Faithless: Tales of Transgression Read online

  My fingers were like ice. I was excited, nervous. Mr. Yardboro smiled at my squeamishness.

  Rainbow trout, perch, halibut. These fish were bought unfilleted from the supplier because they were much cheaper that way. They were to be gutted and cleaned and boned and rinsed in cold water and fried in greasy bread crumbs or baked and stuffed with a gummy substance described in the menu as mushroom-crab dressing which was in fact chopped mushroom stems and that repulsive synthetic food imported from Japan, “sealegs.”

  The fish were slithery-cold. Like snakes. Their scales winked in the harsh overhead fluorescent light. Weirdly round black button-eyes gazing up at me bland and unblaming. One day you’ll be in this position, too. You won’t feel a thing.

  I swung the heavy cleaver in a wilder arc than Mr. Yardboro wished. The sharp blade neatly decapitated a trout and sank a half-inch into the wood. “Not so hard, sweetheart,” Mr. Yardboro said, grinning. “You’re a strong girl, eh?”

  “Don’t know my own strength,” I said cheerfully.

  The fish-stink was making me nauseated and there was a ringing in my ears but energetically I chopped, heads and tails, and pushed them into a bucket on the floor. Without the round black eyes looking up at me, I would feel calmer.

  “Now the guts and innards. Go right in.”

  “Right in?”

  Mr. Yardboro, who often boasted he’d gone ocean fishing since he’d been a kid, cleaning his own fish, showed me how it was done. His fingers were stubby but deft and quick. My fingers were less certain.

  When our cook cleaned fish, he used rubber gloves. I was certain of this. But Mr. Yardboro didn’t present this as an option.

  I was clumsy. Guts stuck to my fingers. Blood, tissue. Bits of broken bone beneath my nails. I must have reached up to touch my hair, nervously. Later I’d discover a strand of translucent fish gut in my hair and I’d understand why Mr. Yardboro smiled at me in that way of his. A dimple in his cheek like a nick made with a razor.

  Next came deboning. “Never mind trying to get one hundred percent of the bones,” Mr. Yardboro said. “This isn’t the Ritz.” I was having difficulty extracting backbones from flesh. It drew my attention, how exquisitely fine the bones were. Curving translucent-white bones, some of them no larger than a hair, a filament. Inside the snaky exteriors, a maze; a maze so easily destroyed by a clumsy human hand. “What’re you waiting for? Get rid of that crap.”

  Embarrassed, I pushed the bones into the bucket. What a stink arose from that bucket.

  “OK, honey. Let’s see you do the operation by yourself, beginning to end. Chop-chop.”

  Mr. Yardboro wasn’t much taller than I was but he loomed over me. Nudging my shoulder with his own. As if we were equals almost, but I knew better.

  Through my life I’d never be able to eat fish without smelling the odors of the Sandy Hook kitchen and feeling a wave of excitement shading into nausea. Raw fish guts, fried fish, greasy bread crumbs. I was sickened but still I ate.

  LOVER

  You won’t know me, won’t see my face. Unless you see my face. And then it will be too late.

  Now the spring thaw had begun at last, now her blood, too, began to beat again. The earth melting into rivulets eager and sparkling as wounds.

  Since the man who’d been her lover would have recognized her car, she acquired another.

  Not one you know or would expect, but of a make she’d never before owned, never driven or even ridden in—an elegant yet not conspicuous Saab sedan. It was not a new model but appeared, to the eye, pristine, newly minted, inviolate. In bright sunshine it gleamed the beautiful liquidy green of the ocean’s interior, and in clouded, impacted light it gleamed a subtler, perhaps more beautiful dark, steely gunmetal grey. Its chassis was strongly built to withstand even terrible collisions. It had a powerful transmission that, as she drove, vibrated upward through the soles of her sensitive feet, through her ankles, legs, belly, and breasts; through her spinal column, into her brain. This is a car you will grow into, the Saab salesman was saying. A car to live with. She felt the reverberations from the car’s murmurous hidden machinery as of an intense, fearful excitement too private to share with any stranger.

  It was the weekend of Palm Sunday.

  So now in the thaw. Miles of puddled glistening pavement, staccato dripping. Swollen, bruised clouds overhead and a pervasive odor as of unwashed flesh, a fishy odor of highway exhaust, gases like myriad exhaled breaths of unspeakable intimacy. In this car that responded so readily to her touch as no other car she’d ever driven.

  She was patient and she was methodical. Taking the route her former lover took on the average of five evenings a week from his office building in the suburb of Pelham Junction to his home in the suburb of River Ridge; three miles along a highway, Route 11, and five-and-a-half miles along an expressway, I-96. Memorizing the route, absorbing it into her very skin. Unless you see my face. And then it will be too late. She smiled; she was a woman made beautiful by smiling. Gleam of perfect white teeth.

  And her ashy pale hair dyed now a flat matte black. Swinging loose about her face. And sunglasses, lenses tinted nearly black, disguising half her face. Would she be willing to die with him? That was the crucial, teasing question. She’d kick off her shoes in the car, liking the feel of her stockinged feet, the sensitive soles of her feet, against the Saab’s floor and pedals.

  Sometimes, pressing her foot against the gas pedal, feeling the Saab so instantly, it seemed simultaneously, respond to her lightest touch, she experienced a sharp, pleasurable stab in her groin, like an electrical current.

  How many times she would drive the complete route, exiting for River Ridge and returning on southbound I-96, like a racing driver preparing for a dangerous race, rehearsing the race, in full ecstatic awareness that it might be the final, lethal race of his life, she would not know, would not recall. Sometimes by day, but more often by night, when she could drive unimpeded by slow-moving traffic, the Saab like a captive beast luxuriating in release, yearning for higher speeds. Like one transfixed, she watched as the speedometer needle inched beyond seventy-five toward eighty, and beyond eighty, risking a traffic ticket in a sixty-five-mile zone. At high speeds, unhappiness is slightly ridiculous.

  It was in the second week of her preparation, near midnight on Saturday, that she passed her first serious accident site in the Saab. On southbound I-96, near the airport exit, four lanes funneled to one, traffic backed up for a mile. As she approached, she saw two ambulances pulling away from the glass- and metal-littered concrete median, sirens deafening; saw several squad cars surrounding the smoking wreckage, revolving red lights, blinding red flares set in the roadway. Yet, as soon as the ambulances were gone, an eerie silence prevailed. What had happened, who had been injured? Who had died? The Saab, sober now, was one of a slow and seemingly endless stream as of a funeral procession of mourners. Strangers gazing in silence at the wreckage of strangers. Only death, violent and unexpected and spectacular death, induces such silence, sobriety. She did not believe in God, or in any supernatural intervention in the plight of mankind, yet her lips moved in prayer, as if without volition. God, have mercy!

  The Saab’s driver’s window was lowered. She hadn’t recalled lowering it but was leaning out, staring at the wreckage, sniffing, her sensitive nostrils stung by a harsh yet exhilarating odor of gasoline, oil, smoke; she was appalled and fascinated, seeing what appeared to be three vehicles mangled together, luridly illuminated by flares and revolving red lights. Two cars, of which one appeared to have been a compact foreign car, possibly a Volvo, and the other a larger American car, both crushed, grilles and windshields and doors shoved in; the cars looked as if they’d been flung together from a great height with contempt, derision, supreme cruelty by a giant-child. The third vehicle, an airport limousine, was less damaged, its stately chrome grille crumpled and discolored and its windshield cracked like a cobweb; its doors flung open crudely, like exclamations. She was disappointed that the accident victims h
ad all been taken away, no one remained except official, uniformed men sweeping up glass and shattered metal, calling importantly to one another, taking their time about clearing the accident site and opening the expressway again. The Saab was moving forward at five miles an hour, a full car length behind the car that preceded it, as if reluctant to leave the accident site, though a police officer was brusquely waving her on, and, behind her, an impatient driver was tapping his horn.

  The sleek black stretch limo was one of a kind in which her former lover frequently rode on his way to and from the airport, on the average of three times a month; several times, in the early days of their relationship, she’d ridden with him, the two of them intimate and hidden in the plush back seat, shielded by dark-tinted windows, whispering and laughing together, breaths sweetened with alcohol, hands moving freely over one another. How eagerly, how greedily touching one another. If it had happened then. If, the two of us. Then. She could have wept, that opportunity lost.

  NEXT DAY she slept late, waking dazed at noon. Bright and chill and fresh, and the sun glaring in the sky like a beacon. It was Easter Sunday.

  The man who’d been her lover, and whom she had loved, was an executive with an investment firm whose headquarters were in a corporate park off Route 11. Beautifully landscaped, like a miniature city, this complex of new office buildings glittered like amber Christmas-tree ornaments. It had not existed five years before. In the bulldozed, gouged, and landscaped terrain of Route 11, northern New Jersey, new lunar-looking cities arose every few months, surrounded by inlets of shining, methodically parked automobiles.

  She’d visited her former lover in his office suite on the top, eighth floor of his gleaming glass-and-aluminum building; she’d memorized her way through the maze of the corporate park, past cloverleafs, past a sunken pond and Niobe willows—she could not attract the unwanted scrutiny of any security guard. For in her beautiful sleek Saab, with her good clothes, styled hair, and sunglasses, with her imperturbable intelligent face, her poise, she looked the very model of a female inhabitant of Pelham Park, a young woman office manager, a computer analyst, or perhaps an executive. She would have her own parking space, of course. She would know her destination.

  Her former lover’s reserved parking space was close by his office building. She hadn’t had to worry that, like her, he might have acquired a new car, for his car was identifiable by the reserved space; in any case, she’d memorized his license-plate number.

  His telephone number, too, she’d memorized. Yet had never once dialed since he’d sent her away. Pride would never allow her to risk such hurt, guessing he’d changed the number.

  You won’t see my face. But you will know me.

  Weekdays he left his office sometime after six-fifteen P.M. and before seven P.M., crossing briskly to his car, which was a silvery-grey Mercedes, and departing on his north-northwest drive to River Ridge. (Except for the days he was traveling. But she could tell at a glance when he was away, of course.) The Mercedes aroused in her a wave of physical revulsion; it was a car she knew well, had ridden in many times. The sight of it made her realize, as she hadn’t quite realized before, that he, her former lover, had not felt the need to alter anything in his life since sending her away; his life continued as before, his professional life, his family life in River Ridge in a house she had never seen and would not see; nothing had been altered for him, above all nothing had been altered in his soul, except the presence of her from whom he’d detached himself like one shrugging off a coat. A coat no longer fashionable, no longer desirable.

  Circling the parking lot, which was divided into sectors, each sector bounded by strips of green, bright and fine-meshed as artificial grass though in fact it was real, and vivid spring flowers. Waiting at a discreet distance. Knowing he would come, must come. And when he did, quite calmly following him in the Saab, giving herself up to the instincts of the fine-tuned motor, the dashboard of gauges that glowed with its own intelligence, volition. You will know me. You will know. The first time she followed him only on Route 11, as far as the exit for I-96; she was several cars behind him, unnoticed by him of course. The second time she followed him on to I-96, which was trickier, again keeping several vehicles between them, and on the expressway the Saab had quickly accelerated, impatient with holding back; moving into the outer, fast lane and passing the Mercedes (traveling at approximately the speed limit, in a middle lane) and continuing on, at a gradually reduced speed, past Exit 33, where he departed for River Ridge; again he hadn’t noticed her of course, for what reason could he have had to notice her? Even had he seen her in the swift-moving Saab he could not have identified her in her new matte-black hair, her oversized dark glasses.

  The third time she followed him was in a sudden, pelting April rain that turned by quick degrees to hail, hailstones gaily bouncing on the pavement like animated mothballs, bouncing on the silver hood and roof of the Mercedes, bouncing on the liquidy-dark hood and roof of the Saab. She’d wanted to laugh, excited, exhilarated as a girl, daring, on the expressway, to ease up behind him, directly behind him in a middle lane, following him unnoticed for five-and-a-half dreamlike miles at precisely, teasingly, his speed, which was sixty-nine miles an hour; when he exited for River Ridge, the Saab had been drawn in his wake, and she’d had to tug at the steering wheel to keep from following him onto the ramp. You never knew! Yet—you must know.

  Sometimes cruising the expressway after he’d left. For she was so strangely, unexpectedly happy. Strapped into the Saab’s cushioned dove-gray seat, a band across her thighs, slantwise between her breasts, tight, as tight as she could bear, holding her fast, safe. It was at the wheel of the Saab, passing a second and a third accident site, she’d understood that there are no accidents, only destiny. What mankind calls accident is but misinterpreted destiny.

  Now the days were warmer, she felt naked inside her clothes. Now the thaw had come at last, the earth glistened with melting, everywhere shining surfaces, oil-iridescent puddles like mirrors. So happy! You can’t know. She surmised that her former lover might be thinking that she’d disappeared or was dead. He’d expressed concern that she was “suicidal”—with what disdain he’d uttered the word, as if its mere syllables offended—and now he would be thinking, quite naturally he would be thinking she was dead. If he thought of her at all.

  Naked inside her clothes, which were loose-fitting yet clinging, sensuous against her skin. Her buttocks pressed into the cushioned driver’s seat, her thighs carelessly covered by the thin, silky synthetic material of her skirts. (For always she wore skirts or dresses, never trousers.) And her legs bare, pale from winter but smooth, slender, and graceful, like the sleek contours of the Saab’s interior. She kicked off her high-heeled shoes, placed them on the passenger seat, liking to drive barefoot, liking the intimacy of her skin against the Saab’s gas and brake pedals. Sometimes at night truckers pulled up alongside her, even if she was traveling in the outer, fast lane, these strangers in their high, commanding cabs, not readily visible to her, maintaining a steady speed beside her for long tension-filled minutes, peering down at her, at what they could see of her slender body, her bare ghostly-glimmering legs in the dashboard light of the Saab, they were talking to her of course, murmuring words of sweet, deranged obscenity, which she could not hear and had no need of hearing to comprehend. Not now, not yet! And not you.

  Once, sobbing in the night. Her knuckles muffling the sound. And the pillow dampened with her saliva. And she’d felt his hands on her. In his sleep, his hands groping for her. Not knowing who she was, perhaps. Her exact identity, as in the depths of sleep, in even the most intimate sleep, lying naked beside another we sometimes forget the identity of the other. Yet he’d sensed her presence, and his hands had reached for her to quiet her, to subdue. To cease her sobbing.

  WEEKS AFTER Palm Sunday and the Saab entering her life. A mild, misty evening of a month she could not have named.

  By this time she’d memorized the route, every fraction of e
very mile of the route, absorbed it into her brain, her very skin. The precise sequence of exit ramps, the succession of overhead signs she might have recited like a rosary, stretches of median that were made of concrete and stretches of median that were weedy grass; how beyond Exit 23 of I-96 there was, on the highway’s shoulder, a litter of broken glass like fine-ground gems, part of a rusted bumper, twisted strips of metal that looked like the remains of a child’s tricycle. And in a railroad underpass near Exit 29 a curious disfigured hubcap like a skull neatly sheared in half. By day you could see secreted on certain stretches of pavement, on both Route 11 and I-96, hieroglyphic stains, a pattern of stains, oil or gasoline or blood or a combination of these, baked into the concrete, discernible as coded messages to only the sharpest eye. And there was Exit 30, where you turned in a tight hairpin, scary and exhilarating as a carnival ride if your car was moving above twenty miles an hour, circling a marshy area of starkly beautiful six-foot reeds and cattails, at its core pools of stagnant water, black and viscous as oil on the sunniest days. How drawn she was, how unexpected her yearning, to such rare remaining pockets of “nature”—relics of the original landscape where, in theory, perhaps in fact, a body might be secreted for years; a body quietly decomposing for years, never discovered though passed each day by hundreds, thousands of people. For in such a no-man’s-land, at the very core of the complex highway system, no pedestrians ever ventured.

  From six P.M. onward she waited until, at six-fifty P.M., her former lover appeared. Carrying his attaché case, walking quickly to his car. Unseeing. As she sat in the Saab, motor off, some fifty yards away, calmly smoking a cigarette, betraying no agitation, nor even alert interest; knowing herself perfectly disguised, her sleekly styled matte-black hair covering part of her face. Her makeup was flawless as a mask, her mouth composed, eyes hidden by dark glasses. Her nails were filed short but fastidiously manicured, polished a dark plum shade to match her lipstick. Calmly, in no haste, turning the key in the ignition, feeling the quick, stabbing response of the Saab’s motor waking, leaping to life.