Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  “Hi,” Mary called. She was making a list. She wore red slacks and a gray sweatshirt.

  “Hi,” he said. And just that quickly, with the utterance of a single mild syllable, the joy evaporated. Something was wrong here. Something diminished him, even as he earned good money and honored his marriage vows and fed and clothed his children.

  “How'd the day go?” Mary asked. She continued with her list. When she wedded herself to a job, she was lost. She wore her dark hair pulled back tight.

  “Fine,” he said. “Smells good in here.”

  “Pork chops,” she said. “And mashed potatoes. Are you hungry?”

  “Yeah. I'm starved. What's that you're doing there?”

  “Oh, just a list of all I've got to get for Zoe's birthday party. I can't believe I've invited eight little girls to spend the night here.”

  He nodded, and almost recaptured the clear, vaulting happiness of the garage. A pretty wife, oak cabinets, pork and potatoes waiting warm in the oven. He wanted to be happy in a solid, sustained way, hour to hour, not in turbulent little fits that gripped him at odd moments, usually when he was alone. He'd worked so hard. Sometimes he suspected that if he acted happy, if he said what a happy man would say, he could catch it again. He could grab it by its invisible wings and hold it, tightly, to his chest.

  “Where are the kids?” he asked cheerfully.

  “Susan's at ballet. Billy and Zoe are upstairs, supposedly doing their homework. You're real late tonight.”

  “Yeah. There's a hell of a lot to do.”

  “I know. There's a lot to do here, too.”

  He coughed, and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I don't hear you complain about the money,” he said.

  “You're in a pretty mood,” she said. She kept on with her list. She held the pencil with a furious primness, and Constantine was afraid of her. She was angry and righteous. She was writing a list to be carved into the granite of his headstone.

  “I'm just a working stiff,” he said. “I just hope for a little appreciation every now and then, that's all.”

  She added something to the list. Her pencil scratched across the paper. “I work, too,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I'm working right now.”

  The kitchen seemed to grow. He felt himself shrinking inside it, a small man standing hungrily on yellow linoleum. He turned on the oven light, looked through the tinted window at the casserole dishes within.

  “So, how about dinner?” he asked. His voice was cheerful again. The voice of a happy man.

  “Con, it's right there. I can get it for you in a minute. Or, if you want it right this second, well, you know how to open the oven door, don't you?”

  “Right,” he said. He took a hot pad and removed his dinner from the oven. He set the dishes on the countertop, lifted their beaded glass lids.

  “Looks good,” he said.

  “Mm. Soft drinks, potato chips, marshmallows. Favors. Maybe little bottles of perfume. Or, I don't know. They may still be too young for that.”

  Constantine took a plate from the cupboard. He was spooning out potatoes when Billy came into the kitchen.

  “Hello,” Billy said. At twelve he was still as skinny as he'd been at five. The knobs and sticks of his frame poked against his milky skin. His face, a sharper version of Constantine's, was taking on a sly expression.

  “Hi,” Constantine said.

  Billy went to the refrigerator and took out a Coke. Constantine felt a constriction in his throat, a spasm of ownership. That Coke is mine, I paid for it.

  “What's going on?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Billy said. “I'm doing my geography.”

  “Geography.” Constantine squeezed the handle of the spoon. How could he fail to adore his son? What was lacking in him? Talk, Constantine silently commanded. Tell me about geography.

  “What about geography?” Constantine said. He set the spoon on the counter, stabbed a chop with his fork.

  Show me where you are on the map of the world. A boy who broods, who lives in books. Who refuses to know the names of tools and shows no interest in outdoor games.

  Billy shrugged. He opened the Coke, which made a fizzing sound. “Latin America,” he said. “Major imports and exports.”

  “Right,” Constantine said. “Imports and exports. They ship a lot of diamonds out of Latin America, don't they?”

  Billy sent him a blank-eyed, satisfied expression. Constantine knew the look. It was the victor's mask, the deep calm of superior accomplishment.

  “No, Dad,” Billy said with elaborate patience. “No diamonds. They export, well, bananas and coffee. And other things.”

  Constantine felt his anger rising. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe it was some other country that mined diamonds. Maybe it was Africa, or Brazil.

  “You're a smart kid, ain't you?” he said. “You're a real smart kid.”

  Maybe his voice carried a sharper edge than he'd meant it to. Sometimes the things he heard himself say didn't match what was in his heart.

  “I don't know,” Billy said.

  “You don't know. Well, what do you know? I keep hearing from your mother all about how smart you are.”

  He watched his son's face. Billy stood before him in his frail armature of bone and pallid skin. His eyes, unnaturally large in his skull, ticked with unknowable thoughts.

  “Where's Costa Rica, Dad?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Costa Rica. The country. Do you know where it is?”

  “What are you talking about, Costa Rica?”

  Billy said, “I forget. Is it north or south of Panama?”

  Constantine waved him away. “Go on,” he said. “Go finish your homework.”

  “Okay,” Billy said. He glanced at Mary and she looked back with such direct complicity Constantine's breath caught in his chest. He suspected that they plotted together, shared stories about his failings. Billy slurped his Coke and started out of the kitchen. He had a precise, girlish walk. He might have been balancing coins on his toes.

  “Listen, mister,” Constantine said to his back. “I don't like your attitude.”

  “Con, just let it go,” Mary said. “Billy, get on upstairs.”

  Billy turned. His thin face was swarming with an emotion Constantine couldn't name. It might have been rage. It might have been terror.

  “What's the capital of North Dakota, Dad?” Billy said.

  “What're you saying to me here? What are you saying?”

  “Con,” Mary said. The anticipation in her voice only made him angrier.

  “What's seven times nine?” Billy asked. “How do you spell 'rhythm'?”

  “Mister, I'm warning you. Who in the hell do you think you are?”

  “I'm a smart kid,” Billy said. “That's what you called me.”

  “Well, you get the hell out of here. By the time I count three, I want you out of my sight. One.”

  Billy left the room. Constantine saw the relief on Mary's face. She held her list.

  “Two, three,” he said. He turned back to the counter to finish filling his plate. He was spearing a pork chop when Billy called from the stairwell, “The capital of North Dakota is Bismarck.”

  Constantine ran from the kitchen and mounted the stairs by twos. He caught Billy on the top stair. Mary was close behind, hollering, but her cries only fueled Constantine's passion. He grabbed Billy's skinny arms, lifted him off the carpet.

  “What did you say to me?” Constantine said, and he heard the clenched power of his own voice. Billy looked into his face with an opaque, stubborn expression.

  He said, “Seven times nine is sixty-three.”

  When Constantine hit him he felt he was obliterating a weakness in the house. He was cauterizing a wound. The back of his hand struck Billy's jaw hard, scraped across his teeth with a cleansing burn. He heard Mary's scream from a distance. Billy's head snapped back and Constantine hit him again, this time with the heel of his hand, a smack solid and sure as a hammer drivi
ng a nail deep into pine. When he let go of Billy's arms Billy crumpled and rolled down a few stairs, where Mary held him to her breast. She shouted and wept. Constantine couldn't hear what she was saying. He looked up and saw Zoe standing in the hallway, shyly, with her hands clutching her belly. “Go back to your room,” he said. He watched until she had run into her room and shut the door. Then he stepped around Mary and his son and got himself downstairs.

  “You monster,” Mary screamed. “You stupid bastard.”

  Constantine didn't answer. He didn't look back. He made himself walk slowly, with buzzing calm,, out the door and into the garage. He got into his car. Breathing steadily, he opened the garage door and backed down the drive, gunned the motor, and drove away. The needle of the speedometer touched fifty before he'd gone two blocks. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw his porch light receding, joining the welter of anonymous neighborhood lights. The sound of his heart drummed in his ears. His face burned with rage and shame. As he drove he promised to work harder. He promised to be better, kinder. He found himself driving back to his development, to watch the nocturnal life of the houses and to listen, like a penitent in church, to the murmur of the voices inside.

  1968/ The golf course was vast as an ocean, cut by a pale sliver of rising moon. Constellations glittered, and a northern wind, the first of autumn, tossed pine branches among the stars. Susan lay on the faint yellow square of the blanket, holding Todd's cock in her hand with cautious solicitude. She watched his face for changes.

  “Oh,” Todd murmured. Steam rose white from his mouth and nose. “Oh. Ohhhh. Oh.”

  “Shh,” she said, although he had not been loud. During the ordinary hours of his life he lived inside his own large flesh with astonishing ease. He seemed to find it unremarkable that his fingertips could grip a soup bowl around its edges and that his feet filled shoes massive and potentially lethal as cinder blocks. He obeyed rules, shook other boys' hands and told them, with profound conviction, that he was glad of their friendship. But at night, on the golf course or in his brother's car, something too big threatened to escape from him.

  “Ahh,” he said, and she whispered again, “Shhh.”

  He groped his way along her thigh. She hoped her thigh was beautiful, alabaster under the tossing branches. She hoped she was something to adore, in skirt and panties, wearing his rough cardigan over her bare breasts and the cold circle of his class ring on a chain around her neck. He slipped his fingers under the elastic of her panties. She shifted nervously. His fingers raised a queasiness in her belly, an unsettled feeling. They probed, rubbing her dark pubic hair (why was it so thick?), and then one dipped inside, quickly, almost furtively. The finger thrust, withdrew, thrust again. She fought a rising panic. He was so insistent. His finger burrowed through her in search of something else, a mysterious perfection she was afraid she lacked. Did he joke about her with his friends? She worked his cock faster, knowing that if she made him come he'd subside and return to himself, gentle gregarious Todd. To take her mind off her own fears she focused on his cock, its veined shaft and purple, strangely innocent head. Todd's was the only cock she knew, and when she fantasized, guiltily, about other boys, she imagined their chests and legs and asses but never their crotches. She put a white, illuminated patch where their cocks would have been; she made them powerful and inspired and neuter, like horses. Only Todd's cock appeared on her geography of the body. She wondered if he understood her loyalty's depth and breadth. She wondered if this diligence, this scrupulous and clinical interest of hers, was what people meant when they spoke about love.

  “Aww,” he said, a moist, guttural sound, and she knew he was getting close. His finger pounded inside her. She might have cried out for him to stop but instead she worked the loose skin up and down his shaft, up and down, aiming the whole of her will at it until, with a strangled moan, he shot a faintly luminous thread that fell, in little round spatters, on the smooth plane of his belly. “Mmm,” she said, and “Shhh.” Here was the smell of bleach. Here was the bucking surrender, frightening and sad. She held tight through his spasms, until his cock softened in her hands and his finger calmed and withdrew and she could lie beside him, comforting him, feeling the heat of his body.

  They didn't speak. If the night had not been cold, they might have slept. Susan lay with her head on Todd's chest, rising and falling with the smooth animal effort of his breathing. She loved this time, when she could lie with him, just lie peacefully in shared ownership of his immensity. She liked the idea that her own body would fit completely inside his. She could wear him like a suit of armor. A wet, frigid smell rose from the grass and she contemplated his belly, where little pools of semen lay, opalescent in the shifting dark. At first his discharge had repelled her but gradually her revulsion had turned to interest. This viscous juice came from Todd's inward, secret self. Todd, the senior class president, whose mother ironed his undershirts. The spilling of semen was so unlike him that Susan couldn't help but be moved. His ejaculations implied some aspect of loss, and she loved to console him afterward. She watched the small puddles, knowing that in another second they'd turn translucent and lose their density, flowing off along his ribs. But now they lay in thick white circles under the October sky. She put out a finger and touched a drop that quivered, perfectly spherical, on his abdomen, just above the tangle of his pubic hair. She told herself she was touching starlight and Todd's sorrow, the secret hungers he revealed only to her. She held her moistened fingertip up in the cold air, watching its dull sparkle, and then she put it to her tongue.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Tasting you,” she said. The taste resembled the smell, mushrooms and spray starch, although it had another thread, something raw and deeply human.

  She felt the pause in his breathing. “Jesus, Sooz,” he said.

  “Strictly for scientific purposes,” she said. “Youth wants to know.” But she heard the thinness in her own voice. She had miscalculated. What she'd done was not the province of people in love. She was sluttish, grotesque.

  He asked, “So, um, what do you think?”

  “Well, it'll never replace ice cream.”

  “I guess not,” he said.

  They both laughed, but an awkwardness had settled between them. Susan pulled his cardigan more closely around her breasts. “I'm freezing,” she said.

  “I know. I am, too.”

  “We should probably go.”

  “Yeah. We probably should.”

  They sat up and began putting their clothes on. Todd took a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his stomach with swift unsentimental motions, as if he was cleaning the windshield of a car.

  “It's getting too cold for this,” he said. “I guess we won't be coming out here any more this year.”

  “No. This is goodbye to the golf course.”

  They looked around as if they were both suddenly surprised to find themselves there at all. Sand traps glowed in the black fields of grass.

  “We used to slide around out here on blocks of ice,” Todd said. “Did I ever tell you about that? At night, when I was ten or eleven. Dan and Ronnie and I used to come out here and slide down the hills on these big blocks of ice.”