Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

They told him just how little they had.

“Too bad!” he said. “Poor you.”

Pie washed her sticky hands in the cooler’s melting ice. Gordon yawned. Then they all three pushed the picnic back into the basket, didn’t bother to fold, drove home. A storm the next day; the power thunked out. Nick and Pie still had a headache from the picnic — too much champagne and whatever they had drunk after — so they took more aspirin. They napped; they looked at the sky; they shared a joint, and they knocked around in bed and felt rubbed and eased when they were finished. It was quiet in the Cottage except for the sound of the rain. They talked about money until they made themselves thirsty. Downstairs on the porch they saw Gordon in the garden under the tent of a golf umbrella. Gordon said he’d walked all the way from the village to them, walked in the rain to get sober. “Last night,” he said sadly. He shut the umbrella and sat on the porch with his head in his ruined hands. So they lit the fat joint rolled against the threat of all-day rain, and Gordon was glad of it. “Yes,” he said, and inhaled deeply and exhaled in a noisy way, seeming satisfied, which was how they felt, too. Forgotten were the woozy picnic and the problems of money. After all Nick and Pie were a handsome couple, young and loved. Aunt Lucinda was rich even if they weren’t. Hundreds of people had come to their wedding, and now they were caretakers to a scenic estate called the Cottage. The Cottage on Morgan Bay. For them the sky cleared and the sun came out and the garden began to sizzle. Gordon stayed on. He watched the happy couple, swatted by the waves: how they exhausted themselves until he was exhausted, too, and he slept. They all slept. They slept through the white hours of afternoon when the light was less complex. When they woke, the sand was peachy colored, and the sky was pretty. Gordon said he wanted to do something, but what? Why didn’t they have any money! They had the Crosley. “Fun,” Pie said. “Some fun,” Nick said. “You killed some kind of animal in that toy.”

Pie said, “I could bike to Gary’s and see if he has any clams. We could have a clambake.”

“Down here? After five? It’s damp and cold and there’s not as much beach.”

“You come up with something why don’t you.”

“The lotion’s hot. It can’t feel good,” Gordon said, but Pie said he was wrong.

“I’m so sunburned anything against my skin feels cool,” she said.

Gordon wiped his hands on her breasts. He said, “Lovely.” He said, “Maybe you’ll think of something to do. I’ll call you.”

A line they had heard before — had used themselves. I’ll call you augured disappointment.

Nick’s handsome face was crinkled. “What the fuck?” he said.

“What’s this?” Pie asked.

“You’re more ambitious” was what Nick finally said.

A cup of soup was dinner; the radio, left off.

“Find some music,” Pie said, and left Nick to wander through the Cottage. She swiped at Aunt Lucinda’s clothes until she found it: Valentino tap pants, and she tapped downstairs to nobody’s music but her quavery own.

“The best you could do?” Pie asked.

“Look at you,” he said.

On the beach, they agreed, their daydreaming was sometimes dangerous. The memory of Gordon’s misanthropic breath against their faces came in gusts.

“Jesus,” Pie said, remembering.

“What?”

The hollows of her body, especially at her hips, were exciting to them both, and they smiled to see the sand running out of Nick’s hand and into the ditched place between her hips.

“Jesus,” Pie said.

“I was thinking I would lick.”

Back to the garden, to the doused and swabbed, every morning, afternoon. Nick staked the droopers and Pie cut back. The heavy-headed mock orange, now past, Pie hacked at and hacked until the shorn shrub looked embarrassed.

“Poor thing,” Nick said.

And Pie laughed. “I’ve turned the grandpa of the front walk into a kid.” Pie, a long girl, wobbly in heeled shoes, bow-legged, shifty — bored, perhaps — but friendly, quick to laugh, on any errand making an impression. Nick left her on the village green the next afternoon, a lean girl in a ruffled bib. What was she wearing exactly? Something skimpy, faded, pink. She wore braids (again) or that was how Nick remembered her when he described Elizabeth Lathem Day — Pie was her father’s invention. A girl, a pretty speck, a part of summer and passing through it. She was. Pie was a white blonde, a blonde everywhere — it made Nick hard to think of her. She had close blond fur between her legs. He liked to comb it with his fingers, pull a little bit. Fuck.

“Where the hell is she?” Nick couldn’t help himself.

Lucinda said there was no family precedent; no one was mad that she knew of.

“Don’t think we weren’t getting along. Quite the opposite.”

Dogs snuffed in the woods off leashes. Heavy yellow and black dogs, their rheumy eyes mournful; their hard tails always looked wet and swapped against the shrubs. Once the dogs barked; Nick heard though they were out of sight. Something they had found dead and offensive — not her, not Pie — thank God! Although after the dogs, the reports, the calls, the case grew fainter. Also, also Nick was drinking. He was forgetting he had this job. He found himself standing in front of open broom closets and cabinets, in front of the dishwasher and sinks. Sometimes his hands were wet.

Watering; he finished watering the wilted patches, then sat on the porch and worried his roughed-up hands, cut and dirty and uncared for, ugly as roots and clumsy. Hard even to phone, to push the buttons accurately, but he did and to his surprise Gordon Brisk answered, and said, “I’m only just home but I’ve heard. I’m sorry.”

And that was that.

What was this guy all about was what Nick wanted to know.

“Tell me,” Nick said to Lucinda. Addresses, historic districts, the watch he wore, his antique truck, Gordon’s conversation was an orange pricked with cloves — an aromatic keepsake of Episcopal Christmases; so it came as a surprise when she said he was a Jew. A Jew?

“You’ve not seen a lot of the world, Nick.”

True, he hadn’t. He had married young.

But Nick did not want to travel: he wanted to stay at the Cottage at least until spring, maybe through another summer. Who knew? Pie might come back. Why would Gordon say more? Nick and Pie hadn’t seen him since — when? That hot, flashy day Brisk discovered they only looked rich; they had money enough to get by. But how much was that? How much did it cost to get by pleasantly? They were young, newly married. The most expensive things they bought were medicinal, recreational.

“You have no idea how happy we have been here,” Nick said. This was the truth uttered later, after whatever had passed for dinner, after the bath that made him sweat, the third or fourth Scotch. “We were really, really happy.”

The mothers and fathers — on both sides — made visits. They remarked on the garden and the ocean; they said no one would leave such a place voluntarily. So Nick stayed on at the Cottage. He watched the seasons redden then blue then brittle and brown the plants. The decline could be beautiful, but Nick’s hands, ungloved, grew grotesque. A fungus buckled and yellowed his thumbnail. His hands, all rose-nicks and dirt, reminded him of Gordon’s hands. Gordon talking about something to do with love, saying they had no idea, speaking in his seer voice, the old, pocked, vacant voice, prophesying horrors they could not imagine.

Not us, Pie thought and Nick thought, too; weren’t they always harmonious after Gordon left? They said, “We’re lucky.” Together: “We are.”

“You have no idea,” Gordon had said another day on the beach. He had said to Nick, “Someday your mouth will bleed in your sleep, and her cunt, too, will stain whatever it touches.”