Into the Great Wide Open (20 page)

“June!” the mother said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it is so good to see you.” She was beaming, holding her arms out; and Junie raced toward her, and into her embrace, with an ease and speed that Kenny found surprising. She went from one to the other, embracing them both. There might have been tears starting in the mother’s eyes; an open heart anyway, to look at her, but Kenny was surprised at the force of this reunion.

“Lyle,” Junie said, “Celine, this is Kenny. Kenny, this is Lyle and Celine.”

“It’s very good to meet you,” Kenny said; and they repeated the words, or something like them, but they were cool toward him, appraising. Stealing a daughter’s girlfriend, Kenny thought; you’d have to be pretty advanced to think of it as a crime.

“I think Kim went to bed already,” Lyle said. “Not to sleep, of course.”

“I’ll get her,” Celine said.

“I can find it,” Junie said.

“No, I’ll get her,” Celine said. “She won’t mind. If you disappear back there, we won’t have a chance to visit with you. Sit.”

She waved her hand as she left the room, like a dog trainer; which she might have been, she had that hearty, no-nonsense … The kind of person people liked, she was used to being liked, Kenny could see that. Lyle eased himself back into his recliner. “Where did Junie drag you up?” he asked.

“We know each other from high school,” Kenny said; but this sounded inadequate, a partial truth. “We sort of ran into each other on a beach trip.”

“At a Girl Scout camp, actually,” Junie said.

“Like Kim met you,” Lyle said, and worked his bushy eyebrows up and down. In his blue jeans, sneakers, and blue work shirt,
he looked like a retired farmer, gaunt, a picture out of the Great Depression. His hands were long and liver-spotted and scarred. Kenny had that sense of walking into another family’s life, into their history, the smell of other people’s cooking, other people’s books. It was intimate, more than Kenny wanted.

“I don’t know if I told you or not,” Junie said. “I met Kim when we were both at camp, in what?” She appealed to Lyle. “The fifth grade? The sixth?”

This was disingenuous, Kenny thought; she never talked about Kim around him, and now they were all best friends.

“The summer between fifth and sixth grade, I think,” Lyle said, after a minute’s consideration. “I could be wrong. You had already been there a year before, hadn’t you?” Junie nodded. “And then there was some requirement about how old you had to be. I can’t remember. Maybe it was sixth and seventh grade.”

Kenny heard regret in the hesitancy of his voice. That and the oxygen tank made him seem old. Kenny could hear him breathing, through the tubes. They must be wondering where they stood with her now, and what Kenny was doing with her. The father’s big hands settled on his own knees.

Just then the mother came back from upstairs, and Kim behind her; Kim in jeans and a buttondown shirt as usual, as always.

“It’s Ken, right?” Celine asked him; he nodded, she turned to her daughter. “You and Kenny are friends from school?”

“Fellow sufferers,” Kim said. She looked unhappy to be part of this. Kenny tried to figure out what he was doing there. An announcement, maybe. A reconciliation. Kim said, “We had Tom Harris together last year.”

“That awful man,” Celine said, and they all sat down. Then Celine leapt up again. “Can I get you, what? We have juice, or I could make some coffee?”

“I’d like a glass of wine, if you’ve got any,” Junie said.

Celine and Kim looked nervously at Kenny; apparently it was all right for Junie to have wine in this house but they were afraid he would inform on them. Like me, like me, like me, Kenny thought, suddenly tired of himself. This
performance
. Just tell me what to say and I’ll say it. “I wouldn’t mind a glass of wine myself,” he said experimentally.

“I’ll open a bottle,” Celine said, disappearing into the kitchen and then returning with five real wineglasses and an expensive-looking bottle. She lined the glasses up on the coffee table while she opened the cork. This had the feeling of a ritual, a ceremony of gracious living; Kenny remembered the trip to Verona, the rained-out opera in the Roman amphitheater. Joie de vivre, Kenny thought. Hard to argue with it, but Kenny resisted. The glasses were dusty and they didn’t quite match. A blue plate in the dining room with a bright yellow sunflower glazed on it. He was a criticizing bastard, he knew it, but he was the one being judged; closed his eyes and thought of his own mother, stranded for life in Baltimore.

“How was dinner?” Kim asked Junie.

“It was unbelievable,” she said.

“Where did you go?” Lyle asked; and Junie told them, and they bobbed their heads in approval; at the same time skeptical, like they didn’t think it was quite right for children like them to be allowed into such a palace of luxury. A Puritan streak could be seen in her cotton clothes and simple gray hair;
one
glass of wine, but good wine. They raised their glasses and drank to nothing. They stopped just short of clinking the glasses together.

Celine held the wine on her tongue, closed her eyes, like she was smoking a joint. “Very nice,” she said.

“I can never tell the difference,” Lyle said. “You might as well give me the cheap stuff.”

“That isn’t true,” Kim said.

“Not like your mother,” Lyle said; and the silence descended
again. Kenny sipped his wine and it was complicated and, he supposed, good. Really he had had enough of the food-and-wine experience and in fact of the whole sensual world at that point. Tired and mazy and he wanted to be alone, somewhere in a dark room by himself with a book to read and the light of one lamp coming over his shoulder, the only waking soul in a dark house. Kenny looked around at the others: whole histories of experience, sacred moments and hard times, that he would never be a part of.

Kenny excused himself and went to the bathroom, which was on the second floor, inconvenient. The stairs were lined with photographs: ski holidays, the Italian trip, different people’s weddings, small children who were maybe Kim and maybe cousins, dressed in the toddler clothes of the seventies. In the bathroom, Kenny ran water over his face but his face still felt greasy and hot. More pictures in the bathroom, elaborate frames that held a dozen snapshots each. One of them was camp: Junie and Kim on horseback, swimming, posing for the camera sitting on a diving board, flatchested, awkward, twelve. Kim playing the guitar while Junie sang in front of a wall of peeled logs, apparently some kind of talent show. All that happy family, happy childhood. Kenny shut off the bathroom light and closed the door behind him but he didn’t go back downstairs right away. In his absence, the four of them had found their voices, and he could hear them talking and laughing, hearing only the general melody of conversation, the ebb and flow.
She was a virgin when I met her
, Kenny thought; making a story out of himself, out of her life. But there was something there. Her childhood had lasted a lot longer than Kenny’s had, the same with everybody else; but the troublesome thing with Junie was that she had been able to
make
it last herself. When her own parents wouldn’t cooperate she found Kim’s. Secrets, the love of horses, the gradual introduction of the elements of adult life one by one—art, culture, food, sex—Kenny had the feeling that she had been able to go through more of the stations; while Kenny
had been thrown out of his childhood all at once, into a bare place where nothing was prepared. The night the cops called about his mother, the first time.

The photographs: picnics, reunions, Christmases. Junie in ski clothes, grinning against a backdrop of brilliant blue sky. Junie reaching up to a cat in a tree, already tall but thin, in her girl clothes.

He sat in the dark at the top of the stairs and listened, as he had listened to his own parents, listened to parties, to their elaborate polite arguments—Kenny’s mother had a master’s degree and read the paper as religiously as his father—and to their fights, which were quieter but sometimes boiled over. Sometimes things broke. But the sorrowful thing that Kenny was thinking about was not his parents but the child that he himself had once been: the child alone at the top of the stairs, listening to the mysteries of the adult life below him, listening for clues, eager, never dreaming—not then, not later, not for a long time after—that his parents were only improvising. They didn’t have any idea themselves. Junie in shorts, in a lawn chair with a goat licking her arm. Smiling for the camera.

Kenny dipped the washcloth into the soapy bucket and wrung it out. His father lay facedown on the plastic sheet, eyes closed, naked. The tub and the shower were both upstairs—the downstairs bath was just a half. The
sacrifice
. He started with his father’s feet, washing carefully between the toes, the toenails that were thick and tobacco yellow; the yellowing horns of callus on his heels and the pink, wrinkled elephant skin under his arch, strangely delicate. His legs were white, his body was universally white except his arms, his hands, and his neck. Kenny washed the backs of the calves, the thighs. He moved his father’s legs apart and washed his father’s anus clean, which was one of the things that he had been frightened to do but turned out to
be just another motion with his hands, rinsing carefully afterward. This was the physical world, the wreckage of the body. Decades of fat, architectural. The arms were getting strong again with the work of carrying the body, rolling the wheelchair. The unloved body, not by its master, not by anybody else. And I will look like this someday, Kenny thought. He didn’t plan to but his father didn’t plan to either. Strange the way the body lapsed back to vegetable shapes at some point, the ruined skin around his father’s elbows, puckered and sagging, dried apricots. His arms were at his side like a diver’s. When they were clean Kenny raised them over his father’s head, so that it looked like he was sunbathing. Kenny scrubbed at his father’s sides, his armpits. I will not be disgusted, Kenny told himself; I will not fail in charity. Birth, suffering, death, rebirth. This body is mine, all suffering bodies are mine, all bodies are suffering (remembering Junie moving over him, lips and tongues, the feel of being inside her on that night in the park). He scrubbed at his father’s back but it wouldn’t quite come all the way clean, a tinge of gray … Another change in form at his father’s neck, where the shirt gave out: the skin had gathered in the sun, making rivulets and deltas of deep permanent wrinkles. The vegetable body. There was nobody else to do this, there was no point in complaining. Kenny knew, it was just samsara, suffering and pleasure were two sides of the same coin but he couldn’t muster the detachment he needed. It’s not all suffering, Kenny thought, helping his father to turn his torso over and then setting the legs straight. It’s not all suffering. It’s not all suffering. It’s not all suffering.

The Taming Power of the Small
: This hexagram means the force of the small—the power of the shadowy—that restrains, tames, impedes. A weak line in the fourth place, that of the minister, holds the five strong lines in check. In the Image it is the wind blowing across the sky. The wind restrains the clouds, the rising breath of the Creative,
and makes them grow dense, but as yet is not strong enough to turn them to rain. The hexagram presents a configuration of circumstances in which a strong element is temporarily held in leash by a weak element. It is only through gentleness that this can have a successful outcome.

I
n this dream, Kenny is a whore but it’s basically OK. The women come to him, three a night. They give him a gold coin with a rolled rubber inside it, and some other small token that his waking self can’t quite remember.
Silky
, Kenny thinks, remembering the soft clean sheets and the perfumed women who come to him. Something feminine, receptive. Somebody else is running him, a vague presence, neither male nor female; the presence doesn’t have Kenny’s best interests at heart, he knows that, but the life is his to enjoy for now. A deal with the devil. The women who pay for him are clean and beautiful. He never leaves the room. He isn’t man enough to escape; not that he wants to.

The middle one on this particular night is Asian, a small compact woman with long black hair, older than Kenny, a woman he could love (he knows this without knowing why). She says nothing, which happens often. Other times they tell him stories, fantastic and dirty; other times they want him to curse in their ears. Kenny is always glad to see them when they arrive, always tired of them by the time they go, but not this woman. They make love—no, they
fuck
; Kenny is paid, disposable—they fuck slowly, decorously. She comes, she weeps. No talking. When she leaves, Kenny feels the restraint for the first time. He wants to leave but he can’t. He wants to follow her.

The next evening she comes back. She talks: she tells him that she is a violinist, that she suffers from stage fright always, but the evening before, after she and Kenny fucked, she was able to make an important debut without fear. The crowd, the lights. She was a success. She is grateful, she wants to tell him; the gold coin and the other token, the one he can’t remember; she tips him, and then she leaves, the way she is supposed to with a whore. The bitterness persists
through two days of his waking life; that and a different feeling, homesick, wanting to go back to a place where she could find him (though he knows, in waking and in dreams, that she’s never coming back). Perfume, skin.

It was February for months, for as long as Kenny could remember. Then one day it was March. Nothing changed, but it seemed like something might. A possibility, a restlessness. Kenny didn’t want to think about it; movement, migration, these things were only taking her away from him.

This happened in English class, the only one that he was bothering with at all. They were talking about Toni Morrison or Alice Walker or somebody, a book that Kenny hadn’t read. Normally he would have but he had been busy, shopping, cleaning, running all the little errands … Really it was a difficulty of faith. Lately he couldn’t believe in anything but what he could touch. The life of the body. Because this other, this elaborate pretending, wasn’t going to lead to anything. Kenny knew that the others, the bright-eyed boys and girls in his class, had read the Cliff Notes or the Monarch Notes or “skimmed” it and made an educated guess about the second half; he had done it himself, flipping through the pages to see if all the characters were still alive, reading the last paragraph. The bright-eyed boys and girls didn’t have to learn anything at all. They were there to pass the test, and when they did, they could go on to the next step. While Kenny knew: he could pass as many tests as he wanted and he still wasn’t going anywhere.