Ann was a widow, but I sometimes wished she were a divorcee. Divorcee was a provocative word, suggestive of pent-up and recently unshackled sexual longings. It was a word like negligee or risqué, whose allure was concentrated in that e, such a libertine letter, so French. Privately, I affixed the e to Ann as well, making her Anne, for the same reasons.
But I liked the word widow, too. There was a kind of dark nimbus around it, a haze of greater experience, of ennobling tragedy. I believed that categorizing people and things was the same as understanding. Maybe every nineteen-year-old does. Ann was a widow, and I understood her.
I felt no competition with the dead man, whose crimson face in the photograph on the mantle seemed to capture the exact arrival of the pulmonary embolism. I had nothing to fear from him. I was nineteen, healthy, and alive.
Besides, there was so little of him in the house. There were none of his clothes left in the closet or the dresser, no other photographs that I could see. I assumed, though I don’t think I ever actually asked, that she had moved into that lonely large house after he died. But, of course, there was the little girl, at that moment at least.
Ann lived in a suburb cut freshly out of the clay. Her blinds were always drawn against the sun, because the dollhouse trees planted along the curb were years from casting meaningful shade. The house was decorated with realtor’s dreck: glass tabletops and rattan baskets filled with marble paperweights in geometric shapes. They were the kind of things you were supposed to replace when you bought the house, with something more personal, but Ann never had. The ceiling of the foyer was too high, and not even Dominga could clean the cobwebs from its upper story. Ann’s house made me sad, and the sadness aroused me.
Ann had red hair that was not dyed. She had narrow shoulders, soft wide hips, and a Caesarean scar, like a wry smile, beneath her navel. She would not remove a single piece of her own clothing. I unbuttoned the blouse, peeled back the pantyhose, worked out the puzzle of the bra clasp, in the order and manner I was instructed. Then she lay back, hiding herself in her hands, suddenly shy. What I liked best about her were the ten thousand freckles scattered across her ribcage, and the white unmarked skin below where sunlight never struck. That was Ann to me—experience and innocence.
I had no plans to marry her. I’d done the math: when I was her age, Ann would be in her fifties. But knowing they could not last forever made our afternoons urgent, bittersweet. She said to me—the soft down of her face against mine—You’re supposed to be in class, young man.
And I said, I’m sorry, miss. But shouldn’t you be at work?
Ann worked for a manufacturer of medical equipment whose headquarters were shaped like a marble paperweight. She was an Associate Director of Logistics. Her work was obscure to me (and it would not have occurred to me to ask her to explain it), but I knew in the afternoons she was supposed to travel between various warehouses and hospitals, when she was, in fact, with me.
We met in the afternoons because that’s when her daughter was at daycare. Her name was Nevaeh—Heaven, spelled backwards. This name I took as a trace of the dead husband, of an evangelical corniness Ann did not possess, or had since shed. It pointed vestigially to that former life, like the photograph on the mantle, the right hand’s ring. I thought the name was ridiculous and I would have laughed about it with my friends, if I’d had any.
I didn’t know what to think, what attitude to take, toward the existence of Nevaeh. It was neither divorcee nor widow; she hung, like a dead limb, from the likeness of Ann I had cultivated within myself. For the first few months it was easy to pretend she didn’t exist, because I’d never met her. Through a cracked bedroom door I spied the spillage of a five-year-old life—stuffed owls and plastic lizards, gleaming board books, tiny cast-off tennis shoes—and it made me uneasy. The room seemed misplaced in the sterile house, and it gave me an impression of a hyperactive and uncontrollable child.
My impressions turned out to be totally wrong. Nevaeh turned out to be quiet and prepossessed, even hostilely so. I met her for the first time when she arrived home with Dominga, the part-time housekeeper, because the daycare had a half-day. Dominga opened the door and Nevaeh rushed inside and found me halfway up the stairs in her dead father’s flannel bathrobe.
She stopped and looked at me straight on. She was trying to figure out what to make of me, and I was trying to figure out what to make of her. In the darkened house her unblinking pale eyes made her seem like a child born blind. Then she shook off her coat and ran to the back of the house.
I followed her. I thought I had bungled a first impression, and that Ann might disapprove. I found Nevaeh standing at the glass door that looked into the backyard. I saw she had picked up a pair of child’s binoculars, precious and pink, which had been sitting on a shelf. What are you looking at? I asked.
She said she was looking at the birds. There was a feeder full of seed in the backyard, which I’d always thought strange for Ann, though now I saw it really belonged to Nevaeh. She identified each of the birds by name: house finch mourning dove carolina chickadee white-breasted nuthatch. I was impressed. I thought birds hatched eggs, I said—not nuts. Nevaeh didn’t laugh.
She liked you, Ann said to me later.
It didn’t seem like she liked me, I said.
That’s how she is, Ann said. She wouldn’t have said anything to you otherwise.
Well, I’m glad. I’m glad she liked me.
Do you want her? Ann joked.
Ann insisted she’d forgotten all about the half-day. But I think she was lying, that she’d engineered our acquaintance on purpose. Ann was like that—sly. She liked to put people together and see how they collided. That night she made dinner for the four of us: me, her, Nevaeh, Dominga. A happy family. I think she drew some private pleasure from how quietly we all sat, none of us able to think of what to say to anyone else. I remember that Nevaeh busied herself at the table with paper and crayons. I drew a picture of Daddy, she said, where he lives in heaven. Heaven was the white upper corner of the page.
That doesn’t look like him at all, Ann said. Try again.
That night, she asked me to drive Dominga home. She might have bundled Nevaeh into the car and done it herself, but she knew that I had no idea how to carry on a conversation with a Guatemalan cleaning woman, someone so unlike myself. She knew, too, that Dominga tried her best to find me invisible. It was the same slyness, becoming more and more familiar to me, but I think maybe she also saw it as a form of education.
I find it difficult now to conjure Dominga’s image. She might have been older than Ann, or younger. She might have been large or small. What we talked about during that car ride, or if we talked at all, I have no idea. What I do remember is that, when she sat down in the passenger seat of Ann’s car, she flipped down the mirror and took a pair of silver hoop earrings from her purse, big enough to slip a fist through. She gently inclined her head from side to side as she returned them to her ears. I remember a dark lip stain.
These things said to me that Dominga’s life was not here, in Ann’s house. It was elsewhere, with other people. It was in that house, no doubt, where I dropped her off, in a part of town I’d never seen, where the rich smell of cooking was implicated with the accordion music drifting out of the window, and where three men—husband father brother?—sat on a couch under the streetlamp.
I think I only saw Nevaeh four or five times, all told. Once I asked her if she’d seen any interesting birds in the backyard. She was tearing a napkin into pieces and eating the pieces. Stop that, Ann said, taking the ragged napkin. She’s pretending not to hear you, Ann said. She’s being rude.
Nevaeh pretended not to hear that, either.
Ann would needle me about Nevaeh when she wasn’t around. You know, she’d say, you’re closer to her age than mine. I don’t think that was true, but it was close to true. You can’t stand it, Ann would say. It disgusts you. She said these things as she slipped a hand beneath my shirt. These were the kind of games she liked to play, and I liked them, too—at least, I did while we were playing them. Later, in the lofted bed of my dorm room, I stared at the ceiling and went over them again in my mind, and felt uneasy.
I stopped reading my Psych textbook because it made certain unflattering accusations toward me. The existence of Nevaeh, now made concrete, made Ann mother as well as widow, and didn’t help. Winter came; afternoons at Ann’s house grew dark and oppressive. I began to complain that we never went anywhere. This was ridiculous of me. I didn’t really want to go anywhere, and I would have been afraid to be seen by my classmates with Ann on my arm. But I demanded anyway, because I felt that if I could bring Ann into the light, the primal and secretive aspects of our relationship could be scoured away. Of course, I only dimly understood that what embarrassed me was the same as what aroused me, and that the last thing I wanted was to get my way.
Ann understood me better than I did, and she called my bluff. Great idea, she said, we’ll go to a restaurant. Nevaeh never gets a chance to go out. You can both drink Shirley Temples.
So I dropped it.
But when Ann invited me to go with her to a conference in the Outer Banks, I leapt at the chance. It would thread the needle: I could be out with Ann, in the real world, but some other part of it, where no one I knew would see. I e-mailed my professors and told them I had the chicken pox. I told my mother I had a sore throat, and not to call.
Ann picked me up outside my dorm. I was waiting for her under the warming lamp of the streetlight—I didn’t want her to see that room, with its bunked beds, like a cabin at summer camp, and the yellow ugly soles of my roommate’s feet. It was the middle of the night; we were trying to reach the first ferry of the morning. It was like eloping. As we sped away in the dark, I asked her what she’d done with Nevaeh.
Dominga has her, she said. We saw the sun rising from the ferry, perched over the black marsh like a blood egg.
Ann drew the shades of our room against the iron plank of the sea. On the floor below, men and women were bustling in lanyards. Ann pulled her own lanyard over her head and became one of them. I was left alone. I was left with the truth, that I was not supposed to be there. I was an interloper at the 12th Annual Conference of Medical Supply Distribution and Advanced Logistics. I felt like a flurry of sand, of beachy grit, carried in by an intruding wind.
I went out while Ann was at the conference. I was allowed to go anywhere on the island but the conference rooms or the main hall. I walked out upon the conference center’s wooden pier to watch the slow traffic of the pelicans, but I had no lanyard, and I was chased away by a woman with a white polo and a folded hat like a sea captain’s.
For two days I walked the tightly clustered streets of that fishing village. It was December, and everything was closed. The shuttered vacation houses, the assemblages of belfries and turrets filling up with nothing but light, depressed me. In the windows of the darkened shops bits of sea glass blinked like goblin eyes, and every restaurant bore a wooden sign that read C U NEXT SEASON. The sounds of drills and hammers, of motel roofs being repaired, echoes across the crescent harbor, but I never did see the roofers themselves.
I felt lonely. Was this why Ann had dragged me out here? To abandon me? To set me safely loose in an empty town where I could do no harm? But at night, when Ann would bring up to the room a buffet plate and a half-filled bottle of wine, I could not hold on to my anger. She seemed made up of such simple shapes and colors, white triangle of skin and square blue shoulder pads, two red columns of hair, and my love for her was just as simple, just as undeniable. We undressed and her stomach and chest were as cool and pale as sand. We had never slept, really slept, in the same bed before. In sleep she cast a leg over me and pinned me down.
On the third day I discovered a nature trail, a poorly-marked sand path leading into a marsh. Tall grasses there whispered like silk in the wind and at the end of the path was a quiet soundside beach. From behind a live oak, I watched six birds wade in the shallow water. Three were brown and three were white. The white ones had red clown faces and unblinking white eyes. They stirred the water with curved bills. They were no bigger than housecats. I watched them for a long time, mesmerized.
That night, I tried to describe them to Ann. I struggled to explain what it had been like to be unseen but so close, how I might have scattered them with the slightest movement. Ann listened with patient disinterest. We should call Nevaeh, I said, and describe them to her. I bet she can identify them.
She’s with Dominga, Ann said.
I did eventually identify those birds, but not until much later. I saw them in a Peterson’s Guide on a shelf in the parlor of a bed-and-breakfast on the coast of Maine. I wasn’t looking for them. I just opened right to their page. White Ibises. The white ones had been adults, and the brown ones juveniles. Parents and their children.
When I saw them, I felt again, contractedly and superimposed upon the feelings of the present moment—the weariness of travel impatience toward the girl behind the counter scrounging up our room key, the anticipation of a long weekend spent with my wife, without the distractions of work and home—what I had felt then, with Ann. Resentment at being carried along and ignored, like extra luggage. The feeling of everything, even Ann, being closed to me.
It was strange to have them back, those feelings. Not least because they ended up being not at all important—not relative to what came after. But they were the feelings that were returned to me.
The window of our room looked out on the Atlantic, underlined in rocks and frost. It was a different vantage point, but the same sea. I thought of Ann, closing the shades against the sea, as if frightened by it—too open, too wide.
That night, I told my wife about Ann for the first time. But as soon as I began, I realized I was in trouble. I began to fear it seemed as if I were divulging a long-kept secret, when the truth was, I hadn’t thought about Ann in years. I rushed through the story, and I tried to make it seem as if the point was really those ibises, and the coincidence of finding them in the bird guide. But my wife is a respected journalist, well-known for her ability to extract honest words from dishonest men, and she would not let me end the story. What happened after that? she asked.
I don’t know if I want to tell you, I said. I’m afraid that if I keep going, you’ll say it explains something about me. You’ll say it explains everything about me. You’ll say, So that’s why you never wanted kids, or why you wear your socks to bed, or why you talk in your sleep.
Is it why you talk in your sleep?
No, I said. It isn’t anything. It’s just a story.
But it’s not the whole story.
Sure it is. What’s missing?
She sat up in bed and pushed her glasses on top of her head. This caused her dark hair to bloom outward, giving her the look of a nun in habit, and revealed the agates of her eyes. Many politicians, many war criminals, have been thus unmanned. Well, I don’t know, she said. I guess I don’t understand how such a relationship happened in the first place. Where did you even meet? How could it work, when she was so much older?
There’s not much to it, I said. I was a freshman. I hadn’t made any friends, and I was lonely. She was very beautiful, and she seemed to want me around all the time. I remember thinking that when I was with her I was entering the real world, the adult world, for the first time.
I understand what you saw in her. What teenager doesn’t want to hook up with a sexy older woman? What I don’t understand is, what did she see in you?
Well, thanks.
Come on. You were nineteen. She was thirty-something.
I was a good-looking kid. You’ve seen pictures of me from back then. I hated going back to the dorm, so I spent most of my spare time at the pool. I had a swimmer’s body.
Do you really think that’s all there was?
I guess I’ve never really thought about it.
I can see that, she said. But you’re thinking about it now. Go on—finish the story.
So I went on. I spoke slowly and chose my words carefully. It was important to get the next part right. Because it was the part of the story I could not explain—only recount.
I had decided to punish Ann. I would do it on the last day of the conference, at the Farewell Mixer. My plan was simple. I would walk up to Ann and say: Hello, darling. She’d have to recognize me then. She’d have to claim me.
Of course, as soon as I entered the main hall, I lost all confidence. It was filled with lanyard people, half-drunk and clustered in conversation. They had plates filled with shrimp and grapes, and plastic cups of wine. No one took any notice of me. I found her in an alcove with others, sitting as languidly, as beautifully, as one can sit on a beanbag chair. The white shelf of her heel, loosed from the dangling espadrille, nearly made me forget my intentions altogether.
I wanted her to blush and stammer when she saw me standing there. But she only held out her hand, the right hand with the star-map freckles and the dead man’s ring. I was helpless toward that hand. The man next to her gave up his beanbag chair for me. I sat on it stiffly. She introduced me as her nephew and poured me a yellow glass of wine.
Immediately I regretted coming downstairs. The conversation was about logistics. What else? Purchase orders, insurance coding. They had jokes about these things that went over my head. I tried desperately, like a child among adults, to conceal my boredom. Then I felt Ann’s hand on the inside of my thigh. The widow’s ring, making tight hard circles. I knotted my hands in my lap to conceal the physiological response. Sorry, someone said at last—you said this is your nephew?
My late husband’s nephew, actually, Ann said. But family is family.
That night’s sex was the best we’d ever had. In her ear, I whispered, Ann, Aunt, Ann, Aunt.
After the conference I got very sick. Even though I’d spent most of four days doing nothing but wandering, sulking, and having sex, I felt bloodless, used up. I missed another week of classes, and the tenuous hold I had on my schoolwork finally collapsed. I ignored Ann’s calls for a while, but when I finally picked up, her voice was cool and sweet, like cough syrup. Yes, I was feeling a little better. No, I wasn’t angry with her. Yes, I would come. Of course I’d come.
It was late. I stepped softly through her kitchen, trying not to wake the daughter. She gave me whiskey and lemon in hot water. It struck me as elegant, antique. I hadn’t even known you could put these things together. She wore a towel and turban, just out of the shower. She put her hand down my shirt and I said: What about Nevaeh?
She looked at me with suspicion. What about her?
We don’t want to wake her up, I said.
I told you, Ann said. Dominga has her.
Then I understood. But I had to go upstairs and see for myself. The little girl’s room was empty. No bed, no dresser, no clothes or shoes, no board books, no plastic animals. Even the lemon-yellow curtains were gone.
Ann wrapped her arms around me from behind. It’s a nice room, she said, without all the mess. You can have it. It can be your room. You can stay here and never have to leave.
It seemed to me that I had two choices. I could go forward into that room, or I could backward down the stairs and out of the house entirely. The hard edge of the moonlight on the vacant walls was a guillotine’s blade. It had fallen on Nevaeh, and if I stepped forward, it would fall on me, too. And yet somehow it seemed just as impossible to go the other way, to leave.
I was afraid for myself. For the first time, I would have to decide between two paths, both of which promised only different species of disappointment. At the same time, I knew that my fear was not what was most important about what I saw. What was most important was that the little girl was not there. Where had Ann banished her?
In the middle of my own first crisis, I was being challenged to think of someone other than myself, to think of more urgent and more innocent pains, and bring what I felt into alignment with what I ought to feel. I think I understood, even as it was happening, that this would be the first in a series of such contests, a series of contests one might call an adult life. I was growing up very fast. I said goodbye to Ann—furious and sad, shaking redly beneath her bath towel—and left.
The next day I drove to Dominga’s neighborhood. I parked just down the street from her house. I was not sure exactly what I was looking for. It would have been too easy for Nevaeh to simply be there, peering up at a tree through tiny binoculars. I was looking for proof of life, maybe, a toy forgotten in the yard, but there was nothing like that.
I watched the house for hours. Nothing happened. No smell of cooking, no accordion music. I felt sheepish and stupid. Even if I did see a sign of Nevaeh, what was I going to do? I had no idea.
I was about to leave when the door opened, and a man came out. One of those I’d seen sitting on the couch in the yard? It was hard to say. He was bald; he wore an Atlanta Braves jersey and sunglasses. He stood and leaned on the wire gate. He didn’t look directly at me, and I wasn’t sure if he’d seen me. After a few minutes he went back inside, only to return shortly and resume the same position. This time a large kitchen knife was dangling casually in his hand.
I started the car and left. Already I was formulating excuses in my mind for giving up. After all, how did I know that Nevaeh wasn’t happier with Dominga? It must have been hard for a little girl in that terrible house, without feature or warmth. Mother and daughter never did seem to understand each other. Wasn’t I being a little prejudiced by assuming that Nevaeh would have it worse in Dominga’s house, just because it was of a different social class? And who was I to decide, anyway? Not the girl’s father—not even close.
I failed Psych; I failed Freshman Comp. I was put on academic probation. I transferred to a school closer to home, as my parents demanded. For a while, I watched for Nevaeh, looking for red-haired girls among the children of brown-skinned families. It was unlikely that I would come across her, but I believed in unlikely things. At some point I realized that the girl I was watching for would be too old for me to recognize. I never saw Ann again, nor Nevaeh. The white ibises in the bird guide were as close as I ever came.
Do you feel guilty for not doing more?
No. There was nothing else I could do.
Couldn’t you have called the police?
I guess so. For some reason, I couldn’t imagine that. What would I have said? My lover has sold her child?
Why sold?
Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes I imagined that Dominga had bought Nevaeh with the same wages that Ann paid her. Sometimes I imagined it happened the other way, and Ann had paid Dominga to take Nevaeh off her hands. I think I had a kind of juvenile belief that anything unscrupulous had to do with money. I didn’t believe that desperation could be enough, that despair could be enough.
My wife was standing between the bed and the sea. When she interrogated someone—how often I’d seen it—she held her left hand in her right, just over her heart, as if cradling an invisible notepad. Or holding a scalpel. It was a favorite of mine among her many poses, and I loved her for it now, though it was not often that her scalpel was turned toward me. She said: Do you think that, in some way, she wanted you for a child? You said yourself that she and Nevaeh never seemed to get along. Could you have been the obedient, compliant child she really wanted?
I suppose. She did offer me that empty room. But you make it sound like she traded her little girl in for a newer model. Like she didn’t have any use for her anymore after I came along.
If so, she must have been very angry and very lonely when you left.
She could be cruel, I said, but she wasn’t that cruel.
I know cruelty. It’s often disguised as something else.
You didn’t know Ann.
No, my wife said. But maybe you didn’t really know her, either.
Just like that, she’s tied the story off, cinched a cord around it. She gets up to ready herself for dinner, to ply her hair with complicated machines and daub powders on her face. I can see her in the mirror, pressing a finger to the softening flesh of her jawline. For me, it’s the thinning patch at my temple. How do you explain to someone that what you love best about their face is how it’s grown into itself, become more itself?
Tied off, cinched: You didn’t know her. She’s probably right. I was too young. Though I think I was a little older, just a little, the day I left her house than the day I entered.
Still, the memories keep coming. As one falls, it dislodges the next.
Here’s one. One day, as I lay on Ann’s bed, I noticed that the photograph on the mantel had been turned around to face the wall. The next day it was gone. The husband had been banished somewhere. As it turned out, he wouldn’t be the last. I thought I had nothing to fear from him. But now I wonder whether he was really gone, or if perhaps he’d been there all the time, looking from the bottom of a drawer, or the back of a closet.
Here’s another. Ann’s bedroom, tousled sheets, white on white. Ann tousled too, bra twisted up and red hair crazed. I told her she was beautiful in her dishabille, a word I’d recently learned and had enjoyed toying with. I mispronounced it—dish-a-bill—and she laughed at me. It’s French, you dummy. But I think she liked that I didn’t know how to pronounce things, or use a wine key, or make a collect call. I was smooth, like a marble paperweight in a rattan basket—something memory could pass over and not be snagged.
Breaker breaker, my wife says to me from the door to the bathroom. This is her way of telling me I’m lost in thought. Got your ears on, good buddy?
Affirmative, good buddy, I say. Twenty-car pile-up on memory lane.
Then I get up and we go downstairs.
