Watch Your Mouth

by Daniel Handler

  “Sorry. Nice going, Dr. Glass.”

  “Call me Ben.” Ben leaned over to me and I saw suddenly the same curve in his lip as I saw in Cyn’s whenever she leaned in to kiss me. I found myself wondering if the curves tasted the same, father and daughter.

  “Nice going, Ben.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’m just—I want to tell you something.” He tied an apron over his crotch and turned on the faucet. “Before you start living here, with us, for three months or however long it is.”

  Something about the way the bassoons were murmuring made me not want to hear it. “Do you want me to dry, or maybe I should shake the tablecloth out?”

  Ben smiled sheepishly: I don’t mean to embarrass you. “I don’t mean to embarrass you. It’s just that—I think mothers are more protective of their children immediately. I mean right after . Birth. Because they came out of their bodies, you know? I mean, of course I had a hand in it.” He held up his hand; I pictured what it was. “It takes two, right?”

  “Tablecloth?” I asked. “Shake it out?” Or hose you down, Ben?

  “But I think the father feels more protective later, when she’s grown up. When she’s become a woman.” Ben turned off the faucet and wiped his hands so there was a damp spot in the middle of his apron. “Look, Joseph,” he said. “You seem like a very nice young man. Sheesh, now I’m making myself sound old. I mean you seem very nice. But I wanted to tell you—well, Cynthia is a very pretty girl. I look at her and I can see how you would look at her.” He walked over and leaned into me again. If I just stood on half-tiptoe—“I don’t mean it like that. You seem nice.” Suddenly I realized what all this was about—a fatherly talk. He was nervous but protective. All this sex blather was just his way of eventually arriving at the same old girlfriend-father point: Don’t you abuse my daughter. Many boyfriends were resentful of this kind of thing, but I understood it. I had the same feeling as I lay in bed with Cyn and felt the results of our sex evaporate, off to impregnate the air somewhere. The wetness on my leg—that had come from me. Mine. I could imagine how protective I’d feel if my fluid grew up, walked around, majored in something. Ben had obviously felt this way since he rolled out of Mrs. Glass’s legs flush with fatherhood. Or maybe Mrs. Glass, like her daughter, preferred to be on top; I could picture her lowering herself onto him like a wet guillotine.

  “What do you want to tell me, Ben?”

  “I can see what you see: she’s attractive.”

  The orchestra, in one big unison blast: BRUM!

  “Cyn?” I asked. “You find Cyn attractive?”

  “I don’t find her attractive. I know she’s attractive. She is attractive.”

  With each tense of the conjugation: BRUM! BRUM! BRUM!

  Obviously I was overtired. I reminded myself that Mrs. Glass had been glad Cyn was getting paid. Ben was probably saying protective, objective, progressive, exhaustive. Any of the words that rhyme, that over the sound of the faucet, wouldn’t be attractive. Over the roar of rinse-water it could have been anything. But the faucet was off, those of you who couldn’t find parking and are now guided into your seats by those pinpoint flashlights the ushers carry. The faucet was off. He said attractive. The opera was really starting up.

  “Are you talking about incest?” I asked, but Ben just turned and smiled at me like I hadn’t said anything.

  This is the first entrance of one of the orchestral leitmotifs that will keep popping up as the plot-knot is tied tighter: The Unknown Dread. Lurking in the backing of the aria like a rapist hiding behind the fire escape, The Unknown Dread is usually sounded by some trombones: a simple, sinister tune, dark and low like fog on a swamp. The Unknown Dread, abbreviated in music criticism journals as “T.U.D.,” will creep in and out of the orchestration whenever vague and hopefully-imagined trouble clouds the stage like hot water, filling pans that need to soak overnight.

  “Funny you should say that,” he said.

  “A laugh riot,” I said.

  “No, it is. Somebody was just talking—but they didn’t call it—what did they call it?”

  “Um,”

  “Intergenerational sex!” he said triumphantly. Hooray. “Somebody—actually, at the hospital, you won’t believe his name. Like the book—well, it doesn’t matter. He was saying that when there’s a new member of the family—well, not of the family, no, but say a daughter’s first—well, not first, of course, you and I both know that. But when a lover enters a family, it can make bare—what’s the term? Lay bare? Lay something. Anyway, a father’s—well, let’s not speak in such general terms. My own feelings for my daughter is what I’m talking about. If you think of it as intergenerational sex you can think of it in its true terms—genetic interchange. What did he say? A force of nature. If I were attracted to Cynthia it would be for a reason—the continuation of the species, probably. Which makes sense if you think about it. You agreed that my genes have made some wonderful-looking children. Well, Cynthia has half of my genetic material. If she and I were to mate, the genetic pool for our children would be smaller. So the chances of producing more beautiful children would actually be greater. See? Intergenerational sex actually makes a lot of sense from a genetic perspective.”

  In my stomach, the salmon turned like a kicking fetus. I tasted my own sour breath, and nougat. He wasn’t repeating something that somebody else had said: that was the oldest trick in the book, like calling a suicide hotline and pretending it’s vicarious: I have a friend who is thinking of killing himself. He’ s staring at a whole bottle of pills right now. If you think something yourself, and it’s something that would shock people, you pretend other people said it. “Having sex with your daughter,” I said, “doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “Dad!” Steven’s tenor is heard offstage.

  “Of course, of course,” he said dismissively. “Never mind. I see I’ve strayed here. You and Cyn will not sleep in the same room, is what I mean, because I have these feelings for her. They’re natural. Having sex with your daughter doesn’t make sense, of course not, not if you think of it as having sex, no. But even though it involves some of the same actions”—here he poked a finger—“it’s not the same thing as having sex. There’s an old saying: If I hit you on the head with a frying pan, would you call it cooking?” He picked up a frying pan and faced me.

  “Dad!”

  He blinked and dunked the frying pan into the sink. “I’m doing the dishes!” he called to Steven. “See what I mean, Joseph? But I’ve strayed. This isn’t what I wanted to tell you at all. I wanted to—I just mean, Cynthia is—well, a dish. And she’s as delicate as one. I mean a real one. To me. And I just want you to treat her—well, the way I would treat her. The way I do treat her. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Perfectly,” I said in sort of a growl, and then barged right on. “Because I understand what can happen to a dish—or anything made of ceramics. Mrs. Glass was telling me. Sometimes all the flaws can line up in the same way, and disasters can happen.” I swallowed. “Broken legs and such.”

  “DAD!”

  “I’m doing the dishes!” he bellowed, looking fiercely at me. I looked right back at him. I was feeling pretty adhesive—protective—myself. The wetness on my leg wasn’t the only thing in the bedroom that was mine. There was one dish he wasn’t going to do. I looked at my hand, which was turning red from gripping Gramma’s parfait glass. I put it down. My hand throbbed.

  Steven came into the kitchen wearing only shorts. “I just wanted to talk to you about something,” he said to his father sourly, and I watched the two of them. Steven’s chest had only a small triangle of downy hair on it, very light tan and descending lazily to a point below the waist of his pants. I was a little surprised at the amount of hair, as Steven seemed so young, but I remembered my own body back in high school, remembered each eager patch of new hair, perky as crabgrass.

  The Glass males began to argue over a compass of Ben’s that Steven had just broken. Sort of a corny closing
symbol, but it is an opera and I had no idea what direction the summer was going. I watched them bicker. Steven had the same curve in his lip, and the pattern of chest hair was probably genetic, too. That meant below his shirt the doctor probably had a thicker isosceles waiting for Cynthia to run her fingers through it. Picturing the two of them naked together made me grow trembling cold, even in the still-steaming kitchen. I felt a thin, nauseous ray of fear go through my torso, sharp and tiny like an icicle. A thorn of pain, a prick. Curtain.

  Act I, scene two

  Later that night. A cymbal crash lingers over lush strings as the curtain rises to reveal the sweltering attic of the Glass home. Joseph has agreed to sleep there for the duration of the summer, one floor above the rest of the family in a small triangular guest room. It seems to Joseph that when heat rises in the Glass home, it rises into this room. It feels like a kiln. There’s a double bed that dips down like a saggy diaper or a parenthesis. A small scuffed desk has been cleared for writing Joseph’s paper, waiting for books travelling in a box which will never arrive, though of course I didn’t know that yet. A small white bureau filled with empty drawers, a closet with the door half-open and wire hangers jingling from the lethargic breeze of the ceiling fan. Sometime tomorrow Joseph will unpack. Right now his duffels of clothing are on the floor, unzipped but unmolested. Which is more than we can say for the characters on the stage: Cyn and Joseph, naked on top of the bedsheets. The orchestra’s pastoral strings are soft enough that the audience can hear our sweaty skin sticking and slapping as we go at it.

  That night was an erotic milestone for me, one of those nights my mind would creep back to, years later and past curfew. It would play in the cramped porn theater in my mind at the slightest cue: when eating something that would run down my chin, when turbulence would make my airplane seat shake compulsively beneath my buttocks. I’d imagine it years later, alone in a dingy apartment, my days weighted by a lengthy recovery program. I’d imagine it months later, while Cyn and I were having sex that wasn’t as good. I’d imagine it days later when one of my campers, having not reached the age of total self-consciousness, reached up the leg of her denim shorts, the better to scratch a tiny bleeding bug bite where my knuckles were resting now.

  We were far away from one another, with our arms extended so that three of my fingers were inside her while her hand stretched to encircle me in a motion I always found breathtaking in its languid laziness. But not now—she was much shorter than me, so she could only grab my knee. The room was so hot that we were attempting maximum pleasure with minimum contact. Her inflamed sex was spread before me like one of those imported fruits you have to chop open to reach the edible part. Her fingers joined mine inside her, her chubby ring finger entwined with my index like sumo wrestlers. As her breathing got shorter and shorter her fingers contracted into a grappling hook; I faintly heard the crack of the skin on my knee breaking. I slipped on the sheets and fell face-first into her. We pulled our fingers out and I wrapped my hands around her like I was drinking soup. Once I open my mouth there’s no stopping me. Her hands flailed to reach me and her moans turned to shrieks; to the audience I’m sure it looks for a minute like I’m killing her. Then she pushed herself away from me and sat up. I looked at her and she put two fingers in my mouth; one tasted like her sex and on the other one I could feel the thick, unwieldy taste of my own blood. It was running down my leg. It smeared a patch of burgundy on Cyn’s dark skin when she pushed me to her and I opened the bedstand drawer for the required erotic catching mitt. After a brief and painful misthrust I was inside her. I was grateful to the family for taking me in this summer. Neither of us wanted to be underneath another body in this overheated attic so we stayed sitting up, Cyn’s breasts swinging against mine like damp balloons every time we moved. Our mouths were hot, so kissing was uncomfortable, but we kept our mouths open and close to one another until our breathing found a sharp rhythm. She moved her hands from behind her back—I saw three of her fingernails had specks of blood beneath them from my knee—and around me, urging me on, and in. All the prepositions were in use: on, in, out, along, around, amongst, and as one of her fingers dipped lower and lower down the center of my back, through. Her finger was just barely inside me, like she was pushing a button. Which she might as well have been: we both lost complete control, pushing so fast it was more like shuddering, shuddering so completely it was more like a seizure, seizuring so hard that the orchestra has to extend its budget and hire some additional percussionists just for these ten measures or so.

  My ears were still ringing when I finally wilted and the juice of our efforts flooded beneath us in a sudden wet stain. Tomorrow we’d feel the same thing in broad daylight during the Welcoming Water Balloon Fight at Camp Shalom. Just then we slithered apart, leaning against opposite bedposts like prizefighters mid-round. My whole crotch was water-logged, as was Cyn’s, although my blood had apparently evaporated during the excursion, or maybe just rubbed in, lotion-like. My knee stung. The sheets were a liquid mess. “Next time we have to do this in your room,” I said. “I can’t believe I have to sleep on all this.”

  “It’ll feel good,” Cyn said. Her leg was stretched out into the air making a faint giraffe-shadow on the wall. I watched it chew as she wiggled. “Plus, we can’t do it in my bedroom. It’s between my parents’ and Steven’s. They can hear everything. You’ll be able to hear everything, too. My room is directly below this one.”

  “Who slept here?” I asked, looking around. “This feels like half a bedroom and half an attic.”

  “Well, it’s all attic,” Cyn said, “but it’s been a bedroom too. My parents put my old bed in it when they redid my room, back in eighth grade. I slept up here while the workmen built those shelves and laid down carpet and everything. In fact”—here she slid over to me, draping her sweaty hair on my shoulder and both hands in my lap like a napkin—“in fact, it was here that I first heard my parents having sex.”

  “Really? Sleeping all those years in the next room and everything?”

  “Well, I was in eighth grade, so maybe I never knew what I was hearing. Or never paid attention. I just remember sleeping in this room and hearing my parents directly below me, in my room. I think they were celebrating the new soft carpet or something.” She stretched; the giraffe found a mate. “It was weird, figuring it out. It was about this time of year, so it was really hot.”

  It was indeed. I squinted at her shifting legs, feeling her float around me like the haze of humidity. The giraffes necked above us on the wall as her voice got hazy, her body got hazy, the whole room clouded over. “It was this sort of muted—cushioned thumping. And I was right above them. The sound was so obvious I felt like I was floating right above them. And then I just realized that thing you realize eventually—that your parents had sex and that’s how you were born. I mean, when you think of your mom you don’t think of her having sex. You know? At least, my mom. My dad, yes, for some reason I can picture him having sex, but my mom just seems like my mom, maternal and everything. But I’m just telling you”—here the rhythm of the aria is broken, so this thematic phrase won’t be missed even by the densest of ticket-holders—“you can hear everything that goes on in my room from this room. The room is right on top of my room. The bed is right on top of my bed. That’s all.”

  She stopped talking and we looked lazily at each other from across the bed, our come between us like a disputed lake. My body was warmed through at her sex talk; as the house creaked around us in the cooling air I could feel the summer evening’s consummation of the entire house. My room was above hers, my bed above hers, and as the floor-boards crackled it felt like our separate bedrooms were going to go at it with the same ferocity of their inhabitants. Cyn watched my interest pique with a wry smile before reaching over and touching the tip with her still-damp finger like she was seeing if the cookies were done. Shrugging she walked over to the closet. On her back I could see the picket fence of leaning against the headboard.

  “See?�
�� she said. “There are still some of my clothes here. Just the stuff I never wore.” She pulled out something covered in plastic wrap, muted pink like a fetal mouse. “Gramma gave me this. It made me look like a scoop of strawberry ice cream.”

  “Good enough to eat?” I said.

  “No,” she said, putting it back. “More like very cold and fattening.”

  “But able to melt at any time.”

  “Shut up. And here’s my bright green vest that was all the rage for ten minutes. And this dress with matching shawl that somebody brought me from Israel. Oh, look! My green flowered bat mitzvah dress! I looked like a shrub.” She stepped into the closet and bent over like somebody waiting to be spanked. She bobbed her head back up, flamingo-like, wearing a bright orange ski cap. “What do you think of this?”

  “Very nice,” I said. “You look like a ski-bunny centerfold.”

  She grabbed it off her head and pulled out something else. “Oh, I love this one.” I couldn’t get a look at it because in a brief blur of color she tossed it off the hanger and onto her body, her arms sputtering for a moment as it went over her head like she had fallen into quicksand. Then she turned around and I saw her in it. I’m not going to describe the cut of the dress, or even the color which I still see on my eyelids whenever I’m tossing and turning, because I feel very strongly that a costume designer should be given as free a rein as possible in designing an excruciatingly sexual garment. It wasn’t absurdly obvious like something black that raises curtains at the thigh, or some strict stripe at waist-level that offers the breasts like a pushy caterer. Off the body it would look like something respectable. It covered everything, but like wrapping paper you can’t wait to tear off. You can imagine what it looks like. It looks like what you want. I know that deep down you know what I’m talking about.

  I felt my lips drizzle with the juice of my gasp. “Wow. That—you look—why don’t you ever wear that?”