He works with great care, making sure that the lines are consistent, uniform, unwavering, that a gentle curve appears between dots, that the graph doesn’t become jittery or messy. He never once uses the eraser. The lighter and the pencil are switched from hand to hand, his fingers shaking in the cold. Angela looks over his shoulder, her chin on his overcoat, saying, “This is about the stupidest thing I ever seen.”
When Treefrog is finished, he holds the paper up and shows Angela the rise and curl of her face — the canyons and ridges and riverbeds and hanging valleys that she has become.
“Heyyo,” he says to the paper.
“That’s me?”
“There’s your ears, that’s your nose, that’s your cheek.”
“Looks bumpy.”
“I can change the scale,” says Treefrog.
“Do me a favor, Treefy?”
“Yeah.”
“Get rid of the bruise there,” she says.
He looks at her and smiles.
Scraping his fingernails along the top of the eraser to make sure it doesn’t leave black smudges on the graph paper, he scrubs out the hillock where the bruise was. She kisses him on the cheek and softly says, “Doctor Treefrog.”
“If I take readings of everywhere I could make a map of the rest of your face. I’d have all these contours and your face’d look like this.” He draws a series of distorted circles. “Your nose’d be like this. And your ear’d be like this. And your lips, they’d be weird. Like this.”
“Where d’ya learn to do this?”
“I taught myself. I been making maps for a long time.”
“You ever do it for anyone else?”
“I did it for Dancesca.”
“Who’s she?”
“I told you about her. And Lenora too. My little girl.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody knows where I is either,” says Angela.
* * *
Walker sits by the window. The apartment has been remodeled to twice its former size, the landlord stung for housing violations. The view from the window has changed in recent years — the sunlight is blocked out by large housing projects that step their way across the city. Giant gray and brown buildings, they frown against the skyline. Washing flutters out from balconies. Boys chat through adjacent windows, using tin cans and string. Suicides are heard for the length of their screams.
Only Louisa and the boy remain in the apartment with him. Both Walker’s daughters have left to get married, Deirdre to a steamfitter in the Texas oilfields, Maxine to a welder from Philadelphia. Slowly the girls have faded from his life. Photographs of their children sometimes arrive late, as if they’ve suddenly been born at the age of one or two. Walker often thinks of making a trip to see them, but it never happens; his bank account will not allow it.
Most of his time is spent sitting by the window, watching his ten-year-old grandson, Clarence Nathan, playing alone in an empty lot across the street.
Sometimes, in the apartment, Louisa dances. Walker turns the couch to face the center of the room, tightens a blanket over his legs, balances a teacup on the arm of the couch. Clarence Nathan also watches — his mother’s arms stretched out to an unvoiced song and her feet going back and forth delicately as Walker’s big guffaws mix in with the city’s sirens. She tucks her head to her chest, as if into a wingpit. Lifts it up again. Arms moving up against a heavy air, she seems ready for the sky, a chimera of movement and geometry. But Walker has noticed changes in the rhythms in recent years. From his position on the soft cushions, he has seen Louisa’s movements clang toward a certain jerkiness, a loss of control. Tall and long-legged, she has developed the look of something wounded. Her arms don’t quite stretch out as they used to. Her feet are not as lyrical. Her breathing is jerky. The primitive rawness is less than it once was, and she has lost something in the way she spins; there is often a temporary stumble on the lip of the carpet, as if her fluidity has siphoned itself down into the tequila, where Louisa searches for it. A bottle and a half a day. In the morning she stumbles out of bed and goes straight to the cupboard, doesn’t even wince at the first sip. She loves to peel the labels halfway off, scraping them with her fingernails. Sometimes she hides in the bathroom for hours, comes out with the bottle empty.
Louisa wears a row of seashells at her neck, strung together on a piece of white twine. The shells jangle when she moves. She always says she feels a little dizzy, that a doctor has given her pills to help cure the problem. She swallows the pills in handfuls and they keep her awake for long stretches. She goes to late-night clubs, arrives home frenzied, her hair unthreading as she tosses in the single bed beside her son. In the afternoons, she wakes only to give a cursory kiss to the boy, then falls back silent on the bed.
A litany of men calls at the door and Walker has noticed — with a thickening sense of shame — the rise of her skirts high on her thighs.
Things have begun to go missing from the apartment: a vase, a soupspoon, a picture frame but not the picture.
“Y’all seen Clarence’s frame?” Walker asks her. “He looks mighty naked without it.”
“Haven’t seen it anywhere,” she says.
“Wouldn’t happen to be in the pawnshop?”
“’Course not. What you think I am, a thief?”
“Take it easy, girl. Y’all know I don’t think that.”
“You saying I soaked his frame?”
“’Course not,” says Walker. “I’m sorry. Just shooting my mouth off. Don’t mind me.”
“After all I do around here? Cook and clean. Keep you near your grandson. You know, I could live anywhere I want. And you tell me I’m a thief?”
“I was just wondering about the frame.”
“Well, don’t wonder.”
“Hey,” says Walker after a moment, “d’y’all ever think about what might be growing in the place of Clarence’s eyeball?”
“What?”
“His eyeball. I mean, what sort of plant? In Korea. I mean, that’s what he said long ago, wasn’t it? That something might grow there in that place.”
“You got a fever or something, Nathan? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. All I hear from you these days is things that don’t make any goddamn sense.”
“Don’t cuss in front of the boy.”
“I’ll curse if I want.”
“Sometimes I think it may be a big American oak.”
“No such thing as an American oak,” she says.
“Or a chestnut tree or something.”
“No chestnuts in Korea.”
“Maybe a maple.”
She turns away. “I’m going out for a while.”
“Where you going to now?”
“Just out.”
“Watch that skirt don’t disappear altogether. You’ll be whistling down the street. They’ll hear you coming around the corner.”
“Funny funny.” And then she sighs. “Will you look after Claren?”
“Holy Name,” says Walker.
“Well?”
“Y’all know I always look after the boy.”
“Thanks,” she says, landing a brusque kiss on Clarence Nathan’s forehead.
“Lord,” Walker says, as she leaves.
One evening Louisa comes home and wakes Walker, and — with her pupils swimming up near her eyelids — she insists on dancing while the boy is asleep. She puts a finger to her mouth for silence and stands in the center of the room. The seashell necklace lies white against her brown skin. She has wrapped a thin blue scarf around her head. Four other scarves hang from it, down to the small of her back, rippling in with her hair, which is filthy. She spins and whirls and throws out her arms and Walker is temporarily enraptured until — suddenly — she loses control, falls, and, as if in slow motion, one foot goes high in the air, her arms make half windmills, her elbow grazes the floor, and she collapses against the cupboard. Her head slices against a metal handle.