Leaving Lucy Pear(11)

This was the new trouble in her life. This was what she had known the first night she woke to the milky arc of Story’s headlights sweeping the walls of her house: she was susceptible. For as long as Emma could remember, she had been the opposite, anchored and hard. Her earliest memories were of infants crying, of holding, changing, feeding them. She prided herself on her steadiness, her lack of surprise no matter what occurred. There was the filthy South End, there was Roland, there was Gloucester, there was the little drafty house in the woods whose chimney liked to catch on fire, there were Emma’s hands always figuring out what to do. The children were never planned but neither were they unexpected; even Lucy Pear, of whom Emma had had no warning, had not come as a shock. She fed them all, clothed them, washed their messes, didn’t blink at their cries, watched her oldest two go off and fall for a little bit of attention, an adventure. Juliet was married to a successful cabinetmaker now. Peter was up in Canada. And through it all Roland had been gone more than he’d been home and Emma had never, not once, felt lust when she looked at another man, or complained about Roland’s comings and goings, or allowed the children to speak of missing him, or warned the older boys off becoming fishermen themselves. It was as if she’d believed, if she held the world at a constant distance, that it would hold her back, if not close then at least upright and unscathed.

She had ignored his flirtations in his office, resisted answering his eyes the afternoon he came to the house bearing the wad of cash and the necklace, but then she had woken to those lights. Lost motorist was her first thought, because automobiles so seldom drove that far up the road and because it went by twice before settling into an idle. Then she rose to her knees and recognized the whitewalls of the Duesenberg’s six tires.

His being there was so bold—so stupid, Roland would say—that she found herself smiling. What made him so certain he’d wake her and not the children? What made him think she wouldn’t shoot him, let alone that she’d be willing to get in his car? She was unaccustomed to such optimism. Yet it shone on her and made her feel supple, and as though she had no choice but to go out and meet it.

She crept out the back door. Her rope cut, just like that.

Massage it into your hands.

Roland would call Story’s way of talking fancy, like the bottle, but Emma heard it wasn’t simply that; she heard the effort it took him to push certain words around his mouth. Off-gone, he’d said, drawing the heavenly blanket over her, and she could feel him go hot at the exotic syllables. They lay under it now, their sweat cooling, the bathhouse flickering whitely around them. Four nights and still she knew almost nothing about the man, apart from what anyone could easily know. He ran the quarry but didn’t own it. He had a wife and a house that looked large enough for four, maybe five bedrooms, but no children. She assumed a sorrow in him. But anyone could do that.

“Are you sleeping?” he asked.

“No.” She touched the back of the hand that rested on her stomach. It was hairless, and soft, everything that Roland’s was not. She wasn’t certain that she felt a great desire for these hands, but they fascinated her, and they touched her as though she fascinated them.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t fall asleep.”

“I’m not worried.”

A scurrying beyond the door made them sit up. The sound stopped, then began again on the roof, louder, before resolving into the pattern of a chipmunk or squirrel. They lay back down, Emma’s head on his chest, which was nearly as hairless as his hands. A sudden vertigo washed through her, guilt and revulsion entwined. She sat up.

“Your wife must sleep well, for you not to worry,” she said.

“Very well, yes. It was part of her education, when she was small. She and her brothers would roam all over with their father—this was for timber, and then the railroad—staying in hotels or strangers’ houses, she and her brothers sharing beds, and she would find a way to sleep, no matter what. Sometimes, she says, they would be directly over a depot, where the men repaired the engines all night, clanking and banging. One time she slept through the whistle of a night train they were meant to board, and her brothers carried her between them onto the train, set her down on her bunk, watched her sleep through the night all the way to Omaha, then carried her to the house of their father’s friend, where she slept right through the rooster’s crow in the morning.” He paused. “She tells it better than me. Susannah’s a very good storyteller.”

“You tell it fine,” Emma said. He loved his wife, she thought, but not in the way he should have—not in the way that would have made him ashamed to go on about her to Emma in such bland, friendly detail. Last time he had told her about Susannah’s childhood pets, and the time before that about Susannah’s love of the stars and her skills with a telescope, and the time before that—the first time—about Susannah’s remarkable strength as a swimmer. Somehow the more sweet things Story told her about Susannah, the more unreal she became to Emma. She was a tale of a wife, a character.

Emma let herself touch his hair. It was as soft and thick as felt. She hooked one of his curls, then watched it spring back.

Story stopped her hand. “Do you think my hair needs cutting?”

Emma waited, thinking the question must be a joke. But Story didn’t laugh—against her ear, beneath the skin and bones of his chest, his heart sent up its steady effort. She considered him. His hair was different, certainly, from the rest of him. It flopped in his eyes, crept down his neck, ferned out across his ears so they showed through only occasionally, like buried treasure. Emma liked the overall effect. She thought the moppish wilds of his hair suited his broad brow and strong jaw, kept things in proportion. And maybe it was also true that all this hairiness made up in some way for his hairlessness elsewhere, and for this pristine, white cave of a room, for everything about the current situation that reminded her how far she was from home. Emma’s father and uncles had all been hairy. She cut her children’s hair so infrequently that the boys wound up looking like girls—they had to put the scissors into her hands, remind her. And when Roland returned from his trips looking and smelling like a woolly mammoth, when other women would have shaved and scrubbed and scolded, Emma wanted him more frankly at those times than at any other.