“So two people drowned.” Brendan’s mom and — a little brother or sister? The thought was deep as the ocean.
“At least.”
“She liked to swim at night?”
“She thought she was fat. And she liked to go bareass. I came to later and found her clothes.”
“I remember that night. Matthew was screamin’ at you.”
“Him and Eve were close. He knew her longer’n I did, if you count the war. I tried to make it up to him, be his buddy an’ all. We’re different kinds of people. He’s different, period.”
“He knows how to make people feel bad.”
“Knows how to make ’em feel good too. Gotta remember that about Matthew: He gives twice what he gets, good or bad.”
“Last few days he’s been botherin’ me about not bein’ home — not takin’ care of you, he said.”
“My opinion exactly.” Jerome looked at Brendan. “So why you keepin’ her away.”
“There’s nothing to do at our house. Araby lives on an estate. Lois cleans there, for a Mr. and Mrs. Winston.”
“They’re very wealthy.”
“I’d say.”
“Which means this Araby ain’t hurtin.’ In contrast to our own situation.”
“Yeah . . . ”
“So bring her around. I’ll be cool.”
“Maybe I will.”
“Fine. An’ see if she’s got a friend.”
“Dad!”
They seeded the pond from aboard the skiff, Jerome on the oars as Brendan ladled corn from the sack into the shallows around the duck blind. Baiting a hunting area is illegal and effective; the description applies to much Jerome did. When the job was complete, the blind recovered, and the truck loaded up and gone, it didn’t take long for the ducks on the pond to edge shoreward for the feast. They dove and foraged well into evening. The habit would hold until next hunting season, when abruptly it would end for a while.
In the truck on the way to town, Brendan asked his father a question he’d been saving. “Before, when you said it scares you to open the duck blind, like sometimes you think Mom’s body will be inside? What are you scared to see other times?”
“I dunno. Ghosts ’n goblins, I guess.”
“Stuff from the war?” Not a subject they talked about, the Vietnam War was like Jerome’s first marriage, before Brendan’s time and therefore a figment for all practical purposes.
“No,” Jerome said, his antennae redirecting to this uncertain signal. “That’s never bothered me much, not like I know it does some guys. I’m too dumb, probably.”
“Like it bothers that lieutenant, d’you think? Your friend.”
Jerome’s eyes flicked from the road to his son beside him. “Is he the one put this bug in your ear? About the war?”
“Maybe.”
Jerome braked and pulled over. “Willyboy’s a loon, all right? And Vietnam didn’t have shit to do with it. Whatever he said about me — ”
“He said you were the best there was.”
“At what?”
“At whatever it was you guys were doin’! You don’t talk about it, so how’m I supposed to know?”
“It’s not necessary for you to know.”
“I want to. You’re always happy to tell me what a waste you are, how dumb you are. When someone tells me you were the best, I wanna believe it. I know you’d never tell me that.”
“I won’t lie.”
“The lieutenant lied?”
Jerome hesitated. His readiness to play the ignorant lowlife was his way of admitting to his son the worst deeds of his past without having to get specific — without having to tell, describe, relive them. “I don’t know if he was lying or not. Sometimes I think I did pretty good over there. Sometimes not so much.”
“You mean killing people.”
“Yeah, that.” Jerome’s throat felt sticky. “But also tryin’ to protect my guys, protect the platoon,” he forced words out, “from anything that mighta hurt them for no need.” He put the truck in gear and drove a while in silence. Brendan, to make up for upsetting his father with hard questions, asked him an easy one:
“Do you like it when I remind you of Mom?”
“What kinda question is that? I loved the woman.”
“Do you miss her?”
“Sure I miss her. She was the one.”
“How did I remind you of her?”
“Jesus, Bren!”
Brendan waited. His dad in thought was like a baby walking; stumbling was part of the deal.
“It’s things I can’t explain. Like, whenever you say the first thing in your head because it’s true and fuck all else; whenever you see the worst shit in the world and deal with it; whenever you give an asshole another chance — that’s your mom in you.”
“I’ve never done any of that.”
“She didn’t see it either. That’s what I miss, now.”
“Enough to never have another girlfriend?”
“I’ve had girlfriends since her, you know that.”
“I mean a real one.”
Jerome flinched as from a matchbox igniting. He’d successfully instructed Brendan by reverse example how to conduct your life with civility and decency; Brendan’s capacities far surpassed his father’s as a result. Jerome need only love him now. The rest was out of his range. It was okay, therefore, to be honest. “No. I don’t miss your mom enough to never have a real girlfriend.”
“Me neither,” Brendan said.
As he parked in their driveway, Jerome released a long thought Brendan’s questions had prompted. “You know, Bren, when I think about your mom best, it’s her swimmin’ that night alone. Moonlight. No clothes. Eve was always doin’ stuff like that, mystical stuff. Walkin’ through a field, readin’ a book. That’s what she was doin’ that night, I’m sure. Havin’ herself a mystical moment.”
“I have those sometimes. My mind kind of floats and I see myself like God sees me. The whole big picture — of me.”
“That’s your mom in you. Me? I don’t have these. I stare into space. I pass out. Someday I wanna have a mystical moment.”
Brendan laughed. “Next time I’m having one, I’ll call you. We’ll split it.”
“I think you gotta have ’em alone.”
“Mom wasn’t alone. Her baby was with her.”
“They went down together.”
“Or up.”
At that moment Jerome’s heart hurt with the weight of love for his son. He shut his eyes as if to imprint Brendan’s image for later recall. He would die for Brendan. He’d kill for him. “This is true,” Jerome said. It felt good to know something was.
Twenty-Two
Anna accused Lois flatly, “You’ve never been hurt.”
“When Grandpa died — ”
“You hardly cried. You got married a month later. Daddy was still in the hospital.” There’d been a car accident, their father’s fault. He’d since recovered, flourished.
“He didn’t like Robby anyway. And I was rushed, remember?” Lois faced her sister at the other end of the sofa. “You think I’m cold, I know. Maybe it’s true. I don’t give much, I don’t ask much.”
Anna was wearing a pair of her sister’s jeans. Lois had fattened in the four years since her wedding. What a farce that had been! Half the guests coked out of their skulls, honking New Year’s noisemakers in the middle of vows. No wonder Anna had had premonitions of a bad end to the marriage. The couple had met in a bar, at happy hour. Lovers should meet at recitals or peace rallies, in field hospitals or church. Anna had a romantic streak — one reason she never got married. Impatiently she struck for the heart of her dispute with Lois. “It was your abortion that hardened you. You’ve never resolved it.” At her wedding, Lois had been ten weeks pregnant and pissed as hell. Seven months later she wa
s all smiles.
“I never had an abortion. Sorry to disappoint. The baby checked out all by itself.”
“What do you mean?”
Lois said what she meant. She’d carried the baby like a good Catholic girl until in the ninth month its heart stopped. Delivery was induced the next day and she gave birth to a tiny corpse. Lois didn’t cry for a long time afterward. Matthew finally broke through, suggesting that her baby must have sensed its mother’s ambivalence and expired as a favor to both of them. The crazy logic seemed truer to Lois than the rationales of holy and medical mystery her other comforters had tried to sell her, so when at last she did cry, it was for the baby she’d caused to die and not for herself who’d been robbed of it. Guilt she could handle. It founded her humor, thickened her skin. It kept Lois sane when nothing else could, as Matthew had known it would.
Anna had paled. “That’s so awful. You never told me. You always implied — ”
“I have a reputation to uphold.” Lois’s voice was flippant; still her confession to Anna had hurt. She offered to show Anna something she’d shown no one before, her tone again blithe, as if issuing a dare between teenagers. “Wanna see a lock of her hair?”
“Her?”
“It was a girl. They let me hold her in the recovery room, get my money’s worth.” At Anna’s misty look Lois snapped, “No, I didn’t name her and I didn’t bury her. I gave her to science.” Her heart was beating fast. Her sister finally would pay for her lifelong condescension toward Lois, condescension based on Anna’s hoarded trove of middle-class malaise. It was Lois’s best shot at payback and she took it, leaping up, “Just a sec,” as if to fetch a magazine or a borrowed sweater.
The little lock of raven baby hair was contained in a small plasticene enveloped that probably once had held a gram of cocaine. Lois tapped the hair out in her palm. Anna looked away. “I’m sorry. You know how I am.” Anna loathed anything morbid. Natural history museums might have been morgues for her gut aversion to them; funerals and hospitals sickened her. “It’s too real to me. I can’t detach.”
Lois touched the soft clump in her palm with one fingertip. What did it mean to her, this strange memento that might have been swept off a barbershop floor? It was like a bullet, removed, that hadn’t killed her, a keepsake not of difficult death but of difficult life, of surviving more or less. Lois bent to her palm like someone taking communion and lightly inhaled. The hair and scalp of her baby daughter cradled in her arms at the hospital had held a faint, unnameable, alive-seeming scent that had caused Lois’s milk to rise in her breasts. Now the lock of hair smelled of nothing at all. Lois closed her hands to a fist and felt the fine tiny strands crackle as they were crushed.
She and Anna heard the truck pull up outside. Jerome was making Anna brunch at his house — lobster omelette, Lois guessed, his specialty. “Now I feel awkward,” Anna said as she stood to leave. “Can we talk later, please? No, I should stay, we should continue — ”
“You made plans. Go.”
“It’s just . . . he asked.”
“It’s okay. Believe me.”
“I’m sorry. But later, I promise.”
After Anna had left, Lois sat a long time on the sofa without moving. She opened her fist, took a breath and blew the featherlight baby hairs across the rug. Some of them stuck to her palm. Something about these few single strands seemed unbearably fragile and sad, and she carefully took each one and returned it to the plasticene envelope. She searched the rug for the rest on her hands and knees. But the rug was dark colored and she found only a few strands beyond the original diminished clump. She propped up on her knees and uttered a dry bitter laugh. Lois knew that next time she vacuumed this room it would feel like she was killing her daughter again.
Ollie Newberry slumped on his barstool at Mantra’s Cafe, despising everyone around him for pursuing mindless happiness while he sank into mortal depression. For the fourth day since his roommate had died, he was passing time over beers and low-tar cigarettes, awaiting the odd hour when that Lois bartender came on duty and made his life worth living.
Ollie hoped his post-traumatic distress might compel Lois to succor him. He wanted succor. He’d read a few volumes of Victorian pornography and was much taken with those scenes of young innocents seduced by their aunts. Any charm contained in his sexual naiveté was compromised by his guile, however, for he was eager to exploit his roommate’s death in order to appear, as its survivor and witness, a more charismatic guy.
He realized Lois was connected to Robby Cochran. Not knowing her last name, he assumed the connection was casual. Lois knew that Ollie was her husband’s accuser, so her indulgence of his ungainly overtures was serious and suspect. In fact, there was an element of redress to it: Jerome and her sister were becoming chummy, and Lois didn’t like it. She had faith that Jerome could only disappoint Anna. Yet the joyless, perilous thing in his heart was worthwhile to see firsthand. Lois had got a fair glimpse in all the bad boys she’d loved when a girl. Now Anna, who’d somehow missed all that, was lining up for a ticket.
Lois respected Jerome as little as she respected herself, which made friendship with him easy and romance quite avoidable. She’d always believed she could seduce him at will; like a serial killer who’d slaughter anything but puppies, denying herself this gratuitous pleasure had ennobled her a fraction. Jerome’s catting around never bothered her. She’d catted around herself. Yet the sheer unlikelihood of him and Anna suggested a rare magic. Some bit of ugliness on Lois’s part, some moral vandalism, potentially was called for.
Her work shift completed, she came around the bar and took a stool beside Ollie, this puppy pursuing her, and asked straight out what he wanted. Ollie, grandiloquent in his cups, declaimed, “You are hot and I am nothing. Take me.”
“You’d regret it. I’m not a nice person.”
“I’m a virgin. I don’t care.”
“Do I get dinner?”
“Breakfast too,” he joked in terror.
“Act ignorant. Don’t pop the illusion.”
“It’s no illusion,” he promised.
So he put himself in her hands, literally. Sitting with her on his skinny bed at the White Bird, he licked the palms of her hands at her order. They were warm, a little calloused, salty. “Now what?” he mumbled between laps of his tongue.
Lois realized she must have a screw loose to be engaging him this way, impulsively constructing a scenario of a boy licking her fingers and palm like a pet. “Try between, in the slit.” She opened her fingers to let his tongue push through.
Ollie couldn’t believe his luck. He wasn’t sure if Lois had fallen for his tragic act or his goofy charm — she’d pitied him in any case, meaning he’d snowed her completely. He didn’t consider that pity might truly apply to him or that his charm at all was genuine. He was a culprit in a con game his life had become since chance had spared him in the ocean four days ago and claimed his roommate instead, a bit of cosmic randomness that made Ollie feel unworthily blessed. All he needed now was a dose of decadence to conclude his youth on the right note of dubious learning, though licking a girl’s hand didn’t quite fill the bill. “Can we move on?”
“Sure.” Lois touched his lip. “Suck.” As if told to rake leaves, he halfheartedly began sucking her finger. “Suck it like you want me to suck you.”
At once he got erect in his pants. He tried to hide it with one hand. Lois pulled his hand away and in his humiliation he just about popped.
“You like it.”
He paused in his labors. “It’s . . . suggestive. I don’t want you to warp me, though.”
“You want me to spread for ten seconds and then you can strut, right?”
“No way. I think we should have affection.” It killed him to say this. “Which I happen to have for you already — ”
“Liar.”
“— but girls take longer, I know.”
She tried to laugh haughtily but it came out a giggle. It was embarrassing. She’d hoped to strike a blow against someone and had wound up captivated. “Yeah,” she said. “Girls take longer.”
He resumed sucking for exactly ten seconds. “You there yet?”
“A real joker.”
“When I’m scared.”
“You shouldn’t be scared. I should be scared.”
He started to tremble. He’d liked the game better, when his ignorance had seemed an asset; now he was expected to contribute. “You’re the boss here. I’m just scrounging.”
“And I’m letting you, sadly for me.”
Afternoon light pressed on the window and gave the room an inviolate quality. Ollie got the feeling that today would forever stick in his mind, as major. He’d wanted just to do it or get it done to him. He hadn’t wanted significance. “You don’t need this. You can go if you want.”
The dismissal took her aback. “Then I guess I will.”
“I’ll kiss you goodbye, though.”
“That’d be fine.”
He touched his lips to hers. Her lips gave under his and he sort of fell into her, his weight teetering forward a fraction after initial contact. He steadied himself with his hands against the wall behind her, his arms around her in a chaste air hug. He arched his back as if her breasts were stingers under her shirt. Her face, which he’d been avoiding looking at eye to eye, had cocked sideways abstractedly. She murmured, “Soft.”
“Huh?”
“Your mouth. Like a woman’s.”
“So’s yours.”
“Tonight I’ve hit bottom,” her tone was cheerful, “though I will say I’m glad it’s with you.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“A big one.”
“Can we kiss again?”
“Not a good idea. For me.”
“Hey, that’s a compliment too.”
Life Between Wars Page 16
