Babylon and Other Stories Part 8

He pulled out her chair for her, too. Once they'd settled their drinks, he said, "So why'd you quit school? You know that's no good."

"Did you finish school?"

"No," he said. "That's how I know."

"What do you do, anyway?"

He looked at her. His skin under the stubble was dotted with small craters. He was wearing an earring, she noticed, a thin, small gold band that looked like it was pinching the bottom of his ear.

"Not a lot," he said. "You didn't answer my question."

"I don't really know. I couldn't get into it, I guess."

"Uh-huh. Was it the same thing with men?"

"Not really."

"You don't talk much, do you?"

"I just met you," Kelly said.

"True enough," Lone said, then nodded and tipped his drink to his mouth. Ice rattled against his teeth. "That's a fact." He smiled and looked at her again, just at her face, and it made her blush.

She remembered this, now. The part of s.e.x that wasn't about touching someone else but about being touched, feeling your own skin warm under a man's eyes and hands, alive to your own body, inside and out of it. She didn't know which was stranger, feeling somebody else's body for the first time or feeling how your own self could change.

"You look pretty," he said.

Kelly rolled her eyes a tiny bit.

Lone just smiled and shook his head. "Oh, you're a hard one," he said, and laughed as if this were a quality that he in particular was well positioned to appreciate. "You are."

When they got home, Marie-Claire let Luz watch cartoons with a book balanced on her lap so that when her father came home she could pretend to have been reading it. The TV room was dark and cool, and the bright sunlight that filtered occasionally through the curtains seemed incongruous and strange. Luz sat with her legs out in front of her on the couch: her own legs next to her new leg, all three of them pointing at the TV. During the commercial breaks she would look at the plastic one and sometimes put her hand on it, as if to keep it from walking off. Marie-Claire wandered around the house for a while-what was she doing, Luz wondered, was she going through the tin box?-and then came back downstairs and stood in the door of the TV room, pretending she was watching Luz, not the TV, but after a while they were just watching cartoons on the couch together. When Marie-Claire fell asleep, Luz got up on her knees and edged closer to look at her face. It was weird how you could see flecks of her makeup stuck to her skin. Mascara was glopped onto her eyelashes, and there were streaks underneath where it had rubbed off, little eyelash flutters that looked like the marks of a feather.

Marie-Claire opened her eyes. "What the f.u.c.k are you doing?" she said.

"Nothing," Luz said, and scooted back to her side of the couch.

When Luz's father came home from school he found them silent on the couch, Luz with Nancy Drew #114 and Marie-Claire with a copy of Steal This Book that she must've found upstairs. He put his backpack down in the hallway and came into the room. "h.e.l.lo, young women," he said. "And how are we all today? Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I hope."

"Fine," said Marie-Claire. She put the book down on the coffee table. "The day was totally fine."

"Great, great," said Luz's father. "You taking care of my baby, Marie-Claire? Luz, is Marie-Claire taking good care of you?"

"Yeah," said Luz.

"Good," he said. Then his eyebrows came together sharply in the center of his forehead. "What is that?"

Luz cradled it protectively. "It's my leg," she said.

"Um. Marie-Claire?"

She shrugged. "We found it by the lake. Luz wanted to bring it home."

"It's filthy," Luz's father said.

"You liked it too," Luz pointed out to Marie-Claire.

"Yeah, I did like it," she admitted. "Actually, Mr. Howard, I'm thinking, you know, I might want to take it home with me."

"No!" said Luz.

Marie-Claire ignored her and turned to her father, sitting up straighter on the couch. She spoke fast and low, imitation enthusiasm bubbling out from under shyness. "I've been doing this sculpture? I'm trying to work on, like, people? This'll be perfect, because I'm very into humans, and, like, artificial parts, because it's like society, you know?" Her black-rimmed eyes opened wide, then aimed down at the ground before she looked back up at him through her long, mascara-thick eyelashes.

Luz thought, please. She knew this was all a lie. Marie-Claire didn't have any sculptures.

"I know exactly what you mean," Luz's father said. "Why don't you take it home."

"How come she gets to have it and not me?"

"Luz," her father and Marie-Claire said at the same time.

"Dad," Luz said, "it's my leg."

"Another way of looking at this, Luz, is that I really don't want you to have that thing in the house anyway. It's too, I don't know, it's not a toy. It's not meant to be played with."

"It's not fair," Luz said. Her shoulders shook and she started to cry.

"I know," Marie-Claire said, putting a hand on her shoulder while her father watched. "I know it's not."

Lone told her about the accident. He was twenty-one, at the height of his Evel Knievel years, and was coming down a hill in the Laurentians high on cocaine, shrieking his head off out of pure joy, when he took a curve too fast and smashed sideways into a truck coming in the opposite direction. He woke up in the hospital, and the doctors told him there hadn't been anything below the knee for them to try to save.

"What happened to the guy driving the truck?"

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it," Lone said. "People always ask me that." He slamed his beer down on the table.

They were in his motel room, a Days Inn off the Trans-Canada. He wasn't staying with Manny because his apartment was a third-floor walkup.

"And I say hey, you know, I've been stuck with this prosthetic f.u.c.king leg ever since, what about that?" He grabbed his leg with both hands just where, it looked like, the real part ended, and shook it a little bit, for emphasis.

"So what happened to him?"

"He was fine," Lone said. "He walked away. Unlike some people I might mention."

"Oh, you mean you."

"Yes, I mean me. Very funny."

"Ha ha," Kelly said solemnly. She took a swig of her beer, swallowed and sighed. "Anyway."

"Anyway," said Lone. "So, do you want to see it?"

"Do I want to what?"

"Do you want to see my leg?"

Kelly shrugged. The truth was that she did want to see it, badly. "If you want to show me."

"Well, I only want to show you if you want to see it," he countered.

"Then show me."

Lone reached down, undid his left shoe and pulled it off, then his white athletic sock. Underneath was the pink plastic foot, toeless, curved, as delicate as a woman's shoe. He started to roll up his jeans, then stopped. "You know what? This would be easier if..." he said.

"That's fine."

"Okay." He took off his other shoe and sock, then stood up and undid the b.u.t.tons at his fly and balanced himself with one hand while he pulled his jeans down with the other. When he sat down again he pulled them off completely and sat there in his boxer shorts.

She found herself looking back and forth between his face and his legs, as if this were somehow the most polite approach to the situation. He leaned back and rested his arms on the sides of his chair. "That's the prosthesis," he said.

She nodded, and leaned closer. It was attached to the end of his leg with a brown strap. "Can I touch it?"

"Sure," he said.

She started at the ankle, which wasn't really an ankle at all, no bone, little contour, just a thinness above the foot. The plastic was scratched and peeling in places, having been through G.o.d knows what trouble. Her fingers went from the ridge of the plastic onto Lone's real skin, which felt weirdly, almost wrongly soft. She rubbed her fingers up and down the hair on the side of his leg, and Lone exhaled a little laugh. She lifted his leg a bit with her left hand and slid her right hand underneath. They were sitting close together now.

"That tickles," Lone said.

She unbuckled the strap that held the prosthesis to his leg and set it gently on the table next to the beer bottles. On the stub of his leg the skin was rippled and folded, as if the doctor had wrapped it like a present, and she slid her fingertips over the b.u.mps. Some of the ridges were red, like welts. "Does it hurt?" she said.

"No." Lone put his hand on her shoulder.

While they kissed, she kept her hand on his leg.

Up in her room, Luz watched Marie-Claire walk away. She couldn't breathe without crying. Marie-Claire swung the leg back and forth as she walked, like a baseball player warming up with a bat. After she turned the corner, Luz climbed under her desk and pulled the chair in as close as she could and sat with her knees up to her chin. One of her knees had a scab from when she fell at the park a week ago. She scratched it off and watched blood well up through the skin. Hearing her father moving around downstairs, getting a drink out of the fridge, she knew he was going to sit down at the kitchen table and open the mail. Then he'd read the newspaper because he never had time in the morning. Then he'd call her downstairs and have her sit in the kitchen while he made dinner, asking her questions about what the day was like, and then she could watch TV for an hour before she had to go to bed.

She pushed the chair away, softly, and crept out from under the desk. She could feel dry tears crinkling her cheek. She went into her father's bedroom and smelled the soapy smell that was always in there. When the floor creaked she stood still, but he didn't call upstairs or anything. Very slowly and quietly, she opened the bottom drawer of the nightstand, lifted the stack of Macleans, and pulled out the tin box. She put the joint in her pocket, closed the box and the drawer, then went into the bathroom and shut the door and looked at herself in the mirror. First she wanted to practice, to make sure it looked right when she said, Marie Claire showed me how.

Afterwards, they were lying in bed, drowsing in and out of talk and sleep, when Lone murmured softly, "G.o.d, you know it's so true." He shook his head.

"What's true?" said Kelly, looking at him. His eyes were closed.

He put his arm around her and stroked her hair. His skin was hot and sticky against hers. "Girls love the leg," he said.

She slept for an hour or two. When she woke up, Lone was breathing steady and slow, his hand on his chest. She got out of bed and dressed. Starting for the door, she stopped at the table and picked up the leg. She was afraid someone might ask her about it, but there was no one around. At the parking-lot pay phone she called a cab to take her back to her car at the Edge-water. There was a suggestion of light in the sky, nighttime opening up and letting go. She guessed it was around four.

Back in her car, she put the leg on the dashboard. Then she put it on the seat beside her, the foot dipping down over the side of the upholstery, but no matter how she placed it, the leg looked splayed out, violent, accidental. There was no point, she decided, in keeping it.

She got out of the car and walked behind the bar to the water, where waves splashed and foamed, swirling detritus around the rocks, and heaved the leg into the lake as hard as she could. It bobbed a few times before floating beyond her sight. This action felt deeply satisfying, as if it were a part of her own self she wanted to leave behind. Driving home on the highway she saw dawn lifting into the horizon, though it was still far off and had a long way to go.

Wonders Never Cease.

The house was isolated and charming, and though they'd looked at other rentals, the first sight of this one was all it took. It was a red farmhouse at the very end of a country road, ten minutes from the small, picturesque college town, and behind it spread a hill covered, at the time they moved in, with lazy, late-summer wildflowers. The first floor had a fireplace, green wallpaper with a pattern of vines, and old-fashioned wall sconces with electric bulbs; the second floor was a warren of small bedrooms. Penny moved through the place gingerly, touching her fingertips to the wallpaper and wooden door frames, planning where things would go. Everything, for now, was still in boxes.

When Tom went off to school every day, she unpacked, starting with the kitchen. Then, upstairs, she made herself an office, for the freelance graphic design she'd arranged with her former employer, but had a difficult time focusing on it. In the back of her mind-or, more properly, in the back of her body, a warm liquid sensation, almost like sickness, a fever that threatened but never did descend-lurked other ambitions, shadowy yet insistent plans. This was the year they would start having children.

Sitting on an unpacked cardboard box, drinking a cup of coffee gone cold, she heard a car in the driveway. She was still used to city living, and it took her a second to realize that any vehicle this far down the road had to be coming to their house. Through the window she could see Irene, the landlady, getting out of her station wagon, holding something wrapped in foil. They were the first people she had shown the house to-it belonged to her daughter, who lived in Boston-and she'd taken an immediate shine to them. Shine was her word-"You're going to take a shine to this area," she'd said-and she was shiny, too, her small, plump face glossy with August sweat and dappled with marks left by the sun over the course of her seventy years. She came, she said, from farming people.

"I don't need to show it to anyone else," she told them that first day. "I know you're the right people for this place."

"We're definitely the right people," Tom said with his usual confidence, and Irene bestowed on him a beatific smile that revealed small, brown teeth.

Today was warm, and Irene was huffing visibly as she came up the driveway. She was a short woman, at most five feet, and the way she beamed up at the world made her look like a character in a kids' book, some smiling, helpful gnome. Penny opened the door before she could knock.

"I came to see how you're settling in," Irene said, once she'd caught her breath. In the morning sunlight, the spots and wrinkles on her face stood out in bright relief. "And to bring you a housewarming present. It's my special zucchini bread."

Penny offered her tea, which was accepted, then sliced the bread and laid it out on a plate. When she and Tom answered the ad in the paper, they'd received a tour from Irene and her husband, Henry, an equally shiny and tiny farmer wearing overalls and a panama hat.

"My husband's deaf!" was the first thing Irene said when Penny and Tom got out of her car. Beside her, sweat pouring down from beneath his hat, Henry nodded, as if he agreed completely.

"He can't hear a thing!" Irene went on, yelling in their direction with an enthusiasm that seemed entirely misplaced. Henry smiled. Through the rest of the tour he walked behind Irene as she showed them what she called the grounds: the house itself, the hillside next to it, and the shed at the bottom, which she said, with a rueful shake of her head, was full of her daughter's old things.

"How's Henry?" Penny said to her now.

"Deaf as a post," Irene said, and grinned. Penny felt obliged to offer, in return, a conspiratorial giggle, as if she, too, had a deaf husband somewhere around the house and fully understood just how vexing it could be.

"It makes some things hard," Irene said. "But it certainly makes some things a lot easier!"

Penny laughed again, out of obligation. The late-morning light was gathering force, turning toward noon, and she was conscious of time pa.s.sing, of all the unpacked boxes. But Irene was settling in, rubbing against the straight-backed chair, as if that might make it more comfortable, stroking the arms with her spotted hands.

"It happened two years ago," she said.

From the fairy-tale rhythm of this sentence it was clear that her story would last a long time, and it did. But its gist was simple: Henry's hearing disappeared slowly, over a year, each day turning fainter and blurrier, like a repeated photocopy. She woke up in the middle of the night and found him sitting outside in the cold, looking at nothing, and when she spoke his name, he wouldn't answer. She thought he was distant, that maybe he didn't love her anymore.

"I considered therapy," she said. Penny imagined these two sweaty, gnomish farmers sitting together on a therapist's couch, working through their issues. "I kept saying, 'Henry, it's like you can't even hear what I'm saying.' And it turned out to be true. Absolutely, literally, true."

"I'm glad you got that sorted out," Penny said.

For a moment, Irene just stared at her, as if she could tell Penny was trying not to laugh out loud, then she beamed again. "I am too, dear," she said.

She stayed at the table for two hours and half a loaf of zucchini bread, telling anecdotes about the early years of her marriage, explaining how to scrub the delicate porcelain of the upstairs bathtub, urging Penny to call as early as possible to order heating oil for the winter. She was offering, in her shiny, organized way, a complete manual for life.

That night, when Tom came home, Penny told him about Irene: the tea, the countless slices of bread, the endless advice. "Two hours disappeared," she said, "just like that."