18
BACK IN THE CANYON I showered off the wine. A breeze blew in the scent of honeysuckle. When it wasn’t unbearably hot in Topanga, the mountain air was reviving and the color of the falling night was extravagant with tangerines and purples.
It felt wonderful, leaving her house. Every time I left a man’s house after a long afternoon, or if he had been the one to leave mine, the evening was tainted. I would wander the blocks of Manhattan, stopping in certain bars and eating raw meat—carpaccio or tartare. Martini Mondays with Big Sky were devil dark. On Martini Mondays he would come at five and leave before seven. My chest would be cool with perspiration. Glasses of pilsner in the sink. I’d leave my apartment just after he did, like it was on fire. I couldn’t bear to be in it after night fell. He would eat takeout on the Upper West Side, sating the hunger that came from beer on an empty stomach and fervent fucking on my leather couch. His wife had these incredible teeth and I would picture her jaw opening for a triangle of steaming pizza. Laughter and the baby and Coca-Cola. Meanwhile I would sit on a stool in a dim bar and make the tartare last for an hour.
In hindsight, it was obvious. Talking to Alice made me realize the thing that I would end up doing was inevitable. Every single man in my life staked the path to murder. I’m not supposed to feel this, but I do: I don’t think the act was vile. I think it was necessary. You can decide that for yourself. I will never lie to you. You are the only person to whom I will never lie.
Before going to bed, I stepped outside to get some air, to walk around the mounds of dry earth. I was happy. I should have known I didn’t deserve it.
I saw Lenny in an unlikely place, walking toward Kevin’s house, down the ravine with the bluestem scratching at his old ankles. I figured he was having an episode and I called out to him.
More rapidly than I would have thought possible, Lenny made his way up the hill.
—I’m terrifically happy to see you, Joan.
—Are you?
—I’m having the clearest of days, the clearest I’ve had in a very long time. I suppose I’m trying to coax the clarity into hanging around by offering a sacrifice unto the universe. The drugs I have to take turn the funhouse mirror of my mind’s eye into a pane of glass, and it’s sublime. But even better, even more sublime, is this: right before the dosages are due, I’m able to make out a different scene in the funhouse mirror. It’s only available to me once every several days, nothing to do with providence but, rather, something in the timing of the drug interactions, the wearing off of one joined with the peaking of another; it would take me, I venture, longer than I have left to live to figure the timing enough to replicate it. But in that sliver of time, I can see even clearer than twenty-twenty. I can see the whole past with flawless vision. Better than hindsight, because it’s as though I am reliving it. I can see things like a god. The clarity is so perfect that it transcends the pain. I imagine this is what dying is like.
—Would you like to come inside?
—I would love that, he said.
I made us tea and we sat at my kitchen table. Lenny slurped his tea and clasped his hands and breathed in deeply.
—There are things, he said, all the accumulated bits of a lifetime, they come back to you suddenly, when you have clarity, some peace because something you dread is no longer there. You know the way you listen to the cleaning ladies of a hotel, the network of them, talking loudly to one another, and to the maintenance man? They are all cousins, related, all of them roasting pigs on the weekend, buying kegs of beer with their crumpled dollar bills. They’re loud and raucous around each other, but then, when they knock on your door, they are suddenly quiet. Housekeeping, they say, in a certain tone.
I nodded hatefully. For one month I had been a housekeeper in a hotel, not a fine hotel but a decent one with both an indoor pool and an outdoor pool. I took naps or read books in the unused affair rooms. They smelled of paint and funerals. I was so young then. I didn’t mind the married men looking at me in my black uniform, the starched hem falling at my knees.
—Oh, Joan! I can’t explain it well enough, I fear. The reasons for everything come to me in those moments of hyper-clarity. I can understand the lives of those housekeepers. I never thought of them enough. But somewhere I ingested their souls. I wouldn’t be human if I hadn’t. Perhaps a better way to tell it is the smell of grass. You know, of course, the smell of cut grass. But when was the last time you truly smelled it? I believe the smell of grass exists more as a trope after the age of twelve. Between twelve and thirty, I’d venture you never smell it. Then suddenly you are thirty, forty, and you think, Ah, cut grass!
I was bored. He was an old racist who thought he was progressive. But I wanted what he had. I wondered if he would leave it to me. His money. His plates. His watch. Even if he would, I couldn’t wait that long. The easiest thing would be to take it when he was out of his gourd and I was Lenore. But he would know it was me when he came out of it. I was sure of it. In any case, that was the last night I would feel sorry for the
