Brood (7 page)

“Alice appears to be starving herself, Cynthia.”

“I know, I know. We're working on it. I'm giving her grass-fed organic meats with no hormones. I think she's worried about…about getting her period. Puberty. All the additives and chemicals in the commercial food supply push kids into puberty way too early. It's a crisis, worldwide. All those children's choirs? Like in Europe? They can't find kids who can sing the soprano parts. Even the ten-year-olds have these deep voices.”

“Why do you think they fear puberty, Cynthia?”

“What do you think? They've been told that for some of the kids whose parents went through those horrible fertility treatments—they've been told that things start getting crazy for those kids once they hit puberty. They're afraid. We all know that. Why shouldn't they be? It's not inappropriate; it's not crazy behavior. They feared their own parents were going to kill them—and fucking
eat
them. Of course they have fears. It would be psychotic if they
didn't
have fears.”

“They're going to end up back in the hospital if we don't intervene quickly,” the therapist says.

Cynthia shakes her head. She wills herself to calm down.

“It's a big step, Mr. White.”

“I appreciate that, Cynthia. And I commend you for your conservative approach. Too many of the parents I see are all too eager to give their kids whatever new pill comes down the chute. They're desperate, I suppose.”

“I'd like some time to think it over. Which antidepressant do you have in mind?”

“Oh, there's a host of them out there. And new ones coming out all the time. And maybe they'd benefit from something else on top of that. Something to stabilize them. Help them put on some weight. Help them get past some of their fears. It's just astonishing the things that can be done biochemically. Amazing stuff is being done.”

“That's what they told my sister and her husband about fertility drugs.”

White lowers his eyes, like some nineteenth-century gentleman showing his respect when a funeral carriage rolls by.

“No,” Cynthia says, suddenly adamant. “I don't think we're at that stage, not yet. I want to give them what they've never had.”

“Which is?”

“Love. Just pure unconditional love. A good stable home. The basic things that every child has a right to—things they have never had.”

“You can't love away the damage that's been done, Cynthia. It's not possible.”

Just then, the recording of those carillon bells playing “Some Enchanted Evening” fills the little room.

“Could they have left?” White asks, frowning, rising from his seat.

“I seriously doubt that,” Cynthia says. She turns in her chair. “Kids?”

Looking as if he's trying not to panic, White walks across his office and opens the door to the waiting room.

The sudoku puzzle book is on the floor, and other than that, there is no sign of either Alice or Adam.

“Kids?” cries Cynthia, with more urgency and less hope.

“They're gone!” White exclaims.

“They wouldn't do this,” Cynthia says. “I know them. They just wouldn't.”

The door leading to the outside is open. Garbage-y summer air wafts in. The white-noise machine on the table continues to make its breathy sound, like a stadium crowd cheering a mile away.

B
oy-Boy leaves Ezra and Annabelle's apartment and rides the elevator down to the lobby. Today was lucrative; the old man bought twice his usual amount and put an extra Benjamin in the envelope for a tip. No question about it: being dangled from a balcony brings out the best in some people. Ezra has been ultra-polite since that first time. Annabelle, however, hardly even glances in Boy-Boy's direction. All the sexual satisfaction Boy-Boy's product has made possible for her has had the opposite effect of dangling her from a balcony. It's made her a bit rude.
She act like me's not there,
Boy-Boy muses as the elevator makes its squeaky descent.

Speaking of not there, Boy-Boy wishes the elevator operator weren't there. Everyone in the crew, from Rodolfo on down, is on high alert.

Us's and thems like us's, we's going down one by one, Rodolfo reminds them all every time they go out to work.

Could the elevator operator be the one doing all this extermination? Boy-Boy wonders. Could this dark old man in a toy-soldier suit be working with whoever is picking off the crew? Or maybe the old man is the exterminator himself! No, no, makes no sense. The exterminator ain't working no fucking elevator, Boy-Boy reminds himself, calming down. But what if the real elevator operator is tied to a chair someplace, conked on the head, handkerchief stuffed in his mouth?

Nervously, Boy-Boy chews on a cuticle. The skin around each and every one of his fingernails is red and raw. He finds his own skin comforting and sort of delicious. Forget
sort of.
It's just plain delicious. He knows he has to be careful, though; it's a dangerous appetite. A couple guys in the crew took it too far, and the result was something even Boy-Boy cannot bear to think about, even though he prides himself on being a street-savvy warrior with nerves of steel.

The elevator moves so slowly.
Fuck me, the peeps in this place must be made out of time.
But at last they reach the lobby and the operator opens the grate, turning all those triangles into exclamation marks, and after that the outer door.

“Thank you,” Boy-Boy says, exiting as far from the elevator operator as possible to guard against some poisonous last-minute lunge. Across the tiled lobby, with its columns and potted plants, freedom waits, just beyond the heavy doors with their polished brass handles and all that money sunshine shining through.

“Son?” the elevator operator says as Boy-Boy leaves. “Sometimes a shower is in order.”

Up many flights, in Ezra and Annabelle's apartment, the shades are drawn, the ringers on the phones are off, and the music plays fairly loud, because although the walls in this stately old apartment building are thick, practically soundproof, Ezra and Annabelle plan to kick up a bit of a ruckus, and they want to make certain no busybody with time on his hands and an ear to the wall picks up on any of it.

They are undressed now, soaking delightedly in the enormous tub in the master bath with its bright blue border of Turkish tiles and solid gold faucets in the shape of swans. Out of some residual sense of modesty, as well as a lingering reluctance to put his aging, sagging, scarred body on prolonged display in front of his young wife, Ezra has poured several capfuls of Ethiopian bubble bath he recently purchased at Henri Bendel. His old exhausted penis lies curled beneath the scented froth of a trillion bubbles while Annabelle, perhaps mocking his modesty or perhaps having a bit of fun, has taken two scoops of bubbles and placed them over her nipples—it's how people in Ezra's business used to have to show girls in the bathtub, several decades ago, when a hint of pink could get you shitcanned.

The tub is fourteen feet long and eight feet wide, and so deep that it took a full hour to fill it. Clunky square tuberose-scented candles purchased from a store near the Piazza Navona burn along the edge of the tub. They also have two bottles of Icelandic springwater. The four vials of blood bought from Boy-Boy lie on their sides next to the water bottles, and, after drying his hands on Annabelle's hair, Ezra uncaps two of the vials and they both drink quickly, after which they both take swigs of the Icelandic water to wash the taste of salted copper from their mouths.

“If pennies could drool, this is what it would taste like,” Ezra says.

“It's like tomato soup that's been in the can so long it's gone weird on you,” says Annabelle. She dabs the corners of her mouth with the back of her hand; the little trace of blood pinks the soapy bubbles. She looks at it for a moment, aghast, but finds a way to laugh. She plunges her hand in the water to wash it clean. Baptism by Ethiopian bath gel!

“Shall we?” Ezra says, picking up vials three and four.

“It's a lot,” says Annabelle, suddenly cautious.

“You can never tell if you've had enough until you find out what it feels like to have too much,” Ezra says. It is one of the great pluses of being with a younger woman—you get to be the sage! You are an ever-burbling fountain of goddamned wisdom, is you what you are.

Ezra downs vial number two, and Annabelle does too.

“Feel it yet?” Ezra asks.

“Feel nauseous. Drinking some kid's blood? Fuck me.”

“I intend to.”

“I'm serious, Ez. This is crazy.”

“People do all kinds of things, my dear, to get to another level. Change things around, make things better. Crush up leaves and smoke them. Ferment grain and drink it. Swallow worms, right? Mescal? Eat mushrooms that grow out of cow shit?”

“I really prefer a nice California chardonnay,” Annabelle says. “Now and again, maybe an ice-cold Pontchartrain Porter, if I'm having a crayfish boil.” She closes her eyes for a moment as a memory of home washes through her—how could she have hated the place so much and yet miss it even more?

“When I met you,” Ezra says, “what were you? Nineteen?”

“I was twenty-seven, Ezra.”

He shrugs, as if she were splitting hairs. “You were wearing cutoffs so short your pussy was practically hanging out.”

“Don't be gross, Ezra. Please.”

“I didn't take the scissors to those old blue jeans, darling. That was your doing.”

“I had beautiful legs. I was proud of them.”

“You still do!”

“No, no. Not like back then. I'm thickening. I'm congealing.”

“You starting to feel something?”

“It always takes a while.”

“I don't know, I figured we double the dose, we get there quicker.”

“It's sort of scary, don't you think, Ez? It's like you're not quite human after you drink that stuff.”

“I've been human long enough. I think I've earned a little holiday from human.”

“I hope we're not drinking Boy-Boy, that's all I hope,” Annabelle says. She feels a stirring within, a little shift in the blood, like the body of a sound sleeper adjusting itself without waking. And then it is gone.

“You just felt something, didn't you. I saw it in your eyes.”

“I don't know. Maybe.” She looks at the empty vials on the side of the tub, with the residue of blood clinging to the sides. “The first time we took this stuff was the best. The first time was lovely.”

“Lovely? It was fantastic. My
shvanz
was like a leg of lamb, and you, my pet, were a vat of mint jelly.”

“Ezra. Please. You say things that actually make me sick.”

“I know, baby. I know.” He is grinning, as if by telling him he has a powerful effect on her, she has just paid him a compliment.

Annabelle leans back in the tub, bends her legs so that her knees emerge from the water like pink islands. She stretches her arms; suds drip from her elbows. Strange. The hair on her forearm looks darker than usual. Very strange indeed.

Ezra playfully scoots over on his rear, pries her legs apart so he can be right next to her.

“I don't feel right,” Annabelle says softly.

“Oh, come on. Take off your Bible belt. We're not doing anything wrong. We're enjoying ourselves.”

“I know.”

“The things that happen in this town. There's about fifty S-and-M bars. I had a guy who used to work with me—well,
for
me, actually, I was his boss—who paid hookers to crap on him. I'm serious.”

“I don't want to hear about it, Ezra. Anyhow, I think you already told me this.”

“He used to lie naked under a glass-topped coffee table while they—I'll say this delicately because I honor your feminine sensibilities, my princess—while the whores moved their bowels. But whose business was it but his own?”

“I feel sorry for the women.”

“Really? Do you? Or is that just something people say? Some idiot gets five hundred dollars for hopping onto a coffee table and taking a crap? I think there's a lot worse things happening in the world.”

“I don't,” Annabelle says. She glances again at the hair on her arm—how could that silvery fuzz have darkened so? Is it a trick of the light? “I think that is exactly what's wrong with this world.”

“Hey, guess what,” Ezra says, touching the tip of her nose with his finger. “I'm totally fucking feeling it.” He grabs her breast. His so-called moves haven't changed very much over time; he is as greedy and desperate as he was at his first sexual encounter, when he was a student at Syracuse, trying to get the deed done with his marketing professor's doughy, slow-witted daughter before anyone attending the party upstairs became curious as to what the two of them were doing in the paneled basement, with its jettisoned barbells and medicine balls. The urgency he is feeling now is not far removed from the urgency he felt then. No drowning man groped for a lifeline with more desperation than he felt in moments of peak sexual arousal, and what Ezra is feeling now is the peak of the peak, the kind of crazed need for connection and release you feel when you are just starting out and lust does not so much cloud the mind as devour it in a few quick bites.

“Put your heels on my shoulders,” Ezra says in a slur. He imagines his penis has just gotten impossibly hard, rock hard, blue-steel hard, consult-your-physician hard. Could it just be in his mind? He reaches under the bubbles and feels himself. Holy syndication! It doesn't even feel like his. It's a unicorn's horn!

“I guess I'm starting to feel it too,” Annabelle says without much enthusiasm. She places her heels on Ezra's shoulders. For an old man, he has nice shoulders, smooth and rounded, with a smallpox vaccination scar high up on his right arm, a little starburst of shiny smooth skin about the size of the old-fashioned seal his lawyer put on the last page of their prenup.

“Sex in tub,” Ezra says.

“Uh…yes,” Annabelle says uncertainly, not because she doubts that is what is about to happen, and not because she isn't ready for a little old-fashioned slap-me-Henry, but because suddenly Ezra sounds as if someone has dropped a brick on his head.

His mouth is open. His fingers, webbed by soap bubbles, wave in the air, as if he were making certain he could move them. His eyelids are at half-mast—perhaps out of respect for his recently deceased brain. He lifts her up—his strength always takes her by surprise, but now it is more surprising than ever—and places her strategically on his lap. Bing: He's inside of her. He is pulsating. She feels his member like a weird alien heart in her.

“Be sweet, Ezra,” she says.

“Moooooove.”

“I am moving, baby. I am.” He tries to kiss her. “Oh, don't,” she says. “Your breath.” She recoils. It's like being kissed by a scab, but she doesn't say this, she doesn't want to hurt his feelings or make him angry. But it is. It's as if someone had taken a cupful of blood, let it dry, and then molded it into two greasy, smelly lips.

But her moving away incites and excites Ezra—just as a dog can be stock-still staring at a squirrel for a long minute and lunge the moment its prey moves an inch. His thrusts grow fiercer. He knocks her off balance and she starts to slide. She tastes the sour fizz of the soap bubbles, spits.

“Wait,” she says, commandingly enough for him to actually listen to her.

“You okay?” he manages to say.

“I think we took too much, Ez.”

“I want to pop,” he says.

Annabelle closes her eyes.
Pop
is what he calls reaching orgasm; every time he says it, it makes her just a little bit sadder. She wants to go home. Home! Home! Oh, please, God: home.

She places her hands on his hips and moves him out of her. It's not as if she does not want to have sex; she just doesn't want to have to look at him and smell his bloody breath.

She turns around, grips the edge of the tub, cranes her neck to keep her face as far from the suds as possible, and lifts her rump out of the water, inviting. She even waggles it back and forth. Hell, if they are going to do this, it might as well be fun…

“Niiiiiiiiiice,” he says, hot little pebbles of beastliness rattling in his throat.

This is good,
Ezra thinks, or sort of thinks, when he sees her be-my-Valentine behind. He buries his face in her, hears her distant gasp. Flesh, soap, water, heat. Taste. What is he tasting? Something. The little wrinkled ring of her final resistance. So good.

It hurts his knees to kneel. Instead, to enter her, he squats.

“Careful,” she says, but the body says differently: she backs into him with a mighty thrust. Almost knocks him over.

It delights him. As she thrusts backward, he thrusts forward, instinctively waiting a beat before his move so they can establish a rhythm. Boy. Girl. Boy, girl. Ba-boom, ba-boom. Rather close to
baboon,
but no: this is music. This is rock and roll, this is swing—hell this is even John Philip Sousa. This is all that matters. This is the point of everything. Every other thing is just extra, what you do before and after you do this.

And, oh, by the way: Ezra wants to pop.

He moves inside her with more urgency. He is lodged so securely in her. Feels as if he had been born here. He has one hand on her hip, the other on the small of her back. She is starting to sink. She is starting to thrash. He hesitates for a moment. Oh, well, these things happen.