The Paper Palace(61)

1989. February, London.


I stumble to the ground, drooling a mouthful of blood onto the sidewalk.

“I’ve had enough out of you, stupid twat,” the man says.

I take Jonas’s ring off my finger and am handing it over when someone steps out of the shadows behind him.

“Hey. Stop that.”

“Fuck off, ya cunt,” Pig Face says, and then collapses to the ground in front of me.

A man stands over him looking slightly shocked. He is holding a tire iron in his hand. “I had it in the boot,” he says, nodding toward a banged-up Rover parked behind him. He’s tall and rangy, late twenties maybe, wearing a moth-eaten corduroy jacket and a thin woolen scarf on a freezing February night. Brits always insist on acting as if weather doesn’t exist. It starts pouring rain and they just turn their collars up. I notice, as I get to my feet, that his brown leather brogues look custom made.

“We might want to fuck off out of here,” he says. “He’ll be a bit cross when he comes to. Can I walk you somewhere?”

“Shouldn’t we call the cops?”

“Ah.” He smiles. “American. That would explain the stupidity of wandering London streets alone at night.”

I still haven’t quite gotten my breath back, but I manage to spit, “Maybe I’m safer here with him.”

“Right, then. As you like.” He fishes a pack of Rothmans out of his jacket pocket, lights up, drops the tire iron back in his trunk, and slams it shut. “Sure you don’t want a lift somewhere? Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He pulls a parking ticket off his windscreen.

Pig Face is still unconscious at my feet, but now he moans. I watch, fascinated, as a thin stream of white breath, like cigarette smoke, exhales from his slack mouth. I am tempted to kick him.

“Are you an axe murderer?”

He laughs. “Yes, but not tonight. Too cold.”

“Actually, a lift would be great.”

“Peter.” He holds out his hand.





1983. August, Memphis, Tennessee.


The funeral is in Memphis. My mother meets Leo’s ex-wife for the first time in the shade of an old magnolia, beside an open grave. I watch droplets of sweat run down the priest’s neck into his stiff white collar. Leo plays out taps on his saxophone as Conrad’s coffin is lowered into the moist soil. Halfway through, his breath falters. The saxaphone echoes a ragged sob. My eyes are dry. I know I should cry. I want to, but I can’t. I have no right. The ex-wife looks at me with hatred, and I’m certain she knows. She is wearing nude hose and little pinched-toe pumps. She holds pop-eyed, pasty Rosemary tight against her thin black cotton dress. Rosemary smiles at me and gives a little wave, as if she’s just spotted me across the bleachers at a basketball game. Her mother’s knees buckle. Rosemary steadies her, looks away.

Afterward, Leo takes me, Mum, and Anna for a quick lunch at a Chinese restaurant, where every dish is full of hearts of palm and none of us speaks. At three o’clock we drop him at his old house for the reception. It is slightly dilapidated—white clapboard with a covered porch held up by big columns. Corinthian, Leo tells us, distracted. They seem too fancy for the house, too hopeful, and it makes me sad. In the front yard are two crepe myrtles, the ground below them carpeted with flowers that have dropped off and turned into bits of colored paper. Next to the front door is an umbrella stand shaped like an alligator with its mouth wide open. I can’t imagine Leo ever living here.

Mum gives Leo’s hand a squeeze. “Sure you don’t want me to come in with you?”

“Best not. I need time with them.”

Mum nods. “When should I collect you?”

“I’ll take a cab back to the motel,” he says.

We sit in the rental car and watch him disappear into the sagging wooden house. Inside, I can hear a floor fan whirring. Someone is sobbing.

We are almost back at the motel when Mum pulls off the highway into a strip mall.

“I need to make a pit stop.” She hands me and Anna five dollars each. “Treat yourselves.” She disappears into the pharmacy.

“What the hell are we supposed to do with ten dollars in a Memphis strip mall?” Anna says.

“Ice cream?”

“The last thing I need is more calories. I’d rather die.”

“Nice,” I say.

“What?” she says. “You want to be fat?”

“‘I’d rather die’?”

She looks at me blankly.

“Very sensitive,” I say.

“Oh. Right. Crap.” For a second her face freezes. Then she starts to laugh. Suddenly I’m laughing, too, a high-pitched hysteria, so hard that, at last, tears stream down my face.

“Girls?” Mum walks up to us. She’s carrying a small white paper bag from Fred’s Pharmacy. Her beautiful face looks tired, worn thin. “Care to share the joke? I could use a good laugh.”

“It must have been the week before Conrad died,” I hear my mother talking on the phone in her bedroom. “We haven’t made love since.”

We’ve been back in New York for a few days. The city is sticky. The banana-vomit smell of rotting garbage rises from the streets. No matter what we do, we end up with big sweat marks in the armpits of our shirts. Air conditioners drip rancid water onto the sidewalks below. Our apartment is sweltering and close with dust and mothballs and the sweet odor of cockroaches in the walls. Everyone hates being here, but Leo can’t go back to the woods. He blames himself for the accident: he’s the one who insisted we go sailing that day. He pushed the boat out even though the waves were too rough. At night his thoughts, his blame, spiral outward. He stomps back and forth in the living room, scotch in hand, ranting at my mother, a broken record of what-ifs, looking for answers he can’t find. Why didn’t I make him wear a life jacket? Why was the life preserver tied with a double knot? How could no one have noticed? Did Conrad see the wave that took him? Did he know?