The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Page 20

  Or so he tells himself. It’s what he has to believe. If he saw any of this for what it is, he’d have to act and the last thing Weston wants right now is for his dizzy collisions in the night to end.

  Until today, when he hurtles out of sleep at 4 a.m. Panic wakes him, the roar of blood thundering in his ears. His synapses clash in serial car crashes; the carnage is terrible. He slides out of bed in the gray dawn and bolts downstairs, lunging from room to room, shattered by the certain knowledge that something has changed.

  Unless everything has changed.

  What, he wonders, running a finger over table tops, the rims of picture frames, the outlines of priceless maquettes by famous sculptors, all still in place, reassuringly there. What?

  Dear God, his Picasso plates are missing. Treasures picked up off the master’s studio floor by Great-grandfather Weston, who walked away with six signed plates under his arm, leaving behind a thousand dollars and the memory of his famous smile. Horrified, he turns on the light. Pale circles mark the silk wallpaper where the plates hung; empty brackets sag, reproaching him.

  He doesn’t mention this to Wings when she comes to him that night; he only breathes into her crackling hair and holds her closer, thinking, It can’t be her. She couldn’t have, it couldn’t be Wings.

  Then he buries himself in her because he knows it is.

  Before dawn she leaves Weston drowsing in his messy bed, dazed and grateful. His nights continue to pass like dreams; the rich orphan so bent on life without intrusions welcomes the wild girl in spite of certain losses; love hurts, but he wants what he wants. Their time together passes without reference to the fact that when Weston comes down tomorrow his King George silver service will be missing, to be followed by his Kang dynasty netsuke and then his best Miró. I love her too much, he tells himself as objects disappear daily. I don’t want this to stop.

  He inspects. All his external systems remain in place. Alarms are set, there’s no sign of forcible entry or exit. It is as though things he thought he prized more than any woman have dropped into the earth without explanation.

  He can live without these things, he tells himself. He can! Love is love, and these are only objects.

  Until the Brancusi marble goes missing.

  In a spasm of grief, his heart empties out.

  Wings won’t know when they make love that night that her new man is only going through the motions—unless she does know, which straightforward Weston is too new at deception to guess. He does the girl with one eye on the door, which is how he assumes she exits once she’s pushed him off the deep end into sleep—which she has done nightly, vanishing before he wakes up.

  Careful, Wings. Tonight will be different.

  To him, Wings is a closed book.

  He needs to crack her open like a piñata and watch the secrets fall out. Guilty and terrible as he feels about doubting her, confused because he can’t bear to lose one more thing, he can’t let this go on. With Wings still in his arms he struggles to stay awake, watching through slitted eyes for what seems like forever. She drowses; he waits. The night passes like a dark thought, sullenly dragging its feet. Waiting is terrible. By the time a crack of gray light outlines his bedroom blackout shades, he’s about to die of it. The girl he loves sighs and delicately disengages herself. Grieving, he watches and when she goes, he counts to twenty and follows.

  He knows the house better than Wings; she’ll take the back stairs, so he hurries down the front. When she sneaks into the central hall and silences the alarm so she can escape with another of his treasures, he’ll spring. Sliding into the niche behind the Brancusi’s empty pedestal he crouches until his joints crack, echoing in the silent house. He has no idea how she escaped.

  Damn fool, he thinks and does not know which of them he’s mad at, himself or elusive Wings Germaine.

  When they lie down together after midnight Weston’s fears have eased: of being caught following—the tears of regret, the recriminations—unless his greatest fear was that she wasn’t coming back because she knew. Did she know he followed? Does she?

  She slides into his arms in the nightly miracle that he has come to expect and he pulls her close with a sigh. What will he do after he ends this? What will she steal from him tonight and what will she do when he confronts her? He doesn’t know, but it’s long overdue. When she slips out of bed before first light he gives her time to take the back stairs and then follows. Like a shadow, he drifts through darkened rooms where the girl moves so surely that he knows she must linger here every night, having her way with his treasured things.

  With the swift, smooth touch of a child molester she strokes his family of objects but takes nothing.

  Damn! Is he waiting for her to steal? What is she waiting for? Why doesn’t she grab something so he can pounce and finish this?

  Empty-handed, she veers toward the darkened kitchen.

  Weston’s back hairs rise and tremble as Wings opens the door to the smoky stone cellar and starts down.

  His heart sags. Is that all she is? A generic homeless person with a sordid squat in a corner of his dank basement? When Wings Germaine comes to his bed at night she is freshly scrubbed; she smells of woodsmoke and rich earth and in the part of his head where fantasies have moved in and set up housekeeping, Weston wants to believe that she’s fresh from her own rooftop terrace or just in from a day on her country estate.

  Idiot.

  He has two choices here. He can go back to bed and pretend what he must in order to keep things as they are in spite of escalating losses—or he can track her to her lair.

  But, oh! The missing furniture of his life, the art. His Brancusi! What happened to them? Has she sneaked his best things out of the house and fenced them or does she keep them stashed in some secret corner of his cellar for reasons she will never explain? Is his treasured Miró safe? Is anything? He has to know.

  Oh, lover. It is a cry from the heart. Forgive me.

  He goes down.

  The cellar is empty. Wings isn’t anywhere. He shines his caretaker’s flash in every corner and underneath all the shelves and into empty niches in Great-grandfather’s wine rack, but there is no sign. It takes him all morning to be absolutely certain, hours in which the housekeeper trots around the kitchen overhead making his breakfast, putting his coffee cup and the steaming carafe, his orange juice and cinnamon toast—and a rose, because roses are in season—on his breakfast tray. He times the woman’s trips back and forth to the library where he eats, her visit to his bedroom where she will change his sheets without remarking because she does it every day; he waits for her to finish, punch in the code, and leave by the kitchen door. Then he waits another hour.

  When he’s sure the house is empty, Weston goes back upstairs for the klieg lights his folks bought for a homes tour the year they died.

  Bright as they are, they don’t show him much. There are cartons of books in this old cellar, bundles of love letters that he’s afraid to read. His parents’ skis, the ice skates they bought him the Christmas he turned four, the sled, all remnants of his long-lost past. This is the sad but ordinary basement of an ordinary man who has gone through life with his upper lip stiffer than is normal and his elbows clamped to his sides. It makes him sigh.

  Maybe he imagined Wings Germaine.

  Then, when he’s just about to write her off as a figment of his imagination and the missing pieces, up to and including the Brancusi, as the work of his housekeeper or the guy who installed the alarms, he sees that the floor in front of the wine rack is uneven and that there are fingerprints on one stone.

  Very well. He could be Speke, starting out after Burton or Livingston, heading up the Zambezi. The shell Weston has built around himself hardens so that only he will hear his heart crack as he finishes: Alone.

  When she comes back too long after midnight he is waiting: provisioned this time, equipped with pick and miner’s light because he thinks he knows where Wings is going; handcuffs and a length of rope. He will follow her
down. Never mind what Weston thinks in the hours while he crouches in his own basement like a sneak thief, waiting; don’t try to parse the many escalating heartbroken, reproachful, angry escalating to furious, ultimately threatening speeches he writes and then discards.

  The minute that stone moves, he’ll lunge. If he’s fast enough, he can grab her as she comes out; if she’s faster and drops back into the hole, then like a jungle cat, he will plunge in after her and bring her down. Then he’ll kneel on the woman’s chest and pin her wrists and keep her there until she explains. He already knows that eventually he’ll soften and give her one more chance, but it will be on his terms.

  She’ll have to pack up her stuff and move into his handsome house and settle down in his daytime life because he is probably in love with her. Then he’ll have every beautiful thing that he cares about secured in the last safe place.

  And by God she’ll bring all his stuff back. She will!

  He’s been staring at the stone for so long that he almost forgets to douse the light when it moves. He manages it just as the stone scrapes aside like a manhole cover and her head pops up.

  “Oh,” she cries, although he has no idea how she knows he is crouching here in the dark. “Oh, fuck.”

  It’s a long way to the bottom. The fall is harder than he thought. By the time he hits the muddy floor of the tunnel underneath his house Wings Germaine is gone.

  He is alone in the narrow tunnel, riveted by the possibility that it’s a dead end and there’s no way out.

  He’s even more terrified because a faint glow tells him that there is. To follow Wings, he has to crawl on and out, into the unknown.

  Weston goes along on mud-caked hands and slimy knees for what seems like forever before he comes to a place big enough to stand up in. It’s a lot like the hole where the runaway tourist stampeded him but it is nothing like it. The man-made grotto is wired and strung with dim lights; the air is as foul as it was in the hole where Ted Bishop disappeared, but this one is deserted. He is at a rude crossroads. Access tunnels snake out in five directions and he has to wonder which one she took, and how far they go.

  Stupid bastard, he calls, “Wings?”

  There is life down here, Weston knows it; she is down here but he has no idea which way she went or where she is hiding or, in fact, whether she is hiding from him. A man in his right mind, even a heartbroken lover, would go back the way he came, haul himself up and station his caretaker by the opening with a shotgun to prevent incursions until he could mix enough concrete to fill the place and cement the stone lid down so no matter what else happened in his house, she would never get back inside.

  Instead he cries, “Wings. Oh, Wings!”

  He knows better than to wait. If anything is going to happen here, he has to make it happen.

  The idea terrifies him. Worse. There are others here. For the first time in his well-ordered life careful Weston, who vowed never to lose anybody or anything he cared about, is lost.

  The chamber is empty for the moment but there is life going on just out of sight; he hears the unknown stirring in hidden grottos, moving through tunnels like arteries—approaching, for all he knows. The knowledge is suffocating. The man who needs to be alone understands that other lives are unfolding down here; untold masses are deep in their caverns doing God knows what. A born solitary, he is staggered by the pressure of all those unchecked lives raging, out of sight and beyond the law or any of the usual agencies of control.

  Encroaching. God!

  Trembling, he tries, “Wings?”

  As if she cares enough to answer.

  The tunnels give back nothing. He wants to run after her but he doesn’t know where. Worse, she may see him not as a lover in pursuit, but a giant rat scuttling after food. He should search but he’s afraid of what he will find. Much as he misses his things, he’s afraid to find out what Wings has done with them and who she is doing it with.

  Overturned, he retreats to the mouth of the tunnel that leads to his house and hunkers down to think.

  There are others out there, too many! Accustomed now, Weston can sense them, hear them, smell them in the dense underground air, connected by this tunnel to the treasures he tries so hard to protect. The labyrinth is teeming with life but he is reluctant to find out who the others are or how they are. They could be trapped underground like him, miserable and helpless, snapped into fetal position in discrete pits they have dug for themselves. They could be killing each other out there, or lying tangled in wild, orgiastic knots doing amazing things to each other in communal passion pits or thinking great thoughts, writing verse or plotting revolution, or they could be locked into lotus position in individual niches, halfway to Nirvana or—no!—they could be trashing his stolen art. He doesn’t want to know.

  It is enough to know that for the moment, he is alone at a dead end and that in a way, it’s a relief.

  Surprise. For the first time since the runaway tourist forced him underground and Wings flew up to the surface and messed up his life, Weston has nothing to hope for and no place to go. And for the first time since he was four years old, he feels safe.

  After a time he takes the pick he had strapped to his backpack in case and begins to dig.

  In the hours or days that follow, Weston eats, he supposes: by the time the hole is big enough to settle down in, his supply of granola bars is low and the water in his canteen is almost gone but he is not ready to go back into his house. In between bouts of digging, he probably sleeps. Mostly he thinks and then stops thinking as his mind empties out and leaves him drifting in the zone. What zone, he could not say. What he wants and where this will end, he is too disturbed and disrupted to guess.

  Then, just when he has adjusted to being alone in this snug, reassuringly tight place, when he is resigned to the fact that he’ll never see her again she comes, flashing into life before him like an apparition and smiling that sexy and annoying, enigmatic smile.

  “Wings!”

  Damn that wild glamour, damn the cloud of tousled hair, damn her for saying with that indecipherable, superior air, “What makes you think I’m really here?”

  The girl folds as neatly as a collapsible tripod and sits cross-legged on the floor of the hole Weston has dug, fixed in place in front of him, sitting right here where he can see her, waiting for whatever comes next.

  It’s better not to meet her eyes. Not now, when he is trying to think. It takes him longer than it should to frame the question.

  “What have you done with my stuff?”

  Damn her, for answering the way she does. “What do you care? It’s only stuff.”

  Everything he ever cared about simply slides away.

  They sit together in Weston’s tight little pocket in the earth. They are quiet for entirely too long. She doesn’t leave but she doesn’t explain, either. She doesn’t goad him and she doesn’t offer herself. She just sits there regarding him. It’s almost more than he can bear.

  A question forms deep inside Weston’s brain and moves slowly, like a parasite drilling its way to the surface. Finally it explodes into the still, close air. “Are you the devil or what?”

  This makes her laugh. “Whatever, sweetie. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” he shouts. “I don’t know!”

  “So get used to it.”

  But he can’t. He won’t. More or less content with his place in the narrow hole he has dug for himself, Weston says, “It’s time for you to go,” and when she hesitates, wondering, he pushes Wings Germaine outside and nudges her along the access tunnel to the hub, the one place where they can stand, facing. She gasps and recoils. To his astonishment, he is brandishing the pick like a club. Then he clamps his free hand on her shoulder and with no clear idea what he will do when this part is done or what comes next, he turns Wings Germaine in his steely grip and sends her away. Before he ducks back into his territory Weston calls after her on a note that makes clear to both of them that they are done. “Don’t come back.”


  Behind him, the cellar waits, but he can’t know whether he wants to go back to his life. He is fixed on what he has to do. Resolved, relieved because he knows this at least, he sets to work on the exit where he left her, erasing her with his pick.

  —The Naked City, 2011

  How It Works

  I see them framed in a Gothic arch, two handsome women caught in mid-confrontation. It’s like something out of an old movie, a black-and-white weepie my mother saw as a kid, although she would deny it, In your dreams. That was way before my time.

  They sit with heads bent under slanting light, one blonde and one—the habit makes it hard to tell. They’re both women of a certain age, although Lydia is, face it, farther along in years and worldly experience than the abbess—I think. Mother Therese is younger, but who knows what she was up to back in her days as Terri Gordon, rising starlet? Both have the chiseled profiles, the entitled air of born stars. It’s about bony structure, although unlike her holy adversary, my mother has been surgically enhanced.

  Lydia spins out her life in terms of although. Weighing this against that, bent on making herself look better to the few people who matter in her odd, Lydia-centric world. My mother is the star of her own life, eternally searching for the right man to share the screen with her. And if she defies probabilities and forces this encounter with the abbess? If you’re that deep into this failure of the imagination, Mother, go for it.

  They are fighting for the soul of Gerard LaPierre. Mother Therese wants it for God, although if Gerard is to be believed, God already has it. My mother could care less about souls. She wants him for herself.

  I can’t wait to see the movie.

  Note to Mother: dood, it’s not a movie.

  Don’t call me mother. If anybody asks, we’re dear friends, and if they remark on the resemblance, yes, we’re related. We could be sisters, right?