Beatrice took another chance. “It’s my boyfriend,” she said.
The person on the other end of the telephone paused.
“Should I hang up? Is he going to be mad?”
She pressed her mouth against the phone. “He already is mad.”
“He is? What’s he going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Beatrice whispered. “Wait—”
“What? What’s that noise?”
From outside her door came a long and low-pitched hum, similar to the sound people make when they’re cold: Brrrrrrrrrrr.
“I think he’s turned on the—” Beatrice inhaled sharply. “I have to go now.”
She put the telephone back into its cradle. Click! And like that, he was gone. He had risen up from some unfathomable place, and now he had sunk back down again, like Champ, or the Loch Ness monster, about which Calvin was building a diorama. Beatrice herself felt waterlogged, as if she had stayed in the bath for too long.
Outside her door, the beautiful wooden box vibrated steadily. Calvin, in his extreme stealth, was probably pressed up against the little button in one of the rooms downstairs. Beatrice stretched out on her bed and listened to the bell hum, imagining herself a lazy servant. But she did so halfheartedly. According to the rules, she was never the servant. Just as she was never the pupil, but always the teacher; never the person who discovers the dead body, but always the body, lying cold and immobile on the floor. How did these rules come about? Although she had invented them, they made no sense to her; they were arbitrary yet inviolable. She knew, for instance, that the telephone would ring again, maybe not this night but another night, and that when it rang she would say, “Hello?” and that the rules would then take over: he asking her questions, and she dreamily offering answers. He would be a landscaper, and she would be a guitar player in a band.
Calvin came into her room, not slithering this time. She felt him breathing on her. “Why didn’t you come?” he asked.
“Were you ringing for me?” Beatrice said.
“Yes!” Calvin said. “Why didn’t you come?”
He turned on her bedside lamp and appeared, in his beret and sunglasses and gloves. Far beneath them, their father bellowed.
“Did the toilet explode again?” she asked.
Calvin frowned. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I couldn’t tell. I tried ringing you.”
“I thought it was by accident,” Beatrice said.
“I made it through the kitchen, with the lights on. They didn’t see me. I snuck across the entire kitchen,” Calvin said. “Then I snuck into the Butler’s Pantry. I was waiting for you — I kept ringing the bell.”
“I didn’t understand,” Beatrice said. “I thought you were pushing the button by mistake.”
“Never mind,” he said wearily. “Too late now.”
He peeled off the black knit gloves and handed them to her. “You can have these back.”
“Don’t you need them?”
“No,” Calvin said. “I don’t. I’m done with that game.”
Without his gloves, he didn’t look like a cat burglar anymore. He didn’t even look chic and international. He looked half dressed and forlorn in his turtleneck and tights, like a girl someone forgot to pick up after tap dancing class.
NOW THAT HE HAD ABANDONED Cat Burglar, Calvin threw his energies into becoming a nosy person. It was as if all his passion for going undetected was now transformed into detecting something sneaky or amiss in Beatrice’s life. He pestered her constantly. Standing outside the bathroom door, he would repeat, tonelessly: “What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?”
Usually, Beatrice was practicing. Practicing lighting a cigarette, or driving a van and lighting a cigarette at the same time. Practicing talking with a cigarette dangling out the side of her mouth, or talking while gesturing with a cigarette in one hand. She had no cigarettes with which to practice, so she rolled up a little piece of paper and held it together with Scotch tape. Sometimes it was easier to use an invisible cigarette, like when she practiced sticking her cigarette between the tuning pegs of her guitar, which was also, at this point, invisible.
“What are you doing?” Calvin repeated.
“I’m smoking!” Beatrice shouted.
A moment of silence from outside the door. Then: “Beatrice…,” Calvin said in a threatening tone. And when she ignored him: “Beatrice…?” he said, sounding afraid. “You shouldn’t be smoking. You know you shouldn’t be.”
She flung the door open and glared. “I’m kidding. Ha ha. I’m only kidding.”
Calvin also began taking an unhealthy interest in the Rock Hotel. “Is it on yet?” he would ask, hovering beside the radio. “Tell me when it’s on,” he ordered Beatrice. Anytime a voice came onto the air, even if it was only the weatherman, Calvin would say, “That’s Shred, right? That’s Shred.” He pretended that he liked listening to the music, closing his eyes and nodding to the frenzied sounds. “I love that song,” he’d say.
But Beatrice knew he was only pretending. For sometimes he would turn away from the radio, blink a few times, and ask musingly, “What are they so angry about?” He was still young enough to think in the same fretful ways as adults. In more charitable moods, Beatrice would say, “One day, Calvin, it will sound different to you.” One day he would be able to tell, like she could, when a song was by Dag Nasty or Minor Threat, even before Shred said anything. “You will be able to tell the difference,” she told him, “between being angry and being alive.”
It was a distinction she tried to impart to the person on the telephone.
“Why is your boyfriend always yelling?” he asked.
“It’s just what he does,” she said. It had become what she did, too: shut her bedroom door and sing along to the Rock Hotel in a strained voice she didn’t wholly recognize. That’s when I reach for my revolver! she would yell, and it made her feel exhilarated, alert, terrifyingly capable. She couldn’t wait until she could drive in a car and yell at the same time.
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
“I don’t take it personally,” she said.
“Why don’t you leave him?” the person asked. “Try someone new.”
“You make it sound easy.” She didn’t like when the conversation sidled off in this direction. “When it isn’t easy at all. Leaving is the hardest thing a person can do,” she said firmly, and then reminded him: “We live together.”
“I guess that’s true,” he admitted. “You get attached, I guess.”
“And we’d have to break up the band.”
“But you could start a new one. An all-girl band.”