It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (3 page)

“Did you make it all the way across?” she asked.

“AH the way. I see Darcy found a friend.”

“Yes. She’s staying in the next house down. We’re invited over for cocktails later on.”

“Cocktails. My!”

“1
said we’d go. Darcy’s so excited to have a playmate.”

“Is she bored here?”

“No, but you know how it is . .

“I thought we might rent bikes tomorrow and go whale watching.”

“Interesting concept.”

“What? Oh!”

She was smiling at him. He laughed. Another of life’s unequivocal pleasures: being reinstated in his wife’s good graces. He rubbed himself dry. He felt refreshed, light on his feet.

An hour later he and Elise walked over to join their daughter at her new friend’s house. A tall woman carrying a pitcher of purplish liquid greeted them on the deck.

“They call this a Cape Codder,” she said, holding her free hand out to Joseph. “Hi, I’m Veronica.”

She was the woman he had seen earlier on in Taylor’s.

She had changed out of the tissuey top into a sleeveless robe of flowing peach-colored linen, but Joseph had recognized her at once as the victor in the incident with the lobsters.

She poured the drinks and called into the house: “Sugar . .

An older man came out onto the deck, sunburned, with a strong, haggard face and vigorous silvery tufts sprouting at his open shirt. “Hal Kaplan,” he said, gripping Joseph’s hand and baring a row of shiny white teeth in a broad smile.

Veronica poured drinks, and the four adults sat at a steel table on the deck, while the girls played down by the pond. She spoke rapidly, her large eyes moving with an intent sociability between Elise and Joseph. Within minutes she had sped the conversation past the conventional pleasantries to more intimate questions and disclosures, in which she took an unashamedly flagrant delight. She and Hal were each other’s third spouse, she volunteered; they had met on a helicopter ride into the Grand Canyon. The girl, Karen, was Hal’s daughter by his second wife, who had died in a speedboat crash. He and Veronica had been trying for a year to have a child of their own. There wasn’t anything physically wrong with either of them, but because she was approaching forty and they didn’t want to risk missing out, they had decided to sign up at an expensive clinic for in vitro fertilization, a process she described in droll detail, down to her husband’s twenty-minute sojourns in the “masturbatorium.” Don’t mind me, her tone seemed to signal as she probed and confided. I’m not someone you have to take seriously .. . “How about you guys?” she asked. “How did you meet?” As he answered, Joseph found himself thinking that if he hadn’t seen her in Taylor’s earlier on, he would have taken her for precisely the charmingly frivolous and sweet-natured person she seemed intent on appearing. And in fact he so disliked holding a negative view of people that he rapidly allowed his present impression of her to eclipse the earlier one.

Hal, her husband, had been an eye surgeon in Miami for twenty-five years. Now he was living, as he put it, on his wits. To judge from the house they’d rented—bigger, sleeker, and glassier than Elise and Joseph’s—he was doing all right on them.

“Karen is in love with your daughter,” Veronica said to Elise, “she is in love with her.”

Elise murmured that Darcy was thrilled too.

Swallows were diving over the pond, picking off skimmers. As the sun went down behind the trees, the water turned a greenish black, with a scattering of fiery ripples. The girls came up, wrapped in towels, shivering a little. Elise looked at her watch.

“Why don’t you stay and eat dinner with us?” Veronica asked.

Elise smiled. “Oh no, we couldn’t possibly . . .”

“It’d be no trouble, really.”

“Say yes, Mommy!” Darcy cried.

“We’re just throwing some things on the grill. It seems a shame to break these two up . .

“Daddy could bring over our scallops . .

Elise turned to Joseph. Assuming her hesitancy to be nothing more than politeness, he made what he thought was the expected gesture of tentative acceptance.

“Well. .

And a few minutes later he was bringing the scallops over from their kitchen, along with a bottle of wine.

Hal had lit the grill. Joseph poured himself another Cape Codder and joined him.

“Lousy day on the markets,” he said, with a rueful chuckle. The older man’s long, rectangular face, full of leathery corrugations, hoisted itself into a grin.

“You play them?”

“We have a few little investments here and there.”

“Time to buy more, is what I say.”

“Oh? You think it’ll go back up?”

“Like a rocket.”

“Really? Even the NASDAQ?”

“No question. The smart money’s all over it. I’m buying like crazy right now.”

“You are?” Joseph’s heart had given a little leap.

“You bet! Intel at twenty? Lucent under four dollars? These are bargain basement prices by any estimation. Nortel at two fifty? Not buy Nortel at two dollars and fifty cents a share?” He gave another grin, the centers of his lips staying together while the edges flew apart, showing his teeth.

“That’s extremely interesting,” Joseph said, enjoying the unexpected feeling of well-being that had come into him. “So you think a recovery’s imminent?”

“Right around the corner, my friend. Right around the corner.” It was like drinking a draft of some fiery, potent liquor!

Hal jostled at the coals in the barbecue with a two-pronged fork. He called over to Veronica: “Bring ’em on, sweetheart!”

Veronica went into the kitchen and came out with the bag from Taylor’s. Setting it on the table, she reached into the crushed ice and pulled out the two lobsters, one in each hand, and brought them over to the grill.

“Joseph, do me a favor and take the bands off, would you?” She was holding the creatures out toward him.

Gingerly, he removed the yellow elastic bands from the flailing blue claws.

“Careful,” the woman said.

She caught his eye, giving him a sly, unexpected smile. Then she placed the living lobsters on the grill. Joseph had never seen this done before. The sight of them convulsing and hissing over the red hot coals sent a reflexive shudder of horror through him, though a few minutes later he was happily eating his share.

At three that morning he woke up with a dry mouth and a full bladder. He got out of bed and walked unsteadily toward the bathroom. Through the open door to the living room he glimpsed the sofa bed where Darcy slept and was momentarily stalled by the realization that it was empty Then he remembered that she was sleeping over at her new friend’s house.

A murky sensation, compounded of guilt and dim apprehension, stirred in him at the recollection of how this had come about.

He stumbled on into the bathroom, .relieved himself, then stood in darkness, looking out at the pond. The moon had risen, and the surface of the water, dimpled here and there by rising fish, shone brightly in its ring of black trees.

He had drunk too much, that was for sure, and overeaten.

He recalled the weirdly euphoric mood that had mounted in him over the course of the evening, an unaccustomed exuberance. Partly it was Hal’s amazingly confident predictions for the market. Several times Joseph had found himself steering the conversation back to the subject, raising various objections to the optimistic view, but purely for the joy of hearing this weather-beaten old oracle shrug them off. And partly too it was Veronica. With a few glances and touches she had deftly set a little subterranean current flowing between the two of them over dinner. He was a faithful husband, not even seriously tempted by actual bodily infidelity, but it gave him a tremendous lift to be flirted with by an attractive woman. Actually she wasn’t, inherently, as attractive as he had first thought. Her chin was long, and her nose looked as though it had been broken. But her evident conviction that she was desirable appeared to be more than enough to make her so. By the end of the evening he had been in an exhilarated state, drunk, aroused, glutted, his vanity flattered, his head spinning with the thought of the markets shooting back up “like a rocket.”

As they had stood up to leave, Elise had called Darcy, only to be informed by the girls that Karen had invited her for a sleepover and that she had accepted.

“Not tonight,” Elise had said, with more firmness than Joseph had thought altogether polite to their hosts.

The girls began appealing at once to the other adults. Veronica took up their case, assuring Elise that Darcy would be more than welcome.

“We love having kids stay over. Anyway, we’re only a hundred yards away ...”

Elise had looked to Joseph for support. Simultaneously Veronica had turned to him. “It’ll be so much fun for them, don’t you think ... ?” She had laid her hand on his arm, and in the flush of his dilated spirits, he had announced imperiously that since they were on vacation, he saw no reason why Darcy should not sleep over.

Elise had said nothing; it wasn’t her style to argue in public. But as soon as they were out of earshot, leaving their daughter behind with her new friend, she had turned on Joseph with a cold fury. “First you force us to have dinner with those people, then you walk right over me with this sleepover. You are unbelievable.”

More than the fierceness of her tone, more than the aggrieved wish to remind her that it was she, not himself, who had accepted the original invitation to go over for cocktails, more than the bewilderment at her objecting so strongly to Darcy’s sleeping over with her new friend, it was her phrase “those people” that had startled him. All this time, he realized, while he had been blithely enjoying himself, she had been assessing this couple, sitting in judgment on them, and quietly forming a verdict against them. On what grounds? He had wanted to know. But as he opened his mouth to demand an explanation, he had felt once again the familiar sense of uncertainty about his own instincts.

And now, as he listened to the insomniac bullfrogs croaking down at the pond, the image of Veronica walking calmly out of Taylor’s with the lobsters came back to him, and with a guilty wonder at his wife’s powers of intuition, he went uneasily back to bed.

The day "was overcast when he awoke later. He was alone. As he opened the curtains, he saw Elise striding up the steps from the pond. She burst in through the kitchen door.

“I am beyond angry.”

“What happened?”

“They’ve gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’ve gone. The car’s not there.”

“With Darcy?”

“Yes, with Darcy.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

He felt a loosening sensation inside him.

“You checked inside the house?”

“The doors are locked. I yelled. There’s no one there.”

Joseph threw on his bathrobe and ran outside, racing down the steps to the path. Rain had begun pattering onto the bushes. Reaching the other house, he blundered about the deck, beating on doors and windows and calling Darcy’s name. The place was empty. The windows had screens on the inside, making it hard to see into the unlit interior, but what he couldn’t see with his eyes his imagination supplied vividly: empty rooms, everything packed swiftly and surreptitiously in the dead of night, Darcy bundled into the car with the rest of them, then off out into the vastness of the country.

A feeling of terror swelled up inside him. He staggered back along the path and up the steps, legs shaking, heart pounding in his chest. Elise was on the phone.

“Are you calling the police?”

She frowned, shaking her head.

If she wasn’t calling the police, that must mean she didn’t think things were as serious as he did. This calmed Joseph, though the calm had an artificial sheen to it that was familiar to him from the rare positive days on the Dow, as though some essential fact had been temporarily left out of the reckoning. Then he remembered again that Elise hadn’t witnessed the scene in Taylor’s, and it seemed to him suddenly that his wife had no idea what kind of people they were dealing with.

She hung up the phone and dialed another number. He realized she was calling nearby restaurants to see if their daughter’s abductors had perhaps just gone out for breakfast. The idea seemed unbearably naive to him. He stood there, helpless, immobilized, looking out through the thickening rain.

She hung up again. “So much for that.”

“What are we going to do?”

“What do you propose, Joseph?”

“I think we should call the police. What kind of car did they have?”

“For God’s sake! I don’t even remember their surname.”

“Call the police.”

“And say what? You call them.”

He picked up the receiver but found himself reluctant to dial, as though to do so would be to confer more reality on the situation than he was ready to bear.

“Maybe just one of them went out and the other’s still around here somewhere with the girls.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know. Picking blackberries ... or maybe they went to the ocean . . .”

“In this?”

“It wasn’t raining earlier. Why don’t I go check? You wait here . . .”

He ran out of the house again. The sandy path wound around the pond to a series of dunes, the trees giving way to wild roses, then to sea grass with sharp edges that cut against his ankles. The sand crumbled under his feet as he climbed, half a step down for every step up. He was panting heavily as he reached the high point. Wind whipped rain and salt spray into his face. He looked down at the shore. On sunny mornings the narrow margin between the dunes and the waves would already be covered with towels and fluttering beach umbrellas and little human figures in bright swimsuits—a touching image, it always seemed to Joseph: life blossoming frailly between two inhospitable elements. It was empty now, not a figure visible on the mile-long stretch of wet sand. Black waves came racing in with the wind, exploding onto the shore. Gulls flew screeching over the surf.

Was this it? Was this the catastrophe he had felt preparing itself inside him? His obscure, abiding sense of himself as a flawed and fallen human being seemed suddenly clarified: he was guilty, and he was being punished. A feeling of dread gripped him. Childlike thoughts arose in his mind: propitiation, sacrifice . . . There was a clock, a valuable Crystal Regulator clock, that he had bought for a bargain in Asheville earlier that year. If their daughter was at the house by the time he got back, he would sacrifice the clock. He would destroy it, smash it to pieces in the back room of his store. Or no, better, he would return it to the dealer who had sold it to him, ask his forgiveness for taking advantage of him . . . And meanwhile, to show he wasn’t only prepared to make a sacrifice in return for a guaranteed reward (the primitive religious state he had fallen into appeared to come complete with its own finer points of dogma), he vowed, right there and then, to change his entire life. Yes, he would devote himself to the poor and needy, give up drinking, overeating, flirting, obsessing about the markets; in fact he would tell Elise to sell off the shares, and they would swallow the losses . . . The thought of this filled him with a sharp, almost painful elation; he seemed to glimpse in it the possibility of a new existence, one of immense and joyous calm. And even though he was aware in another part of himself that there was no prospect of his keeping a single one of these vows (that clock was earmarked to pay for this vacation), he turned back along the path full of faith and hope.