Women and Children First (7 page)

As Valerie caught Suzanne’s eye, it occurred to her that everyone was saying, “Eat! There’s steamers and corn!” but no one was saying a word about lobster despite the humongous red ones sitting right there on their plates. Suzanne put her hands over her lobster, as if to protect it from Valerie, and Valerie knew she wasn’t mad about her showing up too early.

Valerie was always telling Suzanne she was too paranoid about the other people in the house. Suzanne’s problem was that she made the least money of anyone—though not little enough to seem brave, like Valerie—and that her boyfriend Roy made the most. Roy wore the three-piece suits, the ponytail and potbelly of a rich California dope lawyer. He was bisexual, he liked to talk about his leather-bar night life. Especially when someone new—someone innocent and shockable—was around, Roy could get pretty graphic. He said he didn’t worry about AIDS, every six months he went to Rumania and had his blood changed. Sometimes he would say this right in front of Suzanne, and Valerie would thank God that she wasn’t leading Suzanne’s life.

Not that Valerie felt she was leading her own life, exactly. Lately she had the sense she was stuck in some pre-life, some in-between life, waiting for her serious life to start. For now, all that mattered was keeping interested. Lobsters were very low on her interest list, but she had to focus on them for a while before she could make herself look at Nasir, who was way at the top of the list. Nasir waited till she looked at him, then cracked the claw off his lobster, held it out to her, and at the same time motioned toward the seat next to his.

At that table, that art director’s gourmet dream of perfect red lobsters on perfect sea-green glass plates, Nasir’s ripping into that lobster seemed really kind of primitive and nasty. But Nasir could get away with it because he was so beautiful and graceful, and was basically a nice guy. Also, Valerie noticed, he held the lobster body so the juice dripped on the plate.

Everyone got quiet and waited to see what Valerie would do. For weeks she and Nasir had circled each other; it gave the atmosphere an erotic charge and was part of what people found entertaining. Valerie would have liked to sit next to Nasir. She was so drawn to him it scared her. One problem was Nasir’s girlfriend, Iris, sitting across from him. But that wasn’t it, exactly. No one liked Iris, and Nasir cheated on her constantly; last winter he and Suzanne were involved for about two weeks.

Nasir was Pakistani, British-educated, with a terrible and romantic history of loved ones disappeared into Zia’s jails. Unlike everyone else in the house, all of whom were their professions, Nasir shot commercials for a living but was actually something else—a Marxist who dreamed of making political documentaries. So he too was more like the people these people used to know, and maybe that was part of the kinship Valerie felt with him. Also, they shared a similar manic edge. He was the only one she could have taken to the state park, the only one who would have seen what she saw in that Cantonese restaurant extravaganza of red and gold.

The last commercial Nasir shot was for a manufacturer of remote control lamps. Last weekend, Nasir brought twenty lamps out to the house and put them around the living room, and they all took turns standing in the center of the pitch black room making twenty lights dance on and off with the remote control wand. Nasir was always surprising them, turning out to know card tricks, to play stride piano and an amazing game of soccer. He had very large brown eyes, and the power of his attention was such that now, as Valerie laughed and shrugged off his lobster offer, she was so adrenalinized and trembly she had to sit right down next to Suzanne.

Suzanne said, “You chicken.” She was all for Valerie having a romance with Nasir—partly, Valerie suspected, because then the responsibility for Valerie’s continued presence would no longer be just Suzanne’s. Last week, when they were alone in the house, Suzanne told Valerie that she and Nasir would be good together, they both had great bone structure. It was something a fifteen-year-old would say, but Valerie couldn’t help asking, “Really?” or being embarrassed by how happy it made her.

Based on her own little fling with Nasir, Suzanne has warned Valerie not to expect too much, so Valerie could hardly tell her that what held her back, what kept her from even taking a lobster claw she might have liked, was that she expected the
world
, she had a sense that what happened with her and Nasir could be serious. She could imagine a life with Nasir, or anyway, time enough to find out who he was.

Dutifully, Suzanne asked if Valerie wanted a bite of her lobster, and Valerie said no, she didn’t want to spoil her high, and showed Suzanne her little plastic bag of kavakava. Suzanne made a face. Up and down the table, they were talking about food. Roy was going on about lobsters, information he’d picked up from the man at the fish store, many incredibly boring facts about water temperature and seasons. Then Nasir said that when he first came to this country, he’d worked briefly at a restaurant with a fresh water tank in which there was one lobster no one would touch, a forty-eight-pounder named Captain Hank.

Someone asked Nasir where he’d been today, and he said, “I ran away with Valerie.” Valerie was so shocked she laughed idiotically and said, “No, he didn’t!” And where was Valerie? Valerie described the beach she’d been to as if she’d headed there on purpose, and when Roy asked how it was, she said, “Oh great, just like Carnival in Rio! You would have loved it, Roy!” Then she asked how their day at the beach had been, and after a funny silence, everyone said fine.

Valerie said, “What are you guys not telling me?” Suzanne whispered, “Hey, be quiet, okay?” But before anyone could answer, Valerie stood up—the kavakava was making her thirsty and unable to sit still. There was only wine and beer on the table; it would have been okay pharmacologically, but mixing alcohol and the root left a bad taste in her mouth. As she filled a glass at the kitchen sink, she heard someone behind her.

Nasir came close and said, “Wait till you see what’s on today’s tape. I’m gone a few hours and all hell breaks loose.”

One custom of the house was that they videotaped the whole day—breakfast, grocery shopping, the beach—and watched it after dinner on TV. The only event left undocumented was dinner, which they were too busy eating to shoot. Mostly Nasir did the taping, the equipment was his, but he had shown everyone how to use it, and in his absence, Iris generally took over.

“Don’t tell me—an orgy,” said Valerie. Nasir just laughed, as did Valerie, thrilled by their apparent agreement that an orgy without the two of them seemed truly beneath contempt. “Then what?” she said. “A murder?”

“Believe me,” said Nasir, “a murder would look healthy. Fun. Compared to what they’ve got taped, a murder would look like nursery school.”

“Wow,” said Valerie. But Nasir wouldn’t say more. He said he hadn’t seen it, only heard, and now it was hard for Valerie to insist, with ten people carrying in dirty lobster plates while ten more came in debating the best way to unmold crème caramel.

After dessert and the coffee, which took forever because the cappuccino machine could only make four cups at a time, they settled around the living room in front of the TV and turned off all the lights. Nearly everyone sat near the small screen, except for Valerie, who was chewing kavakava and pacing, and Nasir, standing and leaning against the back wall, his face lit and shadowed dramatically by the flickering TV.

The first shot was of people loading the van to go to the beach, and when the camera slipped and the picture swooped down, someone watching said, “Terrific, Iris.”

The camera was riding shotgun. Gary, the lawyer, drove. When Valerie had first come to the house, Gary was clearly interested, but seemed like someone so used to women refusing him that she never even had to say no. Now he played to the video camera, giving his impression of a tour bus guide running down the sights. Gary shouldn’t have tried, he was stiff at it, and faltered. Iris’s camera caught every wrinkle of strain. Iris was a therapist, she used video in counseling, and somehow everyone she photographed looked as if they were toughing it out at some family crisis session. When Nasir did the taping, people looked more handsome and relaxed.

At the beach, Iris caught lots of unfortunate close-ups: squinty eyes, hairy backs, even some armskin flapping as shirts were pulled up over heads. Valerie thought: Trust Iris to show them the suddenly unmistakable signs of age. The camera made it obvious that Roy wouldn’t take off his Hawaiian shirt, the audio blurred the drone of his voice as he sat on the sand holding court like some obese Polynesian king. Keeping its distance, the camera turned on a handful of people walking gingerly into the surf. Then Gary—not on the tape but in the room—said, “Oh, here’s where I almost drowned.”

“Here’s
what
?” said Valerie, kneeling down at the back of the crowd around the TV.

“Almost drowned,” Gary said, but just then the camera was occupied with a start-up soccer practice. Nasir had introduced the game to the house; they played often. Without him, the guys kicking the nerf ball around all looked a little adrift. Then a woman’s voice—on the tape but off camera—said, “Hey, look out there!” and the lens turned toward the horizon where now in the water you could see a human form, moving oddly.

Another off-camera voice asked who that was, and someone else said, “I think it’s Gary.” A couple of seconds went by, then somebody asked, “You think he’s in some kind of trouble?” Another pause, then somebody else said, “No.” The camera turned back to the soccer players standing there lamely, like couples between dances, watching the ocean till someone said, “Are you sure he’s all right?” Focus on Suzanne looking out at the water, then shrugging and saying, “I think he’s okay,” then going off to check something in the food hamper; the camera followed her the whole way, which took about a minute.

“Hey,” said a voice on the audio track, “look at that!” The screen went black. Someone in the room said, “Jesus, Iris, this is where you blew it?” “Sand on the heads,” Iris said. “I had to switch it on and off a few times.”

When the image returned, the lens was scanning the water till it found that same form moving in place and two others speeding toward it. And now the camera zoomed in on two guys grabbing Gary and dragging him in toward the shore. This took a long time, too; finally everyone was wrapping towels around a gagging, shaking Gary.

Gary, in the room, said, “Thank God for the Coast Guard.”

“You almost died,” said Valerie. “Gary almost died, you guys.”

“All right, Valerie,” said Roy. “We can’t
all
be world-class swimmers.”

“You sons of bitches,” Gary said. Then he laughed.

Valerie said, “I can’t believe this.”

Someone close beside her said, “You’d better believe it.” It was Nasir. Valerie grabbed his shoulder and pulled herself toward him and began to whisper in his ear, but it wasn’t sexual, really, it was like talking into a disembodied ear, the only one that would listen to her as she went on whispering, a hot, slightly sandy whisper. The kavakava had begun to burn her mouth. She asked what was wrong with these people, how could Gary sit there and joke with these assholes who had almost let him drown, who were too selfish and lazy to even find out if he had been drowning, and maybe for a little while, at dinner, knew they’d done something wrong, but seeing it on video had freed them, had let them pretend it was just something else on TV.

Nasir didn’t answer. Instead he very gently placed his hand on the back of Valerie’s neck. Valerie felt slightly queasy with lust, felt literally slightly sick. The warmth of his hand drew everything to the back of her neck, but everything was confused—sex, anger, exhaustion, fear, the kavakava which suddenly tasted awful. She said, “Christ. I need air.”

She went out onto the lawn which sloped down to the Sound. It was a clear night and in the distance she could make out the lights of Block Island. After a while she heard people outside, near the door, getting the mountain of wood needed to make a fire in that cavernous fireplace.

When they’d gone in, and smoke was coming from the chimney, she went to the woodpile and got the smallest pieces and began to stack them near the far end of the lawn. She made many trips, adding on branches which had fallen during a rainstorm last week and still lay around on the grass. When she had enough for a sizable bonfire, she sneaked back into the house. Everyone was watching the fireplace, or reruns of SCTV. She ducked into the kitchen and got newspapers and a bottle of brandy.

The fire flared up so fast she jumped back. It went up in two stages, first it rose to two feet, then to about fifteen feet and stayed there, burning. Valerie stood with her back to the house, as near to the fire as she could. The fire didn’t seem hot enough; she kept hugging herself and shivering. She imagined people up at the house, looking out the windows, laughing, maybe even applauding Valerie’s latest crazy stunt. Then they would go back to the TV, or the bigger, nearer fire of their own.

Valerie really did feel crazed as she began to pace, slinking back and forth by the fire, like something out of
Cat People.
She gazed into the flames, putting herself in a kind of a trance which it took her some time to snap out of when Nasir came up beside her. “Great fire,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Valerie.

Then he said, “Give them a break, okay? They’re scared too. Are you one hundred percent certain that you would have jumped in and saved him?”

Valerie was ninety-nine percent certain that she would at least have made sure someone did. But Nasir’s words made her stop and think about the group in the house, about the terrible power of politeness, the desire that things remain civilized and well-mannered, the awful paralysis of the grateful guest. She looked back at the house and thought: No one lives there, no one has stakes there. They’re all one another’s guests.

It made her treasure Nasir even more, for quieting that part of her which was usually so harsh and quick to condemn. She thought: With Nasir, she would be a better person. She looked up into his face. They began to kiss, sweetly at first, then harder. After a while Nasir tipped his head back and as Valerie kissed his neck, he said, in a husky voice, “What about Suzanne?”