At our old house the butterflies still climbed across the walls, short of their destination. I rang the doorbell at the Michaelsons’ and waited for a full minute before Donny came to the door, looking as if he’d just woken up, the thick creases in his meaty cheeks reminding me, eerily, of scars.
“You again,” he said. “Can’t get enough of me, huh?”
“Right,” I said. “Can I see your mom?”
“My mom? Why?”
It was a perfectly reasonable question, and I wasn’t sure how to answer. Because I wanted to know exactly what she meant by “It’s a permanent wave”? This didn’t seem like the right thing to say. I smiled at him.
“She must get lonely, sitting in that room all the time,” I said. “I thought she might like having visitors.”
Donny frowned. “I don’t think she really gets lonely.”
“How do you know?” I said. “Have you ever asked her?”
“Uh, no.”
“So you don’t actually know.”
“I guess not.” He nodded slowly, then stepped back from the door and started down the hallway. Passing the kitchen, I saw Darren standing there; when he saw me, he waved, seemingly without surprise, and asked if I wanted a Popsicle. I shook my head no, and he shrugged good-naturedly. Donny knocked on the door of his mother’s room and let me in.
“You don’t have to stay,” I said. “I’ll just visit with her for a few minutes.”
He nodded again, slowly and a bit sleepily, and left.
Daphne Michaelson was as beautiful and well-maintained as the last time I’d seen her. Her red nail polish looked professionally applied, and her hair shone. She didn’t look at me. She was reading Vogue and nodding sagely at the pictures, as if they were revealing truths she’d long suspected about the world.
“Mrs. Michaelson,” I said, “What’s the permanent wave?”
She lifted her head and stared at me, a band of irritation rippling across her face at the interruption.
“Do you know who I am?” I said. She didn’t acknowledge the question, so I tried a different tack. I looked down at the glossy photos in her lap, where thin and gorgeous women were cavorting in an African savanna, wearing clothes of primitive and dangerous glamour; their lips were black and their teeth pointed and white. “I think those, um, fur-trimmed toga things are pretty,” I said. “Although I think it would be hard to walk around with all those claws and teeth, don’t you?”
Daphne straightened her posture and smiled at me. “It’s only fashion,” she said in a confiding tone. “It isn’t about the everyday world.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said.
“I know I am.”
“What did you mean about the permanent wave?”
She smiled at me gently, as if she felt sorry about how dense I was, and I sensed she was going to tell me something important, an answer she’d been waiting to deliver for years. What she said was, “It’s a chemical process for altering the texture of hair.”
Just then the door opened and David Michaelson came into the cool, dark room. Daphne went back to looking at her pictures, without acknowledging him in the least. I spent a second wishing hard that I was not here, or that he wasn’t. He was wearing one of his cowboy shirts with black jeans and a brass belt buckle. He was not smiling.
“Excuse me, Lynn,” he said. “May I see you outside for a moment?”
I walked out on insubstantial legs. He held the door for me, closed it behind us, and then gripped me by the upper arm, hard, and marched me out of the house and to my car. I felt like a juvenile delinquent with an angry high-school principal. The sun outside was so bright it made my eyes water, and I must have looked for all the world as if I were crying. David stood with his hands on his belted hips, examining my face in a measured, leisurely fashion, like the lawyer he was. He smelled like sweat and men’s deodorant, that fake, pungent musk.
“Why are you always here?” he finally said.
“I think ‘always here’ is overstating the case a little.”
“You’ve been here several times.”
“I’ve dropped by once or twice to say hello,” I said.
David snorted at this response, and I couldn’t blame him for it, really. He shook his head and tried again. “Why do you keep coming over to my house?”
“I didn’t think you’d mind,” I said slowly, “since you’re always coming over to mine.”
He breathed in sharply, his mouth open, and I could see his small, even teeth. Glancing away, I saw Donny and Darren watching us through the living-room window. Darren had an orange Popsicle in his hand; Donny grinned at me and waved. I waved back.
“Is that what this is about?” David said. “You don’t like my relationship with your mother, so you’re coming over here as some sort of revenge?” The words “my relationship” sounded very strange coming from him. “Again, possibly you’re overstating the case a little,” I said.
He sighed and looked off into the distance for a moment. I thought I saw a glimmer of wetness in his eyes, but it could have just been the glare. “My wife is a very sick woman,” he said. “She doesn’t live in the same world you and I do. But that doesn’t mean she can’t be upset by things. I don’t like for her to be upset.”
In the house next door, the house where my mother answered the phone on the day my father died, staring at the receiver afterwards for a long time, as though it had grown utterly foreign to her — as if the world itself had grown foreign — a woman opened the front door and walked down the driveway carrying a large plastic cup with its own plastic straw. She opened the door to her SUV and waved in our direction. “Beautiful day, David!”
“Sure is, Marlene,” he called back.
I took advantage of this break in the conversation to walk around to the driver’s side of the Caprice.
David looked at me over the hood, squinting.
“I care about your mother,” he said, “and you should be better to her. You and your brother both.”
I was stuck to the ground, paralyzed. What saved me was a blur of orange Popsicle in the window, which somehow reminded me of Angus: the smoothness of his warm skin, its ammonia smell, its sweet, abundant freckles. As soon as I saw him again I could forget all of this existed; I would be calm. Was that a definition of love: a force that can drug you with calm and help you forget all the sandpaper realities of the world? Why not? On the force of this question I was able to get in the car and drive away, leaving all the Michaelsons behind.
Sixteen
Almost as much as the condo or Wylie’s apartment or the motel rooms I’d shared with Angus, the Caprice had become a kind of home. Feeling at ease on its cracked vinyl seats, surveying its dark-red dashboard and ivory paint, I’d come to think of it as mine. So when I left the Michaelsons’ I spent a while just driving around the August-dead city, the flowers dry and nodding, the grass in lawns gone halfway to dirt. The white rocks in other yards looked skeletal in the sun, each one a bleached, miniature landscape worthy of O’Keeffe. At an Allsup’s I stopped for gas and a bucket-sized soda, its sweet cold shooting straight to my brain. At the counter, a middle-aged couple was arguing about the nutritional value of the fried, crusty burritos that lay baking under the orange heat lamps, while the teenaged clerk batted her long, fake eyelashes in boredom.
At a pay phone in the back by the restrooms, I called information and asked if there was a listing for Plumbarama. There was, but the phone rang almost ten times before a man answered.
“Yeah,” he said. It wasn’t Angus.
“Is this Plumbarama?”