by T. Gertler
“I just want to look.” But he was already kissing them.
“It hurts.”
“I thought it wasn’t going to hurt once you were off the pill.”
“I don’t know, they’re still sensitive.”
He kissed her neck and she closed her arms around him. Her legs loosened. He began to move inside her. “Wait!” she cried again, and he stopped.
“Well, little one,” he whispered, his mustache dipping in her ear, bristle on his chin sanding her cheek, “I never have to worry about you being unfaithful. When other people fuck, the woman opens her legs.”
Disgrace tempered her panic; over his shoulder, her face became thoughtful. Her legs parted intentionally, experimentally, and he thrust in her with decreasing gentleness. The only time her hips lifted to meet him was when he shuddered in orgasm minutes later.
She clung to him as he withdrew. The platform creaked. He deposited the condom in a nest of tissues on the plank between the bed and the wall. Millions of his sperm were dying in dusty Kleenex near uncorrected tests on pronouns. He kissed her belly, then her dark pubic hair. “Have you been picking again?” he asked.
“No.”
“It’s starting to look like a supermarket chicken again.”
“No, it’s growing back,” she said as his tongue slid down and his head pressed between her legs. She’d sat in the bathroom the night before and pulled out hairs one by one, a bit here, a bit there, a process like thinning plants. It hurt.
She admitted his tongue. Pleasure and his mustache nibbled at her. Nibbling, he swung around and knelt over her face. She freed her nightgown from under his knee. Genitals bloomed above her. He tasted faintly of semen, bitter. He’d said once, “A woman, she was Spanish, told me it was a sign of strength that it’s bitter. I don’t know if it’s diet or what.” Dina had nothing to compare it to. She thought, Tonight I’ll swallow it. Soon, floating on waves of pleasure, she forgot penance, and when at last he produced more bitterness, she waited a polite few moments before, at his urging, climbing down the ladder and running to the bathroom and spitting into the sink.
While she gargled discreetly, he squatted on his heels at the refrigerator. Carmen’s banana headdress made four sickles above him. The refrigerator light showed his stomach pleating into soft folds. She shut the bathroom door and sat on the cold toilet seat: though the weather was too mild for the heat to come on, the apartment, over meat lockers at the rear of a butcher shop, was chilly and damp. Spring invigorated mold colonies above the shower head and the leaking window frame. One side of the apartment met the back of another building; on the other side, a ginkgo tree’s branches choked the two windows above a concrete strip where dented garbage cans sprouted in weeds. Gypsy-moth caterpillars dropped down the chimney, and centipedes bungled indoors. In recent years spring signaled the coming of rats too. They scurried up along disused heating pipes from the basement if the exterminator didn’t leave enough poison there. Listening for scratching in the walls, she winced.
A neighbor, Mrs. Easton, her apartment a prize duplex, had pointed out a depression in the concrete with her glass of Southern Comfort. “They paved it over the summer the other building went up. It was a garden, dear. We had azaleas big as darning eggs.” Brittle, shrunken, childless, she’d died four years ago, a month after her husband’s death.
Larry opened the door. “Well?” He held out a carton of orange juice.
“No, thanks.”
He took a gulp. “You almost through?”
“I can’t pee if you stand there.”
“A watched pot.” He stepped over her legs into the narrow bathroom and grabbed the string for the ceiling bulb.
In the light she leaned forward to hide her nakedness. “Go away.”
“Hurry.” He stepped over her legs again on his way out.
She closed the door halfway. “Remember the Eastons? Remember how skinny he was and how drunk they got, but they were always courteous no matter what, and how the firemen came and found their armchair smoldering and put it on the sidewalk?”
“Are you picking?”
“No.” She pulled out one more hair, and the skin pinkened. She concentrated on relaxing her bladder muscle. “It must’ve been nice here when the Eastons moved in.”
“Hurry up.”
“I wasn’t even born then. You were already doing math.”
“Where’s the TV listings?”
“Behind the TV. Right?”
He answered, but she’d flushed the toilet and couldn’t hear what he was saying.
—
3:56. The movie after Carson had been The Search, with Montgomery Clift, laced with commercials but a good cry. Larry turned off the TV and got into bed beside her. A central valley in the mattress united them. The room lulled itself with the hum and routine chirrs of the refrigerator. Warped floorboards swelled patiently with dampness, a molecule at a time. He cuddled to her as she read by the light of the Tensor, its thin beam swarming with dust motes. A bus braking on Canal Street echoed through a maze of walls and yards. “Why don’t you read the Freud?” he asked. He’d bought a bag of cat’s-eye marbles and Civilization and Its Discontents at a flea market.
“Mmm-hmm.” Her curiosity having overcome her fear of germs, she was reading a month-old Newsweek she’d found on the radiator in the hall.
“Baby, you’ll see. I’ll make you proud of me.”
She put down the magazine. “I’m proud of you.”
“No, but I’m going to stop futzing around so much. I’m going to take out my files and see what I have for a series. Women, I think, maybe with fans. And gold origami paper somewhere.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“Why do you read that? You have to nourish yourself.”
“What kind of women—faces or full-length?”
“Faces. Maybe. You know, I don’t want to interfere, but I don’t think this guy at that magazine knows what he’s talking about. You shouldn’t change the story. If it’s too long for him, let him take out some of his fucking ads.”
“There aren’t any ads in the magazine.”
“So there’s no problem.” He kissed her and turned away from the light. “Don’t read too long.”
She finished an article on the intelligence of dolphins. There was a picture of one smiling in a tank in San Diego. “Betsy’s vocabulary astonishes the experts.” She put the magazine on the table and turned off the light.
In the dark she curved behind him, fitting her body loosely against his, her forehead at his back. She needed to touch the faucet. She would have to creep over him and down the ladder without waking him. She listened for ratlike noises above her breathing and rolled over and touched the table six times, three times with the fingertips of each hand. In the middle of worrying if six times were enough, she stumbled into the unexpected privacy of sleep.
Howard brought Vincent Bask home for dinner. Suzanne, who wasn’t expecting company, stopped cranking the salad spinner when she saw Howard with the stranger. The spinner made one and a half revolutions by itself. She felt afraid that the stranger had come to deliver bad news. Later she wondered why she’d felt that. A large young man in a housepainter’s white cap, the visor to the back, and a plaid flannel shirt smiled uncomfortably at her. The shirt had a history: one red button disrupted a row of white ones, and a brown corduroy patch lay like scar tissue over a top corner of the pocket, suggesting that once something—a pipe, a pen, a road map—had been yanked from there in anger or impatience. And the sleeves were too short; below the cuffs great knobby wristbones stuck out, bearing red-gold hairs caught by the kitchen light. The same color hair glittered around his projecting ears and on his brows and lashes, so that his dark brown eyes seemed to be a mistake, an incongruity as startling as the blue eyes of a Husky. His pink ugliness touched her. She forgave the misfortune of his features, an imposing freckled nose and a thin-lipped mouth. He pulled off his cap, and his face rearranged itself in harmony beneath a halo of l
oose russet curls. He shouldn’t wear a cap, she thought, he must know how it looks.
When his large palm wrapped itself over her outstretched hand, which she had wiped dry on a Belgian dish towel as discreetly patterned as her husband’s shirts, she sensed the man’s power by his gentleness. He held her hand the way she imagined a retriever held a dying or dead bird in its mouth: softly, teeth barely impressing the feathers of a warm frail breastbone. This restraint reminded her of her father, who had hit her only once, though, as the punch line to several of Howard’s jokes went, once was enough. She had been sixteen, out on her first real date, alone with a seventeen-year-old boy named Markie Bailey at the movies in town. She was wearing a new dress, blue, to match her eyes, with little pink and yellow flowers, and wouldn’t eat any popcorn for fear of getting butter on her outfit. Markie Bailey’s mouth left a buttery spot on her neck with a kiss so quick and shy that she thought a fly had lighted there and she tried to wave it away. Her finger poked Markie in the eye. He yelped and scattered the remainder of his popcorn across the row in front of them, its seats empty except for a sleeping man who was there when they arrived and who would be there for the two shows after they left. Kernels pelted his shirt and nestled in the collar. He might have been drunk or dead. Doris Day sang. “I’m sorry,” Suzanne whispered to Markie. “It’s okay,” he said, squinting. “I thought you were a fly,” she said. Water streamed from his injured eye. She went to the marble drinking fountain in the lobby and wet her beautiful linen handkerchief with the embroidered S as a compress for him. She spent her mad money to buy a giant buttered popcorn to replace the one he had dropped.
His eye, red and weepy, winked as he drove her home. When he closed it briefly, he ran his father’s pickup off the road. She gave a shriek, high and abrupt as the sound from a sprung mousetrap. The engine cleared its throat before dying. He asked, “You okay?” She cried, “I’m sorry.” He flooded the engine and said, “Darn it.” He switched off the ignition. “It’ll have to rest a bit. Why’re you crying?” She didn’t know why exactly. When he finally drove up to her front yard and walked her past the porch light to the screen door, where different-colored patches shone with different density, it was forty minutes after her curfew. Moths thumped on the yellow light bulb. “Thank you very much,” she said. “Thank you,” Markie said, his wet eye streaked with scarlet. “G’night,” she said and held out her hand. He kissed her cheek. His hair smelled like buttered popcorn. “See you,” he called as he walked away. She went inside the house quickly, to keep the moths from getting in, and turned off the porch light.
“It’s not eleven, honey,” her father said. He sat at the dining-room table, his accounts book open, bills and receipts spread out like a game of solitaire. Moths danced on the burning bulbs of the crystal chandelier above him. “That’s Austrian glass,” her mother always announced as she carefully bathed the teardrop pendants in ammonia and water.
“We got stuck, Daddy,” Suzanne said. “The truck stalled on the Merritt Road.”
“That Markie behave himself?”
She blushed. “Of course.”
“I mean, was he a gentleman?” Standing up, her father wasn’t much taller than she was.
“Yes, Daddy. He let me go through all the doors first.”
She didn’t understand what in this statement provoked him, but for the first and only time in her life he hurt her. His open hand, which he scrubbed meticulously with green soap after work, his hand hilled with calluses that were clean and permanent, this hand slammed against her cheek, almost on the same spot where Markie Bailey had kissed her moments before. The Austrian teardrops exploded in rainbows. She was too surprised to cry; she didn’t immediately connect her father’s open hand with the stinging on her face.
He pressed her against his checked shirt. “Honey, I’m sorry,” he said. The tenderness she had thought natural and inevitable from him she now understood to be deliberate. It was restraint, an act of will imposed on strength, a harnessing of power. “Did you have a good time?” he asked, rocking her in his arms.
She whispered yes.
“I bet Mama’s still waiting up for you.”
She went into her parents’ dark bedroom. “Mama?”
Her mother was sleeping on one side, the long braid a path on the pillow, legs drawn up beneath the sheet. The cool, intelligent hand that read foreheads for fever rested, broad-knuckled, on Suzanne’s father’s pillow.
In sleep her mother showed disturbing possibilities: a plain woman with a beautiful nose, she might be something more than simply a mother. Her gentleness too was chosen. The arms that reached up ballerina-like to pin sheets on the line also beat down on dough. Had struck the table once. Had pounded, Suzanne remembered, on her father’s back once, a voice crying, “You can’t!” Who had been speaking?
“Mama,” she said again. A part of her childhood vanished. For no better reason than that loss she married Markie Bailey two years later, right after her high school graduation. The marriage didn’t last. Each time he kissed her, she imagined a fly or a gnat buzzing in her hair. She had to clench her fists to keep from swatting it. She explained the problem to Markie, who had never, he swore, heard such a thing. They decided a baby would solve it. After a year of trying to have a baby and two years of trying to find a doctor who would help them to have a baby, Markie said he accepted the lab reports on the tests they’d taken. By then he was selling car and disaster insurance and had come to anticipate his two beers in the evening and his bowling night, Tuesday. Though he joked about busted pipes and low sperm counts (“No paternity suits for this old boy”), she believed he secretly blamed her for their childlessness. The fault wasn’t in his body but in her rejection of it, her failure to arouse him to his natural function, fathering. She kept his pipes busted, she depressed his sperm count.
“If you’d just want me,” he said one night after twenty minutes of bedspring-groaning lovemaking, “if you’d just have to have me all the way up inside, we’d get a baby, I know it.” Sweating, he pried her mouth open with his tongue, and she knew he wanted to go at it again from the beginning. She wanted to take a bath with bubbles. A mosquito whined in her ear, she thought, but it was Markie kissing her ear, her neck, her breasts.
—
Having introduced Suzanne and Bask, Howard left them alone together. “Going…shower…you don’t mind,” he mumbled, whipping his back with his surah tie. She heard him open the door to Matty’s room and say hello. A counter of wilted Bibb separated her from a writer who, Howard had assured her, would soon be “fucking famous.” It seemed to her that she and the writer were ingredients in a stew Howard had decided to create. Her own stew, a new recipe from the Times, bubbled on the stove, drooling sauce down the side of a copper pot.
“Howard says your book is wonderful.”
“Can I help you?”
“No, really. Would you like something to drink?”
“I’ll slice the mushrooms.”
“Some wine?”
“Apple juice?”
“Wouldn’t you like to relax in the living room?”
“I’m helping.”
“They’re supposed to stay whole.”
“Sorry. Good juice.”
He hummed as he quartered tomatoes for the salad and severed the tangled roots of scallions. He refused to pare the carrots. “Let me scrub ’em instead. No skin, no vitamins. Might as well eat typing paper. Which on occasion I have done.” He cut alternate strips of skin along a cucumber, leaving a ridged pattern.
“Howard says you’re going to be famous.”
“I don’t want to be famous.” The large pink writer had tomato seeds drying on the back of his hand. “I wouldn’t mind being rich, though. How come he doesn’t say I’m going to be rich?”
She had no idea why Howard said or didn’t say something, but she knew he had good taste. If he said Bask was going to be famous, then Bask would be famous. Not necessarily rich, because no one could predict popular accepta
nce. She knew Howard had good taste because he told her so in clear uncomplicated sentences he didn’t mumble. “I have fucking good taste. I know good writing. I may not ever be the writer I’d like to be, but I know that too, by God, because I know what it should sound like. What it has to sound like.” These declarations usually occurred thirty miles out of the city, in a rented car headed for a communion with nature devised for Matty’s benefit. Matty didn’t like nature; she was suspicious of its unruliness, its lack of toilets, movies, and museums.