Picturing Will Read online

  “Let me know if it’s not sweet enough. I like to get by with as little sugar as possible.”

  “I’m sure it’s perfect.”

  “But let me know if it isn’t,” he said.

  She looked at him. He looked at the vacuum. “Find out who’s catering it if you can,” he said.

  “I could call the next day and ask if anybody else got sick,” she said.

  “No, don’t do that,” he said, alarmed.

  “Kidding,” she said, smiling.

  He clicked his fingers. “I forgot to bring Mel’s book back.”

  “I’m sure he’s in no hurry for it,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, “maybe I’ll see you at the party.”

  She opened the door and smiled. Duncan lifted the vacuum and waved goodbye as he went down the walk. Like a child, he looked over his shoulder at the end of the walkway to see if she was still standing there. She was, but not because she was seeing him safely on his way. Mary Vickers’s car had just pulled up to the curb. They were going to the playground to sit and talk while Will and Wagoner played, as they did two or three times a week.

  Will was involved in G.I. Joe’s taking over a new kingdom (a cordoned-off area of the bedroom rug, laid out by Mel during his visit the week before: a swarm of plastic cowboys and Indians, with the addition of free-standing castles that Mel had laboriously cut out of a book and glued together), but when the old Ford coasted to the curb, he began to run down the stairs. He and Wag were still too young to have inhibitions about throwing themselves in each other’s arms and instantly resuming their important talk that had been heartlessly interrupted by Mary or Jody when they last insisted upon parting them. They did make a slight parody of their quick embraces, though perhaps it only seemed that way to Jody and they were not even aware of it. The slightly bumped foreheads and the fingers that tickled as they grabbed each other’s waist might have been true awkwardness, the quickly locked eyes a conditioned response from infancy. In any case, they formed a unit of their own that always made Mary and Jody instant outsiders, so that they moved awkwardly toward each other, conscious of the lack of passion they themselves displayed.

  Mary Vickers was Jody’s best friend, but when intimacies were exchanged, they tended to be said with dropped eyes, and certain topics, such as Mary’s marriage to Wagoner (her son was—and Jody never stopped marveling at this—Wagoner Fisk Vickers III), were never alluded to unless Mary initiated the conversation. Jody was better at not asking Mary why she didn’t divorce her husband than Mary was about not prying into the reasons why Jody didn’t marry Mel and move to New York. Then again, although she would hesitate to say it aloud, Jody considered herself more in control than Mary Vickers. More of a survivor, if truth be told.

  Duncan had been caught in the maelstrom of the arrival. Holding the vacuum aloft, waving to Jody, and exchanging a quick greeting with Mary Vickers, he bowed out, heading toward his car. Of course Mary Vickers and Jody agreed that Duncan was a sweet, harmless soul—someone whose positive attitude they could only be in awe of.

  “Don’t go upstairs,” Jody called, seeing the boys’ feet disappear up the stairs. “If we’re going to the playground, we’re going to the playground. G.I. Joe can win the war when you come home.”

  Will looked over the banister. “I just wanted to show him,” he said.

  Will had a way of always seeming moderate. He also had a way of making her remarks seem too cute. Of appearing adult, while she called out shrilly like a child.

  “Show him for two minutes. Then we’re leaving,” she said.

  Will hesitated. “We can look later,” he said.

  Clever. This meant that after the playground they would return to the house. Jody looked at Mary Vickers.

  “Let’s go,” Mary Vickers said. “We want to get there while it’s still light.”

  Will began to walk down the stairs.

  “Wag!” Mary Vickers called.

  He stomped down, overtaking Will.

  “So is Duncan coming to the park with us?” Will said.

  Wagoner stood at his mother’s side, sulking.

  “Duncan just came to borrow the vacuum. You didn’t express any interest in Duncan when he was here.”

  “I didn’t know he was leaving,” Will said.

  Was Will really hurt that Duncan wasn’t going to the play-ground with them? Will’s acting the part of the perfect host, a little late, was making her feel less than the perfect hostess. She searched his child’s face: guileless. He thought whatever he thought.

  “Duncan’s gone,” she said. “And we’re gone, too, the minute you put on your coat.”

  The bench Mary Vickers and Jody sat on was across from the Episcopal church, whose bells rang early every Sunday morning and on numerous other occasions—so often, in fact, that the bells might have heralded the first fallen leaf of autumn and the first star of twilight. The bells were one of the things Jody always listened for, along with the daily screech of sirens, which began early in the morning, reached a hiatus around four o’clock, then sounded sporadically throughout the night. There was nothing in the newspaper to explain why the rescue squad, fire department, and ambulance constantly raced through the streets. It was Mel’s belief that the sirens were turned on every time the men went to grab a burger at McDonald’s. When you were driving, ambulances and rescue-squad wagons inevitably shot past, barely braking to go through the lights, weaving into oncoming traffic, stabilizing just as they seemed about to turn over in their wild trajectory toward one of the hospitals.

  Will liked the sirens; for him, the potential for disaster was exciting. In his experience toppled soldiers shed no blood, and he had not been present when G.I. Joe got his cheek wound.

  His own experience of pain had been the result of falling on the blacktop in back of the school, or being stricken with a sore throat or an earache, and without Jody’s telling him to be brave, he had learned that he should not cry unnecessarily. The other boys had taught him that, the way they had taught him to use a slingshot and to call breasts hooters. Recently, Mel had been trying to teach him to whistle through a piece of grass held between his thumbs. Will’s progress so far was what it would have been if he had been instructed to whistle through pudding. The nicely shaped little-boy hands, when the grass blade was clamped between the sides of the thumbs, suddenly looked boneless, molded from clay, and as he frowned at the blades of grass Jody had an inkling of what it would be like if she lived to see Will an old man, myopically staring at objects held close to his eyes. Mel felt that if Will could master whistling through grass, that would be a good preface to his calling “Hooters!” That was what he had said lying in bed the week before, trying to get a rise out of her. It amused Mel to pretend that he intended to corrupt Will—that he was her enemy, as was the passage of time, which would change her baby soon enough anyway.

  Will and Wagoner were climbing the ladder to go down the slide, “the up-down” in Will’s baby parlance, shooting to the bottom, racing around the side to climb the ladder again. Mary Vickers pretended to be an announcer telling the audience, sotto voce, about an upcoming show, in which Will ’n’ Wag, as she called the performers, would be seen doing various amusing stunts sure to strike fear into their mothers’ hearts. Sounding like an excited sports announcer narrating a batter’s triumphant trot around the bases, she crossed her arms and whispered to Jody: “Now Wag’s in the lead, coming down the slide, and we can see on the sidelines that the squirrel who’s been watching is scared. Not so his sidekick, Will, who’s four for four in successful rides to the bottom. Wag’s dusting the slide—time out—and we can expect that the next ride down is going to be a particularly fast one. You know, our audience out there might be interested to know that part of the success of sliding depends on a slick slide that does not have a residue of sand. But back to the main action, and then at our station break, folks, an ad for Valium.”

  The summer before, Mary Vickers had had her first affair, with a pl
aywright who had moved to town to team-teach a drama course at the university. Mary did not meet him there but ran into him by chance, at the all-night drugstore, where he was buying 3-D postcards of hawks floating over Skyline Drive at sunset. She had stopped at the bulletin board by the Kong game inside the sliding glass doors to see if anyone was advertising to do lawn work. The playwright came out then, slightly high on a few shots of Cuervo Gold, holding one of the postcards and snorting with appreciation. He showed her the card, as if she had been there waiting for him to exit. “Is this really out there?” he had asked. He had come to Virginia from New York for the summer. Walking to the parking lot, she suggested he take 29 south to North Garden, then cut through to route 250, as a good way to get to the mountains. Jody supposed, when Mary first told her these things, that it must have been obvious to Mary that she and the man would become lovers. It had happened between one visit Mary and Jody made to the playground and the next visit, so that when Mary sat on the bench and toed the dust like a sad horse, Jody had not been surprised—only perplexed that neither Mary nor the man thought it would last. It didn’t last past the end of the semester, but during the period when they were meeting for clandestine pepper vodkas and holding hands early in the morning at Spudnuts, eating doughnuts and licking the sugar from each other’s lips in the parking lot before going their separate ways, Jody had taken a photograph of Mary Vickers, naked to the waist, with a feather boa wrapped around her neck. Mary later mailed it to New York so it would be waiting for him when he went home. It was a soft-focus glamour-girl shot that Jody had sepia-toned, in which Mary—except for her sad, expressive eyes—looked like a little girl masquerading in her mother’s clothes.

  Not long after she photographed Mary Vickers, she had taken the boa from the shelf and shot a roll of color to explore its other possibilities. In a decorative way, it could make anything it was draped over look humorous, so she had let herself take a few of those shots, trying to work her way toward something more interesting. She coiled it so that it made a fuzzy turban on top of a melon. She photographed it weaving through her fingers. She photographed it stretched out, bouncing light off a reflector. Then she tried a twenty-second exposure, using only candles for illumination. When she studied the contact sheets later, she saw her inclination had been right. With a starburst filter, the tips of fur narrowed into threads that flashed to the top of the photograph like a spiderweb gleaming in sunlight.

  On the bench near the fence, two mothers were ignoring their children and talking animatedly. The subject was former surgeon general C. Everett Koop, who, one of the women said, had apparently crept around his neighborhood with his mother when he was a child, carrying a garbage can that contained an ether-soaked rag; they would capture a cat, and the surgeon general would take it home to operate on. Whether Mary Vickers was paying any attention to the conversation was unclear, but the woman hearing it looked frightened to death. Mary Vickers was looking at the spot where Will and Wagoner crouched, studying something in the grass. Then she looked at her watch. She shrugged, because she knew Jody had seen her checking the time, and wound the scarf around her throat and pulled the end, pretending to hang herself. Jody knew that Mary Vickers envied her because she didn’t have to go home and cook a meal. Will was always happy to eat cereal with fruit, or the two of them would have what Jody called a many-colored meal: She would arrange side by side on a plate a hot dog, a narrow squirt of mustard, a slice of avocado, a wedge of tomato, a carrot, a piece of green pepper. She and Will said nothing about their secret meals when Mel was there. Either they ate proper dinners she or Mel cooked, or they went out.

  “It’s time to go,” Jody said as Wagoner ran by, arms stretched out like airplane wings. Will ran behind him, tilting his own arms and humming. Jody and Mary Vickers might as well have been monsters who had risen from the ground to claw in the boys’ direction. Please. Go back to the underworld. Don’t be our mothers. No surrender to hooter monsters with grabby hands and obsessive ideas about the necessity of sleep. Just die! Begone! Let us live free!

  Across the playground the pilots were giggling, ready for lift-off, eager to leave the grassy runway behind.

  “Maybe I should get on a plane and go to New York to visit him,” Mary Vickers said, shrugging again and getting up to stare at the two boys in the distance. She plunged her hands into the pockets of her coat. “I have to admit that I envy you,” she said. “Being able to plan your life so you can be gone when you want to. Being in love with somebody you can actually go and stay with.”

  “Mel’s just a romantic,” Jody said. “He’s romanticized me so that he thinks I’m a great artist, and that I’d make a great wife.” Her words surprised her. She was not used to expressing her doubts, even by making questions into statements.

  “Aren’t you thankful that somebody believes in you?” Mary Vickers said.

  The pilots had expected artillery fire, but Jody was speaking softly as she came up behind them. They veered off course and were allowed to try for greater altitude one last time.

  “Did Mel ever tell you he ran out of gas when he was driving Wag and Will to the lake?” Mary Vickers said. “He wanted me to keep it a secret. He thought you’d think he was irresponsible. Another time he called from New York and wanted to know what your favorite color was. He didn’t know your favorite color.”

  Jody smiled. “You think everything he does is endearing.”

  “I told you,” Mary Vickers said. “I think you’re lucky. I envy you.”

  “You could leave Wagoner and do something else,” Jody said. If Mary was going to keep after her, she thought it only fair that she be allowed to mention the unmentionable.

  “You go first,” Mary Vickers said. “Without you I’d go crazy. That would make it a lot easier to leave him.”

  FOUR

  Jody sat next to Mel in the porch swing, pushing them gently back and forth with the tips of her toes. Mel was a tall man with disproportionately large hands and feet he was used to being kidded about. The dark brown eyes he had inherited from his Greek father were his best feature; from his English mother he had gotten his narrow lips, slight chin, and wavy hair. She had met his parents once, years before, when they visited Mel in Virginia. He had dropped out of business school and stayed around trying to figure out what to do, meanwhile writing a novel he never finished. He was rescued—if that was what it was—by his former roommate from Exeter, who opened a gallery in New York City. Mel was in charge of the bookkeeping and administration of the gallery, but more and more often he dropped the names of the celebrities who’d come in to browse, mentioned the parties he tagged along to, discussions held below Sandro Chia’s mural at Palio. Jody listened to his accounts of city life with the same mixture of affection and skepticism she reserved for Will’s theory that G.I. Joes had proliferated all over the planet, so that everyone in the world but him had dozens. Will would come right out and say I want; Mel implied it, and could contain his breathless excitement better than Will.

  Mel’s plane from New York had been late, as usual. The long-promised airport improvements had nothing to do with flights; instead, bulldozers plowed up fields to expand the parking lots. It was no longer possible to abandon your car some distance from the airport to escape paying for parking. As Mel liked to point out, many of the so-called improvements in town were detractions. The city council couldn’t decide whether to build a bypass or widen the highway again to accommodate the traffic. Signs saying Security Watch were posted on downtown streets as often as houses were broken into. Mel had been using these things as leverage, trying to convince her to move to New York.

  When she called the airport and heard that his plane would be delayed an hour, she had rounded up Will and Wag, dumped Captain Magic Rainbow Beads into the tub, and helped the boys undress as the big bubbles rose. Blown from the palm of the hand, they stayed airborne as long as Pustefix bubbles sent sailing from the bubble wand. She launched Will’s rubber turtle, which could float with a bar of
soap in its back but now held a devotional candle, which she lit when she turned off the water. The two boys climbed into the tub with their Night-Viper G.I. Joes. After a few seconds, Will blew out the candle so Jody could remove the little glass cup and Joe could have a ride in the turtle’s belly. It occurred to Jody that an idyll such as that might have been what some real soldier envisioned, dying in combat: to be set afloat, if not among the bulrushes, then amid the Captain Magic bubbles, safe in the hollow belly of a grinning turtle. She got wet helping them soap up and rinse off. Out of the tub, Wag exaggerated his shivering and suffering, allowing her to fold him in a big bath towel and hold him against her legs. Will took hold of his towel and shimmied, like a person about to lose a Hula-Hoop that had already slipped to his knees. Neither boy would let her come near him with a brush. Wag had pleaded to bring the big damp bath towel to play with in the backseat as she drove to the airport to get Mel. All the way there they held it high, a sail that wouldn’t fill with wind but that they made to flap erratically, giggling behind it as she took the winding curves. Later Mel had gotten them to bed with almost no trouble, though he was probably wondering, as was she, whether the house didn’t seem almost too quiet.

  “No wonder kids have nightmares,” Mel said. “Everything in those books has to be made literal. It says, ‘The wind that night had a bite to it,’ and there’s a drawing of a gaping mouth with shark’s teeth.” He bared his teeth and gently sank them into Jody’s shoulder. Then he leaned back, sighing dramatically. “It’ll be his lucky day when he can read pornography under the sheets with a flashlight,” he said.

  Wag was spending the night because Mary Vickers’s husband had come home drunk. Mel had used this information, too, as leverage, saying that people were no different wherever you went. He implied that he was a saint, compared to men like Wagoner Vickers.

  “How can you compare yourself to a fifty-year-old insurance agent?” Jody said.