For a long moment John stood there at the window, taking it all in, and then he shivered, thinking of the fire in the living room, the inoperative furnace and the storm. And then, almost as an afterthought, he bent to the brick-and-board bookcase that climbed shakily up the near wall.
Poking through his son’s leftover books took him a while, longer than he would have thought possible, and it gave him time to reflect on his own adolescent tastes in literature, which ran basically in a direct line from Heinlein to Vonnegut and detoured from there into the European exotica, like I Jan Cremer and Death on the Installment Plan, which he’d never finished. But books were a big factor in his life then, the latest news, as vital to day-to-day existence as records and movies. He never listened to music anymore, though—it seemed he’d heard it all before, each band a regurgitation of the last, and he and Barb rarely had the time or energy to venture out to the wasteland of the cineplex. And books—well, he wasn’t much of a reader anymore, and he’d be the first to admit it. Oh, he’d find himself stuck in an airport someplace, and like anybody else he’d duck apologetically into the bookshop for something fat and insipid to kill the stupefying hours on the ground and in the air, but whatever he seemed to choose, no matter how inviting the description on the cover, it was invariably too fat and too insipid to hold his attention. Even when he was strapped in with two hundred strangers in a howling steel envelope thirty-five thousand feet above the ground and there was no space to move or think or even shift his weight from one buttock to the other.
Finally, after he’d considered and rejected half a dozen titles, a uniform set of metallic spines caught his eye—gold, silver, bronze, a smooth gleaming polished chromium—and he slid a shining paperback from the shelf. The title, emblazoned in a hemoglobic shade of red that dripped off the jacket as if gravity were still at work on it, was The Ravishers of Pentagord. He’d never heard of the author, a man by the name of Filéncio Salmón, described on the inside flap as “The preeminent Puerto Rican practitioner of speculative fiction,” which, as even John knew, was the preferred term for what he and his dormmates used to call sci-fi. He looked over each of the glittering metallic books that constituted the Salmón oeuvre and settled finally on one called Fifty Going Down (Cincuenta y retrocetiendo). And why that one? Well, because he’d just turned fifty himself, an age fraught with anxiety and premonitory stirrings, and the number in the title spoke to him. He’d always been attracted to titles that featured numbers—One Hundred Years of Solitude; Two Years Before the Mast; 2001: A Space Odyssey—and maybe that was because of his math background. Sure it was. He felt safe with numbers, with the order they represented in a disordered world—that was all.
When he reemerged from the narcotic gloom of Buck’s sanctuary, he had the book clutched in his hand, and there was a nostalgic feel to it—to the book and the whole business of it, opening the cover and seeing the title there in bold black letters, and the epigraph (“Death is something I only want to do once”—Oliver Niles)—and he opened a can of chicken corn chowder, thought briefly of heating it in the fireplace, then dismissed the idea and settled into the couch to spoon it up cold and attack the book. It was quiet, preternaturally quiet, no hum of the household machinery or drone of the TV to distract him, and he began, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to read.
—
My mother was my child. I mean this in no metaphoric sense, but literally, because my universe is not strictly like yours, the universe of decay and decrepitude, in which one sinks each day closer and closer to the yawning mouth of the grave. I loved my mother—she raised me and then I raised her—and my memories of her are inextricably bound up with the cradle, the nursery, toys and playthings and the high ecstatic thrill of juvenile laughter. And sadness. Infinite sadness. But it is not my mother I wish to tell you about, but my wife and lover, Sonia, the mature woman of fifty with the voice of smoke and the eyes of experience, the silky girl of twenty who would bound ahead of me along the banks of the Río Luminoso as if she had been granted a second childhood. Which she had.
Let me explain. You see, in our scheme of things the Creator has been much more generous than in yours. In His wisdom, He has chosen the age of fifty as the apex of existence, and not a debilitated and toothless ninety or an even more humbling ninety-five or a hundred. (And what is more obscene than the wasted old man with his mouth full of mush and crumbs on his lapels, or the gaping hag staring round her in the street as if she’s misplaced some vital part of herself?) We do not progress inexorably in age as you do, but when we reach the magical plateau, that golden age of fifty, we begin, as we say, to go down. That is, one is forty-nine the year before one turns fifty, and one is forty-nine the year after.
When Sonia was forty-nine for the second time, I was thirty-one for the first. She had been a dancer, a model, a photographer and a sculptress, and she was looking forward to going down, and, as I presumed, doing it all over again. She’d known some of the great younging minds of her day—they were history now, all of them—and I admired her for that and for her accomplishments too, but I wanted a wife who would stand by me, fix me paella and roast veal in the languorous evenings and hand me a crisply ironed shirt each morning. I broached the subject one afternoon just after our engagement. We were sitting at an outdoor café, sipping aperitifs and nibbling at a plate of fried squid. “Sonia,” I murmured, reaching across the table to entwine my fingers in hers, “I want a wife, not a career woman. Can you be that for me?”
Her eyes seemed to grow until they ate up her face. Her cheekbones were monuments, her lips like two sweet desert fruits. “Oh, Faustito,” she murmured, “poor little boy. Of course I’ll be a wife to you. I have no interest in society anymore, really I don’t—I’m retired from all that now.” She sighed. Patted her lips with a snowy napkin and leaned forward to kiss me. “I just want to be young again, that’s all—young and carefree.”
—
The room had grown cold and the darkness was coming down when John next looked up. It was the darkness, more than anything, that did it: he couldn’t see to read. He woke as if from a dream and saw that the windows had gone pale with the storm—it was snow now, and no doubt about it. The can of soup, the spoon still transfixed in a bit of congealed goop at the bottom, stood frigidly on the end table beside him. When he let out a breath, he could see it condense in a cloud at the tip of his nose. Stirring himself—this was a crisis, the pipes would freeze, and just look at that fire, nothing but embers and ash—he stoked the fire impatiently, laid on an armful of kindling and two massive slabs of split oak. It was four forty-five, he was a hundred pages into the book and the snow was raging down over the slick heart of the ice that lay beneath it. And where was Barb? Stuck in a drift somewhere? Abandoned in a darkened mall? Dead? Mutilated? Laid out on a slab at the county hospital?
The anxiety came up in him like a sort of fuel, pure-burning and high of octane, and he’d actually lifted the phone to his ear before he realized it was dead. There was no dial tone, no sound of any kind, just the utter nullity of the void. He went to the window again. The sky was dark now, moiling with the flecks and bits of itself it was shedding over the earth. He could barely see to the end of the drive, and the lightless houses across the street were invisible. He thought of the car then—his car, the compulsively restored MGA roadster with the fifteen-hundred-dollar paint job in British racing green—but he couldn’t risk that on streets as slick as these were bound to be. He hardly drove it in winter at all—just enough to keep it in trim—and it certainly wouldn’t get him far on a night like this, even in an emergency. And he couldn’t call Barb’s absence an emergency, not yet. They were having a storm. The lines were down. There was no way she could get to him or he to her. He couldn’t call the police, couldn’t call her sister or that restaurant in the mall or that store, Things & Oddments, that featured so prominently in his monthly credit card bill. He was powerless. And like the pioneers before hi
m, he would just have to batten down the hatches—the doors and windows, that is—and wait out the storm.
And where better to do it than stretched out on the sofa in front of the fireplace, with a hurricane lamp and a book? He gave the fire a poke, spread a comforter over his legs, and settled back to read.
—
“Sonia,” I cried, exasperated, “you’re behaving like a child!”
She was dancing through the town square, riding high up off the lithe and juvenile stems of her legs, laughing in the astonished faces of the shopkeepers and making rude flatulent noises with her tongue and her pouting underlip. Even Don Pedro C———, the younging commandant of our fair city, who was in that moment taking the air with his aging bride of twenty, had to witness this little scene. “I am a child!” Sonia shrieked, tailing the phrase with a cracked and willful schoolgirl’s laugh that mounted the walls to tremble in every fishbowl and flowerpot on the square. “And you’re an old tightwad!” And then she was off again, singing it through the side streets and right on up to the house where my mother had been twice an infant: “Don Fausto’s a tightwad, Don Fausto’s a tightwad!”
It was my fault, actually—at least partly—because I’d denied her a bauble at the jewelry merchant’s, but still, you can imagine my consternation, not to mention my embarrassment. I bit my lip and cursed myself. I should have known better, marrying a woman going down when I was going up. But I’d always been attracted to maturity, and when I was a young, aging man of thirty, I found her fifty-year-old’s wrinkles and folds as attractive as her supple wit and her voice of authority and experience. Then she was forty-five and I was thirty-five and we were closer than ever, till we celebrated our fortieth birthdays together and I thought I had found heaven, truly and veritably.
But now, now she’s running through the streets like a little wanton, fifteen years old and you’d think she’d never been fifteen before, her slip showing, her feet a mad dancing blur and something in her hair—chocolate, the chocolate she ate day and night and never mind the pimples sprouting in angry red constellations all over her face and pretty little chin. And there she is, just ahead of me, running her hands through all the bowls of fighting fish poor Leandro Mopa has put out on display—and worse, upsetting Benedicta Moreno’s perfectly proportioned pyramid of mangoes.
And what am I thinking, all out of breath and my lungs heaving like things made of leather? When we get home—this is what I am thinking—when we get home, I will spank her.
—
There was a sudden thump on the front porch, an ominous thump, ponderous and reverberative, and it resounded through the empty house like the clap of doom. John sat up, startled. It sounded as if someone had dropped down dead on the planks—or been murdered. But there it was again, not just a single thump now but a whole series of them, as if the local high school were staging a sack race on his front porch. He glanced at the clock on the mantel—eight-forty already, and where had the time gone?—then set the book down and rose from the couch to investigate.
As he approached the front door, the thumping became louder and more insistent, as if someone were kicking snow from their boots—that was it, yes, of course. It was Barb, the car was stuck in a drift someplace and she’d walked the whole way, he could see it already, and she’d be annoyed, of course she would, but not too annoyed, because of the magic and romance of the storm, and she’d warm herself by the fire, share a brandy with him and something they could heat over the open flames—hot dogs, whatever—and then, then he could go back to his book. But all that, the elaborate vision called up by the sound of thumping feet, the comfort and rationalization of it, went for nothing. Because at that moment, just as he reached his hand out for the doorknob, he heard the murmur of a man’s voice and the high assaultive giggle of a female, definitely not Barb.
And then the door stood open, the keen knife of the air, the immemorial smell of the snow and the whole world transformed and transforming still, and there was Buck, home from college in a snow-shrouded ski jacket and a girl with him, a girl with fractured blue eyes and a knit cap pulled down to her eyebrows. “Hey, Dad,” Buck breathed in passing, and then he and the vigorously stomping girl were in the hall and the old dog was wagging her tail and attempting a puppyish yip of greeting.
“Jesus”—and Buck was shouting suddenly, his voice gone high with enthusiasm—“you ever see anything like this? Must’ve taken us twelve hours from Plattsburgh and the only thing moving on the Northway was the bus. Good old Greyhound, huh?”
John wasn’t thinking clearly. He was still in the book, or part of him was. “You didn’t flunk out, did you?” he said, throwing his hands out, as if for balance.
Buck gave him a look, the narrow eyes he’d inherited from his mother, the beak of the nose and the cheeks flushed with the cold—or drink, hard liquor, and that was all they did up in Plattsburgh, as far as John had heard anyway. “No,” Buck said finally, a hurt and sorrowful expression clouding his features, “I just thought I’d come home for the weekend, you know, see how everybody was . . . oh, this is Bern.” He indicated the girl, who reached up to tear off the knit cap and shake out a blazing head of white-blond hair.
John was impressed. He snatched a quick look at her breasts and her slim legs rising out of a pair of slick red boots. This was the sort of girl he’d wanted in college, lusted after, howled to the moon over, but to no avail. He’d been a nerd, a math nerd, the kind of guy who got excited over cryptography and differential equations, and he’d wound up with Barb. Thankfully. And he wasn’t complaining. But his son, look at his son: Buck was no nerd, no sir, not with a girl like—“What was your name?” he heard himself asking.
A final shake of the hair, a soft cooed greeting for the reeking old dog. “Bern,” she said evenly, and she had a smile for him, wonderful teeth, staggering lips, pink and youthful gums.
The door was shut now. The hallway was cold. And dark. He was smiling till his own teeth must have glowed in the dim glancing light of the fire in the other room. “Short for Bernadette?” he ventured.
They were moving instinctively, as a group, toward the fire—even the dog. “Nope,” she said. “Just Bern.”
Well, fine. And would she like a drink? Suddenly, for some reason, it was vitally important to John that she have a drink, crucial even. No, she said, looking to Buck, no, she didn’t drink. There was a silence. “And how’s school?” he asked finally, just to say something.
Neither of them rushed to answer. Buck, alternately warming his hands over the fire and stroking the old dog, just shrugged, and the girl, Bern, turned to John and said, “Frankly, it sucks.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Buck murmured.
John was puzzled. “You mean—?”
“Aw, shit.” Buck spoke with real vehemence, but softly, almost under his breath, and he rose tumultuously from his place by the fire. “We’re going to hang in my room for a while, okay, Dad?” His arm found Bern’s shoulder and they were gone, or almost, two shadows touching and melding and then slowly receding down the dark hall. But then Buck hung back a moment, the shadows separating, and his face was floating there in the unsteady light of the hurricane lamp. “Where’s Mom?” he asked.
—
When she was twelve, she began to lose her breasts. I would put my arm round her in a restaurant and feel like a child molester, and when we went to bed together I had to keep reminding myself that she was a younging twelve, which actually gave her some eighty-eight years of worldly wiles and experience, at least seventy-five of them enlivened by venereal pleasures. (I never fooled myself into thinking I was the only one, though I wanted to be. She’d been married and separated before I met her, and when she was young the first time, there had been a succession of lovers, a whole mighty tide of them.) She’d begun taking a rag doll to bed—and crunching hard candy between her dwindling molars or snapping gum in my face whenever I began to feel amo
rous—and this just intensified my feelings of jealousy and resentment.
“Tell me about your first,” I would demand. “What was his name, Eduardo, wasn’t it?”
“Don’t!” She would giggle, because I was stroking the soft white doeskin of her belly or the silk of her upper arm, and then, blowing a pink bubble with her gum, she would correct me. “It wasn’t Eduardo, silly, it was Armando. I told you. Silly.” And it would become a chant—“Silly, silly, silly!”—till I sprang up off the bed and chased her round the room, through the apartments and past the maid’s quarters, and only then, when I was out of breath and half spent, would she give me my pleasure.
And then came the day, the inevitable day, when she was no longer a woman. Her breasts had disappeared entirely, not even the tiniest bud left, and between her legs she was as bald as an apple. Of course, I’d known all along the day was coming, and I’d tried to prepare myself as so many before me had done, watching soap operas and reading the great tragedies, but the pain and disillusionment were more than I could bear—yes, disillusionment. Here was the woman I loved, the woman who could talk all day of the books of Mangual and Garci-Crespo, make love all night to the sensual drone of Rodriguez’s Second Cello Concerto and cry out in joy at the dawn as if she’d created it herself. And now, now she sat Indian style in the middle of the bed and called out for me in a piping little singsong voice that made my blood boil. And what did she call me? Fausto, or even Faustito? No, she called me Daddy. “Daddy, Daddy,” she called, “read me a story.”