Sweet and Low Read online

The words are strange in her mouth. But what’s stranger, perhaps, is how no one objects. She’s allowed to sidle up onto the cart beside the boy, whom she doesn’t know from Adam. At the wheel of this contraption is an old Asian man who is all business, frowning as he spirits them through the airport in a flash of blinking lights. Along the way, the boy’s head finds a home on Rosemary’s shoulder. The faces they pass appear startled by the two of them. Rosemary lifts a hand to the audience and offers them, for no reason whatsoever, the queen’s wave, her trip—at least for the moment—all but forgotten.

  IV.

  The doctor spoke of his wife with awe.

  Hank had heard of her merits on many occasions. Arnie credited her with the success of his practice. She made friends with the right sort of people. Pencil thin, a wearer of flouncy blouses, she had an easy laugh, a comfortable way about her that Arnie enjoyed. Once, Hank asked him if he thought she knew, and he responded that he wasn’t sure.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” Arnie said.

  Hank knew of couples like this. They were called white marriages, an arrangement more business than pleasure. The Greenlees were a good business, he had to admit. They lived in a big tan-colored house along the Ross Barnett Reservoir. Hank had driven by their place many times, straining his eyes to peer inside the large bay windows. Usually nothing to see.

  In the year following Arnie’s death, Hank continued to cruise by, noting how Arnie’s place fell, little by little, into a state of disrepair. The garden in the backyard went back to nature, overrun by weeds, and the windows became tinted yellow with dust. Come March, the fountain in the front yard was infected with a splotchy mold. Hank was increasingly worried for her. It became a habit of his to follow her around town. Whenever he wasn’t working, Hank trailed her like a private detective—to her therapist’s at the university hospital, to the grocery store out on Lakeland Drive, to the gray building that housed the studio where she recorded her podcast. Why did he do this? He wasn’t sure. It comforted him somehow, same as imagining the doctor on the doomed aircraft did.

  The podcast he stumbled on accidentally, reading about it on her Facebook page. He listened to it regularly. And when she announced her flight plans, he panicked, bought a ticket to Albuquerque too, and followed her—like some obsessed fan—right on through security. The airport in Jackson was tiny, and she was remarkably easy to find. He had no formal plan. Plans were not his forte. And it made absolutely no sense: going up to her at the airport the way he did. Earlier in the morning, his blood sugar had been running astronomically high, so he’d pumped himself up with several units of insulin beforehand. He wasn’t thinking clearly, but since when had that ever stopped him? He had no intention of telling the wife about his dalliances with Arnie—not if he could help it, that is. What he wanted from her was simple: his pocket watch. He had come up with a story to tell her about this lost object that was mostly true: Arnie was his doctor, he learned of Hank’s broken watch—a family heirloom—and offered to pay for its repair as a—he always stumbled here—a friendship gift? But he never made it that far, but still, the watch. He must have it returned to him.

  An old timepiece that once belonged to his grandfather, a veteran of World War II, it was his parents’ last gift to him before they discovered his sexual predilections and cut him off. The pocket watch had tarnished over the years and hadn’t worked since before he was born, but Hank had kept it on one of his bookshelves because he thought it was—at the very least—an interesting conversation piece when he was entertaining guests.

  During one of his visits, Arnie had admired it. Supposedly, he knew a guy who could fix it. Hank told him not to worry about it, but next he looked, the watch was gone. And the gesture, frankly, had charmed him. Then, somehow, Hank forgot about it entirely until it was too late.

  When he and Arnie last spoke, they argued. Hank had let it slip that he’d become friends with one of Arnie’s past lovers—Arnie spoke often of them, so it was only natural Hank would become curious. He was a cute guy named Josiah, who had Andy Gibb–style hair and a prominent chin. He owned a bookstore Hank frequented. Arnie wanted to know if Hank and Josiah had been intimate, and Hank lied and told him they hadn’t. A practiced liar, Arnie saw through it and stormed out of Hank’s apartment, and the next week his body lay at the bottom of the Gulf.

  It was a shocking way to end things. When Hank learned of the accident on television, he dialed Josiah at the bookstore, not knowing whom to call. “Impact,” he told Josiah, babbling. “My god, the impact killed him.”

  “How’s your sugar?” Josiah asked. “Have you checked it lately?”

  Hank went over to Josiah’s place that night, and they huddled close together on Josiah’s den floor, like a couple of fretful cats, and watched whatever bits of news there were about the crash. Investigators were unsure of the cause, the TV told them; some speculated human error. Later in the evening, lying in bed next to Josiah, Hank at last remembered the watch. He awoke in a sweat. Surely the doctor didn’t have the watch on him on the plane. Arnie was bad about following through, so odds were the family heirloom never made it to the jewelry store to be repaired and was still tucked away in some closet at his house on that goddamned reservoir.

  Hank nudged Josiah in the back. “I need to talk to her.”

  Josiah rubbed his eyes, still waking up. “Who?”

  “The wife—she needs to let me look for it.”

  Josiah said he was hysterical with grief. “Go back to bed.”

  But Hank was already putting his clothes on. Alone, he drove to the reservoir. It was a clear night, stars mirroring across the water. The windows at Arnie’s house framed several silhouettes. Hank had never known the residence to be so crowded. Vehicles lined the driveway and the street, all neatly parked. He stopped his car at the end of the lane, debating his next move. He could very well slip into the house, find the pocket watch, and then exit with no one the wiser. A number of people had come to console the redoubtable Rosemary—who’d ever notice him? He pulled his car off the road. It was late September, and the air was cooler than it should have been, causing his skin to prickle. He got as far as the mailbox, which had GREENLEE scrawled across it in frilly cursive, before he doubled over and threw up.

  The next day Josiah e-mailed him. In it, he explained to Hank how the pocket watch was not what he was after. “It’s a symbol,” Josiah wrote. “You are holding on to a symbol of a past that doesn’t want you, and that is hard, I know. I think you miss your family—when was the last time you spoke with them?—and the absence of the watch is now more real than the watch in and of itself ever was. You are troubled by the negative space it left behind, it must glare at you, and now it’s doubly significant because Arnie is gone.”

  Hank didn’t respond. After all, Josiah had been an English major in college and thought that gave him the right to interpret everything.

  V.

  She doesn’t telephone Amy until she’s sitting in the hospital cafeteria sipping an unfortunate cup of coffee. Amy answers on the third ring. She sounds as if she’s just woken up—all groggy and confused—and interrupts Rosemary several times as she explains the situation.

  “So wait,” Amy says. “You’re not coming?”

  Rosemary apologizes. “I’ve already missed my flight. Plus, the universe is obviously telling me to stay put.”

  “Oh, thank god!” Amy gives her an update on the marriage. Robert, Amy’s husband—the adulterer—has moved out, taking with him only one suitcase, leaving behind his beloved PlayStation 3, which means, Amy concludes, that he’s not really gone.

  “You mean you don’t want him to go?”

  “Would you have kicked Daddy out?”

  They both understand this is what the TV movies call a “low blow.” Calmly, Rosemary changes the subject and mentions the boy. “His name is Hank,” she says. “Heard him tell one of the EMTs.”

  “
Who?”

  Rosemary reminds her, adding, “And I think he may be a homosexual.”

  “Mother.” Amy clucks her tongue and proceeds to inform Rosemary that using the term homosexual makes her sound Republican, and Rosemary, flustered, asks her daughter just what in the hell she should say, and Amy tells her people use queer now, and Rosemary says, “Well, in my day, honey, that word made you sound Republican.”

  At this, Amy laughs, but it’s a haggard sound and Rosemary isn’t heartened by it. She repeats the advice her therapist gave her about counteracting grief: “It’s important, Amy,” she says, “that you stick to routines.”

  Amy tells her she has to go. “I’ve got these e-mails to answer.”

  Which is code, Rosemary knows, for I don’t want to talk anymore.

  So they say their goodbyes.

  The boy appears not long after. Sheepish, he approaches the table, his green eyes never quite meeting Rosemary’s. She downs the last of her coffee, then asks him if he is ready, and he nods. The strangeness of the circumstance washes over her as she rises from the table. How he doesn’t say thank you (not that he needs to) or much of anything, for that matter, as they walk back to her car. Which is fine. Lord knows, she didn’t help him to feel good about herself. Still. Did he just assume she would give him a ride back to wherever? In his world, was it common for people to completely upend their travel plans to tend to him? She decides he must be an only child. Like her Amy, who would, no doubt, act similarly.

  She’s putting the key in the ignition when she remembers: “Oh, you said you needed to ask me something.”

  “Your podcast,” he says, glaring at the dashboard. “I recognized you.”

  He’s dodging and her antennas go up. Something was amiss.

  “How’d you recognize me?”

  And this question stymies him far longer than it should have. She realizes he’s lying. Arnie may have always said she was the most naïve person in stocking feet, but she knows what she knows, and sometimes she knows it all too well.

  “I heard you,” he manages. “Your voice when you were going through security. And I remember you said something about your trip on your show, of course.”

  “Of course,” Rosemary says. “How nice.”

  They sit in the hospital parking garage for a long time, silent, until she remembers that she’s the one behind the steering wheel. “Why, yes,” she says, and cranks.

  On the drive back, she questions the boy further. Turns out, he works for the Department of Education. Something called psychometrics. Rosemary tells him it sounds as if he were measuring psychos, but Hank tells her he oversees the standardized testing of public high school students in Mississippi. “So I guess you’re half right,” he says. He was headed out west. A conference. Not serious enough, however, that missing it will get him in any kind of trouble. As the boy talks, Rosemary gets comfortable with him. She wonders if maybe she misjudged him. Maybe he wasn’t lying. Maybe that’s just the impression he gives. It must be tough business being gay in Jackson. By the time they reach the exit for the airport (she’s driving him back to his car), she gets the idea to invite him to dinner.

  “Nothing special,” she says. “Just steaks on a grill—very low carb.”

  The boy momentarily pales, but he assures her that he’s okay. “Just been a long day,” he says.

  She gets him to agree to be at her house the following Wednesday at six o’clock sharp. Pulling the car into the drop-off lane at the airport, she turns on her flashers and unlocks the car doors.

  “So it’s settled,” she says. “And you can even bring your boyfriend.”

  His eyes lock with hers for the first time. He squints.

  Rosemary smiles weakly. “If you have one, that is.”

  He throws back his head, laughing. Like her daughter’s, there’s no heart in it. Only later, when she’s back home, does she realize there’ll be no dinner. They hadn’t exchanged contact information; he has no idea where she lives.

  VI.

  After he gets home, Hank calls Josiah.

  They haven’t spoken since the e-mail, but Josiah doesn’t seem surprised to hear from him. Hank confesses everything at once: following the wife, confronting her at the airport (What was he thinking?), having an attack of low blood sugar at the most inconvenient time. He finishes the recap by assuring Josiah that he’s in therapy, which is a lie, and he fully expects Josiah to hang up on him. Instead, he asks, “Where are you?”

  An hour later, they are sitting in the break room of the bookstore, a dimly lit little room with a mini fridge and a microwave and a dartboard with Ayn Rand’s picture plastered across it. During their short dalliance in the weeks leading up to Arnie’s demise, Josiah never took Hank back here.

  “Like what you’ve done with the place,” Hank says.

  “Thank Arnie—he’s the one who helped me buy it.”

  “This whole break room?” Hank places a hand over his chest. “Bless his poor combustible heart.” He’s laughing now, the same hard, dry laugh that came over him in Rosemary’s car, except that this time it quickly turns into tears.

  Josiah lets him cry for a few minutes before he asks, “So the dinner?”

  “Not a chance. I can barely talk to her in public.”

  “Good. I think that’s good.”

  Hank wipes his nose with a wad of paper towels. “What if it’s still at a jewelers’ somewhere in Jackson? Waiting for him to pick it up . . .”

  “They’d have contacted Rosemary by now.”

  “And if he didn’t give them his real name?”

  Josiah takes his hand. “Wouldn’t it be easier just to say the watch followed him down into the ocean even if it didn’t?” Hank notices that the past year has not been kind to Josiah. He’s gotten thicker around the middle, and the circles under his eyes have deepened. He wonders how he measures up in Josiah’s eyes. The past year’s been no picnic for him either.

  Hank frowns. “Closure.”

  “Something like that.”

  They agree to meet the next week at a restaurant called the Cock of the Walk, a catfish house on the reservoir themed around an infamous keelboat captain from the Civil War. The restaurant sits across the way from the Greenlees’ house, and they arrive in the afternoon when the water ripples in silver ribbons and the ducks are out. They find a table on the deck and sip tin mugs of sweet tea. As the sky turns pink, their skin takes on a salmon-colored hue. They almost look like teenagers.

  Hank says, “I think about Rosemary more than I think about Arnie.”

  “Me too.”

  “I wonder if she was happy—is happy.”

  “She sounds pleasant enough on her podcast.”

  They throw some corn bread at the ducks, then Hank asks, “What if all of Arnie’s lovers listen to her? What if we make up her core audience?”

  “Whoa,” Josiah says. “That would make her, like, the ultimate fag hag.”

  The waiter brings their ticket, and while Hank is calculating the tip, Josiah sets a small box on the table. Hank stops multiplying and glares.

  “Relax. It’s not an engagement ring.” Josiah lifts the lid from the box and reveals a digital smartwatch, the kind with a touch screen. “It has all the bells and whistles,” he tells Hank. “You can check your e-mail, your pulse rate, your blood pressure.”

  “Blood sugar?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well—nothing’s perfect.” Hank tries the watch on. It does look good on him. “I’d be a fool to accept it—to think it solves all my problems.” He turns his wrist, inspecting it. “But I’d be an even bigger fool if I didn’t. It’s stylish and I do need a watch.”

  Josiah follows him home. Once inside Hank’s apartment, they undress each other slowly, leaving a trail of clothes behind them as they shuffle to Hank’s bed. Their bodies are soft, b
ut the room is dark and forgiving. During their lovemaking, Hank feels another person in the room. Ghost eyes watching them. He claws himself from the covers and sees a figure in the doorway. Rosemary, her mouth opening as if to speak. Then Josiah’s mouth finds his, and Hank is taken back to the mattress. When he looks again, she’s gone, was never there, and there’s a finality to this absence that he can’t quite understand. As it was with the watch and, of course, with Arnie.

  VII.

  How well can you know a person?

  A question Rosemary’s therapist puts to her now and then. But she thinks the better question is Do you want to know a person? Because, frankly, she believes it’s overrated. She has this idea that some of us are really two people. The person we show the world and then the person we keep to ourselves. She considers telling her daughter this when Amy calls her later that night after the airport incident. Amy’s been crying, and she’s talking fast, the way she did as a little girl when fessing up to something. As it happens, Amy has been lying. Her husband was not the one who had the affair. She was.

  “It just happened,” she says.

  And as she explains how, Rosemary’s mind goes to Arnie and his many affairs. To his credit, though, she’s never set eyes on a single woman he’d slept with. He was very tidy, Arnie was. They had come to an agreement after Amy’s birth: no fuss, no muss. He never pressed the issue of sex with her, and she never questioned him on his activities outside the home.

  Her therapist often asks her about their sex life. She supposes one day, sooner or later, she’ll tell the nitty-gritty details instead of her usual response: “Fine.” And she’s positive the therapist (and everybody in the free world who has an opinion) will say their marriage was a sham. But she knows—and, more importantly, Arnie knew—they were happy. Only recently did it become in vogue to share everything with your partner, but Rosemary believes that way lies madness. Arnie, bless him, never inquired about her past, the what that made her the who she is now, and so why should it be anybody else’s business?