Picturing Will (6 page)

She stood by one of the narrow, drafty church windows and realized that it would probably be easy to reenter the church some other day, even if it was locked. There might be enough Halloween souvenirs and enough character to the rundown church itself to make photographing the empty interior worthwhile. The church faced west; late afternoon would be the time to come. She unscrewed her camera from the tripod and began to take a few last pictures with the lens wide open, holding the camera above her head, aiming down and guessing about what would make it into the frame.

Mel came up beside her, the leafy celery top hanging down his chest like a pale green jabot.

“I just called the Careys’,” he said. “Will’s on his second pair of fangs. Nothing seems to be winding down over there.”

“Where did you find a phone?” she said, surprised.

“I struck up a conversation with a guy who had a phone in his car.” He nodded toward the door.

“You found somebody with a cellular phone in
Charlottesville?”

He shrugged. “You’re the one who’s always telling me it’s not Siberia. If I had my way, we’d be in New York right this minute.” He put his arm around her shoulder. Jody was dressed in 1950s regalia: a crinoline, over which she wore a skirt embossed with a poodle that flashed blue rhinestone eyes; a pink blouse with a silver circle pin; white bobby sox; loafers with bright copper pennies. She had pulled her hair back in a pony tail.

“You know,” Mel said, “you look like the type who wants to party all night but won’t put out.”

“Not true,” she said. “As silly as this seems, it’s work. And if you remember—”

He put his fingers over her lips as Bozo strutted by, honking his bulbous nose. Bozo had acquired a fur cape and a wife who had pushed her eye mask to the top of her head. She was trying to steer Bozo toward the front door, but he was drunk and got away from her, swirling his fur like a bullfighter’s cape as she went toward him.

“I remember,” Mel said.

Before leaving the house, they had had sex in the shower while Will marched his new G.I. Joe (his fourth) around the living-room floor, making it do maneuvers over such obstacles as Mel’s running shoes and his own plastic-wrapped bubble-gum Dracula fangs, which he was to put in his mouth later that night. Will loved Halloween. The costumes and shrill cries at the door for candy that had frightened her as a child had never intimidated him. It was interesting to see what a child feared on his own, what fears were communicated to him, and what he was absolutely fearless about. The first time he tasted a soda he had been as shocked as if he’d drunk acid. He shrank from cats but would pat any dog. Halloween was a breeze, but as a small child he had not wanted the overhead light to be put off when the Christmas tree lights were turned on. Vampires were shocking but fascinating. Joan Rivers would make him run from the room. He loved cap pistols but was afraid of the vacuum. The flamingo night-light was scarier than being left in darkness. Will was afraid to put his face in water but fearless in the seat of a bumper car. He once cried because he looked into a man’s mouth and saw gold fillings and thought he could catch them, like a cold.

The band had switched from rock and roll to the big band sound, and Richard Nixon led King Kong onto the dance floor, both stepping aside to avoid colliding with Bozo the matador, still swishing the fur cape. Here was a roomful of people, Jody thought, most of them parents, behaving as if they were children so out of control they had to be threatened. Monsters that all parents swore existed only in their children’s nightmares cavorted with one another, plotting mischief, entering the den of smoke, uncorking bottles with no regret, even if genies were trapped inside.

Mel smiled at Jody. “Too caught up in this craziness to take pictures?”

“No,” she said. “I was just wondering who’d have a cellular phone in this town.”

“Would you like me to get you one?” he said. “Maybe in lieu of an engagement ring? Keep up with the times?”

She shook her head no.

“A cop,” he said.

“A cop?”

“A private investigator.”

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“That’s who had the phone. A guy who’s a private investigator. He’s doing what you’re doing: taking pictures. But he’s got a tiny hand-held job. Some woman who’s off in Aruba hired him to get a picture of her husband with his lover. At first he thought it was going to be impossible, because everybody was in costume, but he came anyway and got the big payoff because the guy’s in regular shoes. They’re the only shoes the guy ever wears. He said he already had a dozen pictures of the guy and the secretary, and that the guy was always wearing those same black wing-tips.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“Why would I be putting you on? It’s not to my advantage to make this place sound exciting.”

“But how did he happen to tell you that?”

“I went outside on the off chance there was a phone any-where in sight. He was talking on the phone in his car. I hung around, and he let me use the phone. He was happy that he had what he needed and could split.”

“You just walked up and asked if you could use his phone?”

Mel nodded. “What’s so strange about that? I said I wanted to make sure my kid was okay.”

She felt a pang when he said “my kid.” Will really did seem to be as much Mel’s child as her own. He had Mel’s way of sitting with his legs uncrossed, both feet dangling because he could not yet plant them on the floor. He bit his bottom lip when he was concentrating, like Mel. He had Mel’s way of saying no without shaking his head as an accompanying gesture. Both of them often threw their pillows on the floor when they slept. And of course they never drank the right beverage from the right glass. For a drink of water Will would take a tiny glass; for an inch of apple juice he’d reach for a beer glass. It was just the cast of his eyes that sometimes reminded her of Wayne—that way of looking slightly down and to the side, even when nothing important seemed to be happening there.

“Guess who!” a flamingo said, stepping in front of her. She could smell alcohol on the flamingo’s breath. Like the private detective, she looked down and saw Duncan’s worn Adidas, though she could have told from the voice alone.

“Duncan,” she said, and he nodded without taking off his headpiece. A palm tree stood next to him: someone in a badly made outfit fashioned out of a sheet painted to look like wood. Big green-painted cardboard palm fronds protruded from the shoulders. The person wore a black eye mask, with a small painted moon curving over one of the eyes.

“Take our picture,” Duncan said, stepping in front of the camera. He put a pink wing around the palm tree. “Mel,” Duncan said, “I really enjoyed that Harry Mulisch book you let me borrow. I keep forgetting to bring it back.”

Jody inclined her head and looked into the camera. There they were: two happy, silly people who had no doubt given great thought as to how they would appear. They didn’t seem that different from the engaged couples who put on their best clothes and sat side by side to smile for posterity.

As Duncan and the palm tree walked away, a dog came up and sniffed Jody’s leg. A fireman tugged at the dog’s leash, smiling at Jody and Mel and saying that the dog was really a rabbit in disguise, but that he was a real fireman.

“I’m the woman in the Toulouse-Lautrec painting,” a blue-faced woman announced, butting her way in front of the camera.

Jody looked through the lens. The woman stood very still, chin resting on her shoulder.

“Got it,” Jody said, looking up. But she had not taken the picture. There was something about the woman she didn’t like—something deeper than the paint and the rakish hat. As the woman moved away Jody moved the tripod a little to the side, centering Mel in the picture. She did not take that picture either, because when she cared about someone, she didn’t like to waste time taking pictures that didn’t reveal him. Mel was sure that he was being photographed, though. He put the celery top back over his head and stood very formally, hands at his sides. Was it mock seriousness, or was he really so used to being accommodating? For a moment she felt vulnerable and sentimental, as if she wanted to rush into Mel’s arms.

That was the good thing about having a camera between you and the rest of the world: It afforded some protection, a way to stall for time. She walked forward and gave him only a quick hug. She could almost hear Mary Vickers’s voice:
Playing with fire
. She kissed Mel quickly on the lips. His lips were cool, as was his hand, which he put briefly on the back of her neck as they kissed.

She looked around for Mary Vickers, who had come as Cinderella, to say goodbye, but the room was very crowded.

It was possible that Mary Vickers had left early with Wagoner, who, as usual, had gotten drunk. Those thoughts flashed through her mind in the few seconds it took Mel to bend and zip her camera bag. Camera bag over his shoulder and tripod in her hand, the celery stalk and the American Bandstand cutie started out into the night.

As they left the church, Mary Vickers was about a mile ahead of them down the road. She had quarreled with Wagoner (if you could call it that—she insisted he turn over the car keys; he tossed them at her and walked off). She had sat in the cold car for a few minutes, expecting that he would come to his senses and reappear, but as she waited she got angrier and thought that he could find his own way home. One of his drinking buddies could escort him. One of those men whose faces got mottled by drink until they turned as rosy as the madras pants they wore.

Mary passed over a small bridge and looked at the moon glowing over a field. She drove by a trickle of a brook that passed under some willow trees. The spring before, during Will ’n’ Wag’s short-lived fascination with butterfly hunting, she and Jody and the boys had picnicked under those trees. Jody had described to her a photograph of Nabokov, running forward with a butterfly net—Jody could make other people’s photographs seem more real than what was actually in front of her as she spoke—and they had agreed that, at the boys’ early age, it was impossible to say what interests would keep up, what hobbies were worth investing money in. Mel had fashioned the butterfly nets from netting that held the padding around busts that had been shipped to the gallery in New York, and sturdy sticks he had collected on a walk. In spite of everyone’s complaints that there were no available men in New York, when you did find a New York man, he seemed too good to be true. It was her ex-lover she was thinking of.

Licking her chapped lips, she remembered his taste for alcohol that burned going down—drinks meant to get you wired, none of those diluted bourbon-and-waters that Wagoner sipped until bedtime. She tried to think that she had been attracted, yet again, to another alcoholic, but that was an oversimplification. She had been attracted to someone who was energetic and a little crazy, and who had ventured to involve her in his flirtation with danger.

A sepia shadow spread in front of the car. She found it difficult to believe that what she saw was real, that it wasn’t just some externalization of what had been going through her mind. It was as if Impossibility had materialized—taken real form—so that she could hit up against it. What had been going through her mind? The willow trees sprang up. She had bit her lip as the car slammed to a stop. There was the cold taste of blood in her mouth.

She had hit a deer. All in a second, her thoughts and her car collided with a deer that ran in front of the headlights. She touched her seat belt to make sure it was fastened. She looked out the front window. For a vertiginous second, the shadow rose and twisted before it crumpled, like something in a horror movie. She fiddled with the shoulder strap of the seat belt like a lady lightly fingering her corsage. Below her fingers, her heart was racing. She said—probably out loud—“My God. I hit a deer.”

There were no other cars. She kept searching the rearview mirror. She looked out the window on the passenger’s side and saw the moon again, but no cars coming in either direction. In a few seconds headlights flashed into the rearview, but by then it seemed she had been sitting there for an hour. She was too shaken to get out of the seat. Rather than having an urge to bolt, she felt glued in place: a heavy person, a ludicrous statue, a woman in a formal dress sitting behind the wheel of a car, a deer crumpled in front of her headlights.

Lights began to blink behind her. A man in a tuxedo who had been at the party was tapping on the window, asking if she was all right. His round-faced wife, who had dressed as Mao, was standing behind her husband, her hands clasped over her mouth. Eventually she lowered one hand and made a circular motion.

The window rolled down, but Mary Vickers didn’t remember having done it. New York, she thought suddenly, but what she was saying was “No. I’m fine.” She was fine, but she had hit a deer. Mao’s hand was now clasping her hand, which gripped the seat belt.

As more cars stopped, Mao helped her out of the car. A real estate agent dressed as Peter Pan ran past everyone and bent over the deer. “Stay back,” he shouted. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.” He said that he had a rifle. That he had a rifle, but he didn’t think he was going to have to use it. Suddenly Wagoner had come from nowhere and was looking at Mary, perplexed. Or maybe he was worried. Or angry, because people in front of the car were assessing the damage. One headlight shot off to the side, cockeyed. There was the moon, over to the right, and the beam of light to the left from the headlight.

The deer was dead. Wagoner, as if he had been just a moment’s apparition, had suddenly disappeared (later, he would tell her that once he saw she was all right he ran down the hillside to take a piss before his bladder exploded). “Let’s move the cars,” Batman was saying. “We’ll have a real pileup if we don’t.”

The wind blew a swirl of leaves against Mary Vickers’s leg as she stood shakily outside the car, and she jumped, thinking that something had stabbed her. She could smell the dead deer’s blood, and taste blood inside her mouth. Mel stood beside her, frowning and examining her cut lip. If Mel was there, then Jody must be there. She looked down and saw that the side mirror had broken. Glass beads spread out in the road as though fish had spawned there. Was this the same world in which little boys chased butterflies? She turned and looked at Jody.