had chalked in pastel blue, ‘Danny V. isn’t , ’ and he pondered this, wondering if Danny V. or someone else had written it, if the person had meant to say more. He retreated into his store, but the endless fragments of his face and body reflected in tables and lamps, the profusion of bedding, set a pulse beating at his throat as though something unfriendly lodged there. He saw Shelly several nights a week after that. He had not a glimmer of how she saw him. Her teasing and laughter seemed to promise something just out of reach, something that caused a fluttering in his belly like hundreds of tiny wings. slid down a long, twisty slide with the child, which Scott felt too foolish to do. ticket, a ride, everything, to see the She laughed and teased the girl the way she did Scott. His daughter peered at Shelly from beneath drawn brows, but by the day’s end, rewarded her with several smiles. Though glad they liked each other, Scott experienced a tw inge of annoyance the next time he saw his daughter. She pouted because he had not brought along the ‘Nice lady with the funny hair.’ “Woman,” her mother said. “ Lady is what people say when they want a woman to feel she should walk not run, or bob her head when she wants to scream.” Scott yearned for his ex-wife to ask about Shelly, that he have an opening to talk about her to another woman, but she told him to bring the child back by eight, and shooed them out, her smile more automatic than Shelly’s, but no less enigmatic. 'His daughter sulked, whined at his refusal to go on the slide with her. He took her home early, with the fragile bond between them on the verge of a terrible, nameless violation. He felt caged in his apartment, finally called Shelly, and asked her to spend the night with him. She hesitated so long, he poked the release button, sure they’d been disconnected. “ Oh all right. Pick me up .” She sounded piqued, as if he had insisted, and she’d given in under pressure, though he had heard in his own voice a diffidence that made him cringe. A HUMMINGBIRD HOVERED BEFORE THE PURPLE- AND-SCARLET BELLS OF A FUCHSIA. HE IMAGINED HIMSELF HOVERING BEFORE THE POSSIBILITY OF JOY. bed. He sprawled there, his body reduced to a lump of sodden misery. Not even the end of his marriage had left him so limp. Shelly touched his shoulder. “ I guess I sounded snotty on the phone. I had a FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE, HE COULDN’ T RESPOND IN BED. HE SPRAWLED THERE, HIS BODY REDUCED TO A LUMP OF SODDEN MISERY. NOT EVEN THE END OF HIS MARRIAGE HAD LEFT HIM SO LIMP. Police.” For a dizzy moment, he thought she meant cops. He found nothing to say, but he tried to make up for his various lacks with his hands and his mouth. While Shelly wriggled, his mind strayed to his daughter’s last birthday. She had wriggled the same way, while she opened presents. She opened his, a large toy robot that walked, talked, and scooped up small objects, and blinked at it. “ Mama got me a guinea pig,” she said finally. “ It squeaks when it’s hungry, and squeals when I pick it up.” “ Tell Daddy thank you, Jenny,” her mother said. He no longer recalled if his daughter had, but he felt now an echo of the hatred for his ex-wife that had bloomed suddenly in his belly like a poisonous flower, and rolled away from Shelly. She sat up on the bed, which came not from his store but from a ‘suite’ he had bought when he married. His wife hadn’t wanted it. He understood her rejection of the bed, a mahogany four-poster,, no more than he understood why she wanted a divorce. Her patient explanations left him floundering, as though through thick fog, and he stopped asking. Her last try—“ I felt stifled”—hung between them, insubstantial, yet dense with implications. Shelly stroked his back, but he shrugged off her hand. She stood, and gathered her clothes with an odd little dip of her head, perhaps acquiescence, though he couldn’t imagine to what. “ It’ ll shirt clung wetly to his back and ribs. Shelly eased out of the car, and gazed at him through the open window. “ Thanks. See you, soon?” He didn’t answer, and her hands moved in the first awkward gesture he had seen, fingers clawed, wrists stiff. “ Okay,” she said. “ Okay.” She strode off, and his mouth filled with a taste of salt. The ride back assumed the timelessness of a dream, the roar of the other cars strangely distant. His earlier misery weighted his body; his legs and fingers grew numb. He didn’t call her again, she didn’t call him. He went to campus a few times, but if she was there, he didn’t see her. Once, the phone rang in a booth on the edge of campus, and he picked it up. A female voice meowed, followed! by a laugh shriller than Shelly’s, and a click. HE SAW SPRAY-PAINTED THERE, WHICH THEIR BODIES HAD CONCEALED, ‘IS ANYONE THERE? ANYONE AT ALL?’DREAD SWEPT THROUGH HIM, BUT HE COULDN’T LOCATE ITS SOURCE. One day, several weeks after his last night with Shelly, he was to pick his daugh te r up from schoo l. He parked outside the building, noting how the fading yellow paint dimmed the vibrancy of the bougainvillea that clung to its wall. A bell rang, loud even where he sat, in the car. He jerked upright. Children hair, which shone like the throat of a tropical bird. His daughter looked taller than he recalled. For a heart-thudding instant, he couldn’t remember her age. He straightened. He had to stop Shelly from simply walking off with his daughter, but they were half-way down the block before he managed to unfold himself from the car. They paused by a board fence. Shelly flapped her hands at a cat the size of a cocker spaniel that chased a miniature poodle past them. Shelly shouted advice to the tiny dog, and the child laughed. Scott pretended they had stopped to let him catch up and join them. He wanted to, but already they moved away from the fence. He saw spray-painted there, which their bodies had concealed, ‘ Is Anyone There? Anyone At All?’ Dread swept through him, but he couldn’t locate its source. He heard Shelly’s high trill, and blundered closer, but the two female figures receded. He bowed his head. He must join them, reclaim his child, but how? He stared at the ir backs. His daughter came to Shelly’s shoulder, her hair was longer, but they swayed toward each other in the same manner, as if to exchange confidences. He longed to seize both, shake them, shake loose the secret of how to reach them. Grappling with panic and pride, he fumbled for a phrase, a gesture, that might wring a clear meaning from the encoded messages that surrounded and enclosed him. His daughter took Shelly’s hand. He must try, harder, before his child began to flash him the cryptic smiles he had seen on her mother’s face, on Shelly’s; before she dyed her hair improbable colors and soared off into realms he couldn't even envision. In his urgent need, he cried out. Shelly and his daughter swung to face him. He ushered her into his apartment with another cringe. He had hidden the bird clock/music box, and hung a print of Van Gogh’s blooming almond branch. He had viewed these as positive actions, but now the clock’s absence seemed apologetic, and the room deadened in contrast to the print’s radiant blue-and-white, its kinetic twist of limbs. He snapped off the overhead light to mute its wild life. He undressed with his back to Shelly, sucked in his stomach muscles, turned. The glass-and-chrome lamp towering beside the bed blazed. He reached to switch it off, his eyes sore, but Shelly protested. She jiggled his arm. “ Scott? I know I’m skinny, but I don’t look that bad in the light.” He supposed she meant that he, twenty pounds too heavy, did and said, “There’s mystery in the dark.” He had attempted a tone of offended dignity, but feared he had sounded merely reedy. He wanted to add that there was also comfort in the dark, but in the brilliant light he was sure he saw mockery in the raised corners of her mouth. He remained silent, the lamp remained on, but for the first time in his life, he couldn’t respond in be okay next time,” she said. “ It happens. You want to get a frozen yogurt?” Her casualness grated, made his failure into something inconsequential. Panic churned inside him, he had to clear his throat twice before he could say, “ I’ ll drive you home.” She stared at him, lips parted. “ I thought I was spending the night.” He said nothing. She bent her head. “ Guess not. Could you drive me into the city, then? I could still make part of the concert.” He agreed, and they dressed in a silence broken only by Shelly humming tunelessly under her breath. Once, she glanced at him, thin brows arched. He mulled what she might want to ask, but accepted her shrug as evidence the question lacked urgency. Yet, in the car, a throat-clogging tension gripped him. The drive across the Bay Bridge seemed to take longer than during rush hour. They reached the Cow Palace. Scott’s streamed out in a shouting mass. He didn't see his daughter, but suddenly, he spied Shelly. He froze, slack-mouthed, and watched her single out his child, as he had not. Neither saw him. Other children eddied around them. Shelly bent close to the girl, blocking Scott’s view of her. The waves of children lessened. He heard Shelly suggest an ice cream cone, . .before your dad comes.” She touched his daughter’s cheek. “You and I could be friends, even if he thinks I’m too young and silly for him. I always wanted a little sister, but there was just me.” Scott’s head buzzed with this version of what had failed to happen between them. He had not known, nor thought to ask, if Shelly had a sister, parents, where she had grown up. He didn’t know what color her hair was, beneath the dye. He shrank down on the car seat. Shelly’s words, her wistfulness clashed with his image of her, jarred him the way the sweetness of the jasmine that frothed white over the school’s wire fence jarred the exhaust-smelling air. He would never smell jasmine again without remembering how the sun filtered through fog to spike gold in his daughter’s brown hair, to gleam on the green patches in Shelly’s Struck dumb by how young Shelly looked, how uncertain; by how self-contained his daughter appeared, he sucked in a breath of the jasmine-drenched air, and lurched forward, both hands already outstretched. Writer Susan Policoff lives in Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Blue Unicorn and Rolling Stone. This is her first story in CSQ. Artist Gene Gentry McMahon lives in Seattle. Her Lovers Senes (paintings and drawings) was recently shown at the Greg Kucera Gallery. 24 Clinton St. Quarterly— Spring, 1987
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