by Dale Peck
He talks about Susan Miller’s gifts: cheerfulness and beauty, grace and enthusiasm. From behind the closed curtain someone clears his throat, someone else sobs. The organ music begins. The service is over.
Along with the others I file slowly past the casket. Then I move out onto the front steps and into the bright, hot afternoon light. A middle-aged woman who limps as she goes down the stairs ahead of me reaches the sidewalk and looks around, her eyes falling on me. “Well, they got him,” she says. “If that’s any consolation. They arrested him this morning. I heard it on the radio before I came. A guy right here in town. A longhair, you might have guessed.” We move a few steps down the hot sidewalk. People are starting cars. I put out my hand and hold on to a parking meter. Sunlight glances off polished hoods and fenders. My head swims. “He’s admitted having relations with her that night, but he says he didn’t kill her.” She snorts. “They’ll put him on probation and then turn him loose.”
“He might not have acted alone,” I say. “They’ll have to be sure. He might be covering up for someone, a brother, or some friends.”
“I have known that child since she was a little girl,” the woman goes on, and her lips tremble. “She used to come over and I’d bake cookies for her and let her eat them in front of the TV.” She looks off and begins shaking her head as the tears roll down her cheeks.
Stuart sits at the table with a drink in front of him. His eyes are red and for a minute I think he has been crying. He looks at me and doesn’t say anything. For a wild instant I feel something has happened to Dean, and my heart turns.
“Where is he?” I say. “Where is Dean?”
“Outside,” he says.
“Stuart, I’m so afraid, so afraid,” I say, leaning against the door.
“What are you afraid of, Claire? Tell me, honey, and maybe I can help. I’d like to help, just try me. That’s what husbands are for.”
“I can’t explain,” I say. “I’m just afraid. I feel like, I feel like, I feel like . . .”
He drains his glass and stands up, not taking his eyes from me. “I think I know what you need, honey. Let me play doctor, okay? Just take it easy now.” He reaches an arm around my waist and with his other hand begins to unbutton my jacket, then my blouse. “First things first,” he says, trying to joke.
“Not now, please,” I say.
“Not now, please,” he says, teasing. “Please nothing.” Then he steps behind me and locks an arm around my waist. One of his hands slips under my brassiere.
“Stop, stop, stop,” I say. I stamp on his toes.
And then I am lifted up and then falling. I sit on the floor looking up at him and my neck hurts and my skirt is over my knees. He leans down and says, “You go to hell then, do you hear, bitch? I hope your cunt drops off before I touch it again.” He sobs once and I realize he can’t help it, he can’t help himself either. I feel a rush of pity for him as he heads for the living room.
He didn’t sleep at home last night.
This morning, flowers, red and yellow chrysanthemums. I am drinking coffee when the doorbell rings.
“Mrs. Kane?” the young man says, holding his box of flowers.
I nod and pull the robe tighter at my throat.
“The man who called, he said you’d know.” The boy looks at my robe, open at the throat, and touches his cap. He stands with his legs apart, feet firmly planted on the top step. “Have a nice day,” he says.
A little later the telephone rings and Stuart says, “Honey, how are you? I’ll be home early, I love you. Did you hear me? I love you, I’m sorry, I’ll make it up to you. Goodbye, I have to run now.”
I put the flowers into a vase in the center of the dining room table and then move my things into the extra bedroom.
Last night, around midnight, Stuart breaks the lock on my door. He does it just to show me that he can, I suppose, for he doesn’t do anything when the door springs open except stand there in his underwear looking surprised and foolish while the anger slips from his face. He shuts the door slowly, and a few minutes later I hear him in the kitchen prying open a tray of ice cubes.
I’m in bed when he calls today to tell me that he’s asked his mother to come stay with us for a few days. I wait a minute, thinking about this, and then hang up while he is still talking. But in a little while I dial his number at work. When he finally comes on the line I say, “It doesn’t matter, Stuart. Really, I tell you it doesn’t matter one way or the other.”
“I love you,” he says.
He says something else and I listen and nod slowly. I feel sleepy. Then I wake up and say, “For God’s sake, Stuart, she was only a child.”
Aphrodisiac
by Christopher Bram
The revolving drum of the multilith printer spun with a rhythmic chatter. Sheet after sheet of clean white paper shot beneath the drum, then jumped into a cradle, each page stamped with Carpenter’s face and politics.
It was unnerving. Imagine being in love, and suddenly the object of your affections begins to divide, multiply in a sort of amoebic frenzy, until the world holds a hundred duplicates of the unique person who’d earned your total devotion. What then?
The original Carpenter stood beside the machine, adjusting the feed of paper, correcting the ink flow, talking to me over the gentle noise of the machine. His smooth, boyish face was tilted forward and a sheaf of blond hair was caught behind one lens of his old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses. Carpenter was twenty-eight, three years older than I, but the only thing about him that looked adult were his hands. They were oversized and tough, ridged along the edges. I have always had great respect for his hands.
“No. I’ve been meaning to come by and see you people,” Carp was saying. “Or at least let you know what was up. But I’ve been occupied with this.” He gestured at the stack of handbills rising in the cradle.
It was lunch hour, and Carp was using his free time to run off material for his city-council campaign. Every few years Carp ran for city council, affiliating himself with one or another of the left-wing groups that seemed to come and go in Richmond with the life expectancy of a fruit fly. He had vanished from view a month before; and although I knew about the campaign, I couldn’t quite believe that it was the only reason he was staying away. He had to know what was going on, and if he did, he would want no part of it. Carpenter had always been a terrible moralist. I had driven all the way across town during my lunch hour to learn how much Carp knew, and I stood there now in the empty print shop, watching Carp, feeling out of place in my three-piece suit.
“That’s the only reason you haven’t been around?” I asked. “There’s nothing wrong?”
He looked at me, surprised. “Not at all. What could be wrong?”
“Nothing,” I mumbled. I invented a reason. “Cathy thought you might be bored with us.”
“Bored? Lord, no. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to see y’all. But this nonsense—”
“Good. Cathy’ll be glad to hear that. She was afraid you’d gotten tired of hobnobbing with the bourgeoisie.”
He prodded the last sheets of paper through the machine and cut off the power. “On the contrary.”
So he didn’t know after all. The news pleased me and I could enjoy watching the rubbery way he moved when he stooped to stack his bills and posters. “You like some help with that?” I asked.
“Nope. Friendship doesn’t require it.”
“For crying out loud, Carp. Carrying your propaganda’s not going to subvert me. Besides, that’s what you’re supposed to do,” I said, picking up a bundle and trying to hold it so that the ink didn’t rub off on my vest. “Subvert, pervert, and seduce. You’re not a very good socialist, you know.”
“I’m a r-r-rotten socialist,” he said with a grin and led the way out back to his car.
It took several trips to fill the trunk and I was able to brush clumsi
ly against him each time we passed; for the moment, that was all the contact I needed. Carpenter and I shook hands, promised to visit each other as soon as the election was over, shook hands again and parted. My afternoon at the insurance office was spent reviewing claims, but the work soothed me; I knew I had another life hidden beneath my button-down respectability.
During the next few weeks we saw Carp only in the form of his campaign leaflets and posters. The bills I had seen being run off by the hundreds were suddenly all over town. There were other candidates, and a flood of other people’s posters, but it was only Carp’s that I noticed. The photograph was old, something saved from a previous campaign; he was dressed in a Robert Hall jacket and the kind of narrow necktie worn by working-class grandfathers. He looked exactly like a kid dressed up for church back home in Nansemond County. Printed beneath the picture were the words Socialist People’s Party. The incongruity of picture and caption made me think of the bland high school photos you see in the newspaper under such headlines as honor student slays own family.
The picture was suddenly everywhere; the whole world seemed to have been papered over with Carpenter’s face. Wherever I went, surfaces mocked me with his beaming-boy image, the boy in the Sunday school suit, the Socialist People’s candidate. He was on telephone poles, on alley walls, on the soaped-over windows of shops that had gone out of business. He even peered winsomely from a wastebasket in the downstairs lobby of the insurance office. Cathy thought it might be funny to peel a poster off and tack it up in the apartment; she called me a stuffy prig when I wouldn’t let her.
Cathy and I weren’t very happy in Richmond. We had never been very good at meeting strangers, but when we lived in Maryland we had Cathy’s family and a few of her friends from college. The only person we knew in Richmond was Andrew Carpenter. Carp and I had come from the same county in southside Virginia. When I met him, he was already halfway through college; I was still in high school. I trailed after him like a puppy, thinking I was only attracted to him because he was what I, foolishly, wanted to be: an intellectual. It was only now, after the insurance company had transferred me to Richmond, that I understood the real reason for the attraction; I understood only because I had tripped over backwards and fallen into it again. Here I was, happily married, and not only had I fallen in love with somebody else, I had fallen in love with a guy.
It bothered me, but not in the way I might have expected. There was no guilt, perhaps only because I was too busy wondering what I could do with this new feeling. I liked the feeling very much and did not want to throw it away. The obvious thing would have been to go to bed with Carp, but I wasn’t sure what you could do in bed with him. Even if I were capable of it, I thought there should be something beyond that, perhaps something like marriage. I wondered about adoption.
Several weeks without Carpenter passed. Cathy was as bored with Richmond as I was, so bored she finally overcame her snobbery and insisted we buy a television. We hunted for things to keep each other entertained. A week before the election we drove out to the University of Richmond to see Children of Paradise. I’d found out that a film society was going to show it and reported the news to Cathy as though it were a gift just for her. But I wanted to see it as much as she did. Our isolation in Richmond had made us very dependent on each other; all our pleasures and desires seemed to blur together. The blurring was nice, in a way, but I found myself missing the sharp edges things had had when we were first discovering each other. Now, we were too easy with each other, even at night when we went to bed.
Cathy was all shivery and excited after the movie. It was a clear, cold October night and we delayed our return home by walking around the campus. I tried to put my arm around her, but she kept breaking away to wave her hands and repeat a favorite line or remember some lush scene. I was very happy, too. Under a streetlight I stopped her and asked to hear the line Arletty uses to invite the actor into her room.
“Hmmmm? Which one?”
“You know. Right after he asks if her door is locked.”
She displayed her big teeth in an enormous grin. I often tease her for having a mouth like a cupboard full of china. “Oh, I love it!” She clapped her hands and grabbed me by the collar to pull me down to her level. She gave her head a shake, pretending to get into character. Eyeing me from beneath her hood of disheveled hair, she mimicked Arletty’s seductive purr: “What do I have that thieves can steal?” Then she burst out laughing and shoved me away.
I watched her parade down the walk, her head thrown back so far she couldn’t see. She nearly fell over a fire hydrant. I continued my amused strut behind her and didn’t catch up again until she had stopped in front of a kiosk plastered with one of Carpenter’s posters. She leaned against it and hooked one arm over the picture, pretending it was real. “Be nice to see Andy again. In flesh and blood, I mean.”
I clutched her hand and pulled her away. “See him soon enough,” I said.
We resumed our walk, leaning against each other’s shoulder for support. “You’re not bored by Carp?” I asked. It was a silly question, but I wanted an excuse to talk about him. From the start, she had made it clear she enjoyed his company. The first time we had had him over to dinner, Cathy was charmed by the way he had repeatedly interrupted his defense of socialism to identify each piece of classical music played on the stereo with the Warner Brothers cartoon he had first heard it in.
She clicked her tongue. “You keep insisting I should be bored by Andy. Believe me, Scott, I’m not. I actually like the goof. And not just because he’s your friend, either.”
“But why? You’ve got nothing in common.”
“Maybe that’s it. Maybe I find him . . . exotic.” She growled the word. “I don’t know. Why does anyone like anybody else? Well for one thing, he’s not an insurance person.”
“Then you find me boring?”
“Oh, get out of here.” She butted my shoulder with her head. “Your friends, dope. Your friends and Daddy’s. Insurance people always seem the same. Cynical about everybody and everything except themselves.”
“They’re not really friends.”
“Okay then, acquaintances. Oh, you know what I mean. But don’t worry, Scottie. You’re different. You’re a mutant.”
I gave Cathy a squeeze around the waist and softly whispered in her ear, “And you’re my little mutant, too.” Our shoulders began to ache; we had to straighten up.
The walkway climbed a small hill and gradually swung to the left. There were fewer lights here and as we walked we saw a full moon slowly shift into the gap between the tall, black dormitories. Close to the horizon the moon looked enormous, as wonderfully theatrical and fake as the canvas disc used for the Pierrot mimes in the movie. I began whistling one of the tunes that had accompanied the mimes.
“Funny thing,” said Cathy, wearily, “but I’ve gotten so used to seeing Andy’s face all over town, I can’t even look at the moon without seeing that goof in it.”
I laughed with her over her silliness. My eyes, too, were twisting the lunar geography into a copy of Carpenter’s face, but I proudly believed my reasons were more dangerous and exciting than Cathy’s.
Love. Sloppy, romantic love. Love so clichéd you saw the loved one in the moon. It takes no talent to fall in love, but I was proud to be in love with Carp. I may have been disturbed that I didn’t know what to do with it, but I wasn’t bothered by the unnaturalness of the love. I was already familiar with natural love, the domestic kind I shared with Cathy. Love with her was love that justified, protected, soothed; it was as commonplace and necessary as a loaf of bread. No matter what tensions might develop between us, my dumb faith in the success of domestic love created the feeling that there was a safety net strung beneath us and that we were absolutely free from danger. It was my love for Carpenter—a sort of ecstatic nervousness—that now supplied me with the missing danger.
Election day. Cathy and I had n
ot been residents of Richmond long enough to be able to vote, but after dinner I suggested we visit Carpenter and sit out the returns with him.
Cathy studied me for a moment, then screwed up her mouth and shook her head. “I don’t think we should. He’s probably off with some friends. Don’t you think?”
“If I know Carp, I’ll make a bet he’s alone reading. He could probably use some company.”
“You really think so?” She was skeptical. Cathy has always been leery of spending evenings with strangers. I promised and teased her into giving in.
Carpenter lived on the edge of the Fan district in a small upstairs apartment behind a shoe repair shop. I had seen the place only once before: walls painted a clinical shade of white, a few straight-back chairs and an unvarnished desk, a wooden floor with no carpet. Tacked above the desk was a solitary picture: an overripe figure of Death towed a frightened monk by his cowl toward places unknown. It was a morbid picture, but oddly it seemed a humanizing touch in the stark setting of the room. An exposed flight of stairs descended from his doorway to the alley.
“So this is where Andy lives?” said Cathy as she followed me up the rattling stairs. The flaking frame shook under our combined weight.
“I’ve pointed it out to you,” I said, rapping on the door.
“Have you?” Holding her embroidered purse against her throat, she looked over the rail at the pile of cans and flattened boxes below. “I don’t think so. Are there any rats down there?”
“Big black socialist rats,” I said, irritated by her sudden delicacy. She seemed to be in one of her prim and stuffy moods tonight.
The knob turned with a sharp snap and the door opened. A stocky woman with rust-red hair faced us. “Yeah?” she said, arrogantly cocking her head as though she expected us to sell her something. Pop music played in the room behind her.
A female. I was stunned to find a female in Carpenter’s doorway. It was a possibility I had never considered.