Aquamarine (3 page)

She knows every possible detail of his schedule. She has his time all mapped out on the inside of the cover of her Re/Max appointment book. This is essential. She can’t have any life with him, can’t even have dates or assignations. She can only find him when she can, and to do that she has to know where he is at any moment that might become a possible meeting moment. Sometimes, even when she can’t get to him, she suddenly has to anyway. One time, last week, she was so suddenly flooded with the need to connect with him that she pulled over to a mailbox, left the motor running, and jumped out before she realized it wouldn’t do. It would have to be a pay phone.

Everything works out tonight. It’s like they are both inside the same oiled watchworks. His league isn’t up yet when she gets there; he’s just hanging out in the bar in his brown UPS pants and a short-sleeved black shirt with gold piping on the pocket and block animal hospital in satin letters sewn on the back.

He has just cracked a joke. She can tell from the even level of laughing from the guys around him, and the fact that he’s not laughing, only looking vaguely accomplished and pulling on a beer. When Jesse comes through the front glass door, his lips go slack around the end of the bottle, and he nods almost imperceptibly to indicate he sees her. She gets change from Lonnie Powell, who weighs three hundred pounds and nearly fills the round booth from which he schedules lanes and rents shoes and balls.

Jesse uses two of the quarters to buy a Snickers, which she unwraps and eats as she walks around back to the Bronco, parked at the farthest reaches of the gravel lot. She gets into the back seat and waits behind the tinted glass, with the door open for Wayne, who follows in a few minutes, climbing in next to her. He unsnaps the clip at the base of her neck, freeing her hair. He is kneeling on the seat over her, like a paramedic with a patient in crisis.

“Oh, babe,” he says, and Jesse feels like she’s made of blue neon, the pulse of a jukebox. She pulls away the collar of his shirt and touches the protruding bone at the base of his neck, inhales his smell, a mix of sweat and Aramis.

It is three months now since she and Wayne started up. She had gone out to the airstrip in Bedelia with a pickup slip for a carton of T-shirts printed with Pratt’s Caverns under a picture of the cave’s stalactite xylophone. Wayne is the new local UPS guy, among other things. He’s building a lively business around a light plane. He runs freight, dusts crops. This summer, he’s been dragging advertising banners over the beach at the state park. Wayne is twenty-six, and life’s an adventure as far as he’s concerned.

Even now that she is so quicksanded with him, now that she’s subject to aches in her glands when thoughts of him sneak up on her—even now, she’s not clear why she got into this in the first place. If someone had asked her who could steal her even a little away from Neal, she would have first said no one. If pressed, she would have said Dennis Quaid.

Wayne is nothing like Dennis Quaid; he’s an extremely rural type of person. He’s from Arkansas. He has been around a bit, though, in a hitchhikey way through the south and west, a summer in Europe. He has a hip look about him—a little ponytail and a pierced ear—but it doesn’t mean much. Style tics he picked up at the state university in Columbia. He didn’t even go to any classes, just hung out for a couple of semesters. He came back with a trunkful of novels and shoe boxes full of blues tapes. He thinks because he reads Jack Kerouac and plays Ornette Coleman up in the air that his spirit soars above the rest of the local population.

Wayne is the kind who leaves, or at least talks about leaving, all the time. He chews gum and has a twitch pulsing under his left eyelid. He walks around frazzled with expectation, looking toward doors and horizons, checking his watch, combing his hair in the reflection of store windows as he passes. He riles Jesse in all the old ways, along with some new ones.

On Friday she goes out to the airstrip to see him. He wants her to come up with him while he practices skywriting, a new feature he’s planning to add to the advertising end of his business.

“I can’t,” she tells him as they sit together in the low grass at the side of the tarmac. “I can’t put the baby through loop-de-loops.”

“Stay and watch from here, then,” he says. “You can correct my grammar.” When she smiles, he drops his fingertips onto her lips in a rippling way, as if he is noodling piano keys. “Olivia’s mother,” he says.

From up in the sky he tries to tell her “hi” in trailing smoke, but he has been practicing for only a couple of weeks, and has a ways to go yet. He starts his “h” too late, and winds up with “ni.”

Technically, they’re not even lovers. They’ve only gone so far as kissing. This makes it much worse. If she weren’t pregnant, and they were sleeping together, having matinees in a room out at the Mona Lisa Motel, which has Jacuzzis in the bathrooms and advertises a “4-Hr Nap Rate,” she could put this down as an affair and manage the guilt as best she could.

But this seems to be truly gruesome love. She feels yanked out of her ground, shaken up. Made stupid. Today for instance, she told Neal she was going to Dr. Ruben’s for a prenatal checkup. At dinner, he’ll ask how it went, and so on the way home, she’ll have to pull over to the side of the road and read up on what is supposed to be happening in the seventh month. And then, next week, when she really does have an appointment with Ruben, she’ll have to tell Neal she’s going to the dentist, and then brush with baking soda in a gas station rest room so her teeth will look polished up when she gets back.

Sometimes it’s even worse. One night she told Neal she was going to the 7-Eleven for dishwashing liquid, and then used the pay phone in the parking lot to call Wayne at home (he lives with a roommate) and persuade him to meet her on the bluff by Red Arrow Road. All this—the rushing and overthought plans so crucial to deceit—for ten minutes of kissing him in the dark, in the orange dash lights of the Bronco, like astronaut lovers.

She tries to keep the rest of her life as sensible as possible, as though this will serve as a counterweight to her secret madness. She makes lists of errands so she can run them in an efficient order. She has gone back to clipping coupons, something she hasn’t done since the early, earnest days of her marriage. She logs all her appointments in her Re/Max daybook and works hard at being on time for them. It is in this spirit that she’s doing 80 Saturday morning when she passes the 45 speed limit sign at the edge of New Jerusalem and gets pulled over by Dell Potter, who when they were growing up used to have the biggest collection of comic books in the neighborhood. Now he works for the highway patrol.

“Oh, Dell,” Jesse says, getting out of her car in the strobe flash of his blue light.

“Jesse, you’ve got to stop driving like a yahoo. You’re a pregnant lady.”

“My mind was on this big sale I’m closing in on, so please don’t go all police on me, will you?”

“Herbert told me he had to pull you over a few weeks ago.”

She just gives him a friendly stare-down. They both know there’s no way in hell he’s going to write her a ticket.

While they stand there silently negotiating, Earl and Thelma Thompson roar by on their Harley, which is nearly as large as a car and painted candy apple red and blaring out from its radio one of those songs from the Christian station which sound like bland love songs, then turn out, a ways in, to be about Jesus. Too much friendliness with Earl and Thelma is an invitation to get proselytized, and so Dell just nods at them and Jesse waves, both in minimal ways. And Jesse begins singing, but low and without moving her lips, “I’ll be riding into Heaven on my Harley,” which is a pretty stupid joke, but it cracks Dell up, as though they’re in church. When he straightens out, he says, “I’ll let you off this once.” It’s what he has to say.

“Dell,” she puts a hand on his arm at the bicep, “will you keep your fingers crossed for me? I think I’m going to sell Alice Avery another house. She’s gotten too big for her britches over at the Inn, wants a place just for herself back up on the lake.”

“That Skeeters is the best thing to happen around here in quite some time,” he says.

“I haven’t been yet,” Jesse says. “I must be the last person in town.”

“Have the pumpkin ravioli,” he says over his shoulder as he goes back to his car. The radio is sputtering out a message. He reaches in and pulls out the microphone and tells it “Car Two,” and waves Jesse on.

Jesse has been selling real estate around the tri-town area—New Jerusalem, Bedelia and Clay Center—since she got her license a dozen years ago. Until recently, this meant putting newlyweds and empty nesters into smaller places, everyone else into bigger ones, reshuffling the already-there population. Now though, there is the whole wild card of Fenny’s Lake, a resort stretch ten miles out of town, popular in the twenties and thirties, done in by the Depression, and already long since fallen into disregard and disrepair by the time Jesse was in high school.

Back then the beach had been reclaimed by mosquito-filled marsh grass, the cottages mostly abandoned, except on summer nights when they filled up with vaporous residents—couples whose presence was manifest only through low moans and flashlight glow, thin wisps of transistorized music. And through their kicked-over traces—used sheepskin condoms and empty pints of Southern Comfort.

In the past couple of years, though, these cottages have piqued the interest of artistic types from St. Louis and Kansas City, who have been buying them cheap, knocking out walls and putting holes in the roofs and fitting them up as studios for painting and throwing pots and even writing music. The general population is suspicious of, and excited by these invaders, as though they’ve been landing at night outside town, in saucers. Even the cultured types—members of the Palette Club and the Bookmark Society—are withholding final judgment until they get a better look, but they can’t stop looking.

Jesse has already sold four lake houses, including the largest, the old Murchison eyesore. The woman who bought this, Alice Avery, is about Jesse’s age. She was a chef at a restaurant in Kansas City and now has revamped the sagging old Victorian into the Fenny Inn, with four guest rooms on the second floor, a sauna in the basement (where rumor has it guests get naked, although Jesse has never heard anybody who could vouch for this firsthand), and a gourmet restaurant, Skeeters, in what used to be the living and dining rooms.

Jesse never thought this sort of thing would go over around here, where people like large hunks of cooked-to-gray meat at the center of their meals and recognizable, soft vegetables at the outskirts. But she was wrong. You have to call two weeks ahead to get into Skeeters and eat Alice Avery’s rare duck breasts and blackened shrimp and salads that have flower petals in them. The other night Jesse saw Chief and Mrs. Purdy going in with the Eldermans, all dressed up and rustling along up the brick walk with hilarity and anticipation. It’s like everyone has just been waiting for Alice to show up.

Jesse stands a little in awe of Alice’s powers to overcome the resistance to change which is practically the cornerstone of New Jerusalem. At first she was envious, wondered why she hadn’t thought of all this. But really, it had to come from an outsider to seem truly new, fresh.

“I think maybe Alice Avery’s restaurant makes everyone feel there’s a party,” she told Neal the other day. “And they’re tickled to be asked. De-fucking-lighted.”

“Do you want to go sometime?” he said. “See what all the fuss is about?”

“I suppose I must.”

When she meets Alice at the Re/Max office this morning to pick up keys for the Fenny’s Lake place, Jesse turns from the peg board to see Alice looking back at her too hard.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while, trying to remember where I’ve seen you before. Pratt, Pratt, Pratt, I’d say, but I couldn’t get a bell to ring. Then somebody—Persis Goudy, I think it was—referred to you by your maiden name, and bingo! You’re Jesse Austin.”

Jesse laughs, purely astonished. “This never happens.” It’s true. Nobody ever recognizes her. The biggest reason is that, in her moment of glory, Jesse was facedown in several feet of water, shaved and suited and capped and goggled. In the news photos she was still wet and smiling too largely, her hair (short then) finger-combed off her face. Even her mother asked, “Which one is you, anyway?”

Alice pushes Jesse into embarrassment by rushing on with a flurry of admiration. What a thrill it is. “I was just a decent club swimmer myself, so you can imagine. Getting to meet one of my idols, after all these years.”

Jesse tries to see the swimmer inside Alice, who is now quite padded, presumably in all that good cooking of hers.

“I still remember you in that little film about the Olympics they showed us at school...” Alice says.

“The Courage to Try,” Jesse fills in, and is immediately embarrassed for the film. Worse, for having its title right there on the tip of her tongue.

“What ever happened to”—Jesse is hoping she won’t remember, but it takes Alice only a flash second to pull up the name—“Marty Finch? What a swimmer. Everybody up on the blocks against her must’ve had chills. You must’ve hated her.”

In lieu of speaking, which is quite impossible in this moment, Jesse gets up and pours herself a mug of burnt sludge from the Mr. Coffee, which has been turned off since the previous morning. Then she has to pretend it is hot and drinkable, but at the same time can’t offer any to Alice, who sees what’s going on anyway, and says, “I’m sorry. I often trip over other people’s wires, even when they’ve considerately laid them underground.” Then she pushes open the screen door. “What say we have a look at that house?”

On their way out to the lake, Alice says, “So, do you still swim?”

“Nah,” Jesse says. An all-purpose lie.

“There’s a screened-in porch off the back bedroom,” she tells Alice as they stand in the empty living room of this house on the nearly deserted north shore of the lake. The house Alice is thinking of buying for herself. If she does, it will have to stop being the house Jesse and Wayne use as a rendezvous point when they have more than an hour to spare with each other. Where they sit on the weathered boards of the porch floor, Wayne propped against the wall, Jesse leaning back into him as if he’s a human chair. He lifts her hair and drags his lips, which are fat and flat at the same time, like Mick Jagger’s, across the back of her neck.