Whenever You Call

by Anna King

At the top of the stairs, Noah began to cry.

  I ran up to him. “You’re not getting a spanking, sweetie.”

  He wailed, “Elll-iiii-ooo-ttt!”

  “Elliot was a very bad boy.”

  Alex said, “What did he do?”

  “You don’t need to worry about that.”

  Calmly, she said, “I do because I don’t ever want to get a spanking.”

  I smiled at her. “There’s only been one time when you were bad enough for a spanking.”

  “I’m never bad.”

  I hoisted Noah into my arms and started back down the stairs. “Remember when you told Elliot that he was dead?”

  A glimmer of a smile. “Yeah.”

  I got to the bottom of the stairs and turned into the living. “Come on, we can start the fire.”

  “I should’ve been spanked for that?”

  “Possibly.” I dropped Noah onto the couch, where he bounced while holding tight to his favorite book of children’s poetry.

  I struck the match and held it to several spots of the newspaper. The fire flared into flame.

  “I don’t think it was nice to tell Elliot he was dead, do you?”

  Alex stood next to me. We both stared into the fire. “It wasn’t nice, but it was the truth.”

  “Elliot was dead?”

  “I thought he was, but I guess I was wrong.”

  I glanced at her, intrigued despite myself. “Why did you think something like that, Alex?”

  “I don’t know.” She started to reach for the poker.

  I put a hand on her arm. “Does Daddy let you use that?”

  She shook her head.

  At that moment, we heard heavy footsteps crossing the porch and then the front door opening. Elliot and Trevor were silent, which surprised me. I wanted to grab Elliot and hug him. Instead, I just watched as they walked silently into the living room, holding hands. I couldn’t imagine how they’d leapt from beating the shit out of him to holding hands.

  Elliot let go of his Dad and perched on the edge of the couch across from Noah.

  Trevor said, “Can I make you a drink? I’m going to get myself something.”

  “Sure, a bourbon. And could you stir the spaghetti sauce when you’re in there?”

  I glanced at Elliot. Our eyes met and I could see that his were wet from crying. I balanced the poker in the corner where the mantel met the wall, then sat down on the couch and put my arm around him.

  “Did you get a spanking?” Alex asked Elliot.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  I began talking in my storytelling voice. “Once upon a time, there lived a baby dragon in a distant country, and he was the last living dragon in the whole world.”

  “He was a baby but he didn’t have parents?” Elliot asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “How did he eat?” Alex said.

  “Exactly the difficulty,” I said, pointing a triumphant finger at Alex. “Without parents, he had no way to eat, and that meant—,”

  Elliot interrupted, “He stayed a baby!”

  I continued, “Because he was a dragon, he didn’t absolutely have to have food to keep living, but he did have to eat if he was going to grow any bigger. The difficulty was that he didn’t know he needed food. In fact, he didn’t even know what food was.”

  Noah slid off the opposite couch, came over to me, and leaned against my legs while staring fixedly into my eyes. I could feel Elliot’s agitation that Noah was moving into his territory and grabbing Mom’s attention, so I tightened my arm around his shoulder in an attempt to reassure him.

  Alex said, “And no one could tell the baby dragon anything because everyone, people and animals and everyone, were too scared that he would eat them—,”

  “Except he didn’t know how to eat,” Elliot said.

  Noah opened his mouth wide and breathed out with loud sounds that I finally realized were meant to be a dragon breathing fire.

  Trevor came in and crossed the room, holding out my bourbon to me and then sitting on the other couch. Alex immediately bounded into his lap and gave him a recap of the story thus far.

  “Does the baby dragon have a name?” he asked when she’d finished.

  Noah started running around the coffee table with one hand steadying himself as he went, while noisily breathing out fire. I sipped my bourbon and held it in my mouth for a couple of seconds before swallowing. “Of course he has a name.”

  “His name’s Spank-Spank!” Alex screamed.

  “No,” yelled Elliot.

  “Pank-Pank!!!” Noah said. “Pank-Pank! Pank-Pank!”

  “One day Pank-Pank wandered away from his nest that was made from green balloons. He didn’t know where he was going and he didn’t know why, but he just had had enough of sitting around the nest and being bored. Also, his toenails kept popping balloons by mistake, which quite scared him.”

  “Sauce looked ready,” Trevor said hopefully.

  “No, Daddy, we have to finish the story,” Alex insisted.

  He gulped at his glass of scotch and rolled his eyes at me. “Sorry, sweetie, but we have to find Pank-Pank some food before we eat,” I said.

  “Pank-Pank has to get some spaghetti,” Elliot said decisively.

  “Ummm, where would a baby dragon find spaghetti?”

  Trevor said, “At an Italian restaurant.”

  I burst out laughing, but then kept telling the story. “Pank-Pank wandered for thousands of miles. He even swam across three oceans, until he came upon a very pretty white house with black shutters. Smoke came out of the chimney of this house and that reminded him of something, though he couldn’t quite remember what.” I turned to Elliot. “What do you think the chimney breathing smoke reminded him of?”

  He sucked in his lower lip. “His Daddy?”

  “Yes! His Daddy used to breath smoke and fire.”

  Trevor said, “So Pank-Pank jumped up on the house’s porch and banged on the front door with his tail. Bam, bam, bam!”

  Noah turned and looked through the living room to the entrance hall.

  “Three children lived in the house, by the names of Alex, Elliot, and Noah,” Trevor said, “and when they heard the pounding noises on their front door, they knew it was a baby dragon trying to get in. They also knew, because they were three of the smartest children in the world, that baby dragons would much rather eat spaghetti than children. They opened the door and very politely invited Pank-Pank inside to share their spaghetti dinner. After eating five plates of spaghetti, plus three servings of garlic bread, the baby dragon began to grow bigger and bigger, until it was clear to these smart children that he needed to go outside right away, before he got too large to fit through the door. The only way they could get Pank-Pank to leave the house was to hold a plate of spaghetti right in front of his nose and lure him outside.”

  “Then what happened?” Elliot said.

  “Because he was so grateful to finally learn to eat, Pank-Pank became the children’s nanny, which allowed their mother and father to go on a cruise around the world. The end.”

  Trevor grinned.

  I nodded. “The end, yes.”

  Noah’s mouth hung open and a pool of spit shone in the left corner of his lips. “Nanny?”

  “Baby-sitter,” I explained.

  By ten o’clock that night, the kids were sound asleep. Trevor and I took the bottle of wine from dinner into the living room, threw some logs on the fire, and turned off all the lights. We snuggled together, gazing into the flames.

  “I didn’t spank him,” Trevor said.

  I turned to look at him, surprised. “What happened?”

  “When we got outside, he started crying and I lifted him up in my arms and suddenly I wasn’t mad at all.” He shrugged, moving his shoulder against mine. “I should have, though. I know I was wrong not to follow through.”

  “You gave him a good scare, probably what mattered the most.”

  Trevor’s hand went to my breast. He pinched th
e nipple, a standard pre-sex gesture of his. As a turn-on, it didn’t do all that much for me, but as an announcement of his interest and intentions, it was welcome. I suppose I could’ve told him, early on, that a hard pinch to my nipple didn’t feel very good. The difficulty, when you first start having sex with someone new, is that you have no way of knowing which moves were the ones that your partner really enjoyed, with the additional, complicating factor of that rush of arousal in the beginning of a relationship, which, translated, meant that anything the other person did, even something as mundane as a hand resting on your thigh, could be received as if it had been the fulfillment of your dearest fantasy.

  I took his hand, the pinching hand, and laced my fingers through his in an effort to keep the nipple attack from escalating, but he went after it with the other hand, this time by plunging down the front of my blouse and into my bra. Suddenly, he yanked everything aside and dropped his head so that his mouth could clamp onto the nipple. He sucked hard, too hard, and used his teeth to bite.

  On the scale between pleasure and pain, this was inching too close to pain. “Ow, baby,” I whispered.

  That spurred him on. He sucked like a machine, reminding me of the breast-pump I’d used for all my kids, which, frankly, wasn’t the kind of association that leant itself to sexual excitement. I tried to squirm away, while also reaching for his cock through his pants. She taketh away, but giveth still. But I couldn’t get him to leave my damn nipple alone and I felt it swelling, breaking, exploding. I placed both hands on either side of his head, grabbed handfuls of hair, and yanked him away.

  “Wha?” he said, gazing at me with surprise.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  He smiled. “You can hurt me back.”

  “It’s not exciting,” I said.

  After three children, one might have assumed that we had complete knowledge of each other’s true sexual natures, but, apparently, not so. Or, to be scrupulously fair, perhaps his needs had changed, which wasn’t something anyone could argue about. And maybe this was a channel for the violence he hadn’t expressed to his son. So I received his violence. We never recovered from that decision, from that angry fucking, from the physical pain I felt and the fulfillment the pain gave him. We never recovered.

  Now Trevor was dead, just as I’d wished him dead only moments before calling his home and hearing the news. I knew I should be devastated, but I wasn’t. Shocked, yes, but grieved not at all. Not at all. Because he’d hurt me and it now seemed clear that I’d never forgiven him when it had really been incumbent that I forgive myself for allowing him to hurt me. I received his violence, something I shouldn’t have done. Yet here he was dead and I was glad because he’d gotten what was coming to him. Hurt me and you die.

  I paced my kitchen, with a sponge in one hand, swiping at surfaces that looked like they could use a swipe. I had only about an hour-and-a-half before I needed to be at the Harvest, tending bar, and in that time I had to call my three children. I wasn’t sure of the protocol here, but it didn’t seem entirely appropriate to reach your kids, tell them their father was dead, and then go off to pour drinks at a convivial hot spot. I threw the sponge into the sink and made the first call to Elliot. As I listened to his cell phone make its distinctive burring noise, my knees started to tremble and I had to sit down at the kitchen table.

  Forty minutes later, with tears running down my cheeks, I’d finished speaking to the three children. Elliot had appointed himself In Charge because he knew, as did all the kids, that Trevor’s wife, Genevieve, would have a difficult time dealing directly with me. It had probably been the worst possible scenario that I’d been the one to reach her just after hearing the news, as if to say that, somehow, I was still a vital part of Trevor’s life. I’d never understood her implacable jealousy of me. Trevor loved her deeply, more deeply than he’d ever cared for me. (Though I’d wondered, at times, whether gentle Genevieve actually enjoyed rough sex. Perhaps that was their strange and wonderful connection: the infliction of pain.)

  I rushed to get dressed, but I ended with a few extra minutes before I had to leave. I wandered through the living room and finally sat in the corner of the couch, listening to the silence of my old house. Everything had gone off-balance, and it wasn’t just that Trevor had been killed in an automobile accident. I kept thinking that there was someone else I needed to call, but I knew Al was in New York City, meeting with his new agent, Christina. Isaac wouldn’t be able to come to the phone at the monastery.

  Jen. I needed to call Jen. Tears again filled my eyes, but I pressed hard into the corners to keep them from spilling over and ruining my make-up. An unexpected thought appeared in my head, distinct and clear, as if it had a bubble drawn around it and the words enclosed by quotation marks.

  “I can’t live without her.”

  But I didn’t pick up the phone. I went to work instead.

  11

  RAVI TOOK ONE LOOK at me and said, “Who died?”

  I came to a full stop, rocking back on my high heels. “How the hell did you know someone died?”

  “Your aura is thick and gray.” She smiled and made waving motions to simulate the shape of my body.

  I had a vague idea of what an aura was, but even vaguely, I doubted that auras really existed. If they did, why weren’t they in science textbooks as fact? On the other hand, the reality of angels was seriously questioned, yet I believed in one angel because I could see him. Maybe Ravi did see people’s auras.

  I walked the length of the bar and ducked under. “My second husband and the father of my three kids was killed in a car accident today.”

  “Oh, wow,” she said, “I’m sorry. Were you on good terms with him?”

  I glanced around the bar, taking my usual pleasure in the dim light reflected in bottles and glasses, the gleam of the marble top, and the smell of early dinner preparations and cooking that escaped from the kitchen. It felt like home, when I used to have that kind of home, with children and husband, a chicken roasting in the oven, dusk drawing in, and time for a drink.

  “Not what you’d call close, but we were cordial. He remarried years ago.”

  Ravi had perched herself on a stool midway down the bar, her chin in two small fists.

  “I’m pretty concerned for my kids, though.”

  “How old was he?”

  “My age.” I picked up a wet cloth and began the swiping thing again. Maybe I liked being a bartender because, in truth, I was a swiper type of person. I whisked here and there, even though I soon noticed that the entire bar was ultra-clean. “Hey, what gives? This place is spotless.”

  Ravi brightened. “Thank you for noticing—,”

  “Who cleaned up?”

  She shrugged. “It just came over me, kind of like a flu or something.”

  I grinned. “I have a terrible desire, terrible for a bartender, to have a drink.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Will you join me?”

  “Yes! A compari and soda.”

  “Umm, I think I’ll have that, too.”

  I made the drinks, heavy on the compari, then leaned over the bar near Ravi while we sipped.

  “Will your daughter have to postpone her wedding?” Ravi asked.

  “I had lunch with her today to discuss the plans and she told me that they had decided to wait until next Spring, so that they could have the wedding in her father’s garden.” I raised my eyebrows.

  “Whoops.”

  My throat swelled and I had to hold the liquor in my mouth for a minute, letting it dribble down, inching through the lump.

  Ravi reached over and placed her small hand over mine. My own hand flipped and tightened around hers.

  She said, “I have a crush on you.”

  My eyes rose and looked at her. “You do?”

  Ravi nodded.

  To my surprise, I wasn’t uncomfortable. “I’ve never had a lesbian experience.”

  “Have you ever thought about it?”

  “I guess not rea
lly.”

  She’d removed her hand and now cupped the compari and soda. “I probably shouldn’t have said anything—sorry.”

  I shook my head, “No, it’s fine. I’m all for fearless declarations of desire.”

  “Now that sounded like a writer, not a bartender.”

  I took a bigger swallow of the drink. “Actually, I wrote a short piece this morning, for the first time in months. It wasn’t intended as anything, really, more like a way to understanding something personal going on in my life, but I ended up sending it to my agent anyway.”

  “What did she say?”

  I wondered how Ravi knew that my agent was a woman, though I supposed her default setting for such things was to always assume a woman, first. “She liked it.”

  “Cool.”

  I said, “Guess I should start setting up.”

  “So, would you like to go out?”

  “You mean, go out go out?”

  Ravi grinned. “That’s what I mean.”

  I stared at her. “I have no idea.”

  “We could have dinner tomorrow night, and see how you feel about it. But I want to be honest: I’d definitely try to kiss you at the end of the evening. I like you in lots of ways, but this is a sexual attraction.”

  She said the words sexual attraction, and my groin tingled. I might have preferred to deny it, but I’d never been one to look the other way when my groin was aroused since groin arousal had always seemed to me one of life’s perfect experiences. I’d lied to Ravi when I said I’d never had a lesbian encounter, although I wasn’t sure whether what I’d done with my best friend, Alice, during the sixth grade could really count as “lesbian.” During sleep-overs, we lay on top of each other and undulated like little squirming piglets. We hadn’t kissed or anything, but it had certainly been a sexual interaction between two girls.

  And like many women, I had fantasies that included same-sex situations. If you lived long enough, and I was getting to the age where I could say that I’d lived plenty long, you started to notice that your fantasies moved through a retinue of old-standbys, with particular, favorite scenarios circling around to find you again, just when you thought they might have been lost forever. But even when my same-sex fantasy life had been at its strongest, and had endured for a long time time—as long as a year—I never felt an attraction to an actual woman. I knew this was considered normal, but I’d sometimes found it puzzling, especially during that long spell of celibacy, so recently ended. I’d wondered whether it would “count” if I’d had sex with a woman. The desire simply hadn’t been there, yet here it was, tickling my groin, even though my needs were now more than fulfilled by Al.