Sleight (14 page)

CLEF: I presume you can tell me when my sister will be here?

WEST: Byrne said they’re leaving tomorrow. It seems there was some issue with arranging the nanny for her daughter, but it was resolved.

CLEF: My niece?

WEST: Yes, of course. I’m sorry—your niece.

CLEF: And for how long will you be asking Lark to abandon her family?

KITCHEN: 
(from across the room)
Clef, come over here and take a look at this music.

MONK’S DIRECTOR: It certainly is an impressive collection. Are you from Mississippi, T?

T: New Orleans originally.

MONK’S DIRECTOR: Oh.

T: But Josh is the blues baron.

CLEF: Who’s Josh?

T: My husband Josh.

CLEF: You mean you aren’t West’s?

KITCHEN: Clef.

T: No, that’s okay. I’m not anyone’s, Clef. But why doesn’t everyone come to the table for some salad? The pasta will be ready in a few.

CLEF: Where
is
Josh?

T: He’s in DC preparing for trial. He’s a lawyer. It’s a big case, I think—class-action suit, another insurance company. He likes this kind of work.

CLEF: “This kind” meaning lucrative?

T: “This kind” meaning punitive.

CLEF: Ahh.

MONK’S DIRECTOR: Are these sunflower seeds?

T: Pine nuts.

WEST: I think, Clef, that Lark will stay up here until she feels that she’s accomplished what she needs to. She’s welcome to bring her family. I’d be happy to help arrange that.

KITCHEN: Then you’ve spoken with her?

WEST: Not yet, but Byrne assures me—

CLEF: Who the hell is Byrne?

WEST: 
(pauses, looks across the table at T
)

T: WEST found him. He’s an unbelievable writer—Byrne wrote our last precursor. Phenomenal. But you’ll get to hear it for yourselves … along with some new work, I think.
(pause)
Also, Byrne is my lover.

CLEF: Your lover?

T: One of them.

CLEF: 
(laughing, lifts a wine glass)
To T. Faulty to her nest.

T: Thank you, Clef. I deeply believe in nests. Are we at peace then?

CLEF: Armistice.

WEST: Will you come to rehearsal tomorrow, Clef? We weren’t entirely successful with your designs this afternoon.

MONK’S DIRECTOR: I tried to explain to them what I’d seen you …

CLEF: I’ll come. (to
Kitchen)
What did you do all day? You didn’t help them?

KITCHEN: I didn’t show them anything. But I meant to tell you … the designs, Clef—they started elucidating themselves.

T: It’s true. No one was having any luck—

MONK’S DIRECTOR: Despite my efforts.

T: —until we split up and started improv-ing in separate studios.

KITCHEN: I just watched. They actually came up with most of our links and some that we hadn’t.

CLEF: Hadn’t
yet.

KITCHEN: Yes. You’re right. Yet.

Lark spent the week before they left like something in a locked box. Byrne hung back, trying not to require the extra energy a guest requires, as she made preparations to join Kepler and Monk in York. Drew, Byrne saw, was sad but wanted a whole wife. Lark sat at the kitchen table those last days scribbling instructions and making calls, while Drew busied himself with the domestic space around her, drying the dishes, clearing crumbs from the mustard-colored linoleum, pausing often as he passed to touch her head. During these moments, Byrne looked away. He’d seen Drew make the same bear-like gesture with Nene. The man’s hands lacked coherence. Though they clearly loved him, when Drew pawed at them, something inside his wife and child ducked.

While the couple spent their remaining nights up late talking and having, except for the bedframe, soundless sex, Byrne browsed the books lining the thin walls of the guest room—mostly history and theoretical science written for the layperson. He skimmed an old volume on plate tectonics, newer ones on chaos and string theory, and devoured a biography of Linnaeus and his system of morphological categorization: naming bound by shape. Byrne kept study of Lark’s book for the mornings, but waited to put down the words evoked by her sketches until the afternoons.
²⁴
In the evenings, while Drew made dinner, he walked with Nene to the lake. He was teaching her to skip stones.

“You’re getting good, Nene. That was four.”

“I can do six.” She leaned over and brushed the red clay off a thin oval rock. She held it up for Byrne to inspect. He nodded.

“When have you done six? I never saw that.”

Nene let the stone go with a deceivingly faint flick. Six dips in and out of the calm. Across the water a jagged bruise of pines spread from earth to sky, in world and in mirror. She looked up at Byrne.

“My daddy taught me this summer. He’s better at it than you. So’s Newt.”

“You didn’t tell me you knew how.” Byrne looked out over the vague, multiple rippling and dropped his next throw—a small yellow-white one—onto the bank. He brought the empty hand to his other and started massaging his wrist and forearm.

“You said you wanted to teach me.”

“Nene, that’s like lying.” Byrne wasn’t sure why he was upset. He struggled with his tone, tried not to accuse her. Of what, being four? After three weeks with Nene, he knew this revelation of her past history skipping stones was meant to hurt him. He asked her. “Why would you do that?”

“You’re taking Mommy away.” Nene wasn’t sulking. She was answering.

“Yes, but only for a little while. She’ll be back soon. I know she’s explained this to you.” Byrne was irritated to be comforting her—she’d wounded him. And he felt ridiculous, having wounds.

“Mommy doesn’t always know how things will
result.
Newt says she wouldn’t have made a very good scientist. She ignores certain
factors.”
Nene enunciated these words as if she’d recently been made aware of their secondary definitions. “What factors is she ignoring?”

“For example:
before anything can mean, it must suffer understanding.”

“Where did you hear that?” Byrne barely registered Nene’s language as extraordinary anymore, just odd—like a streak of white hair, or an ominous birthmark. But this was aphoristic even for her. Byrne didn’t like to speak of Nene’s dead grandfather as if he were a playmate, but sometimes it was the only way to get a response from her. “Did Newt tell you that?”

“That’s silly. Newt thinks that stuff is
bunk.
It’s from Mommy’s book, page forty-two. Don’t you remember?”

“Nene, you shouldn’t poke around in other people’s—in my things.” Byrne didn’t know whether to scold or soothe. Parts of Lark’s book, the photographs mostly, had given him nightmares. He hadn’t paid as much attention to the words—journal entries, captions, quotes. They made him uncomfortable. He read just enough to assure himself they weren’t precursors. “What do you think what you just said means, Nene?”

“It means Mommy’s going to make people hurt. Because she does. Because she thinks it’s right.” Nene sounded, as she rarely did, angry. Byrne watched as her collarbones pulled forward, grew sharp.

Byrne felt cold. The air was wet with lake and the sun, low. Bits of trash at the water’s edge were beginning to look placed—the right shadows adding significance to a candy wrapper, an abandoned sock. Byrne got down, reddening his knees in the mud to look into the girl’s gray eyes. He was either forgiving or being forgiven, he didn’t know which, and Nene’s terrible smallness was starting to show. When it reached full pout, she kicked a Red Bull can into the water, then crossed the short distance between them. She bent over so that the top of her head pressed like a miniature cannonball into Byrne’s chest. He reached out and with his clear hand took her shoulder. He didn’t pull her any further in, and she didn’t cry. His other hand and the rock it held rose and fell beside them, unable to settle.

For the first few hours in the car, Lark said nothing, although she did point out each atrocity billboard as they passed it. Byrne didn’t mention his proprietary feelings toward them, or toward Nene for that matter. They were approaching the blue mountains—drunken giant-brides, sprawling and roomy. The morning was in mist, and the car had already begun pressing itself drowsily against the curves when Byrne asked if they could take a bathroom break.

Lark answered him, “That’s a type of torture you know, an interrogation technique—not letting someone urinate.”

“I did,” said Byrne, “I watch TV.” But the flippancy struck out, humorless, so he apologized by adding, “I’ve also heard a few war stories.”

Lark eyes flickered from the road, appraising him. “Have you?” She wasn’t being sarcastic, and Byrne blushed as if he’d been caught bragging.

“On Sundays, Gil sometimes took me to the VA hospital where he worked. I think it was supposed to be punishment.”

“Gil is your father?”

“Was. I could take a bleach-and-urine sauna in the basement laundry with him, or I could pretend I was someone’s grandson in one of the common areas.”

Lark spoke into the windshield. “You chose the latter.”

“I did.”

Pissing, Byrne realized he’d had a favorite. There had been, always beside the aquarium, a powder-haired man who’d smelled of menthol cigarettes and Dial soap. Byrne hadn’t been scared of this patient; his damage was less apparent than most. Once he had told Byrne how he’d been captured outside Dresden. How he’d been made to work with three other POWs in the German camp. Digging latrines starving. How one day, the soldiers had heard enemy fire—Allied fire—and this man, but not the others, had started walking toward it. No one had stopped him. How he’d walked, how he couldn’t have run—he thought it must’ve been two hours, maybe four miles. And not been shot. How, hospitalized a week later in England, he’d weighed thirty-eight kilos. The old man had said that frail as he was now, he weighed double that. “And back before the war,” he whispered to Byrne, “I boxed.”

Byrne emerged from the interior of the truck stop. “Truck stops,” Lark had explained before pulling off, “make more coffee more often.” Byrne had noted only a burnt smell. His recovery of the old man’s tale was like an itch, and as he recounted it to Lark, he felt a little too excited. She was filling the tank.

“Why do you think that one stuck?”

“He was an elegant man, didn’t look tough. But the way he told it—it was nothing. Losing half his body weight was nothing.”