Elbowing the Seducer
Page 11
She cried out oh and oh and oh. She was hurtling away. She sat up to find him. His eyes floated above dark springs of her hair like a crocodile’s eyes floating above water. She saw an intelligence see her. Strong hands grabbed hers, pinned them down. He would keep her from traveling too far. She lay back, her body arched while he held her down. He was sending her out and holding her down. Held, she sped outward or inward or both. She couldn’t name things. She climbed, she fell, she climbed. She came, crying.
There was nowhere else to go. But he didn’t stop. Her legs didn’t dare close. She wiggled her pinned hands. He shook his head no and kept on tonguing her. All right, she thought, here. She stretched for him, pushed against his mouth. Pleasure surprised her again. Her legs, pushing upward, trembled. Again he spun her out; again he guided her return. With an occasional time-out—a pit stop?—she was prepared to continue for the afternoon. The sun could set on them. This was the meaning of forever: again.
She glided on currents of air conditioning. He was gone. Her legs stretched out.
“I’d say that’s a good fifteen minutes,” he whispered. She tasted herself in his mouth. They’d already rehearsed this part.
But no, he was turning her over. No, Larry had once tried entering her from behind. She’d been too clenched together to admit him. It had ended in a fight: Why-can’t-you-I-can’t-You-mean-you-won’t-I-mean-I-can’t-You-didn’t-even-try. She remembered his instructions, “Lift your ass, damn it.” She remembered the humiliation of failure, and the relief.
Her forehead met the orange sheet; head up, she saw a yellow pillow through the tossed veil of her hair. She was kneeling in a loud field. It was the obeisance of a pilgrim at the gates to a shrine. It was a grave courtesy. She lifted for him and, as he entered her, she cried out as much in pleasure as in fear.
—
“Do you believe in God?” he whispered. They lay facing each other.
“No.”
“I do.” He leaned on his elbow, resting his head against his palm. “I’ve led a very strange and marvelous and sad life, but I believe in God.”
She hoped he hadn’t said that. She wasn’t sure he had because he swallowed his words and he had a cigarette in his mouth.
“Did you know I herded cattle in Montana? I sang with a dance band in college. I was married to an heiress. Spice importers. Could’ve been opium. I have two children by another wife, who’s insane, and a daughter with my present wife. She’s the only thing that matters to me, my daughter. My wife’s a wonderful girl, good-hearted. Collects copper pots. When it comes to sex, she lies there waiting for an act of God to prevent it. She believes in God too. I’ll never leave her—because of my daughter. You don’t have a child, right? You should, it makes all the difference. Do you want a child?”
“I don’t know. Not with my husband.”
“Pick someone to be the father. That’s happened to me. A woman told me—afterward—she’d gone to bed with me to conceive. I have another kid somewhere, a couple of years old. Maybe a few others I don’t know about.”
If she did want a baby, she’d pick him to be the father. She loved him for his curly brown hair, white curls at the temples, his leanness, his mumbling. She admired his solemnity. The cigarette smoke made her eyes water and her nose itch. He had disclosed her female nature. Smoke drifted against her breasts. What else could he teach her?
Growing Pain
by Newman Sykes
Bandaged Moments
by Vincent Bask
Linnaeus Press
257 pages
$11.95
A first novel, like first love, usually is more sentimental than wise. Its charm, when it is charming, lies in its celebration of adolescence. Even if that time of transition is not overtly the novel’s subject, it remains the underlying theme, the secret structure, for a first novel is the coming of age of its author—that is, in the author’s view.
Vincent Bask’s Bandaged Moments is one such write-of-passage: a story about a family in which there is, you may be sure, an adolescent boy, Lulu, a nickname for Leon. You may be sure too that Lulu is going to share his growing pains—bandaged moments—with us, in a lulu of teen turmoil. Unfortunately, this first novel suffers from juvenility without youth’s redeeming energy. A clue to its confusions may be found in the title, extracted from a poem by that problematic genius Emily Dickinson.
The Soul has Bandaged moments—
When too appalled to stir—
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her…
The poem’s intent has nothing to do with Mr. Bask’s book, but he took the words he liked out of context to use for his title. This is emblematic of his other muddled choices throughout the novel. (His only previously published writing, a story called “Eating Peaches,” appeared in Rosemary last year with an epigraph from Eliot’s “Prufrock,” which seems to prove that his taste in poetry is degenerating. The story, by the way, was included in the 1979 Maupassant Prize Stories collection and is worth reading to see the potential Mr. Bask has not yet fulfilled.)
What has gone wrong here? Well, Lulu, mainly. At first the author commendably regards the boy with humor not untempered by compassion. Caught in the perfervid squeeze between a Unitarian mother and a Catholic father, Lulu finds himself “mumbling through a responsive reading from Gibran with the taste of the communion wafer still in his mouth.” He declaims a Latin prayer at his mother’s church and confesses to the wrong clergyman. “Reverend Bob clapped him on the shoulder and said to forget it. Father Boisvert was not so forgiving; the assigned Hail Marys would stretch into Monday.” While clasping his father’s mother’s rosary in “wet working-class hands with two long nails for guitar picking,” Lulu falls into sexual reveries, one for each bead. His mother, observing his rapture, thinks it religious and weeps bitterly that she has lost her son to “Mother Church, stony and omnivorous, lusting for children and the sightless obedience of the unborn.” Lulu’s father, hearing her rant, demurs. “Let me urge specificity,” he says, and she refuses to pair his socks any more. This is genuinely funny domestic warfare, set in a small Massachusetts town with “long memories, long winters, long johns, a few years before yellow scum plated the river and sent the local fishermen off to the shooting range to become hunters.”
Soon Lulu, understandably weary of his parents’ tug of war, falls in with what used to be called a bad crowd, boys who go beyond boyish pranks but stop short of big-city delinquency. There are no guns or hard drugs, but through a haze of marijuana and beery bravado Lulu manages to effect a semirape upon the over-described and undermotivated high school homecoming queen and neophyte virago, who is—could it be otherwise?—blond. I would like to plead for blonds as one of our time’s few maligned minorities without a spokesperson or mimeo machine or proposed constitutional amendment. Years ago, all the princesses in fairy tales were golden-haired; now there are no more fairy tales, and blonds, like immigrant Russian countesses of the thirties, have been reduced to selling gloves at Macy’s. Unfair!
But even if Mr. Bask had made Lulu’s victim a brunette, the novel would still be mortally wounded by its leap from comedy to melodrama. Lulu’s sudden transformation from small-town boy to Little Caesar and the novel’s shift in tone are bewildering. For the remaining three-quarters of the book, Mr. Bask struggles with material that overwhelms him. His prose thrashes like a drowning man: “Always at the back of his mind was the idea that if nothing else ever happened, if nothing else in this incredibly evil damn town ever shook up the locals so that they really listened to what their children were saying, this day would remind them of their deafness and the vastness between what they preached and what they did.”
Vincent Bask is not without talent, but to realize it he will have to work harder than he did in this book. Bandaged Moments is swaddled in problems.
—
Maybe the pound cake was a mistake. She shifted the bag of groceries in her arms, and a staff of celery sh
ook dirty green leaves under her nose. Howard sometimes found cake annoying. “I don’t think we should have this,” he’d say, declining a slice of marble cake or carrot cake or nut cake as if she’d offered him a poison mushroom or a small dead animal scraped off the highway. She looked down at the white cardboard box Matty was carrying, one short finger looped under red and white bakery string. With her free hand Matty reached back to check the knapsack holding her library books and final report card. “Is it closed?” she asked, patting the zippered pocket. The straps cut into her shoulders. Suzanne said, “Yup,” determined not to wonder what inside the pocket made the girl so anxious. In the shadow of their tall, old, expensive building, sixteen blocks north of the office where Howard worked hard to keep them in their apartment, she wanted to drop her groceries and kiss her daughter, but Frank, the day doorman, was walking toward them.
She was at least four inches taller than Frank and twenty years younger. Reluctantly she allowed him to disburden her. She didn’t want to humiliate him by noticing his age, but her packages, groceries, suitcases, Howard’s starched shirts wrapped in brown paper, all were speeding him into disability and early retirement. “His face gets so red,” she told Howard. “That’s Four Roses, not exertion,” he answered. Howard had gaps in empathy. He was overworked from empathizing with writers and critics and other exalted souls.
Frank heaved her groceries to his gut. “Somebody’s waiting for you in the lobby.”
“Hey, Frank,” Matty said.
“Hey, honey.”
Armed with grit and the day’s heated staleness, wind pushed the three of them toward the building.
—
It was Bask. He rose from the worn velvet chair beneath the three-armed sconce with one blind bulb.
“Hello.” She recognized her young-matron sound, delivered with a mix of warmth for spontaneity and of coolness to correct any misimpression the warmth might evoke. She tried to remember why she loved him. She hadn’t seen him since April, when Howard brought him home for dinner; for the second time Bask surprised her.
“Hello.” He was pink and glum.
“Matty, do you remember Mr. Bask?”
They exchanged reserved his. Bask’s rust-colored hair, longer and unrulier than before, covered his forehead and ears, and sprang down along the sides of his neck. He needed a shave; in the dim lobby she saw shadings of red-gold contouring his cheeks and the stubborn jawline. That stubble would scrape against her face. She blushed.
He said, “I called Howard at his office and he said to meet him here. But he’s not here.” Gripping the navy web straps of a dirty white canvas bag, he reminded her of Matty with the knapsack. She would give both of them cookies and milk.
“Please,” she said, “please come up and wait.”
Frank handed Bask the bag of groceries. She blushed again. “I can take that,” she said to Bask.
“So can I.”
In the elevator she held Matty’s hand, which wriggled with impatience. Celery leaves brushed Bask’s Adam’s apple. It wasn’t four yet, and Howard never got home until five-thirty or six. The door opened on low-wattage hallway and green print wallpaper. Matty scuffed the toes of her sneakers on the waxed floor for sound effects, squeaks Howard wouldn’t have permitted. Otherwise the walk to the apartment was silent.
Suzanne and Bask sat in the living room, alone with apple juice and a wedge of Caprice des Dieux and English sesame crackers Howard bought but wouldn’t eat. “They cost too much to eat,” he said. They tasted good, but no different from local brands. If he ever tasted one, she thought, he’d find out. From Matty’s room came low radio noise. It sounded as if the door was closed. She looked into Bask’s dark brown eyes and asked if he’d prefer Brie.
In his eyes she saw her daring reflected, deepened with a stranger’s resonance. Everything she didn’t know about him attracted her. His green tee shirt was wonderful. She expected him to do something: pull her toward him, cover her mouth with his so that before she closed her eyes she would see a flash of green and his brave, troubled face.
He took two folded pages from his canvas bag. They’d been torn out of a magazine; pictures squeezed blocks of print. “Newman Sykes reviewed my book.”
If he’d grabbed for her instead, she would have felt more comfortable. She would have had precedents—advice columns, TV, novels, movies—to consult. The Married Woman Who Is Come On To by a Friend or Colleague of Her Husband’s was a clear and standard situation with clear and standard options: power steering, disc brakes. The Married Woman encouraged or discouraged. Morally there were no options. At a party some years earlier she’d told Bob Small under her breath but very distinctly that if he brushed her breast with his arm one more time she’d dump her sherry on his alpaca weskit and not even consider paying for the dry cleaning. She’d been mildly drunk or she wouldn’t have had the nerve to be so direct, but as she spoke she’d heard a chorus of approval from Dear Abby and Dear Ann Landers and Dr. Welby and Perry Mason and Doris Day and Terry Moore (no, seriously, whatever happened to Terry Moore?) and Debbie Reynolds and, yes, Sandra Dee and Tolstoy too (the Constance Garnett translation, unabridged, the summer in the Hamptons before Matty was born, Vronsky and morning sickness; she’d been nervous on subway platforms ever since) and certainly her Sunday-school teacher, Mrs. Baugh (rhymes with caw), wife of the Reverend, who later married her to Markie. The chorus hallelujahed her at the Smalls breakfront. She had known what to do then. If Bask had told her, “I’m crazy for you, run away with me,” she would have groped her way to the right response, whatever it was. But when he said, eyes hurt and angry, “Newman Sykes reviewed my book,” he was asking for something too large from her, initiative and not response.
She said, “Oh yes, congratulations about your book.”
“Thanks.”
“The cover is really wonderful. On the jacket.”
“Thanks.”
“Howard says that’s important for selling it.” Howard might have said that.
“This is important for selling it.” He flapped the two torn pages. “And after this, nobody’s going to buy it.”
“He didn’t like it?”
“On his list of things to do, reading it comes after cleaning out your neighbor’s cesspool, which comes after cleaning out your own.”
“No.” She laughed at the description, and he grinned at her.
“He says my prose thrashes like a drowning man.”
She could touch his shoulder to console him. His shoulders were powerful, hunched in despair. “Really, Howard should be here soon.”
Brown sorrowing eyes questioned her. “I’m sorry, I’m keeping you from something.” He reached for his canvas bag and stood up.
She was surprised to find no leaves, no branches lodging birds’ nests, no sun shining through the crown of his hair. “No, no, you’re not, really you’re not. Howard’ll be very angry if you don’t stay.”
“I can get him at his office tomorrow.” But the canvas bag again settled its soft bulk on a kilim which Howard claimed had been woven fifty years earlier by a twelve-year-old girl, hymenless and on the way to being toothless, in a desert within commuting distance of the Khyber Pass.
“Is Newman Sykes so important?” she asked.
“It’s all relative, right? The pope’s important if you’re Catholic.”
“I’ve met him—Newman Sykes, I mean. He seems like a nice man.”
“Traitor. I bet you watch him on TV.”
“He did seem nice. He brought Howard home when he was…sick. He carried Howard into the apartment.” She wondered if she’d betrayed Howard by admitting that another man had carried him home. “Besides, it’s only one opinion. It’s not the Times or Time or Newsweek. And it’s not one of his TV reviews. There’ll be other reviews.”
Bask slugged down apple juice. “I’ve got stuff to read. This way I won’t disturb you.” He took a paperback from his canvas bag.
“You’re not disturbing me.”
&n
bsp; “You must have things to do.” He had the book open to a dog-eared page.
Dismissed, she went into the kitchen. Boil water. Pare. Chop. She was noticing how her hands under the faucet stream resembled her mother’s, except for the wedding ring—Howard had better taste than her father—when Bask said, “Suzanne?”
He hesitated at the entrance to the kitchen, as if it were her bedroom. He hadn’t spoken her name before. “Let me help,” he said.
When Howard came home at six-thirty, he found them in the kitchen, the three of them, laughing. There was an odor of burned carrots. Matty was reciting the Gettysburg Address between giggles. She had cake crumbs around her mouth.
—
Suzanne never asked him why he was late. He never told her not to ask him why he was late, but she couldn’t. If she asked, “What did you have for lunch today?” he shrugged and mumbled a rambling, epic joke about a Jewish tailor and God. His Jewish tailor’s accent was singsong and plaintive; his God earnest and cruel and whimsical. There were low wails of oy vay and inventories of horn buttons and bolts of gabardine. She didn’t get the punch line, but she laughed. Since she couldn’t make him tell her what, if anything, he’d had for lunch, how could she expect him to tell her why he was late?
Howard didn’t answer questions for one principled reason: if you answered questions you didn’t mind answering and could answer, then sooner or later someone would ask you a question you did mind answering. Or couldn’t answer. But if no one expected answers from you, you were safe. Being specific wasn’t a good disguise. Vague waves of the hand and rambling, epic jokes kept things nice and unclear. The way used-car dealers stress their honesty, he cultivated his unreliability. He was steady about it.
She simply said, “Hello?” when he walked into the kitchen, and he could ignore the question in her greeting.
Matty licked at the corner of her mouth, where a vanilla crumb had lodged, and finished quickly, “ ‘…By the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ ”