“I dunno. A little sad, I guess. Like we drove the Indians out and gave them bad diseases and stuff. Look! Dogfish!”
“Right. Just very, very junior members of the shark family. There’s nothing — nothing at all — to be frightened of.”
But she felt no fear. There were at least a dozen circling right beneath the kayaks in a fishy spiral. The light was insufficient to give them any color; they were dark shadows, each three or four feet long, up to their own business in a submarine world that wasn’t hers. She found herself watching them with detached wonder — just as a scientist might, she thought.
“See how they chase one another’s tails? Dogfish have the IQ of a medium-sized pumpkin.”
As the spiral moved, they quietly shifted their kayaks on the water to keep them in view. At some invisible signal, the shadows suddenly scattered and were gone.
“Wow!” Alida said.
“I love to watch critters in the wild — they keep one in mind of one’s own critterliness. IQ or no IQ, we’re not so different from the dogfish, really. Time to go back, or we’ll have to drag the kayaks way too far up the beach.”
LUCY WOKE violently from a bad dream. She’d stepped from the elevator to hear an explosion of noise from her apartment. When she walked in, she found it had been taken over by a weird crew of bums who were playing deafening rock music on boom boxes and snorting lines of devil’s dandruff from dollar bills. They’d torn down her pictures and covered the walls with lewd graffiti. When she told them to go, they laughed and sneered. She went to the phone to call 911, but the line was dead; they’d cut it off. A grinning bum with missing front teeth shook a broken bottle in her face. She screamed and came awake in the scented bedroom of the Vanagses’ house, fearing she’d woken her hosts. Or was it just a dream scream that hadn’t found an actual voice?
The dream seemed to her at once infuriatingly familiar and totally obscure. Then she remembered it was exactly the scenario promised by the landlord when he’d first talked about changing her lock. Now Charles O. Lee, comical and horrible in equal parts, had wormed his way into her dream life — an intolerable violation, fuck him. She the one! Absurd, of course, but when she recalled the landlord’s phrase, she felt like the victim of an attempted murder. She the one! No wonder he was visiting her in nightmares.
She quickly fell asleep again, and reawoke just past nine. Given Augie’s rigorous schedule, surely he ought to be practicing his Schubert now, but the house was quiet: no typewriter keys, no fumbled chords from the piano. In pajamas and bathrobe, she went barefoot downstairs to get coffee and bring it up to her room, but there Augie was on his piano stool, nodding his head as he listened to an iPod. Alida’s? She never lent her iPod to anybody except Gail.
“Hi!” He removed the earphones. “Alida’s out on the beach — I seem to go through a lotta sand dollars in the course of my research. I’ve been listening to her favorite band.”
“Oh, right, Green Day.”
“No, not Green Day, Fall Out Boy.”
Lucy had never heard of them. “Yes, of course. Green Day was like last month’s craze. So yesterday now. What d’you make of Fall Out Boy?”
“They’re…cool, I suppose.”
“If you say so.”
“We were out in the kayaks and saw a pack of dogfish. Not a peep of fright from Alida. She enjoyed watching them.”
“She’s at that age when they change so fast from week to week that you can’t begin to keep up with them.”
“She was paddling like a pro today. We had a fine time on the water.”
Lucy’s inner eleven-year-old stirred in her once again. Why did he never ask her to go kayaking? Well, he was smart enough to know she really didn’t want to — that was why.
Augie turned to assassinating Schubert, so Lucy, coffee in hand, went up to get dressed. She was sitting by the window scribbling Augieisms in her notebook when Alida came into the room, holding a book.
“Look what Augie gave me.”
It was a hardback copy — first edition, she saw — of Boy 381. A collector’s item, for it had gone through umpteen printings.
“See what he wrote in it for me?”
On the title page, he’d inscribed: “To my cool friend, Alida Bengstrom, with admiration, from your uncool friend, Augie Vanags.” Then “Useless Bay” and the date.
“Rabbit, you’re going to have to take extra special care of this. It’s valuable.”
“Valuable?”
“It’ll be worth several hundred dollars, at least. Especially after the movie comes out. We’d better buy a paperback for you to actually read. You should keep this in a safe place in your room.”
“I’m going to read it now.” Her tone of voice refused contradiction.
“What about homework?”
“We don’t have much this weekend, just some math. And I really, really want to read Augie’s book.”
When Alida left, Lucy gazed at her notebook, her mind devoid of every thought except the certainty that she shouldn’t have allowed things to turn out like this. The rats’ nest of work all tangled up with friendship had placed her in a hopelessly compromised position. Whatever she wrote after this weekend was bound to be untrue. She tried to accuse herself of having too many scruples, but decided that the opposite was closer to the mark: she had too few.
She stared blankly out the window, and the fast-receding sea looked as glum and gray as she was feeling now.
MINNA WAS on her regular daily path through the grasses and Scotch broom, her basket filling with greenstuffs for a lunch salad. She’d looked forward to having Lucy’s company, but Lucy was up in her room and Minna was shy of disturbing her. So she walked alone, letting her mind drift in whatever direction it chose.
This weekend took her back to the days when she and Augie were first married, and he used to invite his students back to their little rental house for end-of-semester parties. Minna loved these student parties, though she dreaded faculty ones, where the faculty wives were always asking her, “Where were you?” meaning “Were you at Bennington? Or OSU? Or Stanford?” Then she’d have to say she’d worked at Seafirst Bank. Then they’d ask what she did there, already looking for an excuse to walk away.
With students it was different — like it was with Lucy and Alida. But how they drank and smoked in those days! She had to fumigate the house after each party, but still was eager to throw the next one, where students introduced her to Ray Charles, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Dusty Springfield, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan, confided their love lives to her, and taught her to smoke pot. Augie never smoked any, but she loved how warm, colorful, and friendly the world seemed when she was high.
She and Augie used to go to the students’ own, even wilder, parties, on falling-to-pieces old houseboats and in joss-stick-smelling walk-up flats, and always the invites came directly to her, though of course Augie was asked to come along, too. She could still recall the students’ names — La Verne Geiger, Byford Starling, Melvin Kolar, Ron Schnowske, Betty Frailey, Kermit James, Arlo Fruin, Janet Bane…Strange how last week was hard to remember, when things so long ago were crystal clear.
Lucy and Alida somehow triggered these memories. Not that they were like students, but they’d brought with them into the house on Useless Bay some happy vestige of that mood. Minna wondered if Lucy liked Bob Dylan, then remembered her LPs wouldn’t play on Augie’s new stereo system. Minutes later, she recalled they’d got rid of them when they moved out here from Seattle. She’d wanted to hold a yard sale, but Augie had called in a charity for the blind to haul all their old junk away.