Before My Life Began (65 page)

She tells him that he is bigger and harder than any man she has ever known. She tells him to go on and fuck her brains out, and when she does, and when he hears her laugh the way she did when he saw her whisper in Lucius's ear, in the car—laughing
at
him—he finds that his desire to hold back is gone. He yanks down on her hair, snapping her head back even as he lets go and he rams into her as far as he can, feels her convulse. She clamps her teeth down on her forearm, her fists opening and closing on the pillow, in spasms, and he cannot believe how tight she is around him, how raw she feels. He bangs away at her until the sweat is slick between them, until she is crying for him to give her more—more! more!—until he is licking and biting and clawing at her, wherever he can grab, while she whips her head from side to side and makes strange husky sounds from deep inside her chest. Rasping. Growling. She is gone, off by herself in a wild mix of pain and pleasure from which, not being face to face, he feels strangely distant, as if, he thinks, he is a mere accessory.

When he releases and pulls out of her, wet and limp and bruised, and when she rolls onto her back and smiles up at him, there is a look of happy exhaustion on her face that is unlike any expression he has ever seen there before and, gazing at it, he feels the strangest sensation: that she is a woman he has been intimate with for the first time. He looks away even as she clings to him, tells him how wonderful he is, even as he knows that something is over between them.

But why now? And why so soon? Will they ever do it again like this? Will they ever be able to talk about it? He feels spent, dizzy. He watches her face, her breathing. She moves closer to him. Her eyelids drop, she nuzzles against his chest, says his name once, and then is fast asleep. He holds her, her breasts against his, and he stares across the bedside lamp at the painting on the wall. Vermeer's kitchen maid with downcast eyes. Still pouring her milk, still bathed in pale yellow light.

The sweat begins to dry on him. He imagines them doing what they have done in August, in broiling weather, and he wonders how long it would take until they would pass out. The sun glows orange in the haze. It hangs above the bell tower of Holy Cross Church, will soon drop from view. It is the kind of weather his father called steaming. A
steaming day in Brooklyn
. He thinks of his father telling him to let cold water run across his wrists, to drink warm tea with lemon. He reaches down, pulls the sheet up over them. Has the world, in fact, gone mad on him? Can he float away into some other life? He feels as if he is traveling into a foreign country through veils of mist and steam. Can one ever
forget?
Is the life he was believing, a few short hours ago, to be the life he had desired, found, and loved, an illusion, and if so, is the illusion inside the life itself, or in
him
somehow, in the fact that he believed in it?

In a few minutes, he knows, he will leave the room and go downstairs. Ordinary life will resume. Paul and Debbie will lay their plans, enact their schemes. Lucius and Louise will be married. Jennifer will go off to the Cape for the summer, to college in the fall. The boys will go to their camps. Lucius will get his teeth straightened and filled.

He sees the dentist's drill, in Louise's father's office, coming down on pulleys and wires, hissing and whirring. Then he is closer, staring, and the drill is boring into the back of a man's head, where there is no bone. That happened, he knows. He stood next to Abe and watched. Turkish Sammy and Big Jap Willer held the man down. The man began to talk, to sing. He sees the meat cleaver, coming down on his own splayed fingers. That happened too. The cleaver was in his own hand. He hardly felt the pain. The severed digits looked like fat, pink worms. If Susan thought him a fool today, what would she think were he ever to tell her
that
story? Or would she sympathize with him and love him, not for his loss, but because, so helplessly and stupidly afraid, he had panicked.

Paul, he thinks, is like those men. He is capable, without second thoughts, of throwing acid in Susan's face. Aaron is certain of it, even while he is less certain about the man who made him maim himself, who had been shadowing him from one county fair to another. Did the man work for Fasalino? For the police? For the feds? For the state racing commission? The man saw Aaron sitting there, in front of the horse's stall. He watched for a while, admiringly. He asked Aaron where he had learned to draw so well. He told him he had real good hands, healthy hands. The man wore a black silk vest over a gray polo shirt. He looked like a deadbeat, yet his eyes gave him away, were too alert; his shoes, though scuffed and unpolished, had good soles and heels on them. The man took Aaron's hands in his own, told him he should protect a pair of hands that could draw as well as that. He asked questions, passed the time of day, talked horses and odds and handles. Aaron knew the man's game, knew it well. Or thought he did.

Aaron drank heavily with the other stable boys. He passed out, tried to wash the vomit from his clothes, passed out again. He let them carry him to the stable, where they set him down outside the stall, on blankets. One of the boys kissed him on the forehead. They were all laughing. In the morning he did it. But can he even recall why at the time he
thought
he did it, what in the world it was that he thought he could gain or prove by setting his hand on the chopping block and whacking? What he recalls most of all is how hard it was to get his damned head to stop spinning so that he could concentrate. He didn't want to miss. Aim. Lift. Whack. No hesitation. Was he punishing his fingers for having drawn so well, for having given him away? Why let the world—others—take away what you love? Far better, if you sense they will, to do the job yourself first.

Or was he merely trying to add to his disguise? Was he merely confused and foolish? He had the ice ready nearby. He left the stubs, plunged the bloody stumps into the ice, quickly knotted the tourniquet above his biceps, heard the roaring in his head that must have come from his mouth also. He did not resist when the others came running, when they raced him to the local hospital in an old jalopy. He had identification papers, enough cash to pay for the stitches.

Then he was in a new town, working in the slaughterhouse where they brought the old race horses. He felt sorry for them, but he didn't mind cutting them up once they were dead. They drugged the horses like mad at the end, so that they could stumble around the track, and if nobody claimed them and they couldn't pay their way any longer, they sold them for dog food.

Midways and ferris wheels and kewpie dolls and cotton candy and teenagers holding hands and guys winning teddy bears for their girlfriends. Hot dogs and ox-drawing contests and stock car races and 4-H exhibits and horse races and pills and syringes. Hay and shit and wine. Time blurred. Pain gone. America! It was the same in all the small towns. Upstate New York. Massachusetts. Vermont. New Hampshire. Maine. Some of the owners cared about their horses, but most of the horses were old, half-crippled, their legs splintered even if their hearts still pumped. If they didn't shoot them up with drugs the pain would have been worse for them. Aaron let himself grow a beard, let his hair get bushy, let the foul odors sink into him. He worked the slaughterhouses for a while, then restaurants and diners. He stayed away from the fairs. When the fingers were calloused and brown, he went back.

Two years. Jackie left baseball during those two years. Curious that he hadn't remembered that for a long time. While he was wandering, Jackie retired. Thirty-seven years old. Less than a decade in the major leagues. Lifetime batting average of .311. Not bad for a pigeon-toed black man who played his first game in the majors at twenty-eight years old. Outsmarted O'Malley, who tried to trade him to the Giants for thirty thousand and a pitcher. Lived out in Stamford, Connecticut, where he and Rachel built their own home and where there were no black kids for his children to play with.

Two years. Aaron drank less. He liked hard physical labor, getting in shape. Picked apples in Upstate New York, tobacco in Hatfield. Moved furniture in Worcester. Wherever he was he would cut out in the early afternoon when he could, find a playground or schoolyard, shoot baskets. He shaved his beard, kept the mustache, wore sunglasses, learned to walk differently, at a slower gait. He met Susan. Yet he wondered: if the guy who had been following him discovered what he had done to himself, would he have given up the chase for that very reason? Would he have figured there was nothing Aaron would
not
do in order not to be taken back? If they wanted him at all, Aaron figured, they wanted him back alive. If not, why hadn't the man made his move?

In the fall of 1957 he returned to Northampton—worked at the Three County Fair again. Jackie was now a Vice President for Chock Full O'Nuts, working for a white man named Walter Black. Aaron liked that, figured he and Jackie could laugh over it. Jackie with white hair and black face, Walter Black with black hair and white face.

Aaron never saw the man again. And if the man had been merely curious? If he were merely a state dick on the prowl, seeing what information he could pick up playing hunches? If the man knew nothing, had just been sniffing around, had just been trying to scare Aaron a bit, to see what he could frighten loose…

What difference now, Aaron thinks.

He recalls a wide gold band on the fourth finger of the man's left hand, a tiny diamond chip set into it. Family happiness. Aaron smiles. Sure. Maybe in exchange for information about drugs or fixes on one of the other drifters, the man would have helped Aaron. Or maybe he had no idea in the world who Aaron was and didn't care. Maybe he just liked to follow the fairs and watch people draw. Maybe he was on the make. Who knows? What difference now? What difference.

Susan's chest rises and falls. She breathes easily. Her cheeks glow. In a few weeks, summer coming, her hair will begin to lighten, her skin to darken, so that she will appear to be even younger, more beautiful. He has had that for a dozen years now: the smile of a truly beautiful woman. Just for him. Personal happiness. Susan has always believed that, given how awful the world is—the world beyond their door and windows—they are entitled to what she refers to as personal happiness. They are entitled, as in Leverett, to cultivate their own garden and to take joy from it. Guiltlessly. They do what they can, when they can: with their children, with their friends, with Lucius.
Personal
happiness—in
this
life? Aaron laughs. Perhaps the mists are in his head. How foolish can a man be, he wonders. How foolish, and how innocent. The problem, he sees, is not that he began imagining his life before he lived it—it was, after all, a life he had never imagined could be his—but that, when things occurred in his new life that he had not imagined, that surprised and astonished him, he was not ready for them.

He slips from the bed, covers Susan, goes to the bathroom and washes himself. What he feels, he realizes when he returns, is that he has been used.

He dresses and leaves, goes downstairs. He hears Carl and Larry outside, arguing about whether or not Larry was hacked as he shot or if he cried foul
after
he saw that the ball was not going to go into the basket. Aaron looks out the window. Moths flutter, hit the screen, try to get inside. Benjamin lies on a plank of wood that rolls forwards and backwards under the front of a friend's jacked-up car. Benjamin will turn out fine, Aaron thinks. Just fine. Amazing how, short of death, we can and do survive. No magic really.

The children's schoolbooks are on the hallway buffet, in four separate piles. At Susan's suggestion, Jennifer has been reading
The Diary of Anne Frank
. When she was a senior at Northampton High School, Susan played Anne Frank in the stage version of the book.

Jennifer emerges from the kitchen. She has changed into a pair of dungarees and an old green sweatshirt. Her hair is now braided, pinned to either side of her ears in what he thinks she calls Dutch braids. He is surprised at how young she looks, how unformed. The line of her jaw is soft. She is eating a sandwich, carrying a plate. Aaron smells tuna fish.

“Hi,” she says. It is as if what happened at Susan's house never happened. There is neither shame nor guilt nor anger in her manner or voice or eyes.

“Hi,” he says.

“Want some?” she asks, offering him half her sandwich. “I was starving.

“No thanks,” he says, and then: “Your mother is taking a nap. I'll go fix some supper for everybody. Ask Ben if his friend wants to stay and eat with us, all right?”

He looks out the window and realizes that it is night, and that the boys are playing and working by artificial light, using the floodlights Aaron installed on top of the garage. He wonders if any of them heard the noises from the bedroom, if they smiled at one another knowingly, realizing just why it was their mother and father were locked in there, were not downstairs on time for supper.

“Sure thing,” Jennifer says, and then adds, “We all snacked around.”

Aaron picks up
The Diary of Anne Frank
, sees that the bookmark sticks up at about the two-thirds point.

“How do you like it so far?” he asks.

“It sucks,” Jennifer says. “I mean, who really gives a shit if—”

He punches. She flies away from him, clutching at her mouth, letting the sandwich spray across the floor. She sits against the wall, under the window, eyes wide. The front door swings open and Aaron realizes that she must have screamed when he hit her. She spits out a tooth, catches blood in cupped hands. Aaron feels cold. How awful, he thinks, that in this life happiness should turn so swiftly to misery, that love should turn to meanness, that trust should turn to betrayal, that beauty should turn to ugliness. Wasn't there some other way? He nods to the boys, but says nothing. They stare at him, open-mouthed. He thinks of Susan, asleep under the white sheet, her mouth half-open, the room suffused in amber light. What can he say? If what he senses is true—is
actually
true—what will he ever be able to say to them.