Alice Hoffman Read online

  He looked at me. Ten years younger. The sort of man who should have never bothered with me. Beautiful. Didn’t he know that? Hadn’t he ever looked in a mirror? Or was it me he couldn’t see? Was it situational blindness — I couldn’t see red; he couldn’t see ugliness or deceit.

  But he felt something was wrong. It was in the air, like dust motes or gnats. There was a ridge between his eyes. As though he was trying to figure out why I’d be talking about going away when everything we wanted should have been right here.

  “Hey, come into the kitchen,” he said. “I fixed you lunch.”

  Just like that. Not interested. Next subject. The here and now. Lunch on the table. Like normal folks.

  I followed him down the hall. I had a blank feeling, as if somebody had taken what little there was inside me and blown it away. Now I was sure — he’d never read the books on his shelf.

  For lunch he’d fixed me hot tomato soup. He liked it cold himself, with ice mixed in. He poured himself a glass of fresh orange juice.

  “Vitamin D,” he said.

  He needed to think about such things. His complexion was pale; he was never in the sun. I thought he might be fading in front of my eyes. I thought about the field-worker who had half believed he was working for a monster. I sat at the table. We didn’t have much to say. Outside the oncoming dusk was undulating, moving between the clouds in waves of blue light. I felt heartbroken and I hadn’t even known I had a heart to break.

  That’s the danger when you come to the middle of the story. You may find out more than you ever wanted to know.

  We stayed in the kitchen and watched the light fading in the orchard. All that blue, all that light. If I stayed, I would rinse the dishes and he would rest his hands on the ice in the freezer, then come up behind me and touch me until I was burning. I’d let the tap water run. I’d put my cold, wet arms around him. But that’s not what happened that day. We were moving into the after; the then and the now and the soon will be were becoming separate realms.

  This had been happiness and we didn’t know it. We walked right past. Had no idea. Step after step.

  I felt a stinging somewhere, a sharpness. We were waking from the dream of the kitchen, the afternoon, the way we wanted each other. When it grew dark we usually went into the bedroom, the bath. We were happy for the night. Now I was tired. It had been a long day. And we still weren’t done. I told him I didn’t feel well. I needed my sleep. I wasn’t ready to find out anything, I suppose. Not yet. I knew the truth would turn things around.

  “Sorry,” I said when he walked me out to the porch.

  “Sorry for what?”

  For nothing. For everything. For all I was about to do.

  “For being tired.”

  He grabbed me and I kissed him until my mouth was burning. No ice. Not this time. He let me go, looked at me.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Lazarus said.

  That’s what they all said, and then they went ahead and did anyway. When I drove home, I felt bereft.

  I’d lost something; I felt it as surely as I had when I lost the color red, a color I’d never even liked, one I avoided. Now every shade was faded without it, drained, not just scarlet and crimson and vermilion but even rust seemed gray; coppers and bronzes were flat without their red tones. Without red, the dawn was milk, rubies were worthless.

  I didn’t trust him. That was the loss. Dropped like a stone into a pool. Not a word he said, not a book he’d read, not a fuck or a kiss or a look. Not a bowl of soup. Nothing.

  I went home and there was my cat, tail waving back and forth, crouched by the hedge. Every flower was as white as chalk. She ignored me when I walked up the path, but came running when I opened the door to the screen porch. Foul-weather friend. She was due to be fed. She knew what she wanted; I was the one who couldn’t tell if she was purring or if her stomach was merely rumbling as she rubbed against my legs.

  My porch. My key. My home. My nothing.

  There was the shoebox, atop the carton filled with old newspapers, grocery bags, odds and ends. I couldn’t bring myself to bury the mole, and I couldn’t toss it out with the trash. I thought about Renny. We had been working on the Doric temple, and it was nearly done. He had to finish, and he’d been calling me, trying to set up a time when we could get together. But I was busy, too preoccupied to hear about his classes or how the mole he’d saved was thriving, getting fat on cream and grubs. I did agree to work with him on the coming Sunday, but he’d have to wait till then. I had my own problems to think about.

  I peeked inside the box where the dead mole was kept. Some ants had gotten into the mess. There was a smell of damp skin, earth, rot. Nothing pretty. Nothing to keep. Looking at the box, I realized I couldn’t let go; not even of this. I’d been that way all my life, holding on tight. I couldn’t let go of anything.

  Except for the things that mattered most.

  I had an appointment with my cardiologist soon after. Craven. The man who insisted I had a heart. I’d stupidly complained of pain in my chest the last time I’d been to see him, and now he fitted me with a heart monitor that I was to wear for twenty-four hours.

  “You have arrhythmia — and even though that’s not unusual for people who’ve experienced a strike, we want to be careful.”

  “Is there some congenital defect that hadn’t been detected before?” I was thinking of that dreadful Andersen character whose heart is pierced by a shard of ice.

  “You’re as normal as possible, given the circumstances,” Craven said. “We just like to keep watch. In case.”

  I’d been calling in sick to the library in order to spend more time at the orchard with Lazarus. I’d pretty much used every excuse. Nausea, ears ringing, pain in my arm, my side, my everything. My ailments were half true at least, so my guilt didn’t sting as it might have, should have. Obsession did that, I presumed. The wanting of someone, something. The chances a person was suddenly willing to take, the lies so easy to tell. Frances York had never once questioned me or complained. Her generosity should have made it more difficult for me to be selfish, but it didn’t. After the doctor, I headed over to work. Once I’d parked and went in, I found I was looking forward to returning. I’d missed it, in fact. All those untrustworthy words were unspoken here, safely printed and bound up tight.

  “Are you feeling better?” Frances asked when I arrived straight from my doctor’s appointment. It was late, hours past the time I should have shown up had I been working regularly. The weather was muggy and not even the old air-conditioning system could do much about that.

  “I’m okay.”

  Oh, sure. Only sex sick, love sick, lie sick.

  Frances studied me. She might be losing her vision, but she was sharp. “Really?”

  I pulled up my shirt and showed Frances the contraption strapped across my chest.

  “And they said it was all right to come to work?”

  Well, here was my chance, so I took it. “Probably not. I have an arrhythmia. They can track my heartbeat this way. But I feel like a horse in a harness. Or a mule.”

  “You should definitely go home and rest,” Frances said.

  I thought about Falada, that loyal horse who couldn’t help but speak the truth to the Goose Girl, even when his head had been cut off. I suppose I had a moment of remorse, a flash of honesty. It came over me as I stood behind the card catalog.

  “I want to be the way I used to be.”

  It was a stupid thing to say aloud. I didn’t even know what it meant. The me I used to be in what place and time? Yesterday? The day before my mother drove away from us? The minute before Renny suggested that Lazarus was hiding his truest self from me?

  Frances was concerned. “Any recuperation takes time. Don’t rush yourself.”

  She was making matters worse, being so thoughtful. No wonder I stayed away from kindness; in some ways it was worse than ill treatment. You could fight against cruelty, tooth and claw, but sympathy engulfed you, took you over, made you aw
are of all you’d done wrong. I realized I knew absolutely nothing about Frances, except the information I’d garnered from the photographs on her desk. Perhaps she also thought she knew me. I suppose she saw my empty cubicle and made her own assumptions. Poor thing, no photos whatsoever, no personal items, no personal life. And now that harness to chart her fluttering heart — why, it only adds to the already pitiful facts: the ridiculous pixie cut on a grown woman, the way she kneels down in the stacks, as though she had a penance to pay, and her dreadful pale skin. Poor creature. Poor me.

  I kept thinking about those strange books on Lazarus’s shelves. I’d been so sure that our stories were the same, and now I wasn’t sure of anything. I didn’t begin to sneak about until Frances went to get some takeout. She was picking up a salad for me as well. Something complicated, I made certain of that, so it would surely take a while for the coffee shop to prepare it for me. Feta and onions and fancy lettuce and olives. Not the kind with pimentos, the dark purple ones.

  “Are you sure they have that, dear?”

  Not at all. But I was sure my order would give me the time alone I needed. I was ready to dig; I was looking for blood and bones. I watched Frances drive away, then quickly looked up Lazarus’s card. Seth Jones had indeed taken out guidebooks. His interests were deserts, South America, Florence, Rome, and Venice. I held the card in my hand and stared at the titles. A normal enough card, except for a printed mark at the very top. continued. This wasn’t his only card on file.

  I returned it to the catalog. As I did I noticed a card made out for Iris McGinnis; this must be Renny’s Iris, the girl of his dreams. What could she find here that wouldn’t be in the university library? Perhaps she’d only wanted to take her time — we allowed books to be taken out for a month, and the university had a cutoff of two weeks. She’d borrowed the Odyssey and the Iliad. A classics major? A slow reader? A woman who preferred mythological creatures?

  Maybe I should have jotted down Iris’s phone number for Renny, but I was rushed. Frances would be back soon. It was nearing suppertime. I grabbed a flashlight and went down to the basement, to the storeroom. There were boxes of waterlogged books, from the time when the pipes had burst and Frances had enlisted people in town to help save what they could. In the back of the room, finally, I found the old cards. I opened the first box and sifted through the jumble.

  Many of the names referenced residents at the home for the aged. Dozens of yellowing cards, lists of withdrawn books belonging to nearly everyone over the age of sixty-five who’d lived in the town of Orlon. And then, Seth Jones. I held his card up to the light that filtered in through the single rectangular window. More travel books, Africa, Hawaii, copies of National Geographic. Once again, impossibly so, continued.

  I went on to the next box, the oldest records of all. Most of these cards belonged to people who had already passed on; deceased was marked on many in Frances’s neat script, then there was some handwriting I didn’t recognize, which I assumed belonged to the librarian before Frances. I looked through it all; at last, I found Seth Jones. The very day he’d taken out his first library book had been marked in blue ink, nearly forty-five years earlier. Surely, this was Lazarus’s grandfather. Seth Jones would be seventy years or older now, not a beautiful young man who rarely left his house, someone ten years younger than I, a man who was burning hot with eyes made of ashes, someone hiding something, everything, including who he was.

  By the time Frances came back with our food, I’d tidied the boxes, piled them back one on top of another, then washed the dust off my hands. Seth Jones’s library card was hidden in my desk drawer. Frances had waited for twenty minutes while Renee Platt ran out to the Quickmart to pick up kalamata olives. Now, after all that effort, I couldn’t eat. I told Frances there was something wrong with my stomach. Maybe it was the heart monitor pressing down on me. Maybe it was that I was more confused by Lazarus than ever. Why did I still have the sense he was keeping something from me? Wives, bodies, donkeyskin, rooms that should never be entered, stairs that lead to a storeroom of diamonds and bones.

  I thought of the mole blindly puttering around the roots of the hedge until there was a sudden rush of teeth and a sharp twist of its neck. I thought about the way I’d knocked at Lazarus Jones’s door. I thought of “Ring of Fire,” the song people in Orlon listened to against their better judgment. I was starting to have compassion for people who did stupid things. If Iris McGinnis had walked into the library, I would have gone right up to her, had I been able to recognize her, and slapped her. Don’t you know how miserable you’re making someone who loves you? That’s what I’d have said to her. Who do you think you are?

  “Go home,” Frances told me. The library had evening hours, but she clearly felt I’d be of no help. I must have looked dazed; clearly I was overwhelmed. I hoped that I’d taped up the boxes in the storeroom correctly, put each in its proper place. I hoped Frances never found out how untrustworthy I was, or if she did, that it was long after I’d gone.

  I drove home and stood in my yard. I didn’t want to think, really. The possibilities were too terrible. I thought of all those fairy-tale husbands who hadn’t known their true loves in the dark. Fools who’d slept with evil queens or murderous sisters while their real wives were chained to tower walls or thrown to the wild beasts in the woods to be torn apart and forgotten. As a child, I hadn’t believed such stories. Impossible to be duped in such a way. The lover would always know his beloved, certainly, certainly, without a doubt. I hadn’t understood what a mystery a human being was, how many forms love could take.

  The Seth Jones on record had had a library card for nearly twice as long as my Seth Jones had been alive. No wonder he’d been taking out an old man’s books. No wonder his house was dust-filled, his bookshelves untouched. Either the original Seth Jones was an old man or Lazarus was pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

  Now I wanted to know whom I’d been sleeping with.

  I’d left Giselle out for the day and now she came to rub herself against my legs. Who would ever think that September could be too hot? I watched the cat poke around in the weeds. I wasn’t expecting my brother, but he pulled up and honked the horn. Same car as Nina had been driving the other night. It took all my effort to lift my arm and wave.

  “I heard you were at the cardiologist today,” Ned said as he came to join me. “Old Craven gave me a call.”

  “Busybody,” I said. “Both of you.”

  “I’m just making sure all the docs in the study treat you right.”

  Ned had a tall Styrofoam cup in one hand; he went to fetch some lawn chairs from the porch, which he brought down to the scruffy yard, the worst one on the block. Probably the worst for miles around. “Oouf,” Ned said as he set the chairs down. “These weigh a ton. Wearing your harness?”

  “Twenty-four hours. Then I’m ripping it off.”

  My brother had stopped at the student union on his way over and picked up a large iced green tea. I supposed the research project he was at work on was taxing; he looked exhausted. He took a sip of his drink.

  “You don’t like green tea,” I reminded him.

  Was I supposed to tell him what I knew? Warn him? Protect him? Tell him all about Lazarus Jones? Reveal my secret life, his secret wife? Should I have said, Your wife isn’t who you think she is. She’s wandering around in the night, searching for ways to die. Not just one or two, you understand. That’s not enough for her. A hundred different ways. Even more than I know, the expert, the death-wisher.

  “Antioxidants,” my brother said. “Nina says we should all drink three cups of green tea a day. Oh, and tofu and miso, she’s a big fan of those as well.” Ned looked happy, as he had at his party. Just the idea of her. Just the thought. He was brightened somehow. Uplifted. He leaned his head against the lawn chair and gazed at the sky. Maybe the moon was red, maybe it was gray; I had no idea. “Did you know you had bats?” Ned asked.

  “Very funny.”

  My brother appeared older
now that he’d begun to lose his hair, but when I looked more closely, he was still the same.

  “Seriously. Fruit bats. Over by the hibiscus.”

  The tall hedge covered with large colorless flowers.

  “Is that what that is? Hibiscus?” I leaned my head back, too. A black cloud flitted across the sky. Bats. “Shit. You’re right.”

  “You don’t have to worry. You don’t have hair anymore. Long hair,” he corrected when I glared.

  “What about you?” I said. Charming me. “You have less.”

  Ned ignored the remark. He always did that, left you hanging with your own nastiness. “And you’re not wearing red or yellow. That’s what they’re attracted to.”

  “Shoo.” I clapped my hands. My grandmother always told me that would keep bats away. The noise echoed and they left you alone. But the bats in my yard actually came closer.

  “They think you’re calling to them,” my brother said. “They hear it as a love song. That’s why they smack into the engines of planes. They think they’re being seduced by some huge horny bat made out of metal and then — kaboom — crushed, mashed, and decimated.”

  Proof of my theory: Love destroyed you.

  I couldn’t help but think of Nina, that book in her hands, her nightgown, her bare feet, the way she looked right through me.

  “If I knew a secret,” I asked Ned, “would you want me to tell you?”

  “A riddle, right?” He grinned. He liked games. The more mathematical the better.

  “No. I really want to know, Ned. Would you?”

  My brother thought this over. He was wearing a sport shirt and chinos. I hadn’t made it to his and Nina’s wedding. My grandmother had already been ailing, and I hadn’t wanted to leave her, but now I wished I’d managed to attend.

  Ned had thought enough. “Secrets are only knowledge that hasn’t yet been uncovered,” he told me. “Therefore, they’re not in fact secrets, but only unrealized truth.”