doubt that Dave is. Unfortunately we’re not talking about Dave. Any more than we’re talking about Gail or June or how in hell they’re related.”
“They’re half-sisters.”
“Ross, she could take the course.”
“What course?”
As he said this his chair scraped. Keeper looked around. She could see from where she sat that her husband was rising to his feet, and she was about to ask him, as long as he was up—but he passed from view, and she heard the back door open. She closed her mouth.
Night air blew cooler from the kitchen. Keeper got up, though with difficulty, and went to see. His toenails clicked across the linoleum of the dining area toward the kitchen.
Ardis felt for the remote. The screen flashed and came on. A jet-lagged-looking man in a foreign suit and brass-coloured hairpiece was standing in a studio audience pulling a silk rope of scarlet and blue from the cleavage of an obese woman looking up at him with a fight-or-flight expression, possibly an admixture of gratitude. Ardis watched this feat at once absently and in an attitude of calculation, as one who though with weightier matters on her mind would solve the illusion. When she heard a scuff on the fire escape she switched off the TV.
She looked to the kitchen. “You could at least shut the door after you when you wander out without a word.”
He was leaning a rifle against the wall by the table.
“Keep leaving those in the truck and the next we know some ten-year-old’ll be lying dead in the street.”
He was clearing the table.
Keeper returned from the kitchen to circle next to the coffee table, preparing to lie down once more.
“But anyways,” she said.
He was laying the rifle upon the empty table.
“Handsome? As long as you’re up—?”
A few minutes later he came into the front room carrying a bottle of vermouth by the neck. Keeper looked around. Her husband stopped at the coffee table, extending his free fist, palm-downward, over the tumbler. As he did this, she gazed at the back of that hand, a fervent scrutiny. Reached out to stroke the hairs along the clench-smooth skin of it. A tentative caress. At the first touch of her finger the fist released. Two ice cubes clattered into the tumbler. The other fist came forward to pour.
“Thank you, lover,” she said and then quickly, “Why can’t you clean that thing in here? Shouting back and forth like a couple of fishwives.”
He was returning to the kitchen and made no answer.
She took a deep breath and told him everything she had learned from Gail Poot. Where the course was offered, how many weeks, how many hours a day of classes, the cost. She told him what Gail had reported the necessary equipment had set back Wilf and Bertie, and she told him the dimensions of the space in the Belmount Mall they had rented and how Wilf had done all the necessary carpentry and wiring and even a certain amount of the plumbing to get her started. What the space had cost per square foot. How long the lease.
This was information with a real estate component, and he seemed to listen. When she had finished telling him everything she knew, he cleared his throat and said, “No.”
“Don’t tell me Alex Connor wouldn’t give you a good rate,” she cried immediately, prepared for this. “She can pay us back. If she stays on here, she contributes for once in her life like anybody else. It’s not like we don’t need the money.”
“No.”
A silence fell.
“I honestly don’t know any more,” Ardis said quietly, “why I bother.” This admission drew no reply.
“I guess a person lives around here long enough,” she continued, snapping the pages of her magazine, “she just gives up. Who wants to go on slamming their head against the same wall?”
And this question drew no answer.
After a few minutes Ardis said, “I’ll tell you one thing. No woman not a complete monster who’s ever been through the living hell of a child is not going to look out for her, it doesn’t matter how useless she’s turned out, and when men grow tits maybe they can start to understand that.”
Neither did this assertion elicit any sort of response.
“You know what I’d like to know?” Ardis said. “Why in God’s name she’d stop the healing.”
In the kitchen the fridge started up, and shortly after, in the manner of a man who, even as he begins to speak, is extricating, with the greatest reluctance, his attention from something incomparably more interesting, he said, “This assumes she started.”
“Get off it, Ross!” Ardis cried. “These weren’t no-name strangers! And even if it was only the ones ignorant enough to have the faith, the point is it was her they were ready to put it in. She’s the one that’s got what it takes to bring people so far on side all she has to do is touch them with her baby finger and they tip over into perfect health. And don’t tell me that’s not a rarer gift than anything these pill-pushers are up to these days, with their tainted blood and their antigoddamnbiotics. Doctors are nothing any more but a bunch of little Chinese and Jews fresh out of the cradle who think they know everything, when in fact they’re stumbling around in the dark like everybody else.”
She stopped and looked to the kitchen. He was rubbing his face.
“Why’d she stop?” Ardis said.
The hands continued rubbing and then they fell away. “Just as well,” he said.
Another short silence, and Ardis said, “I honestly don’t understand how even you could say something that ignorant. Your daughter has the halt and lame picking up their beds and walking out to meet the new dawn, and you sit there and say it’s just as well if she doesn’t.”
He did not deny that this was what he had said.
“You know what I think?” she asked him.
“I do. You keep me constantly informed.”
“I think she’s up there having the same nervous breakdown she’s been having for the past month, and the reason is, you don’t turn power like that off and on like a kitchen tap. I say she hasn’t got the first clue in hell what she’s sitting on.”
“Not if it’s not her ass.”
“I can’t talk to you.”
There was a pause.
“Look,” he said. “If she’s up there thinking twice about getting herself canonized, it’ll be the first healthy sign out of her in twelve years.”
Ardis had moved on. “You know what she needs? An agent. All right. She was a, shall we say, unusual child with less than zero social skills and an overactive imagination. She flames out in high school, she’s got no aptitude for real estate, she hasn’t had a date in five years, and who am I kidding, she’s not going to be happy doing moustaches and bikini lines. But for Christ sake, Ross, look what she’s capable of! These reporters sniffing around here all winter. The world’s interested, if you aren’t. All she needs is some outside direction.”
“She’s got it. He lives in the sky and his take is one hundred per cent.”
Ardis was holding up the Chatelaine, rattling its pages to get his attention. “Why isn’t there anything on her in here, for instance? We’re just scraping the surface. Play our cards right and our little Two-shoes could be bigger than Jesus and the Beatles put together. These TV evangelists make fortunes, and they’re charlatans, every last horny bugger. I know. I watch those shows. The real thing does not come along every week, and when it does, believe me, the hunger’s there. It’s a market that never dies.”
“You know what?” he said. “I don’t want to hear any more