Solos (14 page)

“But what about you?” she asks Anstice. “Didn't you have a happy childhood? Only child? Wealthy parents who adored you?”

Anstice shrugs. “It was okay. Yours sounds better.”

“You had a pony!”

“You had fun!”

“Your pony wasn't fun? Anstice, don't you know that all kids think that if they had a pony they would have nothing but pure and total fun every single minute for the rest of their lives?”

“My pony was okay, but I had to muck out her stall, and once she kicked me in the shin, and then I got unpleasantly plump and didn't like to ride her any more. We gave her to my cousin Martha.”

“I wish I'd been your cousin Martha.”

“No, you don't. She married the golf pro at her parents' country club and had five kids, none of whom turned out well, and her husband left her, and her second husband is almost seventy, and they live in a high-rise condo in Florida.”

“Oh.”

“See?”

The gray cat settles down on Emily's lap, purring. “Well, at least she wasn't poor.”

“Nope. She was loaded. Still is.”

“I don't care what you say, loaded would definitely be more fun.” Emily remembers Trollope's Miss Dunstable, heiress to a patent medicine fortune, who, when someone told her that her ringlets were out of style, replied, “They always pass muster when they are done up in banknotes.” Everything does, she thinks, and starts feeling sorry for herself again. “Poor isn't fun,” she says, knowing she is whining. “We were already poor when my father died—he was a high school math teacher, for heaven's sake. And then my mother started law school. My mother was a student! We had nothing! We struggled!”

“Really? You had nothing?”

“Well, Mom had to keep calling her parents to ask for money for groceries.”

“Oh, horror,” Anstice says with her mouth full.

“They were really stingy.” Emily offers the cat another crumb; this time the cat turns her head away in disgust. Emily and Anstice look at each other and shrug:
Who can fathom the mind of a cat?
“They hated it when she asked for money. Once she made me call. Believe me, we were a severely stressed family. I had a part-time job from the time I was fourteen. My brother had two.”

“You sound like the Five Little Peppers. Everybody pulling together to help Mamsie. Remember when Ben had to plug up the hole in the stove with an old boot so they could bake a cake for her birthday?”

“At our house, it was everybody helping Mamsie write her brief for Moot Court.”

“That sounds like fun.”

“Oh, Anstice. The fact remains that, happy childhood or not, I'm in love with a man half my age who doesn't even love me back.”

“He's not half your age. He's more like five-eighths your age.”

“I don't trust your math. Or mine, either. He's just very young. His skin is so pure and unwrinkled. His eyes are so clear, and the whites are so white.” She pets the gray cat, who digs her claws gently, blissfully into Emily's thigh. “Marcus is a lot like a cat,” she says.
Who can fathom the mind of a Marcus? “Or
a bird. Like Izzy. Or like—hey, remember the crow who could make a tool out of a piece of wire and use it to get food? In the news last summer?”

“I do remember. It was the same week those rabbits in England found the rare medieval glass window. A great week for animals.” Anstice frowns. “Wait—how is Marcus like the rabbits?”

“I didn't say he's like the
rabbits
. I said he's like the crow. I mean, he's intelligent and lovable and funny and yet there's something in the way, some barrier—like the barrier between birds and humans. He's—somehow—distant. Removed.” A thought strikes her. “That's how Gene Rae once told me I am.”

“Distant?”

“Yeah. Oblivious to things.”

Anstice considers this. “Well, yeah, you are, a little. But maybe that means you and Marcus could actually live together in perfect felicity. You know, making tools out of wire and stuff.”

“Perfect felicity. I like the way that sounds. But we won't live together at all because Marcus isn't interested in me.”

“He loves you.”

“Yes, he probably does. But he loves me like a—” She pauses, shrugs.

“Like a brother?”

“Like a cat, I think. More like a cat. That's what I'm getting at. He doesn't seem to need people. Anstice?”

“Hmm.”

“Is it okay that I'm distant? Removed? Oblivious? I mean, I like being the way I am, but I just wonder if it means there's something wrong with me.”

“What nonsense. If Marcus is like a cat, or a bird, then you're like a dog, Em. You're like Otto: a human comes into the room and you go crazy.”

“But—” She thinks of her idiotic marriage, of her lost boyfriend Peter, of a man named Kevin whom she slept with happily for a month and who suddenly stopped returning her calls, of other men who have come and gone. She thinks of the Dirty Gertie guy Pat and Oliver want her to meet, and of a nice-looking man she saw on the subway the other day, and of how she never expected to be thirty-six and alone, and of how at Thanksgiving her brother Milo and his wife took long walks together every afternoon, and how her sister Laurie spent two hours on the phone every day with her doctor husband, who had to stay home because he was on call at the hospital. She thinks of the E-mail she had from her mother a few days ago in which she said she's dating a colleague in the law firm where she's a partner. She remembers the wedding of Gene Rae and Kurt, where she was a bridesmaid and wept unashamedly into her champagne. She thinks of Marcus, who has no pets. She remembers something she read once—how, in a country she can't remember the name of, when a woman saw the reflection of the moon in the river, she would spoon up some water with the moon in it and drink and then, if she gazed into the water again, she would see the face of her future husband. Maybe she should go down to the East River on a moonlit night.…

“Em?”

Everything seems so hopeless. If she drank a spoonful of the East River she would probably not survive it.

“You okay?”

“Oh, Anstice—”

“What, sweetie?”

“I guess what I'm asking you is—do you think I'll ever have a boyfriend again?”

“Every dog has his day,” Anstice says firmly. She passes the cookies, but Emily says she has to get home and take Otto for his walk. She goes down the stairs to her place, and as she approaches she can hear Otto begin barking and Izzy screeching with joy: They know her step, or her smell, or her aura. Something. When she walks in the door, Izzy squawks “Pretty boy” and flies to her head, and Otto bounds over to sit at her feet, grinning.

10

Murder for a jar of red rum

“You should get yourself a little iMac,” Saul is saying over two bowls of vegetarian chili at the bar in Vera Cruz, the Saturday after Halloween. He and Marcus are drinking beer and discussing, as they often do, the pros and cons of the Mac and the Dell. “The name of the game is tech support,” Saul says, nodding. “And frankly, in that area, the Dell sucks.”

Marcus is feeling good. He has just finished his dog-walking duties for the day, and the dogs always make him happy. So does talking about gigabytes and ROM. Computers fascinate Marcus, though he has never owned one. “But it's cheaper.”

Saul narrows his eyes and points his finger like a gun. “But is it, in the end?”

Zerlenka, the bartender, gets into the discussion, which becomes heated, as computer discussions always do. A couple of other beer-drinkers join in, and the debate is still going when Marcus leaves, just as covetous but definitely more confused. He suspects he'll never spend the money to buy a computer. The problem is not only that he doesn't like to own too many things, that he wants to take off when he wants to, without having to pack up bags and boxes; it's also that he can't think of anything he would use a computer for, except to play games.

Still, as he walks he ponders the pleasure of coming home in the evening and finding a killer crossword on the Web, or playing some complicated number game. There's a program called Mathematica that he read about in the
Times
and wonders if it's anything like the game of Numerabilis he used to play as a kid with Donnie Ryan. The tiny, unhatched egg of desire for all this is nested in his mind, like his urge to change his name, or go to veterinary school. It's something he thinks about when he's caught on the subway with nothing to read, or on a mildly beery walk home like this one.

When he gets there, he finds four phone messages from his father. The first says, “Hi there, sonny boy. It's your pop—obviously, heh heh. Just thought I'd remind you that—well, what can I say? The weekend is here. Give me a call, laddie.” The second says, “Hey, Marcus. It's Hart. What's up? It's the weekend. Call me—okay?” The third says, “Marcus, this is getting serious. It's—what? Almost five o'clock on Saturday afternoon—and I've been expecting you to call all day, and I've got better things to do than sit by the fucking phone waiting. Would you get up off your butt and call me back?” The fourth says, “Hey. Marcus. You said you'd get back to me by the weekend. Well, this is
the fucking weekend!
God damn it, if you don't call me back, I'll take the L train over there and
rip your fucking heart out
.”

There is one other message. It's from Emily:

“Marcus! How about that Scrabble game? If you're going to be around tonight, I'll be glad to humiliate you. Also, I have Halloween candy left over. So call me? Please?”

Marcus puts the kettle on and makes himself a cup of comfrey-mint tea. He sits down in the chair opposite
SEAMUS IS MY NEW BUDDY
, waiting for his stomach to stop churning. His father on top of a bowl of extra-spicy chili is too much. That and the juxtaposition of Hart's voice with Emily's, as if he has somehow brought the two together: beauty and the beast, obscenely entwined, on his voice mail.

He breathes deeply and removes his mind to other matters.

At their most extreme, he recalls as he sips his tea, the Victorians wouldn't put a book by a man on the shelf next to a book by a woman unless they were married to each other. This reminds him, for no good reason, of the Monty Python skit that claims Chuck Berry actually wrote most of Shakespeare's plays, and this reminds him of his mother's death. One morning in the bitter depths of an upstate winter—the winter he disappeared into the woods and stayed there—he had been reading the sonnets and had come across the line “Summer's lease hath all too short a date.”

He'd been struck by how true it was in that part of the world; also by the fact that he hadn't had a letter from his mother in over a week.

I'll write her tonight
, he said to himself. He didn't have a phone, or a car, or even a bicycle. He did have paper and envelopes, and he would buy a stamp at the post office on his way to work. Summer knew he didn't welcome visitors, but she wrote to him regularly, as she used to write to Hart: meticulously printed letters telling him what she was cooking and reminding him to dress warmly when he walked to work.

Later that day, Tamarind came to tell him Summer had been found frozen to death in the woods behind her little gray house. She was wearing her blue angora mittens and a red-and-white striped stocking cap, but no coat, and no boots, just her sneakers with jeans and a sweatshirt. There was no sign of foul play, and no suicide note. It seemed that she had just wandered out to the woods and didn't come back. She was curled up under a tree, as if she had gone to sleep. She had been there at least three days.

Tamarind stayed with him all that afternoon. She made him tea and put whiskey in it, and told him she would help him with the funeral details. She made him promise not to despair, not to blame himself. Before she left, he pulled the book out to show her the line about Summer's lease. Tamarind smiled a little and then, after a moment, she quoted, “But thy eternal summer shall not fade,” and Marcus put his head down and began to cry.

He tries not to think of his mother, alone in the woods in her blue mittens. He knows he has to call Hart, and he's drinking the tea in small, comforting sips, trying to decide whether to call later or right this minute, today or tomorrow, when the phone rings, and he leaps out of his chair and snatches it up. “Okay, give me a break. I just got in, for Christ's sake!”

“Um, Marcus?”

“Oh—Emily! Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“Are you okay?”

“No—yes. I don't know.” He sinks into the chair again. “I got all these harassing phone calls—not yours. I mean, yours was the only bright spot.”

“Is your refrigerator running? Do you have Prince Albert in a can? That sort of thing?”

“Something like that. Leftover Halloween stuff. I guess I'm a little rattled. Or something. I'm sorry. Jesus.” He sips tea. “Okay, then. Scrabble. Candy. Otto and Iz. It sounds great. What time?”

“How about eight? I'm sorry, but it has to be after dinner. I'd feed you, but—”

“I know. You're having a bowl of cereal and six dried apricots for dinner.”

Marcus leans back in the chair. He's feeling better. He can deal with this. He can tease Emily about her eating habits. He can call Hart and—well, whatever. His mind stops there.

“No, actually, I'm having an egg—a nice egg, my mother always calls it. I'm having a nice egg and a piece of toast and, of course, leftover Halloween candy, and maybe a Bloody Mary. You can join me if you like. It's just not the sort of thing people usually serve to guests for dinner.”

“That's okay. I'll just eat my three raisins and a turnip and half a hot-dog roll right here.”

“I don't know why I thought kids would ring my doorbell. Like I could really afford all this stuff.”