“Okay, okay,” I called out. “Let’s settle down. If we want to talk about grown-up subjects we have to act like grown-ups.”
“Mrs. Price,” Marissa chided, her acne-riddled face suddenly full of ancient knowledge. “We are so not grown-ups.”
“But can’t you act it?” I said encouragingly. “Can’t you pretend?”
They were a room full of reality TV hopefuls; in that moment, they swore that they could.
chapter five
I waited all weekend for the hammer to drop: the summons to be served, the call to come in. But Friday night passed uneventfully—I rented a movie about a thirteen-year-old who had to learn how to operate a motor vehicle when his intoxicated older brother needed to be picked up from jail: the two of them then ran a series of errands around shady parts of town to figure out where his brother had left a bag of drugs. To make sure I’d be asleep by the time Ford got home, and for most of Saturday as well, I bought a box of wine, removed its bladderlike sack from the cardboard shell and took it with me to watch the video in bed. Several hours later I woke to Ford holding the emptied container up in front of the night-table lamp. Next to the light, with its amorphous shape and merlot-dyed plastic, it vaguely resembled a placenta.
“Jesus, Celeste.” Ford let out a whistle that wasn’t void of admiration. “Those little brats stress you out today or what?”
My mouth felt taped shut with the sleepy film of the wine. “Can you turn off the light?” I suggested.
“It reeks in here. Did you know this bedroom smells like a hobo, Celeste?” I sat up and Ford immediately began laughing. “Oh my god, look at your face. I think you need to brush your teeth before they fall out.”
It was true; my smile had taken on a darkened sheen of purple. Around my mouth, where pigmented drool had journeyed and dried, there was a reddish stain that recalled clown paint. Stumbling from bed, I was at least able to tuck the vibrator beneath the pillow so that the portrait of my solitary hedonism wouldn’t appear to be quite so complete. “We had a 10-31 that some wino was breaking into the bathroom of the convenience mart tonight,” Ford called as I rummaged through the medicine cabinet, downing a small handful of what I hoped were Tylenol PM. “But the perp got away. That wasn’t you, was it?”
By the time I was up and showered on Saturday afternoon, I had little energy to do anything but sit at the kitchen table and stare at the phone, hoping not to receive a call from AP Rosen or the legal team of Jack’s parents. When it finally did ring, I jumped in my seat. I was suddenly paralyzed; it felt self-proclaimed—if I hadn’t been watching it, it would not have rung—and I cursed myself and let the machine pick up. But it was just Ford doing a sobriety check on me.
“Hello, dear,” I said, picking up to the loud beep of the machine recording stopping. My voice had the gravelly sound of someone wearing a bathrobe well into the day. “I have not touched a single bottle and I’ve prayed to the Lord for strength.”
“Ha,” he muttered. I heard a car horn.
“Isn’t it against the law to be on your phone while you drive?”
“Not when you’re driving the cop car, sweets.” He then entered into a long story about a domestic dispute he’d interrupted that had the following punch line: the chosen weapon of assault was a fly-swatter.
“I’ll catch you later, hero,” I said. When I was hungover, the sound of Ford’s voice made me unbearably nauseous.
Unable to go back to sleep for a nap, I decided I’d wait until dusk settled, then drive by Jack’s house again. Surely, if the family was in pandemonium from a revelation Jack had made, I’d be able to detect something from the exterior: the dining room aglow long after dinnertime, the family seated around the table in a strategy meeting, Jack’s head held between his hands at an angle suggesting emotional anguish while his parents bickered about how best to proceed.
There was nothing to do but wait. Baking myself seemed like the ideal activity; the feeling of sun on skin would serve as a fitting distraction. Slathering myself with SPF and wearing nothing but a wide-brimmed straw hat, I lay nude in our pool’s floating chaise lounge for the better part of the afternoon and evening, bobbing and staring at the clarified sky through polarized sunglass lenses. I thought about Jack there with me, the scent of chlorine and coconut on his skin, his balls tightening in my hand as he eased into the cool water. How great it would feel to be lying on the warm concrete and have him leap from the water, taut and dripping, and lie on top of me, outlining each of my limbs with his own cold counterpart.
I kept hope as well that instead of the worst possible outcome—seeing his parents interrogating him on the couch, large yellow legal pads in both of their hands—I might plausibly encounter the best: Jack mowing the lawn at dusk for his weekly allowance money, freckles of blown dirt sticking to the sweat of his shirtless torso, his mesh basketball shorts slung down below the boxers on his hips. No one else home. In that case, I might be able to park the car and gradually happen upon him, feigning surprise: I’d just made a wrong turn looking for a friend’s house, and then I thought I recognized him out cutting the grass and decided to say hello. Would he mind taking a break, letting me in to have a glass of water? I’d been running around all day; I was parched and he likely was too.
Should this happen, I wanted to be dressed accordingly. When I got out of the pool, I towel-dried my hair and added sea salt spray for messy curls. The sunblock had left a soft beachy fragrance on my skin. Shirking underwear, I put on a pair of terry-cloth lounge pants that sat below my belly button, a push-up bra and a T-shirt that would show just enough midriff. My hangover was causing me to crave starch, so I stopped at a drive-through on the way to his house and got a large order of French fries. I had a certain method of eating them. I liked to clamp down my lips on each one, pulling it through like a straw to get all the salt off, then rub the grains between my lips to make them raw and redden them. By the time I arrived at Jack’s house, my lips stung badly enough to feel poisonous. I parked and the sound of my car’s engine dying was immediately replaced with the harried drone of crickets everywhere.
The garage door was closed; no cars were parked in his driveway. But someone could have been home—a single front room was lit up and the curtains were open. I took the binoculars out of my glove compartment and moved to the passenger seat to see around the cluster of giant palms in the front yard. A closer view showed a middle-aged man passed out asleep on the sofa, a pizza box and two beer bottles on the coffee table. I searched every inch of the room I could view, but there was only the man—Jack wasn’t there. It was Saturday night, I reasoned; it had been silly to get my hopes up. But there was still much to celebrate: the unconscious father figure meant the house wasn’t locked down in any sort of emergency mode. Clearly, Jack hadn’t said a word. I moved the binoculars over to Jack’s darkened window and immediately dropped them.
I couldn’t pick them back up fast enough. My chest began to surge; trying to find them on the floor, I felt like I might suffocate with adrenaline. Had I actually seen him?
When I finally got ahold of them beneath the seat, I thrust them up to my eyes so violently that I felt a volt of pain when their hard plastic hit the bone of my left brow. There, within two seven-centimeter circular lenses, I could see the shape of a body contrasting against the darkness. I focused the lenses further, my fingertips sweating. It was indeed Jack. His right arm rose and fell in repetitive motion, tugging against his crotch. The windowsill blocked me from seeing below his pelvis—the tip of his penis was visible, but nothing beneath it. Yet there in full view was the entirety of his torso, his flexed arm. What caused me to nearly scream as I shoved my fist into my underwear and began grinding my clit against my knuckles was the oddity of his posture and gaze; I came immediately, then continued to push against my pubic bone with the full force of my wrist, as if to try to muffle the insanity-producing sensation and stay in a state where I could, with full mental faculty, observe him as a specimen. He was staring out the w
indow, straight up at the moon, wildly jerking off to a distant celestial body.
Watching him was so taunting that I felt like I was being injured; the longer I looked, the deeper the hot wound inside of me grew. When he finished he closed his eyes for just a moment, resting his forehead on the glass of the window. Then, suddenly, his head turned, and in a singular panicked motion he seemed to reach to his ankles for pants and disappear within his room. A quick rove of my binoculars over to the living room showed that the sleeping father had awakened and left the couch.
I felt like I’d been kidnapped and now had to escape while drugged—a fuzzy, sharp paralysis swam through my limbs and made it difficult to turn the key and start my car; my vision was blurred and a dull nausea churned in the back of my head. My body petitioned that my actions made no sense—everything I wanted, stripped down and clearly ready, was right there in wait, yet I was driving away in the opposite direction, an oxygen-deprived climber traveling farther up the mountain instead of making a descent. My feet were too heavy on the pedals; I pictured Janet’s swollen feet grafted onto my ankles, the prosthetic hooflike shoes she wore tangling on the clutch and brake; at the first stoplight I arrived at, I stalled out. It was several minutes before I realized I’d left his subdivision through an alternate exit. Getting home would require many corrective turns. For a harried moment, with the fluorescent lights of the road and the strip-mall business swirling around me, I wondered if I could find my way home at all. Supposedly I knew exactly where I was—these were roads I drove daily. But there was a confusing pressure at the base of my skull and it was pulsing a blood rhythm not unlike the sound and speed of riot police striking their shields with their batons; it was a sound that thought and memory seemed to find threatening. Reason had evacuated my body. I felt like nothing more than a bomb with a steady timer attached, my heart counting down to an unknown hour of disaster.
When I finally found my street, I parked sideways in the driveway and stumbled in the door. My clothes felt like scratchy wool; I disrobed and stood in the dark, leaning against the cool drywall, panting. Moments or hours later when I heard Ford arrive home—the slam of his car door, a frustrated expletive because he had to park on the street due to my vehicle’s position—I fell to my knees in the dark, squatting down like a dog in the hallway with my ass facing the door.
There was an incoming flood of light, then the hurried slamming of the door’s screen.
“Celeste, Jesus, hello! Good thing I didn’t bring Scottie back for a beer …” The sound of his locking the doorknob and dead bolt, drawing the chain.
“Can you turn the light back out?” I asked softly. Darkness. The sound of his belt being undone, his weapons coming off. My view as he took me from behind was the glass patio doors, through which I could see the full moon hanging in the sky, reflecting off our pool as if it was its point of origin. I stared up at it imagining not the brutish strength of Ford thrusting inside me but the inquisitive determination of Jack’s body exploring the instinct of touch. The moment Ford finished I began to crawl away to the patio door, his semen dripping down my thighs like blood from an injury. Wordlessly, I jumped into the pool and sank to the very bottom, blowing every ounce of air in my body out with all the force of my lungs. The moon seemed to take up over half of the sky. I continued to stare as my lungs began to twinge with panic, my abdominal muscles struggling not to heave in for air, until a naked Ford, one hand cupping his genitals for fear of a nosy neighbor peeking over the fence, eclipsed the view, his mouth overenunciating. “What the hell are you doing?” read his lips. Then I slowly glided up the pool’s slanted floor to the shallow end and surfaced.
I went back to Jack’s house again Sunday night. Hoping for a repeat performance, I took great pains to leave the house at exactly the same time, park in the same spot. I fought the superstition that nagged me to wear dirty clothes I’d worn just the night before, step back into the doubtlessly hardened crotch of the terry-cloth pants I’d had on when I’d seen the erect and glistening tip of Jack’s penis, his budding chest and arms in the full motions of exertion and his mouth parted to channel additional oxygen.
But he wasn’t there; his window was closed. All I could see of his bedroom was a long, draped curtain, fallen as if to announce the show was over.
chapter six
Monday morning the sky was pouring rain to opacity. Students arrived with wet hair and soaked textbooks that had served as impromptu umbrellas. By third period muddy footprints leading from the door to the desks and back had formed the circular pattern of a complex dance diagram.
“There should be a tunnel or something, from the school to the outdoor classrooms,” Marissa protested. Her shirt was soaked through, clinging to her breasts and the side rolls of her stomach. Jack came in a few moments later, a tracing of rain around his shoulders; he’d used a folder to shield his head and his hair had managed to stay nearly dry, but the calves of his legs had been showered. I watched each one of the drops snaking down his legs, some of them traveling all the way from above his knee in a manner that recalled urine. The innocence of that thought—a frightened Jack in the middle of the classroom, wetting himself; me undressing him from his soiled clothes, his damp tender skin cold to the touch—briefly clutched me in a fantasy of erotic mothering and made me long, oddly and briefly, for a more developed personal relationship with Jack. There was a turn-on to the suggestion that I might one day see him troubled, perhaps crying; that I might soothe and reassure him with a sympathy that could lead to a feeling of gratitude on his behalf. One that he would repay sexually, his eyes smiling up at me during cunnilingus. I gave the students a quick character-study quiz about Dimmesdale and his physical response to the guilt of his actions and then stared at the clock: I simply had to make it to the end of the class, mere minutes, and then my wait might possibly be over.
“So what can we learn about the poor, sad character of Arthur Dimmesdale?” I asked. Frank Pachenko raised his hand. Today he wore an actual raincoat, an oversized, red and shining version of the type a kindergartner might wear. It was a hideous color, like the erection of a dog.
“Secrets will fester inside you and make you sick,” Frank reported. At all times, he had the cheerful air of being completely pleased with both himself and the world around him. I pictured him standing in that jacket with that same grin amidst several hundred buckets of fish entrails at the back dock of a busy seafood market. The kid simply wasn’t one to let reality spoil a good time.
“Guilt will eat you alive!” Heath called from the back of the room with a dramatic flair, extending his upturned palms to the sky. I felt a pang of worry in my stomach at the effect the content of today’s class might have on Jack—would it taint his view of the proposal he was about to receive? When I looked over at him he was watching the rain outside the classroom window, the glass pane alive with a metropolitan energy of moving water.
“Do you think he’d feel as tortured if Hester hadn’t gotten pregnant and then been caught and punished?” I asked. “What if no one had ever found out—if they’d stayed two consenting individuals who simply got together outside the view of the uptight townspeople? Couldn’t it have been kind of fun for them—an invigorating secret instead of a poisonous one?”
“Like when you’re dating a girl on the down-low,” Danny said.
“Right … sometimes the whole crux of the excitement is actually based on the fact that it’s a secret,” I added enthusiastically, hoping some of the conversation was filtering through Jack’s daydream. “Unfortunately, pregnancy revealed Hester’s half of the secret. Now Dimmesdale is suffering with a sort of survivor’s guilt for not being taken down in the scandal as well.”
A discussion ensued (“This one time, I was dating this girl but I also kind of technically had a girlfriend …”), though I was careful to stay in the vicinity of Jack’s desk at the back of the room; I had to be next to him when the final bell rang. When it sounded, I stopped right next to the entry side of his des
k so it wasn’t even possible for him to get up. “Jack,” I said, standing utterly still amidst the bustle of the students around us rallying to exit. “Stay behind for a moment so we can talk.”
He nodded, imperceptibly at first, but then he looked up and gave me a slightly worried smile.
“Thank you, Jack.” I took a seat in the desk directly behind him, staring at the blond trail of hair on the base of his neck that swirled discreetly to the right. When the room had emptied, part of me wondered if I should skip the pretense of words entirely—simply stand and disrobe, then ask him to follow suit.
I cleared my throat. “What I need to say to you is a little embarrassing, Jack. I think it’s best, at least at the beginning, if you keep looking forward and I talk directly to your back, just like we’re doing now. Is that all right with you?”
His head nodded. I eyed the waistband of his baggy shorts; my hand could easily slip down their back and touch the base of his tailbone. It was hard to continue talking. But I needed to establish for Jack that our actions wouldn’t be wrong; I also needed to see if Jack would put out any verbal warnings. I kept reminding myself that if he didn’t respond to my advance, if he told, I could simply deny it—I was only speaking words; they couldn’t be proven. “Good. I need to ask one favor from you before I even begin. No matter what I say, no matter what it makes you feel or think, I need you to promise me that you’ll stay in your seat.”
He nodded again, the muscles of his back tensing rigidly upright. Outside, the rain gave a long, windy gust. I wanted him to feel like he wasn’t simply keeping my secret—that I was keeping one of his as well.
“I was driving by your house on Saturday night,” I admitted. “When we first got our rosters, I recognized your address. A friend of mine lived on your street once. So when I was over by your neighborhood, I just decided to drive past your house and see if the subdivision had changed much. I didn’t actually expect to see you, but I did. I slowed down to look at the houses and I saw you in your room.” I took in a deep breath, hoping what I said next wouldn’t make him run. “You didn’t have your clothes on. You were touching yourself.”
Tampa Page 8
