“Join the club.”
“Which club?”
“The club of people for whom things are difficult.”
“What are you doing back there?”
“Sobering up.”
They were in his same old car again, he in front, driving, she in back, lying with her face in the torn and sandy seat. This was a piece-of-shit car, let it be said.
“You’re making that hole bigger!”
“Watch the road! God, what a terrible week!”
“What?”
“I said it’s been a hard week!”
“You brought it on yourself.”
“I can’t hear you.”
“Come up here.”
“I can’t.”
He stopped the car. They were on a road somewhere between one town and another, one of a thousand identical roads that were cracked on their sides, the cracks filled in with swamp grass and sand. A summer heat had come down. It buzzed in the brush nearby. He went around to the passenger side, yanked open the rusted back door, and grabbed a hand of hers that happened, in a series of random movements she was making to try to find a comfortable position on the seat, to have been stretched out above her head.
“What are you doing?”
“Pulling you out of the car.”
“Get off.”
“Get out of my car.”
“You kicking me out of your car?”
“No, sit in the front, this is ridiculous.”
“Man!” She crawled out and rested on her hands and knees amid the cracked asphalt and sand. “I am drunk off my ass.”
“Why?”
“Can’t tell you.”
Having abandoned the car in the road, they stood on the lawn. The house loomed above them. He owned it now, according to the state, or his memory.
She cried and made an angry face. “You killed him.”
“You lied.”
“Killing’s worse.”
They went in. Larchmont Jones lay as if resting on the floor, a face-sized dark red pool beside and connected to his face. Karl stared down into the pool and saw his own face. Sylvia said, “Careful, you’ll fall in love and get stuck to the floor.”
He had never seen the man with eyes closed. The lids had fluttered at times when he searched for a word, and the fluttering had functioned then as a hand held out to stay speech, a Shut up uttered by the eyelids; what is a pool cue to the skull when compared with an adult male’s effectively telling a child every day for years, My life counts for more than yours?
He was not resting. Karl’s mother had been the nap-taker of the house, always on the living room couch. Her naps were both naps and performances of naps, giving her the rest she required and saying, This is all very tiring, leaving the men of the house to figure out what this and all might mean. Sleep could mean so much. One could sleep and be awake, like Karl, who did not know or thought he did not know how his mother had spent all her non-sleep time. The old man’s open-mouthed gray-blue face looked pained. It would not, at least, he hoped, look wry again, but if you zoomed in on the dried lips and off-black hole of the mouth you could find yourself coming up against some difficult concepts.
Sylvia screamed. He eased her into the living room. He sat down on the couch on which his mom had napped, and into which he’d vomited a little yesterday after he’d met Sylvia. It smelled of disinfectant now; Jones had cleaned it with rolled-up sleeves before Karl killed him. She sat on the comfy chair across the coffee table from the couch, as before, five feet of dull domestic space between them. They looked at each other’s eyes. Their eyes dug canals of looking in the air. The canals were fingers that touched.
“What do we do?”
“Bury him.”
“No.”
“Call the cops.”
“No.”
“Come here.”
She came. She curled into his lap and they slept.
“Honeysuckle Rose” woke them up—tempo and ear feel, sprightly; piano style, mediocre.
She scrambled off of him and stood in the middle of the room, knees and elbows bent, torso straight and taut, neck a balanced pedestal for head. Sand clung to her black shirt and black jeans. She’d had black cowboy boots and had kicked them off somewhere, was sockless. Her feet gripped the Persian rug. Her skin gripped the air, or the music in the air. Her white cowboy hat was gone. “Every honeybee fills with jealousy when they see you out with me,” which demoralized Karl. He had started liking having killed Jones. It had begun to give him a more resolute position from which to face the world—more Karlness to his Karl; it had also brought him back Sylvia. But now with “Honeysuckle Rose” the vagueness of being him had returned and he was stuck on the couch again and he wanted to kill Larchmont Jones again but he knew he’d missed his chance.
Night came down on Long Island. The windows went black. He said, “Do you think that’s him playing?”
She looked at him with incredulity. The song stopped at “…you just have to touch my cup.” She left, got as far as the dining room, came back. She dragged him off the couch and pushed him toward the rec room. They stopped at the dining room table, sat down, and put their heads in their hands. The house was quiet. They lifted up their heads. She jerked hers toward the rec room. Karl went in.
“Oh,” Jones said, sitting on the piano stool, “it’s you.”
“Who were you expecting?”
“My daughter.”
Karl pulled Sylvia, who was behind him, into the room.
“Hello, Sylvia.”
“Hello, Monty.”
“You can call me Dad.”
“No, I can’t.”
His left eye, the one on the side of his head where his stepson had hit him, drooped. His cravat, which had been disheveled when he lay on the floor, was restored to order. He seemed his jaunty self, perhaps a shade pensive. “These jazz songs are really so enjoyable. They’re not easier, necessarily, than the classic European pieces, but they provide levity. That nocturne seems to have depressed me. Come in, kids. Ignore the blurriness of the room. My children together in my house, I’ve long dreamt of this. Could you clean up in here while I go to bed?”
“Clean up?”
“Wipe the blood up off the floor and clean and dress the wound on the side of my head where you hit me with the fucking pool cue, yes.”
He slumped over and would have fallen to the floor had she not caught him. She took his legs and Karl took his arms and they carried him up to his room, Sylvia shouting “Support his head!” on the stairs.
“Please,” Karl said, when they’d cleaned his wound and bandaged him and tucked him into bed, “tell me we don’t have the same mother.”
“Murder you’ll commit but incest is a bridge too far?”
“Yes!”
She took his hand in hers—her throwaway gestures left exhilaratingly little Karl in Karl—and said, “Come help me wash my shirt, it’s got blood on it,” and led him to the master bath.
He said, “This is his bathroom.”
“I need the nicest possible bathroom right now.”
She unbuttoned the Miss Popular Hybrid shirt, revealing a translucent indigo bra.
“What are you doing?”
“I told you, I need to wash my shirt. Fill the sink up with cold water.”
“You’re giving me orders now?”
“Does he have any laundry soap in here?”
“How should I know?”
“Look around!”
“Why should I?”
“Because you’re helping me, bro, just like I helped you lug him up the stairs.”
“Don’t call me bro.”
Karl bent down to look for detergent in the cabinet beneath the marble, scallop-shaped sink. It was really nice in this bathroom, he liked it in here now: pale blue walls, soft light that articulated objects clearly and flattered the face, and floating above him in their dark bra, Sylvia Vetch’s breasts, which did not overstep the modesty of nature in their size, but, in shape, and buoyancy, outr
an even the great statuary with which he had occupied himself for a period in his youth.
“Is there any down there?”
“No, but look at these beautiful plumbing fixtures.”
“Don’t start adoring plumbing. My breasts, by the way, don’t get dirtied or damaged by contact with your looking, you don’t need to try to hide it, I like it.”
He grew hot from hair to shoes. Because he had seen Peter Paul Rubens’s painting of the blameless Susanna being looked at by the lascivious elders of her local synagogue, Karl knew what skin looked like that was loath to be looked at, and so he said, “You bluster.”
“What?”
“You stand there inviting me to look at you in your bra but you’ve got like an anorak of toughness on over your real self to conceal it from view.”
She opened her mouth but did not speak. Her arms fell to her sides. She turned her head away from him. He looked at the irregularly shaped dot of red on her high, pale cheek, just beneath her livid lower eyelid. He wanted to know everything about the world this square inch of skin could reveal to him.
“Go find the soap.”
“Did you know I’d be in the house when you came here yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“You knew of my existence.”
“And you really, truly didn’t know of mine?”
“No.”
“That was my first shock with you the other day was your complete nonrecognition of me, your utter inability to figure out who I was, when I’d seen you from afar at least a dozen times.”
“So you really grew up right over in Centraldale? Were you poor?”
“Not really, but my dad thought so. When he started making serious money, my mom and me were like the poverty he had to leave behind. I was the dingy old fridge and she was the dingy old oven in the dark little Centraldale house and we wouldn’t look right in the new big Seacrest place so he got new ones—a nice new out-of-it middle-class wife and kid who were untainted by ever having had to struggle to keep it together.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say.”
“He tried to keep the families a secret from each other—I didn’t know he’d remarried till months after the wedding—but I mean come on, how could you not know? I guess how psychologically damaged you are makes you a mental retard?”
“Probably.”
“Stop pretending that being accommodating isn’t just a form of aggression.”
“Really? You’re accusing someone of pretending something?”
“Go get the soap.”
“What was your second shock?”
“What?”
“You said your first shock was that I didn’t recognize you.”
“Oh. My second shock was how genuinely innocent you are, not to say hapless. It’s really pretty amazingly endearing and sweet. You’re like the anti-Stony. Soap!”
He passed through the bedroom on his way to the hall, looked at the helpless old man asleep in his bed, saw that a pastel orange stain had grown on the bandage around the wound, was troubled by a presentiment, descended to the basement, was menaced there by large shapes, found the soap in the white bottle that had come to symbolize trustworthiness and inevitability, came back up the stairs, averted his gaze from the bed, found, by the bath, the thin, pale, muscled back of Sylvia and its blue horizontal bisector.
“Did you come here yesterday specifically to meet me?”
“Pour in the soap.”
“Why did you conceal who you were?”
“I don’t know, when I realized you didn’t know who I was I decided I wanted to be this mysterious stranger you would fall in love with.”
“That sounds highly implausible.”
“Pour.”
He did. The soap settled to the bottom of the sinkful of cold water.
“Now here,” she said, placed her palm on the back of his hand, closed her fingers around it, and guided it into the water. “Swirl it around. See? This is how we wash a shirt by hand.”
“Oh.”
“Your shirt is bloodied too, it stinks of fear.”
“What does fear smell like?”
“If you’d been around it as often as I have, you’d know.”
The inchoate biography of hardship formed of such remarks was a waist-high, still-boneless homunculus wetly laboring for breath behind the plastic curtain on the bathtub floor.
“Throw it in,” she said, referring, he assumed, to his shirt. She said it impatiently, as she’d said more than half the things he’d heard her say. Maybe she wasn’t worth all this trouble. And though he didn’t know what trouble he meant, he felt, in the bathroom of his wounded stepfather, like a groom at the altar who noticed, as she came toward him in time to a march composed by a German protofascist, that his bride’s teeth, like those of her quarrelsome mother, were yellow and long.
“I think,” she said, “that you think I harshly judge all you say and do. I don’t. I’m in distress. I will tell you why but not now. Please accept that. And please know that I don’t judge you except favorably, and so when you take off your shirt I will be inclined to like your chest because it’s yours. I think you think I have perfectionistic standards. I don’t. I have great curiosity and interest. It’s just right now I’m kind of immensely challenged. Here, I’ll take it off for you. Relax, it’s all right, it’s just shirt-washing, I promise, we’ll go one button at a time, nice and slow. There. And now that one. And now that one.”
He could see she made a careful effort not to touch his skin with her fingers any more than was absolutely required for the task. He felt by removing his shirt she was removing the blazonry that covered his mind and was looking directly at it. Buttons undone, she said, “Do you want me also to—”
He nodded.
She slipped the shirt, whose checks had been orange when new but now were brown, off his shoulders with, again, demonstrative care not to touch that which needn’t have been touched. It dangled now from the two fingers she held up to him, playfully, he thought, as she stood there in, after all, her superwispy bra.
“Throw it in,” she said again, not impatiently this time. “Now push it down beneath the surface and hold it there till the bubbles stop coming up, just as if you were drowning a sack of kittens in a river.”
He held the shirts down, felt the little bubbles rise along his wrists, and used the mirror above the sink to watch Sylvia Vetch lower her gymnastic form onto the soft curve of the bathtub’s rim. He watched her hand darken against its white. He watched her soft belly framed by the hard columns of her arms. Shirts satisfactorily submerged, he turned to face her, leaned back against the sink’s rim, felt its wetness soak through his pants, was reminded of a similar wetness, probably comprised of spilled beer, that he’d felt the previous night at the house party whose key event he was sure lived on in a bubble in him his thoughts couldn’t penetrate.
“So,” she said, “here we are in my estranged father’s bathroom.”
Tones can be tough for everyone and were extratough for Karl, who was lately an avid pupil in the urgent remedial project of tones.
“You know you’ve got his blood on your face, too, right?” she said.
“Or mine.”
“Your wounds have surely closed by now.”
“My face has been jostled a lot recently.”
“Let’s wipe it up.”
“‘Let’s’?”
“I, I’ll clean the blood off your face with a damp cloth, Karl.”
This was the first time she’d uttered his name in his presence, and it had the effect of making him feel as if he existed.
To clean the blood from his face with the soft washcloth she’d found in the small shelved closet of the master bathroom, she needed to grip his right shoulder firmly with her left hand. It being too much for him to experience the calming pressure of her hand and the visual pleasure of her face at once, he turned his head away from her and caught, in a mirror of the same dimensions as many a television screen, a beau
tiful young doctor performing a minor medical task on the sad and scared face of her young male patient with the same intent focus she’d have given to a task of grave importance. He closed his eyes. She told him not to squeeze them shut so tight. She told him to relax his face and breathe. He did. Her slow dabs were so smooth, warm, and moist that he suspected she was making them with her tongue, but did not seek to verify.
The light touch on the edges of his wounds brought into his mind the thought about the wound of his stepdad that had been lurking at its periphery and he said, “We shouldn’t have let him fall asleep.”
“Why not?”
“People with head wounds aren’t supposed to go to sleep, I think, right?”
“Well then let’s wake him up.”
“I’m already awake,” Jones called from the next room.
They ran in, as if his being awake of his own accord was cause for fright.
“Speaking of which, my dear boy, I’m glad you’re finally having your belated sexual awakening, but I wish you hadn’t chosen to locate it in my bathroom.”
They thought they ought to march him around in the fresh air, get the blood flowing to the brain, so they took him down to the front yard, each supporting an arm. The moon slept beneath the earth. The streetlamps had shut off but the sun was not yet up. The two young folks struggled with their weakened charge back and forth across the lawn with only the stars to light their way.
“A mouth even at the best of times is a place of turmoil on the body of a man of a certain age,” he said. “Really for anyone the mouth presents a complicated set of problems. That Nazi bastard—who do I mean here, kids?—the mythographer, this is not a rhetorical question, some chatter from the dugout would be encouraging, unless you mean to bludgeon me again.”
“Joseph Campbell,” his daughter said.
“Good girl. ‘Every living cell has a hungry mouth to feed,’ or words to that effect. The mouth is the crude helpmeet to hunger. When it comes to feeding, let’s face it, the hands are more intelligent than the mouth. The mouth also has to talk and give off other signals about its owner’s mood like a smile or a frown, and let’s face it, moods are confusing. Moods confuse the brain too but at least the brain has equipment made to handle complexity, but what does the mouth have? Lips, teeth, tongue, gums, a soft thin roof over its head. It has to cope with everything a brain has to but has few of the resources. It’s directly below the fanciest organ in the body and how could it not feel bad about this? You know whose mouth is fortunate in this regard is squids. A squid is basically a mouth with a lot of legs to service it. You ask a professional sailor which group of fish he’d least want to end up in the middle of at feeding time and he will not say barracuda or shark, he will say squid. My point being does the word bridgework mean anything to people of your generation? Something’s cracked in there. I’ll tell you this, Junior: if you were swinging for the brain I think you missed. Well, you hit once and missed once, and the time you missed you got my mouth. If I’d been your real father I assure you you’d have had adequate batting practice from an early age. No good reason a middle-class adult American male who isn’t physically handicapped should not have mastered a baseball swing. Nor need this skill be limited to males. My daughter here, uh…”
You Were Wrong Page 7