It was remarkable. A mere month ago he had been a wreck, questioning his faith as well as his life. Now he felt surer about himself than he had in years. He had even called Joe Marchini about it. The priest had laughed like a hyena, but there had been a few moments before they hung up when Marchini had gotten as serious as he had ever heard him. "Well, Jake," he'd said, "you can see that there was just no way I could make you understand until it happened to you. I think you'll agree that it's one of the damnedest manifestations of God's will that you could ever imagine. We're so used, in this business of ours, to calling down His works on other people, but until He does something like this to you, you don't really know what it's all about. It's like leaving your rookie year behind to become a veteran. I don't really know how to explain it."
"Neither do I, Joe," he had said, and then they had both hung up, almost simultaneously, neither having to say the word "good-bye." They knew the call was over, and what it had all been about. And Jacob knew then that what Marchini had said was true: it was like being tested, and getting the exam back with an A on it,
But how had it happened? How had it turned around so quickly? That was nearly as much a mystery as the testing itself. He knew it had to do with Billy, but why? What was it about the boy that had pulled this response from so deep within him? What had made him believe in himself, in mankind, in God, again?
Because the boy needs you.
That was it. There was something about Billy, some mysterious want or need that Jacob felt compelled to fulfill. The fact that he didn't know what it was only increased his certainty that the boy needed him. He had thought for a time that possibly it was a reaction fostered by the fact that he didn't have a son of his own, but he had dismissed that. There was a gulf, a deep empty hole, in this boy, something that was almost frightening in its intensity, and Jacob Beck wanted to find out what was missing and provide it.
Billy needs you.
He looked down again at the neatly scrawled notes of his sermon, then turned out the lamp on his desk and left his office. One-thirty in the morning. This would be the first time he got any kind of sleep on a Saturday night since he could remember. Now that he thought about it, he wondered if he would be able to sleep. He was so used to staying up all night on Saturday that he might end up battling sleeplessness. Well, at least he could pass the time pleasantly for once, watching television or reading a book instead of agonizing over a line of scripture he didn't care about.
He went to the kitchen, opening the refrigerator to see if there was anything worth eating. Nothing. He straightened up and yawned, realizing that maybe he was tired after all and that he might as well try to sleep. He could always get up if insomnia assaulted him.
He trudged up the stairs. Passing Billy's room, he saw light under the door.
He hesitated, weighing whether or not he should investigate. The boy deserved his privacy. But it really was too late for him to be up. He listened at the door, heard nothing. He knocked lightly, then eased open the door and stepped in.
The lamp next to the bed was on. But the bed was unmade, the coverlet drawn smoothly over the pillow.
"Billy?" he called tentatively.
He located the boy's figure seated in a straight-backed chair drawn up to the window.
"Are you all right?" he asked, moving closer.
The boy seemed to be staring out through the window, into the night.
"Billy?" Jacob said again, reaching out for him.
The boy turned around, and Jacob Beck gasped and nearly fell into the two bottomless black wells that were Billy's eyes. Beck stumbled forward, reaching out his hand for support, and suddenly Billy's eyes were gone and Jacob's father was standing there, staring balefully down at him. "A preacher," he began with disdain, but then he vanished and Beck was holding onto the back of Billy's chair, and Billy was regarding him calmly, with the same flat copper eyes he always had.
"What . . ." Jacob Beck gasped, sitting down on the bed and trying to orient himself. Billy regarded him dispassionately.
"What happened to me?" Beck asked.
The boy's gaze was as level as winter ice on a pond.
Beck looked at the boy, sitting quietly facing him in his chair, and shook his head. Nothing must have happened. The room was the same as it had always been, the window the same window, the chair the same. Billy had turned to face him just as he would have expected after he'd entered the room and called to him. His father was not there, Billy's eyes were not huge black endless wells sucking him in, nothing had happened. It had all been there and gone so quickly.
"Is something wrong?" Billy asked.
"No, nothing's wrong," Beck answered, not sure yet if he believed it.
The boy waited for him to say something.
"I . . . was just wondering if you were all right," he said. Nothing had happened. "I saw your light on."
"I couldn't sleep."
Beck's breathing was back to normal. The chair, the boy, everything was as it should be. "Neither can I," he said. "I just finished my sermon for tomorrow and now I don't know if I'll be able to go to bed." Nothing had happened. "Would you like to watch television with me?"
"No," Billy answered.
"Is anything bothering you?"
The boy shook his head and turned back to the window.
A chill went through Beck, thinking that if the boy turned around again, there would be those black eyes, that huge figure of his father . . . He diverted himself with the fact that he thought he detected the faint aroma of tobacco smoke.
"Billy . . ." he began, but decided not to bring it up.
He sat for a few uncomfortable moments, then stood and looked down at the boy. "If you need me, for anything, you can always come to me," he said to Billy's back.
Billy faced the black night through the window.
Jacob went to the doorway and looked back. He'd told the boy to come to him if he ever needed him. But he wondered if he meant it. Doubt had crawled into his head once again. Maybe this elation at finding himself had been a false dawn. Maybe the boy didn't need him after all. Maybe that hole he saw in the boy did not exist. Maybe it was merely the makeup of an alien being, the unknown, unknowable inner territory of someone or something so inhuman as to be incomprehensible.
Maybe something had happened.
Billy had not moved. He sat in his chair, staring into blackness. Maybe that's all there was: blackness. Jacob Beck felt a shiver of that emptiness pass through him. A gulf opened somewhere in his heart. He saw, once more, the empty pit that was life. What was life? A thing that meant nothing, something that was only there, a joke with no punch line except death.
Maybe there isn't anything after all.
He pushed the thought from his mind. Nothing had happened, and the boy still needed him. To his immediate relief, he saw that the peace that he had attained, the inner surety of his own vocation and life, was still there, though somewhat dimmed. The whole battle, he realized, had not been won, but he still believed that victory would be its outcome.
He closed the door to the boy's room and went back downstairs to his office to wait out the rest of the long night.
17
What the hell is a housewife anyway?
Long, slow morning was passing into long, slow afternoon. For Allie Kramer, that meant only that it was now high noon and she could, in good conscience, have her first drink of the day. "Cocktail time!" She laughed sarcastically, shuffling in her bedroom slippers from the television room to the kitchen. With practiced ease she opened the cabinet over the stove. She didn't even bother to look as she pulled down the Jim Beam bottle from its familiar spot. She drew a drinking glass from another cabinet, ice from the refrigerator, and poured a good two inches of bourbon, filling the rest of the glass with water.
Housewife. If ever there was an obsolete term, that was it. "Cheers," she said, facing the refrigerator. The whine of the television in the other room only increased her annoyance, and she drank the bourbon down fast, t
hen quickly fixed another. On the way back to the television room she felt a sudden rush of lightness from the first drink. She swayed, bumping into the wall and knocking a picture askew. She turned to look at the portrait of her husband and herself in wedding dress: Ralph in morning coat, rented top hat in his hand, she in a white gown her sister had lent her because she didn't have enough money to get her own—mostly because Ralph had insisted she quit work a good two months before they got married.
To be a housewife.
"Jerk," she said, raising the glass to the crooked picture of Ralph on the wall.
He was a jerk. And it was all his fault. All of it. The man still lived in 1952, expecting her to play Lucy to his Ricky. She wouldn't have minded so much if he made a bundle, but he only brought home enough each month to barely cover their living expenses. Whenever she complained about it, which she did loudly and often, he put his hands out piously and said, "No wife of mine is going to work." "How many wives have you got?" she wanted to ask him, but the question was foolish, because Ralph was such a jerk he couldn't even keep one wife happy. Not in any sense of the word.
She sat down heavily in her TV chair and faced the set. The Price Is Right was on. But she didn't look at it. Happy, she thought, and that, of course, was the real problem. Because the fool couldn't even keep her happy in bed.
She knew part of the problem was that she was home all the time. But that didn't help. For a while she thought maybe there was something wrong with her. She'd be home all day, cooking (which she hated) and cleaning (which she despised), and the only thing she could think about was sex. While she made the bed, she'd fantasize about Ralph coming home unexpectedly. He'd sneak up behind her, throw her down on the half-smoothed sheets, and take her with a wild look in his eyes. Or she'd be cleaning the kitchen and the thought would come into her mind of him suddenly grabbing her, pushing her up against the refrigerator, and doing it right there, standing up. Or on the dining-room table. Or on the living-room couch, or the floor in front of the fire. Or in the hallway, or the garage.
Sometimes, in the beginning, she had been so horny by the time he got home that she had barely let him take off his topcoat before making little suggestions to him. He had frowned the first few times, saying he was tired, but she had been so insistent that he finally gave in one night. The experience had been so unlike what she had dreamed about (the bastard fell asleep right after!) that she had let him put her off after that, accepting his excuses when he said how hard his day had been, or his favorite, "Let's wait till Sunday afternoon, like we always do. I'll be up for it then." The idiot hadn't even seen the pun in his own words.
Eventually, she had stopped trying altogether, even on Sunday afternoons. And that seemed fine with Ralph, which only infuriated her. "What do you expect me to do around this goddamn place all day long, play tiddlywinks? If we had a kid, I could see staying home, but this is crazy! And I'm going crazy!" But he had only frowned and said, "No wife of mine—"
"This wife of yours isn't getting enough!"
"Well . . ." he'd started, going into his litany, and she'd just let the subject drop.
So she had started to fantasize about other partners. One day she got a piece of junk mail, which she tore open. Ready to throw it out, she saw that it was a sex catalog. There were books and movies advertised, and pictures of sex devices. Something in her recoiled, but then she sat down in front of the TV and flipped through, looking over each picture. The men all looked like they enjoyed what they were doing. The women looked . . .
Happy.
She threw the catalog out, partly out of fear that Ralph would find it, but she found herself dwelling on what had been in it. One of the picture books had been called Hot Deliverymen, and she imagined what it would be like to have the oilman come to the house and suddenly put the moves on her. She tried not to dwell on the fact that their own oilman was fat and dumpy, with a mole on the side of his nose. This one would be tall, with dark eyes. He would put his hand on her, and touch her there and there, and she would melt in his arms. She would fight to get her clothes off and he would take his off, and they'd do it on the rug, and in the bathroom on top of the sink, and then they'd go into different positions. He would know just what he was doing, touching her in that place, putting his mouth down there like Ralph wouldn't. ("It's . . . dirty down there," he'd said once, rising by rote into the boring missionary position.) The deliveryman would do those things for her, and she would be happy.
She looked down and saw that her glass was empty once more. Shit. The Price Is Right was over, the soaps coming on. She got up and flipped the channel to her favorite one. The voices were young, filled with just-suppressed sexual desire. ("You know how I feel about you, Amanda." "Do you?" "I wish we could . . ." "Yes?" "I wish we could make love right now. If only Roderick wasn't still in your life . . .") Eventually on the soaps they got everything they wanted. She knew it was all fantasy, but that didn't help. Her whole life had become fantasy.
She sidled back to the kitchen and made another drink. Better ease up, she thought. Normally she wasn't into her third bourbon until two in the afternoon. "Screw it," she immediately said, thinking of the pile of wash in the bathroom hamper, the dirty venetian blinds in the bedroom that Ralph had been getting after her about, the porch that needed sweeping, the walls, the floors, the rugs, the . . .
She poured an extra finger of alcohol into the glass, watching it spread like amber ink through the water.
She went back into the living room, sitting down with a sigh in front of the set. There they were on the screen, Roderick and Amanda, fighting again, fighting about Rick her secret lover, the man who made her happy. . .
The front doorbell rang.
"Oh, shit," she said, trying to get up with the drink still in her hand and splashing some of it onto her housedress. "Shit. Shit!" The doorbell rang insistently, and she shouted, "Just a minute, dammit!" while trying to wipe at the smelly bourbon on her sleeve. She put the drink down on the rug, where it tipped at a precarious angle on the shag. She reached the front door as the bell rang a fifth time.
"Dammit, what—" she began angrily, but stopped when she saw who it was.
"You call for a plumber, ma'am?" He was tall and black-haired. His eyes were dark gray, like those of the men on the soap operas. They were the kind of bright eyes that played with you, telling you things that the lips didn't. Mischievous. Toying. His eyes were smiling at her.
". . . a plumber?" he asked.
She said, "No," but immediately changed it to, "Yes. Yes, I'm having trouble with my . . . sink."
"Sure thing," he said, smiling; his smile was a bit tilted, making him look rakish when he used it. As he brushed past her, she felt a warm thrill course through her.
She closed the door and turned to him. He said, "Where's the problem?" But he had already put down his toolbox and was unbuttoning the top of his work shirt. "It's . . ." she said, but the answer to the question disappeared as he put his hand out and touched her dress gently, just above the waist.
"Why did you do that?" she asked, beginning the sentence with wonder in her voice, ending it trying to sound coquettish, like one of the girls on the daytime soaps. She still felt the place where his finger had touched, a warm glow budding out from it through the rest of her.
He had his shirt off. He had a well-muscled chest covered with soft black hairs—the way a man's chest should look.
"Just what do you think you're doing?" she asked teasingly, and he took her arms and drew her to him. She let out a shuddering sigh.
Happy.
She felt his hands working gently on her, moving around to unbutton her dress, slipping it down and removing it. Unhooking her bra, he cupped her breasts briefly as he brought it away from her body. He stepped back, drawing his pants off.
Heat moved through her. He lowered her to the rug. She felt the soft, long white knap of it moving against her back and buttocks (I wish I'd vacuumed it like Ralph wanted!).
"What are y
ou doing to me?" she moaned, staring up into his playful dark eyes.
"This," he said.
He touched her there. She felt a bolt of pleasure, like a gate opening to let sunlight stream through. It was what she had dreamed of. He lifted her gently, easing her into one of those positions she had seen in the dirty catalog. She moved her hands underneath, helping him, looking deep into his marvelous eyes. . .
His eyes. There was something in them that made her hesitate. She stopped moving beneath him. She felt his hands freeze, then start to caress her again, moving where she wanted them to, doing what she wanted them to.
His eyes were not right. The gray had turned to copper. Suddenly, she saw what he really was, what he was really doing.
She screamed. She went stiff, throwing her hands at him.
He stood up. He was no longer the man with sultry eyes and muscled chest. Staring down at her where she lay drunkenly on the rug was a child with miniature suns for eyes, and a grim mouth.
"Ralph!" she screamed. "Help me!" The child stepped toward her.
She screamed again, peddling back on the rug until she came up against her TV chair, knocking the bourbon glass over on the rug, filling the room with a sickly sharp-sweet alcoholic odor.
"Take me, Allie," the child said, taking another step. "Have me." Its serious little mouth spread suddenly into a horrifying grin. Its eyes were sucking her in. "I'll be your lover. I'll be anything you want."
"What are you doing!" Allie shouted, trying to look away from those pitted eyes but unable to.
It smiled again, that horribly unfitting grin. "Be happy, Allie."
Allie screamed. The child bent down and touched her. Suddenly it was not the child anymore but the repairman. He smiled down into her face. His gray eyes danced as he moved her the right way, touched her where it was right. He said, "Yes, Allie." Yes. Her screaming had stopped; she was happy. They would do it here, and then they would go into the kitchen and climb onto the table, and then into the laundry room, and on the car in the garage, and then he would tie her to the bed and they would do it again and again and again until she wanted to . . .
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