— Could you stay?
— Have to be at Newark by ten… That was all; and she stood with all her weight against the door motionless in the sudden glare of headlights, until they swept an arc across the windows and were gone.
In that house more frequently now she would find herself paused to listen, as she did passing back to the kitchen, though for what it was never clear. Once there, she turned on the radio which promptly informed her that traffic was being detoured in the vicinity of the BQE because of an overturned tractor trailer truck and she turned it off and picked up the hundred dollar bill, and then she came round to find the crumpled check on the floor and smooth it carefully against the refrigerator door before she put them both under the napkins and placemats in the drawer. Lights went out behind her, TEARFUL MOM wailed mute from the coffee table where Town & Country lay menaced by the Masai in a glint from the streetlight.
In the tub she examined a fading bruise on the inside of her knee. In the bedroom, she brought the television screen to life with two men struggling on the top of a speeding train until one hurled the other off as it crossed a trestle and she watched, wrapped in a towel, for the satisfaction of the flailing figure dashed on the rocks below before she pulled open the bureau's top drawer as the train sped on.
Two, then a third palm size page fell free of the worn address book, a meticulous chaos of initials and numbers, crossings out, writings in, arrows spanning continents, bridging oceans, MHG Golf Links New D tlx 314573TZUPIN; Bill R, Midi and numbers crossed out for BA and new numbers; for funding GPRASH Luanda and numbers; Jenny Dpnt Crcl and numbers; SOLANT and numbers crossed out; Seiko and numbers, IC, more numbers; she restored them haphazard and dropped it into the folder spread open on the bed where she came down to the last page taking her pencil straight to a man somewhat older and drawing it through another life, writing in other lives; through another woman for other women; through somewhere, for a wife hidden now in Marrakech, biting the nub of the eraser over his still, sinewed hands when the phone brought her upright.
— Yes hello…? No, no he's not here who is it, if he calls I can… Well yes he was here briefly Mrs Fickert, but he had to turn right around and… pardon? Well he, well yes of course he's married. I mean I'm his wife. Do you… hello?
The train sped toward her and she caught the towel together at her breast up fetching Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, and it roared right over her as though she'd gone down on her back there between the tracks. Opened to the Ds now, licking her fingertip past dogtrot, dive, her finger ran down dishevel, dishpan hands till it reached disinterested, where the precisely incorrect definition she sought was confirmed in a citation from a pundit for the Times, she drew a line through indifferent and wrote it in, worrying at calm with faint prods of the pencil point: the cool, disinterested calm of his eyes belying? She hatched calm in a cuneate enclosure, licking her finger paging back to the Cs for cunning, past cut-rate, curt, running down from cuneiform and held, abruptly, at cunnilingus. She was reading it slowly, finger back to her lips, pp. of lingere, more at LICK, when the phone rang again.
— Yes? she cleared her throat — yes? hello… She came back on the pillows staring at a woman rudely her junior and blonde at that emerging refreshed from the shower. — No I'm not but, but wait. Wait, hello…? She, whoever you are, I mean you don't need to keep trying to call her here she, you see she's been gone for two years…
The woman on the screen caressed a chaste limb with something from a bottle, turning to look straight at her, and where she came forward now to run her finger with a resolute tremor on to stop sharp at cunning her eye leaped it to cunt. And as though there'd been no interruption, no two years fallen away in Zaire, Maracaibo, Marrakech, — Places like that… BA, Mtdi, Thailand? — never been there… she lay back on the bed as though she'd never left it, — all these lovely things it looks like she'd just gone for the day… the damp warmth of the towel turned chill and fallen away, feet curled in on the bed in the frolic of the streetlight through the trees, her nipples drawn up hard and a hand passing down her breast and out to the knee flexed up for its reach to touch the bruise there, gliding down slowly on a hard edge of nails to the rising fall where its warmth lingered with the close warmth of breath in the suspense of her knees fallen wide broken, shuddering, by the shock of her own voice.
— Yes hello! Oh… oh I'm… she caught breath, — I'm sorry Mister Mullins I didn't recognize your voice… She cleared her throat, — no, no I haven't seen Sheila since… I know yes of course you do, I know she's not well but… No he was here, Billy was here a little while ago but he… with him? No, no she wasn't no, he… He didn't know I mean I don't know no, where he was going he didn't… If I hear yes of course I will, yes…
Knees drawn up she pulled the towel round her bared shoulders and a shiver sent breath through her, staring at that page till she seized the pencil to draw it heavily through his still, sinewed hands, hard irregular features, the cool disinterested calm of his eyes and a bare moment's pause bearing down with the pencil on his hands, disjointed, rust spotted, his crumbled features dulled and worn as the bill collector he might have been mistaken for, the desolate loss in his eyes belying, belying… The towel went to the floor in a heap and she was up naked, legs planted wide broached by scissors wielded murderously on the screen where she dug past it for the rag of a book its cover gone, the first twenty odd pages gone in fact, so that it opened full on the line she sought, coming down with the pencil on belying, a sense that he was still a part of all that he could have been.
4
Her anxious morning greeting in the bathroom mirror was not returned: the glass was steamed over, and she trampled a clump of brown socks, a sodden towel getting to her bath, coming from it back down the hall for an exchange in the mirror over the bureau gone from bleak to critical as her eyes met there and fell to her breasts, to the open drawer idly turning up sweaters, blouses, pulling things on without a second look, finally drawn to the stairs and down by the smell of burnt toast.
— Liz?
— You came in so late last night I didn't…
— Look I don't believe this… He was sitting at the kitchen table in shorts and black socks, papers spread out in the blue haze from the toaster. — Montego Bay collect, thirty nine minutes. Fifty one dollars and eighty five cents.
— Oh. Oh that, must have been Edie…
— Look I know it must have been Edie. I just want to know why she called collect. I just want to know why in hell you'd accept a collect call from Montego Bay.
— Well I didn't realize it Paul the operator said it was Edie calling and I just, I so wanted to talk to her…
— She's trying to run through two million dollars from her dead aunt and she has to call collect?
— Well she, I don't know maybe she didn't have any change and…
— Change! Fifty one dollars and eighty five cents change?
— I don't, why it's always money… She poured scorched coffee, standing there at the sink looking out at a lawn chair overturned in the drift of discoloured leaves on the terrace, — why it just always has to be money…
— Because it always is money! See this? Comes in the same God damn mail, invitation to a gala she's giving for Victor Sweet.
— Oh! she turned, — could we…