But this one time I needed her: that moist buried star inside her, I needed it. When we made love (“fucked!” corrected Lucy), her eyes, her smell — she began to unravel. I saw her shape emerge, as if out of a deep mist. Her thread almost—almost—appeared. I nuzzled her neck.
“C’moooon,” she said.
“You can’t do this.” Tears were piercing my eyes.
“Do what?”
“You can’t give it to me sometimes, then keep it away!”
“What? My pussy?”
“Yes,” I said, though it wasn’t what I meant.
“Okaay.” The smirk was nearly audible. “Come and get it.”
Afterward, she’d kiss my chest and go to the bathroom, and I’d lie in bed, waiting to hear the water start. Once it had, I’d tiptoe to the mirror and attempt that shocked, hunted look, but it wasn’t, was never right, and as soon as the shower had cut off, I’d retreat, heart pounding, to bed. Before that, though, for a delving moment, I’d lie there, considering the windows walled in frost. A stranger might be looking up at them right then, I’d think, wondering who was up there. And it made me nearly tearful, yes strangely joyful to think, I am.
• • •
Lucy performed Sunday afternoons at the Communiqué with an effete piano player named Geoff who snapped his head at the striking of certain high notes. Lucy herself sang huskily into the microphone and swayed in place like a mechanical doll. No banter, no seductive preambles introduced their songs. Geoff injected what life he could into each piece, but Lucy seemed bothered up there.
“That was shiiiit,” she’d say afterward, Geoff trailing contritely behind her. Each Sunday I wreathed compliments around her neck, and each Sunday she shrugged them off.
“It was great,” I’d insist. “Best yet.”
“Lie-er!”
It was true. All of Lucy’s ballsiness abandoned her onstage. Through most songs, she seemed hesitant to leave the microphone stand. The few times she did venture to the hemline of the stage or kicked out her leg or shimmied to her knees, it was always with a curbed physicality, an awkward smile, like that of someone apologizing for a misstep.
Yet I looked forward to these sets as they were a rare opportunity to watch her without being seen, and often in the dark, I would sway and tap my foot as Lucy did in that tollbooth of light. But it didn’t help. Her voice was too husky, her hips too bridled.
“I do wish she were better,” a voice said one afternoon. I turned, and there was Bernard, raising a cigarette to his mouth.
“She’s improving.”
“You’re too kind,” he said. “Or think you ought to be. The stage always calls her bluff.”
Years later a man at a party out west would tell me that he once snorted a drug so good he refused then and there to ever do it again. That’s how I felt with Bernard. I could feel it happening again.
“I assume Lucy told you about me and her,” he said.
“She did.”
“That doesn’t bother you, I hope.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Her goal is to undress the world. That’s what draws her to people like us, who can’t be undressed so easily.”
Together we watched the object of our talk, in her sleeveless green dress, swaying indecisively.
I said, “And the girl likes a good dicking, too.”
He said nothing, smoked. Like that, I hated myself.
Their song ended. Lucy and Geoff struck up a new, stilted number.
“I was surprised how much trouble you had doing her,” he said. “Onstage, I mean.” With that, he patted me on the shoulder and walked away.
EIGHT
From the beginning we had planned on Mama’s coming to the City — first in the fall, then Christmas, then late January — but bad luck kept delaying her visit. Days before she was to take the train in October, Sandra DeMille, her beloved coworker at the library, suffered a stroke while shelving a textbook on naval history, cracked her skull on the fall from the ladder, and fell into a coma. The resident brain doctor at LaClaire County Hospital implored Mama to contact a member of Ms. DeMille’s family, as the human voice, he said, reading or simply chatting, represented the patient’s last tie to the living world. Since Sandra had no family to speak of (her husband had died of a cardiac thrombosis years before), Mama canceled her trip and spent the next five weeks running shifts, along with Mimi Washington and Doris Huitt, sitting by tube-fed Sandra in the hospital, reciting passages from Journey to the North Pole and Everest, At Last!, tales of exploration always having been her favorite.
The week before Christmas, with Mama planning her second trip — having recovered from the initial devastation of Sandra’s fall and having arranged for Wendy Delacroix to take her afternoon shift by the patient’s bedside — Sandra died. “Our time here is very short,” Mama wrote in her letters. “I must see you.” Because there was no one else, it fell on Mama’s shoulders to organize the funeral and oversee the devolution of Sandra’s considerable estate (her deceased husband the scion of one of Sea View’s oldest shipping families) in the absence of a written will.
Herman Mayfield, local lawyer, aided in the stickier legalities. As it had been established town gossip for years that Mayfield adored, and perhaps in his timorous way, loved Sandra, no one questioned his motives in the matter, and it was with the unspoken, but essential, blessing of all of Sea View that Mama and Mayfield donated the lion’s share of Sandra’s estate to the small, cherished library where Sandra had devoted so much of her time, both personal and professional. The remainder was bequeathed to the county’s public school system in keeping with the beliefs and philanthropic history of the DeMille family. There appeared a sweet obituary in the Sea View News, which Mama clipped and mailed to me. “There was too much ice on the road for many people to come,” Mama wrote of the funeral. “But there was a memorial at the library where all kinds of folks came to pay their respects. Mr. Halberstam and others gave very eloquent speeches. Who knew? You can live next to a person all your life and not know the feelings inside them.”
Those weighty matters settled, Mama rescheduled her twice-delayed trip for late January when bad luck, this time in the form of one Jesse Unheim, a rakish and far-flung nephew of Sandra’s, sauntered into town. Unheim was a known entity in Sea View, having gone to Sea View Middle School, where, two years my senior, he readily established himself as the town’s miscreant. In fact, I knew Unheim personally, as he and I were often sentenced to afternoon detention at the same time — me for having once again duplicated a classmate, him for a whole menu of sin. Most famously, he drowned Arnold Polski’s gerbil for sport. Another time, he prank-called the office, pretending to be the husband of his homeroom teacher, a man everyone knew to have run off weeks before with a checkout girl at Sawyer’s Market. Inspired only by a dislike for Ms. Edinger, Jesse left a choked-up message, saying he had made a terrible mistake for leaving a woman like that, and would she find it in her heart to take him back?
After he was expelled from Sea View Middle School, Jesse’s father moved the family to Dun Harbor, where by all accounts Jesse worsened. There was a petty theft, car theft. He went to prison. Once out, he moved west. Many presumed him dead, including the late Sandra DeMille, who referred to her nephew, the few times she could bring herself to (being a woman of famous discretion), as “the poor boy.”
And so, one frigid Wednesday, this very same Jesse Unheim knocked on Mama’s door, dressed in a canary-yellow suit despite the icy weather, accompanied by a short, energetic lawyer he introduced as Morgan Le Fleuer. Ashplant in hand, Unheim demanded his aunt’s estate be returned to him, her only surviving relative.