She parks by the kitchen door, then reaches under and yanks the hood release. “Fool me twice, shame on me. Could you get the groceries?” She lifts the hood and pulls a magnetic Hide-a-Key box off the engine block. “Voilà.” Closes the hood and tucks the box up under the front bumper. “Bingo. You don’t think anybody would look there, do you?”
“I wouldn’t,” he says.
Up the hill behind Aunt Lissa’s house, Henry’s lights are on and white smoke snake-charms out of his metal chimney. Can you actually own a hill? Half a hill, really, but it’s like the moon in that no one sees the side that’s turned away. Down low in the sky, there’s an orange light that tints the snow. He takes the grocery bags, follows Aunt Lissa onto the screened-in porch and stands shivering while she rattles a key in the storm door. “We never used to lock up,” she says. If this were a movie scene, you’d cut right here.
—
He closes the door behind him and rubs his feet on the hairy brown mat. That old-refrigerator smell of an empty house in winter. Aunt Lissa clomps in her flopping rubber boots to the thermostat and the house goes bump; then she clomps into the kitchen. Carl hears water running. The foomp of a lighted burner.
She comes back in, rubbing the knuckles of one hand, then the other. “It should warm up soon,” she says. “I keep the downstairs at fifty.” She pulls a chair over to the register. “Water’s on for tea.”
“You have coffee?”
“Instant.”
He makes a cross with his index fingers.
“It’s terrible for you anyway.” She sits down, still wearing her coat. “Supposed to be a full moon tonight. I hope it doesn’t cloud over again.”
“ ‘When the moon is in the sky,’ ” he sings, “ ‘tell me what am I, to do?’ So what movie?” He thinks he hears a car, gets up and goes to the window. A Grand Cherokee’s pulling up behind the Volvo, headlights beaming, its grille a toothy smile. “Huh. Looks like a small businessman.”
“Be nice.”
The headlights go out, the car door opens. “Yep,” he says. “Big as life and twice as natural.”
Aunt Lissa turns on the porch light. There’s Henry wiping his feet.
“I saw you drive in, so I thought I’d stop down,” Henry says. “Carl?”
“Yo, mah buvva,” Carl says. “You keepin’ it real, yo?” Henry cocks his head. “You know, like real estate.”
“I’m not up on my jive talk.” Henry turns to Aunt Lissa. “Why don’t you come on up to the house while it’s getting warm in here? Connie’s making soup.”
“Yum,” Aunt Lissa says. “We might stop up later. How about some tea? I just put water on.”
Henry twists the sleeve of his leather jacket. “So how’d it go?”
“Well, I suppose it was fine,” Aunt Lissa says. “I don’t have a lot in my experience to compare it to.”
“Hell, I should’ve done this.”
“But you had your closing. It was perfectly fine.”
Henry looks at Carl. “So what were you doing up this way?”
Carl looks at the tabletop. Honey oak with flamelike grain. “I don’t know, long story.”
“Aren’t they all. The hell happened to your face?”
Carl shakes his head.
“Christ,” Henry says. “Shouldn’t he be back in detox?”
“I hate to do it,” Aunt Lissa says.
“He goes up in front of a judge in this kind of shape, they’ll do it for you.”
“I think what Carl needs most is just to get some rest,” she says.
“I think what Carl needs most,” Carl says, “is a good old pop of Demerol. Speaking as Carl.”
He knows Henry heard this because something jumps in that fat throat. “They’re probably going to want him in some kind of a program.”
“Hey, Teletubbies,” Carl says. “Believe it or not that’s an incredibly cool show.”
“This is funny to you?” Henry says.
Aunt Lissa gets up, so whatever the noise is that’s been going on for a while now must be the whistling teakettle. Good that it’s something. “Now, what’s anybody’s pleasure?” she says. “We have Earl Grey, plain old Lipton’s, chamomile…green tea?” Sad: back when she used to read him The Tale of Peter Rabbit, she said camo-myle.
“Actually I better hit it back up the hill.” Henry looks out the window. “Supposed to snow again.”
“Sorry, this is kind of getting to me,” Carl says and goes into the kitchen, where steam’s whistling out of the little pisshole. He takes the kettle off the burner and the noise stops.
“Lissa,” he hears Henry say, “are you sure you’re up to this?” Or maybe he said “listen.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she says.
He hears the door close, and Aunt Lissa comes into the kitchen. “You had to show off for him.”
“He’s a dick. Pardon the expression.” Carl hears the Cherokee start up.
“I know the expression,” she says. “Now help me put this stuff away.”
“Is that a denial?” he says.
“You,” she says, “are wicked.”
—
How all this current shit started, he’d gotten involved with a person in the city who was also originally from Albany—okay, Schenectady—and when they’d been together a couple of days, she’d thought up this idea. Rent a car, both get as much cash as possible from their cash machines (this was like a Saturday night), buy whatever they could find, drive upstate to her parents’ house, her parents being in Florida, and sell it at a major markup to all these people she still knew. This was a very young person: cigarette smoker, chopped-off hair bleached white. Tiny stud in her left nostril like a blackhead and seven gold rings around her left ear, nothing in her right, so when she tried out for modeling jobs she could give them two different looks.
She was temping at the place he worked, filling in for somebody’s assistant. Carl at this point was sort of not living at home anymore, big troubles in Our Marriage (Elaine’s formulation), staying with people, carrying his laptop and a duffel bag with clothes and DVDs. What was weird, he didn’t feel weird. This was thanks to the Paxil, which he was now getting through two doctors at two drugstores, because the one doctor had said 40 milligrams was “rather a lot.” And he was using again on top of it, but not big-time, and mostly to help him write: he’d been posting stuff about 42nd Street on what was really a very serious website.
any dickhead can see that dorothy brock (bebe daniels) is the same person as peggy sawyer (ruby keeler), but the scrim of gender may prevent said dickhead from discerning that julian marsh (warner baxter) is also mutatis mutandis a projection of the “sweet” sawyer’s nut-cutting inner self, the very name suggesting she’d “saw off” your “peg” to “get a leg up,” it being no accident that brock’s “broken” (note further pun) leg is sawyer’s big “break.”
He told the temp with the rings in her ear that there were all too few outlaws on the seventeenth floor, and said Albany was their shared shame. Then she was bold enough to show up at the Christmas party when she’d only worked there a week. He said could he get her a drink—he was on like number three—and she said, “So how much of an outlaw are you?” He held up his left hand, worked his wedding band off and said, “Observe me closely.” He pinched it between thumb and forefinger, showed her both sides, put it in his mouth and swallowed. It scraped going down, but no worse than swallowing, say, a hard candy. And it would, in theory, be recoverable. He chased it with a last swallow, put his glass down and pulled his cheeks open with his forefingers. She looked in his glass, then looked at him. “How did you do that? Let me see your hands.”