by John Domini
“Well,” Ceci went on. “Let me move into a single room. You guys deserve a double.”
Let me move? Let me? Surely Cecelia couldn’t have fallen for Bette’s pose. Surely she didn’t believe in the mannequin. But the mother was actually making apologies. Fingering the hems of her work shirt, she was saying, “I guess you guys won’t get quite the quiet getaway you were expecting.”
Sisters, boy. “So, Ceci,” Kit asked. “What brings you down here?”
The woman touched her glasses. At Kit’s waist the two boys were tugging, pleading: “Play the monster.”
“Same as you I guess,” Ceci said. “A getaway.”
The louder of the two boys was the younger. The blond foursquare Rucky-rat. “Play the monster!” he squealed. “Please!”
“Guys,” Kit said, “give your Mom a chance.” Anyway he didn’t think he was up to the game, your basic Search-&-Destroy. Kit would go after the boys with his head tucked inside his sweater collar, a hunchback effect.
Ceci said, “I just woke up this morning feeling, well. Like I had to flee.”
“I hear you.”
Kit glanced at Bette. He for one felt himself coming into a fresh energy that had its roots in the talk on the ferry. A weekend in a funhouse sounded a lot better than what he’d been expecting. But Bette was looking elsewhere, across the hall. Uh-oh. Framed in the double-wide opening to the dining room, Cousin Cal stood cradling an open shotgun. The brass butts of two fresh shells glittered in the chamber.
“The monster!” Rutger shouted.
A mean piece of machinery, a .10-gauge, Cal’s gun was really too powerful for duck. The uncle toted it up high, two-handed, an unnatural position which kept his shoulders back and chest out. Ten-hut, soldier.
Cecelia addressed him mildly. “More guests for the weekend, Cousin Cal.”
Cal kept glaring. The shell butts gleamed between his chapped hunter’s hands.
“And I told you before,” Ceci went on, “I don’t want the guns around the boys.”
Cal’s face had Marlboro-Man dimples, and his eyes the mercury glint of hard liquor.
“I told you, Cal,” the sister said. “You keep all that stuff in the kitchen. I don’t want to see it.”
The .10-gauge dropped to waist level, and for a moment Kit couldn’t see the shell butts. But then the brass casings gleamed again, harmless in the open housing. Cousin Cal exhaled loudly—you might’ve heard him up on the widow’s walk—but he turned away, gun down, head down. Overgrown Cousin Cal, shrinking fast.
Kit looked at Ceci, eyebrows raised.
“Oh, that old fruitcake,” the sister said. She laughed, touching her glasses. “Cousin Cal, I swear. You can almost hear the fantasies he’s got going.”
Bette, at bottom of the stairs, appeared more regal than ever. As if she’d been positive that the old man would start blasting away, and she’d wanted to look her bravest.
“You can almost hear him,” Ceci said, shaking her head. “Here I am, the world’s toughest cowboy. I mean, fantasies.”
“The monn-sster,” one of the boys whined.
“But you, Kit,” Cecelia went on. “Looks like you ran into real trouble.”
Kit was getting tugged at again. He discovered he’d herded Hans and Rutger behind him, he’d kept them out of harm’s way. He’d been expecting bloody murder every bit as much as Bette.
*
Their room seemed to do their talking for them. The radiator whispered, the bed frame cackled. And Bette too might be coming into a new energy, she just might. At the windows overlooking the shoreline, she went up on tiptoe in a full-body stretch and then with a sudden burst of humming shook her hips. His seaside Sheba. His island witch: She cast a spell with her kiss, leaving him powerless and tongue-tied against the cold wall after Cecelia called upstairs. “Drinks!” the sister called. “Hot drinks!” Down in the parlor he refortified, taking mint wafers and brandied tea, while Ceci complained genially about her life on Beacon Hill. The neighbors were all gay these days. They were very nice guys, granted, community-minded guys. But still, the sister said, they weren’t people she could look at for hints about herself. Hints about what she was going through. She needed at least a few people around like that, Ceci explained, people she could use to suss out something about herself. Bette surprised Kit by mentioning his uncle, the rancher who liked men. She said Kit had found the uncle a decent enough role model, even though he was gay and still in the closet to boot. Bette didn’t sound malicious, and the subject was by no means off bounds, but with that Kit gave in to the boys’ pleading, he played the Monster. An old cracked mackinaw off the coatrack served as his Monster-Net. He tore around the downstairs, roaring till his bruises throbbed. By the time Cecelia called a halt—the boys got revved up fast, their faces red as Christmas—Bette was standing at another seaside window. She was saying it might be nice to take a walk while there was still light. Together, Kit and his wife went out. Below the sea wall they took each other’s hands. Without a word they crunched over winter sand till Kit found himself once more up against it: the channel’s bracing chaos, the mulchy seething whatever. The foam at his feet looked like more of the same, bubbles and scribbles shifting and multiplying. Brainless, directionless. He was once more up against it, the last winy pulp that had swilled out of Junior’s mouth, the seepage under which the man’s face had disappeared. Okay, editor: What’s the issue now? You’ve shaken off your temporary insanity about Sea Level, Nos. 2 & 3. You’ve escaped the phone memos and you’ve gotten past a scary little loup-garou made of rags. You’ve put all that paper behind you. What now? Kit thought of the courtroom phrase, “the whole truth,” and wondered if he’d ever get anywhere near a truth like that again.
He tugged his wife’s hand. His eyes began to water, and at first he thought it was the wind, but then he realized it was the words. He told her everything.
*
Make love to me. Of all the unlikely responses… and with all the sisterly obligations due up in the next hour or so, with dinner and the boys’ bedtime due up… . Yet as soon as she and Kit got back in the house, her face pinched tight and his spongy as a baby’s, Bette lead the way to their room. Once they were up by the salted windows again she hooked him into a hug, close enough to have him retasting the low tide in the smell of their woolens. Then: Make love to me. Please Kit, now. The asking alone sounded a bit off—she almost never asked, in so many words. Kit glanced around the room, at once noting three or four good reasons why they shouldn’t, the unlocked door and the men grumbling downstairs and the still-unmade bed. The mattress was horsehair, at least half a century old.
She had her coat off, her jeans open, one hand at his belt while the other drew his fingers up under her sweater. Her nipple was warm but stiff, and hands and flesh and eyes she had him. The Monster-Net.
The room’s key had been lost long ago, but with a quick jostle Kit heaved the bureau against the door. The mahogany piece thumped into place, elephantine, gashing the doorjamb’s multiple paint jobs. Christ, were they going to knock the place apart? Still Bette had him netted. She had him hooked by a belt loop, a zipper pull, the mushrooming head of his cock. It was a game and not a game at all, a mess of psychology you got free of by diving in still deeper. Bette folded up, making herself an easier reach in undone clothes. Kneeling on the edge of the bed, she started to suck on Kit while his feet were still on the floor. The springs and bed frame screeched and jangled while she hunkered down into a mouth-first bundle. Knock the place apart.
“I don’t have Trojans,” he gasped. “I didn’t think—”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t care.”
Her sucking, his diving was all they needed of foreplay. His unrubbered cock was too serious for that, his confession too recent.
They couldn’t lose their awareness of the Cottage, the mattress, the cackling wood, and in Kit this triggered images from the ranch where he’d been raised. He flashed on freshly dug potatoes in burlap sacks,
on the Jello-and-hay odor of a foaling. Bette moaned, he whispered—darling, the best—yet these guttural breathings seemed to belong with Kit’s memories, as if she’d been back in Minnesota with him. The notion played just perceptibly through his windings against her cunt, through the throb in his injured temple. Because why couldn’t she have been there, at his uncles’ ranch? The time a husband and wife spent at sex stretched way past the norms, didn’t it? Packed with a thousand adjustments, replayed both out loud and in dreams, the time a husband and wife spent at sex expanded out and away according to rules all its own. And he and Bette had put in a lot of time, by now. A whole childhood and adolescence of foreplay and afterwards. Marriage, as Kit knew it, could include the cackling of this seaside manse, the old money showing off, while at the same time it shared his memory of feeling his way up into a mare’s birth canal in order to yank out a stuck foal. Why not? He and Bette were doing it even now, cackling and reaching. Upright on their knees, they clung hip to hip.
Kit rocked with long tremors, kiss to cock. Bette’s look was all tatterdemalion. Here were handfuls of buttock, there a dissolving down-the-throat moan.
They went through spasms for a while, jamming after the best angle. Such a shape they made, upright, the lovers’ capital Y. Y for Yes, Yeah, You. She’d been right to insist.
Afterwards Kit lay fingering his stitches with one hand, the other on the thigh she’d thrown across him. The stretch-fabric of their life as a couple felt as if it were drifting down over them, a vast parachute material, tangible in a thousand gentle rumples. He began making sentences, fumbling, not quite thinking. The talk came out as the marriage-feeling was reeled back in, a compensatory mechanism. Occasionally his sweeter nothings made Bette fish tenderly along his hip, her crotch nudging his bone line.
“Second time,” he found himself saying. “No Trojan, no precautions. The second time.”
She raised her eyes, but it was dark by now.
“Think about it.”
The only noise was a squeak against his breastbone: her wet face, moving. Wet, yes, and he should have known what was happening the moment it started. His wife was crying, he should have known. Her shoulders quivered and she buried her face in his chest.
“Aw Betts.” He locked his arms around her. “Darling.”
Was this his deficient social skills again? Another dumb farm boy move?
“I love you. I love you.”
No answer except the squeaks between them, skin on skin.
*
1/14, 50 minutes:
Subject anxious. Reports dream activity. Rises from couch once twice 4 times.
At street window—“Life, life, one mess after another.”
Dream of paper sack. Bus station, everybody reading paper, he has sack on lap. Can’t let go of sack. Sack seams coming apart, leaking blood.
Visibly anxious. Neck massage.
MEMO: KV Story, 2nd rewrite
I see a property, guys. I see a majordocudrama. I see Emmy.
Guys, you got me wicked psyched. Wicked psyched. The trailers for KV Story, they’ll be like sixty seconds on the hot button. And the beauty is, we can play the integrity number. Hard-hitting real-life drama fresh off the streets.
Kit had thought he’d spend Saturday in the library. In winter, the room was the most livable in the house. Walls of packed shelves provided a leathery coziness, and the fireplace still worked. Ceci had even vacuumed the carpet. The boys needed a clean palace to play, the sister explained. You didn’t want anybody coming home sick.
But before lunch, Saturday, she’d left the boys with Kit. She and Bette had gone into town to talk. Bette’s idea.
“I think I’d like, oh, a glass of wine with my sister,” his wife had said. “Overlooking the sea, you know.”
“A glass of wine?” Ceci said. “An actual adult setting?”
Bette didn’t laugh. She avoided Kit’s look. Instead it was the sister who caught his eye, taking his measure.
And once Cecilia’s wagon pulled out of the drive, the library no longer worked for him. Not with the boys there, playing Star Wars before the fire. They had figurines, Luke, the Princess and the Wookie, and they kept pestering him to join. Aw, wasn’t he going to get a break? A moment to think? What was Bette doing, abandoning him? Kit found a few fingers of gin in dusty half-gallons left over from summer. He withdrew into the now-familiar wooze of alcohol and Percodan, browsing the spines along the farther bookshelves. He pretended an interest in the family Bible. Inked onto the opening pages was a century and a half of marriage, birth, death. The entries ended with the previous generation, a death in ‘51. His wedding—Bette’s, rather—wasn’t there.
Dream of werewolf. Werewolf in room, subject trapped behind desk “antique bureau.” Subject climbs free, hard labor, hand over hand. Other side, free, discovers he was a werewolf & now cured. Discovers wife still back in room. Goes get her & both start climb old bureau, trying avoid rays of full moon. Labor, panic.
Discussion of wife. Intimacy gratifying but threatening. Some fear of wife’s intellect—“Sex is life & death, not theory.” Some recognition of that fear, of its thrill etc.
Adequate understanding re different backgrounds. Avoidance behavior re different values—re wife’s emotional needs.
Avoidance: question about wkend w/wife prompts subject memories of own childhood. Subject again mentions Minnesota Public Radio. Believes MPR root of career, listening w/family, discussing at dinner. Cites state’s progressive politics, Humphrey.
Repeat Q about wkend w/wife.
Integrity, guys—that’s marketing. Integrity, keepin’ it real—you can’t find better marketing. I mean, do I see a blonde Alan Alda for KV?
What was key was, you worked in the double murder. You worked in the guy, the creep KV killed—jeez, what was his name? And you worked in what the creep did. You got the people dying on the screen. That was what was key. I mean, rape & murder, gay rape & murder, it’s right on the hot button. And it’s totally real! Real written all over it. Major marketing.
So, quickly. One problem.
We need kids, guys. We need Viddich and some kids. We’ve got a good guy here, right? And good guys, they’re good with kids.
It’s a formula, you know. Good with kids equals good guy. Nothing your Nielsen idiot understands quicker.
The project need kids.
Maybe the library would never have worked for him anyway. Kit didn’t read casually. Rather he had six or eight books he’d committed to the way other men gave themselves to a ball club or a fishing hole. He had companion books, reread so often that he could recite whole passages, savoring knockout verbs or other surprises. His choices tended to be more recent, however: Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid. The Cottage had nothing like that. As for Kit’s older favorites, the Hamlet was missing pages and the collection of Greek tragedies printed in double columns. Unreadable in the antique light.
Maybe it wouldn’t have worked, the library. When Kit left, it had nothing to do with Ceci’s boys. They’d given up asking him to play. Nonetheless, Kit drifted out of the room, out of the warmth and chatter. He began to climb the stairs.
The echo of his gin-slowed footsteps somehow seemed more in the spirit of the reading he’d longed for. He recalled a line from Herzog, for instance: I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. He’d love to go back to that one now. Love to revisit a few of Herzog’s “mental letters.” Great stuff—imaginary letters to impossible readers. Letters to Nietzsche and Maimonides and Herzog’s own dead grandfather, invisible to everyone except a well-meaning but half-cracked professor of history.
Repeat Q about wknd w/wife.
Subject visibly anxious. Wknd at v old house, he says. “I mean, w/a widow’s walk.” Prompts more memories: Mother. M has “fine qualities.” Leftist, religious (Presby), open-minded.
Q: Open-minded? Example homosex uncle?
Ans: “Not talking about that.”
Q:
How’s M feel about marriage? Example gr-children.
Neck massage. Pacing. Window.
TV, guys, has to get right where people live. Right into the kitchen. We want ‘em so they can’t even see the kitchen, because they’d rather look at our people.
So think about the wife, here. I mean, I like what you did with the wife. Farrah gets serious, that’s killer. She gets serious, and we still have plenty of sex for the trailer. Major marketing.
The library would’ve suited Bette better. When it came to reading, she was an omnivore. If she suffered insomnia or a not too nasty flu, she could go through hundreds of pages at a clip. The one author Kit had known Bette to reread was Tolstoy, and she preferred War and Peace.
Bette. Kit might pretend he was looking for books, at first, but by the time he got above the second floor he knew better.
Up here, the Cottage passageways were darker. Shades had been drawn at the end of summer. And when Bette had finished making love to him, she’d shut down as well. Later, when Kit’s nightmares woke him, she’d refused to be roused. Now when Kit came out on the widow’s walk, he heard the hunters in their blinds. Distant guns. Bette too was off in that distance, firing away.
The weather made the Cottage grounds invisible, and Kit flashed on his father in his Sabre jet, high over foggy Yalu river land. But his father never felt like this, the worm on his back, the world a wet bedlam in his face. His father never felt so wrecked. The thought of suicide, Nietzsche said, is a great consolation (another line Kit had first come across in Herzog). Yet now, the thought struck him just that way: stale and secondhand. Suicide felt like the most cornball idea he’d ever had. Like imitation honor, imitation pain. And in stark contrast, beyond imitation, there emerged the wife he loved, the work he believed in. So they felt at least out in this hard, cleansing winter, as Kit tossed the last of his gin over the railing.