Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

Stevie hated the winter. Because the space heaters in the kitchen and the den had to heat the bathroom too, she could not take a bath without leaving the door open. Maybe she would not have been in such a hurry to see Teddy off to bed had she been able to settle into the steamy waters of her tub behind a securely shut door. The heat of the water kept you from freezing for a brief bath, but if you closed the door, the bathroom quickly cooled, chilling the water by cold-blooded convection. When you stepped out, your body was helplessly aquiver and the joy of luxuriating in warmth for the first time since abandoning your electric blanket that morning had become a barefoot forced march through the storage lockers of a meat-packing plant. If the door stayed open, though, you could soak an extra three minutes and dry off feeling no colder than on a trick-or-treating expedition in October.

  Immersed in the cooling water, Stevie lathered and shaved her legs. Dr. Elsa had offered to take the kids tomorrow afternoon, and Stevie had just about decided to let her. Tomorrow, if this evening’s Exceleriter experiment went as planned, she would be ready for some recuperative therapy: shopping, a movie, dinner in a Chinese restaurant, maybe even a cocktail. Whatever happened, she would need time to think about the results and Dr. Elsa’s selfless offer would give her that time. Stevie’s bath had become a preparatory ritual, beautifying and ablutionary. It was almost like getting ready for a date.

  Afterward, in a flannel nightgown beneath which her torso and limbs felt sensually pliant, and a quilted robe that cloaked her in middle-aged frumpiness, Stevie passed through the unheated downstairs and climbed the steps to her study. She was Lady Godiva in a greatcoat last worn by a French soldier on the retreat from Moscow. Her Exceleriter, on the other hand, was not only naked but warm. She had left the dust cover off the machine. Further, although she had purposely not rolled any paper into place, it had been typing in her absence—presumably after the kids had gone to sleep, so scrupulous was it about concealing its ability from everyone but her. She could tell that it had been typing by the warmth of its metal cover and the illegible black-on-black letters encircling the platen, a jumble of struck-over, indecipherable characters.

  “Damn you,” she said.

  From her filing cabinet she extracted the story about Ted, Seaton Benecke in his role as “dosimetrist,” and the Clinac 18. One more time, she thought. She taped four more sheets of typing paper to the page ending,

  “I fell apart down deep,” Crye said, a dead hand on his wife’s forehead. “If I appeared to give up, Stevie, it was only because it was time for me to pay.”

  She positioned this train of pages so that the Exceleriter—if it had not already completed her dream without benefit of paper—could resume its transcription. Why, after all, was it time for Ted to pay? What debt had maneuvered him to his uncharacteristic surrender?

  “Tonight,” Stevie told the typewriter, “you’re going to do what I want you to do. Tonight you’re going to finish this business.”

  She checked the kids. They were sleeping soundly. She put her electric blanket on its highest setting—something she should have done earlier—and reluctantly shed her robe. Then she eased herself between the icy sheets (a lukewarm chicken filet, hey, in a pocket of frozen pita bread) and waited for her coverlet to begin to toast her. This took a while. Her feet tingled, and she moved her naked legs up and down knowing that the friction would only marginally boost the temperature inside the covers. God! how she hated this weather. It had been a long day, and to end it by galloping a hundred-meter dash flat on her back did not constitute a peaceful retirement. Some writers had winter homes in the tropics. Some writers never ventured any farther north than Saint-Tropez. Georgia was supposed to be in the Sun Belt, but tell that to her frost-bit tootsies.

  Eventually the bed warmed, and Stevie left off her running-in-place for some goal-directed mental exertion. She was going to make the Exceleriter finish transcribing her nightmare by insuring that she dreamt that nightmare, sequence by eerie sequence, right to the end. You could influence the contents of your dreams, after all, by preprogramming your brain with the desired dream imagery. You thought hard about this imagery while still in that hazy hypersusceptible mental state just prior to sleep. Of course, to continue to think deliberately about anything during this unreal period was to dissolve its edges and prolong wakefulness. You had to balance conscious thought with the afflatus of either fantasy or unconscious desire. You had to drift without losing your direction.

  Stevie drifted. She drifted past Ted’s chrome-plated steel-blue coffin on its bier at the graveside services in the Barclay cemetery. Faces melted and blurred in the rain; lilies nodded their heads like constellations of molting swans. Down in the soundproofed crypt from which the half dead were sometimes half resurrected, deep in the angry red ache of her confusion and disillusionment, there in the Ladysmith treatment room, Stevie drifted between the focusing points of the Clinac 18’s lasers.

  And there, floating at the intersection of those laser points, drifted Theodore Martin Crye, Sr., half resurrected in order to dream. Righting himself beneath the eye of the linear accelerator, revolving out of the weightlessness of death to conform to the gravity-bound criteria of her own disembodied eyes, her husband approached her like a living man. . . .

  XXV

  Frightened, Stevie sat up in bed. A figure stood in her doorway. She had a hunch, a briefly bloodcurdling intuition, that it had been standing there for a long time. It neither spoke nor moved, and the melancholy disposition of its head and limbs led her to believe that the threat it posed was not that of bodily harm or indiscriminate violence. It posed a threat, though, and her fear of the figure encompassed but did not define this unnamed threat. She squinted across the cold room, waiting for a sign. At last she said, “Ted?”

  The figure in the doorway shifted.

  “Ted?” Her voice sounded peeved as well as fearful. “Ted?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Teddy!” she exclaimed sotto voce. “You just about scared me silly. What are you doing up? Are you standing there in your jockeys? You haven’t got the sense God gave a green snake.”

  The boy did not move. He had his arms folded across his chest, his hands gripping his shoulders, but this feeble postural tactic was his only concession to the cold. In the yellow-green light coming into her room from the arc lamp on the corner of Hazel and O’Connor, just outside, he looked like Michelangelo’s David in a pair of bikini briefs. The foolish bumpkin.

  “Teddy, what the hell’re you doing?”

  “Mom,” he began uncertainly. Then again: “Mom, I heard you come up, I haven’t been asleep, I couldn’t sleep —”

  Oh, my God, thought Stevie. He’s heard the Exceleriter typing away. He’s scared, and he wants an explanation. What do I tell him? Do I make up a lie about teleprinters and computer hookups, or confess the truth and risk estranging his belief as stupidly as I estranged Elsa’s. Or would he, maybe, believe? And, believing, help restore my own psychological equilibrium?

  “Did you hear my typewriter, Teddy?”

  His voice betrayed his puzzlement. “No, ma’am. You were only in your study a couple of minutes. I didn’t even think you tried to work.”

  “I didn’t.” Well, that exchange had probably done little to lift her in the boy’s estimation. She had framed a ridiculous non sequitur of a question, received an honest if baffled reply, and followed that up with an even more baffling denial of the necessity of her original question. “What’s bothering you, then?”

  “I’m sorry about sassing you tonight, Mom. You know, calling you a fogey and cursing under my breath.”

  “Fogey I heard, the cursing I didn’t.”

  “I said, ‘Oh, hell, what a crock of shit.’ ”

  “Confessing the crime’s plenty—no need to reprise it for me. Senility’s rapid approach hasn’t completely destroyed my imagination.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. I just —” The articulation of this last sentiment stymied him. He shifted his weight, rubbin
g his instep with one bare foot and gently chafing his upper arms. Stevie marveled again at his disregard of the cold. Slowly, though, it was penetrating his defenses, the neglectful machismo of the teen-age boy: the cold and a worry still unvoiced.

  “That’s not the only reason you came in here, is it?”

  Teddy said nothing.

  “Something’s bothering you. You’re an okay kid, but you don’t usually lose much sleep fretting about your mama’s wounded feelings.”

  His dim silhouette disgustedly shook its head. His knuckles stood out from each arm like the tuning knobs on the neck of a guitar. “I wish Dad was here. Damn! do I ever.”

  “Were,” Stevie corrected him. “You wish Dad were here. So do I, Teddy. For both our sakes.”

  He turned to go, and suddenly Stevie feared that he would leave without revealing the worry keeping him awake. He would internalize it, letting it scarify him, a festering ulcer of worry. The boy wanted his father to talk to, but he had only her. He had come to her in the dark because it was easier than in the hard-edged, satirical light of day. At night, if not finally susceptible to the balm of sunny reason, worries were at least mockproof. She had to keep Teddy in the room or he would hide forever the mysterious source of his upset.

  “Come back, Teddy—right now.”

  Reluctantly he turned back toward her, now a silhouette, now a lamp-lit sculpture, beautiful in either guise, the room’s darkness a cloak he wore almost jauntily, its chill an ambient halo through which he moved in mute obedience to her command. When he paused at her cold bed’s foot, Stevie felt she was in communion with a phantom of her own consciousness, a revenant from the underworld of her desire. Teddy was alive, but momentarily he seemed the youthful ghost of his own dead father. Ghosts were always impervious to the cold.

  “You’ve got something on your mind,” Stevie said. “This is as good a time as any to talk about it. Hop in.”

  “Ma’am?” His de rigueur teen-age reluctance had become a de rigueur sonny-boy disbelief.

  “It’s cold, Teddy. I’m not going to let you stand there nine-tenths naked in temperatures that would give a penguin pneumonia. The bed’s warm, finally. Crawl in and we’ll have a chat.”

  He obeyed, and instantly Stevie could feel the cold of his body radiating through the comfortable oven of her bedding. How had he stood it? How could he haunt the winter night in only his underwear? Stevie shifted toward him, slid her arm behind his neck, and pulled him to her. His chin—a smooth knob of snowy marble—rested on her breastbone, just under her throat, while his eyes gleamed up at her like those of a captured animal, bright with suspicion and fear. Indeed, holding him was like embracing a statue with living eyes. Stevie chafed the boy’s upper arm with her hand for some time. Neither of them spoke.

  Finally, Stevie said, “Now.” The boy turned to his back, and she released the pressure on her arm by slipping it out from under him. “Pretend I’m whoever you want me to be and tell me your troubles, Teddy.”

  “Mom—” He moved his head back and forth on the pillow. “Mom, it’s embarrassing. I can’t. It’s silly and embarrassing, and I’ll probably be okay about it if I just let it go for a while.”

  “Come on, Teddy,” she urged him. “Blurt it out. You didn’t edge in here just to play the part of Barclay’s resident stoic.”

  Exhaling cavernously, Teddy shivered down the length of his body. He tilted his head back as far as it would go. “I’m still a boy,” he whispered. “I’m still a goddamn boy.”

  “Of course you are. You’ve only recently become a teenager. You’re not supposed to be Christopher Reeve or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or whoever this week’s hero is. Even the Man of Steel started out as Superboy. The progression’s well established and completely natural.”

  “I’m not Superboy. I’m only a boy.”

  Stevie smoothed back Teddy’s bangs, stroked his head. “Not by my lights, you’re not. You’re growing into a handsome and helpful young man, and the rate you’re going’s plenty fast enough for me. I’m not quite ready to prefix my name with Grandma, if that’s okay by you.”

  “Well, maybe that’ll never happen,” he said bitterly. “Maybe you don’t have a thing to worry about.”

  His bitterness surprised Stevie. She propped herself on one elbow and scrutinized his chin-up profile in the ghastly light. “Teddy, you’re going to have to spell this out for me. It’s not coming together. You’ve just started to get a tickle of hair under your arms and you’re already worried about your ability to father children? Is that it?”

  Another angry, exasperated sigh. “Something like that, yeah.”

  “At your age, young man, you’d better be worried if you do father some gullible young thing’s baby. That’s what you’d really better worry about.”

  “Mom, you still don’t understand.”

  It was true, she didn’t. So far their mother-to-son talk had accomplished little but their mutual frustration. He was demoralized by her inability to deduce his problem, she by his refusal to blurt it out. Obviously the pangs of puberty had begun to rack him, and the trauma of these changes required that she give him her heartfelt sympathy, even if total understanding continued to elude her. Damn Ted for not being here. Damn him! . . . No, that was too strong. Besides, Teddy was flesh of his flesh, and in that mystical sense, at least, Ted was with her even at this moment . . . in the living, suffering wraith of his son.

  “Explain it, Teddy. Explaining it can’t hurt worse than the problem itself.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not maturing right.”

  “That’s a troubling fear—but it’s not uncommon. At one point or another nearly everyone worries about looking right, functioning right. It’ll pass, Teddy. Dr. Sam gave you a complete checkup in January, and you came through without a hitch. The report suggested you’ll live to witness planetary colonization and the swearing-in of the first president of the world state. Maybe you’ll be the first president of the world state.”

  “A doctor’s office isn’t a shower room, Mom.”

  “I know it isn’t.”

  “Dexter Johnson, Sonny Elkins, even Pete, my good buddy Pete—they’re men, Mom. I try to wait until they’re finished to shower. They snap towels at each other and put their jock straps on their heads and hold bars of soap between their buns and make jokes about the nubbins on the team. That’s Pete’s word. At school I’m a nubbin. Here in the neighborhood I’m his buddy.”

  “They sound like men, all right.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “All I know is that you’re equating manhood with the size of your genital equipment. I can quote a thousand and one reasons why that’s stupid, but all I’m going to say is stop worrying. Keep taking your showers after the fun-lovin’ fellas with the five-pound pendulums between their legs and stop worrying.”

  “That’s easy to say.” Teddy turned his face toward her. “That’s especially easy for you to say. You’re a woman.”

  “Yeah, and you’d be a boy even if you had to push your penis around in a wheelbarrow. Who are you trying to impress? Pete Wightman and the guys with jock-strap headbands? The Guinness Book of World Records? Who, Teddy? Whose instant admiration do you want?”

  Teddy looked back up at the ceiling. “Just mine,” he said, still bitter. “I just want to stop feeling like a goddamn boy.”

  “Then stop acting like one.”

  “Good night, Mom.” Teddy started to slide away from her, out of the bed, but Stevie grabbed his arm and twisted him back to his previous supine position. He turned his diamond-bright eyes toward her, astonished as much by her strength as by her untelegraphed move to restrain him. “Mom, just let me go on to bed, okay? I’m tired of talking.”

  Stevie leaned over her son’s face and kissed him on the brow. Her kisses descended casually to his eyelids, his nose, his cheeks, and finally the soft chilly bud of his mouth. She nibbled on his bottom lip and, using one arm to keep the electric blanket over them, slid her right hand down
the porcelain smoothness of his chest and stomach. Her fingers curled back inside the elastic of his bikini briefs (the very brand that Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer, a hunk if Stevie had ever seen one, modeled in full-color one-page advertisements in a variety of national magazines), and her tongue flicked out to lay a trail of saliva from Teddy’s chin to the base of his throat. Eventually her fingers achieved purchase, closing on a masculine knot that burned her palm by exerting an acute reflexive pressure of its own.

  “Mom,” the boy whispered. “Mom, what are you doing?”

  “Ted, you won’t let yourself smile until you’ve ‘proved’ your manhood in the rut-driven, half-blind, immemorial masculine way. All right. If that’s the way it’s going to be, I’ll help you. It’s perfectly safe with me. Then you can stop your stupid worrying and get on about the business of growing up. Just relax and let yourself go, Ted. I’ll take care of everything else.”

  “Mom, I don’t —”

  “Shhhhh. I’m not your mother. You’re my lover. You’re my beautiful, passionate, ever-faithful demon lover. We’ve waited nearly two years for this reunion. Finally it’s here, Ted. Finally it’s here.”

  Careful not to dislodge their blankets, Stevie mounted her demon lover and rocked him like an infant to a blissful, half-comprehending spasm. Warmth and water and armistice, a truce in the tropical swamps of his spasm’s aftermath. A little death, the English metaphysical poets had called the moment of orgasm. Well, that was what she and Ted, with Teddy as the bodily agent of their reunion, had achieved: yes, a little death, unspeakably sweet. Warmth, and water, and resurrection, all on a cold February morning . . .

  Teddy was staring up at her, wide-eyed.

  Stevie kissed him, slumped to his side, took him into her arms, and again began to rock him, this time to sleep rather than to spasm. What passionate bliss to have led this boy in pursuit and capture of the dead man who had once, long ago, loved him into being. She had outwitted the spiteful angels of mortality, won out over middle-class values, the unwritten tenets of universal mediocrity, and the strictures of her own provincial background. She had saved her son. Having fought through to these victories, Stevie found it easy to sleep.