The Most Wanted (20 page)

“ ‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’ ” he said.

“ ‘Rage, rage, against the dying light,’ ” I said, trying to remember what I’d read.

“ ‘Rage, rage, against the dying
of the
light . . .’ Say that Sara Teasdale thing. About just knowing you’re in the wide world with him . . .”

“I can’t. I don’t know it all.”

“Just say something, then. Say some poem you know.”

“I don’t know a whole one.”

“It don’t matter.”

So I told him what I’d already learned of “The Highwayman.” I recited all the parts about the highwayman came riding, riding, riding, up to the old inn door. He leaned forward. “ ‘One kiss, my bonny sweetheart,’ ” I said. My mouth was full of cotton. “ ‘I’m after a prize to-night, But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light; Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day, Then look for me by moonlight, Watch for me by moonlight, I’ll come to thee by moonlight—’ ”

“By moonlight,” said Dillon.

“ ‘By moonlight, though hell should bar the way.’” I went right on to the part where Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, shoots herself to warn the highwayman that the soldiers are looking to catch him and hang him.

“She killed herself?” Dillon breathed.

“She did,” I said. We were both whispering. “She warned him with her death.”

“He was an outlaw.”

“A robber. But I don’t think really a bad person.”

“Did he kill people?”

“No, he just took whatever they had. It was probably rich people carrying bags of gold or something. This was before the American Revolution.”

“ ‘One kiss, my bonny sweetheart . . .’ ”

“Right.”

“ ‘I’m after . . .’ ”

“ ‘After a prize to-night.’ ” He nodded, as if he were a little kid about to fall asleep, and I kept on murmuring. “ ‘But I shall be back with . . .’ ”

“Arley,” Dillon said, almost too gruff and soft to hear. “Do you love me?”

“I love you more than . . . I love you.”

“Would you do that? To warn me?”

He meant would I shoot myself. My breakfast churned around in my stomach. I didn’t know what to say. I did know what he wanted me to say. “I guess so,” I told him. “If there wasn’t any other way.”

“Do you love me, Arley?” he asked again.

I don’t know why I did it. You probably wouldn’t think so from what I’ve done, but I’m pretty shy. I’m shy about my body. Even changing for meets, I had a hard time in new dressing rooms with other girls. So what I did, well, I didn’t think much about it. I followed the directions written in Dillon’s eyes. I knew that any second a guard could come waltzing into Dillon’s room—our hour was almost up—but it was like the scene in those gangster movies where you see people getting shot and the camera makes it so the blood comes blooming out of them really slow, like a scarf shook out, instead of how it would really be . . . a pop, a thing so fast you would hear it longer than you saw it.

I put the phone down. Without taking my eyes away from Dillon, I reached up and unlaced my braid and let my hair shake out. It felt good, like a warm towel coming down around my shoulders. It was so damned cold in there. Dillon’s forehead creased and his lips drew back a little, like he was hurting. I didn’t look away. I put my two hands on the bottom seam of my shirt and rolled it up. Under my shirt was one of those little tight T-shirts people wear for sports. I like them even better than sports bras; they don’t cut you. I rolled the T-shirt up, too, and leaned my whole top, my warm skin, against that cold and smeary glass, my breath coming so fast I thought my heart would burst. I tried to act cool, like a woman, as if showing someone my Dixie-cup breasts was just about the most natural thing in the world to do. Back of my eyes, I could feel tears starting, like little pins stabbing. I was afraid and ashamed and excited and proud all at once. Dillon hung up his phone and put out his two hands, flat against the glass where my breasts were, as if he were holding them, holding me. Then for real I could feel the heat. I had to shut my eyes. When I opened them, I saw that he’d closed his eyes too. We stayed that way maybe a minute. No guard came. Dillon took his hands away the moment I let my shirt down.

He picked up his receiver. “You’re beautiful, girl. You’re beautiful as a queen and as a statue. You’re the landlord’s black-eyed daughter.”

“I love you,” I said.

“Marry me, Arley,” Dillon said.

I swallowed. I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. I shut my mouth and opened it again, and I said, “Okay.”

I can see that girl now. See her sitting there, breath coming shallow and fast, trying to do her hair back up in a braid, her eyes big and dark as coffee in cups. I can see the guard come and sort of survey the room and give me a look that seemed to say he’d seen it all before, and then pull Dillon up, and me standing up and straining, after the door on his side closed, to see the white-blond top of his head as he was led down the hall. Reaching up with my hands, surprised to find tears on my face.

When I look back at that picture of me, left alone on one side of that dirty window, waiting for someone to unlock the door behind me and let me out, I think of a line from Carl Sandburg that I didn’t read until a long time later.

I don’t remember the whole poem.

But I remember one little part.

So far, it said. So fast. So far, so fast.

M
Y SISTER
Rachie was considering becoming a drive-by accountant. “People have been calling to cancel their appointments all month,” she told me, her voice crackling on her car phone. “They’re too busy. Their kid broke its collarbone. Or they have to shop for the holidays. I think I should just get one of those little red pickups, like the people who fix windshields. ‘Have tax shelters, will travel.’ ” Her voice rose about fifty decibels. “Dammit, buddy, the idea is we take
turns
at the stop sign! This is incredible. People act like they just remembered that they’re going to hold Christmas the same time as last year.”

For the first time since we’d moved to Texas, Stuart and I weren’t going home together for Christmas, and I was blue. Of course, we didn’t actually celebrate it, but Christmas was the time most of our friends washed up in the city. There would be impromptu excursions to the half-price tickets booth for Broadway seats, and lots of dinners at smoky restaurants and in the half-demolished houses of couples in the remodeling period of their lives. More for the sake of sentiment than form, so that our folks could have the prodigals all to themselves, Stuart and I would sleep apart during the winter visit, in our old rooms, making silly, sweet hourlong phone calls to one another from Princess phones next to the beds we slept in before we’d ever imagined San Antonio, the law, or each other. At my parents’, we’d exchange eight nights’ worth of trinkets for Chanukah, no matter when it had actually fallen, and we’d light the menorah Rachael had made in her jewelry class in high school. On Christmas Eve, we’d all go out with Stuart’s parents, his brother and his wife and their kids, for Chinese and then for old-time dancing at the Carillon. For sheer dance ability alone, Stuart had made me the envy of all my friends. Like his father before him, Stuart wasn’t just an enthusiastic dancer, he was a good one; he could jitterbug, he could even tango, and he put to shame most of the men of my generation, who acted like they were giving blood if you expected them to stand up and bob their shoulders at a bar mitzvah. Those late nights of dancing at the Carillon, high above the snow-shrouded reaches of Central Park, were among the sweetest hours of my adult life.

Not going made it feel as though everything was changing between us, changing in a way I could have stopped, though only by stopping what I had begun to see as my own evolution. It’s entirely possible, however, to feel very sad even while being very true to yourself.

We finally sat down together a few days before Stuart was to do the unthinkable—go home without me.

“All right,” he said. “Truce time. Tell me what this is really about.”

We’re drifting, I wanted to cry. We don’t see eye-to-eye on the most unnegotiable matter in a couple’s life, and we can’t talk about it. The house doesn’t matter, I wanted to cry, the house is just a red herring! But I said, “Well, I can’t afford to come.”

“Anne,” Stuart said, “I bought you a ticket. I mean, have mercy. The picture of you sitting alone scraping paint off the lintel post or the newel post or whatever at the House of Usher while all of us are going out—”

“Stop it! I can’t stand it, either.” But you’re going to have to face this, Stuart, I wanted to say.
We
are going to have to face this and deal with it. “It’s too much money—”

“It’s four hundred bucks, Anne. Big deal.”

“Four hundred bucks is three rooms of flooring refinished. And anyhow, I can’t let you take me because I dug this hole myself and I have to get out of it myself. You don’t approve of the house. You can’t imagine what I’ve already spent on it, and you don’t even want to know.”

“Honey,” he went on. “Come on. Let’s go home and have a good time and forget all this shit for a while. Jesus, Anne, I need a break. The funding could really be in jeopardy this time.” This was a threat every winter. “I’ve been working twenty-hour days—”

“I also have been working twenty-hour days, Stuart, plus trying to get a house in shape. For us.”

“You didn’t buy that house for us.”

“I did, too.”

“You bought it for you. You bought it to draw some kind of phony line in the sand. Time to be middle-aged! Time to be grown up and responsible! Well, I’m not buying into it, Anne. We had a good life together . . .”

“Nice how easily you put our life in the past . . .”

“I’m not going to argue with you. And I’m not going to go off feeling like I’ve abandoned this poor little puppy, because you’re doing this to make a point, Anne. You’re doing it because you’re stubborn. I don’t have a choice about going. My uncle and my aunt are going to be home, together, with my father, for what will probably be the last time in their lives.”

I sighed loudly. It was childish, but not so childish as the way I really wanted to behave, which was to sit down on the floor and kick my feet. This was all my fault, and so I wanted to slap Stuart for it.

He frowned at me, “Okay, sigh, Annie. But it’s my family. Family values, Anne. You know?” He took a red-and-white-striped ticket folder out of his sports coat pocket and slapped it on the kitchen counter. “Come home or don’t. But I’m not going to be the villain here.” He started to stalk off, and then he looked back. I’m sure I looked like a golden retriever, my face a pattern book of stubborn misery. He leaned over and kissed me, catching my lower lip softly between his teeth for an instant. “Never change, babe,” he said.

At the last minute, I decided to drive him to the airport. I dressed up for it, deliberately putting on matching underwear, a shirt that was almost see-through, and silk pants that kept moving a smidge of a second after I stopped. We necked so much in the car that Stuart was sort of a groaning mess by the time we got to the airport. Delightfully mired in my own spite, my crotch thumping with unsatisfied arousal, I bid him a soppy and flushed farewell, with much protracted rubbing between our two trench coats.

I needed to go over to the King William neighborhood and give Charley Wilder a check for some fixtures, but I decided I couldn’t face it right then. Giving Charley checks was like a weekend job, and these days, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry every time I saw him, which was three or four times a week, since one of us always seemed to have just one small thing to check out with the other. I had come to appreciate Charley: his general calm, his attachment to the neighborhood, and his tenderness with me. He truly was the carpentry angel, taking care to space out the written estimates of what it would cost to bring 4040 Azalea Road into public-health compliance—never mind aesthetic beauty. But even his gently worded estimates were sick and shocking. The house was a money sink, with an ever-circling black drain.

The downstairs bathroom, for example, lacked plumbing, in the twentieth-century sense of the word. The former owner had evidently operated it for years with water carried from a mop sink in an adjacent closet. By knocking out the wall between the bathroom and the closet, Charley explained, he could create one decently functional room large enough for two adults to stand in side by side. “Always important in a bathroom,” I grumbled.

“You never know,” he replied cheerfully.

“And why stop with the wall? Why don’t you suggest we knock the floor and ceiling out too?”

“Actually,” he said, painstakingly removing his nearly ever-present clean bandanna and retying it around his forehead, “we really will need to do the ceiling eventually. . . .”

“What?”

“To put in a skylight. Any other kind of light you put in . . . well, Anne, it’s just not going to make any difference. It’s going to look like Madame Tussaud’s in there, because of the way the eaves overhang that window, and the size of the pecan tree outside.”

“At least the tree is healthy.”

“Yes,” he said, as if talking to a very young child, “it is. And once you remove the branches that are putting weight on the eaves—since some of those branches are the size of young trees—and it could cost a thousand dollars to take down each one of them—”

“Jesus! I’ll cut them down! Can’t we just rent a chain saw?”

“We’ll think of something,” Charley told me comfortingly. He was, indeed, comforting altogether, a person nothing much seemed to flap. I was only now beginning to figure out exactly what it was precisely that Charley did all day and night, since he was always busy. From hints he’d dropped, I knew he did work on commission. He was restoring a tiny, ancient civic building, drywalling a Habitat home on Saturdays, and he had a grant to design an orchid garden at the historical center. When we were together, no matter what part of town we’d invaded for one of Charley’s salvage missions, he seemed to know everyone. One of the other things he did was maintain the landscaping for a couple of restaurants, like The September Garden, the funny old Chinese restaurant with rock bridges that Texans seemed to love just as much as tourists did. One of the perks of the job meant that Charley got meals there free; the proprietor always made a huge fuss over him.

A couple of days before Stuart left, I’d joined Charley there for what turned out to be a three-hour lunch, interesting enough to re-create on the phone for my sister. The things that fascinated Charley Wilder didn’t fascinate me. I was a pavement-and-bright-lights person; as far as I was concerned, shrubs and ferns could keep their secrets.

What did beguile me was Charley’s passion for the things he did. It was . . . not childlike, exactly, but endearingly new, as if he drew wonder from a solar battery that didn’t have anything to do with money, which, I figured, he didn’t have in abundance. I’d begun to look forward to his good-humored and various rambles. He was becoming, as I told my sister—who said, “Hmm”—an unlikely kind of pal.

That day at The September Garden, the subject was live oak trees. There were two huge live oaks at the back of the restaurant’s elaborate topiary and rock gardens. Under one, the restaurant had built an awninged bar. Under the other was a “bar” for children, featuring fruit smoothies and herbal iced teas. Children sat at their own bar while adults, just twenty yards away in clear sight, enjoyed their cocktails. “Just a couple of years ago, they were going to take those trees down,” Charley told me. “The bars were my idea, really. A way to make use of the space without wasting those trees.”

“They must be a hundred years old.”

“Lot more than that. These trees might have been here when the Woodland Indians were here, maybe eight hundred years ago, maybe more. There’s burial mounds in East Texas that have things in them that could be thirty thousand years old and that aren’t from around here, like little masks with shells that came from the seashore in Florida.”

“So were they nomads?”

“Traders, I think. I think they had, like, traveling salesmen.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t
know.
It’s just what I think.”

“So you’re saying these trees were alive when—”

“Not alive.”

“They’re not
dead.
”

“I mean, the part of them that’s alive now wasn’t alive then.” The waiter was hovering, and I asked for a menu, but Charley told me he never used a menu at The September Garden. The fun was in the whole ritual of offering and praise that accompanied every surprise lunch the chef prepared for him. “Unless,” he said, “you’re kosher.”