Dirty Love (29 page)

On the drive home, he stopped at the liquor store in Lafayette Square and bought a six-pack of Miller bottles and a fifth of rye. It was Thanksgiving Eve, his birthday a lifelong prelude to a day bigger and more important, and he’d had to wait in line behind a man who wore painter’s coveralls and a wool cap, the cashier glancing at Francis with eyes so neutral and empty of judgment that Francis felt he was easily getting away with something that maybe he never should have been deprived of in the first place.

A dank resentment settled over him. Walking with his beer and whiskey out of the package store into the cold, exhaust-smelling air, he was a man who’d been wronged, a man who had earned in every way his right to just this one, small reward.

These last three months, as if to accentuate the clarity of body and mind he woke to each morning, he’d gotten into the habit of sipping coffee on the eleven-mile ride to the high school. Beth had bought him an insulated thermos, and now Francis sat in his car behind the package store and poured the rest of his morning’s coffee out onto the cracked asphalt. His fingers were trembling as he poured rye into his thermos and twisted open a Miller and poured it in too. Then he took a long pull from his thermos—cold hoppy carbonation shot through with a leveling fire—and soon he was parked at the seawall down the boulevard from The Whaler. The other parking spots were empty for it was the off-season and from where he sat he could see just a lip of ocean on the other side of the seawall, but the song on the radio was an old one from an AM station in a holiday mood. He did not know what it was, but it was Big Band and had horns in it and the tempo was upbeat and he was fourteen or fifteen years old and his brother George was dancing with their mother in the small kitchen on Ginty Street. He was wearing his uniform, his collar open, and he was twirling their mother who was laughing, her hair coming loose, her eyes soft with something that never rose there. Then the music became a man talking about used cars and Francis was wiping his eyes so he could fill his thermos back up again and he was walking along the hard sand of low tide till he found a kelp-wrapped plank, its grain open cracks of rot he had to look away from for they were death itself and how long had he been weeping like a boy?

There was a woman before Beth. They’d both had too much to drink, and he’d driven her to her small apartment off Route 1 in Saugus. It was a trailer home really. She lived there with her brother, a merchant marine at sea, the shelf above his sofa weighted with shot glasses from all the bars he’d been in from New York to Naples, Italy, and back. Her name was Patrizia, but everyone called her Triz. Francis had been
stateside for only a few weeks. Classes at Suffolk didn’t start for another month, and George had insisted that he stay in the guest room of his house. Francis was twenty-one years old, a war veteran, and he couldn’t just sit around George’s while his wife tended to little Charlie and the new baby. Francis didn’t like how George’s wife kept looking at him either. It was as if she were trying to measure whether the things he’d seen and done over there had made him somehow dangerous to her kids.

Every night George wanted to drink. He wanted to drink and “only talk about it if you fucking feel like it, Franny,” and George would talk about his own war as if he were the only soldier in it. They sat in lawn chairs in the small yard of the house George would later sell at a profit, and as the night grew cool and the mosquitoes became a problem, George came back to Francis about working with him selling insurance. But the idea was cold to Francis, all of it, from having to take orders from George to having to sell policies to people who did not want or need them. It seemed like a racket to Francis, and that’s the word he used in the bar in Boston on a Saturday in August talking to an Italian woman everyone called Triz.

She was plump and large-breasted. She wore red lipstick and smoked Pall Malls, and he kept buying her Brandy Alexanders and talked about whatever came up though he seemed to listen to her more, even though all these years later, half-drunk on the beach on his fifty-third birthday, he could not summon one thing she’d told him except, “Your eyes are so sweet.” Then, later, “Enough. You’re coming with me.” In the orange light of a Tiki lamp, they were on her and her brother’s couch, Francis’s erection in her gripping hands as she pulled him to that warm darkness between her legs, and how could he tell her he’d never done this before?

There were whores in Japan. They lived with their families in alley boxes that smelled like dead fish, and they’d looked like schoolgirls to him, those black bangs, those cheeks they’d covered with so much rouge they became laughing clowns leading his buddies one at a time to where Triz was leading him now. How
warm
it was. How tight and slippery, a tremor of pleasure as she arched her hips and pulled him in deeper. It had seemed to him she was offering him something so personal and private he must have lied to her in some way to get it. She was looking straight into his face, and he could not bear her eyes for she seemed to be searching for something he knew she would not find and then maybe she’d stop and he lowered his cheek against hers. Her skin had the sweet talcum scent of makeup, her hair stiff with spray. She was making sounds he’d never heard a woman make before—moans of encouragement, but also melancholic surrender, not to him but to something inevitable and ageless, as if she were foreseeing their own distant deaths but until then they had this; they had this.

Then it was winter two years later, and Francis was making love with Elizabeth Harrington one month shy of their wedding date. It was her first time, his second. There was no Tiki lamp, no trailer couch or shot glasses above. There was no red lipstick, no sounds coming from Beth, and because it
was
her first time he moved as slowly and as gently as he could, her silence, he assumed, a biting down on her pain and discomfort. They were under a blanket on her bed in the cold-water apartment she shared with another nursing student, a fast-talking girl from the south shore. Outside the window in the slanting afternoon light stood the elevated tracks of the subway train, and Beth held his face in her hands and made him look at her. Her eyes did something to him. There was so much hard will in them—Yes, Francis, I’ve chosen
you
, I’ve chosen
you
, I’ve chosen
you
. Her lips were parted, her chin raised almost in defiance at each of his thrusts, and it was this and the way she held his face and the iron clatter of a train passing full of men and women and children that set everything loose and that good woman Triz had made him withdraw but even his wet shame on her soft pale belly she seemed to think was sweet, and in the Tiki lamp light she smiled up at him as if he’d just brought her flowers, and Francis had closed his eyes against that smile as what was inside him was now pulsing into Elizabeth Harrington, this woman he too had chosen, this woman he had chosen for life.

For
life
, goddamnit. He was walking close to the water. When he leaned down to pick up a smooth stone the sand rose up and smacked his forehead and knees. Where before there’d been resentment, there was now only outrage at the unfairness of how he’d been treated. Though he could not quite pinpoint what had been done to him or by whom, only the empty-chested feeling that he’d been sent something beautiful by someone beautiful and someone else had not done his job and delivered the damn package. Then he was back in his car driving again. He was drunk and knew it, but it wasn’t far to his street and what was he doing going home like this?

Fuck it, Brandt
.

Triz, her black hair and red lipstick, her brown eyes and that smile as she held him and pulled him to her. So long ago, but was it a door he should have kept open? A door that would have pointed to a road taking him someplace softer? A road that would have led to children? That would have led him to no shame in anything about himself—his eyes “sweet,” his seed “sweet”—no shame, no shame, no shame. A nodding off, his eyes opening to see how the sun struck the side of a house, its white trim nearly gold, then the horrible bouncing over curb and lawn and the looming house jolting him into darkness.

F
RANCIS STANDS IN
Devon’s room. He’s surprised at how neatly she keeps it. The bed is made, the bedspread tucked cleanly under the pillows at the headboard. The closet door is closed, and the T-shirt and shorts she put on after her shower lie at the foot of the mattress, one folded on top of the other. Her laptop leans against the bedside table in its unzipped case, and there’s a tiny wink of blue light there.

He was in the dining room when she left for work. He had wanted to check for any emails, to open the most recent one from Devon’s mother, but he was afraid Devon might walk in, and the last thing she needed now was to feel conspired against. It was already a mistake to encourage her to write so personally. She left with a loud “Bye” at the door so he at first thought she was angry till he reached the front windows and saw her walking under the late-day sun in her black-and-white restaurant uniform, those big red headphones over her ears, so perhaps she had the volume turned up and that’s why her own was too.

He would not be in here if she had not ripped a sheet from the notebook he held. On the desk is nothing but a layer of dust and the brass lamp Beth bought in a barn in Vermont. Or maybe it was that flea market in Boston. Or one of the mall stores she went to more often in her last years. He walks over to the wastebasket. There, under three or four used tissues, is a wadded piece of notebook paper. He reaches in for it, half squatting to spare his back, both knees aching in response. Against the white tissues the liver spots on the back of his hand stand out, and this makes him feel old and unseemly as he straightens and carefully opens what his grand-niece has so tightly compressed. He lays the page on the desk and smooths it out. His glasses dangle from around his neck, and he lifts them into place and reads:

Luke’s boat

Uncle Francis dying

He lowers the page. He looks at her bed and her folded shorts and T-shirt. He continues to read.

Aunt Beth dying
Why did Devy cross that out? Because she did not want to write about it? Or because her chilly great-aunt dying was not such a bad thing to her?

Getting old

Sick finding out
Illness with a mind of its own? No, there was that name in one of Marie’s emails. Sick. Yes, Devon’s ex-boyfriend, Sick. Why a name like that?

When I was twelve years old, my mom taught me how to make eggplant parmigiana. She told me the secret was to first bake the breaded slices of eggplant and not to fry them because then it all comes out too oily and the eggplant tastes too much like eggplant which nobody really likes when you think about it.

Wrapping my finger in a bandaid while staring at the stack of Penthouse magazines on the back of my father’s toilet.
Charlie. With a daughter in your house, for Christ’s sake.

The next paragraph is crossed out but easy to read.

Sitting on the closed toilet and ignoring my throbbing finger I wrapped too tightly with a bandaid

Opening my dad’s dirty magazine and seeing a hard penis pointing at the hole of a vagina

Francis glances over at the open doorway, his cheeks heating with the knowledge he has now transgressed. But there are only a few more lines and despite beginning to feel like some ancient creep, he is also becoming more informed about the home Devon fled. He notices his fingers are shaking slightly, and he shrugs it off.

Feeling sick because the only vagina I’d seen that up close was my own two months before this when I had to use a mirror for my first tampon.

I found out about my father’s girlfriend because I used his phone.

Francis balls up the notebook sheet as tightly as he can. He pushes it back down into the wastebasket and covers it up with the tissues. He’s staring at the tiny blue light just beneath the zipper of her computer case, and he knows she spends her nights in front of that machine. He’s tempted to open it and turn it on, but no, he won’t do that. He won’t.

Feeling like a thief, he walks across the carpet of his grand-niece’s room and pulls the door closed behind him. It’s been nearly five months and no word of any kind from his nephew Charlie Brandt. Of course he would have a mistress, wouldn’t he? Of course he would. Francis sent him several emails to update him on Devy’s GED plans, her solid work ethic, but there’s been no response of any kind, only those from Marie asking Francis to tell Devon to text her or email her more often, to pass on her love. Such strange times we live in, entire families separated into their own private cybercells, the same warm blood pumping through their organs and limbs.

On the kitchen table are the vase of white phlox, Devon’s barely touched glass of iced tea, beside it her pen and pencil.

Luke’s boat
.

Clearly an honest start. Why didn’t she continue? Because it’s none of your damn business, Francis, that’s why. Still, he wants to know more about her and he wants to know nothing, for what can he truly do? He carries her glass to the sink and dumps it. He sees her holding a mirror between her legs, this poor girl left to her own devices, and Francis plucks the wall phone from its cradle and pushes the buttons that will ring his dead brother’s useless son, though it’s happy hour on a Friday in August and unlike his father and uncle and perhaps their father before them, that hopper of trains to nowhere, Charlie still swallows down the family’s poison and whoever gets hurt gets hurt, including his one and only daughter who jumped overboard and swam to this half-empty old boat she somehow assumed is stable. Should Francis tell her the truth? That until she came, the captain, so free now, so permanently free, had begun to feel it listing and taking on cold water? Should he tell her that he dreads the day she’ll leave?

2morrow then? Breakfast?

OK

9?

Noon

NOON?

I’m working. Bye.