Hunger's Brides (104 page)

They've shared this savage jocularity a dozen times in the past. Or rather he's shared it with her, in the manner of two world-weary business rivals met in some street, chatting, at the intersection of his abstract humanism, her theoretical misanthropy…. He exclaims over the inquisitorial joining of metal and parted flesh. He thinks he knows how to bait her, but perhaps he has been too complacent.

From the corner of her eye she is studying him not quite clinically.

Still no answer? Still she would have him play both their parts. It is a relief to oblige. This is the safest kind of talk left. With a nod towards the suburban pincushions in black leathers he asks: “Did you ever, I mean were you ever tempted to—” He was going to say,
to pierce something
.

“You do that a lot,” she says.

“What?”

“That.” She nods.“Rubbing your hands. The silent movie villain.”

It was an old tic Madeleine had helped him break. He finds this oddly embarrassing, he finds this faintly annoying.

“No—of course, you'd never draw attention, you want to be invisible.” He has no idea what he is talking about, yet he is not so far mistaken. She wants to be invisible, to everyone else. And in all the essentials, she is, to him. One word too many, one careless comment and everyone will see. Except him.

“You didn't answer.”

“But you just ask away, Donald.”

“On my birthday.”

“Fuck your birthday.”

“You called
me
. If you don't think you can get through this …”

She tilts her plastic cup, pokes at her lime wedge with a straw.

“So. Back to town? Your call.”

She looks into his face, then away. She has folded her straw into a tiny white accordion. “Not yet.”

His voice softens. “Help me out a little, will ya?”

She thinks about this. “Try again.”

“You never want to talk about school….
You
pick, then.”

“Pick?”
She looks up at him in disbelief.

He looks out into the schoolyard, except for the trampled grasses indistinguishable from the prairie just beyond the fence.

“Why only Mexico? Why not myths from here?”

“We're finished with all this, Professor. Remember?”

“That crack about Hiawatha—”

“Pocahontas forgives all.”

“Local Cree figures like Berdache and Wiokachuch fit the research you've shown me. So why not, Beulah? The Aztecs, you use
them.”

Her lips twist into a wincing smile. “Who hasn't?” Two fingertips of her left hand slip to a small sore at the corner of her mouth.

He leans back in his chair, ankles crossed under the table, hands resting comfortably in his pockets. She looks away again, fixes her eyes on the farm machinery. She asks him if they can go now.

“Better Beulah, do better.”

“So guide me, O Grey Owl.”

“Can you answer me or not?”

She hesitates, still not looking at him, shakes her head slightly, as though in answer to an unspoken question of her own. Begins. At the time he understands only a fraction of what he hears…. We all start with certain global rights, to the fruits of the tree, she seems to be saying. But some forfeit their rights to some of the fruit, for what they have done. Locally. And those rights must be earned back, if at all, with heart and blood.

“Listen, Beulah. This may all sound very biblical to you, but somebody out there—and this, I can guarantee—will hear Wagner, a whole New-Age fascist Ur-symphony. Racial memory, folk kitsch, sentimentalizing the past—it's irrational, it's dangerous, and it never goes away. Like plutonium.”

“Two. Three. Eight.”

She says this in a voice so low he can barely hear. And in that murmur there is a tightness he does not hear at all. But he has her attention now, her fullest attention. And she has his. For an instant
he stares into the green eyes across the table. Large, intent, a thread of gold around pupils contracted to a point. Flecks of jasper and rust …

Geology. So many of his father's lessons he will apply today. But right now he must work hard to interpret what she is saying, this striking oracle of his. She takes the lime from the glass. There is no juice left to squeeze out, though she twists. He notices the little nicks and scrapes, some half-healed … second knuckle of each index finger. He concentrates. No not Plutonium, Don, a teeny tiny bacterium, a benevolent microbe, our symbiant friend—like intestinal flora. Is it all just going too fast Professor?—call it a metaphor. Call what?—myths, Doctor, myths. Without them we are not nourished we are not fed. They are a bacterium, a global super-organism.
⁵
Clostridium dificile
—our difficult cloistering, a cluster that darkly blooms in us, like lymphoma. Tiny muscular corpuscular they swim in our blood, they squat in our guts, they help us digest. Too much and they eat
us
, too little and they starve us to death.

“Yes I see.” Someday he will come to think of this as the day he saw too little, remembers too well.

“Then they become our disease and we become—”

“I have my answer, Beulah.”

These eyes so bright, this stunning intensity, this face a mask of twisted smile. Does she have any idea how it looks, this mask of herself? He sits straight now, his back not quite touching the chair. What an amazing creature,
what a waste
. He has offered his help but she has rejected it over and over. He steels himself not to lean back, away, not to flinch.

For once, she is not the first to worry about what others will see. Has she forgotten where they are?

“How's our chat so far Donald? How's it for you—did I pick right?”

When the cup snaps in her hands, spilling ice over the table, he feels something rising up in him.

“Enough.”

Three tables away a pair of brown eyes meets his and he knows that this one knows him. He does not remember her but she knows exactly what's happening.

“You wanted to go, let's go. Get up.”

And he too knows what is happening. He knows that after too
many years of this, each one gets a little crazier, and he knows the pattern is in him, not them. He is on his feet. He feels his own rage rising to answer hers—he is not her father and on this day of days
I am not as afraid of a scene as you think
.

Something has reminded him of his childhood, long rides, empty highways, a small town off by itself.“Come on. Get up. We'll be like two strangers on a bus.” He knows he is the one not making sense now, and it feels very good. It is the best feeling of all. “Telling everything, if that's what you want. Spilling their guts …”

And for the first time, though she has always guessed it was there, she is seeing it in his face. Sincerity…. At last. It is something real. “Where, Donald?” She is ready to go with him.

Get her in the car is all he can think. Get her in the car and tell her. Doesn't matter where. He savours the look that will come into her face.

She stands, her eyes searching his. “How much time do we have?”

They are in the car. They are on the highway. She is quiet now. But instead of seeing in this a confirmation that this has all been to provoke him, he is perplexed, he is troubled. His chest is still lightly heaving, his face still flushed. He understands he is afraid of her, for the violence he knows she can bring out of him.

The air is cool. He tries to give himself over to the spell of the land. They are heading south, flanked by deep green fields. Puffs of cloud scud east, and under them the straight road ahead seems to warp to the west.

Later, droplets on the windshield. One, then another striking his face. He fumbles for the wiper switch, he is still unfamiliar with the car. She is shuddering with the cold, the wind. He has not noticed this.

He pulls sharply over to the shoulder, a scrabble of gravel. When the convertible top is latched they sit, rain pattering on the canvas, cars rocketing past. Tell her. Now and then a tractor trailer, the heavy blast and tug. The car rocks faintly in its wake. He knows the moment is now. Tell her. But she is the first to speak. Something about this angers him.

“Like you said.” She waits. “Strangers on a bus.” He does not answer. He has decided to make her suffer. Let him be judged by his acts.

He pulls back onto the highway.

“Have I ever asked for … anything?” Her voice is quiet. Perhaps she thinks he cannot see her fingers twisting in her lap. Perhaps she thinks he would not care.

He shrugs. “We talk.”

She looks at him a long time. He drives several more miles.

More, they ask, more, then more than there is to give. He has nothing left. Tell her. “Okay, Beulah. How do we do this?”

“You want games. You want rules.”

“I hate games.”

He is surprised by his vehemence.

“And they're all you know.” She waits, but he will not bite. “One day soon, Donald, maybe somebody will find a game you love.”

“Are we doing this or not?” Tell her everything this time.

“Truth or dare.”

“Whatever, Beulah. Ask.”
Everything you never wanted to hear
.

“First the dare.”

“For Christ's sake.” It comes to this. Childishness to embarrass him. His position, the difference in their ages.

“Show me how much you mean it, show me you care.
How much
. You want this as much as I do. You should see your face. Truth or dare.”

“Christ …”

“Okay tell you what, Don—I go first.
Truth …
or I go back to school for you. How's that?”

“At this exact moment, Beulah, I could not give a shit what you do.”

“Better, Donald. Much. A baseline for our polygraph. Now you.”

“It's always something like this. Some crazy shit or other.”

“Nothing to dare?—this is sad, old man, sad very sad.”

She sits sideways in her seat. “Leave your wife.”

“Leave it the hell alone.”

“So protective. So noble.”

“I've told you before—”

“Fine, protect her. Do.
Truth
—tell her about me.”

“Fuck this.”

He wants to help her out, she wants to pull him down.

“You're the specialist, Professor Gregory—how come you're so bad at this? Okay something easier, let's see, Truth … or you come to Mexico with me. Call it a sabbatical.”

He knows she means it. She has risked asking him to come with her. And now she sits, brave child, awaiting the lash of his contempt, shaming him. Fucking childishness.

“Tons of hot springs in Mexico, Don.”

She refers to a small water fetish of his. He imagines the two of them locked together in a death struggle in some tropical hotel room … this is just about the furthest thing from his fantasy. Tell her.

“You're just begging me to hurt you,” he says. Still the fading hope they could just let it drop.

“I don't want
her
life, Donald. I just want into yours. Once.”

He takes his eyes from the road to look directly at her. “But that's not all of it.”

“I want you to look at yourself.”

“You want to save me. Because I'm living a terrible lie.” He keeps his eyes on her, as the car hurtles through the rain at ninety miles an hour. She is unconcerned that in the next instant they may die. He reads this clearly in her eyes. This is not a death she fears. He looks back to the road.

Always near the end, these scenes. The tawdry, the plangent, the operatic, the sophomoric—they are relentless, they are legion, these young women. Just once he would like one of them to do this with grace. Stoke contempt to a cold burn, this is his trick. Use it again. The antidote to this thing that clanks and scrapes up inside his skull like an iron grate.

“Something nobody knows about you. Something you've never told a soul. Told … her.”

It is in the way she says this, something in the reverence she pays his wife. He has an image of the pain about to enter that beautiful young face.
She is just a girl
. But is it pity he feels now or something more familiar, something sickening. They are not good for each other. She is not good for him. She wants him to hurt her.

“Is it over, Donald? Isn't that what you've been waiting to tell me?”

“
No
. But …”

“Soon?”

“How can I know a thing like that?”

He is not so angry, now. He knows that in her way she is doing this for him.

“No, Beulah, not yet.”

She sees he is very close to telling her. “You ask me what I want. See
me
. Not
this.”
Her small, long-fingered hands give a little flick as though sweeping crumbs from her lap. “Just once.”

What he says next is not what he meant to say.

“The first time she left my father I was a year old.” The edgy little gesture he makes—little toy soldier saluting—to keep her from speaking feels comical, such an urge he gives himself to laugh at times.