That little girl didn’t look at all like Laurie. He’d like to go back and have a closer look at the picture. Or have a copy for his own. Why had he refused it? He couldn’t stand looking at it—that was the reason—he knew he couldn’t. The picture that used to hang in the alcove of his apartment—where now there was a blank rectangle, lighter colored than the rest of the wall—was the best one he’d ever taken of Laurie. So why consider having another picture of the child? Because this one had a quality of strangeness, it didn’t look like Laurie; he might hang it over the blank space and perhaps endure looking at it. What a nonsensical way of fooling himself out of distress: he wanted the memory, provided he didn’t have to remember.
* * *
• • •
He wondered if he would have stayed with Donna if Laurie hadn’t died. Yes, very likely. Then was it just the child that had kept them together? Is that all their marriage was? Well, having child that had kept them together? Is that all their marriage was? Well, having children was what marriage was all about, Donna would have said. All about?
Certainly not at the beginning, when he first met Donna. He would never have imagined she could have turned into the motherly type, not in those days. She was too brittle, too smart-ass—bright, throwing sparks in people’s eyes—racy, always up on the newest twists of conversation, never a catchword that was minted yesterday.
Those were the days when the Macmillan Brothers owned the stadium, before Howard Polk took over. The rodeo had just started downgrade and the Macmillans were worried about it so they got the idea of encouraging a woman’s audience, and hired Donna Clements to publicize and promote it. She had just come off the women’s section of a second-rate newspaper and all she knew, with only qualified assurance, was how to put uncomplicated sentences together. But she could talk and had nice manners and she made the members of the women’s clubs feel that every horse, every dogie, every bull was dedicated to them alone.
The first week Donna went to work the men in the rodeo fainted en masse. Most of those who revived were trampled to death in the stampede for her favor. In two or three weeks only Mike Milo survived and he was not doing well. He had been used to the girls with tight pants and easy-jointed legs down at the Red Rio Bar. He wasn’t much at the wooing game, nor did he have to be in those times—his trophies and medals and buckles were aphrodisiacal; they made him clank and clatter when he walked.
Donna didn’t see or hear them. She paid no attention to him until long after she appeared on the job. Nettled because she was ignoring him, he stopped her once, in the corridor under the stands, and uttered some cowpoke obscenity. She gave him her handkerchief and said, “Here, boy, your mouth is running.”
The following night they were on their first date and the same night he tried to lay her. She pushed his hustling hands away and when his agility subsided, rearranged her dress, her position in the seat of his car and her voice. “Please don’t do that,” she said quietly.
He made some standard Red Rio comment about women who said no.
“I don’t consider you an authority on Donna Clements,” she said unperturbedly. “In fact, you’re quite an ignoramus on the subject. So let me teach you Lesson One. I’m twenty-eight years old. I consider myself popular with men. I have at least two dates a week, some weeks as many as four. I don’t have any steady beau, but I see a number of my men friends frequently.” She paused a moment, then resumed. “I am very highly sexed. I know that about myself. Someday, I’ll give a man a great deal of pleasure in bed. But I haven’t done that yet. I’m still a virgin. I intend to stay that way until I’m married.”
He was thunderstruck. “You’re a fucking liar,” he said.
He expected her to slap his face. He had given her the exact cue for it. And after the slap, other things would follow as the night the day. But no slap. Instead: “Lesson Two,” she said. “Obscenity’s a downer.”
Then she sat there as still as absence. And he drove her home.
He couldn’t believe it, he simply couldn’t believe it. Virginity in a woman pushing thirty, with such a wised-up mouth, a woman so attractive, so beleaguered by men, it was a perverted thing. Especially if it was true, as she claimed, that she was highly sexed.
One afternoon, in the tackroom, he overheard the saddle stiffs talking about her, working her over. One of them said, “Christ, she’ll be a volcano when she blows!” Then they all laughed at the pun; they killed themselves laughing.
Mike hated the sound of their laughter and decided that Lessons One and Two were useful wisdom where Donna was concerned. He began to treat her more gingerly, developing a new language with her, and she stopped being so deliberately brittle.
One night he was kissing her, rather chastely, he thought, and suddenly she started to rub herself against him and make agitated murmurings she had never made with him before.
“Do something,” she said. “Please do something!”
She sounded strange, as if her voice came from someone else. He put his hand on her breast and she seemed to want him to do it. But when his hand reached downward, she pulled away with little murmurs of pleading, “No . . . please . . . no.”
Then the unaccountable thing would happen and he’d be at a loss with her. “Touch me—why don’t you touch me?” she begged. Once, when he tried to get her into bed, she hit him and cried and hit him. For weeks thereafter he barely went near her.
On a summer evening, when he came to take her to a movie, she wasn’t dressed when he arrived. She wore a bathrobe and her face wasn’t made up and it looked as if she’d spent weeks of weeping.
“I want you,” she said. “I keep on wanting you—and you don’t try anymore.”
“I have tried,” he said quietly.
“Not really.”
“Then I don’t know how.”
“Make me do it!” she cried. “Why don’t you make me?”
When he started to reach for her, she fought him. “No!” she shouted. “No—stop it—no!”
“You bitch! You want me to rape you, don’t you?”
“If that’s what it takes,” she cried. “Yes!”
There was such terror, such blood in her cry, such anguish, that he pretended he was raping her and she pretended she was fighting him and they both came, at different times, and then she wanted it again.
He had never known a woman like her. So damn much trouble in bed, yet so exciting. Making love to her was so eventful to him, so stirring, that he dreaded being married to Donna for fear of routinizing or wrecking it.
From the minute they married they had a jinx on them. Their bad luck started on the very first day of their honeymoon: the airline lost their luggage; they spent a week in New Orleans without it. But Donna said happily it would force them to spend their entire time where honeymoons should be spent. Besides, she had meant it when she said she wanted to make a baby right away, and this was the making time.
She became pregnant almost immediately—and the jinx seemed over. Mike never saw such a change in a person. The last traces of Donna’s brittleness were gone; there was no more acid on her tongue. Her face softened not only because she was gaining weight but because at last she had come upon a warmer vision of herself. Once, during those early months, she told Mike she could now throw away her knives—she could make her way with a caress. She became giddily sentimental, talking of “happiness surprises” and “armfuls of blessings,” by which she meant babies, of course—she was going to have dozens of them, running all over her, hanging around her neck, “garlands of children.” She coined a hundred treacly phrases she’d have hissed at a year ago. Giggling, she apologized for her happiness—she couldn’t help it, she was living in a sugar bowl.
During the fourth month of her pregnancy she miscarried and lost the child.
The doctor said there was no observable reason for it—it was a fluke. Mike took him at his word but
Donna investigated every syllable. She grilled the man and when he had told her all he knew she went to other doctors, submitted to a whole series of tests and insisted that Mike do the same. Everybody concurred: Mike and Donna were healthy, the untimely birth was nothing but an accident of nature, and the chances of their having another such miscarriage were minimal.
Donna got pregnant again. This time, no sentimental effusions about the caressing of life, no happiness surprises. Just vigilance. Her first three months were miserable—she had constant headaches, she couldn’t sleep and she threw up, as she put it, five generations back. In the second three months the ache went from her head to her legs. The last three months she starved herself to keep her weight down and grew mammoth.
The baby was stillborn.
Again, an accident. Strangled by the umbilical cord.
Dead babies and a live jinx.
To darken the evil shadow that hung over them, Mike had three accidents in that period and seemed constantly to be having an arm or a leg in plaster. All their reverses had to do with luck, they were convinced of it. Although they read everything they could understand about genetics and childbearing and subjected themselves to further medical examinations, more rituals in doctors’ offices, more blood tests, they felt it was all fate—bad luck made bad blood. The hex on their marriage was terrifying.
The third pregnancy.
Nine months of silence. They hardly dared say a word; they didn’t even dare admit Donna had conceived again. They muted everything, they reduced the speed of their lives, they slowed their days down to a crawl, they walked narrowly in the hallways of their house, nighttimes they measured every breath. And just when they had almost convinced themselves that the pregnancy was a fiction and there would be no child, Laurie was born.
She was born and she was healthy.
For Donna the curse on the marriage had lifted. Although she never tried to reclaim that easy sentimental happiness she’d enjoyed by the armful, she was a reasonably happy woman and a deeply devoted mother. If she seemed melancholy sometimes, she didn’t let it contaminate the air, didn’t even talk about it—and Mike thought it might take a few years before she got over the two childbearing failures. It worried him that she clung to the memories so long. He himself had put them aside, totally.
For he had Laurie. The truth about his feeling for Laurie was that he was never sure, before the child was born, that he had ever loved anybody. He had never loved anybody so much that he could trust the unselfishness, much less the honesty of his motives. Even his grandparents were the givers and he the taker. As to the women in his life, each affair had always been more or less a contest; more bargaining than benevolence. And with Donna the bargaining game was going on all the time—somewhat gently, seldom meanly, often affectionately—but always a negotiation. Never in his life had the depths of his—there was only one word for it—goodness been sounded until Laurie came along.
He adored the child. He made the act of giving a game, a ritual, a benediction, a love poem, a nursery rhyme, a prayer. He made giving the great celebration of his life, and Laurie, the celebrated.
He had always considered that being a father was a one-way handout. And he was content with that. He was glad to be the giver, it made him happy, it made him loving. But now a miracle was occurring. Laurie was nearly six now, and starting to repay him, love for love. She was growing into an unusual child, as gallant as she thought her father was, as grave as her mother, as decent as both. There was something intriguingly incomplete about her, elliptic, as if she were saying only half of what she meant, as if she were touching something tentatively because she meant to come back later. She had another quality, an uncanny one: a prescience where her father was concerned. She knew all the directions he took, she could find her way in every neighborhood of his moods. When he was in trouble she unerringly went to the heart of him and brought him comfort. One day he realized a wonderful and somewhat frightening thing: Laurie yearned to be as giving to him as he had been to her.
In early May of Laurie’s seventh year, on one of those glorious nights that give false promise that spring will last forever, he came home and found Laurie feverish. She said strange things about her eyes being too tight to move and hearing loud noises “in this part of my head.” The doctor said it was one of the childhood diseases, probably identifiable by morning. In the meantime, aspirin every four hours and keep her in bed.
Mike sat up with her all night. He gave her aspirin once. The second time he started to give her aspirin she was dead.
On the day of Laurie’s funeral, when they were putting her casket in the earth, a number of people cried, Donna among them. Mike didn’t. Not even when he turned the key and locked Laurie’s room. The surge of tears remained in him like too much blood in his brain.
Instead of bringing Donna closer to him, Laurie’s death pulled her further and further away. Only at night, when they were in bed, did they get close to one another. And even there, by a strange alteration, their lovemaking had taken a turn that Mike couldn’t understand. Donna would suffer him to touch her, caress her, kiss her anywhere—but whenever he started to enter, she would quickly bring her mouth to him and suck him until he came.
One night he asked her about it.
“Why not?” she replied. “Don’t you get any pleasure from it?”
“Yes, of course I do,” he said. “But how about you?”
“Don’t worry.”
She turned over and in a little while he knew she was pretending to be asleep, to ward off discussion.
There was little discussion between them—about anything—in those days. The quiet in the house became almost physical, like a fine gray dust settling over everything. They would go for days without speaking to each other beyond the sentences that made it possible to manage the bare mechanics of their lives. They were alone, each of them living in an empty house, each of them empty.
To fill his own void, Mike found himself going back to books. He hadn’t realized how starved he was for them. He read anything. At first, because he felt he could find a magic manual that would offer him a panacea for loneliness, he read the popular paperbacks in instant psychology—how to be happy, how to know yourself, how to get the most out of sex, precepts toward peace, prosperity, success, pleasure, joy-to-the-world. He learned a lot of words, none of them usable in his daily life, and a lot of formulas, none applicable. When his emptiness stopped aching and he started being apathetic about it, he got scared.
If only he could get close to somebody. He tried again, with Donna, many times. He listened for any sign, the slightest hint, that she might be reaching out to him. And a thought was beginning to form in his mind—had formed—he simply needed the courage to utter it. One night, when they were in bed in the darkness, he started:
“Donna . . .”
“Yes?”
“What if we were to try again—for another child.”
He felt her body tremble. “No.”
He couldn’t see her face, he didn’t have to. She was terrified. He didn’t know what to do about her. He kept hoping a pressure would lift, a color would brighten, she would get better.
A week later, there was a thunderstorm all one evening. It didn’t go away. When he was asleep, it awakened him. Donna was awake too. They lay in bed, watching the streaks of lightning and waiting for the thunderclaps to follow. The room would whiten and go black, then the deafening roll, crack, detonation. In one of the flashes he caught a glimpse of Donna’s face—she was excited. Mike caught her excitement and started to stroke her. For an instant she resisted him but he started touching her breasts, then her vagina, and soon he could feel how warm and moist she was. Suddenly she took him in her hands, twisted her body, turned her head downward, touched him with her lips, her tongue, then sucked him. As the storm burst around them, he came, it seemed he would never stop coming, in her mouth. When his ejaculations
subsided, she ran from the bed into the bathroom.
It didn’t disturb him at first, her running away like that, for she had lately done it a number of times. She would rush away and sometimes be gone so long that by the time she returned he would be asleep. But tonight he heard a sound that worried him. He sat up in bed and listened. Whatever the sound was, there were other noises covering it. He heard water running in the sink, then the flushing of the john, then the shower, all the waters running at once. It was weird. He called Donna. She didn’t answer. He called her name again and when she didn’t answer the second time, he became alarmed and got out of bed.
In the darkness he moved to the bathroom door and knocked. Apparently she didn’t hear him so he opened it. With the noise of the water flowing, the sound of his entrance was covered; she didn’t know he was there. She stood over the toilet bowl, retching. She was trying to throw up and, unable to, was making hideous, painful noises in the back of her throat. She seemed in agony. She put her finger down her throat and he could see her scratching at herself, hurting herself.
“Stop that!” he said. “What are you doing?”
She turned, aghast that he was there. And angry. “Get out!” she said, and when he didn’t move, “Get the hell out!”
“What’s the matter? Are you sick?”
“Yes! I’m sick of it! I can’t stand it anymore!”
He was confused; he wasn’t sure what she was saying. “What do you mean?”
“Sick of all of it! I hate it! It’s loathsome! I hate sucking your goddamn cock! I hate it!”
“Then . . .” He fumbled, couldn’t find the words. Felt stupid and ashamed. “Other things—we can do other things—!”
“I hate all of it! I don’t want to do it anymore!”
She ran into the bedroom, threw a bathrobe around herself and ran out of the house, into the rain and thunder. He didn’t follow her. He didn’t even look out the window to see which way she had gone. He sat in the armchair not far from his side of the bed, sat very still. He wondered how long she had been hiding her true feelings about lovemaking. Ever since the death of Laurie . . . and the terror, the uselessness, of having children, and perhaps the guilt in the pleasure of it.
Cry Macho Page 5