Catapult

by Emily Fridlund

  “Victim,” she’d say, nudging me awake when she got home late from the library. “Come here.”

  I got up and followed her. Sometimes she wanted to shove open the leaded glass window and let a little stinging snow blow in. She wanted to be shivering, goose-pimpled. She wanted to warm my shriveled cock with her mouth. “I like the word ‘screw,’” she’d whisper in the awful cold. “I like the word ‘fuck,’ but every other word for sex is a joke, isn’t it?” I never spoke at times like this out of fear of using one of the many words that turned her off, by accident. “‘Do it,’” she mocked, “‘sleep with,’ ‘make love’?” If it was late enough that it was morning, she sometimes led me in my groggy state to the shared bathroom down the hall, or to the hallway, or to the stairwell. She liked semipublic places. She liked almost getting caught, playing with me in doorways. Once I leaned back against the huge, curved banister in the hallway while she sucked me off, another of the tenants blow-drying her hair in the bathroom five feet away. “‘Intercourse,’” Liv lifted her head to say—just when the whir of the dryer cut off. “From the Old French, meaning ‘commerce.’”

  The bathroom door opened. We scurried up the stairs.

  Before long the icicles outside all the windows were as fat as human thighs. Winter deepened. The radiators were scorching to the skin if you touched them. The stairwell left splinters if you weren’t careful, and the kitchen linoleum was gummy against our backs from years of unwashed grime. When I helped her up at the end that time, the bare skin on her back made a kissing sound that made my own skin crawl. “That was hot,” I said, trying to sound satisfied, enthusiastic. What I didn’t, or couldn’t, admit to her was that I liked our cozy turret best. I liked our two mattresses that took up most of the room and the big wool blanket over both of us. I liked those rare weekend mornings when we stayed in bed, when we lay naked together and watched the weak winter sun shovel squares of light across the stucco wall. On those mornings I could hear the whole house shifting beneath us, pipes popping, people coming and going, water running, and it was so exquisite to fuck leisurely like that, to screw in private slow motion, perched atop it all.

  *

  “What do you think Mrs. Crubin would say,” Liv asked me once, “if she knew?” I shrugged. The truth was by then, by winter, we didn’t have to deal with Mrs. Crubin very much anymore because of her deteriorating health. But we did occasionally. On New Year’s Eve we forced ourselves. We made a pot of oily chili on our hotplate upstairs and carried the leftovers with our rent checks down to Mrs. Crubin, who could no longer walk—even with her cane—who was now looked over by paid caretakers in shifts. For the caretakers’ convenience, I guess, a hospital bed had been set up in the parlor among her whorled cabinets and side tables. We followed one of these caretakers in with New Year’s napkins, Tabasco sauce. Half sitting up in bed, Mrs. Crubin wore a long-sleeved sweater dress in pilled coral.

  “Happy New Year!” Liv said.

  Mrs. Crubin said, “Nrrrrrminnihhppaa.”

  The blue-haired nurse at her bedside bustled about, unconcerned. She tucked a New Year’s napkin under Mrs. Crubin’s chin, plunked a plastic spoon in Liv’s opened Tupperware of chili. “Do you want to feed her tonight? She’d like that, I bet. What a nice idea. Yum, yum, yum.”

  The nurse patted Mrs. Crubin’s belly, and Mrs. Crubin’s eyes went wide.

  “Umm,” I said, backing up.

  Liv didn’t balk. “Maybe in a little bit. Let’s give it a minute.” At the side table, she pushed aside some animal figurines and candlesticks to make room for the sweating Tupperware in her hands. “I know, I know, I know. Let’s watch the ball drop.” She gestured for me to turn on the black-and-white television in the corner. “Let’s watch that party they do at Times Square. Mrs. Crubin, you’d like to see that, wouldn’t you?” Liv’s voice had taken on a formal quality I’d never heard her use before, a glittery, almost girlish lilt. It surprised me how much I appreciated the effort she made, the performance of sincerity for Mrs. Crubin’s sake.

  So for a couple of hours, maybe more, we sat together in the dim parlor—Nurse, Liv, Mrs. Crubin, and I—and listened to dogs bark outside, and watched the crowds heave in Times Square, and eventually heard the roar across the country. “Five, four, three, two,” Liv said, taking my hand. She and I were sitting on the tiniest of Mrs. Crubin’s loveseats, the one with armrests carved to look like braided ropes. Mrs. Crubin and the caretaker were either absorbed in the festivities on TV or fast asleep. They were silent in the furnitured dark behind us. I remember feeling a dense ache of ownership as that ball descended, a strange proprietary joy at seeing Liv’s unexpected kindness to Mrs. Crubin that night, her intuitive sense of the old lady’s—what? Dignity. She’s truly a good person, I thought. And though I hadn’t had any particular reason to think this before, I felt I must have sensed it anyhow, that this reflected well on me, too.

  *

  A little while later, upstairs in our turret, something small and hard tumbled to the mattress when I pulled off Liv’s sweatshirt. She was wet-lipped, panting. The object looked like a rooster. It had iridescent purple plumage in a fan around its ceramic neck, and it lay on its side in the sheets as we looked down at it. Red claw facing us. “Oh, yeah!” Liv laughed. “Hey, look—”

  She found a switch behind its plumage and swung open its head. Inside its hollow ceramic body were a bunch of old yellowed toothpicks. “Isn’t this awful?” she asked, pinching up a pick. “I know. I should feel bad about taking it.”

  “You should,” I said, uneasily. I recognized it as one of Mrs. Crubin’s majolica figurines from the parlor, one from the collection of trinkets she’d shown us with such ceremony in the fall when we’d talked about the afterlife and eaten cobbler together.

  Liv grinned. “You feel bad for me, how about that?” She planted a kiss on the tip of my nose like a princess doing, or undoing, a spell. “There! You be Guilt. I’ll be Bad Behavior. We’ll be a division of labor.”

  “Liv—”

  “Come on, Michael, what use is it to her anymore? She doesn’t have any family, clearly. All that crap of hers will just end up getting hauled off, like the rabbits were. It’ll all end up at Goodwill.” She opened and closed the rooster head like a mouth. “Isn’t this just hideous? Wouldn’t my girls get a kick out of it?”

  I felt an unexpected clutch of love for her then. “Let me meet your kids.”

  “The girls?” She worked the toothpick back into its little bundle. She closed the rooster head. Opened it again. “They’re little witches, they’re in a stage.” She seemed pleased by this answer. “They hate all men-shaped people.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “You know a lot about kids, Michael?”

  “My sister has a five-year-old—”

  She leaned over me to set the majolica rooster on the concrete-block shelf beside her books. Pursed her lips at me, ruffled my hair. “Oh, Michael, you were a big babysitter, probably, when you were a teenager. When you were drunk every night and your daddy wiped the sick off you—”

  I stiffened under the lightness of her hand. “That’s not what I said—”

  “—or when you spent all those months in rehab? And dropped out of school? I’m sure you know everything there is to know about being a good parent? I mean, I’m sure it all comes naturally to you.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  *

  But it was. I had told her all that shit because I thought if I did she might start to see me as more than just a nerdy kid with a thing for older women. I’d felt protective, almost proud, of the story of driving the car into the pond or of the time my dad found me collapsed behind the shed one particularly bad night. I’d explained to Liv how my dad had rolled me carefully onto his overcoat and dragged me up the hill to the house. I couldn’t remember much from that episode, of course, but I did remember how soft his face looked as he struggled with my weight, as if there weren’t any bones left beneath the skin. Freed in t
his way, his face had moved through a thousand instantaneous, unfamiliar expressions. Revulsion, pity, love. I told Liv this. I explained how marvelous it had been to see him that way—my dad, who was usually so cool and removed.

  I told Liv these stories, and others, because I believed we had something in common, a past, which made us both a little remote in the lives we’d chosen. We both had done well in school—were our professors’ favorite students—because we tried too hard to prove we belonged. This is how I understood her at first. She’d done Hindi and I chose philosophy, both uselessly complex, like those inflated, perverse muscles body builders cultivate in their wrists and necks and pectorals. I wanted her to see that I could understand how much a burden that intelligence was, how it wasn’t intelligence at all, not really, but an acute sensitivity to the expectations of others.

  *

  But Liv wasn’t as relieved about the prospect of finishing college as I was. As the spring semester wore on, she finagled a second translating job from another of her professors. My interest in philosophy had fallen off that spring, and I turned everything in unedited and early. But Liv stayed up translating at her desk long after I went to bed, hunched in a little ring of light under her desk lamp in the corner. She planned to graduate with honors. When the yellow tassels arrived in a hive-like coil in the mail, I was surprised to see her unwind them right away and drape them unironically over her shoulders. In May, she won a grant to work on archival documents in Delhi the next fall.

  “It’s a free ride!” she exclaimed the warm spring night she told me about it.

  We were eating dinner at Liv’s desk, perched uneasily on plastic folding chairs. I’d wedged open the leaded glass window with a book, and I remember hearing one of the caretakers taking out the trash down below—dragging a metal can across the driveway—in the long silence that opened up between us.

  “But you’re not really thinking of going?”

  I assumed Liv would stay around for her children, at least, whom she visited one weekend each month. I pointed that out. I said I expected that a year away from one’s children—“one’s children,” I really said that—would be unthinkable in her position.

  “What position is that?” She stood up. Because she was sweating and the folding chair was light, it stuck for a moment to her thighs before thudding to the floor. “Do you mean I should not do this thing, take advantage of this opportunity, because I have kids? Because—” She shook her head in disbelief. “I slept with a guy when I was eighteen, and that guy didn’t like the feel of condoms? I think that’s the unthinkable thing, if you want to know the truth. That’s the thing I can never, ever get my mind around. This is pretty thinkable, actually.”

  “I get it. Okay, okay,” I said, trying to calm her back down. I’d made two chicken potpies in Mrs. Crubin’s oven that night. I’d snuck down the stairs and past the parlor door in my socks, avoided one of the caretakers who was heading out by hovering in a shadowy spot near the basement stairs. I’d wanted us to have a real dinner together for once. It was nearly summer! I’d lit a candle.

  So I changed the subject. I poked holes in the crust of my pot-pie, warned Liv to do the same. “They’re hot!” I told her, tenderly waving away her steam.

  She sat down again. Then pried the whole crust back at once, like a lid. Steam poured over her plate. “I’ve eaten chicken pot pies before, Michael. I grew up on frozen pot pies, remember?”

  *

  How could I remember that? When she talked like that I believed that she was really talking to someone else—her husband, the ex—who must have known a great deal about her pot-pie childhood. All I knew was that one Friday a month she took an overnight bus to Eveleth. That’s where Liv’s teenage daughters lived with her mother in a house on Elbow Creek. She came home Sunday nights with crumb cake wrapped in foil and a mildewy smell—the smell of moldy carpets and sweating walls, of basements—and for the first day or two she was back, she skirted over me, over everything. She was studiously serene, distracted. She did laundry, wrote out bills. She bent her thumbnail back as if it were on a hinge, exposing and covering again the spongy white cuticle.

  Sometimes, I admit, I took her thumb into my mouth and did the bad deed for her, bit the nail off. I pretended, with obscure moaning, that it was something sexual I liked, some weird oral fetish. Liv believed that men did things for all kinds of implausible erotic reasons. But really I just wanted her to be done worrying. And also, maybe, I wanted to hurt her.

  *

  “Marry me,” I blurted one night, pulling her across the mattresses and into my arms.

  The words surprised us both, I think. We fishtailed for a moment between solemnity and joke. She squirmed in my arms.

  “Yeah, right!” Liv laughed, then was silent for a long time. I could feel her heart beating, through her back and in my ribcage, before I realized it was mine. Finally: “Actually, that’s not nice, Michael.”

  “What?” I spoke into her hair. “Asking you to be my wife, my betrothed, my life partner?” I was half playing, half hurt. “It seems pretty nice to me. I’m a pretty nice guy, if you haven’t noticed.”

  She wiggled out of my grasp. “If by ‘nice’ you mean a little judgmental—yes, I have in fact noticed that. You’re always acting like you’re this amazingly decent person, like you’re just sort of tolerating everybody else, somehow. Me.”

  “I’m trying to make you feel better! I’m trying to make you feel good!”

  She curled up against the wall. “You’re trying to make yourself feel better.”

  *

  But by then I believed she needed me and just couldn’t bear to acknowledge it. I’d come by degrees to know things about Liv’s body and predilections, though she always acted like she was introducing me to everything for the first time, to all her elaborate, idiosyncratic preferences. I knew, for instance, that she liked to have her right leg bent up when we fucked, the bright red knob of her knee tucked near her ear. And I knew to keep my eyes open. I knew how and when to help her pull her hair away from her face so she could focus on what she was doing. She couldn’t stand hair in her face, would lose all interest if she had to scrape a single strand from her mouth with a finger. “That’s enough,” she’d say. “That’s over.” Within a few months, I’d learned how to hold her hair in a ponytail, wind it into a bun, mash it between my teeth when I came in her from behind.

  Or, when she crawled around on her knees and blew on my erection like a candle, I knew to let her. She kissed the head and nuzzled it with her chin, and that was fine by me. I let her rub her nose against it. I let her say: “I’m going to huff and puff and blow your house in!” Did she laugh then? I decided it was alright if she did. Once she made me put on her panties afterward, snapping the tight elastic across my pubic hair, and it was—all of it—worth trying, I felt. I was receptive, game, compliant, calm. Indulgent. By late May, it occurred to me that we just needed to find some new way or place, some fresh position or approach, that would inevitably catapult us from this stage to the next. It felt like a project to be working on it like this together, interesting and absorbing work, almost wholesome.

  *

  Often in those early summer nights, we’d hear a burbling, singing sound coming up the stairway. Rising through the dark, silent house.

  Mrs. Crubin, of course.

  “Hmmploooha,” Liv mimicked, nailing the aspirated “p,” the secondary stress, the rising intonation. We were under a sheet, naked, and Liv’s ribs in my arms heaved in silent laughter. “Bhhlmmpahak!” Her pronunciation was eerily perfect. She had a good ear.

  Then, whispering: “What’s the ‘spiritual counterpart’ for drooling, do you think?” Her voice was warm against my neck, a tight, frenzied whirlpool of heat. “What is your relative proximity to Love when you can’t control your bladder?”

  “Ha,” I said, bending away from her breath. Feeling the warm stucco wall rise up beside me, the rough, rounded edge of the mattress.

  Other than
Mrs. Crubin and the occasionally murmuring nurses, the house was perfectly quiet. By then Liv and I were the only tenants left. The others vacated in April and May when classes let out, breaking their leases, taking menial cashiering jobs in the little Midwest towns where they were born.

  *

  One humid evening around this time, I crept downstairs at dusk. Liv was gone—at another departmental function, another school thing—and I’d been halfheartedly filling out applications for summer jobs at camps and libraries. Queasy with the heat of the house, I planned to filch a few cubes of ice from the freezer for my mug of Coke. I could hear a voice murmuring in the parlor as I passed, someone going: “First one arm, then the other.” In the kitchen, the ice cubes grew slick in my hands as I gently lowered them to my mug. I was very quiet as I closed the freezer door, and even so, I heard shoes unsticking from the linoleum behind me. I turned.

  “Excuse me?” This caretaker was unfamiliar to me, young. “Could you lend a hand?”

  She must have mistaken me for family, because she started explaining that the next caretaker would be here in an hour. “Would you mind making sure she’s comfortable? Just till Tanya arrives?”

  Did I look nervous to her?

  “She’s sleeping now,” the young nurse soothed. She was maybe pretty, and she appeared practiced at using this possibility to her advantage. A tuft of strawberry blonde hair fell in front of her blinking green eyes. “Come on in. I’ll just show you what to do real quick if she needs something.”