After the Plague: And Other Stories Read online

  In the next instant he loomed up on the table, pulled out a chair, and dropped into it with a thump that reverberated the length of the dining room. “Gina, listen,” he said, as if they were right in the middle of a conversation and the man with the insect face didn’t exist, “about last night, and you’re not going to believe this, but it was—”

  And then he faltered. Gina’s mouth was hanging open—and this was a mouth that could cushion any blow, a mouth that knew the taste of leather and the shock of the punch that came out of nowhere. “Christ, Les,” she said. “What happened to you—you’re a mess. Have you looked in the mirror?”

  He watched her exchange a glance with the man across the table, and then he was talking again, trying to get it out, the night, the way they’d come at him, and they weren’t just your average muggers, they were the law, for Christ’s sake, and how could anybody expect him to defend her from that?

  “Les,” she was saying. “Les, I think you’ve had too much to drink.”

  “I’m trying to tell you something,” he said, and his own voice sounded strange to him, distant and whining, the voice of a loser, a fat man, a maker of bad guesses and worse decisions.

  That was when the red-haired man spoke up, his eyes twitching in his head. “Who is this jerk, anyway?”

  Gina—Gina the Puma—gave him a look that was like a left jab. “Shut up, Drew,” she said. And then, turning back to Lester: “Les, this is Drew.” She tried to inject a little air into her voice, though he could see she wasn’t up to it. “Drew wants to know where he can get a good steak around here.”

  Drew slouched in his chair. He had nothing to say. Lester looked from Gina to Drew and back again. He was very far gone, he knew that, but still, even through his haze, he was beginning to see something in those two faces that shut him out, that slammed the door with a bang and turned the key in the lock.

  He had no right to Gina or this table or this hotel, either. He couldn’t even make it through the first round.

  Gina’s voice came to him as if from a great distance—“Les, really, maybe you ought to go and lie down for a while”—and then he was on his feet. He didn’t say “Yes” or “No” or even “See you later”—he just turned away from the table, wove his way through the restaurant, down the stairs and back out into the night.

  It was fully dark now, black dark, and the shadows had settled under the skeletons of the trees. He wasn’t thinking about Gina or Drew or even April and the kid in the Suburban. There was no justice, no revenge, no reason—there was just this, just the beach and the night and the criminal elements. And when he got to the place by the lagoon and the stink of decay rose to his nostrils, he went straight for the blackest clot of shadow and the rasping murmur at the center of it. “You!” he shouted, all the air raging in his lungs. “Hey, you!”

  The Love of My Life

  They wore each other like a pair of socks. He was at her house, she was at his. Everywhere they went—to the mall, to the game, to movies and shops and the classes that structured their days like a new kind of chronology—their fingers were entwined, their shoulders touching, their hips joined in the slow triumphant sashay of love. He drove her car, slept on the couch in the family room at her parents’ house, played tennis and watched football with her father on the big thirty-six-inch TV in the kitchen. She went shopping with his mother and hers, a triumvirate of tastes, and she would have played tennis with his father, if it came to it, but his father was dead. “I love you,” he told her, because he did, because there was no feeling like this, no triumph, no high—it was like being immortal and unconquerable, like floating. And a hundred times a day she said it too: “I love you. I love you.”

  They were together at his house one night when the rain froze on the streets and sheathed the trees in glass. It was her idea to take a walk and feel it in their hair and on the glistening shoulders of their parkas, an otherworldly drumming of pellets flung down out of the troposphere, alien and familiar at the same time, and they glided the length of the front walk and watched the way the power lines bellied and swayed. He built a fire when they got back, while she towelled her hair and made hot chocolate laced with Jack Daniel’s. They’d rented a pair of slasher movies for the ritualized comfort of them—“Teens have sex,” he said, “and then they pay for it in body parts”—and the maniac had just climbed out of the heating vent, with a meat hook dangling from the recesses of his empty sleeve, when the phone rang.

  It was his mother, calling from the hotel room in Boston where she was curled up—shacked up?—for the weekend with the man she’d been dating. He tried to picture her, but he couldn’t. He even closed his eyes a minute, to concentrate, but there was nothing there. Was everything all right? she wanted to know. With the storm and all? No, it hadn’t hit Boston yet, but she saw on the Weather Channel that it was on its way. Two seconds after he hung up—before she could even hit the Start button on the VCR—the phone rang again, and this time it was her mother. Her mother had been drinking. She was calling from a restaurant, and China could hear a clamor of voices in the background. “Just stay put,” her mother shouted into the phone. “The streets are like a skating rink. Don’t you even think of getting in that car.”

  Well, she wasn’t thinking of it. She was thinking of having Jeremy to herself, all night, in the big bed in his mother’s room. They’d been having sex ever since they started going together at the end of their junior year, but it was always sex in the car or sex on a blanket or the lawn, hurried sex, nothing like she wanted it to be. She kept thinking of the way it was in the movies, where the stars ambushed each other on beds the size of small planets and then did it again and again until they lay nestled in a heap of pillows and blankets, her head on his chest, his arm flung over her shoulder, the music fading away to individual notes plucked softly on a guitar and everything in the frame glowing as if it had been sprayed with liquid gold. That was how it was supposed to be. That was how it was going to be. At least for tonight.

  She’d been wandering around the kitchen as she talked, dancing with the phone in an idle slow saraband, watching the frost sketch a design on the window over the sink, no sound but the soft hiss of the ice pellets on the roof, and now she pulled open the freezer door and extracted a pint box of ice cream. She was in her socks, socks so thick they were like slippers, and a pair of black leggings under an oversized sweater. Beneath her feet, the polished floorboards were as slick as the sidewalk outside, and she liked the feel of that, skating indoors in her big socks. “Uh-huh,” she said into the phone. “Uh-huh. Yeah, we’re watching a movie.” She dug a finger into the ice cream and stuck it in her mouth.

  “Come on,” Jeremy called from the living room, where the maniac rippled menacingly over the Pause button. “You’re going to miss the best part.”

  “Okay, Mom, okay,” she said into the phone, parting words, and then she hung up. “You want ice cream?” she called, licking her finger.

  Jeremy’s voice came back at her, a voice in the middle range, with a congenital scratch in it, the voice of a nice guy, a very nice guy who could be the star of a TV show about nice guys: “What kind?” He had a pair of shoulders and pumped-up biceps too, a smile that jumped from his lips to his eyes, and close-cropped hair that stood up straight off the crown of his head. And he was always singing—she loved that—his voice so true he could do any song, and there was no lyric he didn’t know, even on the oldies station. She scooped ice cream and saw him in a scene from last summer, one hand draped casually over the wheel of his car, the radio throbbing, his voice raised in perfect synch with Billy Corgan’s, and the night standing still at the end of a long dark street overhung with maples.

  “Chocolate. Swiss chocolate almond.”

  “Okay,” he said, and then he was wondering if there was any whipped cream, or maybe hot fudge—he was sure his mother had a jar stashed away somewhere, Look behind the mayonnaise on the top row—and when she turned around he was standing in the doorway.
r />   She kissed him—they kissed whenever they met, no matter where or when, even if one of them had just stepped out of the room, because that was love, that was the way love was—and then they took two bowls of ice cream into the living room and, with a flick of the remote, set the maniac back in motion.

  It was an early spring that year, the world gone green overnight, the thermometer twice hitting the low eighties in the first week of March. Teachers were holding sessions outside. The whole school, even the halls and the cafeteria, smelled of fresh-mowed grass and the unfolding blossoms of the fruit trees in the development across the street, and students—especially seniors—were cutting class to go out to the quarry or the reservoir or to just drive the back streets with the sunroof and the windows open wide. But not China. She was hitting the books, studying late, putting everything in its place like pegs in a board, even love, even that. Jeremy didn’t get it. “Look, you’ve already been accepted at your first-choice school, you’re going to wind up in the top ten G.P.A.-wise, and you’ve got four years of tests and term papers ahead of you, and grad school after that. You’ll only be a high-school senior once in your life. Relax. Enjoy it. Or at least experience it.”

  He’d been accepted at Brown, his father’s alma mater, and his own G.P.A. would put him in the top ten percent of their graduating class, and he was content with that, skating through his final semester, no math, no science, taking art and music, the things he’d always wanted to take but never had time for—and Lit., of course, A.P. History, and Spanish 5. “Tú eres el amor de mi vida,” he would tell her when they met at her locker or at lunch or when he picked her up for a movie on Saturday nights.

  “Y tú también,” she would say, “or is it ‘yo también’?”—French was her language. “But I keep telling you it really matters to me, because I know I’ll never catch Margery Yu or Christian Davenport, I mean they’re a lock for val and salut, but it’ll kill me if people like Kerry Sharp or Jalapy Seegrand finish ahead of me—you should know that, you of all people—”

  It amazed him that she actually brought her books along when they went backpacking over spring break. They’d planned the trip all winter and through the long wind tunnel that was February, packing away freeze-dried entrées, Power Bars, Gore-Tex windbreakers and matching sweatshirts, weighing each item on a handheld scale with a dangling hook at the bottom of it. They were going up into the Catskills, to a lake he’d found on a map, and they were going to be together, without interruption, without telephones, automobiles, parents, teachers, friends, relatives, and pets, for five full days. They were going to cook over an open fire, they were going to read to each other and burrow into the double sleeping bag with the connubial zipper up the seam he’d found in his mother’s closet, a relic of her own time in the lap of nature. It smelled of her, of his mother, a vague scent of her perfume that had lingered there dormant all these years, and maybe there was the faintest whiff of his father too, though his father had been gone so long he didn’t even remember what he looked like, let alone what he might have smelled like. Five days. And it wasn’t going to rain, not a drop. He didn’t even bring his fishing rod, and that was love.

  When the last bell rang down the curtain on Honors Math, Jeremy was waiting at the curb in his mother’s Volvo station wagon, grinning up at China through the windshield while the rest of the school swept past with no thought for anything but release. There were shouts and curses, T-shirts in motion, slashing legs, horns bleating from the seniors’ lot, the school buses lined up like armored vehicles awaiting the invasion—chaos, sweet chaos—and she stood there a moment to savor it. “Your mother’s car?” she said, slipping in beside him and laying both arms over his shoulders to pull him to her for a kiss. He’d brought her jeans and hiking boots along, and she was going to change as they drove, no need to go home, no more circumvention and delay, a stop at McDonald’s, maybe, or Burger King, and then it was the sun and the wind and the moon and the stars. Five days. Five whole days.

  “Yeah,” he said, in answer to her question, “my mother said she didn’t want to have to worry about us breaking down in the middle of nowhere—”

  “So she’s got your car? She’s going to sell real estate in your car?”

  He just shrugged and smiled. “Free at last,” he said, pitching his voice down low till it was exactly like Martin Luther King’s. “Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

  It was dark by the time they got to the trailhead, and they wound up camping just off the road in a rocky tumble of brush, no place on earth less likely or less comfortable, but they were together, and they held each other through the damp whispering hours of the night and hardly slept at all. They made the lake by noon the next day, the trees just coming into leaf, the air sweet with the smell of the sun in the pines. She insisted on setting up the tent, just in case—it could rain, you never knew—but all he wanted to do was stretch out on a gray neoprene pad and feel the sun on his face. Eventually, they both fell asleep in the sun, and when they woke they made love right there, beneath the trees, and with the wide blue expanse of the lake giving back the blue of the sky. For dinner, it was étouffée and rice, out of the foil pouch, washed down with hot chocolate and a few squirts of red wine from Jeremy’s bota bag.

  The next day, the whole day through, they didn’t bother with clothes at all. They couldn’t swim, of course—the lake was too cold for that—but they could bask and explore and feel the breeze out of the south on their bare legs and the places where no breeze had touched before. She would remember that always, the feel of that, the intensity of her emotions, the simple unrefined pleasure of living in the moment. Woodsmoke. Duelling flashlights in the night. The look on Jeremy’s face when he presented her with the bag of finger-sized crayfish he’d spent all morning collecting.

  What else? The rain, of course. It came midway through the third day, clouds the color of iron filings, the lake hammered to iron too, and the storm that crashed through the trees and beat at their tent with a thousand angry fists. They huddled in the sleeping bag, sharing the wine and a bag of trail mix, reading to each other from a book of Donne’s love poems (she was writing a paper for Mrs. Masterson called “Ocular Imagery in the Poetry of John Donne”) and the last third of a vampire novel that weighed eighteen-point-one ounces.

  And the sex. They were careful, always careful—I will never, never be like those breeders that bring their puffed-up squalling little red-faced babies to class, she told him, and he agreed, got adamant about it, even, until it became a running theme in their relationship, the breeders overpopulating an overpopulated world and ruining their own lives in the process—but she had forgotten to pack her pills and he had only two condoms with him, and it wasn’t as if there was a drugstore around the corner.

  In the fall—or the end of August, actually—they packed their cars separately and left for college, he to Providence and she to Binghamton. They were separated by three hundred miles, but there was the telephone, there was E-mail, and for the first month or so there were Saturday nights in a motel in Danbury, but that was a haul, it really was, and they both agreed that they should focus on their course work and cut back to every second or maybe third week. On the day they’d left—and no, she didn’t want her parents driving her up there, she was an adult and she could take care of herself—Jeremy followed her as far as the Bear Mountain Bridge and they pulled off the road and held each other till the sun fell down into the trees. She had a poem for him, a Donne poem, the saddest thing he’d ever heard. It was something about the moon. More than moon, that was it, lovers parting and their tears swelling like an ocean till the girl—the woman, the female—had more power to raise the tides than the moon itself, or some such. More than moon. That’s what he called her after that, because she was white and round and getting rounder, and it was no joke, and it was no term of endearment.

  She was pregnant. Pregnant, they figured, since the camping trip, and it was their secret, a new constant in their lives, a fact,
an inescapable fact that never varied no matter how many home pregnancy kits they went through. Baggy clothes, that was the key, all in black, cargo pants, flowing dresses, a jacket even in summer. They went to a store in the city where nobody knew them and she got a girdle, and then she went away to school in Binghamton and he went to Providence. “You’ve got to get rid of it,” he told her in the motel room that had become a prison. “Go to a clinic,” he told her for the hundredth time, and outside it was raining—or, no, it was clear and cold that night, a foretaste of winter. “I’ll find the money—you know I will.”

  She wouldn’t respond. Wouldn’t even look at him. One of the Star Wars movies was on TV, great flat thundering planes of metal roaring across the screen, and she was just sitting there on the edge of the bed, her shoulders hunched and hair hanging limp. Someone slammed a car door—two doors in rapid succession—and a child’s voice shouted, “Me! Me first!”

  “China,” he said. “Are you listening to me?”

  “I can’t,” she murmured, and she was talking to her lap, to the bed, to the floor. “I’m scared. I’m so scared.” There were footsteps in the room next door, ponderous and heavy, then the quick tattoo of the child’s feet and a sudden thump against the wall. “I don’t want anyone to know,” she said.