Sacred Time (26 page)

I pressed myself down. “I don't know much about thieves. That's not true. Papa always—”

“Here, now—” Franklin swung himself atop me.

I pushed up, against him, felt him inside me, urgent and deep. “Riptide Grandma—”

“—who is in this bed with us this very moment—”

“—grew up all tangled in guilt, and she's done her best to pass it on to Mama and me. The way I see it, you've got to keep yourself free of all that shit. I mean, when something starts feeling heavy or cross, I shake myself loose. While Mama holds on to the same kind of thing and tries to figure out what it was she has done wrong.”

“This is not a…time to think of…guilt.” Almost. He was almost there. Heavy and swift and almost there.

“Slow…” I was swaying against him. “Slow…Think of Riptide Grandma.”

“That'll stop me altogether.”

“When it comes to sex, she's quite radical.”

He was thrusting himself faster.

“What I've figured out, conscience—her kind of conscience—is what makes you feel bad.”

“I think of conscience as…” Faster now. “…something to figure out choices. Something instinctive.”

Instinctive…

In-stinc-tive…
a pulse now, the word
In-stinc-tive…
an echo throughout my body.

In-

stinc-

tive…

In-

stinc-

tive…

In—

“Franklin? I love you—” But it was Jonathan's voice I heard.
“You instinctively find the sun and lie in it. Like a cat.”

stinc-

tive…

In-

stinc—

…an echo throughout my body, urgent and sweet—

“You're like a cat, Belinda. You instinctively find the sun and lie in it.” Another husband, same bed—“You inspire me, Belinda. You mind if I write it down? ‘Like a cat, you instinctively find the sun and lie in it.'”

tive…

In-

stinc-

Days, Jonathan works for the IRS, but evenings he designs greeting cards. “I know I'm getting closer,” he says whenever Hallmark rejects his cards, and—

“I love you,” my other husband, this new husband, was saying, throat arched. “I love—”

tive…

In—

Franklin. Reaching between us, thumb stroking my clitoris—

In-stinc-tive…

In-

stinc—

tive…
an echo, a pulse—

In—

“Franklin? I love you—”

Jonathan buying yet another one of those ridiculous books:
How to Turn Your Hobby into a Career Without Leaving the House.
Jonathan daydreaming of becoming eligible for the IRS home-office deduction, of designing his greeting cards while watching our children. How often—

Franklin, kissing the sweat from my temples.

stinc-

tive…

—do I tell Jonathan that I can't see myself with children of my own? And how many nights does he go on about our children—chil-dren, always plural—while I let him talk himself to sleep? Until one night when it feels dangerous to listen to him about chil-dren because he may convince me, outlast my will.

“Too much of myself is still missing in Bianca.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't want to talk anymore.”

“I think it means you use Bianca as a scapegoat for everything you don't want to feel.”

“Not with me. You cannot have children with me.”

But he does his patient voice: “You'll want chil-dren before too long. It's a biological thing, Belinda.”

I fly at him. “Don't tell me what I want.”

He's quiet then. For almost an entire minute, he is quiet. And then accuses me, “You only do what feels good to you.”

I kissed Franklin. “He wasn't like you.”

“Who?”

“Jonathan.”

“I guess one more person in bed with us doesn't really matter. We already have your grandmother here.”

“Let's buy a new bed.”

“To make room for a few more people?”

“It's still from that other marriage.”

“We'll get a new bed.”

“Jonathan said I only do what feels good to me.”

“Why would anyone not do just that?”

“You're cold like a cat.” That's how Jonathan summarizes me when he finally believes I do not want chil-dren.

“What is it with you and cats?” I ask him. “First you go on about cats and sun, and now all of sudden cats are cold.”

But he slings the last words. “Some cats eat their young, Belinda.”

Franklin was shy around cats. Our landlady had adopted two strays, and they slunk against Franklin's legs when we returned from our honeymoon. He got alarmed because he'd grown up with horses, and anything smaller seemed at risk to be harmed by his wide hands. Though he felt gangly because of his size, I found such beauty in the way his bones were linked. With most people you first noticed hair and eyes, but with Franklin you saw bones. Raw and harmonious. Rawboned. When he stroked the cats' backs, it was gingerly and with one finger; yet they sought him out, leaned against his finger as if to train him in caresses he hadn't considered yet.

In our bedroom, he unpacked dozens of tiny liquor bottles from that rip-off refrigerator in our hotel.

“When did you take those?”

“While you were in the shower.”

“See…you use what you like, but then you tell them and pay when you check out.”

Franklin looked green around the nostrils, as if just convicted of first-degree altar robbery. “I thought they were complimentary…like the soap and towels and notepads.”

“Soap, yes. Towels, no. Notepads, yes. You didn't know. It's probably a seminary thing.”

Of course, then he had to call the hotel and confess. And of course they already knew about the bottles, though not about the towels, and told him they'd mail us a bill for ninety-four dollars.

“More than the room cost us.” Franklin looked stricken.

“Thank God you left the curtains.”

All of that week he fretted about what things cost, about getting a job, and it became obvious how little experience he had handling money because he'd gone right from his parents' care to the care of the church.

“How's the job search?” Papa asked when he stopped by a week later.

“Franklin is applying for teaching positions,” I said quickly.

“Nothing, so far,” Franklin said.

Papa nodded. “Because this whole area is heavily Catholic.” He was studying Franklin closely. I'd seen that look before: on Papa and on predators in
National Geographic.
And, sure enough, he said to Franklin, “Let me know if there's anything I can do.”

“Thank you,” Franklin started. “I—”

“Franklin doesn't need any help.”

“I'm talking about advice, Belinda.”

After that, Papa called every other day with offers. “We'll schedule something easy for you….”

Franklin and I had fights. The same fight: he'd insist Papa was helping him; I'd insist it was all manipulation, the sincerity of the con man.

“Something temporary…” Papa suggested.

But already two generations were propping him up: first Uncle Victor, pitching in not for Papa's sake but to make Mama's days easier; and then Anthony, for almost fifteen years now. If I let Papa continue, he'd lure Franklin and future generations, making each exploitation sound like an opportunity.

In my family we were accustomed to him presenting his failures as successes; but there was also that other side to him, the generous side that made him be first in line when the Red Cross asked for blood donations—never mind that he might sell a business opportunity to the person waiting behind him. It was Mama's theory that his generosity was directly linked to play and profit. Like Chocolate for Jesus—those chocolate bars wrapped in red-and-silver foil with a picture of Baby Jesus that Papa helped me sell door to door, earning me first prize, a holy-card collection of saints who were both virgins and martyrs, for selling more Chocolate for Jesus than anyone in the history of St. Simon's. He also used to volunteer for the Lenten clothing drive, and he was a regular chaperon for our school trips to the Museum of Natural History and to the Central Park Zoo, where we'd wait for the hippo to charge down the concrete ramp and lunge into the murky water, splashing the wall of glass that separated us from the hippo. I worried the hippo might hurt itself on the edges of the pool that was barely large enough for four hippos, even if you crammed them in there, side by side.

When Franklin had worked for nearly a year as a roofer, his ladder slipped while he was sealing the flashing on Our Lady of Mercy. For two hours he was trapped on that pitched roof, till the nun, who was changing the water of the altar flowers, heard him shouting for help.

“It's a sign,” I told him, “that God is scheming to get you back.”

Franklin laughed. “You and your imagination, Belinda.” His Adam's apple rode high in his elegant throat.

“That's what the nuns always told me in elementary school: ‘Belinda, you have too much imagination. You fill in the blanks of what you don't understand with your imagination.' And look where it's taken me.”

“Where's that?” His red hair fell forward.

“To you. When I met you at the St. Raymond's picnic, I imagined us together.”

He nuzzled my neck. “It's not like you did it all alone.” He smelled of tar and shingles and sun and sweat.

Though I fretted about him working on roofs, I loved that smell on him. Jonathan used to smell of soap and toothpaste, and I swear that's what killed the loving in me. When we met at NYU, we had work-study jobs in the music department. He was peculiar about smells, but I thought it was limited to food, because he complained when one of us brought in lunches with a potent smell—tuna or garlic or peanut butter. To tease him, I'd buy hot dogs or fish from street vendors. I was still not entirely sure how Jonathan and I got from those pained glances to the altar, except that some of it had to do with his voice. He and four other music students, who called themselves the Grand Concourse Troubadours, sang operas without staging them, and when I took my grandfather to
Daughter of the Regiment,
he said, “Your friend Jonathan has the kind of voice that makes you forgot where you've parked the car.” The only other voice Grandpa ever said that about was Mario Lanza's.