The Parallel Apartments (11 page)

“But my relief quickly resigned when I noticed that Betsey was not singing along with you. And I realized your wail was of a different timbre; a longing cry, a tired cry. It was the cry of… a baby. Not a suffering, racked prodigy, but an ordinary, tiresome baby, perhaps in need of diaper renewal. For the first time in my life, an atavism of paternity took me.

“There was Betsey, on the made bed, leaning against the headboard, legs spread, knees up, naked. An edged knife, the heavy bone-cleaving sort favored by cinema madmen, lay on the bed at her elbow. You were between her legs. She was forcing you, your foot,
into
her. Carnation dots of blood peppered the goose-down duvet. Whose blood? I don't know.

“‘Quentinforce,' she said, breathless with mania, ‘we, Justine and I, will be together forever.'

“I was transfixed. Betsey then forced your tiny legy—you were undersized, just as you appear to have remained—up to the knee into her vagina; she stopped, screamed. She picked up the cleaver, raised it. A fool, I flew across the room, jumped onto the bed, and reached for the instrument with my bare hand.”

Without looking at Justine the professor raised the palm of his left hand to display a thirty-five-year-old scarred gash. Three of the fingers of that hand were limp, atrophied, like rotten asparagus spears.

“But it was sufficient. A brief tussle and the cleaver was out of her reach, and I plucked you from her vagina and made for the hills. Betsey was soon after installed in the state hospital, and Denise agreed to quarter you and me for the time being.”

The security guard who had poked his head in earlier repoked.

“Y'all settled down in here?” he said.

“We are settled, my tutelary friend,” said the professor.

The security guard retracted his head, and let the door fall shut again.

“Justine, dear,” said the professor, “are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“Well. You were not injured. Soon after the incident, you ceased crying. You slept hard, snored delicately. I slept on a Murphy bed in your room, as this brief period, in addition to being a formative time for you, was also the start of Denise's and my denouement, a steep and rapid plunge that met its end with a great splatter of mutual repulsion.”

The professor thrust his limp hand into a coat pocket and came up with a pale blue handkerchief pinched gently between his thumb and uninjured forefinger. He transferred it to his other hand and began to wipe at his spectacles while they were still on.

“To be specific: you'd been with us for some weeks when one late afternoon Denise raised from nothing a moderate-to-strong temper tantrum regarding the recent overcrowding in her small rented house, and you and I were bounced. Not knowing what else to do, having never confronted a related scenario in life or literature, I fetched from the carport a child's wagon, and we proceeded on a nice walk. We went to the park, to the cemetery, to Dirty's for a hamburger—I fed you bits of melted cheese from my cheeseburger; you were particularly fond of cheese. I wonder, are you still?”

Justine said nothing.

“I suppose cheese isn't good for a baby,” said the professor. “Nothing is, it seems.”

“I love cheese,” said Justine.

The professor put his handkerchief in his pocket.

“We made a daily habit of our strolls. Every day a different route and pace and pause. Saturdays, Sundays, too.

“One day we became lost, deep in the absurd intrication of cow paths just north of our university. But happily lost: I saw no reason to be on any schedule at that time. And you seemed content, humming and waving and grasping at weeds and uttering a pleasantly squeaky babel. Then, as we were about to cross a street, a van, of the sort a wealthier hippie might own, stopped near us. Your grandmother Charlotte—hardly a fringe citizen, you'll agree—emerged. Livia was in the passenger seat. She remained in the van.”

The doors to the lecture hall opened. Three or four students with ceramic-gray laptops and book-strained backpacks began descending the stairs.

“I don't know how it happened, but…”

A girl wearing a dirty red-and-blue rugby shirt that was surely recently worn in an actual rugby game threw open the lecture-hall door and strode directly up to Quentinforce Johnsonson, PhD.

“Professor,” she said, “this syllabus is bullshit.”

“That syllabus, Miss Jenkins,” said the professor, looking up at the girl, who was at least six-one, “is in fact compressed wood pulp, size, and kaolin, bedaubed with ink in patterns that form sentences in the American variant of the English language, and excludes bullshit altogether, which I leave to my students to manufacture.”

Justine imagined the professor looking up at Betsey like he was looking up at Miss Jenkins.

“No,” said Miss Jenkins, “I mean, I said,
What the fuck?
when you handed this out and I asked somebody old and they said this is a mimeograph. It smells and it's kind of damp when you get it. It's faint. It's bullshit.”

Justine noticed that the girl smelled of moist soil, dark and just dug. The smell of grade-school summers and fireflies. Justine wanted a cheeseburger.

“Mimeography is a perfectly satisfactory method of graphic reproduction. Sit.”

Miss Jenkins went to sit.

“I have another lecture,” said Dr. Quentinforce Johnsonson.

“Oh,” said Justine. “Okay.”

“In conclusion: I don't know how it happened. It just seemed… correct. As if it were the best, and only, thing to do: inevitable and immutable as a tide.”

“You gave me back. To my mother and grandmother. On a street corner.”

“Yes.” More students came in. The professor ignored them. “At that moment, Livia's feelings were difficult to guess. But Charlotte, she was euphoric. She held you tightly but tenderly. She apologized to you over and over. She helped you up into the van. She was tearfully triumphant. She did not want the wagon. This was 16 July 1971.”

The security guard came in carrying an old-fashioned overhead projector, a long, thick power cord trailing behind him. A small student wearing a Joy Division T-shirt followed the guard, pretending for the benefit of a girl swaddled from neck to Nikes in burnt orange that he was going to stomp on the cord.

“I didn't hear anything of you, or Livia or Charlotte, until 1988, when they said on the news that you'd disappeared. There was a photo of you, perhaps from a yearbook. By then I also had not heard from Betsey since 1980, when our lawyers had gone to depose her at ASH as part of our divorce proceedings, a juridical buggering lasting seven years. Beg pardon.”

Justine watched the students compress themselves into the neat rows of the amphitheater like atoms of carbon. She felt a sudden lust for college, a kind of anti-nostalgia for the idea of elective learning, which she'd never had a chance to try. The only formal class she'd ever taken (apart from Darling M'Nabb's) was a pastel-drawing class in Brooklyn, which she'd quit in blanching embarrassment after two sessions when she realized she'd brought
oil
pastels—basically crayons, in both cost and substance—when the medium that was being taught was soft pastels, which cost, by volume, approximately forty times as much. Nothing had since convinced her more that her artistic calling lay in the discipline of collage.

But real college, like the professor's class, not a $225 two-subway-and-two-bus-rides-away class in coloring, seemed pleasant, doable. Hot, even. Why Justine felt this way, after being told by a professor of such a class that as a child she'd come
this close
to having her limbs segregated from her torso by a madwoman intent on the piecemeal stuffing of as much of Justine as she could into her womb, she did not know.

The faint odor of mimeography chemistry.

“The fire ants were bad in 1971,” said the professor. “They were bad again in 1988. And they're bad now. Be careful, my dear Justine.”

The professor picked up his satchel, and, taking each step with caution and concentration, holding out his dead hand for balance, descended into the pit of the hall to the stage.

IV

1968

In 1968, as a junior in high school, Livia had known four things about Burt Moppett: that he was the guy who'd nearly been a mass-killing victim when he was fifteen; that he was dreamy without seeming to realize it (which just made him all the dreamier); that he led a local band, Ye Moppe Hedds, that was based on the 13
^th
Floor Elevators formula, a sound at odds with the prevailing Austin scene; and, last, that she was secretly falling in love with him.

Livia had never gone to hear Burt and Ye Moppe Hedds, partly because her slowly fermenting crush on Burt had lately grown intoxicating, rendering her shier than ever, and partly because she was too young to get into the bars and roadhouses he played in. Her sort-of best friend, Brenda Lathers, whom Livia tutored in math and civics (and who, in a recent poll conducted by a private group at Austin High in order to subvert school spirit and to amuse themselves, had been voted Most Likely to Choke on a Large Dick), had seen them twice now, and told Livia that she intended to become not just Ye Moppe Hedds' most zealous groupie but Burt Moppett's personal
aide-de-camp and concubine. In contrast to Livia, the richer Brenda's crush, the more proactive Brenda became.

Livia, with uncharacteristically little compunction, began to realize that the social dynamic at work might allow her to exploit her friend, Burt-wise. Livia began tutoring Brenda more and more. For free. Livia was smart enough—possibly the smartest person in the whole school—that she could have tutored anybody in anything, for money. But the potential payoff—Burt—was worth some free lessons on checks and balances and the volume of a sphere.

“Anything he wants, Livie,” Brenda had said one afternoon in the school cafeteria while they observed Burt, who was napping across four cafeteria chairs a few tables over. “Anything. I'll get it. I'll do it.”

A nearby group of gangly junior-varsity basketball players was practicing trajectories on Burt with balls of compressed hamburger bun. Since Burt, when planning his nap, had apparently pushed in his four chairs first and then gained them by crawling under the table, he was almost completely bunkered and practically inaccessible to bun wads. On top of the lunch tables a small bunch of bananas, a pile of weathered schoolbooks, and a couple of sleeveless 45s waited for him to wake.

“I wish they'd leave him alone,” said Brenda, trying to peel open a half-pint carton of chocolate milk. “He rehearses and composes all night and he's sleepy.”

“That's the wrong side,” said Livia. “Open the carton on the side with the arrows. Okay, now, back to question number six: the quadratic formula is an example this type of—”

“Come hear them with me Tuesday, Liv. At Wolford's. You know, he wrote a song about me, called ‘Brenda,' and he's going to sing it for the first time. It might even be on the record. You knew that International Artists Records wants to maybe sign him?”

“No fooling?”

“But when you hear him sing and play electric guitar, and see how groovy he is, don't you fall for him, Livia Durant, because he's mine. You're allowed to be a frantic groupie, though. You won't be able to help it, anyway.”

Brenda had delaminated both gables of the tiny carton, but a tougher sub-integument kept the carton firmly sealed and the milk from Brenda.

“He looks pretty goofy,” said Livia, working to convince Brenda of her own indifference regarding Burt. To add to this charade, Livia yawned and
took the chocolate milk carton away from Brenda to give it a try herself. “And he's got those holes in his face.”

“They look like big dimples when he's onstage in the dark,” said Brenda, going through her purse for something. “Come with me. You'll see.”

Brenda took the carton back and tried to stab it with a bobby pin.

The ballplayers meanwhile had discovered that a bun wad carefully aimed and thrown hard, with a low, flat trajectory, could possibly travel
under
the table and peg Burt in the temple, but no one had yet succeeded, even though Bo Fettle, a mean, eczematic country boy whose eyes were cyclopially close together, had come very close.

“How do you get in?” said Livia. “We're not old enough.”

“Quit that, Bo, you jackass!” shouted Brenda.

Bo skyhooked a hamburger patty, which slapped meatily on the linoleum behind Livia.

“I can get us in,” said Brenda. “Through the back where they take the trash out. I know the fry cook. I won't tell you how.”

Livia yawned again and said: “I just remembered—I can't go. I have to take my granny Mère bowling. It's her night at Saengerrunde.”

That Livia was due to chauffeur Mère was true, but that it would stop her from going was utterly false.

“Oh.”

Bo and the junior-varsity bench got up, crept up to Burt, and yanked out all four of his chairs at once. Burt spun and landed on the floor. Then they tipped the table so Burt's property slid off and joined their owner.