The other call was to his mother. She sounded surprised to hear from him — surprised and defensive. But had he heard? Yes, she was remarried. And no, she didn’t think Roger would like it if he spent the night. It was a real shame about his teaching job, but then he always was irresponsible. She punctuated each phrase with a sigh, as if the very act of speaking were torture. All right, she sighed finally, she’d loan him a hundred dollars till he got back on his feet.
It was getting dark when he pulled up in front of the house in Cold Spring. He didn’t hesitate this time — he was too miserable. Get it over with, he told himself, one way or the other.
Naina’s mother answered the door, peering myopically into the cold fading light. He could smell cabbage, cat, and vinegar, felt the warmth wafting out to him. “Marty?” she said.
He’d grown his hair long and the clipped mustache had become a patchy beard. His denim jacket was faded and it was torn across the shoulder where he’d fallen flat one afternoon in Golden Gate Park, laughing at the sky and the mescaline percolating inside his brain. He wore an earring like Terry’s. He wondered that she recognized him, and somehow it made him feel sorrowful — sorrowful and guilty. “Yes,” he said.
There was no embrace. She didn’t usher him in the door. She just stood there, the support hose sagging round her ankles.
“I, uh…I was looking for Naina,” he said, and then, attempting a smile, “I’m back.”
The old woman’s face was heavy, stern, hung with folds and pouches. She didn’t respond. But she was watching him in her shrewd way, totting up the changes, deciding something. “All right,” she said finally, “come,” and she swung back the door for him.
Inside, it was as he remembered it, nothing changed but for an incremental swelling of the heaps of magazines in the corners. She gestured for him to sit on the swaybacked sofa and took the chair across from him. A cat sprang into his lap. It was so quiet he could hear the ticking of the kitchen clock. “So, is she,” he faltered, “is she living here now? — I mean, I went out to Yorktown first thing.…”
Mama Vyshensky slowly shook her head. “College,”she said. She shrugged her big shoulders and looked away, busying herself with the arrangement of the doily on the chair arm. “When she doesn’t hear from you, she goes back to college. For the Master.”
He didn’t know what to say. She was accusing him, he knew it. And he had no defense. “I’m sorry,” he said. He stood to go.
The old woman was studying him carefully, her chin propped on one hand, eyes reduced to slits. “Your house,” she said, “the bungalow. Where do you sleep tonight?”
He didn’t answer. He was going to sleep in the car, in a rubble of crumpled newspaper and fast-food containers, the greasy sleeping bag pulled up over his head.
“I have a cot,” she said. “In the closet.”
“I was going to go over to my mother’s…” he said, trailing off. He couldn’t seem to keep his right foot still, the heel tapping nervously at the worn floorboards.
“Sit,” she said.
He did as he was told. She brought him a cup of hot tea, a bowl of boiled cabbage and ham, and a plate of cold pirogen. Eating, he tried to explain himself. “About Naina,” he began, “I—”
She waved her hand in dismissal. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “I’m not the one you should tell.”
He set the cup down and looked at her — really looked at her — for the first time.
“Day after tomorrow,” she said, “the solstice, shortest day of year. You come to dock on river.” She held his eyes and he thought of the day she’d offered him the whole shabby pile of the house as if it were Hyde Park itself. “Same time as last year,” she said.
The day was raw, cold, the wind gusting off the river. A dead crust of snow clung to the ground, used up and discolored, dirt showing through in streaks that were like wounds. Marty got there early. He pulled into the lot and parked the Camaro behind a Cadillac the size of a Rose Parade float. He didn’t want her to see him right away. He let the car run, heater going full, and lit a cigarette. For a while he listened to the radio, but that didn’t feel right, so he flicked it off.
The lot gradually filled. He recognized some of the cars from the previous year, watched the white-haired old masochists maneuver over the ruts as if they were bringing 747s in for a landing. Mama Vyshensky was late, as usual, and no one made a move till her battered Pontiac turned the corner and jolted into the lot. Then the doors began to open and bare feet gripped the snow.
Still, he waited. The driver’s door of the Pontiac swung open, and then the passenger’s door, and he felt something rising in him, a metallic compound of hope and despair that stuck in the back of his throat. And then Naina stepped out of the car. Her back was to him, her legs long and naked, a flash of her blood-red nails against the tarnished snow. He watched her toss her head and then gather her hair in a tight knot and force it under the bathing cap. He’d slept in the car the past two nights, he’d hunkered over cups of coffee at McDonald’s like a bum. He saw her and he felt weak.
The crowd began to gather around Mama Vyshensky, ancient, all of them, spindly-legged, their robes like shrouds. He recognized the old man with red ears, bent double now and hunched over a cane. And a woman he’d seen last year, heaving along in a one-piece with a ballerina fringe round the hips. They drank a toast and shouted. Then another, and they flung their glasses. Naina stood silent among them.
He waited till they began to move down the slope to the dock and then he stepped noiselessly from the car, heart pounding in his chest. By the time they’d reached the dock, Naina and her mother at the head of the group, he was already passing the stragglers. “You bring a towel?” one old woman called out to him, and another tittered. He just gave her a blank stare, hurrying now, his eyes on Naina.
As he stepped onto the dock, Naina stood poised at the far end. She dropped her robe. Then she turned and saw him. She saw him — he could read it in her eyes — though she turned away as if she hadn’t. He tried to get to her, wedging himself between two heavy-breasted women and a hearty-looking old man with a white goatee, but the dock was too crowded. And then came the first splash. Naina glanced back at him and the soft smile seemed to flicker across her lips. She held his eyes now, held them across the field of drooping flesh, the body hair, the toothless mouths. Then she turned and dove.
All right, he thought, his pulse racing, all right. And then he had a boot in his hand and he was hopping on one leg. Then the other boot. A confusion of splashes caromed around him, water flew, the wind cut across the dock. He tore off his jacket, sweater, T-shirt, dropped his faded jeans, and stood there in his briefs, scanning the black rollicking water. There she was, her head bobbing gently, arms flowing across her breast in an easy tread.
He never hesitated. His feet pounded against the rough planks of the dock, the wind caught his hair, and he was up and out over the churning water, hanging suspended for the briefest, maddest, most lucid instant of his life, and then he was in.
Funny. It was warm as a bath.
THE DEVIL AND IRV CHERNISKE
JUST OUTSIDE the sleepy little commuter village of Irvington, New York, there stands a subdivision of half-million-dollar homes, each riding its own sculpted acre like a ship at sea and separated from its neighbors by patches of scrub and the forlorn-looking beeches that lend a certain pricy and vestigial air to the place. The stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors, and software salesmen who live here with their families know their community as Beechwood, in deference to the legend hammered into the slab of pink marble at the entrance of Beechwood Drive. This slab was erected by the developer, Sal Maggio, in the late nineteen-sixties, though there are few here now who can remember that far back. For better or worse, Beechwood is the sort of community in which the neighbors don’t know one another and don’t really care to, though they do survey each other’s gardeners and automobiles with all the perspicacity of appraisers, and while the proper names of the people next door may escape them, they are quick to invent such colorful sobriquets as the Geeks, the Hackers, the Volvos, and the Chinks by way of compensation.