Danny programmed his New York voice mail to route his calls straight into the new phone. Then he set up his new voice mail and started dialing: Zach, Tammy, Koos, Hifi, Donald, Noon, Camilla, Wally. Mostly he left messages—the point was to shoot his new number into as many phones as possible, and getting that done let off a pressure that had been building in Danny for the many hours he’d been out of touch. He reached actual people maybe one-fifth of the time, and the conversations went something like:
Danny: Heywhatsup.
Friend: Danny-boy. You back in town?
Danny: Any day, now. Any day.
Which was false—he didn’t even have a return ticket—but Danny knew the best way to stay front and center in people’s heads was to act like you’d barely left no matter how far away you were. And while he got caught up on seventy-two hours’ worth of gossip, he soaked in the roar of New York that leaked in around the gossip, which made a perfect balance against the pool and trees and quiet buzzing. He was at home.
He waited awhile before he dialed Martha Mueller’s number at work. He liked to warm up a little first.
Martha: Mr. Jacobson’s office. Her landline gave him his best connection yet, Martha’s scratchy voice so deep and soft in Danny’s ear it was like she was talking from inside his brain.
He said: Martha.
She lowered her voice: Baby, are you out of here?
Way out.
Those guys drove by my place again this morning. In the black Lincoln. I told them you were gone.
Tell me word-for-word what you said.
I said, “He’s gone. Now leave me the fuck alone.” Something like that.
I wouldn’t say fuck to those guys.
Too late.
And what did they say?
“Cunt,” I think. They were already rolling up the window.
Danny: Were you scared? He liked the idea.
Martha snorted. If I were twenty-two and blond, I’d be scared.
She was forty-five, by far the oldest girl that Danny had ever slept with. He’d met her in an ATM line and followed her to a bus stop. First it was just her perfume, although it turned out Martha didn’t wear perfume, she mixed fresh sage in with her underpants. She had red hair with a lot of gray in it. Three weeks ago she’d pulled the plug on Danny, saying the picture they made together was grotesque. They’d hooked up a few more times anyway—she was wild and dirty in bed. From Martha, Get away, you fucker was a come-on.
Danny: Martha—
Stop.
She was right, he was going to say it. And he did: I love you.
Please.
And you love me.
You’re losing it.
He could hear her lighting up. She was a longtime secretary-actress. When the office where she’d worked for fifteen years went smokeless, she kept lighting up until they fired her, then used her unemployment to land a job at Philip Morris.
Martha (exhaling): It’s not love, it’s some kind of erotic delusion.
Danny: That’s what love is.
Martha: Admit you’re bored, Danny.
With you?
With this conversation.
Normally it led to sex. Danny noticed he was grinding his teeth, and it crossed his mind he could jerk off right here, with her rough voice in his ear. But one look at that rancid pool and the urge dried up.
Danny: I’m the opposite of bored. I could go on forever.
He loved her. She had a sly, proud face and a fuzz of invisible hair over every part of her. She made the girls he’d slept with before—models or might-as-well-be models (would be, could be, wished they were, mistaken for, proud they weren’t, etc.), girls with elastic faces who ate a lot of popcorn and green peppers and nodded respectfully whenever he went on about his moneymaking schemes, whereas Martha said once, You can find out it’s bullshit by wasting a chunk of your life or just admit it’s bullshit right now and drop it—made them seem interchangeable. And some miracle had led Danny through that clutter of identical girls to Martha.
Martha: How’s the knee?
Hurts.
You get it looked at?
When would I do that?
It made a funny pop.
I don’t remember a pop.
When the fat guy had you in a headlock and the other one was stomping on your—
Okay, okay. But Martha—
I’ll hang up.
Don’t!
The balance was starting to slip. Being at home meant being in an even mix of locations, like a seesaw with two kids on it that weigh exactly the same. Being only where you were was incomplete, but being not at all where you were (because you were getting upset by the conversation you were having on your cell phone) was flat-out hazardous. That’s when you walked in front of cars. And Danny was getting upset. He’d started to pace.
Martha: I’m forty-five. My tits are sagging—I own cats, for God’s sake! And now it turns out in vitro doesn’t work for women my age, it’s all egg donor, if that, which means I’ll never have kids or at least not my own kids, and men—young men, especially—basically want to spread their seed. You can’t argue with that, Danny, it’s a biological fact.
Danny: But you don’t want kids! And I don’t want kids! I love the fact that you can’t have kids because that means I’ll never have to have any. From my end, it’s a plus!
Martha: You say that now.
Danny: When else can I say it? Now is when we’re talking. All I’ve got is now!
Martha: But you’re still a kid yourself.
Danny stood still. These were the words he never got tired of hearing—words he waited for, hoped for. Hearing them from Martha now was like being skewered. Danny started pacing again, but right away his feet caught on something and he lost his balance—shit, he’d forgotten where he was and now that putrid pool was leering up at him; he was falling toward it! Danny flailed wildly the other way and somehow vaulted onto the marble, his left shoulder taking the whole impact of his weight. Pain shot tears into his eyes.
Tiny voice: What happened? Danny? That was Martha, inside the phone, which had landed a few feet away. Danny groped for it with his nonparalyzed arm. The dark cypress and blue sky turned crazily over his head.
Martha: What’s going on? Are you okay? She sounded not scared, exactly, but anxious. Danny was in too much pain to enjoy it.
I’m fine. He was wheezing. Sweat pricked him under his arms and around his groin. He hauled himself into a sitting position.
Martha: Talk to me. Is it your knee?
She cared about him, it was obvious. Danny kept discovering this right when he wasn’t expecting to, right when he’d given up on Martha, and then as soon as he’d figured it out she would make him forget all over again. Now Danny had one of those clear seconds where everything extra kind of drops away and all you see is what’s actually there. He saw himself with Martha. He got a feeling of peace. Then the phone started shorting out and Danny’s eyes hooked on something he didn’t comprehend at first, but then he did—oh, fuck, he did—the satellite dish in the black pool, sinking.
Danny (bellowing): No!
He jumped up, lunging for the dish. It was already halfway underwater. Somehow he must have kicked it in when he tripped, or could that be the thing he’d tripped on? It was too far away from the pool’s edge for Danny to grab it and fish it back out, so he flattened himself gut-down on the marble and stuck his torso straight out over the pool as far as it would go and tightened his ass and grabbed the rim of the dish with two fingers of each hand and tried to ease it back out without bending at the waist and dunking his head, and that’s when the smell got him—oh God, what a smell: not rot but something after rot, a moldy emptiness, the smell of stale pollen, bad breath, old refrigerators that haven’t been opened in years, rotten eggs and certain wool when it got wet, the afterbirth of his cat Polly when Danny was six, his aching tooth when the dentist first drilled it open, the nursing home where Great-aunt Bertie dribbled pureed liver down her chin, that
place under the bridge near school where the piles of shit were supposedly human, the wastebasket under his mom’s bathroom sink, the school lunchroom when you first walked in—every smell that ever made Danny even a little bit sick gushed up into his face as he leaned over that pool, smells that one time or another got him thinking just for a second (but then he forgot it) that normal life was thin, it was flimsy: a flimsy thing stretched over another thing that was nothing like it, that was big and strange and dark.
Danny shut his eyes and tried to breathe through his mouth. He tensed every muscle in his back to the shaking point, making his torso into a rod so he could use his long fingers like chopsticks to try to lift out the dish, but the pool had settled in around it now and didn’t want to give it back—Danny would have to reach underwater with his hand, both hands, his head, all of him, dive in and dredge the thing back out, and he couldn’t do that. The smell told him not to: No, it said, stay away, because a thing that smells like this is going to kill you.
So Danny didn’t reach under the water. He didn’t touch the water. And then the dish was gone.
He eased himself back onto the marble, shaking and snotnosed. He found the phone and picked it up, thinking maybe by some fluke or miracle or grace period like they gave before they cut you off for nonpayment, Martha would still be there. Nope. It was dead, and not that tunnelly deadness of an open line—that would’ve been the sound of angels singing in heaven compared to this, which was the sound of no sound—an object that was just what it was and didn’t lead to anything or anyplace or anyone.
Danny: Oh my God! No! I can’t—No! What kind of—No!—Give me a—No!
He did all that useless stuff people do when they can’t accept what’s just happened: he crouched, jumped, turned in circles and punched his fists against his head; he stamped weeds under his boots and chucked his phone into the cypress with a throwing arm he hadn’t used in years. Each move was Danny’s answer to some new thought ripping through his brain: his $1,500 deposit blown to hell; his credit massacred; Martha Mueller out of reach; his New York voice mail routing calls into a dead line; his e-mail untouchable; himself stranded in the middle of fucking nowhere, lopped off from the flow of communication Danny needed the way most of us need to move or breathe, and maybe you’re saying, But why did he need it so badly? It’s not like the guy was running General Motors, which is true: Danny had not much going on and no real prospects on the horizon, but what about all those prospects floating around maybe an inch or two beyond the horizon? Those were the ones he was thinking about.
Eventually Danny calmed down enough to start looking for his phone. The longer he groped in the cypress, pulling threads in his jacket and sending fat little birds squawking out into the air, the more precious that clunky plastic thing started to get in his head. Like a relic. Just to have it. And there it was, finally, caught between two branches. Danny felt like sobbing. He couldn’t resist holding the phone up to his ear one more time.
A voice said: Give it up. We’re off the grid.
It was Nora, the nanny, coming toward the pool through the opening in the cypress wall. Danny wasn’t sure if it was actually Nora he was so happy to see or just another human being. He stuck the phone in his pocket.
Nora: Didn’t mean to scare you.
I look scared?
You do.
She went to the edge of the pool and sat on the marble bench across from the Medusa head. Danny followed her over, and she offered him a Camel that he turned down. He felt weak, but there was no way Nora could see that. And the fact that Nora couldn’t see it made Danny start to feel after a minute or two like he wasn’t totally weak, and after another minute or two, feeling not totally weak started to make him feel stronger. I’m saying minutes, but it wasn’t minutes, it was seconds. Maybe just one second. Short enough that all Danny noticed was that suddenly he felt a little bit better.
Nora: How’s the jet lag?
Danny: In and out.
She took a long drag. She was one of those people who make smoking look like eating. Her hands had stopped shaking—maybe she’d taken her meds. Maybe cigarettes were the meds. She wore army pants, black lace-up boots and a frilly white blouse that gave him a decent view of her medium-sized breasts.
Danny: I have to say, you don’t look like a nanny.
Nora: Please. Child Care Specialist.
Is that a master’s degree?
She laughed: PhD. I wrote my dissertation on Mary Poppins.
Danny: The phallic implications of the umbrella? He had no idea where he got this stuff, it just jumped out of his mouth. And getting a smile out of Nora made Danny feel even a little bit better than he’d already started to feel, to the point where his state of mind touched the very low end of good.
Nora: The feminist implications of the unmarried caregiver.
Danny: I almost believe you.
Don’t get carried away.
Why? You’re a liar?
She flicked the half-smoked cigarette into the pool. It floated for a second, then sank. She said, I don’t like facts.
Danny: I don’t like nouns. Or verbs. And adjectives are the worst.
Nora: No, adverbs are the worst. He said brightly. She thought hopefully.
Danny: She moaned helplessly.
Nora: He ran stiffly.
Danny: Is that why you’re here? To get away from all the adverbs back in New York?
Who says I’m from New York?
Aren’t you?
Nora cocked her head. Short-term memory problems?
Oh, yeah. Facts.
Nora: Anyway, there’s no getting away from adverbs. They’re rampant.
Danny: She confessed anxiously.
Nora: They’re in our heads.
She cried desperately.
Nora: I hope you don’t actually write like that.
Danny: I write for shit.
Nora: I’m an excellent writer.
She said smugly.
Nora: Not smugly. Factually.
Danny: Ah. So you’ll make an exception to brag.
Nora lit up another cigarette. Danny felt like he’d won. Conversation, banter, whatever you wanted to call this thing he was doing with Nora—to Danny it was like an IV dose of joy. He felt linked to her, which made his problems seem like Nora’s problems too, which meant if she wasn’t freaking out about the fact that his satellite dish had just sunk into a pool full of rotten water, then maybe it wasn’t such a big deal. Maybe it hadn’t even happened at all. Danny didn’t think all this out, he just felt better, so if he’d already reached a level one of happiness, now he jumped up to level three. And because he’d recently felt bad—like shit, actually—going from level-one to level-three happiness was like riding in one of those elevators that skip a lot of floors on their way to the top and make your stomach flop against your lungs.
Danny: So. You like working for Howard?
Howard is a genius.
She said…ironically?
Howard’s beyond irony. That’s one of the amazing things about him.
Tell me you’re joking.
Nora: I wouldn’t joke about Howard. Seriously.
Danny stared at her, still not believing. You buy all his crap about imagination? The Imagination Pool?
How much has he told you?
Danny: Enough to know it’s a loser. No phones? Come on.
Nora looked at Danny full in the face, maybe for the first time. Have you always been jealous of him?
He was speechless.
Not that I blame you.
Danny: Whoa. Hold on. Let’s just…back up a second. It was suddenly hard for him to talk. I—I wish you could’ve seen him in high school.
Nora: High school? Wasn’t that kind of a long time ago for you?
Danny wanted to tell her to fuck off. Instead he took a slow breath. So is this like a cult? Is Howard your guru or something?
Fuck off.
I wanted to say that to you, but I didn’t.
L
ive dangerously, Danny.
Danny: Fuck off.
Well done.
Is this a fight? Are we having a fight?
Nora: We can’t. We don’t know each other.
So how would you define this conversation?
Nora stood up. It’s an acknowledgment of the chasm between us.
Danny: There’s no chasm. We’re the same person, almost.
Now you’re scaring me.
I feel like I’ve known you my whole life.
Nora: I know what you mean, but that’s an illusion.
She moved toward the cypress like she wanted to leave, and Danny felt a sharp pinch in his gut, like he’d swallowed a staple. He didn’t want to be alone.
Danny: That’s an illusion, she said coyly?
Nora: She said frankly.
My ass. Ominously.
You’re paranoid. Indifferently.
Danny: Coldly?
Not coldly.
Well, not warmly.
Nora: Sympathetically. Actually.
Really?
Nora: I have to go. And then she left.
Within about five minutes of Nora going, the sun went, too. It dropped behind the trees and the second it did the pool and everything around it went dim. The change was huge, like an eclipse. And it wasn’t just the light that changed, it was the mood: the mood went gloomy. Not just because everything was suddenly covered up with shadows, not because that oval of blue sky looked small and far away, not because the pool got blacker and the insects went quiet and there was no more warm feeling on Danny’s skin or hair—because of the atmosphere of the place, which was…gloomy. Danny sat on the bench where Nora had just been sitting and put his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fists and looked up. There was the keep above the trees, smeared with orange sun. Danny wished he was up there, looking down from a place that was light.