“Excuse me,” she said, trundling her luggage in behind her. “Hi, hello. Who are you?”
The girl dropped lightly to the floor and turned down — well, apparently the soundtrack to some poor toy factory’s demolition.
“Sorry?”
“No, nothing,” Hara said. “Just, oh, out of curiosity, what on earth are you doing in my house?”
The girl smiled — as if this were funny, as if she were often surprised, in no more than panties, in the midst of some aerial trespass.
“So … my parents have this place for the week.”
“Have this place…” Hara tested the phrase. “Hmm, see the thing is I own this place, and I’m not in the habit of letting it to the parents of circus performers.” The brightness in the girl’s eyes made Hara sleepy. “Don’t tell me they know Zeke.”
“Zeke…” The girl shook her head. “Something about a charity auction?”
Hara found she was staring at the girl’s nipples, tiny shallow cones nearly the color of her skin. She had tattoos running across her body too, garish colorful things that were actually rather pretty. She might have been sixteen or twenty-five. Hara hadn’t the slightest idea how old young people were.
“I’d love it if you put a shirt on,” she said.
In the study, waiting for Zeke to pick up, she looked out at the ocean. In the dark it was no more than a suggestive absence, an unbroken pane of black beginning where the dock frame showed in a glimmer of light from the house. Of course Zeke would find a way to spoil even this for her.
“Zeke, how are you,” she said when she heard his voice. “So, funny thing — you’ll like this — there’s a girl in my house.”
She heard shuffling, a word spoken to someone, then Zeke came back on. “Who is this?”
“Zeke.”
“There’s a girl … in your house. Well, these things happen, don’t they. Did you invite her, by chance?”
“As a matter of fact, no. You’ve hit on just the crux of the thing.”
“Ah, I see. You mean there’s a girl in the cottage, our cottage, the one we both own. Well, look, it was whoever won the auction. I didn’t know it would be a girl.”
“Oh fuck you, that’s not the point. You know that’s not the point.”
“It was for a good cause, if that helps. Children with rabies or something.”
“You are such an exceptional asshole, do you know?”
“Just think, think of all the little kiddies who won’t be running around, foaming at their tiny mouths…”
Hara closed her eyes. She wanted to laugh; she wanted to pound Zeke’s face until she heard bone crack. It was simply maddening how since going ahead with the divorce they had been getting on so well, the way they had at first, years before. They went to coffee and sometimes even an early dinner after meeting with the lawyers, like perennial rivals putting a hard-fought match behind them. And that’s what it was, a game, a farce. Everything with Zeke turned into a sort of game. Hara didn’t even want his shit, very little of it anyhow. But she wanted the cottage, there was that.
“I can see everyone thinks this is a riot,” she said, “but I’d remind you I’m a licensed attorney. I have no problem evicting Joan Baez.”
“Joan Baez? Hara, you lost me. But look, there’s paperwork, I’ll have Cliff send it up tomorrow. And in the meantime you have a new friend, who sounds fun.”
But by the time the papers arrived the next day (lupus, of all things, Hara knew Zeke did not give two shits about lupus) she had decided that maybe she liked the sylphlike girl with her ridiculous name. Maybe she liked having someone around. She always ended up glad for company, even when she felt herself most eager to be alone. And Lyric had a serenity about her that was, well, lovely. An irrational part of Hara entertained the notion that Zeke might have done this for and to her. It didn’t really matter. She kept from probing the arrangement. Happiness was fragile. You named a happiness to doom it. So she bit her tongue, glancing only obliquely to confirm it was there, still there, and still the next day and the next … and so on and perhaps forever if not for Robert.
* * *
The day Lyric returned from town with the news she’d met someone, Hara had been busy watching leaves knock about and fall off the trees.
“It was so funny,” Lyric said. “I asked this guy at the market where I could find something and he didn’t hear me. So I said, ‘Hey, hello, can you understand me?’ and he turned around real casually and just goes, ‘Probably not.’” She followed Hara’s gaze up into the trees. “Isn’t that funny?”
“Funny,” Hara said experimentally.
“Oh, and I invited him to dinner. I hope that’s all right.”
What was Hara going to say? No? She leaned back in her chair and watched Lyric carry the groceries into the house. “Crazy girl,” she murmured, feeling just a pang of envy for the girl’s perfect ease, her way of making herself at home wherever she was.
What granted a person that capacity? Yes, Lyric’s childhood had been a bohemian mess of, well, money, it seemed, and a kind of inspired heedlessness to round things out. To hear her describe the years she and her siblings had spent under the care of their erratic mother you might think most children moved between communes and expatriate villas, rubbing shoulders with artists and the occasional criminal element, that a certain brand of chic international vagrancy were available to anyone. Hara could all but feel what Lyric left out, the rain-soaked nothing afternoons, the endless downtime of childhood, homework, the necessity of eating, and so on, and still, told in this manner, as outlandish trivia decontextualized for the sake of wonder, the girl’s life seemed otherworldly, as though for her very ingenuousness the treasures of strange accident she blithely enumerated could only flash in the light of your own astonishment.
What a funny thing talking to this girl! Hara worked a puzzle piece into the border and a tree, given a trunk, came to life. She had her stories too, of course. Maybe less incredible than Lyric’s, but she could tell them how she liked. In the kayaks paddling out to the islands Hara told Lyric how when she and Zeke camped there, summers, they played a game called “sex tag,” stripping to boots and chasing each other across the rocky forested terrain. She felt aroused just recalling it, the peculiar sexiness of nudity above boots; Zeke’s cock flopping about as he ran, like a bodily afterthought; how, caught, she might feel the soft, rough birch bark against her cheek, holding a tree to steady herself, or how she might squat over Zeke in the moss and feel the floral life in the air on every inch of her. And then naked and lit in the alpenglow of fucking, as they waved to passing sailboats from the rock beach, how sure Hara had been that of the lives of women and men hers was among the free.
But anything could be a prison, it turned out, perhaps most of all the notion that you were free. And once you started to believe in the idea of your life, well, the filaments of a cage had already begun to lattice themselves about you, hadn’t they?
“But what do you believe?” she asked Lyric.
“Hmm? What do I believe about what?”
Their kayaks were close and Lyric dipped her oar gently in the water as the brightening day carried skeins of mist up from the ocean.
“Do you see your life as a project?”
Lyric laughed. “God, wouldn’t I be in trouble if I did?”
“But what then?” Hara persisted. “Atomic chaos?”
The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. This, for now?” She gestured with her paddle. The water was vitreous before them in the stillness, as though setting back into a pale solid — nacre, white opal, shell.