Lavinia turned the knob and stepped into the dark hallway of the apartment. She’d been here nearly every day in the past few weeks and the rooms always smelled of whatever Mrs. Price was cooking downstairs—pork today, and sauerkraut. Possibly a cake in there somewhere, though onions overpowered it. Lavinia sniffed her fingertips. No, that smell was her. They’d made another molded salad in home arts, and Candy had told Lavinia to juice the onion because Candy had just painted her nails.
Lavinia rubbed her fingers on her skirt. Clare’s door was ajar, and she wanted to go in and see him because seeing him was all she thought about night and day. She studied, through the gap between the door and the wall, the white plaster dirigible of Clare’s leg. She couldn’t see his face, but she decided that if he was asleep she could give herself the pleasure of looking at his face, then go away. She nudged open the door.
He was awake, and he looked so tired and gaunt that something luxurious and protective burst open and flowed through her.
“Hi,” she said, whispering.
“Hi,” he said, not whispering exactly, but in a low voice.
She straightened up and made herself speak normally. “Not so good, huh?”
“It’s better now,” he said, flicking his eyes at the suspended leg.
“It sounded pretty bad, the way your sister put it.”
“Yeah, well.” He produced a small ironic smile. “I didn’t know today was the day, you know?”
“It’s been exactly a month,” she said.
This registered in his eyes. A surprise, but whether pleasant or unpleasant, she wasn’t sure.
“Exactly a month,” Clare repeated. “Dr. Quigley said the same thing.” He issued a dry laugh. “I guess I should’ve been counting, too.”
“Miss Price said Dr. Quigley couldn’t believe you didn’t scream or anything.”
Clare made a small snorting sound. “Well, I was screaming inside, I can tell you. Inside I was screaming like a banshee.”
She laughed. It was funny. He was funny. It was one more reason she craved his company. “Why didn’t you just go ahead and scream then? That’s what I would’ve done.”
His eyes closed and opened in a long slow blink. “No, you wouldn’t. Not if customers were eating in your mother’s restaurant downstairs.”
For a moment he seemed to be dozing. Then when he looked at her again, he nodded at the Enterprise in her hand. “How ’bout you read me something?”
She’d done this before. He liked the local gossip columns, especially About You and Others, which was townspeople news, and What’s Buzzin’, Cousin?, an earnest but inane account of high school events written by Myrtis French.
Lavinia sat down on the steamer trunk against the wall, crossed her ankles, and began to read aloud. She wondered if sitting on the trunk would activate the cologne she’d put on the backs of her knees, but all she smelled was the onion juice on her hands and the sauerkraut smell seeping up from the café.
“Attention, Fallbrookites!” she read, trying to enliven her voice so he wouldn’t fall asleep. “Barney Patten and George Harris have both reported their Bourbon turkeys are laying, but we’re kinda persnickety. We’re holding out for some good Scotch!”
Clare’s eyes were closed, but his lips formed a small smile.
“I ate a turkey egg once,” Lavinia said. “It was okay I guess.” She tried not to touch her hair. “The yolk was really thick. I almost gagged on it.”
Clare didn’t speak, and Lavinia’s skin suddenly glazed with sweat. Gagging on turkey eggs—this was something to talk about? She heard herself reading the next thing her eyes fell upon.
“La Rue Beauty Salon. Mar-o-Oil shampoo, seventy-five cents. Lash and brow dyeing, one dollar. Facials, one dollar. Artistic haircutting, fifty cents.”
Why was she reading this to him? Lavinia felt sick in her stomach and chest.
Clare said, “Artistic haircutting. What would that be?”
“Why ask me?” she said in an irritated tone, and wondered at her own peevishness. She looked down at her lap, where her clipped, cleaned, buffed fingernails rested on her knees. She felt a yearning for him that was like the music her mother played over and over again on the gramophone, a recording of Artur Schnabel playing Beethoven’s Sonata in G Minor on the piano. Each note longed for the next, but was trying to seem cheerful and unconcerned. In certain places, the music managed to be giddy, tripping along like a child. Then it was running headlong into grief.
“My sister’s going to that place, I think,” Clare said lazily, almost as if waking from a dream. “La Rue Beauty Salon. For the wedding.”
He kept his eyes closed as he spoke. There was a mirror on the dresser opposite his bed, and she looked gravely at the kinks in her long hair, and at what she thought of as the Ursa Minor constellation of moles on her cheek. She always sat on his left side so he wouldn’t see the moles so much. Her gaze shifted when he moved abruptly, his face tightening. She thought he might be feeling what he called the long dull ache.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
Long seconds passed and then he said, “I’m fine.”
Just like Miss Price had said I’m fine.
“Why do you say you’re fine when you’re not?”
His eyes shot open and he squeezed his jaw. “Because that’s what you do, Lavinia,” he said in a low voice. “You say things are God-damned fine even when they are God-damned not.”
They were both quiet a long while.
He’d never been mad at her before. Usually they would do their homework together, which wasn’t difficult for him. At first, she was flabbergasted by his ability to read and recall but she’d begun not just to take it for granted but, very slightly, to resent it—why should remembering facts and dates and Latin declensions be so much easier for him? He had won a bet reciting all of “Charge of the Light Brigade”—she had asked him about it—but it was a mistake, he said. “People don’t really like their Kansas farm boys quoting Tennyson.” He’d smiled at her. “Upsets their sense of order.” She liked it when he recited poems for her. Usually he would close his eyes when he did this, as if the words could only be seen in some imaginary land. Once he recited lines and lines and lines of a poem by Shakespeare about Venus and Adonis, and though the density and complexity of the words made the language seem almost something other than English, she was carried along by his voice and the pure pleasure of the flowing, unfamiliar words, and then, abruptly, there was something about Venus kissing Adonis’s cheek and chin and where she stopped she would begin again and exactly at the moment when her mind was catching on these words, and oddly awakened to their meaning, the voice stopped and his eyes clicked open, and he was staring at her in a way that she had never been stared at before. Before that, she’d wondered whether she was in love with Clare Price. After that, she stopped wondering; she felt it in her bones.