—Please, dear, try some of this egg salad.
—My Lenore, he said, not a woman of the kitchen.
—Well, you didn’t marry me for my cooking.
He nodded. He licked his lips. He brought his wrinkled hand around to rest on my rear, cool and wet with blood.
—Darling, you’re aroused, he said.
—Oh, always when you touch me. You know that. But now is not the time. We wouldn’t want to make a mess.
—Wouldn’t we, he said, smiling impishly.
—I suppose I could lay down some sheets.
—Go lay down some sheets. I’ll eat my lunch and be right behind you.
My legs felt rubbery as I walked up the spiral staircase to the hottest bedroom in the world. I’d taken two Klonopin right before my child was born and the effect was finally at work.
I heard the wretched sounds of him eating, the dentures clacking, the whole mouth working to move the soft food down the throat. That noise was enough of a reason to kill him. My white dress was bright red from the waist down. It was rather lovely. I figured I could dye the whole thing red. I took it off and used it to wipe between my legs. I put on a clean pair of underwear and a green t-shirt that said MONTANA on it. I would love to tell you it belonged to Big Sky, but it didn’t. There was a night he came to my apartment wearing the same t-shirt. After we fucked, as he was putting the t-shirt back on, I was struck with the usual fear. He was about to leave. I never knew when I’d see him again. Every time could be the last time. He was going home to her. She got to have this man in this t-shirt.
I was naked in the bed. Listen, you must always be the first one to dress. This is obligatory. I didn’t know to do that. Gosia hadn’t lived long enough to impart that wisdom. We lie there naked after the other person rises because we can’t bear to leave the space. We can’t leave the sweat and the warmth because we love it too much. We love it more, nearly, than we love the asshole rising to put on his t-shirt. Don’t be the fucked one. Be the first to rise.
Meekly I asked, Can I hold on to that shirt?
He laughed.
—I mean it. Can I have it?
He continued to laugh and shake his head.
—Please, I said, hating myself.
He left quicker than usual. He usually stayed long enough to come twice. The moment he was out the door, I opened my computer and bought the same shirt off the Internet. Ponderosa pines on a green background.
—Lenore, are you ready? Lenny called from the bottom of the stairs. I looked down and saw the dirty plate on the table. The fork beside it. There were little mounds of egg salad on the table that he must have dropped as he spooned a second serving onto his plate.
My father used to bring all the dishes to the sink. He even asked me to place my dirty clothes neatly in the laundry. If I left something inside out, he considered it disrespectful to my mother. Leonard wasn’t the type to pick up his plates. He’d grown up with a live-in housekeeper in some colonial house with a foyer table and fresh flowers every three days.
—Put that fucking dish in the sink, my love.
I could have said anything to him as long as I did it in his sweet Lenore’s voice. He stuttered something and dutifully bussed his dishes. Then I heard him make his way up the stairs.
—Remember when we met?
—Of course, I said. You were my boss. I didn’t like you at first. You were married and ugly.
—Excuse me?
—You were ugly, Leonard. You are ugly. But it’s okay.
—I was never ugly.
—That’s true. You were never ugly.
He approached the bed and unbuttoned his fine linen shirt. His hands were shaking with his disease. The full extent of his disability was revealing itself to me. The heat was too much for me to bear and I couldn’t imagine how he was handling it.
He lay down beside me, shirtless. He wore nice khaki pants and simple black socks. Klonopin is a wonderful thing. Xanax, Ambien. They melt you down to your wolf tone.
—I remember the first night, I read to you from Muldoon. “Incantata.” Do you remember? Every stanza is a sentence, I told you, and you, silly thing, you hardly knew what a stanza meant. You wore a lime-green dress. It suited you, but of course a paper bag would have suited you.
He scuttled closer. His touch was odious and yet Vic’s had been worse. I could count on one hand the number of times we’d fucked traditionally, the number of times I hadn’t simply masturbated in front of him. I couldn’t for the life of me call up the sound of Vic coming. Honestly I felt like his love for me—what he thought was love—drowned out his lust.
—Len, I said.
He brought his hand to rest over my belly.
—Yes, my life?
—I’m a whore, my love. A filthy used-up whore. So fuck me. You can feel how wet I am. Only whores are wet like this.
He gasped and began to pinch at me with his old fingers. Roughly and cruelly. How I missed my child. In the mere moments he lived, my child showed me how useless men could be. How boring, how selfish. This old man. This old killer.
I groaned against the invasion of his hand on the place where my child had fallen, but he thought it was rapture. My rage was growing by the second. I felt the tendons in my neck straining like a junkyard dog’s against a chain. I closed my eyes. I pulsed my pelvis against his bony hand when I heard the music from that night.
32
MY MOTHER DIDN’T KNOW HOW to use the paltry sound system in the Pocono house—she barely knew how to drive—the only thing she understood was the Vanity Fair circus animals record player that belonged to me, with its fat orange needle in its own little suitcase. And that was the sound I woke up to that night—“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by the Tokens, turned up as loud as the player could go.
I was waking up all the time back then. Usually between three and four in the morning. I’d look at the clock at my bedside and panic, knowing the earliest I could crawl into bed beside my mother was six. I would have two or more hours of waiting, eyes on the ceiling, haunted by shadows against the window.
But this time I heard the player, which was kept in the spare room between my parents’ bedroom and mine. I worried it was my mistake somehow, that I’d left it on, and that one or both of them would yell at me for ruining their sleep. My mother, especially, acted like her sleep was something that could be lost, never to be found again.
I rose and walked to the spare bedroom. The door was open and the record was spinning on its axis. Now I felt with a profound and queasy certainty that my mother knew where I’d gone that day, that she’d seen me in my damp bikini in the cold house of the man who licked me all over.
In any case I felt sure that she was playing my music to lure me out, to wrest the truth from me. She was capable of such a ruse. I thought she could do anything. She was a witch. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. Her breasts were the color of milk, and cold. The rest of her was warm, but her breasts felt refrigerated. I used to love to touch her nipples; several years after I’d stopped suckling from them, I used to reach my small hands down her low-cut blouses, under the tight cheap skin of her bra, and try to hold her nipple between my fingers.
I turned the player off. All that remained was the whirring of the fan in my parents’ bedroom. The door was closed, which was unusual. I figured they could be having sex. I wondered if part of sex was licking someone all over, as the man—Wilt—had done to me. It bothered me to think of what they might be doing behind the door. I also thought it was possible they were discussing where I’d been in the afternoon. I wouldn’t have expected police to be involved, but I did think they were discussing whether or not to send me away to a boarding school. My mother often threatened this when I was being bad. She told me they would ship me off with a small suitcase, to a place up in the mountains, Castelrotto, where you had to drink goat’s milk every morning and suck down raw egg yolks. Once she went so far as to drive me to the train station with my little She-Ra luggage packed haphazardly with shirts and socks and my favorite doll, Marco. I was seven or eight then and didn’t know you couldn’t get to Italy by train. I shivered and sobbed and began to hyperventilate as my mother strode up to the ticket seller. She took out her huge burgundy wallet and I thought I was going to die. I began to scream. Even though my father was at work and would have had no idea of this cruelty, I screamed DADDY! so loud that nearly everyone in the vast hall turned to look. One of my mother’s fears—the disapproval of Americans. She came away from the counter, brought my chin up close with her sharp nails, and hissed, You ere me, if you ever touch my jewelry again without asking, I vill come straight ere with you. I von’t tell your father and he will think you ran away. You ere me!