road. She turned right, away from the beach.
I pictured a sudden collision, her legs squeezing together spasmodically. Milk like sex, soaking her skirt, the leather bench seat, working its way into crevices, plans.
—Come on, I said, as if Jane were still there, standing next to me, thinking of the girls’ breakfast, wondering if she had enough cereal in the house.
The fog failed to put out my anger. If she wanted to trade, I had very different things to put on the table. She lived in a six-bedroom home outside Boston with a studio above the garage. I lived in a remodeled and largely reduced loft space in Chicago, two bedrooms, one of them only ten by ten, one bath, the porches had been an add-on, making use of the framework of the old elevator shafts. A courtyard in the center of the building. Jane was a set designer for large regional theaters. I appraised fine arts and antiques. She worked part time. I worked chronically. But she had returned to the same guy each night, the same conversations, the habit of sleeping on one side of the bed or the other, listening for their girls in the dark. Forms of possession I didn’t know.
I did have good friends in Chicago. I went to a fitness center and had started a kickboxing class. I liked to shoot pool, joined a team once, which nudged me to get a monogrammed cue and a special pair of gloves for a decent grip, small cubes of blue chalk. I tried a birding group. I was a collector. I had an investment in antique neon signs and the works of small-scale tube-benders. Sometimes old neon came through the auction house. Sometimes I went out on the road to find it. One of my signs read: Watch for Signs. I had them mounted on the walls of the loft and they advertised The Alpine Motel and Texa gas and Night Stop, which probably had something to do with trains or buses or stopping something you were up to in the middle of the night. I never imagined I’d have large holdings. But how can you know?
I believe Lois, my mother, had communicated to me largely through signs when I was a child. She had a beautiful hand and sometimes she doodled a picture of my face and then tacked it on the bathroom mirror along with many reminders, aphorisms, and general warnings. She left one kind of note if she were up drinking in the middle of the night: the scrawl tighter, loopier, many words underlined and capitalized. And another kind of message if she came in fresh from sailing and the boat had placed well in a race. Sometimes she had an expansiveness that brought her into the moment. She bought fresh shelving paper for the kitchen or stopped at the drugstore for cigarettes, found me new dot-to-dot books, and these things she communicated directly, though the shelves went unlined.
But for all that education, I couldn’t decipher Jane’s signs that morning. I left the garage door up, afraid the automatic opener would stir the house.
I imagined she had reached Highway 101 by then and was traveling north. Like Franny, Jane didn’t like the congestion of LA, the heat of San Diego, the enterprise of Mexico. North would take her past Von’s, the bird refuge, the zoo, and then, I imagined, she’d hit the switch to put the top up on the Jaguar, determined to make it to the Bay Area without a stop. Of course she’d remember you can’t put the top up at freeway speeds. So she’d pull onto the shoulder and discover that the mechanism was broken, the top frozen in its housing: one of those repairs Franny had left undone.
If the marine layer burned off, we had planned to spend the morning tracking the girls from the lower deck of the house. Mona had talked about using an inner tube, which would mean one of us joining her. In the afternoon Jane and I would have chipped away at Franny’s things, probably the vases, while the girls entertained themselves. Instead she had driven into a place where the signs seemed to be directing her to unlimited freedom, the tubing on the neon in good shape, no krypton leaks.
I walked through the oil stains on the concrete slab of the garage and left prints on the white linoleum. Heading upstairs, I was aware of the ocean caught in the panes of the French doors, the light. I went into Franny’s bedroom, and that was when I got into bed with Mike, and wrapped into sleep with him.
Before that morning, I had thought that certain feelings were invisible and stayed that way, that I could tunnel under and live off bomb-shelter air indefinitely. I hadn’t told anyone that I was in love with Mike. Jane and I had met him when we were in college. And then of course they became a couple and so on.
Over the years, I had sometimes found myself sleeping with men who reminded me of Mike. Maybe they loved horse racing, or felt uncomfortable in small rooms, or liked to fix things, or empathized too much, or maybe they just didn’t mind my storytelling, and even encouraged it. But I never held on to those men, never introduced them around or took them to familiar restaurants. Mostly they came through my loft in Chicago, looking for towels, razor blades, toast with preserves, and they didn’t understand that I was sleeping with someone else, sleeping right through them. They were small acts. Their bodies changed, they softened, and then a round of intense muscle building. The way they fixed on me, that changed too. And when I put my reading glasses on, they distorted entirely and became guys with names I couldn’t always remember.
Except for this man a couple of years ago, who pried open one of my eyelids, midact, and asked: Who am I? I thought that sex was jarring a metaphysical pin loose. I untangled myself and threw the lubricant back into the bedside table drawer. He accused me of having someone else on my brain, he could feel it. His old girlfriend: she had had someone else on the brain. I’m disappointed, he said. It was one of those moments when a man thinks he can put on your father’s jacket and parade around. I’m disappointed in you. He got up and found his clothes in a heap and left. It was raining, which almost added a note of tragedy to his departure. I watched him from my window. He was drenched when he hailed a taxi.
two
I don’t get many clear messages about the future. No crawls at the bottom of my mental screen. I would make a terrible oracle. But sometimes I know things. I knew when Franny was hit by the train. Well, I didn’t know that it was a train that took her out, but I knew she was out of life. And when you get that kind of sporadic but intense signal, it’s hard to understand how you can miss the obvious things. I missed things with Jane. I should have seen she would take off.
Two weeks before she drove away in the Jaguar, she had phoned me in Chicago. She asked if I’d go through the estate with her. We had lost Franny six months earlier, in the winter, so I had already gone out to California for the funeral. When Jane called, I was getting ready for an off-hours interview, hoping to pick up a gig in an auction house. Afterwards, I had plans to meet friends at a pub. I had been out of work for a while. It was a particularly bad time to make a second trip.
—You’re it, she said, as if we were playing a child’s game.
—I know a great appraiser in LA: Tony. Tony has four brothers and they’re all appraisers and they’d probably all come up to the house just to see it and . . .
—Things will go quickly, she said.
—I guess anything’s possible, but . . .
—I don’t want five guys named Tony.
—No, they’re . . . I know plenty of others. Some of the best.
—But that’s what you do, you go through stuff. You’re an expert.
I didn’t say: That’s like assuming you’re willing to mutilate yourself because you sell knives for a living.
Jane knew I didn’t want to be the one to break up Franny’s house. It had always been my catch basin, safe landing. Jane’s relationship with her grandmother had been held together by friction, and though no one ever said this, though no one fully implied it, Jane was blood and I was stray. And
