Glimmering

It was an old song, something his grandmother would sing to him when she returned from one of her beano nights, her breath warm with beer and cigarettes. Her reedy voice would quaver, whooping drunkenly on the chorus as she sat in front of the trailer in her lawn chair, swatting at blackflies and tossing spent cigarettes onto the dirt.

When his mouth opened he could taste the wind, its rich salt broth of decay, of fish and rotting kelp. It was a familiar taste, a familiar scent. A storm smell, that would send women running out to pull laundry from the line, and the men to the 52 Variety, where they’d smoke and swear about the ravaged ground-fisheries, the boats that no longer plied the bay.

He tried to shade his eyes. Weird blobs and jots of color swam across his field of vision.

He shook his head and stared into the boiling pit below him. He could see his breath in the heavy vaporous air above the whirlpool. When he sang the sound was harsh and bloodless as a gannet’s cry.

Spray lanced his bare flesh but he no longer felt it. He could see nothing but a slanting blur of green and grey. His nostrils filled with water, but still he sang, beating his arms against the air. He felt exhilarated, almost exalted, by the storm; by the thought that minutes from now he would be dead. He inched from the rubbery bed of sea wrack to the very tip of the protruding ledge. The stone slit through his sneaker and cut into his bare foot. A cluster of barnacles sliced his heel, and he shouted, caught his breath, and forced himself to go on.

A few inches of granite was all that held him there above the maelstrom. But he was not afraid, he had never been so unafraid. It was all a storm now, all the earth overtaken by tempest, and he was part of it, as much as the yellow foam curdling about his bloody foot, as much as the rain and boiling sky. Somewhere little crabs nibbled and fetched at the milky shreds of a cormorant’s flesh. For one last moment Trip stood there upon the ledge, blinking as he gazed upon the ruptured world.

Here goes nothing, he thought. And he was gone.

PART TWO Everyone’s Invited

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Lady of Situations

Through some miracle of coincidence—he would not have been surprised to learn that The Golden Family was behind it—Jack was able to complete a call to Jule Gardino and leave a message on the answering machine. It had been months since he’d put a call through this easily.

“Julie! It’s Jack. Listen, I need to talk to you, about some business. I mean lawyer-type business. I mean I’d like to talk to you anyway, of course. So call me if and when you can. Oh, and tell Emma hi. Hi, Emma! Bye…”

He set the phone down. He felt exhausted, and experienced a familiar anxiety. Had he taken all his medications that morning? Was it time to begin the next round of his remaining pills and inhalants and herbal tinctures, or had he already missed something? He looked around for a working timepiece, saw only ornate horological confections with hands set at odd hours: twenty past seven, five past noon, or was it midnight? He decided it was time to go back in. He gathered the GFI prospectus and The King in Yellow, thinking morosely how once again he had gotten no work done. Then he returned to the main house.

It was later than he had imagined, well past noon. Mrs. Iverson had made lunch: tinned sardines on stale crispbread with a drizzle of the olive oil left by Leonard at Christmas. Jack ate absently and alone, preoccupied with thoughts of corporate largesse and with the lingering image of Larry Muso’s dark eyes and ivory-colored skin. His grandmother had lain down for a nap. When he finished lunch he did the same, first checking his arsenal of pills to make sure he hadn’t missed any. He squeezed a dropperful of Fusax onto his tongue, placed The Golden Family’s prospectus on his nightstand. He heard the faint tinkling of chimes. He was looking forward to thinking about Larry Muso’s offer, to imagining what three million dollars might buy. Perhaps even some time with Larry Muso himself? But within minutes he was sound asleep.

^ ^ ^

He woke not knowing how long he had slept, or what time of day it was. He rubbed his eyes and sat up, feeling out of sorts. He stood and recalled his morning in the carriage house, Larry Muso’s sloe eyes and the small triumph of a telephone call successfully placed to Jule. With a yawn he crossed to the window.