He told her he hadn’t known, or he’d forgotten — or hadn’t even thought of it, really — and he thanked her for thinking of him. They sipped their beers in silence a moment, the light on the night table the only illumination in the room, and then he said, “You know, that house belonged to my father. That’s his signature on the deed. We spent summers here when I was a kid, best summers of my life. I was here when Mrs. Rastrow’s — when Ronald and Elyse drowned. I was maybe twelve at the time, and I didn’t really — I didn’t understand you could die. Not if you were young. Up till that point it was old people who’d died, the lady next door — Mrs. Jennings — my grandmother, a great-aunt.”
She just nodded, but he could see she was right there with him, the brightness in her eyes, the way she chewed, sipped. He felt the beer go to his head. He wanted to ask about her, how she’d come to the island — was it an ad in the paper, lumber heiress in need of a companion to wear silk Chinese dresses in a remote cottage, room and board and stipend and all the time in the world to paint, write, dream? — but he didn’t want to be obvious. She was exotic. Chinese. The only Chinese person on the island, and it would be rude, maybe even faintly racist, to ask.
He watched her tuck the last corner of the sandwich in her mouth and tilt back the can to drain it. She wiped her lips with a paper napkin, then settled her hands over her knees and said, “You know, it’s no use. She’s never going to go any higher.”
He was embarrassed suddenly — to bring all that into this? — and he just shrugged. It was a fait accompli. He was defeated and he knew it.
“She knows about your wife. And you know she could pay a fair price, even though the place is run-down, because it’s not the money — she has all the money anybody could want — but she won’t. I know her. She won’t budge.” She lifted her face so that the light cut it in two, the ridge of her nose and one eye shining, the rest in shadow. “She’s just going to let it rot anyway. That’s what she’s doing with all of them.”
“Spoils her view?”
She smiled. “Something like that.”
Then the question he’d been swallowing since she’d appeared at the door, finally pried up off his tongue by the beer: “This isn’t some kind of negotiation, is it? I mean, she didn’t send you, did she?”
The question left a space for all the little sounds of the night to creep in: the cry of a shorebird, the wind scouring the beach, something ticking in the depths of the heater. She dropped her eyes. “No, that’s not it at all,” she murmured.
Well, what is it then? he wanted to say — almost said — but he felt a tightening across the surface of him, his flesh prickling and contracting as if all his defenses were going down at once, and the answer came to him. She was here for him, for a quick fix for loneliness and despair, here to listen to a voice besides Mrs. Rastrow’s, to sleep in another bed, any bed, make contact where before there had been none. He got up from the bed, moved awkwardly toward her, and she got up too. They were as close as they’d been at the door. He could smell her, a sweet heat rising from the folds of the sweater, caught in the coils of her hair. “Did you want to maybe go over to the tavern?” she said. “For another beer, I mean? I only brought the two.”
He didn’t want another beer, hadn’t wanted the first one. “No,” he said in a whisper, and then he was holding her, pulling her to him as if she had no bones in her body, everything new and soft and started from scratch. Her cheek was pressed to his, scintillating, electric, her cheek, and she let him kiss her and her bones were gone and she was melting down away from the chair and into the bed. She didn’t taste like Ruth. Didn’t feel like her. Didn’t conform to him the way Ruth had through all those years when she was well and alive and lit up like a meteor, and he had to say something, he didn’t have any choice. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m sorry. I really don’t.”
She was beneath him on the bed, her hair in a sprawl. He pulled away from her — pushed himself up as if he were doing some sort of exercise, calisthenics of the will, the heaviest of heavy lifting — and before he knew what he was doing he was out the door and into the night. He thought he heard her call out his name, but the surf took it away. He was furious, raging, pounding his way down the dark strand as if every step was a murder—That dried-up old bitch, and who does she think she is, anyway?
A sudden wind came up off the shore to rake the trees, the branches rattling like claws, and the smell assaulted him again, the smell of rottenness and corruption, of animals and their glands. He kept walking, the wind in his face. Head down, shoulders pumping, he followed his legs till he got beyond the lights of the farthest house and the sky closed down and melded with the shore. There was something there ahead on the beach, a shape spawned from the shadows, and it took him a moment to see what it was: a trash can, let’s all pitch in and keep the island clean, turned on its side in a spill of litter. And inside the can, the animal itself, coiled round the wedge of its head and the twin lights of its eyes. “Get out of that!” he shouted, looking for something to throw. “Get out!”
IN THE MORNING he made his way back up the long dirt drive and signed away the property. By noon, he was gone.
Chicxulub
MY DAUGHTER is walking along the roadside late at night — too late, really, for a seventeen-year-old to be out alone even in a town as safe as this — and it is raining, the first rain of the season, the streets slick with a fine immiscible glaze of water and petrochemicals so that even a driver in full possession of her faculties, a driver who hasn’t consumed two apple martinis and three glasses of Hitching Post pinot noir before she gets behind the wheel of the car, will have trouble keeping the thing off the sidewalk and out of the gutters, the shrubbery, the highway median, for Christ’s sake.…But that’s not really what I want to talk about, or not yet, anyway.
Have you heard of Tunguska? In Russia?
This was the site of the last-known large-body impact on the Earth’s surface, nearly a hundred years ago. Or that’s not strictly accurate — the meteor, an estimated sixty yards across, never actually touched down. The force of its entry — the compression and superheating of the air beneath it — caused it to explode some twenty-five thousand feet above the ground, but then the term “explode” hardly does justice to the event. There was a detonation — a flash, a thunderclap — equal to the explosive power of eight hundred Hiroshima bombs. Thirty miles away, reindeer in their loping herds were struck dead by the blast wave, and the clothes of a hunter another thirty miles beyond that burst into flame even as he was poleaxed to the ground. Seven hundred square miles of Siberian forest were leveled in an instant. If the meteor had hit only four hours later it would have exploded over St. Petersburg and annihilated every living thing in that glorious and baroque city. And this was only a rock. And it was only sixty yards across.
My point? You’d better get down on your knees and pray to your gods, because each year this big spinning globe we ride intersects the orbits of some twenty million asteroids, at least a thousand of which are bigger than a mile in diameter.
But my daughter. She’s out there in the dark and the rain, walking home. Maureen and I bought her a car, a Honda Civic, the safest thing on four wheels, but the car was used — pre-owned, in dealer-speak — and as it happens it’s in the shop with transmission problems and, because she just had to see her friends and gossip and giggle and balance slick multicolored clumps of raw fish and pickled ginger on conjoined chopsticks at the mall, Kimberly picked her up and Kimberly will bring her home. Maddy has a cell phone and theoretically she could have called us, but she didn’t — or that’s how it appears. And so she’s walking. In the rain. And Alice K. Petermann of 16 Briar Lane, white, divorced, a realtor with Hyperion who has picked at a salad and left her glasses on the bar, loses control of her car.