Games to Play After Dark

by Sarah Gardner Borden

  “You must talk about it with your husband.”

  She shrugged.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  She shook her head.

  “He doesn’t know?”

  “It just never came up. It just hasn’t. The other night, the Robin night, I thought about getting into it. But I don’t know; then it just felt weird, after all this time. And I wondered if I told him, maybe he’d just think I was making excuses. Maybe I am.” She put her head on Jack’s chest and ran her fingers over his abdomen. “What’s this?”

  “What?”

  “This scar. Knife fight? From your days in prison?”

  “Oh, that. Hernia.”

  “I hate for you to think badly of him,” she said.

  HOURS LATER she poured herself a cup of Jack’s frighteningly hot percolator coffee. “Thank you,” she told him.

  “What, the coffee? You’re so welcome.”

  “No. I’m going to go. I’m going to go home now. And I guess just see what happens.”

  She took 95, relatively quiet this early in the morning. Another Springsteen song played, one of his early ones, about the boardwalk and amusement parks and freaky sideshows, before he started writing about cars and dreams. Last summer, the circus had come to town. Kate had watched the girl on the trapeze, watched and watched. The girl’s body tensed as she grabbed the swing, her muscles readying under leotard and tights. Robin pulled at Kate’s elbow. “Mommy, Mommy.” A pink cloud of cotton candy had toppled into her lap. Kate shushed her and shoved the sticky stuff back down on the stick, like a hat. She watched the girl, anxious and excited, with a sensation that was somewhere between wanting to be her and wanting to fuck her. This was the problem. She wanted to fall and catch herself by her knees, to be skilled, and to express her freedom exquisitely—she wanted to be the one admired and overpowered, but she wanted to hurt the girl and hold her down too—she wanted to be a man and screw her, dominate her; she wanted that supremacy and that messy release.

  She pulled into her driveway ten minutes before eight. Lila and Robin had yet to leave for school. Kate called the respective classrooms, spoke with the respective teachers. “Movie!” Lila cried, and, “Popcorn!” Robin hollered. They drove to the video store and rented a movie and watched it. They made popcorn. They made ornament strings with the leftover. They made more hard-boiled eggs and pushed them magically into the milk bottle. They made a giant mess that Kate found herself able to live with for an entire week.

  KATE RETURNED to the Rose Center and assisted in the holiday decoration. Colored lights went up in the windows, an artificial tree in the common room. Pregnant Brittany gave birth to a baby girl. She returned to the shelter from the hospital and triumphantly displayed the infant, whom she’d named Latrina.

  “Latrina?” Kate said to Ruby. They were filing case reports in the unventilated office, which gave off the same radiator and foot smell as the budgeting classroom.

  “I think she made it up.”

  “I figured. But does she not know the word ‘latrine’?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Does she not realize she’s basically named her baby ‘toilet’?”

  “Don’t say anything. She’s very proud.”

  “Oh, jeez.”

  Ruby put her finger to her lips.

  “Okay, then. Latrina it is.”

  Kate baked cupcakes for the holiday party and had Lila and Robin decorate them with silver sprinkles. She packed them into the Tupperware container and brought them to the party. She sat on the couch and drank a ginger ale and played with Latrina. She laid the baby on her knees and clapped the tiny feet together.

  Brittany had found a job with a cleaning agency and a basement apartment for herself and the baby. She planned to leave the shelter in six weeks. Eva, on the other hand, had decided to return to Nikolai and the Bridgeport apartment they had shared.

  “Why?” Kate whispered to Ruby.

  “Food, rent, health insurance …” Ruby ticked off on her fingers.

  “I’m not criticizing. But if Brittany can do it …”

  “Frankly, I think she’s jealous of that girl.”

  On her way out, Kate ran into Eva smoking a cigarette. Eva held the pack out to Kate and tilted her head.

  “You sure? I know they’re expensive these days.”

  “Of course. Of course.” Eva leaned forward and lit Kate’s Marlboro with her own.

  Kate inhaled and threw her head back and blew out smoke with her lower lip.

  “Oh, God, that’s good.”

  They smoked and leaned against the building.

  “So pretty, the stars,” Eva said.

  “Very pretty.”

  “You know I am leaving?”

  “Ruby told me.”

  “You don’t like it.”

  “No,” Kate said. “I don’t like it.”

  “He wants wife. If I stay away he will marry her, the girl. Russian men, they like to be married.”

  “Hmm. Yes. I bet.”

  “I am happy. He is my family. Family should be together. Father, mother, child.” Eva conducted with her Marlboro: a brief aria of a happy family.

  “You won’t always want him,” Kate said.

  “I want him,” Eva said.

  “But in a couple of years you won’t.”

  “I will want him always, always, to the end.”

  “Well,” Kate said. “Then the end might be right around the corner.”

  She threw the Marlboro to the ground and stepped on it and walked away and got into her car.

  25

  HE SHOWERED and exfoliated and applied lotion and dried her hair. She dressed and smeared on scented lip gloss and drove to Jack’s apartment. He opened the door and she dropped her purse and car key and kissed his face and his neck and pushed him over to the couch.

  “So,” she said after a bit. “Anyway. What do you do for the holiday?”

  “Well, I used to go to my parents’. Then my ex’s parents’. But, death, divorce. So, not much of anything.”

  “Oh, that’s sad!”

  “Don’t worry about it. Hanukkah is kind of a minor holiday anyhow.” He ran his hands up and down her back. “And you? Tree, presents, the whole thing?”

  “Yes. Then we all go to my mother-in-law’s. Yuck. She makes Cornish game hens. So we each have our own individual hen and no one shares. For Thanksgiving too. She thinks it’s festive but it’s not; it’s like the sorriest thing ever.”

  “Hang on.” He retrieved his pants and went into the bedroom and returned with a manila folder. “Look what I found.”

  He held it out to her and she took it and opened it. Together, they looked at what appeared to be lecture notes.

  The familiar handwriting sprang out over the yellow paper. “These are my father’s,” she said. She groped around for her T-shirt and underwear and slid back into them.

  “They’re yours if you want ’em.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Oh, cheer up. Look. That stuff that happened, it doesn’t have anything to do with, you know, his mind. That was just how he was with me and then just a small part of how he was with me. And again, also, it was what he was used to. The way he grew up.”

  “Seems worse with a girl.”

  She smoothed out the paper. “Notes on the Feynman diagram.”

  “If you don’t want them, someone will.”

  “No. I want them. Thank you.” She slipped them back into the folder. “I remember him being really into Feynman.”

  “It kind of goes with the territory.”

  “Yes. I know that, at least. But he wrote that piece on the whole atom-bomb incident.”

  “The incident? The Manhattan Project. World War Two, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima?”

  “Yes, yes. Don’t tease. He was writing about how Feynman didn’t know what they were making, or rather, what they were making it for.”

  “No, he knew. Did you
read the piece? That wasn’t your dad’s angle.”

  “But I thought he was shocked. Feynman. When they dropped the bomb.”

  “No, no.”

  “But—”

  Jack got up and took a book from his shelf and opened it. He searched for a page. “In this letter to his mother? After the experiment, the testing? He wrote, ‘Everything was perfect but the aim. Next time it’ll be headed for Japan.’ ”

  Rudy, on the money after all!

  Jack said, “You know, initially he thought of it, the building of the bomb, as a defensive act, as defense against the Germans. He knew the information was out there; he knew that his team could do it, and that if they could, so could the Germans. It was World War Two, he was Jewish, for what that’s worth.”

  “But then …”

  “The Germans pulled out of the war. But by then, as he claimed, at least, he’d forgotten why exactly he’d decided to take the project on in the first place. And by then they—the team at Los Alamos—were so caught up in it. They’d put all this time and work into it and … just, in a fundamental way, wanted it to succeed. Wanted to finish the job.”

  “The job.”

  “Morally, yes … questionable. But the whole endeavor became less and less about the reasons behind it and more and more about the thing itself, until that was the only thing. Turning matter into energy.”

  “Thank you, Professor.”

  “You’re so welcome, dear girl.” Jack returned the book to the shelf and himself to the couch.

  “All this time, I’ve been …” She shook her head. “Misinformed.” She traced the shape of his ear with her fingers. “Well. Anyway. Tell me a story. Something about when you were a kid.”

  “Let’s see.” He lay back on the couch and put his feet in her lap. “I had this friend, Rick Roberson. His dad was just … completely bonkers. Once he took us somewhere, maybe to the zoo or to an amusement park, Riverside or something … I’m not sure. Somewhere far enough so we had to take the highway. He’d packed a lunch, and at some point, a ways into the drive, he pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and we all got out and had a picnic.”

  “That’s dangerous!”

  “I’d say so.”

  “So. The rest of the break? What’s on the agenda? Besides this or that landmark research project?”

  “Well. Hopefully, hanging out with you. Then I wrap things up here. Then, Sydney.”

  “Australia?”

  “Yep. Sabbatical.”

  She flinched and stared at him. “What?”

  “I mentioned it when you were here, didn’t I?”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Swear I told you.”

  “Absentminded professor.” She looked down at his feet and put a hand on his toes.

  “I’m renting this place to a guy from the University of Sydney. I’m renting his place and he’s renting my place.”

  “Just like that movie with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet.”

  “Exactly like that.”

  She pushed off of him and got up. She found the rest of her clothes. She located the manila folder and slipped it into her purse.

  “Don’t go yet.”

  “If you really wanted to you could change things around. Right? I don’t mean to put too fine a point on it. But you could, right?”

  “You’re married,” he said. “It’s not like …”

  “For me it is,” she said. She pretended to look through her purse for the car key, which lay in plain sight, glinting up from between two floorboards.

  “Come back here for a minute. Come on. Let’s hear a story about you.”

  “You’ve heard them all.”

  “Stay anyhow.”

  “I’m going to go home and read my book.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “Just this book.”

  “Called?”

  “I don’t know. Anniversary something, or something anniversary. I found it in my mom’s bookshelf. Someone must have given it to her, because it’s not the kind of book she’d buy for herself.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “A guy and a girl. Young, married. They break up. They get back together.”

  “That sounds very dull.”

  “The best books usually sound that way.”

  “If I were going to write a book,” he said, “a real book, not an academic book, I would write about—okay, how’s this—”

  “Bye. Happy Hanukkah. And New Year and all that.” She picked up her purse and pulled her coat on.

  “Faculty girl grows up, falls in love, gets married, moves to the suburbs, has a couple of kids.…”

  “Well, that does sound dull.”

  “Or this. Woman with abusive father—”

  “Let’s write a story about you.”

  “Already plenty of stories about me. The Professor, for one. Then the Jack stories. ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’ ‘Jack and Jill,’ ‘The House That Jack Built’ …”

  “Honestly, ‘abusive’ is a word you shouldn’t abuse.”

  “Volatile father, jackass husband, gets married, has kids. Meets brilliant older man. Experiences sexual renaissance. Then, let’s see …”

  “That story—I would guess that story does not end happily.”

  “No?”

  “Those kinds of stories never do.”

  ALL AROUND HER, objects (recently purchased magazines, certain articles of clothing and jewelry) began to take on the sheen of heartache—and not just new things, but old things too, as if her whole life had become associated with him. She’d been all right without him (had she?) mere weeks ago, but now desolation met her at every juncture of her day. Shopping for groceries, driving to the Rose Center, she thought about Jack’s shaggy armpits, his scarred abdomen, his pale, ropy arms. How flat everything else seemed.

  She finished her charmingly optimistic novel. She read through her father’s notes on the Feynman diagram, as if they might make some kind of sense. They didn’t.

  Tidying up, organizing the puzzles and games and Woodkins and Webkinz and dolls, Kate recalled the napkin-clad Barbie from the gallery, the celluloid gang bang, the copulating couple. Jack had likely known what he’d wanted from her even then. He’d wanted it and gone after it and gotten it and moved past it and left her there in the middle of it, still wanting it and unable to proceed without him. The attraction and attachment were specific to him, accidental as he was, as she knew he was—still, the attachment persisted in her body. It seemed as though they, Jack and she, had been involved in two separate, parallel experiments: his linear and goal-oriented, hers circuitous and obscure. His completed, his energies released and deposited in her; hers still in its early stages, now interrupted. The sweetly libidinous urges expanded painfully within her, finding no way out and, at any rate, nowhere to go. It was a sudden stifling of her biological inclinations, like something lying down and dying inside of her.

  She read her father’s notes again and this time she understood. Something, if not the notes themselves. That sexuality and autonomy—hers, at least—were at cross-purposes, the former constantly distracting from the latter. That her father had simply wanted her to identify wholly with something reliably abstract.

  26

  ATE AND RUDY GO STEADY for the next three years, through her junior year at Whitney Hall and the year he takes off before college. But Kate is no longer fawned over at dinner and Ella Anderson greets her coolly from her stance at the kitchen island. In Rudy’s room and in the backseat of his car Kate develops certain techniques—she learns to twist as if she’s opening the jar, and to wrap her hands around his shaft and link her fingers together. She learns to make a ring with her thumb and index finger at the base. They borrow a cucumber from the Anderson family refrigerator; when finished with it they return it to the crisper and Ella slices it up for the salad. They rent a porn movie from the sleazy video store where no one they know ever goes. Rudy is reluctant to give his phone number, but the clerk insists:
“In case there’s an emergency, like the video is seven days late or something.”

  Kate’s effect on Rudy, what she produces with her mouth and tongue and hands, is divinely gratifying to her, exhilarating and nifty in the manner of a science project—eggs frying on pavement, soap in the microwave, the illuminating power of crossed wires. Swearing and sighing from him, shouts of joy from the Valeries. And sex, once they get to that, is another delightfully reactive pastime. She feels about Rudy the way she does about a certain yellow cake sold at the Main Street bookstore café: yellow cake with chocolate frosting. The cake is dense and porous and textured and damp. Not terribly sweet, though the chocolate frosting is very sweet. A slab of frosting dissolves between two layers, leaking into the spongy pores so that the top of the bottom layer and the bottom of the top become saturated. It is necessary to cut the cake with the side of her fork and then look at it before eating it, necessary to observe the textured insides with the chocolate smear. She has eaten the cake for breakfast, for lunch, for a snack, for dinner. She feels the same hunger for Rudy. He is satisfying and pleasing in every way. He is satisfying yet never satisfying enough. Having had a little she wants more of the same. And the cake is volatile and meaningful as well, deliciously fraught. Possibly it resembles a cake baked for some childhood birthday. Possibly Rudy resembles her father, somehow, or her mother, or a character in a book, or a line from a song. She doesn’t know. But in his arms she feels the pleasure of a dream—blurred but particular, opaque but revealing, a pleasure that has nothing to do with Rudy but is, at that moment, impossible without him.

  Usually Kate returns at midnight from the Andersons’ to find the first floor shut down, the refrigerator humming in the dark, her parents’ bedroom door closed. But sometimes her father is up and about, listening for her. And then sometimes he stops her as she fetches her glass of water from the kitchen. Though he knows, he’ll ask where she’s been. He’ll ask after Rudy, after the others. He’ll point out the time or Kate’s chafed jaw or her general disarray. The kitchen is their place, as if compromised now, as with some outbreak of the skin, susceptible to a certain altered chemistry.