Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  The wedding was flawless, except for the guests. It had of course been necessary to invite the people who worked for Constantine, and they were for the most part boisterous men in cheap, outdated suits, escorting wives who were variously cowed or shrill but were, in every instance, badly dressed. With the help of Todd's father, Mary had rented the ballroom at the country club, and had had it impeccably decorated with urns of white lilacs and centerpieces of cream-colored roses. She'd enlisted a caterer to provide Rock Cornish game hens, wild rice, and French-cut string beans with slivered almonds for over two hundred. She had made no mistakes, and now into her white-and-cream reception marched a brigade of foremen who'd been hired specifically because they could bully other men into building houses as quickly and cheaply as possible. They were married to just the kind of women you'd expect: brassy, in loud dresses and too much jewelry, their hair teased and tortured into great stiff piles on top of their heads. Todd's mother and his two aunts wore simple page boys and dressed in pure colors, and Mary suffered over her own French twist. Her dress was frosted pink—she silently thanked God she had decided against a ruffle at the bodice. As she danced with Billy, who was straight-backed and self-conscious in his blue gabardine suit, she watched Susan laughing with two of her bridesmaids, and it seemed that Susan had gone to another country, where all the girls were effortlessly thin and beautiful and all the boys had futures sturdy as suspension bridges. Even through the graceful hush of the pill she felt, again, a little storm of emotion that might have been anger and might have been fear. She didn't want either feeling, not on a day like this. She concentrated on her daughter's beauty, her remarkable ease and charm. This one, at least, was safe. Mary hummed along with the band, a few bars of “Begin the Beguine.” She said to Billy, “Seems like the wedding's a success.”

  He said, “I guess any wedding's a success, huh? I mean, as long as they really get married, it's worked.”

  “If that was all that mattered, they could've gone to a justice of the peace and saved your father about five thousand dollars.”

  “C'mon. Did this shindig really cost five grand?”

  “You'd be surprised how things add up. You kids have no idea.”

  He whistled. “Five grand,” he said. “For one party.”

  “When you get married,” she said, “your father'll be off the hook. Your wife's family will have to pay.”

  “When I get married,” he said, “we'll go to a justice of the peace. If somebody wants to fork over five thousand bucks, we'll take the cash and spend, like, a year in Europe.”

  “The girl you marry may feel differently.”

  “I wouldn't marry somebody who felt that differently.”

  The number ended, and Billy walked Mary back to her table. As she walked with her hand on her son's elbow, Mary's pink shoes shed their cool minty light against the indigo carpet of the country-club ballroom. This was her son, on his way to Harvard. She was conscious of his new height, the size of his hands. She loved him so. He was still hers, the most intelligent of her children, full of promise and afflicted with a ravaged complexion that only increased the terrible weight of her love. He was at once ethereal and painfully human. He, alone among her children, suffered hurts and prides she could read.

  That night she lay in bed in her nightgown, watching Constantine undress. His body, gone slack and hairy, now inspired in her a tenderness that had almost as much to do with motherhood as it did with passion. Her husband might have been her oldest child, a difficult and obstreperous boy who lived outside the realm of her control. She could love him, more or less, when she thought of him as a wayward boy, one who occasionally did harm to others, who was subject to violent fits of temper, but whose decent heart would outlive his youthful fury. In his middle age Constantine had turned boyish, and she lived with him that way, as a boy with a pudgy body and a petulant streak. Wearing only his Jockey shorts, he sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Well, there she goes. She's married.”

  “Mm-hm.” Mary still inhabited the outer edge of the yellow pill, its soft declining side. The world retained its feathery aspect.

  “Married,” Constantine said.

  “I think the wedding went fine, don't you?” Mary said. “I had a few doubts about the band, but really, on the whole I think it was a real success.”

  Constantine rose without speaking, put his pajamas on over his shorts. He had had a few during the reception, he was moving with elaborate caution, but Mary didn't think about that. She thought about the wedding she'd produced, a sit-down dinner for over two hundred. She tried not to worry about its coarse aspects: the off-color toast made by Constantine's partner, the foreman who'd argued with a wife in a dress crawling with fuchsia flowers. She tried not to imagine the future weddings of Susan's bridesmaids, girls whose families Mary scarcely knew because she was an Italian woman married to a Greek construction man. None of Todd's people had gotten drunk.

  “I could have done without Nick Kazanzakis's toast,” she said. The hard edges were returning. “What's the matter with him? A toast like that, at a wedding.”

  “Nick's all right,” Constantine said. “He likes a little joke. Nobody minded.”

  “Betty Emory minded. I was sitting right beside her. I saw her go stiff.”

  “Fuck Betty Emory. She's got a stick up her ass, just look at her.”

  “Oh, lovely. That's a very nice thing to say about a lady. I'll tell you one thing, she is a lady. Which was not true of about half the women there today.”

  Constantine got into bed. The smell of liquor was mixed with his old personal smells.

  “Let's not fight,” he said. “Not tonight.”

  “Fine. I'd be delighted to not fight.”

  He pulled the covers up to his chest. She saw how haggard his face looked, how worn. He was getting older.

  “This was our daughter's wedding day,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Now her name is Mrs. Emory. Susan Emory.”

  “I know.”

  She turned off the light. The room went black, and pieces of objects slowly materialized: half of Mary's vanity with its oval mirror, the nearer legs of the chaise on which no one ever sat. Mary lay looking at the room, her mind so tangled with thoughts that she might have been thinking of nothing at all. The bedside clock put out its buzz. There was something else, a strange sound she thought at first was coming from outside but which she realized was the sound of Constantine weeping beside her. He was turned away, and she laid her hand on his back, which was covered with the broad stripes of his pajamas.

  “Con?” she said. He didn't answer.

  “Con? Are you all right?”

  “I'm okay,” he said thickly.

  “Con, what is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It can't be nothing.”

  A minute passed, filled only with the sound of his weeping. She thought, My life is going on outside me. I don't know anything about it.

  He said, “I can't believe she's really gone.”

  His own words seemed to inspire in him a fresh wave of sobs, and his crying had a tone that was not quite fleshly, a sound like wet paper tearing. She hadn't heard him cry in years. Mary was sympathetic and irritated, to almost equal degrees.

  “She isn't gone,” she said. “She just has a life of her own now. New Haven isn't so very far away.”

  “She's gone,” Constantine said. “She isn't ours anymore.”

  “Well, she hasn't really been ours for a long time, has she?”

  “She's been mine,” Constantine said.

  Mary understood. She pushed the thought away.

  “You're just tired,” she said. “And you've had too much to drink. Everything will be okay in the morning.”

  He turned and faced her. In the dimness, distorted by weeping, his face looked haunted, ancient. Mary saw, with awful clarity, what he would look like when he was helpless, and needed her care to survive.

  “Please,” he said. He held out his ar
ms and, when she did not move into his embrace, he took her and pressed his hot wet face onto her neck. “Please,” he said.

  “You're just tired,” she said. “And drunk.”

  “I'm more than that,” he said. “Oh, God.” He kissed her neck, took her chin in his hand and put his lips on hers. They hadn't made love in—what?—six months? Longer? Tonight would not be the night, not as far as she was concerned. Long ago, she'd started winning the battle with her own feelings. For years now she'd felt desire closing down in her, the lights going out like the lights of a household preparing itself for sleep. At moments, lying right here in this bed, she'd fallen into a panic. This was her fate being made; this was the future stitching itself onto her skin. There would be no other life than this. The feelings, the fear itself, had come to seem familiar to her—they were part of what she meant when she used the words 'my life.' Now, tonight, she was in no mood to change her life. Not with Constantine maudlin and drunk, not after a day as wearing as this had been.

  She disengaged her mouth and said, “Honey, go to sleep. You'll feel better in the morning.”

  “I can't sleep,” he said.

  “Yes you can.” She spoke to him just the way she'd spoken to the children when they awoke from nightmares. Now, as then, she marveled at the maternal certainty she heard in her own voice. They believe I'm their mother. They believe I know what I'm doing.

  “Just close your eyes,” she said. “It'll happen before you know it.”

  And, to her surprise, he obeyed her. He returned quietly to his own side of the bed like a randy boy who wanted discipline even when he said he wanted every noise and thrill in the world. She lay quietly beside him, listening to his abating sobs with motherly concern. It was only after he'd fallen asleep that she was stricken with a horror so powerful and nameless she got out of bed and took three of the pills, to give herself the simple unremarkable gift of sleep.

  She took a hairbrush, a cheap bracelet, a bar of amber-colored soap. She knew she had to stop. She consoled herself with a short list of virtues. Everything she stole was cheap, and she never used what she took. As long as she didn't use the objects, she did not feel indicted by them. Susan sent postcards from her honeymoon in Hawaii, short and undetailed assertions of happiness written in a hand more scrolled, more adult, than Mary remembered her handwriting to be. Mary attached the postcards to the refrigerator with fruit-shaped magnets. She kept the objects she stole in her drawer, hidden away, until her holdings began to look like the trousseau of an impoverished bride.

  1970/ He called it car ballet. It had that strength and grace, that musical stillness. Out on the back roads, trees hung blackly, fence posts were dark and important as tombstones. Behind the trees and the fence posts, farmers slept under roofs blue with moon. Billy liked to imagine the silence. When he pictured the silence he loved all the more what their headlights did to it. What their music and engines brought. Tree limbs jumped, sizzling with gold and silver light. Dust boiled up, yellow at their approach and red in their wake. Bits of his favorite songs found their way into farmers' dreams.

  “Car ballet!” he'd call from the back seat. He'd put his feet, big in boots, out the window. At moments, at night, he felt a huge new world of freedom and love cracking open.

  Sometimes it was Larry's father's car, sometimes it was Bix's. Sometimes, on lucky nights, they got both. Larry's father had the green Chevy Impala, Bix's had the Ford Galaxie. The Chevy was slightly racier, but the Ford had a rubberized, floating ride that gave you nervous stomach and a hard-on when things got rockety. Billy always hoped for the Ford.

  “Faster,” he said. “Floor it.” He was the voice of speed. He was the smallest, the smartest, the one most intricately loved and hated. The radio played “Eight Miles High.”

  “You're crazy,” Dina said. She rode in the back seat with Billy, pressing her big knee against his skinny one. She smeared sugary pink lipstick over her heavy lips, blackened her brows with a grease pencil. Her boots were higher than Billy's. She called herself a pirate queen.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Oh, yes. I'm crazy.”

  She rubbed his knee with hers. The old nervousness came to him, the breathless trapped sensation. In front, Bix and Larry passed the vodka through the blare of the music. Sometimes it was vodka, sometimes beer. Whatever they could get. Once Dina stole a bottle of crème dè menthe from her father, and Billy and Larry vomited green along three miles of road.

  “Hey, boys, can a lady get a drink around here?” Dina said. Larry handed her the bottle. Bix sat straight-armed at the wheel, silent and murderously blissful. He was the one with the meanness in him. Night flashed by, with its insects and its threads of deeper and lesser black.

  When Dina had had her swig of vodka and passed the bottle to Billy, she left the taste of her lipstick. Billy watched the shaggy brown curve of Bix's head. He filled his mouth with vodka and felt the burn, the little explosion. He kept himself from screaming with the pure rush and happiness of it. The future kept coming and coming.

  “Car ballet,” he said. “Time for stunts.”

  “What kind of stunts?” Larry said. He had the worst skin, the least complicated sweetness. He gave you things you never asked for. His hair model was Keith Richards.

  “Figure eights,” Billy said. He sat up, put his head between Bix's and Larry's. He put his head deeper into the music. On the dashboard, dials and numbers made their hushed glow. Tree trunks hurdled past.

  “Figure eights,” Billy said again, handing the bottle to Larry.

  Bix swerved to the far side of the road and back again. The tires made their protest, a clean swiping sound.

  “Figure S,” Bix said. “Just warming up.”

  Bix had a military brain. He aimed himself at the world like a torpedo.

  “Don't you boys hog that bottle up there,” Dina said.

  “Let's go crazy,” Billy said into Bix's ear. The motion had given him a hard-on. He loved Bix and feared him. A low branch brushed the car like a gigantic wing.

  “Wow,” Larry said.

  “Girl could die of thirst,” Dina said. Her perfume was everywhere.

  “How crazy?” Bix asked. He gave the bottle back to Billy.

  “We been on this road too long,” Billy answered. “Let's fly.”

  “Fly? You want to fly?”

  “Yeah. Oh, yes.”

  “Right. Here goes.”

  Bix hit the brakes and turned sharply. The car bottomed into a ditch, then bounced up again. Drops of vodka flew glistening into Billy's face. A stick cracked under the axle, loud as a broken bone.

  “Whoa,” Larry said.

  The car bounced a second time, then settled itself. They were in a field. The headlights showed the field going on until it met a stand of thin, shocked-looking trees.

  Billy whooped. Dina screamed, “What's happening?”

  “Figure eights,” Billy hollered. “Come on.” He put the bottle to Bix's lips, tilted it. Vodka poured into Bix's mouth and down his shirt. Bix revved the engine and the car shot forward, headlights shining into knee-high grass.

  “Whoa, far out,” Larry said with an appreciative smile. Dina put her hand on Billy's shoulder. She wore six rings. Some were silver, some plastic.

  “Where are we?” she said. Her voice was thick with the vodka.

  “We're in space,” Billy told her. “We're flying.”

  The DJ, sitting somewhere in music and electric light, played “Ruby Tuesday.”

  “This is dangerous,” Dina said.

  “I know.”

  Bix steered the Ford in a wide arc. Darkness and a rank green smell blew in through the windows. The axles bumped in the ruts so hard they couldn't get the bottle to their mouths. Grass and trees and wedges of night sky tilted in the headlights. Billy laughed, and Dina laughed, too.

  “Figure eight,” Bix said with the suave cruelty of a bomber pilot. Billy's heart swelled. He told himself he was in love with crazy motion.

  “Yeah,” he sai
d. Because he couldn't get the bottle to Bix's lips he poured a splash of vodka over his head. Billy felt the edge of the world, the harsh blossoming happiness that moved too fast for ordinary life. Only when you raced, only when you took the risks, could you enter this other dimension that shot through time and space at triple speed.

  Larry hummed the “Blue Danube Waltz.” “Da da da da da, taa taa, taa taa.”

  “Go,” Billy screamed. “Go go go go go.”

  The cow came from nowhere. They swerved into the final loop of their figure eight and there it was, black and white, big as an oncoming car. Billy saw its shining black eye. He saw its nicked white ear. He screamed. Larry screamed. Bix cranked the wheel and the car jackknifed with a shrill mechanical screech. Dirt sprayed up through the windows. Billy's eyes and mouth were filled with dirt. The car skidded, lurched, and stopped so suddenly Billy was thrown into the front seat. He couldn't see. He felt his forehead crack against something that wasn't hard and wasn't soft. A splinter of a dream flashed inside his head: a desert sandstorm with a dark, cloaked figure running through it. Mick Jagger sang, “Who could hang a name on you?”

  A silence came up under the music, a steaming windy silence.

  Billy blinked, rubbed the dirt from his eyes, blinked again. He saw that he was lying on his stomach, looking down at a boot. A brown work boot. Bix's. He turned around and looked up at Bix.

  Bix still sat behind the wheel, smiling and bleeding.

  “Shit.” Bix grinned. “Sweet shitting mother of Christ.”

  Billy saw that he was lying on the front seat with his head under the dashboard. Bix and Larry were still in their seats. Dina sat blinking in the back with a confused but polite expression, as if the conversation had turned to a topic she didn't fully understand.