—I deserve that, old girl.
—So you and Lenore, the mother of all mothers, fucked in a temple of love. And lit all the magic candles to usher the insemination along. And then?
—And then nothing. Her cycle came. It was a terrible day. You know about the coyotes and the cycles?
I nodded and Lenny did, too, solemnly.
—The coyotes circled the house. They howled before she even started to bleed. They could smell the blood traveling down her tubes. I heard her upstairs, the whimper. My blessed bride. A good man would have gone and comforted her. But I only felt rage. Rage at myself, but also at her—like a real damned dog, I was angry at my bride for showing me the extent of my futility. Then further down it went, the boiling anger, down my hips and into my shaft. I wonder if you know how rage can stiffen the shaft. It’s like a war cry. I left the house, engorged. I drove up the canyon to Sandstone. I didn’t check in at the main house but sneaked to the yard at the back where the trampoline was. There was a tall American Indian girl laughing and jumping up and down, her tits like turkey wattles, shaking. Two men were watching, and two other women, a couple of pale whore blondes. All of them naked and slim as snakes. Nothing looked human to me. I was the stiffest I’d ever been. I climbed the trampoline and tackled the American Indian girl like a wolf. I stripped down and knelt her on all fours and got behind her like an animal. Look at me, I’m built like a rich man, not like a beast, but that day I was a beast, and none of them stopped me. After all, they’d built that place to act like animals and here was a man dispensing with the formality. I was full of rage because I was being denied the one right of all humans. The one reason we are on this earth. To procreate. So I fucked the American Indian girl with my rage and then the two blondes as the two men looked on. They stroked their cocks and watched me take what I was owed.
I shook my head in revulsion. I thought I’d expended all my disgust on hearing from men about what they were owed.
—You are shocked, Joan. I’m an old man now. The evils we have done would be pointless if they didn’t get passed down so that others might not make the same mistake. Wouldn’t you say, Joan? I know you have secrets, too. Nobody comes to the canyon unless they do.
I bit my lip. I tried to keep my hands in my lap, away from his throat.
—My point was that Lenore was only for children. She wanted only to be a wife and a mother. But a mother first. A mother always. Joan, that isn’t you, I don’t know you too well, but I hope you’ll allow me that. I love a woman like you. A part of me always wished to have that, a woman I could do battle with. Perhaps it would have suited me better. Perhaps my story would have turned out differently.
—I don’t care how your story would have turned out, Lenny. You wanted to gag a woman with your cock.
—That’s not the bad part, I’m afraid. I’m still getting there. You see, I want to come clean!
I pushed him to the door and then outside the threshold.
—Please, Joan, I’m an old man. I don’t expect you to feel sorry, I only—
—I only feel sorry for your wife, Lenny. This stupid woman who wanted a child that you were too empty to give her.
I spat, and watched a bubble of my saliva land on the bridge of his nose. I don’t know where the impulse came from, but it made me feel more powerful than I had ever felt before. I slammed the door in his face.
Then I walked up the spiral staircase and took off my white dress to go to sleep. When you’ve been raped in a dress, you might think you want to burn it but I didn’t.
* * *
IN THE MORNING THERE WAS a knock on my door. Alice was early. I hadn’t pulled myself together as much as I’d wanted to. I checked my face in the hallway mirror. I smoothed down my hair and opened the door. I’d completely forgotten about the little girl.
She had Vic’s face. That was the most remarkable thing—his face staring back at me, his probing eyebrows, the shining balls of his pale cheeks. The way she held herself in my doorway was all her father. An uneven confidence.
Then I realized we’d met before. She’d come to visit her father in the first few months of my employment. I was enjoying the early days of being the boss’s pet. I remember she came around to my desk, smiling at me dreamily. She’d probably been ten or so and I’d been twenty-seven. She introduced herself and didn’t say much more, just smiled and hung around my desk until her father called her away. He must have told her I was a star or something, a real go-getter in the advertising world. He must have said something so that she’d take note of me because he wanted to show me off to everyone in his orbit, even his own child. Women always talk about how men are so compartmentalized, how they can fuck some cosmetics manager all week, then go home and play Scrabble with their kids and scratch their wife’s back. But Vic had just one compartment and it was only for me. His love for his children was real and large, no doubt, but his mania for me was tantamount.
—Eleanor, I said.
—You used to be hot, she said, adjusting the wire-rimmed glasses on her face.
I blinked. She wore frayed jean shorts and a pair of white sneakers and a pullover sweatshirt that said ESPRIT in large rainbow letters across the front.
—Thanks, I said.
—Do you know why I’m here? she said. It sounded foreboding because of how nice and childlike her face was. But for the same reason it also sounded ridiculous.
—I think so, I said. Her hands were trembling inside her pullover, which she was using like a muffler.
—Do you want to invite me inside?
—Wouldn’t that be stupid of me?
—I’ll do it right here, I don’t care.
I could see she thought she meant it. She was soaked through with pain and rage. I’d been there before, I understood exactly. But how could I be afraid of this little girl, of my child self, standing there on the threshold?
I told her to come inside. I opened the door wide and walked backward. Eleanor advanced slowly, pulling a gun from the front pocket of her pullover. It was marvelous in its smallness and blackness and made her seem like an adult.
She kept the gun pointed at me. Gradually her hands stopped trembling. She looked up at the high ceilings of my oven of a house.
—Not what you pictured? I asked.
She shook her head.
—Not like the movies, I said.
—Fuck you, she said. Fuck you! Sit down!
I sat down at the kitchen table and she advanced until she was four feet away. I assumed that was the distance at which she was confident about hitting her target.
—I can see your nipples, she said softly.
I looked down at them. All talk of nipples made me think of my mother. In her big round eyeglasses with her layered blond hair and her white seventies breasts. She was the buxom beautiful of movie stars. Her nipples were enormous. You could see them through wool sweaters.
—Do you want to hear a story? she asked. The gun was pointed at my head. I told her that of course I did.
—You probably already know, she began, how we go as a family to Anguilla every year.
I nodded. Vic had spun it to me as his wife’s trip, the highlight of her cold season, their Easter jaunt to Anguilla.
—Last year, she continued, Dad told us at the last minute he couldn’t go. He said he had to work and it couldn’t be remote. He had to be in the office. Such a fucking load, and we knew it. My mom was really upset. I think she knew about you or at least had an idea about you. She swept it under the rug, I guess. But Anguilla was really important to her. It was like the only time she had my dad in front of her every day for ten days. It was heaven for my mom. We’d get a nanny, too, this girl from the island, and she’d watch Robbie for most of the time so my mom could pretend she was this free woman with her husband, you know? Every night is date night on Anguilla, she said. She drank a lot, which she never did at home, and she was just so happy. Dad was happy, too, I mean especially in the beginning when I was a little kid, before Robbie was born, he and I would go snorkeling and shell picking and we built sandcastles and collected sand crabs. After Robbie, it was hard. My dad sort of detached from things, not from me so much but from my mom and Robbie. They were like this set of broken dolls or something. I think he thought that if he detached from them, he could live a normal life.