Edgar and Lucy Read online

  “I don’t have a condom,” Lucy said. “Is that what you’re—”

  Mid-sentence, she snapped awake. “Hey,” she shouted. “What the fuck are you doing?” When she turned, the boy had her wallet in his hand and was pulling out the cash. “You little piece of shit.” Unsteadily she lunged at him, but with one easy push he knocked her to the ground. She felt the damage, a burning scrape across her knees.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “James,” she said gently—as if there’d been some mistake, as if he’d forgotten they were friends.

  “That’s not my name. Get a fucking life.”

  She felt the empty wallet hit her on the back of the head—an insult so great that, as the boy drove away, she could not bring herself to look up to note the license plate. Neither did she call out for the bartender. She vomited, wiped her mouth. The empty wallet was beside her, and she retrieved it before crawling toward her car. Shame, more than drunkenness, prevented her from standing. The pain in her knees was sobering.

  She felt a coin under her hand as she crawled. The boy had stolen all her money. What would she tell Florence? She usually gave the old woman half her paycheck. Lucy picked up the dime, but it wasn’t a dime. It was Saint Christopher. The man who’d carried the Christ child across a swollen river. She only knew the story because she’d overheard Florence tell it to Edgar.

  Lucy gripped the medal in her hand and then flung it with all her strength toward some bushes at the edge of the lot. All she wanted now was to get in the car and drive. Disappear.

  When the phone in her bag began to ring, she was afraid. She knew it was the old woman. But what could Lucy tell her? She could say a friend was ill, she’d be gone a few days. Buy herself some time.

  She blindly pulled the phone from her bag and answered it. Her lips were trembling, though, and no words came.

  “Lucy?”

  It was the butcher.

  The sound that suddenly burst from her mouth could not be stopped.

  “What’s wrong?” the butcher said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m … yeah, I’m…” She held the phone away from her face so that he wouldn’t hear her crying.

  “Did I wake you up?” Ron was saying as she brought the phone back to her ear.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “So, do you feel like it?” he said.

  “Feel like what?”

  “What I just said. Come over, if it’s not too late.”

  A shaking Lucy covered her mouth.

  “You don’t want to?”

  “I want to,” she said quickly.

  “Good,” said the butcher—and Lucy repeated the word with the shrill lilt of a mockingbird.

  11

  Vesuvius

  Edgar woke with a start. There was something cold on his chest, as if someone had dropped an icy coin there. He slipped his hand under his pajama top and then looked up to see if the roof was leaking (it had happened before). The only thing entering the room, though, was the sun, oozing through a crack in the baby-blue curtains. The light was thick, a bright yellow-orange like hot lava.

  Edgar’s mind flashed to something he’d seen on television. Figures encased in ash. People trying to run from a volcano’s wrath; families huddled together, even a dog—all of them simultaneously killed and preserved by the hot goo that had rained down upon them. Edgar sympathized. He lifted his hands against the sun-lava pulsing between the curtains, feeling certain he’d achieved the perfect gesture of mortal terror. To any onlooker, though, the boy’s pose—jazz hands and angelic O-mouth—might have suggested that Mount Vesuvius had splattered its juice upon an amateur production of Annie!

  Edgar climbed out of bed and scuffed his feet against the thick carpet, slowly making his way across the room. Before entering the hallway, he stopped, pointed a finger, and touched the copper doorknob. When it sparked, he let out a small, satisfied squeal. It was his habit to greet the doorknob in this manner every morning. Today’s shock was particularly potent, and Edgar was wide awake as he made his way down the stairs. When he heard a clang in the kitchen, he hoped his grandmother was making waffles. He was starving.

  * * *

  She’d told the butcher she’d been out drinking with a few gals from work. “One too many?” he’d said, noticing the scraped knees. “Angie kept ordering pitchers of margaritas,” she’d replied, padding the story. Luckily he’d pried no further about her injury—though if he needed more specifics, she’d prepared a line about an uneven sidewalk outside a Mexican restaurant. When the butcher kissed her boozy mouth, it was with a slow seriousness that had made her swallow her lies and fall silent. In the bathroom he’d told her to sit on the edge of the tub—after which he’d knelt down to clean the cuts with alcohol poured onto a wad of toilet paper.

  Now they were sleeping. They’d had sex only once—rather uncomfortably in the bathtub. When Lucy had first arrived, the butcher noted the shaking hands and strained smile, not to mention the roughed-up knees—and he’d pretty much abandoned the idea of fucking her. But after he’d cleaned the cuts, she’d leaned forward and bitten his ear—and his ears were his weakness. She bit and licked and flicked her tongue until he was moaning like a little girl. When she tugged him into the empty tub, it was like some fumbling reenactment of a boyhood fantasy. “I’m crushing you,” he kept saying—and the girl kept saying, “Yes.” He pulled up her dress and entered her unsheathed, pumped until he shot his warmth into her. It wasn’t until later, lying in bed beside his gently snoring lover, that he realized this was the first time he’d ever come inside a woman. A terminus of latex had always limited his fulfillment. Nearly forty years old, and it was not until tonight that he’d experienced the full flower of sex. When he exploded unimpeded within Lucy, he felt a shock of expansion, an astronaut’s weightless bliss.

  Plus, the girl was beautiful. He’d never had a piece of ass this fine. And now he’d had her two nights in a row. She was not without some damage, of course—and though she clearly had a past, she wasted no time in the present, the little fire-starter. Red hair, holy shit, above and below. He turned in the bed and laid his large hand on her belly. Feeling his fingers rise and fall with each of the girl’s breaths, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  * * *

  The old woman was chasing a small animal. At first she thought it was a cat—but no, the tail was too long. Maybe it was a monkey. Were there monkeys in New Jersey? She wouldn’t be a bit surprised. The world had changed so much; there were no proper borders anymore. Well, whatever the creature was, it was sure to get at the tomatoes, the perfect end-of-season beauties.

  With the sun just coming up, the old woman ran across the yard, amazed at the animal’s speed. More amazing was her own speed; the fact that she could keep up with the beast. It hesitated for a moment at the fence, and the old woman leapt for it, landing on her chest with a thud that made the breath bark out of her. She slid across the lawn until, miraculously, she had the animal in her hands. She pressed her fingers into its pliant, muscular midsection, and when it turned its head and bared its teeth, she saw that it was something extraordinary. She gasped and, as she opened her eyes, reached her arm upward toward the ceiling, where the candlelight was flickering in the most deliberate and insistent manner. Her arm was heavy, but she kept it aloft, even as the pain shot through it. The light on the ceiling was lovely—its clever arabesques bringing to mind the pair of pretty orange guppies her mother had kept in a glass bowl in the parlor, when Florence was a girl.

  She felt her heart, as she’d never felt it before—as if she were meeting it for the first time, this beating striver, monster and angel of her life. Even the old embers (her sewing machine, the piano, the touch of Pio’s hand), things she had thought long extinguished, suddenly flared into an overwhelming chaos. When she turned her heard toward the Virgin, she could barely breathe. She tried to call out for the boy, but nothing came from her lips. Edgar, she thought. My Edgar. The boy’s mother was flo
oding her chest, as well. Poor sweet Lucy, she had always been such a beautiful girl, and the old woman was sorry for all of it, all the pettiness between them. The tears came to her eyes, and as her heart grew to unmanageable proportions, she sank below the surface of the room and returned to the animal in the yard.

  It was still there, still looking at her. It smiled benevolently, with its white fangs gleaming and its gray fur flashing needles of silver. For a moment, the old woman clutched it tighter—victorious, proud. But then she let it go, she relinquished everything. It was so much easier than she would have guessed; complicated for a moment only by the great tug of love for the child. But that love, at the same time, spurred her onward, and she slipped into a black coolness that stripped her of all pain.

  She passed through her mother’s parlor again, but now the whole room was filled with water—the fish swimming freely, drawing complicated circles that seemed to possess and define her whole life, circles that seemed to live at the threshold of music. As she sank farther down, she knew where she was going. She knew this was the water she’d been trying to plumb for years, the water below the bridge at Shepherd’s Junction, from which no body had ever been recovered. When her feet touched the sandy bottom, she stood, at last, before the gold Chrysler LeBaron. Amazingly it was still in excellent condition. The driver’s window was open and Frank sat at the wheel, staring ahead, unchanged. He didn’t turn to look at his mother. And, for the first time, she did not ask, Why? A question that, since her son’s death, had plagued her like a fly trapped in an airless room—tap tap tap against the sealed glass. The question, like the fly, had never grown weary, but had persisted with a savage lunacy.

  Now there was only silence. She was strangely absent of questions. She leaned her head forward into the car’s interior and kissed Frank’s surprisingly warm cheek. Immediately, as if she’d clicked a switch, her course shifted and she began to rise, speedily, through the cool water. She looked up and saw the light-riddled undersurface rushing toward her, and when she broke through it, she dissolved into a kind of perfect laughter. A rippling white denouement that tore her apart. The relief was profound, and shamelessly erotic. Not bad at all, she thought. Her first orgasm, in death.

  * * *

  Edgar sat at the table, waiting for his breakfast to appear. That’s how it happened: he sat down and his grandmother brought him food. When he’d walked into the kitchen, he realized that it wasn’t his grandmother he’d heard, but a pan that had fallen from its hook on the wall. The hook had fallen out as well, leaving a crusty hole in the plaster and white dust on the floor.

  After sitting awhile, Edgar decides to make himself useful. He stands and collects the dust, throws it into the sink. Then he picks up the pan, his grandmother’s ancient fryer—a blackened and dented thing the size of a trash-can lid. He groans when he lifts it, ashamed of his weakness.

  Edgar, though, is not weak. Edgar is gentle. The subtlety of this eludes him, though.

  With a grunt, he swings the frying pan and lets it crash onto the counter. Where is everyone? He’s hungry. It’s a quarter past seven already. His mother’s a famous sleepyhead, but not his grandmother. Should he go upstairs and wake her?

  And then he remembers the women’s argument from last night. His mother had left the house, had driven away. Edgar feels the familiar dread of octopus ink in his belly—which sends him straight to the cupboard for some cookies. He takes them into the living room. Sugar and television—that often does the trick. Edgar picks up the remote and, after several clicks, lands on an early-morning children’s show. A tall man in a rainbow-colored top hat and fluffy bedroom slippers is dancing a funny little dance—except it isn’t funny at all. The man looks like he has to pee. When he finally stops dancing, he claps his hands three times. At each clap, a child appears—all three of them hamming it up with over-actory faces (Whoa! How did I get here?). Edgar makes his own face, one of distaste. He knows fake magic when he sees it. Real magicians don’t wear rainbow-colored top hats. They don’t wear top hats at all. Real magicians, Edgar knows, wear the same clothes as everyone else. Plus, they don’t do their tricks on television. Real magicians do their stuff at home, in private—or in the woods, at night.

  Edgar clicks off the television with a huff and turns his head toward the hall. And though he isn’t supposed to shout in the house, he shouts, calling out for the one person who always comes when he calls. It isn’t magic, how she appears; it’s simply his life.

  BOOK TWO

  TIME REGAINED

  Wild, wild horses, couldn’t drag me away.

  —THE ROLLING STONES

  12

  L.O.V.E.

  It wasn’t her. It was a person made of wax, made to look like his grandmother. Edgar was kneeling before the ornate silver casket that seemed to him like a giant butter dish. Inside lay the woman who was no longer his, nestled in a froth of scrunched-up fabric shimmery as his mother’s underwear. A vandal had put slashes of red paint across his grandmother’s lips and on her cheeks.

  “She looks nice, doesn’t she?” said Lucy, standing behind her son.

  Edgar didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no. He could hear his mother clicking her nails, something she did when she was nervous.

  “She looks peaceful.” Lucy tapped the boy’s shoulder, encouraging him to get up. He’d been kneeling there for a while.

  “Stop saying she.”

  “Stop saying what?”

  “Don’t say she.”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  Edgar shrugged and wished his mother would go away. He wished everyone would go away. There were too many people in the room, and Edgar knew he’d need to be alone with the old woman to get her to open her eyes. He was too shy to say the magic words in public. (I love you. I’m sorry.) And though he knew he was betraying his grandmother by remaining silent, he could not do otherwise.

  It was awful. Death would think itself real without an official protest from the dead person’s greatest ally. Edgar hated the tears that ran down his face; they were a giving in to a reality bereft of imagination. He brushed the warm trails from his cheeks with a feeling of shame.

  At least he’d worn the sneakers with the lights in them. When you stepped firmly on the heel, tiny blue lights danced around the edge of the sole; and when you pointed your toe, a beam of red light pulsed from the tip. He was standing now in front of the casket. With a nimble movement of his feet, he activated the lights—both the blue blips and the red beams.

  “What the hell are you wearing?” said Lucy. “I told you to put on your Buster Browns.”

  “I know,” Edgar said glumly. But he’d worn the sneakers for a good reason: his grandmother had hated them. And he was old enough to know that there was something even stronger than love to get people to notice you—and that was irritation. Edgar directed the red beams directly at the casket.

  “Turn them off,” Lucy whispered.

  “You can’t turn them off. They turn off by themselves.”

  “When?”

  “When they’re finished,” sassed Edgar. “It’s on a program.”

  Lucy took hold of her son’s arm and suggested he move away from the box.

  Where was he supposed to go, he asked her.

  “Just sit down for a while,” she said. “Out in the audience.”

  “It’s not a play,” replied Edgar.

  “Don’t be rude, baby. Other people need to come up and say goodbye.”

  Goodbye? Edgar pulled his arm back from his mother’s grip. “Did you do that to her face?”

  “Do what?”

  “The red stuff.”

  “Of course not.”

  Lucy glanced at Florence in the butter dish; really looked at the dead woman for the first time. The boy’s distress was legitimate. The funeral parlor had obviously hired someone from Ringling Brothers to do the makeup.

  “You said she looked nice.”

  “I lied.”

  Edgar was relieved
to hear his mother admit it. “Because she doesn’t look like that.”

  Lucy agreed. Even the hair was wrong. For the past fifteen years, Lucy had cut and set the old woman’s wispy frizz, always managing to make it look elegant. She reached into the coffin and adjusted Florence’s coif, relieving her of the awful spit curls someone had pasted down on her forehead.

  “That’s better,” said Edgar. “Push it back more.”

  * * *

  The room was preposterously full, considering the fact that, other than the boy and his mother, Florence had no living relatives. Well, yes, there was Pio’s brother’s family, but those bonds had dissolved in rancor when it was discovered that Frank’s cousin Vincenzo had been selling drugs to Frank. Lucy hoped Vincenzo might show up. She wouldn’t mind scoring a little pot. The next few weeks would be tough.

  Many in attendance were strangers to Lucy. Throughout the interminable hours of the wake, it was the boy who had to inform her, with discreet whispers: “That’s Mr. Wong from the fish store” or “That’s Mrs. Collucci from where we get the bread.” Edgar referred to one ancient man with whiskered nostrils as the peddler. “What do you get from him?” Lucy asked. “Different things,” the boy said. “Peppers, artichokes. Sometimes buttons. He has a cart.” Lucy felt dizzy. There was a whole world she knew nothing about. Henry and Netty Schlip who ran a “dry-goods” store. The Fortunato brothers who sold pots and sharpened knives. A black cobbler with the unlikely name of Willie Marchwell. It was as if the boy had lived with Florence in some other century. Peddler, cobbler, dry goods. Hard to believe such things still existed.

  “And that’s Mrs. List from where we get the flowers.”

  “Okay,” Lucy said, unable to keep track.

  “The house flowers,” the boy added. “Not the cemetery flowers.”

  “Do you go to the cemetery?” Lucy asked, amazed.

  “Sometimes,” the boy said.

  “How do you get there?”