Edgar and Lucy Read online

  Why was it, Lucy wondered, that sex after drinking always seemed to temper the next day’s sickness? As if the sex somehow burned away the poison. Or maybe what it burned away was the sadness, the feeling of waste. More likely, it was simply the collision of bodies, the violence of it, that brought a mind back to its senses. Lucy imagined the effect would be pretty much the same if, after a few too many drinks, you were to drive your car into a tree. You might wake up with a broken arm and a gruesome gash across your forehead, but the hangover would probably be minimal.

  Lucy turned to look at the tree she’d run into last night. Ron Salvatore, the butcher. Salvatore’s Meats. Lucy giggled. Would she ever be able to drive by that sign again without blushing? She always felt girlish after sex. Somehow it enabled her to stretch her mind gently toward the future. Not stupidly, of course, not with any great ambition or specific longing, but with a more general feeling that her moment had not passed, that the angels (or, at least, men) were still watching her.

  Ha! She couldn’t believe she’d slept with a fat man. Well, he wasn’t fat, exactly. He was just extremely large. But it was all firm—even muscular. And at nearly seven feet tall (to Lucy’s five foot five), he was practically a giant. Not to mention another Italian. She couldn’t escape these people. New Jersey was full of them. She flicked her ash into an empty wineglass and smiled. The way he’d growled unabashedly during their multiple collisions. It was exactly what she’d needed. She hadn’t had sex this good since Frank died. There had been other men, of course, in the last few years, but they lacked skill. For all of Frankie’s faults and weaknesses, he was a master of pleasure—knew how to inflict it. Lucy ran her free hand slowly over her belly in the same way her husband used to do, so lightly that it caused her whole body to shiver. She lit another cigarette and dragged deeply. Time had passed so quickly, while she wasn’t looking. How old was she now, anyway? Thirty-four?

  That’s exactly what she was, but she pretended she couldn’t remember.

  God, she’d been so innocent, practically a virgin, when she’d first slept with Frank. Even after all these years—seven since he’d died—he still seemed to have possession of her. There’d been only one boy before Frank—a single incident at a party—but Lucy never counted that. The sex had been unpleasant; she’d barely been conscious. But with Frank she’d felt like a treasure chest, full of exquisite things she’d never fathomed were inside her. She was a richness into which he’d plunged his hands, his tongue, his cock. It was strange, at first, to be the object of someone’s greed. To be idolized, adored. Over time, it had actually changed the shape of her face. Before Frank, she hadn’t been beautiful. It was a gift the bastard had given her. If he was glaring down at her now as she lay beside a virile giant, well, it was his own damn fault. He could have stayed. She would never have strayed from his bed.

  She shrugged off these thoughts. Her body was still a marvel of contentment. Someone had touched her again in a way that made birds fly through her stomach. Not butterflies; it was more than a nervous flutter. These were big-winged creatures swooping down off high cliffs. She glanced at the clock. An hour yet before she had to be at work. Maybe she’d get up and make some breakfast. Surely there’d be some nice bacon in the butcher’s fridge. Ron lived just above his shop. A man with a good supply of meat in barking distance from the bedroom—not a damn thing wrong with that, she thought, as she swung herself lightly off the bed and slapped her hips with an easy, offhanded affection. The angels, who had thought this affection dead, took note of it, and followed Lucy into the kitchen.

  * * *

  Distracted momentarily with the mother, the guardians ignored the child, and he tripped, dropping the prayer card he was trying to read as he walked.

  God of all mystery, whose ways are beyond understanding,

  Lead us, who grieve at this untimely death—

  Toni-Ann Hefti dashed from her yard and snatched up the card, which had slid across the pavement. “Mine,” she said. “Mine now.”

  Edgar stood, brushed himself off. “No, Toni-Ann,” he said, holding out his hand and waiting for the girl to return his property.

  The girl shook her head and smiled. She had a terrifying, freewheeling face that stretched expressions to their limits. Her smile showed too much of the inside of her mouth. Her tongue, today, was purple. Grape juice, hoped Edgar. Though, with retarded people, who knew? It might be house paint.

  “It’s my grandmother’s,” said Edgar.

  “Find-uz keep-uz,” said the girl.

  “But you didn’t find it. I dropped it.”

  Such logic, though, didn’t work on Toni-Ann. She smiled again and tilted her massive head. She was more like an animal than a person. Edgar leaned back, hoping she wasn’t going to touch him.

  Toni-Ann liked Edgar, even though he’d never done anything to claim her affection. Sometimes the girl snuck up from behind and hugged him, lifting the little boy and planting a wet kiss on the back of his neck. It horrified Edgar. Retarded people had terrible manners. She was probably at least fourteen, but his grandmother had explained that people like Toni-Ann had the minds of infants. She also had told Edgar that such people were dangerous. The Heftis lived next to the Finis, and the old woman always warned the boy to steer clear of the fence if Toni-Ann happened to be playing in her yard.

  “Ed-guh,” she said now, running a hand through her hair like a demented movie star. She had a weird kind of power, a booming voice, painfully strong hands, and a hairline that seemed to start just above her eyes. “Sign of an idiot,” the grandmother once noted. “They tend to be hairy.”

  Still, Edgar was fascinated by the girl. Though why did she always have to get so close? At the right distance, he’d be able to love her more, the way he knew he should. Because you have to have pity on poor souls like that, his grandmother always said.

  Toni-Ann was looking at the prayer card now, scanning the text. Could idiots read? Edgar wasn’t sure.

  “Nelly,” she suddenly said with astonishing clarity. But then she faltered. “To … To … Torrrrrr,” dragging out the r like a car that wouldn’t start.

  Edgar watched her struggle, but it was too painful. “Tortelli,” he finally said. “Nelly Tortelli.”

  Toni-Ann giggled. And, really, Edgar had to agree: it was a funny name. As he smiled at the girl, her own smile doubled in size, and her laughter increased to frightening proportions. It was like water shooting out of the ground, like a geyser—a kind of joy Edgar could barely comprehend.

  “Toni-Ann, get your ass in here!” Mrs. Hefti called from the doorway. She was wearing a bulky yellow robe that looked like something made from inflated swimming pool rafts. “Toni-Ann!”

  The girl’s face went blank. She put the edge of the prayer card into her purple mouth and scurried off toward the house. Edgar watched her slip past her mother, who continued to stand in the doorway, looking up as if she had a question about the trees.

  “How are you, Edgar?” she called out.

  The boy offered a little wave and opened his mouth. But he was too shy to shout across the immense green sea of the woman’s lawn.

  “What?” Mrs. Hefti said, putting her hand to her ear as if she were going deaf.

  Edgar shook his head and moved his lips to no effect.

  “I can’t hear you, honey.”

  “Nothing,” he said. He didn’t mean it to sound rude, but it did. That was the problem with shouting.

  “Okay then,” Mrs. Hefti said, as if any further interaction would be useless. “You have a nice day.”

  What a strange slip of a boy, she thought—and so white. Something wasn’t right about him. Of course, he might have been damaged in the womb. The mother was quite a drinker, from all accounts. Mary Hefti sighed, whisked her puffy robe back into the house like an antebellum hoop skirt, and shut the door.

  At the sound of knocking, Edgar looked up to see Toni-Ann thumping her fist against one of the upstairs windows. What did she want now? She was b
anging so hard Edgar was afraid she’d break the glass. He shook his head to warn her and then ran off. There was nothing he could do to help. Her house was her house, just as his was his. Inside of which a person had to face his problems alone.

  3

  Beards

  There was the truck again: a pale green pickup with mud-crusted tires. The streams of rust that flowed down the dented hood made Edgar think of tears—but only painted-on, like a clown’s. For all its mars and pocks, the truck seemed oddly happy. You couldn’t say the same about the man sitting inside. There was something serious about the way he stared out the window and watched the kids smashing into bags of chips and chomping on candy bars. Every few days the truck was there, parked across the street from the Mark-O-Market. The convenience store was just down the block from Edgar’s school. He often bought a Coke there on his way home—a beverage his grandmother frowned upon. Usually he sat on one of the red benches outside the Mark-O, the bottle of forbidden nectar clutched solemnly between his hands.

  Today, under late summer sun, Edgar sipped and stretched out his legs. There was a terrific slant of light bearing down on the truck, but the man wasn’t wearing sunglasses, like he usually did. Even from across the street you could see his blue eyes. They were unnaturally bright, as if they were plugged in somehow, or operated by batteries. The man’s hair fell from his head in complicated locks. Blondish-brown. The beard, neatly trimmed, was darker. It was hard to tell from a distance, but sometimes it seemed to Edgar that the man was looking directly at him. It didn’t make the boy nervous, because there were lots of other kids around—and the man looked at them, too. He looked at everything (the treetops, the clouds), or he just leaned his head back as if to study the inside roof of the truck. Every now and then he seemed to have fallen asleep. Once it looked like he was laughing behind the rolled-up windows. Strange, Edgar had thought. People usually didn’t laugh like that—with jerky, shoulder-heaving shudders—when they were alone. Which made Edgar wonder if maybe the man was crying.

  Did the other kids see him? No one else ever seemed to be looking in that direction. But the man was right there, in broad daylight. It wasn’t like he was a man hiding in the dark—a thing Edgar knew about. A long time ago he’d had a friend, Jack, who’d shown up at odd hours to camp in his bedroom closet. If Edgar wanted to speak with him, he had to go into the tiny room with a flashlight and a box of cookies (Jack was always starving). Even then, Edgar never saw Jack’s face. The man was always standing up, his face lost among the hanging clothes. Conversation was little more than a brief exchange of hums and squeaks—a bird language—after which Edgar and Jack would lean against each other silently, often with the buffer of Edgar’s blue peacoat between them. When his grandmother would find him, he’d be sound asleep, still on his feet, propped up inside the dense rack of clothing.

  Today, outside the market, Sara Prokoff, a classmate, was sitting on the bench beside Edgar. He was inclined to mention how it was now exactly five times that he’d seen the green pickup across the street—and did she think that strange? But, as he looked at Sara, who was manipulating a straw to loudly hoover up the stubborn dregs of her frozen Berry Blast, he decided to keep the man to himself. Edgar wondered, though, if he was breaking some law by doing this, because it was a major rule these days to report anything you saw that was out of the ordinary. The man clearly wasn’t a terrorist, though; he had blond hair and a blue shirt like someone who worked at a gas station. Though he did have a curious bumper sticker on the back of his truck.

  GUN CONTROL IS HITTING YOUR TARGET

  Edgar noticed it as the man was pulling away. He wasn’t sure what it meant, though he knew guns were generally a bad thing. Still, he looked forward to the bearded man’s visits. He was one of the few men in Edgar’s life, and the boy didn’t want him to go away.

  Besides, Edgar knew from experience the cost of disclosure. When he’d finally mentioned Jack to his grandmother, that was the end of it. Jack never came back. No doubt he was off with some other boy who knew how to keep a secret. Edgar refused to make the same mistake twice.

  Whenever the man in the truck waved at him, Edgar waved back—and no one needed to know.

  * * *

  The sweating bottle of vodka had sat overnight on the coffee table, and now there was a huge ring on the wood. Florence stared at it. She’d cleaned the table this morning, cleared away the glasses, the ashtray with one, two, three butts in it. Luckily she’d been up early and had set it all to rights before the boy had come down for breakfast. That’s the last thing the child needed, waking up to evidence of his mother’s debauchery—not only the vodka and the cigarettes, but the couch cushions suspiciously atumble, the whole damn living room looking like Who-Did-It-and-Ran. She’d have to polish the table again. Rings were stubborn. As she headed to the hall closet for the oil soap and the rag, she noticed the photographs on top of the piano: three of the frames placed facedown. Och. This was the last straw. One by one she lifted them, begging God for some insight into the girl’s twisted mind. A photo of Pio and Frank at the boy’s high school graduation; one of Frank, alone, on his cousin Vincenzo’s motorcycle; and the third photo, not Frank at all, but Lucy herself—yes, of course—in her wedding dress. The old woman shook her head. What was the girl trying to pretend with these men of hers? That she had no past? That she was a blank slate? Well, she was fooling herself if she thought her history wasn’t written all over her face.

  Florence sat down on the piano bench, exhausted at ten in the morning. The girl had been good for so long. No drinking, no men; she had stopped her foolish attempt at dating. The old woman had thought, with relief, the girl was finally settling down. But now, it seemed, she was out twice a week—and that wasn’t counting the weekends. She’d have to have another talk with her.

  Why was it so hard for people to get used to their loneliness? Why did they fight it so much? At a certain age, you had to throw in the towel. Not that she wished loneliness upon Lucy; but ha, what else was there? What was the silly girl hoping for? And with the kind of men she dated. Florence wouldn’t give fifty cents for any of them. From the looks of them, they were sure to give the girl a high time and not much more. She thought of the waves again in Dr. Faustini’s magazine. With too much force, she slammed the lid over the piano keys. Who was always opening this? No one even played the stupid thing anymore. She should get rid of it, donate it to people who would appreciate it. These days, she could barely stand to look at the contraption. When she dusted it, she couldn’t get past the feeling that she was dusting a huge black casket shoved up against the wall. An empty casket, no less, just waiting for her to climb inside. Once a month she polished it. Absurd! A woman forced to polish her own coffin, like something out of a fairy tale.

  But she’d loved this piano once. When her father had brought it home, she’d been ecstatic. Her mother had burst into tears: “Ora si vive così bene,” she’d cried, her hands covering her face. “In English,” her father had scolded, and her mother had ventured it slowly, turning to Florence like a nervous schoolchild. “We live so good now?” The girl nodded; it was close enough. When she sat down on the bench, her parents joined her, but no one dared touch a single key. Florence was afraid she might insult this noble creature that had come into her house and whose language she did not yet speak. But after a single lesson, her trembling fingers could make a song—a simple lullaby about a star. And for years then, every Friday, Ms. Bernice Tilling, a beautiful giraffe of a woman with pearl earrings, ducked her head through the front door, carrying a new batch of sheet music. It was an hour of unadulterated bliss. Florence played beautifully, studying for seven years straight—until Pio arrived, and suddenly there seemed to be no time for anything but the idylls and anxieties of romance. Later she tried to encourage Frank to play, but he never cottoned to it. Which was infuriating, because he had so many other ridiculous ambitions. It would have been a lovely thing to see the boy—his feral hands put to good use—playing “
Clair de lune” or “Beautiful Dreamer.” How she’d loved those songs. It would be nice to hear them again, though she knew she could never bear to play them herself. Maybe Edgar, one day, she thought—but then she brushed the thought aside, parsimonious as she had become with her hopes. She closed her already drooping eyes while her fingers sought out the lovely fleur-de-lis carved into the center of the lid. Like a blind woman, she could read her whole life on that raised figure. There was the left petal, there was the right, and now her finger traced the great rising center of the flower—sharp still at the tip, after all these years.

  “No,” the old woman muttered, nodding off, confused. Why did they always leave her alone? She wanted the boy back. It was his birthday, wasn’t it? Where had he gone? And where was that mother of his? Harlot. Leaving a ring on the wood. No, she cried from the depths, her leg suddenly twitching—not in my house!

  * * *

  After Pio died, Florence had gone on exactly one date. Lunch with Dominic Sparra. He’d worked with Pio, a lifetime ago, in the tunnels—another of the craftsmen hired to tile the inside of those huge passageways that allowed drivers to travel safely underwater into the city. They had always frightened Florence, the tunnels, and she would worry every time Pio had to go off to that inhuman place. When, just two years back, she ran into Dominic at the cheese counter at Corrado’s, she felt an immediate affection for him, recalling the danger he’d shared with her husband. And she knew that his wife, Mary, always sickly, had died suddenly of flu, the winter before—the same winter Pio had passed away.