Second Nature (13 page)

 
 
He’d promised to talk to Stuart, but now he wasn’t so sure he could go through with it. He tried his best to avoid him—he’d take long showers when Stuart came to the house, he’d pretend to be sleeping—but Stuart wouldn’t give up. He seemed always to be at the house, a small tape recorder ready. He was there at breakfast and again at dinner; he was out on the porch when Stephen came back from running. He sat on the couch whenever Connor and Stephen played chess. When Stephen washed the supper dishes, Stuart was right there beside him, ready to dry.

“He’s driving you crazy, isn’t he?” Robin asked Stephen as they sat on the steps of the front porch drinking iced tea.

It was dusk, and Stuart was stretched out in the hammock, watching them. He lifted his own glass of iced tea in a toast. His depression had lifted completely, for all the good it did anyone else.

“Not exactly,” Stephen said. He took a piece of ice between his teeth and cracked it in two. “A little.”

“Right,” Robin said. “Go home,” she called to Stuart.

“It’s Kay’s home, not mine,” Stuart called back. “She’s got that housepainter there tonight. He’s fixing dinner for her.”

“He won’t leave,” Robin sighed. Homer was curled up beside her, and she rubbed his head in the space that he liked, between his ears. “It’s all my fault that we’re stuck with him.”

“Kay had me run out to King Kullen and pick up the sour cream and cabbage he needed for his recipe, and I actually did it,” Stuart called. “If I left here now, she’d probably ask me to wash their dishes and tidy up, and I’d have to split the housepainter’s head open. You can’t ask me to go.”

“The funny thing is, I would do things for Stuart that I wouldn’t do for anyone else.” Robin was sitting close to Stephen; their legs were almost touching. “Just because he’s my brother.”

Alongside the house, the roses drooped and turned dusty from the heat. Stephen had never bothered to name his last three brothers. By then, words didn’t mean as much, he didn’t need them. He could distinguish his brothers’ voices from miles away, he knew each one’s scent and could identify their paw prints in fresh snow. Stephen finished his iced tea, placed the glass on the porch, then stood up.

“You don’t have to talk to him,” Robin said.

But she was smiling, and as far as Stephen could tell, this meant she was pleased. And she was, really, at least until Stephen and Stuart went into the house, and she was left out on the porch, with Homer as her only company. Sitting out there, watching the first faint stars appear, she realized that she was actually jealous. She wanted to be the one in that room upstairs with Stephen. Through the open bedroom window she could hear Stuart testing his tape recorder.

“One, two, three,” he said, and then his words replayed back to him.

All summer long Robin had not once allowed herself to wonder what would happen next. Some people believed this was a condition to strive for: to be in the here and now. But Robin saw this could easily be just another way to lie to herself, the way she had lied to herself about Roy. The women who had asked for him on the telephone, then quickly hung up when told he wasn’t home, were all delusional. That’s what Roy always said. Maybe they were attracted to him, but if they were that was their tough luck. He wasn’t leading anyone on. Marriage meant commitment. The words were interchangeable, weren’t they? At least up until the end. Alibis were contagious little things, a way to sweet-talk yourself into believing whatever you wished could be true. Beneath those first stars, Robin wished she would have demanded the keys to the handcuffs even if Stephen had been ugly and old, even if he hadn’t looked at her that way. She wished she could wash the dishes or read a book while he told her brother the story of his life and not want him all to herself. She wished she had thought to comb the knots out of her hair and change out of the soiled clothes she’d worn when they’d dug out the roots of some fallen poplars earlier in the day. Instead, she shooed the cat away and carried the empty glasses inside, and she tried to pretend that just thinking about him didn’t cause her a ridiculous amount of pleasure.

Up in the guest room, Stephen was crouched down on the floor. Stuart sat cross-legged facing him, his clothes wrinkling. Between them was the tape recorder. That evening, as Robin left the unwashed dishes in the sink and searched for a comb to untangle her hair, Stephen answered every question he was asked, but that didn’t mean he told the whole truth. How could he have survived, that was what Stuart wanted to know straight off. What happened when the snowdrifts were higher than his head or when ice locked his lips together? What did he wear on his feet, on his back, what did he eat, where did he sleep, did he understand fear and longing and desire? If he ever saw men did he run from them, convinced they were creatures completely different from what he was? Who, exactly, had he thought he was all those years?

Stephen told Stuart half of everything, much the way he now knew men did when they didn’t want to lie outright. The other half he couldn’t even say aloud. He’d never tell that ticks plucked from under the skin were always eaten whole or that blood was best washed off immediately, otherwise it caked when it dried, especially on strands of hair and under fingernails. He didn’t tell Stuart that his own reflection had frightened him so badly that he took to closing his eyes when he crouched down beside a stream to drink. He did not dare mention that he’d torn meat from the bone when a deer was still warm and struggling, or that sometimes he was sent to attack not from the flanks, but straight on, quick as an arrow, but much quieter, except for the blood pounding inside his head as he pulled the deer down by the nose before it had the chance to rear its head.

He told Stuart only the half that was easy to hear, explaining how it was possible to know the hour of the day from the shadows on the ground but not how, when you were hungry enough, you could kill without thinking. How if something didn’t have a name, he had named it, inside his head, and that was why language had come back to him easily. But he left out how much he hated those words he couldn’t get rid of. He never said them aloud. He used only the language of his brothers and in this way he had deluded himself, and had come to believe he was truly one of them, just as he was deluding himself again, right this minute, pretending he was no different from any other man.

As he spoke, Stephen’s voice was detached, but Stuart had been too gripped to turn on a lamp. He hadn’t even noticed when the tape ran out and facts were escaping into thin air. Stephen’s eyes, not his voice, gave emphasis to every word. They were hazel, with flecks of yellow and green, depending on the light. Look, and it was impossible to look away. As he walked back to Kay’s in the dark, having gotten exactly what he’d believed he’d wanted, Stuart felt unsure. He’d been one of those to sign the transfer papers, committing the Wolf Man for life. Afterward he’d had lunch at his favorite Chinese restaurant; he’d ordered Peking dumplings and Buddha’s Delight without thinking twice. He wouldn’t get just an article out of this, he’d get a book, maybe even two; he should have been elated. When he returned to the house he and Kay had shared for so long, he should have thrown open the front door and walked right in. Damn the housepainter, who was probably still there, sipping the last of his coffee, his arm around Kay’s waist. Damn the divorce. He should have headed for the back pantry, where Kay still kept the wine, so they could celebrate. Instead, he went around to the side of the house and up the stairs to the third-floor entrance.

He remembered when Robin first put in the clematis that now wound its way along the railing of the stairs. As far as Stuart could tell, it was nothing but a twig, and when Robin had insisted that someday the vine would be so strong it could easily survive a hurricane, Stuart had laughed. He’d never once considered that not only might this be true but he might not live here long enough to notice. Well, he noticed now. The clematis was so overgrown Stuart had to push it away each time he wanted to open the door. He went inside and put the tape recorder on the table and switched it on, then went to the sink and drank two glasses of cool, rusty tap water. He had sat across from the Wolf Man in his hospital room and never once had any idea of who he was. He’d never even looked at him carefully, and now he wondered how his own life had gotten away from him. When was the last time he had made a real decision or taken a stand? What exactly was it that he believed in? The voice he’d captured on tape was telling him what it was like to see stars beneath an open sky for the first time. Were they lamps suspended in the dark or ice crystals caught in the web of the night? Would they fall from above in a hail of fire and light, or guide you on the path home?

Downstairs, in Kay’s living room, music was playing. Stuart recognized it: Stéphane Grappelli, a heartbreaking sound. The housepainter had left his bicycle leaning against the fence. It was already past midnight and the bicycle was still there. Stuart remembered that on nights as hot as these, their grandfather had allowed them to sleep out on the porch on thin cotton pallets. Robin had always fallen asleep quickly, her breathing soft and even, but for Stuart the stars had been too disturbing and too bright, and he’d often crept inside to his stuffy bedroom, relieved to be back in the house.

Now he wondered why it was he’d been so easily frightened. If he had been the one to crawl out of that plane, would he have lain facedown on the cold ground and given up? Would he have scrambled into a tree when the wolf first approached him, preferring to starve to death there in the branches? He let the tap water run until the rust was all gone and the water was clear. One month out of the year was all he had allowed himself to be who he wanted to be; except in August, he’d been so busy doing what he was supposed to do that he wouldn’t have noticed if a dragonfly had settled on the journal he was reading, the shadow of its translucent wings drifting across the page. For so long, things had just happened to him that it took a moment before he fully understood what he was about to do. But actually it was a relief when he took Stephen’s cassette out of the tape recorder and placed it in the sink.

 
 
With every hour the night grew hotter and more humid, the way it sometimes did late in August. This was the sort of night when everyone prayed for rain. People couldn’t sleep, or if they did doze off, beneath rumpled white sheets, their dreams were not what they had hoped for. Richard Aaron dreamed he was chopping wood in a forest of a thousand trees; his back and arms were tremendously strong, he could feel the heat in his muscles. He was high in the mountains, where the air was chilly and blue, and he gasped as he woke into the hot August night to find himself in his old body, and he tried his best not to fall asleep again the whole night through.

Mosquitoes rose in clouds above the marshes, propelled upward by the rise in the temperature, maddened by hunger and heat. They swarmed through the windows of the fisherman’s shack where Connor and Lydia were spending the night, both having lied to their parents. Lydia had left a note that she was sleeping at a friend’s house, Connor was supposed to be at his father’s for the weekend. Neither of them had felt the slightest pang of guilt, but now they wondered if the mosquitoes had been sent to harass them. When they couldn’t stand it anymore and were covered with red bites, they ran out into the marsh and covered their bodies with mud. They wanted to hide nothing, and yet they continued to keep their love a secret. It was better this way, and much less dangerous. As long as no one knew, nothing could be ruined. Let the rest of the world just try to keep them apart, let anyone try to interfere.

Some things lasted forever, didn’t they? Some things no one could deny. The heat, for instance, and the slugs that visited Robin’s vegetable garden, traveling faster than anyone might expect as they made their way through the dark grass. Only a year before, on a night as hot as this, Robin had sat in her parked truck on Delaney, the headlights and engine turned off. Although she hadn’t smoked in years, she had bought a pack of cigarettes and had already lit several; by then she was like a hunter ready to blow off her own foot just to get the rat she was aiming for. Roy had insisted he would be working, but when she’d called the station—the air conditioner in the living room had blown all the fuses, and blue sparks had shot out of the wall—George had been confused. He’d dodged around a bit and then had finally told the truth: Roy was off on Thursday nights. Apparently Roy had neglected to tell Robin that this had been his schedule for more than six months.

Wearing only an undershirt and shorts, not taking the time to bother with shoes, she had gotten into the truck and started driving. After she’d gone through town twice, she parked outside Harper’s over on Delaney, not just to check for Roy but to cool down. Her clothes were drenched with sweat; her skin was sizzling. She dropped a lit cigarette on her thigh and didn’t feel a thing. And just when she thought she might be crazy, and George had been mistaken or she had misunderstood, she saw them in a parked car, right across the street. He was all over some woman; she’d have to be blind not to see it. Later, Robin would realize that the car belonged to Julie Wynn, who was in charge of the drug education program, but that night the woman didn’t matter. Robin got out of the truck and walked across the street. She didn’t notice that the asphalt was burning her bare feet; she didn’t give a damn about that. She went around and grabbed open the car door, but once she’d opened it, she had nothing to say.

“This isn’t what you think, baby,” Roy told her, right away, as he was getting out of the car.

His hair was messed up but aside from that he was so calm you’d think she’d discovered him picking out an inferior brand of frozen vegetables at the market. If only he had kept his mouth shut, maybe they would have had a chance. Amazing that he could say the wrong thing so quickly. It was exactly what she thought: There was no such thing as trust or faith. Or at least she had been convinced so at the time. Now, as she stood outside, calling for the cat to come in for the night, it seemed that last fight had happened to somebody else. Somebody else had dragged all of Roy’s clothes into the driveway. Somebody else had sworn she would never fall in love again. It couldn’t have been her, because if it had been she wouldn’t be feeling this way. Not like this.