Peter Landesman: Blood Acre

"It was strange seeing Nathan today," he says. "It's been years. Everything comes back in a flood."

She responds with an ironic smile, impenetrable, she knows.

He releases her, waving down the bartender. "I'll get us some coffee."

When it comes neither of them touches it. Claire stares ahead blankly, as if unconscious of her surroundings. Though she feels the air alive around her, feels every little thing, every grain of dirt under her shoe, every floating dust mote, the electric fields around the lamps, the breezes of microwave, the ultrasound, the invisible, sourceless currents. The Herbie Hancock still playing in her empty car down the street, the endless loop of tape going around and around and around. Nathan's tape.

The thunder comes steady now, close, then echoing far.

"It sounds like target practice," Santos says.

"No," Claire replies, "it's war."

This bar, for example, had finally felt purged, swept clean of the past. But now with Errol here alone, in the flesh, seeking, it seems, her help-

"Claire, you said we could talk about it. About a child," he begins.

She clears her throat. "So that's what's on your mind. Sort of strange timing. This wouldn't have to do with seeing Nathan, would it?"

"Time is what I'm talking about. I want to be a father, I want to send something out there, pieces of us-"

"Out there-?" Claire points. "Pieces?"

"We aren't getting any younger."

"Well," she says, "usually one gets married first."

Again she feels him taking her in, overturning every particle, every thought, in that thorough detective manner of his.

"Don't look at me so hard," she says.

"I've considered marriage, too," he replies.

Claire grips the lip of the bar tightly, light-headed. "Tell me," she says, "did Nathan remember about us?"

Santos finally sips at his coffee.

"Did he ask about me?"

He begins to answer but she turns from him. She has changed her mind; she doesn't, after all, want to hear the answer.

A silver Chevrolet pulls up outside the window, in the mirror. Claire hears honking. She points a finger. "Isn't that your little friend? "

Santos turns around. "Excuse me," he says, with his overbearing politeness, and heads for the door.

"Errol-" When he turns around, she says, "I don't want to see him again. Nathan," she says, to clarify. "I don't want it to startall over."

She watches him run into the street, ankle-deep in snow, leaning into the driver's window, his breath rising and twisting away in the wind. She remembers the first time she met him. Nathan had arranged it, of course, an evening with law school chums, to begin at Jackie's Topless. Ruth was there, and Oliver Schreck. The whole gang, of sorts. And next to the footlights sat Nathan and Errol, best of friends, so like adopted brothers, warriors in jeans and penny loafers without socks. Two chuckling cousins, she liked to imagine, who had pledged to run off to the strip club together at the height of the tedium of a family dinner but had never actually done so, until years had passed and their navels had grown to long gashes, and slapping high fives like middleschoolers at the varsity game they geared up the courage to flee after dessert. But they were in over their heads. It wasn't what they thought. The light was dingy and the men's room reeked and the unairbrushed girls were spotty with patches of cellulite and other minor glitches of construction. And later, they would slink into bed and with closed eyes and lax tongue wordlessly make love to their groggy women-Nathan to her, Errol to his young wife-kneading thigh and breast and puffing the right name, "Am I big enough, Am I big enough," but in their minds fucking against the men's room stall the sixteen-year-old stripper with pubescent tits and pristine mons who had leered at them repeatedly from the stage, shaking at them her cottoncandy promise until each dropped a twenty at her feet, after which she looked over not again, not ever, not even a mistaken glance-

"I have to go," Santos says. He has returned out of breath.

But Claire is unable to move. The roar of surf has returned to her ears. A little white road climbing and dropping, the tropical villages steadily passing. Their tin churches, signs in a language she never heard of-a kind of paradise.

She blinks it away. "But you just got here."

"I'm sorry."

"They can't do it. You're off duty."

He is fumbling with his coat, nervously squeezing his pockets."I don't know what's going on. I'll meet you later, back at your place. "

She stills his hand. "Errol, are you okay?"

He looks up. "They called me."

"Why would they do that?"

"They didn't say. That almost always means something, when you ask and they won't say."

Claire, worried, arranges on her face a smile of certainty. "You worry too much. It's nothing." She searches up and down the bar. All signs of the crying baby have gone. "Check for me here when you get back."

Santos slips out; the tail-lights of the car taking him away fade then turn a corner.

It's nothing," Claire says again, this time to no one, not even herself.

Back again at the middle window facing the harbor, she slides her free hand into the pocket of her jeans while in the competing reflections the wedding invitations she still remembers hover, blurred around the edges like a late-night commercial for romance, the same homemade paper with pressed flowers, the same florid print:

Nathan Stein and Claire Proffitt

request the pleasure of your company …

That was six years ago. Nine years ago, Nathan's big victory for his father was an actual innocent man, a petty thief who had been manhandled by police who quarried up and inside him in search of cocaine-packed condoms. They had found nothing. They had the wrong apartment, the wrong man. An anonymous Dominican, an easy patsy. But Nathan, through the nights writing his opening and closing, drawing up lists and lists of questions for cross, ques tions for redirect, stirred the indignation of the court and the newspapers, untiI, like his father, he was more conductor than lawyer, inspiring articles and talk shows, making a martyr of his client, stumbling upon this image of himself as a desired man-a man actually desired for the right reasons. In Washington Heights, he was a hero.

The attention eventually faded, Nathan had more work than he could handle, and he and Claire took the opportunity to run. He had had his heart set on Honduras, for reasons unclear to Claire at the time. That interminable ride to Tegucigalpa, a drive far outside that city to the home village of a client of Milton's, where in the mornings they were handed a glass container with the milk still warm. New York vanished. Milton's reach withdrew. Their walks were slow and endless and lovely. Outside the village, the grass chewed low made winding shapes between the goat tracks burned into hillsides. Straight young pine trees bisected the tops of the hills, a boundary separating some grass from other grass. By late afternoon a wind began, and the crisscrossing clouds piled up behind the hills. Days and days and days and all those young pines leaning into the wind, all that grass sighing at once.

Their last afternoon, atop a hill, the clouds descended nearly to them. It was a Sunday, and they could hear church instruments calling and answering each other from four or five different corners of the village at once. Goats tore at the ground, children's shrieks and a dog's barking flew upward, circled, evaporated. Brown squares of garden and disks of small homes and circles, circles of women's heads and circles of swollen bellies of children wandering in circles, collecting wood, scrubbing, picking, always with something in their hands, a hoe, arcing high overhead in a half-circle and cutting into the corn. Older children with more circular baskets. Half-sober half-dressed shoeless men weaving along the banks of the brooks toward their semicircle of thatch roof in compounds swept and groomed by other hands and goats. Everything had geometry, everything in its place, in its order.