Beautiful Kate (12 page)

Having put out her cigarette, she nuzzled in close, hugging me with her right arm and leg. And I could tell by her breathing and the tautness in her limbs that she was working up to the big question, having fortified herself with intimacy.

“You know what?” she asked.

“No, what?”

“He told me something else—something I don’t believe.”

“What was that?”

“It was about you. You and Kate and Cliff.”

“What about us?”

She burrowed in tighter and kissed my neck and my ear. “Well, you know. That you and Cliff—you know
—did it
with her.”

I kept my voice level, betraying as little reaction as I could. “And where did he get this idea? Did he say?”

“I guess from some old hired man here. Years after you’d left. I forget his name. Smelly somebody.”

“Stinking Joe. A very reliable source.”

“It isn’t true, then?”

“What do you think?”

“Well, according to Junior—or I should say according to this hired man—that’s why your brother Cliff drove the car into a tree that night, to kill them both. But he didn’t die, so he came back here and finished the job.”

“Is that a fact?”

“That’s what Junior said.”

“Well then, it must be true.”

She looked at me. “Well, is it?”

There, in the darkness I laughed with soft contempt, hoping she could not feel the angry pounding of my heart. “Maybe Stinking Joe should have written Harlequin Romances—that’s what I think.”

“There’s no truth to it, then?”

I did hear this conversation, but I still find it hard to believe, especially that part rendered by my own voice. “We were all at this stupid dance,” I heard. “And we’d been drinking. Kate got sick and Cliff decided to drive her home. On the way, they crashed. He tried to make it home on foot, but he bled to death. Kate was in a coma and died later. Weeks later.”

“And that’s why you left here?”

Pretending casualness, I hugged her to me and kissed her hair and her forehead. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore, honey. Not tonight, okay?”

“I just wanted to be sure about it, that’s all. That it wasn’t true.”

“Well, now you know.”

“Yes.”

We kissed goodnight and she rolled away from me, pulling my arm across her breasts, making sure that I would be there, embracing her, as she fell asleep. It was a ritual.

Hours later I lie beside her smoking at least my sixth cigarette since she dropped off. I study the stains on the ceiling and I feel time begin to slacken its pace and finally falter and stop altogether, forming a narrow crack in the world through which I try to squeeze my bloody little person so I can escape, forever into a field of high soft grass, there to run in the wind with Kate and Cliff, our hard stubby little hands locked tightly together. That, you see, is my earliest memory: a hot summer day on a hillside somewhere near the barn, the three of us not even in kindergarten yet, and we are running downhill through waist-high grass hand in hand, our legs churning and our voices bubbling in laughter and finally shrieking with a fearsome joy as we tumble in a heap at the bottom of the hill. Getting up immediately, Kate again takes our hands and pulls us along after her.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s do it again.”

But I catch myself now. The hell with them, I growl. They are dead and I am alive and time marches on. Oh, you bet it does.

Slowly I become aware of a sound somewhere in the night, a sound like that of a distant pump throbbing in futility, drawing dryness. Then I begin to realize that it is an animal sound, some creature moaning or fighting for breath and I get up and put on my robe and go across the hall to his room, which is lit dimly by a mercury vapor streetlight on the corner, a light of death, blue and cold. I sit down on his bed and touch him, just his shoulder, lightly, as though I feared for my own life.

“Jason,” I say. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

The keening diminishes and he seems puzzled now, not quite sure who or what has come to him at this hour. An angel of death, in a torn terry-cloth robe?

“What’s the matter?” I repeat. “Can’t you breathe?”

“What? Who?”

“It’s Greg. I was awake and I heard you.”

He stares at me, a death’s head in cerulean light. His hands writhe on the blanket. He echoes me. “What’s the matter?”

“You, Jason. You were moaning or crying.”

“You lie.”

“I thought you might need help.”

“For what?”

“I just wondered what was wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Yes. Is it your breathing?”

He lies there in the gloom, gathering himself now, catching hold. Long seconds pass, and he repeats my words once again.

“Is it my breathing?”

“Yes, tell me. Let me help.”

“You think you can?”

“I can try.”

His chest rattles with congestion as he laughs at me. “All right, then. My trouble is I’ve come to the end of my breathing. It’s about over now. Can you help me there?”

“I want you to see a doctor.”

“A doctor? They can cure death now, can they?”

It is late and I am cold and he has begun to exasperate me, as always. “Jason—you were moaning.”

“And why not?” He looks at me, saying nothing more for a time, his breathing the only sound in the world. Then he starts again, speaking slowly and carefully, wheezing and coughing and pausing for breath as he goes on. “Just think of it, what it is like to lie here in bed in the dark in the winter at seventy, with your body dying and no one to talk to, no one you care about or who cares about you in the whole wide world. You’re all alone and you don’t believe in religion or afterlife or any of that nonsense. There’s just you and your dying body and the cold and the dark. So what if I moan? So what if I cry? What would you do—get on a bus for Hollywood?”

I am on my feet by then, standing there shaking my head as he rattles on. When he is finished, I smile and go to the door, pausing for just a moment as I leave.

“Well, have fun,” I say.

6

I have always contended that if you are looking for a dazzling and definitive analysis of almost any subject at all, just turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica. For instance, Sarah’s 1970 set has this to say on the subject at hand:
Incest prohibitions are found in all cultures, primitive and civilized
. How about that? Why, it doesn’t matter who you are—a Hollywood screenwriter or a visitor from outer space—you learn something from a line like that. Or consider this:
[In the United States] intercourse between father and daughter, mother and son, and brother and sister are [sic] universally forbidden
. Case closed. After that, just what else is there left to say on the subject? What else but a lot of whining words of explanation and self-justification, as if by some sorcery of language one could hope to turn his dirty little pile of linen into the vestments of normality if not sainthood. So consider yourself forewarned, which as we know is forearmed. I am at your mercy.

The first instances of sexual activity between Kate and me happened when we were quite young, only seven or eight; and I understand that the phenomenon is not particularly rare among brothers and sisters at that age. Some experts describe the aberration as a common outgrowth of normal sexual curiosity, though in my case I must admit to motives based less on inquisitiveness than on the simple but exquisite pleasure I felt each time we “touched” each other, as we called our little explorations. During the course of that one summer I don’t imagine we did it over a half-dozen times in all, and then only because Kate wanted something from me—a favor or possession—and would give in to my entreaties, submitting to my busy little fingers while she impatiently squeezed and tickled my “bone.”

On weekend mornings, when the two of us and Cliff usually wound up in bed together, gabbing like churchwomen, I sometimes tried to pull down her pajama bottoms and press myself against her buttocks. Most of the time she would just push me away under the covers, but once she got angry and yelled at me, which made Cliff realize what I was doing. He promptly tossed me out of bed and punched me on the arm and threatened to kill me if I ever did such a thing again.

“She’s your sister, you dumb ass!” he remonstrated. “Your twin! You can’t do that! It’s not
right!
”

Behind him, on the bed, Kate gave me a look of contented mockery. Cliff may have been shocked, but she most definitely was not.

That was about the extent of our sexual misadventures as children together, a deviancy that I never expected to recur any more than I believe Kate did. And I don’t think it would have either, if even one link in the tenuous chain of cause and effect had been different from what it was.

That chain took form on a Sunday morning in May, a month before the two of us were to graduate from high school and join Cliff in proud attendance at the Woodglen Community Junior College, an economy which our Yale- and Sorbonne-educated father deemed necessary and even desirable, in that it would weaken an elitist bent he detected in our attitudes. I can remember lying there in bed alone—no, lying
here
, in this very room—and looking over at Cliff’s Big Ben, which gave the time as eleven o’clock, almost three hours since I first had gotten out of bed to relieve my bladder of its beery burden from the night before. I remember being vaguely aware of Cliff getting up and dressing, preparing to escort Mother and the kids to church, as he often did, knowing how much it meant to her in the absence of Jason, who preferred to spend his Sunday mornings with the
Tribune
and in long solitary walks over his fields, undoubtedly thinking deep agrarian thoughts while he inspected his cattle and his fences and his grass. Stinking Joe was off for the day. And Kate—if she was not out riding her pony, she was probably still in her room, I judged, reading a book or sharpening her tongue.

The one thing I was certain she was not doing was contemplating a second act of Sabbath masturbation, as I was, basically because it seemed about the only chance I had of losing my erection before dinner that afternoon or maybe even before graduation in June. I gave continence one more chance, however, picturing in my mind the naked bodies of old men and women. I thought of chickens and cows and finally I concentrated on Jason, a mental
coup de grâce
that seldom failed me in my occasional quests for sexual calm. It did not work for me this time, though, so I slipped on my jockey shorts, arranging them in such a way as to force the damned thing down. At the same time I began to feel a powerful morning-after thirst and I started into the bathroom to get a drink of water—only to stop dead in the open doorway, for in front of me stood Kate, naked, cupping her breasts, studying herself in the full-length mirror on the wall next to the tub. She looked only puzzled at first, as if she could not figure out how I had come to be where I was, evidently believing that she had locked both doors. But almost immediately this other thing hit her, this fit of sudden mindless rage, and she turned on me in a snarl of flailing arms and clawing fingers. I tried to get out of there, bending and retreating under her senseless assault, but she kept coming, hitting and slashing and screaming at me. So I seized her wrists and spun her down onto my bed, trying to hold her there, trying to calm her.

“Kate!” I tried. “Please! I’m sorry! I didn’t know you were there!”

But she kept struggling against me, writhing under me, trying to break my grip on her wrists. And she went on trying—for minutes, it seemed—until finally I began to feel the rage draining from her. I let go of her wrists then and she rolled onto her side, under me, giving me her back and pulling up her legs as she covered her face with her hands. And slowly, helplessly, she began to sob, a sobbing like no other I had ever heard, as if some alien force were tearing at her from the inside, shaking both of us as we lay there on the small twin bed. I stroked her head and patted her shoulder. And I pleaded with her.

“Don’t, Kate. Please, honey. Please.”

But she could not stop, no matter how much I begged. I tried to tell her that everything was all right now and that I had not meant to hurt her. I hugged her and I buried my face in her hair and I may even have kissed her too, but only as a brother trying to get his twin to stop that piteous sobbing.

And then abruptly it happened, the stuff spurting onto both of us, all over her buttocks and back and even up onto my chest. Until that moment I had not even been aware that I still had an erection, and especially not that my shorts had slipped down off it. But there the evidence was, as hot and sticky and shocking to me as it was to Kate. Immediately her crying ended. She turned on the bed and looked up at me, her expression bruised again with puzzlement and disbelief as her hand reached behind her and touched the semen and brought it around, viscous and dangling, for her eyes to see. Then she got up, slowly and carefully, as though she had been lying with a wild beast and feared to rouse it again.

“I didn’t know, Kate!” I pleaded. “It was an accident!”