The Hare Page 7

  By noon, she’d reached I-95, and she was wild with heat and thirst. But there was nowhere to get water — not a store, not a restaurant, only houses, many boarded up, as was the only gas station. She remembered Chip and the ice water, how the droplets of condensation shimmied down the outside of the glass, and the cold metallic tang of the water on her tongue. Her toes had been rubbing for some time, and she realized the gooey sweat she was feeling in the shoe was, in fact, blood. She considered walking barefoot, but the sidewalk was littered with splodges of gum, bits of glass, coils of dog shit. Occasionally, there were needles and syringes.

  The air clung to her, a tight plastic wrap of sooty-sludge.

  In the lee of the roaring interstate, she turned onto Fairfield Avenue. She assumed this was the most direct route, as she couldn’t take I-95 itself. The pain in her foot did not diminish, but she realized she could go for long periods without attending to it, so she focused on what techniques she’d use to render her surroundings in paint or charcoal or pastel, and she wondered why no one painted such shabby, lonely places. In photographs, they appeared crafted — line, shadow, mood, narrative. Hopper’s paintings were gentrifications. Art couldn’t help but glorify, art was a singular trajectory from the glory of religion to the glory of the self. Although Ida had said art needs to be about something other than the self — it paradoxically required an enormous ego and self-interest to imagine and execute provocative work. Even Ida’s bloody, muscular canvases glorified the struggle of men and meat and blood in the Tribeca warehouses — sanctified it, for as Rosie really considered the life of those men, and the death of the animals, they were without glory, they were mired in dirt and excrement and offal, the terrified animals skidding in their own blood. The grubbiness of the reality was absent from the art. And if art reflected society’s values, then society did not value the banal side-streets of Bridgeport, CT, or Lowell, MA. These storyless, unlovely wastes existed only as a map, out the window of a speeding car, or from above, the plane flying elsewhere, fast. Art was a product for the wealthy — only they could afford it — and it reaffirmed their view of the world. They did not ever see the scuffed, the soiled, the stinky, the dull, and so it did not exist for them.

  She thought about Bennett defacing his parents’ Picasso. It was like the ducks on his tie: he was defiant; and that’s what made Hobie uneasy — a sense that Bennett was pretending to be inside, but was in fact, outside, giving the finger. Rosie wondered if she was part of Bennett’s provocation. Had he chosen her because she wasn’t what they all expected? And did this mean that she merely represented something to him — she was a kind of prop? She remembered she’d already had this idea of a play, and she now reflected on how a play depended on the intensity of the acting, which was actually lying, lying sprouting from the heart so it sounded like truth and felt like truth, and everyone was fooled despite the cardboard set and the velvet curtain.

  Fairfield Avenue melded with the Post Road, and Rosie paused in the shade of a hardware store. Her foot throbbed, her head throbbed. She might have a miscarriage from the walking and the heat and what that would be like, warm, lumpy blood and relief that the decision had been made for her. For a few minutes, she watched customers coming in and out of the store, mostly men in work clothes. They didn’t seem to notice her, intent on pine cabinets and plumbing. They had pencils tucked behind their ears. Their sense of purpose amplified her lack of it, and she felt again her vagueness and transparency. Hobie had said, a girl like you and she’d assumed he meant poor but perhaps he meant insubstantial. He hadn’t flirted with her, he’d summoned her and dismissed her, like a disappointing employee. The money was nothing to him — bits of paper to him, and yet it was life or death for the unborn child within her. It was her entire future.

  She could phone Ida. It would have to be a collect call, and how would that go? Would Ida be excited and tell her to keep the baby, and come to live with her in New York, she’d be a grumpy but loving godmother and the baby would play on the floor as Rosie and Ida painted? No. Ida would wonder why a student, one of hundreds, was asking for advice on getting an abortion.

  Rosie thus continued on, miles in the Saharan heat, then she turned onto Station Street, down Rose Hill, carried on to the bridge over the river, and up Sasco Hill. Despite the low light of evening, the heat stubbornly remained. Her shoulders sagged, she could not affect an effortless stroll. She trudged. She felt dizzy and unsteady and sticky with sweat. She looked at the golden sea and thought of Bruegel’s Icarus and the relentless forward motion of life. With every second, the summer was closer to being over.

  Reaching the country club, she decided to take a short cut, past the clubhouse, along the shore. As she turned down the club’s drive, she saw a dead squirrel, its lower body completely flattened, but the upper portion and the head intact. The death had just happened, for the blood was bright, and the squirrel still retained a look of surprise. Maybe she’d even seen it here alive in the morning. Rosie hurried past. But then she stopped. She turned and bent down. The perfection of the animal, she noted, the clean fur, the eager eyes and nimble hands, and then the exploded pink sachet of its stomach, the mutilated spine and legs: the absolute fact of what a car does to a body. The frailty of skin and bone and form. Rosie thought about the carpet on the road, the night now months ago. Tart bile rose in her throat.

  The driveway descended, parting the cartoon-shaped greens, and slithered toward the white clubhouse and the glittering gold sea. She began to run, either away from the dead squirrel or toward the boathouse, or both. Her breasts bounced painfully, she hadn’t worn a bra and they were bigger with the pregnancy, and her right shoe came off. She veered from the tarmac, onto the links, directly toward the boathouse. She was stumbling. Her eyes were open, though her vision was hazy, the dark grass, the yellow sea, and she was in the car with Bennett all over again, her memory had not reshaped the object in the road, the motion of the car had not altered. Bennett had run over a man. Maybe a woman. Maybe already dead, maybe, maybe, maybe drunk, a tramp, a lost child, a woman, and Bennett had not stopped and she had not insisted. She’d listened to “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” she had sipped wine, rolled a joint, she’d wished there really had been a party with Mick and Keith.

  Golfers watched her as she ran. She heard vague shouts, protests, she kept running. She had to call the police and explain, they would understand, she was very sorry, it was an accident, an oversight, a dark road, an easy mistake to make.

  Tripping into a bunker, she collapsed in the sand. She was filled with wishing; wishing like a runner needing breath at the last mile, wishing so hard, so-so-so hard her guts hurt, wishing that it wasn’t true, praying — even, praying to either no God at all or a God who certainly wouldn’t be sympathetic, praying that it hadn’t happened, hadn’t happened surely, surely had not happened, not the carpet, not the baby. This wasn’t supposed to be life, not what she’d fled Lowell for, not how it was for the lesbians who were probably at a party on Fire Island or rehearsing their new performance. Rosie gritted her teeth and sucked in, wishing somehow time would scroll back, she dreamed, imagined, deluded.

  Maybe a really bad person had been in the road, a wife beater, a child molester. Maybe someone already dead. Maybe —

  “Hey, are you OK?”

  A man in an outfit of circus colors stood above her, golf clubs slung across his shoulder.

  “Do you need help?”

  She could tell him right now, she could say, “Call the police. I’ve killed a man.” She would be brave. Not pusillanimous.

  The golfer extended his hand. Another man was behind him. Rosie thought she heard him say, “Is she on drugs?”

  Rosie stood of her own accord, sand fell off her, she could feel the grains rubbing into the blisters on her toes and her heel, and she was glad of the gritty pain.

  “This is private property,” the clowny one told her.

  The other said something about calling the police, and Rosie almost lau
ghed, or perhaps she did because the two men stepped back as she rose up. They were unsure, she wasn’t what they expected out here golfing on a summer evening. Yet she rose, Rosie-rose, a shabby Botticelli’s Venus, she shook loose the sand, shook loose her long, sweaty, clumpy hair, and she stumbled away from them. They snickered in her wake.

  It was dark by the time she reached the boathouse. The lights were on, the French doors open, she could hear the rambling notes of Miles Davis, the meaning remained incoherent to her, irritating to be honest, but Bennett loved it. “Listen, listen!” he would demand. “The complexity! The cohesion! The beauty!” Up the stairs she staggered, her throat was dry, and she felt the sting of sunburn on her shoulders and face. Through the glass of the door, she saw Bennett inside, reading a thick book, drinking wine.

  Hearing her, he turned, assessed. “Rosie, Jesus Christ —”

  “I want,” she said. “I want to talk about that night in the road.”

  “What night?”

  “You know, you know. When we went out to that place in Meriden. And on the way back —”

  “Meriden?” As if he’d never heard of the place.

  She persevered: “On the way back you ran over something in the road. She caught his eye. “What was it?”

  Then his focus shifted. “Are you OK? What’s happened?” He put out his hand, a gesture of concern. But, also, she knew, of obfuscation. She pushed him away. He said, “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “We must go to the police. It will be all right.”

  “The police?”

  “We’ll say we thought it was a carpet.”

  “Rosie, you’re not OK. Look at you —”

  “Stop it!” she heard herself shout. “I was there and you were there, and we ran over something in the road, maybe someone, a body, and you kept going, we kept going and the next day you went to the car wash and told Jiffy to clean under the car, specifically under it.”

  Bennett stared at her, a Minotaur in his tunnel. She took a step back, she gripped the hard, certain table edge.

  He countered her, moved to her, his hands on her arms. He could do anything to her. “What’s this about, my girl?”

  “Just tell me what you think it was.”

  “You’re really upset, sit down and tell me —?”

  “The thing in the road.”

  “Rosie —”

  “You know, you know it was a body, you know it!” She could hear herself shrieking.

  He tried to pull her into him, against his big, safe chest, but she resisted.

  “Ssshhhhh,” he held her. “It’s OK.”

  And then she smacked him, not hard, because she didn’t have the range, she was pressed up against him, so it was an awkward swipe at his face. Now he let her go. He turned his face, and she couldn’t see his expression. He made a small nod. Then regarded her, calmly. “Eggs,” he said.

  She didn’t understand, and he smiled gently, maybe lovingly.

  “Scrambled eggs, Rosie. That’s what you ordered. A side of bacon, coffee, whole wheat toast. You remember, don’t you? After the car wash, we went for breakfast.” He released her completely, she wouldn’t run away. “Rosie, Rosie, my girl, we sat in the window of Denny’s and ate our breakfast.”

  She stared at him. She was slow to grasp his point; but then she could recall the way he’d chatted with the waitress, he’d liked her earrings, little hanging baskets of flowers, and she’d made them herself. Bennett had been amazed; he had his way of charming women of a certain age simply by noticing them. He had made a joke — slightly off-color — and Rosie and the waitress had laughed. Oh, laughter like a little bubbling stream. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what kind of person laughs after they’ve run over a dead body in the road?

  “We should have stopped.” Rosie wasn’t even sure anymore if she was saying this, or whispering, or only thinking.

  Bennett poured himself more wine. “Can I get you anything to drink? You look like you’ve had a terrible day.”

  And this is the way decisions are made. The day unfolded and Rosie stumbled through it, and she grasped only that turning left or turning right changed nothing. Fate absorbed such details, it hardly noticed, lumbering forward in its steady and ancient gait, and the best she could do was stay out of its way and not make a fuss.

  MIRANDA

  1985

  Rosie had crafted a way to carry Miranda on long walks. She’d taken her old Parsons backpack and cut two holes in the bottom for the baby’s legs. In rain, she had a poncho to cover them both. In sun, she fitted a canopy made from a wire coat-hanger and a pillow case over Miranda’s head. They often went down to the sea, along the beach to the country club’s boundary. Rosie sat on the handkerchief of sand between the PRIVATE MEMBERS ONLY sign and the rough, scratchy wild grass and pebbles of the native shore. Chip stared at her, the little man in his tidy whites, and she would wave cheerily. Miranda sucked on rocks as Rosie watched the white seabirds skimming the water.

  On this particular morning, as Rosie returned to the boat-house, she saw Hobie waiting. He and Mitzi had been away for nearly a year, Aruba and skiing in Switzerland, Bennett had said, and then a sojourn in London for Ascot followed by a stint in Marbella — which, Bennett noted, had done wonders for Mitzi. “She looks years younger and you can’t see the scars at all.”

  Miranda was fussing, Rosie jiggling her on her hip.

  “May I come in?” Hobie’s teeth seemed too big for his mouth as he smiled.

  Rosie opened the door, he entered, but only just.

  “How are you, Rosie?”

  “I gave your money to another woman who needed it.”

  He blinked, nonplussed. He couldn’t remember the money, it was so unimportant, a mere four hundred bucks. Then his eyes settled on Miranda; oh, that money. He’d paid for her not to be alive. “What’s her name?”

  “Miranda.”

  “She’s beautiful.” He chucked her cheek but Miranda turned away from him, sniffling. “I need to tell you, Rosie, I need to ask — do you have someone else — someone, somewhere else you can go?”

  No, she did not.

  “Are you sure? No one?” he pressed.

  She touched Miranda’s cheek. “No.”

  “I really regret that it will be unpleasant for you.”

  “What will?”

  He looked sad, or perhaps disappointed that she hadn’t taken his advice about the abortion. The baby bothered him. He took out his money clip. “Let me give you something so you can call a cab, get a room at a motel.”

  “Why would I need to do that?”

  “Or we could get you a job. Can you clean?”

  She couldn’t understand him, he was speaking WASP.

  He looked from her to Miranda and back again. He was almost pleading, “Mitzi knows people.”

  “People? What kind of people?”

  “People who need cleaning.”

  Obviously, he didn’t mean this literally, dirty people in a line.

  “Go away,” Rosie said and tried to shut the door. But his foot was there.

  For a moment, he stood regarding her through the door. The skin around his eyes had tightened but otherwise he was expressionless. “I came here to help. I felt sorry for you.” Hobie retrieved his foot and started back down the stairs.

  In one of Bennett’s novels — she couldn’t remember which because they were all thick and had paintings of wistful women on the front, usually by one of the Pre-Raphaelites or Degas or Sargent — Rosie had read about droit de seigneur: the right of the wealthy landowner to sleep with any woman who lived on his property. But Hobie didn’t want to fuck her, she was a cheap thrift-store girl, and he pitied her. Instead he had loomed in his tailored shirts, smelling like daffodils and lemons, showing her his gleaming teeth. She didn’t belong in his house, didn’t go with the magnificent décor, he was moving her around, she was an object, an unattractive chair or a lamp, and he was putting her out on the si
dewalk. This was what Bennett had meant by entitlement. Rosie shut the door, hard enough for him to hear. But he didn’t turn — couldn’t be bothered, as he strode back to his vast house through his garden.

  She tried to stay awake to tell Bennett. Miranda snored softly by her side, sleeping at oceanic depths. The Marianda Trench, Rosie called it. The weeks since her birth had passed with quiet consistency, flitting like a cartoon calendar, and the only way Rosie could track time was the incremental changes in nature on her walks. The arrival of certain migrant birds on the drizzly brink of rain storms; the buds that hesitated for weeks then popped like fireworks — forsythia, dogwoods, apple, cherry; the wild grasses along the shore pressed forth their own humble flowers, miniature folds of purple or pink attended by noisy bees. The summer heat had colonized the days, diffused the colors to a Monet haze, and the gardener resumed his tours of duty with the lawnmower.

  If it wasn’t for Miranda, Rosie might imagine nothing had changed: her life remained contained within the miles she could walk. Bennett lapped around her in his wild ellipses, returning home with bags of groceries and good humor. He was happy, he swept Rosie into his arms and kissed her, he took Miranda on his knee: “Do you see how strong her legs are? She’s going to be a lacrosse player.”

  Rosie felt a truce between the fierce, bright moments of love she had for Bennett and the doubts that crouched in certain dusty corners — where he went, what he did, the source of his money. She suspected he wasn’t doing quite what he said he was. The art dealing seemed more about the dealing and she wondered if it was dealing pot or if the provenance of the art wasn’t quite proper. He couldn’t bear boredom or stillness, he needed amusement, to find the edge of situations. Beneath the quiet exterior of her days pulsed a kind of electrical charge — an anticipation, at times a foreboding. Sooner or later, something was going to happen, like a trip wire, and maybe that was Hobie.

  Rosie woke.

  A door. She heard and waited. Footsteps on gravel, and also the shushing sea and the baby breathing. Bennett was not in the bed. She got up and went to the window. He was outside in the night.