Real Life (13 page)

“What did your father do, Hugo?” It was Mrs. Garner's turn.

“He worked in a garage, I think. He liked cars. He didn't go to college or anything. I think he was pretty smart, though.” Hugo helped himself to more beef stew. He liked this substantial food, not the little salads and things his aunt made. Once they'd had crackers and cheese for dinner. “He died in a car crash. It was irony, my grandfather said.”

He saw the Garners look at each other: the poor child. He'd seen the look before. Mrs. Wylie used to have it, his teachers, the people at his grandfather's funeral. It always made him feel sorry for himself, the poor little orphan boy whom Fate had bereaved again and again.

“My mother died when I was a baby,” he said. “She was in a car crash too.”

“Oh, no!” Mrs. Garner put down her fork.

“Yeah,” Hugo said. He was feeling the wine; at least, he supposed it was the wine that tingled the top of his head and made him want to wring sympathy from the Garners. “I never knew her, really. I used to live with my Aunt Rose, but then when my father died I went to live with my grandparents.”

“And were there cousins there to play with? At your aunt's?”

“Yeah, but they used to just tease me, mostly. They were—” He thought. He wanted to say something like “juvenile delinquents,” but he wasn't sure it was a strong enough description of Shane and Monty. He contemplated telling his third lie: They're in jail now. Wow! Maybe it was true; he wouldn't be surprised. A memory flashed by him, of Shane holding his hands a foot apart and saying, “I just crapped the biggest turd!”

“They were a pain in the neck,” he said, and amplified: “They used to lock me in the chicken coop. Then when my father came and gave me money, they used to steal it.”

“My goodness,” Mrs. Garner said.

Mr. Garner cleared his throat in a troubled way. “Have some more of this stew.”

“Could I have just about a quarter inch of wine to wash it down?” He realized as he spoke that the Garners' glasses were still nearly full. “Or maybe some water would be better. I'm just so thirsty!”

“Tell you what,” Mr. Garner said. He put a little wine into Hugo's glass and then poured in some ice water from a pitcher. “How's that?”

“Great.” He took some more stew and washed it down.

After dinner, he helped load the dishwasher and then he went outside. He had a mission. In the evenings, when he went for his long, bored walks around the pond, he had been hearing the guitar music from the Verranos' place again—loud, mournful, sometimes discordant music. Lately he'd thought he'd heard a voice too.

He had a method for going around the pond. You could do it two ways. One he called the chicken way: you went down past his aunt's property until you came to a road, a little causeway over the stream that fed the pond, then over to the Garners' and down the shore on their side, then there was a swamp you skirted via another road that crossed the stream (wider here, though not quite a river: Marsden Creek, it was called) and passed the Verranos' driveway, and then the waterfall, and beyond it a sort of track back to his aunt's. The gutsy way was to go right through the swamp, getting your sneakers wet, and detour past the waterfall, stepping on boulders in the frothing water and getting everything else wet.

It was a hot night, the water would have felt good, but he didn't think he ought to return to the Garners' sopping wet. He thought Mrs. Garner might not like it, though his aunt never seemed to mind. He took the long, chicken way, starting from the Garners' and heading for the Verranos'. The pond lay dark and motionless; it could have been an oil slick. Hugo stumbled a little: the wine. He remembered his father drunk, and Rose, and the fear of death clutched him suddenly when he came to the road. He looked both ways, and then looked again, before he crossed. The poor child, everyone would say, if he was run over and killed. And no more Hugo. He wondered if he would see his mother and his father, if stuff like that was true. The things they'd told him at St. Michael's when he'd gone there, back in first and second grades. He stopped at the bridge over the creek to take a deep breath. He had eaten too much stew, too much blueberry pie. He wondered, if the Garners adopted him, if they would eat in the dining room every night. He hoped not. And he knew the Garners wouldn't adopt him; they were too old. But it was one of his going-to-sleep fantasies.

The music began, suddenly, as he stood there looking down at the water. He turned his head toward it. The Verranos' house sat on a little hill. The front room was lit up; as he listened the music grew louder and he heard the voice. It was eerie, loud and thin, a ghost's voice. The top of his head tingled again. It was a girl, singing and playing the guitar.

It was nearly dark. If whoever it was looked out she probably couldn't see him, but, just in case, he approached the house roundabout, from the back. He crept up on the lighted window. The Verranos' place was old, and most of the windows were too tall for him to see into, but the lighted one was in a little addition that had been put on the back—probably to take advantage of the waterfall view on the other side of the driveway. He stayed back in the shadows, stood on tiptoe, and looked in.

There was a red-haired girl in overalls. She was standing in the middle of the room playing a guitar, and if her head hadn't been thrown back in song she could have looked right at Hugo. He moved further away, staring at her. She was short, skinny, frizzy-haired, intent. He listened to the words:

“Well, can't you see I'm just a kid?

And I don't care what you did.

A kid like me can't understand it all—

Well, don't you know I'm only fifteen?

Absorbed in my teen-age dreams,

I don't hear the sound of your fightin' down the hall—damn!”

She broke off, and the guitar stopped. She stood in silence for a minute, then nodded and said aloud, “All right—take it.” The music began again, and then her voice:

“Well, don't you know I'm only fifteen?

I just don't know what you mean,

When I hear the sound of your fightin' down the hall.”

Her voice was high and piercing and right on key. She stopped, then sang:

“The sound of your fightin'…”

and stopped again. The guitar dwindled away to chords, then to two notes picked fast, over and over, then silence. “Well,” she said after a while. “The hell with that, Listerine. Right?” Then she was still. Hugo was sure she could see him, but she just gazed straight ahead, frowning. She had very thick eyebrows; her frown was impressive. She stood like that for a while, and then turned suddenly and left the room, and he couldn't see her anymore. A huge black cat jumped to the windowsill and stared out at the night.

“You look gorgeous,” Rachel said when Dorrie emerged from the bedroom.

“Gorgeous may be going too far,” Dorrie said.

“You're right. You actually don't look one bit better than suicidally beautiful.” Rachel poured her a drink, and Dorrie began to cut up vegetables for crudites. “You must always wear blue, dollink,” Rachel said in her Russian accent. “And you must get your hair cut every six weeks without fail. And promise not to forget your old friends when you and Charles walk off into the sunset together to the sound of the throbbing balalaika.”

“You're so silly you must be nervous, Rachel.”

“Of course I'm nervous. The damn bean dip is too runny, and this dress makes me look fat, and it's hot in here.” Rachel's mood changed suddenly. She pushed back her hair with both hands, sighed, took a gulp of her drink. “And Leon and I aren't getting along all that well.”

This was news to Dorrie. She had met Leon the night before; he had been there when she arrived home at midnight, tired out from the show. He was the jovial, paunchy man Dorrie had expected—stretched out on the sofa with his shoes off and his head in Rachel's lap. They were watching
The Thing
on television. Leon leaped to his feet, hugged Dorrie, told her he'd looked forward to meeting her, asked her how the show had gone, told her he loved her work, loved the teapot and mugs Rachel had given him for his birthday. “Leon is interested in everything,” Rachel had told Dorrie, describing him. “And he likes everyone. A bitchy old complainer like me doesn't deserve him. He's so
good
, Dorrie.” This was obviously true: goodness shone out of his small brown eyes; it seemed to reside even in his bushy hair, his beaked nose, his quick smile. Rachel could do a lot worse than marry him.

“You don't look fat, Rachel,” Dorrie said. “You honestly do look gorgeous.”

Rachel looked up from the bean dip. She had tears in her eyes. “I really wanted to fall in love with him. I really tried.”

“I thought you
were
in love with him.”

“It's just not working. I like him very much; he's wonderful and all that. It's not his fault—it's mine.” Rachel lifted the dish towel to her eyes and dabbed gently, preserving her eye makeup. “I still miss William, of course.”

“Oh, God, Rachel. William.” For a moment life seemed silly and futile. Not much more than a year ago, she and Rachel had spent hours together, analyzing the shortcomings of William: his selfishness, his lack of understanding, his childish temper tantrums. His mother had spoiled him rotten, Rachel said. He wasn't fit to be married. He filled her with a blank, black rage. She was glad to be rid of him. If he hadn't left her she would have left him. Et cetera. Hours and hours of anger and scorn. And the relief Rachel said she found talking it over with Dorrie, getting it straight. Had all that been for nothing?

Rachel blew her nose. “I don't suppose it's William, really. It's just cheap nostalgia.”

“For what?”

“For marriage, I guess. I want so much to get married again. And I thought Leon was the one. But when I begin thinking about that rat William I can tell I've just been fooling myself. Again. I never learn.” Rachel laughed mournfully, almost proudly; she opened the refrigerator and bent down to look in. The kitchen was a mess, as if it reflected this new disorder in Rachel's life. “I've met a lot of men, Dorrie. Why can't I fall in love with one of them?”

Dorrie couldn't think of a reply; it was a problem she had never encountered. She was always falling in love; it was the men who didn't. The doorbell rang.

“Oh, hell—” Rachel took a container of sour cream from the refrigerator. “If I add this to the dip will it make it more runny or less?”

“Less, I should think. Try it.”

“Will you let in whoever that is, Dorrie? I'm sorry, I'll be right there.”

Dorrie left her stirring in the sour cream—it didn't seem to help, after all—and went to the door. It was Leon, with Charles Lind, both of them carrying bottles of wine. Leon hugged Dorrie again and introduced Charles. He was not as Rachel had described him: he was not “quite attractive.” He was tall, dark-haired, beautifully dressed, and horrifyingly handsome. Dorrie took one look at him and steeled herself.

He smiled at her, a smooth, manufactured smile, meant to devastate everything in its path. Shaking his hand, she perceived dismay behind the smile, and thought, The hell with him, wondering where her indifference came from. Rachel's discontent? Fatigue? The approach of middle age? Her feeling that no one should have fingernails as flawlessly manicured as Charles Lind's?

Rachel came out, lamenting the bean dip, and she and Leon disappeared into the kitchen with the wine. Charles poured himself a drink and sat down beside Dorrie. His smile became dutiful. He cut a slab of brie and placed it squarely on a cracker. Dorrie imagined him having his nails done, practicing his smile on a fawning manicurist. “Cheese?” he asked her, and she took one of his precise constructions. His aftershave was overpowering, and smelled somehow kitcheny: cinnamon?

He wasn't, it turned out, a mere librarian; he was a high-level archivist at the new Kennedy Library, and he launched into a detailed recital of his duties there, and his gripes—a dull tale, full of the injustices done to Charles by his boss. Dorrie tried to remember he was a gifted painter; she could conceive of him doing self-portraits, not much else. Nudes, maybe: his gaze kept falling to her cleavage. She said to herself—trying to be fair—that a more aggressive, more self-confident, more interested woman could have stopped the flow of egotism, maybe even brought out his better side. Everyone had a better side. She knew he was rattling away at her because that's what you did when you were stuck with a plain woman who didn't talk much. She sat quietly nibbling crackers, noting with fascination the small regularity of his teeth, his clear, tanned skin, the deep blue of his eyes, the thick black lashes. One was not often this close to perfection. She was reminded of Iris, so beautiful she had seemed unreal. There was something disquieting in such inhuman beauty, or so it seemed to her—something out of joint. Flawlessness was not a human attribute.

He sat with her for the space of one drink and four slabs of cheese, and then he wound up his monologue, looked at her brightly, and said, “I'll just see if I can help out,” and headed for the kitchen. Dorrie heard him and Leon talking computers. She thought, I should be humiliated—dumped after fifteen minutes. But she felt serene, proud of herself. There had been plenty of occasions on which simple dislike of a man hadn't insulated her against being hurt by his coolness. Progress, she thought, and sat sipping gin and turning the pages of a magazine containing one of Rachel's stories. The story began: “Vanessa met Christopher in the supermarket. He had just knocked over a display of Puppy Chow, and Vanessa helped him put it back together. Maybe that was why, for as long as she knew him, he reminded her of a puppy: cute, impetuous, untrainable, devoted but inclined to bite.”

Rachel poked her head out of the kitchen. She looked flushed and distracted, the calico apron discarded, her hair beginning to descend from its careful arrangement. Too much gin in the kitchen. There was a painting in one of Dorrie's father's art books—
Mother's Ruin
: a harassed, aproned, disheveled woman, leaning against a big black late-Victorian stove, swigging from a bottle.