“No,” Natalia was saying, “you are not listening to me. I am not going to go there, to the house of your mother, unless I have Russian vodka to give to her-export, good Stolichnaya, no pepper flavor, no vanilla, no nothing-and flowers. Roses I will give her. White roses, three dozens, with the long stem. And you stop. You stop-there. There is a store.”
“You don't understand,” he said, his eyes locked behind his sunglasses, “but this town is a slum, nothing like that here. No florists, no liquor store that sells anything more than the cheap shit in the pint bottle. This is forty-ouncer territory, malt liquor, Miller High Life in the tall can.”
They were in downtown Peterskill, sitting at a light. He'd already taken a little detour past Pizza Napoli-boarded up, scrawled over with graffiti, the big red-and-white sign he'd spent twenty-five hundred dollars on still in place, still proclaiming the optimism he'd felt back then-but he didn't say a word and Natalia, busy with her face, didn't even notice.
“Then you go right back out of this town to anyplace, I don't know, the mall, the supermarket, and a good quality of liquor store. I am telling you. I will not get out of this car.”
It was all right. It was fine. In a way, it was a relief to flick on the blinker, hang a left and cruise up Route 6 a couple miles to the upscale mall because he was tentative about the whole thing, about exposing himself not only to whoever might be looking for him to glide up in front of his boyhood home and see his mother but about Sukie too. About that first instant, that beat of recognition. Would she come to him? Would she even know who he was?
At the mall, he parked at the far end of the lot and stayed in the car while Natalia trooped off in search of fatted calves and burnt offerings, but not before a colloquy that was like a KGB inquisition. (“And why will you not come?” she wanted to know. “I don't want to run into anybody, that's all.”
“Your ex-wife, is that who? Or some policeman? Is that it?”
“Just anybody,” he said. “I don't want to see anybody, okay? What's your problem? You see the store? There's the fucking store.”) It took her a good hour or more, the pavement radiating heat till the whole vast oceanic lot shimmered and blurred in mirage and he ran the car for the air-conditioning till it began to overheat. He had no choice but to crank the windows down-and there was that smell again, the smell of his boyhood, of all his years here when he didn't know the rest of the world existed. People stalked by, wrapped up in the private resentments and narrowing back rooms of their own personalities, mothers and children, Jewish, Italian, dark hair, dark eyes, retirees, punks in their street racers and the girls they performed for, everything a performance.
It came to him then that he was being crazy, purely crazy. Nobody knew him here. Nobody would recognize him. He could stroll right in there and buy all the flowers they had, cases of vodka-drink it in the lot out of the open bottle. Sure. Beg for it. Beg for them to come and lock him back up for violating his parole and running out on his child support and the Harley and whatever else they could dig up. At least he'd got rid of the cardboard plates with the dealer logo and the chrome license-plate holder with Bob Almond's name on it and the Larkspur address because that was flying naked. If anybody wanted to know he had the temporary registration taped right there in the lower right-hand corner of the windshield as per California regulation and the plates were on the way-though he did have to get on the stick and see about registering the thing in New York. Driving without plates was just asking to get pulled over. Right, tomorrow. He'd do it tomorrow. And then it occurred to him-it hit him, hammered him with a kind of flaring panic that got his stomach fluttering all over again-that he had to get out of the car and go into that store, or one of those stores, because in his fog he hadn't thought to pick up anything, no toy, no doll, no candy, nothing, for his own natural sweet little daughter, for Sukie.
The house hadn't changed at all, at least as far as he could see-maybe some of the trees were taller, the weeds thicker along the edges of the lawn. He was standing there at the door of the car, caught in a shaft of sun that was like a spotlight, a box of Godiva chocolates in one hand, the flowers in the other, and the stuffed toy he'd bought for Sukie wedged under one arm, giving the place a quick scan as Natalia, running the brush through her hair one final time, made him wait. His father had always spent an inordinate amount of time and money on the place, putting on the addition with its brick fireplace, pouring a new concrete walk, repainting the exterior every three or four years and the trim every two, as if that could forestall the declining property values, and though he'd been twelve years dead now, the effort still showed. Decay had settled in, that was inevitable. And his mother certainly wasn't about to worry over it-as long as the roof didn't fall in on her she'd be happy to sit there in front of the TV with her bloated friends and a vodka and Collins mix and watch the water stains creep down around the fireplace where his father had screwed up the flashing despite the best of intentions.
“All right,” Natalia was saying, and there she was, her shoulders squared and breasts outthrust, looking commanding and beautiful and throwing back her head so that her hair rose up in a fan of light and settled in perfect array on the perfect white skin of her bare shoulders. And the bones there. The exquisite bones. The scapulae, the muscles, the ligaments that flashed and moved under her skin. He had a moment of revelation that took him out of himself and he saw her as a sculptor might, some genius of line and form with a block of marble and a hammer ready to hand. “Well?” She was giving him a crucial look, a look that asked, “Am I beautiful? Am I ready? Do you want me?”
“Yeah,” he said, “yeah, yeah, you look great,” and she held out her arm for him and they turned to glide up the walk, the most natural thing in the world, everything in its place, and then he saw the arc described by the screen door as his mother leaned into it-his mother, with the nose he looked at in the mirror every morning and her hair gone silver and cut in a liquid fall at her jawbone so she looked like some stranger out of a silent movie-and the other figure there at her side, so small and delicate, with the unappeasable eyes and the blanched unforgiving face of the hanging judge.
Five
TO EXPECT TRUTH, justice, the closure official victims were forever demanding on the little screen as the captioning played out dispassionately beneath their grim tight faces, to expect anything other than chaos and frustration, was delusory and she was foremost among the deluded. Life frustrates. Eternally frustrates. How could it be any different? That was what Dana was thinking as she stood in the rain on a stranger's lawn and watched Bridger poised at the top of the front steps, knocking at yet another door. When Frank Calabrese's fist had come down on the bartop with the pure uncontainable force of vengeance in all its shining potentiality, she was sure they'd come to the final turning at the final corner. He knew the thief. He named the thief. He knew where he lived. And ten minutes later they were at Peck Wilson's house-the house he'd grown up in, where his mother lived still-and she and Bridger had got out of the car in the rain, every individual blade of grass standing up stark and violently green, the twigs of the trees curled into claws and her heart about to explode, and then the knock at the door and the sky darkening and darkening till it was like night in the afternoon… and now, after all that? Nothing. Nobody home. No silent footsteps, no noiseless drop of the latch or presumptive squeal of the hinges, no face appearing behind the dark screen that was like the scrim of a confessional or the veil of maya. None of that. Nobody home.