Waveland Page 10

  “I was thinking about you and me, and your girlfriend,” she said. “And Tony. And about what happened.”

  “With Tony?” he said. “Or with us?”

  “Both,” she said. “Tony and everything else. I was thinking about me and this house. I went out for a drive. Sometimes I like to get out.”

  “In the middle of the night,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “In the middle of the night. It's quiet. It's dark. There aren't so many people. You can drive around unencumbered. I smoke in the car.”

  “I don't think you ought to smoke,” he said.

  “I don't in the house. You never let me smoke in the house, and I don't like to smoke much anyway, but in the car I like to smoke. I like the sound of the engine, the feel of the air conditioner, the smell of the smoke, the smell of my breath as I draw it in and blow it out.”

  “All of that?” he said.

  “I want you to stay with me,” she said.

  “I'm here. We're here. We've come to stay for a while,” he said.

  “No, I mean I want you to stay.”

  “Permanently?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I don't see how I can do that,” he said. “Not now.”

  “It's only been a year,” she said.

  “A year is a long time,” he said.

  “Just give it a try,” she said. She reached out and touched his hand and started playing with it the way she always played with his hand. “Greta can stay, too,” she said. “Maybe. Maybe all three of us can live here. We'll just be friends. That's mostly what we were, right?”

  “Well, more than that. We were friends, lovers, partners. Husband and wife,” he said.

  “But it really came down to friends. After all the fucking was done.”

  “That's not quite true,” he said. “Not even after the fucking. There was something else—some tenderness.”

  “There was a lot of tenderness,” she said.

  “Right. That's what I mean.”

  “So where's that now?” she said.

  “You got a cigarette?” he said.

  “Not in the house,” she said. “Where's that tenderness now?”

  “I don't know,” he said. “Gone away. Too old for tenderness.”

  “Pish,” she said.

  “Why does everybody say that?” he said. “Pish. Everybody I know says pish now.”

  “You don't know so many people, do you?” she said.

  “Guess not,” he said.

  She crooked a finger at him and led him out of the bedroom, down the hall, into their old bedroom. It looked different, both better and worse. Looked like it was right out of West Elm or something—lots of semi-designer furniture carefully placed, good-looking fabrics, lots of earth colors. It was, above all, tasteful, even sort of serene. He was surprised how much he liked the way she'd fixed it up. In the whole house it was the only room she'd changed.

  “I do, actually, have cigarettes,” she said, opening a drawer in one of the nightstands.

  “Came to my senses,” he said, standing by the French doors. He pulled back the drapes on either side. The light was just coming into the sky outside. Off to the right, where the lake made a dogleg, the water was all mirrored up. He could hear the birds waking up or whatever it is they do that makes them chirp and cry in the mornings. There was a sliver of white moon way off to the west.

  “This is nice,” he said. “You're nice, Gail.” She crossed the room and stood beside him at the window, and they looked out at the lake and the pier, painted white, and the church beyond the houses on the other side of the lake, with its white steeple pointing up into the thinly lit sky. She pushed open the French doors out onto the balcony, and they stood there in the doorway for a few minutes. She hooked her arm in his, rested her head on his shoulder. Ducks were silhouetted against the reflected lake light.

  “I don't need so much,” she said.

  “A good thing,” he said. “I don't have much.”

  “Don't be mean,” she said.

  “I'm not being mean,” he said. “I'm just, like, honest. You kind of caught me at a bad time here.”

  “Tonight?” she said.

  “Rest of my life.”

  “Good to know,” she said. She intertwined her fingers with his and wrapped her left hand around his arm, leaned harder. “It could be a lot worse.”

  “I'm supposed to be telling you that,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. “I'm just helping you out.” She stepped out on the balcony and lit up a cigarette. He followed her.

  The balcony faced north and they were close to the lake, so they had horizon all the way east to west. There were chairs. The chairs were wet. Neither of them mentioned it. They sat together without saying anything for a while. The light in the east came up as if on the world's biggest rheostat. It was something to see. Dusky blue at the horizon turning rose, then orange, then pink, then a little green before the whole lighter blue of the sky running up forty-five degrees and turning darker again. Stars still sat up there in the darkness. Vaughn and Gail could just make out each other, hands and feet, the railing, the chairs. They stared out over the water. There were trees all around the lake so their horizon was black silhouettes against the less dark sky. Occasionally a bird shot over the house. Vaughn heard wings beating the air. Gail tapped his arm and pointed to the lawn on the other side of the garage, in the strip of land that ran down to the pier, where six ducks, dark against the brown of the grass, hustled around pecking for food, straightening their feathers.

  “They were just kids a couple weeks ago,” Gail said. “The four on the left. Now look at them.”

  Above the pier the pink from the lowest tier of light had come down to rest at the other edge of the lake so that the treetops were now reflected along the shore, and above them, in the water, the pink sky, the lighter blue. A heron swung by out of nowhere, cutting diagonally across in front of them and sailing to a spot on the far side of the lake.

  “It's not so bad, is it?” Gail said.

  “It's Rome Adventure,” he said.

  “The movie or the book?”

  “I don't think there was a book.”

  “Oh, my god,” she said. “Forgive me.”

  “You're forgiven, but let's don't mention it again,” he said.

  “Christian Bale and Madonna,” she said. “I don't know.”

  “Keep going,” he said. “You'll get there.”

  “Dakota Fanning,” she said, pointing the glowing ash of her cigarette at him.

  “Now you're cooking,” he said.

  “You've still got that young thing,” she said.

  “Not really. Not too young.”

  “A guy at the office who's sixty-five has a two-year-old daughter.”

  “And the wife?” he said.

  “Late thirties,” she said. “He's very excited about it, too. Everybody seems to be excited for him. I personally think it's disgusting, of course.”

  “He sired this child when he was beyond sixty?” Vaughn said.

  “I believe that's correct,” she said.

  “Oh holy night,” he said.

  “Well, I just thought you ought to know,” Gail said. “I thought you ought to keep that in mind. Anything's possible. The world is still open to you.” She paused for a minute and patted his arm.

  He looked at her, trying to figure out what she was thinking.

  “Nah,” she said. “Just kidding.”

  “Gee, thanks,” he said.

  “Look at this white light over here,” she said. He looked. She was right. It was something. Above the trees in the east the sky had gone sweet and creamy. Aerosol whipped-topping white.

  12

  Ten days sailed by with minimum incident. Gail was missing in action a couple of nights, one overnight, but there were no visible wounds; and so, during this period, the three of them were a happy, if elaborated, family. They sat on the deck and watched ducks in the evening
s. The third or fourth time they convened on the deck there were dozens of ducks about, maybe two dozen, squawking and running after one another in the grass at lake's edge. There were five swans—two full grown, white, and three that were younger, leggy and still gray. It was late afternoon.

  “Are these swans doing the right thing?” Greta asked. “Is this the right time of year for them to have these babies?”

  “They're late,” Gail said. “Maybe a month, maybe two, seems like.”

  Vaughn had in mind the duck scene from the first season of The Sopranos. Tony by the pool, dreaming of another life. He had no idea about Greta. He never knew what she was thinking anyway. She was probably thinking about poisoning him the way women poisoned men on Court TV. Or maybe she was thinking about swans—how they're made, why they have those feet, what are feathers? It would be like Greta to look it up in the wildlife book her husband had given her.

  Vaughn said, “You have that bird book. You could look it up.”

  “What, Bo's bird book? How do you know about that?”

  “Saw it at your house,” he said. “One day. You weren't there. It's inscribed.”

  “I know that,” Greta said. “What, do I look like I'm pining away for Bo here? Not on your life. I'm Lucky Girl.”

  “Annie Oakley,” Gail said. Then she looked up, caught the expression on Greta's face. “Just kidding,” Gail said. “Joking around.”

  “Don't you start, too,” Greta said.

  “Too?”

  “Yeah. Your husband has the morbid curiosity blues every once in a while.”

  “He's not my husband,” Gail said.

  “Right. Sometimes I forget, you know?” She turned back to Vaughn. “I just don't picture you creeping around the house going through my things.”

  “Ease up, will you? I pulled a book out of a bookcase.”

  Greta waggled her hand. “You're right. Sorry. Just caught me by surprise. And I am lucky, after what happened to Gisele—her face, all that. I could be Girl With One Eye, but instead here I am with you, watching these ducks.”

  Gail said, “They come because of the lake. If we didn't have the lake we wouldn't have the ducks.”

  “That's right, honey,” Greta said.

  “So he did that to her on purpose?” Vaughn said. “Ran her into that building or whatever it was?”

  “It was a garage,” Greta said. “And, yes. He was a bastard.”

  This was typical Greta-talk. Passing reference to the trouble she'd seen. Sometimes it was drug-related, her life on the lam in Los Angeles years before, skittering across town in the middle of the night in skimpy garments after being tossed out of a moving car by her husband, Bo, who was at that time a lowlife hanger-on in the screenwriting business. Her story was that he'd written one pathetic screenplay for some one-shot director and it had gone exactly nowhere, and this produced in Bo the realization that his life was unfair. From this he took his charter to heap manure on others near and dear, and that meant Greta mostly, and mostly Greta did not talk about it. Gisele was one of Bo's priors.

  Later, of course, Bo took the big sleep.

  Vaughn wasn't sure Gail knew what they were talking about, and he was going to say something by way of explanation, when Greta gave him a little cockeyed wave of the head that he figured meant leave it alone. So he turned back to the ducks.

  The ducks were quacking a lot more than was attractive. They were also shitting on the lawn, or doing something that looked like shitting. He was thinking they probably weren't shitting, that they probably did that in the water, when they were sitting there, floating along, paddling, or whatever they did. He was thinking they must be doing something else on the lawn, but the way they wagged their butts it looked like shitting.

  “What are they doing out there?” he said. “You see this?” He pointed at a duck with one of those iridescent green bands around its neck. “The mallard, there, or whatever it is. That a mallard? Whatever—you see what it did?”

  “It's walking,” Greta said. “They walk funny. You'd walk funny if your feet were spatulas.”

  Gail got up and leaned on the railing. “It feels like when I used to be grounded.”

  “You are kind of grounded,” he said.

  “Ah, man,” she said. “That's crap.”

  “We need you,” Greta said. “Without you we'd get on each other's nerves so bad. I mean, there's trouble here.”

  “You should go on a retreat,” Vaughn said. “Take a couple of weeks in the convent with the Sisters of Mercy. You'd be in there with the big drapes and the smelly furniture. Who knows? Maybe you'd like it?”

  “I would like it,” Greta said. “That's been proven.”

  “I'd go, too,” Gail said. “I'd be like some sainted nun.”

  “You wouldn't be able to sneak out for meetings with Cheech,” Vaughn said.

  “Don't call him that,” Gail said. Then she stopped a minute, as if an idea had come to her. “Maybe I should go to church, like tonight. Anybody for church?”

  Vaughn got up and put an arm around her shoulder. She was steady, no shrugging him off. “I could go to church,” he said. “We could move in there. Think they'd mind?”

  “Don't discourage her if she wants to go to church,” Greta said. “He wants to go all the time,” she said to Gail. “Talks about it, anyway.”

  Vaughn threw bread to the ducks. They quacked like crazy. The sun was missing in action, cloud-obscured, making the afternoon pleasant, almost winterlike. He hugged Gail and kissed her temple, and, as he pulled back, caught a glimpse down her shirt of her small breasts in a padded bra. He looked away quick, tossed more bread, and more bread, a fever of bread tossing.

  “Eat up, guys,” he said to the ducks. “Life is short.”

  “Is not,” Gail said, pulling the loaf out of his hand. She fished out a slice and started chewing on it.

  “Don't these ducks belong to somebody?” he said.

  Gail sighed and shook her head. “Wild,” she said. “They're wild ducks.”

  “They saw the water and landed, right?” Greta said.

  “Mrs. Posey got the swans,” Vaughn said. “So why is it strange to think maybe she got the ducks, too?”

  “Mrs. Posey is the head of the Swan Committee,” Gail said. “The swans were eight hundred apiece. That's what she said. And when they have babies we have to give the babies back to the people who sold us the swans. That's the deal. She said she would have paid for the swans herself if the board hadn't approved.”

  “If I had an air rifle I could use these ducks for target practice,” Vaughn said.

  Air rifle. It had been a while. Probably the ducks would have waddled away at high speed with the sound of the first shot. Not to mention the projectile itself. These ducks were particularly pretty, he thought, in an iridescent way. And he didn't want to shoot them, though he had shot at turtles from their neighbor Bill Ansen's deck one night several summers before. He used to see Bill Ansen out there all the time shooting into the water, but who knew he was shooting turtles? Then Vaughn went over there one evening and Bill Ansen showed him how much fun it was, shooting at the turtles swimming in the lake. The pellets just ricocheted off the turtles' backs, Bill Ansen said. He was a great guy, Bill Ansen. But then he died.

  “I think I will go to church,” Gail said.

  “Me, too,” Greta said.

  “You're going to church, too?” Vaughn said.

  “Sure. Won't hurt,” Greta said. “People go to church all the time. So, yeah, we're going to church. Right, Gail? We're going to kneel in the pews. We're going to say some prayers, and ask forgiveness, and like that. We may stay there all night long. We may never leave.”

  “I think I'm going, too,” he said.

  “I like the way church smells,” Gail said. “That's the main thing.”

  “That is the main thing,” Vaughn said, flipping the remaining four slices of bread into the air, one after the other, in the direction of the ducks. The slices spun like edib
le Frisbees and seemed to linger, weightless, in the air, before falling to earth.

  13

  Eddie came over for Thanksgiving dinner and stayed to watch World Series of Poker reruns, and he got so pissed Vaughn thought he was going to wreck the place. Vaughn had to change the channel to calm Eddie down. He switched to the Discovery Channel and after a few minutes of some travel program Eddie started attacking the hosts of that program.

  “You suck,” he said. “You bunch of fucks. I mean, who'd have thought you could get paid to go around and look at old towns and shit? I mean, I could fucking do that. I've been some places.”

  Gail said she was tired and was going to get into her pj's, and left the three of them in the TV room. Eddie hated everything, which made him a perfect companion for Vaughn; but Vaughn didn't want Eddie to know that, or maybe he didn't want to admit that they had the same view of people on television. Eddie divided the world into the people on television and the rest of humanity, and in this division the people on television came out on the short end of things.

  Vaughn kept cycling through the channels. He caught a lot of football, and some other holiday fare. He tried to pacify Eddie with a late NFL game, but no luck. He tried a stop on the agricultural channel, but Eddie had some choice things to say about the cows. Then they hit some news channels.

  “Fucking Arabs,” Eddie said. “They're fucking everywhere. I'm over at the house watching the big screen and I just can't get away from them. What're these guys here doing?”

  He gestured toward the screen where there were some street scenes in some town somewhere—maybe Iraq, maybe Afghanistan. Guys in robes, some huts, the usual. A few big cars coming through in a motorcade of some sort.

  “What're they doing?” Eddie said. “They should wash up or something. They should get running water, for fuck's sake.”

  “Easier said than done,” Greta said. “It's like a desert over there.”

  “And yet, here comes somebody in a fucking Mercedes-Benz!” Eddie said. He pointed at the TV. “These people really burn me up. This is like some bad television show that some producer sold the studios and now we have to fucking watch it for ten years.” He got up and shook his head, glaring at the TV. He slapped his forehead with his palm and pointed at the screen with his stump. “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,” he said, quoting somebody.