Lone Star
After an hour he was still crying! And Hannah was still rubbing him, talking to him, gesturing far and wide.
Chloe understood nothing of this kind of emotion. Nothing. It seemed to her that logic must prevail in a grown man’s head when he spied himself standing in the middle of the college where he had tenure, bawling because his teenage lover had decided to move on. Not even move on, for Blake was the here and now, just … move sideways. Move back. Move away. How could the enormous common sense of that decision finally—finally!—not triumph over him?
Chloe had been keeping an eye on the time—the thing she usually had least of, next to money—but after ninety minutes her eyes left the watch permanently to pitch silent poison darts in Hannah’s direction, hoping her friend would sense Chloe’s own despair at the tedium of spying on a stranger’s excessive distress. Come on, wrap the whole thing up, put it in a doggy bag, take it home. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! Chloe kept silently shouting. LET’S GO!
There was pacing, but there was no departing.
A hundred and ten minutes. A movie now. First a tragedy, then a comedy, then a farce, now Shoah.
Wait. Something new was happening. The stooped old man nodded. He let Hannah hug him, pat him.
Unfounded optimism. There he was, crying again. He could barely stand on his grieving geriatric legs. Carefully Hannah helped him over to a bench, and sat down next to her soon-to-be-erstwhile lover, continuing to cajole and comfort him.
The girls had a three-hour ride back home.
“Did you see him?” Hannah asked.
Oh, I saw him all right. Saw him, heard him, memorized him. I could play him by heart on the piano, that’s how well I’ve studied him.
“Yes,” said Chloe.
How could she tell Hannah about college?
She couldn’t. And didn’t.
She wanted to ask if Hannah loved Blake half as much. Would she shed a quarter of Martyn’s tears when it came time to say goodbye to Blake? Would she miss him an eighth as deeply? What was it called when it wasn’t pain, but a fraction of pain? Grimly Chloe closed her hands on the wheel.
“What happens next, Chloe?”
“I don’t know, Hannah. What happens next?”
It was going to get dark soon. Her mother would be worried. Nothing to do but drive on. “Remember Darlene Duranceau?”
“Who could ever forget her? Why would you bring her up, of all people?”
Chloe shrugged. “I’m trying to make a point about what happens next.”
Blake and Mason had dismantled the woman’s overflowing garbage heap of house in Denmark, Maine, after she died. She had been a hoarder, hoarding even herself in the end. She kept eating and sitting, eating and sitting, and soon she got so big that she couldn’t move off her couch, and she just kept eating and eating and eating, using the couch not just as a bed and a dining table, but also as a toilet, and, eventually, as a grave.
It was winter when she died, and everyone had been snowed in for days. The local market couldn’t deliver Darlene’s groceries. When the roads were finally plowed, Barry the delivery boy brought Darlene her customary two boxes of Pringles and pretzels. Barry found her. Barry did not recover from this. He had been a shy clumsy kid in Chloe’s homeroom, but now he was on major meds, in therapy six days a week and home-schooled by Social Services.
The townies talked about nothing else. What was Darlene’s life like before she and the couch became one? What drama in her life had led her to the upholstered end? Was the end a consequence, an answer to a why? Or was it a catalyst? If everything you did led to everything else that would eventually happen, the question was: was Darlene Duranceau the beginning or the end?
After the coroner pronounced her dead, and it was time to remove her from the premises, the EMT workers discovered that she was stuck. From lack of movement, she had developed sores that festered, causing open wounds that oozed into the sofa, which then closed up around Darlene’s flesh like lichen to a rock. She had liquefied and then mummified into her furniture. The town cremated her with the couch. No one but the boys out in the schoolyard ever discussed how the funeral home fit Darlene and her Davenport into the relatively narrow opening of the cremation pyre.
How could Chloe add to Hannah’s chaos by confessing about California?
She wants to tell her, but she can’t.
She can’t.
And she doesn’t want to.
Hannah will feel betrayed.
What kind of a terrible friend would Chloe be to betray her friend and then tell her about it?
So she doesn’t tell her.
She thinks she justifies it beautifully.
Only a guilty mouthful of what feels like open safety pins alerts Chloe to the falseness of her excuses.
“I know the answer,” Hannah said. “You know what happened next for Darlene? Nothing.”
“Yes. That was the end of Darlene’s story. But yours is just beginning, Hannah. That’s what I’m trying to say. Take heart.”
“Did you see how upset Martyn was?”
“I saw.”
“Do you think he’s going to be okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think is going to happen?”
“It’ll be something. Martyn is not Darlene.”
“But what if what happens next is you and your sacred striped sofa become one?” said Hannah. “What if when God said flesh of my flesh, he meant flesh of my sofa? The Chesterfield of my flesh? What if Martyn is a Darlene?”
“You can’t possibly believe that.”
There was silence for a while. It was black out. There were no lights on the road except for the car’s headlights.
“Blake is the sweetest lover,” Hannah said in a small sad voice. “You don’t expect that from someone like him, because he’s so rough and tumble, but he is super gentle and super considerate. He’s always caressing me, kissing my back. He’s always trying to make me happy.”
“You’re lucky,” Chloe said, settling into the wheel, stepping on the gas pedal. She didn’t think Blake was so rough. For months, when his dad couldn’t walk, on account of nearly dying, oh and having a back broken in three places, Blake carried his father to the reclining chair by the sandy shore and set him down into it so Burt could watch the lake and the sky and Blake and Chloe fishing in the boat and skating on the ice. His dad liked to watch the kids having fun, Blake said.
9
Red Vineyard
“TEACH ME, HAIKU. TELL ME HOW TO BEGIN. TUTOR ME IN beginnings.”
Blake plopped down across from her in the nearly empty learning center, scruffy, smiling, slapping his notebooks onto the heavy wooden table between them. His pens rolled toward the window. Chloe watched them, and he watched her watching them. Without breaking eye contact with her, he stopped them from falling to the floor and then he spoke. “What’s been the matter with you today?” When she didn’t reply, he went on. “Is it because of Barcelona? Don’t worry. They’ll say yes. They’ve been talking to my mom. Asking her if she thinks we’re trustworthy.” Blake laughed. “I told her, lie, Ma, say yes!”
She smiled half-heartedly but couldn’t look at him. She pretended she was super distracted by Very Important Thoughts. About pi and Ovid and Pearl Buck. The tutoring center at the Academy was a large first-floor classroom with twenty-foot windows and long wooden tables behind which girls like herself sat and waited for students who needed help in math, hard sciences, English, you name it.
Although final exams were getting close, the place was nearly empty. She’d had just one student all afternoon, an apathetic freshman from Delaware named Kerwin, whom she schooled in irrational numbers like pi. “You can’t have an infinite string of zeroes in a pi exponent,” Chloe told Kerwin, “because then the fraction would end. And what do we know about pi? It’s transcendental. It cannot end.” Her mother had once taught her about pi. Something about divinity and infinity. The soul is divine, her mother had told an anguished Chloe. Don’t worry. The soul has no end. Like pi. An infinite thing cannot end.
Kerwin wasn’t getting it. And Chloe wasn’t at her best. Her mind kept wandering. To distant beaches, imposing cathedrals, white stucco resorts in the hills, Hannah walking arm in arm with Blake through the halls, cozy as all that, as if Martyn had not happened, as if the last eight months of tawdry Tuesdays and Saturdays at the Silver Pines had not happened, Hannah making out with Blake between Health and Gym, discussing the prom with him between English and Science, fretting about her mango dress matching his peach cummerbund at the prom, and all the while Blake going on and on about Barcelona, and all the while sadness seeping on and on into Chloe’s heart. How could Hannah pull off such nonchalance? Chloe couldn’t tell why this bothered her as it did. Usually she tried not to ask herself too many why questions.
Now, pretending she hadn’t heard Blake ask about beginnings, Chloe turned to the window, to continue to daydream about Iberian dragons rampaging through the streets. Across the field she could almost make out Mason’s breathless shape on the baseball diamond. He was just a panting dot in golden dirt. It was the only time she saw him panting, perspiring, on fire. When he was out in the field.
“Yoo-hoo, Haiku …”
She blinked and dragging herself back to reality turned to a quizzical, smiling Blake. He was clad as usual in plaid and flannel and cotton and denim, his stubble four days old, his wild hair three days unbrushed and two months streaked by the spring sun. “I just need to know what’s in my suitcase,” he said.
“In our play we reveal what kind of people we are,” Chloe told Blake, quoting Ovid. “So first figure that part out.”
He looked wholly unimpressed. “You’re putting the cart before the horse.”
“No …”
“You are. Believe me. First I write. Then I figure out what it all means. Which, by the way, is the opposite of the insane horse crowd. They put portents on paper first and then use a mallet to beat it into a story.”
“You have it all figured out, don’t you? What do you need me for?” She sounded just like her father.
He leaned forward as if confiding. “I don’t have anything figured out. What would you put inside it? How would you start it? Look what I have.” He pulled out a three-subject spiral notebook to show her. He had divided his notes into sections: story, characters and the last one for thoughts, notes, lists, tidbits.
“I write and write,” he said, “but I still don’t know the most important thing.”
Ain’t that the truth, thought Chloe. She studied the grain in the table. He was too carefree and earnest to be saddled with her pity. “You do kinda have to know what’s in the suitcase if you’re writing a mystery.”
“Who said it’s a mystery?” He shook his head. “No. See, it’s the best thing of all. It’s an unexpected thing. You think you’re reading one kind of story, and then—POP, it’s another.”
“Like not a mystery?”
“You think it’s a mystery, but it’s really a Western.” He laughed. “Or you’re ready for a mother–daughter drama, but it’s really a two-man play about the meaning of trees. A thriller becomes a musical, a coming of age story is now the return of the native, science fiction turns out to be a war story.”
“Wait,” Chloe said, “a musical? How can a story on paper have music in it?”
He grinned as if he were about to doff his black hat. “That’s the trick, isn’t it?”
They were leaning forward over the table. The only other people in the room were three other tutors and a proctor. Outside it was deep spring, warm colors, tulips and grass, outdoor sports and new running shoes, the courtyard full of girls in light summer frocks, the kind she never wore, blowing up in the wind. She could see the three cream-brick dormitories, Payson-Mulford, Webster, and Hastings, arranged in a semi-circle of unchaperoned fun. Every Friday night before curfew, drunken madness. Next to Hastings a fence, a back gate, and a cemetery. Before the fence a tent. And under the tent, a barbecue grill and three picnic tables.
There once was a story with music in it at one of those tables.
Blushing at a hot lick of a nearly forgotten memory, Chloe quickly cantered away from the aching nostalgia of the picnic bench near Hastings, thinking we’ll never be that drunk again, her tongue-tied gaze colliding with Blake’s amused and amiable stare.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She stared at his large, scuffed hands, folded together in calm Zen across the table.
“Tell me why we must go to Europe,” he said.
“To find the blue suitcase, I suppose.”
“Why Barcelona?”
“The question is not why Barcelona,” she replied, gazing out the window. A thousand open questions, invisible to the naked eye, apparent to every living soul. “The question is why anywhere else?”
“Exactly. Who else would know this but you?”
She was trying to answer her own riddles in the unfinished English essay, a treatise on feminism and freedom in Pearl Buck. “You would write about Pearl Buck,” said her English teacher, whose insinuations Chloe didn’t appreciate, but it was too late to change her topic. You would get all As, Chloe. You would have an extra eraser, your neat notes from last year, the report handed in three weeks before deadline, and a yes from all the schools you applied to. Universities of Pennsylvania and Maine. John Kennedy Jr.’s alma mater, and Einstein’s. Every Boston school worth going to, Duke too, and San Diego, that misty Spanish renaissance on Mission Bay. You would. Chloe hated those two words.
It fed too cleanly into the digested and mealy narrative about her, the stereotype she despised and had tried all her life to change. She didn’t want to not do well. She just didn’t want to be known as the girl with the Chinese mother who did well.
You would.
My mother is fifth-generation American, Chloe would answer to every suggestion of the supposed intellectual blessings of her ethnicity. She is more American than I am, since my father’s father was born in Ireland and his mother somewhere in the Baltics. My mother, on the other hand, makes peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. She frequently forgets to buy soy sauce. Does that sound Chinese to you? And yet how else to explain her own relentless quest for excellence? Every revolutionary date, every candidate for president, every battle in the Civil War, every Law and Act, every polynomial and integral domain, every tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow all the way to dusty death had to be not just memorized but internalized?
Pearl Buck wrote about the Chinese woman from a hundred years ago, but she could’ve been writing about Chloe’s mother and father. Jimmy Devine wanted a docile lamb who would be happy to contain herself within his four walls. Pearl Buck said that a woman full of energy and intelligence could not be contained within any man’s walls, but then Pearl Buck, the obedient daughter of a Christian missionary in China, had never met Lang Devine. She can’t be held there, Pearl Buck wrote, even if the walls were lined with satin and studded with diamonds. Chloe disagreed. Her mother’s wood cabin walls weren’t lined or studded with anything but photos of Chloe.
Pearl Buck seemed to think that Lang would soon discover she was living within prison walls. Chloe begged to differ.
Even children were not enough for some women. She may want them, Pearl Buck wrote, need them, and even have them, and love them, and enjoy them. But they wouldn’t be enough for her. “Nobody likes children, Chloe,” her mother would often say. “But we have them anyway.” Chloe was almost sure Lang was joking. Because for some women, children were everything.
Some women didn’t know anything about politics. It took all their effort to be wives and mothers. Well, Ms. Buck opined, that may be sufficient for some women, but their husbands certainly found the time to occupy themselves, not only in their chosen fields and with being husbands and fathers, but also apparently, with other women as well. Just ask Terri Gramm next door who worked sixty hours at L.L.Bean to pay the mortgage while her husband honeymooned in Maui with the assistant baker from Dunkin’ Donuts.
Chloe swore she would grow up to be a different kind of woman, not Terri, not Lang, not the donut-maker-helper.
But what kind of woman?
She had no idea. Chloe had the answer to everything, except the important things.
“Don’t worry about what’s in the suitcase for a moment,” she said to Blake in a voice thick with longing. “And the answer to the why will come. Just start at the beginning. Start with something true and real. Begin with your two main characters, the junk dealers.”
“If you’re going to make fun,” Blake said, “I’m going to give them another livelihood.”
“I’m not making fun. Tell me about them.”
Eagerly Blake opened the notebook to the second section. Character. Pages were filled in pencil in a slow and careful hand, too slow, too careful for Blake. Her delighted skepticism must have been apparent on her face. Without affront, he said, “Did you know, Miss Smartass, that Van Gogh sold only one painting in his entire lifetime?”
She marveled into his grinning face, tedium forgotten, even Barcelona and parents and Hannah’s other lover forgotten for a moment. “The surprise here,” she said, “is that you would know anything about Van Gogh.”
“Come on, Haiku, you know I’m a font of useless information.”
She broke a pencil. “Are you implying that you will also sell only one thing in your lifetime, say your purported story? Or could you possibly be equating yourself with Van Gogh’s talent?”
“Neither.” Blake was unperturbed by her teasing. “Red Vineyard was not even his best painting.”
“It was pretty good, let’s say that, but again, how is that relevant”—she wagged her finger in a small pi-circle at him and his notebook— “to what’s going on here?”
“All I’m saying,” Blake said, “is that if Gerald Ford can be a male model, then yours truly can be a writer.”
“Another metaphor entirely, but at least more apropos.”
“And did you know that Einstein did not or could not speak until he was nine years old?”
“How in the flipping world is that relevant?”
“Maybe I’m a late bloomer like him.”
Chloe smiled. He was being so cute. “Maybe. But the thing that’s actually relevant about Van Gogh is that he painted the Red Vineyard not while standing at the window looking out at it, but solely from his memory and imagination. Take that away and mull it, Einstein.”
Blake took it. He mulled it. “Maybe The Blue Suitcase will be my Red Vineyard,” he said, his own voice deep with longing.
“Or you could try writing something like Breath by Samuel Beckett,” Chloe said, straight-faced. “It’s one of his lesser known plays. It lasts thirty seconds and has no actors and no dialogue.” Her eyes twinkled.
And Blake, bless him, laughed, as Chloe had hoped he might. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “It’s called an intermission.”
And Chloe laughed.
The proctor shushed them. “Mr. Haul, I’ll thank you to keep your voice down.”
“What if I’m a writer?” Blake said to her, lower and leaning in. “I could be a writer, no?”
It must have grated on him that Chloe didn’t think he could do it. And she didn’t even think that. Well, all right, she did. She did think that. But so what? What did it matter what she thought? God.
“Figure out what’s in your suitcase,” she said, “and you will be a writer.”
Blake sat contemplating her. His face was inscrutable.
“What?” She became discomfited. She hated not knowing what people wanted from her. She didn’t like to disappoint.
“What do you think should be in it?”
“It’s your story.”
“But if it was your story.”
Chloe shrugged. “This one lady I deliver Meals on Wheels to, all the way in Jackson, lives in a yellow shed. I’m not kidding, it’s a shed off the main property, which is huge, but the shed is tiny, and it’s painted yellow, and she sits in a chair outside this canary box all day and watches the road, the cars, the walkers. She’s right past the covered bridge to Jackson. She’s ninety-two. She tells me that she prays to Jesus every day that today will not be the day she dies because she wants to be buried with all the jewelry her husband had given her, but she’s afraid her kids will never go for it once she’s dead. She tells me she’s trying to figure out how to get buried alive so she can decide what goes with her. She’d probably put her jewelry into this vanished case.”
“What’s her name?”
“Lupe.”
“I need to meet her ASAP,” Blake said. “Are you and Hannah doing Wheels tomorrow? Mason and I will go with you.”
Chloe didn’t know what to say.
He was so excited, he skipped right over her lying silence. Then it was time to go.
They ran for the late bus, heaved on, said hi to Freddy the thoroughly vetted and tested union driver. Chloe sat next to the window, Blake next to her, their backpacks squeezed between their legs. Freddy waited another minute for stragglers. Chloe spotted Mason still in his baseball uniform, walking down the path from the fields, with a team of catchers and cheer girls flanking him with their pom poms and their camaraderie. He saw the bus, waved to Freddy, yelled something facing the girls while running backward, then turned and sprinted with his gear and school books to the blue bus. In the twenty seconds it took Mason to jump on, Blake had gotten up and moved over one seat. Mason took the vacant spot next to Chloe. Blake sat with his back to the windows, his feet stretched out. He nearly tripped Mason with his sticking-out black Converse hi-tops.
A panting, sweating Mason kissed Chloe. “Sorry I’m all gross,” he said, wiping his face with the sleeve of his jersey.
“No, I like it.” It was nice to feel an exerting Mason wet on her skin. It was only after sports that she felt it.
“Mase, we’re going with the girls tomorrow,” Blake announced. “Meals on Wheels. To get awesome deets for our story.”
Holding Chloe’s hand, Mason shook his head. “No can do, bro. End-of-year varsity barbecue tomorrow. Sorry. But the three of you go. Have a blast.”
Twisting her mouth this way and that, Chloe looked out the window. How does she tell Blake that Hannah hasn’t gone to Meals on Wheels with her in months?
10
Lupe
HANNAH’S WHEREABOUTS ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS WAS explained by none other than Hannah herself who, as soon as they came pounding on her door to tell her about tomorrow, said, Chloe, what are you talking about, I haven’t been doing Wheels with you in months. You know I’ve been working the lunch shift at China Chef, trying to save up for our trip.
Blake’s kinetic gaze slowed down to take in Hannah, and then Chloe for a puzzled moment longer. “Why wouldn’t you just tell me that?” he asked.
“I haven’t done it for a while myself, I forgot,” stammered Chloe, throwing Hannah a rebuke dagger with her eyes.
“What’s the matter with you?” Hannah whispered, dragging her inside the house. “You know I’ve been working most Saturdays.”
“Do I?” Chloe said, pulling her arm away from Hannah and walking back outside. “I thought you were working on Tuesdays too. Shows you what I know.”
At nine the next morning, Blake knocked on her door.
“Good morning, Mrs. Devine. Good morning, Chief.”