Big City Eyes

Having been the picture of the week, standing in front of Claire’s Collectibles with my foot up on a bench, unobtrusively revealing my butterfly bandage, I was now a minor local celebrity. Occasionally people poked each other when I walked by. While I was buying toothpaste at Bright’s Pharmacy, the saleswoman told me that she loved my column, it was really fun. When I was stopped at a light, a man knocked on my car window. I lowered the glass and he said, “Are you a left-winger?”

“What?” I responded, floored not only by the question but by the term, which seemed archaic.

“For your information,” he said, butting his face very close to my own, “Tom McKee saved my wife’s life when she had a heart attack.”

For the next few blocks, I drove without knowing where I was going, right past my destination, The Sakonnet Times. I had not expected to be thought of as anti-McKee.

Coral Williams, owner of the Comfort Café and president of Bambi’s Friends, a group dedicated to protecting white-tailed deer, refused to accept payment for my morning coffee. She told me that she often fed deer microwave popcorn and had named every doe that visited her lawn.

I received several protests from the anti-deer people, reiterating that deer did not fall in love and that my insistence on anthropomorphizing them was contributing to the community’s inability to deal with the serious deer overpopulation problem.

At the editorial meeting, while he gloated about the mail, Art passed around a box of apple crumb muffins, his first complimentary breakfast offering since I’d worked for the paper. This weekly meeting, about as formal as it got there, was held in Art’s second-floor office in the small building, which had been someone’s house a century ago, and was the most rundown structure on Main and the only one that faced backward, into the parking lot. Whether from being hand-hewn or from enduring decades of damp, salty seaside weather, floors had slanted, walls had buckled. No architectural right angle could be found in the place. In the shabby downstairs foyer, Peg, the receptionist, answered the phone, doubled as a copy editor, and handled subscriptions with relaxed cheerfulness. “I’ve been here forever,” she’d say by way of introduction. Every day she wore the same cardigan sweater over her shoulders and the same bubble-gum-pink wedgies, with or without thin beige socks.

Design and page layout occupied the former dining room, still wallpapered in faded pink roses, and advertising had the living room. The kitchen, unchanged from the forties, had an ancient round-shouldered refrigerator, where Art stored the bag lunch he brought from home. All day, staffers poured themselves coffee from the only modern appliance, an electric drip coffeemaker that sat on the chipped tile counter.

For editorial meetings, the full-time reporting staff—Bernadette the intern, Rob (just out of college), and I—rolled our matching pedestal chairs out of our shared office and through the narrow hallway, bumping over thresholds and banging into walls, to Art’s slightly less musty space. We sat around him in a semicircle, notebooks on our laps, mugs of coffee on the floor next to our feet. This morning, we also had our muffins. We held them on little square napkins.

“I want you to keep it up,” Art told me.

“Keep what up?”

“Just be irritating.”

I didn’t argue with that description of myself, since being irritating was a trait I cultivated. Although I was always taken aback when someone remarked on it. As I took a sip of coffee, I noticed that Bernadette was wearing a pullover sweater in a color similar to the burnt orange satin fabric on the Nicholas bedroom couch.

The event, now fourteen days past, had cast a lingering spell. By “the event,” I do not mean the dog bite, which had healed, but the brief encounter—the cop, the naked woman, and me. My only comparable experience was fallout from passionate necking sessions with my first boyfriend. After a torrid night with Evan, I would go to high school in a near stupor, attending class after class in a state of obliviousness, reliving every kiss and grope. Twenty years later, here I was with similar daydreams.

Even the chemistry between Sam and Deidre, the palpable connection of alien beings, much as it repulsed me, propelled me back to that moment when I saw the woman and almost simultaneously felt McKee close in behind me.

Sam now greeted me every morning with “Nuqneh.” He explained that it meant “What do you want?” There was no word in Klingon for “good morning” or “hello.” What was in store for this eccentric child? Was he an accident waiting to happen? I used my sensual daydreams as a distraction to shield myself from worry.

I was unable to formulate the simplest inquiries about Deidre. “Does she have brothers or sisters?” “What do her parents do?” “Tell me about her family.” I rehearsed the questions in my head, but as innocent as they sounded, they seemed to reveal their true motives: revulsion and morbid curiosity. I should stop at her house and introduce myself to her mother. Every day, I planned to and put it off. I was sure there was only one parent in Deidre’s life, because I believed that every depressed, loner, weirdness tendency in Sam was my fault. I traced the warping back to the day his father, at my request, had left. I couldn’t figure out how everything got all mixed up together: McKee and I in that bedroom, Sam and Deidre every day.

One evening at the dinner table, I stared at Sam across a plate of pasta, dreaming about McKee. The grip of his arm on mine, the smell of his neck. At first I had recalled only his entrancing aftershave, but now I imagined an infusion of sweat and brutish masculinity.

Later, behind my locked bedroom door, I’d imitated the naked woman. Although keeping semiclothed, in the extra-large T-shirt I slept in, I laid myself out, supple and willing. The leg arrangement—limbs slightly more than casually separated—felt especially erotic, as if I were extending an invitation. Yet, I couldn’t make sense of that right arm. Flung out to the side, it hit the edge of the bed at her elbow, but it couldn’t bend down, because she was on her back. This was awkward and uncomfortable. It made my forearm—hanging unsupported in the air—feel like a ten-pound weight. How could she have slept in that position?

I hadn’t seen McKee since the event, at least not that I knew. It was difficult to tell one cop from another as they cruised by. I’d visited the dispatch office only once, where I was ignored by Sally, the dispatch officer. She spent most of her time on the phone with her mother, who baby-sat her toddler while Sally worked. They discussed his nap, his diet, what clever thing he was doing. “Hold on, Mom,” was what she usually said, before switching to 911 to announce, “Police Emergency,” or to handle more routine matters on the regular line. Sally’s ignoring me could signify nothing—business as usual—or loyalty to the department in general or McKee in particular. I wondered if he was angry with me. Had I embarrassed him or hurt his feelings by insulting his competence? Most likely I wasn’t on his radar screen at all. McKee had a job, a security company on the side, a wife, possibly a family. I had considerably more spare time than he did. I contemplated taking a knitting or patchwork class at the local historical society, and went so far as to phone an inquiry. Curb my lusty thoughts by keeping my hands busy. Wasn’t that what nuns did?

“I think I should back off the police,” I told Art at the editorial meeting. “I feel really bad.”

“If you feel so bad, why did you write that stuff?” asked Rob, the other reporter, taking a large bite of his muffin and sending a shower of crumbs onto his notepad and lap.

“I don’t know, it just happened. Like automatic writing. I didn’t mean to attack the police, only to tease.”

“I hate teasing,” said Bernadette. “My boyfriend teases me. We have these big bushes on either side of the front door. They’re like cut in a shape so they don’t look like a bush.”

“Yes,” I said, helping her along.

“So he knocks on the front door, and when I open it, no one. I say, ‘Hello.’ He jumps out from behind the bush, screaming.”

“That’s scary.”

“No it isn’t. So then I say, ‘Stop teasing me,’ and he says, ‘I’m not teasing, I’m flirting.’”

Art attempted to get the meeting back on track. “Whatever you were doing in that column, Lily, teasing, flirting—”

“I wasn’t flirting.”

“Of course not.” Art chuckled—the sort of sound you might hear if you placed your ear next to an aquarium and discerned the faintest bubbling of the oxygen pump. “Whatever you were doing, keep it up.”

Bernadette raised her hand, waiting to be called on.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to phone Mr. DePosta. He’s so mean.”

“You have to call Mr. DePosta,” said Art. “He’s the one who filed the complaint.”

“About what?” asked Rob.

“About teenagers hanging out on the sidewalk in front of his store,” I said. “I noticed it in the police log.”

“I already talked to him once. I won’t call him again.”

“Reporters make phone calls, Bernadette,” I said, not unkindly. “That’s what we do.”

“Not me, okay? Anyway, you act ways I wouldn’t. God, you swore at the police.”

“I did not.”

“We’ll discuss Mr. DePosta later,” said Art. “Next week there’s a town meeting on the deer problem. Cover it, Lily.” He stood up, indicating that we should get to work.

I dragged my chair back through the hall and found several messages and my telephone ringing. “Lily Davis here.”

“This is Angela Stubbs. As a twenty-year pet owner—” People always felt the need to establish their credentials, however dubious. Mrs. Stubbs went on to assert that dogs give unconditional love, unlike children, and the police were wiser to rescue Baby than a joker like Gavin Sturges.

“You’re right. Of course, you’re absolutely right.” I closed her out politely, “Thank you for calling.”

“Hey.”

I turned to see Bernadette pull a velvet scrunchee out of her ponytail, fluff her long black hair dramatically so it fell around her shoulders like a full skirt, and whisk it right back up again. “You know, your kid does it.”

“Does what?”

“Hangs out in front of Mr. DePosta’s liquor store.” Bernadette sank into her chair as if it were a depressing place to be.

“How do you know?”