Real Life (19 page)

“I don't think she'd do that,” he said. “And I doubt if she'd have anything, anyway. I don't think she even knew my mother very well.”

“I'll bet you a million dollars she's got at least some photographs or something. Your parents would have had them, and when your grandfather died your aunt would have taken them.”

Hugo thought it over and decided that it was probably true. Of course—somewhere there had to be photographs of his mother, probably right there in the house. His mother's things. Cold sweat broke out on his back, chilling him, and the sun was all of a sudden painfully bright. The smell of the Coppertone was sickening. Nina stared at him. “Are you all right?”

“She said she'd be home for dinner,” he said. “I'll ask her then.” His voice sounded strange and hoarse, scaring him. He cleared his throat. He hadn't known how much he wanted what Nina had said—a picture in a frame by his bed, old report cards and letters. My mother, he thought, and wanted to cry.

“Why wait?” Nina asked him. She got to her feet and looked down at him, hands on hips. She was a goddess, her hair all aflame. “Come on. Let's have a look.”

“You mean just go through her stuff? I can't do that, Nina. It's her house.”

“It's your house too, Hugo. And besides, the stuff belongs to you, not to her. They were your parents.”

“But I can just ask her. She'll give me whatever she's got. Not that I think she's got anything.” Arguing, at least, removed the urge to cry and made Nina look less like a goddess of war and more like a human being. “We can't just go sneaking through everything.”

“She'll never know. Oh, Hugo—” She squatted down beside him again, her guitar bumping her knees, and put her hand on his shoulder. “Don't you see that she'll never give you anything like that? You know what she's like. She'd do anything to avoid a scene. She probably figures you couldn't handle it, you'd go to pieces and she'd be stuck with a basket case.”

“I'm not going to go to pieces. I just don't see why I shouldn't have a picture of my own mother.”

“Well, of course!” She squeezed his shoulder. He wondered if she knew what happened to him whenever she touched him. He wondered if she knew he was trying to get up enough nerve to kiss her. The idea of kissing her had begun to consume him, and he worried constantly about bad breath. The night before, there had been a full moon: lumpy, yellow, and swollen, looking ready to burst. He had been with Nina at the Verranos', and they had sat outside watching fireflies and listening to the night sounds. The train whistle had sounded from over beyond East Latimer. He had thought that the time was right for kissing her, and just as he was about to she had said, “Doesn't the moonlight look exactly like frost on the grass?” and then, quickly, “Let's go tuck the kittens in for the night,” and the spell was broken. What he had wondered all day was if she had done it on purpose, because she had sensed his decision and couldn't bear to be kissed by him.

“Come on,” she said. “Let's go check it out.”

“Let me ask her first, and if she says no we'll go and look.” As he spoke, he knew she had won.

“All right,” Nina said. “But let's just have a small hunt for ourselves first. I don't mean go poking through her personal junk. But maybe there's something you've never noticed, like an old photo album. She wouldn't mind if you looked in something you found right out in the open, or on a closet shelf or someplace like that. I mean, you live there, Hugo. Suppose you were looking for a tennis racket, or your old sneakers?”

He sighed, and she took her hand from his shoulder, and they both stood up. “You're right,” he said.

“Right as usual,” she said, and he had to laugh at her. They walked hand in hand up to the house.

His aunt's studio looked as if it had been abandoned suddenly by a person under attack; things were piled any which way, a pot of glaze had been left open on the worktable, there were uncleaned paintbrushes stuck in a can, dirty rags in a heap on the floor. “What a mess,” Nina said.

“She's been away a lot lately.”

“The weird paramour up in Boston must really turn her on.”

“I wish you wouldn't call him that.” It seemed irreverent, there in Dorrie's house, for Nina to make fun of her. With Dorrie gone and Nina there, the house was different—foreign and almost threatening, as if it could hear Nina's mockery and retaliate somehow.

“Well, what should I call him? The gigolo? Or just the WP?”

“You could call him Alex.”

“I hate the name Alex. What about him? Do you like him?”

“He's all right. I have no opinion. I've only met him a couple of times.”

“He hasn't tried to win you over yet? Get on your good side to win your auntie's heart?”

Hugo laughed nervously. “I haven't seen any signs of it. Mostly he just ignores me.”

“Well, watch out. He'll be wanting to take you to the circus and make you play catch with him out in the yard.”

Nina parked her guitar inside the door and they climbed the stairs to the living room. It was hot up there, and stuffy, and only slightly less chaotic than the studio. Hugo had no idea where to look for such a thing as a photo album: in the bookcases, where the books were lined up two deep? in the piles of magazines that filled every odd corner? under the stacks of old letters and bills and God knows what on the desk and beside the easy chair and stuffed into baskets and falling off shelves?

Nina stood in the middle of the room and closed her eyes. He watched her, thinking again about kissing her, about kissing in general. It seemed to him an unbelievably gutsy, horribly intimate thing to do. It was like an invasion of someone else's territory. The kissing on
Upton's Grove
always bothered him, those big, wet, close-up kisses they performed with their mouths wide open, as if devouring each other. Nina was watching
Upton's Grove
with him now—they watched it at the Verranos'—and she always groaned during the kissing and said something like “Give us a break.” And yet he knew that even if it looked a little weird it was something good to do, and certainly something he wanted to do with Nina.

“What are you doing?” Hugo asked her.

“I'm divining. I'm calling to the spirit of your mother and asking her where her pictures and things have been hidden.”

“Come off it, Nina.” Nina began scanning the room with narrowed eyes, her head thrust forward and her jaw clenched. Hugo laughed. “Now you look like a red fox stalking its prey.”

“I doubt it,” Nina said. She had a way of dismissing what he said by raising one eyebrow and tossing her head; she did it less often than she used to, but enough to make him, sometimes, afraid to speak. He turned away from her and began going through a pile of papers. He had wanted to say for a long time that she reminded him of a fox: the fox, specifically, that he had seen out behind Rose's once, a sleek, quick-eyed apparition, ruddy and beautiful. That was Nina, with her red hair and her pointed face and her air of wildness.

He felt her hand on his arm; she had come up behind him. “Unless you're my prey,” she said. He put out a hand to draw her closer to him. He was always remembering how, on the day the kittens were born, she had come into his arms. He had imagined a hundred times how his hands would feel on her bony shoulders, her back. But she smiled at him and pulled away. “Just kidding,” she said. “Let's start with the closets.”

He hadn't meant it to be much of a search, but once they started he couldn't stop. “Just be careful, Nina,” he kept saying. The excitement of being in the empty house with Nina was overwhelming, but his nervousness didn't go away. He couldn't believe he was doing what he was doing. He kept listening for his aunt's car to pull in, and looking around trying to see things with her homecoming eyes. “I don't want this place to look ransacked.”

Nina waggled her fingers at him. “Have no fear, darling. Another successful job by the Little Falls Pond cat burglars. High-class ransacking at reasonable rates.”

She was, in fact, more painstaking than he, and not nervous at all. Her attitude appalled and fascinated him. She would have gone through his aunt's underwear if he hadn't stopped her, and she found a slinky black dress in the closet and held it up against herself, looking in the mirror. “Nina, please!” he cried in horror and tried to take it from her.

She wrenched it away from him. “Calm down, Hugo, you'll have a heart attack. Now admit it—” She went back to the mirror. “Wouldn't this look better on me than on her?” She lifted her chin and let her eyelids droop. He stood beside her, looking down at her smooth freckled skin, the long dark eyelashes against her white cheek, her electric hair.

“It would look beautiful on you,” he said. His heart pounded so hard he could hear it inside his head: was this a heart attack? But he knew it wasn't. He knew just what it was. He wanted, suddenly, to leave, wished he could, knew he couldn't.

Nina grinned at him. “You are cute,” she said, and hung the dress back in the closet.

They found an old picture of Dorrie and Phineas as children, and an album full of snapshots of people Hugo didn't know—some were soldiers, and the settings looked European. “These must be from the war,” he said. Some of them he thought were of his grandfather as a young man. He liked them, and he liked the old pictures of his father and his aunt; as children, they had looked almost exactly alike. “Look,” he said to Nina. “They could have been twins.”

“He's better looking,” Nina said. “She hasn't changed a bit, has she?”

There were no pictures of them as adults. His aunt's high-school graduation picture was the most recent. And there were none of his mother.

Until they looked under the bed and found a dress box full of junk. Inside, right on top, was the clipping—old and brittle, and so yellow it was brown. They stared at it together:
TEEN MOTHER SLAIN IN DRUG DISPUTE. BABY SLEEPS THROUGH IT
.

Having a love affair was simpler than Dorrie had expected. Lying in Alex's bed on August afternoons, walking with him down the Boston streets, sitting across the table from him in her kitchen drinking beer while the hot sun beat down outside, she was ashamed of the trepidations of July.

Within a week after they met, Dorrie and Alex had been lovers; by the first of August they had decided they were in love. “There's something wrong with the terminology,” Alex said when they discussed this. “How can two people be lovers before they fall in love with each other?”

“For a writer, you have an awfully literal mind,” Dorrie told him, though she too was bemused—not by the terminology but by the fact, and the readiness with which she had, after all, accepted it into her life.

“It's so modern of us,” Alex said. “Sex before love. It makes me feel young. I used to think I was such a proper gent. Used to spend weeks hoping and praying and sending flowers and little mash notes.”

“Bilge.”

“It's true! Then I met you and we were in the sack inside of a week, without so much as a bunch of daisies. You've corrupted me.” It made her happy to be the kind of woman of whom such things could be said, even in jest.

Her friend Rachel asked, “Didn't I tell you you could get any man you wanted if you put your mind to it?”

“I don't think you ever said that, exactly,” Dorrie replied. “Besides, I didn't put my mind to it. If I had, I would have run as fast as I could in the opposite direction. What I had to do was keep my mind out of it.”

“Well, good luck,” Rachel said. She and Leon were still planning marriage, maybe a little wedding in the fall. She had stopped talking about it to Dorrie, but her voice on the phone had an undertone of pessimism that Dorrie couldn't miss but didn't know how to respond to. “Alex has quite a history, you know.”

“Oh, well, everyone does, Rachel,” she said. “Except maybe me.”

Alex was forty-seven. The veins on the backs of his hands stood out in ridges, and his hair and moustache were mostly gray, and there were hollows under his eyes that merged with parentheses of wrinkles on either side; otherwise he seemed no older than her previous lovers had been. But he talked, sometimes, like an old man, and he tended to lose energy in a way that seemed to Dorrie not physical, nothing to do with age, but mental, as if the will to be young had left him. He was a self-confessed failure, prone to nightmares, perpetually short of cash. He drank too much, and he was possessed by his desire to see the Grand Canyon.

He had been born in England, moved to the States as a child, and retained a trace of accent, a tendency to let his voice fall instead of rise when he asked a question. He had spent several years hitchhiking around Europe, a time he referred to as his crazy days. His eyes were gray and sad, washed-out looking, experienced. The inner depths of his mind she imagined to be as cluttered and full of riches as the rooms of her house.

The apartment he lived in, by contrast, was insanely bare. He had two rooms, and owned practically nothing, all of it shabby: a trunk left over from college, full of manuscripts; a card table; two ancient Windsor chairs in bad shape; an oak press-back rocker with a broken rung; a maple desk with a portable manual typewriter; a travel poster of the Grand Canyon tacked up on one wall; the sagging daybed on which he slept. All his books were paperbacks, and tattered.

“I can't stand to have possessions,” he said. “A roomful of nice furniture would make me feel ill. Literally. I couldn't live there—I'd be weak in the knees all the time. And clothes—buying new clothes makes me feel like I'm suffocating. It's not because I'm cheap. I love to spend money. I spend a bundle on whiskey. Ephemeral things, that's what I like.”

Dorrie wondered if that included her. He seemed impermanent to her, tentative, like someone she imagined. He was all gaps and loose ends. Nor did he, at first, tell her much of importance about himself. She knew that he and his wife, whose name was Beth, had been divorced for thirteen months. Beth and their two teen-age sons had moved to California. The divorce had been painful for Alex, in ways he seemed unable to explain. His relationship with Margo, however—because it didn't matter—he described in detail.