“Not a one.”
“I had a good time but my calves ache from dancing in high heels.”
“I think maybe your calves ache from something else.”
She laughed and he said, “I love you.”
For Janice’s sake she put a lilt of deceptive laughter in her voice. “Do you really? Heavens, I never would have guessed it.”
“Could I bring over some lo mein later this afternoon and see you?”
“Do you think the Chinese restaurants will be open?”
“If they’re not, we’ll eat toast and watch football games.”
“Fine. Let me get a nose count.” She dropped the receiver from her ear and said, “Christopher wants to bring Chinese over later. Should we count you in?”
Without turning to face her mother, Janice said, “Sure,” and walked from the room, leaving her orange juice untouched.
JANICEwatched them like a cat the entire time Christopher was there, but if they were intimate, they gave nothing away. Christopher sat most of the day with his nape caught on the davenport cushions, his ankles crossed, watching bowl games with Joey and Denny, rehashing plays with them. Lee, dressed in a gray sweat suit and terry-cloth footlets, read a book curled up in a living room chair. At five o’clock she got up to warm the car in preparation for taking Denny home. Christopher roused himself and offered, “I’ll take him if you want.” “No, you’re all comfortable there. I’ll go. Back in ten minutes or so.”
Janice thought, If these two are messing around, I’m Mae West! They both acted as if they needed a shot of testosterone.
Lee returned, warmed up the Chinese food in the microwave, brought everybody a plate in the living room and returned to her comfy chair to eat hers and continue reading.
At eight o’clock, Christopher stretched and said, “Well, I think I’ll go.”
Lee had difficulty pulling her eyes away from her book. “Just one min . . .” She raised a finger and kept on reading to the end of the paragraph.
“Don’t stop reading. I can find my way out.”
“Oh, no! No!” Lee returned to reality, leaving her chair with the book plopped facedown on the cushion. “It’s just that I haven’t read a book for so long. I kind of got lost in it.”
“Well, keep on. You don’t have to see me out.”
She yawned, linked her fingers and inverted her hands straight out in front of herself, stretching everything from her waist up.
“Lazy day.”
“Yeah, it was.” He got his jacket and put it on in the front hall. “Thanks for letting me hang around underfoot.” He kissed her cheek, making no secret of it while the two kids looked on from the front room. “Hey, Joey, Janice . . . see you, huh?”
When the door closed behind him, Janice decided with some relief, I was wrong, Joey was wrong, Christopher is no more to her than Greg’s replacement.
ITwas 2 P.M.—Lee’s lunch break—on the first business day following New Year’s when she knocked on Christopher’s apartment door. He flung it open and the two of them nearly ripped each other’s skins off, lunging together. They kissed as if tomorrow it would be outlawed. He pinned her against the apartment door, then changed his mind and dragged her away from it to skin off her coat and drop it to the floor. The kiss was openmouthed, sexual, impatient—the lush, pervasive kind that ends imposed suppression and begins to mark territory. In the midst of it he captured her breasts, flattened them and her hard against the closed door. Their combined weight hit it with a bang that shuddered up their hipbones and echoed outside in the hall. When it ended she held him none too gently by two fistfuls of hair above his ears. “Don’t you ever do that to me again! I’ve never spent such a miserable day in my life! I wanted to come over to that sofa and flatten you underneath me, but all I could do was sit there across the room reading a silly book!”
He laughed and said, “Are you saying you wanted me?”
She put pressure on his hair and raved, “Wanted? Wanted!” then, growling, used his hair as a handle and wobbled his head around as if to tear it off his neck.
“How are your calf muscles?” he inquired with a crooked smile.
“Kiss me nice and I’ll tell you.”
He kissed her nice, gently this time, while she smoothed the hair she’d been clutching and left her hands gently cupping the back of his head.
When he once again looked down into her eyes, she said quietly, “My calf muscles could use some physical therapy.”
“Ah,” he replied, “I’ve got just the thing in mind.”
He picked her up and carried her like a bride into the living room where the Christmas tree was gone and the furniture in its customary place. He dropped down on the sofa, tipping her off his lap and curling forward to hold and kiss her while her legs trailed over his thighs. Exploring her lips and tongue with his own, he freed the buttons up the front of her lavender smock. Beneath it she wore a sweater. His hand was already skimming up underneath it when she halted the kiss and told him, “Christopher, I have some really bad news.”
His hand stopped and he sent a look of concern straight into her eyes.
“I got my period last night.”
For three beats he only stared disbelievingly. Then he flung himself backward against the sofa as if he’d been shot, his head flopping back, eyes closed, hands dropping free of her while he groaned, “Ohhh . . . nooo . . .”
“Sorry,” she said with a shrug and a grimace.
“How many days?”
“Four or five.”
He raised his head, opened his eyes and laid a finger across her mouth vertically. “Then you’re no good to me, madam, because that’s all I want you for, you know.”
She kissed his finger and said, “Here I thought you loved me for my popcorn balls.”
He squinted at one corner of the ceiling, thought for a moment, then turned a grin down her way. “Now that you’ve reminded me . . . I guess I can stick around for four or five days longer.” He grabbed her elbows and hauled her up. “C’mere.” When he’d righted her, amid some awkward adjusting of her weight and limbs, she ended up straddling his lap, his hands at her armpits between her sweater and smock. He tilted her forward and kissed her with the pressures of pre-intercourse set aside, replaced by a laxness perhaps even more enchanting. His lips were sublimely soft, moist and relaxed beneath hers as they exchanged four winsome, crisscross kisses—noses left . . . right . . . left . . . right. They took time, after the exchange, to study each other’s eyes and faces appreciatively, their hands fluttering upon one another as idly as the fins of unswimming fish, his beside her breasts, hers at his back hairline. They were fine, rewarding minutes, those silent ones, while they recognized that sex could wait while their true allure for one another grew each moment they were together . . . and, too, each moment they were apart. Their eyes imparted the message, then they exchanged small possessive smiles at very close range.
“I’ll tell you something,” he said softly, “New Year’s Day was hard on me, too. I knew I shouldn’t come over, but I just had to.”
“I’m glad you did. If you hadn’t come to me, I’d have come to you, and I didn’t have any idea how I’d explain myself.”
He began to rebutton her smock. “It’s hell having to explain yourself, isn’t it?”
She combed his hair back with four fingers, enjoying the crisp coil of it, the combination of scents—shampoo, laundry, skin—that created the effusion peculiar to him.
“Janice knows,” she said, scraping his skull lightly with her nails.
“I suspected as much. She was pretty aloof yesterday.”
“I think she almost asked me in the morning.”
Her smock was closed. He rested his hands on the crook of her waist. “What would you have said?”
She quit furrowing his hair. “I would have told her the truth.”
“Would you really?”
She nodded so infinitesimally he believed her. “I just wanted some time for us first. We d
eserve that, I think, before I stir up the cauldron that’s bound to boil over when everybody finds out.”
“You really think so?”
She nodded, her eyes dropping to the V-neck of his sweater. “Everybody but Joey. He’s crazy about you, and he’s young enough that he doesn’t have preconceptions. But Janice is going to be mortifled. Sylvia is going to be shocked. And my mother . . .” Lee rolled her eyes, then settled them on something at her left. “. . . My mother will be the worst one of all.”
“Does it matter so much, what they think?”
“Well, of course it matters.” She needlessly adjusted his shirt collar over the neck of his sweater and left her hands flat on his collarbone. “They’re my family.”
“Are you saying they’ll disown you or something?”
“No, they won’t disown me.”
“Then they’ll disown me.” He said it without rancor, looking up into her eyes, stating the likelihood as if it were something they must face and deal with.
She sighed and wound her arms around his head, drawing his face to her chest. “Oh, I hope not. I’d like to think they’re less hypocritical than that.”
They sat on, in the caramel light of afternoon that slanted through his windows, so happy to be together, accepting this unconventional pose in all its intimacy as their own. His face was turned aside while she plunged one hand into the hair at the crown of his head and worked her fingers as if shampooing, then stroked the hair to the limits of its short length before repeating the motion again and again. She couldn’t get her fill of pleasure in touching the myriad textures of him after the many years’ dearth of male textures. His hair, his jaw, his brow, the lobes of his ears, his ribs and chest; even the textures of his clothing seemed different from hers, draped over muscle so much firmer and a bone structure so much broader. His hand was up her back again, between the smock and sweater, absently marking time across her shoulder blades like an inverted pendulum.
He closed his eyes and drifted, enjoying, too, the distinct femaleness of her, the pressure of her legs wrapped around his hips, her nails on his skull, her palms on his clothing and her breath on his forehead. The sun warmed his left cheek while her breasts—soft and pliant—warmed his right. She was scented much like her flower shop, herbal and lavender and floral all mixed together. His elbows, at her ribs, outlined a body circumference that seemed fragile compared to his own. Her shoulder blades, when his fingertips brushed them, felt as insubstantial as bird wings.
Man . . . woman . . . different . . .
So incredibly, enjoyably different . . .
“You want something to eat?” he asked when they had both grown lazy and indifferent to all but the sun and the motion of their hands.
“Mm . . .” she said against his hair, her eyes closed. “What have you got?”
“Some salami and cheese. Bagel chips. An apple.”
“Mmm . . . do I have to?”
“You should eat something.”
“I could live on this.”
He smiled, nearly shivering beneath the gentle strokes of her hand on his hair.
“What time do you have to get back?”
“I shouldn’t stay long. Sylvia’s got a dentist appointment this afternoon.”
He sighed and regretfully withdrew from her arms, looking up at her with his hair ruffled.
“Look at you, straddling me again. You’re such a tart.”
She clambered off, catching his hand, hauling him up behind her. “Come on, let’s find that salami.”
Holding hands, they walked toward the kitchen, stone in love. But as they went they wondered how much longer to keep their affair secret, and what it would lead to and why whenever they discussed its outcome their tones became somber, as if they were altering forever the future of their lives, though they did not know how.
SHORTLYafter winter vacation ended, the school called Christopher. It was a silver-bright winter day warm enough to raise steam off the melting sidewalks. Inside the police department, where he was . lling out an accident report, it smelled of late morning coffee and gun-cleaning oil. He took the call and heard a woman’s voice inform him, “This is Cynthia Hubert, the principal at the junior high. We have a seventh-grade student here, Judd Quincy, who’s gotten into some trouble. He says if we call you you’ll come over here and bail him out.” Christopher sighed and let his shoulders sag, tilting back in his swivel chair.
“What’s he done this time?”
“Stole some money out of a teacher’s purse.”
Christopher closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Damn that kid. He thought they’d been making progress.
“You sure he did it?”
“She caught him red-handed.”
“Is the liaison officer there?”
“Yes, Judd is with him.”
“Listen . . . don’t do anything with him till I get there, okay?”
The principal’s pause sounded strained with indecision. Finally she sighed and said, “All right, we’ll wait.”
They had Judd in a counselor’s office of Fred Moore Junior High when Christopher entered, in uniform. The room held an impacted, high-tension stillness often accompanying proven guilt. Judd sat in an aqua vinyl chair staring at his Air pump tennies. He looked skinny and unkempt. Christopher nodded to the liaison officer, Randy Woodward, from his own department. Behind Chris the principal entered, a stylish, thin, salt-and-pepper-haired woman wearing a straight gray dress and gold-rimmed glasses. He turned around and shook her hand. “Thanks for calling, Mrs. Hubert.” He glanced down at Judd, still staring at his Air pumps, which by now looked as if they’d marched across Prussia on a foot soldier.
“Could I talk to him alone for a minute?” Chris asked.
The others went out and left the two of them alone.
Christopher shuffled over to stand before Judd, looking down on his bent head with its burry hair and birdlike neck, his rumpled, dirty T-shirt under a filthy denim jacket and jeans with tears across both knees. He stood a long time with his hands on his hips, the room quiet while from the outer office came the muted sounds of voices, and someone using a stapler, and a phone ringing persistently.
Finally Christopher asked, “Did you steal some money, Judd?”
The boy said nothing, only hung his head and studied the tongues of his tennies.
“Did you?” Chris repeated softly.
Judd nodded.
Words of rebuke somehow refused to form in Chris’s mind. He’d lectured Judd so many times, had taken the tough-guy stance and made the kid realize the world wasn’t fair but he’d just have to live with it, muddle his way through to adulthood, when he could finally make his own decisions. It struck Chris today, however: the kid was only twelve years old. To Judd, muddling his way through to seventeen, eighteen, whenever he might graduate from high school, must seem like asking him to become a Rhodes scholar. He was a scared, mixed-up, unloved little boy who probably hadn’t been fed breakfast this morning, never mind kissed goodbye on his way out the door.
Suddenly Christopher found himself doing what he’d never done before: he went down on one knee and took Judd in his arms. Judd clung and started crying. Christopher held him firmly, swallowing hard to keep himself from doing the same, his nostrils narrowing at the stale smell coming from Judd’s skin and clothing. He and Judd stayed that way, close and silent, while the secretary in the outer office seemingly used up an entire bar of staples, and every absentee in the school population called in sick. When Christopher tried to pull back, Judd clung harder.
“What went wrong?” Christopher asked. “Something at home?”
He felt Judd shrug.
“You want to get out of there? You want to live in a foster home?”
Judd said, “I want to live with you.”
He pulled the boy’s arms from around his neck and forced him to sit back on his chair. “I’m sorry, Judd, you can’t. A person has to be licensed to give emergency foster care, and besides
, what would I do with you when I work nights?”
“I’d be okay.” Judd dried his eyes with the backs of his wrists. “I’d just watch TV and go to bed anytime you said I should.”
It nearly killed Christopher to reply, “I’m sorry, Judd, it wouldn’t work.”
Judd looked up with more sincerity in his eyes than Christopher had ever seen there. “I could do stuff for you, maybe vacuum your place or warm up your can of soup for you.”
That was Judd’s idea of a meal, warming up your can of soup. Chris put his man-sized hand around Judd’s boy-sized neck, wondering how much dirt was disguised by his dusky pigment. Then he got up and sat on the aqua-blue chair beside Judd’s. He bent forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
“Tell me what happened at home.”
“They took my free lunch tickets to buy coke with. Then they tried to give me some of it, said they was gonna turn me out— woohoo.”
“Turn you out?”
“Yeah, you know—introduce me, sort of, to something new.”
“The cocaine, you mean?”
Judd nodded while Christopher’s adrenaline shot a stream of heat through his chest. It wasn’t all that uncommon for parents like Judd’s to fence their kids’ subsidized lunch program tickets, but trying to get their own kid hooked on drugs was a new one on Chris. His innards seized up and he experienced the unholy desire to find Wendy and Ray Quincy and drive his fist into their faces until they needed plastic surgery.
“Now, let me get this straight.” He lifted the kid’s chin and forced his direct attention with a straight-line gaze. “Your mother and dad bought cocaine with your lunch money, then tried to get you to use it. You’re sure that’s how it was?”
Judd jerked his chin free. “I said that’s how it was, and that’s how it was.”
“So you stole the money to eat lunch with?”
Judd had returned to shoe staring.
“Judd, I’ve got to have it straight this time, no lies, no half-truths. Is that why you stole the lunch money?”
The boy mumbled, “Yeah, I guess so.”
Family Blessings Page 33
