“You have to worry about staying safe. And keeping your child safe.”
“That, too,” I said.
Chastity is the other vow nuns take. Maybe that was why I was scheduled to go to another town, another house, another school, another identity, because Patty Bancroft, who said over and over again that she had finally been beaten senseless by her banker husband until her face had had to be rebuilt by one of the plastic surgeons who worked for her now pro bono, had never remarried. Maybe she knew about Mike Riordan. Maybe I’d known about Mike Riordan all along. Maybe I’d tried not to notice how awkward it was for him to look at me, even in the school library or on the sidelines of a game. Maybe I’d convinced myself that I wouldn’t be seduced by how comforting it was, just to know that someone bigger than me was looking out for my son. That’s what had first gotten to me about Bobby, the idea that someone would keep me safe and sound, look out for Frannie better than Frannie could look out for herself. The feel of his arm around me. The way he held my coat. Jesus Christ, the illusions you manage to sell yourself, better than any car salesman. I’d done it again with Mike Riordan, except that instead of convincing myself that he was everything, the way I had with Bobby twenty years ago, I’d convinced myself that he was nothing at all.
There was no lake in Lake Plata, just a sluggish reservoir and a community pool, but Mike took us to the ocean the Saturday after the trip to the carnival. He came with a cooler full of soda in the back of his Toyota, and an armful of old blankets; I made fried chicken and potato salad.
“Can Bennie come?” Robert asked.
“I think it would be better this time if it was just us,” I said.
“Just us, like me and you?”
“And Mike,” I said.
“I can’t call him that,” Robert said. “I have to call him Mr. Riordan.”
“I think when we do things like this with him you can call him Mike.”
“What do you mean, when we do things like this?”
“When we all go out together.”
“Are we going to go someplace together after this?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I’m calling him Mr. Riordan,” Robert said.
He compromised. He called him nothing at all. When we arrived at the beach, Robert ran toward the water, kicked his shoes aside at the tide line, and went in up to his knees while we struggled with the blanket. When Mike joined him in the surf, he moved away, as though the two were magnets, naturally, inevitably repelling one another. When I went into the water, he positioned himself between Mike and me almost unthinkingly. To anyone watching from the long crowded stretch of white beach, flat and glittering slightly in the midday sun, our movements must have looked like choreography of a strange sort. Our conversation was like that strange, dissonant modern music I picked up from time to time on classical stations, fit and starts with no melody. Mainly Mike talked to Robert, and Robert ignored him:
“I hear that that team from Lake Oijda is going to be good.”
“Your mother makes good fried chicken.”
“I brought a Frisbee if you want to play.”
“Robert, you’re being rude,” I finally said.
“I just don’t feel like talking,” he mumbled, and ran back into the sea.
I stood to watch him pushing out into the deeper water. The swell of the waves, the air making a floating bolster of the seat of his striped trunks, the working of the wings of his shoulder blades as he fought the current—he looked as though he was trying to fly, to rise up, to take off. He was a good strong swimmer, my boy, although he’d been afraid of the water at first. But he did it to please his dad, when he was three, went to the Y in downtown Brooklyn, dipped his little pointed face below the surface of the water as though he was going into a cave.
I shouldn’t have come to the beach. The beach was Bobby to me. The smell, the sharp sun, the sand. I could see his shoulders, the muscles working as he pulled his shirt over his head and swam out so that he was only a dark divot on the horizon. The lifeguards would blow their whistles and demand he come back, and slowly, arrogantly, he would. He would walk over to the lifeguard stand and speak to them and then go back out, and this time they would leave him alone, as though he had some special dispensation from the everyday rules of safety and common sense. When Robert was smaller he would stand at the water’s edge and watch, the whole line of his back rigid, and when he was older he would swim up and down in shallower water, parallel to the shore. And I knew he was just waiting for the day when he was brave enough to strike out after Bobby, shoulder to shoulder into water so deep that there was no imagining what was underneath your feet.
I can’t swim. Never could. My skin burns and I keep my clothes on over my suit for all but a few minutes on the beach. My parents took us to Coney Island, when we were children, my mother carrying the rented umbrella and the bag of towels. It was a lot of trouble for nothing. Grace and I huddled in the shade, running in our T-shirts to and from the water like nocturnal animals woken up in the middle of the day. My insteps, peeking out from the broad shadow of the umbrella, burned so badly they had to be covered in salve as white as their natural color.
Bobby and Robert never even wore sunscreen.
“I think we’ve ruined a beautiful friendship here,” I said.
“No we haven’t. We’re still friends.”
“Not you and me. I don’t know, maybe you and me. But definitely you and Robert.”
Mike Riordan squinted through his sunglasses and shrugged. He was like me, already a bright, feverish-looking pink. An Irish tan, we’d called a sunburn when we were kids. “What would you have felt like if someone took your mother out?” he said.
I laughed. “It’s not imaginable to me that anyone would take my mother out,” I said.
“There you go,” said Mike Riordan. “Sometimes I think it’s the strangest thing—we grow up in our families seeing our parents as completely sexless beings, and then we’re supposed to know how to have relationships.”
“My parents were completely sexless beings.”
“In your mind, maybe. That’s what we all think. My parents used to send all of us to nine o’clock mass on Sundays and then they’d go to the eleven o’clock together. I was twenty-three years old before I finally figured out why they fought us so hard when one of us wanted to sleep in and go to later mass.”
“I bet your mother just needed the sleep.”
“Nope. I asked her one day. She said, oh, grow up, Michael, you have six brothers and sisters.”
That was our first date, I suppose. At least that was what Robert seemed to assume. He appeared to know instantly, almost chemically, that Mr. Riordan had gone from being a friend to being a threat. I suppose I’d had a chemical reaction, too, the first time we went running together after the carnival. The sound of us breathing sounded different to me, and when we brushed up against one another accidentally, bare arm to bare arm, as we had dozens of times, we now both lurched back to our own side of the dusty track. No matter what Cindy said, and said, and said again, I wasn’t attracted to Mike Riordan, didn’t have a jones for him, as Clarice Blessing, the pretty, smart-mouthed black nurse in the ER on my shift, used to say about any good-looking man who came in with a broken bone or even a bullet wound. Once, I remember, Bobby came in when he’d had to get my signature on some bank papers and Clarice had been behind the front desk. “Tasty,” she said, before someone told her who the dark guy in the pressed jeans and the white shirt was. “Tasty but dangerous.” That’s how I thought of my taste in men: tasty but dangerous. Mike Riordan was the least dangerous guy I’d ever known, and every time I thought to myself, well, Fran, he’s just not your type, I had to remind myself that my type was the type who left marks.
“Bennie asked me if Mr. Riordan was your boyfriend,” Robert said one day after school.
“Oh yeah? What’d you say?”
“I said you didn’t have a boyfriend.”
The next week Mi
ke took us out for pizza and a PG movie. One Saturday we went bowling and then ate Chinese at a cinder-block place back behind the supermarket that turned out to be pretty good. Robert pointedly asked for chopsticks, while Mike used a fork. “You will have a great dinner with two people you really like,” Mike read off his fortune cookie. “Let me see that,” said Robert. He squinted in the dim light of the restaurant, hung with red-and-gold paper lanterns and signs for Chinese beer with a dragon curled around the bottle. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” Robert read accusingly. “Yeah, that too,” Mike said. “I think that’s what we’re looking at right here, a single step.”
“I hate fried rice,” said Robert. “Fried rice isn’t real Chinese food.”
“Eat the dumplings,” I said.
“Or whatever,” said Mike, shoveling in fried rice with his fork. You had to admire his patience.
The beginning of March, the air softening, turning warmer, Mr. Castro took Bennie and Robert to a jai alai game at an arena an hour and a half south of Lake Plata, and Mike took me to a restaurant in Lakota named La Caravelle, where they set everything on fire at the table except the wine. I was starting to look at him differently, that way you do, seeing the pale hairs on the back of his hands, the places at the corners of his brow where his hairline was beginning to inch back along the crown, the V of his shirt where his throat met his chest. The fourth time we were out—Robert away for the night, me in a dress and heels—I was afraid of him. I kept my knees from nudging his beneath the table.
“Can I ask about your divorce?” Mike said when they had put the cherries flambé in front of us.
“Do you have to?”
“Robert seems like he thinks that you and his father will get back together.”
“Did he say that?”
“Not exactly. He does seem to think that you won’t be around here for long, like you’re going back to where you come from. Which I guess means he believes you’re going to get back together.”
“Don’t all kids say that?”
“Lots of them. Sometimes it’s true.”
“In this case it’s not. I stayed with him a lot longer than I should have because eventually I thought I’d get perfect enough to make things better. I figured just by being nice, or being quiet, or being pretty, or sweet, or stupid, I could make things all right. I was wrong.”
“For the record, I already think you’re pretty perfect.”
“Don’t say that. That’s what screws everything up, that perfect crap. Because the people who don’t stay, they leave because its not perfect, because they think it’s supposed to be. Or my sister. She gets involved with one shitty married guy after another and she’s managed to convince herself that it’s because she’s working out this, that, or the other thing. But really it’s because if she met some nice available man who loved her she’d have to settle. He’d be nice but not smart enough, or smart but not handsome enough, or something. No one likes to settle, even though we all do.”
Mike looked down at his hands. “Sorry,” he finally said.
“Jesus,” I said. “What set me off that time?”
“I said you were perfect.”
“Well, there you go,” I said, and we both smiled and then looked down at the table again. The check lay there like a message, as though if I picked it up instead of a scrawl of abbreviated entrées and numbers there would be some words, some warning: Fran Benedetto, Fran Flynn, Beth Crenshaw, whoever you are, whatever you call yourself, why the hell are you doing what you’re doing, out of the frying pan into the fire, you’re not single, you’re not ready, you’re not interested, you’re not who this man thinks you are, you’re not who you think you are, you’re not.
I looked at his hands. I couldn’t help myself. They were big, the line of the knuckles knobby and square, and I wondered what he would say if I asked him if he’d ever hit a woman, and knew that I didn’t need to ask. Whatever it was that had made me soft and wet and warm whenever Bobby Benedetto whispered in my ear was part of whatever it was that made him twist my arm and slap my face. I’d been seduced by the danger I only faintly divined when I was twenty years old and the danger was being caught by the cops with my jeans around my ankles on a bench along the beach in Far Rockaway. I looked at Mike Riordan across the table as he took his credit card from a brown leather wallet and knew that he was maybe the safest man I’d ever met, and that that was his bad luck, and mine, too. Patty Bancroft used to talk about how her husband had been two men, really, one mild and avuncular, the other a purple-faced monster. But Bobby was all of a piece, and if anyone had asked me, when we both were young, if I thought he could ever do what he did, I would have said, no, my God, are you crazy? and deep inside a part of me would have known, not that it was possible, but that it was inevitable.
“You look a little tired,” Mike said.
“I am.”
Cindy likes to lecture me about how different dating is today than it was twenty years ago when we did it last, but she gets most of her information from daytime talk shows and the dark hints she picks up from single mothers to whom she sells Avon on her evening calls. She keeps telling me that men now expect you to put out—she still says put out, Cindy, as though sex is transactional—on the first date. But that isn’t the problem. The problem is that there is less to do on a date when you are a grownup. Dancing at bars seems silly, and there are no more of the kind of Saturday-night parties where you can French kiss in the corners. As we left La Caravelle, the owner in his rusty tuxedo bobbing and grinning and urging us to return, I realized that Mike Riordan and I were running out of restaurants.
“Love is lovelier the second time around,” Cindy liked to say.
“How the hell would you know?”
“Oh, don’t be so touchy,” she said. “You know how few single men out there are really interested in a relationship?”
“I’m not interested in a relationship,” I said.
“Oh, please,” Cindy said.
“Please come inside,” Mike said when we got to his place, in a condo complex out by the city limits. And when we were inside, in the living room with a couch and matching love seat that looked as though they’d been arranged in exactly the same way they’d been arranged in the furniture store, he said, “Please stay.” I wasn’t used to a man who asked, a man who said please, and, later, thank you, bashfully, boyishly, and something about it irritated me. But still I went along, maybe to prove to myself that I could love a nice man, a good man, a man who would look at his hands when I gave him a hard time and not use them against me. I went into the bedroom, listened to the sound of zippers coming down and shoes hitting the floor as though they were sounds from some dumb show on the radio, sound without pictures. I tried to be there, I really did, but it was as though the wine and the dark numbed me, sent me into a trance. I was watching myself doing what I was doing, envisioning the curve of my back above the slight swell of my hips, looking at the cesarean scar that his fingers found hidden beneath the hair. I kept my eyes shut, but it was as though my eyes were in his hands. He kept whispering my name, and the sound of it was soothing, almost hypnotic. Beth Beth Beth Beth, and “yes” I finally said, and perhaps it was that that made me open my eyes, and remember all in a rush suddenly the last time I had had sex with another man, so vividly, so detailed that it might as well be happening again, in this strange bed with the plaid sheets and the dark wood headboard. It was like having a ghost there, hanging over me, pushing his knee between my own, holding me down with the weight of his chest, his chest hard and furred with black hair, his harsh guttural whisper, like a knife at my throat: “Come on. Come on.” Using himself as though his whole body was a knife, cutting into me, breathing fire and Canadian Club into the side of my face, his jaw set so hard that I could feel the stone of the joint digging into my cheek.
“Beth,” Mike Riordan whispered again, and I had to look up at him, had to keep my eyes open, to remind myself that it was not Bobby, that
Bobby’s hair was not light, his shoulders not sloped that way, his face not soft like this. Mike looked back at me and he must have seen something in my face. Maybe I was wearing the look I’d had that last night with Bobby, as he raped me. There ought to be a different word to describe what it is when it’s your husband who does it, when it’s a man you’ve invited, longed for, loved, hated, feared, known, desired. But there’s only that one. I remember sitting with a college student one night who’d been pulled into an abandoned building near the subway and sodomized by a teenager with a gun. “It’s like he stole my soul,” she sobbed, eloquent in defeat. Maybe Mike looked down and saw the face of a woman who’d had her soul stolen, who was broken and empty, sere as a seed pod in autumn. Whatever was in my face, he couldn’t go on.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I was hurting you.”
“No. It’s okay.”
He fell back against the pillows, his forearms crossed over his face. He smelled like lemon cologne and his voice cracked like a boy’s. “Oh, God,” he said, “please don’t say that. Don’t say it’s okay. For four years I lived with a woman who forced me to pry everything out of her with a crowbar. I’d say, Laurie, what’s going on? What’s the matter? It’s okay. That’s all she ever said.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m tired.” I could not look at him, nor he at me. I could still feel Bobby on me, like a weight on my chest.
“Beth,” Mike said as I got out of the car at my own place.
“It’s okay,” I said over my shoulder, and went inside and took a shower.
I love to look at Robert when he is flushed and sleepy, his face a little crumpled, his eyes half-closed. Sometimes, after Bobby hit me, I’d go in and look at Robert and make myself feel better. Make myself settle down and shut up. When he’s headed toward or away from sleep, Robert’s face looks innocent, unmarked, as though nothing bad has ever happened to him. Will ever happen to him. He looked that way standing by my bed, holding an old earthenware bowl with a few greasy kernels at the bottom. “Could you make us some more peanut-butter popcorn?” he said, so nicely, even though he knew the answer was yes.
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