The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (6 page)

She says, “How well did you know him?” and “Do you want to come in?”

She is not merely holding the door for a stranger, she’s holding it for her father, she’s opening it to a future she can sense and almost see. A thousand moments from her life crowd into this one. She feels their rush. Until this point, she never imagined that life could be so rich.

Three boys smoke and talk about sex.

Even her back, says Lee. She had this incredible back with these shadows by her shoulder blades… I don’t know how to tell you.
He flicks his cigarette to the plank floor of the porch. The spark from the butt could consume the graying wood of the shack, but it merely smolders.
I touched every part of her.

They are taking their spring break in the mountains, alone in the wilderness. They spend the whole time talking of girls when they could have gone to a beach to pursue them.

She made me wear a rubber, Lee continues.
He taps another cigarette from his soft pack.
I felt like I’d put on a spacesuit, while she was completely naked.

The word
naked
, like an explosive, creates a silence after it. It is a word he loves to say.

That’s one big condom
, says the next boy, Greg, snickering and staring at the silver clouds above the pencil tips of pine that hide the moon. He puffs on his big cigar.

The trip has consisted of one error after another—getting lost on the drive up the mountain, the car stuck on a muddy shoulder near a lake, the boys without a fish after hours in an overstocked reservoir because they packed the wrong bait. Through it all they’ve relished their incompetence, talking the whole time—on the drive, at the lake, in mud up to their ankles as they pushed against the Plymouth’s trunk—about sex.

They stand now on the porch without their coats, the night turning cold, their beer and food inside the cabin, because they’ve locked themselves out. They will have to make a decision soon—to break in or hike a few miles up the road and ask for another key—but for the moment they smoke and Lee describes the girl who permitted him to have her body against his.

It felt so
—he strikes a match, as if to complete the sentence. He lights his Camel and shakes his head as he inhales, as if his lungs fill with wonder. Lee’s father, a half decade earlier, was caught performing an abortion and stripped for three years of his license to operate. His father’s crime colors every aspect of Lee’s sexual life.

He blows a long spine of smoke, continues his tale of the naked girl, her naked opening, his tunnel vision. Much of it has basis in lived events, involving a girl with braces on her teeth and a feeling inside him, a tenderness he knows instinctively to disown.

Then she made this noise.
Her moan had startled him, frightened him, made him worried, made him come.
I wish I had a tape of that noise.
You don’t know, he says, his head shaking again in astonishment.
I can’t tell you.

Greg touches thumb and finger, making a circle, the signal for “okay,” now a symbol for something else, the burning end of his cigar thrusting into it and out. Its aromatic smoke he associates with the men his father would bring home after the children were supposed to be asleep. These men would gather in the kitchen, which would smell, come morning, of smoke, despite the pancakes his mother would have bubbling on the griddle, standing in her underwear with her flipper, red marks marching up her legs to her slanting panties, the cleft in her buttocks beneath the silky fabric visible to this boy even now every time he inhales smoke—a slight and shimmering ravine loosed in his memory from his actual mother, ready to furrow into any girl passing before his imagination.

When it’s his turn to talk, Greg describes an uncurtained window (
I had to roll a wheelbarrow over and stand on it to get a good look
), the forked body of a naked woman prone on her woman’s tummy (
tan all over, and I mean a perfect tan on every inch of her
), the panorama of her body before him (
her toes hung over the edge, and her feet were spread way apart and had really deep arches
), his eyes upon the widening gate of her sex (
her legs made a vee, like the point of an arrow, like a path that gets narrow and then more narrow as you get closer to where you need to be
).

This is not an image Greg has actually witnessed but a picture from a magazine. Yet it speaks to him more powerfully than experience. He doesn’t know that he isn’t talking about sex. Neither is he trying to recall his mother’s satin panties at the kitchen stove. Through a keyhole one night as a child, he witnessed his mother being passed among a throng of men in the kitchen, gently fondled by each. She took a hatted man’s cigar and dimpled her cheeks sucking smoke from it. His father’s bright voice called out,
First!
as he kneeled among them. On hands and knees he crawled behind his wife to make a ladder of kisses up her thighs, his tongue a serpent bent on pleasure, her panties at half-mast in its honor. His mother tugged the other men close to her, whose mouths touched her neck and breasts and parted the pink of her lips. And later that night, after the boy had returned to bed, the sound of applause came slapping down the hall.

Greg does not remember this night, but it lives inside him. The weight of it straightens him like a plumb, holding him erect, a tension in the long ligaments of his back. Its heft is what first settled his eyes upon the photo and now limns his description of the splayed woman with excited affection. He pulls on the cigar again, tries to blow rings, but cannot tame the smoke into recognizable shapes.

Even lying like that, her bottom was, her ass—the cheeks were not flat, but kind of round, not like bubbles, more like those packets of sugar. You know that sugar?

The third boy of the group hesitates on the edge of the splintered porch, leaning against a knotty post. This boy would be me, thirty years ago, seventeen and posing with a cigarette, hoping to look untouched by anything in the wide world, including my own history, the distance between what I know of myself and who I actually am—roughly the same as the distance between who I want to be and what I’ll become.

I say nothing for the moment. My Lucky Strike I treat like a date, fondling it, making a display of our familiarity, watching smoke curl from its burning end. I stall long enough for silence to slip onto the porch. The mountain air chills us, the stars flaunt their ancient light, creatures move in the piney distance just beyond our apprehension.

I would like this moment to prevail. I want for these boys to finally recognize the cold and feel their need for shelter. In the bracing air comes the sweet and predatory fragrance of decay, and it is not impossible to believe that boys might smell it, might hear the gliding complaint of an owl, which directs their attention to the night sky, the million burning things hovering above their heads. They might, at last, stare at the world around them and see, unfiltered by their shared obsession, the actual world around them—the sky, moon, stars, trees, a brown patch of earth, three kids with uncombed hair and mud-spattered jeans. They might witness these things for what they are, emblems of nothing, yet freighted with a terrible beauty.

Instead, when they lift their eyes to the dark heavens, they see a universe nippled with light, the crescent moon, that luminous curve of ass, riding seductively above the phallic pines. Their litany of extremity and orifice must continue, the push-me pull-you stories of suck and satisfaction, the wagging bravado of boys alone in the woods. Their every word returns to the feminine body—the ones they have witnessed, the flesh they have beheld with their own flesh, how the friction of skin on skin lights in them the spiraling fuse that they mistake for their souls. It’s too simple to say they describe the roundness of women’s breasts because they cannot say they love their mothers. Neither can they say that they love the world, nor that they feel the rending weight of it. But they can say
buck naked
and
big tits
, and if they need to say something that has nothing to do with sex, they speak of sex anyway: annoyed,
screw it;
pleased,
bitchin’
. When forced to speak of their love for one another, they say,
fuck you, man, you suck the big one.

Lee’s father, by this time, once again practices medicine. When the trouble came down, Lee had been led to the guest bathroom in their large house, where he settled on the rim of the tub, while his father sat on the lid of the toilet. It was the final week Lee’s parents would live together, although Lee did not yet know that. His father’s hands and voice shook as he explained why he had done what he had done.
No money changed hands
, he told his son. The woman, almost forty, married, mother of four, had wept in his office.
A good friend
, he said.
She needed help
. Yet it had been her husband who turned him in.
How he knew
…, Lee’s father began, but he let the sentence fade away.

Can Lee ever forgive himself for what he did next? He asked not about his father’s arrest or why his father and mother yelled at each other; he did not ask about the law or about justice; he did not even ask how his father felt, or if there was anything Lee could do. Instead, he asked,
Was she naked
?

Lee cannot forgive himself because he can no longer name the transgression. But the awareness of this betrayal rides with him: in his shoulders, there in the dark space between the blades; in the narrow gap between bucket seats, the gulf that separates him from the girl with the braces; in the delicate silences among the words of his every sentence, words that shimmy about a girl’s torso more roughly than his hands. The actual touch of his hands on the girl’s body had been compassionate and laden with his father’s shame, his fingers gently strumming her ribs, tracing the flared bones of her hips, his heart brimming with a rapacious delicacy.

When he seeks words to describe the encounter, he can only say,
She was… she was so… such great pussy.

When it comes my turn to howl into the chasm, I describe my night of wonder.
At the party, after the Chandler game,
I begin, the cigarette a lever in my mouth,
she found ways to let me see her panties, just me.
I tap the end of my Lucky; flakes of ash float on the frigid air.

The story I tell my friends is true, but what I tell is only a fraction of the story. The white flash of the girl’s panties from across the crowded room stirred in me a sleeping longing, a desire that hibernates in the marrow. I didn’t remember my favorite aunt but relived her jaunty walk across the porch of my childhood home, a walk I witnessed through gaping blinds, her man of the month grasping her shoulder, spinning her into his arms, his hands sliding beneath her skirt, revealing the white planes of her secret skin. What can a boy do with such information but store it in his body?

At the end of the party, that girl and I found an empty room.
And I put my finger there, right there, right right there. I felt like my whole body was in that finger, warm, wet, and just where it wanted to be.

I think my turn is over, but they won’t let me quit.
Did you fuck her?
They want to know. They need to hear it. When I say that I did, it’s only partly a lie. The power of that encounter speaks louder than the simple facts.

Yeah, I say. Yeah, I fucked her, all right.

Don’t hold back, Greg says. Describe the deed.

Because I’m a virgin, I cannot describe the love I made with that girl. I describe, instead, my favorite landscape, the contours of a wheat field bordered by a canal, how wild the flowers grow along the bank, how bushy the patches of grass, how ready the field grows for the thrasher, and how, after the harvest, the stubble has to be burned, ash enriching the soil, preparing it for next year’s crop. Lacking the words and experience to tell it right, I substitute the body of woman for the body of earth, the geography of an upturned hip and slanting slope of skin for the blue-green landscape of windblown wheat whose stalks genuflect and rise, a billowing movement that engages more than the eyes.

At least that’s what I think I did. We didn’t know what we were saying, and yet we knew we were saying more than what was said. Talking about the slender ribbon of dark hair on the taut surface of a girl’s abdomen, I knew I was describing a thing whose real meaning was beyond my grasp, like a child who dreams of sex before he knows what it is, describing the mounds and valleys of his dream and the impossible wish to walk among them.

We were boys of no particular distinction, inventing our own history, perpetuating a species of desire as common as the cold weather that made our bodies tremble. Into the morning hours we continued our allegory of the body female, until we thought to try a window, and one by one we tumbled in, where we built a fire and breathed the smoke, then crawled beneath our coarse blankets to talk again, elevating, as best we could, the fragile faith that our lives had meaning.

He was black, too tall to be a dwarf, too short to be normal. Monica had to show
her driver’s license before he would let her into his condominium. Her DMV photo she considered alluring, her mouth showing a little pout, head tilted at a tough-girl angle, bangs falling just right across her forehead. She generally liked to be carded, but not at work.

“I have my own vacuum,” he said, wanting her to leave the Merry Maids Hoover in the carpeted hall. “Follow me, please.” His voice had the melodic lilt of strangeness, and there was something in his walk, a wobble, as if the floor beneath him were shifting. Monica’s daughter Sally, not quite three years old, ran with that same rocking motion, her arms lifted and flailing at the air.

Monica regarded all black men as personally threatening, but she knew this about herself and tried to compensate. There weren’t that many blacks in Albuquerque, but she had dated one for a while. His lips had touched the soft skin below her ribs; his tongue had explored her belly button. But while they were together, she found herself suggesting barbecue ribs, Kentucky Fried Chicken, even watermelon. “I love the blues,” she had said, and then found herself unable to name a single performer. “The one Diana Ross played in that old movie,” she had added. She would have been humiliated, but he’d had no interest in the blues, which she found annoying. He had been disappointing, hardly black at all. However, she hadn’t trusted him with her daughter. There was that.

The black man she now followed down the hall went by the name of Mr. Chub. He intimidated her: his blackness, his shortness, the swaggering teeter of his walk, the cut of his expensive clothes—pants ballooning at the waist, tapered at the ankle, as if to emphasize the brevity of his torso, and his white shirt, buttoned to the collar, cuff links (cuff links!) in the shape of gold coins.

“This is your first house of the day?” he asked, his voice smooth, like someone from radio, like Brian, her lover. Not actually her lover at the moment. Brian was her former and, she was confident, future lover. A smooth voice like Brian’s, but Mr. Chub’s voice was strange, too, haunting.

Monica assured him this was her first stop of the day. He paused before a closet, his hand on the brass knob, thin brows arching. Above his large head, a tight nest of dark, curly hair.
Natty
was the word that came to mind, natty hair and
nattily
dressed, but she thought they might be racist words. Her mind seemed to insist that she was a bigot, but she didn’t feel it in her heart.

His big head nodded slightly. “And you… pardon me, but you did bathe this morning?”

“You don’t have the right to ask me that,” she said, suddenly defiant, fearless, then immediately afraid. She had showered and shampooed her hair. She bought shampoo from her hair stylist. She didn’t scrimp on her hair.

“I apologize,” he said and removed the vacuum from the closet, a Kirby Deluxe with a chrome case, brand-new and gleaming like a car just waxed.

“It’s beautiful,” Monica said.

“Sis-sis-sis,” he stammered. “Sis-sis.” He looked away, composed himself, his shoulders rolling mechanically. “I… have… a… stutter,” he said, as if announcing royalty. “Rarely.”

“My husband stutters,” she said, dismissive, half shutting her eyes, imagining it were true. She could almost picture him, his hair rumpled, his sweet and naked mouth unable to fix on a word. “I’m used to it.”

Mr. Chub seemed charmed by this. His smile grew large and rectangular, teeth white and perfect. From the neck up he was movie-star handsome, a peaked mustache feathering his full upper lip. “If you have any questions, you may call me,” he said and showed her the intercom mounted low on the wall—his level, the Chub plane. “This button is tricky,” he warned, pushing it with his black thumb, pink in the creases. Not really black, of course, a shade of brown, with some red in it, like a dark oak stain, a tobacco color. The black man she had dated had been a waiter in a seafood restaurant. He had been getting a degree in economics. Uncircumcised. He preferred V-neck sweaters. She made a mental note to look through Mr. Chub’s clothing.

She stripped the bed, bundling the expensive pinstriped sheets, imagining this man’s life, then imagining her own—a woman with a husband who stuttered, a woman who cleaned condominiums as a way to get close to the mysterious Mr. Chub. She could write an article on him or even a book, either exposé or biography, depending. When Brian finally reappeared in her life, she would reveal that she had begun a biography, but she would refuse to divulge her subject’s name.
He insists on anonymity,
she would say.

She vacuumed the big closets first, noting the shirts, identical except for color, all facing the same way and evenly spaced, like men marching in a parade. They would fit her, she thought, and wished she could try one on. There were only two sweaters, crew necks, folded and stacked on a shelf, but many belts—twenty-six—wide ones with enormous buckles, thin ones with elegant latches, belts made of metal, belts ringed with turquoise, a crude leather belt with little silver figures on it—
milagros
. She had a cross at home covered with milagros, silver shapes that healed whatever was broken—damaged arm, chronic headaches, bad marriage, loneliness. In the center of Monica’s cross was a silver heart milagro. She would rub her finger over it daily and ask that her heart be healed. On Mr. Chub’s belt were silver legs in a pair, one leg longer than the other. Monica touched the silver image to her lips. She would put a photo of this belt on the cover of her book. Maybe an actual milagro could be pounded into the cover of the hardback.

She knelt to inspect his footwear: six pairs of identical black shoes, polished, mounted on sloping wooden blocks. The soles of the left shoes were an inch thicker than the soles of the right. Custom-made, she thought, imagining a man kneeling and measuring her bare feet, then stretching the cloth tape to calibrate her legs, her thighs, to make shoes that would balance her perfectly, even her keel, flatten the world.

She would not sleep with Mr. Chub. No matter his grave pleading, his crooked legs bent beneath him. She inhaled sharply as she pictured it. On his knees, he would only reach her thighs. He’d have to stand, his natty hair blending with her pubis, his enchanted voice humming through her torso.

Monica cleaned houses most thoroughly when they were not dirty to begin with. Mr. Chub’s spare condominium looked as if it had been cleaned the day before. She concentrated on grout in the tile lining the shower stall, grime on the chrome legs of the sink, dust at the base of the porcelain toilet.

He entered the bathroom while she knelt before the toilet, which made her gasp.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said.

She clutched her heart, panting convincingly. “I’ll be all right.” She offered him a smile, which he returned.

“You work very intently,” he said, that rhythmic singsong—but smooth. How would she ever find words to describe it?

The Man with the Magical Voice
, a working title.

“I just thought I’d look in on you,” he said.

“I’m fine,” she assured him.

On her knees, she was only an inch or two shorter than he. She was on the Chub plane, the world around her instantly altered.

“You know how to reach me,” he said.

He might have looked down her blouse. He turned too quickly for her to be certain.

Dear Chub
, the letter began.
Have you forgotten the way to ElPaso?
Monica found the letter in the trash, slipped it into her basket of cleansers, touched it several times to be sure it was still there. Even while he commended her work and promised he would ask for her again, she had slid a finger past the plastic bottle of Lysol to feel the crinkled texture of the paper. An unauthorized biography, and here was the first clue. Each week she would add to her store of knowledge about him.

She drove directly to her next customer—her next john, she used to say, as if she were a hooker, but no one had found the term provocative or funny. She parked in front of the Stalker’s house, a redbrick bungalow inhabited by a middle-aged man who followed her, watching her clean, a computer genius she guessed from the mess he kept, who lived alone. “My wife died of a strap infection,” he had said slyly, expecting her to be curious, a stupid joke hiding in the mispronunciation, in his watery eyes, but she had refused to ask. She thought of him as a stalker, a creep, a Heffalump; although, he had given her a set of china, unchipped and almost complete. “I’ve no need for it,” he had said, hiding his secret motives so well she still could not name them.

She sat in the front seat of her blue Corolla under the shade of the Stalker’s giant sycamore and flattened Mr. Chub’s crumpled letter against her knee.