The Trouble with Bliss

by Douglas Light

  Chapter 23

  “Mors,” Seymour calls the moment Morris enters the apartment, “get in here.”

  “What is it, Daddy?” Morris asks, distracted. He closes the front door, locks it, then lifts his hand like he’s reaching to touch his nose or rub his eyes; his fingers settle on his lips, as if feeling them for the first time. Still, he’s bewildered by the make-out session, by Andrea kissing him. Disappointed in himself for responding to her meaningless affection.

  “We can’t do this,” he remembered telling her, breaking from her embrace. His breath was short, shallow. Flustered, he didn’t want to stop but knew he must. There were a million reasons why it was wrong; none of them readily came to mind. She’s married, he thought. That’s one. “This, us, we can’t do this,” he said, experiencing a multitude of emotions—everything from scorching exuberance to a trouncing sadness.

  Her lips joined his in another bruising kiss. He couldn’t stop her. She pulled back a moment, her mouth glossy with spittle. “What can’t we do?” she asked, then pressed in again.

  Morris’s pores opened and a vigorous sweat covered his body. He wanted to take her on the bar, or the pool table, or on the sticky floor, his animal impulses overpowering his brain. Finding her thin body, he held it fast, drawing it tightly to him. And as he kissed her, breathing an air she’d already breathed, the words “Half the evil in the world comes from people not knowing what they like” rose to his mind like a sunken buoy that’s broken free from its trappings.

  Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. He’d reread part of the book this afternoon, his copy worn and frayed. It was on the shelf in the back room, next to a copy of Gail Sheehy’s Passages, a book of his mother’s. And while his recollection of Ruskin’s line wasn’t exact, Morris knew he wrote about the curse of not knowing. Simple clarity, clean truth. Half the evil in the world.

  Andrea was in his arms, desired; she was not what he liked. A difference he’d be hard pressed to define, but a difference he intrinsically understood.

  Stefani clambered into the back of his mind. She, too, was wrong. They both were wrong. Nothing could come from either, except damage. Remorse.

  Reluctantly wresting free from Andrea the second time, he felt the presence of someone else, a hard stare. Turning, he found Mrs. Cruxo on the other side of the bar, barely two feet away, her head propped in her hands and an expression of boredom lining her face, like she was watching a poorly produced TV commercial for a local butcher’s shop for the hundredth time in a row.

  “Right, like, can I help you?” Andrea asked. Mrs. Cruxo’s lumpy, baked-apple face turned from Morris to Andrea, examined her closely, then turned back to Morris, where her eyes settled on him with a look of pleading.

  Clearing his throat, Morris wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve and said, “Another, please.” He motions his hand like he was conjuring a coin from thin air. “Another two beers.”

  Mrs. Cruxo slowly lifted herself from her propped position and lumbered to the beer taps, moving like gravity dealt with her differently than others.

  “Hasn’t she ever seen two people kiss?” Andrea asked, her hand resting on Morris’s neck. “You need a haircut,” she told him, lightly tugging at his hair.

  “This isn’t right,” Morris said, confused. Half the evil in the world comes from people not knowing what they like. He studied Andrea, her black hair, the lines guiding the skin around her eyes and mouth. Her lips were lopsided, the lower one thicker. Morris looked for answers in them, hoping the sight of them alone would settle and calm him. This is not what makes me happy, he thinks. “Andrea,” he said, “I feel—what? I just—”

  “Right, I know,” she replied. “Guilt. It’s so nice to finally feel something.”

  “I’m not myself these last couple of days,” he said. Stefani, Jetski, Andrea. He felt his life had been yanked from him like a bear ripping a baby from a stroller; fierce, forceful, unalterable. “What I mean is, we just can’t—”

  “I know we can’t, right? But I know we have,” she said. Her cell phone rang. She looked at number. “George,” she said, her voice flat. “He’s sorry now, that’s why he’s calling.” She answered it. “Right,” she said to her husband. “Right, right. No, I know, right.” She hung up. “I hate to go,” she told Morris, “but I have to go. I have to face what needs facing, right?” She popped a cinnamon Altoid in her mouth and stood. “We’ll talk,” she said, and dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar. She then gave Morris a passionate parting kiss and walked out.

  Morris stared at the bar’s door, at the point Andrea last occupied before stepping out into the world and night, unsure of what had taken place. Two fresh beers sat before him, two half drunk ones. Morris slid the twenty toward Mrs. Cruxo. She slid it back, as if to say “On the house,” or “You need it more than me.”

  “Mors, damn it,” his father calls, “get in here.”

  He finds his father standing in the middle of the room, fresh from the nightly shower, one he takes prior to bed. A towel’s wrapped around his waist. The phone’s in one hand. The other holds a pair of yellow panties. Stefani’s. From Friday. Her surprise.

  “Who’s on the phone?” Morris asks, ignoring the panties.

  “Some girl,” Seymour says. “Been calling all evening.” He shakes the panties like they’re a bloody cat’s pelt. “Something you want to tell me?” he asks.

  Morris takes the panties from his father, stuffs them in his pocket. “I need some privacy, Daddy,” he says, handling the phone. He covers the mouthpiece. “I need a minute,” Morris says.

  Seymour doesn’t move.

  “Alone.”

  Seymour doesn’t move.

  “In private,” Morris says.

  Seymour grudgingly leaves. “We need to talk,” he tells his son. His voice is tinged with something like pride. “We need a good talk.”

  Putting the phone to his ear, Morris says, “Hello?”

  It’s Stefani. Her voice is strange, ragged. “Mr. Charlies tried to kill me.”

  It takes Morris a moment to register what she’s said. “What?”

  “This afternoon, Mr. Charlies tried to run me down with a white stretch limo.”

  “You sure it was him?” Morris asks, unable to picture Mr. Charlies driving. “You sure it wasn’t someone else driving a limo?”

  “He wasn’t driving,” Stefani says. “He was in the back, being chauffeured.” She’d been at Central Park, she explains, was crossing Fifty-seventh Street toward the Plaza Hotel. “I hear this screech and this limo roars right at me. I had to jump out of the way, you know. Like really jump.”

  “Mr. Charlies was being chauffeured?” Morris doesn’t believe it. “Stefani, I think—”

  “It’s ’cause of that cheese I stole,” she says. “He’s out to kill me.”

  “He’s not going to kill you over Brie,” Morris says, but then isn’t so sure.

  “His driver nearly ran me down. And when I go to yell at him, the driver just ignores me, walks around to the other side of the limo and opens the back door. That bitch Mr. Charlies steps out, dressed in an all-white suit like that guy from that old TV show with the midget, Fantastic Island or whatever. I just wanted to spit on him.”

  “So you’re telling me Mr. Charlies was chauffeured to the Plaza?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In a limo?”

  “Yeah, a white one. And you should’ve seen his driver,” Stefani says. “Huge, like he had that disease where you grow and grow and can’t stop growing. A freak. And black. Like really, really black. I’d have gone at Mr. Charlies myself if it wasn’t for his driver. The guy scared me.”

  Morris doesn’t respond, can’t respond, his head soaked with images.

  The issue of Stefani’s panties, Seymour somehow finding them, is a twig in a swollen river; the currents have already carried it off and rounded the bend.

  “Mr. Charlies,” Morris says aloud. “Outside of his store.” It wasn’t an impos
sibility, but like a sighting of the South American quetzal, it was something rare.

  “That bitch Mr. Charlies will pay. But listen,” Stefani says, “I got to get off the phone. Promise me two things, though.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Morris says, half listening.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, yes. I’m listening. Two things,” he says.

  “First, meet me after school tomorrow. Ray’s Pizza.”

  “Tomorrow?” he says. “Okay, I can do that.”

  “Promise.”

  “Ray’s. After school,” he says. Half the evil in the world. Tomorrow he’ll tell her, “No more.” He’ll tell her they can’t keep on. “What’s the second?” he asks.

  There’s a hesitation on the line. He can hear Stefani breathing. “Prom,” she finally says. “Promise to take me to Junior Prom.”

  Chapter 24