Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  What worried Zoe: She may in fact have sought to murder him. He was her first gentle man, her first black man, and she loved him with a hunter's ferocity. Didn't she think about putting her hands inside him? Couldn't she get herself wet by imagining biting his perfect ass, not gently but ravenously, sinking her teeth into the roundness of his cheeks, their maddening, muscular innocence? She thought of herself inhabiting Levon, scooping him out. She ran her fingers through his pubic hair and had an acid thought about Cassandra at dinner, her jaw hinged so it opened as a snake's jaw does, so she could swallow bodies nearly as large as her own. Hold on, she thought. Don't get too loose. She thought of trees dripping with snakes. She watched Levon's profile.

  Yes, he would leave soon. He had never been here, not really, and he was going somewhere she couldn't follow. He dreamed in a language different from hers.

  She ran her finger slowly down over her breasts to the curve of her stomach. Nothing stirred there, not yet. She thought he would leave before the child started showing itself, and she thought that was probably right. She wouldn't tell him. She didn't have the words. And, anyway, this was her child, hers alone. Levon would want to give it a name she couldn't know. He'd want to cup the child's feathery soul in his hands and add it to his own fierce inventory. She looked at him for a long time. She watched the progress of sleep on his strange, beautiful face.

  She had the nameless part of him. She would keep it safe; she'd talk to it in a language that was perfect and true.

  “Goodbye, lover,” she whispered. Without opening his eyes, he said, “Good night.”

  Then the drug kicked in, and she followed a dream out of the room.

  1982/ The evening of the day the divorce papers were signed Constantine bought a six-pack and drove out to his houses. He didn't want to see Magda. He didn't want to do anything and he didn't want to do nothing. He parked on a street, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. He waited for a sense of calm to arrive but as time passed he only found himself growing more and more irritated with the lighted windows, the little arrivals and departures, the formation of yellow ceramic ducklings lined up behind a white ceramic mother duck. Who did they think they were, these people? Suckers, rubes, busting their nuts to make the payments on these shitbox houses, walls you could break through with a kitchen spoon and aluminum window frames that would keep out the cold about as well as a raincoat would keep you dry if you fell in the ocean. He drove to another street—Amity Lane—and then to a third, Meadowview. On Meadowview, in the middle of a block, one of the units stood empty. Number 17, right. Everybody who built on spec knew that, for some reason, certain houses seemed to carry a curse. They were dogs, they were lemons, though they'd been built from the same material, the same pine and plaster, as all the others. Same two-car garage, same wall-to-wall, same kitchen fixtures. In Constantine's tracts, they were three or four doors down from their identical twins, for Christ's sake. But, for some reason, these houses wouldn't sell. They'd stay dark and empty as the rest of the tract filled up. Birds would start nesting in the eaves, skunks would whelp pups in the sub-basements. Kids would break in to smoke marijuana or to fuck in the empty rooms, to write smut on the walls. Finally you'd cut someone a deal, let him have the place for five grand or so below market value, and sometimes that was the end of it but sometimes, with a few of these houses, the trouble just refused to go. The new owners would default on their payments, and then after the bank foreclosed and Constantine bought the place back from the bank the next new owners—nice people, regular types—would die in a car accident or lose a child or just disappear one day, with the dishes still neatly stacked in the cupboards. No one in the business believed in curses or ghosts, sacred burial grounds, anything like that, but occasionally, for whatever reason, there were these houses like the one at 17 Meadowview, empty more often than not and prone, when occupied, to ill fortune. There were these houses that stood in a little vortex of bad luck, though their paint was fresh and their chimneys straight.

  Constantine got out of his car and walked slowly around the silent house, taking in its simple details. White aluminum siding, aluminum eight-over-eights, green fiberboard shutters he'd bought by the gross. Too new and clean to be haunted, he thought. The house held its darkness inside it, the empty silence of its rooms, though he knew the interior as well as he knew the rooms of his own home. From the foyer (the wives loved little touches like calling the entrance a “foyer”), you went straight ahead to the living room with its dining el. To the left was a kitchen and a little linoleumed foxhole called a family room. To the right were three tiny bedrooms, two baths. Total square footage, eleven hundred fifty-five. Constantine strolled to the back yard, a patch of raw dirt that had been trucked in from Passaic to fill in the marshland that had once been here, just a big wet tangle of cattails and frogs and the occasional whooping crane. He stood on the bare earth, facing the house he'd built. There was the sliding glass door that would open into the living room, there the high rectangular window of the master bed-room. He stooped, picked up a stone and threw it, without rage, almost speculatively, at the bedroom window. The stone went through the glass the way it would disappear into black ice, with a small clean sound, leaving its jagged, white-edged shape behind. Constantine wasn't sure how he felt. Angry, maybe, but maybe it was more like empty, like he needed to break every window in this goddamned house just to get to zero again, just to start feeling something simple like rage. He threw another stone, and another. He broke all three panes of the master-bedroom window, then broke the sliding glass door, which would not shatter but only took the stones like a body taking bullets, one hole and then another. He hurled stone after stone and then, growing nervous about the police but still full of nothing at all, no particular feeling beyond a vague urge to be out of there, he got quickly back into his car and drove away.

  It was a clear, warm night. The thruway had its own steady rhythm, its soft white glow. There was some kind of comfort in driving and he told himself, for almost fifty miles, that he was in fact just driving, working something out of his system. It wasn't until he'd passed Manhattan that he admitted, sheepishly, that he was probably going to drive all the way to Susan's place in Connecticut.

  He got there after midnight. The sight of Susan's house, a substantial colonial standing among mature trees on a solid piece of property, brought tears to his eyes. She had made it. She was happy, safe; she had the life he'd wanted for his children and himself. He got out of his car and walked quiedy across the lawn, listening. He could hear nothing except the crickets and the faint sigh and rustle of the night itself. No sound of the baby crying. But, hey, the lights were on upstairs. He stepped up onto the porch and stopped there. What would he tell Susan when she came to the door? The truth would have to do. Today he and her mother were officially divorced and he couldn't stand the thought of being with anyone but Susan. Still, he didn't knock on the door or ring the bell. Something moved in him, some furious remorse, and he didn't want Susan to see it. He didn't want the liquor and sympathy of her husband, a Milquetoast, a nice boy who'd made it because his parents were rich and because he wasn't torn by the passions that sometimes ruled other men. Constantine didn't want to be old in this house, or alone, or defeated in any way. And yet he didn't want to be anywhere else. He loved the house, the sturdy prosperous lines of it, the dormers and dovecote, the eight-over-eights. This was the real thing, here. These were the details he and Nick Kazanzakis reproduced, in particle board and aluminum, on the houses they built down in Jersey and Long Island. It had a few of the same details—Dutch-style door, bay window—as the little haunted number on Meadowview Drive. Constantine wasn't ready to drive away, but he couldn't ring the bell. He couldn't present himself as a sad case, a creature in need of shelter. He stood on the porch for a while until he heard the baby's soft fretful crying, drifting down from an upstairs window, and then, as if he'd been summoned, he went back to his car. He stayed there until all the lights were out. He watched the progress of
darkness, the play of shadows over clapboard, as mother and husband and baby slept within. An hour passed, and another. He watched the stealthy, restless business of the night being conducted until the night itself forgot he was there, until his waking presence had been subsumed and he had joined the silence that rose up from the earth and met another silence, a deeper, icier one, that fell from the stars. He saw a raccoon waddle with unhurried propriety across his daughter's lawn. He saw an owl lift silently out of an elm tree like the spirit of the tree itself. He heard callings, little chirps of pleasure or alarm or simple assertions of being. He heard one long birdcall, a terrified sound that was unmistakably a question. Quickly, in shrill bursts: Can it be? Can it be? Can it be? He lit another cigarette, opened another beer. It had only been kisses and hugs. He'd never messed with her. He loved her, for Christ's sake. He was her, in a way, and she was him. If that made any sense. Kisses were harmless. Kisses were okay. He watched the night pass. At one moment he felt as if he were guarding the house from the living darkness that swarmed around it. At another he felt that he was homeless, destitute, come to confess his shortcomings and seek whatever protection he could find at the gate of a nocturnal city.

  1982/ Smallness was over for him. He'd lost all interest in being lithe and clever, a monkey boy. At twenty-nine, Will wanted size. He wanted to move with the ease and authority of geography. No more nervous little thin-boy dance. He was tired of making jokes. He was ready to look a little dangerous, to need no apology.

  He started at a gym on the outskirts. He went faithfully, in a cold tumult of shame. He was ashamed of his aging boy's body and he was ashamed of his desire to improve it. It was easier to be cynically, defiantly skinny. It was easier to sit on a barstool and make cracks. Now he was admitting it—he owned this vanity. He wanted what fools want; he shared their belief in the flesh. Still, shivering with embarrassment, he went. He drove to the gym after school let out, put himself through his routines. The gym he'd chosen lay in a failing shopping center in Maiden, far from the orbits of all his worlds. At this gym, middle-aged men sweated on exercise bikes. Bands of thickly muscled boys with outdated hair-cuts hoisted enormous weights and spoke to one another in loud, encouraging insults. The boys could have been the brothers of his old friend Biff, noisily confident, in love with their own beauty and ready to murder any man who admired it as they did. Will kept to himself. He detested and, grudgingly, admired them from across the carpeted field of barbells and machinery.

  He was mortified and he was faithful. He grimaced under five-pound weights. Sometimes, when he was red-faced and exhausted after lifting an especially insignificant weight, he glanced around and smiled, helplessly eager to let any witnesses know he was in on the joke. When he saw that no one had been watching him and no one appeared to care, he picked up another weight and started again.

  The five-pound barbells became easy for him and he promoted himself to tens, then to fifteens. After almost two months he began to notice a slight swelling in his chest. At first he refused to believe it was the result of his efforts. He had not imagined his body capable of responding to discipline or hard work. His body had always seemed to live on its own. It had looked the way it looked, stayed healthy without sufficient rest or abstention from liquor or any elaborate attention to questions of nourishment. Now Will examined his reflection and saw that two small mounds of muscle were beginning to rise under the flat white skin of his chest. He turned sideways, then faced front again. There they were, undeniably. Little humps of muscle he'd made.

  He worked harder, and he grew. It felt like a miracle. The muscles of his chest revealed themselves and then, more slowly, the muscles of his shoulders and back. He felt as if a second body were emerging. He watched as it asserted its shape: the raised straps of his triceps, the solid pillows of biceps. He started buying books on nutrition and, still stinging with shame, buying exercise magazines in which glossy, tanned men demonstrated new exercises. He tried the new exercises. He bought vitamins, forced himself to eat five meals a day. He lived inside this new body, watching its changes with a hope he had not yet been able to manage for another man. He was embarrassed about that, too—what kind of person was he turning into?—but he let himself go. He let himself be admired, by his own eyes and the eyes of others. He was becoming a hunk. He, Billy, the skinny boy whose only powers were his wit and his talent for saying no. At the gym, as he grimaced under his increasing loads, he spurred himself on by thinking about bulk and power, the end of doubt. When the weather turned he bought tank tops; he bought his first pair of Speedos. He began living as two people, the self who had been a frightened child and the self whose landscape of musculature threw small flesh-colored shadows on his own skin. Occasionally he imagined showing his enlarged body to his father. He imagined his father's admiration and, more obliquely, his father's desire. Sometimes Will felt guilty for spending his time and his energies on a project so perishable. Sometimes he was filled with a soaring sense of possibility that took him back to the days, more than ten years ago, when he went driving at night with his friends, in those big borrowed cars that could take them anywhere.

  1982/ “Hello?”

  “Mary Stassos, please.”

  “Speaking.”

  “Mary, this is Cassandra. Zoe's friend. Do you remember me?”

  “Cassandra. Yes.”

  “Mary, listen. Zoe's okay, but she's in the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “Don't get all plucked, she's okay.”

  “What is it? What happened?”

  “Well, honey, she took a few too many pills.”

  “What?”

  “She slipped up a little. Too many little red something-or-others, it could happen to anybody. Now listen, she's fine, they say they'll let her out tomorrow or the next day. She didn't want me to call you, and I almost didn't, but then I thought, what the hell, I've never obeyed anyone, why start now? And really, a mother ought to know about these things.”

  “Where is she? What hospital?”

  “St. Vincent's. I'm here now.”

  “I'll be right there. And, Cassandra?”

  “Mm-hm?”

  “Will you stay with her until I get there?”

  “I wouldn't abandon my daughter, now, would I?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Figure of speech. Now, honey, get in that car of yours and drive.”

  “I can be there in an hour.”

  “Don't break your neck, love. She's fine, honestly, I'd tell you if she wasn't. A girl makes a mistake every now and then. And, Mary?”

  “Yes?”

  “The baby's fine. When you get here, you and I have got to do some serious talking to this girl about behaving like she has in her condition. We'll be an avalanche of nagging—”

  “The baby?”

  “Listen, just get here. Girl, you've got some catching up to do.”

  Zoe was asleep, lying thin and gray in a hospital bed. Mary stood watching for signs of her daughter. The girl in the bed had a blankness, an anyone quality. She was thin, not pretty, her hair lank and unclean on the pillow. Mary found herself staring at Zoe's hands. The face was waxen, slumbering, lost in its silent demonstration of how skin can lie upon a skull. Mary looked at Zoe's hands and saw her there, in the curl and twitch of the fingers. There was her daughter's inchoate being, the creaturely push and pull Mary remembered. There was the fretful one-year-old, asleep and dreaming in Mary's lap, cutting off the circulation in Mary's legs because she dared not shift her position for fear of waking Zoe and setting into motion another hour's worth of sourceless, inconsolable weeping.

  She was still watching Zoe's hands when a voice behind her said, “Mary?”

  It was a man in a dress.

  He stood in the hospital light, a tall man with garish red lips and enormous, spidery black fans of false eyelashes. He wore a black beehive wig and a red square-dancing dress, bristling with net and chiffon and synthetic red lace.

  “Yes?” Mary
said.

  “It's Cassandra.”

  Mary passed through an interval of dislocation, a loss of order like what she'd felt in Constantine's office the day she'd realized he was having an affair with fat, homely Magda. This was Cassandra. The words appeared in her head. Her daughter had taken an overdose and this was the woman Mary had liked so much on the telephone.

  “Sorry about all this,” Cassandra said. “I didn't have time to change, it's not what I ordinarily wear to emergency rooms.”

  Mary nodded. She said, “Cassandra.”

  “Oh, I know, I know. Life is full of surprises, isn't it? Have you talked to the doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you see? She's going to be fine.”

  “What happened?”

  “She wasn't doing Marilyn, if that's what you mean. I'm sure of it. Like I told you over the phone, it was a simple mistake. But she's got to stop this. You know how the young are, they think nothing can possibly happen to them.”

  A part of Mary floated to the ceiling and hovered there, watching herself stand beside her sleeping daughter and talk to a tall man in a red dress. A part of Mary asked questions and wanted answers.

  “Did you say something about a baby?” she said.

  “I thought you knew. She told me she'd told you. I kept saying to her, 'What do you think you're going to do, hide the kid for the first eighteen years?' I said, 'You're not Lucy Ricardo, don't try to come up with some kind of zany scheme.'”