“Bitch!” he screamed, slapping the redheaded girl with all his energy. The back of her head hit the window with a sharp crack. The girl’s eyes, bogged with tears, didn’t even seem to register pain from this. She was still coughing.
They were parked along the drive up the Iwo Jima Memorial. The girl’s hands were scraping skin off her throat; she began inhaling deeply, but Winston didn’t hear any air coming out.
Winston Adair grabbed the girl by her hair, twisting his fingers into the ringlets.
He pulled her face over his penis.
“Maybe if you get to work it’ll help.” He pressed her lips against the tip of the wagging condom, and miraculously, her lips parted, and the redheaded whore from Fourteenth Street began sucking.
They looked like small jewels at first, parts of a necklace come loose. They were a sapphire blue in the twilight shade beneath the bridge, and he’d really thought that maybe they were the whore’s, that they’d fallen off when they were rocking back and forth in the cool mud.
But then he saw their small legs, and their long slender wings.
And the pincers extending from their diamond-shaped heads.
Mandibles opening and closing, opening and closing.
Antennae touching his shriveling penis.
And then the pain had begun, somewhere in the back of his head at first, which he thought was awfully funny considering where the wasps were hanging out—a pain like a long sharp needle being thrust in his ear, poking around, twisting.
It took a few seconds before the pain localized to his crotch.
His fist was tight in the girl’s hair as he remembered, but he felt a sharp pain, and looked down. The girl kept her head in his lap, her eyes wide with terror, gasping, sucking in air, breathing in, breathing in, breathing in.
But not breathing out.
She gazed up at him as if she had never seen a human being before. She looked like a Polaroid of a whore, not the living, breathing thing.
Winston noticed that his penis was a pinkish red color from her strenuous sucking. It felt sore. But not as bad as when he was in his twenties.
Winston noticed that the condom was no longer covering his penis.
When the girl stopped breathing in, she stopped breathing altogether.
Panic hit him in the gut like a tank of bad chili—he felt imprisoned in his tight suit—a spoonful of urine leapt out of his penis before he could bring it under conscious control. “You bitch, don’t you die!” He pulled her jaw back—it wanted to bite down on his fingers—he reached back into her mouth. It felt like dripping jelly, it felt like the inside of a rat’s belly, it felt like a mud dauber’s nest. He could feel the slippery edge of the condom that she’d sucked down her throat. Lady, if you could figure out a way to live and keep this thing implanted down there permanently, you could revolutionize safe sex.
Twice, the condom slipped through his fingers.
And then, praying for a miracle— who the hell are you praying to? —the third try, he managed to catch the rubber on the edge of his ragged middle fingernail. He hoisted it up. When it came as far as her tongue, he yanked the condom out and tossed it onto the dashboard.
He shook her, holding her indelicately by the shoulders.
But it wasn’t so bad, those wasps biting him, really chewing down on his gonads—it hurt like an atom bomb, but that wasn’t the worst of it. You forget pain as you get older, you forget the feeling that you’ve just stuck your Washington Monument into a garbage disposal when you screw enough women. You forget it in the face of other things. Worse things.
But at twenty-one, the worst of it was the whore’s laughing.
The worst of it was looking down between her legs, and seeing where those wasps came from.
The worst of it was seeing that the mud dauber wasps were coming out of the woman’s vagina.
The redheaded girl coughed, opening her eyes. Her eyelashes dripped with tears. Mucus flowed in a thick stream out of her nostrils. She wiped at her face. She sniffed. When she breathed in, she breathed out.
She was alive.
And she spoke.
She spoke with a man’s voice, a man with a thick French accent.
A man with whom he’d done business once upon a time.
Before Winston Adair could get out of his cherry red Jaguar, away from the whore with the man’s voice, she whispered to him: “Breeder.”
CHAPTER FIVE
CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION
1.
“I would’ve given anything to see the look on her face.” Hugh was laughing so hard he had to put his fork down.
They decided to celebrate off their usual budget, and so they went into Georgetown for an Italian dinner. Hugh wore the blue seersucker jacket he always felt uncomfortable in; this was for Rachel’s benefit—she loved the way he looked in that jacket with his faded khakis, blue shirt and bow tie. “You just might be the only man in America who doesn’t look goofy in a bow tie,” she told him as she adjusted it against his neck earlier in the evening. Hugh felt he looked too conspicuously “yup.” Rachel thought he looked disarmingly handsome.
“You’re so attractive with linguini on your chin, here -” Rachel reached across the red-checkered tablecloth with her napkin and wiped away the bit of food beneath her husband’s lower lip. She’d already spilled tomato sauce raindrops down the front of her blouse, and in trying to daub them away had turned the droplets into a crimson smudge. (“You can dress me up,” she’d said, half joking, half despairing, “but you can’t take me out.”)
Hugh shook his head from side to side. “Most obscene,” he bit down on the words in his imitation of Mrs. Deerfield. “They hated cats.”
“Everyone’s watching, now will you stop it?” But Rachel could not help laughing herself. “Imagine, Kahlua and milk at ten in the morning.” She glanced towards the waiter for a minute because she realized what she had just said and could not bring herself to meet Hugh’s brief glare. Hadn’t she seen Hugh downing Bloody Marys that last year he was in law school, always before his eight o’clock class? But she mustn’t think about that: it had been her one condition that before they got married he would stop drinking. And he had stopped, or at least cut down considerably which was the next best thing. The same way I’ve cut out smoking, Rachel thought, guiltily remembering the single cigarette she kept in her purse for life’s little emotional emergencies. She’d given up her pack-a-day habit with her pregnancy and had stayed off them even after the miscarriage. “She really is something, though. In this world but not of it, as daddy would say.”
“I’m willing to bet the former tenants really did give her a good scare.”
“Who were they?” Rachel’s eyes returned to him. She looked like a child ready for a particularly good bedtime story. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes she felt as comfortable and safe with Hugh as she had as a girl with her father.
“Oh, a nice gay couple—it was really they who were responsible for cleaning that place out, getting rid of the garbage. The place was practically empty for nearly twenty years—every vagrant in Washington must’ve slept there at one time or another. So when the Old Man decides that folks are returning to the city, he kicks out whoever’s squatting there, has a team go in and do some superficial cleaning, but it was really those two young men who deserve all the credit. They’re the ones who did the bookshelves. And the ornate banister—as shaky as it is. And the fireplace. Did you notice how well the ceiling was restored? Them, too. I’m a little surprised by the grimy kitchen and the filth in the turret room, but you can’t have everything.”
“And they just left? They buy their own place or something?”
“Who knows? I think they moved out to the suburbs themselves. Too many breeders moving in to D.C.”
“You know, Hugh, that’s one of your less attractive qualities, saying that word breeders like people are cattle.” Rachel wanted to add, and I wouldn’t mind breeding a little in the next year or two, either, but decided that
wouldn’t be subtle enough for Hugh. “Or when you call your father ‘the Old Man’ like he’s not even worth considering.”
“I’m not about to call him ‘daddy’ like some debutante from Potomac.” Hugh raised his palms as if to ward off a curse. “Just joking. Scout, you’re not even from Potomac. Jeez, Scout, is the honeymoon really over?”
She felt his shoe scuffing against her ankle beneath the table. “I’m sorry, I guess I’m not in the best of humors. Daddy’s sort of my sacred cow, and I know if he were alive, the two of you would get along really well. I guess when I hear you, you know, talk about your father like that… well, I’m just tired right now.”
“All right, I’ll lay off the lousy jokes for a few minutes anyway. So how did you like the stuff about the ghost?” Hugh asked.
“I think it’s romantic,” Rachel said. “I think it’s neat that old Rose Draper still walks the halls waiting for Julian Marlowe to return.”
“Ah, yeah,” Hugh wrinkled his nose, “except for one little detail. Scout.”
Rachel raised her eyebrows inquiringly.
Hugh grinned that perfect orthodontic grin of his.
“Really romantic, if it weren’t for the fact that Rosie Draper was a notorious whore. They say she was the Typhoid Mary of syphilis cases this side of the Potomac. They called her The Clapper as a term of endearment.”
2.
As she got ready for bed that night, Rachel looked not so fondly at their tiny one-bedroom basement for what she hoped was one of the last times. “Sassy and I can move the stuff that fits into the car on Thursday—I’m not going in to the office—and you’ve got an interview in the morning, right? But if you could be home by, say, two,” she called out from the bathroom to Hugh who didn’t respond. “Hugh?” Rachel glanced out the door to the square bedroom. Hugh had fallen asleep on top of the covers in his khakis and pale blue button-down shirt. He looked adorable with his hair all mussed, the way his chest expanded and deflated while he snored lightly.
It all comes out in the wash, right? Between you and me, Hugh, I don’t think we were fit to be parents yet. It was a silly thing, and maybe you were right, maybe it was a blessing in disguise. You’ll get a job, and then in a few years when we have put away a little nest egg, we’ll have some kiddos and I’ll just be a mommy for a while. But first, first over everything else, we’ll make a home together.
“Thank you for letting us take the house,” she whispered quietly.
Her husband snarled a reply as he sleepily turned over on his stomach. Rachel went over to the edge of the bed and sat down. She reached out and stroked Hugh’s back. She felt the breaths he was taking, anticipated the snores, wondered what he was dreaming. They’d had their problems in the past year, but things seemed to be working out. Rachel was positive that the new home would help. In a larger place they would at least avoid the arguments that cramped quarters seemed to encourage.
And maybe on Thursday he would come back from the job interview, into their new home, with good news.
CHAPTER SIX
AFTER THE INTERVIEW
1.
Hugh walked up Connecticut Avenue in the rain. The streets steamed. Noontime traffic was awash with honking and skidding and brake slamming. Hugh was not crossing at the crosswalk, he was not waiting for the light, and he was not looking both ways.
“Fucking asshole!” a cabbie shouted as Hugh passed in front of the taxi on his way to DuPont Circle.
Exactly, Hugh considered: fucking asshole.
It was the phrase in his mouth when he’d gone up to the tenth floor of the building at McPherson Square, waited at the receptionist’s desk for fifteen minutes, and then was given an audience of another quarter hour with his old fraternity brother, Raymond “Bufu” Thompson.
“Hey, Bufu,” Hugh had said, extending his hand.
Thompson caught his hand but didn’t shake it; he just took it and dropped it. “I’m afraid my associates call me Raymond these days, Hugh.” Thompson looked like every young Washington lawyer: well-groomed, eager, shallow and possessing that pathological trait of always seeing the world as a movie in which he is the star. The power tie and blue pin-stripe suit didn’t tarnish that image one bit. Bufu Thompson, his old roomie, his frat-rat brother, the only guy who could turn in a term paper two weeks late and still act stunned when he flunked the course—this man looked like every other man in every other office in downtown Washington.
Hugh walked across DuPont Circle, and then up to KramerBooks. It was a bookstore with a cafe called Afterwords, and Hugh found during his recent days of unemployment that he could sift through the stacks of books and then sit and have some coffee and a sandwich, and watch all of Washington go by before the end of the day.
“I’m looking for a book,” he told the clerk. “I know you guys don’t have it because I’ve been looking all week. It’s called Diaries of An Innocent Age, by Verena Standish. Can I maybe get you all to order it?” At least Hugh could accomplish this: ordering the book. When Rachel heard that Verena Standish, wife to the diplomat, had written about Draper House in her published diary, she seemed interested in reading it.
After Hugh ordered the book, he grabbed a copy of City Paper at the entrance, and then went back to the tables that lined the long window in the back. A pretty blond girl who looked like she was about ten years younger than him—maybe twenty, twenty-one—was sitting, waiting for someone. She glanced over at him and smiled.
He smiled back.
She raised her cup of coffee in a silent toast. He kept smiling; he couldn’t help it. When was the last time a pretty young girl had smiled at him? Was she a student at GW? At American U.? At Catholic?
But it had gone too far—she stood up and came over to his table. “Hi,” she said.
Hugh was startled; he could feel his heartbeat under his tongue. He was soaked from the rain; his tan suit felt like a moist towelette wrapped around him. He combed his fingers through his hair, squeezing water out. He bit his lower lip but he couldn’t bring himself to look at her face. He was trying to look down into his own coffee. He nodded his head and said a slight “hello.” He made sure she noticed his wedding band by tapping on the table nervously with his left hand.
“My name’s Isabel.”
Hugh and Isabel exchanged a few pleasantries. The whole time Hugh was wondering how to get rid of her: the wedding ring hadn’t done the trick. Then he remembered the one thing that most women seemed to find absolutely resistible.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been looking for work. Haven’t had a job in a while.”
Within seconds, Isabel excused herself; the rain seemed to be letting up, she had places to go, friends to meet, oh, and her boyfriend, who by the way has a job, was picking her up across the street at the Metro.
How had Bufu Thompson put it? Oh, yeah. “I guess of all people in this town, you don’t need me telling you what it’s like. Your dad’s got the biggest firm around, and you’re coming to me for work? We’re part of this machine, you and me, Hugh. We all get stamped out like gingerbread men—and we’re all after the same jobs. I can maybe throw some paralegal garbage your way, but you don’t want that, do you? Now, if you’d take the bar again, maybe pass it this time—and I know you’ve got it in you—hey, if a guy with your background is coming to me, a junior shit-kicker with your connections—I even think Rachel could probably bail you out of this more than someone like—oh, man, don’t look at me like that, Adair. I’m giving you some sincere advice here...”
Without realizing what he was doing, Hugh ordered a glass of wine. The rain had not let up as the blond Isabel claimed when she abandoned him; it seemed to be coming down harder. Wine was suddenly there before him.
Just a glass of wine. He had never been an alcoholic—that was something Rachel had dreamed up. She was from a family of teetotalers, never saw a bottle of anything in the house when she was growing up. So to her, one or two (or three or four) drinks meant a disease. Wine wasn’t all that bad, and anyway�
��he missed the taste of it. That was the worst thing about giving up alcohol for Rachel: the taste of wine. It was such a hassle to put people out at parties and have to drink soda, especially since wine, one glass anyway, didn’t have all that much alcohol. Now, if he had ordered a carafe, that might be considered excessive at midday, but not a glass. Especially with the headache he was getting, just thinking about Bufu Thompson and the whole damn legal profession. Sometimes Hugh wondered how Rachel could live with all that bullshit. He wondered how he could have been so goddamn starry-eyed in law school.
He also wondered why in hell he had allowed himself to fall in love with Rachel. Why had he done that to a nice girl like Rachel Brennan? He rarely thought about his late wife, Joanna—it was as if that marriage was a picture from someone else’s scrapbook.
His father’s scrapbook.
Unlike Rachel, Joanna had been the perfect debutante, someone his father absolutely approved of, a woman who, as the Old Man had put it, “has what it takes.”
What it takes.
The waitress came by with another glass of wine.
“Did I order this?” he asked.
She nodded. “But if you don’t want it -” She made a motion to take the glass away.
Hugh shook his head. “No, it’s all right, I guess I did order it—rainy days always make me thirsty.”
He thought about his father, in the Volvo with his pregnant wife Joanna, and he wondered why in hell the Old Man had been allowed to escape that accident alive.
2.
Let’s Pretend, Scout. Hugh raised his glass to the people passing on the street. Good Christ, Scout, Let’s Pretend I haven’t failed you in your search for the perfect daddy. Well, slap my face for thinking that! Hugh reached up with his free hand and slapped his own face. It didn’t even sting. “I love my wife, you know.”
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