‘That’s right. Maybe it’s gone now, but take my word for it, it was real enough when it appeared at the end of my bed, and I wasn’t going to take any chances.’
He told Summer everything, although he tried not to make it all sound too melodramatic. He told her how Charlie’s head had been bitten off. He told her about Maria and all her cuts and bruises. He told her how Tibbles had come back to life after being crushed, but was dead for a second time.
He tried to explain to her how the first day of the new semester seemed to have happened and yet not to have happened, but how several people had memories of it. Or feelings of déjà-vu, anyhow.
‘I had that once,’ said Summer, nodding to show that she understood what he was talking about. ‘My mom took me to Disneyland when I was about seven and when we went into Mickey Mouse’s house I was sure that she had taken me there before. But my mom swore to me that she never had.’
‘Well, you know what kids’ imaginations are like,’ said Jim. ‘You’d probably seen it in a cartoon, and fantasized that you were really there. When I was a kid, I convinced myself that I knew Huckleberry Finn, and that he and I used to play together and go fishing together, even though I didn’t even have a fishing pole. He always used to thrash me at marbles.’
They lay in silence for a further few minutes, and then Summer unexpectedly reached out in the dark and flicked the tip of Jim’s nose. Jim had been listening for any scratching noises from upstairs and it made him jump.
‘Hey!’ he protested. ‘What was that for?’
‘Nothing. Just being playful, that’s all.’
‘There’s a Korean demon in my apartment and you’re being playful?’
She leaned over him and breathed warm spearminty breath into his face. ‘You know something, you’re such a great guy. You’re great-looking, you’re funny. You give off this what’s-it’s-name. This charisma. But it’s like you’re this old man already, when you’re not.’
‘I’m older than you.’
‘I’m twenty-two, twenty-three next birthday.’
‘Exactly. And I’m thirty-four. That means I’m twelve years older than you are. When I was reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea you were still waking up three times a night for ten ounces of warm formula.’
‘Well, I couldn’t forget that you’re a teacher, too.’
‘Exactly.’
‘The trouble is, you never forget that you’re a teacher, either. You seem to think that because you’re a teacher nobody can teach you anything. Especially somebody younger, like me.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Do.’
‘OK, then,’ said Jim. ‘I’m always open to new ideas. Why don’t you expand my horizons for me?’
‘You really want me to?’
‘Sure. Go ahead. I can’t sleep, anyhow.’
Summer switched on her bedside lamp. She climbed off the bed and said, ‘You go to a club, you see pole-dancing, you think there’s nothing to it, just holding on to a pole and waggling your tush. Well, look at this.’
She took hold of one of the bedposts, hoisted herself up, and spun right around it with one arm flying free. Then she held on to it with both hands and jumped up, spreading her legs wide apart.
For the next three or four minutes, she spun and circled and even hung upside-down. As she clung on to the bedpost Jim sat up in bed watching her in amazement. The bed creaked and swayed every time she swung herself around, but she performed with such fluidity and grace that it was easy to believe that she was completely weightless.
Eventually she swung around one last time and landed on the bed, almost on top of him, so that he bounced up two or three inches. She was panting a little, but Jim was perfectly aware that if he had tried to copy her, he would have been ready for CPR by now.
‘You see?’ she said, and kissed him. ‘And that was only round the bedpost. If you could see me with my proper pole . . .’
‘I’m speechless,’ Jim told her. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.’
She kissed him again, and then again. ‘Every single move has a name. Like the first move I did, that was an Angel. Then I went into an Explosion. Then a Backwards Showgirl. Then the Full Moon . . . that was when I was upside-down and kind of curved – you know, like the moon.’
She kissed his forehead, she kissed his eyelids. She squeezed his cheeks together in one hand and kissed his lips. He did nothing to stop her. In fact, he began to kiss her back. She tasted not only of spearmint toothpaste but of pink lip-gloss, too, and her hair smelled of apricots.
‘You know what, Jimmy-wimmy?’ she whispered, and her face was so close that she was out of focus. ‘When you drive out of that college every afternoon, you need to stop being a teacher and you need to be yourself. Every time you talk to me, you make me feel like I’m sitting at a desk. Try to find out who you are, because one day you’ll wake up and find that you’ve been teaching for years and years and the only person who hasn’t learned anything is you.’
Jim said, ‘You are wise beyond your years, my child.’
‘There you are, you see! You’re still doing it! You need to forget about your poems and your quotations and all of that literature stuff. You can’t go through your whole life talking with other people’s voices, even if what other people said was exactly what you wanted to say but you just couldn’t think of the words. Look at your T-shirt.’
Jim peered down at it. ‘It’s Walt Whitman.’
‘I don’t care if it’s Walt Disney. It’s not Jimmy Rook.’
Jim didn’t exactly know why, but the way in which she called him ‘Jimmy Rook’ gave him an unexpected feeling of pleasure and almost relief, as if ‘Jimmy Rook’ were another person altogether – somebody much more relaxed and less self-conscious; somebody who wasn’t endlessly harassed by ghosts and demons and anxieties about his students. He could imagine a whole crowd of young people hanging around a diner, and one of them suddenly saying, ‘Hey! Look who it is! It’s Jimmy Rook! Hi, Jimmy!’ and Jimmy Rook walking in, smiling and strutting and high-fiving, everybody happy to see him.
‘You’re really somebody, Summer,’ said Jim. He touched her lips with his fingertip. ‘I looked at you and I talked to you, but up until now I had no idea who you are.’
‘That’s the whole point. You don’t know who you are, either. Maybe it’s time you tried to find out.’
She laid one hand on top of his shorts. His instinctive reaction was to take hold of her wrist and firmly lift it away. But she was right. She was much younger than him, but she wasn’t one of his students, and tonight he wasn’t the teacher. Tonight he wasn’t the demon hunter, either. Tonight he was Jimmy Rook.
‘Goodness!’ she said, in a little-girly voice. ‘I do believe there’s something growing inside of these shorts!’
She gave him two or three squeezes, and then said, ‘I wonder if it’s a beanstalk? I sure hope so. I could climb it all the way up to the clouds and find the giant’s castle and bring back the goose that lays the golden eggs or whatever. You know how good I am at climbing up poles.’
‘Do you know what, Summer?’ Jim told her. ‘You’re nuts.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said, in a deep, mock-serious whisper. She took hold of his waistband and tugged his shorts halfway down his thighs. ‘Look what I got here. Your nuts!’
It was a stupid joke, but they both laughed so much that they accidentally knocked their foreheads together.
‘Ow!’ said Summer. ‘I shall have to spank you for that! Or spank your monkey, anyhow!’
She took hold of his hardened penis in her hand, her long manicured nails digging into the skin, and rubbed it slowly and lasciviously up and down. Jim lay back on the pillow and watched her, because all she wanted him to do was watch her. She was the teacher now.
She kept on rubbing him, gripping him so tight that the glans of his penis flushed dark purple, and the eye gaped with
every stroke like a landed fish.
‘Now you can tell me a poem,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Tell me a poem. Go on.’
‘Summer, for Christ’s sake . . .’
‘Tell me a poem or I’ll stop.’
‘I thought you said I was supposed to forget about being a teacher.’
‘Don’t tell me a poem like a teacher. Tell me like Jimmy.’
So, as she slowly rubbed him, he recited the next few lines of the Walt Whitman poem that he had been reciting to himself in bed.
‘The early lilacs became part of this child, / And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird, / And the Third-month lambs—’
‘That’s so beautiful,’ said Summer, even though she didn’t once take her eyes off his penis. ‘That could almost make me cry.’
Without another word, she dipped her head down and took his penis into her mouth, and very gently sucked it. Her fine blonde hair tickled his thighs, and he reached down and stroked it. He wanted to continue reciting the poem but he had forgotten it, all of it. Come to that, he had forgotten every poem he had ever known. He had forgotten everything he had ever known. The way that Summer was making him feel now, all knowledge was irrelevant.
He started to feel a tightening sensation between his legs, but it was then that Summer sat up, and licked her lips, and smiled at him, and crossed her arms so that she could take off her T-shirt. Her breasts tumbled out of it, and Jim could see that he had been right: the Lord had been magnanimous. They were enormous, but very buoyant, almost afloat, with pale strawberry-pink nipples, crinkled and stiff.
Jim sat up and pulled off his T-shirt, too. Walt Whitman’s white-bearded kisser wasn’t exactly a turn-on. He kicked his shorts off his ankles and took Summer into his arms. God, she felt like an angel. He nuzzled her and ran his fingers down the curve of her back and for the first time in a very long time Jim felt completely carried away, as if a huge warm wave had lifted him out to sea. No anxiety, no responsibility, nothing but soft skin and pleasure.
Summer started to sit up again, but Jim said, ‘My turn,’ and firmly pushed her on to her back. He knelt beside her and tugged off her tiny white-lace thong. Then he parted her thighs and opened the freshly waxed lips of her vulva with his fingertips. It was like opening up some exotic pink fruit, filled with clear sweet juice. Her clitoris peeped out and he licked it with the tip of his tongue.
‘Oh, Jimmy-wimmy,’ she breathed, one hand gripping his bare shoulder. ‘You can teach me now, if you feel like it.’
He licked her again, and again, and at the same time she took hold of his bone-hard penis in her hand and slowly stroked it.
There was silence between them for a while. Jim continued to lick her until her back began to arch and she began to breathe faster and deeper. He could feel every muscle in her body begin to clench. He could almost feel what it was like to be her, with that clockspring tightening inside her. She was so juicy now that he was almost drinking her. His penis was dripping, too, so that her fingers were slippery.
He was happy. There was no other word for it. He was so excited that he was practically delirious, but most of all he was happy. He was Jimmy Rook, making love to a beautiful young blonde, and she was huge-breasted and long-legged and silky-haired and she was funny, too, and that was all he cared about.
But then for no accountable reason Jim Rook made one of his cutting observations inside his mind and immediately spoiled it all, just the way he had spoiled almost every other relationship he had ever had with a woman. Jim Rook thought, Look at me, dipping my head up and down, lapping up Summer like Tibbles lapping up his milk.
The thought totally threw him. He lifted up his head, breathing hard, but his penis started to soften. Summer kept rubbing at him, but the more forcefully she rubbed the softer he became. He stayed where he was for a moment, with his eyes closed and his head tilted back, but then he dropped sideways on to the pillow next to her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘What’s wrong, Jimmy?’ she said, frowning at him through a fine curtain of blonde hair. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve suddenly gone all guilty on me. I am old enough, you know. I’m even old enough to drink.’
He took hold of her fingers and squeezed them together, and then kissed her fingertips. ‘I’m sorry, Summer. It’s not you. You’re beautiful and you’re bright and you don’t even know how wonderful you’ve been tonight, you really don’t.’
‘Then what is it? You’ve suddenly remembered that you’re a faggot?’
Jim shook his head. ‘I’m not a faggot and I know you’re old enough. It’s me. It’s me and my ghosts – me and my goddamned demons. There’s always a little nasty niggling imp in the back of my mind who won’t trust anybody or anything, and won’t take anything at face value. Like, is this really real, or are you dreaming it?’ He didn’t tell her what he had thought about Tibbles.
‘You do like me, then?’ Summer asked him.
He brushed the hair away from her face and kissed her. ‘Hey – a little more than like.’
‘Then where do we go from here? Do you want us to go back to bumping into each other on the landing, every now and then, and saying “hi, how’s it hanging?” and nothing else?’
Jim looked into her eyes. He had always known they were blue, but he had never realized before what a complicated collection of blues they were, like broken fragments of cornflowers and sapphires and sky, all jumbled up together in a kaleidoscope. She was right: he always spoke to people as they were sitting behind a row of desks, and even though he cared about them, he never looked at them closely enough. Not as close as this.
‘No,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘I don’t want to go back to that.’
She put her arm around him. ‘In that case, Jimmy-wimmy, maybe we should try again. Tell your nasty little imp to stay in his box for an hour or two, and we’ll see what we can do with Mr McFloppy.’
‘OK. I’ll try.’
She kissed his arm. ‘You’re real skinny, you know. You need to build up your upper body. Maybe I should take you to the gym. But we can start by exercising your love muscle, can’t we?’
She took hold of his penis again, and stretched it out like saltwater taffy.
Jim said, ‘Careful . . . it does have a breaking-point!’ Summer giggled and yanked it even harder. Just as she did so, however, they heard a loud crack, like breaking glass, followed by a high, despairing scream. Then there was another scream, and another, and each scream was so different from the last that they sounded like a chorus.
‘Jesus, what’s that?’ said Jim. He scrabbled for his shorts, bunny-hopped into them, and hobbled toward the bedroom door, still pulling them up. Summer reached for her T-shirt but she couldn’t find her thong in the tangled bedclothes so she went across to her closet and pulled out a short denim skirt.
Jim opened the front door. At first he thought that the automobiles parked on the opposite side of the street were on fire, but then he realized that the orange flames that were dancing in their windows were reflected from Mrs LaFarge’s apartment downstairs. He ran barefoot down the steps to the landing below, with Summer following close behind him.
Flames were leaping out of the window, as well as thick showers of sparks, which whirled up into the yucca trees. It looked as if the interior of Mrs LaFarge’s apartment was already a furnace. Shielding his face with his upraised arm, Jim could see a couch blazing from end to end, and two blazing armchairs. The television had imploded, and flames were pouring out of the empty screen. A large framed photograph of Mr and Mrs LaFarge on their wedding day was slowly being scorched black from the bottom upward, so that the happy couple looked as if they were sinking into a tarpit.
Jim couldn’t see Mrs LaFarge anywhere. He shouted at Summer, ‘Call the fire department! I’m going to see if Violette is still inside!’
‘Jimmy! You can’t! It’s too dangerous!’
‘Ca
ll the fire department! And tell them we’ll probably need paramedics too, while you’re at it!’
Summer hurried back up to her apartment. Jim stood in front of Mrs LaFarge’s front door for a moment, trying to decide if it was a good idea to kick it open or not. The fire was burning with a loud hollow roaring noise, punctuated by the crackling of broken glass.
He had almost decided that it would be safer to wait for the fire department when he heard another scream, so distorted that it barely sounded human. Then another, more of an agonized wail. He didn’t have any choice. He stepped back as far as the railings, and then he took two quick steps toward the front door and kicked it.
He heard the frame splinter, but the door stayed shut. He stepped back again, took a deep breath, and then rushed at it again, kicking it so hard that he was jarred by the impact all the way up to his hip.
The door burst open. Inside, the hallway was filled with fire, from floor to ceiling. Standing in the center of this fire, her arms spread wide as if she were being crucified, stood Mrs LaFarge, wearing nothing but flames.
ELEVEN
‘Violette,’ he said, or at least he thought he said it. But then he screamed out, ‘Violette!’
He edged toward the doorway, knees bent, ducking down low and keeping one arm raised up in front of his face. Even so, the heat was too fierce for him to approach within less than four feet of it, and he could still feel his cheeks scorching.
Besides, there didn’t seem to be much point in trying to rescue Mrs LaFarge from the flames. Her skin was already blackened all over, and in several places it had split wide apart to expose her glistening red flesh, like the black crust of a lava flow splits apart to reveal the molten magma underneath. Deep in several of these crimson crevasses he could see her blood actually bubbling.
But it was the look on her face that gave Jim the greatest feeling of dread. It was blackened, too, like a minstrel moneybox, and all of her hair was burned into crispy clumps. It was difficult to tell if she could still see, but she appeared to be staring at him, unblinkingly because her eyelids had shriveled up into little knots. She had no eyebrows, either, so her stare was expressionless – or it would have been, if she hadn’t been smiling at him so widely. There was no question about it. Jim was pretty sure it wasn’t the heat, shrinking the skin on her face like some kind of horrific face-lift and distorting her lips. She was actually smiling, almost as if she were enjoying her immolation.
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