When Odette surfaced within my arms and kissed me for reasons too remote to protest, this vision had put me pretty well at my ease, and I had no trouble at all catching her by the shoulders and pushing her against the stone edge of the tub. She clasped my head wetly with both hands, to hold me still, and it was like a child’s need for assertion, to set the rules of play, and so I pressed into her, and would not let her lead. We battled like that for a while, and then I took her wrist and dragged it pinned against the stone, just for fun. Looking up I saw it was the splinted hand.
“You’re rougher than you look,” she said huskily, turning her head aside. She put her hand over my face, and as her fingers spread I closed my eyes and she pressed lightly on my lids.
“You like it,” I said automatically, because it had always been so.
“What if I don’t?” she asked, making her voice small.
“Suck it up then, I guess.” I pushed my face into her hand to see if she would hold me off. I felt her fingers drag luxuriantly away.
I went at her neck a bit, very chaste, careful to leave no mark, but with energy, leaving behind a faint streak of my own blood. She clutched me to her and began to speculate.
“You’re one of those servants who thinks they’re better than their masters,” she said, chuckling lowly. “Usually you’re very uptight.”
“You smell like food,” I told her, just to balance things. It wasn’t true, but along the tub’s edge I’d seen a plate of leftover beans and chicken bones. She stiffened a little, and then we heard the echo of steps.
For a long moment I thought it would be the Pharaoh, but his gait was wrong, misshapen—instead of casual steps we heard the squeaking, half-mechanical shuffle of the recently invalid. The hospital sounds of him seemed a judgment of their own, and as he came toward us through the mist Odette drew quietly away.
I didn’t know how to face Calyph that way. It wasn’t that I was ashamed, or had any feeling of having misbehaved. I was proud to be found out in her company, yet I felt outed somehow, uncomfortable at the revelation of my desires even where they were most universal. Again I lay back in the water, trying to be easy. I watched him loom up in the light and take us in. I remember hoping he’d see her as an unexpected wrinkle of me, a hidden prowess.
“You shouldn’t be here, J,” he said right off.
“Why?” I asked lazily, hearing my voice calibrate itself to some libertine cadence in the lone drawled word. I would’ve been glad to be treated almost any way, as a rival even, rather than to be given more stern warnings.
“You know,” he said, and there was real heat in his voice. He didn’t look at Odette, but still she shrank away, fading into the background as far as she was able. She’d lowered herself into the water so the purse of her lips lay along the waterline.
“Did I take your place?” I asked, hearing again the strange caress in my voice. “You forgot your wallet.”
“I was here,” he said, “before she was here. Then I got out. As you best.”
Odette seemed to have sunk lower yet, intently watching us, her whole mouth submerged.
“It feels nice in here,” I said. “Isn’t it nice, Odette?”
“Yes,” she lispered.
I felt all at once in total command of the situation and all parties in it. “You ought to join us,” I said. “I’m sure Puma would like it.”
She rose up in the water then, just slightly, so that her hair came dripping clear, watching him, waiting.
He hesitated a moment, and I could see he did desire her. I wondered if she’d told him about her fight with the Pharaoh. If he was true to his code it wouldn’t have made any difference, but still he lingered, and did not look at her, and after all she was one to turn men’s rules for themselves into just so much false dignity, so many resolutions left behind in a drawer somewhere at the moment of crisis, and I knew he knew it. Yet my own presence must have baffled and unnerved him—I was curious which force would be the stronger.
I imagined him stripping off his brace and lowering himself down, the water in the tub rising, bracing for our negotiation of one another as two bodies in the close space. How could we resist her, yet how could either of us touch her with the other there? How would she react to our mutual presence? I imagined she would be for it. All at once I imagined us both going for her, his hands and mine around her, feeding on her lips and limbs, our heads banging accidentally together. His scarred, shrunken leg would lie awkwardly against mine beneath the water; my blood off her would mark his face. I felt the sudden urge to clutch her, to hold her up to him. Full once more of the thrill of becoming unknown to myself, I grabbed her thigh to turn her toward him.
I watched him lower himself upon the crutches, and he leaned his face down to mine.
“You do what you want now, Jess,” he said quietly. “This some sorry shit, though, you want to know the truth.” Then he straightened and swung himself slowly away through the silent, dripping room.
As he receded I could feel her coming back to me. “It’s all right,” she tried to begin.
“Shut up,” I said.
She sank herself into me a moment, obediently. Then she rose again and put her face in front of mine. “You’re one of those white deviants,” she pronounced, looking at me with mock-horror with a sort of approval breaking through it, as though she’d found in me something more interesting than expected.
I felt my lip curl at this. I thought tiredly that I’d better play along, just for an instant, that this deviance was something I ought to suggest an affinity for, so I could transcend it.
“Naw,” I said. “Naw.”
“No?”
“I got a little black in me,” I told her.
She looked at me close; with soft fingers she examined my hair.
“You poor thing,” she said.
I looked at her fiercely, willing her belief and, I was sure, its consequence, her envy.
“You poor, poor thing,” she repeated.
I fondled her carelessly then—I turned her and once more pressed her against the stone of the pool. The fun seemed to have gone out of it a little, but I gripped her by the scruff of the neck and willed it back.
“Close your eyes,” I said. “Turn your head.”
She frowned but she did it.
“Keep them closed,” I ordered. “Now open your mouth.”
Her face was set in a thrill of dislike, but she’d decided this deviance I was supposed to have was attractive, a force to be obeyed. Her mouth opened slightly, warily, the corners of her lips peeling apart.
Rising up, I reached over to the edge of the tub and took the chicken in my hand. It was cool and greasy. I felt a shudder of disgust, but there seemed such a logic in what I was doing. It was like an inspiration of wrong. I put the fleshy end of the chicken bone to her lips.
After that I do not remember, only that we were on our feet in the spray and she was blazing at me, and I was trying to comfort her, to change her mind about me, absurdly to show her all the flair and daring of the act, how brave I was to carry through, knowing its repugnance.
“See,” I kept saying. “No, look.”
But she only blazed out. I don’t remember if I was hit—the marks would have been obliterated by the marks of what came after. I only remember pleading what a childlike, innocuous, not-worth-telling-anybody time we’d had, and then just trying to get out of there, to get her to let me go quietly, but then I heard more steps, and saw Joseph Jones through the mist, and Ras too, and Goat. It seemed they were trying to keep Goat from coming in, but when they saw me they put away their differences.
PART
THREE
7
On my twenty-eighth to last day, just as my bruises were at their most vivid, I drove out to Dunthorpe and Ras answered the door. There was a tin of polish in his hand, and he frowned a little when he saw me. He twisted the lid, ensuring its tightness, and I got the sense that with that gesture his trove of professional advice was closed to m
e forever. “From now on, de car stays heah.”
“How do I get here?” I asked.
He pointed past me to an old Mazda parked at the edge of the driveway. The white crescent of nail at the tip of his finger looked cut to exactly one thirty-second of an inch all around. “For de rest of de month, dat is yours. Keep it clean or you will hear about it. Dent it and it comes out your wage.”
From his pocket he produced a key on a long, yellow lanyard. The length of cord was a humiliation in itself, and I wondered if he would order it around my neck.
“What kind of driver don’t have his own car!”
Getting into the thing, I slammed the seat back as far as it would go. The engine started with an ugly sound. I took it to the garage, and the car felt too light, too near the ground—it was as if I was piloting some child’s kart. I took the spot farthest from the door, where Antonia used to park her scooter. Even the door handles felt flimsy.
Ras met me again at the door. “Now I’ll show you your room,” he said.
“My what?”
“I hope you brought a day’s change.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Den you should just nod and smile,” he said, leaning forward a little. “I cannot believe you do not know dese basic tings.”
He walked past me to a door in the back wall I’d never seen open. The recycling carts that’d stood in front of it had been moved away, and I could see the faint lines of broom tines on the concrete. He opened the door and I saw a handrail slanting upward.
I looked at the ceiling. I couldn’t understand there being anything above the garage. The roof slanted up on one side, but I thought that was just, you know, architecture. The garage ceiling was lined with planks, spaced inches apart, through which you could see the emptiness above, but atop my new car the space above the planks was covered over in particleboard. Ras had gone away up the stairs; his shoes sounded harshly on the cheap steps.
At the top of the stairs was a cramped room with a low, slanted ceiling. A single tiny window gave a grimy view of the Japanese garden. The room held a card table, folded up and leaning against the wall, a folding chair leaning in front of it, and, in the middle of the room, a rolling metal bed frame, also folded up, with a meager mattress sandwiched inside. There was a large pitcher in the corner. The pitcher wasn’t folded up.
“It has de Internet,” Ras announced in a jolly voice.
I felt the slant of the ceiling brush my hair. There was no hope of standing upright except against the far wall.
“You want to quit?” Ras asked. “Hmm? Dis is beneath you?”
“I want to serve out my time,” I said.
“Good,” he said, coming to the doorway and waiting for me to step aside. “Den make yourself at home, and wait.”
I pulled out the chair and sat, dazed, feeling a voluntary hostage. I touched my yellow eye, and the spectacular mottle on my side where Savier had punched me above the kidney, disgustedly, exactly once. Ras and Joseph Jones had dragged me still wet from the tub down the same hall Ras had just pulled Goat along, and the Pharaoh was waiting in front of my little room.
Jones had given me the shot on the eye, for illustrative purposes or just for sport. “See?” he said. “You see what he is?”
The Pharaoh seemed impatient to get back to his party, and punched me hard without remark. They threw me in my room and I lay there until dawn, the chlorine itch spreading slowly across my body.
I picked up the pitcher and held it in my lap, putting my palms around its curve. The ceramic was warm, and it seemed the only friendly object in the room. Within my reach at the top of the stair was an intercom housed in the wood. The hole was bigger than the speaker, and I could see the stud behind and the wires going away down the wall. I wanted to press talk and see if I could get Calyph; I wanted to locate some reminder of my dignity. I turned up the volume, just to see if anything could be heard.
“What?” a distorted voice swiftly asked. It sounded like Wedge or Maxim. I turned the knob back, but in a moment the voice returned. “Don’t come in the house,” it said. “You ain’t allowed in the house no more.”
I rose and unbundled the bed and lay on it blankly. An indefinite time later I was woken from my daze by a shriek of feedback. “This shit on? Yo, Jess.”
I stumbled over to the stair.
“How you like your room?” he asked. “We thought it’d be more convenient this way. They do it up right?” I couldn’t tell if he was being flip or not, and looked at the plastic grille as though it might be of help.
“You got the wifi hooked up in there?” the speaker asked.
“Not yet,” I said. I think I hoped he’d come up and check on the airwaves, and see my situation and be appalled.
“Ras put encryption on that mess, but we’ll get you the code. Lotta changes around here I guess. Can you come down in about twenty?”
“I guess I can make that,” I said.
After our last night at the Pharaoh’s, we stopped at a seafood place on our way out of town. We got as far as the lobby, where a wooden sign hung with nets and rigging proclaimed famous clam chowder. Calyph’s crutches stilled and he shook his head. He must have thought it too tacky a place to fire me in, and we turned around to find our fate on the public boardwalk. We ended up sitting on a sandy concrete slab by the sea, where I was given my thirty days’ notice.
Thirty days! He had his moments of cruelty, his dictatorial sunglasses, and what his Hollinger profile called a mercurial persona, but Calyph was mostly too kind. Anyone with a less complicated relationship to his pride would’ve been able to fire me on the spot. He wasn’t going to have to search very hard for a new driver—Joseph Jones had brought three newly trained servants with him to the Pharaoh’s. I’ll always be curious if he’d stowed them somewhere during the night, when I was stumbling around under the illusion that the world had suspended its moral judgment because the moon was full and somebody had brought a few masks, or if they had all filed in quietly at dawn, at the very moment the cognac glasses were taken away. So as not to breach taste, Jones treated them as his own attendants, but I knew that one of the dapper men avoiding my gaze as I took down Calyph’s bags was my eventual replacement.
We sat on the slab and watched a bunch of children fly kites shaped like dragons and butterflies, until a kid wearing a hemp necklace came over and handed Calyph a marker and a soccer ball.
“I got Travis Outlaw’s autograph,” the kid shouted to the kite-fliers, stumbling away over the dunes.
Calyph shook his head. “That hurts me, damn.”
“I’d have known it was you,” I consoled him.
“You sweet.”
“Sorry about the restaurant.” I’d seen the place on a billboard, so it was my failure. “Are you hungry? I saw a fish market down the street.”
“Kind of cheap of you to start being so thoughtful now.”
“That’s true,” I allowed.
Keeping his face hard and unamused, he chuckled, like a cough. “So you’re a good lackey when ain’t no girls around? Have I got that right?”
I sucked in sea air, and felt the roots of my teeth tingle in the cold. I nodded humbly.
“Lucky I got no wife,” he mused. “You ever have any urges to, like, do some weird shit to the serval or anything?”
I informed him I had no weird serval urges.
“You locked that boy in the closet one time. Didn’t know if it was a fetish.”
The memory of my doing that was such a fleeting part of a set of violent, confused images that for a moment I thought he was making it up. “I only have the usual fetishes,” I said stiffly, and we sat a moment in what felt like harmony. Having to fire me had brought out his tenderness, and being on the way out I could say what I wanted.
“I’ll put that in your references,” he said.
“I’ll never do this again,” I said quietly.
“No? You could. You aight at it.”
“I am?”
/>
“Sure.”
“I broke your leg,” I said. “And your marriage. You ought to fire me faster before we see what else I can do.”
As soon as these words left me I had a moment of awful foreboding, for slipping the truth by him like that so flippantly, for no purpose but my own pleasure. I suspected him of being smarter than me all the while, and it was a terrible risk to give up anything his paranoia might so easily light on. But then I watched him let my words go by, like so much empty boasting. He let them pass so easily I wondered if his innocence was as much a pose as mine.
“You know I don’t fault you, Jess. You know I don’t wanna end it here, either. But I vouched for you, to people whose respect I gotta have. Ain’t nothin’ to be said now. Shoulda found some other girl. We might be able to find something else for you when your time is up, is all I’m saying.”
“If you aren’t dead by then,” I said, and I laughed through my teeth, and he through his, and together we watched the wind blow clots of foam out of the sea.
When we got back from the coast, the house was as dark as I ever saw it. Within the security gates there was no need to keep an illusion of habitation, and as we came around the last curve the front of the house loomed before us in the twilight like a place where nobody lived—an abandoned construction or a foreclosure.
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