T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

He was back at the motor court by five and he called Ruth just to hear the sound of her voice and to lie to her about the old lady’s offer. Yes, he told her, yes, it was just what he’d expected and he’d close the deal tomorrow, no problem. Yes, he loved her. Yes, good night. Then, though he wasn’t a drinker, he walked into the village and sat at the bar while the Celtics went through the motions up on the television screen and the six or seven patrons gathered there either cheered or groaned as the occasion demanded. He let two beers grow warm by the time he got to the bottom of them and he had a handful of saltines to steady his stomach. He was hoping someone would mention Mrs. Rastrow, offer up some information about her, some gossip about what she was doing to the island, about Rose, but nobody spoke to him, nobody even looked at him. By seven-thirty he was back in the cottage paging through half a dozen back issues of a news magazine the woman at the desk had given him with an apologetic thrust of her hand, and she was sorry they didn’t have any TV for him to watch but maybe he’d be interested in these magazines?

He was reading of things that had happened five years ago — big stories, crises, and he couldn’t for the life of him remember how any of them had turned out — when there was a knock at the door. It was Rose, dressed in a bulky sweater and blue jeans. The black patent-leather pumps she’d been wearing earlier had been replaced by tennis shoes. Her ankles were bare. “Hi,” she said. “I thought I’d drop by to see how you were doing.”

Everything in him seemed to seize up. How he was doing? He was doing poorly, feeling trapped and bereft, pressed for money, for luck, for hope, so worried about Ruth and her doctors and the tests and prescriptions and bills he didn’t know how he was going to survive the night ahead, let alone the rest of the winter and the long unspooling year to come. Mrs. Rastrow — her employer, her ally —had cut the heart out of him. So how was he doing? He couldn’t even open his mouth to tell her.

They were both standing at the open door. The night smelled like an old dishrag that had been frozen and defrosted again. “Because I felt bad this afternoon,” she said, “I mean, not even offering you something to drink or a sandwich. Alice can be pretty abrupt, and I wanted to apologize.”

“Okay,” he said, “sure, I appreciate that.” He was in his stocking feet, his shirt open at the collar to reveal the T-shirt beneath, and was it clean? His hair. Had he combed his hair? “Okay,” he said again, not knowing what else to do.

“Do you have a minute?” She peered into the room as if it might conceal something she needed to be wary of. Her shoulders were bunched, her eyes gone wide. The night air leaked in around her, carrying a sour lingering odor now of panic and attrition — a skunk, somebody had surprised a skunk somewhere out on the road. Suddenly she was smiling. “I guess I’m the potato peeler salesman now, huh?”

“No,” he said, “no,” too forcefully, and he didn’t know what he was up to — what she was up to, a young woman who lived with an old woman and wore tight silk Chinese dresses on an island that had no Chinese restaurants and no need of them — and then he was pulling the door back and inviting her in, their bodies pressed close in passing, and the door shutting behind them.

She took the chair, he the bed. “I’d offer you something,” he said, “but—” and he threw up his hands and they both laughed. Was he drunk — two beers on an empty stomach? Was that it?

“I brought you something,” she said, snapping open her purse to remove a brown paper bag and set it on the night table. There were oil stains on the bag, translucent continents, headlands, isthmuses painted across the surface in a random geography. “Tuna,” she said. “Tuna on rye. I made them myself. And these”—lifting the sandwiches in their opaque paper from the bag and holding two cans of beer aloft. “I thought you’d be hungry. With the diner closing early, I mean.” She pushed a beer across the table and handed him a sandwich. “I didn’t know if you’d know that — that they close early this time of year?”

He told her he hadn’t known, or he’d forgotten — or hadn’t even thought of it, really — and he thanked her for thinking of him. They sipped their beers in silence a moment, the light on the night table the only illumination in the room, and then he said, “You know, that house belonged to my father. That’s his signature on the deed. We spent summers here when I was a kid, best summers of my life. I was here when Mrs. Rastrow’s — when Ronald and Elyse drowned. I was maybe twelve at the time, and I didn’t really — I didn’t understand you could die. Not if you were young. Up till that point it was old people who’d died, the lady next door — Mrs. Jennings — my grandmother, a great-aunt.”

She just nodded, but he could see she was right there with him, the brightness in her eyes, the way she chewed, sipped. He felt the beer go to his head. He wanted to ask about her, how she’d come to the island — was it an ad in the paper, lumber heiress in need of a companion to wear silk Chinese dresses in a remote cottage, room and board and stipend and all the time in the world to paint, write, dream? — but he didn’t want to be obvious. She was exotic. Chinese. The only Chinese person on the island, and it would be rude, maybe even faintly racist, to ask.

He watched her tuck the last corner of the sandwich in her mouth and tilt back the can to drain it. She wiped her lips with a paper napkin, then settled her hands over her knees and said, “You know, it’s no use. She’s never going to go any higher.”

He was embarrassed suddenly — to bring all that into this? — and he just shrugged. It was a fait accompli. He was defeated and he knew it.

“She knows about your wife. And you know she could pay a fair price, even though the place is run-down, because it’s not the money — she has all the money anybody could want — but she won’t. I know her. She won’t budge.” She lifted her face so that the light cut it in two, the ridge of her nose and one eye shining, the rest in shadow. “She’s just going to let it rot anyway. That’s what she’s doing with all of them.”

“Spoils her view?”

She smiled. “Something like that.”

Then the question he’d been swallowing since she’d appeared at the door, finally pried up off his tongue by the beer: “This isn’t some kind of negotiation, is it? I mean, she didn’t send you, did she?”

The question left a space for all the little sounds of the night to creep in: the cry of a shorebird, the wind scouring the beach, something ticking in the depths of the heater. She dropped her eyes. “No, that’s not it at all,” she murmured.

Well, what is it then? he wanted to say — almost said — but he felt a tightening across the surface of him, his flesh prickling and contracting as if all his defenses were going down at once, and the answer came to him. She was here for him, for a quick fix for loneliness and despair, here to listen to a voice besides Mrs. Rastrow’s, to sleep in another bed, any bed, make contact where before there had been none. He got up from the bed, moved awkwardly toward her, and she got up too. They were as close as they’d been at the door. He could smell her, a sweet heat rising from the folds of the sweater, caught in the coils of her hair. “Did you want to maybe go over to the tavern?” she said. “For another beer, I mean? I only brought the two.”

He didn’t want another beer, hadn’t wanted the first one. “No,” he said in a whisper, and then he was holding her, pulling her to him as if she had no bones in her body, everything new and soft and started from scratch. Her cheek was pressed to his, scintillating, electric, her cheek , and she let him kiss her and her bones were gone and she was melting down away from the chair and into the bed. She didn’t taste like Ruth. Didn’t feel like her. Didn’t conform to him the way Ruth had through all those years when she was well and alive and lit up like a meteor, and he had to say something, he didn’t have any choice. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m sorry. I really don’t.”