Strong Motion (41 page)

“I don’t expect you to be wrong, but if you are, I’ll know that you tried very hard to be right. I’ll know that I did everything I possibly could to make the right decision, that I consulted a person I trusted, and we simply had bad luck. As I said, it’s not that I’m so greedy. It’s that I can’t bear the responsibility.”

“This is Sweeting-Aldren we’re talking about.”

“That’s right.” Melanie laughed nervously. “I hope you didn’t find that out from Louis. He makes a point of being indiscreet.”

“I think I can help you,” Renée said.

“You haven’t seen him again, have you?”

“Pardon me?”

“You said you knew him. You meant the day of the earthquake. You didn’t see him again after that.”

“No, actually. Actually I did. He invited me to a party at your daughter’s.”

“Oh.” Melanie paled, touching her mouth. “I see. And did you go?

“Yes.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“I tried to.”

“You did not tell me that.” She twisted sideways in her seat, touching every part of her face with her fingers, as if she wasn’t sure it was all there. “And that—that should have been the very first thing you told me.” She nodded to herself. “The very first thing.”

“I tried to.”

She swung violently to face Renée.
“Are you involved with my son?
”

“No!”

“Have you
been
involved with him?”

“No. No! I went to a party with him. And a few weeks ago I— went to dinner at your sister’s. Your daughter’s. He seemed to think he needed a date. He was very polite to me.”

“Did you talk about me?”

“Not at all.”

“How come your hands are shaking?”

“Because you’re scaring me.”

“Did you tell him that I’d called you?”

“I mentioned it, yeah.”

“How many hours?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How many hours have you spent with him?”

She shrugged. “Ten. Eight. I don’t know.”

Melanie leaned across the table and searched Renée’s face, touching it with her gaze as she’d been touching her own face with her fingers, her fear growing as it sent roots deeper into the gap between the sweetness of the face and the underlying possibility that Renée was lying. It was pathetically evident how much she longed to trust Renée. But she couldn’t get a definite answer from the face, and she’d placed such hopes in it that she couldn’t bear to keep on looking, lest she find her suspicions confirmed. “Oh God.” Again she turned sideways on the banquette. “Oh God, I don’t know what to do.”

“Why don’t you call Louis and ask him? If it’s so important to you.”

“Ten minutes ago you were trying to convince me not to trust you. Now you’re doing the opposite. It’s because I mentioned money. I dare you to say it’s not true.”

“What’s happened is that you seem to think I have some reason to be lying to you.”

“You’re not the same person I spoke with two months ago. And now I see why. Now I see why. How could I have not thought of this? Oh, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Are you ladies ready to order?” With a flourish the waiter produced a ballpoint pen.

Making severe eye contact with him, Melanie donned her glasses and placed her order. Then, while Renée ordered, she clutched the glasses in her fist, squeezing them so hard the plastic creaked, and stared hopelessly across the dining room. Renée covered the fist with her hand. She was thinking so hard that her lips stirred faintly. “I said I could help you,” she said. “I know what you should do with your stock, and you’ll be very happy you asked me. I’m going to help you.”

Melanie tilted her head back and swallowed.

“I’m going to tell you what to do,” Renée said. “And I’m so sure I’m right that I’m going to back it up with whatever money I have.”

The light in her face had become a glittering, intoxicated implacability. She stroked Melanie’s hand. Suddenly fingernails sank into her wrist. A face rushed forward; it smelled of breath, perfume, ingratiating skin cream.
“Are you involved with my son?
”

“No!”

“And you want money from me
.”

“Yes.”

“You want to make a deal
.”

“Yes.”

Melanie slumped back into her seat. “All right.” A full minute passed as she sat and bit her lips, her fears obviously undispelled. Finally Renée asked if she wanted wine.

“Not for me, thank you. You may order a glass for yourself.”

“Can I order a bottle?”

“Whatever you like.”

“Why don’t we
relax
and
enjoy
ourselves?”

Melanie shook her head hopelessly. “It would have been better to avoid money as a topic. It would have been better to wait. You can mock me now, but I really did have hopes for a different kind of lunch.”

“I’m going to give you good advice. You won’t be sorry.”

“I’m sorry already. I’m sorry to have involved you in this. I’m sorry to be involved in it myself.”

“Let’s just finish, then. Let’s just do the last thing. And then we can relax.”

Melanie stiffened at this mention of the “last thing.” She hesitated and hesitated before she finally took a matchbook from her purse, wrote a figure on the inside, and nudged it across the tablecloth.

Renée read the figure, took the pen, and calmly added a zero. “I may want more,” she said. “If I’m right. You’ll need to give me a few days. But I definitely won’t take less, unless . . .” She considered. “Why don’t I take whatever cash I have in the bank and put it up as security? Then we can have a—what would you call it? A sliding scale. The less right I am, the less you give me. If I’m wrong, you keep the security.”

“I’m not going to discuss this with you. We’ll meet on Tuesday.”

“See if you can do better in the meantime.”

“I may do just that.”

“Uh-huh. Talk to Larry Axelrod.”

“Perhaps.”

Renée ate a plate of carpaccio drenched in yellow oil. She kept emptying her wineglass, until she began to glow like an object in a kiln, her selfconsciousness transmuted into volubility as she did her Why I Hate Boston number, her California’s Even Worse number. Melanie might have been listening to a daughter whom she liked and had every reason to be entertained by, and yet seeing in her only reminders of her own heavy heart. Of her relative proximity to death, of her inability to relax and enjoy a lunch, of her estrangement from the world of things that young people talk about. This really does happen to parents who are unhappy, even those who love their children.

Her tongue curled as she added up the figures on the check. Renée was glowing as if she’d been through a snowstorm. Back on the planet of ceaseless car traffic, in front of the hotel, she asked for money for a cab. Melanie opened her purse on her hip and dug a twenty out. “I’m sure you think it’s silly of me to keep asking. Perhaps it doesn’t even matter. But—”

Renée’s fingers closed on the bill. “But.”

“Well, only whether there is some involvement between you and Louis.”

She took Melanie by the shoulders. “What do you think?”

“I suppose I’m still inclined to think there is.”

“Really.” She pulled Melanie closer and kissed her on the mouth, the way any woman might kiss the person who’d wooed her over lunch with pearls and wine.

Melanie wrenched free and dusted herself off. “I’m going to have to reconsider this, Renée. We’ll assume you’ve had a little too much to drink. But I’m afraid I’m still going to have to reconsider.”

“Sliding scale. Security. Immediate terms.”

“I’ll talk to you on Tuesday morning.”

“See you then.”

The rain had turned to a fine warm mist, agreeable to the skin. As soon as Renée was in a cab, she stretched out on the seat.

“You OK there?” the Haitian driver said.

“Yes,” she said loudly.

Water trickled and made lenses on the window above her, a twisted aspect of the city in every droplet. The soaked façades upside down, the utility wires dipping and dividing. She was feverish. Three in the afternoon, drunk off her ass and lying in a cab. Romance, romance. Three in the afternoon, the warm rain, she’s coming home from seeing herself. She can still feel her warmth inside her and on her skin. She can smell her own nose, she can taste her own mouth.

“That’s twelve dollars, sixty cents.”

“Go up the hill here on Walnut.”

Her stomach upset by the carpaccio and wine, she lay on her bed until the windows stopped getting darker and became a little lighter and the rain turned to steam and silence. It was as if a tent had descended on the street, its damp canvas flaps coming to rest behind the houses; as if the street were a film lot hosed down for a nighttime shoot, with a loud, busy world beyond the houses. A near neighbor was cooking waffles. Girls and boys on the porch across the street turned on a heavy-metal anthem. It might have been playing in the next room, not outside. She plugged in her telephone and dialed a number. “Howard Chun, please.”

“He not here,” came the answer.

She changed her clothes and went down to the street. One of the porch girls—the fat one; there were also two skinny ones—turned up the music. Maybe they thought she was going to complain about it. She mounted the stairs. “Does somebody here have a joint I could buy?”

They turned the radio down, and she repeated the question, looking from skeptical face to skeptical face. The younger boy was ten or eleven. “Are you Jewish?” he said matter-of-factly.

“No.”

“What’s your last name?”

She smiled. “Smith.”

“Bernstein,” the boy countered.

“Greenstein,” said a girl.

“Shalom!”

Renée waited.

“How long you been living there?” the fat girl asked.

“Five years,” she said. “How long have you been here?”

“Where’s your Chinese boyfriend?”

“She’s got a bald one.”

“Hey.
Hey
. You got any beer?”

She crossed her arms. “How old are you guys?”

The older boy, silent until now, rose stiffly from a broken Adirondack chair. His puffy high-tops were carefully unlaced. “You gotta buy us some beer,” he said.

“All right. How much?”

The girls conferred, the older boy taking pains to appear uninvolved. “Ten, but they gotta be taw-boys,” the fat girl announced positively.

“They have to be what?”

“Taw-boys.”

“Taw-boys?” Renée smiled, not understanding.

“TAW BOYS. THE BIG CANS.”

“The sixteen-ounce cans!”

“The fucking taw cans!”

“Doy, doy, doy.”

“You know what sixty-nining is?”

“Steven, shut up, you little jerk.”

“Doy, doy, doy.”

Standing apart, the older boy rolled his eyes. Renée descended the steps to cries of
Shalom!
A smell of infrastructure was stealing from the bushes, and she could hear her own telephone ringing, another pro-lifer calling.

When she came back from Highland Avenue, the older boy led her into the front room of the first-floor apartment and broke two cans off one of the six-packs she’d bought, returning them to the paper bag. He showed her his dope. “It’s very fresh,” he said earnestly. “Steven, close the fucking door.” The door closed. “Which one you want? Take the big one. My name’s Doug.”

“How old are you?”

“Almost sixteen. I’m gonna get my license. You go out with me sometime?”

“I don’t think so.”

On her kitchen table she set out the joint, a pack of matches, and a saucer. She positioned a chair in front of them and turned off all but one light. She had a cassette marked
DANCE
that had been broken for five years. Training her desk light on it, she opened it up and spliced out the mangled stretch with Scotch Magic tape and nail scissors.

The dope tasted like April in college; like the music on the tape. She danced to “London’s Burning” and “Spinning Top” and “I Found That Essence Rare,” her arms and legs mixing the last faint banks of smoke into a haze. She thought she was crying when “Beast of Burden” played, but when she opened her eyes there were no tears and it seemed that she’d only imagined it.

Outside the kitchen window she lay down on the wet, sloping shingles. They were made of real slate.

In the morning she tracked down a mineralogy professor who liked her and had lent her one of his cars several times before. She also appropriated a departmental camera, with a zoom telephoto lens. The sun was blazing on Route 128. As methodically as she could, she drove every road and street in Danvers, western Peabody, northern Lynn, and South Lynnfield, stopping often to trace her route on a map with a red pencil. There were zero cars in the parking lot of Sweeting-Aldren corporate headquarters, a white Monticello-inspired structure set into a green hillside. From a Boston & Maine railroad bridge, from the back of an unfinished office complex, and from the rear corner of a cemetery, she surveyed company installations—regiments of horizontal tanks like giant caplets, towers with iron vines with iron tendrils spiraling up them. The corrugated siding of the major buildings was a certain pale blue she didn’t think she’d ever seen; on a color chart, the shades all around it were probably pleasing, but this particular blue was not. Dreamy fumes of acetone were native to the place.

By Monday the heat had reached full, white force. She dressed in cutoffs, sandals, and a tank top that she’d never worn except to sleep in. At the Peabody City Hall, on the ground floor outside the Assessor’s Office, she found listings for eight smaller, noncontiguous parcels of land owned by Sweeting-Aldren. The six of them that she could tour by car had nothing more interesting than horses on them; she didn’t try to reach the others. She was driving as fast as she dared, and still it was almost four o’clock by the time she got to Beverly airport.

A girl in the coffee shop was lifting a wire basket of french fries out of oil. She told Renée to talk to a man named Kevin in the hangar.

“I should just go right in?”

“Yeah, you’ll find him.”

As soon as she went through the hangar door someone whistled at her, but all she could see at first was a blinding square of white sky at the far end. Near where she stood, the cowlings had been removed from a Cherokee and from an eight-seat turboprop with a boxy grasshopper body. Two grease-blackened twosomes in blue coveralls were working on their shiny guts, reaching up with tools. Asked about Kevin, they pointed to a young man on a ladder by a baby jet farther down. He was spraying aerosol cleaner on the jet’s windshield.