"You know, I actually once had an idea," she says. "I don't know why. I've always dreamed of having a farm somewhere with
Nathan. A real one, with that blue silo they have now with the American flag painted on the side. A red barn, of course, an old pickup truck."
"Nathan hates the country," Ruth says with a wife's nonchalant bitterness.
"He does have that East Hampton house," Claire points out. "That mansion, that hideous gargantuan thing. That Sheetrock palace, as sturdy as a house of cards."
"It's beautiful in its way."
"Big enough for a family of ten plus servants, if that's beauty."
"He has all those gardens but never weeds it. All that lawn and doesn't mow it. He even has a pool."
Claire's eyes are blurred with tears. She is laughing, she thinks. "But he can't swim."
"Hates the water."
"Does he even own it outright yet? He probably doesn't even know. There are so many things he used to own, or owns, or thinks he owns. Though all he really has are those stashes in his closets and drawers, the rolls of cash and all those Rolexes, in his suit jackets for god's sake." Her martinis are finally beginning to take pleasurable effect. Claire gives a snort. "Sorry, it's just the idea of Nathan knee-deep in the rhubarb, in overalls and boots and a John Deere hat, a shovel in those soft little hands of his, digging into the manure. All his Armani suits sealed in plastic in the closet. It's almost too much to imagine."
Ruth is laughing, too, but embarrassed, her little dark pouched eyes glinting, beaded and distant.
"What is it?" Claire asks her. "What's wrong?"
"I think of him differently. Maybe as he should be."
"Ah." Claire spins back to the bar and eagerly swallows what is left of her martini. "And what way is that?" But there will be no reply. "You love him," she says flatly. "That's why you put up with everything you do. Though I don't see how you can. After a while, I couldn't. He would have liked the farm, though," she says, drying her eyes. "Just to own it, like his record collection. Own it just because he could. And he'd have hired some Guatemalan to run it for him, the wife of some client doing fifteento-life. And her daughters, of course. Can't forget daughters. Especially Guatemalan daughters."
Ruth clears her throat. "Nathan never told me you had a child. "
"Nathan doesn't know. But you did, didn't you?"
Ruth presses on, as a good lawyer would: "Does Errol?"
But Claire's attention has been tugged back to the TV. "My god, isn't that-?" A stunning face in high-school portrait, a strange hybrid of Hispanic and some blood that gives the girl green, bottomless eyes, virtuous, maddeningly off-line to the right; that gummy blue background behind every adolescent's head; her white shirt buttoned chastely to the neck, a tiny silver crucifix looped through the collar. Prim as a nun the day she marries Christ. The face vanishes, spliced into a long shot of Coney Island and its ferris wheel and its long and vacant-boardwalk. Finally a pan across the icy beach, focusing on a shrouded corpse. "Isabel Santos of 147th Street, Manhattan," the anchor says with the swagger of one calling a horse race, "a gruesome discovery made earlier today by chilly members of the Polar Bear Club."
“Oh-" Ruth has clamped her hand to her mouth.
'Errol's Isabel? My god-" Claire pictures Errol's sister, Milton's secretary, mastering the phones, making the coffee, collating the depositions, then sashaying into Milton's office for dictation, the door locking behind her, to actually do god knows what. Ruth is on her feet. "The phone?" she asks the bartender.
Claire can only stare. "Call Nathan? But they have already-he must already know. After all, they called Errol."
Against the wall near the johns, Ruth dials one number and says nothing. She dials another and turns her back, cupping the mouthpiece with her hand. She hurries back, her coat already on. "I couldn't get him."
"Then who was that on the phone?" Claire asks, then waves off the answer, for a moment having forgotten whom she is dealing with. "I'm sorry."
"I have to go."
"Of course. Some other time."
Claire looks up at the bang of a door and an icy gust and Ruth's hunched bulk shrinking in the frame of the window, trudging away through the snow.
Santos is on the sidewalk before Barbados has stopped the car. The tenements run like hedges, none the same yet all alike. Gaps among the buildings like punched teeth. Arms full of flowers and eyes crippled by memories, Santos lets himself in the front door and leaves it open for Barbados. The derelict building. Upstairs, in the apartment in which he was a boy, plain rooms, pressed-tin ceilings, rough-hewn floors. A gust of wind moans through the windows, prowling room to room through the puckered-glass transoms, making them chatter. Somewhere a clock ticks. His chest is tight, his throat rattling. He goes to his pocket for his inhaler. The clock tocks. Something more than time passes here. The little spray of medicine tricks him: his eyes clear, his lungs rise, his veins run.
"She was clean," he says, turning at the door. "I still don't get that.
Barbados touches the center of Santos's back. "The examiner will know everything in a few hours."
"They did the core temp? Sometimes they pass on the core temp.
"They never pass on it. They didn't pass on it now."
"They pass on it. Believe me. When they don't give a shit."
"About her, they give a shit," Barbados says.
"You saw her nails. They were clean. Do you get that? You telling me she didn't fight? That girl didn't fight? She fights everything. She fights all the time. There were marks. She was fucked up. You saw the marks-"
"Errol."
They watch him from the couch, gathered there below the X-ray light of the fluorescent ring, as for a family photograph. The sister he has left, his mother’s hand on her shoulder. Others, old friends and neighbors, line the walls. Here and there, displayed proudly on old, unworthy furniture, gleam the expensive gifts Milton Stein has given Mrs. Santos, his long-time secretary: vases and wood boxes, a brass lamp; in the corner, a stereo system with all of the doo-dads. A neighbor raises a hand, a solemn gesture.
Santos kneels before his mother, rests the bouquet in her lap and takes her limp and clammy hand. "Momma," he begins.
She blinks some signal. Beside her, on the end table, a lush display of flowers. Wildflowers, carnations, poinsettia, their cards. Blood-red roses, Milton Stein and Natban Stein. Santos fingers the card and snaps it from its string and hands it up to Barbados.
"They're fast," Santos says.
"It is their business to know."
Santos's mother slides a finger along his hairline, contemplating.
"What was she doing out there?"
Since he saw Isabel lying on the beach he has tried to see her face in his mind but he cannot. He remembers her hand, like a tiny creature in his. He remembers tugging her through a schoolyard fence in the muffled quiet of a winter's day, deploying her to the outfield on a pond of asphalt as blank and featureless as airport tarmac. A playground strewn with old snow, glittering puddles of broken glass. Her even breaths hanging before her in transfiguring balloons. He remembers that while the boys moved listlessly in grimy parkas Isabel in her white snowsuit scurried here and there, flailing, giggling, blocking the ball with her shins. Errol hit the ball high into the gloom, Isabel staggered beneath, face to sky, hands outstretched, waiting to cradle anything that might need catching.
"Momma, who did she go out with last night?"
His mother is weeping. "She didn't say."
He looks to his other sister.
"Has she been going out with somebody?"
Nothing. A dull shake of the head.
Santos presses his eye with the back of a hand. "I have to call Claire," he says.
At the kitchen table he rolls a bottle of beer in his hands. Bar bados puts down the phone. "Nathan Stein didn't call in, but someone else did."