“Mom, we have to respect his wishes,” Portia said.
“Oh, well far be it from me,” Janet said. “I know how much my wishes always counted.”
“I think you did all right for yourself, Mother,” Lily said.
“Can we not get into this now?” Portia said.
“No, I like it that she thinks,” Janet said. “It’s a very attractive quality. Or would it be an attribute? Whatever it was your father had.”
“Please?” Portia said.
“I’m sorry, am I ruining the occasion?” Janet walked back over behind her canvas. “This is vile.” She took it off the easel and dropped it facedown on the decking. “I hope he is hovering, actually. Just to sweeten up his eternal reward.”
—
How’s this for prescience? Of course Lily will turn her cellphone on, and of course Garrett will call, and of course she will give him directions. And again she will fuck a man in a dead girl’s bed. Two in two days? She’s unstoppable!
She rolls back over against Garrett, fingers creeping around in his chest hair; you always come when it’s the bad boy. The fan’s still roaring, drying her sweat, giving her chills. “So,” she says, “I think I’m going to go for sixteen men on a dead man’s chest. Or is the pirate thing over with?”
“Hmm, I’m picturing that,” he says. “Looks a little gay.”
“Have you ever done two women?”
“Why? Is that a thing that interests you?”
“Did you and Portia do that?” she says.
He takes her hand away and sits up against the headboard. “I don’t think I need to answer these questions.”
“I forgot,” she says. “You go case by case. Is it hot to fuck sisters?”
“What about you? Is it hot to fuck somebody who fucked your sister?”
She puts her legs over the side and stands up. “Do you really have to leave so soon?”
He grabs her arm and yanks her back onto the bed.
“What are you going to do?” she says. “Rape me?”
He lets go of her arm. He reaches down, finds his T-shirt and pulls it over his head. Stands up and steps into his briefs. “Question.” Picks up his shirt. “Is Portia going to know about this?”
Lily makes no move to get up again. “Come on, wouldn’t you rather just improvise?” she says. “It should be more exciting for you. Test your little”—she flitters her fingers—“ganglions. You can watch her face for signs. If you’re looking for your pants, they’re over by the door.”
From the bedroom window, she watches his car back out of the driveway; her arm still hurts where he grabbed it. Already eight o’clock, and getting dark. Two minutes less light every day. She’s got three hours to fill just to get to movie time—and she’s already run through everything she’s brought except Royal Wedding, which she really doesn’t want to watch. And then? And after that? She hasn’t had her swim today, could that be what’s wrong? The recreation area closes at sunset, but that shouldn’t stop a girl who’s already figured out so much.
She leaves her underwear on the floor, pulls on her jeans and gets her father’s white shirt out of the closet, goes downstairs and tucks the one-hitter and her lighter into the pocket. She’s halfway to the lake before she looks down and sees she’s driving barefoot. Since the gate’s closed, she passes on to the far side, where it’s privately owned and narrow paved drives have signs arching above them: Lochbrae, Breezy Shores, Pinewoods. She turns into a lane with a small sign simply reading Private and parks on the dirt, out of sight of the road, then reaches into her pocket.
When she gets out of the car, the white shirt seems to glow in the dimness, so she takes it off, her jeans too, and walks, naked, through the trees, on merciful pine needles, to where she can see water, a dock, a cottage with lights on. She looks right, looks left, then leaves the cover of the pines and tiptoes toward the grassy bank. These people won’t spot her: she’s been gifted with invisibility. Only the dead can see her nakedness, and haven’t they been watching all along? She steps onto the moss at the edge of the bank—its softness feels green—and into the weeds and water. Her feet sink to the ankles in muck. It’ll be warmer once she gets in. She wades till the water’s up to mid-thigh, leans forward and launches herself.
It’s as close to flying as we get in this world: breast-stroking through this uncanny element midway between earth and air, your legs extended behind you, your feet touching nothing. She swims out until she’s breathing hard, turns, treads water and looks back. The lights are on in the cottages, and here and there on the shore she can see tiny people clustering around the flames of outdoor grills. The stars are coming out, and the voices from far across the water are pinpricks in the silence. Her heart’s slowing again, she’s catching her breath. She treads water, floats awhile on her back, then treads water, then floats awhile. You could do this forever—or until you see the way that leads on from here, or until the dead speak to you at last.
Alcorian A-1949
The man who built this house—Royall Brown, 1750–1797—is buried in the graveyard up across the road, along with his wife, his son and his son’s wife and children. I’ve outlived him, at least in the sense that he was forty-seven and I’m now sixty-one. He built it in 1790, so I’ve occupied his house longer, too—unless you believe the lady we bought it from, who told Deborah she used to hear his ghost. Bring your drink out to the porch. You can see his headstone up there, the one with the top carved in the shape of wings.
The year we moved here, Deborah did a rubbing and had it framed for my fortieth birthday, his epitaph in forward-slanting script: Dear Christian Friend, as here you stand / Thy Flesh is dust, thy Time is Sand. We were ironists but we weren’t—does that contextualize it for you? He the still-promising composer and sometime pianist who had studied with Morton Feldman; she the once-promising mezzo, pregnant with a last-chance child who was to be raised in clean air, among woods and white clapboard houses, where the wicked cease to trouble. Royall Brown’s epitaph sang to me, as words sometimes will even now, in a darksome, twisty melody, which I put through the grinder—inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion—and set for baritone and cello. You’ve heard that old Library of Congress recording of Golden P. Harris singing “I’ll Lead a Christian Life”? Well of course you haven’t, but that was the mood I wanted, though if you were to hear my piece—and there’s an if—it would just sound like good old dentist’s-chair serialism. Wasn’t I the shit back then? I must still have it on reel-to-reel somewhere, performed by colleagues at a faculty recital.
Mrs. Gartner, who’d heard the ghost, lived on here after her husband died, despite macular degeneration and incipient dementia. When she finally fell and lay at the foot of the stairs for a day and a night, her granddaughter got her into Merrivale, the nursing home here in town—so her friends could still visit, in theory—and put the house on the market. But the lady signed the papers herself, God bless her, in the solarium, a lighted magnifying glass in her other hand, with the granddaughter standing beside her wheelchair. Then she clutched Deborah’s wrist and said, “You won’t forget me now?” Deborah and I took the girl to lunch afterward, though I shouldn’t say “girl”; she looked to be in her mid-twenties. She told us her grandparents had raised her—no explanation given—and that she’d lived in the house from when she was six until she went off to UNH. She had chopped-off black hair, black nail polish and black tights that showed white flesh through their ladders. Her name was Jessamyn. I’ll omit all that the male gaze registered, but isn’t it always a question of would you or wouldn’t you? Deborah (though she’d seen me looking and surely knew I would) told her to stop by anytime she came to see her grandmother. But we never heard from her.