Jernigan (7 page)

Back in the bedroom, Martha was lying pretty much as I’d left her: on her stomach, bent arms making a diamond around her head. I undressed again, got under the covers, lay against her, caressed her awake. Sleepily she rolled onto her side, facing away, and my penis slipped between her buttocks. Then she reached around behind and pulled me in tighter. So. If she was ready for refinements this early along, it meant what? Probably that it would run its course even quicker.

“Mmm,” she said. “Do you like that, is that good?”

“Listen,” she said, after another little while, “I hope this isn’t too shocking of me, but I think there’s still a little thing of Vaseline in the drawer of that night table.” Right she was. I got the cap off, hands trembling. A few seconds later she said, “Oh my God. I know you’re
not supposed to do this anymore, but I just”—she inhaled sharply—“do not care.” Later we both lay staring at the ceiling. “You’re probably completely scandalized,” she said. “Rusty sort of gave me a taste for that.” She snorted. “Literally
and
figuratively.” We stared some more.

“I guess you probably don’t need to hear about Rusty,” she said. I reached over to pat her thigh, and my hand collided with hers reaching over for me.

When we finally got up, the kids had gone off someplace. She made coffee and brought it to me on the living room sofa, pretty good brewed coffee with cinnamon in it. I couldn’t decide whether cinnamon was a good idea or whether it was in bad taste because you should want the true flavor of the coffee. She pawed through the records again and came up with Webb Pierce, which got her some points. I mean, Webb Pierce? You would’ve thought Billy Joel or something. Or would you? Consider the woodstove and the black-and-white tv, and just the house in general. So maybe that t-shirt had been an aberration, or even a very twisty irony. Then there was the thing she’d said about her husband giving her a taste for that: had this been tactlessness or air-clearing openness? She did seem to know the difference between
literally
and
figuratively
. I was having trouble getting a handle on this Martha Peretsky.

“Have you ever heard him?” she said, lowering the needle.

I considered saying yes and said no. So whatever the first lie was going to be, it wouldn’t be that. Unless I’d told one last night at some point. I thought I remembered maybe fudging some things.

“If you end up liking it,” she said, “I’ll stick a tape in the thing.”

“Great,” I said. “Friend of mine’s been getting me into country music a little.”

“Why isn’t anything coming out?” she said. “I’ve
got
it turned up to five.”

“I can
sort
of hear it,” I said.

“OA my God,” she said. “I forgot to bring the speakers inside.”

“Your neighbors like Webb Pierce, do they?”

She jerked the needle off the record.

“Why don’t I go out and hand them in to you through the window?” I said.

“Would you? That would be great.”

Another beautiful day out. And full-grown trees around: on Heritage Circle the trees mostly weren’t big enough yet to give shade. Here I was in the backyard of some woman I’d been fucking. Whereas a year ago today—I don’t know, enough with the year ago todays. “Your yard looks kind of partied-upon,” I said, handing her the first speaker. “I’m afraid our cleanup last night was kind of superficial.”

“And whose fault was that?” She actually shook a roguish finger.

“I’ll make it up to you,” I said, queasy at having to coquette back, but wasn’t it a lover’s obligation not to break the mood? “It actually shouldn’t take that long.”

“Come in and have your coffee first,” she said, probably meaning Let’s go back to bed first. Or at any rate, that’s how it turned out.

We got to hear the Webb Pierce later.

“Yeah, I really like it,” I said. So maybe
that
lie was the first. “How did you end up getting a taste for this?” Phrased about as maladroitly as possible.

“Long story,” she said. “You really want to know?”

“Sure,” I said. The second.

“When we were growing up, outside of Washington, my dad had this country-western band? The Stony Davis Show.” She said this announcer-style.

“That was your dad’s name, Davis?” I said, wondering about the Peretsky.

“Yeah,” she said. “I just sort of kept my married name. So anyhow, his big thing was imitations, I mean he could do Johnny Cash and Ernest Tubb and, I don’t know, Eddy Arnold. Webb Pierce, of course. And he really had them down, and that was part of his show. And see, he
looked
a little bit like Webb Pierce. Kind of jowly? So about once a year he and the band would drive someplace like Pennsylvania or New Jersey where he wasn’t known, and they’d call some little nightclub and give them this story that Webb Pierce’s bus had broken down on the way to somewhere and that since he was stranded in the area he’d put on his show that night for—I forget what he’d ask, but something that would’ve been really a lot of money then. And they really used to fall for it. And he’d comb his hair the exact way Webb Pierce did and go in there with this real fancy cowboy
suit on and sing, you know, ‘There Stands the Glass’ and everything.”

“He actually got away with this?” I said.

“For years,” she said. “And that was money he would never spend. He used to say Webb Pierce put me through college.”

“He made that much on this thing?”

“No,” she said. “He always liked to exaggerate. But I guess it might have covered a year or something.”

“He still alive?” I said.

She tapped her lips with index and middle finger. “Two packs of Luckies a day,” she said. “I really wish Clarissa could’ve known him.”

It wasn’t until late afternoon that we got around to filling brown plastic trash bags with paper plates and beer cans. I emptied one can into a withered geranium in a pot on the mossy back steps, figuring kill or cure. And wondering if I’d be around to learn which. The kids had come back by this time, but they’d gone right up to Clarissa’s room. Of course. I spun the bags, twisting the mouths into tight ropy spirals which I tied with paper-clad lengths of wire. Then we dragged them out by the mailbox.

“Garbage day isn’t till Wednesday,” she said. “I hope the raccoons don’t get into this stuff.”

“What’s today anyhow?”

“Sunday.”

“Really Sunday?” I said. “It feels so much like a Sunday I thought it couldn’t actually
be
one.” A feeling I’d forgotten: Sunday with a wife, and work the next day. “Jesus,” I said. “Is that twisted thinking or what?”

“Not really,” she said. “Do you always assume everything you think is so crazy nobody can understand it?”

Odd that after all that bed it made me angry that she was getting personal. Odd unless you thought about it.

“Hmm,” I said. “Am I a snob, in other words?”

We were about that close to getting nasty.

Then she laughed. “I would never
suggest
such a thing.”

By six o’clock I’d had enough of it. I pleaded chores, unspecified, to finish up around the house before another workweek began, then knocked on the door of Clarissa’s room. After much rattling and
clicking of bolts, the door opened to the exact width of the girl’s white face. “Daniel?” she said. And his face appeared above hers.

“Petals on a wet black bough,” I said. The faces didn’t look any more or any less blank. “Listen, Danny?” I said. “I’ve got to get back to the hyacenda.” Now, where hyacenda came from was one of Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories, where Pat is writing a western movie and gets
hacienda
wrong.
Ext. Long Shot of the Plains. Buck and Mexicans approaching the hyacenda
. One more of my obscure things that Danny had no way of understanding. He probably thought it was really hyacenda. “I’ll see you back there, what, before eleven, huh? And if you want to come home for dinner we’ll call Domino’s or something, okay?” Don’t be fooled by how casual this all sounds: I was issuing a command.

“Okay,” he said, looking down and away. I was sorry for him, being ordered around by his father, however collegially, in front of his girlfriend. Or perhaps he was embarrassed by a belated sense of having gone too far with his cheeky little thumbs-up this morning.

Back downstairs, Martha stuck a cassette in my shirt pocket. A long kiss at the door—each bending a knee to insinuate a thigh between the other’s thighs, a voucher for unfinished sexual business—and I was out of there.

The house looked, as I pulled into the driveway, the way a house looks if you’ve been away for a month: that is, the angles and proportions had gone all funny. Or something. Maybe just more distant than I’d expected, as if through the wrong end of binoculars. But there was the lawn, all freshly cut. By me. Yesterday.

I got a beer out of the refrigerator, took it into the bathroom, and finished it while taking off my clothes. The tape in my shirt pocket was labeled
WEBB PIERCE
in awkward handwriting. I stayed in the shower a good long time, soaping and rinsing everything twice. Then to the bedroom, where the Yahrzeit lamp was still going, pale in the late-afternoon sunlight. I gave the plastic rod a twist to close the blinds, then shut the door, and the candle threw a shaky shadow of me on the wall. I thought how amazingly sick it would be to jerk myself off, after this day, in this candlelight. Then I thought, You’d better stop scaring yourself. So I put on clean clothes, got another beer out of
the refrigerator, went into the living room and turned on the tv. Another ballgame, with two thirds of the outfield in shadow.

I was still sitting there when Danny rolled in, during the Independent News. In fact, just as they were rerunning the highlights of the same ballgame, how about that. He sat down on the sofa, crosslegged, with his God damn running shoes still on. Though I don’t suppose I really gave a shit. He sank at once into the tv trance, as if that were his real life in there and the rest was shadows. Well, like father like son. Some commercials came on, then the weather, then the commercial where the pretty woman eats Frusen Glädjé and you wonder whether or not you’re supposed to think she really feels shame. Then the muffler strongman came on and Danny said, “So you going to see her again?”

What he was really asking, I imagined, was the following: A, was his father the kind of man who wouldn’t see a woman again after spending the night with her? B, was that the kind of man to be? C, how would this complicate his life? And perhaps D, was he going to get a new mother? Hey, I could have used the answers too.

“Well,” I said, “we certainly liked each other a lot—I mean, obviously.” Idea: Why not put it on the kid? “But how would
you
feel about it?” I said. “You and Clarissa? I mean, it’s sort of a strange situation for you to be in, right? All of a sudden your father and her mother.…”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Well, at least unusual, okay? You’ll grant me unusual?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We kind of knew it would happen and everything. When we finally got you guys together.”

I stared at him. This was sitcom stuff. Well, of course. These were kids who’d spent their lives watching shit like this, widower with houseful of girls meets divorcee with houseful of boys, and some William Frawley type around too, in an oh-so-improbable apron.

“She’s real nice,” he said. “And you two have a lot of stuff in common, right?”

What, like being old?

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “I mean, it was a nice thought, but didn’t you think through the consequences? You know, suppose it really got serious with the two of us and then you and Clarissa broke
up. Or vice versa.” I was a great one to talk about thinking through the consequences.

Now he stared. “But Dad,” he said. “If you thought that way about everything, you wouldn’t ever do anything.”

Hey, welcome to Heritage Circle.

He got up off the couch. “I’m gonna go practice.”

“Fine,” I said. “Just use the things, okay? The earphones? And don’t stay up all night.” The shit you’re obliged to say.

After the news they had some paid program on about being an entrepreneur, with people like Famous Amos. I zapped the sound down almost to inaudible and picked up P. G. Wodehouse. If I ever needed Blandings Castle, boy, tonight was the night. The lawns and gardens that you could practically see before you as your eyes moved along through the words, and Psmith winning the hand of Eve Halliday entirely on charm and eccentricity. Without so much as a kiss.

6

Although I’d had enough of it by Sunday afternoon, on Monday morning I called her from work. Partly because it was the call you had to make if you didn’t want to seem heartless, partly because I wanted her again that night. Hey, partly because it would put off for another few minutes having to start calling more prospects about this dogshit office space I’d just listed in the too-far-West 30s, next door to an SRO. I mean, I was
saying
I’d just listed it. And in fact it
was
my most recent listing.

Nobody answered the phone, and I hurt like a three-year-old at the thought that she had a life of her own.

Danny wasn’t home when I got back from work. Called over to the Peretskys’, got Clarissa. Yes, Danny was there, but her mother wouldn’t be home until eight. Did I want to talk to Danny? Did I want her mother to call me when she got back? No, no, not important.

I called again at nine-thirty. Not back yet. Tell her … tell her I’ll
try to reach her later in the week. Nothing important, tell her. Catch up with her eventually.

Went to work the next day, came home. The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door; son of a bitch stopped just as I got to it. Danny, of course, wasn’t home. Phone rang again ten minutes later. Her. “Clarissa is such a space case,” she said. “She didn’t tell me you’d called until this
afternoon
. I could’ve
killed
her. So”—deep sigh—“how
are
you?”

III

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