Picturing Will (23 page)

As she sipped, she unfastened the robe with one hand. She had on a low-cut black lace brassiere with a tiny red flower over the front clasp. She finished the champagne. He was getting hard. The fan was turning. What had happened to account for his sudden luck with women? It was as though angels had plotted to please him. The little red flower made him think of impatiens. Hoeing the ground. Digging with the trowel. Setting in little impatiens plants. White, salmon, and red. Last week’s work. His hands were on her hips.

“I do have a bed,” she said.

The bedside clock was ticking. Will had had a toy—a piece of laminated cardboard shaped like an alarm clock with bells on the top. He would spin the hands, making them go round and round. Babies always parted their lips when they played. Wayne had shown Will how to click his tongue. It had taken a long time to teach him. He was glad that he didn’t have to be the one to teach Will to whistle. He could not remember if he had taught Will to click his tongue over the Giddyup Pony book, or to make the sound of the ticking clock. He would be going home to Will and Corky.

Elliott stretched out across the width of the bed, and again he kneeled and looked down at her. For fifty, she was in very good shape. She would have to be fifty, give or take a few years, because of the age of her son. “Did he have that girl with him?” she had asked. He had not even reached them in New York; he had left a message on their machine. Susan had asked why they didn’t join them for a swim. “We’re not lepers,” she had said. Elliott’s son fucked a girl who wore white cowboy boots. In Wayne’s imagination, they had taken on sterling silver tips, cleats, and silver spurs. She kept them on when they fucked. She lay naked on top of a lasso, a
Penthouse
beauty photographed through a haze filter. Then she sat in a sports car, a Mazda RX-7, in a driveway in Florida. She had called “Honey” with as much of an edge as she would let creep into her voice, considering that she wanted to please the man so he would marry her. She had certainly not been his wife sitting there, in that car, in those boots.

Wayne took Elliott’s smooth feet—even those were smooth!—and brought them to his chest. He ran his hands down the sides of her thighs. He was smiling at her, and she was smiling at him. The bushes were planted on her hillside. There would be pool parties, which he would not be a part of, when she and her guests would drink champagne and notice—vaguely notice—that things were in flower. The day at the pool would probably stay in Will’s mind longer than in the minds of any of the people Elliott entertained. Will would tell Jody. She would ask what he did, and he would tell her that they went swimming at a big pool, and what could she think but that Wayne had friends who had a swimming pool. He looked down. A little wisp of hair blew over Elliott’s forehead, sent aloft by the turning fan. She was rubbing his pubic hair, her thumbs moving up and down the sides of his crotch, her fingertips rising high to stroke the part of his body where the hair ended and his own smoothness began. Impossible to imagine Will in such a position. Will kneeling in front of a woman. Though he would, of course. By that time, would magazines offer the same orchestrated fantasies seen through smoky lenses? Victorian ladies in their bustiers. Cowgirls naked except for white boots, pouting with bee-stung lips, hair spread out on the pillow? Maybe by then space helmets would be erotic, and the hourglass figure, which had been replaced by the anorexic figure, would be something else entirely. Nipples might not be points of fascination, but the clavicle. By the time Will was grown, Jane Fonda might be leading the archangels in aerobics, or using all her muscle strength to leap through the fires of Hell, if she hadn’t been forgiven for what she did in Hanoi.

He had powdered Jody’s buttocks with a big powder puff and then pulled her ass into his stomach and gone inside her, the powder leaving two small moons on his body.

Hanoi. So long ago, it might have been the Civil War.

On the rug, playing with baby Will. Not sure-footed at all. Those hard baby shoes, laced up, that they put them in. Like they’d plunged your tiny feet in rigid ski boots and you were trying to run. No flexibility. No way to run fast enough to win, even though Daddy could only move so fast on his hands and knees. The palms could take it, but not the knees. Trousers helped. Baby knees, going up and down like a carousel horse. Up-down, up-down. Trying to run, but how, with feet in ski boots? Knowing you’re going to be caught. Just knowing it. Squeal and run, work your knees, but you’re as stationary as an animal on a carousel. Big bear will get you, smiling in the disguise of Daddy. Run in circles. You’ll be caught.

He cupped his hands over Elliott’s hipbones and pulled her ass against him, entering her.

What had Jody thought, when she realized that he wasn’t coming back?

Would he be coming back here? To Elliott’s?

He was prepared for Kate to leave. From the first, he knew that she would leave and go back to New Jersey. That allowed him time to prepare. The good thing about fucking other women was that when you left them, or they left you, whatever you had done could be recreated with your next partner, and she would be grateful. Interested. He had powdered Corky’s bottom, improvising a little, years later, by spanking her first. And she had liked it.

What is amniocentesis? flashed into his mind.

Corky was letting him know that she was having a good time with Will. He could see his son growing close to her. She had bought him a little tube that would break the world into bits when you looked through it.

Tick tock.

He fucked Elliott harder this time, three or four hard strokes, slowly withdrawing until only the tip of his penis was inside, moving his fingertips to her nipples, gradually accelerating his thrusts as his grip on her breasts tightened. Tick tock. In out. It seemed silly, child’s play, if you thought about it. Two adults in odd positions. No wonder children were frightened when they looked into a room and saw what they shouldn’t see. Sometimes the people
were
hurting each other. And if they weren’t then, they might be somewhere down the line. Hurt if the other person refused to do it every day. Or if the person left. Or if you left, and tried to forget the person. Your body would remember.

He could not remember the names of all the women he had fucked. For a while he could. Now he couldn’t. And if things kept going the way they were, there was sure to be more amnesia. Though he hadn’t even wanted to fuck the girl in the Mazda—the girl who said “Honey” with an edge in her voice—it would be an interesting idea to have Corky keep her shoes on, her high heels, which she could wear as she crouched over him.

He had planted rhododendron bushes on Elliott’s hillside. Maybe she would look at them and think of him, and of the turning fan, the phone that rang and was answered on the second ring by the answering machine, the ice cubes clattering into the bin.

He could hear them clattering again, as he came. So much fucking always gave him a headache, so that what he heard was partly the imagined avalanche, and partly the sound he made, a groan uttered as much from pounding pain as pleasure.

This was what he was doing as Corky took care of Will. Exhaling. Kneeling on a bed with a woman below him who turned over, her arm bent, thrown across her eyes. He kissed her elbow. He kissed her only there, then stood and waited to see if she would look at him. When she did not, he turned and started toward the other room to gather his clothes. When he got there, he went behind the bar and helped himself to another beer, tossing the cap on top of the bar. While the refrigerator door was still open, he took one of the little bottles of champagne and put it in his jacket pocket. He felt sure that she would not hug him goodbye. That even if he decided to go into the bedroom to bend over and kiss her, she would not feel the bottle.

He was right. He went back to the doorway. The fan was turning. She had rolled onto her stomach. He went to the bed and kissed the top of her head, tousled her hair. He also kissed her spine, at the small of her back. Then he went away, having had a premonition from the first that this was the way he would depart.

He left the front door open. When she saw the open door, she would have to think of him.

The bottle was a little ice pack. He could remember Jody telling him, when Will was an infant, that if you stand in cool water, it cools your whole body. That in the winter, if you cover your head, you will be warmer, because so much heat is lost through the head. She kept the blue stocking cap pulled down low, to Will’s eyebrows. Around every body there were invisible currents of air—hot air or cold air—spreading out, dissipating.

He stopped for a minute and looked at the pool. He went closer and saw that a bee was floating, struggling for its life. The water was quite still. If the bee made it to a long green leaf a foot in front of it, it might have a chance. He thought about pushing the leaf farther away, but didn’t. He looked back at the open door and wondered what insects would enter the house.

A man who had picked the wrong woman three times was the only kind of man who would leave three women.

He looked at the leaf. A maple leaf, very still in the water.

He went to his car and got in, taking the cool bottle of champagne from his jacket pocket, dropping it on the passenger’s seat.

There were moments in life—rare moments, but they happened in every life—when you knew clearly what you did and did not want, and why. You could know the minute you took off in a car that you would not have to test-drive anything else, that this was the one for you. Apparently, all women could tell in a split second if a dress was right or wrong for them. You could know that because the butter on the popcorn you got in the movies was rancid, you would never be able to stand the taste of popcorn again. Wayne could remember the moment, as a small boy, when he had put his washcloth on top of the soap dish, thinking: This is ridiculous. I can wash my body with my hands. I will never again use a washrag.

Today was another one of those moments. Alone in the car, he knew that whatever Corky wanted, and no matter what price he had to pay for refusing her, he did not ever again want to look into a rearview mirror to check the expression on his child’s face as he drove along. A child who would die if he rolled up the windows and left the car in the noonday sun. A child who would be limp when he was lifted out. Whose little mouth he would suck up into his own, breathing. Breathing.

Such things happened. They didn’t make the papers, but they happened time and again. Children dead in their cribs. Suffocated in cars. Born to nuns and thrown in the garbage. Snatched into the tiger’s cage at the zoo, or pulled underwater by an alligator, which was eventually hunted down and split open, the dead child inside.

All of those things would be horrible, but worst of all would be transporting a sleeping child, slumped in its seat, buckled in as if things were so safely arranged that if the car became a rocket and shot into orbit, the child would not even suffer whiplash. You could pull over and check a million times, if you let yourself. The motion of the car would put the child to sleep. The child, asleep, might be dead. He would never again sing or talk in the car—talk to himself like a madman—to try to keep a child awake. He would never again break into a sweat as he pulled off the highway to check for that tiny expulsion of breath from the child’s nostrils as its head lolled to the side. He would never again fumble with straps, thinking he had only seconds, only to have the child open his eyes, quizzically, wondering why Daddy was frantic. Was Daddy suddenly digging like an animal getting ready for winter, in mid-July? Was Daddy playing a game? Was the baby’s navel, which Daddy’s fingers seemed to be tickling, the nut, and was Daddy a silly squirrel?

You were always seen as being out of control with children. At the shoreline, not realizing that your voice would carry so well, you would shout too loudly. Heads turned. On the roller coaster you acted insane, clutching the child with both hands, so you felt unsafe yourself as the speeding car swooped down. You squeezed the child too hard, hurting him.

Never. Not ever again. Better that the needle go into your own heart and pierce it than prick the womb in which a fetus lay curled.

The note Corky had left on the kitchen table said that they had gone to watch a movie on Corinne and Eddie’s VCR. It gave him time to sit in the kitchen chair quietly. To concentrate on breathing evenly.

He had left her stretched across the bed, the fan turning, the door open.

He pushed the bottle of champagne on top of the clutter on the second shelf of the refrigerator. He could lie so spontaneously about where it came from that he didn’t even need to bother thinking about that.

Part of the exhaustion he felt must have been because of the fucking, and drinking, and fucking again.

He had planted rhododendrons on her hillside.

He closed his eyes and imagined a bee buzzing in Elliott’s bedroom. A bee, above her naked body, carried like a leaf, airborne, blown by the currents of the ceiling fan.

Maybe she would smile when she saw the open door. She liked it that he was cocky. That he had stood there, in the Florida room, letting her know with his eyes that he realized she wanted something more than to give him a check to take back to the landscaping service.

Deciding to take his time about getting Corky, he took a quick shower, then dried off, went back into the room and pulled a beer out of the refrigerator and threw the twist-off cap in the trash. Cardboard was in there. Corky had bought Will a set of jacks and a ball.

When he went next door and shouted hello as he opened the screen door, Corky’s voice and Eddie’s hollered back.

They were watching
Dirty Dancing
.

Corky gave him a bright, false hello.

Will was sitting on the floor, turning the little ball he had gotten earlier over and over in his hand like a worry bead. That afternoon he had gotten a call from Jody. Jody wanted him to do her a favor. She wanted him to return to New York early—before he saw Wag, because if he returned when she needed him to return there wouldn’t be time to see Wag—so he could be photographed with her for the July issue of
Vogue
. She was going to be one of five women photographed with her child—a full-page picture. And her show opened in July. He would be doing her a great favor. She would return the favor by promising to have Wag for the summer—the whole summer—if Will would leave Florida early, so that they could be photographed together for
Vogue
.