Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  “You’re on a roll, kid.”

  “Can we do this again? Before I leave — ”

  “For prep-school. God.”

  “Don’t rub it in. But yeah. So it’s gotta be soon.”

  Her smile yielded no answer.

  He saw her to the door. On the street she turned uncertainly and looked back at him. It struck her full force how pathetic and bizarre was her behavior today. But her disgust lifted when Ollie waved at her and flexed his arms like a muscleman. She bowed her head in playful obeisance. It seemed almost too bad that she’d never have anything to do with the little prick again.

  The next morning, Saturday, Lois cleaned at the Winstons in preparation for their dinner party tonight. She was in a bad mood. Anna hadn’t come home last night, hadn’t even thought to call.

  A dilemma arose when the cook, Mrs. Locke, telephoned to announce she wouldn’t be working tonight and what’s more was quitting for good. The woman often gave notice after domestic squabbles, as if her greatest leverage over her sons Marcus and Del was her threat to be home for them always. Usually she relented in a day or two, no one much inconvenienced. “No! No! No!” Mrs. Winston barked into the phone. “I absolutely require you here!”

  Mrs. Locke was adamant. Her heart had been broken “like a plate,” she said, “by my flesh and blood, God help me.”

  “Do you mean Marcus?”

  “I mean Delbert!”

  “What’s he done to you?” Mrs. Winston asked.

  “To himself! He believes he’s . . . he says he’s . . . ”

  “John!”

  Mr. Winston grabbed the phone and pressed it to his ear in time to hear “homosexual” bellowed bitterly. He blinked in dismay. “Say again?” Mrs. Locke had hung up. The old man replaced the receiver and shrugged to his wife. “A survey. When’s dinner?”

  With no cook for her party, Mrs. Winston asked Lois, who was serving tonight, to do double duty in the kitchen and pantry. Lois had a better idea. “There’s a guy I know, he’s no chef but he’s got a couple specialties,” who also, Lois knew, would leap at the chance to meet his son’s new girlfriend. “His name’s Jerome.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Winston said, “if you could persuade Mr. Jerome to assist us tonight, I don’t think he’ll complain about his fee. Mrs. Locke had planned a crown roast with sausage stuffing. Can he manage that?”

  “Better leave it to him.”

  “So I shall. We’re eight, as you know.” The old woman gasped. “Look at the time! Can your Mr. Jerome pull it off?”

  “He’s a magician.”

  Lois didn’t realize that her suggestion had been unconsciously intended to get Jerome away from Anna until Jerome, when Lois called him, enthused, “Hey great, I’ll tell your sister.”

  “Why her?”

  “Be fun, the three of us goofin’ on the rich folks.”

  “This is a job. It’s not fun.”

  “So it’ll be both.”

  Which killed it for Lois. She opted out at once, informing Mrs. Winston that Mr. Jerome and his assistant Miss Anna would be catering tonight. The old woman said doubtfully, “I’d prefer you to be here too, dear.”

  “Can’t do it,” Lois said, her stomach gone hollow. “I’ve got a date.”

  Twenty-Three

  She’d felt crazy to be there, at Jerome’s last night. I am crazy, crazy, had been Anna’s one thought as she’d sat stiffly beside him on his couch. “So,” he’d shrugged. “You game?”

  “You cannot be as cool as you seem.”

  “It’s not like I try to be.”

  “I mean relaxed. You can’t be that relaxed. Look at me, I’m shaking like a leaf. I’m a nun, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Not yet, you said.”

  “And a virgin, okay? Are you familiar with the term?” She tapped her breastbone. “Me.”

  “Look,” he said confidingly. “You wanna play, I’m there. You can be a virgin tonight. I’ll be daddy, teacher, schoolboy — whatever you want.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “And I gotta say — these swear words? Not attractive. My boy’s asleep upstairs. He’s got high ideas about ladies.”

  “And you? What are your ideas about ladies? About me?”

  Jerome sighed. “Your nun thing? I was into it — a fine woman as yourself layin’ it down for Jesus. But now I get the feeling it’s still maybe yes, maybe no. Plus there’s serious charisma between me and you, don’t tell me not. Plus I like you. I think you’d be fun to, you know, love.”

  “I’ve never associated the two. Love and fun.”

  “Well, we shouldn’t lie. It’s not always love.”

  “Yes, even virgins know that.”

  “For real, huh? You’re puttin’ pressure on me now.”

  “Hey, if you can’t handle it . . . ” Did she say that? She blushed fiercely and looked away.

  “No, that’s great!” He touched her arm. “Anna made a joke — and Jerome got it! Fuck, babe, we’re made for each other.”

  Her laughter lingered a moment. “I’m not really a virgin. In my mind, yes — don’t ask me to explain. But technically, no.”

  “I forgive you.”

  “That makes one of us. I should go,” she said quickly, as if escaping a crime scene. “I’m very . . . out of sorts.”

  “Listen, Anna. Irregardless what the neighbors say, I’m no stud. But I’m off the butts, I’m shaved and showered, I been chewin’ mint gum all goddamn day — you could do worse, is my point.”

  She raised her forefinger in warning. “It’ll mean nothing.”

  “In a hundred years.”

  “Tomorrow!”

  “Your call. I’m a big boy.”

  She hesitated. “Why am I not nervous anymore?”

  “It’s only me.”

  She smiled, allowing, “I suppose it’s only me too.”

  Jerome parted his hands as if over a poker pot and received his winnings graciously.

  Though she hadn’t had intercourse in a long, long time, Anna did have a fair degree of up-to-date experience in other areas of intimate communion at once exotic and repressed, alternatives to the usual finale that in the short run left no one complaining. She’d always been honest with her sexual partners about doing some things but not The One Thing, forgoing excuses of malady or virtue for a purred confession, “I’m different,” which in her boyfriends’ open minds translated to “I’m kinky.” It kept Anna in the driver’s seat, kept men at a distance and made sex with them always slightly ludicrous. The act they didn’t share betokened all they’d never share, and from the beginning each relationship’s end was assured. Inevitably her sexuality had come to seem altogether vestigial. She stored it away like wine too good to drink, content with legends of its body and flavor. Having idealized sex to an extreme degree, doing it tonight full-tilt could be a potentially invaluable farewell performance, one that would make her, she told herself as she followed Jerome to his bedroom, a better servant of God and man.

  The tensions of unveiling were aggravated by her rustiness — how to lie, to conform her body to another, most of all what to say. She said nothing. Jerome mumbled about her scent and her hair, ran his right hand along her length (stopping, she noted with unsurprise, to squeeze her skirted left buttock), but soon fell to his chores in silence. She felt nothing, and clinically began to hope he had some lubricant handy. His mouth was a bothering thing on hers, his face like a scratchy needlepoint pillow looming suffocatingly. Resigned to this, she popped her shoes off and heard them hit the floor at the end of the bed. She became aware of a new sensation, a rhythmic lascivious slurping. She peered down and observed a gray-snouted Labrador licking the soles of her bare feet. She informed Jerome, “Your dog is licking my feet.”

  “Me and him work together.”

  A
nna’s eyes widened —

  “He sees I’m flunkin’ out here.”

  — and she laughed. Really laughed. At everything.

  They had no choice but to start again at conversation, clothed, on the bed, the dog out in the hall. Mainly they shared humiliating sexual experiences. They discussed disease and birth control, Jerome indicating in his bedside drawer his means of covering both. The introduction of “rubber” with the lights still on was a change in pattern that put him into a whole new mode. When you fuck, as did Jerome, any woman you can, it’s purely the ritual that keeps your interest up; when she, in response to your premier trick, issues the expected murmur or muscle spasm, it prefigures and enhances the upcoming payoff, like chopping coke on a mirror or pouring that first Glenlivet. His pattern was shot now. Let-down in a way, Jerome as they talked undid Anna’s buttons and opened her blouse almost out of mere politeness, his fingers idly tracing the upper border of her bra as if inspecting it for safety features. Anna in turn undid Jerome’s shirt. She touched his nipple and he breathed in: “My weak spot.” She flicked his nipple with her fingernail, amused at how he reacted. She leaned down and laid the flat of her tongue on it, was further amused when before she began to lick or suck he pressed back as if seeking these things and gave an audible sigh. Now she did lick, one nipple and then the other for a long while, and neither he nor she grew bored with this, which was an expected boon.

  For Jerome this quaint little turn-on had become, in the years since his wife died, his innermost sexual secret. It embarrassed him to be made mush that way; it was faggy. With women since Eve, he could fuck and fuck and hold off as necessary, then at the right moment push his chest to their mouths, or even, with his hand in the dark, pinch his own nipple and pow. What made the secret dear was that Eve had discovered it; it stood for the distance they’d crossed together, the naked, hardwon trust. Eve had exploited his weak spot as the key to a subtle submissiveness he was damn touchy about, spinning hushed theatricals of sexual bossiness which you wouldn’t want advertised in the light of day. He couldn’t say this to Anna, not yet. But he did the next best thing when he whispered in her ear, “Tell me what to do.” She looked at him quizzically. “Tell me,” he whispered again, eyes clamped as if fearing a slap, “for me.”

  As the notion took hold, Anna’s balance, her place on Jerome’s bed, grew as sure and instinctive as a cat’s on a ledge. She sat up. He laid his head in her lap as she stroked his naked torso. “Unzip,” she said. “Show me it all . . . ”

  It had been years since Anna slept all night with anyone, so the restiveness following her postcoital drowse was caused as much by the slumbering mass beside her as by her own racing thoughts. Whimsically giving herself to the likes of Jerome was a trick she’d played on herself, she thought, a willful debunking of all her lofty assertions. In a further irrationality, she vowed then and there to love this man forever. Anna’s hand was between her legs when she made this vow, not in a perverse variation on placing one’s hand on a Bible (though the notion occurred to her, evilly) but simply in a gesture of getting a grip on herself. Her abandon last night had carried shades of a breakdown, or, worse, of the full flowering of a frivolous nature. She was still tender where her hand touched. She promised herself to never, never, no matter what, change her life again.

  In the early dawn Jerome stirred and woke. He propped on one elbow and scanned Anna’s slim blanketed form. She nervously feigned sleep. With his free hand he gripped the blanket under her throat and drew it off her body, which lay then revealed for appraisal in the silver light, like gems on a jeweler’s felt. “Woof,” he said.

  She opened her eyes. “What might that mean?”

  “It means — ” he considered. “It means hallelujah.”

  She closed her eyes and tucked herself against him. “Woof,” she mused. “I like it.”

  When Anna woke again he was gone, which annoyed her, made her feel disconcertingly dumped. Saturday cartoons were on the TV downstairs. Jerome’s son was in the kitchen. “My dad still sleepin’?”

  “He seems to have left.”

  “Want pancakes?”

  She smelled them cooking. Brendan’s ease with her told her a strange woman’s presence here wasn’t unique. Like a cigarette before a firing squad, the revelation relaxed her a little. “Thanks.” They read newspapers and ate. Brendan put the dishes in the sink. “Where are you going?” she asked him.

  “Confession. Why, you wanna come?”

  “I should wait for your father.”

  “Did he say when he’d be back?”

  She shook her head, humiliated. “Is that significant?”

  “Could be a long time, is all. So,” his smile looked like his dad’s. “You game?”

  “I must say I’m impressed, going to confession on your own.”

  “I haven’t been for a while, but yeah, I’m the only one I know who does. The priest thinks I’m gonna be a priest some-day, that I’ve got the call.”

  “Is he right?”

  “I sure hope not. That’s one of the things I confess.”

  An hour later, Brendan and Jerome returned home at the same time. Anna had done the dishes and straightened the house. At her demand, Jerome explained where he’d been. “I had arrangements to square away on a thing. Last minute.”

  “For dope?” Brendan asked.

  “Yes. For dope.”

  “Fuck you, Dad. Fuck you.”

  “Look. Come tomorrow, it’s over, I’m out. So lay off.”

  A tense pause. Then the boy said, “The money just better be worth it.”

  “Brendan!” Anna said.

  Jerome laughed. “His father’s son.”

  “But you did promise, Dad. Jesus.”

  “This is strictly for Robby. For his bail they’re gonna want Christ knows. I gotta be there with cash — Anna, wait!”

  “Goodbye. It’s been swell.”

  “Apologize to her,” Brendan told Jerome. “For this dope thing, and for ditchin’ her before. She was totally lost this mornin’.”

  She stared at the boy.

  “I’m sorry, Anna. Never again.”

  She stared at Jerome.

  “Bren, she’s confused. Talk to her.”

  Brendan turned to Anna. “Me, I’m stuck with him. You have a choice.”

  “Jeez, don’t lay it on thick or nothin’.” Jerome took up his own defense, looking Anna in the eye. “It’s only me, remember?”

  “From what I’m hearing, that’s not good enough.”

  He went to her and grabbed her shoulders, kissed her on the mouth. She was mortified that Brendan was watching; she realized that was the point. Jerome gave a whispery growl. “You met my kid. I got some o’ what he’s got. That’s the best I can offer.”

  She stepped back and smoothed her blouse. Her skin felt electric underneath it. She stepped forward, put her arms around Jerome and kissed him. She’d lost all sense of herself. Her plan to become a Benedictine sister seemed less than capricious now, a high-minded fancy to add to countless others that had sustained her thus far, that had made her loneliness seem a god-given test, an affliction to be worn like a medal. Call it delusion. Pure vanity. Pure crap. She was nothing more than normal.

  She and Jerome held each other in the middle of the room. She scanned about for Brendan out of the corner of her eye, but he’d decorously left, persuaded that for the moment these two could take care of themselves.

  Twenty-Four

  That afternoon, in what had become a daily devotion, Willoughby sat on his boarding house bed tossing Jerome’s pistol from hand to hand till it mesmerized him like a hypnotist’s watch. The pistol had proved the ultimate mixed blessing, a thrill to discover and a terror to contemplate. Each moment that passed without its deployment was another confirmation of shame.

  And feeling ashamed, Willoughby began casting ab
out for an alternate path to the bloody objective he’d set himself to. He recalled that Sergeant Cochran hadn’t acted directly in Willoughby’s fragging. “I let it happen,” Jerome had said. Maybe Willoughby could do likewise, give the damn gun to somebody with gumption, then stand back and watch the chips fall. But whom? A homicidal nut would be nice. Which pointed, from all Willoughby had heard, to Jerome’s younger brother. Blow his brains out, shoot up the jailhouse — Robby would know what to do — and with Jerome’s own weapon to boot. How ironic, Willoughby thought. How sad.

  Fairly skipping the few blocks to the Penscot police station, he took a seat on a sidewalk bench across a picturesque street whose cobblestones, to Willoughby, looked like muffins in a baking pan or the tops of a lot of brown skulls. For about one minute he conjured marvelous strategies to smuggle the weapon to Robby inside. He was casing the joint as crooks do on TV. He was having fun.

  His happy minute ended when a young man walked by and paused at the street corner. The guy wore a widebrimmed cowboy hat and his pants were belted tight as a sausage link. His face when it turned looked severely distracted, the face of a dope or a genius. Willoughby saluted him in greeting, and the guy’s expression transformed as he briskly returned the gesture. He reminded Willoughby of how Willoughby must have looked to citizens in his hometown, a curious figure, half sorrowful, half-comic, shuffling along in a bubble of solitude and impossible plans. “What’s your name, pardner?” Willoughby asked apropos of the hat.

  The reply came proud and clear. Then the youth continued across the street to the police station.

  Willoughby was laughing to himself. Yahweh, for Christ’s sake. Everybody’s got an angle.

  Del Locke was on desk duty inside the station. The prisoner’s nephew Brendan Cochran was down the hall visiting his uncle. It was the boy’s first time here, fulfilling a family obligation as far as Del could tell. Watching them on the video monitor, he guessed from Robby’s wagging finger and Brendan’s dutifully nodding head that Robby was preaching again.

  Del’s brother strode through the station entrance. Scarcely acknowledging Del, Johnwayne headed down the hallway to the lockup cells. On the monitor, Del saw Brendan turn warily at Johnwayne’s approach. The boys began heatedly to argue, their muffled voices carrying to the front office. Robby beckoned them to the side of his cell. Del saw him take their fists in his and force them into a handshake. Del was moving to the door when Brendan pushed through it. He started to apologize, “My brother doesn’t understand — ”