You hated the power you had to hurt her. Hated her hurt hurting you back.
You’re awake now and she’s on your mind. And that’s the way it’s going to be. Back on the edge of his bed he realizes he’s stuck with her this morning, wants her this morning and for better or worse she won’t let him go. She’s sitting on the toilet. Sizzles like bacon frying. He can smell the coffee she’s started. He sniffs his fingertips for the buttery scent of her. Rule was no lovemaking until he showered after ball. Infection. Germs. Her vulnerable urinary tract. The woman in the window possessed no insides. No periods. No illnesses, no female disorders. Wouldn’t age or die. Home from her job the woman will undress, shower, spend hours in her apartment doing what she did, bare-ass as Eve. So near and yet so far. Didn’t Little Anthony and the Imperials sing that? Near and far. Far and near. When he sat reading with Caroline in the quiet of an evening, sharing the couch, his back against one threadbare armrest, hers against the other, why did she always close her robe or shut her knees if she noticed his eyes straying from his book, peering between her naked legs?
The weekend they’d driven to the island, her reluctance had been on his mind. What are you hiding? What don’t you want me to see? Both kids bawling in the backseat. His nerves unhinged two seconds after the drive began. He trots out complaint after complaint as they plot a path through the map he believes he’s memorized and she holds on her lap.
Hiding? What in the world are you talking about?
Forget it.
So they argue over choices the map appears to offer. Alternative routes. Distance versus traffic. Red lines or green. Venture unshakable opinions about roads neither’s ever seen. Opportunities for sarcasm, disagreement, nastiness are legion. He decides his elder son is responsible for the war in the backseat. He stops the car to threaten him with mayhem, with abandonment on the highway if he doesn’t stop teasing his brother. He’s surprised how good it feels to lean over the seat and shout at the top of his voice. A grown-up screaming at a child. Does he actually derive pleasure from scaring a four-year-old? The car rolls along. A three-hour drive stretches close to four. Something is drastically wrong. He’s been humping way over posted limits. Must be the directions they’d been given. The map. His wife’s command at an intersection.
Why does that marker say West 202? Aren’t we going east? The ferry’s east.
You said east was left. I said turn right but you insisted on turning left. So we’re probably headed away from where we want to go.
Away.
You insisted on going left.
I said east. Always south and east. All along I said east. The goddamned map you’re holding says east if you don’t believe me.
You turned left. You’re driving and you turned left. You ignored me. Don’t try and blame me now.
You have the map right in front of you. You’re supposed to be giving me directions.
I tried. I said east but you turned left and that’s west.
Then we’ve been going the wrong way. Shit. How far back was the fucking junction. You were just going to sit there, weren’t you? Till we ran off the end of the known world. You don’t give a damn, do you? Just so you wind up being right.
Right was right. I said right ten times. You said east was left so you went left. Right was right.
Right was right. Right was right. Do you think that’s cute? It’s not. None of this bullshit’s funny. All you had to do was read the map and keep the kids quiet.
They are quiet.
Yeah. Because I made a fool of myself.
You insisted on a left turn.
Fuck the turn. Left. Right. What’s the fucking difference?
They’re quiet because they’re listening to you talk the way you’re talking to me.
Thank you, Emily Post. Tell me, dear. How come you’re better than everybody else? That’s your problem. Holier than everybody. Criticize, criticize, but you, you don’t make mistakes, do you? Your way’s the right way and the only way. Goddammit. I ask you to do a simple thing—my way for a change—and what kind of answer do I get: Let’s just sit and read. Let’s just relax together. One of the boys might wake up and wander out here.
What are you talking about?
You know, dammit. Don’t pretend you don’t.
He’s remembering the drive but he’s not remembering it accurately. The conversation back and forth continues too long without interruptions. He needs to back it up, add a sound track of unearthly squeals, squalls, cries of pain and brays of triumph from the kiddies in their car seats. Traffic noise. Rattle of the loose spare tire cover. The thumping of his heart. A silent scream boiling in his throat. The wall she slapped together stone by cold stone between them. The arctic wind in her voice. Ice cracking beneath the hurtling station wagon.
He couldn’t wait to escape the car. He’d make her suffer for this.
Theirs the last car permitted on the ferry. Tension didn’t let up until the final instant when a grizzled, one-armed sailor waved them aboard. They’d been wedged somewhere in the late middle of an endless line of vehicles queuing at dockside. No doubt in Cudjoe’s mind the carnival-striped van in front of them would be the last one allowed on board. Perfect ending to a perfect day. A battered, hand-painted VW with a menagerie of young, seminude passengers. Bodies shuttled in and out of the van nonstop. He couldn’t keep track of how many. All tanned, long-haired, scruffy. Beads, headbands, cutoffs, bare tops, bare legs, spacey blue eyes. Probably fucking in the funky oven of van this very moment. A squirmy mound of bare asses white as snow, sucking and fucking and blowing dope and they’d be delivered to the island stoned, happy as clams, ferried across the neck of water to pitch their tents while he’d be stranded with wife and kids in this nowhere place, acres of concrete, Cyclone fencing, warehouses, stuck in some cruddy, overpriced motel. Whole family crammed in one room. No hanky-panky. She’d pat his hand when he reached under the sheet and laid it on her bare thigh, pat it and slide it off. Whisper in his ear: You know we can’t do anything in here. No privacy. No trespassing on her side of the bed. The room’s stuffy, hot, in spite of an air conditioner louder than all these vehicles revving up for a charge at the ferry. One car at a time through the needle’s eye. The line inches forward in heart-teasing, heart-stopping little snippets. He’s ready to ram the van. Torch it and roast every blond, bronzed hippie occupant if he can just move up one notch.
He’d see the crazy van again on the island, parked above a secluded cove when he’d driven with Sam to buy liquor and visit the dump. Both station wagon and VW had crossed on the last boat of the evening. Red, white and blue curtains across the van’s back window. A peace symbol covered the whole front door. Sam would notice him looking over the dunes at the van and point beyond it toward the ocean where the land dropped out of sight. They swim without their drawers down there. Then he’d helped Sam unload plastic sacks of garbage. Sam didn’t heave far enough and one split, scattering eggshells, coffee grounds, lemon peels, an empty vodka bottle in the clear space at the foot of a mound of garbage bags.
Losing it, me bucko. Old Sam’s losing it. A little boy’s face, guilty, ashamed.
Metal rims of Sam’s glasses erupted. Tongues of light flicked at the sun. This old man still counting, still worried about measuring up. His eyes are invisible behind thick lenses. Moon focals. A basset hound’s droopy dewlaps. Why was Sam still so hard on himself? Cudjoe felt sorry for him. Then sorry for himself. Sam was a great man. A successful writer, editor. He’d learned so much from Sam. Learned because he’d been afraid. Why wasn’t there a stop between fear and pity? A long easy pause, space where they could both unbend. Throwing a garbage bag fifteen feet. What did it matter? Who was keeping score? Sam’s embarrassment unsettled Cudjoe. They were tossing garbage bags onto a heap of other garbage bags. One fell short, bounced off the pile, tumbled, burst, disgorged its contents on the clear space in front of the mound. Had Sam known he was dying? In less than two years paramedics would find him on the parquet flo
or of his kitchen, unconscious. They’d breathe in his mouth and attempt to beat life back into his chest, but he awakens only long enough to say two words, Teach me, in the rear of an ambulance. Rachel had told Cudjoe the story, related to her by one of the paramedics. Teach me. Bolting up for a second Teach me. Breaking death’s bonds. Sitting up startled that he’d escaped so easily, amazed that death’s hold was light, light as feathers, as a spider’s web, he popped up, stopped only by a strap securing him to the stretcher. Life, what other people had done to him, the final barrier after all. He’d snapped death’s bonds. Was on his way up, back, when the leather safety restraint stopped him, whiplashed his breath away. Teach me. Like a sigh. An exhalation. But clear and distinct. I heard him say those words, ma’am. No doubt about it. Just as plain as I’m telling you now. Teach me is what he said. Sure of it. Thought you might want to know, ma’am.
Gulls floated over the dump. Gull cries, the lazy circling of gulls. Gulls had followed the ferry across the sound. A second wake in the air. Gray and white like the plowed sea. Gulls hovering in the squat-bottomed boat’s slipstream, patiently sailing, scanning the water for bilge. He’d read that sharks trailed the stench of slave ships all the way across the Atlantic, feasting on corpses thrown overboard. Gulls screech and glide above the refuse of the islanders. Cudjoe tried not to breathe as he helped unpack a week’s trash from the trunk and backseat of Sam’s blue Dodge Dart. Sun was a bitch. A minute in the open and you were soaked. You could only hold your breath so long, then you had to inhale stink. Just a couple trips each, back and forth. Heave ho. Hurl a plastic sack. The mounds grow tall as a house, a pine tree. Body bags stacked a mile high rotting in the sun. Bad meat. Dead boys coming home from Vietnam were Cudjoe’s age, Cudjoe’s color, his high-school classmates. You couldn’t see color through the thick, green bags. You could smell corpses, but all of them—red white black brown yellow— stink the same. Sam is careless. The bag bursts, vomits up its guts. He apologizes. His eyes accuse Cudjoe of being younger, stronger, of having many more years to live. Cudjoe is guilty. Others crossed an ocean and died for him. Guilty because he didn’t fight, didn’t die. Cudjoe thinks of Sam as a sad, failing old man. Can’t imagine why he was once afraid of him. Why he’d packed his wife and kids in a station wagon and driven two hundred miserable miles, hat in hand, to pass Sam a manuscript. So scared he turned the trip to Sam’s island into a nightmare, found ways to positively, personally put a hurt on his sons and the woman he loves.
That first night on the island he couldn’t sleep. Wondering if Sam was reading the manuscript. Mad as hell because they’d whipped through two bottles of wine and most of a quart of vodka, only four of them drinking hard, Cassy, Sam’s daughter, might have finished a goblet of wine, maybe two, so it’s four of them doing the damage, two really, Cudjoe and Sam, unholy together, bringing out the best and worst in each other, doing most of the damage, especially if you added an ice-cold bottle of Mateus they’d guzzled like soda pop on the ride home from the dump. Couldn’t sleep because Sam might be somewhere in the house, spectacles perched on the wings of his nose, in slippers and a robe, glass of brandy near at hand, reading the script so long in coming, reading it and liking it or disliking it. The terrible power in his old, spotted hands again. Would he know what the fuck he was reading? Had his bald head lolled back into the notch of the easy chair in his study, is his mouth open calling hogs, his breath turning the room into a distillery? Had Cudjoe’s story put him to sleep? Would they talk in the morning? Would there be anything to talk about? Sam wouldn’t dare give the script only a cursory, drunken reading. Of course he’d be his meticulous, conscientious self. Another read-through tomorrow. Up at dawn, crisp, sober as morning, as the sea breeze that worried the front porch swing. Its creaking chains are what woke Cudjoe in the first place. Trying to make sense of that rasping, rhythmic tick in his sleep. The loose, thin sleep of far too much drink. Worried awake by a sound he can’t place, can’t will away. He eased himself out of the tall four-poster bed, careful not to wake Caroline. He was ashamed now of the way he’d acted on the drive down. She’d hit the bed like a rock, her back to him, motionless in an instant, slamming the door on any possibility of nighttime, bedtime reconciliation. He’d boozed himself into feeling better about everything. Flirted with Sam’s wife and daughter, and their smiling approval, the teasing back and forth had reaffirmed for him the charm he believed he exercised over womankind. Trying to piece the evening together, the dinner, drinks before, after and during, he realized he’d made absolutely no contact with Caroline. He’d begun having fun so he’d assumed everyone was enjoying themselves. Now as he searched his memory for one sign, one touch or smile or word that said she’d forgiven him, that her mood had changed, that the bitter ride to the island was forgotten, he was forced to admit he not only hadn’t seen positive signs, he’d ignored Caroline’s presence entirely.
Like a thief then, he tiptoed across the room. Figures out the noise that had been summoning him. Carried his shorts into the tiny guest room down the hall, next to where the boys were asleep. Shut the door quietly behind himself, slipped into his drawers. He shivers. Why didn’t he bring a shirt? More like a walk-in closet than a room. Barely large enough to fit a bed. One oval window with a crack in the glass. This room’s on the side of the house away from the sea, faces scrubby pinewoods that are part of a forest belt Sam had said bisects the island. Plenty of moonlight. Cudjoe can see clearly down the back lawn to a black wall of trees. This must be a corner room. To his right the main wing of the house looms perpendicular. The entrance, with its columns and wraparound porch, would be on the far side of this wing. Half a house away, the swing with its cargo of ghosts sways, invisible from where Cudjoe stands, its chains creaking monotonously, tirelessly as potbellied buoys rocking and tolling in the harbor.
Other sounds break through the soughing wind, the protest of the swing’s rusty chains. A splash, then the sighing drone of water through pipes. Below him in the moonlight a white body hugs itself, twisting slowly, tentatively into spray from an outdoor shower sheltered in this nook of the house. Cassandra must have been swimming in the ocean and now she’s warming herself, rinsing salt and sand from her body before she goes to bed. Her long hair shrinks to a cap of seaweed tight on her skull. She peels off a swimsuit and steps deeper into the gushing water. Her skin’s luminous in moonglow. Wet hair glistens darkly as blood. The water’s invisible except for a nimbus of white froth at the nozzle and needle slants highlighted momentarily. If you couldn’t hear the water, if you ignored the chunk of soap she’d plucked from its hiding place, what you’d see was a young woman dancing slow motion in a cascade of silvery moonlight. Her arms carve space from the darkness, her feet buried in shadow are never still, turning, sliding, little mincing steps, rising on her tiptoes. Her fingers caress her breasts, rub the black patch of groin, preparing them, offering them to the same god at whom she stares, rapt, when she arches her neck, leans her head back on her shoulders. She welcomes him, drinks him into every pore of her body, her skin the thousand-eyed gate of a great city thrown open to receive him.
At any second from the black margin of woods, satyrs will hobble out to claim her. Sam’s lawn is full of naked hippies, bronze skins flayed so they’re white as marble. They’re blowing flutes, passing jugs of wine, wicker baskets of fruit, dancing in rollicking daisy chains. Everybody in the house snatched from sleep by the racket, scrambling from their beds to join the romp.
Cudjoe hears himself trying to explain to his dead friend why he’s spying on his daughter. Bullshit about her being everywoman and no woman won’t go down. She is Cassandra, Sam’s and Rachel’s only child, eighteen years old, born on a day her family once celebrated, then mourned. Sam had changed her diapers. Rachel sat up with her through nights of fever. Cassy had been fed, sheltered, cherished. Her loving parents in spite of themselves had conspired to drive her a little mad. Cassy’s behavior often erratic, but just as often charmingly, excruciatingly perfect. She
was becoming who she must be by whatever devious paths her imagination could invent, circumventing one Cassy, their Cassy, to be another. Hence solitary midnight swims in the ocean. Long walks alone in cities at night. Dropping out of high school. A shower while normal people are trying to sleep. Cudjoe knows the history of her troubles. The rescue missions, and kiss-and-make-ups. Rachel’s and Sam’s constant fear she’d go too far and they’d lose her altogether. He understands he’s wrong to be stealing from her. Violating her privacy. Poaching the bloom of her young woman’s body while she’s offering it to the spirits of night. He shouldn’t be at this window staring down at her, a hard-on extending his shorts in spite of the slew of classical allusions he rehearses to himself. Unable to be still, staying and leaving, as she plays in water warm as a bed.
No excuses. Sam’s no saint. He should understand. No harm intended. How many young editorial assistants had he banged over the years? No harm. Sam, Apollonian light of reason and intellect, knew what happened on full-moon nights when horny maidens cruised down from the hills. So look, Sam. I’m sorry. She’s your daughter and I have no right, but . . . He starts some lame apology, not because he intends to cease what he’s doing but because Sam is dead, and the dead have power. Sam may be hovering, waiting to avenge this violation of his daughter. The dead on their powdery thrones, looking down, weary, disappointed. He must answer to Sam because Sam’s his twin, his cut buddy and drinking pardner, voice of his conscience, stage manager of his art, Sam in the wings silently paring his fingernails. Didn’t Sam teach him how to be capable of anything? Technique, technique, my bucko, is truth.
Cassy was special. Sam loved her to distraction. Cassy was another chance. Sam could lavish on her what he’d never been able to grant to Rachel. A great passion replayed, only this time he wouldn’t fuck over his woman. No lies. No cheating. A better Sam, reborn penitent, wiser for having sinned grievously. Capable of unconditional love. He’s screaming at Cudjoe. Leave her alone. Leave her alone. She’s my last goddamned chance.
Philadelphia Fire Page 7