Into the Great Wide Open (23 page)

“Well, I know,” she said; her anger spent, dullness creeping back into her voice. Kenny knew the feeling: this was complicated. This was puzzling. She said, “I just want to have a life, is all.”

“I don’t want to put up walls between us,” Kenny said.

“That’s such a lie!” she said. Now she was staring at him, her print forgotten. She said, “That’s complete bullshit, Kenny, you’re the one. You never let me anywhere near you, I’ve never even seen your house or seen your family. I mean, you practically live in my family’s house.”

“I never thought you wanted to,” he said.

“You never invited me,” she said; and then there was nothing at all to say for a while. He had meant to spare her, that’s what he told himself; now he saw that it was shame that drove him. He kept her away, that much was undeniable, although he hadn’t noticed up till then. One of those uneasy silences in the middle of an argument, a temporary loss for words but nothing settled, like the greasy, electric feel of the air when a lightning storm is about to break. Kenny didn’t see how they got to where they were, or how they were going to get back safely: he had hurt her without meaning to, without even knowing. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Watch your eyes.”

She laid the print on a tilted board and switched on a viewing light; and the safelights, which had been as bright as day the moment before, were drowned in the bright white light. Give me my darkness back, Kenny thought, the red-lit warmth. She peered at the print, her face inches away.

“I hate this picture,” Junie said, without looking up.

“Then why are you showing it?”

“Because everybody else likes it.” She turned to him then, severe
in her wire-rimmed glasses. “You were the first one but everybody else thinks the same thing. That other stuff is boring, this isn’t boring. That’s what people say.”

“This has a naked girl in it.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know, I tend to
underestimate
when it comes to sex.”

“Not me,” Kenny said.

She looked at him; prepared to like him again, prepared to smile, but there was no way back across the gap; not now, at least.

“You know what it is?” she asked. “That was the only picture where I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. All the rest of them I thought about it and
then
I did it but this one I just did it. It’s my crazy-Woman picture I guess.”

“You’re not crazy,” Kenny said.

She looked at him sharply and Kenny panicked.

“You’re a little fucked-up is all,” he said, “like everybody else. Like me.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that I’m normal.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t make something out of nothing,” Kenny said.

“But I’m just like everybody else,” she said. “I’m fucked-up, everybody’s fucked-up.”

He opened his mouth to say something back but he had run out of words again. Just the plain fact: they could screw things up to where it didn’t matter if they loved each other or not. The idea scared him.

“I love you,” Kenny said again; but it was just words.

Fucking after fights was best, the edge of anger pushing them hard against each other so a little of the fight spilled over: you’re mine now, you’re mine now, you’re mine now … She thrust against
him, she dared him to make her come. The loving touch, and then the other kind. His teeth on her nipple. Junie bites. Nothing either of them wants to know: how close they’ve always been to violence, fuck you, no fuck you.

And afterward it’s good to have the body of the other to harbor in. A stranger’s body, maybe; lying in the dark of her narrow bed, Junie with her back to him, touching along the length of their bodies. It’s quiet, a candle on the table with its small flame rising straight up in the air. Breathing, both of them in time. A truce. A moment that is attached to neither the past nor the future but suspended in between; that’s the beautiful thing about coming, Kenny thinks, it’s being sideways out of time. If death is like this give me more. The hardest thing is to stop, to be where you are and just ride the wheel, not caring where it’s taking you. She stirs against him, restless. The skin between them is warm, blood temperature, the air has a slight cool edge. Good bones; he touches the primitive cage of her pelvis. The animal body. A couple of big cats fucking, then lying in the sun. Their bodies want each other, their bodies fit, their brains can go fuck themselves. Junie shivers, not from cold. He remembers the fear, down at the beach, the way her body shook and racked. His dick stirs against the warm curve of her ass, the velvet softness, it doesn’t care. Junie is weeping, for some reason unknown to him.

He holds her body close, but the rest of her is gone.

She cries quietly, and after the first trembling there’s no more. He wants to ask what’s wrong but the words have already failed them. They have gone past words, they would only be entangled. Before she has quite stopped crying—he can feel the hot childish tears against his palm—she takes his hand and presses it to her face, like she was hiding herself in it. Presses herself against it, holds there for a minute; then kisses the palm of his hand, his wrist. His body takes immediate notice. She’s kissing him with her tongue, a feeling that travels directly to a hot place at the base of his spine, don’t stop.
Kenny is hard instantly. A moment of fumbling then he sees what she means to do: face down, she lifts her hips toward him and pulls him inside her. She’s miles away, her face mashed into the pillow. She wants to get fucked. Body to body, there’s more here than Kenny wants to think about and then he isn’t thinking at all anymore, that passive … the
victim
. And then his own hips driving hard.

Afterward she closes her eyes and sleeps or pretends to sleep.

He pulls her black jeans on himself—he wants to wear her clothes—and goes downstairs. It’s perfectly safe, they’re all asleep. He takes one of her father’s fancy beers out of the refrigerator, which he is perfectly welcome to; sits in the living room under the one light but there isn’t anything to read. Then shuts the one light off and sits alone in the dark. Junie, alone in the dark upstairs. This paradise where they were going to be girls together, not literally but something has been broken. Something has been lost. For a minute he thought that he had found a way out of his father’s life. He didn’t have to be a man. He could be what?—an amateur lesbian, a lover of women’s bodies. But she wanted him to fuck her. He sees that now. Something has been broken. He sits alone until the beer is gone, blank, waiting for whatever is going to happen next. Then it’s time to go home to take care of his father.

In his bad dream it’s the counselor, the one from the beach, McHenry: Junie’s screwing him behind some kind of glass. Kenny can’t touch them but they know he’s watching. Junie stops and looks him in the face and says, How do you like me now? Because he’s such a selfish bastard. She laughs, she means to hurt him. The things that he is told in dreams are true.

His father had the television off for once when Kenny got home that afternoon. He was staring out the living room window at the church across the street. A wedding rehearsal was starting up, people coming and going in shiny bright-colored cars. Weddings and funerals made it hard to park.

“Can I talk to you?” his father asked, in his new twisted voice. Kenny was about the only one who could understand him.

“Let me get squared away,” Kenny said. “You need a hand?”

This was code for going to the bathroom; his father shook his head no. “There’s some business down there, though,” he said, angling his head toward the bedpan.

Kenny emptied it for him and then returned it and then went to the bathroom again to wash his hands with the yellow antibacterial soap. Anti-life, he thought. I’m anti-life and I vote. Remembering the curious distaste in his father’s face, as if some other body had filled the bedpan. He could use it by himself now; he could get to the bathroom in his walker, for that matter he could mount himself into the wheelchair and roll out onto the sidewalk to terrorize the neighborhood, if only he felt like it. He didn’t seem to.
GODZILLA RETIRES
.

ELVIS IN THE BATHROOM
.

“I got a letter,” his father called out. “We both did. It’s from Ray.”

Kenny was cooking hamburgers, peas, sordid American food. Tomorrow: canned chili and dog food. The range hood was blasting out the grease and smoke and he couldn’t really hear his father. “Hold on,” he said; gave the burgers a last experimental pat with the spatula and went out to the living room, where his father was looking grave. Kenny asked, “What’s Ray got to say for himself?”

“He’s tired of it,” his father said. “He wants to come back, I guess.”

“Has he still got the ticket?”

His father glared at him, like this was a rude question, and impertinence. “I suppose he does,” he said. “I don’t have any reason
to think he wouldn’t. Anyway, they can afford to ship him back one way or the other.”

“Who?”

“What’s their names. You know. I can’t remember things sometimes, you know that”—again, like it was Kenny’s fault. “The people he went away with.”

“The Clarks.”

“I guess they’re driving him crazy, I don’t know. You can read it if you want to.”

He aimed one of his big numb hands at a note on the bedside table, like he was throwing it away; and Kenny picked it up and put his eyes on it, glad for the interruption. Some voice of warning started up inside him when he heard Ray was coming back. Keep away from the wreckage. That feeling of the whirlpool, the downward spiral with nothing but blank water at the bottom … Viking funeral, Kenny thought. Chinese fire drill. He read the note as he walked into the kitchen again, as he flipped the hamburgers:

Shit, thought Kenny. Let me know if this is all right. But how much anger is enough? He already had stores of it, stockpiles; enough anger for his father’s lifetime and his own.

He set the table, put the ketchup on, helped his father into the wheelchair and wheeled him to the kitchen table. The range hood drew the night air in, cold air, faint messengers of spring.

“What do you think of that?” his father asked. “You think it was a mistake, letting him go like that?”

Letting him
escape
. Kenny didn’t say it.

“You can’t tell about these things,” his father said. “You do the best thing, the way it seems to you at the time. You can’t know everything.”

“That’s right,” Kenny said.

“I had a feeling, though.” His father lapsed into contemplation, silence. They dug in, the loud clattering of knife on plate as Kenny’s father buttered his peas. Kenny couldn’t watch him while he ate, not exactly gross, but the presence of disease, disfigurement, he couldn’t quite get used to it. His hands, his mouth, the muscles he used to express himself with his face, none of them worked the way they had before. He was taking his death in installments, a little part at a time: 10 percent dead, or 8 percent, or 15. And it was tremendously hard work for him to go about the normal business of life; it required all his concentration to keep from dropping his fork, to raise it level to his mouth and bring it in. He ate his peas with a tablespoon and still spilled. His
will
, Kenny thought; it was his father’s will that was driving him, down in the lizard brain, I want, I want, I
will …
Also this: Kenny didn’t need to think kindly of him, didn’t need to be charitable, because he was taking care of him.

His father laid his fork and spoon on the table beside his plate, a third of his hamburger eaten, finished.

“You do what you can,” his father said. “You do what you think is right at the time, that’s all you can do. You know?”

“I guess,” said Kenny, unwillingly.

“I know that things were not the way they should have been around here.” Suddenly his father turned his eyes on Kenny, his big dark headlights, wounded worse than ever and full of the sadness that he loved above all else. Kenny froze in the lights. “I know that things were getting out of hand,” he said. “I guess one of the things was, I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”