Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

“Don’t ever come to my house again,” I say.

“Was I really there, then? I thought I had the wrong place. Was that your son? A fine little boy. He can certainly keep a secret, can’t he.”

“I’ll call the police,” I say.

“Goodness,” she laughs. “The police.”

It sounds absurd, I have to agree.

“I was concerned about you,” she says. “You haven’t been here for a while. You’ve been avoiding us.”

“Don’t ever again…” I say.

“A delightful little boy,” she continues. “But you mustn’t burden him with secrets.”

“…to my house.” I couldn’t be more insistent.

“Actually,” she says, “no one would fault you if you stopped attending. How many times must we endure someone making a hash of Gregory of Nyssa? People are so tenacious when they should be free. Free!”

I begin to speak but find I have no need to speak. The room is more familiar to me than I would care to admit. Who was it whose last breath didn’t bring him home?

Or am I the first?

They met Gordon Brisk on a Friday the thirteenth at the Clam Box in Brooklin. They pooh-poohed the ominous signs. The milky stew they ate was cold — so what? They were happy. They were at sea; they were at the mess, corkskinned roughs in rummy spirits, dumb, loud, happy. And they really didn’t have so much to say to each other. They were only a few months married and agreed on everything, and for the moment nearly everything they did — where and how they lived — was cheap or free. They expected gifts at every turn and got them.

So it was at the Clam Box on a Friday night — lime pits along the rim of the glass, Pie feeling puckered — when Gordon Brisk introduced himself as a friend of Aunt Lucinda’s from a long time ago. Nick said he had seen Gordon’s paintings, of course. And Gordon said, “Am I supposed to be surprised?”

Gordon told a story that included Aunt Lucinda when she was their age, young. There were matches in it and another young woman who almost died. Aunt Lucinda in the story was the same — all love, love, love and this time for Gordon — and as for Gordon himself? He held up his hands. His hands had been on fire. He said, “Just look at these fuckers,” and they did. They looked and looked. The hands should have scared them, but they were drunk and sunburned and happy. They were glad, they insisted, glad to have met him. “Our first famous person,” Pie said after the after-dinner drinks when she and Nick were in the Crosley driving home. Pie was driving, too fast; she was saying how she loved those amber-colored, over-sweet drinks, the ones floated with an orange slice and a cherry. She had had too many, so was it any surprise she hit something? She hit what they thought was a raccoon. It was definitely something large and dark, but fatally hesitant. Pie was driving the Crosley, a gardener’s mini-car, which had no business on a public road, but Pie had wanted to drive it. The Crosley was a toy, yet whatever Pie hit hobbled into the woods, dragging its broken parts.

Home again and in their beds, Pie and Nick took aspirin and turned away from each other and slept. Next morning — frictive love — and then as usual in the garden, Aunt Lucinda’s garden, the famous one, a spilling-over, often photographed, sea-coast garden. The garden was how they lived for free. They were the caretakers in an estate called the Cottage. Some cottage! Why would Aunt Lucinda leave this paradise they asked, but she had told them. His name was Bruno and his wealth exceeded hers. The villa he owned in Tuscany was staffed. “Everything here is arranged for my pleasure,” so Aunt Lucinda said.

Gordon had said, “Scant pleasure.” He had said, “I’ll tell you pleasure. The killing kind.” And then to most everyone at the Clam Box bar, he described his wife: shoe-black hair and pointy parts. That cunt was the source of the fire, or so he had said at the Clam Box. “I was fucking around” was what Gordon had said, “but who wouldn’t?”

They were untested, Pie and Nick. They were newly everything; and now here they were caretakers for a summer before the rest of life began, and on this morning, as on so many mornings, the cloudless sky grew blue, then bluer. White chips of birds passed fast overhead, and the water was bright; they looked too long at its ceaseless signals and at noon they zombied to it. They let the water assault them until, cold and helpless, they let the waves knock them back to shore and up the beach. Sand caught in all the cracked places, and it felt good to take off their suits and finger it out. They lay directly on the sand; they dozed, they woke, they brushed themselves off. They wanted nothing. They were dry and their suits were dry and, for a moment, warm against them, and they walked to the shore; Nick and Pie walked along the shore and then into the water and they knew the water all over again. So went the afternoon in light — no clouds — whereas indoors was dark. It was dark, but they ran through the mud room toward the phone. They ran, and then they missed it. Who cared? They had the late afternoon before them. They tended the garden. Nick and Pie, they watered the deep beds; they flourished arcs; they beaded hooded plants and cupped plants and frangible rues. They washed paths. The wet rock walls turned into gems. What a place this was! How could Aunt Lucinda’s Bruno match it? Of course, the sunsets could be overlong if all they did was watch them, but they were distracted. The hot showers felt coarse against their sunburned skin and the lotion was cold. They put on pastel colors and saw their eyes in the mirror — another blue! Another summer dusk, stunned by the sun’s garish setting, they stood close to the grill and the radio’s news. They were in love and could listen, horrified but untouched, to whatever the newscaster had to say. But the flamboyant infanticide accomplished with duct tape was too much. Just north of them it had happened in the next and poorest county.

“Turn that off!” Nick said, and Pie did.

For them, nothing more serious than the dark they finally sat in with plates on their laps and at their feet melted drinks that looked dirty.

“Death: will it be sudden and will we be smiling? Will we know ourselves and the life we have lived?”

“Don’t even think such things!”

But Pie did, and Nick did, too. He said, “Think of something else,” and Pie came up with Gordon.

Gordon at the Clam Box. His high color and his scribbled hair. The way he startled whenever they had swayed closer. Was he afraid he might be touched? But there were all those women. An actress they had heard of. A lot of other men’s wives. Aunt Lucinda. “A beauty,” was what he said of her. Cornelia Shelbey had been a girlfriend, too, until the Count swooped down. A prick, the Count. Cornelia Shelbey was a cunt.

“What are we?” they had asked.

“Conceited!”

Nevertheless, Gordon called them. The picnic was his idea. Midmorning and already hot, the coast, a scoured metal, stung their eyes. Even as they drove against the wind, they felt the heat. There was no shade for a picnic. The tablecloth, cornered with rocks, blew away. The champagne was wavy. The food they ate was salty or dry; no tastes to speak of. Nick wanted peanut butter and jelly on pink, damp bread. Instead here were cresses and colored crisps. Then the champagne began. Pie swallowed too much of an egg too fast and it hurt her throat. Gordon said of Aunt Lucinda’s Bruno, “The man’s a fool. He knows nothing about art, but he lets people play with his money.” Gordon picked at the knees of his loose khaki pants and what he found he flicked away in the sea grass. He asked, “How do you play with yours?”