The Hare Read online

  He swept his hand out. “What do you think?”

  She bit her lip. “The light isn’t good in here, though.”

  They went back upstairs — almost colliding with Selena and the coffee. “We’ll have it in the drawing room instead,” Hobie told her.

  “I can take it,” Rosie made an attempt on the tray.

  Selena’s eyes widened and she tightened her grip. “Miss, no —”

  “Really, I can —”

  There was an awkward tug-of-war. Hobie touched Rosie’s waist, “Selena can carry the tray.”

  Triumphant, Selena led the way. She settled the gleaming silver tray on the coffee table and fluffed a few of the cushions before exiting.

  “Don’t mess with Selena,” Hobie mock-whispered.

  “I just wanted to help.”

  “She is the help.”

  “Right.”

  “We pay her well. Don’t feel guilty.” He poured the coffee. Even the cups were exquisite — green and gold dragons frolicked on a pale orange background. There was a side plate of delicate ginger biscuits. Homemade. The silver tray was covered with a starched white cloth. How did it get so white, so clean, Rosie wondered.

  “You’re very wealthy,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can have anything you want.”

  “Not true.”

  She waited for him to glance at her and say, I can’t have you. Instead he said: “People like me can buy anything without thinking about what we might really want. Let alone need. And then we just end up feeling deeply unsatisfied but with lots of stuff.”

  “Why did you buy the painting?”

  “I didn’t know. I was just drawn to it. And then you said what you did about the couple being imprisoned, and I understood my attraction.”

  “Are you imprisoned?”

  Hobie regarded her. “I can’t tell if you’re fearless or naïve. I suppose, being young, you are both.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I have bad manners.”

  “Did Bennett tell you that?”

  “My grandmother.”

  “I’m suspicious of manners,” Hobie went on. “Especially good ones.”

  “But you have good manners.”

  “Exactly.”

  Without warning nausea welled up Rosie’s throat, and she stood, needing immediate escape. She banged the tray with her knee and the coffee clattered and spilled. “I’m so sorry —” The coffee was dripping from her onto the plush cream carpet. She pulled off Bennett’s shirt.

  “No, leave it —”

  But she kept dabbing at the coffee with the hem of the shirt, apologizing, “Sorry, sorry, sorry, oh —”

  “Selena will —”

  At last he grabbed her hand. “Leave it!”

  Was he going to kiss her? Were they about to become lovers?

  But he let her go. Abruptly, he said: “What do you know about Bennett?”

  Rosie felt the wet dark stain of the coffee on her thigh. Having charted this course, Hobie was bound to continue, and Rosie sensed this was why he’d brought her here and not because of the painting at all, not because of the job at Sotheby’s.

  Hobie sighed as he spoke, “He’s troubled, you know.”

  What did that mean? Troubled. Like a boy who hurts cats.

  “We help him. Well, Mitzi, really. It’s her sense of loyalty. She’s very loyal.”

  The coffee stain seemed to come from inside Rosie, as if she was leaking this dark fluid, staining the sofa. What would Mitzi say when she saw the mess?

  “But there’s only so much we can do.”

  Rosie thought of Bennett with his head in her lap, weeping about his dead mother. She loved him, and she wanted to heal him.

  Hobie was speaking, she tried to listen. After all, he’d invited her here so that he could speak to her, at her. So that he could say things like: “I don’t know who you think he is, though I can see he might be attractive to someone like you.” And: “The family has cut him off. Though it would be indiscreet of me to say more.” And: “Please take this in the spirit of my concern, you’re very young, very inexperienced. You should ask yourself why he isn’t married and why he isn’t married to someone of his own age and background, or at least dating —”

  “I’m pregnant,” she said because it was the only thing she had in her head to make him stop.

  Hobie was quiet for a moment, considering. His voice was surprisingly gentle. “Do you want to be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you told him?”

  She shook her head, bewildered, suddenly, as to why she’d confessed to this man.

  Hobie said: “Go back to school, Rosie. Figure yourself out. You’ll have other chances with a far better man.”

  She heard herself sob, and then sniffle.

  They sat for a moment. At last, he picked up the thread. “I just wanted to warn you.”

  “Warn me?”

  “He’s just —” Hobie searched the ceiling. But within the filigree plaster was neither the word nor a speck of dust.

  “I love him.”

  “You love him. Oh dear. You’re like a peasant girl in a 19th century novel. He’s a rake. He’ll ruin you.”

  “Isn’t he your friend?”

  “Mitzi and his mother were great pals at Groton, you see.”

  She did not see. What was Groton? Groton, fish forks, shoe horns. Hunters. Hunters were a type of horse that you rode with hounds. Shooting was not hunting even though you shot animals, birds and killed them. Hunting was something rich Texans who owned car dealerships did. Rosie regarded the van Eyck now, the pompous man, the precocious young woman, perhaps younger than her. Fastened into her winter clothing, fastened into her life with all the windows shut, she had not yet realized her predicament. But the artist had: the dead hare in the maid’s hands.

  “Do you need money?”

  “For what?”

  “To get rid of the baby.”

  “And how would that look if I took your money for an abortion?”

  “No one is looking.”

  Hobie was holding his money clip. Because the very wealthy don’t have wallets, they have crisp-as-fresh-lettuce cash or accounts or chits.

  Rosie walked from the boathouse toward Southport train station where she could get a taxi. She hoped to assume the casual air of someone out strolling. The road along Sasco Hill was lined with huge maples and high walls. It was poorly paved, rutted with potholes, belying the wealth on either side. The road also cut cleanly between two types of money, for the WASPy wealth occupied the sea-side and the aspirational rich the land-side. Their houses were just as large — perhaps larger; but the sea was the premium status: the inherited money, the old money. Here lived the Daughters of the American Revolution, Bennett had explained, the debutantes, the members of the Pequot Yacht Club and the Country Club of Fairfield who knew the difference between Fishers Island and Block Island, Aspen and Vail, Palm Beach and West Palm Beach. On the other side: those who thought a scull was a Halloween decoration.

  Cars drove past. Mercedes, BMWs, Jaguars did not stop. She didn’t mind, the walking felt surprisingly good, the striding. There were squirrels in the trees, they chided her, and unknown birds. Who might know their names? She could smell the sea and fresh-cut grass, for the wealthy kept their lawns meticulously mown. A trickle of sweat worked its way down her spine as her leg muscles lengthened and contracted. She was even a little out of breath when she came to the bridge that crossed the Mill River. Beyond, the road tilted uphill and inland, past ornate Victorian homes on small, carefully tended plots. This was still pricey real estate, yet Rosie wondered at the panoply of money, the way the rich — and the wealthy — must self-order. Like files in a cabinet. Where did Bennett fit in? He always told her not to worry about money, he seemed not to worry about it himself. Yet his family had cut him
off.

  A tradesman’s truck honked twice, whether the honker intended to flatter or to warn her out of the way, she couldn’t know. The road went downhill only a short distance to the station. In five minutes she was there, knocking on the window of a cab. The driver didn’t want to go to Bridgeport.

  “Please,” she said.

  “You gonna tip?”

  He grumbled most of the way there, a diatribe against black people and Puerto Ricans. Rosie knew she should tell him she didn’t agree, but she was afraid he’d stop and make her get out.

  The clinic was a low-slung building in a neighborhood turning sour. “Can you wait for me?” she asked the driver.

  “Sure. But you gotta pay me now.”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be.

  “Honey, you know how many times I sit waiting for a fare and they never come back?”

  She thrust a hundred at him.

  Inside, behind the bullet-proof glass and the bullet-proof steel doors, a dozen women were sitting on hard mustard-colored chairs, focusing on the tattered back copies of Good Housekeeping and Time as if these contained stories of deep interest. Rosie had thought it would be mostly young women like her who didn’t want to mess up their lives with a baby. But there were older women, too; one had a child with her, a boy who incessantly banged his toy car on the floor.

  No one looked up, the women seeking invisibility, for even here, among strangers in a similar situation, Rosie felt their weary shame. The fault was theirs — as it was hers: the missed pill, the slippery diaphragm, the sexual abandon. The consequence was absolute, a hard, singular fact in a foamy, relative world. You’re either pregnant or not pregnant, Rosie thought as she sat.

  Had any of these women been raped? Rosie didn’t see any obvious signs, black eyes or bruises. Katya and May went to protests, STOP VIOLENCE AGAINST WIMIN. They’d stuck fliers under her door that said “No, means NO.” And in smaller print: “My body, my consent. YES, PLEASE. Otherwise, it’s rape, asshole.” Was it, though? Wasn’t it something else — some other word, like the co-pilot taking over the plane? A kind of duty?

  One by one, women were called, meekly following a nurse through a door. Nothing could be heard, though Rosie imagined machines sucking and sucking, vacuuming out women’s wombs. She wondered where the contents went, the waste. Down the sink? Into a special vat? Ten minutes passed and the boy began driving his car into Rosie’s foot. His mother grabbed him roughly by the shoulder. “Quit it, Michael.”

  “It’s OK,” Rosie said. Their voices were loud in the quiet room.

  The boy didn’t quit, he moved the car up her leg.

  “Can you imagine bringing a child somewhere like this?” The woman sighed, pulling him back. “It’s the only time I can get here.”

  With dark, solemn eyes, Michael looked up at Rosie and began licking his car, extravagantly rolling the wheels against his tongue. The other women were glancing furtively over their magazines. Suddenly, the woman gathered up her boy and her giant handbag and hurried to the door. The handbag slipped off her shoulder, almost causing her to lose her balance. With one hand on her child and the other hand dragging the bag, she crabbed around the reinforced steel door.

  For a moment, Rosie sat. Her turn was coming up. Like the line in Baskin-Robbins on a summer day. Only she was going to get an abortion. An abortion. Then she’d go back to New York, she’d finish her degree, she’d learn what it meant to be an artist and it would be the beginning of her true journey, Ida Shultz would be her mentor, she and Ida having coffee, painting together, and this summer would fold up behind her, as others had done, those with Chris, those of her childhood — the still, hot, untended days she’d waited it out in Gran’s house. There would be another man, as Hobie had promised, another lover, even lovers like weeks or seasons, and one or two in Paris, in Venice, on wide beds with white sheets and rain outside, the smell of gesso and turpentine, a tray of coffee, a bottle of wine.

  “Rosemary Monroe,” the nurse said.

  Rosie stood, she hovered between the seconds, between the skin of time, and then she turned and ran out the door.

  Outside, the taxi was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps this was a sign, she wanted a sign, to help her turn back into the clinic, to the art, the lovers in Venice, the marvelous beginning of her life. Then she saw the woman — Michael’s mother — shoveling him and her handbag into a rusty Ford Fairmont. The recalcitrant bag caught on the side mirror, disgorging various items onto the pavement — a wand of mascara Rosie knew was a cheap brand, scraps of papers, keys, a hair brush, a packet of cigarettes, a packet of gum. The woman scrambled to collect them, and now the child was crying, pulling at the seatbelt. Should she offer to help? Yet Rosie refrained, she sensed a despair she couldn’t fathom or counter; she wanted to run away from it, appalled, it wasn’t what she wanted — which was a wise, calm, knowing friend, perhaps Ida Shultz and not the way the woman was shouting at the child, “Shut up, shut up! God’s sake!” and now the car wouldn’t start, the woman kept turning the motor over and over, rurrrrr, rrruuuurrrr, and the abortion she’d decided not to have, or maybe wanted to but now couldn’t and there’d be another child to be shouted at or was she just going to get someone to take care of the child and come back? There was a smell to this, the way Gran’s washing machine smelled, the stagnant-pond, wet-dog lint that got caught somewhere inside. She’d always thought of it as the damp debris of the lodgers. It had been Rosie’s job to wash their sheets once a week.

  The woman leaned her head against the steering wheel, the boy screaming behind her, his fury at the injustice of the seat-belt. Rosie saw the mascara on the ground, near the wheel. She ran, picked it up, knocked on the car window. “It’s yours,” she said.

  Perhaps she’d expected crying, the woman’s face wet with tears, maybe even relief that she’d decided to keep her baby. Or simply gratitude for Rosie’s kindness with the mascara. But the woman merely turned her head, her eyes dry, the whites redveined, Rosie could see, and the smears of dark beneath them. “What?”

  “Your mascara.”

  The woman’s hand came out, took it. Now, they’d be able to share the bittersweet choice they were making. A sense of kinship rose in Rosie like dough. This woman would help her, they’d help each other. Rosie could see inside the car, the mess on the floor, on the seats, an odor of sour milk, of rotting apples. Now, they’d go and get a coffee.

  “Thanks,” the woman said.

  “Your car,” Rosie noted.

  “What about it?”

  “Can I help?”

  “You a mechanic?”

  Obviously not. The child’s screaming reaching a pitch, so Rosie had to raise her voice. “I have some money.”

  “What?”

  Louder: “I have some money.”

  Rosie saw the boy kick the back of his mother’s seat, a determined thump-thump, and she turned and slapped his thigh. “Knock it off, Mother of God, I can’t take it!”

  “Here.” Rosie suddenly thrust the rest of Hobie’s money at her. The woman looked around, searching for the trick, the joke. “You think I’m selling?”

  “I just want you to have it.” Rosie smiled.

  The woman seemed uncomprehending. Then she gazed at the money with a hungry, animal stare. The notes were clean, green, peeled off a brick of notes, a brick among other bricks in a vast shining vault of money — clean rich-people money, not coins, not wrinkled by time or softened from being left in a pocket in the wash. A moment’s hesitation, and then she grabbed it.

  “Would you like to get a cup of coffee?” Rosie suggested with a smile.

  The woman frowned. “What?”

  Rosie realized she couldn’t even offer to buy one, she’d just given all the money she had. At that moment, the Fairmont’s engine finally caught, it jerked backward, the woman hauled the wheel around, then the vehicle lurched forward, exhaust billowing from the tail pipe, and out of the parking lot with gathering speed, the magnetic pull of a future that di
d not contain Rosie or her pity or her confusion.

  The pity felt remarkably good. Pity made the pitier powerful. But then Rosie thought: What if she uses the money to buy drugs?

  Briefly, Rosie saw herself from an objective perspective, as a passerby might: a girl, alone, in the parking lot of an abortion clinic on a summer morning. She felt bereft for herself, to undertake this sad pilgrimage alone, to err so wildly in her attempt at connection, and now to have found herself without a choice to make, having given all her money away. What had possessed her to pursue a fantasy that coffee with a stranger might help her decide whether to have an abortion? Her thinking was like a scribble by a child: it started at one point then went scribble scribble sribble scratch scratch scribble loopy loop and then stopped. She was penniless, she hadn’t had an abortion, and she was a dozen miles from Sasco Hill. What a fool.

  She began to walk.

  Her right heel blistered. At first, she tried to walk with her toes pressed hard against the toe of the shoe, but this made her shuffle. So she folded down the back of the espadrille, which was better, though now the shoe flip-flopped and would soon be ruined. Few people remarked as she passed through the broken neighborhood. It was like sections of Lowell she’d always avoided, flat and low, boarded up, weedy.

  “Where you goin’, honey?” A guy yelled. He was drinking beer at this time of day.

  “You lost?” An old woman with a shopping bag demanded.

  Kiss kiss whistle whistle commented some men on a road crew filling in potholes. She didn’t want to smile, but she did, she felt the trap, the thrill of their flattery because she had a vagina and breasts and wasn’t 72 years old. She saw pigeons eating an old bit of fried chicken, and considered their cannibalism. They couldn’t know what the piece had been as a whole, or even that it was part of a whole. Which was true of many things in life, you saw the piece and did not understand the greater context, the entire chicken. You could not, because you lacked information, you lacked perspective.