he could come home to Kent for the funeral. He had arrived windswept and whippet-thin, with hair past his shoulders, a beard of sorts. There was a visitation the day before the burial but over the years their mother had isolated herself so completely that fewer than a dozen people signed the visitor’s book at the Hammer-Dooley Funeral Home, and five of them were from Annabelle’s migraine sufferers’ support group.

Paul shaved clean for the visitation. He had creditably cut his own hair and even somehow found a blue suit and a crisp white shirt to wear. Sitting on a folding chair next to their mother’s closed coffin, he openly wept, and he wept the next day as well, when they placed her in the ground.

“Well, we’re the family now,” Annabelle said to him, as they walked away from the cemetery through a cool, stinging mist.

His physical transformation, the openness of his sorrow, the tender way he placed his arm around her shoulders had led her to believe that the two of them were going to experience an emotional renaissance, a new closeness that would make them a team, a unit such as they had never been before, but that very evening, in the quiet, sad-smelling house on Wycoop Lane, as they ate the cold cuts they had purchased for those who might come to the house after the funeral but which had been untouched, because Annabelle and Paul had forgotten to extend the invitations, Paul, suddenly done with weeping and mourning and Connecticut in general, announced that he had to get back to Alaska the next day, and Annabelle, who felt as if she had been slapped across the face, said, “I’ll take you to the airport.”

Eventually, she had gone to work for the U.S. Postal Service, first as a mail sorter, then a carrier, and eventually in the human resources department, helping to develop an employee training program, which led to her relocation to Los Angeles, where she met Bernard Maby, an accountant for Continental Airlines. But the dull, glaring light of LA had a way of triggering migraines for Annabelle, and Bernard had stormy relations with the Iranian expatriate community, most of them far richer than he, many of them thinking of him as more Lebanese than Persian, and some of them remembering him from his days as a nightclub owner on Rue Monot in Beirut, a place called Cessez-Feu, which had a shadowy reputation, rumored to be a money-laundering operation, though nothing was ever proven.

One day, Annabelle called Paul and announced that she could no longer tolerate her job in HR, and that she and Bernard were unhappy in Los Angeles, and, further, that she had put in for a newly open position delivering the mail back east. Paul said that all sounded good, to which Annabelle replied, “Well you might not think so when I tell you where the opening is.” She waited for him to ask where it was but Paul rarely asked direct questions so she just told him her new job was in Leyden. He said that sounded great to him, and she said, “Oh you say, you say. But maybe you better think about it, okay? I don’t want us to come all the way to be treated like strangers.”

Annabelle and Bernard have been in Leyden for two months now, and Paul sometimes forgets they are here, not because he isn’t glad to have his sister back in his life but because he is so used to living away from her, and his mind, as it makes its way around the parameters of his life, is not used to taking her into account. Nonetheless, he has seen Annabelle a number of times and, somewhat to his relief, twice he has attempted to see her only to be told she is tired, or busy. Tonight, however, is the first time he has seen her since what happened in the woods and he has spent part of the day wondering if the secret sitting in the pit of his stomach gives off a smell that only Annabelle can detect.

Dinner has been planned for six o’clock, out of deference to Annabelle, who rises early for her job. Nevertheless, she and Bernard are nearly an hour late and when they come in they are distracted, private. To Kate, they show the signs of a couple who have quarreled in the car. Annabelle barely apologizes for their lateness, and while she is effusive in her greeting of Paul she is cool toward Kate and barely glances at Ruby. Paul’s sister is tall, with an athletic build, and she is pretty when she smiles, but her expression is usually that of someone who suspects she might be entering a room in which unkind remarks have recently been made about her. Paul has told her that Kate doesn’t drink and she and Bernard have brought wine, which is served in the living room, with a fire going in the hearth, and a bowl of olives and a platter of cheese and crackers, all contributing to an air of conviviality—all that is missing is the conviviality itself.

When they go into the dining room, Annabelle is absorbed by Bernard, who sits at the dining table with his small hands folded, looking down at his empty plate. He looks forlorn in his brown suit, with his droopy mustache and melancholy eyes. He is bald, except for two strips of dark hair on either side of his head, smooth and shining like the fenders of a hearse.

“Bernard was worried about leaving his job and coming east,” Annabelle is saying, “but he made so many contacts while he was at Continental and now he can work at home and he’s got more clients than he knows what to do with.” She reaches over, pats her husband’s arm.

Paul’s seat at the table—his table, built with his best oak, hand-sanded, hand-stained, not a nail or a screw in the entire thing—is empty. He has rushed the chicken back into the kitchen after having begun to carve it at the table and discovering its moist, translucent joints leaking blood.

“Sorry everyone,” Paul calls out from the kitchen. “I got sort of a late start on this.”

Kate smiles at Bernard. She is stimulated by his presence, excited to engage with a Muslim. “Does it seem odd to have a man in the kitchen?” she asks.

“Chicken must be cooked,” Bernard says.

“Now somewhere in my mind,” Kate says, “I have this notion that in Lebanon raw lamb is a delicacy.”

Bernard shrugs his narrow shoulders, keeps his eyes on his plate.
“Kibbe nayah,”
he all but whispers.

“Raw lamb?” Ruby trumpets, slapping her forehead in case anyone has failed to notice her astonishment.

“It’s fine, Ruby, you just don’t understand,” says Annabelle, who has taken it upon herself to give the child a sense of boundaries that the girl’s mother seems not to be providing.

“We eat it with mint and olive oil,” Bernard murmurs.

“Fascinating,” Kate says. “I’m sort of curious about another thing,” she adds. “I know there are synagogues in Windsor County, but are there any mosques?”

“I certainly hope not,” Bernard says.

In the kitchen, Paul slides the chicken out of the oven, hoping for some sudden onslaught of good luck that will in quick order transform the stiff, bloody bird into a succulent golden dinner, but one waggle of the drumstick tells him that the chicken still has a ways to go. He looks at his hands, flecked with blood. He shoves the pan back in, flips the oven door shut, and goes to the sink to wash his hands. The salted and peppered blood is oddly resistant. The red grit of it has lodged beneath his fingernails, the grooves between the palm side of his finger joints remain red, and he stands at the sink trying to scrub them clean.

“You’ve really civilized my brother,” Annabelle is saying, as they hear the slam of the oven door from the kitchen.

“How do you mean?” Kate asks.

“He’s just so different,” Annabelle says to Kate. “He was always sort of wild. You never knew where he was. He never did anything the usual way. He might give you a bracelet, just out of nowhere, but then your birthday would come around and he’d have no idea that this was the day, this was when you were
supposed
to give someone a present.”

A few minutes later, Paul returns from the kitchen. The chicken has been hacked into pieces to hasten its cooking, but it is arranged nicely on the platter and he serves it formally, standing by each of their chairs in turn.

When he gets to Kate with the platter, she notices his hand. It is a bright, translucent red, and a blister has risen, plump and round as a soap bubble. “You burned yourself, baby,” she says to him, and he smiles at her in a way that strikes her as nonsensical, as if he is pleased.

Outside, wintry winds keen, rattling the windows. The sky is dotted with stars and the moon is icy-white and full.

“Hey, by the way,” Kate says. “Did Paul tell you guys about our New Year’s Eve party?”

“Of course not,” Annabelle says.

“Well you have to come.”

“It will be our pleasure,” Bernard says.

“Did you forget?” Annabelle asks her brother.

“Sort of,” he says.

“Paul’s got a lot on his mind,” Kate says. She means it protectively, and she’s startled by the look he gives her.

“Aren’t we going to say grace?” Ruby says.

“Oh, it’s okay, honey,” Kate says. “We have guests.”

“Come on, Mom, you say the best graces.”

Kate looks around the table and says, “I really don’t. She’s just used to things a certain way.”

“By all means,” Bernard says with a wave.

“I think it would be lovely if you said grace, Bernard,” Kate says.

“I think it would be lovely just to eat,” says Annabelle. “This chicken, Paul. It smells so good.”

“I’m sorry I brought it out undercooked,” he says.

“So, what about it, Bernard?” Kate says. There is a certain truculence in her tone—she hears it herself, and she wonders for a moment why she would want to needle her guest. There is no time to think about it, not now, though it does occur to her that she was in the city seven years ago when a group of Muslims from Brooklyn and New Jersey drove cars packed with explosives into the parking garage of the World Trade Center, and that night she had been out with her boyfriend, a lawyer, and an old pal of his, a self-consciously bizarre writer of children’s books, and she found herself unexpectedly eloquent on the subject of Islam and its followers, their self-righteousness, their belief in vengeance, their appalling treatment of women, and her boyfriend started talking about how he would go about defending them in court, as if justice were a game, and then the children’s book author said that Muslim extremists were more like Christian extremists than they were like other Muslims, and Kate called the waiter over and asked for the check, mainly because neither of the men she was with seemed to take what she was feeling very seriously.

“Do Muslims say grace?” Kate asks Bernard.

“Muslims say
bismillahi
,” Bernard says, “which means I begin in Allah’s name.”

“Very pretty,” says Kate. “How do you pronounce it again?”

“You have this idea that Bernard is a Muslim,” Annabelle says. “And he’s not.” The last word expands emphatically and Annabelle colors, hearing the insistence in her own voice. “And anyway,” she says, “who cares what religion anyone is? It’s all pretty dubious anyhow, isn’t it, and it just gives people another reason to clobber each other over the head. Paul and I never gave a hoot about all that junk.”

Ruby’s jaw drops, as if she has just heard a confession to the most mind-boggling depravity.

“Is that true?” Ruby asks Paul.

Before he can answer, Bernard is speaking. “In my home, which was a very traditional Maronite household, our grandmother required us to bow our heads before eating so that our foreheads touched the table. This I always did, with blind obedience, until one day I decided it was time to make a rebellion, and I only pretended to bow my head. I looked around the table and there we all were, twelve of us. The family lived in two adjoining houses and we took our evening meal together, without exception. And there was my grandmother, with her little white head bowed, and her eyes tightly shut, and my mother with her head bowed, and my uncle Fady, too, but every other person, my grandfather, my sister, my two other uncles, even my little brother, were simply staring ahead, eyes wide open, heads unbowed, and I realized all those nights, all those prayers, only three out of twelve of us were participating, and the rest were just being quiet for the sake of my grandmother.”