Rosie (11 page)

He bent down and kissed Sharon on the forehead, oh please let him kiss me too. Let him tuck me in. “Hello,” she whispered.

He spun around, angrily, but his face softened; in the thin moonlight he looked like Sharon, a roundish, open face, soft brown eyes.

“Hello,” he whispered back.

He came to her bed, and she smiled up at him. He tucked the sheet and blanket around her neck, smoothed her cheeks with his fingertips, and left the room.

Sheltered, sleepy, safe, her breath grew soft and she slept.

Millions of times a year, women turn around at the sound of a strange man's voice and are shot, stabbed, raped. Rae was explaining to two men that this was why she had screamed bloody murder.

Two hours later the four of them were sitting around a campfire that Rae had made; they were drinking Tang screwdrivers which the men had provided. Elizabeth and Rae had eaten by themselves and drunk all the rum. Rae had ventured to the men's campsite and invited them over for a joint.

Now they lay sprawled against the logs which formed a ring around the campfire, smoking dope beneath a crystalline starry sky. The white crescent moon made dappled slanting shadows of the trees, and the air was as crisp as chilled vodka, smelling of leaves and grass, of living and burning wood. Pretty Boy Meadow, bordered on one side by the rushing, rock-filled river, icy blue-green at dusk. The music of river, frogs, crickets, birds, owls, and the crackling fire soothed and enveloped Elizabeth, and she only half listened to Rae chatter on about mosquitoes.

Lank, the one who had first approached them, was tall and fat and talkative. In the moonlight, the bald spot at the crown of his short red hair looked like a silver yamulke. The other man, James, was short and thin, with dark fluffy Einstein hair. He lay smoking silently.

“I swear to God,” said Rae. “This Off is amazing.” She sprayed every inch of her body, clothed or exposed, with the mosquito repellent, then sprayed some into her fingers and dabbed it behind her ears as if it were Arpege. The men were transfixed.

“Mosquitoes adore me. You'll notice they leave Elizabeth alone; she's got that bad-vibe force field, whereas with me, I mean, I can psychically hear them arrive—no mosquito in sight, but ever so faintly I can hear a plane approach, and then,
neeeeeow, neeee-yowwwww,
they're buzzing me.”

“You want another drink, Rae?”

“Sure. Thanks.” Lank stood and walked to her. “Elizabeth?”

“Please.”

“James.”

“Yeah.”

“Drunk again,” said Lank. “Two nights running. It's because we're unemployed.”

“It's because we're alcoholics,” said James.

“No, we're not.”

“Pretty damn close.”

Elizabeth looked up when Lank handed her the red thermos cup of Tang and vodka. “Thanks.”

“You have an extremely aristocratic face. Doesn't she, James?”

“Yes,” he said, smoking again.

“Do you
guys
backpack often?” Rae asked, lighting a cigarette.

“I do. Several times a year. It's James's first—”

“...and last—”

“—time.”

“Elizabeth's too.”

“Were you best friends before?”

Rae nodded, smiled at Elizabeth, who scowled, good-naturedly.

“So were me and James. I thought he would love it.”

James and Elizabeth looked at each other cautiously.

“You hate it too?”

She nodded. “I liked the first couple of hours. The next five were as recreational as—I don't know. Chemotherapy.”

“You know what James did yesterday? He asked me to carry his pack for him against my chest, like a sandwich board. And when I refused, he got all sulky. Then he decided to abandon his pack on the trail. He thought someone would find it, see my address, and ship it home.”

Rae laughed. “You know what Elizabeth did, a few hours ago? Well, see, first of all I should mention that I sort of lied—”

“You didn't
sort of lie,
Rae, you lied, period.”

“This is true. I told her it was only four hours to the meadow, and so we have this enormous scene, and she goes into this two-hour sulk, during which, at one point, she suggests that I walk back to the trailhead, call the National Forestry Service, lie, and have them pick her up by helicopter.”

Lank laughed, James smiled.

“I haven't felt so bratty in ages,” James said.

“Where do you guys live?”

“San Francisco. We live in an apartment building on Sacramento. Where do you live?”

“Bayview. I live down the street from Elizabeth and her daughter.”

“What do you do?”

“I'm a weaver. What do you do?”

“I'm an unemployed English teacher,” said Lank. “He's a writer.”

“Published?” Elizabeth asked.

It came out in a much snottier tone than she had intended, and hung in the air for a moment. She looked at him, saw that he was looking at her with disdain.

“I'm sorry, I just—everyone says they're a writer.”

“Isn't she awful?” said Rae. “Sometimes I don't know what I see in her.”

Elizabeth shook her head at herself, smiled wryly, apologized again.

“Forget it. And yes, one story in the
Kenyon Review,
one in
Esquire.”

“Yeah? That's great. You write short stories?”

“I'm writing a novel. The stories were chapters from the novel.”

“So, do you make enough to live on?”

“Not really. I've been working on and off as a waiter for the last couple of years. Right now I'm living off some savings and the
Esquire
money. I figure it'll last me for the next five or six months, and if I haven't sold anything else by then I'll go back to waiting tables.”

“What's the novel about?”

“Me.”

“Yeah?”

“It's about trying to live a life which, when I review it at eighty, will not contain too many episodes for which I will kick myself.”

“It's pretty funny,” said Lank.

“So,” said James, and sighed. “Read any good books lately?” And then he and Elizabeth were off and running:
Far Tortuga? Birdy? Under the Volcano? Rabbit, Run? Middlemarch? Milagro Beanfield War? At Play in the Fields of the Lord? Out of Africa? Wapshot Chronicle? One Hundred Years of Solitude? Herzog? White Mule?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Passage to India?
Yeah.

“How about Schuyler?” she asked.

“What's for Dinner?
Loved it.”

“‘Pussy pines so,'” she said.

“Yeah, yeah. Remember Biddy, the old lady, sitting in the chair with taloned feet, reminding herself of the Chinese empress who looked like a wise old monkey?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, and they shared a great laugh.

“Schuyler?” asked Rae.

“Yeah, the poet. You know, James, he spends about half the year in an asylum.” He nodded.

“James was headed for one. I rescued him.”

“You call backpacking being rescued?”

“I'd come into his room where he's trying to write, only he's like a dog going around in circles before it sits down; he's going, ‘Thigh, thigh, is there such a word, Lank?' He thinks it sounds too lispy to exist, so I tell him to look it up, so he goes to the dictionary. ‘T,' he says, ‘okay, t, huh'; he can't seem to place its order in the alphabet; he's going, ‘Ellemenopee, cue, are, ess, and tee...'—he's singing the alphabet song—‘now I've learned my A B C's, tell me what you think of me.'”

James was laughing.

“So I say, ‘Good
boy,
James,' and he's going, ‘T-h,' big problem here, with ‘h.' ‘flitch?
flitch
aitch aitch.'”

Everyone was laughing, and the joint, relit, was passed.

“We should string up our food pretty soon,” said Lank.

Elizabeth groaned.

“It's not that bad,” said Lank.

“Yes, it is,” said James.

“But we have to do it. Last night we got pretty loaded and starting hoisting up the pack with food in it, up onto the bear wires—see, Elizabeth, strung between the trees? But then we left the other pack, with a few snack-type items in it, which we thought we might need later that night, outside our tent, ten feet away maybe, and this morning, we hear,
Chuff chuff, chuff chuff chuff,
and this bear is gobbling down our Cheetos. Lucky the pack wasn't closed, or he'd have torn it apart.”

“Lucky it wasn't in the tent,” said Rae.

“Really. Anyway. We have the equipment, and I have the experience, and if we were to pass out and get ripped off again, I couldn't live with myself.”

“Let's have a nightcap,” said James. “Then we'll do it.” He got up to collect the cups and Elizabeth sized him up: five-foot-four tops—no, maybe five-five. She imagined being in bed with him, wondered if their children would have that crazy hair, if their children would be teased in school, imagined them spending their weekends not backpacking. He had a good voice, beautiful hands, pleasant face, green eyes. But she towered over him. Why did the packaging matter so much? The best men she had known, besides Andrew, the ones with whom new languages
were invented, had chipped teeth or pockmarks, were fat or sixty or...

“You read
Pigeon Feathers
lately?”

“Yeah,” she lied.

“Updike's the master. Sometimes, when I read him, I'm so in awe that I think I'll never write again, that there's no point in my trying to compete. But sometimes I read him because I want to
cringe
with admiration, and somehow it gets me back to the typewriter.”

Rae and James lit up another cigarette; Elizabeth watched the silvery wafting smoke.

“So you've got a daughter?” Lank asked.

“Does
she
have a daughter. You'll be reading about her someday—she may be a writer, or a great comic actress. Ro-sie Ferguson.”

“How old?”

“Eight,” said Elizabeth.

“Does she look like you?”

“Sort of. She's got black hair, but it's curly. We've got the same features, basically, but her face is heart-shaped, triangular, and she's got these very blue eyes.”

“Not to be believed,” said her aunt. “And her schtick is amazing.”

“Are you divorced?”

“No, widowed.”

“Oh.”

They sat, the four of them, finishing up their drinks, watching the golden red flames of the campfire.

“Would anybody like to hear me sing?” asked Lank.

“No,” said James.

“I would,” said Rae.

So under the silver moon, Lank got up, somewhat unsteadily, and cleared his throat. Oh, God, thought Elizabeth, this is going to be awful.

They heard the river, the rustle of leaves, the fire and crickets and owl, the great animated stillness of a meadow at midnight, and then Lank began singing “Stranger in Paradise,” in an at-first quavering tenor, not loud but with great feeling: It was
beautiful, and chills went up her spine. She wanted him to sing all night.

Rae wept.

“Wasn't that beautiful?” she asked, an hour later, when she and Elizabeth lay side by side in the tent. “The song?”

“Yeah.”

“They were terrific. Why don't we ever meet guys like that?”

“We just did.”

“Yeah, but they live in the city, and we didn't even give them our numbers.”

“Did you want to see Lank again?”

“I'm leaving, remember? For two months. But you and James.”

“I liked
him, but I wasn't
attracted
to him.”

“Why not?”

“He's a dwarf. And a smoker.”

“None of your deodorant-commercial men have panned out....”

“I can't stand kissing smokers.”

“But—”

“Look. It was a good night, a nice twist of fate. And it was for tonight, and that's all.”

“But Andrew was a nice twist of fate. It was a total quirk that you ever met, and the rest is history, the rest is Rosie.”

True, she thought. If one day, more than ten years ago, she had not chosen to kill time in Brentano's while waiting for a date to show up in North Beach, and if the Neruda collection Andrew had bought there two days before had not been missing middle pages, they would not have been in the bookstore at the same time. Andrew was at the cash register when Elizabeth went to pay for
The Universe and Dr. Einstein.

“Can I take a quick look at that?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He looked at the cover, flipped through the text, and handed it back. “Can I read it when you're done?” he asked.

Rae fell asleep almost immediately. Elizabeth lay in the tent,
alone in the dark, in the woods, and listened to Rae's stomach growl.

“Rae?”

The only response was a death rattle, a grunt, and coughing. Elizabeth thought of Rosie and started to play the tape in her mind called “Rosie and the Dreadful Things”: Rosie in a burning house, Rosie being murdered. Something was in Rae's nose, causing an airy wheezing distinct from the snores.

To take her mind off the commotion, Elizabeth replayed parts of the James tape. “Jesus!” he'd said. “I couldn't
stand
the idea that the Russians saw that photo—Reagan looking like an old snapping turtle, lying helpless on his back, flailing; some clown in a cheap rubber Nixon mask; the Madame Tussaud statue of Carter; and Jerry Ford behind them all, mouthing ‘Woof woof woof' to amuse a child.” She smiled in the dark, heard an owl.

She and James had
recognized
each other. Too bad he smoked. Too bad he didn't look the right part. Too bad he didn't know her last name. Rae stopped snoring and ground her teeth, grunted, wheezed; Jesus, Elizabeth thought unkindly. No wonder she'd never been married.

Maybe he would come to Bayview, looking for her. Maybe in the morning there'd be a note from him in her backpack. But you'd eat him alive, Elizabeth, you'd tear him apart.

Hi, James, she would say when he called, sexy, aloof, and wanting to see him. What a surprise, she would say.

“Hello? Hello!”

“Rae! It's okay, you've been dreaming.”