Crushed Page 9

  Wickham Hill’s tone turned sportive. “Maybe I should know what it is you wouldn’t do that you’ve never done before.”

  An easy laugh slipped from Audrey, but she also felt a warning flare of danger. “There are one or two things,” she said, knowing there were many. “Skydiving is one I’m willing to talk about. Did you want to go skydiving?”

  “No. Tea-dancing.”

  At first she heard this as “T-dancing” and wondered if it was some sexual activity she’d never heard about. She tried to sound casual. “What’s T-dancing?”

  “According to the paper, it’s what they did at teatime during World War One, only now they do it at night.”

  “Oh,” she said, laughing and relieved. “Tea as in teapot. When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Okay. What should I wear?”

  Wickham Hill said it sounded semiformal. “Something along the lines of last night,” he suggested, “only maybe a little more so.”

  An image of the long beaded dress in Veni, Vidi, Emi popped into Audrey’s mind. “Okay,” she said. Then: “Am I saying okay too much?”

  He laughed. “No.” He made his low voice even lower. “I like hearing you say okay.”

  After hanging up, Audrey sat at her table, staring into the distance, trying not to think of the $394 dress. Something along the lines of last night, only more so. But she didn’t have anything like last night, only more so. At home, the only formal things she had were a suit dress, which was dowdy, and a black velvet skirt, which looked like Sunday school.

  Her car was parked in front of Veni, Vidi, Emi. As she walked toward it, she decided to base her decision on luck: if the same horrible salesclerk was at the counter, she wouldn’t buy the dress; but if the clerk was gone, she would.

  At Veni, Vidi, Emi, Audrey stopped as if to look at some open-toe shoes in the window display, but let her eyes rise to the central desk, where the thin, awful salesclerk stood staring silently back at her.

  Audrey turned at once and walked to her car, trying not to feel what she truly felt, which was disappointment.

  Chapter 27

  Sifting

  In the living room of his apartment, Clyde stood at an ironing board, nosing the hot point of the iron around the buttons of his white dress shirt, which he never wore anywhere except to work.

  It was Saturday afternoon, and he was working that night at the Jemison Country Club. It was where he worked every Saturday night, busing tables, setting silverware, and serving what he thought of as “pre-food”—baskets with three kinds of bread and ice water with lemon wedges. When he’d interviewed for the job, he’d looked at his hands and said, “I can do anything except talk to people,” but he’d said it in such a low mumble that the interviewer, a smiling older woman, had to ask him to repeat himself.

  Today Clyde’s mother was watching a football game, Michigan-Wisconsin, though she had no affiliation with either school. Watching sports, like watching cooking shows, was just another of the weird by-products of her condition, and though she watched the game impassively, her eyes seemed even more than usually sunken.

  Clyde’s father sat down at the desk, turned on the computer, and pulled a file of job applications from his briefcase. A moment later, he leaned back from the computer with a startled look on his face.

  “What’s this?” he said, turning to Clyde. “You been using the company’s background-check program?”

  Clyde wished there were some way he could say no, but he couldn’t think of one. “I was just looking up a couple of addresses,” he said.

  His father was staring at the screen. “That’s what the phone book is for. And Google. I see three names at least. Wickham Hill. Theo Driggs. Audrey Reed.” He turned. “Who are they?”

  “People from school.”

  His father took this in. “And why did you need their addresses?”

  Clyde shrugged. “Just wondered where they lived, is all.”

  “But you found a lot more than addresses, didn’t you?”

  Clyde didn’t answer. His father took a deep breath. “Look, Clyde, these are the personal lives of real people. People like you and me and your mother. Who shouldn’t have to think about strangers peeping through the keyhole.”

  His father was staring at Clyde, and from the side, Clyde could feel his mother’s eyes on him, too. He felt embarrassed, then defensive. He pointed to his father’s file of job applications. “What about what you do with all those?”

  In a restrained voice, his father said, “Those are people who have, in writing, given the company the right to look into their backgrounds. I doubt that”—he turned to the computer screen—“Wickham Hill, Audrey Reed, and Theo Driggs gave you written permission to go sifting through their private lives.”

  “I didn’t go sifting,” Clyde said. Then, more softly: “I didn’t understand it was such a big deal.”

  “Okay, then,” his father said.

  And so, on that warm Saturday afternoon in November, Clyde’s father nodded and resumed his work, his mother stared blankly at a televised football game, and Clyde, feeling even smaller than normal, went back to his ironing.

  Chapter 28

  Audrey, Courtside

  Thwock. Thwock. Thwock.

  Eyes closed, Audrey lay on the chaise on the sideline of C.C.’s tennis court, listening to the slow, rhythmic sounds of one of C.C. and Lea’s long baseline rallies. Audrey was feeling good. She’d told C.C. about the tea dance, and about how she didn’t really have anything to wear and didn’t want to waste the afternoon buying something new, and C.C., remembering that her mother and Audrey were the same size, had gone to her mother’s closet and found five formal dresses, which she’d laid out on her bed. Audrey had loved them all but chose the filmy, high-necked red one, which fit perfectly. So now she had nothing to do but sit in the strange, warm November sun, letting the pleasant afternoon sun warm her long legs and bare arms.

  The thwocking sounds stopped, and C.C. muttered, “Oh, that was clever.”

  Audrey smiled without opening her eyes.

  “Deuce,” Lea called, barely audible. Then, following the serve, the sounds began again: Thwock. Thwock. Thwock.

  C.C. and Lea played the same baseline game, doggedly retrieving side to side and, with looping strokes, sending top-spin forehands and two-handed backhands to alternating sides of the opposite backcourt. Audrey, taller and more aggressive, preferred a serve-and-volley game. She made more spectacular shots, but, in the end, the baseline retrievers usually won, especially on clay. Which was fine by Audrey. It meant more time lounging in the sun and thinking about Wickham Hill.

  She peeled down the straps of her top to let the sun touch a bit more of her skin.

  “No bare ta-tas allowed courtside here, honey,” C.C. called between thwocks, and Audrey smiled and turned her top down another half inch.

  C.C. said, “I guarantee you”—thwock—“my creepy little brother’s upstairs with his binoculars on you right now.”

  Audrey didn’t care. A breeze moving through the fallen leaves made a soft shushing sound, and Audrey thought her drowsy hothouse thoughts of Wickham Hill even while her friends’ genteel world went on without her, thwock thwock thwock.

  At the court change, C.C. and Lea sat down nearby, toweling sweat and sipping lemonade. Audrey said, “Who’s winning?”

  “Lea,” C.C. said, and added, “We always think of Lea as gentle and sweet, but in fact she be sneaky and cruel.”

  Audrey, who’d closed her eyes again, heard Lea’s soft laugh. C.C. said, “What did I tell you? The cretin’s up there, watching us.” Then, yelling: “We see you, you little deviant!” Slumping down in her chair and tilting her face to the sun, she said, “You know, if this is global warming, I’m not sure I’m against it.”

  “Where’s your mom?” Lea asked.

  “The gym. She wanted me to go and take a yoga class with her. I declined and respectfully suggested she take Brian instead. She said she didn’t thi
nk so. She probably knew he’d pass gas and play dumb.”

  Audrey laughed without opening her eyes. The truth was, Audrey idolized Mrs. Mudd. She was an attorney, but she never really seemed like one. When they were all twelve or thirteen and began having sleepovers at C.C.’s house, Mrs. Mudd would help them fall asleep by dimming the lights and having them all stretch out on their sleeping bags. She would teach them a few yoga poses: the sphinx pose; the cobra pose; the cat, rabbit, and warrior poses. Then she would tell them to relax in the corpse pose, which made them giggle. After they stopped giggling, Audrey really imagined herself as a corpse—as her mother, lying in the sunken garden, dead but not dead, awake but not conscious. Then Mrs. Mudd would go from girl to girl, lifting up their legs, pulling them gently, and setting them down again, as if their hips needed a slight adjustment. She’d do the same with their arms. Then she would briefly rub Audrey’s neck and shoulders, and before drawing away, she would touch the center of Audrey’s forehead with the tip of her finger, as if she were turning off some kind of light.

  “This morning, I went into my mother’s room,” C.C. said, “and she was on her yoga mat, doing the most bizarre move. She was on all fours, and all of a sudden she lunged forward, popped her eyes out, and stuck her tongue way, way out. She actually made an animal sound. I’m not supposed to talk to her when she’s doing yoga, but I said, ‘Would that be the madmanin-the-attic pose?’ ‘Lion pose,’ she said calmly, and did it again.”

  As Lea and C.C. walked back onto the court, Audrey listened to the shushy scuffle of their shoes on the sandy surface of the clay. Somewhere nearby, a squirrel chattered. C.C. said, “Don’t fall asleep, Aud, you’re playing the winner.” Audrey, without opening her eyes, raised a hand in acknowledgment. Beneath her eyelids, orangy arcs rose and receded in a pleasant pattern, and soon she was again listening to the lazy and reassuring sounds of baseline rallies and thinking of Wickham Hill, with whom she’d soon be dancing.

  In the late afternoon, it began to cool sharply. C.C. zipped on a sweatshirt and said, “November returns.” They hurried into the house, arms folded against the cold, and Audrey went upstairs to get C.C.’s mother’s red dress. Brian’s door was open, so she glanced in. He had his back to her, leaning close to his computer in intent concentration. The plump bearded dragon was draped over the back of his neck, asleep.

  Brian was searching for something, apparently, because he was scanning down a list of what looked like Web sites. He was so lost in concentration that she was able to creep forward, lean to within an inch of his ear, and say, “Gotcha.”

  Brian jerked up so suddenly that the lizard half slid and half fell to the ground. “C.C., you . . . !” he sputtered, but then, seeing Audrey, he turned calm.

  He bent to pick up the bearded dragon, and Audrey helped check the lizard’s body for signs of damage. By the time she was sure she hadn’t killed the thing, Brian’s screen saver was peacefully showing slides of outer space.

  “I shouldn’t’ve sneaked up on you. I just thought you were, you know, looking for naked ladies or something.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t,” he said. “And maybe I was.” He ran his index finger over the little spikes on the dragon’s head. “Speaking of ladies,” he added, nodding toward the binoculars that were sitting on his windowsill. “Seeing you down by the tennis courts—sunning the rarely seen territories—that was what I would call extremely stellar.”

  Audrey grimaced and shook her head. “I’ve got to go now,” she said, and Brian, nodding his head, staring at Audrey, and stroking the lizard in his lap, said, “You don’t, but you will.”

  Chapter 29

  Clyde’s Ride

  Clyde stood waiting for his ride in front of the apartment building. It was early Saturday evening. The sun had already set, and the sky was pink through the bare tree limbs by the duck pond. It had been a beautiful, warm day—weather-casters called it the warmest November 8 on record—but now, without cloud cover, the temperature was down to the mid-forties, and dropping.

  Clyde shivered a little in his work clothes—black slacks, black Nikes, black socks, and a white button-down shirt, neatly pressed. He wasn’t wearing a jacket—the country club provided the black jacket and tie he wore while busing tables—and he’d told his mother it was too warm for a parka, a mistake, as it turned out. He had to stamp his feet and blow on his hands to stay warm.

  As a dirty yellow Geo approached, Clyde raised his hand to signal the round-faced girl behind the wheel. She pulled over, and Clyde opened the door to high-volume ska music. The girl’s name was Manda Will, and when she grinned up at Clyde he could see the wide space between her two front teeth.

  “Hey,” Clyde said, but his voice was swallowed by the music.

  Manda lived with four other girls in a two-bedroom apartment not far from Clyde’s. She was taking a few units at LeMoyne and had two or three part-time jobs, including the one at the country club. When she’d learned how close to her Clyde lived, and that he didn’t have a car, she’d offered to give him rides, a dollar each direction. “Cheap,” she’d said, grinning her gap-toothed grin.

  The car was warm and the music was okay, once Manda turned it down a little. Clyde was comfortable with Manda, mostly because she never seemed to mind his quietness. She was wearing a white top with a black skirt, shoes, and stockings. It took about ten minutes to reach the country club, during which time they listened to the Jamaican singers and stared out at brick buildings. Everything looked cold and dead at dusk, the traffic lights glowing in the rising clouds of exhaust. When Manda nosed her car into a parking spot near the back entrance, she reached inside the waistband of her skirt and pulled out a cigarette case. “Stay put, okay?” she said when Clyde started to open the door.

  “Okay,” Clyde said reluctantly. He knew she hated to smoke alone in the car. He watched her flip open the case and extract a hand-rolled joint. She depressed the dashboard lighter.

  “Wanna tootle the flute?” she said. Clyde shook his head no.

  A few seconds passed while Manda held the smoke in her lungs. Then she exhaled and said, “How do you do it, Clyde? Without a little reeferization?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not that bad.”

  She gave him a look. “That’s where you’re wrong, Clyde. It is that bad, and then some.”

  But it wasn’t for Clyde. Bad was thinking about his mother. Bad was having to explain looking up Wickham Hill, Theo Driggs, and Audrey Reed on Bor-Lan’s LexisNexis program. Bad was thinking about Wickham calling Audrey his long-stemmed study partner. Good was putting on the black jacket that the manager handed out, delivering the pre-food to the diners, pouring water from crystal pitchers. Dying wasn’t on people’s minds here. Untouchable girls weren’t on people’s minds. All the workers wanted was to do their jobs, and afterward count their tips.

  “Tonight you’re doing my tables just like always, okay?” Manda said.

  Clyde nodded. Manda waited tables. Clyde bused them.

  Manda squinched one eye as she again drew smoke into her lungs. When, after a few seconds, she exhaled, she said, “You don’t talk a lot, do you, Clyde?”

  Clyde gave so slight a shrug it might, to Manda, have seemed like a twitch.

  She said, “I was telling my roommates about you, how you’re the strong, silent type. I think one of them wants to meet you. Should I work on that?”

  “No,” Clyde said flatly, and to his surprise, a quick loud laugh flew through Manda’s lips.

  “You do like girls, though, right?” she said.

  “Depends on the girl,” Clyde said—a response that Manda also found hilarious. Clyde made a mental note that, once they started serving, he’d better help make sure Manda was taking the right dinners to the right tables.

  Chapter 30

  Enter Audrey and Wickham

  The cab turned onto a familiar tree-lined road that led to the Jemison Country Club, and a man leaned from a window of the gateside kiosk.

  Wickham slid a ca
rd to the cabdriver, who presented it to the man at the gate, who gave it a glance and waved them through.

  “I guess you’ve been here before?” Wickham said, and Audrey murmured yes. “I like it here,” she said. “My father’s a member.”

  The cab pulled up in front of a new building that, because of its shake shingle siding, pale yellow window light, and heavy, chiseled beams, made Audrey think of a tinted post-card of an old Adirondack lodge. Her father hadn’t had time to take her here for ages, and she wondered if he knew they’d fixed things up so much. She’d have to tell him.

  Faint strains of a swing band came from within, and, as her father had always done, Wickham opened the car door, held out his hand, and helped her step out.

  Inside, perfectly pruned dwarf citrus trees, fragrant with white blossoms, filled white-enameled tin planters. Black-jacketed waiters and busboys whisked in and out of the dining room, which was much bigger than the old one. When they were seated, Audrey said, “You know what this reminds me of? Old Cary Grant movies. Do you like Cary Grant?”

  Wickham said he didn’t really know. He’d heard of him, but he’d never actually watched one of his movies. “I know his real name, though.”

  “His real name’s not Cary Grant?”

  “No sirree.”

  “Then what is it?” Audrey said.

  In a playful voice, Wickham replied, “It’ll cost you to find out.”

  “Oh yeah? How much?”

  “Plenty,” he said, laughing.

  Chapter 31

  Episode at Table 9

  Clyde had used a crumber to clean a white tablecloth and was setting out the china service for coffee when he noticed someone at table 9 who looked a little like Audrey Reed, only older.

  Then he saw that the woman didn’t just look like Audrey Reed.

  She was Audrey Reed.

  And she was with that new guy from Georgia or wherever, who was all flashed out in a suit and tie. Audrey wore a high-necked red dress that made her look older, and beautiful, and . . . rich. She’d been laughing, but when she stopped and glanced his way, Clyde feared he might need to nod or smile or even speak. But he was wrong. Audrey Reed looked right through him.