Over break, she went to Barbados with her parents. His mother invited Mr. Gallagher for Thanksgiving dinner. It was becoming obvious to Teddy that Gallagher and his mother had the hots for each other, even though they went to great lengths to hide it. That morning, his mother bought a fresh turkey from the farmer down the road and plucked the feathers off herself on the back steps, saving them in a shoebox to use in her work. Teddy liked Gallagher all right, but he wasn’t sure how he felt about him hitting on his mother. Whenever he was around, she’d get this look on her face, this kind of radiance. She was a beer poured too fast, her golden liquid spilling over the edge.
It started snowing that afternoon. Gallagher showed up in a corduroy blazer, his beard neatly trimmed, his hair combed back behind his ears. He held an armful of yellow tulips and his mother took the flowers in her arms like a fussy infant and brought them into the kitchen and laid them on the table. She stood on a chair to get down a white pitcher and put the flowers in the pitcher with some water and brought the pitcher to the table. While the turkey was cooking, the three of them put on boots and walked out into the back field. The snow fell heavily and dazzled in the cold sunlight like a shower of sequins. After a while, they came upon a coyote with something dead in its mouth, a woodchuck maybe. For a moment none of them moved, and he noticed how his mother squeezed Gallagher’s arm. It occurred to him that he was used to having his mother to himself and compared the moment to other times when they’d confronted the possibility of danger and it was just the two of them. Those times she didn’t need anyone protecting her. The coyote lifted its head slightly, as if to be polite, and ran off with its supper.
Teddy helped his mother set the table. First, they whipped up the linen cloth like a parachute and watched it settle down on the surface. They set each place with the old china plates that had been her grandmother’s. She took the silverware out of an old wood box with a red velvet lining, and placed the tarnished silver candlesticks in the center. His mother put on dangly crystal earrings that made little shapes on her cheeks whenever she laughed. There was something almost formal about the way she moved in front of Gallagher, something contained. Teddy compared it to the beginning of a symphony, when you don’t really know what to expect, but the music lures you gently and you get pulled in. Somehow there is no letting go. You want to follow it. You want to get to the end.
Last year on Thanksgiving she’d had to work. Teddy had stayed in the apartment, getting stoned, eating Fruit Loops out of the box.
After the feast, they played Scrabble and listened to his grandfather’s ancient records. It was kind of fun, though. Gallagher was pretty exceptional at the game and used words like mirth and boon. He changed Teddy’s ant to antipathy and his mother’s gent to effulgent and got too many triple word scores to name. Teddy decided that playing Scrabble with Mr. Gallagher wasn’t such a good idea after all, even though, in truth, he kind of liked it even though most of his own words were pretty lame. For dessert, they had ice cream and fresh raspberries and whipped cream and he fell asleep on the couch after midnight, hearing the sounds of muffled delight coming from the darkened hall.
Some of the workers at the Goldings’ barn had gone home to Bogotá for the holiday and Rudy asked if Teddy wanted to help him out in the barn. Teddy was glad to have something to do. The pay wasn’t much, but the work wasn’t all that demanding; it was good lunch money, Rudy tried to joke. “I assume there’s a cafeteria at that country club school of yours, or do you get served on tablecloths?”
“Yeah, there’s a cafeteria,” he said, wryly. He didn’t really like Rudy talking about the school like he was some spoiled rich kid. He didn’t see himself that way, but Rudy hadn’t known him last year, when he was a dirtbag kid in L.A., hanging out at the skateboard park, shooting the big roaches in his mother’s apartment with a BB gun.
To get to the barn, Teddy had to wake at five, which wasn’t easy— he wasn’t a morning person. Half-asleep, he rode his bike to the Goldings’ barn under the grim clouds. His mother had promised to get him a car in the spring, if he got decent grades, but he wasn’t sure that was possible, so he thought he’d better save up on his own. Rudy showed him where everything was and what he was supposed to do, mostly shoveling out the stalls. He didn’t mind the work. He liked using his body, pushing the wheelbarrow, dumping the manure in the pasture where Rudy had shown him and he liked working outdoors and he liked the smell of the farm.
After work the first day, Rudy invited him up to his room for a beer. They drank Coronas and Rudy showed him his porn collection. “Here, check this out,” he said. “You can take it home, just don’t let your mother know.” He laughed. “Incidentally, it’s what he does.”
“What who does?”
“Golding. He’s in the porn business.”
“Really? Willa never said anything.”
“She never said anything because she doesn’t know. It’s a big fucking secret.” He pressed the DVD into Teddy’s chest. “This one’s my favorite. Take a good look at the star, you just might recognize her.”
The movie was called Drive-In. It didn’t have much of a story, but he supposed few of these films did. It went like this: A man and a woman were at a drive-in movie, watching a science-fiction flick, sitting on the hood of the car. The man starts fucking the girl on the hood of the car, and he’s questioning her, asking her if she likes his big fat dick inside her and she squeals and says, yes, she likes his big fat hard dick fucking her, and then two other men come over and ask her if she wants them to fuck her too and she says yes, she wants to be fucked in both places at once, they can fuck her at the same time while the third fucks her in the mouth, then they can all be happy. She just wants to make them happy, she says. Teddy watched the girl’s face and she looked like she was in pain, which was part of the turn-on, he realized, and he saw a tear running down her cheek.
Stupid cunt, he thought, coming into his own hand. You deserve it.
It didn’t occur to him until later that night, when he was lying in bed, that the girl in the movie was someone he knew. He got up and looked at the picture on the cover. It showed the woman lying on her stomach in a leather G-string. Her hair was platinum blond; a wig, he decided. Her face seemed wildly familiar. You just might recognize her, Rudy had said. And then, in a spectacular revelation, it came to him: It was Willa’s mother, Mrs. Golding.
Sure, she was much younger, and she was hot as summer pavement—but it was her. He’d put money on it.
Over that week, when Willa was away, he went up to see the girl on Angel Hill. He felt bad about it; he felt despicable, yet he couldn’t keep away. Like a drug he felt hollow when she wore off. When he’d gone into her that first time, he’d remembered a visit to the science museum as a small boy, sticking his hand into a mysterious cavern to try to guess what was inside—his fingers had encountered the soft, tepid chambers of a sea sponge.
He felt in a struggle with himself. Every time it was like being in a dream, you never knew what to expect. She was a mystery to him. She might put on a black veil. She might have on makeup or not. Every time she’d pull up the shade so he could see the moon, if there was one, and they’d lie together very close on the bed, smoking, talking, and then she’d start to touch him. She reminded him of one of the old china plates from his kitchen, ringed in blue. She was like a thing of beauty from another time, a ghostly beauty that scared him. He guessed she was maybe eighteen or nineteen. Sometimes he’d find bruises on her thighs, scratches. She had scabs on her belly from something; she wouldn’t let him see. She said one of her clients hit her sometimes. “He likes to punish me,” she said dully. “He says I’m no good. I need to pray. He makes me get on my knees.” She laughed, trying to make a joke of it, and dug around in her box of trinkets. “He gave to me this.” She showed him a rosary. “He wants to reform me.” She had a broken rib. Her room was full of flowers. “He sent me flowers,” she told him. “Chocolates.”
“Who is he?” Teddy said.
Teddy took all the flowers in a heap and brought them outside and made her watch as he set fire to them. They stood there watching them burn.
Once, as an experiment, Teddy pushed her head down, hard, like he’d seen in the film, making her gag, and he thought in his head: You know you want it like this, you deserve it. But she reared back. “Don’t be like that,” she said, her eyes tearing. And he held her. Told her he was sorry. He didn’t know why these things came into his head and sometimes he worried that there was something wrong with him, that he was a bad person, like maybe his father had been.
She was hooked on crystal meth. It was her whole world. She’d do anything just to get some. He asked if he could try it, but she wouldn’t let him. “You stay away from it or I won’t love you anymore.” He’d watch her hunch over her glass pipe like an old bag lady that’s pulled something out of the trash. He didn’t like fucking her when she was high and now she was high all the time. Once, when he was kissing her, her tooth fell out in his mouth. He spit it out in his hand. The tooth was gray, almost black. It was rotten. He felt sick.
She got up and looked inside her mouth in a mirror. “Look what’s happening to me.”
“You have to stop.”
“I can’t.”
“I’ll make you. I’ll lock you up.” He said it like he meant it, but he knew he didn’t care enough. He looked away from her. He needed to get out of there. He didn’t want to be with her anymore. “Don’t be sad.” She tried to kiss him, but he didn’t want her kisses.
“You shouldn’t be here. It’s not right.”
She gave him her crazy smile and shook her head and messed up his hair. “I’m okay, Teddy Bear.”
He pulled on his jeans. “I have to go.”
She grappled for her stash, made an ugly face. “Then go.”
His mother was waiting for him when he got home. He could tell by the cold look on her face that she was pissed. She made him sit down with her at the kitchen table. “I cleaned your room today,” she told him. “Look what I found.” She held up his box of rubbers. Worse, she had found the movie Rudy gave him. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“I assume you’re sexually active?”
“So?” He saw no point in lying to her. He had never lied to his mother in the past, why should he start now. But for some reason he could not explain, he started to cry. He cried like a little child. His mother came over and took him in her arms. She held him there.
“It’s okay, honey, whatever happened. You can tell me anything, you know that.”
He cried a little more, then she sat back down, waiting for him to explain. “She’s someone I met,” he told her. “It just happened.” He felt so stupid. “I don’t want to go there anymore.”
His mother looked at him. Time seemed to pass very slowly. Finally, she said, “Who is she?”
“She’s a prostitute,” he admitted.
His mother sighed. He could tell she was disappointed. “Please tell me you used a condom.”
He nodded miserably. “I’m not an idiot.”
She hesitated. “What’s with this?” She held up the movie. “Where did you get it?”
“Someone gave it to me. I didn’t even watch it,” he lied.
“It’s not real,” she told him. “It’s not the way it really is. I hope you know that. It’s not how women should be treated.”
“I know,” he muttered, but he didn’t know. Not really.
“You’d better,” she said. Then she tossed the movie into the trash. “That’s where it belongs. Tell your friend you lost it.” She started up the stairs. “And get your homework done.”
31
Being a single mother had its challenges. Claire had always imagined that, as Teddy got older, it would get easier. But that’s not what had happened. It had gotten harder, more complicated, and she sometimes doubted her abilities to properly guide him. What did she know about adolescent boys? As embarrassing as it was to admit, the fact that he’d lost his virginity was upsetting to her, even though she’d lost hers at the same age. Just those words: losing your virginity. As if something were lost, not found. Why wasn’t it something to celebrate, she wondered. Why couldn’t she celebrate it? After all, sex—making love—under the best of circumstances, represented the ultimate connection between two people. Why shouldn’t she be happy for him that he’d embarked on this thrilling aspect of adulthood?
But he’d lost it to a prostitute.
That upset her. Deeply. What in the world had possessed him?
Couldn’t he have waited for someone he loved? Someone like Willa.
Why was everyone in such a goddamn rush?
And what about love?
What about love? a voice echoed. She hadn’t loved Joe Golding, yet she’d slept with him repeatedly. Their affair had been substantial, salacious, passionate. Typically, and with no shortage of irony, when someone like Nate Gallagher appeared, someone who made her positively weak with longing, the possibility of sex terrified her.
Moreover, when it came to her son, she was fairly emphatic that a person of his age had no business having sex for the simple satisfaction of having it, without love.
She was no prude. In fact, she considered herself to be quite liberal when it came to the subject. She fully supported sex education in schools, including the dispensation of condoms. Animals naturally mated when the time was right; why shouldn’t humans? And what was so wrong with sexual gratification, anyway? But in truth, her conversations with Teddy about intercourse had been limited to clinical mechanics, and, quite frankly, they had made her squeamish.
Maybe Joe Golding had been right about her after all; maybe she was the worst sort of hypocrite.
But a prostitute?
Why?
And what was he doing watching porn? That infuriated her. That she could not abide. What in the hell was wrong with him?
“It exists in our culture,” Joe had said to her, as if that made it all right. “There must be a good reason for it.”
On an impulse, she called Golding’s cell phone. When he answered, she could hear the ocean in the background. He was on a beach in Barbados. “Rough life,” she said.
“Somebody’s got to do it.”
“I need a male opinion,” she said, and told him the story about Teddy. “I figured I’d ask an expert.”
“It’s not uncommon for boys of his age. What movie was it?”
She told him and he sighed, obviously familiar with it.
“Have you seen it?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen it. It’s an old film, where did he get it?”
“Some friend of his.”
“I would confiscate it if I were you.”
“I already have.”
Joe hesitated a moment too long and said, “I don’t want that thing getting around.”
“Okay.”
“And do me a favor,” he said. “Don’t watch it.”
“Why not? Maybe I’ll learn something.”
She had said it as a joke, but he didn’t laugh. “Promise me, Claire.”
She wasn’t about to promise him anything. Instead, she changed the subject. “By the way, I’ve decided there’s no such thing as a simple life. It’s futile to even pursue one.”
“I’ve come to that conclusion myself,” he said.
“I wish there was.”
“Me too.”
“I wish the world were different.” He didn’t say anything. Again, she heard the waves, the sound of happy voices in the background. “I’m sorry I was such a bitch.”
“You have strong feelings. You shouldn’t apologize.”
“For someone with such a sheltered life,” she told him, “you’re a very accomplished lover.”
He laughed. “Coming from you, that’s a compliment.”
“I actually miss you.”
“I miss you
too.”
“I guess I’m more conservative than I realized,” she said uncertainly.
“Conservative is not a word I’d use to describe you.”
“I need to find someone who’s available for a change.”
“Yes, you do. And you will, Claire. I’m sure of it.”
“Are things okay with Candace?”
“Yeah, they’re okay,” he said. “Aside from a little collateral damage. I appreciate what you did, actually. You inspired me to work on my marriage.” He laughed a little then said, as if to make it official, “I am attempting to honor my commitment to her.”
“Good for you.” She used the German accent. “A little head shrinking can go a long way, yes?”
“I know it’s hard to believe, but I just might be cured.”
“Ya, it’s good.”
“It’s good to be away, as a family.”
“Good boy,” she said. “I’ll let you go.”
“I’ll see you.”
It was a nice conversation and she was happy they’d talked, but she felt a little lost when she hung up. It always came down to her being alone. That’s just how things worked out for her. She’d give a lot of herself to people, men, and end up empty-handed. She didn’t blame them, it was her own doing. She had no one to blame but herself for being unattached. But now she wanted someone in her life. She didn’t want to be alone anymore. She wanted to live out the rest of her days with a man she adored.
She thought of Nate Gallagher driving around in her father’s truck with her picture on the visor and laughed out loud. He had called it fate. It occurred to her that she wouldn’t mind riding around with him for a while, years, maybe.
She wondered how he’d look without that beard.
She went downstairs and fixed herself some tea. A simple life, she thought, dunking the teabag, lifting it up on a spoon, wrapping the string tightly around it to squeeze the water out. Her mother had taught her to do it. And her father would scoop the sugar and hold his spoon on the tea’s surface, letting the tea seep into the sweet mound gradually, so it would evenly disperse. She could almost imagine him sitting here now, doing it. “The sweet things in life take time,” he used to say. “You have to be patient.”
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