VACANCY & ARIEL

“Is this going to be one of those nights?” she asks teasingly.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“A boomerang, I think. Somebody threw a boomerang.” Bewildered, she says, “A boomerang?”

“Shh! Listen!”

Confused, she shelters beneath his arm as he reacts to variations in the wind’s pitch, to a passing car whose high beams sweep over the dune grass, lighting the cottage, growing a shadow from its side that lengthens and then appears to reach with a skinny black arm across the rumpled ground the instant before it vanishes. He hears no repetition of the sound, and its absence unsettles him. He’s positive that he heard it, that somewhere out in the night, a snaky-jointed figure is poised to throw. He hustles Marley toward the cottage and hears, as they ascend the porch steps, a skirling music, whiny reed instruments, and a clattery percussion, like kids beating with sticks on a picket fence, just a snatch of it borne on the wind. He shoves Marley inside, bolts the door, and switches on the porch lights, thinking that little brown men with neat mustaches will bloom from the dark, because that’s what sort of music it is, Manila taxicab music, the music played by the older drivers who kept their radios tuned to an ethnic station—but he sees nothing except rippling dune grass, pale sand, and the black gulf beyond, a landscape menacing for its lack of human form.

He bolts the inner door, too. Resisting Marley’s attempts to get amorous, he opens out the couch bed, makes her lie down and take a couple of aspirin with a glass of water. He sits in a chair by the couch as she falls asleep, his anxiety subsiding. She looks like a kid in her T-shirt and diaphanous green panties, drowsing on her belly, face half-concealed by strings of hair, and he thinks what a fuck-up he is. The thought is bred by no particular chain of logic. It may have something to do with Marley, with his deepened sense of the relationship’s inappropriateness, a woman more than twenty years his junior (though, God knows, he’s championed the other side of that argument), and she’s younger than that in her head, a girl, really…It may bear upon that, but the thought has been on heavy rotation in his brain for years and seems to have relevance to every situation. He’s pissed away countless chances for marriage, for success, and he can’t remember what he was thinking, why he treated these opportunities with such casual disregard. He recalls getting a third callback to test for the Bruce Willis role in Die Hard. Word was that the studio was leaning toward him, because Willis had pissed off one of the execs, so one the night before the callback he did acid at some Topanga cliff dwelling and came in looking bleary and dissolute.

Looking at Marley’s ass, he has a flicker of arousal, and that worries him, that it’s only a flicker, that perhaps his new sense of morality is merely a byproduct of growing older, of a reduced sex drive. He has the sudden urge to prove himself wrong, to wake her up and fuck her until dawn, but he sits there, depressed, letting his emotions bleed out into the sound of windowpanes shuddering from constant slaps of wind. Eventually he goes to the door and switches off the lights. Seconds later, he switches them back on, hoping that he won’t discover some mutant shape sneaking toward the porch, yet feeling stupid and a little disappointed when nothing of the sort manifests.

Chapter 4

HE’S WAKED BY something banging. He tries to sleep through it, but each time he thinks it’s quit and relaxes, it starts up again, so he flings off the covers and shuffles into the living room, pauses on finding the couch unoccupied, scratches his head, trying to digest Marley’s absence, then shuffles onto the porch and discovers it’s the screen door that’s banging. Thickheaded, he shuts it, registering that it’s still dark outside. He walks through the house, calling out to Marley; he checks the bathroom. Alarm sets in. She would have left a note, she would have shut the front door. He dresses, shaking out the cobwebs, and goes out onto the porch steps, switching on the exterior lights. Beyond the half-circle of illumination, the shore is a winded confusion, black sky merging with black earth and sea, the surf still heavy. The wind comes in a steady pour off the water, plastering his shorts and shirt against his body.

“Marley!”

No response.

With this much wind, he thinks, his voice won’t carry fifty feet.

He grabs the flashlight from inside the door, deciding that he’ll walk down to the Surfside and make sure her car’s gone from the lot. She probably went home, he tells himself. Woke up and was sober enough to drive. But leaving the door open…that’s just not Marley.