At the crest of the hill two stallions
backs black against a nectar wash
graze on the green-tang clover,
acorns to sniff out.
We lie together beneath the flowering hawthorn,
your white collar unbuttoned.
Once, I heard the sound
of wind under water, breathed in the sea
and survived.
I hope my father was right, that Dwight’s drowning was an accident. I hope he left his lover’s house that morning wanting nothing more than a bracing swim; that he lay on the banks of the Hudson River, listened to the water flowing past, breathed in the crocus blossoms, the sour-tart smell of crabgrass. He stripped down to his underwear and waded out into the muscular water, floated, watched clouds run across the sky, the flocking birds. He turned to swim back, but the landscape had changed. Now he was drifting past an unfamiliar shore, pulled by a current too strong for him to fight.
* * *
—
The doorbell rings twice.
“Anybody home?” Peter calls out.
“We’re back here,” Mum calls. “Don’t let the kitten out. He keeps trying to escape through the front door.”
Peter is carrying an enormous bunch of flowers, daylilies and pale pink garden roses.
“Happy birthday, Wallace,” he says, handing them to my mother. He looks around at the piles of books everywhere, my mother on the stepladder, alphabetizing. “Very festive.”
“I’m too old for birthdays. I’ll change my blouse and then we can go.” She hands me the flowers. “Can you put these in water?”
* * *
—
Most of the streetlights on our block are out, deliberately broken by crackheads, who prefer the shadows. Peter and I walk home from dinner down the center of East Tenth Street, arm in arm, making ourselves a larger, less appealing target. Half the ground-floor apartments have beware of dog signs in their windows, though we rarely see anyone walking a dog.
“Your mother was on excellent form tonight,” Peter says. “She was practically beaming when we put her in the cab.”
“She loves to be pampered. She pretends to scorn it, but take her to an overpriced restaurant and pick up the check? She acts like a delighted little girl who just got a new doll from Daddy. Also, she adores you. You make her feel young.”
“And you?” Peter asks.
“I am young.”
“Do you adore me?”
“Most of the time. Sometimes you’re just irritating.”
He pulls me to him, breathes me in. “You smell good. Lemony.”
“Probably the cheese-clothed lemon wedge they gave me to squeeze on my fish.”
“Eau de Sole. Because every woman has one. I think we could market that.” Peter laughs.
“Not every woman,” I say.
When we open the door to our apartment the air in the room feels charged, staticky. A faint metallic tang in its molecules. The phone is ringing and ringing, unanswered. Next to it, on the bookshelf, a vase of tulips has overturned, water pooling.
“Fucking cat stepped on the answering machine again. I’m going to strangle that damned cat.” I throw my coat on the table and storm into our bedroom. There are two large windows in our bedroom. One on the right, over the bed; the other, which opens onto the fire escape, mostly obscured by heavy metal security bars that can only be opened from the inside, in case we need to make an escape. The window above our bed is now lying across it. Above the bed, a gaping hole, a splintered wooden frame. There’s a man squatting on the windowsill. He grins at me, eyes glazed, seemingly unaware that he is teetering on the edge of a four-story drop. His greasy hair is matted, weeks of unwashed filth webbing the surface, as if spiders have nested in it, their microscopic eggs warmed by his damp, cradle-capped scalp. Somehow the man has managed to climb across the side of the building from the fire escape, span the free fall, and bash in our entire window frame. On the fire escape, outside the unlocked window bars, I can see our TV and VCR, the tangled cords of the answering machine.
The man follows my gaze, then looks back at me, cocks his head, as if deciding whether to go or stay. He wets his lips with the tip of his pink tongue and smiles. I scream for Peter, but it comes out as a whisper. Leering, the man starts to climb back into the room. My entire body coils. If I run at him right now, take him by surprise, body-slam him, he will fall backward into the night sky, splatter onto the cement, lie there, eyes wide open, while some other crackhead picks his pockets. I hurtle toward him like a battering ram before I can change my mind. And then I’m flat on my face, legs kicked out from under me. Peter strides past, tall, menacing. He is holding a kitchen knife. When he speaks, his voice is measured, blade-cold.