was hard to know where Mike would land if he jumped.
To get my head on the pillow, I nudged him a little. He knew how to breathe from his diaphragm even in his sleep. I touched the spot over his missing appendix, surprised that he didn’t wake, and curled into his back. Then froze. I heard a boat move through the water, close to the house.
I made a ring out of my left thumb and forefinger and fitted it around his penis. He stiffened and angled and his hips moved in what appeared to be deep REM sleep. His back twitched a little. I waited, as if a horn or bell would go off, signaling the start of my trade with Jane.
I slipped my hand away and put it under my ribs to feel my irregular heartbeat. I thought about basic survival, considered social membranes, tried to review one of those rules that keep people in check. The house sounded like an engine cooling. If I just shut my eyes for one minute, I’d be able to straighten things out. But it was too easy to siphon off his REM. I hadn’t slept in days and I guess I’d exhausted all thoughts of survival.
......
When Jane left Mike, she took her grandmother’s Jaguar. A coffee-brown machine with a mocha interior and custom tortoiseshell trim along the dash and armrests. It was built in 1965 and I had spent summers from the time I was eight sticking to its leather seats, flipping the ashtray covers open and shut with Jane. Her grandmother, Franny, ground forty years of Chanel No. 5 into the ball of the stick shift. She was big on original ownership. But now Franny was dead and her family still hadn’t decided what they’d do with the car.
Jane had come down to the kitchen at four that morning. I was up because I never slept at Franny’s house. But Jane typically woke in the afternoon when she drank hard. So I didn’t understand why she was standing there, fully dressed, as if she wanted to get an early start.
She had that rehashed Audrey Hepburn look: blue summer dress, thin belt, sandals fastened with leather straps. She filled the pot and scooped level measures of coffee into the machine, sat down at the table across from me. She looked as if she were going to say something, stopped, then told me Mike and the girls were still asleep, as if I needed reassurance about this. I listened to the Pacific as it hit the pilings, and I looked at Jane’s lipstick, not sure why she’d bothered. Her eyelashes—they would have disappeared if it weren’t for the mascara.
—You do something to your hair? I asked.
It appeared to be hacked at, not cut. I didn’t think it had been like that earlier in the evening.
—Sort of.
I began to glide the salt and pepper shakers across the table, waiting for her to continue. Figure eights, in and out of the light from the overhead spot. Jane had once been offered a job as an eye model with a good New York agency. You could magnify those eyes until you were looking down at Earth. They were that blue. It’s a bad form of envy to want someone else’s face. I tipped my head to one side to get the full effect of her butchered hair.
—You use Mona’s scissors?
She stopped the movement of the salt but couldn’t quite reach the hand with the pepper.
—In a fair world you’d have kids, Mattie.
Her daughters were asleep in the clock room. Mona was four then, Livvy fourteen.
—I’m too tired for the fair-world conversation, I said.
—You can’t expect to . . . no, I don’t mean that. I don’t know how long you plan on . . .
I had that queasiness I get when a salesman leans against my buzzer.
—I’m only thirty-five and I didn’t sleep last night, Jane.
—Humor me with a what-if.
—I should have gotten up to read.
—You want a whole life, don’t you? she asked.
—Define whole life.
—Marriage . . .
I saw the strain, the need to talk. I knew it wasn’t about my sense of family. Whatever it was, I couldn’t respond. In that way you imagine you have influence over events, I’ve punished myself for that moment.
—You didn’t sign me up for an on-line dating service, did you? Because I’ve looked at those men.
She began to fold and unfold one of the linen napkins left on the table.
—I know this is about Franny. . . . I open the towel cabinet and it’s like she’s standing there, waiting for me to make some right decision, I said.
—About the towels?
—Which ones should go to the women’s shelter because the edges haven’t frayed, which ones to the Salvation Army. . . .
—She’d appreciate what you’re doing. I appreciate it. More than you know.
Periodically, Jane used to send me snaps taken at their home outside Boston. Mona wore reindeer antlers, or rabbit ears, sat by giant jack-o’-lanterns. Livvy was the one with her back to the camera, walking out of the frame, her hair blue or green, the back of her jacket pounded with studs that formed messages I couldn’t read. I had a soft spot for Livvy. Mike was the lens. It was his job to catch and measure light, to wait for conditions. I watched what he did to get a picture. He tugged on something emotional, sometimes the thing he couldn’t state. Maybe he’d frame a tiny gas station sign in one corner of an image that said exactly what he couldn’t express with the large people in the foreground. But if your eye was sharp and you knew how to read backwards or thought to hold it up to a mirror, it was all there. I looked for Mike’s face in those photographs—sometimes Jane would nail him. The dark moods and then a shot that would make me think A Hard Day’s Night, the antic self. But it was mostly Jane, and sometimes I had the sense, looking at her, that she understood something I was going through at the time. Maybe it was a mind trick, but that was what I thought Jane did, made people feel no one else fully understood them. I said that to Mike one time, and he laughed. Later he said maybe I was right.
—You look like you’re going to the store, I said to Jane.
Up the road, Von’s grocery was open twenty-four hours. That was the place to order a sheet cake if you had to, the red frosting dyed your tongue red, the blue blue. You could get arugula at Von’s, deodorant, hybrid chickens.
—I’ve never said this to you, maybe because we were both a little drunk at the time, but I told Mike once, if anything happened to me, he should marry you.
—You’re upsetting my stomach, I said.
I got busy wiping down the edges of the sink, my face heated.
—He brought it up the next morning when we were perfectly sober. He asked me if I had been serious. I said: Yes. And he said . . . well, he said a lot of things.
I couldn’t tell if she was trying to peel my layers or if she had done that already and was holding me up to the light. I watched her remove the coffee pot halfway into its drip. Coffee spit against the hot plate, a trickle slipped onto the counter and pooled. She threw her napkin down to soak it up.
At moments like that I pictured Franny smoking a cigarette close to the window so the fumes wouldn’t fill the
