“Stop!” Abbie screamed. “We lost Sox!”
“Are you crazy?”
“Sox has gone! He fell out!”
“No way.”
“Rolf, you’ve got to stop!”
She tried to grab the hand brake but he lashed out and shoved her away and she banged the back of her head against the window.
“You bastard!”
“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!”
She looked back but the dog was nowhere to be seen. Abbie looked down at her hands and saw that there was blood on them. She started to wail.
In just a few quick seconds everything had turned upside down and gone spiraling out of control. She couldn’t believe it was happening. Her head was a slide-show carousel: the blazing house, the guy kneeling there, staring at the smoking hole in his chest, that look in his eyes when he stared up at her.
Through the streaming blur of her tears she looked across at Rolf. He was breathing hard, his face warped with concentration as he drove them in a manic rush through the maze of streets. Houses, storefronts, the glare of headlights strobing by, an ambulance now, its sirens blaring and lights all flashing.
“We’ve got to go back.”
“Just shut up.”
“It was an accident. We can tell them. We have to go back and tell them.”
“Abbie, shut up.”
“Rolf, if the guy dies! They’ll think we killed him.”
“He’s already dead, you idiot!”
They were out on the highway now and he slowed a little, his eyes darting between the road ahead and the rearview mirror. There were more sirens now, then flashing lights ahead, two police cars coming fast toward them. But they whipped past without slowing.
“For fuck’s sake, stop crying,” he said.
There were signs to the freeway now. Another police car came by and then the road was clear. Rolf slowed and checked the mirror, then quickly turned left onto a side street and took two more turns and soon they were driving down alongside some derelict land and parking up behind the Toyota.
“Come on,” he said. “Abbie, come on! Move!”
But she couldn’t. All the power had drained from her limbs. She couldn’t stop staring at her hands. She had tried to wipe the blood off on her pants but there was still some under her nails and in the creases of her knuckles.
Rolf quickly got out and unlocked the Toyota then ran back and dragged her from the van and down the sidewalk to the car, all the while looking around to see if anyone was coming or watching. He dumped her in the front passenger seat and shut the door. She heard him open the trunk and take something out and there were a few moments of silence until the trunk slammed shut and he was climbing into the driver’s seat beside her and starting the engine. He did a quick U-turn and braked alongside the van and lowered his window. The van’s window was open too and he struck a match and tossed it through and at the same time stamped on the gas pedal. Abbie looked back and a second later felt the air compress and saw the van explode into flames behind them.
And soon they were out on the freeway, arcs of orange lights flashing overhead like the gates of hell as they headed out of town and into the waiting darkness. And so filled was her head with the image of her alien bloodied hands, that to where and to what if any kind of life, she neither knew nor cared.
TWENTY
If there was one thing Eve had always hated more than being photographed, it was being asked questions about her work. So being interviewed for some local cable station was a double whammy. The reporter looked about fourteen years old and had already confessed that he usually covered basketball stories and didn’t know the first thing about art. And he wasn’t being falsely modest. He really didn’t.
She was pinned against one of her new paintings, not one she would have chosen to talk about; in fact she didn’t really like it and wouldn’t have included it in the show if Lori hadn’t forced her to. But the camerawoman liked the color and said that if Eve stood in front of it, the background was better and they could get some guests into the shot as well as that nice potted plant over by the window.
“So,” the fourteen-year-old was asking. “Do you do it in, like, little bits, you know, like, work on a little section of it first and then do another little section and so on? Or do you, like, do the whole thing in one big go and then, kind of, fill it in?”
Eve could see Ben leaning against the wall, with his glass of red wine. He was talking with Lori but she knew from the way they were smiling that they were eavesdropping on the interview. The bastards.
“Well, I guess it varies from picture to picture,” Eve replied. “With this one, I had a very strong idea of the shapes I wanted and the way they were going to relate with each other. And you just, kind of, go with the flow. And inevitably something will happen that changes what you intended, you know, an accident of some kind.”
The boy looked mystified.
“You mean, like, a car accident?”
“No, I mean something that happens on the canvas. You make a mistake and suddenly, if you stand back and look, it’s better than what you planned.”
She could tell he hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about. Maybe she should start talking about basketball.
The gallery was cooler and quieter now that people had begun drifting out into Canyon Road. It had been a great party, though Eve had hardly known a soul. She knew that Lori had been working hard on her list, trying to drum up new clients, so it hadn’t just been the usual crowd of friends and hangers-on who came only for the pinot noir and canapés. To deter freeloaders, a lot of the galleries served nothing more potent than punch at show openings but Lori had managed both to keep the wine flowing and to sell a lot of pictures. All evening Eve had seen her scurrying around sticking little dots onto the paintings. Quite a lot of them were red too, which meant money had changed hands and the deal was as good as done. The green ones, of which there were more, meant the picture was reserved for a week with no deposit, so they weren’t worth getting too excited about. It usually meant someone had drunk too many glasses of wine and tomorrow would forget all about it.
The fourteen-year-old, thank heaven, seemed to have run out of questions now. Eve had long ago run out of answers.
“Thank you very much,” he said.
“You’re welcome. Thank you so much for coming.”
The boy wandered off with his camerawoman to take some more pictures of the paintings and Eve walked over to Lori and Ben, pulling a face as she came up to them. He handed her his glass of wine and she took it and drank.
“That was so impressive,” he said.
“Bullshit. With you two standing here smirking, I couldn’t string two thoughts together.”
“Neither could he, so you were perfectly matched.”
He put his arm around her and kissed her on the cheek. Lori leaned toward her.
“We have sold a truckload of paintings,” she said in a conspiring whisper. “Have you seen? Twenty-three, maybe twenty-four. Fantastic.”
“And Lori says she’ll only be taking five percent this time,” Ben said.
“In your dreams, pal.”
They laughed. Then Lori said she had to go and help Barbara, her assistant, who was over at the desk in the front room taking deposits and doing the paperwork. Eve looked up at Ben. He looked so handsome in his black linen shirt and white chinos. He still had his arm around her and now gave her a little squeeze.
“I’m so proud of you,” he said.
“Oh, go on.”
“You should have heard some of the things people were saying. They were just knocked out.”
“They were?”
“Yeah, they said it was the best pinot noir they’d ever had at an opening.”
She pinched his arm.
“No, honestly. Everybody was just in awe. You could have sold those two wolf angels twenty times over. That woman from LA in the red dress and the earrings? She just stood there staring at them for about ten minu
tes. She was nearly in tears.”
“That might not be good.”
“It was. She loved it. She was having a cathartic moment.”
Eve smiled and reached up and kissed him.
“I love you,” she said quietly.
They had dinner at El Farol with Lori and her latest boyfriend, Robert, who worked at some hi-tech military installation in San Diego and often had to come to Los Alamos for meetings that were so top secret he was hardly even allowed to tell himself about them. He was a thin little guy with gold-rimmed glasses and a pointy face and a habit of bombarding you with facts that were interesting enough but didn’t lead to any kind of real conversation. Ben could do a great impression of him.
“Do you know how many humans there are in the world?” Robert asked between spoonfuls of crème brûlée.
Everybody had forgotten.
“Six billion.”
He paused a moment, for appreciation.
“Do you know how many birds there are?”
Nobody did.
“A hundred billion.”
He repeated it, in case somebody had missed it.
“Do you know how much of the earth is land and how much ocean?”
“No,” Ben said. “But I’ve a feeling we soon will.”
Robert chose to ignore that. Eve caught Ben’s eye and tried not to laugh.
“One-third land, two-thirds ocean. That means one hundred and ninety-one square miles of land. Which means . . .”
He paused for effect. Ben, dead serious, leaning forward as if riveted, was pressing his knee against hers, trying to make her laugh.
“. . . two-point-five birds per acre.”
They all did their various best to look amazed and edified.
“Where does Lori find them?” Ben asked afterward, as they walked up the hill to the car. “I mean, what does she see in the guy?”
“She says he’s incredible in bed.”
“Really? Jesus. Does he whisper sweet facts and figures in her ear?”
“Uh-huh. Apparently it’s an amazing turn-on.”
“Oh really?”
“Absolutely.”
He thought for a moment, then put his lips close to her ear.
“Did you know that Polynesian is almost an anagram of oily spanner?”
She gave a little moan.
“All it needs is another R.”
“Stop, stop.”
They walked on awhile, the strike of their footsteps echoing off the adobe walls, his arm cozily around her. The night was clear and close to freezing, the fall shading to winter. God, Eve thought, they had been together nearly a year. And it was two years, almost to the day, since that night in New York when they saw Kiss Me, Kate and had dinner. At times it seemed like the blink of an eye and at others like a lifetime.
She had never expected it to be easy. She had known from the outset, even when they first met, that he had an aptitude for sadness. And she sometimes wondered if it was this very trait that had attracted her. For though she had never knowingly done it before, she was aware that it was possible for a woman to confuse love with pity and to take a man on in the hope of saving him. Or to see him as a sort of challenge, persuading herself that she and she alone could rescue him and mother him and make him happy. She didn’t think she was that kind of woman, in fact she hoped to God she wasn’t. But how could one ever be sure?
In fairness, Ben wasn’t that kind of man either. And Eve preferred to think that what she had fallen in love with was the man she had glimpsed behind the sadness. The man who, day by day, Ben seemed more able now to be. Like he was tonight, so easy and light and funny. When he was like that there wasn’t anyone in the world she would rather have been with.
But there had been occasions when she had wondered if they would make it. She had never met a man so susceptible to guilt. He was a double-major at it, a professor of guilt. And during those first few months after he had left Sarah and was living in Kansas and coming to Santa Fe for a week or two at a time, he was giving himself such a hard time that she’d almost had to ask him to stop visiting, at least until he sorted himself out. He seemed to have this bottomless pit into which he poured everything he could conceivably blame himself for and then every day would climb down into it and wallow around.
It wasn’t just about Sarah and his kids. A lot of the time it was about his mother. Living with her was driving him to distraction. He would get angry with her for going on about him and telling the same stories again and again of some wonderful thing he’d done when he was younger and he would end up saying something hurtful and then spend the next week feeling guilty about it. It even irritated him that in no time at all she seemed to have forgotten her first reaction to his leaving Sarah and had set to work rewriting history. He’d once heard her on the phone telling a friend that he’d never been happy with Sarah and that, actually, he was a saint for staying so long.
The prime source of his guilt was, of course, Abbie. Eve could remember trying to comfort him, back at the beginning of the year, telling him that it was only a matter of time, that in a few months Abbie would start feeling better and understand his side of things a little more. But that hadn’t happened. If anything the girl’s hostility had entrenched and solidified. He’d come back from Missoula almost broken. Eve felt like phoning the girl to tell her to grow up and stop being so damn selfish, but of course she didn’t.
Since then, Ben had been trying to learn to live with the fact that his daughter, for the foreseeable future at least, was lost to him. He had at last listened to Eve’s advice and found himself a therapist. The only other time he’d done it was after his father died and then it was only two or three visits. She’d heard him speak dismissively of what he called the whole shrink culture. On the whole, he said, people just ought to get on with it. But he’d obviously come to the conclusion that he couldn’t and had gone out and found a guy he liked and now dutifully visited twice a week.
He didn’t tell Eve too much about their sessions but apparently they talked a lot about how, in almost every area of life, the things you did soon became the only things you could do. Grief and guilt could easily become habits as much as picking your nose in the car. Guilt, the therapist said, was nature’s way of getting you to reconsider or rescind something you had done. But if you were sure, really sure, that you didn’t want to rescind, then it was just like some playground bully that had no other purpose than to make you feel bad. When Ben felt lured to his pit of guilt, the therapist suggested, maybe he should just pause on the brink, have a look down and decide if, today, he really wanted to get wet.
He still took a good wallow now and then, but it wasn’t daily anymore. And as the summer passed, Eve had watched him grow looser and brighter. Pablo adored him and it seemed mutual. He had a natural way with kids and Eve loved hearing the two of them talk and laugh and enjoyed watching them do all the boy stuff, throwing a football around or playing softball or pretending they were sumo wrestlers.
When he’d first moved down here, Ben had been adamant about finding a place of his own and kept going to see houses and apartments that were never quite right. To begin with she didn’t discourage him. Until then, the longest they had lived together was a couple of weeks and although it had worked fine, it somehow seemed too early, too significant, to have him move in permanently. But he was easy to live with, presumably because he’d had so many years of practice. And soon, with barely a word being said about it, they both came to accept that he was there to stay. He had, however, rented a room down the street which he now used as an office.
Eve had to work on him a little, to stop him from being so fussy and fastidious. He liked everything in its proper place, while she was more relaxed and left things lying around. Well, okay, she was untidy. Sometimes she would catch him clearing up after her or checking that she had locked the car door (she never bothered) and she would stand there and give him a look and he’d put his hands up and apologize.
“Why do you have
to lock the door?”
“People steal things.”
“I haven’t locked a door in ten years and nobody ever stole a thing.”
“Then you’re very lucky.”
She tried to get him to acknowledge that what he saw as sensible precaution could also be construed as expecting the worst to happen. And if you expected the worst, it had a funny habit of not wanting to disappoint you.
“So give me an example,” he said.
“God, there are so many.”
“Just one.”
“Okay. Making Pablo wear a helmet when he rides his bicycle.”
“But he could fall off, for heaven’s sake.”
“See what I mean?”
“You’re really telling me that putting a helmet on him makes it more likely he’ll fall?”
“Uh-huh. Probably.”
“Eve, you know that’s baloney.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But kids have got to learn. You can’t protect them from everything. Like the other day when he was climbing that tree and you got all uptight about him falling.”
“He could have broken his neck.”
“He didn’t.”
Ben shook his head. She went and gave him a hug.
“Listen, honey,” she said. “All I’m saying is this: If you have negative thoughts, you invite negativity. Positive thoughts have power.”
He didn’t quite concede, but at least it seemed to make him think. A few days later he mentioned that Sarah had once accused him of being a control freak. He asked Eve if she agreed and got depressed for two whole days when she said, in the nicest possible way, that she did. But he was getting better, he was trying, he really was.
He missed his friends, she knew, and felt hurt and rejected by the many who, in his view, had blindly allied themselves with Sarah, leaping to judgment without even attempting to hear his side of the story. The one he had been most hurt by was his old partner and best buddy Martin. After taking Josh to Cape Cod, Ben had gone to collect Eve’s paintings that had been commissioned for the Cold Spring Harbor office block. Martin had refused to hang them and they had stood gathering dust in the ICA garage. He had kept Ben waiting in reception for twenty minutes and then had been cold and brusque and treated him almost like a stranger.