Love Maps Page 13

  “It’s going to be all right,” she says.

  It’s dark. She’s making dinner. The phone rings. It is Samuel. The thief is dead. His name was Francisco Luis McCarton.

  “No,” Philip says. It’s the most forlorn sound she has ever heard.

  He is hunched over, his face hidden. She touches him carefully on the back. His spine quivers. He jabs at the door. He wants her to leave; she refuses. He gasps for air. He is crying, gulping down air, biting off the sounds. It comes as a shock. She has never seen him cry.

  “Get out of here!” he hisses.

  As soon as she is gone, his sobs break free. She sinks down on the other side of the door, clutching her knees, listening.

  *

  She had known it had to be Franco. The moment she saw Maya, she knew, but she had hoped she was wrong. But of course. That’s why Maya had been so interested in the plans for Haupt’s office, its impermeability, the details of the fingerprint sensor. Sarah had gone on and on, answering all her questions, bragging. She had thought that Maya was finally giving Philip his due. She’d even shown her the blueprints.

  She splashes her face at the sink. Her reflection gazes back, pink watery eyes, frizzy hair, skin the color of an old rag. She only met Franco that one time, but she had recalled him over the years. People rarely caused that kind of stir in her, that sense of recognition for someone who you do not know. She had thought that Philip had sensed this, that he was jealous, that that was the reason for the sudden shift in mood. But later, when she’d asked about it, he said no, all kinds of people felt that way about Franco. He was magnetic. You could hardly get mad about it. He’d just been pissed at Maya for gloating so.

  She dries her face. She leans her forehead against the bedroom door. He is quieter now. She opens it a crack. He is sitting on the floor, wrapped up in a blanket.

  “Why did she do this?” he asks, his voice cracking.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Please call Detective Domingo.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t know that we knew each other. He doesn’t know that Maya engineered this whole thing. He doesn’t know that she kicked me the fucking knife.”

  “He does know that she kicked you the knife. It wasn’t a knife, actually. It was a dagger from Haupt’s collection. It had been left in his office. He’d been thinking about using it for a letter opener. Maya and Haupt told him. They said that Franco was strangling you. Wasn’t he?”

  “I want to talk to the police.”

  “Why don’t you talk to Samuel first?”

  She pours Philip a big glass of Scotch and one almost as big for herself. They sit at the kitchen table, a table that Gus made them, a thick slab of wood salvaged from a barn, sturdy knobbed legs, steel fittings taken from a ship. There’s a sofa in the living room that looks out on a lovely view of the Hudson, but this is where they always sit. Other nights they read the paper or do the crossword or plan dinner parties. But tonight they wait for Samuel. Philip sips Scotch, his head swollen, his anger gone for the moment. “Franco taught me how to play basketball. There was a court an hour’s drive from Conningsby’s. It was behind a little school with sagebrush all around. We’d drive out there, listening to Jimi Hendrix on the eight-track. He must have stolen that car.” A tiny smile breaks into his face. “It was a nice car.”

  “Why did you hate him so much?”

  Philip looks at her, as if surprised to find her there. His eyes are bright amidst the mess of his face. “I didn’t.”

  Chapter 13

  Connecticut, October 1997

  She held the canvas to one edge of the table and stretched it by hand. The table wobbled under the pressure. It was a cheap thing with dented aluminum legs and a plastic top, some fifties-era substance that was once shiny and optimistic but was now old, dull, cracked. She stopped stretching. The crease was still there. She’d live with it. She drew a picture of Philip. A crude picture, dull lead on untreated canvas, yet there were his eyes, flickering. It took a month for the bruises to go away. When his face returned it was a narrower, more asymmetrical face than the one it had been. Perhaps it would have been better if he had gone to the precinct and started blabbing to the first police officer he met. He had so disapproved of lying, and to be bound up in the same one as Maya?

  On one of those trips to Texas, Tori had shown her a snapshot: Philip’s hair sun-bleached and shaggy, Franco leaning into him, a crinkly smile aimed at the camera. Sarah had pored over it, fascinated by this vision of Philip, his shirt not all the way buttoned, his eyes shining happily, both him and Franco gorgeous in that way of young men. Philip had been in grad school. He’d visited Conningsby as part of a larger trip. He was on his way to New Mexico to see an architectural commune inspired by the geodesic dome.

  Franco, according to Tori, was one of Conningsby’s projects. A young man with no family, back from the war, in need of a job. Conningsby gave him a shack on his ranch and some mechanical work. The very first day that Philip was there, Franco offered him peyote, and Philip said yes. When Philip had told her that, Sarah hadn’t been able to believe it. Her Philip? But he hadn’t been hers yet. He had been twenty-six, in awe of Franco, who had defused bombs, who had dealt drugs, who treated Conningsby with a nonchalance that Philip couldn’t muster. They found the basketball court behind a one-story whitewashed school. Philip had played basketball, of course. Kids in Indiana play basketball, but he’d never played well, never liked it until Franco took the time to counsel him. The way he told it, Franco changed his fundamental understanding of the game. The two of them would practice for hours in the desert sun. One day, when the temperature stupefied them, they found a shaded trail by the court. It took them to some canyons where they scrambled up old footholds into a cave. There they sat and talked and talked, words pouring out of them, until it was dark and they had no light and stumbled and groped their way home.

  Philip had not known why Franco bothered with him, he felt like an innocent beside him. Then one day they had wrestled by the lip of an old mine, and Franco had kissed him. A sweet kiss. That was the word Philip had used, more than twenty years after, still shaking his head in wonder. A sweet, simple kiss from an unsweet man. Philip had shoved him off. But he couldn’t get that kiss out of his mind. He had planned on telling Conningsby that he needed to go to New Mexico a little earlier, but he stuck around day after day, unable to let it go. Finally, he touched Franco’s belt loop and suggested they return to the basketball court.

  He waited under the hoop for a long time, appalled at himself. He did not know what he intended to do, but he knew he had invited a possibility into his life that he had never imagined, and he was terrified. Franco finally drove up in his white sedan with the eight-track blaring. There was a girl beside him. She stuck her head out the window and waved. She had a tube top with huge tits spilling out. Fine, Philip thought. Franco had taken him at his word. They would play basketball, the girl would watch Franco cream him. Franco didn’t get out of the car though. Philip walked over. Franco sprawled behind the driver’s wheel, smiling, and with his eyes still on Philip he reached over and squeezed the girl’s crotch. “Come on,” she giggled. “Let’s party.” Philip had mimicked the girl’s voice in a way that made Sarah’s skin crawl. He left that very night, without even saying goodbye to Conningsby.

  Franco must have felt it too, whatever it was that bound them. How else to explain the madness of him agreeing to do what he did? Even if everything had gone according to plan, and the only people who discovered him were Maya and Philip, could he have possibly thought Philip would simply chuckle—Dang, old fellow, well done—and they’d all shake hands? Was it pure cockiness? Did he think he could stop him with a smile? He had struck her as intelligent that night at Temple’s. Perhaps he’d had a plan of his own, one he simply could not execute. He had not—could not—have known the fullness of what he was getting into.

  So many times she had imagined Philip straddling him, the metal gripped, and that
pause, that terrible pause when Philip could have stopped. Instead, he had looked at Maya. He had insisted, when Samuel came over, that it was wrong to call it self-defense. It was enraged manslaughter and he did not want to lie about it. Samuel had listened patiently, not outright arguing, only commenting on the slipperiness of memory and the welter of emotions that can spring up and muddle the best of judgments. Philip kept returning to Maya’s eyes, how they had glittered. His tone was uneven, edged with fury, as if he were blaming her not just for kicking the knife but for his own muscular action. Sarah sat at the table, drinking in Samuel’s calm reason, and yet, even as she did so, she had a vision of Maya’s eyes—enormous, honey-colored, urgent—her breasts white and heaving. She could see the two of them staring at each other, the knife going down as if directed by their mutual hatred.

  How the hell was she supposed to explain this to Max?

  *

  There hadn’t been a trial. Philip had been a good husband and a good businessman and did what Samuel told him to do. Sarah did not know what he said or did not say, but he must have lied. Wouldn’t they have asked, as a purely procedural matter, whether he knew the perpetrator? If they had discovered that he or Maya knew Franco, certainly there would have been more of an inquiry. But it was 1989. Stray bullets were flying into kitchen windows, kids were collapsing in their Cheerios. Poor Detective Domingo was exhausted and in need of a rest. Why bother with the death of a known burglar, whose consulting business was proved to be a sham, who was suspected of numerous high-end burglaries and safecracking, who had no friends willing to come to his defense, who had, according to three eyewitnesses, clearly been the aggressor? It was the highest murder year on record, and the detective’s daughter had just dropped out of school and was threatening to hitchhike cross-country to find her mom.

  The day the case was dropped, Philip locked himself in his home office and sharpened pencils in the electric sharpener. Zzzzzzpppppp, zzzzzzzzpppppppp, zzzzzzzzpppppppp. For hours. He came out past dark, holding a wastebasket filled with pink eraser tips and metallic bindings, which he neatly dumped in the middle of the kitchen floor. She’d wanted to hurl them back at him, so pissed she was by that point. Skin contact repulsed him. He would jump even when she just casually brushed past him, shudder if she tried to draw him into anything intimate. It was awful. Night after night, to lie next to a man who shudders at your touch. It wasn’t so bad in the beginning, given the obvious physical hurt he’d suffered, but later, when his bruises faded, when she could see his body as it had been …

  *

  They had, before it happened, been trying to have a child. He had been so eager, drawing up charts about how they could split child care, proving that she’d still have enough time to paint. She had taken out her IUD. For his Christmas present. Almost impossible to believe, the pleasure of returning home from her studio, dreaming up new variations on old things, their warm bed, his mulchy smell, the way he held her. All that, poof. And yet not altogether poof—perhaps that was the worst part. Once he had braved the outside world to buy her a tin of tea from a little coffee-tea-spice shop they used to go to when she still had her apartment in the Village. Indian tea leaves in a tin decorated with a tasseled elephant. “Elephants always remember,” he’d said.

  “Remember what?”

  He’d looked as if she ought to know. “Better times.”

  He’d boiled the water, stuffed the leaves in the tea ball, told her that the man behind the counter was still smoking cigarillos, that his apron was still smudged, that there was a cat still asleep in the corner. “Was the old one white and gray?”

  Sarah couldn’t remember. “All cats are gray in the dark,” she said.

  He smiled. She got a painful lurch in her chest and looked out the window. Rain fell on the fire escape. He came over and they drank the tea and listened to the fat drops falling on windowsills and windowpanes and, down below, the swish of tires on wet pavement. Then he spoke. He said that he knew how difficult he was to live with. He wanted to apologize. He didn’t touch her, but he stood close, agitating the air. She said that she understood, that it was fine. It was patent bullshit. What had gotten into her? Time had broken, and Philip had stood there, talking to her, seeing her—but she’d gotten so used to being seen through. She didn’t grasp it until it was too late. He raised a wavering hand and put it on her shoulder. She clung on to that afterward, the weight of his hand, the place that it had lain on her skin and bone. She could still feel its ghostly presence, so relentlessly she’d clung.

  *

  The 7-Eleven sign glowed through the trees. The woman behind the counter, a water balloon of a lady with thin hair and a blotted complexion, glanced up from a tabloid and nodded in recognition. Sarah hesitated. “I’ll get these,” she said, picking a roll of peppermint Life Savers. “And a pack of Winstons too.”

  The woman pursed her lips. “I thought you quit.”

  “What?”

  “You told me last time not to sell you cigarettes without giving you shit.”

  “That was two years ago.”

  “I’m a mother. Mothers always remember.”

  “That’s elephants. Elephants always remember!” She was shouting.

  The woman tut-tutted then handed her the pack. “Don’t ask for what you don’t want.”

  She smoked the first cigarette in the parking lot. Just stood there, rooted to the ground, inhaling, coughing. What did she want? She wanted to punch him in the nose. No one, before or after, was ever so good to share a bed with. Fucker. She coughed up some phlegm and spat it out, then headed home, the streetlights few and far between.

  Chapter 14

  New York City, 1989

  The phone rings. Sarah inhales, exhales, watches the smoke fork. Buh-ring. Buh-ring. What are you buh-ringing me? Greenpeace? Samuel? Eddie Kiebbler? It won’t be Philip, wondering where she is, dark already and no word. He’ll be relieved to be alone. Buh-ring. She lets it ring. The phone stops. It starts again.

  “Hello?”

  “Can I come over?” Maya asks.

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Downtown. Five minutes away.”

  Even less. Sarah is smoking the same cigarette when the buzzer rings. Maya waits on the sidewalk, her hands in her pockets. She’s wearing a gray suit with a white buttoned shirt underneath, very tailored and British. She spends most of her time in London these days. They face each other, not hugging or kissing, just standing there. They haven’t seen each other in months, taking advantage of their different cities. But they have to, eventually.

  Maya squeezes Sarah’s shoulder. “You look exhausted,” she says.

  “I am.”

  “Are you on a good painting jag?”

  “Nope. Just escaping the apartment. You want to come up? Have some coffee with no milk?”

  “No,” says Maya. “I want to take you out to dinner.”

  They walk. They find themselves in Chinatown. The density of the place bears down on them, the packed sidewalks, the awnings dripping backpacks, Tshirts, pseudo silk pajamas, the peddlers wheeling carts of asparagus, coconuts, grapes, the vendors squatting over blankets of windup dolls and fake jade fountains. Cars honk and drivers curse and fish flop on their beds of ice, and it’s strangely restful. They duck into a Vietnamese place that Sarah likes, fake wood tables, plastic banana trees, and an Asian clientele that pays little attention to them.

  Maya frowns at her menu. “Where have you taken me? No champagne. I want to celebrate your sales. You didn’t tell me how well you did at that show.”

  “A beer will do me fine.”

  The waiter arrives, a Vietnamese kid with a big Adam’s apple and skinny, nervous fingers. “Oh god,” Maya says. “What are we getting? How can one keep making these decisions? I’ve found a place in London that doesn’t have a menu. They prepare a delicious meal every day and you just take what they got. It’s marvelous.”

  “Two mint shrim
p salads and Saigon beer,” says Sarah.

  The waiter bows and leaves. “Do me a favor,” Maya calls after him. “Make sure the beer’s extra cold, and put it in champagne glasses if you can find any.”

  “He doesn’t understand a word you’re saying,” Sarah whispers. But he returns carrying the beer on a tray with two wineglasses and makes a show of pouring it.

  “Very good,” says Maya. “Come have a beer with us when you finish your shift.”

  He blushes. Maya laughs.

  “You’re right,” she says to Sarah when he leaves. “This is a good place, in spite of all this—” She waves around at the menus and plastic trees. “Now, here’s to you—or rather, your love maps.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were the only one who sold anything at the show?”

  “That’s not true. Other people sold stuff, Kiebbler’s pump went to some museum out in Texas.”

  “Yeah, but you sold everything.”

  “Almost everything.” Not Eric’s map, which had been taken down early, rolled up with a bow, and placed in his coffin.

  “BB is furious. I mean, he’s pretending to be the great man of art but he’s seething.” Maya laughs. “Oh god, sweetheart. And you’re getting a solo at the Galley!”

  “I don’t know if the Galley’s really going to happen. It’s a possibility.”

  “You don’t look as pleased as you should.”

  “Do you even have a clue what Philip’s going through?”

  “Forget Philip.” Maya looks annoyed with her for bringing him up. “I don’t want to think about him. You can’t blame me for all his shit. Excuse me. I know you have to think about him. I don’t know how you do it, personally. What are you grinning at?”