The Testimony

by Laura London

  Beth provided her with enough teasing material against Jesse to last a good six months if judiciously employed. Indy arrived midway through the half. His contract with the Milwaukee Ballet disallowed everything—soccer, motorcycling, downhill skiing—that might injure the fabulous body in which the company had invested so many dollars. He said that, the way fate worked, this practically insured that he would break his neck falling off a bleacher seat.

  When Christine found her way up to the top row and handed him a cold bottle of beer, he tossed his beret on her curls and arranged it becomingly.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked.

  “I had a union meeting. What’s the score?”

  “We’re down, four–three. It’s been fierce. See the guy on the Croatians’ with the black mustache? The ref just gave him a yellow card for this.” She imitated the referee’s motions.

  “Unnecessary roughness.”

  “That’s what I thought. He gave Sandor a nosebleed.”

  “Oh, Lord. Yeah. I can see it on the front of his shirt. What did Beth say?”

  “A truck driver would have blushed. Jess and Peter didn’t look very pleased either.”

  “I can imagine.”

  Christine caught the warm wool scent from his sweater as he took a long drink from the bottle. Then he said, “How’s Jesse?”

  “I don’t know.” Her hands clasped in her lap. “Angela Currie told him that she saw us together.”

  He had been settling the beer between his feet, but he turned his face toward her at that, the heavy-lidded green eyes regarding her alertly.

  “It hurt him,” she said. “Neither one of us has ever taken a problem outside before. What could it do but draw two red lines under how poorly we’re communicating? I don’t think he wanted to let it hurt, but it did.”

  He handed her the beer. “Drink.” After she did, he said, “Have you stopped giving up what you need?”

  “I…” She paused. “I’m not sure.”

  He nodded. “Keep on it. I know I sound like a one-trick pony, Chris, but you can’t put him back together. Only yourself.” Leaning back slightly, as though to see her better, he said, “Did I ever tell you that you’re beautiful?”

  White shock. “No.”

  “You are. Your features are pretty ordinary, but—I don’t know—something kind of shines from inside.”

  “I think I just felt a rush of nutrition to my ego.”

  “Good. Taking care of you right now is the closest I can come to taking care of Jesse.”

  “I know.” She saw his pliant smile appear briefly before a roar from the spectators around them drew their attention back to the game.

  Watching his brother through narrowed eyes, Indy reached blindly for the beer in Christine’s hands. “He didn’t need to lose that ten pounds in prison. He’s out of shape.”

  “Yes. And it really bothers him too. Look at his face. It’s inhuman that that jail doesn’t have a place to exercise. He went from a tiny stuffy room with cots at night to a tiny stuffy room with tables and chairs during the day. It’s inhuman.”

  Indy shrugged. “Economics. Who’s going to get into office these days running on a platform of budget expansion for the prison system?”

  The bleachers shuddered as the spectators erupted to their feet. Jesse had stopped a lightning pass from his brother Peter and broken loose from the defender at his side. In one fast, sensuous burst of power, effortless in appearance, looking like the Jesse of last summer, he put the ball neatly through the Croatian goalie’s outstretched arms and it bounced against the back net in a swirl of black and white. Goal.

  But even as a crowd of friends and relatives who hated to lose were beginning to cheer themselves hoarse, the referee blew his whistle, signaling an offside call that meant the goal didn’t count. Christine pulled the beret down over her eyes, stuck out her tongue, and said, “Blah.”

  All around them, heavily accented voices were scaling upward in volume, and Indiana was shouting angrily, “Offside, my ass! He wasn’t offside!”

  As for her husband, her fascinating, pleasant-tempered, uncommonly intelligent husband, Jesse had his well-structured nose two inches from the referee’s, and there was no mistaking the substance of their interchange. The referee flipped a yellow card from his back pocket and held it over his head—it was a warning. Jesse replied with a hand signal that needed no translation. Without wasting another second, the referee flashed up a red card, putting Jesse out of the game. As Jess came stalking to the sidelines, the crowd gave him an ovation, probably because they were enchanted by this sudden, unexpected feistiness in their favorite striker. But Christine, gripping hard on her knees, could feel the repeated movement of her lips as she whispered, “That’s not Jesse.”

  “Hey, tiger, what’d you say to him?” asked someone from the bench four rows down.

  “I told him to stuff it,” Jesse snapped, catching the thrown towel, wiping his face and neck with it. He looked angrily into the crowd and yelled, “Chris!”

  It made her angry to be summoned like that, like he was calling the dog, but he was marching off down the sidelines with his jaw set, pulling on his sweat jacket, and his mood told her there was no depending on his coming to his senses and returning to apologize if she sat tight. You never knew, he might take off without her, and she’d have to catch a ride home with one of his brothers, which would be even more embarrassing. Darn him anyway. She hopped down and ran to catch up to his long strides.

  She cleared her throat. “Evidently you don’t think we should stay to the end.”

  “Screw it,” he said succinctly. “We’re going home.”

  Oh, we are, are we? she thought irritably. At the car he wrenched open the door for her, and then his own, more violently. She had hardly pulled on her seat belt before he ground the Chevy into gear and spun out of the parking lot with an acceleration that was a nice mate to his temper. When they stopped at the light at the end of the block, he pulled the left-turn signal. It came off in his hand with a neat snap. Christine gave a sputter of mirth; she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the way he sat there staring with disbelief at the hapless auto part in his palm. With a heavy sigh he tossed it over his shoulder into the backseat and began to snicker too. Then they were clinging to each other’s shoulders, howling with laughter, until the chest pains made them gasp and the line of cars waiting behind them became a devil’s chorus of blaring horns. But in their laughter was a new note that they both heard; and that was despair.

  * * *

  Sandor, Peter, and a couple of Jesse’s friends from the team came by after the game to see how Jesse was doing after his virgin expulsion, and they invited him to come out with them to a tavern for a “red card” party. Jesse looked questioningly at Christine, but he seemed pleased by the sympathetic intrusion. She had the feeling that, if he stayed home, they would have a rip-roaring fight, so she gave in gracefully.

  “You go right ahead, Jess. I’ll spend a quiet evening at home darning your socks,” she said with a mock wistfulness that masked the real wistfulness she felt.

  “You’re a lucky man, Jess,” Sandor said, taking her into his arms and warming her all over with his lean body. “My socks are full of holes and Beth just says she likes the way my toes look poking out when I lie on the couch watching TV.”

  They laughed and carried Jesse off, and she wandered upstairs and, interestingly enough, actually looked in Jesse’s drawer and threw out a holey sock or two, wondering how many women left in the world still darned. She could imagine her female Irish ancestors knitting their men socks by candlelight, darning them by candlelight. It was comforting to realize that Beth, very content in her traditional woman’s role, didn’t darn socks either.

  Then Christine called her sister in Boston and ran up the phone bill talking cheerful nothings for half an hour. She spent from then until three o’clock in the morning making herself feel worse by drinking coffee and reading a long bleak family saga and waiting for Jes
se to come home. It was beginning to show gray through the window when a taxi pulled up outside and she was awakened from a half doze by the bravura strains of something culled from the Budapest Opera repertory being sung in loud disharmony by four unruly men in the street outside, one of whom was her husband. She dragged herself to the window and watched them. They were leaning on one another, holding one another up, and trying to help Jesse find his house key, a task evidently difficult to accomplish given the state of the searchers. She descended the stairs stiffly and let him in, throwing a quick wave to the other three roisterers, who piled back into the taxi, throwing her unsteady kisses and compliments that she was glad the neighbors wouldn’t be able to translate.

  She got him to the couch and began to pull off his clothes, an activity that was complicated by his amorous attentions, which, though misguided, had enough instinctive expertise to be extremely arousing.

  “If you can make love in this condition, Ludan, you’re a medical marvel,” she whispered.

  He was not, however, a medical marvel. He fell asleep. But when she crawled out from under his dead weight, the motion roused him enough to gaze up at her with his splendid light eyes and say, “I love you, babe. I love you so damned much.”

  How nice. She covered him with a comforter, but she would as soon have smothered him with it.

  Given the coffee in her system, getting up four hours later was not the undertaking it might have been.

  The house was quiet as she sat at the pine table in her small country-style kitchen. She had tuned the stereo to an easy-listening station and left it on low. A long soft sigh came from her as she dropped two pieces of bread into the toaster. Why had she let it become so difficult for her and Jesse to be open with each other? She became tied up in knots inside whenever she tried to talk about him in prison, and she wondered whether it was better to be silent or to risk being insensitive. Soft-focusing on the toaster, she enjoyed the oblique fun-house-mirror effect of its aluminum side until twin swirls of smoke rose from the slots in increasingly giddy clouds.

  “Damn!” she said. She’d forgotten. Three months ago, bringing in a bag of groceries by herself, carrying the keys between her teeth, she’d knocked the toaster off the kitchen cart and sent it banging to the floor. The next day it had sent up smoke signals, which was why she hadn’t used it since then. The frustration of that day returned as she quickly unplugged the offending appliance and fished the two flat shards of carbon from the slots.

  Waving her hand to circulate the smoke, she tried to scrape the toast and ended up with a sink of black dust and two needle-thin pieces of toast.

  “So irritating!” she ground out, and stood by the sink staring at the scraps of toast she had left. She’d seen bigger postage stamps, she thought glumly, her mind drifting back to Jesse. He had gone off like a powder keg yesterday. There could be no more pretending. She couldn’t continue to say “That’s not Jesse” whenever he did something unfamiliar, because it was Jesse. It was Jesse as he had become.

  She jammed the remains of the toast down the garbage disposal with a fork and turned the switch. Nothing happened. This she was used to—the disposal had a quirk. You had to flip twice. She flipped again and it worked, as it always did. But this time it had a new trick, which it played after the toast was only half-ingested: it gave a horrible grinding noise and a loud belch, and after a few seconds of disgusting suction noises, the other sink began to fill with dirty water from its drain.

  She moaned and grabbed the disposal switch to turn it off. She was thinking, Have I changed too? Adversity was supposed to strengthen people. She tried to search out the new strength inside. She tried to find the something beautiful Indiana said she had. But inside she was hollow.

  The base of her spine prickled and her neck was tightening as though there were a noose around it, familiar feelings when she was overwhelmed with worry. Distractions, she needed distractions. Not the saga. No more coffee. Thank goodness for the laundry. She left the cloudy kitchen and trudged up the stairs, trudging down a few minutes later with a laundry basket, leaving a small track of dirty clothes behind her down the basement steps.

  A moat of dark water ringed the washing machine and she walked through it on tiptoes, shuddering as the cold sliminess touched her skin. “Yuck! Yecchhh!” she complained as she fed the clothes into the spinner. Spring rains had turned the old basement into a swamp. She should have remembered to start the dehumidifier and check the sump pump. Turning on the washing machine, morosely watching the rapid drip of water from the hose at the faucet end, she decided that it was very interesting to learn that, when one’s life fell apart, everything went at once. She thought of her happy, orderly life dripping away like the leaky hose.

  The washer began to spin. A new wrinkle in the warped linoleum had put the machine off perch, and it began to rock in an unholy clamor, like a bucket of bolts possessed by an evil spirit. To top it off, a weird, high-pitched scream came from the hallway above her head, and she stared up in appalled wonderment until she realized that the cloud of smoke from the burned toast had finally reached the smoke alarm in the entranceway. She plunged headlong up the steps, racing to open the kitchen door and clear the air.

  But Jesse had opened the door. He was standing in the middle of the kitchen in his bathrobe, his hair tousled, looking sleepy eyed and amiably cross. The smoke alarm stopped its nerve-tingling keening as the cloud dissipated into the backyard.

  “Morning, darlin’,” he mumbled, and yawned. “What’s that ungodly racket in the basement? It sounds like the washing machine that ate Cleveland.”

  Christine had the pronounced feeling that she was on the verge of making the kind of immature scene she most despised.

  Jesse seemed to come to the bleary conclusion that for a man who had come home at dawn, he was not being very diplomatic. He tried to turn it into a joke. “Christine, how many times do I have to tell you not to clean the lawn mower in the washing machine?”

  “Everything’s broken around here! The car and the sink and the toaster and the washer.”

  The words, delivered somewhere in the decibel range of an SST on takeoff, had a powerful effect on Jesse’s hung-over brain. One hand opened the cupboard over the sink and groped shakily for the aspirin while he took in the lavender shadows that fringed her eyes, the smears of black soot on her cheeks, her belligerent barefoot stance.

  His hand closed gratefully around the aspirin bottle. Attempting to rise to the occasion somehow, he said, “Smoke detector’s working,” and smiled at her. She looked murderous. He took two aspirin.

  Then he caught her around the waist and brought her back with him to the plush easy chair, drawing her down against his chest, covering them both with the comforter. Tenderly he wiped the flushed, defiant face of the woman who was everything in the world to him, picking up a stray tear or two. He thought, This is the second time in a week I’ve made her cry. I’ve got to pull myself together before I hurt her any more.

  Resting his cheek against her hair, he listened to her fretful choking complaints about his behavior, his appliances, his soccer game.… At least she’d gotten over her reluctance to fight with him.

  She was gulping out, “All you do is drink with your brothers and stay out all night and never fix a thing. You don’t fix a thing.”

  They both knew what she was really begging him to fix. Christine, I’m trying.

  “I know two late nights out without you in less than two weeks was pushing things,” he said. “But being with my brothers seems to help.”

  “Everyone helps but me.”

  “No. No—you help most. Most by far. Do you think you could go back to sleep if I held you?”

  She sniffed.

  Interpreting that as a yes, he snuggled her more comfortably against him and whispered, “When you wake up, will you let me make love to you?”

  She sniffed again. And so he did.

  Chapter Seven

  Jesse’s parents had resided in the South
Side neighborhood of Pigsville since their arrival in Milwaukee in 1957. “Yeah,” Jesse loved to tell people, “I’m from Pigsville.” It was a unique area, isolated like the land time forgot in a dwarf valley that only the initiated knew how to find by threading through the potholed lanes of industrial Milwaukee, past a truck dealership, and then plunging down, down a spiraling blacktop road flanked by high airy grasses and buttercups.

  An old railroad yard bounded Pigsville to the north, the forbidden playground where Jesse and his brothers had spent their Saturdays inventing elaborate games inside the decrepit sidelined boxcars and observing the constant shuffling of full ones. Just beyond the rail yard, a brewery rose like a massive red-brick cliff, puffing its roast-corn aroma of malt deliciously into the little valley. And not thirty feet from the back bedroom Jesse had shared with nine brothers, a colossal concrete pillar shot upward to support the high slab of an interstate freeway, as sturdy and awe producing as one of Goliath’s legs. WELCOME TO PIGSVILLE and PIGSVILLE IS BEST, announced ancient spray-painted messages on the pillar, greeting Jesse and Christine as they pulled up to join the herd of cars in front of his parents’ house on Sunday morning.

  The freeway would block in shade toward noon, but it was still early enough for creamy sunlight; and it was quiet enough to hear the robins sing because the cement pillars seemed to capture and drown the city sounds from the sharp bluffs above. Only the Ludans’ tar-papered bungalow showed signs of activity. The little cottages and raised-basement houses slumbered on. A tabby cat meowed its way through the chicory patch underneath a rowboat up on cinder blocks in a neighbor’s yard. Plantain and pineapple weeds grew lushly in the little plots, and here and there lay an inexplicable dirt heap. Spring plantings of geraniums and petunias were already beginning to brighten everyone’s window boxes. Good-naturedly inadequate, robustly unpretentious, Pigsville had a way of seeming to delight in its own lack of gloss.