Real Life (15 page)

“There's this
auberge
in the Laurentians,” Rachel said. “I was there a couple of years ago. It was run by a very chic expatriate Frenchwoman—gracefully aging—and this handsome young Canadian who was obviously her lover. It was right out of Colette. I'd love to go back and see if they're still together or if he's left her for some young thing.” Dorrie knew Rachel had been to the inn with William—their last vacation together before he left her for a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher named Janet whom Rachel always called The Slug.

“It was a wonderful place,” Rachel went on, looking sad. A bad sign, this Williamish reminiscing, this talk of deserted women. “She did the cooking, good wholesome food and lots of it, and this killer dessert called
trempette
. And there was a beautiful garden, vegetables growing alongside the flowers. I wonder if it still exists.”

It was at that moment, at that image of broccoli and squash flanked by roses, that Dorrie became conscious of Alex's knee, under the table, pressing hers. She looked at him, felt the blood rush to her face and neck. He smiled at her.

Charles began talking about a trip he had made out west.

“Did you get to the Grand Canyon?” Alex asked him. His voice was even, his face calm and humorous; maybe he thought it was the table leg he was caressing. “I asked because I was thinking of sending my hero out there. In my book,” Alex explained when Charles looked blank. Under the table, his leg twined around Dorrie's. “I've wanted to see the Grand Canyon since I was a kid and I'll probably never get there, so I figured the next best thing would be to send him. But I don't know. He's terrified of heights. I wondered how badly it would affect an agoraphobe, to look over the edge of that chasm. I hate to put the guy through a bad time, but—” He paused, smiling to himself at the prospect of rocky immensities and sunset colors. “I've got my heart set on it,” he said. Under the table, he put his hand on Dorrie's thigh, and squeezed.

“I really couldn't help you,” Charles said with a short laugh. “I don't have those hang-ups.”

“Alex's hero is based rather heavily on Alex, needless to say,” Margo put in. “His only friend is a dog named Woofy—isn't that cute?”

“I've changed his name,” Alex said. “It's not Woofy anymore.”

“What is it?”

“It's Margo. And I've decided to make the dog a bitch.”

Margo pretended to smile. “You're such a scream, Alex.”

“That was uncalled for,” said Charles.

“No, it wasn't, actually,” said Alex. “But what'll it be? Pistols at sunrise? Or do you want to step outside right now?”

Charles looked at Alex with disdain. “Come off it, Willick.”

“Do I have to? It's such fun.”

Rachel looked close to tears. “All of you come off it,” Leon said. “Quit quarreling and eat, for Christ's sake.”

Alex leaned across the table and said to Rachel, “I'm sorry. I'm being a shit. This is an incredibly good meal. I'm going to quit making an ass of myself and start making a pig of myself.”

Rachel summoned up an unhappy smile. Margo sat with her teeth clenched. Charles tore into the French bread as if it were Alex. Leon began talking again, about his travels in Europe as a young man. Dorrie closed her eyes for a second and had a vivid, startling vision of herself and Alex, hand in hand, looking over the edge of a Grand Canyon-like abyss. Where had that come from? A previous incarnation? Alex glanced at Dorrie regretfully and removed his hand from her thigh so he could help himself to more chicken. She had an insane desire to laugh. Their legs, still entwined, began to sweat cozily together.

The girl with the guitar was named Nina. Hugo met her on Saturday afternoon by the waterfall: a girl even smaller than he had thought, and skinny as a water bug, though Hugo sensed she was his age, maybe even older. She was still in her overalls, and her bare feet stuck out pink below the frayed pantlegs. She sat cross-legged on the rough grass, her guitar in her lap. “I live in town, actually, but I'm cat-sitting,” she said. “For Susan and Paul. The Verranos? They're in Europe. Susan is my sister. I come over twice a day to feed Listerine and play my guitar.” She took a stack of rubber-band-wrapped cards from her back pocket and peeled one off. Hugo took it. It said:

NINA SLAUGHTER

“RHYMES WITH LAUGHTER”

Songs to go

“I'll bet you've never heard the name Slaughter pronounced like that,” she said. “It was my own idea. Otherwise, it sounds so violent, and I deplore violence in any form. Don't you?”

“Yes,” Hugo said. He sat down beside her on the grass. Up close, in daylight, her hair was dark red and wild; no attempt had been made to tame it down—though Hugo couldn't imagine what would do it. No mere elastic or ribbon: metal bands, maybe. “I live with my aunt in the white house,” he said, and smiled at what it sounded like. “I don't mean the White House, like in Washington. I mean over there.” He pointed through the trees.

“Well, obviously,” Nina said, and he blushed. His dumb jokes.

The guitar slung across her chest hid most of her. She strummed a chord. “Do you like music?”

“Sure. Everyone likes music.”

“Not true. My mother doesn't. Which is why I have to sing my songs over at my sister's.”

“You mean she doesn't like any music? Or just—you know—” He nodded at her guitar.

“Rock and roll, she calls it. Or country and western. She doesn't know which is which. She only likes the classics.” Nina pursed up her mouth and lifted her eyebrows and waggled a little finger—a parody of a lady at a tea party. “Mozart,” she said in an English accent. “And Beethoven, dahling. And all that jolly old craperoo.” Hugo laughed. She held her pose for a minute, then smiled at him. “Who do you like? What's your favorite group?”

Hugo thought hard. He knew very little about pop music. “Oh—Duran Duran, I guess.”

She stared at him, strummed a chord. “Really? I thought only girls were hot over Duran Duran.”

“Oh—well—I'm not really hot over them, I wouldn't say.”

“I don't like rock much. I loathe New Wave, especially, and that little creep Michael Jackson. I have to admit I really prefer country and western. I adore Dolly Parton, don't you?”

“Sure. Kind of.” He remembered a big-breasted blond woman in a movie he'd seen with the Wylies. He remembered her breasts better than he did her singing.

“But the kind of music I really want to write is unclassifiable,” Nina said. “I want to write songs about what no one has ever written about before. You know the kind of things I mean? Like I heard of this chauffeur once that was named Parker. Isn't that a fantastic name for a chauffeur? Wouldn't that make a song?” She raised her face to the clouds, lifting her chin. Around her neck she wore a choker made of knotted and braided string. On the back of one hand was what looked like a tattoo—or maybe it was just a ballpoint pen drawing—of a large, heavy-lidded eye, realistically rendered. Looking at her, Hugo had the same feeling he had had when David Wylie sat down next to him in the lunchroom one day and took out of his lunchbox a dog-eared notebook filled with poems: that he was in the presence of a weird and special person, someone to be listened to. “And there's this tribe in Africa, or somewhere,” Nina went on, “that has this ritual where boys have to prove their manhood by cutting off one of their fingers and roasting it and eating it. Can you imagine what a song about that would be like? Or about water striders.” She pointed out toward the glittering bugs on the water. The eye on the back of her hand looked straight at Hugo. “What do you think? Or about cats. Could there be a good song about cats? Or does it have to be love love love all the time? I think about that a lot. Why do songs have to be about love and practically nothing else?”

“I don't know.” He decided to be honest. “Actually, I don't know that much about music. I'm not really into it.”

She seemed to forget him as he spoke. She began to strum another chord, built it into a tune, and sang:

“Well, I don't know much about music,

No, I don't know much at all;

I just wanna be with my baby,

Hangin' out at the shoppin' mall.”

Her voice was eerie, sharp and high—a witch's voice, Hugo thought. Her lips were pink, with high peaks. She slapped her palm against the strings, abruptly, and the music stopped. She looked down at her feet over the top of the guitar and said, “Well.”

“Is that one of your songs?” Hugo asked her. He reached out one finger and plucked a string: a deep-voiced twang. “You wrote that?”

“What? What I just played? Are you kidding? I just made it up now. That's crap.”

“It didn't sound so bad to me.”

“You were right, then. You don't know much about music if that didn't sound bad to you.”

Hugo wrapped his hands around his knees and stared out over the pond, casually, as if he was about to change the subject, about to yawn or get up and leave. He was sick of the way she kept insulting him. She didn't even know him. “Not that it was great or anything,” he said.

Again she ignored him and began to play. He turned his eyes to watch her fingers creeping over the strings like lithe, white little animals—retreating, advancing, pouncing, retreating again, picking the same notes over and over fast, then slower, stopping. The eye—it was drawn on with a pen, he was sure of it—watched him. The waterfall made its endless sound, which, if you closed your eyes, was strangely like the sound of fire. Nina rested her chin on the guitar, looking glum, and said, “All I want is to be a famous songwriter.”

“Ah,” he said, hoping to wound her. “The what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up game.”

“I don't mean when I grow up,” she said. The gloom in her voice was replaced with disdainful amusement. “I mean now. I'm sixteen; I could leave school any time if I could support myself—if I had a career.”

Hugo blushed. What was he doing here talking to this girl who would always one-up him, who knew things, who was sixteen years old and ready to quit school for a career? “Hmm,” he said, implying boredom, sophistication, skepticism, aware that it was all undercut by his red face. He had imagined being in his loft with a girl. What a load of crap. How could he have forgotten what it was really like, being with girls? How they terrified him. How he always said the wrong thing. How he turned into a hopeless nerd.

There was a pause, while he stared across the pond and Nina, so far as he could tell, stared at him. He refused to turn and meet her eyes. He would sit looking over at the swampy pine woods and the high scatty clouds forever before he'd acknowledge her existence.

She stood up suddenly and held out her hand. He saw it—white, freckled, tiny—stuck in front of him. The thumbnail extended thick and yellow; the rest were bitten short. The eye, close up, was not so well drawn. “Come on,” she said. “Come and meet Listerine the Purring Machine.”

He looked across the pond one last time, as if he loved it, and then put his hand in hers. She pulled him to his feet and stood grinning. “Listerine is expecting kittens any day—we think. She's huge, but of course we have no way of knowing when she's actually due.” She kept hold of his hand, and they began walking up to the Verranos' house. “We can't exactly ask her when she went out and did it.”

He laughed. His laugh sounded strained and stagy. Nina scared him: how could he live up to her? And, small and flat and frizz-haired though she was, she seemed to him very sexy. The day in general was very sexy—the hot, sun-filled July afternoon, the impassioned guitar music, the pregnant cat, the rhythmic chirp of insects. There were times when all of life seemed sodden with sex. Even pronouns—it struck him again, as it often had, how sexy pronouns were: how every time you said “he” or “she” you were acknowledging the mysteries of sex. And how he wouldn't exist, and Nina wouldn't, and no one would, if it weren't for sex. Even Listerine wasn't merely a cat, she was a female cat; her sex was an essential fact that it was impossible to forget. Nina said “she,” “her,” “she,” “her,” and Hugo could see in his mind not only the huge pregnant cat but the photograph of his pregnant mother leaning against the Camaro, and Rose vast and sleepy with Rodney in her belly. He remembered the day—he had been at the reservoir swimming with his cousins—when he'd realized that the parts of people that were always covered up were the parts where men and women differed from each other. It was without doubt the most embarrassing day of his life, until this one.

“I'm glad I met you, Hugo,” Nina said, surprising him. She squeezed his hand and then let it go. “I hate school when it's going on, but when summer comes it's so boring around here.”

“Do you have brothers or sisters?” he asked, thrilled. That meant she didn't find him boring. “Or friends. You probably have a lot of friends.”

“I told you,” she said in an elaborately patient voice. “My sister is married. This is her house. I'm cat-sitting for her.”

“You don't have to condescend to me,” he said, astonished at himself for using the word. He didn't think he had ever uttered such a word before.

Nina took it in stride. “You're right. I'm sorry. Of course, I could have other sisters, or brothers. But I don't.” She grinned at him. “Thank God. I like my privacy. I love my sister, but her wedding was the happiest day of my life, and not only because I got to wear a gorgeous dress and a picture hat.” Hugo tried to imagine her pixie face under a big hat; he wouldn't have expected her to care for such things. “As for friends,” she went on, “forget it. This town is full of idiots and creeps.”

“I think I've seen some of them,” Hugo said. “In town—like at the pizza parlor on Main Street.”