by Sonia Taitz
“Hey Mom!” David still calls her Mommy, but Joe has taken to this cooler “hey Mom” locution. Either way, they often drive her mad (Jude takes pride in how well she controls this moodiness). These “kids” are fourteen now, and one is approaching the word “hulking”—couldn’t they get their own snacks?
Joe was off in boarding school during the academic months, but in the summer Jude gets to remember how loud, insatiable, and demanding he can be, and even the shy David, who stays home all year long, echoes his brother’s boisterousness after a few weeks together.
In the spirit of good grace, “Mom” would do just as they wished. “Mommy” would haul herself out of the cool waters and out of her reveries. Up the pool’s shaky little metal stairs and down the other side, she will pad across the lawn, up the deck stairs, and into the kitchen. By the time she gets inside, overwhelmed by artificial light and the packed, humming fridge, the water spell would certainly have broken. Not only might Jude end up not going back into her pool, but she would probably drive the boys somewhere, to that mall, for instance, to buy them shoes for the new term. From fridge to car to mall, anti-sensual and almost cruelly banal.
But they were boys in summer, so brief a season, playing Ultimate Frisbee and beating each other up, laughing at nothing at all. That was their fun; they should have it. But what was her fun to be? Was pleasure merely a thing of the past? That seemed too cruel and Darwinian—that she had fulfilled her biological purpose and could now be ignored, except for drudge’s duties.
The twins rarely let her touch them, much less hug them, anymore. In the past, they had been her puppies, her cubs—tumbling with her, allowing her to tussle their hair. At night, she would read to them, their heads on her shoulders, right and left; she would kiss them and smell their yeasty smells. Now, getting their ice pops was one of the only ways Jude still experienced the fleeting perception but still undeniable fact that she loves them and that they love her. It wasn’t their job to show it; that would increasingly be the job of her husband. And he did, at times: he had surprised her with the pool. What is more, he had set it up, refraining from cursing when the byzantine instructions had, here and there, frustrated his sense of mastery.
The ice pops’ colors are so fake that Jude often worries if she really ought to be buying them. Was she showing love to her boys, or perhaps contributing to a future disease, the sort that would strike at about her current age? But she gets them anyway, running to the enormous fridge.
How she’d loved tending to her children’s needs when they were born, when she could hold each like a football and nourish them from her own breasts. Her body had magic then; it could create life and nourish it. Every biological step had been sensuous and rewarding. The seeds inside her growing into people she would love forever. The round tummy, a pool itself, heated and protective. An ocean, in fact, salt-rich and sustaining; in it, they swam and grew. Her voice must have been fascinating to them then, muted and mysterious, a sea-mother calling from a larger sphere.
The births were hard, but then again it was a war that is won and ends in glory, a parade, and that fountain of victory—mother’s milk. Their eyes had met hers in recognition, old soldiers who share undying memories. But now they had forgotten all that, and that was . . . that was good. That was what the world wanted: that a man leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife.
But what should the mother then cleave to?
Phrases from the Bible often echoed in Jude’s ears. The boys’ names were biblical, too. David and Joseph. Jude’s parents were Jewish; her father quite traditional. Jude’s own name was originally Judith, but how could she keep the name of a woman best known to the world for chopping off a man’s head? (Jude’s father had had the female form of Judah in mind, not the decapitator.) As Judith grew up, in any case, the name had diminished into “Judy,” and later “Jude” began to fit her better. That was a name she would keep, a brand she treasured, evoking, as it did, both the darkness suggested by Thomas Hardy and the Beatles’ comforting tune. “Take a sad song and make it better,” they had cajoled. She was trying. In fact, she had been doing so for years.
Jude’s name helps her now when she wants to be more than a fecund farm animal. It helps her when she’s the wife of a man who is always in Italy, exporting special pasta from Rome. The pasta is shaped like spaghetti, but significantly thicker and more expensive, and empty in the middle, like a drinking straw or a pipe that has run dry.
She doles out the ice pops and grabs a red one for herself. Later, after showering, I’ll check my Facebook account, she thinks with a little shiver.
She has not been able, after all, to resist opening up to Collum. She didn’t stop with the first little greeting. No, she’s come forward, she’s been honest, and told him that she missed him. It was out in the open: she was married and she had children, but no one had ever known her, never needed her, the way he had.
Collum had responded to this honesty with heat. His life, he said, had been one big lie since they’d parted. Everything he’d done had been false. Every step away from her an agony of exile.
Jude had been delighted by this intensity. She remembered the boy she knew, lost and lonely. She’d found him and he’d clung to her, become her own soul to tend to. How amazing that after being lauded as the biggest star in the world, and all that fame and money, he still felt that way and needed her. She needed him, too. His longings were linked to her heart, soul, and groin. His need summoned hers. It made her body hot and willing. All the water in her little above-ground pool couldn’t cool her off these days. There was a man in the world who might claim her now—a man whom every woman wanted, but who wanted only her. A man who knew her without age and time and trouble.
If he were to stand in front of her now, she’d jump on him, wrap her legs around his waist, bite him on the shoulder, mash his mouth. They’d drop down to the ground and he’d cover her with his body. You wouldn’t be able to see her; she’d be down, under. Lost and found at the same time. This was the kind of sex people wrote volumes about. Byron had composed poetry in honor of it. And maybe Jude could have it. She could have it and have it and have it. Sometimes him on top and sometimes her.
On the other hand, it was all too real, and it was crazy, rotten, wrong. Jude had never done anything in her life that was so clearly sleazy. She had never deliberately hurt anyone. She had never committed that harsh word, adultery. Some had. There were affairs going on all around her in Plum Grove, and people accepted it. It was a way of getting on, surviving—something like a cocktail, an Ativan, a joint. But with Collum, it would be much more than that. It would be a revolution. A mutiny. It could rip hearts out and unseat thrones.
Jude had always prided herself on being not only a good girl, but a superlative one. Her father had once called her “the one you can always count on.” In fact, the only horrible thing she’d ever done was hurt Collum in the breakup long ago. And even that had not really been her fault.
Should she let him count on her again?
A month after they’d started reconnecting, Jude told Collum that they should stop, that their exchanges might be dangerous. How could this end well, whichever way it ended? She was committed to her marriage and her children.
He had answered:
I don’t care! You’re the one who really knew me.
You’re the one who really loved me.
You’re the one I’ll always love.
These three sentences—sentences she deeply wanted to hear, sentences she couldn’t deal with, sentences that saved and ruined her—had stopped the game. Jude had not been able to write to him again for days. Collum had re-sent his message, but then, to her consternation, had written no more.
So even if he’d “always loved” her, he could still cut her off? Love was funny like that. Love was awful like that.
Jude is worried now. She does not want to answer, or be answerable, but she certainly does not want Collum to disappear. Not now, when her boys are taller tha
n she is, when her husband is away more than he’s home. And sometimes away even when he is at home. Preoccupied. And not with her.
She goes upstairs and gets out of her bathing suit. She showers, dries off, wraps a towel around her body. She checks her computer for input. There is still no new message, so Jude composes one herself:
I have been swimming, round and round like a fish in a bowl.
Every circuit leads to you.
I had an ice pop earlier. Red,
like my lips would be if we kissed for a very long time.
It would be chaste. It would be honest. Just kisses forever and
nothing else. Or everything else, but so pure and so true.
Of course I love you. I always have. Come here and get in my pool.
Her heart beats wildly as she presses “send.” The words instantly come to Collum and he reads them. Her words pierce his heart just as his words pierced hers. His heart beats wildly, and he tries to calm himself down.
What a tease, he thinks, hoping his cynicism can save him from pain. Just when I think she’s there, she’s nowhere. “It would be honest,” she says, and I don’t even know her married name. “Come here and get in my pool,” she says, and she’s playing house somewhere with some lucky bloke, but I don’t have a proper address.
Slam
Jude’s husband was nicknamed “Slam.” His real name is Samuel T. Ewington, but he’s such an incredible tennis player that his friends, and there have been great crowds of them, dubbed him “Sam the Slam,” which led to plain old “Slam.” Men now greeted him like this:
“Hey Slam! How’s it goin’?”
Possibly this brash camaraderie hid their fear. Slam could be formidable. He tended to be first on line in life’s proverbial banquet. He won all tennis games. He still made good money. He’d have to be tall (lucky for him, he was towering). He’d have to have sons; he had two, born efficiently at once. He’d have to have the sleekest, darkest mane in all the jungle, that is, the world of business in which he operated. And he did: thick, abundant, sleek, and shiny hair, the coif equivalent of the Cadillac Escalade SUV. Now that he was no longer in the formal business of consulting, he wore his hair long and wavy; its touches of silver only enhanced it. Sam’s height and his locks and his tennis and his cash had to exceed that of everyone in his circle, including his two growing sons, which for now they still did.
You could laugh about the new pasta importation career, but it was neither funny nor ridiculous, because, after a period of struggle, Slam was beginning to make a nice living with it. People really went for the thick spaghetti, especially the tubular whole-grain. People took food seriously.
Before his downturn in fortune, Slam had made good at his more traditional job. A management consultant, he had specialized in multinational food corporations. He had been able to make a few million, most of which he had lost in the crash, but he had invested a serious portion in the noodle world. Now he produced handmade pastas that, like the most precious matzoh cracker (Jude had described this bit of Judaica to him), is watched from the time the little seeds are planted, grow, are harvested, baked, shaped, patted, pricked, and marked with an “S” for Sam, Slam, or Success. No, not literally marked—metaphorically. In short, the man had discovered, as he liked to put it, that “there is dough in dough.”
You also could not laugh because Sam’s business allowed him to—no, demanded that he—travel to Italy for “quality control.” Slam liked to be in control of quality, and in this world there are few places where you can control anything. Or anyone.
For instance, teenage boys could sometimes be insubordinate. They spent their lives playing with their thumbs on little buttons, or watching beeps go by on pixilated screens. One of your boys could be flighty, and get such rotten grades on easy tests that his boarding school threatened to expel him, even though his father had been a distinguished alum. The other could be lanky, shy, and bookish, making you wonder if you had played enough ball with him (not that this boy had wanted to). That one could go to boarding school and return within a month with a nervous condition. The pediatrician had suggested the occasional use of anti-anxiety medication, but Jude had refused to give her son those pills. She felt that time itself would help her shaky boy.
Wives, thought Slam, were even harder to control. Wives could be moody, and sometimes they looked as though they weren’t taking as much care of themselves as they should. (Bustiers and heels and whatnot could not replace hard cardio time at the gym.) No matter what you did for them, they seemed always to be muttering to themselves “Eh! Not good enough.” (And that “eh” delivered with a tiresome, Abrahamic sense of moral judgment.)
And then, all of sudden, they would be all sweetness and scented candles; what was the angle with all these moods? Probably that was the perimenopause, which was another thing you couldn’t control. Mother Nature, and her slight (but noticeable) loss of skin tone.
Slam himself was feeling a bit older lately—despite his vigorous exercise, both at home and abroad (at home, the recumbent bicycle; abroad, the sporadic skirt-chasing). His sense of time moving on was getting harder and harder to ignore. But the pasta, unlike Dorian Gray, Ozymandias, or Drexel, that was eternal and ever-renewing. So was the travel to Europe, that long glide through the air, away from cloudy Putnam County, across the amnesiac ocean, and into la bella Italia. There, they treated Slam like a prince of the Medici (whose coat of arms boasted three bold rock-hewn balls). There, he could sit in the velvety lounge of a hotel with tapestries hung on the walls. A man of the world, he could perch on a throne-like wooden seat with rolled armrests and stare at grapes, nipples, and laurels atop the immortalized heads of the victorious.
Breaking Horses
Collum Whitsun’s closing in. He’s lying low in the bush and creeping forward toward Jude. More than sober in the daytime, he is alert and purposeful. He’s figured out approximately where she is, so he’ll need a low-profile base in upper Westchester or lower Putnam counties. Working at a stable seems an optimal idea, good cover. These are abundant, as wealthy women liked to ride, and more than that, liked to see their children—particularly their daughters—in full gear, sitting atop handsome, trotting horses. In Australia, where Collum had spent his teen years, riding was sweat work, hard on a bloke’s body. Here, it seemed to be poofter-oriented. Still, horse-wrangling was the sort of work at which one could be anonymous as he searched for his girl.
Before his fateful face had led him to playacting, Collum had been best at manly labors, and what could be manlier than the handling of large beasts? After moving the family, his father had found even Perth too cosmopolitan. Ignoring his poor wife’s protests, Neil Whitsun had taken Collum and his two older brothers to a cattle station miles away from any civilized town. There, under a crazy, yellowish sky, the boys had learned to break horses. The trick was to be mean and nasty, while making quite sure (by use of ropes, whips, and spurs) that there could be no form of retaliation.
Once subdued, horses would work all day in the dust, ridden by hostile men, leading and pursuing even-more-subordinated cows into orderly lines and columns. Young Collum often felt like those horses, wild and bad, broken and good, hated more than he was loved. He even felt like the cows, hounded—there were literally hounds who chased the cattle—along with the horses. These hellhounds were wild, ankle- and shin-biters, mouths open, baying, toothy and hysterical. At home, they were confined to a shed and given no affection.
Collum could be gentle, though. His hands possessed a genius touch, and he could breathe peace into an equine beast in seconds. His strong legs gripped these animals with a message that reassured them: Stay put and do as I say. We’ll both like the ride. When he learned this, he learned that love could be as big a bully, as harsh a sadist, as power. He was happy to have this knowledge in his arsenal of tricks.
Neil Whitsun was a deeply religious man, so this ordinal dominion did not trouble him; these rankings, to him, were sacred and immutable.
&nbs
p; “It was Adam, was it not, who named all the beasts of the field?”
If you say so, Dad, thought Collum, whose own name, no matter where he had lived (American suburbs, Aussie savannahs) brought him only teasing. “Column A or Column B?” people would pipe, laughing in his face. And his last name, Whitsun? That was witticized into “witless.”
“Be proud of your name,” his father had said, when Collum had complained. “Collum is a Saint. He bore more suffering than you will ever know. And Whitsuntide is God’s own fair season.”
Whatever that means, Collum thought.
“Thanks, Dad,” he said dully.
Thanks a lot, for nothing. Worse than nothing. Something sulfurous. Collum thought of his father himself as God, not the good God but rather God the punisher, God the burner of villages and instant slayer of sinner-men. God of the permanently unfair season. He vowed to find a way to escape this primal netherworld. He had tried once before, and failed. Now, the very heat he lived in seemed like Hades, invented by his father to stun the boys into submission.
Meanwhile, his mother served meat up every day. Three times a day, she plopped it on plates, red and sizzling, wet and quivering. Three times a day, and the boys chewed it in both sorrow and anger, chasing it down with hurlings of fresh, frothing milk.
Collum’s older brothers, Ryan and Rob, were tall and strong, but Collum was tallest of the three. By the time he reached his eighteenth year, he was long, lean, and hardened, inside and out. His hair, on the other hand, was a swirling blond, the hair of a Renaissance angel. Collum’s face, moreover, conveyed the sweetness of youth, a kind of pained but faithful longing. This expression, conflict balanced in poignant equipoise, helped him flee his world. Women had only to look at him and they would fall into a dreamy trance.
That Collum became a brawler from the time he discovered drink only made him more appealing. Drink made him angry enough to run from the ranch. He wanted out, and tried to get there, mostly with his fists. His nose was broken a time or two, and often a girl, impressed by these melees, gave him exit and peace through her body. One of those girls, an aspiring actress called Lyndee, thought he ought to try out for a small film she’d read about. She showed him an advert in the paper: “NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED. CALLOUSES AND TOUGH MUGS A PLUS.”
