Who have you told that I'm here?" Nathan hangs his head.
“You are no good, Nathan. Though your friends love you. Ruth was here today. Somehow she knew."
Nathan, alarmed, checks his watch. "Today?"
Maria's cracked lips part, in a smile, Nathan supposes, but the effect is monstrous, a demonic sneer. "And I love you. But you are no good now. I'll tell you what has happened. You've become just like your father. When you were fat I couldn't tell you apart. I used to think that you'd crawled inside his body. You laugh. Look at you, laughing. You made fun of him your whole life, the things you said about him, but now look. You waited your whole life to be something else but you never were anything but him. Did you tell anyone, Nathan? Does anyone know I'm here?"
Nathan shuts his eyes. He has been going around without her for more than a year, bringing along with his bottles of wine his new excuses: Maria has to stay late at work; Benny is sick; Maria's mother is not well. When is it that he thinks up these lies? Even he doesn't know. Does he conceive of them over time, making certain they are enough unlike the ones preceding; or do they come to him while he stands at the front door, ringing the bell, spontaneously, randomly coming to him, and he is merely lucky the lie is different enough, for it is, all the lies are different enough. Or is he so practiced at producing excuses that they merely fly out of his mouth via a direct conduit between his lips and the lying part of his brain?
Maria doesn't come, can't, won't, won't ever again. And by the way, didn't I tell you? She is dying.
The world is not that gullible. It is merely too afraid to insist.
"I am dying."
"Yes," he says.
“Yes.”
Yes. Nathan traces the sweaty creep diagonally across the base of his neck. As though he has said not yes but guilty, as though he is giving it again, in case she didn't believe it the first time, her verdict: guilty.
Maria lets her head drop toward the window and the office building across the way. "They're always watching," she says dreamily. "You don't know. They send signals."
Nathan sighs, then leans forward, solicitous. "What do the signals say?"
"That they're going to kill me."
"They look too busy."
"There is an aerobics class on one of those floors."
"Tuesday and Thursday nights."
"And don't you love that," Maria scolds.
"I was only kid-"
"Young girls shaking their tits at me in the window. They want me to die."
I'm sorry.
We'll be happy.
Nathan says neither of these things.
A light comes to her face, a union between stillness and sweatsheen and the dingy blue light. Her lips harden and curl. Eyelids flutter, pupils capsize, as blank now as a marble statue's. Beneath the blanket she brings her feet together and lifts the jagged knobs of her knees. Her arms lift, her head turns, and her eyes, rolling and rolling, now return, staring with electric certainty at the drab gray wall. Stilling, breathing quietly, she doesn't move until her position hardens over the long seconds into a Christ-like pose. Nathan half stands, seeing not Maria but something using her, inhabiting her body, again that thing that awaits him, too. Dementia. Sign of last days.
Up Nathan goes, looking away, taking a wide berth around Maria's outstretched arm, reaching for the phone. He dials, lifts his wristwatch and counts to fifteen. This is a nifty thing he's learned. His own 900-number charging $99.99 a call for nothing. He wanders the city, using phones at offices, at friends', calling himself, holding on for the required fifteen seconds, and hanging up. Most offices will miss the calls, not enough digits to stop the eye. A hundred bucks a pop, he can make what, twenty grand, forty, before someone catches on, before he's long, long gone. It is horrible, he knows. Horrible, especially, here.
Nathan puts down the phone and goes to stand by the window. Outside, the streets have darkened, the sky has paled, weighing down with the dull fog of a hundred million pricks of light. Television, reading lamp, billboard, tall-light, streetlight. Wires pass across the window, offensive, closing him in. The snow swirling around out there doesn't yet amount to anything, merely a manifestation of the cold.
Wringing his hands, looking back, briefly, at Maria's demonic grin, he turns toward the snow and remembers. A second date. She came armed with a chaperone. "This is Benny," she'd said. "Today he is four. And I am twenty." It was a prepared speech. And she paused to permit time for the math, as a stage actress will leave a space for laughter. Ultimately, it was this indifference toward all that, her nonchalance about her unwed motherhood, that won him over. She was different, and insistent on him seeing her as different. It wasn't beyond her to know full well that she, her tribe, was merely his taste, that she was merely the momentary head of Nathan's barrio queue. Standing firm, with her hand like a hat on her boy Benny's head, her eyes flashed defiantly. She'd given birth at sixteen. There it was. It was all clear now: she intended to resist. Interesting, she shall resist. Nathan asked her what she did. She merely laughed, she waved her hand. It does not matter, she said. What I do, it has nothing to do with me.
The sheets shift. Maria's arms lower, her legs slide beneath the covers. Her eyes slide and focus on the first thing that comes into her view: Nathan's empty chair. Craning her neck: "He has gone already? "
"Here.”
Her eyes, locating him at the window, stalk him as he returns to his chair.
"Come sit by me," she says.
"Me?”
She cannot have meant him. Nathan's chair is Nathan's chair, distant, the doghouse. But Nathan sits beside her, and she takes his hand. Between her bones he feels swollen.
"I have been in this bed for a week," she says. "The people in this bed always die. I don't know how many corpses I am lying on top of." She wipes her face with the back of her hand. "I want you to know that I come from a wealthy family. My father bought for nothing that property on Roatan before I was born, before the resorts, before the airstrip. Trees and beach and water-who knew the world would want it?”
Maria pauses, out of breath, and Nathan, hearing a whisper in his ears, scans the room, suspiciously eyeing the bedstand, the gurney, the intercom wired to the nurses' station outside. You are a liar, says the bouquet of near-dead flowers tossing in front of the heat vent. You are a traitor, hum the fluorescent bars.
"We would be rich, if we sold it," Maria is saying. "We would be happy, if we built on it. I once thought we would together, Nathan, build a house, both of us, on the water. Be happy. I gave it to you in case something happened to me so that you could still be happy. I wrote it down. We did that together. Your father was a witness.
You are a coward, Nathan hears. But he throws a sweeping glance around the room. The flowers, it turns out, are saying nothing at all.
"But I can't depend on you, Nathan. I have taken back my piece of Roatan. All of it. There is nothing you can do. The will is done. It's with my things. You get nothing. I want you to know I have seen to it. You will get nothing."
Nathan swallows, takes back his hand, his plane ticket, his vision of white sand, and clutching it all moves back to the chair at Maria's feet. She opens a Bible to a particular spot, most of the lines scored under, the margins darkened with notes. "For the wrath of God, Nathan, is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth-" She clears her throat. "The invisible things of the world are clearly seen"-looking up to train her gaze on Nathan, now closely examining his fingernails-"and who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the creator who is blessed forever amen. For this cause God gave them up until vile affections, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, Nathan! spiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things." Whispering now: "Disobedient, Nathan." She levels at him a disdainful stare, and continues by heart: "Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them, Nathan, fornication, Nathan! Do not.