—We have to keep it low-key for the girls, he said, but his words and his mouth worked at different speeds now.
—Her disappearance, he said, as if I hadn’t understood.
I probably had that stretched-awkward smile I get. We both took another drink.
—We could say she’s gone to look for architectural salvage, I said.
—We’re knee-deep in architectural salvage.
—But she has her time away, right? Conferences?
I began to feel my own break between phrasing and delivery. As I watched his face, I picked up something of Jane in the ticking of the feather pillows, mixed with her grandmother’s oily scent. I looked at his chest. I felt like the girl in Duras’s The Lover, when she was about to touch the man’s chest for the first time. I offered to stay a couple of extra days, make some headway on Franny’s stuff. Then I caught myself and quickly wound back to the girls.
We agreed that it would be plausible for Jane to go off and work for a while in seclusion. She had a commission designing sets for a version of Peter Pan, in Boston. Mike would hide her drawings.
He picked up the knotted ends of my nightgown ties and rolled them between his fingers, letting them drop against my chest.
—Can you really make any knot? he asked.
—I know knots, I said.
My father had taught me dozens of sailor’s knots.
—And flags, I said. Capitals. By-products. My mother and her fucking workbooks.
—I thought you did scrapbooks.
—Those too.
I rushed to tell him everything I could about the articles I clipped. On a variety of subjects.
—I know. I could tell you where tulips spring up on Dutch maps.
I put my hand on his cheek and he said:
—I’d rather see a knot.
I tried to do something with the nightgown ties, but they were a little short.
He kissed my neck, just below my left ear, as I fiddled.
If Livvy were awake she was in the clock room, across the hall, listening to the passage of time, stubbornly holding on to her bladder. She was like Jane, hated to get out of bed in the morning. I wondered if she drifted when things got crazy. If her subtle body fled when it was under too much pressure, the way mine does. I knew she had her antenna and it’s possible she could pick up sounds through the heating grate. Not that you could receive whole words that way, certainly not with the noise of the clocks, but Mike and I whispered nonetheless.
—I should go downstairs, I said.
—I know, he said, but touched my leg.
—There are people who eat tulips to calm down, I said.
—Tulip eaters, he said and slid his hand between my thighs.
I thought about bringing up the friend who slept with her second husband the night of her first husband’s funeral, but I guessed that was a random thing, and let it go.
—We’re both a little bereft right now, I said.
—This isn’t about that.
—No?
—No.
Mike slowly pulled my nightgown up.
—I know how to draw kitchen triangles, I offered.
—That’s why I’ve always loved you, Mattie.
—I have stats on gun-related deaths. Skee-ball accidents. Nothing on car flights. Less on why we drive toward collision.
I wanted to take my rental car and find Jane out in the state of California and bring her home, keep myself from going anywhere else. I wanted to climb onto his lap and stay on at freeway speeds.
He wetted my right nipple with his tongue. I looked at the small indentations on either side of his nose, from his glasses, as I tried to breathe. I pressed a baby finger into one of them. It fit perfectly, like a tiny shoe.
—Tell me one of your stories, he said.
That was what we did. We told each other stories.
—Okay. There was a woman who fucked the David once. That guy I knew in college, you remember Stuart, he told me that.
The light pressure of Mike’s teeth, the way his tongue flicked. I thought of a ruby-throated hummingbird. But I proceeded with my story.
—I’m . . . not sure if he meant the false David near the Uffizi or the real David in Galleria dell’Accademia. But I hadn’t been to Italy . . . then, and I think I was a little naïve about security. But I like picturing that . . . otherworldly event: the woman seeming to . . . float upward, maybe she used . . . a rope ladder, or had a harness or swing, maybe she had help . . . from friends. In either case, she must have ascended when the guards were changing shifts. I feel certain she held on to him . . . like a moth to a wool blanket . . . until the first shout and the hands . . . that plucked her off.
Mike slid his hand into the bottoms of my shortie pajamas. I closed my eyes and began to float. Just before my head hit the ceiling, I heard the door handle twist back and forth.
—There’s something I have to watch! Mona shouted from the other side of the door.
Mike lifted his head.
—I’ll be there in a few minutes, honey. Turn on the TV in the living room.
We listened to the weight of Mona’s descent.
—Fate? Mike asked, as if he were offering me a soft drink.
The TV went on downstairs: loud.
Though I didn’t ask, he told me not to worry about Livvy. She wouldn’t be up for a while. She had stayed up very late.
He said he wanted to see every knot I knew how to make later. I wasn’t sure when later was, but I knew he wasn’t either. So I agreed to later.
Then Mike got up, kissed me once more, and soon the shower went on.
I found one of Jane’s robes. A pocket held a scrap of paper with this message: Nan wants the tea service. I wasn’t sure who had written it. In college, after Jane had dropped architecture and started sleeping with Mike, she’d changed her handwriting. I thought she wanted to move away from rendering. But now I understand she was trying to copy Mike.
As I slipped out the door and inched down the stairs to the first floor, I realized that he was soaping himself, bending under the low showerhead. Large enough for three, the stall had been plumbed to hit body parts below five feet. It only bothered me when I had to shampoo. But Mike was over six-foot-one, Jane five-eight.
The blue satin cuffs of her bathrobe slid past my fingertips, the bottom hem made a petal on the floor, almost bridal. She was probably passing through central California as Mike’s hot water ran and I knotted the robe ties. Inhaling fertilizer, the scent of developing artichokes, she would pull off at the exit and head toward a stand. Probably the one with a mural of dancing artichokes on the side. The kind of place that also sells honey, walnuts, medjool dates. She would sit in the car for a while and try to decide if she should leave the 101 and take back roads instead. There wasn’t any hurry if she had no idea where she was going. Of course she could have just turned around, pulled the Jaguar into the garage, found me down in the living room with Mona, and never questioned my wearing her robe.
There was a guy who killed himself on the 101 by taking a shotgun and wiring it to the shaft