Preston Falls : a novel (30 page)

She tells the post office lady she left her key at home and could she have the mail for Box 324. No problem. On the one hand it's nice that people up here are nice, but it's like anybody could just waltz in and ask for your mail. This lady's beauty-parlor perm looks odd with that mannish blue postal service sweater, but it must be cold working in here. She comes back and flops four bundles with rubber bands around them on the counter. "I guess you hit the jackpot."

"I guess so," Jean says. "Well, it can't all be bills."

''There you go." So Jean has struck the requisite Preston Falls note: wry stoicism with a hint of self-deprecation.

She goes over to the chest-high table, slips off the rubber bands and starts throwing junk mail and catalogs into the wastepaper thing. She never knew they had so many hardware stores and lumber companies up here. A couple of things marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL: IMMEDIATE RESPONSE REQUIRED, from a post office box at Cooper Square Station—probably some bogus contest. Sales at Grand Union. Full-color circulars from Ames, with all this seventies-looking type and layout; apparently they're trying not to intimidate rural people.

She takes the rest out to the Cherokee—bills, bank statements; but, again, not a single letter—and she starts the engine so she can run the heater. The most recent phone bill, postmarked October 26, says THIS IS A FINAL DISCONNECTION NOTICE: total amount overdue $157 and change. But no long-distance calls on the statement. The one postmarked September 26 shows calls to Etna, New Hampshire (his mother), Rutland, Vermont (that lawyer?), Chesterton, New York, and New York City. Two electric bills. Two American Express bills (neither one has new charges) and one Amexgram, that thing they send when you haven't paid: his balance is six hundred-odd dollars. Two MasterCard bills, balance of nine thousand and change; the October bill has some

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snippy little thing about his minimum payment. SECOND NOTICE from Allstate Insurance; Willis registers the Cherokee and his truck up here because the premiums are lower, which she's always thought was dishonest.

She rips open the bank statement postmarked October: a balance of $12.17, no canceled checks, no ATM transactions and a five-dollar service charge. The September one shows a balance of $17.17, with a single cash withdrawal: 9/18, $400, New Baltimore Service Area, New York State Thruway, plus a $1 ATM fee.

Why did he bother to leave seventeen dollars? Obviously to keep his account open. Which meant he took off for somewhere but intended to come back? Or at least to have the option? But maybe it was just that the machine only gave out multiples of twenty: her little girl-detective deduction. New Baltimore. That's the one just south of Albany, right? But was it even Willis, or had somebody stolen his cash card? But if they'd stolen his cash card, wouldn't they also have his credit cards? And since there was no activity on those statements . . . But of course Willis's MasterCard was pretty well maxed out.

She fastens her seat belt, releases the brake and waits to pull out as a low-slung black car passes by. Going to the post office before the police made sense, actually. Well, so now she's been to the post office. She so much doesn't want to do this. The poHce station, she assumes, is in the town hall, where you always see cruisers parked around the side.

The officer behind the counter looks to be in his twenties; he's got one of those ultra-neat short haircuts young Christians have, with the perfectly circular cutouts around each ear. Naturally he wears a wedding ring.

"Hi. I'm Jean Karnes?" she says. "Are you the person I spoke to?"

"No, ma'am. That would be Officer Plankey." The name tag above this one's badge says ALDEN. "He went out for breakfast. Are you the lady that called about your husband?"

"Yes."

"Here," he says, pointing to a waist-high swinging door. "Why don't you come around this way and have a seat."

She sits on a metal folding chair at the side of a metal desk with a computer on it. He sits down on the swivel chair and clicks a mouse here and there on the pad, squinting at the monitor. Then he starts tapping at the keyboard. "I brought along a picture," she says.

He stops tapping, takes the picture from her, looks, puts it on the desk.

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He asks for Willis's full name, address, age, description and occupation, tapping in her answers; then he listens to her story. He doesn't seem to think it's weird that Willis's computer was on—they've got one at home, and he's always forgetting. The broken window? Could be kids; anything missing from the house? Not that she knows of. Well, come to think of it, she didn't see his guitars. But of course he sometimes hides them, and she didn't check his hiding places. She tells about the unpaid bills and the cash withdrawal on the Thruway on September 18. He nods. And how long since she's seen or heard from him? Well, right around then, actually. He looks at her. "You mean around September eighteenth?" he says. Probably, she says. He looks back at the screen, taps a few characters, then, still looking at the screen, he says, "Was this a usual length of time with you and your husband?"

Not until she's back in the Cherokee does it hit her that she should have told about him getting arrested on Labor Day weekend; she'd honestly forgotten. And it probably had no bearing. Well, so they'll find out anyway, won't they, from their computer? But when he asked if Willis had seemed unusually upset—no, "overwrought"—it might have been good to mention that. Instead she said he was a little burned out from work. So now they'll think she was being evasive.

Well, she's done all she can do here, yes?

She could drive by the house one more time, just in case his truck is there. Maybe check on the guitars?

No. Enough.

She heads back through the center of Preston Falls, trying to remember the most direct route over to the Northway. Past the old movie theater with its windows boarded up, past the used-furniture place that's now a pile of bricks with charred boards sticking up, past Winner's, where the display window has a cardboard cutout of a black cat arching its back. Right: Halloween. At least she'll be back in time to be with Mel and Roger. She drives past Julie's Luncheonette, with the hole busted in its plastic sign. Past the one surviving nice old storefront, Howard & Sheron's, with black-and-gold lettering that still says SUNDRIES and always makes her think of sun-dried tomatoes. She's a city person; so sue her. Sometimes it depresses her that she's ended up back in the burbs, even though she'd campaigned for it because of the kids. A blast of wind comes along— ivhomp —that actually rocks the Cherokee and sends a plastic bag flapping up into the blue sky like a rising witch.

The elevator doors open on fourteen and Jean sees Helen, talking on the phone at the reception desk, and the pure white wall with her own smoky Lucite letters spelling PALEY, and she has to say: it's a relief to be here.

Either she was too tired to enjoy it after driving down from Preston Falls, or Halloween really hadhecn dreary this year, (The three messages from Marty Katz on the answering machine in Chesterton didn't help her mood either.) Roger had wanted to be Dennis Rodman—this would've involved a blond wig and blackface, which Jean thought was racially tricky—but luckily he changed his mind and decided to be Frankenstein. (Frankenstein's monster, Willis would say. But while the cat's away.) She got him a rubber mask that had the things sticking out of the sides of the neck, and he wore Willis's arctics, tied around his shins with twine, the toes stuffed with newspaper, Mel was Courtney Love: basically an excuse to put on a hiked-up skirt, fishnet stockings, heavy makeup. Jean wouldn't let her go to the party ail her friends were going to, ostensibly because it was a school night, and really because she'd heard rumors of dosed Hawaiian Punch at the same party last year. So Mel declined to go through the motions of trick-or-treating—she's stopped eating sugar anyway—and stayed, in costume, in the Cherokee, watching Roger thrust his treat bag at grownups in their doorways, smiling their forced smiles. Next year they've got to have a better plan.

Jean left Carol to hold the fort while she took the kids around. But only four trick-or-treaters came to their door the whole night, so they're stuck with all this candy, plus the bagful of loot Roger collected. Before he brushed his teeth, Jean let him have some M&M's and a Milky Way from their stockpile, and told him he could start on his own stuff tomorrow, after she'd looked it over. She saw no signs of tampering, but of course with an expert job you wouldn't. When he went to bed, she

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noted down everything in his treat bag, took it all out to the garbage can and drove to Rite Aid to buy replacements.

This morning the kids whined and dawdled from the minute she woke them up, and she finally just said, which was really unlike her, "Why are you punishing meV They both gave good imitations of bewilderment, and probably they were bewildered. She poured Product 19 into their bowls and sogged it down with milk, thinking (stupidly) that if she poured in the milk they would have to hustle. Meanwhile she didn't even have time to make herself toast; she folded a piece of bread and gnawed at it to keep the coffee from making her sick to her stomach. She did finally get them mobilized and into the Cherokee; she dropped Mel at Chesterton Middle School, then Roger at Mary M. Watson. Watching him safely inside, she began to weep because all she ever did was crab at them and they really seemed to do so much better with Carol. So then of course when she got to the station she had to pull the mirror down and fix her stupid makeup in the parking lot, with a million people looking. No wonder all these men on the train don't go home until like eight o'clock at night. Though by this afternoon she'll be longing to be with her children again.

The Paley Group was her first job interview when she finally finished Pratt, and she was too stupid then to realize how lucky she was. While every other investment firm was cutting back, Paley had committed to a ground-up in-house redesign. She now knows this was Jerry Starger's idea, hiring some young designer (on the cheap) to take charge of everything from stationery and brochures to the monthly newsletter to the whole look of the offices. Jean probably got the job because she wasn't all that young and therefore seemed more trustworthy than some little chickie from Parsons or FIT with a stud in her nose. And things being what they are, it couldn't have hurt that she was a woman. And okay-looking: not the beauty of the world, she knows, but sort of perky—a word she hates. You can be too beautiful, like Claudia What's-her-face, the supermodel. (At the newsstand downstairs this morning, Jean saw her on the cover of some magazine: "A Supermodel Who's Super-Nice.") You can picture all these men tripping over their shoes and, in the end, not liking you because of it. Jean has an idea Anita Bruno—another of Jerry's hires—suffers because of her looks. Though on the other hand, if not for her looks she might not be here to suffer, if that's not too catty

Anyhow, she earned her keep that first year. She came up with the

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new logo (basically PALEY in this austere lettering) and made sure it got on business cards, letterhead, all the signage. They needed the help: one of the old brochures actually had this crosshatched drawing of two white guys in suits facing each other across a desk, one pointing to something on a piece of paper and the other cocking his head like the RCA dog. She even picked new art for the corridors, getting rid of the giant color photos of sailboats and bringing in these plexiglass-framed constructions of torn-paper triangles, thread and birds' bones that she'd found at a show in Connecticut.

Of course everything was a battle royal. "How the hell is it supposed to show up?" Arthur Paley said when Jean and Jerry Starger brought the big Lucite P into his office to show him. "Hell, you see right through it."

"Right, but don't forget," Jean said, "that wall's going to be absolutely white."

Arthur Paley held up the smoky P and looked through it out his window at Central Park. "Christ," he said.

"Trust me," said Jerry Starger. "This is perfecto." He brought thumb and forefinger together to make an OK sign and pumped it three times. "This says ex^^c^ly what needs to be said. The name is there, three-D, an inch thick. Solid. But at the same time it's not up there screaming its head off at you. It's like: We are here, for those who know."

Arthur Paley shook his head. "The world lost a great Fuller Brush man when they let you into Princeton," he said. "I have to think about this." But he came around, and the reception area won Jean her first bonus. A thousand dollars, which she used to start a little fund for Mel and Roger.

The redesign's pretty much in place now, and she's gone on to stuff like working with the computer people on the new Web site, which Jerry Starger wants up and running by the first of the year. But she always has to keep an eye out to make sure everything isn't sliding back. Accounting complains about the cost of repainting this wall every four months, but in order to work, it has to be absolutely white, not just sort of white like everything else in New York.

Helen, shoulder raised to wedge the phone against her ear, is writing on a pink While You Were Out slip; she sees Jean and turns on a smile. Jean always feels funny waltzing in here wearing slacks and whatnot past Helen, in her outfits and power blouses. They sometimes ask about each other's children. Helen hangs up the phone and puts the call slip in the S section of the metal rack on her desk. There's a story about that metal

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rack. What convinced everybody that Jean was a head case was her taking it home and painting it white; she just couldn't stand looking anymore at that tan thing plopped down on the white desk in front of the white wall and next to the terrific square white vase she'd found at Pier 1. She called around and learned that nobody carried these racks in white, so she asked Helen if she could borrow it over the weekend. Out in the garage on Saturday morning, she took it apart—twenty-seven fins plus the base—and sprayed everything with white Rust-Oleum. She reassembled it on Sunday and brought it back Monday morning in a plastic bag inside another plastic bag, dreading that she'd scratch it.