The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (3 page)

On the front lawn, they join Ellen and a few others, including the hostess, “the consummate bitch,” whom Greta has only briefly met. Her name is Penny, and the straps of her black dress have slid down her shoulders, revealing the white of her breasts. The V in the back shows her panties. It’s a dress aching to come off.

They begin the trek to Ellen’s house to the tune of “Hotel California,” sung by a stray man from the party. His voice has range but he lacks control, emoting through the song as if the lyrics have no meaning. Greta has seen actors perform this way, milking each scene even though it makes the character incoherent. There have been times in her life when she felt the conflicting urges: to behave sensibly, to make the most of the moment.

When they pass an elementary school with a colorful plastic slide and jungle gym, Greta recalls the playground at Euclid Square where she first met Ellen, where they watched kids and talked about their lives.

Oh, how they had loved each other.

Ellen strolls a few feet away, her arms wrapped around her thin torso, lost in calculation. Does she really want Andrew? Something subterranean is guiding the evening; Greta guesses it must be love. What does she want herself? For Ellen to seduce him? That will leave her with the bad singer or one of the other men. Sex with strangers often interests but rarely compels her. With Duncan, sex served an additional purpose. It reminded her who she was. It taught her who she loved. It fed the flimsy and hard-to-hold thing she came to think of as her soul. Sex with strangers inevitably disappoints. It feels good some of the time, but it is momentary and meaningless, like any other workout.

Penny continues to play hostess, even as they distance themselves from her house. “There used to be an estuary here. It’s underground now. Been that way for ages. But they left the bridge, a metal bridge that had gone over the water. It was here a long time.”

“I remember that,” Andrew says. “I didn’t grow up on this side of town, but I remember a bridge over nothing.”

“It was only a foot or two off the ground once they filled in under it,” Penny continues. “The joke in high school was to jump off the bridge. How we dealt with heartbreak.”

“Where was it?” Greta asks.

“You’re standing on it, toots.”

Greta nods but doesn’t smile. She gives herself permission to dislike this woman. Why on earth has she left her own party? The road shows no traces of the bridge. A street lamp blanches their faces. Up the way, fog drifts across a yard, a simple oval, like a white hole in the fabric.

During what turned out to be the final month of Duncan’s life, Greta threatened to divorce him. He blamed it on Ellen. “You hear her talking about lovers and lawyers, and it sounds dramatic.” He wanted her to quit calling Ellen.

Greta refused. She had brought up divorce after he signed a legal form to be put on a ventilator when the time came. It would operate his lungs, permitting him to live indefinitely. He would not be able to speak by that time. He would not be able to move more than an eyebrow. Greta took the children and went to her mother’s house. She doesn’t know whether she would have gone through with the divorce. Duncan wheeled his electric chair onto the back stoop and veered off the ramp. He suffocated in the snow.

“I jumped out a window,” Andrew announces, indicating his cast. “I landed badly.” He has spoken softly, but everyone hears.

“Were you trying to kill yourself?” Greta asks.

“My, my,” says Penny, “aren’t we direct.”

“I was trying to kill something,” Andrew says. “Not me literally, it was only the second story. But I had to make a point.”

A surprisingly complicated man, Greta thinks, handsome, damaged, confused—a worthy companion.

“Greta’s no stranger to stunts,” Ellen says. “Ask about her divorce sometime.”

The others make noises to convey the sensation of being startled and enticed, a consensual apparition of emotion rather than the real thing. Greta, though, feels genuinely stunned. She doesn’t know what Ellen’s talking about.

“Let’s do hear some divorce stunts,” Penny says. “Give us the down and dirty.”

“I don’t know how to respond,” Greta says. Her husband died before she could divorce him. “I wasn’t a saint. No one would accuse me of being a saint.”

“We don’t want whining,” Penny says.
“Stunts.
Exploits. Humiliating whatnot.”

“We were happy,” Greta says. “Ellen can testify to that.” She will not describe the way Duncan’s body quit little by little, how it became a substance, a stone. The immovable object. How it repulsed her. Every moment of her day was concerned with that weight, its comfort, its functions, its awful greed. “When Ellen moved away, well…”

Andrew and Penny speak at the same time. He raises the cast to stop her. “Sometimes we need an outside party to keep the inside steady, like…” His face tilts skyward. His head makes small jerking motions, as if he’s searching the constellations for words.

“A
voyeur
,” Penny suggests. “Every family needs someone staring through its windows. It’s the only thing that keeps you from seducing the mailman.”

They laugh to let Andrew off the hook, but Greta doesn’t laugh and neither does Andrew.

“She had a fling with a boy,” Ellen says, making her eyes wide. “They were upstairs while hubby was down!” They have almost reached her house. She points to it, and her voice takes on the approximations of excitement. “Our destination: Florida’s official Bacchanalia site—Elle’s Den of Iniquity!”

Greta is too bewildered to move. She never had sex with any boy or man—not while Duncan was alive.

Andrew hangs back with her. “Like a spoon,” he says at last, “in a cup of coffee, that keeps it from spilling over the rim. An outside person can do that. A spoon. That really works, you know.”

“I know,” she says. The sudden affection she feels for him is troubling. She takes his arm. “We’re falling behind. We should catch up with the others.”

AJ can’t stop trembling. The men help him from the harness. He wants to describe the look the snake gave him and how it stared at him a second time after it was cut in two. It had a cruel face and then an awful, impossible face. There is no way to tell anyone this.

They wrap him in a coarse blanket. They’re treating him as if he’s injured. Could this blood be his? He touches his ribs as he walks, a man on either side of him. He pats the bloody places, feeling for wounds. They put him in the cab of the truck. He can’t remember the boss’s name, but he’s driving, talking about bathing and fresh clothes, taking a day off. They’re not going to the hospital, which tells AJ he isn’t hurt.

It’s a long drive and no one is at his house when they arrive. His boss asks when his parents get home. AJ doesn’t know. He thinks they should be home now and wonders whether they’re in the right house. On the end table is a picture of himself as a boy standing between his mother and father. No one else would have that.

“You ought to get a shower,” his boss says. “You’ve got blood on you.” After a moment, he adds, “I never should have put you in that harness. I have experienced men. They wanted to see how much they could slough off on you.”

“It was okay,” AJ says.

“Get some clean clothes,” his boss says. “Soak in hot water. I’ll wait out here. Go on. Wash off.”

AJ understands something is required of him. He heads down the hall to turn on the bathwater. In his bedroom, he finds clothes. When he returns, his boss is by the front door, talking on a cell phone. AJ piles the fresh clothes on the toilet lid. The water is hotter than he normally likes, but he feels it’s his job to soak as his boss suggested, and isn’t he a good guy to be so concerned? All that happened was a snake… a snake in a tree… a snake he sawed in two… a snake looked at him and ruined his clothes.

The bathwater turns pink with the snake’s blood. A surgeon could sew the snake back together. Doctors can do all these things now. They could get blood from other snakes to fill its body. But there’s no way to make it alive again. Which makes AJ wonder what that means, to be alive.

He dries off and dresses, discovering that he took two pairs of pants from his room and no shirt. When he steps from the bathroom he finds his boss on a kitchen chair in the hallway, his cap in his hand. The cap is green. His name, AJ recalls, is Tom Stewart.

“You look like a new man,” Tom Stewart says almost too softly for AJ to hear. “Did you a world of good, I bet.”

It occurs to AJ that maybe he missed something in all the action. What else could have happened?

He says, “You didn’t have to wait, Mr. Stewart.”

“I owe your parents a word or two about what happened.”

AJ doesn’t know how to phrase the question he wants to ask. “I cut up a snake,” he says. “Did something else happen?”

Tom Stewart raises the hand with the hat, pauses, and then fits it onto his head.

“No, son,” he says. “You did fine.”

“That snake was alive,” AJ says. “It makes me think how you can’t put life back into something once it’s gone.”

“That’s right,” his boss says. “That’s how it is.”

AJ wants to describe the commotion inside him. He wants to say the encounter with the snake is the most important moment of his life. But how can that be true? He was born, wasn’t he? He’s had sex with two completely different girls. He won a drawing for a color television and sold it for two hundred dollars. He went to Disney World and tried to kill himself. How could sawing up a snake compare to any of that? He realizes he himself was the one screaming. That makes the most sense. A snake, even if it isn’t sawed in half, can’t scream. That’s why his boss is here. To make sure the screaming and trembling are done. He can’t decide whether his hands are shaking. It might just be his eyes.

He says, “Why am I so…”

“There’s no telling,” Tom Stewart tells him. “What scares us, we don’t have control over that.”

“After I cut it in two,” AJ says, “it was ugly.” He wants to say more, explain that the snake had a second and horrible face, but the door opens. The sun is all but set and his father’s shadow across the carpet is gigantic.

As soon as the joint is lit, Penny decides she must get back to her party. “I don’t require an escort,” she announces, a statement that demands a volunteer.

“Grab Andrew,” Ellen whispers to Greta. “Let’s hold on to him.”

As the joint is passed to Andrew on the couch, Greta intercepts it and sits on his lap. She inhales to make the lit end glow. The one who sang “Hotel California” offers to walk Penny.

The Talking Heads sing over the speakers. A slight chronological advancement over Motown, Greta thinks, as she rises from Andrew’s lap. By the end of the album, the joint is gone and all but four have returned to Penny’s party. Besides herself, Ellen, and Andrew, there’s a dark little man she has hardly noticed. The pot is not so potent that she fails to see her duty. She kicks off her shoes and traipses over to his chair. She sits on one of the wide arms and puts her bare feet on his knees.

“Hey, sport,” she says. “I’ve forgotten your name.”

He has a serious face with intense black eyes.

“We were never introduced,” he says softly.

“I’m Greta, like the immortal Garbo.”

“Not too often I meet an immortal,” he says. “You’re only the second.”

She laughs at that. “Tell me something about yourself.”

He bends his finger. She obediently leans in. “I’m in love with your friend.” He points.

On the couch, Ellen and Andrew use a mechanical device to roll another joint.

“Which one?” Greta asks.

“Hah,” he says without any humor. “Your sister. This whole evening is for my benefit. I’m supposed to be crazy jealous.”

Andrew holds the rolling apparatus while Ellen tucks cigarette paper in its vinyl saddle. They look intimate already.

Greta says, “Sorry, but I don’t think so.”

“Oh?” His eyebrows rise, and the pouches beneath his eyes vanish. He looks a decade younger. “Watch this.”

He runs his hand along her leg and under her dress.

“Hey, now,” she says.

At the same moment Ellen says, “I know,” and hops up from the couch, spilling pot over Andrew’s lap. “Let’s move the furniture and dance.”

AJ pedals his bicycle to the house where the tree is coming down. He has stayed home from work two days, and it has taken most of the morning to ride from his neighborhood, which has few trees and no snakes. He watches from a distance. He doesn’t want the crew to see him. All of the branches have been removed from the tree. The top of the trunk has been lopped, but the tree is still incredibly tall—and bare now, like a single monstrous thought.

He pedals farther, to the house with the red tile roof. A station wagon fills the driveway. The house is brick—nothing any bad wolf could blow down. It would take something huge, as big as the tree, to knock it over. The sprinklers are on and a man is on his knees in the wet grass, getting soaked.

“Can you help me?” the man says. He is trying to turn off the sprinklers.

AJ gives the spiked knob a twist. It’s not really that tight.

The man is effusive. He drips on AJ’s shoes. “Are you handy?” he asks. His name is Duncan, and he offers work. “A few hours a week.”

AJ starts immediately, hauling trash to the curb, mowing the back lawn, raking leaves in the wet grass. He is not quite finished with the leaves when Duncan tells him that’s enough.

“My wife and kids will be back soon. I don’t want them to see you.”

AJ doesn’t know how to take this.

“They don’t know how weak I am,” Duncan explains. “I don’t want them to know. Not until they have to. The children…” He loses his voice. His face changes shape. He searches the grass, as if his voice has fallen there. AJ imagines what the voice might look like. In the raked pile, a jagged red leaf turns away from his gaze. Finally Duncan says, “Once they know their father is dying, their childhood’s over, you see?”

These words don’t just strike AJ’s ears but take to the sky, which pales and wobbles. He swallows an uncomfortable gulp of air.

Duncan pats him on the back. “How are you at carpentry?” He describes ramps for a wheelchair. “I want to have them ready when I need them.”