Everything (14 page)

A nice strong ale for a rainy day, said Edgar, setting down a pair of brimming cups. This will put hair on your chest.

But I don’t want hair on my chest.

Then it won’t, he said.

Loud, false. He was not himself. Not the considerate, gentle man who had slept in her tiny bed the night before, cupped together against the cold and damp. Now her roommates knew, which was all right, Layla guessed. She was done with Daniel anyway, or he was done with her. But where was gentle Edgar?

* * *

The one she loved.

She didn’t see a problem with the word, though she had never said it to him, never said it like that. I loved that movie. I’d love some more wine. But never I love you. Never to a lover, to Daniel, to anyone.

I can’t believe I live here, she said. Look at that! It’s not even four in the afternoon.

Now she was false, too. False and false. The happy pretend couple. They stared out at the water and saw only their faces reflected back at them in the glass, blue in the neon. He looked sorrowful and confused and then she remembered that she was the reason for his sorrow and confusion and she hardened against him again. Leave me alone, then.

I lived in Olympia once, he said. Went to get my shoes off the closet floor one morning and there was green mold all over them. That was pretty much that.

We talk and we talk and we talk and we never say what we mean.

Edgar looked like he had been slapped—stunned, then angry. There was a little satisfaction in that, at least.

What do you want to know? he said. Just ask me. Anything.

OK: what am I doing here?

* * *

Maybe I’m not the person to ask, he said. I wanted you to come to my opening with me. I asked if you would. Look, I want what I want, you know? If you think I shouldn’t ask, then I won’t next time.

That’s not what I mean.

Well, what do you mean, then?

I don’t know, she said. I really don’t. I just feel like we got into this mess because it made us happy and now we’re both unhappy all the time. All the time! I mean, I think of you and it makes me happy but everything around it.

I know.

And you have all the power, she said. You make all the decisions. I’m just along for the ride.

That’s not fair.

Well, you tell me, then. Tell me how it is.

Edgar didn’t say anything, just held onto his beer glass with his cold, thin hand and looked out the window at the passing ships, the cabins and little clusters of town lights. And all she had to do was reach across the table and take his hand and things would be all right again, she knew it. He wore an old gray sweater that she knew had a hole in the armpit, scuffed boots and jeans to his own opening. She loved that sweater. Still she could not bring herself. They traveled across the dark water as strangers.

A punch line
, except that it was no joke: thirty-nine years old, slim and strong. Taylor had been out in the mountains on his bicycle, a nice old Ritchey that was still hanging in the rafters of the garage, waiting for him to come back. Felt the first pangs or pains a few miles up the Rattlesnake, turned around and rode it out, made it into the trailhead where somebody had a cell phone and called 911 on himself.

June was at work that day on the OB ward five stories above the emergency room, but she didn’t find out for an hour and by then Taylor was dead. It wouldn’t have mattered. They told her he crashed in the ambulance on the way back and never really came around after that, though he was still alive by a thread when they got him in and that still bothers her. Even if he didn’t know, maybe he would have known just the touch of her hand. It’s one of those
thoughts she knows she should leave alone but she can’t seem to; five in the morning, just light out, and June lying in her bed alone and thinking about a thing that happened in another life … What if she could have that moment back?

It didn’t really matter. A minute more or less. Some people never in their lives knew love. They had years. But what if she had known?

Around and around and around.

Her life is going backward now. From the present moment, which seems so insubstantial that it might not even exist, back into the days when she was nothing but a thought, a feeling, a suffering, the year after the funeral in which she lay on the carpet of the living room with Rosco just to feel the warmth of another living body beside hers and Rosco—a young dog then, lean and handsome—consented to lie with her, without end, did not move until she let him know that it was all right to. She’s just a script now, a set of intentions and directions. Back then, she was an accident, all chance. But before that, she was real, she had a body and a husband and together they had ventured up the Bitterroot to look at a litter of Golden pups and found him in a trailer that smelled of Clorox. The women who bred and raised him were each recently divorced and one of them had cancer and a solitary horrible parrot sat in the corner. It was like the world was in three dimensions then and now it was flattened out, a drawing. There had been two parrots that the breeder was watching for a girl in a wheelchair, and one of the parrots had died and she was going to replace it—the girl was nearly blind, she’d never know—but then it seemed like the girl was likely to die herself and so there was no point in buying another. Besides,
the breeder said, the parrots were horrible to the girl. All they did was peck at her and make her bleed.

The breeder was so big and unhealthy that she wheezed trying to get from one side of the room to the other and bending down to pick a pup was almost beyond her, but the dogs themselves were glowing and lively and pretty. She gave one pup to Taylor and one to June and that one was Rosco. June knew it the moment she touched him. Them there eyes.

They both felt death hovering above that trailer, waiting to strike. They both felt anxious, waiting for the day when they could come pick him up; and then, when the day came, they felt that they had rescued him from that death.

Taylor had been driving through L.A. once a few years before this—still in college, maybe, she thought—and had gotten himself pulled over, mistaken for somebody else, and these asshole L.A. cops had him spread-eagled on the hood of his car with a nightstick up between his legs and they were yelling at him, Motherfucker, motherfucker where’s the rosco? Taylor didn’t even know what they meant by it, but they didn’t stop till they’d searched his whole car, half an hour in the sun with his cheek on the hood of his car.

So they named the dog Rosco.

Taylor had been in L.A. trying to break into the jazz scene. Trombone was his first love, his only love. Everybody else was listening to the Blues Magoos and Jimi Hendrix, and he was up in his second-floor bedroom in Hamilton, Montana, listening to “Chasing the Trane” and “Ornithology.” He was smart in his body, not so
much in his mind. Never saw him with a book in his hand. RL was a little like that, too. Taylor, as soon as she was ready to settle down with a novel and a glass of wine—God, she drank some awful cheap wine back then—he’d be off to the garage with a wrench in his hand, ready to fix something or break something. He had a room in the basement, too, which he had lined with old mattresses and rugs with a record player in it and he would go down there with his trombone and practice and June would have to pretend she didn’t hear it. Really, he was a good player but just a solo trombone with none of the other parts got old. It wasn’t so bad in summer but in December when she was stuck inside.

Taylor wanted to name him Bird so he could have a dog named Bird, but June thought you didn’t want to confuse a dog anymore than you had to. So Rosco. Rosco because it was a little bit dangerous just from the L.A. business and they had beaten danger to get him home with them.

Then he got sick. The third day they had him home, he started puking blood in the morning, and had bloody diarrhea.

Taylor said it, but June knew instantly in her heart what he meant when he said they had called this on themselves. Some creepy magic, as if they had named him Bird and he had flown away. Sitting in the linoleum room waiting to hear. They brought the puppy tiny and barely alive in a blanket and Taylor held him to his chest and Rosco couldn’t hold himself, a stream of brown liquid shit and red blood down the front of Taylor’s shirt. It was parvo, the vet said, we’ll give him an IV and keep him quiet and hope for the best. The two of them in the bar that night praying to whatever they could find to pray to, knowing they had called this on themselves, the little helpless pup paying for their failings. It wasn’t fair. He
hadn’t done anybody wrong. He was just a little fellow who meant nobody harm. He was a good dog.

If he made it through that first night.

That’s what the vet said.

Which he did. All this long life, all these days and deer chasing and morning sunlight on the kitchen floor and it hung by a thread that first night, but hang it did. The thread held. The dog lived, thirteen years until tomorrow. We dodged a bullet, that’s what Taylor told her. We dodged a bullet that time.

Tom Champion met them
at the ferry dock, a squeeze, a celebration, an old family friend and then the tentative handshake for Layla. Who was she?

Tentatively welcome. Provisional. Conditional.

A drizzling black evening. She and their tiny luggage went into the backseat while Champion and Edgar talked about old friends and family matters that Layla had never heard of. Which was fine, fine. She had her secrets, too, and her surprises. It just might be yours, she thought. It
might
. Rain in slants and spatters across the black glass. Cow country all around them, green and dark, the occasional farm light through the dripping trees. The speeding sedan, the girl in the backseat, kidnapped. I am the McGuffin, she thought.

* * *

After twenty minutes or so, the lights gathered and the forest gave way and they were in a small, cute town. It was so cute. Her heart just gave out at the sight of all those picket fences, all that clapboard siding, those Norfolk Island pines and monkey-puzzle trees. Mercedes SUVs lined the sleeping streets, and tiny jaunty sports cars. No rotting snow or deer carcasses here, no derelict hot tubs, no hunting campers. Fucked, flustered and far from home. Edgar would understand that she didn’t belong here, would understand why. He was from home, originally from Cut Bank. He knew which end of a chain saw was the front.

But Edgar was in the front seat, talking movie stars and Microsoft money with Tom Champion. This isn’t Bigfork, Tom Champion said. This isn’t the cast-iron Kokopelli crowd. These are serious collectors.

Fine with me.

They buy in depth. If they like the work, they’ll take a lot of it. But they’re not just buying stuff for the sake of buying. They’re not on vacation.

People live here.

A lot of them, it’s their second or third house. A lot of these places, you don’t see the lights on too often. But, yeah, some of these people, they come and they stay, they help out with the schools, that kind of thing. Gene Hackman came to an assembly last year at my daughter’s school. Nice guy, is what I hear.

* * *

Gene Hackman, Edgar said. Wow. I didn’t know he was still alive.

The town itself looked like a toy, a model railroad set blown up to nearly life-size proportions, and the men’s conversation seemed like it came with the town prepackaged. Men men men men manly men. Suddenly she thought of June and missed her sharply. A world without men. A prop, a love during Layla’s cannibal summer. Blood and ice, bodies frozen in the streets. Daniel with his poetry and hair. It all seems miles and miles away. If men stopped going to war, would women start? It seemed like a question, anyway.

Good crowd, said Tom Champion. Through the lit front of the gallery she saw the patrons in cashmere and denim, the people from the various catalogs with their catalog haircuts and their good teeth, clutching plastic cups of wine and talk, talk, talking and twenty of the
same exact picture
on the wall. What was this?

Edgar was grinning at her, embarrassed, as he helped her out of the backseat. I didn’t know, he said. I was going to tell you ….

And really she didn’t know what there was to be nervous about and then she followed the two of them into the warm lit room and saw that they were not all the same, they were all slightly different but only slightly, and they were all drawings and paintings of her face, Layla’s face. Twenty or thirty paintings of her and then the little crowd, a couple of dozen, dropped their conversations and turned toward the door where she and Edgar stood, and they smiled at her and approved and welcomed them.

* * *

A kind of panic, a feeling she didn’t recognize. She backed out, knocking Tom Champion out of the way, out the door and into the rain. She couldn’t breathe.

He came out after her, out into the street.

I’m sorry, Edgar said. I meant to tell you.

When, exactly?
The words came to her but she couldn’t get them out of her mouth, a hot ball of anger choking her, stuffed down her throat.

I thought you might like it, Edgar said. I did.

There in the road, the damp dripping all around them. The lights faded in the rain to sudden infinite black night.

My face, she finally said.

It’s not, he said. That’s not what this is about. Come take a look.

No.

Please.

She didn’t have anything to say. Please, he said again.

The thing was, she loved him, she did. He didn’t mean her any harm. But all those pictures of her face, all those people looking at
her. And she was a hardheaded girl, besides, didn’t like to back down to anybody, wouldn’t give an inch. But maybe she should just give in. She wasn’t doing so good, doing things her way. Maybe Edgar was right or maybe she should just let herself believe that he was, just let go, let herself be led.

OK, she said. Let’s have a look.

They walked in slowly as a dream. The little crowd parted, left an empty circle around them as they started around the gallery. She recognized the first one from that rainy day in the fly shop, she recognized the light, the memory of it, soft pencil gray.