Darling? Page 7

  “Would you like to have Arlita over sometime—?” Mama asked suddenly. “Maybe to spend the night?”

  This, from someone who fled into her room when she so much as heard footsteps in the hall, was a heroic offer. She wanted to make amends—she so desperately wanted to be a good mother. She’d have done anything for Lanie if only she could.

  “Oh, Arlita’s going to camp,” Lane said lightly. “But, thank you, it’s a great idea. Maybe in August after she gets back.” She took Casper’s leash down from its hook, and he jumped up and charged toward her, paws on her shoulders to lick her face, nearly knocking her down. Mama smiled tenderly at the picture before her, and the knot in Lanie’s chest loosened: the planets were back in their proper orbits, the summer was stretching ahead, anything was possible, anything at all.

  * * *

  She waited until Mama was in bed—seven-thirty—to run the bath, so she wouldn’t have to explain anything. She usually took showers and not many of those—Mama washed so often Lane had bathing filed under madness in her mind. Once she was immersed, though, she wanted to stay there forever. Telling a story of herself like the stories of fashion models (“for breakfast she has only strawberries and the purest spring water … such delicate beauty must be nourished by perfect comfort and soothing ritual”) until it verged into the story of a young goddess (“washed in the waters of the Aegean, she returned to the island of Cythera where the spirits fed her a salad of flowers to restore her strength before her pilgrimage to Delphi was to begin…”), she lay back and felt herself dissolving—all that wrought-up tenseness that Mama hated in her seemed to melt away. She had to scrub fiercely, but when it was done there she was, glowing pale as the statue of a goddess, and there seemed something so tender and poignant in her body that Zeus would surely flash down from the heavens and carry her away.

  By the time she was dressed again it was eight-thirty, but what is eight-thirty on the longest night of the year, when you are pale as a goddess and Uncle Bud is going to get you a job at NBC? “Come on, Casper,” she whispered. “Let’s go down and see the flowers.” She could feel him shivering with excitement as she clipped the leash on—it reminded her never to be so eager—it would be awful if people knew how much one wanted them.

  Mr. Lathrop was in the lobby waiting for the elevator.

  “Just the person I’d been hoping to see!” he said. “I was going up to the roof—want to come?” And without waiting for an answer he stepped in and pushed the button for the twelfth floor.

  “Penthouse, James,” he said to the air, and up they went. “To your left,” he said, holding the door for Lanie and Casper, “around the corner, and voilà!”

  The sign on the door read EMERGENCY EXIT, ALARM WILL SOUND, but he threw it open and ushered them gallantly through. At the top of the passage the light was brilliant, and when they stepped into it, he swept his arm out as if the view of the city shimmering in the confluence of rivers were his own invention and he was operating the stately ships and the sails that flicked between them by remote control.

  “Is it—?” Was it real? Because how could it be? People said there was a view from the north side, but Lanie hadn’t realized this meant one side of the building looked out on a different world. She let Casper off the leash, and he ran lightly, doggily around the chimneys, sniffing in the corners, rolling on a piece of AstroTurf set up like a putting green as if it were a real green lawn. There were beach chairs set up, one with a folding umbrella attached and a rubber tree planted nearby in a barrel, and a shuffleboard chalked on the asphalt with a plastic paperweight for a puck.

  “No one’s here tonight,” Mr. Lathrop said, “but it can get pretty lively.”

  Could it be, that he had taken her to a kind of secret place where all the quiet, exhausted tenants of this building, who hardly acknowledged each other inside, suddenly came out in their T-shirts and Bermuda shorts to socialize and bask in the sun? She started toward the edge to look down, but she had to step back—it seemed as if some irresistible force would pull her over.

  “It’s safe,” Mr. Lathrop said, and set his hand on her shoulder. “See, it’s the same brick wall as the rest of the building. It’s no different than looking out your bedroom window. It only feels different, that’s all. Look, it comes up to your waist—you’re not going to fall.” Seeing her scrubbed arms outstretched she thought yes, maybe she did dare to look out from here.

  Casper came around the chimney with a tennis ball in his mouth, which he dropped expectantly at Mr. Lathrop’s feet. “He’s so obedient!” Mr. Lathrop said, which was hardly the truth, and Lanie wondered if Casper was imitating the dogs on TV. He raced after the ball when Mr. Lathrop threw it and was back in a flash, stepping like a parade horse though his dignity was compromised by the sight of his tail madly wagging.

  “Go, tiger!” Mr. Lathrop said to him, skipping the ball along the asphalt. “Do you see over there?” he asked Lanie. “Those trees?” She followed his pointing arm to a surprising green thicket there in the midst of the tenements and avenues.

  “That’s where I grew up,” he told her. “The whole island used to look like that—can you imagine there were farms here?”

  She could not. She could hardly believe Staten Island hadn’t been paved over since the day the world was made, or that Mr. Lathrop had ever been a boy. She felt nearly the same vertigo, looking up at him, as she had looking down from the rooftop a minute before.

  “I used to shoot ducks over there,” he said. “Rex was a wonderful hunting dog. Casper would be, too—it’s hard on these outdoor dogs, living in the city. There were deer in there, too.” His voice had grown distant and sad; he was confiding—amazingly—in her!

  “That’s where I first kissed my wife, in fact.” The word—wife—stabbed her.

  “You wouldn’t have guessed that, I suppose,” he said when she didn’t answer. “I don’t seem the type?” he asked. “Who’d marry me?”

  “Oh, no!” Lanie said. “That’s not what I meant!” She forgot that she hadn’t spoken. She wanted to ask where this wife was, but she imagined that, like Mama, she had grown to despise him and pushed him out of her life.

  “I’m not the type, that’s all,” he said. “Some people are meant to be alone.”

  “You seem like a very nice person to me,” Lanie said, cursing herself for the banality—if only she could find the words to comfort him, to draw the thorn out of his paw … Well, it would be magic, he would belong to her.

  “It must be nearly your bedtime,” he said then, looking very busy and serious suddenly, accepting the ball from Casper without even patting him and turning back toward the steps, though it couldn’t have been much past nine. So after all that, he still thought of her as a child!

  * * *

  The center of gravity had changed; it was located in Mr. Lathrop’s apartment, number 301. Lanie said nothing to Mama, who was always afraid someone would steal Lanie’s love from her. How could a mother fear such a thing? But she did, and her fear made it seem possible, so that Lanie feared it herself sometimes, too. She kept him a secret, never spoke his name aloud, which meant there was no way to contain him: he got loose in her mind like ether, and when she woke up in the morning she felt like he’d been with her all night, and when she knew she might see him her heart battered itself against her ribs like a frenzied animal in a cage.

  The next day it was Casper’s turn for the bath—he looked extremely skeptical at first, but she whispered to him that he would love it, and while she was lathering him he began to revel, rolling in the water and shaking himself until she wrapped him in a towel and lugged him out in her arms like a monstrous baby. He smelled like fresh laundry, and when she set him down, he raced around the room and jumped back and forth over the coffee table like a circus dog, and Mama laughed in the old way and Lanie felt like the girl in the camera eye whose life was all energy and accomplishment, no secret cravings, no fears. Taking him out to walk she pushed the button for the up elevator by mi
stake, and in a minute he was yanking her up the stairs to the roof.

  “Ah, here you are!” Mr. Lathrop said, really glad to see her she thought, cautioning herself against such ideas. “Is it your birthday?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Oh, what a shame!” he said. “And I’ve gone and gotten you a present…”

  It was a paper box with two gilt crickets mounted on springs inside, which began to chirp as the lid was opened and fell silent as soon as it closed.

  “It’s the best thing on Mott Street,” he said, peering into her face. “What do you think?”

  He’d been in the midst of the city, where people streamed around you and everything was bright and quick and fascinating, and he’d been thinking of her.

  “I love it,” she said, unable to lift her eyes—if she stared at it hard enough, she would understand the secret message she was sure must be there. They weren’t alone today—there was a breeze and Mr. and Mrs. Chartov, who usually huddled in the back of the elevator, whispering together as if they were still afraid of the KGB, were taking advantage of it, she asleep with her skirts pulled up to sun her heavy, pale legs, while he read a spy novel with a dagger on the cover. Henry Ramos was playing boules on the AstroTurf with another man Lanie didn’t know, while Florence Sklar, the very flirtatious and very old lady who lived across the hall from them, weeded an herb garden she had planted in a barrel, wearing carmine lipstick and a panama hat.

  Lanie went to the edge to look out over the place where Mr. Lathrop had proposed to his wife. “Did you live on a farm?” she asked him, wanting that falling sensation she’d had when he confided in her the night before, expecting him to change the subject, but he began to give such a long, full answer that it seemed he must have been thinking it out all day. His father had been a chemist, and died young, and then …

  “Did she die, too, your mother?” Lanie asked.

  “No,” he said, looking off over the water. “No…” But he sounded as if he wasn’t sure. “She just didn’t know what to do, without him. She wasn’t … strong.”

  I’m strong, Lanie thought. She remembered how she made the boy fill the prescription, how she steadied Mama along by balancing insulin and sugar, exercise and sleep, always keeping a little snack and a happy story on hand. Mr. Lathrop (call him Hank, he said, and she did, but in her thoughts he was always mister) could rest his head on her shoulder, he would be safe with her.

  Casper found the tennis ball again and dropped it at Mr. Lathrop’s feet, looking up at him with a yearning Lanie hadn’t seen before, that made her think absently that dogs care more for men—certainly Casper had loved her father best of all. Mr. Lathrop took the ball and skipped across the roof like a stone on a lake, his attention fixed inward the whole time. He wasn’t handsome; a thick vein pulsed in his temple, and one eye was overcast somehow—it was a hurt to be kissed away. And his shoulders were broad, sheltering. She knew about love—she had watched the couples in the park, the way they couldn’t keep apart from each other. If she dared to touch him … But she did not. She knew about sex, too—the man puts his penis in your vagina. It seemed a cold thing, but she would bear it gratefully for the sake of love.

  * * *

  When she wanted to prove he really existed she could open the cricket box and hear them chirp—by mid-July the lid no longer closed tightly, and if she left it in the east window, they’d wake her when the sun cleared the Federal Building in the morning. That meant, Hank said, it was light that activated them … a chemical reaction. He really was Hank now, and she was Lane—he younger, she more adult; they knew each other’s paths and where to cross them—they saw each other every day. He knew so much—all about chemicals, medicines, the way things work—she absorbed it all as if life were an enormous contraption she needed his knowledge to steer. After lunch, as soon as she’d done her mother’s blood levels, she’d run to the library and grab a mystery for Mama and something for herself, anything to hold up in front of her so Mama wouldn’t see the new expressions—every kind of longing and satisfaction—that were shaping her face. She looked in every mirror she passed—she was beginning to see something she liked there, a listening spirit that a man might come to love. Whenever she saw her reflection now she wondered what he had seen in her, what he meant when he said “a girl like you.”

  She kept the books under the roof stairway so she could act as if she’d been at the library all afternoon, a ruse Mama either believed or accepted, it hardly mattered which. Once Lane forgot a whole batch and owed three dollars by the time she returned them—she didn’t have it, of course, and the nice librarian wasn’t there, and some snippy substitute refused to let her take any more books. The blood sprang to her cheeks as if she’d been slapped, and she turned away vowing never to enter that building again, and in the midst of thinking “You’ll be seeing me on NBC any day, bitch,” she realized the summer was passing with no word from Uncle Bud, and her mother was as silent about him as about her father now—it would be poison to mention him—so she thought, instead, “I’m going to marry Hank Lathrop, and you’ll still be nobody.”

  Though why the library volunteer would be jealous of such a thing she could not be sure—but she felt it to the bottom of herself—it would be the proudest victory, to have won his love. And he didn’t work, he must have money, he could take care of them—Mama, too—he would keep them safe, she would keep him warm.

  She had won him, she believed she had. She hoarded his confidences, kept them close to her heart, took them out when she was alone to hold them to the light and marvel, that he had given these things to her. He told her more and more and more. She could feel his story beginning to circle around both of them, binding them tight to each other. When he hugged Casper, burying his face in the dog’s neck, he must be wishing to hold her. Yes, she was coming into that rarest and most precious of possessions—a man’s heart. And all because she knew the secret of adults, that they are no less frightened than children and if you care for them properly they will love you in return.

  Casper was like a child, too, panting and wagging his tail in a frenzy, bounding to fetch the ball a hundred times in a row. If they were engrossed in their conversation and forgot to throw it again right away he’d race in circles around the AstroTurf and try to retrieve Mr. Ramos’s boules.

  “No, no, Casper!” she called, laughing, and he bounded over to her and licked her face and nearly bowled her over. “No!” she said, laughing, scratching his ears, and Hank gave him a biscuit from his shirt pocket and threw the ball. And looking away toward the spot where he’d kissed his wife said that it was right after they were married that Rex had to be put down.

  “That’s life, I guess,” he said, “one loss after another. When I met Sarah … It was the first time since my dad died that I felt—I felt—” He wove his fingers together, and she said she knew. “Twelve years ago … I thought when we were this age we’d be looking back at our life.…”

  Twelve years! Then, this was a sadness from before Lane was born, a sadness the entire span of her life had not eased. She laid her hand on his shoulder and felt it tense—it was the same as with her mother; pain drew the being into a fist around it, you couldn’t open the hand again no matter how you tried. “What happened?” she asked him, lobbing the ball softly into the corner just to get Casper out of the way.

  “I guess—I guess she didn’t want me anymore,” he said, and his lip trembled, and Casper brought the ball back with his tail wagging so hard it looked like he’d tip himself over, and Hank took it from him and packed it between his hands like a snowball. “No, there was no mystery, she didn’t want me.…” And he hurled the ball away as if he meant to be rid of it forever.

  It bounced beside the chimney and sailed over the wall, bright and still against the sky for a moment before it fell out of sight, with Casper behind it, gone in one ecstatic bound.

  “That’s how it is sometimes, with men and women,” Hank was saying, looking down at the floor as if
to keep from any distraction. She couldn’t interrupt him—what would she say? She couldn’t believe it herself, that she had just seen Casper leap away into the sky. “I thought, I thought—but I was wrong.” He looked up, finally, looking to her for an answer.

  “He went over the edge,” she said, still staring at the spot she’d last seen him as if a celestial version of Casper might come trotting back through the air.

  “He—what?” Hank shook his head, getting the past out of it.

  “Casper, he—the ball bounced and he went after it.”

  “No, honey, he can’t…,” he said, and her heart quieted—he was so reasonable, he would explain now how it couldn’t have happened, there were laws of gravity and velocity that prevented such a thing … or how there was an awning down there where Casper would have landed softly like a dog in a movie, or how he could fix a broken dog … But watching his face she saw his calculations prove out the wrong way. He went to look over the wall, then took her by both arms and turned her toward the stairs.

  “I’ll take you home,” he said. “Then I’ll go down and see what I can do.”

  * * *

  “He died happy, Lanie,” her mother said. “He was doing what he loved best, with the girl he loved most, he probably didn’t even feel anything. You said you didn’t hear him cry. It’s better this way, I’m sure of it, darling—he lived a good life, and died in an instant, what more could you ask?”

  She had a mother’s tutelary manner but Lane knew what she was saying: that Lane was all she had in the world and if she gave in to grief they’d both be lost.

  “I suppose it’s true,” she said, trying to see it this way, thinking how he’d lain on the carpet all that time hardly lifting his head, and then from the first time Hank threw the ball for him he was alive again and watching, watching, afraid to miss a single chance. He had leapt over the wall as if now that he had Hank, he felt he could fly. “His last moment was a happy one,” she said.