Now I worried she was cruel and careless enough to leave me even after she knew who we were to each other. I wanted to stitch our bodies together.
At a crowded restaurant we ordered pâté on baguette and arugula with Treviso from a girl with interstellar bangs. There was porridge on the menu and something called a risky biscuit. The font on the menu was old diner style. The slices of bread were tremendous, ash-powdered, hard on the outside, cloud-soft within. We sat out on the patio, arid with brown vines and piles of firewood.
—How far along are you? she asked.
—I have no idea.
—Are you going to keep it?
—I don’t know, I said, even though I knew I would.
She put her hand on my arm. Moments like those, I couldn’t imagine she wouldn’t love me.
—Why don’t you go to the police? Tell them this child is a runaway. Have them send it back to its mother.
—I can’t go to the police.
—Such an outlaw, Joan. Are you wanted in New York City? Are you the one who killed Vic?
—I just don’t trust the police.
Alice nodded and didn’t ask me to clarify, but the police officer appeared to me then. There were two who came that night; one of them dealt with the bodies and the other dealt with me. He was in his early thirties with the pale bloated face of a young boy that merely expands out at the sides as he ages. It took me a while to realize that he thought I’d done it. He wasn’t intelligent. Even an hour later, when the trajectory of events became clear, he remained cold. He treated me as so many men in the future would.
—So tell your landlord, she said, laughing. I’m sure it’s another coda in the lease.
—She’s a little girl, I said as I touched my stomach.
—You have your own child to protect. Are you a warrior, I want to know? Or are you some husk that men—and now this girl—have had their way with?
After the words left her mouth, there was no trace of them on her face. I realized that no matter how much I’d told her, she didn’t understand my life. Of course, I hadn’t told her the end. Big Sky, in one of his pontificating moods, said it took fifty years for a death to be completely forgotten, but sometimes it took only two weeks. Some people, he said, were stronger than others.
I realized in that very instant that I would never see Big Sky again. I would never see his face again. Feel his warm and reticent touch. Of all the rapes I’d sustained, this was the worst degradation—the way a man who thinks nothing of you can loom larger than your life, and another life inside of you. That was the most awful thing. That, like my mother before me, I felt that my child was a burden.
25
LENNY MET ELEANOR ONE 103-DEGREE afternoon. She was curled up on the couch when he knocked. I felt I was opening the door to a shameful secret.
I introduced her as a friend who was staying with me. She was quiet and looked homely in a pair of inexpensive pajamas.
—For how long? he asked. I knew Lenny wanted to continue to unburden himself. I missed the jail of Lenny. How easily I could dip in and out of it. On top of that, my plan to pinch the watch was stalled.
—I don’t know. A bit.
—There’s a provision in the lease, no long-term guests.
I knew that he was upset because he would not feel free to come and see me as often as he wished. Eleanor was not beautiful. If Alice had been staying with me, he would have been fine with it. He would have been more than fine. He would have been excited.
—She’s not. She’s staying for a few days.
I was thrilled there was now an hourglass on her stay.
—In any case, Lenny said, trying to regain ground, I was coming to inform you that I have not received your August rent.
—It’s August twelfth. I have a fifteen-day leniency.
—Well, yes, but. I’m informing you.
—Thank you.
Belligerently he turned and walked away.
—I can’t leave, Eleanor said when the door closed behind him.
—At some point—
—I want to stay, she said, until the baby is born.
—You will be a part of its—his—life. I promise you that.
—But.
—Forever.
Then I sickened myself.
—He’s your brother, I said.
She began to cry. She said she had nowhere else to go. She didn’t want to go home. There was no home left. She asked me, through her tears, what her father had been like with me. Had he always been happy. I told her he talked about her all the time.
—In what way?
—He was very proud of you. When you learned how to drive, for example. How you parallel-parked so well.
She looked at me in that way all children do when hearing specific stories about how their parents felt about them. I’d had that look with Gosia many times.
—But what about how he was with you? Was he always happy to be with you?
—Yes, I suppose. But he was also sad.
—Because you didn’t love him back.
Eleanor was sitting on the couch with her legs bent to one side. The pajamas were tight around her thighs and chest. She’d come to Los Angeles with fourteen hundred dollars, which in that city was barely enough for several dinners. At least it was barely enough for dinner the way that I ate dinner. The way that I racked up debt to cool my fever.
I’d taken her to a giant discount clothing store in the Valley. We shopped beside a mother with stringy blond hair and twig legs in ripped
