“A linguistics major.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“What I’m saying is that all was well in the kingdom. Not exactly, because she wasn’t my wife, but she should have been. But for the purpose of the story, what I’m saying is that we were in fine shape, it was a fine day —”
“Month?” Banks says.
“March,” I say.
“That’s right,” Banks says.
“I was going to drop her off at the shopping center, where she’d left her car, and she was going to continue on to her castle and I’d go to mine . . .”
“Continue,” Banks says.
“And then she tried to kill us. She did kill herself.”
“I read it in the papers,” Banks says.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“Banks’s lesson,” Banks says. “Never look back. Don’t try to count your tail rings.”
Danielle walks into the room. “I have come for the gin,” she says. “The cook said you had it.”
“Danielle, this is Banks.”
“How do you do,” Banks says.
Danielle reaches down and takes the bottle from Banks. “You’re missing a swell old time,” she says.
“Maybe a big wind will come along and blow them all away,” Banks says.
Danielle is silent a moment, then laughs—a laugh that cuts through the darkness. She ducks her head down by my face and kisses my cheek, and turns in a wobbly way and walks out of the room.
“Jesus,” Banks says. “Here we are sitting here and then this weird thing happens.”
“Her?” I say.
“Yeah.”
Lorna comes, very sleepy, carrying a napkin with cookies on it. She obviously wants to give them to Banks, but Banks has passed out, upright, in the chair next to mine. “Climb aboard,” I say, offering my lap. Lorna hesitates, but then does, putting the cookies down on the floor without offering me any. She tells me that her mother has a boyfriend.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
“Stanley,” Lorna says.
“Maybe a big wind will come and blow Stanley away,” I say.
“What’s wrong with him?” she says, looking at Banks.
“Drunk,” I say. “Who’s drunk downstairs?”
“Rosie,” she says. “And William, and, uh, Danielle.”
“Don’t drink,” I say.
“I won’t,” she says. “Will he still be here in the morning?”
“I expect so,” I say.
Banks has fallen asleep in an odd posture. His feet are clamped together, his arms are limp at his sides, and his chin is jutting forward. The melting ice cubes from the overturned glass have encroached on the cookies.
At the lawn party, they’ve found a station on the radio that plays only songs from other years. Danielle begins a slow, drunken dance. Her red shawl has fallen to the grass. I stare at her and imagine her dress disappearing, her shoes kicked off, beautiful Danielle dancing naked in the dusk. The music turns to static, but Danielle is still dancing.
Secrets and Surprises
Corinne and Lenny are sitting at the side of the driveway with their shoes off. Corinne is upset because Lenny sat in a patch of strawberries. “Get up, Lenny! Look what you’ve done!”
Lenny is one of my oldest friends. I went to high school with Lenny and Corinne and his first wife, Lucy, who was my best friend there. Lenny did not know Corinne then. He met her at a party many years later. Corinne remembered Lenny from high school; he did not remember her. The next year, after his divorce from Lucy became final, they married. Two years later their daughter was born, and I was a godmother. Lenny teases me by saying that his life would have been entirely different if only I had introduced him to Corinne years ago. I knew her because she was my boyfriend’s sister. She was a couple of years ahead of us, and she would do things like picking us up if we got drunk at a party and buying us coffee before taking us home. Corinne once lied to my mother when she took me home that way, telling her that there was flu going around and that I had sneezed in her car all the way home.
I was ugly in high school. I wore braces, and everything seemed to me funny and inappropriate: the seasons, television personalities, the latest fashions—even music seemed silly. I played the piano, but for some reason I stopped playing Brahms or even listening to Brahms. I played only a few pieces of music myself, the same ones, over and over: a couple of Bach two-part inventions, a Chopin nocturne. I earnestly smoked cigarettes, and all one spring I harbored a secret love for Lenny. I once confessed my love for him in a note I pushed through the slats in his locker in school. Then I got scared and waited by his locker when school was over, talked to him for a while, and when he opened the locker door, grabbed the note back and ran. This was fifteen years ago.
