“We assumed you did that on purpose, didn’t we, John?” Hane looked out over his glasses and smiled conspiratorially at the boy.
“Yes,” said John. He looked at the ceramic figurines on the shelf to his right. There was a ballerina and a clown.
“Well,” said Millie, “maybe I just did.” She placed her napkin in her lap and began eating. She enjoyed the leftovers, the warm, rising grease of them, their taste and ecology.
“It’s very good food, Mrs. Keegan,” said John, chewing.
“Before you leave, of course, I’ll cook up a real meal. Several.”
“How long you staying?” Hane asked.
Millie put her fork down. “Hane, I told you: three weeks.”
“Maybe only two,” said John Spee. The idea seemed to cheer him. “But then maybe I’ll find a flat in the Big Apple and stay forever.”
Millie nodded. People from out of town were always referring to the Big Apple, like some large forbidden fruit one conquered with mountain gear. It seemed to give them energy, to think of it that way.
“What will you do?” Hane studied the food on his fork, letting it hover there, between his fork and his mouth, a kind of ingestive purgatory. Hane’s big fear was idleness. Particularly in boys. What will you do?
“Hane,” cautioned Millie.
“In England none of me mates have jobs. They’re all jealous ’cause I sold the car and came here to New York.”
“This is New Jersey, dear,” said Millie. “You’ll see New York tomorrow. I’ll give you a timetable for the train.”
“You sold your car,” repeated Hane. Hane had never once sold a car outright. He had always traded them in. “That’s quite a step.”
THE NEXT MORNING Millie made a list of things for John to do and see in New York. Hane had already left for his office. She sat at the dining room table and wrote:
Statue of Liberty
World Trade Center
Times Square
Broadway 2-fors
She stopped for a moment and thought.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Circle Line Tour
The door of the “guest” room was still closed. Funny how it pleased her to have someone in that space, someone really using it. For too long she had just sat in there doodling on her business cards and thinking about Michael. The business cards had been made from recycled paper, but the printers had forgotten to mention that on the back. So she had inked it in herself. They had also forgotten to print Millie’s middle initial — Environmental Project Adviser, Mildred R. Keegan — and so she had sat in there for weeks, ballpointing the R back in, card after card. Later Ariel had told her the cards looked stupid that way, and Millie had had to agree. She then spent days sitting at the desk, cutting the cards into gyres, triangles, curlicues, like a madness, like a business turned madness. She left them, absentmindedly, around the house, and Hane began to find them in odd places — on the kitchen counter, on the toilet tank. He turned to her one night in bed and said, “Millie, you’re fifty-one. You don’t have to have a career. Really, you don’t,” and she put her hands to her face and wept.
John Spee came out of his room. He was completely dressed, his bright hair parted neat as a crease, the white of his scalp startling as surgery.
“I’ve made a list of things you’ll probably want to do,” said Millie.
John sat down. “What’s this?” He pointed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I’m not that keen to go to museums. We always went to the British Museum for school. My sister likes that kind of stuff, but not me.”
“These are only suggestions,” said Millie. She placed a muffin and a quartered orange in front of him.
John smiled appreciatively. He picked up a piece of orange, pressed it against his teeth, and sucked it to a damp, stringy mat.
“I can drive you to the station to catch the ten-o-two train, if you want to leave in fifteen minutes,” said Millie. She slid sidesaddle into a chair and began eating a second muffin. Her manner was sprinkled with youthful motions, as if her body were on occasion falling into a memory or a wish.
“That would be lovely, thanks,” said John.
“Did you really not like living in England?” asked Millie, but they were both eating muffins, and it was hard to talk.
At the station she pressed a twenty into his hand and kissed him on the cheek. He stepped back away from her and got on the train. “See a play,” Millie mouthed at him through the window.
AT DINNER it was just she and Hane. Hane was talking about Jesus again, the Historical Jesus, how everyone misunderstood Christ’s prophetic powers, how Jesus himself had been mistaken.
“Jesus thought the world was going to end,” said Hane, “but he was wrong. It wasn’t just Jerusalem. He was predicting the end for the whole world. Eschatologically, he got it wrong. He said it outright, but he was mistaken. The world kept right on.”
“Perhaps he meant it as a kind of symbol. You know, poetically, not literally.” Millie had heard Hane suggest this himself. They were his words she was speaking, one side of his own self-argument.
“No, he meant it literally,” Hane barked a little fiercely.
“Well, we all make mistakes,” said Millie. “Isn’t the world funny that way.” She always tried to listen to Hane. She knew that few students registered for his courses anymore, and those that did tended to be local fundamentalists, young ignorant people, said Hane, who had no use for history or metaphor. They might as well just chuck the Bible! In class Hane’s primary aim was reconciling religion with science and history, but these young “Pentecostalists,” as Hane referred to them, didn’t believe in science or history. “They’re mindless, some of these kids. And if you want your soul nourished — and they do, I think — you’ve got to have a mind.”
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” said Millie.
“What are you talking about?” asked Hane. He looked depressed and impatient. There were times when he felt he had married a stupid woman, and it made him feel alone in the world.
“I’ve been thinking about the garbage barge,” said Millie. “I guess my mind’s wandering around, just like that heap of trash.” She smiled. She had been listening to all the reports on the barge, had charted its course from Islip, where she had relatives, to Morehead City, where she had relatives. “Imagine,” she had said to her neighbor in their backyards, near the prize tulips that belonged to neither one of them. “Relatives in both places! Garbagey relatives!”
Millie wiped her mouth with her napkin. “It has nowhere to go,” she said now to her husband.
Hane served himself more leftovers. He thought of Millie and this interest of hers in ecology. It baffled and awed him, like a female thing. In the kitchen Millie kept an assortment of boxes for recycling household supplies. She had boxes marked Aluminum, Plastic, Dry Trash, Wet Trash, Garbage. She had twice told him the difference between garbage and trash, but the distinction never meant that much to him, and he always forgot it. Last night she had told him about swans in the park who were making their nests from old boots and plastic six-pack rings. “Laying their eggs in litter,” she’d said. Then she told him to be more fatherly toward John Spee, to take a friendly interest in the boy.
“Is this the end of the leftovers?” asked Hane. At his office at the college he ate very light lunches. Often he just brought a hard-boiled egg and sprinkled it carefully with salt, shaking the egg over the wastebasket if he got too much on by mistake.