Tampa

by Alissa Nutting

  I expected him to feel this was a betrayal and argue, but it hardly seemed to register; he was staring at the toilet paper dispenser with a gaze of forlorn defeat, as if he’d just taken a hefty dump but was helpless to wipe himself. Still, I wanted to offer further explanation. “You’re going to have too many people watching you in the next few days, Jack. You’re likely going to be in great emotional pain. It might get very tempting for you to call me, but for our sake we can’t make contact again until things settle down.” Suddenly Jack’s frozen stare broke; he squeezed his eyes shut, then began a low scream; seconds later he was violently smacking his own forehead.

  “Shhh,” I said soothingly. I knew I had to distract him, give him something to fixate on. “Jack, listen. Do you know the number of my secret phone by heart?”

  He nodded, grasping his hair and drawing his knees up onto the toilet against his body. This had the effect of making his testicles, which hung off the ridge of the toilet seat in solitude, seem like a normally internal appendage that had accidentally fallen out. “Good. In a few days, if you’re able to walk to a pay phone without anyone following you, call me around five o’clock. Understand?”

  He nodded. I sat down on the edge of the tub across from him and waited for several minutes before Jack finally stood, dressed, then began an automaton-like walk into his bedroom, where he grabbed the comforter off his bed. I followed him out to the hallway and watched Jack place it over his father’s body. There was something charming about the fact that Buck’s funeral shroud was a blanket covered with several months’ worth of commingled seminal and vaginal fluids from his son and me. When I cleared my throat Jack finally spoke.

  “I’ll go move the car.” We didn’t turn on any lights in the house; I watched only the outline of Jack’s body ambling toward the front door as I turned and went my separate way toward the garage.

  When I pulled out of the driveway and passed by Jack idling inside his father’s car in the street, I noted lights on in Mrs. Pachenko’s house but didn’t see anyone nosily peeking out through the window blinds. Although I didn’t turn to look at him as we drove in opposite directions, I could somehow feel that Jack was not watching me leave.

  *

  Unfortunately it turned out that Buck wasn’t the only surprise of the evening. When I pulled into the driveway Ford’s police car was already home. Although I was wary about what change might’ve brought him back early, I was relieved that he wasn’t out on patrol. I didn’t want Ford to be the officer to respond to Jack’s call.

  “Hey, I’m in here,” Ford called out from the back room. I entered the den to find all the furniture covered with plastic drop cloths; Ford himself was on a ladder, painting the ceiling a forgettable beige. “Where you been?” he asked distractedly. From his tone I knew I didn’t actually need to answer him; he was about to launch into why he was home and what he was doing and would go right ahead whether I responded or stayed silent, but I felt compliant after the day’s long events. “Went out for a bite to eat with some of the girls from work,” I answered.

  “Ladies’ night,” he said, a touch of grandeur in his voice. “Speaking of nights, I got switched again. New shift starting tomorrow. Ten P.M. to six A.M.” There was something sickening about the slick sound of the wet brush’s bristles moving back and forth across the wall, like a large predator’s tongue washing its kill. “Kinda brutal but I’m trying to play the game, right? That’s where they need me for now. At least we’ll get to have dinner together. When you’re not eating with the gals,” he joked.

  This news, combined with knowledge of the changes that were sure to come for Jack following Buck’s death, made me feel the sliding nausea of a perfect era untying itself; it would be hard to do much of anything after school with Ford at home waiting, if Jack even continued the year out at Jefferson. The thought suddenly occurred to me that Jack would now have to go live with his mother—did that leave me with enough time to work up to a level of full engagement with another student before the summer break started? “Anyhow, they gave me tonight off to do errands and such before I begin on the vampire crew. I thought I’d finally get started on shaping this den up.” He motioned to a swath of paint samples taped to the wall. “You like taupe for the shutters?”

  I swallowed, worried that I might abruptly throw up on my shoes. “Yes, Ford,” I did finally manage to say. “I just love it.”

  chapter thirteen

  Jack was broken for good, though the weepy, vacant state he occupied for the first few weeks after the death did thankfully fade. He missed ten days of school; it was just after the last period let out on the second week of his absence that my cell phone sounded its alerting buzz inside my bag.

  “I’m at the house,” Jack said. “My dad’s house. I’m here alone. Please come over.”

  At first the invitation sounded so perfect as to seem like a trap, but my libido overruled any suspicion; I’d been going stir-crazy in the classroom, trying to make educated guesses as to what type of underwear different boys wore by inspecting their groins when they stood up at their desks to read aloud.

  I found Jack in his room lying on his bed, his fingers laced behind his head as he looked up at the ceiling. It was an anticlimactic reunion—on some level I expected him to be feeling as sexually deprived as I did, to grasp me and begin passionately kissing; if he had to cry with relief at being able to touch me again, I wouldn’t have minded coital tears. Instead he barely blinked when my face came into view above his. I lay down next to him and ran my hand up his shirt, stroking his chest.

  His mental perspective wasn’t ideal for intercourse. “My life is over,” he said, his voice cracking with dramatic inflection. “My mom said I could stay in town with our friends the Ryans and finish out the year at Jefferson, but then I have to go live with her and do high school in Crystal Springs. I’ll never see you. I won’t even be going to high school with any of my friends.” He let a beat of silence pass, then placed his hands over his face, as though this fact horrified him most of all. “I wish I were dead.”

  I realized that if I was going to glean any satisfaction at all from this visit, I needed to put forward an agenda of transmuting suffering through sexual healing.

  Kneeling beside him, I lifted his shirt and began to kiss upward from his stomach to his chest in slow, warm licks. “Your body doesn’t wish you were dead, Jack,” I told him. “Just your mind. You’ve got to separate the two. Live in your skin instead of your brain.” With that I began furiously kissing his neck, occasionally lowering my pelvis just enough that it put light pressure onto his crotch. He was responding; I could feel an erection building though his body seemed tensed against it. “Distance won’t be a problem,” I lied, peeling off my shirt and unhooking my bra. I stroked his forehead and offered him a nipple in an act of mothering. When he took it he closed his eyes to suck intensely, as though some intoxicating drug might eventually come out and take his pain away. “And you’ll make new friends in no time. Everything’s okay.”

  He kept sucking my nipples, one and then the other, in a near-hypnotic trance. His brow was creased with indecision; he licked his lips and stared off in thought, like a sommelier trying to discern a vintage at a blind taste test. Suddenly a switch seemed to flip inside him and he sat up, pulling down his pants, then lifted my ass up toward him and entered me. Thank god, I thought—I had a flash of optimism that the worst was over. The sex was very good, his pelvis steadily driven. When he came it seemed like a natural catharsis to the entire situation, and I pulled him back down to the bed and wrapped my body around his. “That was great,” I whispered, feeling a light, exuberant air pour into the room. He was breathing very quickly, his chest rising and falling with emphasis. I expected it to slow down after a moment but it didn’t; although we were completely still, his body was acting like he was sprinting in place.

  “We killed my dad,” he finally said.

  “Absolutely not!” I exclaimed. What a counterproductive and harmful thou
ght for him to have. Pressing my lips against his head as though to beam the words directly into his skull, I tried to reassure him. “Jack,” I said, “a heart attack killed your dad. It’s tragic, but everything is going to be just fine.”

  We did in fact have a few strokes of luck come our way, namely the house. As Jack’s legal guardian, his mother wanted control of the property to set up a trust for her son; Buck’s siblings claimed their brother wanted money from its sale to go toward the care of Buck’s ailing mother and said they’d made a verbal contract with Buck about this matter. Arbitration would take months, perhaps even a year or two, during which time the property would sit vacant and Jack and I could continue to meet whenever time allowed, though Jack often wasn’t in the mood to be inside it. “We have to go somewhere else,” he’d stress. “Anywhere, I don’t care.” It wasn’t always practical to drive so far out of town, so I settled instead on blended anonymity; off one of the town’s main roads there was a series of medical plazas whose driveways lead into one another like the links of a chain. After hours, their parking lots always remained peppered with cars and there was absolutely no through traffic; not once did another car come down the road while we were in the middle of anything.

  Yet the situation was far from perfect. Sometimes it was downright hellish. First there was the arrangement of illuminated signs, many of which advertised obstetrics and fertility practices. With their various lights glowing around us to form the shape of an imperfect pentagram, it seemed like an act of conception voodoo might occur: these totems of medical miracles would join forces and somehow cause my birth control to fail. The other terrible aspect was the heat and the bugs. We couldn’t leave my car running and enjoy the AC in case a security guard came by on his rounds, which meant we were battling the summer’s oncoming humidity against my car’s leather seats. When it did get so hot inside that we felt we had no choice but to roll down the windows, every mosquito from the development’s manufactured pond smelled our salty blood and came searching. On one night we cracked only the front two windows, then began to have sex in the back; by the time Jack reached orgasm there were so many of them in the car that their mass was a dark, hanging cloud—I stared for a moment, convinced their formation was about to shift and take on the shape of Buck’s vengeful face, before pain brought me back to reality. Suddenly I could feel them stinging the ripest places of my sensitive flesh; our minds had been so misdirected by sex that we’d failed to realize how dire the situation was until the moment we finished. Jack then jumped out of the car completely naked—I couldn’t blame him but I also could’ve killed him for it.

  “They have security cameras,” I hissed out the car door at him. “Get back in!” But instead he grabbed his clothes and put them on outside; I was left in the car with the bugs.

  But the true disappointment of these meet-ups had nothing to do with location. Jack seemed to be divorcing himself from the sex and turning it into a rote act. There was a slightly tortured air to his expression throughout, as though he was doing it against his will. His thrusts became harder and harder, like he was trying to feel something but failing. In general he appeared to want to express a sentiment he couldn’t quite say or perhaps even understand. “Well,” he’d often start, but when I responded, “What is it?” he’d shake his head lightly. “Forgot,” he’d answer, his eyes blank.

  I looked forward to summer, hoping it would be restorative for him. Our last unit in English was an analysis of To Kill a Mockingbird, which gave me pause. I didn’t want the text’s elements of morality and justice to seduce Jack into walking the misguided path of honest confession. During third period, I did all that I could to steer the conversation away from relevant topics of depth. “So if we were to remake the movie nowadays,” I asked on one occasion, “who would you guys cast to play Boo Radley?”

  “Someone bald,” answered Marissa. Every other student except Jack quickly nodded in agreement.

  *

  But even summer break brought no great reversal to his sulking. Jack had to be replaced as soon as possible, but there were obstacles. The first was my own libido. I couldn’t accept the thought of a three-month dry spell until fall hit and I could find Jack’s successor. The flirtatious encounters during substitute teaching that had once aroused me to the point of sustenance—a quick shoulder rub for a student who complained about stress, a celebratory hug for a recent honors society inductee—now seemed like a starvation diet after my year with Jack. The second was the nagging fear—largely paranoia, I tried to convince myself—that I needed to keep Jack fully under my spell just a bit longer, until it was certain that no aspect of his father’s death would be resurrected for examination by the police. As far as I knew there’d been no suspicions at all. But what if someone had seen my car leaving and suddenly felt compelled to mention it? A breakup would likely feel like emotional napalm in Jack’s tender state, and if he was still burning from my rejection when new questions about the night his father died came to light, the situation might indeed turn prickly.

  And the fact that our escapades were more sporadic—to prepare for the late-August move to his mother’s, Jack was alternating between spending a few weeks with the Ryans, then a few weeks in Crystal Springs—meant I had more patience for his stricken attitude of gloomy resignation. His father’s death had matured Jack in a way that made him far less satisfying, but each time he returned from his mother’s I had several weeks’ worth of pent-up cravings, and this blind need allowed for a protective myopia against his dour moods: I’d take him immediately, in a ravenous attack that I considered necessary self-defense. Stopping to inquire about the comfort of his position, or to ask what he wanted, would simply have given him an opportunity to passive-aggressively brood—I could imagine him answering my inquiry with a shrug, then looking off into the distance, hoping I’d stop and embrace him and use encouraging phrases to tug at the question of what was bothering him until we began a long, dull chat that was all about Jack and his multitude of hurt feelings. I wasn’t about to sanction such boredom. Instead, each time we met I’d ride him with masturbatory energy, letting him halfheartedly push beneath me with a listless stoicism until I was finished, and then I’d slide off, give him a quick kiss and leave; it was often clear that he wasn’t going to orgasm no matter how long we went at it. Even so, he was better than nothing until I could secure a new beau. My very last conversation with Jack had already occurred several times in my head—taking a sympathetic posture, warmly caressing his hand and shoulder, I would gently point out that I reminded him too much of his father’s terrible death—to move past it, I’d argue, he’d need to move past me, and that was why I had to insist we stop seeing one another. I even convinced myself Jack knew this was coming and had accepted it—after all, I’d never given him back his secret phone, and he’d never asked for it. Instead I continued to insist on pay phones and he kept calling me from gas stations and McDonald’s parking lots. I furnished him a new roll of quarters for just this purpose every week.

  *

  Being out of school for summer combined with Ford’s night shift meant intolerably long days. I accommodated Ford’s schedule in some regards: I began to sleep late in order to waste as much of our afternoon time together as I could. It was impossible for me to have any sense of ease when he was home. This allowed me to spend the evening and early morning hours while he was away lost in pornographic flights of imagination about what the fall semester might bring. Ford and I fell into a routine of waking for breakfast at three or four P.M., then going to the gym, where he’d watch me work out the entire time with a proprietary satisfaction; no matter where I went in the exercise or lifting rooms, I could feel his eyes following me. He seemed to like it even more if other men were watching me as well, or if they approached me; if another guy struck up a conversation, I could always count on Ford’s overly grabby hands to find my ass a second later, pinching or spanking it with a shit-eating grin as the man who had just introduced himself slinked away. Ford l
iked to shower at the house, but I always insisted on doing it there, in the segregated changing rooms, to protect myself from his soapy grasp. We’d return home to a horrible evening of ennui—I began making elaborate dinners each night just to pass the hours—and when Ford finally left for work each night, I had the exhausted relief of a host whose departed houseguest had overstayed his welcome for a week.

  This situation resulted in my jumping at any offer of outside social engagement, no matter how banal. I attended school board meetings, PTA functions and even Janet’s birthday party. This latter fete was held at a small strip-mall bar called Raccoons, in the back near a modest karaoke setup and a few arcade games. Mrs. Pachenko and Mr. Sellers and I were the only attendees. Janet began to act overserved almost immediately; perhaps she’d done some pre-partying in the parking lot.

  “Why don’t you have a wife?” she demanded of Mr. Sellers less than an hour in. Mrs. Pachenko seemed to grow increasingly nervous, particularly once Janet launched into a series of derogatory comments about the administrative staff’s genital size. “It’s a small dick,” Janet loudly announced of AP Rosen’s plumbing. “You can tell that just by the way he walks.” In the bar’s dim lights, Mrs. Pachenko had a forlorn, dumbfounded expression, like a slow-witted child trying to force together two puzzle pieces that didn’t fit.