Snap, p.27
Snap, page 27
So on the beach now, with Laura eager for the phone, it is a comfort to think of the kitchen being empty, waiting for Ida’s return, and of the phone ringing on inside it.
Except that the phone doesn’t ring. Ida, holding the receiver to Laura’s cocked ear, hears the buzz-click-buzz of a busy signal. So she dials again, thinking she must have dialed incorrectly. Buzz-click-buzz-click-buzz-click, she hears, and then she hangs up, dials and hears it again.
I have no imagination, Ida thinks, because she can’t imagine Ruby being at home, going on with his life without her. But come to think of it, the idea of him being there is a little aggravating, it’s like a faint tap-tapping at the edge of her mind. She remembers something. Pinball. The very first time she played, Ida couldn’t get it right. She kept yanking on the knob but nothing happened; the little steel balls stayed put in their glittering column. Which is how she feels now. Someone’s flicking a switch somewhere on her body, eliciting nothing but a few annoying clicks.
So into the cabana she goes, leading Laura to the bathroom and then down to the water, where they spend a peaceful hour playing in the sand with a Dixie cup. Laura finds a gap-toothed comb in the sand, and together they comb Laura’s hair. Laura’s hair is like Ruby’s, so soft you could forget you were touching it at all. She lets her fingers move within it, exploring the fragility of Laura’s skull and the grains of sand nesting near the roots. When Laura lifts up her hair and holds it high in a messy ponytail, Ida guides the comb down the nape of Laura’s neck to her spine, and then on down the spine, and then up again. Laura shudders and laughs. When the ferry hoot-hoots for the sixth time, they climb the tangled hillside to the upper road, stopping to toss flower petals into the mouth of a big ceramic frog. At home she kisses Laura into bed, and then, while Laura sleeps, sits by the phone, not looking at it. Surprisingly, she finds she can imagine Ruby’s voice, its exact pitch and timbre, its quiet, blond musical tone.
Except it isn’t Ruby’s voice that answers the phone, when finally Ida dials. At first there is only a hurried, breathing silence.
The silence is disconcerting.
“Hi,” Ida offers. “Who is this, please?”
Again there is silence and that same hurried breath.
“This is Ida,” Ida says. “Whoever you are … Is this my house? Or … Well … ’
Ida stares at the ocean from her spot on the living room floor. The ocean is black. Above it the moon has a faded look. Down below, in the darkroom kitchen, Nina shrieks with laughter, and then Big Stan limps up the curving stairs, muttering to himself. Ida is about to hang up when a voice comes out of the receiver, not Ruby’s. It is a young, a very young, woman’s voice, which Ida thinks she has heard before.
“Oh, God,” says the voice. “Please come home.”
Then the line shuts off and begins to hum, while a high, narrow cloud travels over the moon, bisecting its naked glare. Ida can’t think whose voice it might be, or even remember what the voice said. She only knows that something happened when she heard it. Pinball again, only this time the steel ball took off like crazy, ricocheting around and sounding all sorts of alarms. Lights, bells, everything. Ida stands for a minute in the center of all of this newfangled commotion until she knows what it is. It’s jealousy. How delicious, really, the way it’s filling her up. She tastes, swallows and feels the tap-tap again, expectantly, but this time it is only Big Stan, who’s come up from behind.
Only Big Stan. Only.
“Tomorrow’s my birthday,” he tells her. “The fourth of July. The fireworks are best from the bedroom window — you can see the whole ferry lit up from the colors, and that’s what Nina likes to do, with a bottle of wine, but Laura likes to watch from the bench on the hill under the arbor. So I’ll take Laura there, but you stay here with Nina, because I know that’s what you want, the two of you in the goddamn bedroom. I’m trying to be nice about this, you know.”
Ida drops the receiver back onto the phone. She pretends to consider, pretends to be silent. She pretends to take him seriously, just to buy a little time, a little sustenance, a few more seconds of jealousy.
7
JUST A SHORT WHILE later, Nina told Ida, “I really am trying to act decent about this, you know. I’ve tried my hardest not to rush things but he’s losing control. I can sense it. He’s like one of those voleanos that just let go, kaboom. Believe me, Ida, I’m just trying to protect you, and give you what you want, the two of you. You and Big Stan can watch the fireworks from the bed, and there’s a mirror on the ceiling, if you’re into that sort of thing. Also, if you get the angle right you can almost see the ferry. That’s what Big Stan likes, the blinking lights, although he’ll never admit it, even to you. I’ll take Laura and a bottle of wine for me and a canteen of milk for her to the bench on the hill under the Spanish moss. Know where I mean? We’ll bring a bag of cookies, and we’11 give you ample time, believe me, because Big Stan isn’t exactly Speedy Gonzales. Not to say he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He does, I swear. He’s like a teenage kid. You know how they get violent? They do, not on purpose, they just forget what part of you they’re into. If he hurts you, just scream, and it will be okay because no one will hear you, not with all the banging going on outside over the water, no pun intended. And I want you to find out how old he is, please, because he won’t tell me. I want to know how many candles to stick in his cake. And he might tell you, I mean, he will tell you, if you ask it in a roundabout way when he least expects it. Just, well, when his eyes start rolling …”
Nina yawned, stretched and reached into her bag. Throughout all of this talk she had appeared rather lazy in her usual style, both feet propped up on the arm of the couch, the ankles unshaven, the toes engaged with one another in some apparently endless sequence of miniature stretches, like dancers warming up before a show. Then, suddenly alert, Nina blew fuzz from a hairbursh she’d pulled from her bag — pjffi, pfffi, pjfft — like someone blowing out candles on a birthday cake. She eyed the brush critically, ran it first down one side of her head and then the other, sighed and let it drop again into her bag. Nina’s hair was looking somewhat oily, adding to the shipwrecked feel of Anne’s living room, its view of the ocean obscured by Venetian blinds on whose slats had been stenciled, green on steel gray, a forest of coconut trees. Ida hadn’t even known the blinds were there until the unlikely forest appeared, trunks bowed slightly as if under the weight of the fruit. She searched the fronds for signs of monkeys and, lo and behold, found one, swinging by its tail. Paradise. Nearby, on a shelf, sat a giant conch shell with its slick pink insides inside-out, and to its left, on a neighboring shelf, perched a sea fan, sublime on its domed nub of coral. Some soft, melodic tune that had been playing on the stereo subsided to a surflike static awash over several indistinct human voices.
When Nina poured herself a drink, the bottle struck the glass with a far-off clink, and the ice cubes, settling, echoed that distant sound.
Ida thought of the fish in the fish tank at home. No wonder they always seemed frantic, batting their noses against the glass. They wanted to know if the world was still there, outside the walls of the aquarium.
“Did you notice he’s been sleeping in the truck?” Nina continued. “I’m guessing it’s the Cold Shower Philosophy of desire. You know. ‘Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder,’ or some thing along those lines, whatever the hell they say in Canada. You are from Canada, you said?”
Ida nodded.
“He won’t come near me at all,” Nina said, “and he can’t stand being in the house with you unless he can take full advantage. It’s cute, in a way, he’s like a Swiss army knife, all folded up on the seat of the truck with his hand on the — get this — his hand on the gear shift. Cute. Sometime around four, he moves to the back of the truck to stretch himself out on my velvet curtains. Shit. I don’t know why 1 have to be so damn nice about this. I hate it. I’m a pushover, Ida, if that’s the term. The two of you can walk all over me on your way to each other. I’ll do a sculpture of the two of you engaged in the climactic moment. Lately I’m starting to think about clay again. Red clay, with fragments of brick mixed in. You know how it is when you’re dying to get your hands on something?”
“You could probably dig some clay right out of this beach,” suggested Ida hopefully, wanting to change the subject. In her mind, she was yearning for a gulp of air but kept hearing Nina’s words — the two of you, the two of you — rising to the surface of the room like bubbles, and repeating themselves with a pop-pop-pop.
Nina seemed to have worn herself out, for the moment, at least. She let her head sink into the soft leather shoulder of the couch and, having balanced her drink on her tummy, reached for a lock of her hair. Blinking, she withdrew a single strand and pulled the split ends apart with deliberate concentration, millimeter by millimeter, adjusting the tension in her fingers so as to keep the hair from breaking prematurely. What Nina wanted, Ida realized, was an infinite series of perfect halves, as if, having split this hair, its two new halves might be split in succession, and then the halves of those halves, and so on and so on, forever. It would be like splitting wishbones straight down the middle, over and over, wishbone after wishbone, so that everyone got what they wished for. Nina never even got close. Her hair was too brittle, too fragile, and always broke in the middle, leaving one frayed end like an insect’s leg, jointed and fringed.
Sighing, Nina picked another hair.
Ida watched.
She watched Nina’s eyes on Nina’s hands, and let her own fingers creep across the carpet with a whisper toward the mouth of Nina’s bag. Closer and closer crawled Ida’s hand, past the discarded hairbrush and into the depths themselves. Nina’s bag was like a sink hole in whose vast, black reaches swarmed objects long missing from the face of the earth, dusty and sticky with crumbs. When Ida’s arm was wrist deep, Nina gave a little jump and began to sit up. Ida withdrew her hand and coughed. Nina sighed and flopped down again to pluck another hair. Her drink slid off her belly but landed snugly in a dent in the leather upholstery, upright as could be, not having spilled a drop.
In a minute, Ida’s fingers resumed their mission, more quickly than before and with new confidence. She found she was enjoying the subterfuge. Not that she had any plan. She didn’t. But she had faith in Nina’s bag; Nina’s bag would provide. Reaching in, Ida closed her fingers on the first thing they touched. The thing felt reassuringly familiar, and Ida wasted precious seconds squeezing and poking, trying to guess what it was. She remembered such a game out of her childhood: you thrust one hand into a paper bag and, eyes averted, tried to name what you were touching. It was always something obvious: an apple, a feather, a bar of soap. Today’s game was more difficult. What could it be? A toupee? A mouse? Ida slid it discreetly out of the bag and into her blue jeans pocket, prodding and squeezing. Then she knew: it was her electric blue rabbit’s foot key chain.
No. It couldn’t be. That key chain was gone, along with the car itself. Ida hadn’t even called the cops to report it.
Nina’s key chain, then, the rabbit’s foot brown, not blue, and sort of mangy. Several patches of fur had been torn right off, and the whole foot crackled if you squeezed it too hard. What remained of the claws was flaking and chipped, as if the rabbit had chewed its toenails before it died. But on the foot was a chain, and on the chain were two keys.
Big Stan complained to Ida, later that night when she ran into him on the steps, that he had no decent place to sleep.
“Nina doesn’t want me around,” he said mournfully, looking very sweet in his Williamsburg bricklaying knickers and neither stockings nor blouse, the baggy pants demurely buttoned at the knees. “Because of you. Nina’s always been a sucker for anticipation, and she doesn’t even want me around for that. She wants just the two of you in close proximity. Laura she can ignore. She doesn’t even want me using the bathroom. Did you know men get bladder infections? They do, believe me, I feel like I’m rusting through. Tomorrow’s my birthday, I’ll be thirty-nine fucking years old. I make Nina feel old, when what she wants is to be innocent again. Anne made it worse, because Nina didn’t like what she saw. Nina wants splendor, not fade cream. That’s her big word these days. Splendid. She’s eating you up, no pun intended, Ida. I thought it was just physical, maybe, but it isn’t. It’s everything. She’s making me sleep in the truck.”
“He’s thirty-eight,” Ida whispered into Nina’s sleeping ear. “He’ll be thirty-nine tomorrow, on his birthday. Today, actually,” she amended, glancing at Nina’s dirty-faced watch. Then she slipped the watch off Nina’s wrist, ever so gently, and onto her own.
“Splendid.” Nina grinned and turned over on her side, snoring.
Through a tear in the felt that Big Stan and Nina had hung up to cover the window of the kitchen-darkroom, moonlight entered like a needle pulling silver thread. When it reached the blue halo of the safe light, for some reason left turned on, the ray of moonlight simply vanished, and the rest of the room was in darkness. Still, the safe light cast its vague blue presence against the weave of Ida’s T-shirt, making her feel like a ghost. She switched it off and pulled a chain swinging over the sink, where a recessed bulb blinked a fluorescent glare in whose familiar kitchen pallor Ida felt somewhat at home.
The faucet was running, and water trickled slowly into the nearly overflowing sink. In it, some submerged prints floated sleepily as lily pads. Ida opened the drain, emptied the water, reclosed the drain and let the sink fill again as the prints bobbed and rinsed.
She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she knew, after an hour, when the chink in the felt window shade showed a brighter, higher moon, that she hadn’t found it. That it wasn’t here. From a makeshift clothesline of thread and metal hairpins hung strips of negatives, all in a row. The negatives had curled, and on the counter, mistreated, lay contact prints bent every which way like autumn leaves in a speckled pile. A pair of tweezers lay on top of one, and on another lay the grease pencil, trailing its ribbon of shaved wood. Ida counted five enameled trays lined up on the counter and six cotton balls soaking in a cup of green fluid. She counted three brown glass bottles, two small paintbrushes and one corroded tin funnel on a sheaf of paper towel. She did not know why she was counting. Then, in a minute, she did know. This had once been a kitchen. You counted in kitchens. A little of this, a little of that. A dash, a pinch, a drop, a dollop. Teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, half cups. Ida knew, just by looking at a cake pan, for instance, how many inches across it was and how many inches deep. She knew, just by tasting a fingerful of icing, that it had not quite reached the soft ball stage, two hundred and forty degrees. She knew, in her kitchen, and that was all there was to it. Only here, there was nothing to know. Here the air smelled sour, and the countertop showed halos where the chemicals had spilled. Even the timer was broken; Ida spun the bright plastic dial and watched as it sprang back over the minutes, way too fast. When she tapped on the dial and spun it again, the same notched intervals lagged and tocked.
She unrolled a springy contact sheet and held the paper flat against the counter. It was an entire roll of film depicting … what? Something moving. Ida guessed it was a tern soaring over the beach, unless it was cars whizzing by on the highway. Perhaps the sheet was upside-down; Ida flipped it over, studied it afresh and sighed. More blurs in motion. No. These were not what she was after.
In the rear of the darkroom refrigerator, behind stacks of plastic-wrapped photographic paper and boxes of film, Ida found a brown paper bag containing one carton of eggs, two packaged fruit turnovers and a single orange. Apparently this was all the food that the house had to offer; perhaps Nina and Big Stan had emptied the cabinets before setting up shop. There were no soup cans, no breakfast cereals, no grains or nuts or cans of tuna. Ida unwrapped the turnovers, slid the eggs back inside the refrigerator and bounced the orange in the palm of her hand. The pastry was apple, and the apple was crunchy with ice. But the orange was plump, cool and fresh-looking. When she held it to her nose she smelled an orchard of fruit trees. With a thumbnail she punctured the stippled exterior and imagined a slowmotion take of the spray as it arched f rom the wet flesh into her nostrils. Beautiful. But she would save the orange for later. She would share it with Laura, who suddenly was standing in the living room above, whimpering. There she was at the top of the stairs in her nightgown, sleep tossled and sad eyed.
