“It’s so foggy out, Marilyn. I’ll come get Mark.”
“He can stay. I’ll be a martyr,” she says, and hangs up before I can object.
Freddy comes into the house, tracking in mud. Sam lies in the kitchen, waiting for his paws to be cleaned. “Come on,” Freddy says, hitting his hand against his thigh, having no idea what Sam is doing. Sam gets up and runs after him. They go into the small downstairs bathroom together. Sam loves to watch people urinate. Sometimes he sings, to harmonize with the sound of the urine going into the water. There are footprints and pawprints everywhere. Tucker is shrieking with laughter in the living room. “… he says, he says to the other one, ‘Then, dearie, have you ever played spin the bottle?’ ” Frank’s and Tucker’s laughter drowns out the sound of Freddy peeing in the bathroom. I turn on the water in the kitchen sink, and it drowns out all the noise. I begin to scrape the dishes. Tucker is telling another story when I turn off the water: “… that it was Onassis in the Anvil, and nothing would talk him out of it. They told him Onassis was dead, and he thought they were trying to make him think he was crazy. There was nothing to do but go along with him, but, God — he was trying to goad this poor old fag into fighting about Stavros Niarchos. You know — Onassis’s enemy. He thought it was Onassis. In the Anvil.” There is a sound of a glass breaking. Frank or Tucker puts John Coltrane Live in Seattle on the stereo and turns the volume down low. The bathroom door opens. Sam runs into the kitchen and begins to lap water from his dish. Freddy takes his little silver case and his rolling papers out of his shirt pocket. He puts a piece of paper on the kitchen table and is about to sprinkle grass on it, but realizes just in time that the paper has absorbed water from a puddle. He balls it up with his thumb, flicks it to the floor, puts a piece of rolling paper where the table’s dry and shakes a line of grass down it. “You smoke this,” he says to me. “I’ll do the dishes.”
“We’ll both smoke it. I’ll wash and you can wipe.”
“I forgot to tell them I put ashes in the sauce,” he says.
“I wouldn’t interrupt.”
“At least he pays Frank ten times what any other accountant for an art gallery would make,” Freddy says.
Tucker is beating his hand on the arm of the sofa as he talks, stomping his feet. “… so he’s trying to feel him out, to see if this old guy with the dyed hair knew Maria Callas. Jesus! And he’s so out of it he’s trying to think what opera singers are called, and instead of coming up with ‘diva’ he comes up with ‘duenna.’ At this point, Larry Betwell went up to him and tried to calm him down, and he breaks into song — some aria or something that Maria Callas was famous for. Larry told him he was going to lose his teeth if he didn’t get it together, and …”
“He spends a lot of time in gay hangouts, for not being gay,” Freddy says.
I scream and jump back from the sink, hitting the glass I’m rinsing against the faucet, shattering green glass everywhere.
“What?” Freddy says. “Jesus Christ, what is it?”
Too late, I realize what it must have been that I saw: J.D. in a goat mask, the puckered pink plastic lips against the window by the kitchen sink.
“I’m sorry,” J.D. says, coming through the door and nearly colliding with Frank, who has rushed into the kitchen. Tucker is right behind him.
“Oooh,” Tucker says, feigning disappointment, “I thought Freddy smooched her.”
“I’m sorry,” J.D. says again. “I thought you’d know it was me.
The rain must have started again, because J.D. is soaking wet. He has turned the mask around so that the goat’s head stares out from the back of his head. “I got lost,” J.D. says. He has a farmhouse upstate. “I missed the turn. I went miles. I missed the whole dinner, didn’t I?”
“What did you do wrong?” Frank asks.
“I didn’t turn left onto 58. I don’t know why I didn’t realize my mistake, but I went miles. It was raining so hard I couldn’t go over twenty-five miles an hour. Your driveway is all mud. You’re going to have to push me out.”
“There’s some roast left over. And salad, if you want it,” I say.
“Bring it in the living room,” Frank says to J.D. Freddy is holding out a plate to him. J.D. reaches for the plate. Freddy pulls it back. J.D. reaches again, and Freddy is so stoned that he isn’t quick enough this time — J.D. grabs it.
“I thought you’d know it was me,” J.D. says. “I apologize.” He dishes salad onto the plate. “You’ll be rid of me for six months, in the morning.”
“Where does your plane leave from?” Freddy says.
“Kennedy.”
“Come in here!” Tucker calls. “I’ve got a story for you about Perry Dwyer down at the Anvil last week, when he thought he saw Aristotle Onassis.”
“Who’s Perry Dwyer?” J.D. says.
“That is not the point of the story, dear man. And when you’re in Cassis, I want you to look up an American painter over there. Will you? He doesn’t have a phone. Anyway — I’ve been tracking him, and I know where he is now, and I am very interested, if you would stress that with him, to do a show in June that will be only him. He doesn’t answer my letters.”
“Your hand is cut,” J.D. says to me.
“Forget it,” I say. “Go ahead.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Did I make you do that?”
“Yes, you did.”
“Don’t keep your finger under the water. Put pressure on it to stop the bleeding.”
He puts the plate on the table. Freddy is leaning against the counter, staring at the blood swirling in the sink, and smoking the joint all by himself. I can feel the little curls on my forehead that Freddy was talking about. They feel heavy on my skin. I hate to see my own blood. I’m sweating. I let J.D. do what he does; he turns off the water and wraps his hand around my second finger, squeezing. Water runs down our wrists.
Freddy jumps to answer the phone when it rings, as though a siren just went off behind him. He calls me to the phone, but J.D. steps in front of me, shakes his head no, and takes the dish towel and wraps it around my hand before he lets me go.
“Well,” Marilyn says. “I had the best of intentions, but my battery’s dead.”
J.D. is standing behind me, with his hand on my shoulder.
“I’ll be right over,” I say. “He’s not upset now, is he?”
“No, but he’s dropped enough hints that he doesn’t think he can make it through the night.”
“O.K.,” I say. “I’m sorry about all of this.”
“Six years old,” Marilyn says. “Wait till he grows up and gets that feeling.”
I hang up.
“Let me see your hand,” J.D. says.
“I don’t want to look at it. Just go get me a Band-Aid, please.”
He turns and goes upstairs. I unwrap the towel and look at it. It’s pretty deep, but no glass is in my finger. I feel funny; the outlines of things are turning yellow. I sit in the chair by the phone. Sam comes and lies beside me, and I stare at his black-and-yellow tail, beating. I reach down with my good hand and pat him, breathing deeply in time with every second pat.
“Rothko?” Tucker says bitterly, in the living room. “Nothing is great that can appear on greeting cards. Wyeth is that way. Would ‘Christina’s World’ look bad on a cocktail napkin? You know it wouldn’t.”
I jump as the phone rings again. “Hello?” I say, wedging the phone against my shoulder with my ear, wrapping the dish towel tighter around my hand.
“Tell them it’s a crank call. Tell them anything,” Johnny says. “I miss you. How’s Saturday night at your house?”