Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (44 page)

“Who is he, Claire?”

“My . . . boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend.”

“Ex?”

“We’ve broken up.”

“So what’s he doing here?”

“I don’t know.”

The man seems to think a moment.

She watches David take a step closer to the curb. She shakes her head again.
No, goddammit
! Don’t
do
this!
Please
, you fucking lovely idiot, stay the hell
away!

“I think you’d better invite him in, Claire.”

“No.”

“Oh yes. You have to.”

“I won’t.”

“Yes you will. Or it’s you first and then him. Twenty seconds is all I need. He’ll never know what hit him.”

He closes the briefcase beside him and snaps it shut and slides the spindle down the bar well beyond her reach. He’s ready to go now. The game is over. All of it over now unless she brings David into this and if she does, won’t it just begin again? to what end? Why does he want this? What can he hope to gain? He can walk out the door right now. Free and clear. Just walk away.

Her eyes go back to David. To hold him there.
Don’t move
.

“Do it.”

“I can’t.”

“You will.”

She thinks—hard and fast as best she can.
She will not do this to him
. And there seems only one way to do that. To convince him that she’s furious at him for being there. He ought to be able to believe that. He ought to have anticipated that reaction from her. She has every right to be furious—though she’s not. Though seeing him again even under these terrible circumstances feels so tender that what she’d like to do is embrace him, hug him, sob into his shoulder not just for what this man has put her through tonight but for all they’ve lost and all they had. To do that one more time again. What she’d sworn she’d never do.

She moves out past the service station and turns and heads past the man to the door.

Outside on the corner David sees her long purposeful familiar stride but the look on her face is unfamiliar. It’s a look he can’t quite read. When he’d thought he knew them all. He’s only just arrived here but already something feels wrong about her and he thinks, who’s this guy in there?
New boyfriend? Boss? But boyfriend doesn’t feel right. Of course it’s possible he doesn’t want to admit that she might already have one. Might already have replaced him.

But boyfriend doesn’t feel right. Nor does boss. Something about her face, the look in her eyes.

A car passes and then another. Claire is at the lock now.

He steps out into the street.

Claire looks up from the lock and he’s crossing, coming toward her and she feels the blood rush to her face, pulse pounding and she flings open the door because
she will not expose him to this goddammit, she will
not
permit that
and summons the most dismissive angry tone of which she is capable and shouts out into the still night air.

“DAVID! GO! GET . . .”

. . . OUT OF HERE!
is what she means to say. . . .

. . . but the sheer sudden size of her voice startles the man inside and he thinks . . .
HELP! THE POLICE! she’s calling for help the stupid bitch
so he turns and fires and the flower blooms wet in her back and he hears the silencer like a door closing exactly as he’s told her it would be and she falls spilled to one side, the glass door wedged open by her hips and he pulls the briefcase off the bar thinking
the fucking cop was right, he’s finally had to shoot somebody
and the boyfriend is almost across the street closing the gap between them and as he steps over her body he sees her eyes flutter stunned and wide and the man is yelling
Claire! Claire
! loud enough to wake the dead, the man not exactly understanding yet he thinks but there’s no way to know what he’ll do once he does so as he turns a sharp right headed toward the subway at 72nd he fires again and watches, for just a moment, a second flower bloom across the man’s chest, watches him sink to his knees and fall and reach for her, the man’s hand settling in her flung tangled hair along the sidewalk, his hand opening and closing in strands of hair, unable to reach further.

He doesn’t know if he feels fear. He might. Maybe he should.

But he knows he feels good.

David lies sprawled along the sidewalk. The sidewalk feels oddly warm to him. It ought to feel cold this time of year. He tries to move but can’t. He tries to breathe and barely can. Is this shock? Death? What? He sees her lying near him in the doorway. If he focuses on her, on Claire, he might live, someone might come by.

That he might even want to live disgusts him.

She stares up, blinks into empty sky.

Tears again
.

So many tears in this city. So much heartbreak.

Then none.

Thanks to Amy, Mila, and Adonis

for Beth and Richard

She was his earth, his ground. He had cast his seed to her again and again
.

He awoke feeling that he knew what was necessary, that what she needed was a kind of light both real and metaphoric, that she needed to get out into the world far more than he had allowed himself to trust her to do.

He decided he would take her.

When they stepped off the bus into early afternoon sunlight he saw how the city had changed, none of it for the better. It was only a town, really, that had tried to bloom into a city during the Fifties and arguably had succeeded for a while, but now the war babies who had driven its boom years, who had caused its schools to rise out of the vacant lots and farmland and crammed its movie palaces and soda shops, had fled and left its potholed, littered streets to time and waste.

Still he felt at home here.

He took her to Mabel’s Coffee Shop, where as a boy he had sat over Coke and crumb bun waiting for Miss Lanier, his accordion teacher, to finish with the pigtailed little redhead who had the lesson just before his on the third floor across the street. They had lunch there at the counter—she a hamburger from the grill and he a tuna sandwich with a thin slice of pickle.

Miss Lanier was gone. Cancer. Miss Lanier had gone to earth. And he had not seen his accordion in thirty-five years.

The faces in Mabel’s were mostly black now. But they seemed to him the same tired faces he had always seen there, working people’s faces bent over working people’s food.

He realized that Mabel’s always had depressed him, even angered him somehow.

It had not just been the accordion lessons.

But the girl didn’t seem to mind.

He took her arm and led her past a shoe store, a dress shop, thrift shop, and the Arthur E. Doyle Post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, to the Roxy.

The Roxy was boarded up. It had probably been closed for years. Graffiti was sprayed across rotted boards thick and colorful as the patterns on a Persian rug. He walked her across the street to the Palace.

The Palace was open.

“How about a movie,” he said.

She brushed a clean fine strand of blond hair off her pretty face and nodded.

They sat in the dark, alone but for three other patrons slouched low and scattered in front of them, and watched Jean-Claude Van Damme fight his way through a double feature, and he thought how they were the only couple there.

At intermission he bought popcorn. Midway through the second feature he unbuttoned her blouse and massaged her naked breast and rolled her pale wide nipple between his
fingers, letting it harden and then go soft again, feeling the nipple beneath the palm of his hand and thinking, if only I had gotten this thirty years ago. Jesus.

When it was over it was really dark. They had dinner at a place called Rogerio’s a few blocks over. He thought the place had served Chinese take-out once, but now it was Italian. He ordered a double scotch for himself and iced tea for the girl and then ordered himself another. They ate pasta and thick, hot crusty bread, and she was very quiet.

They walked out into streetlights shining.

Across the street he saw the sign.

Like so many others the shop had not been there when he was a boy. He would have remembered it. But someone was inside. The place was all lit up.

He felt the flush of pleasure and swelling of his cock inside his baggy trousers.

“Come on.” he said.

She sat on the wooden bench in front of him naked to the waist, nipples going hard and then soft just as they had in the movie theater, while the bearded man sat behind her working on her shoulder blade, his needle buzzing like a barber’s electric trimmer over the soft rock music on the radio.

The music was meant to be soothing. The man had warned them that there would be more pain than usual because the bone was so near the surface of the skin in this location. He could see the pain skitter in her eyes. She had been under the drill for over half an hour now.

“What’s it like?” he asked her.

“Feels like . . . cat scratches,” she said. “Hundreds of little cat scratches. Then it’s like . . . he’s peeling me. And then . . .”

The tattooist smiled. “Like a dentist’s drill, right?” he said.

“Yes,” she breathed.

He saw the sweat beaded on her upper lip.

“Scapula,” he said. “Can’t be helped. You’re a helluva subject, though, you know that? You don’t move a muscle. You’re like working on a canvas. I’m gonna give you something special. You’ll see. A rose is just right for you. Just a few more minutes.”

From the hundreds of drawings that lined the walls he had chosen for her a simple red rose no more than an inch and a half in diameter. He thought the rose was beautiful and that the man had quite a delicate hand. You could see veins in the green leaves, the creamy blush of red, the thorns that studded the graceful stem.

The buzzing stopped.

“There now,” said the man. “Give me your hand. Hold the gauze here and press. Not hard.”

She did as he said. The man stood up from the bench.

“You want to see?”

He got up and walked over behind her. The tattoist lifted her hand away. He was very gentle.

Beautiful, he thought. The rose looked even better than it did on paper, more detailed and more delicately formed, its stem tracing precisely the natural curve of bone as though it belonged there, as though it had grown there in her silky flesh.

The man looked at him, nodding, appraising his reaction. He had a long bushy beard and his greying hair was tied back into a tail as long as a horse’s tail and his eyes were unreadable. But he saw no judgement there. Though it was impossible that he had missed the marks along her back and shoulders.

He saw no judgement there at all.

“Anything else I can do for you?”

His eye drifted to the glass display case by the register. There were rings and studs of gold and silver and semiprecious stones.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, there is.”

She had not sat so well for the piercing.

On the first try she had flinched despite the topical anesthetic, and her flesh slid free of the instrument that was similar to a paper punch just as he had begun to apply pressure. The man had cursed and then apologized to her for cursing. The girl said nothing though it had hurt and tears streamed down her cheeks. The man had reapplied the anesthetic and tried again, holding the tip of the nipple more firmly between thumb and forefinger and pulling so that it was possible to see that that hurt, too, telling her soothingly that it would only be a second, just a second, then squeezed the handles together.

She gasped and then was silent.

He was surprised there was so little blood.

The man threaded her flesh with the thin silver band he had chosen from the display case.

Then bent to the other breast.

The lights went out behind them, and he heard the tattoist draw his shade as they stepped into the street.

He took her arm and led her to the corner.

On the bus trip home he was annoyed with her. It was as though she didn’t want the nipple rings. She had shown no reluctance about the rose tattoo. It was as though she accepted that. Whereas to him they were one and the same. Both rose and rings marked her as his—they would for the rest of her life. And if he could not bring her fecundity, if he could not bind her to him by fucking a girl-child into her depths of her womb, he could at least do this. Children were the glue, his mother had said, and he thought it ungrateful of the girl to wish to deny him.

It had been such a good day in the city.

He opened his flask and drank. In the darkness there was no one to see. Towns faded by and dark suburban homes. He drank some more.

The towns grew smaller. Houses yielded to woods and
thicket and stands of pale birch trees and old weathered stone fences.

Finally they were home. He got off the bus ahead of her and held out his hand. She took it, and they walked up the unpaved road in the moonlight. He could see the small grey spot on the back of her blouse where the tattoo had bled through the gauze. There were no such spots on either of her breasts, but he thought that the blouse would still need washing before the blood had set, and that annoyed him, too, for some reason he wasn’t aware of. He tilted the flask and finished it as they came to the door and he took out the keys and opened it and turned on the lights as they walked inside.