“I don’t think he ever denied doing it,” I say.
“For all we know, he’s trying to protect you; you are the younger brother, after all.”
“Actually, I’m older.”
The lawyer shrugs. “Whatever.”
“Is there going to be a trial for Jane’s murder — because I’d like to be here for that,” I say.
“Remains to be seen,” the lawyer says. “We’re still negotiating.”
I change my tactics. “Nate wants to do something for the boy, the surviving child.”
“Who’s Nate?”
“George’s son?”
“And what would he like to do?”
“He’s interested in adopting, or at least taking the kid out for a day.”
“Because why?”
“Because why? Because he feels bad that his father killed the kid’s family. Why are you asking why — isn’t it obvious?”
“Obvious is meaningless. It’s not up to me,” the lawyer says. “The boy is living with his aunt.”
“Could you give her my phone number and let her know that we’d like to do something? More than something, we’d like to do a lot.”
“Are you seeking to avoid a civil suit?”
“This is about one kid who lost his family wanting to help another kid who also lost his family, but if you want to make it ugly you can,” I say.
“Just asking,” he says.
“How about you get me the aunt’s phone number and I’ll do it myself,” I say.
“Whatever floats your boat,” Ordy says, taking a drink from the fountain and wiping his lips on the back of his hand.
I don’t have a boat.
I’m late for lunch. I arrive and tell the maître d’ that I’m meeting someone.
“A lady alone?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, suddenly nervous, trying to remember what Cheryl looks like. The only thing that comes to mind — a striking but odd detail which is not useful in this situation — I’m remembering that her pubic area was groomed in such a way that instead of a vertical landing strip (that is, a strip of hair running from top to bottom) she had what she called a “flight path,” which was a wider patch running from side to side, and which had been dyed hot pink. Hard to forget that. I’m blushing as the maître d’ leads me to a table where a woman sits alone.
“Are you you?” I ask.
“It is I,” she says.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say, sitting down.
“Not a problem,” she says.
I look at her more closely. If I were being honest, I’d say she looks entirely unfamiliar, which prompts me to think that it’s all a setup, that some guy will pop out from behind the grill and announce himself as “Stoned Pauley from peepingtoms. com.” Maybe it’s my obsession with media, with a camera crew, with the idea that everything has to be documented in order to be real. Whatever it is, it’s making me nervous. She seems to intuit my concern.
“I changed my hair,” she says.
“It looks nice,” I say, with no commitment.
“I play with my hair a lot,” she says. “It’s a way of being expressive — you may recall the pink?”
I blush but am relieved.
“What happened to your eye?” she asks.
“Gardening accident.”
“It looks like you’ve been crying,” she says.
“Sweating, not crying. The salt water may have aggravated it.”
“So — how are you?” she asks, struggling to make conversation.
“Weird,” I say. “And you?”
“Were you always weird, or is it only now a thing?”
“I was in court for my brother this morning — he’s in a bit of trouble and, oddly enough, today the charges were dropped.”
“That’s fantastic,” she says, raising her water glass. “Cheers.”
“He’s guilty,” I say, indignantly. “I was ripped off. I was counting on justice being served.”
“You mentioned that you’d had a stroke?” she says, changing the subject. “How did it affect you?”
“What makes you ask? Is my face falling? That’s what it did, it slipped and fell while I was watching in the bathroom mirror.”
“No reason, just trying to find out more about you.”
I nod.
The waiter brings some olives and bread and tells us about the specials and offers us “a moment to think.”
I tell her about Nate and Field Day weekend.
“Aren’t kids great?” she says, beaming. “But, look,” she says, leaning forward and forgetting that Nate is not my child, “this isn’t about our kids, this is about us. I’ve been there,” she says, “the soccer mom, standing out in the warm afternoon rain with the coach whose corporate-lawyer wife just got breast cancer and he’s so sad and lonely and wants a little action on the side. ‘Could you just touch it, right now, right here, under my poncho? It would feel so good to have someone touch it. Come on, I’ve got it out, feel, it wants to do a little dance for you.’”
The way she tells it is both terrifying and a turn-on.
The waiter comes back. “Come to any conclusions?”
“No,” I say, “we haven’t had a chance to think.”
“Should we share something?” she asks.
“Whatever you desire,” I say, and she seems pleased with that.
She looks up at the waiter. “The meatball pizza with no onions, and a large salad.” The waiter nods and then leaves.
“So — what happened with you? You mentioned you’d come unraveled.”
“I went off my medication. I’d been on it so long I couldn’t remember why I was taking it. They gave it to me for postpartum blues sixteen years ago and I stayed on it, but recently I thought it made no sense. I’m happy, I said to myself, I have all the stuff I’m supposed to have, I can do whatever I want. So I stopped taking the medication, I weaned myself off, and everything seemed good.”
“And?”
“And then, a few months later, a girl I knew since nursery school dropped dead, and something shifted. Slowly, it all got away from me.”
“How did it start?”
“Flirting,” she says. “I would go online and send flirty little e-mails. And then I had some phone calls — very innocent, but fun. And then someone dared me to meet him in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot — said he’d be wearing a jelly doughnut — and, well, I took him up on it.” She takes a sip of her drink. “I really don’t know you very well,” she says.
“Why sex instead of shopping, for example?”
“Are you calling me a slut?” Her voice gets sharp.
I lean forward. “I’m trying to understand what it means to you and why you wanted to see me today.”
The waiter puts the salad between us.
She throws her head back and shakes out her hair. It’s the kind of move that looked good when Farrah Fawcett did it, but here it looks odd, like a health hazard. She sheds coarse blond threads into the salad.
“Ugghh,” she says, plucking them out. “They say not to dye your hair more often than once every six weeks, but I can’t wait that long — when I need a change I need it now.” She’s blinking and seems to have a lash in her eye, which is reminding me that she wore glasses when I met her for lunch at her house — she had glasses on, glasses on a string around her neck, glasses that hung down in front of her like odd breast-magnifiers tapping against her chest again and again, as if to remind her of something, as I had her from the back.
“Do you wear glasses?” I ask.
“Yes, but I broke them. I’m flying blind,” she says, putting a bite of hairy salad in her mouth.
She slowly extracts the long thread and calls the waiter over. “There’s hair in the salad,” she says.
“How unusual,” he says in a deadpan tone. “Would you like another?”
“We’ll wait for the pizza,” I say.
“Enough about me,” she says. “Let’s talk about you. So you’re teaching?”