Before Vic I had, for a time, kicked men in the testicles with high heels. One man gave me a painting I turned around and sold for twenty-five thousand dollars. Another gave me a vintage silver print of Diane Arbus’s A Widow in Her Bedroom. I treasured that photograph. Sometimes I felt it was the finest thing about me.
Suddenly there was an extreme noise on the road. I have to tell you that terrible things always happen around me. I was marked at ten. People don’t want to know that many bad things can happen to one person or around one person. A bad thing happens and coworkers circle your cubicle, their grating palms on your shoulders. Another bad thing happens and you’re no longer someone upon whom they could try out their munificence. You’re a squashed pack of Merits on the highway.
The girl, Natalia, came out with my frittata on a plate. A Chevy Tahoe had head-onned a yellow Beetle. The Beetle, which looked like a human being, was compacted, its face smashed. There was the braking of other cars and a single horn sounded but otherwise a snowy peace settled across the Canyon. I looked at the girl and the girl looked back at me.
It took the man a long time to come out of the Tahoe, and when he did, he was covered in frosty dust. He staggered toward the Beetle. It was a seventies model with the handlebar on the hood and the headlights like a ladybug’s eyes. Medium-dark gray smoke poured out.
It felt as though the driver of the Tahoe walked for hours but he never made it to the other car before the ambulance did. It was possible the ambulance came the quickest an ambulance had ever come. The driver of the Beetle, a woman, gave the impression of burned toast. She was laid out on a stretcher. The urgency they saved for the other passenger. I turned my head when an entire infant seat was lifted out by the broad-shouldered men. I could see the baby, who was not crying. I could taste the metal and the tears of the father in the morning.
Beside me the girl’s mouth hung open but otherwise she didn’t shield her eyes or make a noise. She’d likely never seen death. She stood there with that white plate. She’d been taught to put a wedge of tomato on the rim. I wanted to shove her nose in a slick of blood. But I couldn’t. I had to let the girl go home, sit on her mother’s couch, and tell her boyfriend she’d seen a woman and her newborn die on the road today. The boyfriend would ask about the types of cars involved.
* * *
BACK AT THE HOUSE I found my landlord sitting at the table outside my door. He had a pitcher and two crystal glasses.
—Joan, he said. This table is for all of us. I moved it to be closer to your door where there’s some shade, but if you don’t want it here, I can move it back. If you don’t like company.
It was hot and still. I hadn’t cried about the car crash and I thought that if I went into the house alone I would lose it. I would take a pill and sit on one of my boxes. I felt I could have stopped it somehow. I knew for a fact I could have saved my father and my mother. I liked to think that one of the reasons I’d lived through my own nightmare was so that one day I might prevent someone else from suffering. But the infant died. The mother died. I watched. I finished filling out the job application.
—How’d your audition go? he said. He poured me a glass. Dreamily he said, Lenore’s lemonade.
—My audition, I said quietly. Likely I didn’t get it.
—You’re a certain age. Do you mind my asking?
—About thirty years younger than you, I said, and he smiled. The older the man, the more my specialty. I knew that when I met God one day it would go well.
The lemonade was vodka-forward. There were bits of mint floating at the surface. I thought of the radio in the car, of what the mother and the child had been listening to. I imagined it to be Peter, Paul and Mary and that the song would live in the air there forever. Sounds didn’t die.
He told me to call him Lenny and asked me what everyone wants to know. Where did you come from, what do you do for money, why are you alone. I gave him a list of odd jobs. Babysitting, floral arrangement. The time I’d made up dead people.
Underneath our bodies the ground rumbled and I looked up at the sky. An earthquake was one of my most vivid fantasies. But it was only Kevin waking up, turning the silver dial on some large box.
Leonard’s knee began to tremble. He had the face of an old movie actor, a Paul Newman. It was an interesting face and I liked him better than I had earlier that morning with his cane and metal breath. He looked fresh. He wore a white sweatshirt and gray pants. Gone were the old-man sneakers. In their place a good pair of loafers. Still, his ankles looked like they had been dug up.
—Are you through unpacking?
There were boxes I would never unpack. Six large ones. They contained things like the square packets of hotel shower caps my mother saved. And, from the first time my mother cut my hair, a loose braid of black.
—Yes, I said. Do you live in the potting shed?
He smiled and nodded at me, like, I know the kind of woman you are.
—It’s not a potting shed. It’s one of these tiny homes. I don’t need a lot of space. I used to live here, in your place.
—Why’d you move?
—I didn’t need all the space, he repeated.
I could tell I’d gone too far. I wished I didn’t care.
—Have you always wanted to be an actress?
—No. I didn’t want to compete with all the other pretty girls when I was young. So I waited. I figured I’d be more interesting now. I was biding my time.
—Kathi told me you came all the way out here alone.
—I drove.
—She drove, he said, rubbing the rim of his glass. He looked at me in the familiar way.
I finished my drink and stood. He placed two fingers on my wrist and poured me another glass, saying, A bird cannot fly on one wing, my friend. You can flap one wing, but you can’t fly on it.
I sat back down. Lenny had a controlling air. At some point he had been in charge of things—family money, legacy, oil futures, a wife, a mistress—and old men like him never stopped flexing their alleged power. Sometimes, when he was being gallant, he reminded me of my father, but so did anyone. For a very long time I had written the word Daddy in the steam of shower doors. This was when I lived in places with glass doors. At the apartment in Jersey City I had written it on so many different spots that, when the sun came through the cloudy window, you could see the letters in many directions, like a crossword.
—My wife died, he said, a little under a year ago.
—I’m sorry.
He nodded. He seemed to believe I should feel the pain alongside him.
—Her name was Lenore. Lenny and Lenore. Do you want to know how we met?
—Of course, I said. And I did. Everybody always wanted to know how everybody else met. It seemed possible the key to life was contained on street corners in springtime when a man retrieved a woman’s scarf from the sidewalk.
—It was on Love Connection. The television program.
—Wow.
—It was the first season they were on the air. She wore a purple skirt suit with little white kitten heels.
—Was she beautiful?
—Beyond beautiful. That something extra. Chuck Woolery asked her if she had any fetishes. She said yes, she had two. The first was that shirts and socks have to match. She didn’t like it if a man wore a white shirt and then black socks. She thought it was sloppy. At this point, Chuck Woolery looked down and he was wearing a white shirt with black socks. Lenore laughed. I don’t think anybody in the world will ever have a laugh as wonderful. Tough, said Chuck, if you wear argyles. She didn’t laugh that time. She knew how to suspend a man. It’s a rare talent. I was jealous of Chuck from the start. I was always worried, in the beginning, that Lenore was going to love someone better.