We already know she can’t swim. She’s Martin’s sister, and I’ve known her for seven years. Martin and I live together—or did until a few months ago, when I moved. Barnes has known her almost all her life, and they’ve been married for six months now. They were married in the living room of this house, while it was still being built, with Elvis Presley on the stereo singing “As Long as I Have You.” Holly carried a bouquet of cobra lilies. Then I sang “Some Day Soon”—Audrey’s favorite Judy Collins song. The dog was there, and a visiting Afghan. The stonemason forgot that he wasn’t supposed to work that day and came just as the ceremony was about to begin, and decided to stay. He turned out to know how to foxtrot, so we were all glad he’d stayed. We had champagne and danced, and Martin and I fixed crêpes.
“What if we just tore the cover off that David Hockney book,” Audrey says now. “The one of the man floating face down in a pool, that makes him look like he’s been pressed under glass? We could hang it from the tree over there, instead of wind chimes. I don’t want a swimming pool.”
Barnes puts her foot down. She lifts the other one and puts it in his hand.
“We can get you a raft and you can float around, and I can rub your feet,” he says.
“You’re never here. You work all the time,” Audrey says.
“When the people come to put in the pool, you can hold up your David Hockney picture and repel them.”
“What if they don’t understand that, Barnes? I can imagine that just causing a lot of confusion.”
“Then you lose,” he says. “If you show them the picture and they go ahead and put in the pool anyway, then either it’s not a real cross or they’re not real vampires.” He pats her ankle. “But no fair explaining to them,” he says. “It has to be as serious as charades.”
Martin tells me things that Barnes has told him. In the beginning, Martin didn’t want his sister to marry him, but Barnes was also his best friend and Martin didn’t want to betray Barnes’s confidences to him, so he asked me what I thought. Telling me mattered less than telling her, and I had impressed him long ago with my ability to keep a secret by not telling him his mother had a mastectomy the summer he went to Italy. He only found out when she died, two years later, and then he found out accidentally. “She didn’t want you to know,” I said. “How could you keep that a secret?” he said. He loves me and hates me for things like that. He loves me because I’m the kind of person people come to. It’s an attribute he wishes he had, because he’s a teacher. He teaches history in a private school. One time, when we were walking through Chelsea late at night, a nicely dressed old lady leaned over her gate and handed me a can of green beans and a can opener and said, “Please.” On the subway, a man handed me a letter and said, “You don’t have to say anything, but please read this paragraph. I just want somebody else to see it before I rip it up.” Most of these things have to do with love, in some odd way. The green beans did not have to do with love.
Martin and I are walking in the woods. The poison ivy is turning a bright autumnal red, so it’s easy to recognize. As we go deeper into the woods we see a tree house, with a ladder made of four boards nailed to the tree trunk. There are empty beer bottles around the tree, but I miss the most remarkable thing in the scene until Martin points it out: a white balloon wedged high above the tree house, where a thin branch forks. He throws some stones and finally bounces one off the balloon, but it doesn’t break it or set it free. “Maybe I can lure it down,” he says, and he picks up an empty Michelob bottle, holds it close to his lips, and taps his fingers on the glass as if he were playing a horn while he blows a slow stream of air across the top. It makes an eerie, hollow sound, and I’m glad when he stops and drops the bottle. He’s capable of surprising me as much as I surprise him. We lived together for years. A month ago, he came to the apartment I was subletting late one night, after two weeks of not returning my phone calls at work and keeping his phone pulled at home—came over and hit the buzzer and was standing there smiling when I looked out the window. He walked up the four flights, came in still smiling, and said, “I’m going to do something you’re really going to like.” I was ready to hit him if he tried to touch me, but he took me lightly by the wrist, so that I knew that was the only part of my body he’d touch, and sat down and pulled me into the chair with him, and whistled the harp break to “Isn’t She Lovely.” I had never heard him whistle before. I had no idea he knew the song. He whistled the long, complex interlude perfectly, and then sat there, silently, his lips warm against the top of my hair.
