It had been after one of her dockside trances that Lainie had plodded along the anchorage before going north past Patterson Park and east on Baltimore Street. She found herself dwarfed by tall buildings, coasting between them as if by canoe. She stopped outside one of the largest buildings in sight, a black-and-gold citadel with 1920s stylings. The revolving door turned and turned, blowing in a gust that smelled of leather and ink.
Lainie considers her morning news routine intellectual aerobics, and for that same reason she’d braved the whirling door. It spat her out onto a chessboard floor of a lobby carved from what looked like solid obsidian. Cutaway views of higher floors offered glimpses into what looked like an autonomous city. The workers here had their own post office, eateries, coffee carts, corner stores, newsstands, watch repair shops, security department. Modern women in smart outfits and men with briefcases crisscrossed the lobby, straight-backed with importance.
In this self-contained world, there was no Richard Strickland. No Timmy or Tammy Strickland. No Lainie Strickland, either. She was, rather, that woman she’d left in Orlando. She wished to bathe in the sensation so she took an elevator to a small bakery to pore over the display case. She decided on something she would enjoy herself, for once. When the clerk looked at her, she said, “Lemon Butter Ring, please.” Except he hadn’t been looking at her. A man, a building regular by the looks of his shirtsleeves, said, “Gimme a Lemon Butter Ring, Jerry,” at the same time. She apologized, and the man chortled and told her to go ahead, and she insisted she oughtn’t to eat an entire butter ring by herself anyway, and he said that yes, she should, Jerry makes them better than anyone.
The man was flirting but wasn’t overbearing about it, and besides, in this midworld she was capable of anything, and when the man complimented her voice, she pretended to be inured to such fluffery and laughed it off.
“I’m serious,” he said. “You’ve got a strong, soothing voice. You ooze patience.”
Beneath her costume of calmness, her heart raced.
“Ooze,” she said. “A word every woman wants to hear.”
The man snorted. “Say, who do you work for in this joint?”
“Oh, no one.”
“Ah, your husband, then. Whereabouts?”
“No, not that, either.”
He snapped his fingers. “Mary Kay. The girls upstairs are wild about it.”
“I’m sorry. I just came inside to—well, I just came inside.”
“Is that right? Hey, this may be a little forward, but any chance you’re looking for a job? I work at a little ad firm upstairs, and we’re hunting for a new receptionist. The name’s Bernie. Bernie Clay.”
Bernie held out his hand. Before Lainie could transfer the Lemon Butter Ring so as to accept it, she understood that everything had changed. Over the following hour, she introduced herself as Elaine, not Lainie, rode alongside Bernie on a gleaming escalator, followed him through a waiting room of trendy red chairs, and sat in his office past which ambled dozens of jolly men and secretaries who threw looks her way. Not hostile, but not friendly, either, as if wondering if the woman in the beehive had what it took.
Lainie knows she did all of this, but recalls only snippets. What she remembers in full are the rapid calculations she made regarding the schedules of her kids and husband, all of which had to be gauged before countering Bernie’s job offer, in a take-it-or-leave-it tone she couldn’t believe came out of her mouth, with her own part-time proposal—the best she could do, she said.
She hears the thump of Timmy kicking his seat at the table, hears the tentative clink of Tammy’s spoon against her bowl. Lainie rotates her head to see her reflection in the china-cabinet glass, wondering how beehives caught on in the first place. The secretaries at Klein & Saunders all have sleeker cuts, and though Lainie has only worked with them for a couple of days, she’s begun to imagine what it would feel like if her hair, too, was styled that way.
30
ELISA SUSPECTS SHE’LL never again know nights of such marvel and delight. Encounters in F-1 are too wondrous to grasp undividedly. She relives them the best she can, in gasping instants, like movie scenes that belong on the Arcade’s fifty-foot screen instead of being glimpsed on Giles’s tiny TV. How the whole pool burns electric blue the instant she enters the lab. The V-shaped current of the creature gliding underwater to meet her. The eggs as smooth and warm as baby skin. The creature’s head rising from the water, his eyes rarely gold now, but softer, human colors, and twinkling, not flashing. The safety lights’ snug, orange glow, like morning in a manger. The massive, bladed weapon of the creature’s hand, signing “egg” with motions gentle enough to stroke a gosling. Facial expressions she’d forgotten she could make: lip-biting excitement reflected in metal surgical tables, big-eyed anticipation reflected in pool water, heedless grins reflected in the creature’s shining eyes. Even daily drudgeries, the frustrating preliminaries to visiting him, are bathed in his radiance. Morning eggs not plopping into her stovetop pot but capering. No more dragging her feet room to room upon waking: she’s Bojangles in the kitchen, Cagney in the bedroom. Her choice of footwear getting showier by the day, sparkling down the Arcade’s fire escape as if the railing is threaded with tinsel. Dancing across Occam’s freshly mopped floors to watch the colors of her shoes gloss like a rising sun over a lake. Zelda giggling at her vivacious mood and remarking that Elisa’s acting like she did when she met Brewster, a comment Elisa deflects while wondering, half-crazy, if that’s exactly right. The scuffed, cat-fur cardboard of LP covers, the twelve-inch square revealed to be the precise dimension of joy. The creature signing “record” before she’s halfway to the pool, standing near the ledge, torso revealed, his chest scales glittering like a drawer of jewelry. The pinching of dust from the record player needle like the wiping of a tear from her eye. Miles or Frank or Hank or Billie or Patsy or Nina or Nat or Fats or Elvis or Roy or Ray or Buddy or Jerry Lee turned into angelic choirs, their every sung word gravid with a history the creature yearns to understand. His lights, his sensational lights, a symphonic reply to the purple glow of crooners, the blue pulse of rock and roll, the dusky yellow of country, the blinking orange of jazz. The touch of his hand, rare but thrilling, when he plucks eggs from her palm. The one time she dares hold nothing at all, and still he reaches out, draws his claws softly down her wrist, curling his hand into her palm as if enjoying the pretend-egg play, and letting her close her fingers around his, for that instant making the two of them not present and past, not human and beast, but woman and man.
31
SEX SIGNALS IN the rain forest were flagrant. Tortured ululations, fanned ruffles, engorged genitals, fulgent colors. Lainie’s signals are just as obvious. The drop of her eyes, the pout of her lip, how she leads with her bosom. It’s a wonder the children don’t crumple their noses at the pheromones as she puts a coat atop her apron and herds them to the bus. She returns and lets the coat drop to the carpet like a movie star. She touches the banister of the stairs with a single arched finger and asks, “Do you have time?” His head is smothered in painkiller, roaring like a tornado heard from a storm cellar, and words are inaccessible. She pivots on her finger and climbs the stairs, hips swinging like the tail feathers of a sashaying macaw.
Strickland takes his plate to the sink and shakes the omelet into the drain. He flips the switch of the garbage disposal. It’s the first they’ve owned. Blades whir like feasting piranhas. Specks of egg spatter the stainless steel. He turns it off and hears the floorboards overhead squeak and bedsprings creak. He’s been given food, is being offered sex, is suffused in warm morning sun—what else could he want? Yet he disapproves of his wife’s brazenness. He disapproves of himself, too, for the erection pressing against the sink. Seduction games belong in the Amazon, not here in this precise, planned American neighborhood. Why can’t he control himself? Why can’t he control anything?