Then he sent another e-mail that began simply, Please read this new one and ignore previous e-mail, and so I ignored the first but failed to read the new one, seeing nothing dangerously swaggering in anything he’d sent so far.
Spring warmed the air. Light fell from the sky like sugar from a bowl. At night, if I slept at home, without Reynaldo, he would phone. “Are you asleep?” he would always ask.
“No.”
“You sound as if you are. Quick. How many fingers am I holding up?”
He would make me laugh.
Noel, Noel, the toilet bowl. Noelle turned off the vacuum cleaner when he saw me. “It’s finally my birthday,” he said. “Really. I put a patchouli sachet in the vacuum bag for the occasion.”
“Well, happy birthday,” I said, and together with Mary-Emma in my arms sang him “Happy Birthday” in Portuguese. As we finished the last lines—“muitas felicidades, muitos anos de vida!”—we sang them with great articulated gusto, as at the concluding ring it reminded me of “Ina Gadda Da Vida.” Clapping began behind us, and I turned.
There were Sarah and Edward. Only Edward was smiling. “Very nice,” said Sarah, looking at me. She was wearing a gold sweater knit in tight roseknots so that her slim arms looked like ears of corn. On her head was her thick cotton chef’s toque. “What language is that?”
“Portuguese,” I said. “I think.”
“Portuguese,” Sarah repeated, nodding her head.
“It’s my birthday,” said Noel, to help me out.
“Yes, well, happy birthday, my dear Noelle!” She kissed him on his cheek and then threw one arm around him and kept it there. I could see he’d been working for her for years.
He pointed at her but looked at me to tell me this: “I love her!”
“Yes, but, darling, you left your Diet Coke in the freezer and it exploded again.” Sarah would not smile. Or rather, she would not smile big.
I turned with Edward and Mary-Emma as we headed back to the kitchen. Edward was shaking his head. “He’s always doing that with the Diet Cokes,” he said.
I went to warm a muffin in the microwave for Mary-Emma, and Edward suddenly stopped my arm. “Look,” he said. “There’s a moth in there.” Without putting the muffin in, he pressed On to see what the moth would do. This penchant for torture, in the guise of curiosity, was the same sick experimentation of certain doctors, of bored boys, of lunatics, and it was in Edward, too. The moth was not singed. Neither did it flutter and combust, as a heartless data-seeker might have predicted. As I myself had predicted. Had I missed my own latent calling as Mad Inept Scientist? The moth did nothing at all, just stuck whole to the plastic wall of the oven. Probably the poor creature had already been dead for some time. I cleaned it out with a paper towel, then warmed Mary-Emma’s snack.
“Well, I wanted to see,” said Edward.
Thoughts of Bonnie preoccupied me. I dreamed of her at night. She was always approaching to say something but then said nothing. She floated. She zoomed. She burst forth from adjacent rooms. There were no doors and then suddenly one would appear and swallow her. She would emerge through a wall. She was always empty-handed. She was gaining weight. Her clothes were the pale gray of plastic copy machines and desktop printers. She would not speak. I couldn’t get her ever to say a word.
At the Thornwood-Brinks’ the phone rang a lot, and when I answered it there was a long pause before the hang-up. Then for a while the phone calls seemed to cease.
Worried that Bonnie had taken her own life, I googled Bonnie Jankling Crowe again, expecting to find, as ever, nothing. I instead found a notice from a Georgia newspaper about someone named Bonnie J. Crowe who had been found murdered in an apartment in Atlanta. No known suspect. No evidence of robbery. Investigation pending. My heart leaped up. Of course! I thought. This would be exactly the sort thing that would happen to poor doomed Bonnie. Here I was worried she was suicidal when in fact getting herself murdered would be more her style.
But how would she have had the money to get to Atlanta? Might she have sold her new gold watch for which she had traded a child and been ushered into a retirement from if not all happiness at least all things Mary? I went on eBay and discovered a gold watch for sale there by someone who went by bonniegreenbay. And how many Bonnie Crowes were there in this world? How many bonniegreenbays? I had to stop. I had discovered too much. I had learned things there was not a test on: I had to get back to my studies. The soundtracks to The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan played incessantly in my apartment.
On Saturday nights I visited Reynaldo on my own. I no longer wore the water bra — that jig was up, or that jug-jig, as Murph called it. He did not seem to mind my lack of dairiness, as we said of cows. In fact, he seemed enthralled or at least very attentive, and once said he preferred small-breasted girls. (“And you believed him?” a later boyfriend would say to me cruelly.) If the gray dress was not available, I would be forced to make an outfit from all the different black things I owned, which were all a slightly different black: there was the bluish black and the olive black and most oddly the reddish black — all faded or shiny or worn to a hue unique unto itself and impossible to wear with anything else that was black. I would add a silvery swampy sweater, with dangling balls or quartz for earrings, like a third and fourth eye in the dark against my hair. I wore lipstick that made my mouth look bloody. I wore mascara that by morning had collected like soot in the corners of my eyes. I wore an army green jacket that looked unexpected with a fuzzy ivory scarf looped around the collar like the scruff of a chow.
As if adorned for a costume party’s idea of a terrorist, I wore my Egyptian scarab necklace and my Arabian Goddess perfume and a clumsy blue ring made in the backstreets of Karachi. I was politically incorrect. The idea was a surprise attack. Which seemed to work. Often we didn’t talk at all. His arms were soft and strong. His penis was as small and satiny as a trumpet mushroom in Easter basket grass. His mouth slurped carefully as if every part of me were an oyster, his, which made me feel I loved him. He would pull away and look at me happily from above. “You have the long, pettable nose of a horse,” he said, “and a horse’s dark, sweet eyes.” And I thought of all the horses I had seen and how they always seemed to be trying to get their eyes to focus and work together. Their eyes were beautiful but shy and lost, and since they were on opposite sides of their heads like a fish’s, one of them would sometimes rear up in skepticism and fear and just take a hard look at you. I felt nothing like a horse, whose instincts I knew were to run and run. I had mostly in life tried to stand still like a glob of coral so as not to be spotted by sharks. But now I had crawled out onto land and was somehow already a horse.
There was a tender but energetic adhoccery to our sex, the way there is when young people are not embarrassed by their bodies — what they look like and what they want. Kissing was urgent yet careful, luminous and drinklessly drunk. He hovered — quivering, tense, and flight-bound — I bucked, humped, and arced, a dancer in a sea lion suit. Afterward, he would sometimes say, “That was one for the scrapbook!” When I slept in his bed, I slept deeply and long. When I went to the Thornwood-Brinks’ directly from there, I would sometimes walk, sometimes take my Suzuki scooter. Sarah would flee the house with arbitrary explanations: “I don’t want the Mill to become one of those precious little restaurants with everyone so serious in their white jackets like they’re technicians in some sort of lab. Though look at me.” She pointed to her own Marie Curie getup. “I look like a dental hygienist.” This was the sort of snobbery I noticed even among the most compassionate Democrats. I could hardly say I was immune. What was education for, if not to acquire contradictions? At least it looked like that to me. “I mean, Edward works in a lab and he doesn’t even wear a white jacket. Though maybe he should … And yet honestly, some discipline is required in every kitchen. I left a note for you on Emmie. She’s got a tiny bit of a cold and the Tylenol drops and instructions are right there on the counter. Bye!”