Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  “Mary, I—I'm sorry.”

  She laughed, a sudden breathy little sound, as if she was blowing out a candle. “All these years,” she said. “And you finally feel regret—”

  She stopped, and stared at him with a black emptiness he had never seen on her face before.

  “I'm going to bed,” she said. “I'll talk about this in the morning, I'll do whatever I have to do, but right now all I can think about is going to bed.”

  She left the room without touching him. He heard her footsteps, soft and unwavering, as she ascended the stairs.

  Constantine poured himself a drink and stood in the kitchen sipping it. The ice cracked; the new teapot-shaped clock swept its face with the thin red line of its second hand. He watched the house go through its own silent life until Billy came in through the front door. Constantine heard his footsteps in the hall, the particular clatter those boots of his made on the tiles, a reckless sound, like a pony.

  Billy came into the kitchen, expecting Mary. When he saw Constantine his face changed.

  “Hey, Dad,” he said.

  He wore a flowered shirt, purple and orange, with sleeves so full and fluttering Constantine wondered if the shirt had been made for a woman. His hair tumbled wispily down over his eyebrows, shrinking his face, and that along with his erupted skin gave him a dim-witted, oafish look.

  He's a scholar, Constantine reminded himself. He's got a scholarship to Harvard.

  “How ya doin', Bill?” he asked.

  “Groovy.” He opened the refrigerator, peered inside, closed it again. He took an Oreo from the cookie jar, nibbled delicately along its outer edge.

  “You're home early,” Billy said.

  “Yeah,” Constantine answered. “I am.”

  “Where's Mom? Out?”

  “She went to bed. She's not feeling so good.”

  “Oh.”

  Constantine could not imagine what a father would say next to his son. He sipped his drink. Almost before he'd decided to, he heard himself saying, “If that damn hair gets any longer you won't be able to see.”

  “I can see,” Billy told him. “I've got eyes all over my head.”

  Constantine nodded. Every answer had to be smart, every movement had to mock and defy him. He knew that he loved his son—what sort of man doesn't?—but he wanted him to be different. He wanted, right now, to stand in this kitchen with his boy and talk to him about the world's elusive glory and its baffling, persistent disappointments. He wanted to wrestle with his son, to throw a football at him with all his strength.

  “You borrow that shirt from your sister?” he said.

  “I have to go, Dad.”

  “We're talking. Are we talking here?”

  “I have to go over to Dina's. Tell Mom I'm having dinner there, okay?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “I know you did. It's my shirt, Dad. It's my hair and my shirt and my life.”

  “Nobody said it wasn't your life. But I'm the one the principal's gonna call about the hair. And I paid for the fag shirt.”

  Billy stood in the middle of the room. He stood, it seemed, in exactly the same place Mary had stood, weeping and holding her purse with both hands.

  “As a matter of fact, you didn't pay for it,” he said. “I bought it with my own money. That's why I work at Kroeger's, so I don't need to accept any more from you than I absolutely have to.”

  “Calm down,” Constantine said. “No need to get all hot and bothered here.”

  “You didn't pay for this shirt,” Billy said, “but listen. I'm going to give it to you anyway. This'll cancel out one shirt you bought for me when I was still too young to make my own money. How's that sound to you?”

  He began unbuttoning the shirt, revealing with each button a wider V of skinny, blue-white flesh.

  “Bill. For Christ's sake.”

  He stripped off the shirt and held it out to Constantine. His bare chest was skeletal, luminous, dotted here and there with livid red pustules. How could a young boy, on the verge of manhood, look so sick and elderly?

  “Take it,” he said.

  “Stop,” Constantine told him. “Stop this.”

  Billy dropped the shirt to the floor. “How about the boots?” he said. “These were expensive. These ought to cancel out two or three pairs you bought me in the fifth grade.”

  He raised one thin leg and struggled out of an ankle-high brown boot. As he was pulling it off he nearly lost his balance, and Constantine couldn't help laughing. For the first time in memory he pitied and admired his son. His son had rage and a shrill potency.

  “Bill,” he said affectionately. “Billy.” As his son worked the boot free Constantine reached out to tousle his overgrown hair. Maybe they'd have a drink together. Billy was seventeen, old enough for a little bourbon at home.

  At the touch of Constantine's hand, Billy jumped back as if he'd been stung with an electric wire. “Don't,” he said, flinching.

  Constantine realized Billy had thought he was about to be hit.

  “Bill,” he smiled. “C'mon, calm down.” He held out his hand, palm up—a gesture of penury, of harmless intentions.

  But Billy, ashamed of having flinched, took another two steps back. He still wore one boot, which clopped loudly on the floor.

  “I'm going to pay you back,” he said. “For everything. For every single thing you ever gave me.”

  “You're acting crazy,” Constantine said.

  Billy turned and strode, single-booted, off-balance, back to the front door.

  “Don't talk to me that way,” Constantine said sharply, but he made no move to follow. He hadn't the heart right now. He heard the door opening and closing. Then he heard the sound of his son's single boot heel striking the door, hard. Now Constantine was ready to fight. He ran to the door but when he got there and opened it all he found was the other empty boot, lying on its side on the stoop.

  The house was quiet. Pipes and ducts made their soft, efficient sounds. Kitchen appliances droned. Mary was upstairs sleeping, dreaming her dreams. A thief, a repeat offender; a woman who'd sat silently in the fluorescence of the sheriff's office with her makeup bleeding onto her pale, mortified skin. Billy was gone to his friends, half naked. As Constantine poured himself another drink he thought of Susan, brave and clever and forgiving, moving with smooth-limbed certainty into a future that held only better and better news. What had happened didn't matter. It was only a couple of times, drunk; a small thing. It was only kisses and hugs. It was love, that's all. He thought of calling Susan but knew his pride would not recover from the memory of a half-drunken conversation with his own daughter in which he begged for forgiveness. He'd be old one day. He had to be careful about the past he made for himself.

  Billy's shirt lay in a bright heap on the floor. Constantine bent over, hearing the faint crackings of his stiff knees, and picked it up. It was light as smoke, made of some gauzy fabric. Thumbnail-sized orange poppies and trumpet-shaped purple flowers bloomed on a field of black. Constantine lifted the shirt to his face, inhaled its odor. It smelled like his son—his sweet cologne and deodorant, a hint of the wintergreen candies he chewed for his breath. Billy was obsessed with the idea that he smelled bad, and Constantine understood his boyish terror. He himself had chewed anise, doused himself in scent, scrubbed his teeth three times a day. What thoughts of Billy's so terrified him that he drenched himself in perfume, scalded his flesh with showers that steamed windows all over the house? What thoughts? Constantine dropped the shirt back on the floor. Then, because he was a family man, because he had love for his son shot through with hatred, he picked it up again and draped it carefully across the back of a kitchen chair.

  How many people had seen his wife being arrested? How many were talking about it now, over dinner? I told you this would happen sooner or later, what can you expect from people like that? His eyes burned. So much work, so much daily caution. All so precariously balanced.

  He went to the sliding glass door, look
ed out into the back yard. Susan, up north in a tidy little apartment, setting out dinner. That's what he wanted to think about. But the idea of Susan, like his happiness and his outrage, flew defiantly around the room and refused to settle where his rightful feelings were housed. What pulsed in him were bitter prayers for Billy and Mary and himself. Deliver us from our nameless defeats, the rats inside the walls.

  He walked out into the yard and stood for a while, looking up. It would be dark soon. The sky was flattening, losing its blue depths, settling in around the earth. A jet pulled a vapor trail, pink-gold in the dying light. Constantine's house looked big and dense as a battleship. Its windows reflected the sky and the black branches of neighbors' trees.

  This yard would be perfect for a garden if the Wilkinsons' maple didn't throw too much shade. Over there, at the south end, that would be the spot. Holding his empty glass, he walked over and paced off the modest square that seemed the most promising place. Yes, a garden. Bean rows, lettuce, the gawky beauty of sunflowers. Right here. Strawberries winking like jewels. Tomatoes big and fleshy as men's hearts. He looked down at the grass beneath his feet. His feet looked trim and prosperous, sheathed in expensive white loafers. Their gold buckles gleamed. He took a sip from his empty glass and continued looking down at the ground he owned.

  Zoe had heard what happened in the kitchen. She'd been watching everything. Now she saw him through her bedroom window, standing alone in a new smallness. She sat smoking a joint and watching him on the lawn with night coming around him. She felt the whole house shrinking.

  She put out the joint and walked down the hall, past the living silence that came from Momma's room. She walked through the colors and the quiet order into the back yard, where the evening insects made their circles.

  “Hi, Poppa,” she said.

  He turned, surprised. He took her in. She saw from his face that she was pale and wild, the strangest of the children. She was loved but she was not known.

  She was going somewhere else. Every day she said goodbye.

  “Zoe,” he said. She saw that he had forgotten about her.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “Aw, Zoe. Look. It's you.”

  “I know. I know it's me. I saw you from the window.”

  “I—” Poppa raised his arms and lowered them again. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  A silence passed. Then Poppa said, “I was thinking about maybe starting a garden here. In the yard.”

  “Mm?”

  “They're a lot of work,” he told her. “You watch over a garden all the time. Bugs get in. Weeds. Too much sun, too little.”

  She shrugged. “I'd like it,” she said. “I'd like to have a garden.”

  “We could grow a lot of things here,” he said. “We could grow squash, beans, tomatoes.”

  “I hate tomatoes.”

  “Okay. No tomatoes.”

  She shivered at the thought of a tomato. He crouched and dug into the grass with his fingertips. He scooped out a small handful of earth.

  “It isn't bad soil,” he said, straightening up. “Look here. See how dark?”

  She nodded. “I'd want to have flowers, too,” she said. “Could we grow flowers here?”

  A garden would be something to come back to. A garden would remember her.

  “Sure,” he said. “This soil is made for flowers.”

  Carefully, as if it were fragile, he gave her the little ball of dirt. She held it close to her face and inhaled its rich black smell.

  “It's good dirt,” he said. She pretended not to notice the one tear that crept down his face. She didn't know what to say about it.

  “I'd water the garden,” she said. “I'd take care of it.”

  “You would,” he said. “I know you would.”

  He touched her hair. His hand was big and unsure. She held the dirt in her hand and watched her father's white shirt catch and hold the last of the light.

  “I know you would,” he said again.

  II

  CRIMINAL

  WISDOM

  1971/ The sky over Cambridge was an Arctic blue, a blue burned clean of sentiment or the suggestion of simple kindness. Although it was just past noon on a warm October day it did not seem impossible to Billy that the sky would begin producing frigid little stars. He lay on the grass of the Yard, looking up. Inez, sitting on her Hegel and Kierkegaard to protect her skirt, put out her birdlike grandeur, all her powers of frank, sharp-eyed disapproval.

  “Billy is too nice,” she said. “Whoever named you Billy wanted you to spend your whole life behaving yourself.”

  Inez had a thin golden body and a riot of wiry black hair. Her face was round and incisive and blankly mysterious as an owl's. Sun and the movements of other people flashed on her little round glasses.

  “My parents named me Billy,” Billy told her. “Who did you think?”

  “William is better,” she answered. “Or Willy.”

  “Not William;” said Charlotte. “William. Uck.”

  Charlotte was a Midwestern girl, pale as milk, with powerful hands that would not settle. She touched her hair, touched the buttons of her thrift-store tweed jacket, touched Inez's bare golden knee.

  “Right,” Inez said. “Willy. Or Will. For formal occasions.”

  “I could maybe do Will,” he said. “Willy is too, I don't know. Presumptuous. Cutesy. I could probably live with Will.”

  Inez and Charlotte consulted one another silently. “Done,” Charlotte said. “We name you Will. The child Billy is dead. You're a new man, sugar. Rise up and go forth into the world.”

  “You can't just change my name,” he said.

  “We can. We have.”

  “Okay. Let's see. Inez, I hereby rename you Sister Agatha of Modesto. Charlotte, from henceforward you will be known as Zsa Zsa.”

  Again, the women consulted each other. They shook their heads.

  “We already have the right names,” Inez said. Charlotte picked up a fallen leaf and tore it in half, as if that was the ceremony that would make a fact of the hour and the conversation. Even her nervous gestures had an ordained aspect.

  “Sugar, we're doing this for your own good,” she said. “We're not being capricious. Billy is just something you've outgrown.”

  “Fine,” he said. “That's fine. You call me Will. I'll call you Sister Agatha and Zsa Zsa.”

  “They won't stick to us,” Charlotte told him. “Wait and see.”

  “I've been Billy for eighteen years,” he said. “It's too late to change.” But, privately, he was starving for a new name. He barely believed it was possible.

  “Wait and see,” Inez said. The Yard fluttered around her, leaves sparking and skimming on the air. Everyone hurried; everyone carried books through a weighted autumn light that broke around them like fog. Billy believed that if there was a heaven it would be the first in an endless series of heavens, each one shocking and strange and perfect in ways you could not possibly have imagined. In every heaven you'd be someone new.

  “It's pretentious,” he said. “It would be such a pathetic display of ego.”

  “Mellow out,” Charlotte advised him, and he agreed to try.

  They lived together, the three of them, on the top floor of a faded brown house on Massachusetts Avenue. Paisley bedspreads blew from its rattling windows; silver chimes glittered fretfully on its prim front porch. Billy adored the house. He loved Charlotte for being wry and mannered and faintly masculine. He loved Inez for her willful and methodical rejection of common sense. Because of her, there was speed and blotter acid. Because of her, a procession of strangers, usually thin contemplative men, appeared in the shower or fingered guitars on the porch or sat shy and unshaven at breakfast. Billy called Inez and Charlotte the Holy Sisters of Permission. He told them all his secrets, and then began inventing new ones.

  The name Will stuck to him, as he'd scarcely dared hope it would. His other friends took it up readily, because it seemed that almost ever
ything in the world was old and out of plumb and needed renaming. The name Will became first his sly privilege, then his right, and finally an outward fact. Among his friends he was no longer someone called Billy. Billy belonged to the old past, the dying era of cars and sorrow and colonial greed, the prosperous desolation of houses. Will had a new beauty: clear skin, a sharp delicate face framed by hair that fell past his shoulders. Will was sinewy and even-tempered, symmetrical of body, with long legs and a soft, ragged triangle of hair at his breastbone. He moved gracefully, a little tentatively, inside his army jacket and shapeless khaki pants. Sometimes, in certain lights, he was able to believe he had turned into a man named Will. Then it passed and he returned to himself, a boy named Billy, someone small and foolish. Others called him Will but in his dreams and his thoughts he was Billy, just that, a boy smart enough to fake his way through, a boy well acquainted with the limits of the possible.

  On a warm evening in April, when the air smelled like rain and people walked on Brattle Street carrying tulips in paper cones, a man leaned over Billy and said, “You know, you're a rare soul. Do you mind me telling you that?”

  Billy, who had been reading Faulkner and drinking coffee at a white marble table, looked up in a bright panic, as if a disembodied voice had publicly announced his most embarrassing secret wish. The man leaned over the table. He was well past thirty, with complex, vaguely geological facial bones and liquid eyes. He had a lunatic enormity, although he wasn't large. His hair was windblown on a windless day.

  “No,” Billy told him. He was full of fear but his voice came out steady and slightly bored, as if he was used to attentions of exactly this kind. He couldn't tell whether the man was crazy or inspired. The man's face had a doglike ardor. He wore white bell-bottoms and a brown leather vest and a yin-yang symbol on a thong around his neck.

  “A rare and ancient soul,” the man said in a speculative tone. “I had to stop and tell you that. You shouldn't drink coffee, it excites the body but kills the spirit. That coffee has got orange light crackling all over you.”