June blushed. She liked the sound of that, your man. “They wouldn’t be after him,” she said.
“Dunno,” said Esther. “He got in a fistfight with some guy before getting wasted and driving his car into the trees, or so it’s being told. He’s going from here to the courthouse, I imagine. Boy, they can have him.”
That day he’d sworn at the Jell-O, calling it a green mound of butt fat. And he’d demanded a second dinner after eating only the meat out of the stew of the first one. June wished he wouldn’t do such things, but a courthouse? She couldn’t believe it would ever come to that. He was a public figure, after all, practically a celebrity. In her mind, she’d imagined that he would soon be discharged from the hospital, and they would begin dating, and everything would blossom from there. She tried to sound reasonable now to Esther. “He’s just a little rough around the edges, plus all this pain he’s in. What he wants is a little love, I think.”
Esther breathed out a long sigh. She had four clipboards under one arm and an assortment of plastic tubs in another. “Oh honey, you got that wrong,” she said. “He wants jailing and then some.”
—
JUNE WOULD BRING him cold cans of cola, chunky crab salad sandwiches, brownies she’d baked, but then Craig would talk about marijuana as though she’d missed an important part of the menu.
“You got any weed?” he’d asked.
“Weeds?”
“Pot, marijuana. Don’t tell me you never heard of it. You can put some in these brownies next time you come. Would you do that for me, babe? Add a little reefer?”
June hesitated. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said.
“Hash? Hell, I’ll take some Lebanese if that’s all there is, but bring something to kill a bit of the reality around here.” He made a gesture toward the room, then looked at her pleadingly.
“I’ll bring beer,” she said, though she knew alcohol was forbidden, possibly even dangerous with his medications.
“That’s a start. But I could give you a phone number to call—”
No numbers, no buying drugs. He gave up after a few tries with her, the expression on his face as though he’d been trying to teach a dog to ride a bicycle.
She decided his behavior was all because of his painkillers. She’d spent an afternoon in the library, looking up the effects of certain analgesics and barbiturates on the brain; she’d read the fine print on the drugs he’d been prescribed. The warnings included dementia, mood swings, all sorts of antisocial behavior, not to mention various physical problems. You couldn’t expect him to act “normal” when he was taking all these drugs. And anyway, sometimes he was very sweet.
“You tell Bobbie I’m thinking of her,” he said. “She’s a nice girl.”
“Oh, she is,” agreed June. “I couldn’t have asked for a nicer daughter.”
“And so resourceful.”
June thought about that. “Yes, that is true. She makes dinner most evenings these days. And does the laundry, too.”
“You pay her for that?”
“Pay her? What, like an allowance?”
“She might need some cash. You ever ask her? Whether she’s got enough cash? I’ve got a feeling that girl would be good with money if she had some. Ask her if she has any money.”
The way he said these things made June wonder if he were passing judgment on her mothering skills. It was true that she hadn’t recently asked Bobbie anything about money or what her needs might be, and she realized now that this had been an oversight. A teenage girl had to have money for clothes and makeup and that sort of thing. It was kind of Craig to point this out.
“I guess I ought to bring up the subject,” she said.
“Yeah, tell her I was wondering how she was getting on with money—that I was concerned. And that at some point maybe we should talk about it.”
June couldn’t think why he’d want to talk to Bobbie about money. And she couldn’t understand the way his mood seemed to plunge even as his body healed. But she did what she was told and asked Bobbie whether she thought she had enough money.
“Enough money?” Bobbie said, as though June had asked if she were planning to rob a bank. “Who wants to know?”
“Craig wants to know,” June answered. “I think he’s worried that you don’t get an allowance.”
—
ONE NIGHT, DURING the last minutes of visiting hours, he said, “You look forward to coming here, don’t you?”
June was gathering her car keys, slipping her feet back into her pumps, readying to leave. She thought he’d been asleep and had been moving as quietly as she could when she heard his voice. “All the damned day long this is what you think about,” he continued.
She looked at him, unable to contradict him but refusing to agree.
He said, “You can’t wait to get here every day, sit yourself down next to me.”
She made a sound like a laugh, but she wasn’t laughing. She didn’t understand why he was reducing her caring for him to some kind of obsession. But perhaps he had it right. Call it weakness, call it loneliness, call it the need for distraction, she’d grown to love the routine of visiting him at the hospital. Her nightly visits were the closest thing she’d had to a romance in many years and she felt like a girl again, walking beneath the banks of umbrella lamps in the parking lot, her heels making clicks on the lighted sidewalks, coming through the great glass entrance of the hospital with its atmosphere of quiet urgency, taking the elevator to his floor. It felt important, like going to an office, except there was more to it. A romantic edge that made her eager. It gave her something, she didn’t know what.
“What you’re thinking about is getting here,” Craig said now. “The whole day long, in your mind, you’re always on your way.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. But it was true. From the moment she rose, showering and washing and dressing, she was thinking about what would happen at the other end of the day. Through all the hours at the store, serving customers, sorting stock, counting out the register, while driving back in the car, scrubbing off the pencil lines and powdered shadows from the backs of her hands where she’d demonstrated to customers the difference between matte rose and frosted rose, or sepia compared to dark rust, she was an arrow searching for a target, flying through the hours until at last she could land at the hospital, at his bedside.
“Believe it or not, I’m a very busy lady,” she said, smiling at him with her eyes.
His response was immediate and damning. “But you don’t care about all that,” he said.
“I do!” she said, but it sounded unconvincing. Weekends, tidying the house, handwashing her dresses, hanging damp stockings over doorknobs, bleaching her yellowing bras. She’d sit in the bathroom with an angled hair-dye brush, dabbing Clairol onto her roots, looking at her face that seemed with each passing summer a little more overcooked. Weekdays, the mad rush to work, the endless standing and stooping and smiling behind the showcases of cosmetics. She sweated in the heat from the spot lamps above. She hid her freckles and the pockmarks of her acne beneath Gold Beige (44) or Natural Buff (60), her stomach swaddled in her skirt, the glint of her earrings reflected in the countertop glass. She was always smiling, always inviting, always ready, and she did not know any longer for what, if not seeing Craig at the end of the day.
“You better be quiet now or I won’t come tomorrow,” she said.
“Oh, you’ll come,” he said, rolling his tongue over his gums.
He reached to touch her. It seemed almost as though he were trying to touch her chest, but she intercepted, taking his fingers in her palm and stroking them.
“Not if you talk to me like that.” She was trying to gain some ground, give him a gentle scolding without discouraging him altogether. “I won’t come back if you’re going to talk to me like that, no sir,” she said, but she was smiling, trying to make it better. His fingers were thick and warm, filling her palm. Surely he wanted her here with him at the hospital. She couldn’t have been
mistaken about that.
“Talk to you like what?” he said slowly. His one eye blinked at her. “I’m only making an observation.”
“But you shouldn’t say—”
“I already did.”
She looked down at the floor. He was really very rude, she thought. She wondered why she was so glad he held her hand, but she was glad. It thrilled her, even though it was so little a gesture after all her greater ones. She accepted it, cherished it, knowing all the while that she gave it greater importance than she ought to.
“Close the curtain there,” he instructed. He meant the cotton blind across the wall of windows on one side of the room. The blind had a coating like a shower curtain and was made from material that did not hang like cloth. It was a flimsy covering that was meant to offer a degree of modesty to the patient or perhaps only to block the lights of the hall.
“Don’t the nurses usually do that?”
He shook his head. “Go. Do it. Nobody will care.”
She rose, watching his face. He wasn’t angry, not exactly, not yet. She got the feeling that the things he asked her to do were a kind of test to see if she cared about him. To see where her loyalties lay. She went to the window that faced into the corridor. Outside, a few feet away, was the nurses station: a desk, a lamp, a standing fan, a blond nurse currently on the telephone. She saw, too, that the nurse was not alone. There was an orderly, leaning on one end of the long desk, drinking coffee and watching the nurse as she spoke with the caller. Evidently the orderly had brought the nurse coffee, too, because it steamed on the ledge above the desk. Most of the ceiling lights had been switched off for the night and the desk was now lit by a lamp. June watched the nurse take a sip of coffee, then finish the phone call. She watched the orderly waiting, his face registering an attraction that the nurse, too, had taken in. June could see the way the nurse smiled at him, and the kind of composed anticipation that the orderly returned. Locked into each other, they had no interest in what was happening in Craig’s room or in even glancing her way as she stood stiffly at the window, unsure of what Craig was asking of her, or why he wanted the curtain drawn.
“Go on, close it,” he said.
She pushed the curtain together. She could feel Craig’s gaze on her, on her legs, on her ass. She sensed he had a plan, and that she mustn’t interfere with that plan. She understood, too, that the moony persistence that the orderly displayed toward his nurse was of a different type to that of Craig, who she heard moving in the bed, adjusting his position. She wanted to turn around, to deflect whatever was starting between them, but she didn’t dare.
She heard him now, the deep, slow voice, the determined instruction. “Take off your blouse,” he said.
She could not say a word, not to protest, not to agree.
She heard Craig speak again. “Undo the front,” he said. “Unbutton it.”
Her lips were dry, her palms wet. She felt a bead of perspiration run down her side. She had never before taken off a stitch of clothing in public. It wasn’t the sort of thing she did.
“Nobody can see.”
“Even so—”
“Please,” he said.
She did not know why he was choosing this moment. She wondered if the crash, the near-death experience, had altered Craig’s views on such matters. Maybe he needed to feel attractive. Maybe he needed confirmation that she saw him as vital and desirable. She thought about his eye. She thought about the hole drilled in his head. She undid the first few buttons of her blouse. There were things she wanted to discuss with Craig; their age difference, for one. He must be aware that she was in her mid-thirties—she had a fifteen-year-old daughter, after all. But she didn’t know exactly how old he was, and surely they should talk about that before sex got started. Which was now, apparently.
The remaining buttons were now undone and the folds of her blouse hung loosely at her sides.
She heard Craig again, his voice low. “Turn around,” he said.
She glanced at her watch; it was a quarter to eleven. If anyone walked in, they would know what was going on. She looked down at her chest, at the freckled sternum, the plain white bra. If she turned now there was no going back. He would see her naked, or half naked, and this would be the new expectation every time they met. Did that matter? Did she expect they’d keep seeing each other after he was discharged from the hospital if there was no sex? Anyway, she’d wanted sex, hadn’t she? But she’d wanted, at the very least, to kiss him first.
She breathed in and out slowly. She did not want to do what she was about to do. Nobody was forcing her. Nobody could make her do a thing. And yet here she was, as though her body did not belong to her, as though she had no will at all. She had watched herself do as Craig asked, unbuttoning the blouse, and now she crossed her hands in front of her and swung toward him, as he had directed.
He was sitting up, his legs apart. She could see how he stared at her breasts, his face hard with concentration. It had been a long time since she’d been with a man. She’d forgotten the energy that came with desire, the flush on the skin, the intensity in the man’s eyes, the muscles, flexed and waiting. She opened her mouth and a little breath escaped, she felt a charge move up her spine.
“Move your hands,” he said.
She didn’t know if she could. She pleaded with herself to do as he asked but she wished that if they had to do this—to do this right now—she could lie down and let him move over her and be somewhere private. She didn’t think she should undress so close to the window. She didn’t think she should be so brazen.
“Craig, I don’t know if—”
“Pull up your bra.”
It was too much. She almost said so. It wouldn’t be difficult to get her blouse straight, grab her handbag, and leave, would it? What could he do? If he yelled at her, he would have the nurses to contend with. Esther would set him straight. Put that thing away, she’d say. And keep your hands to yourself in my hospital! That was the kind of scolding he needed. But she was not Esther, and he would not be interested in her if she were. She looked at him, his bandaged head poking toward her, his good eye fixed on her chest. She wasn’t a small-breasted woman. The breasts were certainly more impressive in their bra, shaped, blooming proudly outward instead of flopping down. If she lifted them out of the bra cups, they would dangle unnaturally unless she removed her bra altogether, which she did not want to do now, right here, just feet from the orderly and nurse on the other side of the glass, whose own lovemaking was so far confined to words and glances.
But she did not want to lose that expression on Craig’s face, his longing for her, his attention. All her life she’d craved just this kind of smoldering look from a man, this raw desire. Yes, she had wanted other things, too: friendship, security, a home. But at the heart of it all, at the very center, she needed to feel as though she fulfilled this very necessary, authentic desire.
She drew the straps of her bra down her shoulders a few inches, caught in the embrace of his stare. Now he could see her full breasts. Uncaged from the bra they were strangely shaped, with nobbly areas around the nipples, and wide, dark areolas. The angle of her nipples was low, facing down; a disappointment, perhaps. It would have been so much better for him not to see her breasts like this, in the unforgiving hospital light, with the humming of machines and the silent dripping IVs and the people just outside. But here they were, and nothing could be more clear than the promise of her naked breasts, and her willingness to disrobe at his request.
“Touch yourself,” he said.
She wondered if he were only joking, that at any moment he would relax his gaze and tell her that he was sorry and had been wrong to say anything like that. Maybe he’d explain that he’d gotten carried away because he found her sexy, holding his apology up like a bouquet of roses. Button up and give me a hug, he might say. Wouldn’t any decent man say that? Button up and give me a hug, if you can find a way of doing that with all these tubes.
But that wasn’t what he said, though
she longed for these words, as well as for his embrace. She knew that with the arm in traction and the crack in the pelvis, and the way his head was bandaged and unmovable, there wasn’t much chance she’d be able to hug him, but those facts didn’t stop her wishing for it. She wanted him to stand beside her, lean and tall and fully able once again, and for her to reach up and bury her face in his neck, to feel the heat of his body against her own, to press into the architecture of his bones and muscles, and to feel him press into her. But she needed all this to take place in privacy.
“Put your fingers on your nipples,” he said.
“I don’t think I can—”
“Yes, you can. Do it. Do it for me.”
She stared down at her breasts. The fluorescent light caught the blueness of the veins that crisscrossed and all the little imperfections of her skin. They were enormous, her breasts, but they’d taken on a lot of the extra calories she’d been storing and the weight caused them to hang like skirts above her stomach. Still, she imagined that was a turn-on for a man. Big breasts, that was a plus, surely? Even so, she couldn’t bear to touch them, to pretend that touching herself that way gave her pleasure. She was already imagining how in the future she would remember this moment, standing on the cold linoleum tiles, exposing herself. She decided a good compromise would be to hold her breasts, covering them as she did so, but in a manner that might fool Craig into thinking she was getting some pleasure from it. She thought she could manage that much.
She cupped each one in a hand, then slowly lifted them up. She did not dare look at Craig, fearing his disapproval. There were secrets to men she had never understood. What had moved him to insist that she show her breasts in so unromantic a setting? And why would he want her to fondle herself, as though his touch was wholly unnecessary? There was the question, too, of where exactly she was meant to focus her gaze. Was she meant to look down, as though admiring her own breasts? Or watch her fingers and pretend they were another’s? Was she supposed to look at Craig, as though catching him in the web of erotic play between them? It was hard to tell, so she closed her eyes. That proved quite useful and she managed to do as he wanted for several minutes before opening her eyes once again, blinking into the opaque brightness of the hospital room.
Age of Consent Page 18
