Beautiful Kate (30 page)

But the floor was crowded and I could see them only now and then. And also Barbara had begun to hum close to my ear, at the same time pressing her body tightly against mine, with the result that I was rapidly losing interest in everything but her. I do remember the last time I saw Kate and Cliff, though—remember it as those in Hiroshima must have remembered that last clear doomed morning. The two of them had stopped dancing and just stood there looking at each other for a few moments before starting off the dance floor, with Kate leading the way. I remember the golden flow of her hair against the black velvet of her dress and the determined thrust of her chin and the long lovely line of her neck and of her arm reaching back as she held on to Cliff’s hand. About him, I recall mostly in that moment that he looked both miserable and resigned, as if he did not want to go with her but knew he had no choice in the matter, which only reinforced that air of fatal nobility and decency he always carried with him, like a tattered flag.

That is what I remember of those few moments. Only that. At the time of course I thought the two of them were just going to their table, and as a result I did not continue to gaze after them. Then too I was increasingly absorbed in trying to keep an incipient erection in its place, a task that Barbara Polanski seemed intent on frustrating. So I was not even aware that they had left until Sally and Arthur came steaming over to our table and demanded to know where their dates had gone. A great wit even then, I asked them if I was my brother and sister’s keeper.

“That’s not funny,” Arthur said.

“Are they coming back?” Sally asked.

I told them that I didn’t know and in fact wasn’t even sure that they had gone.

“Well, they have!” Arthur snapped. “And let me tell you, Sally and I have had just about enough of you Kendalls.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I said, lifting my paper cup.

When they were gone, Barbara leaned over as if to tell me something but instead put her tongue in my ear. Under the table my hand crawled onto her leg and she left it there.

“Maybe we ought to go too,” she said. “After one more drink, okay?”

“I’ll buy that.”

As I refilled our cups with punch and came back to the table and spiked them, the ball had already begun to unravel. At the poolside a fortyish woman kept drunkenly pulling on the sleeve of her husband’s tux, trying to get him to break off a conversation he was having with another man, and he peevishly slapped at her hand but missed and toppled her into the pool. The man he had been talking to immediately began to laugh like a lunatic at the poor woman sloshing about in the shallow water, trying to work her sopping gown back up over her suddenly bared breasts, and in turn prompted her husband to shove the laugher into the pool after her. By then, the tables were emptying and there was a lot of shouting and laughter as the crowd began turning itself into a mob. From the splashing sounds I knew that others were going into the water now too, but I couldn’t see them, except for the inevitable atavistic flapper who had scrambled up onto the high board and now began to strip to the accompaniment of a bump-and-grind number Marty Moon and the Meteors just happened to have in their repertoire. The girl unfortunately never made it down to her altogether, prematurely falling off the board as she struggled to undo her brassiere.

By then Barbara and I were already making our way to the door.

“What a great dance,” she said. “It’s really been fun.”

I drove us to the forest preserve and headed for a remote stretch of bridle trail that I knew the sheriff’s patrol never checked. And even before we got there Barbara Polanski had me convinced that I was finally going to establish my sexual independence from Kate. (The incident in St. Louis did not apply, as far as I was concerned.) Sitting tightly against me, Barbara kissed me and nuzzled my neck and I felt her hand come to rest on my bulging lap. By the time we parked, I had unzipped my pants and she had begun to caress me with her hand. What I really wanted, though, was for her to go down on me as the black woman had, but she made no move in that direction and I lacked the nerve to ask her to do it. Instead I took her in my arms and unclasped her dress in the back and worked it down. But all she let me do finally was mold and kiss her breasts. The rest of her, she said, was off limits.

“I’ve already gone that route,” she told me. “And I just won’t let myself be used anymore.”

As I kissed her, she explained. It seemed that in high school in Waukegan she had dated a “good Catholic boy” for three years, but had remained chaste all the way till graduation, after which she had thought they would marry. So she had let him make love to her “all last summer,” expecting to get an engagement ring from him at any time. But all the fellow did was give her a goodbye kiss and move on to Notre Dame, free as the wind. Since then, she had wised up, she said. She would give a boy pleasure if she liked him, but that was all.

“Until I get that old wedding ring, these legs stay crossed.”

By then I was already past controlling myself and I ejaculated all over her hand and dress and a windshield towel I belatedly had snatched off the floor. But that did not bother Barbara in the least. It was what she expected, she said. What she wanted. To give me pleasure and “maybe kiss a little and have a bit more rum,” that was enough for her.

Only slightly disappointed, I obliged her on all three counts. And in time I asked if she agreed with leading sexologists that unless a man ejaculated inside a woman, they were not having true sexual intercourse. The woman might come herself, but that didn’t matter, I informed her. To the experts, she was still pure.

“Like right now,” I went on. “Right after the guy comes. He could do it and a girl wouldn’t even have to worry.”

“What girl?” Barbara asked.

“Any girl.”

Her smile was dubious and knowing. But for some reason, she did not laugh. “How could the girl trust this guy?” she asked.

“She wouldn’t have to, because it’d be too soon for him. He couldn’t come even if he wanted to.”

“Some could.”

“Not me.”

“Really?”

“Honest.”

Thus did I occupy myself during those crucial minutes and hours when my brother and my twin needed me more than at any other time in their lives. But then, ever since leaving the dance, I consciously had tried not to think about them: why they had left together and where they had gone and what they were doing. Perhaps I sensed that this would be the night when it all came out into the open, when my life would change unalterably for the worse. So why not take it in stride? Why not just lounge back and give myself a few final hours of innocent pleasure? Who could it hurt? Yes, that could have been my reason. Or then again, maybe it was only that I didn’t care enough, not enough anyway to let it inhibit the free and noble exercise of my libido.

Whatever the reason, the thing I remember about that very special span of time is Barbara moving onto my lap and presenting her breasts to my mouth one at a time. And above all, I remember that as she arched backwards to change the angle of my penetration of her, I could see over her head in the darkness the radium glow of the dashboard clock’s hands pointing to one-fifteen—approximately the time that Cliff and Kate in the family Packard were going through the guardrail above Thorn Creek and slamming into the trees beyond. And I never did understand that. All my life I have heard stories of siblings and twins who seemed to share the same nervous systems, who felt pain when the other was hurt and who sometimes even died when the other died. But me—I felt nothing at all. In his mind my brother already was dead and my twin sister lay broken beyond all mending, and the only thing I felt was the silken secret heart of Barbara Polanski sliding back and forth on me. So don’t sing me songs about no man being an island. I know better.

Incredibly, seventy-two hours have passed since the storm ended, yet the roads remain unplowed and we are still without power. The days have become clear and sunny but so cold the snow has not even begun to melt. Sometimes I wonder if there has been a nuclear strike or some other cataclysmic event, rather than a simple snowstorm. Occasionally from upstairs I can see in the distance some of our neighbors—an old Mexican woman and two black youths—trying to dig out of their homes. But since the road is still closed, it would appear they dig in vain.

Meanwhile I keep the fire going and I write these pages and I look after Jason, who seems to be weakening with every passing day now. He sleeps most of the time, taking catnaps interrupted by feeble bouts of coughing and an occasional need to urinate. I force-feed him soup and water but he is strong enough to take only a little at a time. And his grip on reality seems less sure each day, to the point now where he sometimes doesn’t remember who I am or how we came to be alone together in this cold and silent house in the snow.

13

Last night, while I slept, my father died. I woke at dawn and stirred the fire into life and fed it a few more split logs from the dwindling pile in the living room. I tried the phone without any luck and then I used the bathroom before going upstairs to check on Jason. At first, I thought everything was all right, because he was lying on his back, as he usually did, with his head propped up on pillows. But he made no movement and then I saw that his eyes and his mouth were slightly open, as if death had surprised him by coming while he was asleep. I felt his forehead and found him already cold, so I closed his eyes and pulled the covers over his face and opened the window to let the room get even colder than it was. Then I shut the door and came back downstairs and washed my hands.

I still find it hard to believe that he is gone, even though I knew he had been slipping for weeks now. But yesterday he had seemed no worse, even taking some soup and trying a bite of toast, though it also should be noted that he barely spoke all day long, just lay there in Sarah’s bed gazing out the window at the now-blue sky. The last time I checked him was at eleven last night and he was sleeping then. The room was about as warm as I could get it, probably close to sixty degrees, and I had him wearing his usual two pairs of long johns under a good half-dozen covers. Because of this, I don’t feel that he could have died of heat loss. And I know that I have been diligent in trying to get food and liquids into him.

So I tell myself as I sit writing this that I am not to blame. I did not let my father die. Yet when I found him this morning, what I felt more than anything else was anger—at myself—as if I knew that I had failed him once again, bugged out on him one last time. And somehow the fact that I know this is not true doesn’t change a thing. Nor does it make any more endurable this terrible isolation. I thought it was bad enough before, to be snowbound with a dying old man in the midst of a suburban ghetto. But now, sitting here alone, with the phone and electricity still off and food and firewood running low and my only companion a body lying upstairs under a sheet in an open-windowed room, I begin to understand the meaning of the word
isolation
in its more exact dimensions. And I don’t much care for it.

At times I wonder if the phone and power companies and the street department are all locked in some dark conspiracy of inaction undertaken for the sole purpose of giving me time to finish this record, its completion being of such vital importance to the world at large. Maybe once mankind learns all about Kate and Cliff and how I came to flee to California they will renounce their old habits of greed and intolerance and bellicosity and lay down their arms in favor of brotherhood and sweet discourse. And if not that, then maybe they will push a few dollars my way. Whatever. That is probably the chief advantage of writing in isolation: that tiresome old lock on reality begins to slip and you never even know it. You forget that most people do not eat straight out of cans or yell obscenities into a dead phone or stand at the open door calling for persons already dead for a quarter century. Nor do they keep returning all through their days and nights to a messy kitchen table and a dog-eared stack of legal pads, to scratch in them a few more words of infinite superfluity. But then not everyone knows what is real.

After Barbara and I got back into our clothes, I started the Buick and turned on the headlights. And I saw, glaring down at us from a tree limb about a hundred feet ahead, the round yellow eyes of a great horned owl. The bird immediately took off, but so slowly, its great wings barely flapping, that it seemed as if some force other than flight were lifting it up through the trees into the darkness. I looked at Barbara to catch her reaction to the owl, but she had been fastening her hose to her garter belt and had missed it. So I said nothing. By then I was not feeling very talkative anyway, having just “established” my sexual independence only to discover that everything remained exactly as it was before. My life was still about to blow up in my face. And in my own mind, I was no less a pervert, no less a slave to my twin.

I followed the bridle trail to the main forest preserve road, which took us past the formal parking area above Sauk Lake. I saw a few cars there and later I would wonder if that was where Kate and Cliff had gone after, leaving the dance. Now, however, I went past it without a thought and turned onto Reardon Road, which ran west for about two miles between the forest preserve on one side and a series of small farms on the other. It was a curving two-lane blacktop, out of the way and lightly traveled, which made it a favored race course for area hotrodders. Its sharpest curve was at the point where the road passed over Thorn Creek and the rocky, tree-lined ravine that bordered the stream. The guardrails there had been breached more than a few times and I myself remember signing the impressive casts of the Camelli brothers when they returned to school weeks after surviving a crash at the site.