She wouldn’t mind going for a drive, though — that was something she missed, just following the curves out to the reservoir to watch the way the ice cupped the shore, or up to the turnout on Route 9 to look out over the river where it oozed through the mountains in a shimmering coil of light. Or to take a walk in the woods, just that. She was in her room, on her bed, posters of bands she’d outgrown staring down from the walls, her high school books on two shelves in the corner, the closet door flung open on all the clothes she’d once wanted so desperately she could have died for each individual pair of boots or the cashmere sweaters that felt so good against her skin. At the bottom of her left leg, down there at the foot of the bed, was the anklet she wore now, the plastic anklet with the transmitter inside, no different, she supposed, than the collars they put on wolves to track them across all those miles of barren tundra or the bears sleeping in their dens. Except that hers had an alarm on it.
For a long while she just lay there gazing out the window, watching the rinsed-out sun slip down into the sky that had no more color in it than a TV tuned to an unsubscribed channel, and then she found herself picturing things the way they were an eon ago, when everything was green. She saw the azalea bush in bloom, the leaves knifing out of the trees, butterflies — or were they cabbage moths? — hovering over the flowers. Deep green. That was the color of the world. And she was remembering a night, summer before last, just after she and Jeremy started going together, the crickets thrumming, the air thick with humidity, and him singing along with the car radio, his voice so sweet and pure it was as if he’d written the song himself, just for her. And when they got to where they were going, at the end of that dark lane overhung with trees, to a place where it was private and hushed and the night fell in on itself as if it couldn’t support the weight of the stars, he was as nervous as she was. She moved into his arms, and they kissed, his lips groping for hers in the dark, his fingers trembling over the thin yielding silk of her blouse. He was Jeremy. He was the love of her life. And she closed her eyes and clung to him as if that were all that mattered.
Rust
That was the sky up above, hot, with a fried egg of a sun stuck in the middle of it, and this was the ground down here, hard, with a layer of parched grass and a smell of dirt and leaf mold, and no matter how much he shouted there didn’t seem to be much else in between. What he could use was a glass of water. He’d been here, what — an hour, maybe? — and the sun hadn’t moved. Or not that he could see, anyway. His lips were dry, and he could feel all that ultraviolet radiation cooking the skin off his face, a piece of meat on the grill, turkey skin, crisp and oozing, peeling away in strips. But he wasn’t hungry — he was never hungry anymore. It was just an image, that was all. He could use a chair, though, and somebody to help him up and put him in it. And some shade. Some iced tea, maybe, beads of moisture sliding down the outside of the glass.
“Eunice!” he called out in a voice that withered in his throat. “Eunice, goddamnit, Eunice!” And then, because he was old and he was angry and he didn’t give a damn anymore, he cried out for help. “Help!” he croaked. “Help!”
But nobody was listening. The sky hung there like a tattered curtain, shreds of cloud draped over the high green crown of the pepper tree he’d planted forty years ago, the day his son was born, and he could hear the superamplified rumble of the TV from behind the shut and locked windows and the roar of the air conditioner, and where was the damn dog, anyway? That was it. He remembered now. The dog. He’d come out to look for the dog — she’d been gone too long, too long about her business, and Eunice had turned her parched old lampshade of a head away from the TV screen and said, “Where’s the dog?” He didn’t know where the dog was, though he knew where his first bourbon and water of the day was — right there on the TV tray in front of him — and it was 11:00 A.M. and plenty late enough for it. “How the hell would I know,” he’d said, “you were the one let her out,” and she’d come right back at him with something smart, like “Well you’d better just get yourself out there in the yard and see, hadn’t you?”
He hadn’t actually been out in the yard in a long while — years, it seemed — and when he went out the back door and down the steps he found himself gaping at the bushes all in flower, the trumpet vine smothering the back of the house, and he remembered a time when he cared about all that, about nature and flowers, steer manure and potting soil. Now the yard was as alien to him as the Gobi Desert. He didn’t give a damn for flowers or trees or the stucco peeling off the side of the house and all the trim destroyed with the blast of the sun or anything else. “Booters!” he’d called, angry suddenly, angry at he didn’t know what. “Booters! Here, girl!”
And that was when he fell.
Maybe the lawn dipped out from under him, maybe he stepped in a gopher hole or tripped over a sprinkler head — that must have been it — but the long and short of it was that he was here, on the grass, stretched out like a corpse under the pepper tree, and he couldn’t for the life of him seem to get up.
I’ve never wanted anybody more in my life, from the minute I came home from Rutgers and laid eyes on you, and I don’t care if you are my father’s wife, I don’t care about anything anymore…. Eunice sipped at her drink — vodka and soda, bland as all get-out, but juice gave her the runs — and nodded in complete surrender as the former underwear model — turned — actress fell into the arms of the clip-jawed actor with the ridge of glistening hair that stood up from his crown like a meat loaf just turned out of the pan. The screen faded for the briefest nanosecond before opening on a cheery ad for rectal suppositories, and she found herself drifting into a reverie about the first time Walt had ever taken her in his arms.
They were young then. Or younger. A whole lot younger. She was forty-three and childless, working the checkout desk at the library while her husband ran a slowly failing quick-printing business, and Walt, five years her junior and with the puffed-up chest and inflated arms of the inveterate body builder, taught phys ed at the local high school. She liked to stop in at the Miramar Hotel after work, just to see who was there and unwind a bit after a day of typing out three-by-fives for the card catalogue and collecting fifteen- and twenty-cent fines from born-nasty rich men’s wives with beauty parlor hair and too much time on their hands. One day she came in out of the flaming nimbus of the fog and there was Walt, sitting at the bar like some monument to manhood, his tie askew and the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up to reveal the squared-off blocks of his forearms. She sat at one of the tables, ordered a drink — it was vodka and grapefruit in those days, tall — and lit a cigarette. When she looked up, he was standing over her. “Don’t you know smoking’s bad for your health?”
She took her time, crossed her legs under the table and squirmed her bottom around till she was comfortable. She’d seen Ava Gardner in the movies. And Lauren Bacall too. “Tell me that,” she said, slow and languid, drawing it out with the smoke, “when I’m an old lady.”