“To thine own selves be true.”
“Now just who the hell would that be, Mister M? Me? You? Or them?”
I sat on the cold concrete bench under the deep blue sky, looking at the feathery fibers of clouds inch-worming toward the east. The smell of dried leaves, soil that would stay damp until spring, and smoke coiling from a distant chimney assaulted my nose. The sharp sound of heels on the sidewalk surrounded me, accompanied by scraps of conversation that melded into hubbub. A cross-town bus honked its horn. My fingers rubbed the pebbled surface of the Styrofoam cup, my face felt the kiss of wind, my mouth held the rich oily taste of coffee. In a world of sense, I was nonsense.
I was thinking about never being alone with my thoughts.
“No man is an I-land, but maybe a me-land,” Mister Milktoast chimed in.
“No, but do I have to be a whole fucking archipelago?”
“Yo, Roachtit, what are you bitching about now?” Loverboy had risen from his lusty dreams and walked down the Bone House stairs. He must have smelled meat, gotten a whiff of clean female skin, or maybe he dug the hat, too. “You finally bringing home some bacon? About time. My nuts are the size of onion rolls.”
Mister Milktoast answered for me. “Now, Loverboy, there’s more to a woman than her physical gifts.”
“Oh, yeah, Fuckwheat? You can diddle yourself till the cows come home, talk about that emotional crap until you vomit, and that’s fine for you. But, me, I got needs. And let me tell you something.”
“Yes, my lascivious brother?”
“When I’m doing the synchronized snakedance, you can bet your sweet-boy ass you’ll be watching.”
Mister Milktoast made no answer. Loverboy retreated into the dark, triumphant.
“Love is a bed of roses, my friend, and you’ll always suffer the pricks,” Mister Milktoast said, then he, too, slipped off into the dark rooms of my mind, leaving me on the concrete bench, the cold flowing into me and filling me until I was as hard and fragile as an ice sculpture.
I awoke each morning during those next few weeks with Beth’s name on my lips, trying to follow her back into my dissolving dreams, sure she had been in them. When I eventually mustered enough nerve to call her, she seemed pleased to hear from me. I was afraid she had been humoring me, tossing scraps of her attention to me the way a grudging retiree tosses breadcrumbs to a starving pigeon or a girl does when she thinks you might have a hunky friend she can meet later.
We talked daily after that, of art and its pretensions, of the weather, of bad novels, of the concrete ant-farm of Manhattan, and, when all else failed, of feminine politics. Bookworm came in handy then, popping up to talk about the latest browse in the Paper Paradise. I didn’t know him enough to trust his motives, but he sure knew how to pontificate. And he wasn’t even that boring.
Beth and I started going out together, sharing lunch or a walk or sometimes only time. She was easygoing and open, eager to share her work and her life and her dreams. I was a good listener. With all those voices in my head, I’d had lots of practice. I knew when to nod and when to shut up, which I’d learned was about all you needed to know in order to satisfy a woman’s desire for constant attention. Life imitates imitation.
For the first time since Virginia’s death, I was goofy with attraction. I had been afraid that we each got only one shot at love in our lives, and I had destroyed mine through Loverboy’s callousness. But now my heart was reawakening, my chest expanding with the helium of desire, blood puffing with St. Valentine’s poison.
On our fifth real date, after watching Hitchcock’s “Strangers On a Train” at the campus theater, Beth wanted to come to my house for drinks. She was impressed that I owned a house. I suppose she was used to having a romantic rendezvous interrupted by the proverbial unwashed roommate, and I knew how that felt, though I lived alone. Since she didn’t have a car, I drove her to my house, pulling into the driveway under the smoky skein of stars that made up the Milky Way.
As I opened the door, the Bone House door also opened, and I was afraid.
We stepped into my living room. Beth looked at the walls that were lined with bookshelves, and books were also stacked on the coffee table and on the floor beside the sofa and chairs. The lamp threw its cobwebbed light across the tan carpet. The room was made brown by the weight of its dull shadows. Beth didn’t mention the absence of a television, something my infrequent visitors usually noticed instantly. I had all the channels I needed right inside my head.
“Nice place,” she said. Pleasant. Goddamned pleasant and nothing more.
“Make yourself at home. There’s the stereo, if you can get there through the mess.”
I started a pot of tea and Beth put on an R.E.M. CD. She sat on the couch and sang along in a pure, pleasant voice. I brought her a glass of the Red Zinfandel that I had bought and stored in a closet in hopes of one day sharing with someone. Or maybe some genetic disposition had planted the bottle there, knowing all Coldirons eventually sought some form of escape, liquid or otherwise.
“Aren’t you having any?” she asked.
“I don’t drink much. But don’t worry, I’m not holier-than-thou.”
She has more holes than you, Mister Milktoast quipped.
“Shut up,” I whispered back.
“What?”
“Tea makes me sneeze.” I sniffed. It sounded enough like “Shut up” to get me off the hook.
“You’re quite a bookworm,” she said, surveying the shelves.
Did she know? The truth was sometimes the best possible cover story. “Yes, among other things.”
“So, Richard, tell me about those things.”
“What you see is what you get.” Except for my Little People, the Bone House, memories, my favorite candy, and the fact that everything she said would one day end up in a book.
“You told me you came from Iowa, but nothing about your parents or anything. You didn’t walk full-grown out of the cornfields, did you? A sort of ‘Field of Nightmares’ or something?”
Guitars chimed from the stereo speakers in repetitious riffs. Michael Stipe was mumbling enigmatic vocals over the college-rock backbeat. My past was like Stipe’s lyrics, best left murky and unknown, unless I could sell the book, in which case it all was on the table. Except that thing with my mother. “Well, my past is no big deal. I try to live for the moment.”
“Don’t get surly. I was just asking. Can’t you at least tell me the good parts?”
The good parts?
“Parts is parts,” said Loverboy, before I could stub him out like a cigarette.
“Huh? Where did that come from? Don’t tell me you’re an amateur actor, too?”
“Nope.”
“But the way your voice just changed...and your expression...”
“My run-of-the-mill evil twin. But back to my past...the best part was moving up here and meeting you,” I said, feeling Loverboy twitch in my brain like a frantic fetus kicking its mother’s uterine walls.
“Flattery will get you everywhere. But I’m not that easily put off the trail. There’s a secret to you, Richard. I’m not a babe in the woods. And I’m not easily scared off.”
Babe, Loverboy said. See? They all know it. So, Booksquirt and Milk Dud, stop with all that ‘respect’ shit.
“My biggest secret is that I get a strange feeling every time I’m around you,” I said, a little uneasy at Loverboy’s stirrings. Was he going to crash the party, complete with lampshade hat, clown shoes, and a toilet seat around his neck, ready for a gloveless stranglehold?
“What sort of feeling? And don’t say ‘love,’ because love is like God and UFOs, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“The feeling you get when you eat your favorite candy.”
Beth finished her wine. I reached out to take the glass, but she said, “I’ll get it. Where’s the bottle?”
“On the counter. Help yourself.”
She stopped to look at my aquarium on her way to the kitchen. The yellow angelfish cut their mindless pa
tterns through the water. “Peaceful in there,” she said. “No worries.”
“None at all,” I said, voice trailing as I was dragged into the Bone House. My roommates were coming to life. The Little People were awakened by the storm of emotions rattling the eaves and they appeared to be rearranging the furniture.
They sensed my helplessness. They all came out at once, tripping each other as they rushed for the door and fought for dominance of my face.
“I like your woodwork,” Beth called from the kitchen. It sounded as if she were across the universe.
Please stay in there, I thought at her, before I was free of thought. Then I became an observer, an innocent bystander who wasn’t truly innocent, helpless witness to the actions of my own flesh. A blameless victim. I sort of liked that.
“I got some wood for you,” Loverboy said.
She laughed. And she was back on the couch, the half-empty bottle in front of her, and I was close to her, breathing her, kissing her, drawing in her warmth. It must have been Loverboy’s silver tongue that had first drawn her lips near and then plumbed the soft mysteries of her mouth. Her body was pliant and yielding under my hands, vibrant and alive, like a small wren or else a mammal wrapped in synthetic down.
But then it was me locked in this embrace. Then it was my passion swelling up in my chest and lower, driving blood through my veins in rapid gushes. Then it was my loneliness driving my hunger, my anguished years without human contact that now caused the ache in my trembling limbs. Then it was my taste buds relishing her wine-sweetened tongue.
“My turn,” I whispered in her tender ear, and she had no idea what I was talking about.
And I was feeding on her, sucking her affection like a vampire drew blood, cold and needy and vanished with the dawn. I was a monster, a zombie pulled from a deep grave.
I should have stayed undead.
Because Loverboy enjoyed the rigor mortis in our pants.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Let’s pretend I was Bookworm.
Beth took my hand as I led her upstairs to my bedroom. The night hung around us in soft folds, dressing itself in darkness even as we shed each other’s clothes. Our mouths joined, lost for words, lost for useless language, aching for real art. We shivered and incorporated.
Her skin was satin, and as our bodies came together among the blankets, the bottom of everything autumned away. My fingers flowed over her fine hair and the warm mounds of her flesh, lifting her to the high, unseen clouds as smoke from this burnt offering.
Our tongues danced like moist spirits, frolicked about the cemeteries of our lips, laughing without sound. A thick dew of passion rose on our skins and mingled. Our flesh gave and took and joined, softened like blistering wax and hardened like cold syrup. We leapt into pulsating oceans and climbed ashore clean with languid pleasure.
I know, I know, you want the sex, the blow-by-blow, clits and cocks, not poetic coyness.
You’re such a pervert. Though I’m laying my whole story out here, some things are none of your fucking business. Such as my fucking business.
I held her in my arms afterward, leaning against the pillows with her sweet animal scent on me. The starlight peeked through the window at her face, at her pale pink smile and the shining pools of her eyes.
“Thank you,” I said.
“My pleasure,” she whispered, blowing her breath on the small part of my ear.
“I’ve never felt anything like that before.” Pleasant. Fucking pleasant.
“You mean, you’ve never...”
“Well, let’s just say I’m new at this game.” Mother didn’t count, if indeed that ever happened, and I wouldn’t dare write it if it had.
She giggled, her chest vibrating under my embracing arm. “You acted like you knew what you were doing. Like it was part of a play or something. And you said you weren’t an actor.”
“Sometimes, it’s all in the script,” I said. They were there, waiting in the wings, leering down from the cheap seats, understudies plotting revolution. But I felt strong, revived and vigilant, and I kept them off the stage. This spotlight was mine, goddamn it, and I was going to enjoy it while it lasted.
“And what role are you playing, you kissable weirdo?”
“Othello without the guilt. Romeo without the fatalism. Hamlet without the paranoia.”
“Or maybe just a bad actor working with good material?”
“You got it. Do you want me to feed you a line now?”
“No. I want you to make me feel. I want you to do things to me.”
“Hey, that’s what a bad actor does.” Spiders skittered across my gut, bats flapped in the rafters of the Bone House. “Act badly.”
“Well, maybe you need a rewrite. Because you’ve got just about the worst pillow talk I’ve ever heard. How come it took you so long to make a move on me?”
“I just wanted to be sure.” Sure that you wouldn’t sell me down the river for a dollar’s worth of candy or make me cross my heart and hope to die.
“Oh, a sensitive modern guy? Or just afraid of rejection?”
“I’ve never been afraid of you.”
“Should I be afraid of you, Richard?”
She snuggled her head onto my shoulder. Her hair spilled across my chest as soft as corn silks. I was reminded of the cornfields of Iowa, of my youth. I buried the memory like roadkill. Or maybe just kicked it in the ditch. “After that? I could never hurt you.”
“Mmm. Says the Big Bad Wolf. You forget that I still don’t know much about you.
Where you came from. Who you are.”
“Maybe later. Maybe someday I can tell you.”
I opened the coffin of my vampire heart, feeling something bright and broken and strange rising inside me. Then I realized what it was, and I shivered. It was hope, hope that life could be worth living after all, hope that there might actually be a someday. That maybe there was more to me than Little Hitler, Loverboy, Bookworm, and Mister Milktoast. That maybe Richard Allen Coldiron could have feelings after all.
And hope was pleasant. Very fucking pleasant.
I ran my hand over Beth’s hair, over the curve of her ear, down the swell of her cheek. She squirmed a little, pressing closer against me. I wondered what she was thinking, what kinds of secrets she would never tell, what was hidden in her Bone House. From the briefly forgotten outside world came the sweet tang of fallen apples. A bit of moon had risen somewhere over the invisible horizon, making the room less gray.
“Well, what does the critic have to say about my performance?” Beth asked, her face turned to mine, her eyebrows making dark merry arcs.
I searched for and found her lips. “Thumbs definitely up.” All ten of them.
“And other things ‘up’ as well.”
I laughed, and the sound was swallowed by the walls. “Where do we go from here?”
“You mean, what happens next? Like the future, with a capital F?”
“Well, Act Two, anyway. Getting to know each other. Every story needs a middle.”
Her body tensed under me. “Richard, I feel really good. Don’t think I’m easy or anything, I just happen to like sex. And with you, I really like it. And I like spending time with you. But as for other things, we’ll just have to see.”
“But what if—”
“Shhh. No ‘what ifs,’ remember?”
“I can’t help it, Beth. I think about you all the time. All day at the bookstore, I’m thinking of ways to see you, ways to be with you.”
“Don’t think the L word, Richard. I’ve been hurt too many times with that word as the justification. I’m not being cold—because I’m really an eternal optimist—but I’ve learned to be careful.”
“I told you I’d never do anything to hurt you, Beth.”
“Neither would those others. But some things are beyond our control.”
“Waiting doesn’t always work. Sometimes, you don’t get another chance.”
“I’ll take my chances, then. Good things are worth wai
ting for.”
She was just like Virginia. Ready to give almost everything, wanting everything, taking it in her hands and holding it to her breast as if it were a hyperventilating dove. Then, just as it became tame and submissive and known, she would throw it into the sky to its unwanted freedom. She wanted everything just to give it all back.
But what did I know of love? All I knew was what love wasn’t. I learned from my father and his boots, from Mother’s strange bleary affections, from Sally Bakken’s manipulation, from Virginia’s madness, from Mister Milktoast and his self-interested protections. Love was for other people, those who weren’t haunted by the ghosts in their own head.
The hope that had fluttered in my chest wilted like black licorice on a sunroof. And the old doubts rose, tarry waves in a turbulent id. Then I was sinking, being pulled inside myself, into the place that had been a haven in my childhood but was now a stone prison. The house of the Little People. The house of hurt. The Bone House.
I reluctantly yielded my flesh and embraced my victimhood. Oh, always the victim, a last-place loser in the Blame Game.
“Absence makes the heart grow foundered,” said Mister Milktoast.
“What do you mean by that?” Beth asked.
“I dig,” said Loverboy. “Live for the moment and take it as it comes. Heh heh.”
I screamed at Loverboy to leave Beth alone, shouted uselessly from behind the steel bars in my head, yelled down the dead corridors at the people who were taking turns with my body and the one who wanted to take a turn with hers.
I felt Beth kissing my neck, knowing it was Loverboy’s kiss, his tingle under her salt saliva, his smirking satisfaction at my helpless distress, his hands that were cupping her perfect breasts. Not mine, never mine.
“I’m glad you understand, Richard,” Beth said.
“Just don’t say we can still be friends. Don’t put the honeypot on a shelf now that I’ve had a taste. Or some bread thing. Let’s see. Don’t plug your donut hole until I’ve licked off the powdered sugar.”
She giggled, and it made her body shake. “I won’t say it if you don’t. Let’s just see what happens.”
Scott Nicholson Library Vol 1 Page 75
