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  “But you haven’t,” Derek Blessing said, reaching for one of his cigarettes. “You haven’t in the least talked it out.”

  “There’s not a single thing left to tell. I’ve told you everything that happened from the time I was born up to now …”

  “Except how you feel about it.” He drew smoke deep into his lungs and sat up abruptly, throwing the fur on the polished floor. He crossed his legs and rested his forearms on them and looked at her, his face alight with intensity. A pulse hammered in the side of his throat.

  “Well, of course, I felt pretty awful about it when it happened, but that didn’t last long, and after that I truly forgot … It doesn’t matter now. It hasn’t mattered for years.” Mike was defensive. She did not know what he wanted from her. The snake of anxiety stirred slightly, far down; it had not gone, then.

  “Bullshit, you forgot. Bullshit, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter so much you went bonkers on the two ten to Bridgehampton. We’re only half done here, Mike. Now I want you to tell me exactly how you feel about it … all of it. The pain, the fear, the grief, the rage … Christ, the rage must have been enormous. You must have enough rage in you to move a continent. I want it all … and then we’ll decide what you’re going to do.”

  “I … do? What do you mean, do? I’m not going to do anything; if you think I’m going back there to that house and that town and that … you’re as crazy as Annie. I’m going to stay in New York and get on with my life, that’s what I’m going to do. Derek, really, I’m talked out. I can’t talk anymore. I haven’t talked about this for years and years. There’s simply nothing more to tell you.”

  “Yes. There’s more. There are worlds more. And you’re going to tell me. We’ll have some supper first, if you like, or better still, a drink. But you’re not going to leave here till you tell me how you feel about it. Feel, not think. Don’t you see? It’s a matter of resolution. You’ve got a great story but no resolution. You can’t possibly get on with anything until you’ve resolved this godawful business with your father.”

  “Why do you care?” Mike asked simply.

  “Because I care about you and I want you whole,” he said, just as simply, looking at her with opaque, preternaturally focused eyes. They gave his eroded face a look of great, refined energy. Mike felt again the weak, warm stinging of tears in her throat and nose.

  “Okay,” she said. “All right. I’ll do my best. But you’re going to have to let me stretch first, and give me something to eat.”

  “Deal,” he said. “Just let me take a piss here, and I’ll whomp us up something. What do you feel like? Junk or elegant? Junk, I think. Nachos and beer. And maybe after we’re done talking I’ll take you to Bobby Van’s for pizza.”

  He got up and walked toward the bathroom, peeling off the velour sweat suit.

  “I can think of one resolution that sounds good,” she called after him, her voice trembling a little with the effrontery of what she was about to ask. Her heart started its slow, sick thudding again.

  “And that is?” he said, disappearing into the bathroom. She heard the splashing into the lavatory bowl.

  “I … thought I might sort of keep you company this summer. Maybe put most of my stuff in storage and just bring a few things, and go in once or twice a week to get my mail and look at apartments. I could do some research for you; I know you hate that.” She could hear her voice going on and on and hated it, but could not seem to stop it. If she stopped, she would have to hear what he would reply.

  “I’ll do de cookin’, honey, I’ll pay de rent,” she added, and fell silent with the awfulness of it. In the silence, the thought formed and hung, perfect and terrible: I don’t have anywhere else to go.

  Water splashed into the basin, and then it stopped, and she heard the shower go on. Perhaps he had not heard her. Relief swept her; please God, don’t let him have heard me, she prayed.

  “Doesn’t sound like a bad idea,” he called back over the shower’s luxurious thunder, and her heart leaped up again, from the cold floor of her stomach to her throat. Lightness flooded her once more. Not to be alone … just not to be alone right now … For the first time in more than twenty years she felt giddy with the need to be with someone, giddy with the relief of that tidal need met.

  She sprang up out of bed, stumbling a little on pin-prickling feet, and stepped into her slacks and slid her feet into her moccasins. She walked to the mirror over his bureau and looked at her face, which looked pale and luminous; her fire was back. She grinned at herself. Picking up the ivory-backed brush that he had gotten in Kenya last summer, she attacked her matted hair until it stood out around her head like a nimbus, and swept the rough bristles lightly over her cheeks, and watched the sepia freckles fade under the quick wash of color. She felt suddenly silly and capricious and very young, and did a small, quick dance step on the little square of Navaho rug he had laid down in front of the bureau.

  The room was really very hot. Mike walked around to his side of the bed and leaned down to turn off the electric heater. Her foot stuck something just beneath the edge of the bed and sent it spinning across the glassy floor, where it came to rest against a leather rhinoceros stool from Abercrombie and Fitch. It was a tape recorder, the old Panasonic he had had ever since she had known him. It gave a click and sighing whirr, and her own voice came bleating out into the room at full volume.

  “You wanted history, you got history.”

  “I asked for history and I got tragedy,” Derek squalled from the injured recorder, and Mike got up and went over to it and pressed the stop button. She sat back down on the side of the bed. She stared stupidly at the recorder.

  She became aware presently that he was standing in the door of the bathroom, a towel around his waist, looking dispassionately at her. One eyebrow was cocked up.

  She looked at him silently.

  “I guess I can assume that the famous block is about to break and you’ll be starting a new book soon, so you won’t be wanting company after all,” she said finally. Her ears and head rang mightily. The hateful buzzing started in her wrists.

  He reddened slightly and grimaced.

  “Christ, I hope you don’t think I’d use that,” he said. “I just thought you ought to have it on tape, use it for a therapeutic tool, like Annie does.”

  She kept on looking at him steadily.

  “Matter of fact, the dam does feel like it’s breaking, a little,” he went on. “You know how I am when I’m working, Mike. Sure, you can come stay with me if you want to, but I’m such a single-minded son of a bitch when I’m going good: well, you know that. It’d be no fun for you at all. Look, why don’t you go on home, do like Annie says, mend your fences with the old man, see your sister and your friends, renew old ties and all, get some perspective on things? It’s a great solution for the next two or three months, till you can find a new place and I can sort of get … a leg up on things. Then, when you come back, we’ll have the whole fall …”

  “You are a sorry son of a bitch, Derek,” Mike said. “But you write good books about women. I always wondered how you did that. There must be quite a little stable of us around here somewhere, all on our own little tapes. Or is it floppy disks now? Well. Sorry to leave before the literary fete ends, but you’ve undoubtedly got enough to go on from here. I’m sure just the right resolution will present itself, when the time comes.”

  “Jesus, I always knew there was probably a world-class bitch somewhere under all that ladyhood …”

  “Fuck off, Derek,” Mike said.

  She left Manhattan three days later on a late morning Delta flight for Atlanta, and as the L-1011 circled back out over the sandy hook of Long Island and the glittering sea off the Hamptons and turned to the South, she thought with a small, cold smile that she had had to take the jitney in from Sagaponack after all.

  12

  “ISN’T THE NEW AIRPORT SOMETHING?” DEEDEE SAID GAILY. “I bet there’s nothing like it in New York.”

  “T
here certainly isn’t. It beats even London and Paris and Rome,” Mike said, with an enthusiasm that she did not feel. She ached with sleeplessness and the physical effort to control the anxiety, and her wrinkled linen skirt and silk shirt were rapidly drying into corrugated ridges in the arctic breath of the big Pontiac’s air conditioner. The temperature when they had come out of the Atlanta terminal was ninety-one degrees at 1:00 P.M. and climbing steadily, and she had been wet through her underclothes to her skin when they had finally gained the car, prudently parked in the airport’s faraway economy lot.

  DeeDee’s eyes disappeared into the folds of flesh surrounding them as she squinted at Mike, and her small scarlet mouth tightened. She said nothing, but her silence rang in the stale, chill air. Mike knew she had affronted DeeDee with her talk of foreign airports; she had meant to offer her sister the gift of incomparability for her hometown, but she knew she had sounded as if she were place-dropping.

  “Not that I’ve seen much of those,” she added, and felt the newly familiar stab of annoyance at herself and her sister. She had been placating DeeDee since her arrival and was not quite sure why. She had never done so before.

  She looked at DeeDee again, the glance hidden behind large, shielding sunglasses. It was hard not to look at her. DeeDee was immense. She still looked out of the beautiful blue, black-fringed eyes that Mike remembered, but the rest of her face was a travesty of the pretty, rose-flushed young woman she had been when Mike went away; was at once comic and pitiful, like a child’s scrawl of stolen cosmetics on a melting snow woman. The pink flush was now round circles of magenta blusher on the apple-knobbed mounds of her cheeks, and her delicate, small flower mouth had all but disappeared in the folds that ran down from her pert nose. That nose, once Mike’s despair and envy, was almost porcine now in all that lapping flesh, and the skin itself was the peculiar grayish blue-white of old snow.

  The face rode atop an amorphous body that hove from side to side as DeeDee walked. She wore a powder blue polyester pantsuit and chalk white beads that flew up and down on her bosom, the astounding cleavage of which reached nearly to the last of her chins, even in the modestly cut polyester shell sweater. Sweat and talcum and a transmuted perfume rose steamily from between the great white pontoon breasts. Only the tiny pattering feet in elaborately strapped white high-heeled sandals spoke of the real long-ago DeeDee. Those, and the glossy pile of blue-black hair that helmeted her head in an intricate, lacquered hive of puffs and knobs. Mike felt her heart twist with pity, revulsion, and guilt. Beside her own sharpened thinness, her sister must look downright grotesque. She was glad that there was no family resemblance between them; gladder for DeeDee’s sake than for her own. She did not care what the hot, jostling throngs of people passing them might think. But DeeDee had always cared.

  Under Mike’s fatigue there was a dead spot, as if a great balloon had deflated and collapsed, puddling to earth in an inert rubber pond. She realized that she had, on some subterranean level, been anticipating the comfort of her big sister’s arms, waiting for the bossy but soothing, fluttering ministrations she had not even consciously remembered from her childhood, but that were, nevertheless, there, under the years of annoyance at DeeDee’s nattering letters from Lytton. That comfort, those ministrations, were not going to be extended. Ever since their first formal little hug in the airport lounge, DeeDee had been sniping at her. Tiny, silvery barbs about Mike’s accent, her career, her “New Yorky” clothes and “exciting jet-set life” swarmed like gnats over their first few minutes together. True, she had thanked Mike profusely, over and over, for coming home to “lend a hand,” and she was elaborately solicitous about Mike’s divorce and the task of raising a child alone in a city like Manhattan, which her tone left hanging, depraved and Babylonesque, in the air between them. And she was even more vocally worried about Mike’s all-too-apparent anxiety, which manifested itself in shaking hands and rapid, shallow breathing. But when Mike stopped at an airport water fountain to take another Xanax, the small, cold flare of triumph in DeeDee’s eyes was unmistakable. And her allusions to Mike’s love life, as she phrased it archly, were heavily treacled with insinuation. Mike, knowing that DeeDee could not possibly have heard of Derek Blessing or the others before him, nevertheless found herself bridling as mulishly as she always had when DeeDee had pressed her for information she did not want to give.

  “My love life is about as unspectacular as my career at the moment.” She smiled, hoping wearily to propitiate her sister into silence. She wanted some time to deal with the loss of the phantom filial support she had not known she hoped for. She wanted time to assimilate this fat, officious, discontented stranger. Where was pretty, breathless DeeDee, who had taken her part and restored the waters of family serenity after Mike’s extravagant childhood outbursts; who wrote so faithfully, if nigglingly, during Mike’s long years away from Lytton? Not in this ballooned and banal middle-aged woman.

  “I really do appreciate you coming home, Mike,” DeeDee said again from the backseat, where she had slipped as if it were her proper place, leaving Mike to slide onto the scorching gold vinyl of the front seat beside Duck. “I know it wasn’t easy for you to get away. You must work all the time; we really are proud of you, even if we don’t tell you so. I bet I’ve got everything you’ve ever written in scrapbooks. I thought you might like to have them some day; I know how bad you used to be about keeping your things straight.”

  She patted Mike awkwardly on the shoulder, and the young DeeDee was back again, fleetingly, in the touch. Mike turned and smiled at her.

  “It’s not that much of an imposition, Dee,” she said. “Rachel’s with her father this summer, and things are going to be slow for me until fall. If I was ever going to come, this is as good a time as any. And I’m glad if it will give you a breather. To tell you the truth, I really came because I’m hungry for some of your cooking.”

  I am not going to tell her I came because there was nowhere else for me to go, she thought. I am not going to tell her about the awful, ridiculous week my life blew up. There’s a core of DeeDee in this woman somewhere, but there’s somebody else in there who likes the smell of my blood too much.

  Her sister laughed, the pretty chime that had always so captivated their father.

  “Well, you’ll have some of that soon enough,” she said. “I’ve left a hen and some dressing for you and Daddy to have tonight. It’s about all he seems to want anymore, chicken and that combread dressing Rusky taught me to make. You eat every bit of it, too. I can see your ribs clear through that shirt.”

  “That’s not all I can see,” Duck said, and poked Mike’s thigh with a large red finger. Mike’s face and chest flamed. She knew that the damp cream silk of her shirt was glued like tissue paper to the sheer scrap of bra, and that her nipples were standing out in the freezing blast from the air conditioner like bas-reliefs on a frieze. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked straight ahead, saying nothing. He had not changed appreciably since she had last seen him, those twenty-odd years ago, except to acquire blinding white ersatz Gucci loafers and belt and a great paunch. His hair was as thick and pompadoured and pomaded as ever, the same tawny-blond pelt, crawling down his bursting neck now in sideburns, and his hooded eyes still roamed like spiders or the eye stalks of crabs. They played over Mike’s body and then slid up to her face, and he smiled his famous one-sided smile.

  The silence from the backseat bit like adders. Mike was glad of the Xanax calm that hummed in her head and idled softly in her pulse. She called up a skill that she had acquired through the days of tumult and sometimes even mild danger over the years, the days in Los Angeles and Chicago and other cities where the cusp of crisis had called her; she shut him as cleanly out of her mind as if she had sheared him away. She turned her head and looked out of the blue-tinted window at the countryside flying by. She had never liked Duck, not from the very first. But she had been somewhat comforted in the beginning by DeeDee’s obvious adoration of him. Now, though, DeeDee did n
ot look at Duck adoringly whenever he spoke, or reach out to touch him for no reason at all. She looked at him little, Mike had noticed, and touched him even less.

  Neither would I, Mike thought with a shudder. It would be like touching a dead frog.

  Unlike Duck Wingo, the landscape had changed. Whenever Mike had thought of the country of home, which she seldom did, the images that sprang to her mind were old, softened, sliding ones: hills like the curves of a woman’s body melting into one another, blurred by the inevitable black-green pine forests; wave upon wave of tawny broom sedge; fields starred with jimsonweed and blackberry tangles; white frame and asbestos-siding farmhouses slumping into the tired, soft-red earth of swept yards, surrounded by gently sagging barbed-wire fences and tippled outbuildings; weather-silvered corpses of unpainted Negro shanties; blurred piles of orange-rusted automobile carcasses in rutted side yards and blind-gaping white refrigerators on front porches; Jesus Saves and palm readers’ and Burma-Shave signs; herds of rough-coated cattle all facing the same way under pecan and walnut trees; great, virulent green shrouds and seas of kudzu surging across entire fields and rights-of-way, engulfing abandoned houses and telephone poles and stands of spiky trees, so that entire acres of the earth became demented green sculpture gardens.

  But the land outside the Pontiac’s window now was a sharp-edged quadrilinear suburbanscape. They flashed past a white concrete shopping mall gleaming like a city of tombs in the savage light. Arrows of fire glanced from the roofs of thousands of automobiles lapping at its fringes. Across the new four-lane access road on which they had turned from the Interstate, a support mall, panting treeless in the heat, offered a Big Star and a Treasury Drug, tax services and real estate offices, a discount video warehouse, a Catholic church incongruously occupying a commercial building, and a small village of fast-food outlets. Mike counted Burger King, Arby’s, McDonald’s, Del Taco, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Long John Silver’s all within a few feet of each other. All except the Del Taco were doing a thriving late-lunch business; AMCs and bestial big-tired torpedoes crawling with spoilers and pickups with bumpers boasting I ♥ THAT COUNTRY SOUND and SUPPORT YOUR NRA were bellied up in sun-stunned parking lots. It might have been anywhere in the country; they were whirling through vistas that Mike had driven through in rental cars from airports in a dozen different cities across the United States. The alien terrain was made even more unsettlingly anonymous by the cold, ghostly blue of the glass she was looking through. It was impossible to tell even whether it was winter or summer, except for the showering fullness of foliage and something inexorable in the slant of the light.