Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  “Do you?”

  He glances at me, then turns to the window to exhale. “How can I hate her? I don’t even know the woman. She could be any woman I might pass walking down the street in any major European metropolis. Maybe she’s Diahann Carroll on Dynasty. Maybe she’s Phylicia Rashad.”

  “On Cosby,” I say absent-mindedly, and he scares me half to death by laughing out loud. “Yes!” he exclaims. “On Cosby! Oh, Lord! Maybe that’s my mother!”

  I can only laugh, nervously, I’m so taken aback by this outburst, which strikes me as a little psychotic. He throws his cigarette butt out the window and says, calmly now, “No. I don’t hate her. What’s to hate? Amsterdam is a hell of a lot more interesting than Virginny. So is London.”

  “So your Auntie Florie raised you?” I say.

  “Not Florie, darling. Fleurie. Like fleur, you know, the French for ‘flower,’ like fleur-de-lis?” He’s lisping now, getting bitchy, deliberately trying to annoy me. Maybe he thinks I don’t know those disgusting stereotypes. Well, he’s wrong; I do. Everybody does.

  “I know the French for ‘flower,’ thank you,” I say.

  “I’m sure you do.”

  I decide to let it pass. “So your great-aunt raised you?” I ask again.

  “Hmmmm,” he says, exaggeratedly, as though he’s considering the question. “Hmmmm. Housed me. Fed me. Clothed me. Educated me, even—expensively, as you can attest. But raised me? Not really. Not terribly. I spent most of my time hiding from her. And Auntie Fleurie is so goddamned dignified, in her big old house with a portico and eighteenth-century wallpaper—she wouldn’t debase herself to come look for me. So, no, in answer to your question—and, I will add, a most keen-minded question—she did not raise me. Nobody did. I raised myself.”

  We’re silent for a moment before he asks, “Now, Mr. Fitzpatrick, the question remains: Who raised you?”

  “It’s more like, who’s raising me,” I say.

  He pounces right back. “All right, then. Who has raised you and who continues to raise you?”

  He’s sounding so ridiculous, so arch and professorial, I can’t help but laugh a little. And before I can think of a cleverer answer, something approaching his own, I just give him the honest one: “A lot of people.”

  This doesn’t seem to give him pause. “And do you share their values?” he shoots right back.

  It seems like such an obvious question, and yet I’ve never really considered it before. In some ways, I don’t even know what it means. “Well,” I answer carefully, “I guess about some things, no. And about other things, I guess I do.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I guess about family. Feeling that your family is very important to you, and you don’t let them down. And that you support your family in whatever they do, and they support you.” Even halfway through saying this, I feel like a cornball, but I mean it, I think.

  “I see,” he says, starting to finger the St. Christopher medallion again, much to my dismay; I start feeling some sort of frontal attack coming on. “And do they support you in all your endeavors?”

  I think about my mother and about Yale, and how she had said, “We’ll find a way,” and how, even if they had never introduced me to my interests, they certainly had never stood in the way, and I say, “Uh-huh. I guess on the whole they do. Basically, they don’t bother with me.”

  “I see,” he says, then: “What are your people, anyway? I presume Irish, this being Massachusetts?”

  “Irish,” I say, then, “Dirty micks,” but he doesn’t laugh.

  “And is that it? You look swarthier than just Irish.”

  “And Italian, too, on my mother’s side. But I try to play that down.”

  “I see,” he says, still professorial. “So here we have the red-nosed people of Eire, surely the dumbest people in the world, with the possible exception of a few drunks who fucked the Blarney Stone, like Joyce and Yeats. And then we have the brilliant race behind Mussolini and the Holy See—and the Godfather movies, which completely glorified cold-blooded murder in the name of family, as you say—and let’s see, what else? Oh, of course, scungilli! Delicious scungilli! And Chef Boyardee!”

  I don’t even know what scungilli is, but I’m still vaguely pissed off, partly because I’m embarrassed enough about the Italian side of my family and have always been grateful to have gotten my father’s last name instead of Ianelli. All I say is, “It’s not correct to refer to Italians as a race. They’re an ethnicity, maybe, or a nationality. But not a race.”

  “Oh, yes, they are!” he exclaims. “They’re a race. They’re a race to the finish line, to see who can eat the most scungilli before Judgment Day, before the Big Thunderclap!” And he smashes his hands together—“Ba-boom!”—and I’m beginning to wonder all over again if he’s psychotic. And then he quiets down and he says to me, settling back in the passenger seat, his cigarette finished, “You needn’t worry, Mr. Fitzpatrick. You transcend your race.”

  I scowl. I almost want to say to him, flip, “You transcend yours,” because he’s like no black person I’ve ever seen—or white person either, for that matter, or any person. He’s more like a character out of some novel, or a play, he seems assembled out of so many pieces. But I don’t say that. I don’t think that would be wise. Instead, I say, “Thank you, Mr. Jefferson Tremont,” and I hope that’s flip enough for him.

  “My lord!” he exclaims. “You remembered the entirety of my last name. Quels retention skills. You’ll ace the SATs.”

  “I already have,” I say, and then I can’t help but laugh a little at my own arrogance. It also buoys me to be a little grandiose for a minute, like him.

  “Have you?” he says, and laughs, too. “Well, seize the day!”

  The little digital clock on the dashboard reads ten to midnight; without even really thinking about it, I’ve been driving back past St. Banner, through the outskirts of West Mendhem and well into Boxford; without even calculating, I’ve been wanting to get us both out of West Mendhem, beyond my realm of familiarity, and his, because when I’m with him there, it feels a little spooky; it feels like a place I’ve never been. I’m pulling off rural Route 133 now, onto a semipaved road that leads to a small lake in the woods where Phoebe and I go sometimes. (Once we went there in the spring and read Emily Dickinson aloud while eating fresh strawberries, and declared ourselves pretentious.) He seems to be pricking up his ears in the seat next to me now, peering out into the leafy darkness.

  “Where are you taking me, Mr. Fitzpatrick?” he asks with mock trepidation. “All sorts of untoward things could happen in a remote spot like this.”

  “We’re not so far from St. Banner, actually,” I say, enjoying this moment, being in control, picking the locale. “I just wanted to get out of West Mendhem. There’s a pretty little lake down at the end of this road where I come sometimes.”

  I pull the hatchback halfway off the path and into the woods, and shut off the engine. Now there’s dead quiet, here in a pocket of clearing in yet another ancient Massachusetts burg known only for its proliferation of horse stables and antique stores, but that’s all somewhere else, and long gone to bed, like the rest of the world. There are goddamned crickets, though, just like the other night by the roadside near St. Banner, a whole singing society of them.

  We’re walking now down the path, down the little slope to the rotting wooden pier that sits on the lake, the flat feet of his sockless loafers louder on the gravel than my sneakers, sounding so acute, like a kind of dare. “‘Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though,’” he says, sotto voce. “I bet you had to memorize that in elementary school, didn’t you?” he says to me.

  “No,” I say, and before I can elaborate, there’s a horrible commotion in the bushes to our left, and some kind of shapeless furry thing—an opossum, I think—runs across our path. I jump back about six feet, with a hiss. But he never moves, just watches it run across the pathway with curious detachment,
as if he nearly falls over woodland creatures all the time.

  “Are you quite all right?” he asks me a moment later, archly.

  “That thing was the size of a beagle,” I say.

  “Thank God you’re a country boy,” he says, and we keep walking.

  The pier doesn’t creak when we step onto it—it’s too sodden—and in the dark the small lake looks black and forbidding, like oil, except for the patches covered in lilypads, which glint silver now. On all sides, there’s a wall of fir trees and weeping willows, and behind us, the car and the road are obscured over the rise in the land. It’s like we’re in a kind of hollow.

  “It’s pretty here, isn’t it?” I ask, just wanting him to agree, to say a simple yes and not make much more of it.

  “This is so,” is what he says, so calmly, looking over the surface of the lake, and I can’t see the temperament of his eyes in the dark, whether they’re mocking me or not. Then he pulls something out of the pocket of his khakis—a joint. He smokes it the way he smokes cigarettes, indifferently, not greedily like Phoebe or Charlie, or, I guess, on those occasions when I join in, me myself.

  “Vous voulez?” He offers the lighted joint to me. I pause for a moment and he catches it and says, “I won’t fink on you when you’re up for a Supreme Court nomination in later life. I won’t fink on you about anything.”

  “That’s okay.” I take the joint and inhale, trying to play it cool. “I hate politics. They bore me.”

  He takes back the joint, seeming actually to be considering my words with some consternation. He takes another hit—holding the joint between his second and third fingers, I notice, which I’ve never seen before, but it’s actually rather elegant—holds, exhales, then smiles. “They bore me, too. You know that? They really do. They don’t get anybody anywhere. He takes yet another hit before he hands it back to me. “Anyway, I believe in the trickle-down theory. I really do agree with Reagan on that. It only makes sense. Everything trickles down. Money. Love. Hate.”

  “Rain,” I say, laughing, and he laughs, too: “Of course, rain, brilliant! Everything trickles down!”

  The pot is creeping in around me now—it’s obvious; I can feel it. A warmth is starting to prickle from the top of my head down my spine, and an exquisite buzz is filling up my head, smothering out all sounds save the two of us standing here, snickering. He doesn’t seem to be affected; he’s still got that same disdainful half-mask smile on his face, and he’s concentrating it on me. For the first time, I’m feeling it without daring to think it: he is handsome behind his little glasses; there’s something geometric and assured and smart in his face, and his right hand, holding the joint delicately, seems to say as much about his intelligence and his profound contempt; he discriminates against everyone, including me, because why shouldn’t he, with such perfect, self-possessed hands? Thoughts I guess I might have had from the start, anguished, but now they’re seizing me with complete sovereignty, utter clarity, uncomplicated by dread. Or, better, my dread is choked off in narcotic acuity.

  Then we’re facing each other—how do people find themselves in those positions without having maneuvered to get there?—and he’s got his hands on my waist, under my T-shirt. “Oh, baby” is what he says, bringing my ear down to his lips, “you’re gonna have it all.”

  “You’re such an idiot,” I say back. “You already have it all. You just waste it.” My hands are on his shoulders now, unbidden by me, buzzing. It’s an awfully warm night, come to think of it.

  “Uh-huh,” he says, and that’s it. We’re on the ground now, kissing each other’s brains out. Later, I’ll realize it was my first kiss, but now, it just feels like an extension of the conversation. Later, I’ll wish I could say that he played me, that he handled me wherever he wanted to handle me, that I didn’t even know what was happening, but it would be a lie.

  Stopping for a minute, divested of shirts and buckled belts, he asks me, “Have you ever done this before?”

  “No,” I say. I guess I basically know what he means. “Have you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Who? Someone at S.B.A.?”

  “No. Someone in Virginia. Last summer.”

  “Who?”

  He laughs, viciously. “The poor fool who comes to tune my aunt’s piano. He’s forty-six, with a wife and kids. He’s a loan officer at the bank and he tunes pianos on Saturday mornings to calm his nerves. He’s of complete shabby-genteel lineage, and if you didn’t know that, you’d think he’s condensed-milk white trash! But he’s not. He’s an absolute angel, and he adored me.”

  I don’t know if he’s making this story up or not, it sounds so outlandish. So I venture: “What happened?”

  “What happened?” He settles his head against my stomach, crosses his hands over his chest and looks up at the sky. His short, scrubby hair feels itchy and almost—weirdly—comical against me, and lies there like a funny dark meteor against my stomach. “What do you think happened?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I say. “That never happened with me and our piano tuner.”

  “That never happened with you and anyone, am I not mistaken?” he asks, turning his head and nuzzling his face into me like I’m a throw pillow, but I can’t say I don’t like it.

  “No,” I say. “Not until tonight, I guess.”

  “Never with une petite fille? One of your little striving, poetry-loving friends from town?”

  That makes me think of Phoebe, and then Phoebe and Charlie, and I wonder what Phoebe would say or do if she could see me now. (I wouldn’t want her to, I think. I wouldn’t want anybody to see me now.) And all I say is “No. Not yet, anyway.”

  He laughs, and it sounds derisive to me. “Aren’t you going to tell me?” I ask, wanting to change back the subject.

  “What’s to tell? It was last summer. I was just back from Paris. Fleurie was at a church meeting, and Mr. Stockley the tuner was downstairs under the piano. So I went down and sat on the settee and watched him and asked him about his tuning business. And then he asked me all about Paris and I told him. And it looked like he was going to cry, he wanted to go so badly. He asked me if I had seen the Mona Lisa in the Louver. That’s how he pronounced it, Louver, like a louvered door.”

  I laugh, glad I’m able to be in on this joke instead of outside it, which I too often seem to be with him. “And then what?”

  “And then. And then I said yes, I had seen the Mona Lisa in the Louver, and he really wasn’t missing anything because you can’t get that close to it anyway, and he was just as well off buying a postcard and maybe taping it up near his desk at work where he did his accounting work. And then I asked him how to tune a piano, and—what then?—oh, precisely, he had an enormous coughing fit, and I brought him a glass of water because it was Saturday and the maid had the weekend off to go see her sister in Charlotte, and then he said, ‘You gotta get right down here if you want to see how it’s done.’ And that’s what I did.”

  “And?”

  “And what? Good Lord, you’re a Curious George.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What do you think? We did exactly what we’re doing right now.” He’s quiet for a minute, then says, “Only more.”

  I’m starting to get that prickle again, not far from where his head is, and I wonder if he can tell. “Well, what does that mean, exactly, ‘Only more’?” I also don’t know how I’m bringing myself to ask such a question.

  He rolls over until his chin is digging into my stomach, and he looks at me with his eyebrows arched high in his forehead. “Do you really want to know?” he asks me, and he seems gentler and more deferential than ever before.

  “Um. I guess so. I mean, yeah.”

  Then he ratchets his head down a few inches, and in a minute he’s pulling down the zipper on my shorts—efficiently, without a lot of fuss—then he’s pulling down my briefs, which I can only assume smell wretched from a long night of manual labor. But then, in a minute, when he’s lost to me and everything el
se in his singular pursuit, all I’m thinking is that I have never known anything could feel so good, not a back-rub from Joani, not the last line of the greatest book ever written. I can’t take my hands off the top of his head, and eventually, I’m so consumed with curiosity that I sit up and swing around and lunge for his khakis the way I imagine a quarterback—or fullback, or halfback, or whatever—must lunge for the ball in the crucial final seconds of the game, leading the team to sweet victory.

  “Good Lord,” he exclaims, surfacing for a minute. “Can’t you just lie back and enjoy yourself?”

  “I am” is all I can say before I start in, before he starts again.

  When it’s over—first me, with him just on my heels—and I’m furiously running my tongue around inside my mouth to make sure everything is still there, he says to me, “Do you know what the piano tuner said to me right after this?” He’s lying back, flat, receding, his head lying smack against the rotting planks of the pier, looking different than I’ve ever seen him before, drugged and unpoised, like I’ve caught him in the moment when he’s about to fall asleep.

  “What did he say?” I ask. I’m sitting up now, pulling my briefs and shorts back on, feeling funny down there, like I’ve been skinned, and in my head bewildered whether or not I should feel bereft now, and fallen, or simply not bother.

  “He abandoned all pretense of petit-bourgeois gentility. The Louver was the last thing on his filthy little mind.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘I wish I could stuff your beautiful black cock in my mouth every day, first thing in the morning and last thing before I go to bed.’”

  It’s a shock to me, not the sentiment itself, but to hear him of all people say it. I don’t say anything myself. I don’t know what to say.

  “Don’t you?” he asks me, and I look at him, expecting him to flash me a preening smile. But he doesn’t. He looks perfectly serious, and for some reason, that makes me take the question literally, makes me think about the crazy logistics of that: every day, twice a day. “That would take some doing to pull off in my house,” I say. “Especially with my grandma living with us now, because she’s up at the crack of dawn saying her rosary.”