Carly folded the peanut butter cup in two and offered half to the Miracle. “Don’t tell Daddy,” she said.
“Thank you!” said the Miracle.
Carly said, “You’re welcome!” Then, “I know you miss him, Nat. But you can’t stay in the bath smoking pot for the rest of your life. You’ve got to keep moving. Get a hobby. They’re starting a volunteer docent program at the museum. That would be perfect for you.” She nibbled the edge of her peanut butter cup. Carly had never met Ezra.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“Do,” she said. “Meet me for lunch. I’ll introduce you to Liam.” Her boss. Single, she’d mentioned more than once. She gave my foot a chipper little pat. She was happy to have a project.
Ezra and I lasted a year, barely. Every night, I would unlock my back door and get into the bath. I’d drink, read and wait for him. Some nights he never came. Those nights I would stay in the bath until the water got cold and there was no more hot water to warm it. On nights he did come—often from somewhere that left his pupils big and his hands trembling—he’d let himself in through the back door, come into the bathroom, touch the top of my head and sit on the lid of the toilet. I’d prop my foot on the faucet and he’d silently loop his index finger around my big toe. We’d read—me National Geographic and histories and remarkable true stories of people surviving plane crash, shipwreck, avalanche; him the local newspaper and slim volumes of plays. We’d talk and he’d roll us cigarettes. In flush times he would roll me joints too, with little strips of paper rolled up in the end so that I wouldn’t burn my fingertips when I smoked them. Ezra was mostly into booze and coke. He didn’t smoke pot unless he was already especially fucked up. This was also the only time he ever said he loved me.
Weeks passed, and I moved though the world perpetually bewildered, in the way of the shell-shocked and the heartbroken. Some days I did my best. Eventually I even met Carly for lunch, as promised. I waited for her in the gallery, where I was reminded why I disliked art museums in general and the Nevada Museum of Art in particular. The rooms were too well lit, and I didn’t care for the way sound behaved in the place. There was a rooftop terrace where Carly hosted cocktail parties for members and prospective members. It was bloodless. My high school friends had their wedding receptions up there.
Car and I walked to a deli and ordered Reubens. At one point, and out of absolutely nowhere, she said, “Liam went to Yale.”
“Cool,” I said, through a mouthful of dressing-sogged rye. Carly looked at me for a moment, pained, then plucked a translucent shred of sauerkraut off my chin.
On the way back through the courtyard, we passed a sculpture I’d never seen before. It seemed to be made from a hundred arcing pieces of soft gray driftwood, all delicately fitted together and balanced in the perfect form of a horse. It looked as though I could push it over. I loved this about it. “Touch it,” said Carly. I did, and immediately realized that it wasn’t made of wood, but of bronze patinaed to look like wood. The branches I’d thought were carefully interlocked were welded together. Just then, Carly called across the courtyard.
Liam was good-looking in a way that indeed suggested Connecticut. He was lean and jaunty, though he’d obviously made some effort to coax his hair into a state of semi-unruliness. Carly introduced us, then said, “Well,” and retreated swiftly inside.
Liam smiled and removed his hands from his pockets as if just remembering some childhood reprimand about having them there. I struck the sculpture with the heel of my hand, and the blow made the hollow sound of a bottomless well.
“Carly says you have an art degree,” Liam ventured.
“I thought this was wood.”
“It was,” he said, in a consoling tone that brought to my attention the fact that I had arrived at a state of needing consolation. He went on hurriedly. “Or, she molded the wood, anyway. Molded the wood and then burnt it out.” He gestured sheepishly to a placard set into a boulder nearby, by way of citation perhaps.
“That’s terrible,” I said, suddenly feeling nauseous. “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.” Liam started to speak again, nobly, but I interrupted him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go.”
Liam, maintaining his East Coast dignity, said only, “Right.”
On the walk home, I stopped occasionally to brace myself against the bigtooth maples lining the street. I pressed my hands to my breasts where they’d begun to bloom up from my bra, and longed for a museum that didn’t feel like a museum. I preferred the preserved homes of historic figures. I liked a quill ready to be dipped in a pot of ink, a bonnet tossed onto a rocker, firewood half stacked by a stove. A house waiting for people who would never come. This made sense to me.
Outside my front door sat a pair of tennis shoes, the heels trampled down, the canvas cracking in the sun. A plaque mounted on the brick above them might have read:
The End (1 of 3). The day was warm for fall. They had their feet in the Truckee River. They’d been drinking wine since lunch. She was drunk and he was getting there. She was telling him where the phrase Indian summer came from. He didn’t believe her. They were laughing about this when all at once he stopped laughing and said, “A part of me wants this. More than anything.” He was always saying this. She had long since begun to wonder how many parts he had. She knew she’d fallen for a puzzle of a man, all parts and pieces and fractions, but was only now seeing how few of those would ever be hers.
He took her hand. “I want you seventy percent of the time,” he said. “No. Seventy-five.”
Fucker, she thought, wanting badly to bite him in all sorts of places, all sorts of contexts. On the apple of his cheek. Through a cutlet of skin gathered from the back of his hand. There was nothing to say. In the silence it occurred to her that they were within walking distance of her apartment, and that they had been all day. She saw the route home the way a bird would.
He said, “I’m sorry. I hate that I said that.”
“Then stop,” she said.
“I can’t.”
She was brave from wine and unseasonable sunshine and the newfound closeness of home. She told him he was making things too hard on her. She told him she was afraid she’d let him do this forever. The saying of these things had been a long time coming—these and many others—and as she walked home, her feet riverwet inside these tennis shoes, she knew they meant the end of them.
A second placard, buffed shiny and mounted at chest height just inside the front door:
The End (2 of 3). Two days later a storm rolled in from the west and Ezra came, for the first time, to the front door. When she opened it he said, “Hey,” and took her by the jaw and kissed her. She tried to find some sign in the way he worked his mouth against hers. But it was his same kiss—as brutal, as consuming. It did to her what it always had. He turned her around and pushed her up against the cool wall of this hallway. He put one hand in her hair roughly and kissed her neck, more teeth than tongue. He worked his other hand up then down her, shucking her clothes to the floor. The front door was still open, a wet autumn smell slipping inside. He pinned his knees into hers and spread her legs apart. She made uncontrollable gasping sounds, muffled by her mouth pressed to the plaster. He pushed harder against her and she tilted her hips into him. Then, as if he felt the fight go out of her, he turned her around so she faced him. He bent and kissed her once on the bridge of her nose. She managed to say, “We need to talk.”