The pool was crowded with what appeared to be children from only two families: one white, one Hispanic. The parents were seated on lounge chairs on opposite sides of the pool, the white mother and father reading separate magazines, the Hispanic mother keeping a close eye on the kids while her overweight husband, who had obviously just come out of the water, dried off next to her.
The kids were all playing together. Two white boys, five or six Hispanic boys, one Hispanic girl. They were playing Marco Polo, and the girl was “it,” swimming with her eyes closed, hands extended, as around her the other kids, screaming and splashing, scattered about the pool.
He and Suzie walked over to the adjacent Jacuzzi, dropping their towels on nearby chairs. She sat on the edge, dangling her feet in the hot water, while he went over to the wall behind the tub and turned on the timer that ran the whirlpool. He got into the water, walking down the short steps and sitting down across from where Suzie still dangled her legs. He caught the glance of the Hispanic mother as he sat down, and she smiled at him. He smiled back. He pretended to look slowly around the pool area, but used the opportunity to study the mother more carefully. She was in her mid- to late thirties, and though she was a little on the chubby side, she was still fairly attractive, and she definitely rated better than the fat old man who was her husband.
He wondered, if they’d both been here unattached, if they’d met at the pool and she hadn’t had a husband or kids and he hadn’t been here with Suzie, if they would’ve gotten together tonight.
He wondered what it would be like with her.
He hazarded another look. She was focused on her kids this time, yelling something at one of them, but when she glanced up she looked in his direction and she smiled again.
He smiled back.
The first woman he’d ever been with had been Mexican. He’d been sixteen and she’d been in her early thirties, and she hadn’t shaved her legs or under her arms, and he’d been pretty sure that she hadn’t bathed in a while, but it had been a wonderful experience anyway, one that had remained unmatched for him until Phoebe, years later. There’d been something sexy about it all, about the fact that she didn’t shave like American women, that she smelled of sweat and musk rather than flowery perfume, and that made it seem nasty and forbidden. He remembered the way she’d bucked crazily underneath him and held his buttocks tightly to keep him in, and even now the memory stirred him. She’d kept him inside even after he’d finished, allowing him to grow soft within her, and it had seemed to him that that was the part she’d liked best.
She was a puta, a whore, he heard later from his friends, but she hadn’t charged him anything, and he wondered whether what they said was true or if they were just jealous.
He glanced across the roiling water of the Jacuzzi to see Suzie staring at him. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
After swimming, they returned to the room. She was still in the mood, and she pulled down his trunks. His penis was shrunken, water-shriveled, but she knelt before him and used her mouth, and though he still didn’t feel like having sex, he allowed himself to be pushed onto the bed and even let her be on top.
Afterward, she showered and he lay there watching TV. She’d shown no interest in seeing Taos, in looking through the shops and galleries, and while he should have been grateful for that, somehow it didn’t sit well with him. He didn’t want to walk through shops and galleries, but he wanted her to want to. The thought that she was content to stay in the room, like him, and watch television was depressing.
She came out of the bathroom naked, her hair still wet, and jumped on the bed next to him, bouncing on the hard mattress as though it were a trampoline. She leaned over and kissed him, tried to get him to be affectionate, but he pushed her aside and said he wanted to watch the news. She pouted, tried to make him feel guilty, but he didn’t care enough to feel guilty, and she eventually fell asleep while he watched a joking weatherman predict tomorrow’s temperatures.
He woke her up an hour or so later, took her to dinner at an outdoor café that he said was supposed to have the best food in Taos but which in actuality he’d chosen at random as they’d walked down the street. There was a short, astound ingly ugly woman eating alone at the table next to them, and while Suzie chattered away about subjects in which he had no interest, he watched the woman eat. He found himself wondering whether she’d ever had sex, whether any man—or any woman—had ever wanted her. She might be good in bed, he reasoned. Someone like that would probably be extra giving, more attentive to a partner’s needs than someone with less to overcome.
The woman caught him looking at her and she grimaced in distaste, forcing him to turn away.
When they returned to the room, Suzie hinted that she’d like some oral sex, and he started working on her, but it took so long that she fell asleep in the middle of it, and he quit and fell asleep next to her, his jaw hurting.
He awoke the next morning early, before dawn, before her, and he carefully pushed off the covers and got out of bed. She was curled up on the opposite side of the mattress, facing away from him, and when he walked around the foot of the bed he could see that she was smiling in her sleep, her expression one of unconcerned, unburdened happiness. He stood there for a moment, watching her, thinking, then quietly put on the clothes he’d been wearing yesterday and had dumped on the floor. He picked up his keys, put his wallet in his pocket.
He left everything, left his suitcase and other clothes, left the toiletries and ice chest. They were peripheral, extraneous, and would only tie him down. He opened and closed the door without waking her, sneaking out to the car. He started the vehicle, waited for a moment to see if she would hear and recognize the noise and come out after him, but the door to the room did not open, the curtains did not part, and he backed the car out of its space, swung around and peeled out of the parking lot.
He drove through Taos, north, past the reservation.
He thought of Phoebe, then thought of Suzie, still asleep in the motel room, and as he passed over the bridge that spanned the Rio Grande gorge he smiled. He was still smiling as he crossed the border into Colorado.
Three
“That is rough,” Jason said sympathetically, clapping a hand on his back.
Steve winced. He didn’t like other men touching him, something that Jason, one of those touchy-feely guys, never could seem to figure out. Steve did not understand why certain individuals felt the need to invade the space of others, but, hey, that was the way some people were, and Jason was one of them. Live and let live.
Dennis and Will merely shook their heads, staring into their glasses.
Despite everything that was going on, Steve had met his friends for their regular round of drinks after work on Friday, and while he’d debated whether to tell them about his father, he’d decided at the last minute to come clean and let them know what was going on. He was glad he had. He’d been a bundle of knotted nerves all week, his mind going over and over the increasingly bleak possibilities, and it felt good to unburden himself, to fill in Jason, Dennis and Will on the horrors of the VA hospital and frontotemporal dementia, and tell them the hellish half-life his father had to look forward to before he finally succumbed to his disease and died.
He hadn’t told Sherry yet, although he wasn’t sure why. She knew that his father was in the hospital, of course, and he’d told her about the stroke, but he hadn’t gotten down to the nitty-gritty, hadn’t come clean about the violence and the dementia. He felt a little guilty spilling his guts to his friends before his fiancée, but for some reason he found it easier to talk to them about it. Probably because Sherry would make him go deeper, would try to probe his feelings about his father and his family—and he really didn’t want to delve into that right now. He had enough emotional burdens to deal with as it was.
Dennis looked over at him. “So have the meds made any difference?”
Steve shrugged.
“What do the
doctors say?”
“It’s downhill from here. It’s only going to get worse.”
“How bad is it now?” Jason asked.
“He only recognizes me sometimes. And he usually talks nonsense. Yesterday, he saw me and said, ‘Crap the biscuit.’ ”
Will let out an involuntary laugh, then stifled himself. He immediately held up an apologetic hand. “Sorry, dude. Sorry.”
Steve smiled. “That’s all right. It is funny sometimes. Even my mother laughed yesterday when he told her to ‘Purple the cat.’ Sometimes it’s all you can do.”
Dennis nodded. “Laugh or else you’ll cry, huh?”
Steve nodded. “Yeah.” But the truth was that he’d never been in any danger of crying. His father’s situation might be heartbreakingly tragic, but his realization of that was all intellectual. Emotionally, he felt completely disengaged. He told himself it was a coping mechanism, the way he protected himself from hurt, but he knew that wasn’t true. He simply did not have the loving feelings toward his father that most sons had. What he did, he did out of obligation.
At least his mother had finally started coming with him to the hospital. It had taken two days and a lot of guilt-tripping, but he’d convinced her to accompany him so she could speak directly with the doctor. She moaned and complained all the way there, putting on an exaggerated show with her broken wrist to show that she was suffering too, but when she finally saw her husband, drugged and strapped to the bed, all of that went out the window, and she burst into tears. Obviously the two of them did have a deep emotional connection, something he’d always suspected but had never really known for sure.
“Does your dad know that he’s talking gibberish?” Jason asked.
“He thinks he’s making perfect sense.”
“That must be frustrating.”
“It is. But it still shouldn’t make him so angry. That’s the freakiest thing, the way he gets so mad. I mean, he’s never been Mr. Sunshine, but when he’s saying things that we don’t understand, he gets furious. He starts screaming, his face gets red, his hands clench. That’s why he’s restrained. The medication seems to have helped, but the anger’s still there, and if he weren’t tied down, I know he’d try to attack us.”
“So are you going to have to take a lot of time off work for this? These family emergencies really eat into your vacation and sick days, you know.” Jason worked in the human resources department of Automated Interface, and he tended to see things from that personnel perspective.
Steve shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Will laughed. “It’s not like you have a real job anyway.”
Steve forced himself to smile. Will was always saying things like that, insinuating that because he’d gotten a job with AlumniMedia and spent his days putting together newsletters and yearbooks for various high school and college reunions, he didn’t do as much work as the rest of them but just sat around staring into space and doodling on scratch paper. Usually after such a put-down he’d come back at Will with something like “That’s not what your mama told me last night,” but he was too tired today and didn’t want to get into it.
“I interviewed a sex researcher this week,” he said. “She’s doing a study of pornography.”
Will grinned. “Now you’re talking!”
“You know, I never really understood before what people meant when they said pornography was anti-women—”
“Oh, come on,” Dennis said. “Not that feminist crap!”
“No, really. She had a point. She said most of the acts depicted in porno movies and on hard-core Web sites and things were ones that didn’t give pleasure to women: BJs, spanking, anal. . . .”
“Was she hot?”
“Kind of,” he admitted.
Will grinned. “Hot babe? And her job is watching movies with anal action?” He shook his head apprecia tively. “Mmm, mmm, mmm.”
His friends laughed, and Steve decided to drop the subject. He wasn’t sure why he’d brought it up in the first place other than to change the topic of conversation, but he should have known that they would find it titillating, and he sat there and nursed his beer while Jason, Dennis and Will riffed endlessly on the various acts the sex researcher had to chronicle and whether she used the information she gathered in her private life.
He left early.
Sherry was waiting for him when he got back to his apartment. She’d used her key to let herself in and was cooking something in the kitchen. The TV was on and turned to NBC Nightly News.
Steve’s first reaction was one of annoyance—how dare she do that without calling and letting him know?—but that was replaced by a weary gratitude. He hadn’t thought to pick up junk food on the way home, and there was no way he was in the mood to cook something, so if she hadn’t come over his dinner probably would have consisted of Doritos and Dr Pepper.
He walked into the kitchen, gave her a quick squeeze and looked over her shoulder at what was on the stove. “What are you making?”
“Fettuccine Alfredo,” she told him. “I figured you could use a little home cooking. I know it’s been a rough week. How’s your dad doing?”
He wanted to tell her the truth, the whole truth, but he didn’t know how.
He was just like his parents, he realized. The old Harry Chapin situation: He’d grown up just like them.
Steve didn’t like that, didn’t want that, and he forced himself to explain everything that had happened, from his mother’s day-late phone call about the attack and her broken wrist, to yesterday’s outburst after a nurse had neglected to administer one of his father’s afternoon dosages. It was awkward at first, and the discomfort made him realize that one reason he hadn’t been completely honest with her was because he was embarrassed. Embarrassed for his father and his family and himself. He didn’t want Sherry to see his dad the way he was now and didn’t want her associating that behavior with him.
He was also afraid, although of what he was not exactly sure. That she would see his family as something it wasn’t? Or that she would see it for what it was? He didn’t know. Something, though. He was afraid of something.
She kissed him when he was done talking, and she was crying. Her tears were warm on his cheek. His own eyes were dry, and he felt more tired than sad, but he was glad that she’d been so touched. She clung to him tightly, and he squeezed her back, grateful that she was still there.
He hadn’t lost her.
Was that what he’d been afraid of?
Maybe.
She stayed over, and they spent Saturday at the beach: walking along the pier, eating lunch at the Crab Cooker, taking the ferry to Balboa Island and browsing the tourist shops. A tan blond teenager and his equally tan, equally blond friend were poking at a beached jellyfish with sticks on one of the sections of sand between boat docks on the island, and among the crowd of people that had gathered, Steve saw Gina from work. She was with a paunchy, balding older man, and they were both wearing bathing suits, she a string bikini. Steve didn’t know whether the man was her father, husband or boyfriend, didn’t know if her family lived on Balboa Island or if she was just visiting. All he knew was that he didn’t want her to see him, and he ushered Sherry back into the strolling crowd on the sidewalk and made a quick getaway. It felt strange coming upon a woman he knew from work, whom he’d encountered only in that rigid, formal environment, on the beach and barely dressed. He thought it would be embarrassing to both of them if they met here, and he did not relax until they were once again on the ferry and heading back across the bay.
They stopped at Roger ’s Gardens afterward so Sherry could look at the flowers, and on the way home he realized that he hadn’t thought about his parents all day. The reprieve had been nice—but he felt guilty. What kind of son was he? He should be able to think of nothing else, and the fact that he was so easily distracted, that ordinary weekend activities could make him forget that his mother was home alone and suffering with a broken wrist because his father had dementia and had tried to k
ill her, made him feel ashamed.
He started to turn left into the driveway of his apartment complex, but at the last minute remembered that Sherry’s car was parked on the street. He drove around the block, then pulled behind her Prius. They got out of the car. She hadn’t planned on staying over last night, so she was still wearing the same clothes as yesterday. She wanted to go home, take a shower and change.
“Do you want to come over tonight?” she asked him. “Stay?”
Steve shook his head tiredly. “I’m going to go see my dad before it gets too late.”
She smiled, giving him a quick kiss. “You’re a good son. That’s one of the things I love about you.”
He forced himself to smile back. Was he a good son? He didn’t know. Was his dad a good father? That was an even harder call. But the fact that he still went out of his way to visit his old man despite the problems they’d had indicated that he’d probably come out on top in a head-to-head comparison. He doubted that his dad would do the same if their situations were reversed.
Why, though, was he keeping score? Why did he even care about how the scales balanced? He didn’t believe in heaven, hell or an afterlife, didn’t think he’d be called to account for his actions. And his father certainly wouldn’t know whether he had stopped to visit. But Steve had always looked at his life as though disassociated from it, as though watching it from afar. It was as if he were in a movie, and the truth was that many of the thoughts he had, many of the actions he undertook, were for the benefit of that movie’s unknown viewer. He was writer, director, star and critic of his own life.
He wasn’t alone in this, he knew. What were all those plugged-in teenagers doing with headphones in their ears but playing a sound track to the everyday occurrences that made up their lives? In their heads, they too were pretending they were on a screen and someone was watching.
It was what everyone did, to one extent or another.
He kissed Sherry good-bye, promised to call her tonight when he got home, and watched her drive off, waving, before getting back into his own car.
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