Cul-de-Sac (10 page)

Except for the dismal reality of living in one room his quarters were as she expected … neat and clean, as unadorned as a barracks. Only two framed photographs on the wall, Annie assumed they were of Teddy’s daughter and grandson. Disappointed with how little this room revealed, Annie opened the connecting door to Teddy’s office … and stopped short.

“Oh,” the man said. “Didn’t know anyone was home.” He was standing behind Camel’s desk and had an unlit cigar in his mouth.

“Teddy’ll be back in a minute.”

“Sure.” He was about sixty, average height, big belly, broad red face, thinning gray hair showing around the edges of his golf cap. He wore lime-green pants, a short-sleeved pink shirt, white shoes … and as Annie watched, he gripped an imaginary golf club and
took a few practice swings. He seemed harmless, a pear-shaped man with thick arms and a fat ass.

“Are you a friend of Teddy’s?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Annie Milton.” She held out her hand and he came from around the desk to shake it but didn’t offer his own name in exchange. Instead he said, “Annie
Milton
 … yeah Teddy’s told me all about you.”

That’s a lie she thought … if Teddy had mentioned her at all he would’ve used her maiden name, Annie Locken. “And you’re …” she asked.

“Late for a date,” he said pleasantly except that his smile was more leering than friendly. “You got Teddy working on Cul-De-Sac for you isn’t that right little lady?”

The reference to Cul-De-Sac started her heart beating fast, her palms sweating … Annie making a point of checking her watch. “He’ll be back any second now.”

Which also amused the man. “I’ll catch him next time.” He waved and winked and left the office … Annie locking the door after him.

She was still feeling anxious when she went over and stood by the phone to try Paul again. I’m staying with Teddy Camel, she rehearsed … he’s an old friend of the family, a former policeman, I came to him because I’m scared about what happened last night and frightened of you too Paul, the way you denied that man was even there.

Paul will be suspicious, he’ll ask, now who did you say this Teddy Camel was.

I told you, a friend of the family, an old friend of my mother’s … and then there would follow other lies and half-truths, Annie using them as stepping-stones to get through this minefield.

Because she can’t of course tell Paul about the Teddy Camel she’s been in love with since she was ten years old, can’t tell Paul how she tricked Teddy Camel into joining her at the beach house when she was twenty-one and Teddy was thirty-six … certainly couldn’t tell Paul any details of that summer, how she walked
around sore between the legs and sore in her heart too, crying over Teddy Camel and wearing his shirts, and if he’d said let’s knock over a convenience store and kill some clerks she would’ve said yes and if he had wanted to tie her down and fuck her in places she’d never been fucked before, she would’ve done that too, she might even have been the one who suggested it … she practiced writing her first name next to his last name and all during that summer when she was twenty-one and saw him walking toward her she experienced an elation like being bitterly cold then drinking something warm and sticky sweet, his gestures endeared him to her and she kept looking at his face when he was looking elsewhere and, if she could have, she would’ve spread her body over his like an ointment … you can’t tell something like that to a husband even if it is tucked away fourteen years in the past.

When he got to the beach house those fourteen years ago and discovered no other guests in attendance, Camel knew she wasn’t telling the truth about all the other people canceling out at the last minute. She hadn’t expected him to believe her, what surprised Annie was how angry he became. “Don’t ever lie to me,” he told her in a voice so chilling that she was physically afraid of him and almost called the whole thing off … then took a chance and said, “Stay with me anyway.”

No he said he wouldn’t do that … but he’d spend the night because it was too late to find a room.

Which meant she had the night. Annie was twenty-one and this time when she slipped into bed with him his protests were feeble and although they didn’t make love that first night, neither did Teddy demand that she find somewhere else to sleep.

She made him breakfast.

She walked around in cotton underwear.

It wasn’t that difficult.

So that by the third day they were in almost constant coitus, during recesses Annie would take him out along the shore and say, “Oh look, Teddy, the insatiable sea.” He would hold her hand as
they walked but only at night; in public, during the day, he wouldn’t let her touch him.

She fell into talking jags which wasn’t like her at all, not like her to cry for no reason either, she told Teddy Camel things that, hearing them today, would make her cringe … for every woman there is one man, for every man, one woman, and although you don’t always end up with your soul mate and in fact can be perfectly happy with someone who isn’t your soul mate … you’re mine, Annie declared, and I’m yours.

He’d listen to all this while drinking expensive gin and smoking unfiltered cigarettes and making no replies but when Annie told him she had the beach house for all summer, Teddy surprised her by saying he’d accumulated almost two months leave and could go back to work for a week, make arrangements, then return here and the two of them could spend what’s left of summer together.

That week he was gone Annie pined for him in ways that would strike you as pathetic if you’ve never been in love the way Annie was … and when Teddy returned they fucked so much that her genitals turned swollen and her nipples ached from his mouth and she bore his bruises.

Her jaws were sore, for the first time in her life she tasted semen and biting a shoulder she tasted blood … Annie swallowed both.

Her emotions shrink-wrapped to him so tightly that circuitry on occasion went haywire flipping Annie from laughter to tears or the other way around … Teddy watched without asking what any other man would ask, what’s wrong? Sometimes she wanted to hurt him, he’d have to yank her by the hair to stop her biting him and once she slapped him across the face as hard as she could apropos of nothing except the delirium of love, it brought a glaze of tears to his eyes but not from emotion, just an automatic response to being slapped hard in the face … then he walked away, poured a gin, sat down to drink it, never asking why’d you do that, either he knew or didn’t care.

They drank beer for breakfast and formed a conspiracy it didn’t count as alcohol.

She read to him passages from books she loved and quoted
poems she knew by heart. Listening carefully, Teddy often said nothing.

“Oh listen to this Teddybear, right up your dark alley. ‘J’ai appelé les bourreaux pour, en périssant, mordre la crosse de leurs fusils. J’ai appelé les fléaux, pour m’étouffer avec le sable, le sang. Le malheur a été mon dieu. Je me suis allongé dans la boue. Je me suis séché à l’air du crime. Et j’ai joué de bons tours à la folie.’ ”

Trying so very hard to impress him, I’m a senior in college, I can speak French … making him wait patiently for the translation.

“ ‘I called to the executioners that I might gnaw their rifle-butts while dying. I called to the plagues to smother me in blood, in sand. Misfortune was my God. I laid myself down in the mud. I dried myself in the air of crime. I played sly tricks on madness.’ ”

She looked up from the text and pronounced the author’s name carefully for Teddy: “Rimbaud.”

“
A Season in Hell
,” he replied … astonishing her.

He didn’t like massages, giving or receiving, but allowed her to shampoo his hair.

She watched when he shaved and one time in the shower together she said he could pee on her if he wanted to but he didn’t want to.

He bathed her, touching Annie more tenderly than any supplicant ever touched any queen … then fucked her like a whore on the bathroom floor.

She was always showing off for him, posing provocatively, raising a skirt to reveal her bare ass.

One night she dressed in a red skirt that barely covered that ass, wearing a tight tube top then in vogue, she balanced on red high heels with straps that wrapped around her ankles, she put on too much red lipstick and piled her red hair on top of her head and, emerging from the bathroom, demanded with theatrical bitchiness, “I’m bored, take me dancing.” He told her he didn’t dance and in any case wouldn’t take her out looking like that, he’d be getting in fights all night long. She threatened, “You don’t take me dancing, I’m going alone.” Leaving the implication hanging like his cigarette smoke in the air between them, she demanded,
“Well?” Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, he conveyed through gesture, posture. Annie left, Teddy didn’t call to her or ask her to reconsider, neither did he follow after her or say, when she returned at midnight, where have you been I was worried sick. She told him, “I just went out and sat on the beach, in case you were wondering.” He said, “I wasn’t.”

They shot pool, they played miniature golf … Teddy was serious in these endeavors, having fun without smiling unless you counted the way he squinted.

Unprecedented in her adult life she begged for attention, debased herself and felt ennobled doing it … pouted, played a little girl, cried on purpose, went all kittenish and coy.

One time she pulled a knife on him. He slapped it out of her hand and neither spoke of the incident again.

She said things a person seriously in love will say, linking the concept of love with the word forever, getting giddy over the moon … he never laughed at her and never hurt her physically except as an unintended consequence of vigorous intercourse.

Teddy was always surprising Annie by what he knew, whom he had read, he surprised her by being good at crossword puzzles, they got preferred service at restaurants and bars maybe because of the way she gazed at him with adoration and the way he looked noble and this combination elevated the spirits of waiters and bartenders and even passersby who’d turn around for another look at Annie Locken walking with Teddy Camel.

If she’d kept a diary that summer she would’ve capitalized his pronouns.

Annie wasn’t on the pill, she’d lied to him about that and for some reason the Human Lie Detector didn’t detect this particular lie. He was however aware that she wasn’t nearly as sexually experienced as she wanted him to believe, much of what she did in bed with Teddy that summer she’d never done before … like getting pregnant.

Annie didn’t tell him.

Fourteen years ago she was in love with him as deeply as a person can be in love, as deep as the sea she might’ve said at the time
 … once she masturbated him as they stood in that ocean and Annie told him, salt to salt.

Each time they’d walk down to the shore she’d say, “Oh look, Teddy, the insatiable sea.”

Until finally on the last day of that summer he asked the question she’d been angling for: why do you keep saying that?

“Because I’m the insatiable sea,” she answered.

He didn’t comment.

“Now you’re supposed to ask, ‘If you’re the insatiable sea, then who am I?’ ”

“Okay.”

“Ask it.”

“Consider it asked.”

“You’re those rocks there, see how they’re getting worn down.”

He looked at the rocks, then at Annie, then he said, “Takes a long time.”

“I got all the time in the world.”

He said he didn’t.

“Let’s get married.”

He didn’t say no, he just looked seaward his blue eyes squinting in a way she found almost unbearably attractive.

“I’m serious.” And she was, Annie already knew she was pregnant. “Let’s go get a license right now today, we’ll stay here whatever waiting period there is, then we’ll get married and I’ll go back to Washington with you.”

That’s when he said no.

“I can make you happy, I love you … marry me.”

“No.”

She kicked him hard in the leg and demanded it: “Marry me goddamn you!”

“No.”

“
Yes
. Marry me or I’ll fucking kill you.”

“I doubt it.”

“If you don’t marry me I’ll kill myself.”

“Yeah well …”

Annie performed all the tricks she knew, pouting and crying
and cajoling and promising what she’d do for and to him on their wedding night and every night of their marriage after that, debasing herself and begging him and then threatening to go off and fuck every man she meets … nothing worked.

“Do you love me, can you at least say you love me?” she asked.

“No.”

Jesus he was a hard man.

“Then it’s over?” Her mind would not compute such a sentence. “The summer, us … everything?”

When he didn’t deny it she felt claws at her heart.

“Teddy …”

He waited.

“And so, sir, how would you sum up this past summer?” she asked, her voice playful, mocking the weight on her heart. “How would you characterize the young lady?”

He looked her right in the eye. “The sweetest little piece of ass I ever had.”

Annie choked on it but willed herself to be tough … tough like Teddy Camel, telling him, “Or ever will have.”