by Ed Gorman
And a dope just has, I wanted to say. But Cliffie’d had enough abuse for today.
“If you say so, Chief,” I said.
Somebody called for him from the front door of the house. I walked back to my car and headed back to town.
On the dance floor, she said, “You smell good.”
“New aftershave.”
“Oh.”
“You smell good, too.”
She smiled nervously. “Same old perfume.”
“But it’s a good one.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
You know how it goes when you’re both thinking about one thing-in this case how far we’d go tonight-while you’re talking about something else.
So far tonight, over pizza and three mild drinks each, we’d talked about Cliffie pestering her for more information, her mom wanting to get a dog, her sister in Indianapolis worried that her husband was having an affair, how she was able to smell winter on the air this afternoon, how most people never believed her when she said she could smell winter, and how there was a new intern at the hospital who wasn’t so hot at washing his hands and how a couple of the nurses had decided to say something to one of the staff doctors about the matter.
As the music ended, she said, “You mind if we sit down?”
The restaurant was small, dark, and filled with people who seemed to be quite earnest about having a good time. There was a lot of empty laughter and a lot of drunken kidding with the waitresses and a lot of middle-aged dry-humping on the dance floor whenever a ballad was played.
She said, “I don’t think I’d better have any more alcohol.”
“Yeah, I noticed you staggering around on the dance floor.”
“I overheat is the problem. My body temperature goes up. I feel like I have the flu or something.”
“All right. Next round I’ll order milk.”
She smiled and said, “Are we going back to your place?”
“If you want to.”
“A part of me wants to.”
“Which part is that?”
“You know what I mean.”
“You mean,” I said, “you’re not sure if you want to go back to my place or not. Whether things are moving too fast. Whether you’re ready.
Whether I’m ready. And that’s very natural.”
“Oh, it is, doctor? And how did you come by all this medical knowledge?”
“I went to the library and read up on breast cancer.”
“Are you serious?”
“Spent an hour there.”
“God, Sam.”
“And part of what I read was that you’d just naturally be uneasy about-”
“You really went to the library?”
I was trying to tell if she was amused or angry. I couldn’t.
She said, “Were there pictures?”
“Photographs, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Uh-huh. There were.”
“Of-af surgery?”
“Of after surgery.”
“I don’t know if I like that, Sam.”
“I’ll tell you what. Let’s dance again.”
“Now?”
“Nat “King” Cole. C’mon.”
We danced. In fact, we danced to the next three records, all ballads. And said not a word. She didn’t hold me quite so tightly now.
And when I accidentally stepped on her foot, she didn’t make any kind of smart remark.
She said, “I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“Gone to the library?”
“Yes.”
“But I was just-”
“I know what you were trying to do, Sam. And it’s sweet, it really is. To care about me that much. But I don’t want you to see me as some kind of freak you need to read up on.”
Then she put her head on my shoulder and held me very tight indeed and when I started to say something, she said, “Please don’t say anything, Sam.
Please don’t.”
“I’m drunk already,” she said as she stood up. And she was, in fact, a tad wobbly as she headed for the second time to the john. “I must have a bladder the size of a pea.”
We’d come back to my apartment and despite her earlier resolution to forsake the bottle, she’d been matching me drink for drink. That sounds more impressive than it is, given the fact that I’m a terrible drinker. We’d had two more drinks was all. She went into the john and while I waited for her, I put my head back and tried to remember what it was like the first time I ever got drunk. Either it was when I snuck a quart of Hamms from the refrigerator and slept out in a tent with Mike Totter when we were fourteen; or it was the time Dodie McKay invited me over-I was fifteen-when her folks were out of town. The thing with the quart of beer was that I was also smoking cigarettes and the combination made me really giddy for a long time and then made me vomit. I’m not sure I was drunk, I think I just tested the limits of my stomach. With Dodie, I got drunk enough that I told her how much I loved the beautiful Pamela Forrest and would always love the beautiful Pamela Forrest and if there was an afterlife I would love the beautiful Pamela Forrest then, too. None of which Dodie wanted to hear. She’d invited me over to see if I wanted to go to the freshman dance, an invitation she took back by the end of the evening when she put me on the street to wobble my way home.
It was like a first drunk tonight, that was the best way to describe it. New and novel and giggly as hell.
When Linda came out of the bathroom, she headed straight for my chair. “Okay if I turn all the lights out?”
“What if I’m afraid of the dark?”
“Tough.”
So she went around and turned the lights out and then came over and sat in my lap. It was great there in the dark with her, the feel and smell and womanness and girliness of her, the feel of her hose and the perfect length of neck and the toothpaste scent fresh from my bathroom, a little squeeze of my Colgate no doubt.
“I used to sit in my Dad’s lap when I was little and comb his hair all forward. And then I’d laugh and laugh.”
“Do you want to comb my hair all forward?”
She reached up and clipped off the lamp on the end table next to the armchair we sat in. And that was when she kissed me.
The moonlight cast everything into silver and shadow relief. The apartment had never looked better.
I let her slide back on me and then I slipped my arm around her back. I didn’t realize she had shorn herself of bra until my hand reached the middle of her spine.
She did it quickly, deftly, while she was still kissing me, unbuttoned her blouse. My hand found its way to her breast and touched it with a kind of lusty fondness or fond lustiness. Take your choice.
She sighed deeply, tilted her head back.
“That feels so good.”
“I’m used to seeing you fishing off that deserted railroad bridge in the summer,” I said. “You always wore white Tshirts without a bra. I always wanted you to stand at an angle to the sun so I could get a glimpse of your breasts.”
“Why didn’t you ever ask me out, Sam?”
She took my hand and kissed it and then placed it on her breast again.
“I was too busy with the Queen of Sheba.”
“The beautiful Pamela Forrest.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“You really think you’re over her?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“That’s good enough for me.”
She tilted my face up and kissed me again.
“I’m really getting into the mood now. I wasn’t sure I could.”
“Yeah, so am I.”
This time, I kissed her. Teenage lust did wonderful and urgent things to my crotch. There’s nothing like good old teenage lust when you’re in your twenties. Long may it last.
I knew the rules for tonight. The skirt wouldn’t come off let alone the slip and the panties.
Nice and slow and easy. With an emphasis on slow.
But we sure found a lot of
things to do within the limits of the rules, let me tell you. You reach a point in foreplay when you think you just may need to be committed to a mental hospital, you’re that goofy.
And then the moment was there. I don’t know why it was the moment-there hadn’t been anything said, she hadn’t urged my hand in any particular direction -but it was the moment and it was time to do it.
I wanted to do it when we were in the depths of a kiss that was making us thrusting gasping maniacs, because then it would be natural.
And it was natural. I just slipped my hand over. The nerve endings on my palm registered data with my brain-the shock of feeling the thin coarse patterns of the scarring where her breast had been. I wanted to tell myself-tell her-t everything was just fine, that it was just a little scarring was all. No big deal.
But of course it was a big deal. It would take some getting used to. As would looking at it in the light sometime.
But then I thought of what this moment must be like for her. How much she’d dreaded it, yet had wanted to get it over with. And how, based on my reading at the library, her future was perilous. The recovery rate for her kind of breast cancer was not good.
She started crying, not hard, not dramatic, and put her head on my shoulder, her tears warm on the side of my neck.
After a time, she raised her head and said, “You want another drink?”
“Not right now.”
“Me neither, I guess.”
She eased herself onto my lap again and I slipped my arms around her.
After a time she said: “I meet with this group of women who’ve had the same kind of surgery.
There’re some men who can’t handle it.”
“Then they’re not men worth knowing. You’re still yourself. That’s what matters.”
“Please don’t lie to me, Sam.”
“I’m not lying. I’m not saying it was easy here tonight. I really was afraid I’d do or say something wrong. But a lot of times the fear is worse than the reality. I’m just happy I finally got to see one of those breasts you used to flaunt at me down at the railroad bridge.”
“Oh, yes, I’m the flaunting type, all right. Roger Darcy was the only boy I would’ve flaunted myself around.”
“Roger Darcy? The kid who used to call in all those false fire alarms?”
“I felt sorry for him.”
“Roger Darcy. He’s probably an arsonist by now.” A merry kiss of her doing, and once again we went at it, determined to find out just how much you could get away with within tonight’s rules.
You’d be surprised how much fun you can have within those rules.
Twenty
As you’re breathing your last, say a quick prayer that the priest who buries you is Father Mulcahy and not Father Fitzpatrick.
David Egan had always claimed to be unlucky. And his unluck held right to the end.
Father Fitzpatrick presided over his funeral mass and burial.
Father Peter Fitzpatrick was once a real sharp priest. This was probably sometime around the Civil War. He’d served in several larger cities and then gotten himself sent here instead of retiring. He always said he didn’t want to retire. He was a priest on the model of Mgm central casting priests-white-haired, pleasantly overweight, with a radiant smile for everybody.
The problem was he’d never bothered to get to know anybody here. He mostly played golf in the warm months and went to movies in the cooler ones.
He’d found a way of retiring without retiring.
Since there were only two priests, he had to take his share of funerals and his words on the deceased were always masterpieces of ham-bone rhetoric.
In Father Fitzgerald’s Generic Speech for the Recently Departed, everybody had led an exemplary life, had been universally beloved and was certainly, even as we sat squirming in our pews, sitting next to God and enjoying a Western on the celestial Tv set, Father Fitzpatrick being partial to Westerns.
Of David Egan, he said: “People always knew they could come to David Egan if they had problems of a spiritual nature. And with them he shared his knowledge of right and wrong, and how to survive these troubled times with hope and humility.”
Sounded just like the David I knew.
I couldn’t listen to the rest. I’d heard this same sermon applied to a wife-beating drunk, a twenty-year-old girl of saintly soul and beauty who had died of a brain aneurysm, a crooked and vicious cop, a kind and gentle man who ran a flower shop and was the subject of much rumor because he was unmarried at age fifty, and a decent old bullshitter from County Cork who’d lost both legs on Guam in the worst days of World War Ii.
Hell, Father Fitzpatrick would’ve repeated those same words-? he shared his knowledge of right and wrong” and taught “them how to survive these troubled times with hope and humility”-if he’d been burying Heinrich Himmler.
The back rows of the church were packed with young people who were angling for a role in Danger Dolls! about hot-rodding girl gangs. David’s friends.
The ones he’d taught about right and wrong.
The front rows were crowded with the more reputable friends he’d made in his high school days. The girls cried, the boys looked bored, though there was one boy who managed to cry and look bored at the same time, no easy feat, believe me.
But the people I spent the most time watching were the Kelly sisters, sitting in the front pew on the right side of the aisle, and the two girls sitting a mere row apart on the left side of the aisle, Molly Blessing and Rita Scully. They both wore dark suits and looked quite pretty and young and forlorn. The Kelly sisters used Kleenex to daub their eyes; the girls used delicate handkerchiefs.
Father Fitzpatrick droned through his sermon, dragged through the rest of the mass, and then walked down to the communion rail to commence escorting the coffin out to the waiting hearse. The rows emptied from front to back. I was near the middle so I didn’t get out in time to actually see it. But I heard about it, of course.
Sunny day. Cars whipping by, the drivers indifferent-or frightened by-th death in their midst.
Small clutches of mourners on the sidewalk, talking, a smile dared here and there, and then the shout.
I had just reached the center of the front steps when Rita slapped Molly or Molly slapped Rita and the fight ensued. I’ve heard the story told both ways. Personally, I’d put my money on Rita as the instigator, but then you can’t automatically dismiss the quiet ones like Molly, because sometimes they have tempers worthy of Charles Starkweather.
I did get to see the last few seconds of it, the part when Rita reached over and grabbed the shoulder of Molly’s suit and started ripping away. Which was when about 673 guys jumped in between them and the bell sounded, officially ending the fight.
Talk about your town legends. This would be talked about for generations. And it was just the sort of thing Egan would have loved, two very attractive girls battling over him this way.
They were both red-faced, sweaty, and thoroughly disheveled by the time I got over there. I didn’t get to talk to either of them. They were both dragged away by their friends.
I’m happy to report that there were no fisticuffs at the burial site, though Father Fitzpatrick did get confused once and talked about “David’s courage in fighting in Korea.” David would’ve been about eight back then. Well, at least he hadn’t put him back in World War I.
I’d hoped to see Andrea Prescott. At the moment the person I was most curious about was Jack Coyle. I’d wasted our little confrontation because I hadn’t pushed any specifics at him.
I wanted to know where he and Sara met when they got together.
Andrea Prescott was in Iowa City, in class all day, her mother told me. The mom was much nicer than the daughter. I told her I’d try her later.
I spent two hours in the office trying to make some real money. I was finishing up with a probated will when I thought I might learn something from Kenny Chesmore.
“How’s it going, Kenny?”
“Two m
ore chapters, man. Lesbians are a lot easier to write about than three-ways.”
“Those damned three-ways. They can wear a guy out.”
“I’m in kind of a hurry here, McCain.
What’s up?”
“If you wanted to take an eighteen-year-old girl to a motel within driving distance of town here, where would you take her?”
“Eighteen? She’s legal, anyway.”
“Barely,” I said.
“That’s a pun but I’ll let it pass.”
Kenny knew how much I hated puns.
“What you’re really saying is where could you take her where nobody at the motel would talk, right?”
“Right.”
“Nowhere.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means they all blab. All the owners, all the night clerks. When I get stuck for ideas sometimes, I call them up and they tell me about some of the kinky stuff their customers d.”
“So you can’t think of any place?”
“I’d go private. If it were a steady thing, I’d have a little apartment stuck away somewhere.
Something like that. Or I’d take her along with me on business trips. But no way would I start jumping her anywhere around here. Somebody’d spot you for sure.”
“Well, thanks, Kenny.”
“Sure. This thing you’re working on, McCain.
It wouldn’t involve a three-way, would it?”
“May all your future books involve lesbians, my son.”
“Thank you, padre.”
I tried working again but couldn’t concentrate, especially after Jamie came in with one of her girlfriends, whom she insisted was going to help her make some serious headway on all the filing she’d neglected for the past month. The friend was a ponytailed girl with earnest eyeglasses and a sweet serious face. Under her left arm were two books, Tender Is the Night by F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. And she was hanging out with Jamie?
“This is my cousin Carrie, Mr. C. She gets straight A’s.”
I reached out and we shook hands. She glanced at Jamie and said, “I just realized something, Jamie.”