Should have been. Has been in every French movie but this one for the past what, twenty years?” She put down her glass and let out a short two-note laugh that was like birdsong, a laugh that entranced him, and he wasn’t worried about work now, not work or anything else, and here was the bottle in the bucket, the wine cold as the cellar it came from. “And then the whole village comes out and applauds her at the end for staying true to her romantic ideals — and the husband, Jesus.”
Nothing could irritate him. Nothing could touch him. He was in love, the pelicans were gliding over the belly of the bay and her eyes were lewd and beautiful and pleased with themselves, but he had to pull the stopper here for just a minute. “Martine’s not like that,” he said. “I’m not like that.”
She looked over her shoulder before digging out a cigarette — this was California, after all — and when she bent to light it her hair fell across her face. She came up smiling, the smoke snatched away from her lips and neutralized on the breeze the moment she exhaled. Discussion over.
Marcy was twenty-eight, educated at Berkeley, and she and her sister had opened an artists’ supply shop on a side street downtown.
She’d been a double major in art and film. She rode a bike to work.
She was Asian. Or Chinese, she corrected him. Of Chinese descent, anyway. Her family, as she’d informed him on the first date with enough irony in her voice to foreground and bury the topic at the same time, went back four generations to the honorable great-grandfather who’d smuggled himself across the Pacific inside a clichéd flour barrel hidden in the clichéd hold of a clichéd merchant ship. She’d grown up in Syracuse, in a suburban development, and her accent — the a’s flattened so that his name came out Eelan rather than Alan — just killed him, so incongruous coming from someone, as, well — the words out of his mouth before he knew what he was saying — as exotic-looking as her. And then, because he couldn’t read her expression — had he gone too far? — he told her he was impressed because he only went back three generations, his grandfather having come over from Cork, but if it was in a barrel it would have been full of whiskey. “And Martine’s from Paris,” he’d added. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
The bottle was half-gone by the time they ordered — and there was no hurry, no hurry at all, because they were both taking the afternoon off, and no argument — and when the food came they looked at each other for just the briefest fleeting particle of a moment before he ordered a second bottle. And then they were eating and everything slowed down until all of creation seemed to come into focus in a new way. He sipped the wine, chewed, looked into her unparalleled eyes and felt the sun lay a hand across his shoulders, and in a sudden blaze of apprehension he glanced up at the gull that appeared on the railing behind her and saw the way the breeze touched its feathers and the sun whitened its breast till there was nothing brighter and more perfect in the world — this creature, his fellow creature, and he was here to see it. He wanted to tell Marcy about it, about the miracle of the moment, the layers peeled back, revelatory, joyous, but instead he reached over to top off her glass and said, “So tell me about the shoes.”
Later, after Mr. Apodaca had backed out of the driveway in his little white convertible with the Mercedes sign emblazoned on the front of it and the afternoon melted away in a slurry of phone calls and messages — OMG! Chilty likes Alex Turtieff, can you believe it?
— Dolores made them chiles rellenos with carrot and jícama sticks and ice cream for dessert. Then Allie quizzed her and Lisette over their homework until the house fell quiet and all she could hear was the faint pulse of her father’s music from the family room. She’d done her math and was working on a report about Aaron Burr for her history teacher, Mr. Compson, when she got up and went to the kitchen for a glass of juice or maybe hot chocolate in the microwave — and she wouldn’t know which till she was standing there in the kitchen with the recessed lights glowing over the stone countertops and the refrigerator door open wide. She wasn’t thinking about anything in particular — Aaron Burr was behind her now, upstairs, on her desk — and when she passed the archway to the family room the flash of the TV screen caught her eye and she paused a moment. Her father was there still, stretched out on the couch with a book, the TV muted and some game on, football, baseball, and the low snarl of his music in the background. His face had that blank absorbed look he got while reading and sometimes when he was just sitting there staring across the room or out the window at nothing, and he had the mug cradled in one hand, balanced on his chest beside the book.
He’d sat with them over dinner, but he hadn’t eaten — he was going out later, he told her. For dinner. A late dinner. He didn’t say who with, but she knew it was the Asian woman. Marcy. She’d seen her exactly twice, behind the window of her car, and Marcy had waved at her both times, a little curl of the fingers and a flash of the palm. There was an Asian girl in her class — she was Chinese — and her name was Xuan. That seemed right for an Asian girl, Xuan.
Different. A name that said who she was and where she was from, far away, a whole ocean away. But Marcy? She didn’t think so.
“Hey,” her father said, lifting his head to peer over the butt of the couch, and she realized she’d been standing there watching him,
“what’s up? Homework done? Need any help? How about that essay — want me to proof that essay for you? What’s it on, Madison?
Or Burr. Burr, right?”
“That’s okay.”
“You sure?” His voice was slow and compacted, as if it wasn’t composed of vibrations of the vocal cords, the air passing through the larynx like in her science book, but made of something heavier, denser. He would be taking a taxi tonight, she could see that, and then maybe she — Marcy — would drive him back home. “Because I could do it, no problem. I’ve got”—and she watched him lift his watch to his face and rotate his wrist—“half an hour or so, forty-five minutes.”
“That’s okay,” she said.
She was sipping her hot chocolate and reading a story for English by William Faulkner, the author’s picture in her textbook a freeze-frame of furious eyes and conquered hair, when she heard her father’s voice riding a current down the hall, now murmurous, now pinched and electric, then dense and sluggish all over again. It took her a minute: he was reading Lisette her bedtime story. The house was utterly still and she held her breath, listening, till all of a sudden she could make out the words. He was reading Balto, a story she’d loved when she was little, when she was Lisette’s age, and as his voice came to her down the hall she could picture the illustrations: Balto, the lead dog of the sled team, radiating light from a sunburst on his chest and the snowstorm like a monstrous hand closing over him, the team lighting through the Alaskan wind and ice and temperatures of forty below zero to deliver serum to the sick children in Nome — and those children would die if Balto didn’t get through.
Diphtheria. It was a diphtheria epidemic and the only plane available was broken down — or no, it had been dismantled for the winter.
What’s diphtheria? she’d asked her father, and he’d gone to the shelf and pulled down the encyclopedia to give her the answer, and that was heroic in itself, because as he settled back onto her bed, Lisette snuggled up beside her and rain at the windows and the bedside lamp the only thing between them and darkness absolute, he’d said, You see, there’s everything in books, everything you could ever want.
Balto’s paws were bleeding. The ice froze between his toes. The other dogs kept holding back, but he was the lead dog and he turned on them and snarled, fought them just to keep them in their traces, to keep them going. Balto. With his harnessed shoulders and shaggy head and the furious unconquerable will that drove him all through that day and into the night that was so black there was no way of telling if they were on the trail or not.