Inappropriate Behavior: Stories (13 page)

How do you cut his toenails, the boy would ask. Have you ever tried one of those vacuum brushes they do on the TV? What kind of treats does he like? How high can he jump?
Haw hi kinnee jump?
And when Tom would answer, the boy's response would be a sound it is very hard to replicate in words, a kind of appraising
hmmm
sound, but one that also sounded sort of sarcastic, like the boy was not appraising the dog but appraising Tom, and finding him, or his answers, wanting. But Tom was also nervous during these morning conversations that the mother would come out and confront him face-to-face about the dog, which, in all the time of leaving notes, she had never done. How often do his ears need cleaning? Did you ever think about bobbing his tail? Has he ever bit anybody? It was almost like the boy thought about nothing but the dog all day long, formulating a new list of questions for the next time he and Tom would meet. Sad, but no one else in Norfolk put this kind of energy into talking to Tom.

Then there was this: One night, during an especially intense bathroom show, Patty dropped to her knees in front of Tom and sucked him while he watched the child across the way. Just as Tom was about to come, the girl flipped off the lights and left the bathroom, and Patty, as if on cue, rose to her feet and took Tom's hand between her legs. “I'm so wet I can't even walk,”
Patty said, and Tom raised her skirt and fucked her there against the kitchen counter while the dog watched from the doorway.

Almost immediately after what was unquestionably the single greatest sexual experience of their three years together, Patty felt incredibly guilty. They sat on the bed and Patty cried. Tom tried to console her, but failed.

“We won't do it again.”

“But we did it.”

“What's the big deal? It's just a little kinky. It's not like we're child pornographers or something.”

“What
are
we like?” Patty said.

“It's not like the girl is eight or something.”

“It's not like anything, huh? Then why did you get so hot?”

“Because
you
were hot, Patty.”

“Yeah, I'm real hot compared to that.”

“Listen, Patty,” Tom said. “I didn't ask you to go down on me in the kitchen.”

“Yeah, but your dick was already hard when I pulled it out,” she said. “You've never fucked me that hard. You've never—”

“Patty,” Tom said. “Calm down, okay? Let's just go to sleep.”

Two nights later, it happened again, exactly as before. And then:

“You want kinky. I don't mind kinky, Tom. I'll dress up. You can tie me to the bed if you want. You can spank me. You can have my ass.”

“I don't need all that,” Tom said.

Weeks passed. It happened again and again.

“Then why is the only time we have sex anymore after we watch her in the window?”

“That's not the only time we have sex.”

“Oh yes it is,” Patty said.

“Well, hell, she's there every night.”

“Not every night.”

“Anyway, Patty, most nights. And I am, I will remind you,
a man, and that is a teenaged girl who right here in this state would have been a very marriageable person only a couple of decades ago.”

“You prick.”

“Why am
I
a prick?”

“You're a prick because all you think about all day long is getting through dinner and getting to those dishes. Our dishes have never
been
so clean. I couldn't
pay
you to help with the dishes before.”

So now the question becomes, did they eventually stop? They did not. Nearly every time they did the dishes, they wound up savaging each other in the kitchen. There were different instigations, different positions. There was the thing with the spatula. One night, bent over a rolling microwave cart, she did give him her ass, demanded he take her ass. Tom decided it wasn't for him. At times food would intervene—vegetables, jellies, spices, sandwich meat. Patty became skilled at the sexual applications of various kitchen soaps. Some nights Tom didn't even want to that much. But they did it, and afterward there would be the same recriminations, the same guilt.

“Do you think this might mean I'm a lesbian?” she cried one night.

“I'm
worse
than a lesbian,” she cried one night. “I'm a lesbian pedophile. Do they even
have
those?”

“I just wanted a normal sex life,” she cried one night. “You've got me so fucked up now I don't even know who I am.”

“Prison,” she cried one night. “I can tell you right now, that's where this is heading.”

One night she cried, “I'm going crazy.”

And on top of all of this, the thing with the dog got worse and worse. They installed a gate at the top of the stairs, but the dog leaped over it or busted through it. They tried crating the dog when they left the house, but by now they hardly ever left the house, and you can't keep a dog crated all the time—it was cruel, and what was the point of having a dog in a crate? Tom
installed an indoor invisible fence at the top of the stairs. Made things worse—the dog ran right through it and thrashed down the stairs even louder, yelping from the pain where the collar was zizzing him on the neck. Also, the ghost kept unplugging it. The notes from downstairs kept coming, kept getting meaner and meaner. Profanities, and so on. Old Hoard kept calling, demanding that they come up with a solution. The term
eviction
was actually employed. School wasn't going well for Tom. Patty had gotten a job in the registrar's office at the college, and she hated it there, too. They began to make plans to leave Norfolk. Old Hoard would keep their deposit for breaking their lease, but it didn't matter. Tom would finish out the semester, they would go back to St. Louis and apply to other graduate schools for next fall. Patty's father owned a PR firm, specializing in hospital accounts, and Tom could freelance there, and Patty could get her sub job back at the high school. And then one night, Tom had Patty bent over the kitchen sink where they could both see the girl, when they heard something hit the window.

They froze. Across the way, the girl had one leg hiked up on a laundry basket, applying lotion to her right inner thigh. When something else hit their window, Tom and Patty noticed the lights in the kitchen were on. How had they forgotten to turn them off? They always turned them off. They still hadn't moved—Tom's hands were on Patty's hips, and his penis was retracting from her of its own accord. Patty finally shoved him backward and crawled away. Tom focused on his own face in the window and on holding very still. For some reason, this seemed important, seemed all that was important. If you don't move, his face seemed to say to him, nothing else will happen. Time will stop. And then the light in the kitchen went out, and Tom couldn't see his face anymore.

Tom still didn't move, but now he could see down into the gravel driveway between the two houses. He lowered his eyes, and there, standing poised to toss another pebble, was the boy from downstairs. When he saw Tom look down at him, the boy
set the pebble on the ground. The boy looked at Tom in his window, then looked at the girl in hers. Then he looked back at Tom and slowly wagged his finger, a terrible grin on his face. Then he ran back inside. Tom still didn't move. When he finally raised his eyes from the driveway, the girl's bathroom light was out. Something wet from his penis hit the top of his bare foot with a splat.

Tom finally turned from the kitchen sink. The house was completely dark. The dog was lying near the top of the stairs, waiting to charge when the cops arrived. Tom called for Patty and got no response. He looked in the living room, he looked in the bedroom. While there, he put on his pajama pants and a T-shirt. He looked in the bathroom, its shades drawn against the streetlight outside.

He finally found her on the sunporch, curled up in the corner below the window where they'd seen the ghost in the photograph. She was crying, quietly but fervently, and this time, Tom didn't blame her.

“Prison,” she cried. “I told you.”

“Patty, I've got to ask you,” Tom said, sitting down cross-legged next to her. “How did you forget to turn out the lights?”

“I
did
turn out the lights,” she said. “I
always
turn out the lights.”

“But tonight they were on, and tonight's the night we got caught.”

“I turned off the lights,” she said. She started hitting her knee with a balled-up fist. She hadn't put any clothes on.

“Patty, the lights were on.”

“I had my eyes closed,” Patty said. “I was with
you
, not with her. I was fucking
you
, not fucking her.”

“Wait,” Tom said. “The lights
were
out.”

“When I'm about to have sex in a window in front of a naked fifteen-year-old girl, I always turn out the lights,” Patty said. “That's what I'll tell the judge.”

“The lights
were
out,” Tom repeated.

“She might be fourteen,” Patty said. “Hell, she could be
twelve
—what do we know? We probably should have looked into that before we started this life.”

“No, Patty, listen to me. The lights were out. I remember. Something happened.”

“You've got to be kidding me,” Patty said, finally turning to look at Tom, her mouth hanging open. “The ghost?” She'd cried so much the tips of her hair were wet, where they'd fallen in her face. “That's what you're going with, the fucking
ghost
? Good luck with that one. I'm pleading insanity. Women's issues. Hormonal imbalance. Hysteria. I'm not too proud, obviously.”

She was right, of course—it'd been one thing to joke about living in a haunted house. It'd been one thing to write home or regale their Facebook friends with tales about the unplugged plugs and the missing shoes and the milk. It'd been one thing to blame the ghost for the way the dog behaved. It'd even been one thing to call out to the ghost sometimes, to talk to him like he was really there. But the ghost certainly had not turned on the kitchen light. Patty had simply forgotten it, and they'd both been too far gone in their game to notice it. Would
that
be a better defense? It's just a game, Your Honor. No one's hurt by it. The girl never even knew we were watching her. It had to be better than
the ghost turned on the lights
.

But wasn't this better still? Your Honor, we're terribly sorry the boy saw us doing that in the window. We're still newlyweds, we get carried away sometimes. It'll never happen again. The girl? What girl? I don't know what you're talking about. You say she was showering in that window across from our kitchen? I can assure you, sir, that we never saw anything like that—if we had, we would have immediately gone over there and told her parents. What kind of people do you think we are? I'm a graduate student, for crying out loud, not some kind of sicko. I'm offended, frankly. The whole accusation is absurd. I don't care what a twelve-year-old boy thought he saw, Your Honor. If the boy, the twelve-year-old boy, knows something about a naked
teenaged girl in a bathroom window, maybe that's something you should ask
him
about.

Yes, that was better, but would Patty hold up? She was still punching a bruise into the top of her knee, crying like she really was hysterical. Now she stopped punching and began gripping her forearms, twisting the skin there like an Indian burn. What was this? Manufacturing evidence against him? Your Honor, look at my wounds.

“Patty, you need to get dressed,” Tom said. “I'm sure the cops will be here soon.”

“Oogie, boogie, boogie, boogie, blah, blah, blah,” she said, knocking Tom's hand away where he'd reached out to her, her fingers twitching wildly in the air. “I don't want to talk to you anymore. I don't want to hear you talk. I have the right to remain silent.”

“Patty, is this how you want them to find you, to find us?”

“That's exactly right, Tom,” Patty said. “They've found us. They've discovered us. I never wanted to come to this town in the first place. You
had
to go to graduate school. Why did you have to go to the only school that let you in? Shouldn't that have been a sign?”

“Patty—”

“No,” she said. “It should have been a sign to
me
. That's it. I should have seen this all along. My God, what am I going to tell my father? I was a teacher, Tom. A high-school teacher. I
taught
that girl. She was in every class I taught, and somewhere inside me, just waiting for you to get it out, was
this
person, this
thing.
” She started pounding her knee again. “It's every man for himself now, baby. I'm going with he drove me to it. I'm going with he forced me. I'm going with insanity.”

And after a while of all this, after a long while, they began to realize that the dog had not started barking, that no one had pulled up outside the house, no cops had come, no knocks on the door. It was incredibly quiet. For hours Tom and Patty sat there on the sunporch, until even they went quiet. At some point
Patty fell asleep, and Tom covered her with an afghan. Maybe Tom fell asleep. The next thing they knew it was dawn, and they might not have even noticed that if the dog had not risen from the top of the stairs and come to the sunporch, his cold nose nudging Tom to go out.