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  “Yes, I can talk!” he shouted into the receiver.

  He was sure it was his friend Dale Lewis, calling for a swimming date. It wasn’t. It was one of his mother’s friends, calling to say that Gracie was dead.

  She would have been proud of the way she’d been found, in a chair by the window, a book of poems open on her lap. She was dressed in those painted-up army fatigues and a sweat shirt and high-top sneakers. The sweat shirt was inside out. Bits of dryer lint clung to it. No make-up whatsoever. Fingernails bitten, knuckles slightly chapped, eyes open, hair down. Which troubled Ruby. The friend who had discovered her that morning provided, along with condolences, a detailed description of the corpse. She said his mother’s hair was only halfway braided, loose at the ends. Around her middle finger had been wrapped, like a gaudy ring, an elastic band secured by two translucent blue plastic globes.

  Ruby wondered, Was she braiding her hair or unbraiding it, when she died?

  At the graveside, Ruby shuddered. Ida squeezed his hand. It was late in March; in St. Louis the redbuds were starting to bloom. Glancing at Ida, Ruby saw that her eyes were closed. Her lashes were long, black and fell precisely in the hollow created by the high tilt of her cheekbones.

  Ida was aware, even with her eyes closed, that Ruby was watching her. She ran the tip of her tongue along the edges of her teeth, nearly imperceptibly. She had the smallest teeth imaginable, uncannily lovely, like cultured pearls. Ruby got an erection. He fought the urge to smile. At the minister’s urging, he gathered a fistful of soil and tossed it down into the grave. There was the thwack of wet dirt hitting wood.

  But the sound, Ruby thought, his muddy fingers laced again through Ida’s, was not of finality. More of promise, of goodwill, of things to come. It lingered. It had an echo, like that of two wine glasses meeting briefly over candlelight.

  Ruby removes a book from the shelf in his mother’s library, clasps it by the binding and shakes it so the pages fan apart. Out drops a coupon for Post Grape-Nuts, expired in 1957, when Ruby was six years old. Had his mother fed him Grape-Nuts then? He can’t remember. Closing his eyes, he sees her fumbling with her purse at the check-out counter in Tri-City Market, a line of bored shoppers lengthening behind her. “I could have sworn I had that coupon,” she is saying.

  Maybe it happened, maybe it never did. Of absolute certainty is the fact that she had shopped at Tri-City only so Ruby could stare at the boxes of rabbit meat stacked alongside the TV dinners in the frozen-food aisle. He has not seen rabbit meat since. Had Ida come along on this trip, they might have driven down Vernon Avenue and taken a look. But Ida hadn’t. Ruby drops the Grape-Nuts coupon into a paper bag that is filling quickly with other coupons, clipped recipes, newspaper columns and assorted ancient yellow papers on which the ink has smeared like awkward brush strokes, bluish, purple and red. Here are unused shopping lists, unmailed letters, jotted telephone numbers and calendar appointments, the phone calls never made, the appointments never kept because his mother forgot them, having thrust the notes between the pages of a book and put the book back on its shelf. His mother had left two rooms of books, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, all to be dusted and loaded into boxes, all read just partway through, the bookmarks twirling to the floor at Ruby’s feet. He doesn’t know yet what to do with all these books. He thinks of carting them to Goodwill to be disposed of piecemeal, separated like orphans. He thinks of selling them en masse, but who would buy them? He thinks of burying them in the yard as if they were a pet, or shipping them all home to Williamsburg.

  No solution seems right, but that’s no surprise. Ruby knows he has been sidetracked all day, distracted from his purpose. First he’d glued the tiles in place in the bathroom, but the job only left him wondering what to do next. In fact, the bathroom seemed no nicer than before, only greener and smelling of Liquid Nails.

  “LIQUID NAILS Adhesive creates a permanent bond between most surfaces,” Ruby read on the back of the tube.

  And then he read it again. A permanent bond. Most surfaces. He put his hand to his cheek, stroking upward. In the car at the airport just this morning, where Ida and Ruby had parted, she had put her hand to his cheek and stroked upward until it grazed his ear, and then she took the hand away. That was goodbye. Ruby would be gone for nearly a month, and Ida’s gesture, her cool knuckles traversing the length of his face, seemed at once to communicate the brevity and the horrible duration of that time. After a second she turned wordlessly away and fixed her eyes on the windshield, cupped her fingers around the knob on the gear shift and rested them there. Ruby marveled. His lovely wife. Ida’s body is punctuated with angular juttings of bone: the shoulder blades, the collarbone, the spine in which each vertebra is miraculously apparent, the hips which particularly in summer acquire the precision and transparency of the sails of toy ships. Her limbs are delicate and strong as the limbs of saplings. Her pulse, when he touches her, is as quick as a bird’s. Not long ago Ida enrolled in a dance class, and lately she incorporates a balletic detachment into everything she does. Cracking an egg, for instance. Ruby had never considered that such an act, the tapping of an egg against the rim of a cup, could be so moving.

  Then, climbing from the car to get his luggage from the back, Ruby saw how Ida’s foot inched forward so the toe of her shoe tapped the accelerator, the engine idling beneath it, an impatient, purring sound. He circled the car; the hatch sprang open with an automatic click. He got his luggage, slammed the hatch and watched the car glide off as if he’d pushed it himself.

  Was he surprised? Not really. If he thought of marriage as a series of warming-ups and cooling-offs, and if the easy, temperate plateaus were dotted here and there with angry jagged canyons and brief excited peaks, then this was one of those canyons, or more exactly the fall down into it, a fall broken here and there by ledges and snags so that he felt the change in the atmosphere, the air chilling by degrees as he fell.

  Has he hit bottom this time? There is never any sure way of knowing. Ida is a mystery, full of meaningful shifts in mood and behavior. For days, she seems content to give him all of her attention, then all at once she’ll act as if she doesn’t even see him.

  Ruby always asks, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Nope.”

  But he has learned not to press her. Lately, he feels like someone testing a rare fruit for ripeness; if he is careless and applies too much pressure he might bruise it. On the other hand, if he puts it aside for a day it might ripen, burst and be lost. His marriage has never before seemed so precarious, so vulnerable, so frightfully organic.

  The other night, when he woke, they were lying with their backs to each other. The room was still dark but the sky was purple. The fan was whirring. In his mouth was an aftertaste of the gin and tonics he and Ida had shared before bed. Well, not shared, exactly. He drank his on the hammock in the garden, Ida sat on her spot on the roof, close to the sky. She looked very small. When he lifted his glass, it seemed to encompass her.

  “Cheers,” he had said, but she hadn’t heard him. Now he tasted, on the edges of his tongue, the lime and sour tonic. He sighed, stretched, turned over and placed the flat of his palm against the curve of Ida’s back. Gently, so as not to wake her.

  She jumped so suddenly the impact nearly threw him out of bed. She did not wake up. It was as if she had been shot. She settled back into the same curled-up position in which she had been lying. Her breathing was just audible. He touched her again, experimentally, between the shoulder blades. One arm flew out, hit him hard in the face, and snapped back to her side.

  Nothing like this had ever happened before. Their nights had been calm, warm, measured. Ruby often thought their nighttime lovemaking to be a sort of sun shower in the midst of pleasant weather, an unexpected release of moisture and fragranee that freshened the earth and then vanished.

  He touched her tentatively a third time. Her body shook mightily and subsided. He said, “Ida, are y
ou up?”

  There was no response.

  “Are you dreaming?”

  Nothing.

  “Do you love me?”

  “Of course,” Ida said, sleepily. He kissed the nape of her neck, relieved. She kicked him hard in the belly. This went on. By morning, when the light fell on the two of them, he was wounded, battered and weak. Ida rubbed her eyes, opened them and studied him critically.

  “You look awful. Didn’t you sleep?”

  “Bad dream,” Ruby said.

  “About what?”

  Ruby shrugged. Ida frowned.

  “About your mother,” she guessed. “I can see her in your eyes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can see her,” Ida said. “She’s in there, looking out, right past me.”

  The now empty bookshelves are free of dust, their knotty pine spotted with black spinning whorls. Ruby buttons his shirt; he’s been taking it off and putting it on again all day. How can a person be cold in St. Louis in June? This morning when he first entered the house, its coolness had been welcome. The drive from the airport had sweated him up, and the chilled metal touch of the doorknob when he’d let himself in had refreshed him immediately. But now it’s too much. Emptied of his mother, of her frenetic opening and shutting of doors and windows, the house has acquired the living hiburnal chill of a cave; it seems to breathe him in and out like a vapor.

  He steps over to the window in the front hallway, where a shaft of gaudy light angles down. The house is on Kingsbury Avenue in University City; the street buzzes with a residential, summery, red brick peace. In the center is a grass island with a bench no one sits on, strewn about with tricycles and soccer balls. But there are no children around at this hour, and their absence gives the toys a desolate, abandoned look, like debris left behind by an ice floe. It is six-thirty, dinnertime. Ruby hunts in his pockets for cash. He will have to buy his dinner at the Majik Mart. Just what does a person eat, when he eats alone?

  Outside, he follows the sidewalk to the alley that leads between some houses to Delmar Avenue. He is wearing wading sneakers, the canvas snipped away to expose his toes. There is the noise of traffic, the odor of exhaust fumes, the busy hum of the city. From the open upper window of a brick building floats the tinny scratch of a cheap stereo. Some people gather on a front stoop in silence, eating fried chicken off china plates. Ruby sees the smiling face of Colonel Sanders. Hungrily, he hurries past. At the Majik Mart he selects a can of orange juice, some frankfurters, rolls and a jar of good mustard. The prices are higher than in Williamsburg. It is a neighborhood grocery; in the aisles people chat offhandedly and pocket their lottery stubs. He feels out of place and preppy in his khaki slacks and braided rope belt, but his bare toes help him blend in.

  Across the street from the store is a gas station with a phone booth. He’ll call Ida. He wants to hear her voice. The idea comes to him with a shock, as if the notion of the telephone were new to him. With impatient pleasure he crosses the road, pulling change from his pocket. He slips the coins into the slot and dials, and hears his own phone ringing in his own house, miles and miles away.

  Maybe Ida is having a bath. Or a shower. He likes to watch her in the shower, how the water beads slide down her backside, filmy with soap. And the way she soaps herself up, her deft hands reaching even the trickiest spots.

  He lets the phone ring a long time, and then hangs up and waits a minute and tries again. She is there, on the second ring.

  “It’s me,” says Ruby, grinning.

  “I know,” says Ida.

  “I called a second ago but you didn’t answer.”

  “Yes.”

  “I miss you,” says Ruby.

  There is a pause.

  “I know it.”

  “Say something else,” says Ruby.

  “Something else.”

  “Say you love me,” he says, playing along. He likes the way she jokes with him, over the telephone.

  “You love me,” says Ida.

  “Come on, say it.”

  “It,” says Ida.

  “Come on,” he pleads. In the silence that follows, it dawns on him that Ida is not joking; there is no laughter in her voice or in the rhythm of her breathing, only a vague impatience.

  The operator asks for another quarter. Ruby hesitates, puzzled. He fingers his change. A car honks in the distance as a shadow appears on the parking lot, just like that.

  “Bye,” he says, testing her.

  “Bye,” says Ida. “Have fun.”

  She hangs up.

  Stunned, he replaces the receiver. He does not remove his hand; he can feel the plastic sweating under his fingers. When the telephone rings, he snatches it up, breathless.

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  There is a familiar voice, the voice of the operator. “I said I need another quarter,” she tells him.

  He walks back through the shadows, past the poster shop and the movie theater and the steps where Colonel Sanders, left behind, rolls to and fro on his ear. Pratzel’s bakery — which he’d frequented as an adolescent, late at night, eager for a doughnut hot off the racks and for the brief friendly company of all the other late-night munchers gathered near the sliding wooden side door, waiting for it to open — has been boarded up, its display window painted a streaky white. He takes the long way back, down Delmar past the soul food place with its smells of ribs and greens, to Skinker Boulevard, right on Skinker, then right again, through the tall black iron gates onto Kingsbury Avenue. The evening is still hot and humid and Ruby is exhausted; his open sneakers suck in pebbles like famished whales. He wishes the sun would drop down so he could put himself to bed. He can’t put himself to bed before the sun goes down, like a child. On his mother’s front porch he sits low on the director’s chair and contemplates the scene. A figure passes on the sidewalk on the other side of the grass island. Linell, in her fat, baggy sweats. She doesn’t notice him. She turns up the path to her house, carrying her giant stick inside with her. Ruby doesn’t ask himself why a person might brandish such a weapon on such an evening. It seems a perfectly natural thing.

  2

  “IF, AS YOU SAY,” writes Ida, “there is so little love in the world, how did I get stuck with so much of it? Really Audrey, it’s worse than flowers — I have no place to put it. Would you believe he’s phoned me already from St. Louis? I didn’t want to answer it. I believe I’ve turned him into a maniac. The way he touches me in bed, like a piece of Steuben glass. I don’t deserve this. I think I’ll stop shaving my armpits and shave my head instead. Maybe then he’ll see things a little more clearly. My real hope is he’ll meet someone in St. Louis, nothing big, just enough to broaden his perspective, so to speak. I need a break. Really, Audrey, he loves me too much. Love is a fucking barbiturate, Audrey. Really, I envy you.”

  Ida, considering, crosses that last line out. She shades the words in fully with her pencil; it is not the right thing to say at this moment to Audrey, who at thirty-four will not admit she wants a man to love her. Poor thing; but she’s playing it safe. She lives in Nova Scotia, in the town of Bear River on the Bay of Fundy, alone in a house with a view of the water, out of sight of any eligible man who might reject her. She eats too much. She is Ida’s first cousin. Ida remembers how, when they were girls growing up, she envied the dormancy that was Audrey’s flesh, how, regardless of the changes that occurred within her body, on the outside Audrey remained the same, anonymous as a pillow, and how years later when the changes made their way to the surface, nobody noticed them.

  The Bay of Fundy has the strongest tide in all the world; each day within sight of Audrey’s window seat the water disappears and then comes back. Audrey would like to write poems. Instead she writes letters to Ida, enumerating the debris left behind by the water as it slips from the bare muddy bottom of the river. Beer cans and boat shoes, bicycle wheels, soggy brown coils of rope, like innards. Once, a dead porcupine, its stinking quills matted and dark. Audrey’s letters, over ti
me, are getting loonier.

  “This tide is contagious,” wrote Audrey. “I eat myself silly, and then I throw up. You should see what comes out of me. It’s not human, the way I live. I had to get to the market but the cows were humping again in the driveway. It breaks my heart. I’ve stopped eating beef. Miss Meat and Potatoes starves herself on Raisin Bran and gains two pounds in a week and a half. I’d kill myself but that would be an embarrassment and expensive. They’d have to bury me in a piano box. Imagine the men it would require, to lower me into the earth. Where are they when I need them? What frightens me most is that someday I’ll stop wanting them. It happens. And the fact is, the minute you’re happy with nothing, people pity you. And that’s the last thing I want, your sympathy. I’m just telling you how it is up here, hot and dry. Give my regards to Mr.-I-Love-You. Love and kisses. God knows you’ve got your share, you creep. Audrey.”

  That was the most recent of Audrey’s letters; Ida folded it into the shape of a frog and set it on the dresser along with the others, all frogs, a chorus of grunts and complaints. Why has Audrey stopped writing? Maybe she’s found a lover, maybe she’s lost weight, maybe she’s happy and has run out of things to say. But how can Audrey be happy? If Audrey were happy, she wouldn’t be Audrey. If Audrey were happy, Audrey would be miserable.

  In a way, Ida is envious. Her own disposition, she has been told — Ruby has told her — is as clear, as prepossessing, as crystal. He has compared her to a gem that, when dug out of the earth, requires no polish, no grindstone, to perfect its impossible symmetry. “What he seems to be saying,” Ida wrote to Audrey several months ago, “is that I am utterly without mystery, without complexity. If you’re a hunk of quartz, then I am nothing but a speck of mica on top of it.”

  “I am not a hunk of quartz,” Audrey wrote back.

  The frogs are lopsided, limp in the new summer air. Her own letter Ida folds into an airplane and sails it across the room; it is Ruby’s airplane, a DC-10, the kind that crashed in Chicago, the one whose engine fell off. Boom. It swoops lazily into an arc and nose dives into the Boston fern, which is dying. Ida doesn’t care. Only the air ferns, which subsist happily on nothing at all and which Ida has strung from all the light fixtures in the house, are worth caring about. Spray them with water, they fill the house with oxygen. Ida, in reciprocation, is careful to perform her breathing exercises beneath each one in turn. The simplicity of this relationship, its very necessity, pleases her.