Untitled.FR11 (8 page)

“So what are you up to, Little Miss Hot Thighs??” An eon again of backspace and correction. The pedant in her. Typing in real time, the laggardliness of it all made each word monumentally important, even as it pressed impatience buttons inside Katt to hell and gone.

“Zip. Puttering,” she typed. “Hubby massage.”

“From one bed to another? You *are* a slut!” “No no no. Headache, soothed brow, working out kinks in his shoulders.”

“Kinks :“)?”

“You heard me!”

“Is he a handsome brute? Think he could handle two?”

That pained her. Deep sting. Sudden welling of rage toward them both. He’d had this woman, concealed it, used it to manipulate her and Conner. “So-so. I doubt he’s up to your exacting standards. He’s pretty straitlaced.”

“I almost had an ongoing threesome once.” “Somebody flinch?”

“Yeah, me. The guy took serious sick, she had to get a nurse, full time, nothing contagious. I bailed. Life’s too fucking short. I liked the man. Even loved him. But not enough to saddle myself. His problem, not mine. It’s like people trapped behind wheelchairs. Sacrificing their happiness. All I see is burden, years of waste, a pitiful time sink.”

Carriage return. Sherry was waiting. Katt disagreed with her, saw such love as ennobling and only proper, then realized her own acts spoke otherwise. “Luck of the draw, I guess. Doing what befalls. What feels right.”

Pauses in chat were often pregnant. She’d paused and now Love Bunny paused, wondering, Katt supposed, how or if to respond to Newcummer’s implied disapproval. What she’d typed didn’t exactly argue against Love Bunny, but it hung in the air, and her friend’s reply confirmed her defensive stance: “Hey maybe I’m selfish or something, but it ain’t for me, ya know?”

“This was in Fort Collins?” asked Katt.

“Nope. Years ago. Anyway, gotta be off now, sweets. Friggin’ prep for classes.”

“Ah. Think I’ll go garden or sumpin’.” Lie down for a nap, more likely.

“Sounds groovy. Hey, tell you what, whyncha leave me a steamy message, tell me what you liked, turn me on again with them seductivoracious—yow, do you like that? I just made it up!!!—words of yours?”

“ ’Kay. Maybe tonight. You do likewise?” In memory, she was fondling Sherry, hands at her pubis, finding there the bare beginnings of cervical oddities. She’d passed by that decision point, neither healing nor hurting. Instead she’d resumed her caress, Sherry’s warm body mirroring the ardency of the rhythm Katt took up. Then the monitor came back, its disk drive fan muffled below like the muted roar of jet engines.

“It’s a promise, love,” came Sherry’s message. “Good. I liked what we did.”

“Mwwwah, sweets. Smooch at you later.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

Chat Mode off.

Four days later. Thursday afternoon. Conner, having quickly learned to avoid College with his bike, sped along the tree-lined, far-less-traveled Remington Street, picked up the bikepath at Johnson Drive, and headed home. Jounce of wrapped gift in his back basket. A warm day. He hoped they wouldn’t melt.

Fort Collins was a neat place. Water fountained over boulders in Old Town Square, a bookstuffed Stone Lion just at its south edge, and refurbished brick buildings cozying it in. And that was just one block, but a block that kept calling him back. The chocolates had been waiting for him a few stores south of Walrus Ice Cream down College. Then he’d found his bike and sped off, Mom’s surprise prompting notions of secrecy as he rode. Sure Dad had bought a gift for both of them to give her, as usual; but other than his heartfelt amateurish kid-art, painted or penciled at Dad’s request, this was the first time he’d planned and bought a gift of his own without Dad’s help or conniving. A sweaty jogger, bare-chested, passed by with a perfunctory wave on the other side of the bikepath. Conner grinned at him but the grin was broader for sweet anticipation: He’d get off the bike early, prop it against the side of the garage, no kickstand, eggwalk to the sliding door into the den, glide through a minimal unscreened crack, close it, creep around like in the movies, find Mom and Dad together by the sound of their voices, and visit heart attacks of happiness upon them. It was past four. Mom would’ve just come home from work and Dad would be back from school by now.

A rollerblading couple went by, the woman tailing the man and neither one of them giving him any acknowledgment. On his right, a trio of ducks waddled nonchalantly down an embankment into the pond. Beyond it, his house went past, odd view of it from the back, Mom and Dad’s bedroom window above but he doubted they were watching. She was going to be so excited and he’d be too, but he wouldn’t show it cuz that was uncool; okay, a little and he’d endure her hug so she wouldn’t feel bad. Dad’d be proud. Up over the arced bridge, around the bend, and straight away along a trickle of creek—there was the path’s end, through a wide gate to Wallenberg Drive. No traffic or rare. Rich houses. Past them he coasted, ramping up onto the sidewalk, slowing and dismounting. There was Mom’s car in the driveway. A riot of flowerbeds edged the walkway to the front door. Conner felt like a thief, cutting a corner, taking the walk along the garage. He propped his bike along the side and worked the package loose, wrapping paper crinkling out his guilt. Skulking about was super fun.

Good, the screen was unlatched. He slid it, zvrig-gled it really, along a stubborn track, then backward once he’d got inside. Voices through the vent. They were upstairs. His tennies squeaked. He slipped them off, padded on soft socks across the kitchen floor, through the dining room to the vestibule, and up the stairs.

He was gonna make it undetected. Above, the straight edge of white wall was poised to yield up a parent or two, his surprise blown. Nope, nope; thick-carpeted stairs, no telltale creak to them, one hand angling on the bannister, the other clutching Mom’s chocolates. Voices again louder above. Bedroom, he guessed. Parent stuff. Who knew what they found to say after so many years?

Hallway now. He hung near the baseboard, stifling an almost irresistible urge to laugh. Door ajar. The voices came clearer. “I decided to keep it from you one more day what with your birthday and all. I thought—”

“C’mon, Marcus, forget that, my birthday is nothing.” Her voice was raw. Conner stopped feeling so impish.

“I’m sorry. I think it’s really finally—”

“We’ll get it looked at first thing tomorrow morning. We can go now if you want, Poudre Valley’s emergency room. I can leave Conner a note, he—’’

“No, it’ll wait.” Dad too harsh. He lowered his tone and Conner felt thickness in his throat: “It’ll wait. We can set it aside for the evening, no sense in spoiling the festivities.”

“Shall I call the hospital?” Her voice was quavering, and on the hallway wall opposite their door, a pool of sun high up vibrated like disturbed water, reflections of some unknown something inside. The disease had hit at last and Conner fancied he felt a sleeping caterpillar curled tight in his own head, just now beginning to wake.

“Yes, better prep them so we see the right man, so he shows up and raises the right hoops.”

“C’mon, Marcus, it might be something else.” But her voice betrayed her.

“Sure,” Dad said, knowing better.

And Conner stood in the hallway, package tight to his chest, trying not to breathe as a nightstand drawer opened and phonebook pages flipped by and Mom lifted the receiver and punched in a number and, after a pause, spoke into it. Her words were low, lower than their conversation, but she said it, said what he knew she would—and when she did, he wanted nothing so much as to get away, to be by himself in the outdoors and let free whatever this churning, woozying stuff was inside him. But some of it spilled out, and his grip on the package loosened and made fumbles of noise, so that first Dad came out and Mom soon after and he couldn’t help it, he was weeping like a baby in their arms.

Marcus had had a weekend to absorb it. Sherry’d gone to Cheyenne on some vague last-minute thing, their planned Sunday afternoon tryst up in smoke. Wasn’t working out in any event, months of fantasy more intense, more reciprocal than the reality; and he much doubted he’d’ve been able to pretend to no problem if they had bedded down. So here he was, before his students—but his thoughts were on a quiet time spent alone by the overcast lake in City Park, Conner on his mind. And Katt. And a father and his effervescent daughter come down to feed the ducks and geese that honked such frenzied giggles out of the little girl.

What had the doctor said? The Huntington’s was there all right—he’d always known as much despite the odds they invariably cited—and it was active. Last spring, word of the HD gene’s discovery had been published; but that was a far cry from curing it, nothing Marcus would benefit from, though his son had a chance if the disease waited a decade or two before striking. He and Conner had had a heart-to-heart, late in October in his study, on just

this subject, himself sober, somber even, hearing his own father’s voice in the words he spoke and yelling at himself ineffectually inside to break free of that mold, not to make light of it surely, but not to fu-nerealize it either. He had decades, a nice slow descent, a nice long time to burden his family with his incapacity, if you trusted the averages. But Dad had fallen apart much faster than that, and already Marcus could feel the place in his head—fancy, surely— where his mind was seeping out. Nothing betraying yet in the way he moved, but every fumble now posed a question.

“Let us speak, dear friends,” he said, putting on for their amusement his haughtiest John Housman, “of the death of Falstaff.” Then his own voice, the fair Belinda giving him a tantalizing eye amid the laughter: “Fat earthy man, in an odd way the counterpart to Dromio’s offstage kitchen wench in A Comedy of Errors, this expansive girthful rogue was perhaps Shakespeare’s most memorable character.” More damned automatic pilot, this lecture, but it was what they paid him for, and it didn’t get in the way of or betray to public knowledge the grief he felt for himself and for his son. “All the world, pure appetite fulfilled, generous in falsehood and in being caught out, in love with all manner of fleshly delights—such was Falstaff.”

He spoke of sex and erections and the pastoral in the reporting of Falstaff’s death, what might have been gained or lost in seeing him die instead of hearing about it; but all the while he was glancing at Belinda perfectly formed, and watching his son’s face gain a quick maturity there in the study as he recounted for him for his grandfather’s death; and feeling, always feeling, the nugget of nothing growing inside his brain. Little packing-snail, slowly expanding, taking over territory, desiccating gray matter as it grew. His movements would become as random as his father’s, mind as loose-limbed and imbalanced as his body, out of control and a burden to Katt and Conner. Neuroleptic agents would counter the effects for a while, but they offered no cure. When would it kick in, when? Surely not for another dozen years at the earliest; surely he was feeding his fear into imagination’s boundless hopper, and once the shock abated, he’d settle, resigned, into inevitability.

That was how these things worked.

A kid in the back, chair-drape and ankle-cross of the radically bored, raised a slow arc-swung hand. “I’m still PO’d at Prince Hal for dumping his fat pal in the previous play. I mean I get why and all, but he was dead wrong.”

Little smart-ass, thought Marcus. Would make an okay Hal, this Bentley Frink. “I can guess where you’re taking us, but please expound, expand, explain, or expostulate as you will.”

He’d shown them Orson Welles’s brilliant The Chimes at Midnight, a pastiche of Falstaff scenes with Welles acting the role of the fat man himself. Frink had looked puzzled then, uncharacteristically reserved. Marcus knew that his puzzlement would inevitably turn to bravado in class.

Frink smiled like the junior tottering on senior that he was. “Seems to me old Will meant the demoting of Orson Welles to reflect badly on politics,

even given the clean-up-his-act of prince-become-king. But today, he has other fish to fry and he doesn’t want to bring the counterweight onstage to remind us of the bad taste of banishment. Good Prince Hal, acting unkingly, has put down his impish side, so the allure, the sheer charm, of that impishness is left backstage.” Translation: Frink calls Shakespeare to task for casting Prince Hal in too good a light, the banishment of Falstaff swept under the rug in 2 Henry IV.

What a stupid pointless game this academic rumination became after a while, even as it exercised minds. Here he stood, propped at the edge of his desk, his brain losing a cell with each beat of his heart, and they spoke of story. “Good point,” he said, thinking how puerile it was really, “and it saves the bother of decking the player out for one measly scene, when he was most likely busy with one or the other hefty part.” And that’s when Marcus began to feel a rise of something wrong, an inner upsurge. The classroom, caught in a whirlpool of Cartesian collapse, melded window and desk, floor and ceiling, a rush of students closing in as he clung to his fall, deskwood sliding by. A dizziness wrapped in his voice’s high piping seized him, sheer panic in his sustained repetitive cry. He was going to die. He was going, absurdly, to lose all respect from his students with this incessant yelping. Hands moved upon him, sounds leaping from concerned faces. The floor felt too solid at his back, the sunlight too harsh and intrusive.

Someone cushioned his head on a coat, some angel, her breasts going by—and it was Belinda. Concern hung in her eyes, and a sheen of dismissal. Wasn’t fair. The process was supposed to be slow, years of lassitude. The front of his face sheeted in fever and tears and the classroom kept spinning spinning spinning through the animal howls coming up elemental from his depths, confusion without end.

3

Tuesday, July twenty-ninth. After Marcus’s collapse the previous afternoon, Katt’s life had become awash with tumult; summoned from a meeting at HP, white-faced Kristy rushing her to a phone, the emergency room intern clearly clueless about the problem, then leaving Conner a message and speeding west on Harmony and up LeMay to the hospital where Doctor Bein, finally matched up with Marcus, peered curiously into his eyes. “Ever had any heart problems?” he’d asked. She’d said no. “Could be a first,” his medicinal odor, a hint of arrogance; “I’ll run some tests.” But he suspected (so much was clear from his stunned puzzlement) and she knew