He stepped through the soft ground around the building to the side window and peeked through. He saw only a small group twenty feet from the podium talking about matters that had nothing to do with him. He moved stealthily for his jacket, then walked quickly out the door again.
When he made his way through the lot again under the full yellow moon, he felt a hand on his back, fingers curling at his collar. Two cars had boxed him in. His heart raced, and his hands balled into fists. He turned and the woman in the long coat stood with her arm around a teenaged girl. The girl looked frightened, an infant animal on a highway.
“I just wanted you to meet my daughter,” the woman said, and she stood back, away from the light. A man in an army jacket stood watching alongside a lanky boy resting against a car.
“She’s a National Merit Scholar. She’s got herself a full scholarship to Notre Dame University,” the woman said. “She speaks French and Latin and she grew up in this town.”
For a moment Kistler couldn’t place himself. He did not know what he was doing out in the mud with these people. He glanced back at the firehouse and remembered. And then the girl began to speak in a foreign voice, in what Kistler guessed was Latin. It was like nothing he had ever heard. It sounded to him like a benediction. He began to shiver. As the girl spoke, Kistler’s hand reached up and gently touched her cheek. It was as warm and smooth as sunlight.
Spectator
When I was twenty-five, Abby was seven. When I was thirty-two, she was fourteen. This is something I dwell on, though I know it isn’t constructive.
She is more worldly than a lot of thirty-year-olds I know, more so than my ex-wife for instance. Abby is comfortable with herself, comfortable with me, and still I see myself meeting her at a playground when I’d just married Lynn and started my life. Abby’s in overalls standing near a swing set and I’m in a rented tuxedo, watching her.
For nearly two months Abby’s been living with me and we almost never step out unless we have to. I teach painting at the college on Wednesdays and build furniture in my house, and Abby’s looking into grad school. Anthropology or psychology. She wants to see the world, which I’d like to do with her if I can save up the cash to make it happen.
It is inhumanly cold here in Ithaca, and the streets are sheets of ice. We haven’t seen the sun for seventeen days, which means we have to find ways to keep indoors interesting. Like playing strip backgammon or downloading music from places like Iceland or Tunisia or making five-course dinners. Or inventing games. We tell the life stories of bit characters in the movies we see, then compose new story lines for them in which they get rich, or end up in prison.
She is only nineteen, but I’d swear she’s lived longer than me, or just learned more from staying up reading every night, or writing letters to her future self. (“It isn’t a diary, I hate diaries.”) She is nocturnal; daylight unnerves her. If she goes out in the morning to get us coffee, she wears my Blue Jays hat, tipped over her forehead, and a pair of sunglasses.
Abby says I’m the first one to get her talking about her messed-up past. I open her up, she says. We start our talks when it’s been dark a few hours and we’ve eaten dinner, drunk some wine, maybe smoked a little weed. Then she says something that sends me spinning; never fails.
One night last week, Abby made some tea and put a Sigur Rós CD on and told me a story about a crazy aunt who lived in Montana, painted landscapes, and eventually hung herself, and she caught the woman’s voice and gestures disturbingly well, shaking like an old lady and then easing into a calm, low-voiced drawl.
Her body is so damned perfect, even, or especially, with the ten extra pounds she’s put on living here, which have softened her edges. Her skin is pale and freckled on her shoulders, and under her light green eyes. I watched her speak as she moved her arm in drunken brushstrokes, and when she looked at me, she fell silent, as though sorry she’d told me anything. Again, I felt like a voyeur.
“Go on,” I said. “Keep going.”
She said, “I don’t want to. Let’s go to bed.”
Another night she told me how she spent a summer living on a beach. Not in a house near the beach, but in a sleeping bag with her sister and her mother on the beach in Isla Vista, California. And they begged food.
Picture this. We’re eating a huge meal of eggplant lasagna and sharing a ten-dollar bottle of wine and she’s telling me about begging for food because her mother figured she could store up the welfare checks and take a trip.
“We got taken in a few times, and we snuck into a house for two weeks,” Abby says. “It was furnished and everything, with a big-screen TV, and art on the walls, but we didn’t turn anything on unless we had to. We snuck out the back door when we heard a car pulling in and that was that.”
She showed me a Polaroid of her and her sister, about seven and eight, waking up in a big blue sleeping bag, with their hair matted against their faces and their mother sitting next to them, wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette.
I started thinking about where I was that summer: twenty-five and dropped out of college. I worked that summer painting and rehabbing houses with my father. But what if I’d decided to drive out west like a lot of people did and I’d seen those three sleeping on the beach? What would I have thought?
That was the summer I fell in love with Lynn and locked myself in Ithaca for another ten years.
“Somewhere warm and cheap,” she said. “Somewhere like Mexico.”
Like someone’s grandfather I wake at six, and I start in cutting and shaping wood. I’m building a rocker this week; I’m smoothing the spindles with a sander and I’m setting the headboard on the stiles, which are perfect this time, not too thin or too blocky. This was supposed to be for the owner of my favorite bar but I’m thinking of giving him a different one I made over the summer. This one is Abby’s.
My workroom is spacious and drafty, with hardwood floors covered in wood chips, paint, and dust, which holds the room’s light, like gauze. My father built this house, along with five or six similar ones in this town, big rambling things with front porches, fireplaces, and shingled garrets on top and high ceilings and mullioned bay windows, the kind of places that look instantly old and cost half your paycheck to heat. While I work, Abby sleeps, eight feet up, twenty feet away in my loft. She snores. She’s the only woman I’ve known who does. I can hear her sometimes in the kitchen, but I never tease her about it because I know why she snores. Her mother broke her nose five years ago in a fight, a few months before she died. I’m the only one who knows that.
Abby says we fucked each other to death in a previous life, that it was written on our tombstones. She’s joking, but it would explain a lot. I have never before been so lost in something like this, where it can happen at any instant in any room without notice. But Friday night, after we’ve been kissing and working things up to a high boil, Abby switches the rules on me. She pulls at the end of my belt and then as if remembering something, she lets it drop. We’re on the couch in my living room.
“You think we could go a night without doing this?” she asks me.
“A whole entire night?” I ask, smiling, and I reach back to touch her thigh.
“I’m serious,” she says. “Let’s see if we can. Let’s see if we can sleep in separate beds. Cold turkey. Twenty-four hours.”
“What would that prove?”
“That we don’t need it,” she says. “I want to prove to myself I don’t need this.”
“I need this,” I say.
As I said those words I wished I had them back.
Abby sinks under her hair. She stares down. She’s wearing a plain white T-shirt and cutoff army pants, and she is painfully beautiful.
“Maybe that’s not so good,” she says. “Maybe it’s not good that we’re putting everything on this right now. Maybe I should stop missing classes.”
“Let’s not play this,” I say. “I mean, I want to be
with you and there’s no reason we need to take a test to find that out.”
“Let’s just go one night, one lousy night without sleeping together and then we can go on every other night doing whatever we want.”
For an instant I’m angry. I’m asking myself why I’m with a teenager; why I’m playing high school games instead of living with an adult.
Something shifts between us, or did a while back. I tell her she can have the bed; I’ll sleep right here.
“It’s just one night, okay?” she says, and she kisses me on the nose like I’m a child. “We’re not going to die or anything. You’ll see.”
From two until dawn, I pace by the loft watching Abby sleep. It is exactly like being dead, being unable to touch her. I watch her knees bend to her chest and her face brush the pillow. Her nose, curved and long, is dormant above her mouth, which is open to let her breathe. Her lips are chapped, and her hair is wild across the top of the bed. She’s wearing the same T-shirt she wore the last three nights, a long College Town Bagel shirt with a picture of a bagel.
I’m thinking of all the places she’s slept in, growing up around California and Boston and upstate New York. Her father died when she was two, and her mother was a little crazy. No one lives on a beach with her kids or moves ten times in four years unless she’s crazy. The time Abby’s mother broke her nose was when Abby moved her stuff to her friend Vicky’s house. Abby said she’d forgotten most of what the fight was about, but it had something to do with her mother’s boyfriend.
When her mother found her, it was ten days later, and her mother was so drunk she embarrassed Abby in front of Vicky’s parents, slurring her words and cursing and then breaking down in tears. She lost all control is what she did, and she knocked Abby straight on with the base of her palm. Abby said it felt like her nose had been pushed back through her head. Blood poured over her T-shirt and her jeans and her bare feet, she said, more blood than she’d ever seen, and she couldn’t breathe.
“Other people’s mothers don’t act like this,” Abby said. “Other people don’t have mothers who break their noses.” She was fourteen when it happened.
I felt so sad and empty when she told me that, though I know if she’d grown up happy, she’d likely be sleeping in a dorm room right now. I wonder what her mother would make of me, closer to her age than Abby’s. She probably wouldn’t care.
I want so badly to climb into the loft with her. But she’s taken control. It’s my house and she’s directing the show. I can’t sleep. I’m watching Abby, and the sky outside is pale with new light.
Saturday, I take her out to see Liz Phair perform at Cornell. We drink a pitcher of margaritas and smoke a joint before leaving and Abby is real physical, running her hand over my leg while I drive. Last night is forgotten. The sidewalks are saffron from the streetlamps and Friday’s snow. Not a star to see, the sky is gray and fierce.
She smiles at me like a little girl, like the girl in the sleeping bag. I can hear her wheezing hard through that broken nose, and I try to get my breath to match hers. For a minute or so it is just the human noise of one imperfect breath, two broken bodies working together. I feel a warmth rush over my head.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks. I stop at a light behind a van filled with kids staring out the window. One presses his nose into the glass and turns his head sideways, which Abby doesn’t see. She is looking at me.
“How good life is,” I say.
At the theater we play the overview game. Abby and I eavesdrop or spy on people and try to size up their lives from their faces, their arguments, their clothes. We sit at diners and watch old couples arguing, or new couples awkwardly ordering breakfast after they wound up somehow in bed together. We lay bets on whether they’d make it to a third date, or a fifth. “I’m betting he blows her off on the fourth date, comes up with a phantom stomach flu,” Abby would say.
We walk along the second-floor railing, looking down on people buying drinks, posturing, talking. People are young here, high school and college, woolen caps and piercings. There are a few older earth types and the teaching crowd but I don’t see anyone I recognize.
“He’s driving her crazy,” Abby says.
“Who?”
“That guy in the gray T-shirt. He’s driving that woman crazy.”
The two are talking to another couple.
“Look where she’s standing. Look at her hands,” she says.
They’re clenched in balls, okay. And the man in the gray T-shirt has his shoulder just past her so he can’t really see her while he speaks. Yes, I can see that. We stand watching. The woman from the other couple touches the man’s shoulder while she speaks to him. He laughs.
“What do you think she’s telling him?”
“She’s complimenting him on something, it looks like,” I say.
The woman, the gray T-shirt’s date, pulls up closer to the other woman, leaning forward like a runner pushing for an inside lane. Then the two guys start talking, as though there’s no one else there.
Abby’s look says Can you believe this? And then I realize I know these people. I don’t say anything. The guy in the brown suede blazer—I think his name is Daniel—says something to the group and then walks over to the line by the bar. Abby takes my hand and squeezes it. And then, this is what amazes me. From the bar, Daniel looks straight up at Abby and grins.
She smiles back and then turns away.
“That was strange,” I say. “You know that guy?”
“I don’t think so,” she says, but a chill runs through my chest. What does that mean: I don’t think so? Daniel’s look is the kind a guy gives someone he knows, maybe slept with. I glare down and watch him order his drink and rest his elbows on the bar, and when I turn toward Abby, she is walking slowly away.
When Liz Phair, pale and wispy, takes the stage, I drift into a funk—torturing myself about Daniel. I don’t hear the music; I just see him. I remember where I know him from, high school. He was a year behind me, bright, loud, and into politics. He played in a band, I think, and his father taught at one of the universities, which is what I think Daniel is doing now. That and getting a Ph.D. in something. It’s amazing what you can remember when it comes down to it. I don’t know if Abby knows him, but his grinning at her silences me.
I imagine him meeting her at a Cornell party, Abby in ripped jeans and a thin white T-shirt, and this pretentious fuck rattling on about art and music, while people around them hold wineglasses and tilt their heads thoughtfully. Then he takes her to his apartment where as a prelude to hooking up they listen to our music and tell each other our stories. That’s what kills me—they talk in our voices.
Later that night I dream I’m with Abby, and we run into Lynn. Her hair is streaked with blond highlights now, and she’s clearly done time at the gym. She has a child in tow—things have panned out for her—and she looks at Abby and says, “My God, Willie, she’s beautiful. She’s young but she’s absolutely beautiful.”
I say, “I know. We’re living together now,” and Abby turns her head away, declining her role in this. I say “This is what I wanted” or something like that, and Lynn’s kid starts untying my shoe. I’m telling him to stop and Abby starts walking away. I run after her, diving on her eventually, and when I wake up I’m kissing Abby and holding her tight, though she’s still snoring and smelling like sleep.
When I shift on top of her, legs around her stomach, she whispers, “Easy, cowboy. I’m not going anywhere.”
I’m thinking of Daniel when Abby tells me her friend Carl is having a breakdown, and she’s thinking of spending the weekend at his house, do I mind?
“What’s the problem?” I ask, trying to sound trusting. I can’t imagine that analyzing Carl is what she’s longing to do.
“He’s just got a lot of pressures. Too much to live up to. He’s got no one else to talk to.”
I know Carl. Carl was in the painting class I taught last fall at the college, the one where I met Abby. He is s
tick thin and pockmarked, and he drew ghetto scenes of New York, where he grew up, long-bodied men and women with exaggerated features. He is someone who I imagine has crises all the time.
“Well, why don’t you ask him to come here,” I say.
“Sure, if that’s okay with you,” she says.
“Let me think about it,” I say, but there’s no way I’d let that fuckup in my house.
“I’m losing my friends,” she says. “I’m losing them because I’m not ever seeing them. It’s starting to get to me—being here all the time.”
“Let me think,” I say. “Sure. Do what you want.” I’m pouting.
I’ll be thirty-seven in less than a month.
I go back to work on the rocker, and I listen as Abby talks on her cell phone.
“Hi, Carl,” she says, and she tells him she doesn’t know about the weekend. She laughs a lot and tells him to eat well and take care of his body and she gives him a list of breathing and relaxation methods to work on, rib cage out, shoulders back, and some yoga chants that she’d taught me. “Rama, Rama, Rama,” and then, I couldn’t believe this, she starts singing to him on the phone. The voice is like a ten-year-old’s, singing high-pitched, third-grade songs: “The Muffin Man,” “Frère Jacques,” the Brady Bunch theme, and I feel like I’ve caught her in bed with someone.
Last summer I saw Lynn’s wedding announcement in the Sunday Ithaca Journal. There was a photograph of my ex in a white gown, looking very pretty, like it was her first wedding, and next to her was a stout, long-haired man in a morning coat, a real estate broker from Syracuse named Evan. I was amazed at how little I felt. It was as if I’d barely known her, as though she were some girl I’d hung out with a half-dozen times.
If pushed, I can remember her being high-strung, doting, and as determined to talk through our issues as I was committed to avoiding them. We stayed together four years, two of which I stayed true and never went out much and the others where I rarely came home before 2 A.M., and I’d sleep on the living room sofa. It was the period after we lost our baby and everything shut in on us. She got pregnant in our second year, and for a while it brought us close; it really did. I built a crib and a high chair in my workroom, and I thought about ways in which we could make more money as she got bigger and went to sleep earlier than me every night. Things weren’t perfect between us, but I thought being parents would ground us in a good way—rid us of the threat of possibility; I am not good when I have too many options.