Bliss (29 page)

On the lawn, Eva said, “I’m not really tired. I feel fine.” Her leg hurt, but she wasn’t favoring it as much as earlier.

“FINE. Me, too!” His smile was unnaturally wide and dazzling. “Even after all that. Shit! I feel great! Look at this fucking place! It’s OURS.”

The profanity hung on Dart’s mouth ugly as snot. It wasn’t his way. But his eyes were alive and glassy, and Eva felt close to him for having seen his little madness.

“I shouldn’t sing, huh?” He broke into a huge laugh. “I get—”

“You freak out.”

“Not ALWAYS. It’s when I sing with Sun, or when something else is bearing on me—it was that
guy
, Jeeter.
I know who he is
. And he’s
touched me now
, Eva! WITH HIS HANDS. And I’ve eaten Audrey’s FOOD. YOU don’t believe in it, Eva, but this place is
filled with people
who KNOW things, and if you do believe in
things unseen
, things not understood,
then you benefit
, you get CALLED.
Goddamn!
” His voice rang like through tubular bells.

“That guy Jeeter’s a fisherman, I think. Does tattoos on the side, Audrey said. A regular person.”

“Look DEEPLY, EVA!
Open
yourself.” He brushed her stomach with his fingers. “We’re gonna stay here a WHILE.”

D
art plopped on the couch at the Rowe House like he needed a minute. Closed his eyes like he wanted not sleep but some conscious dark. Eva opened the Rowe’s medicine cabinet, and along with the box of orange mosquito bracelets and suppositories and mouthwash faded almost to water were things Eva could use. Cotton swabs and crusty tweezers. Plus rubbing alcohol that Eva sniffed and figured to be still potent.

Eva’s cell rang weakly from under a towel and she ignored it. She carried the things to the bedroom, dumped them on the bed. “Dart,” she called. “Shower’s free.”

“Yeah?” He sounded miles away and malleable. “OKAY.”

He got in the shower and she went to the kitchen, put on a dented pot of water to boil, and dropped in the tweezers. Then she carried her supplies to the patio, along with the coconut oil Sunny’d given her. Eva flattened the chaise and pulled a chair and small glass-topped table beside it. She grabbed a plastic pail and walked the short distance to the shore. A few people from Édouard’s party stood on dry sand with cups of strong punch and cigarettes and wilting paper plates of food. They looked her way, but Eva paid them no mind and walked directly to the damp stripe closest to the water. There was faint light from Audrey and Ben’s patio, but it was the moon, even from within its halo, that lit Eva’s way. On her knees, she dug the pail’s lip into dense sand, and when she had what she wanted, she filled the pail to the top with seawater. The tide was dramatic and high and the water stung her leg wounds so she bit down on her tongue.

Dart’s voice like mortar fire called her name as Eva walked gamely back with her prize. He stood on the patio naked. The moon washed his skin a gleaming russet, warmed his eyes amber. Quarterback shoulders, belly soft, but flat, long meaty arms and penis and legs—all lithe and peacefully primed.

“You’re amazing,” Eva said.
This is purity
, she thought.
Realness
. No
who did what to whom when
. Eva set down the pail. “Really … like, beautiful.”

“Thanks. It’s what happened when I got off that stuff.”

“Lay down on that,” Eva said, back on strategy. She pointed to the chaise and flipped on the outdoor lights.
They’re weak
, she thought,
but with the moon, we’ll be fine
.

He thought she wanted to have sex there, but she went back in the kitchen, put the pot of water in the sink, added enough cold until she could reach her hand in and scrape the last of the crust from the tweezers with her fingernails. Eva put a pot of clean water back on the searing orange eye.

“Evey? You all right in there?” When she got back on the patio, he was on his back, fingers laced under his chest, like a corpse in a coffin. “Full moon,” he said. “Means rain.”

What is he? Chief Running Bear all of a sudden?
“I’m gonna do your back. Cleanse it.”

“Now?” He sat up. “Full moon isn’t a good time for this. Blood’ll be involved. Full moon isn’t a good time for a letting.”

A letting? Who says that?
But then Eva spoke and she couldn’t believe how serious she sounded. How serious she was. Eva allowed for a minute that whether what he said was true or not, it was his truth, and so she’d deal with it like that. “It is a full moon,” she said. “And I’m going to deal with your back with sand and water from the ocean. With coconut oil from the Philippines. With whatever else I’ve found here. If you do … bleed more or something, I think it’s for the best. I think whatever comes out needs to come out, and should. I think you’ll feel better.”
I’ll feel better if you’re better
.

“This is you? Or Jeeter told you what to do? Or Audrey?”

“It’s what I think you need. What I want to do. You have to lay down, turn over on your stomach.”

“I believe in stuff,” Dart said calmly. “You know that. Half the reason the herbs I’m taking work is because I believe they are. But they don’t work like real drugs do, Eva. I know how I acted tonight. Know how I can act, period. You can’t fix me.”

“I’m not trying to fix you.”
Yes, I am
.

“Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate your … impulse. And I understand the symbolism—a cleansing, cleaning my back, my background, I guess, letting impurities from my body and spirit.”

“How about your back is gross and needs care.”
And I want to care. I want to do something
.

He looked at her and said nothing.

“So if magical Audrey or Jeeter had told me to do it, you’d believe.”

Dart blinked in slow motion.

“Believe in me, then,” Eva said. “I believed in you. I came over here.”
I’m having the baby. I think I believe in you. And that’s all I’m about. Me, you, the baby, Cat
.

Dart turned over on his stomach. He put one hand atop the other and put his left jaw on his knuckles. As he closed his eyes, tears came
to Eva’s. But she knew how to keep working, however emotional she was. She knew how to use her emotions to meet her goals.

Eva sat in the chair near him, poured a puddle of alcohol on the table, and in it set the tweezers. They looked sharper cleaned. When she dipped a thin facecloth in the pail, and rubbed it over his back, he gripped the legs of the chaise. Eva scooped sand from the bottom of the pail. It was fine and mudlike and studded with tiny pieces of shell. She placed a few mounds of it on him and rubbed it from his shoulders to the small of his back. D’Artagnan set his jaw. She moved from her chair and sat on his butt and rubbed the sand into him harder. “Taking everything off that’s dead,” she said.

He let go the lounge legs and let his wrists drop to the stone floor. With a small cup, Eva poured seawater over his back. Her skirt was getting wet. Her wound burned, and her bandage loosened as water streamed down her thighs and calves. Dart flinched. Bumps and pimples on his back broke open. Eva thought the water would be good for them—mineral salts and microscopic algae—she’d been to enough spas to know. She went into the kitchen, added cool water to the boiling. It still scalded her hands a bit as she dipped and wrung out a dish towel. Back on the patio, she laid it steaming on Dart’s back, and he groaned so she thought he came. She repeated the process, and this time his moan was softer. When she lifted the second towel, his skin was still speckled, but more elastic and less dull, and the bumps, open or closed, had risen higher.

Eva thought, as she usually did, that his back was grotesque—ignored and left to rot, and somewhere in her there was a déjà vu of a slave whipped and of a woman trying to heal him while knowing that the back could be healed, but that the mind was out of reach.

She was determined and absorbed, alight with her own gesture. Sitting on his butt again, Eva picked up the tweezers and began a meticulous process of extraction. Alternately she pressed in with her instrument and dabbed clear welling oil or opaque oil and blood with the damp towel. His back wept rancid, teeny black-tipped snakes. Dart flinched, but he didn’t yelp. The side of his face she could see was stretched and squashed into a grimace. With the slightest push, double
pores sent up squiggles of whiteness. After thirty minutes of this, Dart was falling in and out of sleep.

Eva worked another forty-five minutes. She made her way down his back with patient precision. So zenned out by her chore, she heard her life’s music clearly over the fading sounds of the party next door.

Big bonus for you this year, Eva. Almost a quarter mil, Eva. Doscientos
cincuenta mil dólares después de impuestos, negrita.

Some women simply have a low threshold for pain
.

The sound of Tupac’s voice shook Eva from her reverie.
Édouard must’ve set up some turntables
, she thought.
And he’s playing my song
.

Eva’s mind started to click.
“Hit Em Up,” B-side to Tupac and K-Ci & JoJo’s 1996 “How Do You Want It?” One of the strongest double sides in hip hop history—really
the
strongest unless you counted Run-D.M.C.’s
1983 “It’s Like That” b/w “Sucker MCs” or Eric B. and Rakim’s “Eric B. for President” b/w “My Melody,” which—as much as I adore Run, and did fuck Rakim—I don’t. “Hit Em Up” is the most concentrated rush of fury ever recorded. Tupac daring death. Daring fools to murder him. Tupac acting like life wasn’t worth it, like here on earth you only pimp or get pimped, like mother-love’s triple-layered trigonometric algorithms are always reduced to coin tosses and Faustian choices. Like, as Prince put it—in 1984—on the evergreen soundtrack to his too-ripe
Purple Rain:
In this life/Things are much harder than in the afterworld/In this life/You’re on your own. So ruff/so tuff
, Eva thought, channeling Zapp’s Roger Troutman
. Tupac so dead and us so sad and the last days of his life so filled with bitter, toxic fruit. No dad for him, barely a mom. Have to have been abandoned early on to yell out, taunting “Five shots couldn’t drop me/I took it and smiled” Almost have to have been left alone, left to die, to become a true superstar
.

Édouard backed the record over and over that lyric, wearing an even deeper groove in the vinyl. The line, as it always had, stretched Eva’s wounds wide enough to halve her.

Eva startled Dart with a wash of seawater. He yelped and squirmed, and pushed himself up some with his palms.

She set the cup down, and Dart grabbed her wrist so that he almost snatched off the bracelet he’d given her.

“You’re not done, are you?”

Eva was thrilled and encouraged. “Almost.”

Relieved, Dart lay his head back down.

She emptied the bottle of rubbing alcohol over his back. His toes pointed immediately. His shoulders and ass tightened. He reached under himself to adjust his erection. Eva patted his back with a dry towel. He settled into light panting.

“You all right?” she said.

“I’m brand-new.”

For the last of it, Eva poured a dime of coconut oil on her palm. She rubbed them together until they were shiny and thinly covered
and then rubbed over the tiny new wounds and old scars, the raised hard places, the places most dry and still calloused over. Dart moaned again, faintly and insistently, and Eva knew enough to rise from her seat on his ass so he could turn over and she could sit on him and he could hold her hips and churn her in a way that could make him climax almost instantly. His stroke had her feeling high.

He could be my baby’s father. He should be
.

Stroke me. Love me
.

This could work. This should work
.

You could fuck me like this every time the baby’s asleep. Make more babies. Walk in the park with a stroller and a scooter. “What a lovely family,” they’ll say
.

I’ll take care of everything. You just take care of me, like this
.