You Were Wrong (9 page)

“Stop pretending that being accommodating isn’t just a form of aggression.”

“Really?
You’re
accusing someone of pretending something?”

“Go get the soap.”

“What was your second shock?”

“What?”

“You said your first shock was that I didn’t recognize you.”

“Oh. My second shock was how genuinely innocent you are, not to say hapless. It’s really pretty amazingly endearing and sweet. You’re like the anti-Stony. Soap!”

He passed through the bedroom on his way to the hall, looked at the helpless old man asleep in his bed, saw that a pastel orange stain had grown on the bandage around the wound, was troubled by a presentiment, descended to the basement, was menaced there by large shapes, found the soap in the white bottle that had come to symbolize trustworthiness and inevitability, came back up the stairs, averted his gaze from the bed, found, by the bath, the thin, pale, muscled back of Sylvia and its blue horizontal bisector.

“Did you come here yesterday specifically to meet me?”

“Pour in the soap.”

“Why did you conceal who you were?”

“I don’t know, when I realized you didn’t know who I was I decided I wanted to be this mysterious stranger you would fall in love with.”

“That sounds highly implausible.”

“Pour.”

He did. The soap settled to the bottom of the sinkful of cold water.

“Now here,” she said, placed her palm on the back of his hand, closed her fingers around it, and guided it into the water. “Swirl it around. See? This is how we wash a shirt by hand.”

“Oh.”

“Your shirt is bloodied too, it stinks of fear.”

“What does fear smell like?”

“If you’d been around it as often as I have, you’d know.”

The inchoate biography of hardship formed of such remarks was a waist-high, still-boneless homunculus wetly laboring for breath behind the plastic curtain on the bathtub floor.

“Throw it in,” she said, referring, he assumed, to his shirt. She said it impatiently, as she’d said more than half the things he’d heard her say. Maybe she wasn’t worth all this trouble. And though he didn’t know what trouble he meant, he felt, in the bathroom of his wounded stepfather, like a groom at the altar who noticed, as she came toward him in time to a march composed by a German protofascist, that his bride’s teeth, like those of her quarrelsome mother, were yellow and long.

“I think,” she said, “that you think I harshly judge all you say and do. I don’t. I’m in distress. I will tell you why but not now. Please accept that. And please know that I don’t judge you except favorably, and so when you take off your shirt I will be inclined to like your chest because it’s yours. I think you think I have perfectionistic standards. I don’t. I have great curiosity and interest. It’s just right now I’m kind of immensely challenged. Here, I’ll take it off for you. Relax, it’s all right, it’s just shirt-washing, I promise, we’ll go one button at a time, nice and slow. There. And now that one. And now that one.”

He could see she made a careful effort not to touch his skin with her fingers any more than was absolutely required for the task. He felt by removing his shirt she was removing the blazonry that covered his mind and was looking directly at it. Buttons undone, she said, “Do you want me also to—”

He nodded.

She slipped the shirt, whose checks had been orange when new but now were brown, off his shoulders with, again, demonstrative care not to touch that which needn’t have been touched. It dangled now from the two fingers she held up to him, playfully, he thought, as she stood there in, after all, her superwispy bra.

“Throw it in,” she said again, not impatiently this time. “Now push it down beneath the surface and hold it there till the bubbles stop coming up, just as if you were drowning a sack of kittens in a river.”

He held the shirts down, felt the little bubbles rise along his wrists, and used the mirror above the sink to watch Sylvia Vetch lower her gymnastic form onto the soft curve of the bathtub’s rim. He watched her hand darken against its white. He watched her soft belly framed by the hard columns of her arms. Shirts satisfactorily submerged, he turned to face her, leaned back against the sink’s rim, felt its wetness soak through his pants, was reminded of a similar wetness, probably comprised of spilled beer, that he’d felt the previous night at the house party whose key event he was sure lived on in a bubble in him his thoughts couldn’t penetrate.

“So,” she said, “here we are in my estranged father’s bathroom.”

Tones can be tough for everyone and were extratough for Karl, who was lately an avid pupil in the urgent remedial project of tones.

“You know you’ve got his blood on your face, too, right?” she said.

“Or mine.”

“Your wounds have surely closed by now.”

“My face has been jostled a lot recently.”

“Let’s wipe it up.”

“‘Let’s’?”

“I,
I’ll
clean the blood off your face with a damp cloth, Karl.”

This was the first time she’d uttered his name in his presence, and it had the effect of making him feel as if he existed.

To clean the blood from his face with the soft washcloth she’d found in the small shelved closet of the master bathroom, she needed to grip his right shoulder firmly with her left hand. It being too much for him to experience the calming pressure of her hand and the visual pleasure of her face at once, he turned his head away from her and caught, in a mirror of the same dimensions as many a television screen, a beautiful young doctor performing a minor medical task on the sad and scared face of her young male patient with the same intent focus she’d have given to a task of grave importance. He closed his eyes. She told him not to squeeze them shut so tight. She told him to relax his face and breathe. He did. Her slow dabs were so smooth, warm, and moist that he suspected she was making them with her tongue, but did not seek to verify.

The light touch on the edges of his wounds brought into his mind the thought about the wound of his stepdad that had been lurking at its periphery and he said, “We shouldn’t have let him fall asleep.”

“Why not?”

“People with head wounds aren’t supposed to go to sleep, I think, right?”

“Well then let’s wake him up.”

“I’m already awake,” Jones called from the next room.

They ran in, as if his being awake of his own accord was cause for fright.

“Speaking of which, my dear boy, I’m glad you’re finally having your belated sexual awakening, but I wish you hadn’t chosen to locate it in my bathroom.”

They thought they ought to march him around in the fresh air, get the blood flowing to the brain, so they took him down to the front yard, each supporting an arm. The moon slept beneath the earth. The streetlamps had shut off but the sun was not yet up. The two young folks struggled with their weakened charge back and forth across the lawn with only the stars to light their way.

“A mouth even at the best of times is a place of turmoil on the body of a man of a certain age,” he said. “Really for anyone the mouth presents a complicated set of problems. That Nazi bastard—who do I mean here, kids?—the mythographer, this is not a rhetorical question, some chatter from the dugout would be encouraging, unless you mean to bludgeon me again.”

“Joseph Campbell,” his daughter said.

“Good girl. ‘Every living cell has a hungry mouth to feed,’ or words to that effect. The mouth is the crude helpmeet to hunger. When it comes to feeding, let’s face it, the hands are more intelligent than the mouth. The mouth also has to talk and give off other signals about its owner’s mood like a smile or a frown, and let’s face it, moods are confusing. Moods confuse the brain too but at least the brain has equipment made to handle complexity, but what does the mouth have? Lips, teeth, tongue, gums, a soft thin roof over its head. It has to cope with everything a brain has to but has few of the resources. It’s directly below the fanciest organ in the body and how could it not feel bad about this? You know whose mouth is fortunate in this regard is squids. A squid is basically a mouth with a lot of legs to service it. You ask a professional sailor which group of fish he’d least want to end up in the middle of at feeding time and he will not say barracuda or shark, he will say squid. My point being does the word
bridgework
mean anything to people of your generation? Something’s cracked in there. I’ll tell you this, Junior: if you were swinging for the brain I think you missed. Well, you hit once and missed once, and the time you missed you got my mouth. If I’d been your real father I assure you you’d have had adequate batting practice from an early age. No good reason a middle-class adult American male who isn’t physically handicapped should not have mastered a baseball swing. Nor need this skill be limited to males. My daughter here, uh…”

“Sylvia.”

“Sylvia I did regularly take to the batting cage until her mother and I reached our impasse. Not that I think a person would swing a stick quite so hard at the head of someone with whom she shared genetic material, just that if she did she wouldn’t have done it like a pansy. My slippers are wet. I see shadowy figures.”

“Should we take him to the hospital?”

“No, I mean in that car over there.”

Suspended by his arms from the shoulders of the boy and girl, he nodded toward a parked car they hadn’t noticed. They stood still and wordlessly watched the car take form in the undimming light. Each glanced back at the house as if to calculate how quickly they could get to safety behind its forward wall, for there were as Jones had observed two man-shaped shadows in the car that was parked at the edge of the lawn without having seemed to arrive there.

The man on the driver’s side opened the door, stood up out of his seat, was tall, closed the door softly behind him, walked toward them across the grass in the vein of the one who knows he will prevail in the encounter—who knows, indeed, that this will be an encounter in which someone will prevail and someone will be prevailed over. He was Sylvia’s friend Stony.

“Guess you killed the wrong guy,” she whispered to Karl, and time was not slow enough for his mind to translate this remark into its native tongue before Stony said, “I’m especially glad to see you, Karl, because I’ve been wanting to apologize for the hat incident.”

“Do you have the hat?”

“No. Sorry not to have brought it.”

Karl, not hopeless in the art of understanding how what was meant differed from what was said, knew he’d twice been apologized to by a man who would continue to demean him. And he introduced Stony to Jones on the suspicion that they already knew each other, but he could not confirm this because Stony’s “Stony Stonington, pleased to make your acquaintance” was suffused with one of the ambiguous tones with which he seemed to suffuse everything, and because Jones’s uncharacteristically passive response might have been caused by his head wound.

Stony said to Sylvia, “You sure change dance partners at lightning speed,” another remark that was like the prow of a ship whose stern was not to arrive in the port of Karl for some time. Sylvia’s noticeable tensing up was easy enough to explain as a reaction to being out of doors in her bra on a cool spring morning with three men in the emerging light, and I think we would be remiss if we did not commend Karl’s earnest effort not to notice the effect of the coolness of the air on the
bra region
of Sylvia too eagerly on this occasion in the company of her father and her friend.

Larchmont Jones said, “I’d love to sit down now if I may be permitted.”

“Are you all right?”

“No.”