About a Girl Read online

  “Kate,” he said, and his tone was dangerous. He looked at me for the length of another excruciating silence, and then he sighed. “Fine,” he said. “Come in.”

  I followed him into a big open white-walled room whose windows looked out over the water. Huge wooden beams held up the high ceiling, and the floor was made of rough storm-colored stone. It was furnished with a kind of elegant carelessness: a rectangular wooden table that could have comfortably seated twenty people, piled high with books and sheet music and instruments in varying states of string-sprung disrepair; a big low couch, upholstered in desert-hued patterns that made me think of Raoul’s Pendleton blanket, littered with beautiful old kilim pillows; a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves opposite the bank of windows, crammed to bursting with more books and papers and here and there gourds and stone statues and smaller, more obscure items that might have been instruments or totems or artifacts of some mysterious and ancient religion. It was the house of someone with a tremendous amount of money and good taste and no inclination to impress visitors; everything in it had been bought for a purpose that was utilitarian, not decorative, despite most of the objects’ inherent beauty. The room seemed like an extension of the person in front of me, who was already moving away, arranging a pile of papers on the big table, adjusting a battered old violin where it rested on a chair, drawing the curtains—I almost told him not to, I was so longing to see the stars, but of course it was his house. I had no idea what to say to him. If I had hoped for some teary and melodramatic confession of paternity at the sight of me, a warm and welcoming embrace, impassioned pleas for forgiveness, my hopes should have been dashed against the rocky shore far below us.

  “You live in town?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I came from New York.”

  “You came from New York City? Here? Why?”

  “I never met Aurora,” I said in a rush. “She ran off, or something, she left me right after I was born, and all this time I never cared, but I’m going to college in a couple of months, and I thought—I mean, it seemed like something to sort out, before I leave. Who she is. And I thought you knew her, and I guess I just…” I trailed off. “I just came,” I finished, “here. To ask you. About her. You did know her? That’s why you’re still talking to me?”

  “I knew her,” he said. “A long time ago, and not well. How did you find me?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him about Mr. M, and my thoughts went staticky again; there was something wrong with the connection between my brain and my tongue. “A—friend,” I said. “My friend. Who’s your old friend, I think. He looked you up.” This sounded absurd as soon as I said it.

  “I don’t have any friends.” There was a dark hum in the air between us, something thick and strange; I thought of Kate’s owl stare and Maddy’s yellow one, and for some reason Mr. M’s own eerie black gaze—his eyes were so dark you could not distinguish between iris and pupil, and it gave him an uncanny look. I made a helpless gesture with one hand. Jack shook his head as if he were trying to dislodge a mosquito.

  “I can’t imagine why you came all the way out here. I don’t have anything to tell you about Aurora.” He would not meet my eyes. You’re lying, I thought. You’re lying, and you know I know you’re lying. I found that I could think clearly again; the air was less odd. I was, more than anything, exhausted. I yawned.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “I hadn’t gotten that far.”

  “How long are you planning on being here for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He raised one eyebrow. “Your—family? You have one? They know you’re here?”

  “Of course I have a family,” I said, indignant. “And yes. They know. I mean, they will know. When I call them.”

  He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Well,” he said. “It’s too late to send you packing, and your ride seems to have abandoned you. You can spend the night here, I suppose. And we’ll figure out what to do with you in the morning.”

  “That’s very nice of you,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Kate gave me a hamburger.”

  “At least she’s good for something,” he said. Not his girlfriend, then.

  “How do you know her?”

  “I’ve known her for a long time. Look, we can—talk—in the morning. You look tired.”

  “Kind of,” I conceded.

  He did not waste any more time on small talk; he pointed me down a wide hallway that led past a kitchen—as beautiful and well appointed as the main room of the house, all gleaming stainless-steel surfaces and burnished copper pots hanging from a wrought-iron rack over a butcher-block counter—several doors in a row that were shut tightly; and finally, another heavy wooden door, this one open, to a small room overlooking the sprawling tangle of Jack’s garden. Under the window, a twin bed, neatly made up with a soft patterned grey blanket; against one wall, an old oak chest of drawers; and another door that proved to be a bathroom. A skylight framed a patch of night sky. It was a lovelier room by far than my own beloved but faintly shabby bedroom in Brooklyn, with its familiar but uninspiring view of the side of the neighboring brownstone and its mismatched furniture.

  I had never before given much thought to the acquisition and deployment of nice things; Aunt Beast would have been as content with an old barstool as an Eames chair, and Raoul and Henri, though they both loved to brighten the apartment with fresh flowers and were forever bringing home paintings or pretty throw rugs or other small, jewel-like accouterments that made our house the cheery, welcoming nest of disorder that it was, would never have spent real money on something so trivial as furniture. But Jack’s house had a cool grace to it that made me feel both envious and awed. I was no stranger to the homes of rich people; it wasn’t just money that made this place what it was. It was him. I wondered, with a sudden, delicious thrill, how many stars I would be able to see through the skylight. And of course, there was the whole out-of-doors to make into my observatory. No light pollution here. Assuming Jack let me stay here after tonight, which was assuming a lot.

  “Sleep well,” he said, and then he was gone.

  “Thanks,” I said to the closing door.

  I set my bag on the floor and dug out the binoculars, and then a wave of exhaustion ran through me, so debilitating that it knocked me onto the bed, and I lay on my back like an upended beetle, staring up at Jack’s ceiling. I thought of Raoul and Henri and Aunt Beast, but there was no phone in the room and it seemed a tremendous feat to get back up again and go out into Jack’s house in search of one. I’ve known her for a long time—that was what Kate had said about Maddy, too; had they all known—I would just rest for a moment, and then I would take my binoculars outside and survey the constellations—I’d be able to see so much out here—and then I’d find a phone—and then sleep fell over me like a blanket, and all my thoughts ended there.

  * * *

  I woke up to the smell of coffee. Henri, I thought, Henri made me coffee, and I opened my eyes. The light in my room was not right—too clear and too insistent, and not hot enough. The blue square of sky overhead was all wrong, too, and I turned my head to the window—wash of green, blue water—what had happened to the apartment building next door? You’re not home, you idiot, said the voice, and then the day before came back to me. I sat up in Jack’s guest bed, blinking stupidly, and reached for my clothes, before I remembered I’d fallen asleep in them.

  I made my way into Jack’s kitchen—I hadn’t even taken my shoes off the night before—in search of the coffee smell’s source, and of Jack. I found the former in a pot, next to a note written, presumably, by the latter:

  Tally,

  Will be on the boat all day. [The boat? What boat?] My apologies. Dinner? We can talk then. Stay as long as you like. Bike in the shed behind the house if you want to go downtown. Don’t worry about lock, no one will take it.

  —J

  I drank my coffee. Jack
had said stay, but not pillage the refrigerator, and anyway I found upon inspection that its contents—a lone jar of hot sauce, a single pickle bobbing forlornly in a jar of brine, the moldy end of a loaf of bread—did not inspire much in the way of breakfasty thoughts. Hopefully he was better at dinner.

  The shed was easy to find, half-hidden in the woods behind Jack’s garden, which was a tangle of some giant flower I did not recognize: stalks almost as tall as I was, and blossoms of densely packed petals curled into vivid orange and pink tubes. I made a mental note to ask him about them later. The last bits of morning fog were drifting off the grass in sinuous grey tendrils. Unlike his house, the shed was a chaotic nest of grubby disorder: cobwebs thickly netted a tangle of rakes and hoes, and rusty chunks of ancient machinery whose original purpose was undeterminable were half-obscured by a carpet of grey dust. Jack’s bike, resting precariously against something that looked like it might once have been a lawnmower, was in better shape. It was too big for me, but after a brief search I found a screwdriver on a workbench, next to a fat black spider that waved one leg at me jauntily before scurrying off, and with some effort lowered the bike’s seat to a manageable height.

  I more or less remembered the turns Kate had taken the evening before to get out to Jack’s house. As long as I headed downhill, I didn’t think I could get too far off course. I did not relish the thought of the return trip. I’d been accompanying Aunt Beast for years on her regular laps of Prospect Park—recently, I’d even gotten fast enough to keep up with her, though, despite my namesake, I’d never win any races. But the faint sloping grade of the park road did not come close to the perilous inclines that led to Jack’s.

  After I’d managed the jarring ordeal of the pothole-laced gravel road, the descent was a delight—flying headlong down hills with the clean summer all around me, fields and salt breezes and a startled, fat old dog that barked laboriously at me from a front yard where it was sunning itself. The main part of town was easy to find. At the far end of the main street was a smallish marina I hadn’t noticed the day before and a quaint motel advertising free cable and water views. I straddled the bike and watched sailboats bob in the harbor for a minute before turning around for a closer inspection of downtown.

  I had no interest in Victorian antiques, stuffed toy rabbits in a variety of costumes, saltwater taffy, or a 1950s-themed diner whose miserable-looking employees were visible through the window sullenly delivering milkshakes to cabbage-white tourists in visors and garish Hawaiian-print button-downs. On my second pass of the street I discovered a used bookstore tucked between a jewelry store and a boutique offering striped socks, postcards, T-shirts sporting various epigrams on the pleasures of fishing, and scandalous lingerie. A wooden sign in the window bearing the moniker MELVILLE & CO. rested atop a pile of yellowed books. Inside, the store was a jumble; the overstuffed shelves, labeled with hand-lettered signs in crabbed script, had spilled over into teetering stacks of books piled haphazardly on the floor, and the front windows were so obscured by more stacks of books that only a thin slice of sunlight made its way through to illuminate the shop. A middle-aged white gentleman with disordered brown hair and round spectacles sat behind an oak table piled with even more books and did not look up as I came in. It was the sort of place I wanted to bottle and send to Raoul. Raoul. I hadn’t called them. I would call them later.

  I poked happily amidst the stacks, careful not to upset them. But if I was going to be here a while—how long was I going to be here? At least a few days?—it would not do to uncover all the bookstore’s secrets on my first visit. Kate’s bar was downtown, but I couldn’t remember exactly where, and had missed it on my compass of the main street. I had nothing else to do, and anyway maybe she’d have something to tell me about why Jack had vanished into the ether the moment I arrived. I was not thinking about Maddy. I was not. I made my way back up to the proprietor’s desk.

  “Excuse me—do you know where Kate’s bar is?” He looked up at me at last, and although his manner was curt, his eyes were friendly, and I found myself liking him immediately. He reminded me a little of Mr. M.

  “Scylla and Charybdis, you mean?”

  “What?”

  “It’s called Scylla and Charybdis.”

  “What on earth is that?”

  He lowered his spectacles and looked over them at me with a despondent expression. “What in god’s name do they teach young people these days? Nothing at all? Scylla and Charybdis were two extremely unlucky ladies.” He got up and disappeared behind a shelf, and I heard him rummaging around for a moment before he emerged holding a decrepit paperback with its front cover missing and several of its pages on the verge of falling out. “With my compliments,” he said, handing it to me. “The knowledge that I am lessening the weight of ignorance in the world will be payment enough.” I looked at the title page, yellowed and torn: Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  “My uncle is always telling me to read this,” I said. “But to tell you the truth, I mostly read science fiction and books about physics. I don’t like poetry.”

  “That’s like saying you don’t like food, or are inconvenienced by breathing,” he said, unperturbed, “but you are a child, and so have some small excuse for your idiocy.”

  “I am not an idiot or a child,” I said crossly. “I am eighteen years old and quite intelligent, and anyway that’s an unpronounceable name for a bar.”

  “It doesn’t matter. There’s only one bar, and so no one has to pronounce it.”

  “Fine,” I said. Aware I was being ungracious, I made an effort to curb my temper. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. The bar is across the street. Surprised you missed it,” he said, and returned to his book. Thus dismissed, I went back out into the blazing sunlight.

  While I was in the bookstore, an enormous tawny dog with an inky muzzle had draped itself languorously across the stone steps of Kate’s bar. “That’s Qantaqa,” Kate yelled from inside as my shadow fell across the doorway. “Just kick her out of the way and come on in.”

  “Get,” I said uncertainly to the dog, who weighed as least half as much as I did. It looked up at me and yawned.

  “Qantaqa!” Kate bellowed. “Get on out of the way, you fat-ass!”

  The dog got to its feet with the injured dignity of an old drunk and lumbered a couple of feet to the left, where it resettled itself with its chin on the steps and gazed up at me reproachfully. Going back into Kate’s bar, in broad daylight, unaccompanied, made me unaccountably nervous, but perhaps being underage was something like being a vampire; as long as Kate had invited me in, I ought to be welcome. I stepped past the dog and settled myself on a wooden stool. “Hi,” I said to Kate. “That’s a funny name for a dog.” Maddy was nowhere to be seen, I noted, with a surge of disappointment.

  “She went to buy cigarettes,” Kate said and, unbidden, pushed a bottle of beer across the wooden bar toward me. I debated confessing what Aunt Beast referred to as my puritan streak (“Unnatural,” she said, “in a growing girl, but at least it means I don’t have to keep an eye on you”) before deciding against it and taking a cautious sip, which I nearly spat out. If people drank this stuff for fun, I could not imagine why. The physicist George Gamow once noted that the quantum principle was not unlike a person being able to drink either a pint of beer or no beer at all, but entirely incapable of drinking any amount of beer in between zero beers and a pint. Kate did not seem like a person who would have much interest in this anecdote. I took another sip; the second one was not as bad as the first.

  “How’s Jack?” Kate asked. “You have your talk?”

  “Absent,” I said. “He went to bed right after you dropped me off and I didn’t see him this morning.” There was something I was supposed to remember about Jack, I thought, something that night—

  “He’s a hard one to pin down,” Kate said. The door to the bar opened again and there she was—same black clothes, yellow eyes gleaming, Qantaqa surging to her feet like a physical manifestatio
n of my own delight. “Down, you goof,” she said gently, knuckling the dog—hers, obviously—behind the ears. Qantaqa subsided, remaining on the steps as Maddy slid onto a stool near me in a cloud of lavender-scented black hair, smacking the pack of cigarettes against her left hand. For all the shabby clothes, there was something about her that suggested grace that couldn’t be unlearned; her back was as straight as a dancer’s and she held her head high. Kate had already gotten down the bottle of whisky.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” Maddy said. There was a silence. I stared at my beer bottle in a frenzy of anxiety. “It rains diamonds on Saturn,” I blurted. Kate and Maddy both looked at me in astonishment.

  “Does it,” Kate said politely.

  “Because of the lightning storms,” I said. I had dug my hole; might as well keep going. “They turn methane into carbon and then it hardens in the atmospheric pressure. I mean, no one has seen them, obviously, it’s just a theory, but it seems…” I trailed off. “It seems possible,” I finished weakly. I took another drink of my beer.

  “Imagine that,” Maddy said. I thought at first that she was making fun of me, but her yellow eyes were clear and she’d tilted her head in my direction. There was something almost tendrilly about her voice, like the wisps of fog that had crept through Jack’s yard that morning, something grey and breathing that slipped under my skin and wrapped ghostly fingers around my heart. I forced myself to look back at my beer; without noticing, I’d picked off most of the label in a fit of nervous energy. All I wanted was for her to keep talking to me.

  “You and Kate know each other from the bar?” I asked.

  “Oh, we go way back,” Maddy said.

  “Few thousand years,” Kate said. Maddy shot her a strange, incomprehensible look, and then smiled, but I thought, She doesn’t know what that means, either.