The Heaven of Animals: Stories (24 page)

But, that night, he did something he’d never done: He asked her, outright. He hadn’t believed it, not really, only wanted the slap to sting. The truth was, she was very good at what she did. She got lots of work, and she refused to half-ass a case. This meant long hours, and if he wanted to talk fidelity, they could start with the smut she’d found under the bath mat. He’d suggested he wouldn’t need magazines were she fulfilling her wifely duties, and she’d observed that such duties might be a little more palatable if he stopped calling work every ten minutes to make her feel bad. Furthermore, should he question her faithfulness again,
ever,
they were through—she’d file the paperwork herself.

“Go to hell,” he’d said, then hung up. His cell phone had buzzed, then dinged with the message she’d left. He’d made no move to check it.

When, hours later, the house phone rang, it wasn’t Lorrie. It was no voice he knew. He listened to the voice, heard something blossom, taloned and black, and then his understanding of the world came loose from his place in it.

That her death had saved them a divorce was no comfort, was worse than no comfort. And so what if the thing he wanted back wasn’t
her
, but
them
or, if not them, an idea of them, of what they’d been, once, long ago?

He wanted her back, if only to tell her he was sorry, that he hadn’t meant it, hadn’t meant a word.

.   .   .

Sunup, and Mark had to hustle to keep up. He and Joshua crossed the grounds of Victorian Park. They walked fast under the shadows of factories and canneries turned, this century, to shops and hotels. The windows of the buildings glowed, awnings striped and stretched to toothy grins.

They passed a beach. Offshore, swimmers moved in a line between buoys, all flutter kicks and swim caps, arms scissoring the bay.

The plan was for Mark to spend the morning at the Maritime Museum. He would see the ships, watch Joshua give his tourist talks, and then it was off to Salon Six for Marisa’s massage.

“You’re not
naked,
if that’s what you’re worried about,” Joshua said. “There’s a towel.”

Mark pulled on his shirt collar. The suitcase had not arrived. Over the phone, an attendant had reminded him that today was the day before Thanksgiving,
a very busy day,
and that, in the future, Mark might
consider carrying on
. He’d wanted to scream. Instead, he’d returned the phone to his pocket and cut the tape on a cardboard box that Joshua had pulled from storage. The box was labeled
FAT CLOTHES
and was full of fashions maybe five years old. He settled on jeans and a white T-shirt with the black outline of a lion faded on the front. The clothes fit, but the odor of cigarettes was all over them, as though they’d gone into the box unwashed, which, for all Mark knew, they had.

Joshua wore his uniform, the trademark green slacks and tan, button-down shirt of the park service. His hat—perched high and unfriendly-looking on his hillock of hair—sported a brim stiff as the blade of a shovel. It was a forest uniform, one that made more sense on Smokey the Bear than it did on the beach.

They passed a trash barrel, and Joshua flicked a spent cigarette into it.

They continued up a paved embankment, across a street, and through an open gate to a small, weather-beaten building.

“Here we are,” Joshua said.

Mark had expected a museum, something grand with a winding staircase, portraits of dead sea captains on the walls. But the building looked more like a public restroom. The front was brown wood, unsanded, and the roof was tin. The real attraction was just ahead, a dozen docked ships and a pier that caterpillared into the bay.

They walked the pier. The ships varied in size and age. There were naval vessels, holes cut from their sides for the mouths of cannons, and schooners whose sails hung like pirate ships’. The ships stood in various stages of disrepair, some bright, hulls gleaming, others rusted, in need of real work.

The crown jewel, Joshua said, was the
Thayer,
a tall ship with wide, white sails and a prominent black bow. A red stripe marked its middle. Its anchor chain disappeared into the bay, links big as refrigerators.

“A million bucks,” Joshua said. “New hull, new deck, new mast.”

The ship towered over them, sails flapping.

“These old ships, you can’t just spit and scrub off the barnacles,” he said. “Restoration takes time, craftsmanship. A lot of love.”

A gangplank stuck out like a tongue from the ship and touched the pier. A traffic barrel, orange and white, blocked the plank.

“Closed to the public,” Joshua said. “Belowdecks is a mess. But, next year, it’ll be something to see.”

He talked more about the ships, about plans for the park and the Facebook page they were designing that week. He talked, and they strolled until they’d reached the end of the pier. Joshua lit a cigarette and leaned against the railing. He stared out at the bay, where an island broke the water’s surface like a turtle shell. At the center of the island stood Alcatraz, the notorious condemned prison turned notorious tourist trap. At the airport, Mark had come across posters, signs, and colorful brochures all advertising the not-to-be-missed San Francisco destination.

“Only five men ever got off that island,” Joshua said. “Their bodies were never found.”

“Sharks?” Mark asked, and Joshua shook his head. It wasn’t sharks or the distance to dry land, he told him. It was the cold, the heart giving out before the body clawed its way to shore.

“It’s all about conditioning,” Joshua said. “You take an athlete whose muscles can keep up, he’ll produce the heat to make the swim. Drop anyone else in this water, and in half an hour you’ve got yourself a Popsicle. They pulled a guy from the bay last week, your typical Joe Desk Job. Went hypothermic in ten minutes.”

The wind changed direction, and Joshua’s smoke was in his face. He coughed.

“Are you sorry you came?”

Mark said nothing. If Joshua was looking for comfort, assurances, he wouldn’t get them from him.

Joshua put his cigarette out on the railing, exhaled, and, with a nod, as though something had been settled, let the butt drop into the bay.

“I think you’ll like dinner tomorrow,” Joshua said. “The place, it’s no home cooking, but they do a good job. We went last year. Pumpkin pie’s out of this world.”

He ran a finger and thumb along the brim of his hat, then glanced at his fingertips as though checking for dust.

“Anyhow,” he continued, “dinner’s on me.”

If regret was a malleable, shape-shifting thing, then his brother’s was taking multiple forms—the massage, the meal—and why couldn’t Joshua just say the words?

“You don’t have to do that,” Mark said.

“My treat,” Joshua said. “I insist.”

.   .   .

The foyer of Salon Six was spacious and high-ceilinged. The furniture was sleek, modern-looking. Contoured chairs littered the lobby, and Mark lowered himself into something resembling the tortured body of a compressed letter
S
.

He didn’t want to be here, but neither did he want to insult Marisa. She and Lorrie had been, if not close, at least closer than he and Joshua had ever been. Lorrie wouldn’t have wanted him mad at Marisa, and so he’d tried hard not to be.

Tables rose low from the floor like collapsed TV trays, and Mark reached toward the nearest for a
USA Today
. The paper informed him that the president, as per tradition, had pardoned a pair of Thanksgiving turkeys. The birds would live out their remaining days at a game ranch in Virginia. He put the paper down and shut his eyes.

A long morning had given way to an interminable afternoon. All day, he’d watched Joshua do his thing. The talks were collages of history and statistical tidbits: how many trees had gone into the construction of this ship; how many tons of steel had gone into that one; the precise dates during which a particular vessel had been seaworthy and why it no longer was. Men and women with sunglasses and shopping bags nodded, smiled, and held their squirming children’s hands. Occasionally, someone posed a challenging question. Joshua had the answer, always, and, each time, an awed murmur rose from the park visitors like the call-and-response of a crowd watching fireworks.

Mark understood quickly why Joshua had stuck with this job. Here was work that allowed—no,
encouraged
—his brother’s love of trivia, his brother’s very nature: that relentless, uncompromising know-it-allness.

Was he jealous of the attention his brother got, the applause at the end, the admiration over facts probably forgotten before the shopping bags were unpacked, before the sunglasses left these people’s heads? Jealous when, back home, he was lucky to keep the attention of two, three kids a class while he filled the marker board with conjugations or spoke at length about the subjunctive mood? Maybe he was. He didn’t want to be.

A door opened to the waiting room, and Mark heard his name. He stood and followed a woman in white down a white hall to a small, white room. The room smelled like mint and incense. At the center of the room stood a long table. An O, like a spare tire, hung from the table’s end. A few cabinets and a counter hung from one wall. One might have mistaken the room for a doctor’s office if not for the lighting—dim—and the flicker of a candle on the countertop.

“You may disrobe and lie down,” the woman said. She handed him a white towel, then she left the room.

He didn’t move. A minute later, there was a knock at the door and Marisa walked in.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re dressed.”

He hoped, right then, she’d let him off the hook. Together, they could tell Joshua whatever she wanted, whatever it took to keep him from lying down on that table.

But, no, she was giving him instructions, smiling, stepping out of the room.

When she returned, he lay naked on his stomach, face tucked into the table’s spongy O. The towel covered his middle. The position wasn’t a particularly comfortable one. It hurt his shoulders to lie flat with his hands at his sides, but it seemed wrong to let his arms hang from the table in air.

Marisa asked how his morning had been, how he liked the ships and whether he was enjoying the city. There was an opening and closing of cabinet doors, the scrape of a lid coming loose.

He said it was fine, all of it fine. That the day had been good.

“Your brother is so smart,” she said. “I watch his presentations, and I’m amazed.”

Something cold splashed his back, and then Marisa was rubbing vigorously. The oil warmed where she rubbed. He felt the towel fold down from his lower back, felt it tuck in around his waist. Through the O, he could see only the octagonal pattern and white grout of a tile floor.

“You have great skin,” Marisa said. “Some backs, you should see them. They’re so bad, I have to glove-up. And then the clients get mad because it doesn’t feel the same, the latex. And how do you point out politely that they have too many zits or a rash or open sores?”

She rubbed hard, but her hands were soft, uncallused. Gradually, he relaxed. He felt warm all over.

“I get it now,” he said. “I get why people like this.”

He meant it. He closed his eyes. The room swayed. Light burrowed up his back and burst into his shoulders, then radiated, hot and bright, through his whole body.

“You’re very good,” he said.

“I’ve been at it a long time,” she said. Then, lowering her voice, she said, “But not much longer. I’m in school.”

She was studying sign language, she said. As a translator, she’d help people communicate with one another. The idea captivated her, how a gesture became words, how words became the movement of hands.

“I want to be that conduit,” she said.

In Burlington, he’d had a pair of deaf neighbors. Summer evenings, he and Lorrie would sit on their porch and talk while, across the street, the deaf couple sat on their porch and spoke with their hands. Always, he’d have to be reminded not to stare. But how could he not stare? The movements, the transmissions—they were beautiful. And Marisa’s hands . . . the choice was perfect. The language had been made for hands like hers.

She worked his back, pressing, kneading. Her body’s shadow glided through the candlelight and over his small patch of tile. Her fingers navigated his shoulders. She moved to the end of the table, and her shirt’s hem grazed his hair.

He lifted his head, and there was her arm at his face. Veins pulsed, delicate and blue, the image suddenly lovely, this wrist, pale and soft-seeming, and these veins, tattooed in the shape of a tuning fork to her skin. Her wrist brushed his chin, and he kissed it.

It lasted a second, maybe less, a kiss so close to a breath, he let himself believe she wouldn’t notice. But already Marisa was backing away. Her hands left his shoulders. He sat up, careful to keep himself covered. She was as far from him as the room allowed, backed into a corner beside the cabinetry and counter. The candle’s flame danced by her wrist.

“Watch yourself,” he said.

She brought her hands to her chest, but her eyes didn’t leave his.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Why did you do that?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t know. He couldn’t say why he’d done it, couldn’t fathom the impulse or the compulsion to follow it. Or, he could fathom the impulse. Impulses came and went: the stove that said
Touch,
the red light that said
Run,
the ledge that whispered
Jump
. They came unbidden and, like the wishes of children, went ungranted. Far as Mark knew, it was this way for everyone.

Why this one, though? Why a kiss? Why now?

“Joshua would be so hurt if he knew.”

“I wish you wouldn’t tell him,” he said.

Marisa’s cheeks puffed and her bottom lip lengthened. She exhaled, and Mark felt the wind across the room. She lifted his brother’s clothes from the counter and set them on the table beside him. She moved to the door, opened it, but stopped short of the hall. She turned and stood in the open doorway.

“He’s sorry,” Marisa said. “I can promise you that. He’s embarrassed. He’s ashamed. We both are. We should have come, and we didn’t. I can’t explain it. There’s no explanation good enough even if I could. All I can say is that we’re sorry. But you know that. You have to know that.”