Women and Children First (11 page)

“Jesus Christ,” says Vincent, “just tell her what I’m doing.” Then he says, “Sorry, Mom.”

“That’s all right,” says Rose, and turns away from him. Vincent rarely sees Rose cry, but now there are tears in her voice as she says, “I know, I know. We’ve all got to blow off steam.”

Vincent steers Laurel to his car. With baby Owen’s car seat in the back, Beth’s crayons and coloring books, and fast food garbage matted on the back floor, his car, he decides, is a half-ton wedding ring. Vincent remembers hearing about a sex murderer being sought in L.A. The witnesses are all prostitutes whose friends vanished forever after talking to some John with a kid’s car seat in the back of his car. They disagree about what the guy looked like, but they all noticed that.

“How many kids do you have?” Laurel asks.

“Two,” Vincent says.

“That’s great,” Laurel says. “I want to have kids. But I’m only twenty-five now. I figure I’ve still got time. Right?” She settles in, buckles up, then leans forward and runs one finger over the dashboard. “What kind of car is this?” she asks.

“Rabbit diesel,” says Vincent.

“I’ve seen that ad,” Laurel says. “Where Wilt Chamberlain gets out of the car?” Laurel sounds dubious, and Vincent can see why. Today the car feels small, mashing Vincent and Laurel together. The dark red interior fits them, close and hot as a blanket.

“Where to?” Vincent says.

Laurel laughs. “East Lexington,” she says.

Vincent looks at her. East Lexington is twenty-five miles away. For a second he’s annoyed, then excited, then happy.

“Are you sure that’s all right? I can call a cab from Catskill.” Laurel flutters her hands.

“I’m sure,” Vincent says. “It’s nothing.”

It’s a bright August afternoon, hot in the sun, but not humid. Driving through a shady patch, Vincent looks out at the cornfields; the edges of things are beginning to sharpen and turn crisp, like in the fall. The sky is a children’s-book blue. Today—miraculously—they go five miles on Route 34 without seeing another car, and no trucks come barreling up behind them while Vincent’s car strains toward the speed limit. “Hey,” Laurel says. “Private road.”

Neither talks for a while. No need to rush anything. Vincent slips a tape into the tape deck and as if on cue, the Talking Heads sing “I’ve got plenty of time.”

“Nice music,” says Laurel.

Listening, they ride till they’re just past Gilford Lake. Then Laurel leans forward again and turns the tape all the way down. Vincent likes the way she just went ahead and did that. Laurel points out the window at the former Arrowhead Lodge, now L’Auberge Colette, a French country inn opened last spring by two guys from Brooklyn Heights. Vincent has heard it’s pretty good; some of the faculty go there.

“Have you ever eaten there?” Laurel says, and when Vincent says no, she says, “That’s weird.”

“Why?” says Vincent.

“You teach French,” says Laurel.

Vincent waves one hand vaguely. “The kids…”

“You should get a baby-sitter,” says Laurel.

“What about you?” Vincent says. “Ever baby-sit?”

Laurel giggles. “I’m not kidding,” she says. “You should.”

“You’re right,” says Vincent. They used to have a neighbor kid they thought was okay. One night they came home to find him showing the kids how to put lighter fluid all over his hand and set it on fire. But baby-sitter problems aren’t what Vincent wants to talk about. Suddenly he feels that pressure again: time’s running out. They’re a third of the way to East Lexington. Soon he’ll be dropping her at the garage and nothing will have happened but this.

“You can start off with this great grilled seafood sausage,” Laurel says. “In a light tomato sauce with dill. And those crusty long baguettes to dip in the sauce—they bake them in this giant stone oven. Plus all kinds of terrines and pates with those little cornichons, I could eat a whole plate of them. The chef does great things with game. Venison with a kind of spicy Thai sauce. Stuff like that. Plus, you can get plain grilled fish, veal cutlets in this almond-lemon sauce. And for dessert—”

“Don’t tell me,” says Vincent. “Crème brûlée.”

Laurel glances at him. “You don’t have to eat there,” she says, shifting slightly away in her seat. “I don’t care.”

“No,” Vincent says. “It sounds great. Who do you go there with?”

“My cousin and her husband, mostly. They’re into good food.” Laurel moves closer again—all this is in fractions of inches. “Gee,” she says. “Thanks, really, for the ride.”

“It’s nothing,” says Vincent. That’s right, he thinks. It is. Nothing. And what did he think it would be? What did he think would happen between him and some twenty-five-year-old physical therapist on the road between his dying father and a two-time loser with Lou Gehrig’s disease?

Out of nowhere, there’s a line of red brake lights ahead of him. Everyone’s rubbernecking: an old man’s car’s broken down. For a while, after his father got sick, Vincent was always amazed to see old people walking around, or driving. This one’s in trouble. Steam’s billowing from under his hood. A cop’s there, helping.

“Ruined
his
whole day,” Vincent says.

“Car trouble all around,” says Laurel. “Maybe it’s in the stars.” Laurel turns back for one last look at the steaming car, then says, “When I was a kid I thought I saw a vision in my neighbor’s backyard. First I thought it was a ghost. Then I thought it was the Virgin Mary. But when I got really close it turned out to be steam from the neighbor’s dryer.”

Well, Vincent thinks, that explains everything. Religious. He’s aware that some part of him wants to believe that Laurel is religious, that she’d have to be. In some way, Vincent decides, it’s not her body he wants, but her spirit. He wants to believe that people like Laurel exist—simple, selfless, purely good.

“Are you Catholic?” he says. For a moment Vincent almost wishes
he
were; his parents stopped going to mass before he was born.

“Till I was seven,” Laurel said. “Then I quit.”

“Why’d you stop?” Vincent asks.

“I don’t know. It was winter. It was cold in the church. I missed so much I just didn’t go back.”

Vincent thinks: If they’ve talked about God, they can certainly talk about work. “Listen,” he says. “How does somebody become a physical therapist, anyhow?”

“SUNY,” says Laurel. “I’ve only had my license three years.”

“But
why
?” Vincent says.

“I just like to use my body, I guess,” Laurel says. “Keep in shape. And I like to help folks.”

Vincent can’t let himself take this seriously. He doesn’t even want to consider the possibility that this girl who has obsessed him, whom he’s seen as a kind of saint with the healing touch, is in fact just a glorified aerobics nut. Besides, he’s positive there’s more to it. Certainly there are other ways to use your body and help folks besides lavishing such tenderness and encouragement on so much dying flesh.

“I guess that’s not all,” Laurel says a moment later. “I mean, for one thing, I was never squeamish about certain stuff that might bother other people. Even when I was little. Maybe I was born that way. Like here’s something that happened.” She waits a moment, then says:

“When I was ten we lived in a basement apartment in Troy. My window was right on the street. First it was a good neighborhood, then it wasn’t so good, and one morning I woke up to find this bum in bed with me. It was summer and he must have crawled down through the open window. His face was stubbly, and at first I thought it was my dad—he always kissed me good-bye when he went to work. But then I smelled alcohol on his breath, and my dad didn’t drink. The bum wasn’t doing anything, just sleeping, but anyway I called my parents, and when they came in my dad went crazy, beating on the guy, pushing him out through the lobby and back onto the street. My mother would burst into tears whenever she told the neighbors. My brother had bad dreams for months. But not me. It didn’t bother me, I don’t know. Even then, I figured: Hey, he’s a person, too.”

Vincent loves Laurel’s story, loves it so much he wants to make her repeat it. Maybe if she told it again, he’d know what it reminds him of. Then he figures it out on his own. It’s “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitaler,” the story that, Vincent thinks now, was the most loving and beautiful thing Flaubert ever wrote. Julian, the hunter who has progressed from slaughtering the innocent beasts of the forest to accidentally murdering his own parents, is forgiven—and forgives himself—when he hugs a leprous beggar in his arms all night. Suddenly Vincent feels grateful for his work, for knowing that story and being able to make this connection. He feels that he has been allowed to see some pattern in things and feel comforted, feel that some things endure beyond individual lives. He remembers how when Marianne was pregnant with Beth, and he’d get scared, he’d look at strangers in the street and, for comfort, think: Everyone was born. Now he thinks: Everyone’s parents die.

He so wants this feeling to continue that he tries to picture the Troy apartment, Laurel at ten. His daughter will be ten in three years; but dark, intense Beth is nothing like Laurel, and anyway, Vincent can never imagine his own children older. So he thinks of himself at ten, in his own room, his own house, the stucco New Rochelle Tudor they moved into when he was six. He sees his room, all those leaded glass windows, his toy trains—and instantly he realizes his mistake. The memory of that room is so sharply, so unexpectedly painful, it knocks the wind right out of him. For that was his father’s house, where Vincent lived as a child. He will never live in that house again, and his father will soon be dead. Vincent sees that this fact stretches backward and forward in time, changing everything, so that even the happiest memories are dangerous and will hurt. What difference does it make if two stories match, if a French saint and some little girl in Troy wake up in the arms of a bum? His father is dying, and that’s all there is.

“Are both your parents alive?” he asks. The way it comes out is almost accusing, which is almost how Vincent means it.

Laurel looks at him strangely. “Yes,” she says. Then she says, “I’m sorry about your dad.”

Vincent doesn’t answer. He’s afraid he’ll start weeping in front of Laurel. What makes it worse is that he can’t even speed up to distract himself. He’s stuck in a no passing zone behind some old lady doing forty. He leans forward, resting his breastbone against the wheel. Laurel leans forward too. He wonders if she’s unconsciously mimicking him, then realizes she’s pointing up through the windshield.

Looking up, Vincent sees a gigantic bird approaching them, flying slowly in from the west. At first he thinks it’s a heron, but it’s gliding. More like a hawk, except that it’s too big for a hawk. Could it possibly be an eagle? Whatever it is, it’s flying oddly, and as it gets closer, Vincent sees why. It’s got a huge fish in its claws. The fish is still struggling, and the bird’s trying not to drop it.

“I think it’s an osprey,” says Laurel. “Look at that!”

Still hanging on to the fish, the bird swoops down toward a telephone pole, clearly intending to land. But just as Vincent and Laurel pass, the fish drops out of its claws and falls to the ground. Vincent watches in his rearview mirror as the bird hovers, checks out the wires, the nearby road, decides it’s not worth it, and takes off. Vincent notices that the telephone pole is, as luck would have it, newer and slightly lighter than the rest.

Vincent and Laurel drive another quarter mile, till Vincent finds a safe place to make a U-turn. Then he circles around and heads back. He spots the light-colored telephone pole and pulls off the road. He gets out and walks through the grass.

The fish, still moving, is easy to find. Vincent picks it up. It’s slippery and hard to hold, enormous and heavy and perfectly silver, shiny as a new dime. The sun hits it straight on. Its eye is open and bright.

He thinks about bringing it home. At first he is worried that Marianne and the kids won’t believe him, or, if they do, will take it wrong: all their fishing brings in nothing, and all he has to do is drive down the road. He’ll also have to explain what he was doing here with Laurel. Then he thinks: Marianne and the kids aren’t like that. They’ll believe him and love his story, they’ll exclaim over the fish, his luck in finding it, his sharp eye, his reflexes, his common sense. His giving Laurel a ride will seem like what it is: a decent thing to do, regardless of why he offered.

Laurel is talking as she gets out of the car and walks toward him. “It’s a freshwater bass,” she’s saying. “From the reservoir, probably. You can do anything with that. You could bake it in foil with plenty of fresh parsley and garlic and olive oil and green pepper and lots of sliced fresh tomatoes…”

Vincent can’t speak. He holds the fish toward Laurel. He doesn’t know if he is offering it or just showing it. He will do anything she says.

H
ER LOVER IS A BIOLOGIST,
a specialist in animal relocation. When the ecologically conscious want to build in a wildlife area, he is called in to move the animal populations and accustom them to their new home.

It took her some time to believe that such a job really existed. Or rather, she believed him until the first time he went away on an assignment; then she worried that he had made it all up to escape her. It seemed inconceivable that men who constructed new factories and extended the edges of cities should spend so much money on nature. She could understand why the developers of a new ski resort might worry about displaced resentful bears, but why would a lumber company feel so solicitous about elk?

For comfort, she thought: How could anyone make all that up? Besides, the details of his life added up. He knew every animal language, every bird call, the moony lowing of bison, the high-pitched, complex rattling of hyenas. She loved hearing, but not watching, this; she was embarrassed by the comical ways he had to screw up his face to make these sounds. But often, at night, she’d ask him to do mourning doves or owls, and though it was already dark, she’d close her eyes and imagine her bedroom was a forest. Also she loves making love with him; she feels that watching animals mate has taught him something about men and women—nothing specific, really, but something she has no language for and so cannot describe.