The Last Worthless Evening (16 page)

So I told him, and I see now that's when he knew my parents didn't know I was going to him, didn't know about the pills and the vomiting. You know how they are, the doctors: they handle you so fast they hardly look at you, and even if they do, even if they touch you with their stethoscope and their fingers, you feel like they haven't. But he was definitely looking at me, and I couldn't believe it: there it was in his face; he wanted me, the first time almost anybody ever looked at me like that, anybody but punks in the halls and at parties, the first time ever that the guy was a grown man. An old one too. So I looked back. And saw that he was old but not too old. He was probably fifty or more, but he was distinguished-looking; he had a nice haircut, not too short, and blow-dried hair, dark brown with some gray at the sides and temples; and he was tall and trim, athletic-looking, probably racquetball and tennis. I knew he sailed his boat. The lines in his face must have come from the boat; they looked like outdoor lines. I watched him watching me; then I took out a cigarette, which I'd always been afraid to do in a doctor's office, and I lit it and he didn't say anything. After a while he got up and gave me his Styrofoam cup for an ashtray. A few drops of coffee were in the bottom. He drank it with cream. Then he said: “I can help you.”

He was standing right in front of me, his legs nearly touching my knees, and I moved my cigarette out to the side so the smoke wouldn't go up to his face.

“Please do,” I said.

“Come here tomorrow night at eight.”

Tomorrow was Wednesday. I said I would. He kept standing there. I finished my cigarette, blowing the smoke off to my side and watching him talk to me. We would have to be careful, he said. He could get into very bad trouble. But he could give me the pills. But I mustn't ever say a word. I nodded. Then, I don't know why, I knew he was hard. When I put out my cigarette I glanced at it. His pants stretched across its top, and it was like it was trying to push through the pants and touch my eyes.

On Wednesday night it was very big, and I knew I had never really fucked before. I had done it in the yard and in cars at parties, when I was loaded on drugs and beer. But this was slow getting undressed, and his hands weren't a doctor's anymore, they were slow and gentle and everything took a long time. He liked eating me and he stayed down there till I came; then he sat on the floor beside the couch and touched me till I was ready again. Then he put on a rubber, and for a long slow time he was in me and I came again and finally he did: when it happened to him he groaned and shuddered and cried out in a high soft voice like a girl. That night he gave me birth-control pills too.

So I had all these pills to take, and I hid them in my underwear drawer where I keep my cigarettes and grass, and I should have kept them all in my purse, but I'm so careless about my purse—I keep dropping it on the kitchen table with my books, or leaving it in the living room, on top of the television or on the couch—that I was always afraid, when it was just grass and cigarettes, that my mother or father would pick it up wrong, just to move it, and everything would fall out on the table or floor: my Newports and my dope, and then it was speed and downs and the birth-control pills, so everything was under my pants. Still I should have been safe. I do my own laundry and fold it in the basement and put it away.

But that night Heidi was over and we were up in my room, and I was putting away my clothes when Dad knocked on the door. I said come in. He opened the door and stood in the doorway a while, talking to us. He always liked to talk to us kids and our friends. That night we talked about school, and he said we had to work hard and try to get scholarships but that he'd see to it I went to any place I could get into. He could always get money, he said, and I was the last one, so it was easier. Then he was talking about when he went to the high school and the trouble he and the guys got into, getting wise with old Mrs. Fletcher (she still teaches English, even though we think she's senile the way she keeps reciting “Snow-Bound” every year on the first day it snows because Whittier was born here and lived here), and he and his buddies would get sent to the principal; and talking Armenian in French class; and sneaking fishing rods out of the house in the morning and walking down to the bus stop with the rods in two parts down their pants legs, so they walked stiff-legged, and when they were around the corner they took out the rods and went to the pond—and it was all so tame and old-fashioned I felt sorry for him.

I've told him there are guards in the halls and patrolling the lavs for pushers, and he knows, because every kid in the family has told him, about kids smoking dope and drinking on the bus at seven in the morning, but it's like to him it's something that's going on, but it's out
there
somewhere, with the Puerto Ricans and Italians, but it's not here, in this nice house he's buying every month, like we have our own world here. And Goddamn me, that's when I put the panties in my drawer, while he was laughing about him and his buddies growing up. He had moved into the room, by then, and was standing on the rug under the ceiling light, and what I didn't think of is how tall he is. If I were standing there, I could not see into the back of my drawer. I can't even see into it when I'm standing beside it; I have to sort of raise up and look toward the back. But he could look straight down in it. Not that he was. He was talking to us, Heidi sitting on the bed and me standing between the bed and the chest of drawers, and I suppose his eyes just naturally followed my hands as they took clothes from the bed and put them in the drawers, and when I put a stack of pants in the top drawer, all he did was glance that way, and what he saw wasn't the cellophane of grass or the two bottles of pills or the birth control pills, but the Goddamn turquoise of the Newport pack, and he stopped talking and I saw his face change; he said “Uh-oh,” and I shoved the drawer closed.

“Karen,” he said, and I looked at Heidi. She said later she thought it was the grass. She didn't know about the pills, none of them, and she still doesn't.

“It's for me,” Heidi said. Her face was red, and her mouth and eyes were scared-looking, and I will never forget what she did for me, or tried to. Because she knows my Dad has a temper, and telling him you smoke dope is like telling some of these other parents you're on heroin. “Karen doesn't smoke it,” she said. She looked like she was about to cry.

Then he knew. He lives at home like he doesn't know anything but the leather factory—he's a foreman there—but he is not dumb. . I wish for him and me both, and Mom, and Francis, that he was. Because then he said: “You better go on home now, Heidi.”

She got her parka and was gone, looking at the floor as she walked past him; at the door she looked back, and her face was still red and her eyes were bright and wet. Then she went down the hall and I heard her on the stairs and my mom calling good night and Heidi said it too, and I could tell it was over her shoulder as she went out the door. I heard it, and then the storm door, and was looking at Dad's shoes.

“Open it,” he said.

I shook my head. If I spoke I would blubber. He turned his head and shouted, “Marsha!”

Mom didn't answer. She came up the stairs, her footsteps heavy like running, but she was only climbing fast. She stood at the door a moment looking at me and at Dad's back; then she came in and stood beside him.

“She's smoking dope,” he said. “Cigarettes too. Show your mother the drawer, Karen.”

Then I was lying on the bed, face-down, like I had fainted, because I didn't remember deciding to do it or getting there: one second I was standing looking at them, then I was crying into the bedspread, and I knew from the footsteps and the slow way the drawer opened that it was Mom who did it. Then she was crying over me, hugging me from behind, her hands squeezed between my shoulders and the bed, and Dad was talking loud but not yelling yet, and I started talking into all that, babbling I guess, but it wasn't about Francis and me. I said that too, but it was like a small detail when you're describing a wreck you were in, telling the police, and Francis and me were just the rain or the car that stopped to help: sometimes I screamed, but mostly I moaned and cried about vomiting my dinner and hiding that from them and laxatives and having to go at school and holding it and holding it till the bell, then hurrying to the lav and the sick sounds I made in the stall with the girls smoking just on the other side of it and saying
gross gross
, and my fat ugly legs and my fat ugly bottom and my fat ugly face and my fat ugly floppy boobs and how I wanted to be dead I was so fat and ugly, and some time in there my dad stopped talking, stopped making any sound at all, except once when he said, like he was going to cry too, like Mom was the whole time: “Oh, my God.”

ARCHIMEDES NIONAKIS

I said it too. I didn't say much more as I stood at the window looking from Karen to the twilit traffic to Karen again while she talked and wept and Paula's eyes brimmed over and she wiped her cheeks. Then Paula took her to the bathroom behind the waiting room, and they worked on their faces and came out cleansed of tears and made-up again, walking arm in arm. Karen was plump. But, like all those others—and I know all is hyperbolic for only eight women, nine with Karen, but on that Friday afternoon their number seemed legion—she was not fat.

Looking out my window at people driving home from work in the lingering sunset, the snow having stopped Thursday morning and the sky cleared overnight, I listened to Karen and thought of my brothers, perhaps the happiest Americans I know. I barely remember my father—I am not certain whether I recall him or merely have images from stories my brothers and mother have told—but my brothers remember him and the village where we lived. My father owned a small café and was also the mayor of the town, so when the Communist guerrillas came they took him with them, to the hills. They all knew him, and they said We have to take you because you are the mayor. Some months later one of them came through town and stopped at our house to tell my mother her husband was well. Kosta was ten, and my mother sent him with the man and a knapsack of food and wine, and they walked for two days to the camp in the mountains, where Kosta spent a day and a night with my father, who showed him to everyone in the camp and boasted of his son who had come to visit. It was, Kosta says, a gentle captivity. They treated my father well, and he could do whatever he pleased except escape. Kosta walked back alone, stopping at houses along the way. Later a guerrilla came to tell my mother that my father had died, probably of pneumonia, and they had properly buried him, with a marker, in the hills. She managed the cafe and cared for me, playing among the tables, and worried about her older sons and wrote to her brother in America to sponsor us.

So my brothers have built a business and houses, and when I go visit them or, more important, when, unobserved, I see them driving in town, and I watch from the sidewalk, I know they are happy, as I do when I go to their shop and wait for one of them to trim what is left of my hair. They laugh and talk; for eleven or twelve hours a day, six days a week, they do this, and they make a lot of money from those women, as though, immigrants that they are, they had seen right away in the shoe factory where the heart of the nation was and left that bleak building and women's feet and moved up to their own building, and later their homes, paid for by women's hair. And remained untouched, unscathed: swam and skied and played tennis with their wives and children, indeed lived athletic lives as naturally as animals and never considered the burning of fat or the prolonging of life. As I run, not for my waist or longevity, but to maintain some proportion of my
homo duplex
, to keep some balance between the self I recognize and the little bastard who recognizes nothing as familiar, a quotidian foreigner in the land. My brothers watched with amusement, if even that, as their hair fell out. They celebrate all Greek holidays, as I do with them, and on Greek Easter we cook a lamb on a spit; they take their families to the Greek church, and I do not know whether they believe in God as much as they believe a father should take his family to church. They visit Greece, where now my father's bones lie in a cemetery in our village, and I go there too, having no memories save those of a tourist who speaks the language and shares the blood, so that I have no desire for a Greek household as my brothers have made with their marriages here, nor do I have a desire for an American one. So this year in my apartment I have Paula, and I have a law practice that is only an avocation, and my only vocation is running each year in Boston the long run from my father's country.

Still Karen talked, seated at my desk, leaning over it, her hands outstretched, held and stroked by Paula's. I looked at Paula sitting in the chair she had pulled up to a corner of the desk, and I thought I could tell my brothers now; it was clear to me, and I could explain it to them, could show them why I would not, could not, work twelve or eight or even six hours a day five or six days a week for any life this nation offered. I had not fled a village where I would roam without education till I died. I had simply been a five-year-old boy placed on a ship. I looked out the window again and thought of Lillian Clark and those terrible eyes and the Puerto Rican girl she had to free her of her work, so that she had nothing at all to do, while in the garage the steel of the Porsche drew into itself the February cold. I spun from the window in a moment of near glee, so that Karen stopped and sniffed and looked at me, wiping her eyes. But I stopped myself and turned back to the window. I had been about to tell her I was glad Jake had done it.

She did not mention once, that entire time, the killing of Francis Clark. Nor did I ask her to. When she finished I told her we would take her home and saw at once in her eyes what I knew as soon as I had spoken: we could not do that, we could not enter or even drive to the front of Jake's home, and I felt affection and respect like love for her then, saw her as a sixteen-year-old daughter who not only loved Jake but understood him too. She would have done everything again so she could clothe herself in smaller and smaller pants and skirts and dresses and blouses, but she would have done it with more care. And I remembered from somewhere, someone, in my boyhood:
Don't shit where you eat
. It was the way my brothers ran their households, and perhaps one of them had said it to me. I told Karen that Paula would drive her to her streetcorner and I would phone her father. They both nodded and went to the bathroom. When they came out, I held Karen's parka for her and told Paula I would see her at my apartment.