Turn of Mind - Alice LaPlante [52]
If you just told Fiona that you agreed, she would give me the money. Why won’t you do this for me? Just this one last time.
I was a reluctant mother. And Mark was difficult to love, I remember trying to cuddle him when he was three or four and crying about some playground injury, and I felt frustrated by the awkwardness of it all, the sharp elbows and bony knees. Yet he is my boy.
Mom? He has been watching me closely.
Yes.
You’ll do it?
Do what?
Give me the money?
Is that what you wanted? Why didn’t you say? Yes, of course. Let me just get my checkbook.
I get up to go to my room for my purse, but Mark stops me. Holds out a notebook and a pen.
Mom, you don’t have a checkbook anymore. That’s in Fiona’s hands. All you have to do is write a note here saying you’ll lend me the money. Just those words: I will lend Mark $50,000. No, you need a couple more zeros on there. That’s right. Now sign it. Great! Wonderful! You won’t regret it, I promise you. I’ll show you that I can make things right.
He’s halfway to the door before collecting himself, turning back, and kissing me on the cheek. I love you, Mom. I know I’m a son of a bitch sometimes, but I do. And it’s not just the money talking.
Show’s over, I tell the people who have gathered around. Go to your rooms. Shoo. They scatter like cockroaches.
Love, love is everywhere. People are pairing off, two by two, sometimes three. Couplings that last perhaps an hour, perhaps a day. Junior high for the geriatric set.
The woman with no neck is utterly promiscuous. She will be intimate with anyone. Here that means holding hands. Sitting in the lounge side by side. Perhaps a hand on a thigh.Very few words spoken.
Husbands and wives show up, are looked at blankly. Some of them cry, all are relieved. A burden lifted. But these lovers. To be eternally seeking, to be besotted, to retreat to and be stuck at the most ignoble stage of life. God preserve me from ever going through that again.
I was that foolish just twice. There was James. And then there was the other. It ended badly, of course. How could it not? His young, aggrieved face. His sense of entitlement.
He would be close to fifty now—how odd to think that. A decade older than I was then. I never cared to see how he fared after leaving. I assume he did well, things are easy for the beautiful ones.
But it wasn’t his beauty that attracted me. It was his feeling for the knife. I thrilled at that. His grip on the handle as if grasping the hand of a beloved. Still, to have that passion, that desire, but not the talent. I pitied him. And then pity turned into something else. I never used the word love. It couldn’t compare to what I felt for James. But it wasn’t like anything else either. And that counts for something.
When thinking over one’s life, it’s the extreme moments that stand out. The peaks and the valleys. He was one of the highest peaks. In some ways looming larger than James. If James was a central mountain in the landscape of my life, then this other was a pinnacle of a different sort. Higher, sharper. You couldn’t build upon its fragile precipices. But the view was spectacular.
There is colored tape on the rich carpet—somewhat spoiling the effect of luxury they work so hard to maintain here, but useful. This is a linear world. You go straight. You make right turns or left turns.
Following the blue line takes me to my bathroom. Red leads to the dining room. Yellow to the lounge. Brown is for the circumference walk, which takes you round and round the perimeter of the great room. Round and round. Round and round.
Past the bedrooms, past the dining room, the TV room, the activity room, past the double doors to the outside world with exit painted seductively in red letters. And on you go, in perpetual motion.
Something nags. Something that resides in a sterile, brightly lit place where there is no room for shadows. The place for blood and bone. Yet shadows exist. And secrets.
An extraordinarily clean place, this. They are constantly scrubbing, vacuuming, touching