“Upstairs.” He undresses in his bedroom, where he always does; in the bathroom on the other side of the partition, water begins to cry, to sing, to splash. He looks down and has nothing of a hard-on. In the bathroom he finds her bending over to test the temperature mix at the faucet. A tuft between her buttocks. From behind she seems a boy’s slim back wedged into the upside-down valentine of a woman’s satin rear. He yearns to touch her, to touch the satin symmetry, and does. It stings his figertips like glass we don’t expect is there. Jill doesn’t deign to flinch or turn at his touch, testing the water to her satisfaction. His cock stays small but has stopped worrying.
Their bath is all too gentle, silent, liquid, and pure. They are each attentive: he soaps and rinses her breasts as if their utter cleanness challenges him to make them even cleaner; she kneels and kneads his back as if a year of working weariness were in it. She blinds him in drenched cloth; she counts the gray hairs (six) in the hair of his chest. Still even as they stand to dry each other and he looms above her like a Viking he cannot shake the contented impotence of his sensation that they are the ends of spotlight beams thrown on the clouds, that their role is to haunt this house like two bleached creatures on a television set entertaining an empty room.
She glances at his groin. “I don’t turn you on exactly, do I?”
“You do, you do. Too much. It’s still too strange. I don’t even know your last name.”
“Pendleton.” She drops to her knees on the bathroom rug and takes his penis into her mouth. He backs away as if bitten.
“Wait.”
Jill looks up at him crossly, looks up the slope of his slack gut, a cranky puzzled child with none of the answers in the last class of the day, her mouth slick with forbidden candy. He lifts her as he would a child, but she is longer than a child, and her armpits are scratchy and deep; he kisses her on the mouth. No gumdrops, her lips harden and she twists her thin face away, saying into his shoulder, “I don’t turn anybody on, much. No tits. My mother has nifty tits, maybe that’s my trouble.”
“Tell me about your trouble,” he says, and leads her by the hand toward the bedroom.
“Oh, Jesus, one of those. Trouble-shooters. From the look of it you’re in worse shape than me, you can’t even respond when somebody takes off their clothes.”
“First times are hard; you need to absorb somebody a little first.” He darkens the room and they lie on the bed. She offers to embrace him again, hard mouth and sharp knees anxious to have it done, but he smooths her onto her back and massages her breasts, plumping them up, circling. “These aren’t your trouble,” he croons. “These are lovely.” Down below he feels himself easily stiffening, clotting: cream in the freezer. CLINIC FOR RUNAWAYS OPENED. Fathers Do Duty On Nights Off.
Relaxing, Jill grows stringy; tendons and resentments come to the surface. “You should be fucking my mother, she really is good with men, she thinks they’re the be-all and end-all. I know she was playing around, even before Daddy died.”
“Is that why you ran away?”
“You wouldn’t believe if I really told you.”
“Tell me.”
“A guy I went with tried to get me into heavy drugs.”
“That’s not so unbelievable.”
“Yeah, but his reason was crazy. Look, you don’t want to hear this crap. You’re up now, why don’t you just give it to me?”
“Tell me his reason.”
“You see, when I’d trip, I’d see, like, you know – God. He never would. He just saw pieces of like old movies, that didn’t add up.”
“What kind of stuff did he give you? Pot?”
“Oh, no, listen, pot is just like having a Coke or something. Acid, when he could get it. Strange pills. He’d rob doctors’ cars to get their samples and then mix them to see what happened. They have names for all these pills, purple hearts, dollies, I don’t know what all. Then after he stole this syringe he’d inject stuff, he wouldn’t even know what it was half the time, it was wild. I would never let him break my skin. I figured, anything went in by the mouth, I could throw it up, but anything went in my veins, I had no way to get rid of it, it could kill me. He said that was part of the kick. He was really freaked, but he had this, you know, power over me. I ran.”
“Has he tried to follow you?” A freak coming up the stairs. Green teeth, poisonous needles. Rabbit’s penis had wilted, listening.
“No, he’s not the type. Toward the end I don’t think he knew me from Adam really, all he was thinking about was his next fix. Junkies are like that. They get to be bores. You think they’re talking to you or making love or whatever, and then you realize they’re looking over your shoulder for the next fix. You realize you’re nothing. He didn’t need me to find God for him, if he met God right on the street he’d’ve tried to hustle Him for money enough for a couple bags.”
“What did He look like?”
“Oh, about five-ten, brown hair down to his shoulders, slightly wavy when he brushed it, a neat build. Even after smack had pulled all the color from him he had a wonderful frame. His back was really marvellous, with long sloping shoulders and all these ripply little ribby bumps behind, you know, here.” She touches him but is seeing the other. “He had been a runner in junior high.”
“I meant God.”
“Oh, God. He changed. He was different every time. But you always knew it was Him. Once I remember something like the inside of a big lily, only magnified a thousand times, a sort of glossy shining funnel that went down and down. I can’t talk about it.” She rolls over and kisses him on the mouth feverishly. His slowness to respond seems to excite her; she gets up in a crouch and like a raccoon drinking water kisses his chin, his chest, his navel, goes down and stays. Her mouth nibbling is so surprising he fights the urge to laugh; her fingers on the hair of his thighs tickle like the threat of ice on his skin. The hair of her head makes a tent on his belly. He pushes at her but she sticks at it: he might as well relax. The ceiling. The garage light shining upwards shows a stained patch where chimney flashing let the rain in. Must turn the garage light off. Though maybe a good burglar preventive. These junkies around steal anything. He wonders how Nelson made out. Asleep, boy sleeps on his back, mouth open, frightening; skin seems to tighten on the bone like in pictures of Buchenwald. Always tempted to wake him, prove he’s O.K. Missed the eleven-o’clock news tonight. Vietnam death count, race riots probably somewhere. Funny man, Buchanan. No plan, exactly, just feeling his way, began by wanting to sell him Babe, maybe that’s the way to live. Janice in bed got hot like something cooking but this kid stays cool, a prep-school kid applying what she knows. It works.
“That’s nice,” she says, stroking the extent of his extended cock, glistening with her spittle.
“You’re nice,” he tells her, “not to lose faith.”
“I like it,” she tells him, “making you get big and strong.”
“Why bother?” he asks. “I’m a creep.”
“Want to come into me?” the girl asks. But when she lies on her back and spreads her legs, her lack of self-consciousness again strikes him as sad, and puts him off, as does the way she winces when he seeks to enter; so that he grows small. Her blurred face widens its holes and says with a rising inflection, “You don’t like me.”
While he fumbles for an answer, she falls asleep. It is the answer to a question he hadn’t thought to ask: was she tired? Of course, just as she was hungry. A guilty grief expands his chest muscles and presses on the backs of his eyes. He gets up, covers her with a sheet. The nights are growing cool, August covers the sun’s retreat. The cold moon. Scraped wallpaper. Pumice stone under a flash bulb. Footprints stay for a billion years, not a fleck of dust blows. The kitchen linoleum is cold on his feet. He switches off the garage light and spreads peanut butter on six Saltines, making three sandwiches. Since Janice left, he and Nelson shop for what they like, keep themselves stocked in salt and starch. He eats the crackers sitting in the living room, not in the silverthread chair b
ut the old brown mossy one, that they’ve had since their marriage. He chews and stares at the uninhabited aquarium of the television screen. Ought to smash it, poison, he read somewhere the reason kids today are so crazy they were brought up on television, two minutes of this, two minutes of that. Cracker crumbs adhere to the hair of his chest. Six gray. Must be more than that. What did Janice do for Stavros she didn’t do for him? Only so much you can do. Three holes, two hands. Is she happy? He hopes so. Poor mutt, he somehow squelched her potential. Let things bloom. The inside of a great lily. He wonders if Jesus will be waiting for Mom, a man in a nightgown at the end of a glossy chute. He hopes so. He remembers he must work tomorrow, then remembers he mustn’t, it is Sunday. Sunday, that dog of a day. Ruth used to mock him and church, in those days he could get himself up for anything. Ruth and her chicken farm, wonders if she can stand it. Hopes so. He pushes himself up from the fat chair, brushes crumbs from his chest hair. Some fall and catch further down. Wonder why it was made so curly there, springy, they could stuff mattresses with it, if people would shave, like nuns and wigs. Upstairs, the body in his bed sinks his heart like a bar of silver. He had forgotten she was on his hands. Bad knuckles. The poor kid, she stirs and tries to make love to him again, gives him a furry-mouthed French kiss and falls asleep at it again. A day’s work for a day’s lodging. Puritan ethic. He masturbates, picturing Peggy Fosnacht. What will Nelson think?
Jill sleeps late. At quarter of ten Rabbit is rinsing his cereal bowl and coffee cup and Nelson is at the kitchen screen door, red-faced from pumping his bicycle. “Hey, Dad!”
“Shh.”
“Why?”
“Your noise hurts my head.”
“Did you get drunk last night?”
“What sort of talk is that? I never get drunk.”
“Mrs. Fosnacht cried after you left.”
“Probably because you and Billy are such brats.”
“She said you were going to meet somebody in Brewer.”
She shouldn’t be telling kids things like that. These divorced women, turn their sons into little husbands: cry, shit, and change Tampax right in front of them. “Some guy I work with at Verity. We listened to some colored woman play the piano and then I came home.”
“We stayed up past twelve o’clock watching a wicked neat movie about guys landing somewhere in boats that open up in front, some place like Norway –”
“Normandy.”
“That’s right. Were you there?”
“No, I was your age when it happened.”
“You could see the machine gun bullets making the water splash up all in a row, it was a blast.”
“Hey, try to keep your voice down.”
“Why, Dad? Is Mommy back? Is she?”
“No. Have you had any breakfast?”
“Yeah, she gave us bacon and French toast. I learned how to make it, it’s easy, you just smash some eggs and take bread and fry it, I’ll make you some sometime.”
“Thanks. My mother used to make it.”
“I hate her cooking. Everything tastes greasy. Didn’t you used to hate her cooking, Dad?”
“I liked it. It was the only cooking I knew.”
“Billy Fosnacht says she’s dying, is she?”
“She has a disease. But it’s very slow. You’ve seen how she is. She may get better. They have new things for it all the time.”
“I hope she does die, Dad.”
“No you don’t. Don’t say that.”
“Mrs. Fosnacht tells Billy you should say everything you feel.”
“I’m sure she tells him a lot of crap.”
“Why do you say crap? I think she’s nice, once you get used to her eyes. Don’t you like her, Dad? She thinks you don’t.”
“Peggy’s O.K. What’s on your schedule? When was the last time you went to Sunday school?”
The boy circles around to place himself in his father’s view. “There’s a reason I rushed home. Mr. Fosnacht is going to take Billy fishing on the river in a boat some guy he knows owns and Billy asked if I could come along and I said I’d have to ask you. O.K., Dad? I had to come home anyway to get a bathing suit and clean pants, that fucking mini-bike got these all greasy.”
All around him, Rabbit hears language collapsing. He says weakly, “I didn’t know there was fishing in the river.”
“They’ve cleaned it up, Ollie says. At least above Brewer. He says they stock it with trout up around Eifert’s Island.”
Ollie, is it? “That’s hours from here. You’ve never fished. Remember how bored you were with the ball game we took you to.”
“That was a boring game, Dad. Other people were playing it. This is something you do yourself. Huh, Dad? O.K.? I got to get my bathing suit and I said I’d be back on the bicycle by ten-thirty.” The kid is at the foot of the stairs: stop him.
Rabbit calls, “What am I going to do all day, if you go off?”
“You can go visit Mom-mom. She’d rather see just you anyway.” The boy takes it that he has secured permission, and pounds upstairs. His scream from the landing freezes his father’s stomach. Rabbit moves to the foot of the stairs to receive Nelson in his arms. But the boy, safe on the next-to-bottom step, halts there horrified. “Dad, something moved in your bed!”
“My bed?”
“I looked in and saw it!”
Rabbit offers, “Maybe it was just the air-conditioner fan lifting the sheets.”
“Dad.” The child’s pallor begins to recede as some flaw in the horror of this begins to dawn. “It had long hair, and I saw an arm. Aren’t you going to call the police?”
“No, let’s let the poor old police rest, it’s Sunday. It’s O.K., Nelson, I know who it is.”
“You do?” The boy’s eyes sink upon themselves defensively as his brain assembles what information he has about long-haired creatures in bed. He is trying to relate this contraption of half-facts to the figure of his father looming, a huge riddle in an undershirt, before him. Rabbit offers, “It’s a girl who’s run away from home and I somehow got stuck with her last night.”
“Is she going to live here?”
“Not if you don’t want me to,” Jill’s voice composedly calls from the stairs. She has come down wrapped in a sheet. Sleep has made her more substantial, her eyes are fresh wet grass now. She says to the boy, “I’m Jill. You’re Nelson. Your father told me all about you.”
She advances toward him in her sheet like a little Roman senator, her hair tucked under behind, her forehead shining. Nelson stands his ground. Rabbit is struck to see that they are nearly the same height. “Hi,” the kid says. “He did?”
“Oh, yes,” Jill goes on, showing her class, becoming no doubt her own mother, a woman pouring out polite talk in an unfamiliar home, flattering vases, curtains. “You are very much on his mind. You’re very fortunate, to have such a loving father.”
The kid looks over with parted lips. Christmas morning. He doesn’t know what it is, but he wants to like it, before it’s unwrapped.
Tucking her sheet about her tighter, Jill moves them into the kitchen, towing Nelson along on the thread of her voice. “You’re lucky, you’re going on a boat. I love boats. Back home we had a twenty-two-foot sloop.”
“What’s a sloop?”
“It’s a sailboat with one mast.”
“Some have more?”
“Of course. Schooners and yawls. A schooner has the big mast behind, a yawl has the big one up front. We had a yawl once but it was too much work, you needed another man really.”
“You used to sail?”
“All summer until October. Not only that. In the spring we all used to have to scrape it and caulk it and paint it. I liked that almost the best, we all used to work at it together, my parents and me and my brothers.”
“How many brothers did you have?”
“Three. The middle one was about your age. Thirteen?”
He nods. “Almost”.
“He was my favorite. Is my favorite.”
> A bird outside hoarsely scolds in sudden agitation. Cat? The refrigerator purrs.
Nelson abruptly volunteers, “I had a sister once but she died.”
“What was her name?”
His father has to answer for him. “Rebecca.”
Still Jill doesn’t look toward him, but concentrates on the boy. “May I eat breakfast, Nelson?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t want to take the last of your favorite breakfast cereal or anything.”
“You won’t. I’ll show you where we keep them. Don’t take the Rice Krispies, they’re a thousand years old and taste like floor fluff. The Raisin Bran and Alphabits are O.K., we bought them this week at the Acme.”
“Who does the shopping, you or your father?”
“Oh – we share. I meet him on Pine Street after work sometimes.”
“When do you see your mother?”
“A lot of times. Weekends sometimes I stay over in Charlie Stavros’s apartment. He has a real gun in his bureau. It’s O.K., he has a license. I can’t go over there this weekend because they’ve gone to the Shore.”
“Where’s the shore?”
Delight that she is so dumb creases the corners of Nelson’s mouth. “In New Jersey. Everybody calls it just the Shore. We used to go to Wildwood sometimes but Dad hated the traffic too much.”