The Shaft (3 page)

    Jonathan popped free of her and felt a speck of moisture strike his cheek. His treacherous cock had catapulted a droplet of her lubrication right into his face. It was damned near symbolic.

    Amanda had meant no. Period.

    And Jonathan had suddenly seen himself as ludicrous. An absurd man on his knees with a hard-on jutting toward space like a cruise missile with no target to blow up.

    Useless then, useless now.

    The Greyhound's tilt-seat was a classic, slickly grimed in the manner of a doorjamb that has suffered a million filthy hands. A disinfectant tang lingered in the cabin. It persistently reminded Jonathan of a bar men's room in Mexico. Dingy place. He had logged an unlovely half-hour or so there, hooting into the big porcelain megaphone, in another life. No hard liquor since that adventure, no thanks. Just some wine, or beer with lime at dinnertime. Amanda had smoked dope to relax for as long as he had known her. Jonathan had found that if he smoked enough to get dizzy, it made him frisky, then leadenly tired, and he would spend the next day and a half with a sore throat. He lacked any taste for the permutations - hash, bongs, half-and-half. Amanda was a browser, a sampler who used drugs infrequently and socially. She only did coke at parties. Jonathan thought sucking powder up your nose in order to be groovy was genuinely repulsive. His drug of choice was caffeine, plus that other white death, refined sugar. Jonathan was a coffee achiever.

    Smoking dope helped Amanda knock down some of the barriers she habitually cast in the path of her own sexual pleasure. She almost never orgasmed easily; it took caring effort and a commitment of time from both partners. Most of the guys in her past had never given half a damn about working at it. Accordingly, Amanda had matured thinking herself to be frigid, or otherwise personally at fault. She seemed most fulfilled when she could blame both herself and her partners, with the bad old world at large thrown in for filler.

    More than a hint of meanness there, Jonathan accused himself. Egg her on by telling her she enjoys being a victim. What an understanding fellow you are.

    The erosion of their relationship had become palpable at the point where Amanda insisted on smoking a joint before fucking. Rainwater patters against a marble tombstone and at last begins to wear the epitaph to unreadability.

    Unbidden, a parade of images from the past marched through his head. Mostly silly. The way she used to playfully grab his ass in the supermarket, or merely tell him what a cute butt he had. That winter drive to Birmingham during which they held a crazily civil discussion on how movies are rated while his hand was delving into her khaki shirt and making her nipples come to attention. Or Amanda, grinning like a gremlin and going down on him at four in the morning, midway through a night flight to LAX. The groping and giggling in the clothing store changing booths at the mall. The
oh-so-salacious
phone calls at work. Hawking computer mainframes had never appealed to Jonathan's romanticism. That one evening he had sulked home - he was to quit two days later - and found Amanda waiting in his bed, wearing the most maddening black lace nightgown conceivable. The way she had smiled and said, 'Jonathan? Do me a favor…?'

    They began playing house shortly after that one.

    He snapped to. Bus. Night. He was wallowing.

    It wasn't just the sex, of course. He was dwelling on that aspect because the sex had been so good between them, and it had been so goddamned long since he had made love to her. To anybody. They had suffered a few bouts of generic lovemaking as their relationship burned down. It had plowed on, grim and unsatisfying, for nearly a year. Somewhere along the line they'd given up making love and settled for having sex. Problems replaced caring.

    Just now he was randy enough to turn goofy whenever a pretty waitress smiled at him.

    Sex wasn't it. Nothing was it. It was… it was so damned complicated, so tangled, that trying to peg a specific catalyst or culprit would trivialize everything they had shared. Right this minute it had gifted Jonathan with a Clydesdale of a cluster headache that felt like a cinderblock being dropped on top of another cinderblock. It overran the left side of his skull, causing his eye to tear and his nose to drip. There was sweat in his eyebrows. The pain was consuming, and past meditating away. Time to grab for the Excedrin.

    He twisted his rucksack around on the vacant seat beside him, unzipped the largest pocket and pulled out a half-empty bottle of Calistoga water that still fizzed. He had an apple and some Hydrox cookies left, lost amid the cassette cases and other junk down in the pack - his Nikon plus zoom, loaded with color film at a thousand ASA, his toilet kit, his address book, a flap pouch protecting his dense, dark pilot shades. The bottle's twist-cap went
fssss
. He dry swallowed three of the white pills. The fourth got stuck. He tilted the bottle to his lips and felt the pill disintegrate in the grip of his throat. He tried to relax, eyes shut.

    Nope.

    It had all gotten perverted. It had all turned so complex. There were so many beginnings and endings to it that it was impossible to he it into a nice, knotty, front-to-back narrative.

    Once upon a day he had phoned Amanda at work. Just to make contact, hear her voice, ask her how she was.

    'Pregnant.' She had said it just so, on purpose, and hung up on him.

    After that had come the argument. Doom-laden, with dug heels, it started with talk of abortions, salaries, and practicality. It ended with nebulous notions of what constituted growth in a relationship between two human beings. Amanda wept a lot. Jonathan thought he had won the argument.

    Jonathan lost.

    Sharp she was, canny and diverse. It frustrated Jonathan that the apparent goal of her life was to subjugate all that made her unique, to melt into the commonweal and become what his good buddy Bash had dubbed one of the Butt People.

    Said Bash: People who watched titty channels and hung out at the Silver Bullet. People who reproduced irresponsibly and nattered about their desire to get back in shape someday. People who thought winning a lottery would solve all their problems. People to whom life improvement meant affording a more expensive pickup truck. People who counted on God to fix their plumbing, their shortcomings, their existences, because they were too lazy. Lite Beer people. The massmind, the calculatedly ignorant, the lower spiritual castes. The sort of good folks who under the right circumstances would happily form lynch mobs and book-burning parties.

    The Butt People.

    Amanda's upbringing had been different. Children had always been a part of her scenario. But too many birthdays had passed for maternity to remain a foggy, sometime-but-not-now notion. She slid down into an exitless panic. Jonathan thought seriously for a while about playing Daddy to some small someone. He was shocked to realize he did not despise kids as much as he feared he might. These miniature human beings were intriguing.

    They were the most intriguing, he found, when they belonged to somebody else, when they could be observed at will with the repulsive parts edited out.

    Too many friends insisted too fervently that everything changed when you became a parent. No big surprise there. Jonathan heard the solidarity of the trapped, seeking to seduce him. He asked Amanda why. Her response had been heated, cast in steel.

    'Because it's what people do.'

    Not enough, not for Jonathan, who did not believe in building families by accident, the way a pioneer constructs a shelter not out of choice, but out of necessity. And that was not enough for Amanda.

    It had been a slow income year, and Amanda had gotten an abortion. Jonathan wondered if he would ever be forgiven for his complicity.

    Amanda chanced upon a gray hair, then another. Then a stretch mark or two on her thighs. Jonathan noticed varicose veins on his own ankles. He did not mention them. For Amanda, a time bomb had begun ticking. The prospect of whether she had actually pinpointed a flaw in her mirror was a no-win exchange. If he noticed, it hurt her. If he pretended not to, she felt overlooked. And if he did nothing, held at neutral, her eyes silently damned him one more time.

    She stopped smiling. She erected an automatic denial response against any proposal of Jonathan's. She entrenched for a long tug of war. This irritated Jonathan. Waste pestered him. He reluctantly supplied whatever pressure was required to keep the tension equalized. Nobody was going to budge. There were egos to be preserved. He thought of the joke about the self-protecting fuse - the one that protects itself by crisping the entire circuit rather than burning out.

    Lovemaking? Call it nightmarish.

    So now Jonathan's cute butt was Chicago-bound, with Texas dwindling to the rear, Tangerine Dream tapes to supply a highway soundtrack, and pills for the headaches that whacked chrome spikes into his brain. He brooded about the end. The damage Amanda could wreak upon him with a look, or a stolid silence. He moped about the practiced and incomparable way they had moved together, melded into one seamless, primal being, giving and receiving pleasure. Two folded into one.

    'Take the job,' she had told him. 'Sure. Go have fun with Bash.' Jonathan fancied he heard the wham of a gavel. 'You will anyway, right? You can probably make some money, so why not? Get away from me because I'm such a bitch, anyway.'

    There came times when the acid certainty in her voice made him want to start flinging wild haymaker blows. 'Well.' He had shrugged, still frustrated. 'What about you?'

    'What about me? Don't make any big sacrifices on my behalf.' Her tone said:
You fucked up again, ace. What you should have asked was what about US? See? You don't really give a damn
.

    They could predict each other so well. Why wasn't that a good thing, a healing, strengthening, positive thing, instead of the nastiest form of ultimate weapon?

    
And where do you get off being so goddamned naive?
a tiny, impish voice shot back.

    Chicago offered work. Chicago offered distance.

    Jeffrey Holdsworth Chalmers Tessier - of the New Orleans Tessiers - was burly and bearded, slope-shouldered and large of tooth. His eyes were a mellow golden-brown, radiant, absorbent, constantly storing input on his mental video recorder. His line was freelance graphics, his patter rapidfire and ceaseless, and he had been Jonathan's best friend of record since their first encounter at a university film club meeting in 1977. Jonathan had been chasing an architectural degree, Jeff had been loafing away a liberal arts scholarship. Somewhere amidst the womanizing and pool-playing he acquired the nickname Bash. He still maintained a loving hold on his Deep South accent. He told Jonathan that Amanda had been a 'shayme.' To Bash, ladies might come and ladies might go, but there were always more ladies, and if the universe worked right Jonathan would forever be able to blubber on his big shoulder.

    Male bonding was critical to Bash's diagnosis of the world. Give him a screening of The Man Who Would Be King or Heartbreakers, with Nick Mancuso and Peter Coyote, and he gladly slid into Nirvana. Bash's life was not hampered by marriage or kids or health insurance or devolving into a Butt Person. Such worries never seemed to be on his plate.

    'So blow town, Fed Ex your rosy red asshole up here, and help me steal some of Capra's capital, m'boy.' He pronounced it
boah
. He always talked like that. 'I'm snug in a position at Rapid O'Graphics, snug enough to swing my considerable personal influence and even more awesome charm. Hell, you're a shoo-in as soon as I say so. Think of it as your first step on the Big Ladder of Life, from Ronald McDonald to Dom Perignon.'

    Bash had even sprung for bus fare.

    Jonathan was no computer salesman; at least he and Amanda had agreed on that. He warmed to the idea of breaking Rapid O'Graphics under the wing of someone as big and loud'and life-embracing as Bash. For now, he'd had his fill of bleakness and ashes.

    That, at least, was his rationalization. There was no way to express it that did not make him seem petty, self-serving and brutal. It was the ancient pep talk: We need to separate for our own good. A venerable old standard that had already failed to work for millions of dissatisfied customers.

    There was, as it turned out, a single event in Jonathan's memory. The event he could point to and say this is what split and splintered them, a nasty and mordant thing like a caustic chemical sloshing around in his mind and burning the emotions there.

    Northward rolled the Greyhound bus, ignoring one small town after another, preparing to hurdle the line into a new state.

    The cluster headache still sheeted Jonathan's vision with wetness. He closed his eyes, ringing down his own personal nightfall. A tear streaked freely along his cheekbone. He thought once more of the most horrible thing he had done to Amanda, the woman he still loved.

    

    

    Cruz made it to the rail just in time to see Chiquita destroy an umbrella table, face-first, five stories below. She missed the pool by a good ten feet. Until he saw her brains splatter all over the sun deck, he hadn't realized the bimbo had had any.

    Cruz would see her fall thousands of times more before his life was over. His ears were cracking constantly and he had a headache. Over the cabin com, Captain Falstaff of Eastern Airlines announced to the passenger complement of the 737 that there was turbulence coming; they should belt up. Cruz sat gripping the armrests. One was loose. He stared out over the starboard wing and wondered how these double plastic windows could possibly get marked up on the outside. Was the wind shear that nasty thirty thousand feet up? He thought of fat gremlins riding the wingtips and working their alien vandalism.