Rudy’s door is open. He’s lying on his bed with a book, wearing jeans and a Whitney Hall T-shirt, listening to Bob Dylan. She stops outside. “Hey,” she says.
He looks up, miserably, from his studying. “Hey.”
She puts her hand against the doorframe and leans into the room.
“Do you have a test?”
He gestures toward his flash cards. “SATs.”
“Did you know the SATs were developed by a racist?”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“My dad.”
“No shit.” The misery gripping his face loosens a little.
“So if you don’t do well, don’t feel bad. A racist. He wanted to keep black people out of colleges. It wasn’t a secret or anything either. He said as much. He admitted it!”
“Your dad is smart,” Rudy said. “He’s, like, the smartest person I’ve ever met.”
“Yup. He’s writing an essay on Richard Feynman.”
“The guy who invented the atomic bomb?”
“Yeah. Except he didn’t know what he was doing. That’s what my dad’s writing about.”
“Yeah? Well, then, what the hell did he think he was doing?”
“Something for the government, he just didn’t know what.”
“Something for the government. If you say so.”
“It’s true.” She lets go of the door. She swings into the room and over to the bed. He shifts, makes room for her.
“How’s Delaney?” Rudy asks. Janey Delaney is the ninth-grade homeroom and English teacher.
“We’re reading Beowulf.”
“It’s a drag, huh?”
“Also short stories. We just read, um, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’?”
“Any good?”
“All I remember is it has the word ‘erections’ in it. Like, in the story it means buildings? But my friend Suzanne circled it. And we were laughing and Ms. D. sent us out into the hall.”
“Bad girl,” Rudy says. He pushes his flash cards aside. He leans back against the headboard.
She looks right at him, into his bloodshot eyes. “Are you high?”
“A little.”
“Can I have some?”
“We’d have to go outside. To the garage. And I don’t feel like getting up right now. And anyway, you’re way too young.”
“I am not.”
“You ever smoked before?”
“No. People I hang out with do, though.”
“Topher?”
“No, no.”
“Well. Do it with them then. I don’t want to be responsible for your first joint.”
She picks up a flash card. “Dearth.”
“Fuck. No clue.”
“Lack of. Scarcity of. Paucity of.” She takes the pile of cards into her lap. She sits with one leg folded on the bed, the other hanging off and kicking at the floor. “Tremulous.”
“Unsteady.”
“Perilous.”
“Dangerous.”
“Esoteric.”
“Obscure.”
“Cryptic.”
“Esoteric!”
“Now you quiz me.” She passes him the cards. “If I win you have to … you have to do my laundry for a month.”
“A fucking month?”
“That’s right.”
“And if I win? My mom already does my laundry.”
“If you win …” The Valeries are alert, listening, beginning to jig like popping corn. “If you win I have to kiss you.”
“Like kiss kiss me?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“You ever done that?”
“Of course. With your brother. And Lev Santiago.”
Rudy shakes his head to imply no knowledge of Lev Santiago, another inconsequential ninth grader.
“And I’ve gone to second base too. With your brother.”
“You like doing that?”
“What?”
“Making out.”
“Yes! It’s my favorite thing to do.”
“But. You’re like a little sister to me.”
Topher is waiting, wondering. Where could she be? They hear feet in the hall and his voice getting closer: “Kate! Kate!”
She rolls off the far side of the bed, spilling the flash cards. She lies on the carpet, in the narrow space between the side of the bed and the wall. She registers scuff marks on the baseboard, an outlet, a hardened gym sock, which she picks up and clutches to her chest. Rudy’s bed, like Topher’s, is a block of melamine with a pullout trundle below.
“You seen Kate?”
“Not since dinner.”
Topher’s footsteps recede. She hears Rudy get up and close the door and lock it.
She slips back onto the bed, holding the sock.
“You don’t want to touch that,” Rudy says.
“No?”
“I whacked off in it.” He takes it from her and tosses it into the hamper. He gathers the flash cards. “Okay. Let’s see how you do.”
Topher, meanwhile, scours the house, his feet going this way and that. Down the stairs. Through the kitchen. All around the first floor, which, like Kate’s first floor, is a perfect square, each room leading into another.
She knows all the words but deliberately gets four wrong.
“So,” Rudy says.
“So.”
“So now …” He points to her and then to himself. “Right?”
“I thought I was your little sister.”
“Kiss me. Kiss me, Kate.” He crosses his arms behind his head and lies back against the mess of pillows.
She sits up on her knees. She crawls across the mattress and leans over him.
He seizes her neck and slides his other hand under her shirt, then under her pink cotton bra. He pulls her face against his, pushes his lips into hers, gets his tongue into her mouth. They kiss like that all through a long song about a girl named Louise. Then, boldly, she climbs on top of him and sits astride his lower abdomen.
His excitement is nothing like Topher’s. Where Topher’s is spastic and disorganized, Rudy’s is purposeful. Her idea, this encounter, but quickly he takes over. His hands on her hips, he moves her back and forth, pulling her against him. He gets her shirt off and sucks at her left nipple. This is startling but pleasant. He flips her onto her back and rolls on top of her. One hand holds hers above her head, and, while he French-kisses her mouth and neck, the other is busy with his fly.
He takes her hand and directs it down there and closes it around him. She holds the bare supple appendage in her hand and squeezes lightly; she recalls the Durham Fair, to which her mother takes Miles and her every summer, and how once, years ago, they stood around in a crowd in the shade of a striped tent watching a monkey juggle two cucumbers, how afterward the monkey man came right up to Kate and chose her and put the live monkey into her arms. Rudy’s anatomy—a live thing suddenly in her charge—reminds her of the monkey, who, finding himself in a strange girl’s embrace, turned his head to the side and fidgeted and climbed up on her shoulder and sucked his protuberant lips.
Rudy keeps his hand over hers, showing her how to do it. She knows a little from watching him in the bathroom. But he wants her to hold him more tightly than seems comfortable.
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
“No. No.”
She tugs the skin up and down and rubs her thumb around the end.
He pulls aside her underpants and puts a finger inside of her. This is divine. She forgets to move her hand.
“Shh,” he whispers. She opens her eyes. He’s smiling down at her. He kisses her face. “Shh. You like that, don’t you?”
When it starts to hurt she goes to work on him again. “What do you want me to do?”
“That’s really good. What you’re doing.”
“Like this?”
“Yeah. Unless …”
“Unless?”
“Unless you want to …” He looks in her face and glances down at himself. “Do that other thing.”
&n
bsp; “What thing?” For all she knows—she suspects there’s much she doesn’t know—it’s something too dirty for even Cosmo to address.
“That thing with your mouth.”
“Oh. That thing.”
“You ever done that?”
“Umm … well, once …”
“Don’t lie. You haven’t.”
“No. I haven’t.”
“I’ll help you out.”
“I mean, I know a little.”
“You’ll catch on. You’re a smart kid.”
He rolls on his back and pulls her on top of him. She puts her hands on his chest and pushes up the Whitney Hall T-shirt. Sweet little black hairs sprout around his nipples and in a line down his abdomen. He strokes her hips. His hair is in disarray, black cowlicks everywhere. She combs it with her fingers.
“I feel like if I do that you’ll tell everybody.”
“Fuck, no!”
“What if you’re lying? What if you do?”
“I wouldn’t. No way.”
She is willing to experiment. Now she wants to see. And she trusts Rudy. More, in fact, than she does Topher.
But she sits up on her knees and puts her hands on his chest. From his window she can see her own house and a light in Miles’s bedroom, where he is most likely reading Tintin comics and eating Fritos by the handful. Whether or not her father should have slapped her seems debatable, but certainly she should never have said such a thing about her brother, poor chubby little Miles; she deserved something along the lines of a slap; that much she knows.
“It’s weird,” she says. “I feel like I’m still in the car.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I backed into a space and did a three-point turn.”
“Girls suck at driving. We’re afraid when you drive.”
“Not me.”
“Didn’t you just tell us a whole story about how you ran into the mailbox?”
“Yes, but okay, so I forgot to pay attention for like half a second.”
“Half a second can take lives when you’re behind the wheel,” he says gravely.
“Well, I’m just a beginner.” Through Rudy’s thin curtains she sees Miles cross his room. “I can see my brother,” she says. “That means he can see us.”
Rudy unwinds the pull on the aluminum shade installed behind the curtain. The shade falls with a clatter.
“I should go home.”
He moves her hand back down. His thing, wet at the tip, twitches under her palm. His eyes reel with lust. He wants her—her in particular, not a magazine, not his right hand.
The Valeries murmur encouragement. She recounts the steps. Position—check.
She slides down his abdomen.
“Wait,” she says. “Water.”
Swiftly, he hands her a glass. She drinks. Musty tap water, the same as runs through her pipes next door. Then back down. She holds him at the root. She kneels between his legs. Her hair falls over his pelvis. She runs her tongue around the tip.
“Oh, fuck,” Rudy says.
From the Valeries, shrieks of glee.
The album ends. The record crackles; the arm lifts and settles.
“You’ve got some mouth on you, little sister.”
Outside, in the house, Topher perseveres. Up and down the stairs he travels, through the first- and second-floor rooms and hallways, opening closets and knocking on doors. Over and over he calls her name, seeking her, his fairy-tale companion lost in the woods.
“Kate! Kate! Kate!”
16
RIVING NORTH to the Rose Center, Kate glimpsed signs for the Home Depot she used to frequent, the dangerous diner, the steakhouse, the Showcase Cinemas. She registered a scattering of titles, films she’d never heard of and would most likely never see. The generic nature of these titles frightened her, titles that years ago would have elicited a happy jolt of recognition—the word arrangements basic but relentlessly opaque. Andie and Brice had vanished, never to be heard from again. Sometimes Kate worried that Andie had died from her mysterious illness. Wes had moved out soon after Kate and Colin had—Kate had run into him once, at an Exxon station along 95. Lucy would be into her teens by now. Possibly living in Oregon, with the woman who used to be her mother.
Kate got off the highway and drove past the granite yards, the fierce fenced dogs, the tied sneakers looped over telephone wires.
She taught her class. Brittany dozed against the radiator, but Eva was absent. Kate looked for her afterward and found her in the common room, reading The Kreutzer Sonata, or rather, Kreytserova Sonata.
“I missed you in class today,” Kate said. She sat down beside Eva on the grubby couch.
Eva shrugged. “Is hard for me.”
“Could I make it easier? What, what about it?”
“English, very hard.”
“What’s this about?” Kate indicated the book.
“Man kills his wife.”
“Oh, dear.”
Eva smiled, exposing her pretty teeth. On the floor at her feet her son, a toddler, played with oversize LEGOs. In his full pale cheeks and perfect lips and teeth he resembled his mother—in his blue eyes and coarse nose, somebody else, a blue-eyed man who had fucked the boy’s mother, then dragged her by her ankles across the driveway. A tremendous unease, an anxiety, hung about the boy on the floor—to Kate, even the way he seized the LEGOs and forced one onto another, the exact same way Robin did, appeared ominous.
“It’s good? You like it? You like the book?”
“Oh, yes.” Eva paused, as if pursuing some exquisite insight, or at least its English expression. It eluded her and she said, “Yes, yes. Very good.”
“I tried to read War and Peace but I couldn’t get into it. I’ve read Anna Karenina twice, though. The first time in school. The second time for my book club.”
“Yes, me too. In school too.”
“But the last time I read it I didn’t like it as much. Basically because the Levin–Kitty relationship really bothered me.”
Three other women, one of them pregnant, dozed in front of the television. The common room smelled, not unpleasantly, of chicken soup—better, at least, than feet and radiators.
Eva had finally stopped jumping at the doorbell and the phone. The dramatic effect of her Picasso face had lessened. The scratches had contracted and the bruising had dulled to an advanced state of yellow and puce. Kate gestured toward it. “Any word on him?”
“He wants to see Ivan.” Eva looked at the boy. “He speaks with my family. My aunt. He will want to take him, to keep him.”
“Don’t worry. Even if he took it to court … you’re the mother and he’s, you know.” Wife beater. Monster.
It was often the case that these men went after their sons, not their daughters, as if their boys were phallic extensions of themselves.
“He miss him.”
“Ivan? Misses his dad?”
“Yes. And me too.”
“You miss him?”
“Yes.”
On the wall over her bed, below a poster of Jon Bon Jovi, Eva had taped a photograph of her little family, in summer, at a crowded Connecticut beach. Eva wore a sexy flowered bikini, maybe one size too small. She held Ivan, who held a plastic bucket and pail, on one hip. The husband posed with a muscled arm around her shoulders. He looked brutishly out with his blue eyes. Eva, smiling, appeared genuinely happy.
The guy did, at least, have a nice body.
“I miss him,” Eva said again. She looked at her son.
“What did you like about him? Can you say?”
Eva shook her head.
“Okay. Well, what didn’t you like about him? Barring the obvious?”
“He tells me I am fat.”
She reached for a cookie, then withdrew her hand. She reached again. She took a cookie and looked at it and put it in her lap.
“My aunt says he is with girl,” Eva said. She bit into the cookie. “Young girl.” She examined the cookie again. “I must stop. I must to
smoke but I have no cigarettes.” She looked hopefully at Kate. “You smoke?”
“No, sorry. Sometimes. Once in a while.”
How young could the girlfriend be? Eva wasn’t more than twenty-two.
“I hope she’s okay,” Kate said.
“If I meet her, I will spit on her,” Eva said.
“You’ll find another guy, Eva. You’re young too. Very, very young.”
Would she? And, if so, was there more than a middling chance that any man she chose would deviate extremely from Nikolai? If she did meet someone else, what would she go through with him?
“It is good, all this”—and Eva waved her hand to signify the room—“but men hit their women, their children, is not so strange. Nikolai, his father hit him. My father, his father beat him with belt. Mother too.”
“He beat his mother with his belt? Your grandfather? Or his wife?”
“No. My father mother. She beat him. With husband’s belt.”
“Did your father hit you?”
“No.” She chewed. “My father have stroke.”
“Your mother?”
“She is gentle person.” Eva reached for another cookie.
Kate took one also. “When I was in the fifth grade? In school? We, my class, had this whole secret code for whoever had gotten their period. If you’d had your period, you were oatmeal. If you hadn’t you were chocolate chip.”
“And you were? Which cookie?”
“I was oatmeal. I got it that year. But I lied; I said I was chocolate chip. I was embarrassed.” She finished the cookie and wiped her fingers on her jeans. “It fits, doesn’t it, the oatmeal and chocolate chip. Like, oatmeal is sort of earthy. Womanly. You think of grains and harvest, fertility symbols. And chocolate chip is innocent, childlike.”
Eva looked at Kate with some puzzlement. But she offered: “When I have period Nikolai wants me take out trash. I have this, you know, heavy flow? He does not like to smell.”
The house line rang. The pregnant woman started in her sleep.
“And you do it? You take out the trash when you have your period?”
“Yes, yes.”
Kate found herself obliged to indicate what was wrong about this but reluctant to do so directly. So she said, “My father, when he found out I had my period, he told my mother to tell me not to use the downstairs bathroom when I had it—or theirs, or my brother’s.”
Games to Play After Dark Page 17