Inappropriate Behavior: Stories (20 page)

“Do you have a bucket or something, maybe a scrub brush?” I said. Amid the talk of death, I didn't want to be standing out in the open, vulnerable. My ribs hurt, and I felt sick to my stomach and to something like my soul. Dick opened the door, but just a crack. I could barely make him out in the dark apartment. He wasn't looking at me, his face in profile behind the door, his head sort of bobbing up and down.

“I need to clean up this mess,” I said.

“Nah,” Dick said. “I can't come back over there tonight.”

“Did that guy hit you?” I said.

“No.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Then please come back over and help me. I'm in a lot of trouble, Dick.”

He shook his head, one bloodshot eye catching the light from the porch. “I've got to get to work,” Dick said. “If Pittsburgh was a regular-season game in '96, and I forgot that, then what else have I forgotten?”

“Dick, I have blood all over my apartment.”

“I've got to get to my books,” he said softly, bobbing his head again. “He's made me doubt myself.”

“Can I just borrow—”

“Charlie . . . I'm a . . . quiet,” he said now. “I'm quiet, Charlie. I just want to read my books. I need to
know
this stuff.”

“Okay, Dick,” I said. “I understand.”

“I just need to know is all, Charlie. I hope you'll be okay.”

“I understand,” I said, and the door clicked shut gently in my face.

I went back to the apartment and showered, put on my new clothes, and sat at my table drinking beer and watching the blood dry and waiting for the cops to come. I have no idea what time the doorbell rang. It was late, or early. I'd fallen asleep in
my plastic chair, ten or twelve empty cans of Busch on the gory floor at my feet. I needed to piss, figured I'd better do that before I let the cops in and they hauled me off to the rest of what was left of my life. The bell rang again, and then I started thinking the cops wouldn't ring the bell. They'd say
Police!
and pound on the door, or kick the door down, or just turn the knob and come on through, like Ray had done earlier. The bell rang again, and I stepped around the bloodstains on my way to the door.

And it was Molly, the troubled and variant soul, Molly in a green wool sweater and a tartan schoolgirl skirt combo we'd bought at the Lands' End outlet in Warrenton, boozy and bright-eyed though bruised-eyed Molly, blond and beautiful Molly of my destruction.

“Molly,” I said.

“We're just alike now,” she said, pointing to her eye.

“Sorry that happened,” I said.

“Why couldn't Jesus be a Chinese
woman?
That's what
I'd
like to know. I mean, if we're saying—”

“What do you want, Molly?”

“I heard what you did to Ray,” she said.

“It wasn't Ray,” I said. “It was one of the other—”

“Not my
brother
, Ray,” she said, laughing. “The guy you cut, his name is Ray, too. Ray also. But they call him Ray-Two at the gym. The other guy is his brother, but I forget his name.” She put her fingertips to her temples. “It gets confusing,” she said.

“Molly, what do you want here?”

“I wanted to see your pagoda, Charlie. Ray was telling me about it.
My
Ray.”

“How's the other one?”

“Who?”

“Ray-Two.”

“Fine. Can I see the pagoda, Charlie?”

“Fine? He was bleeding pretty bad. Look at all this.”

“Yes,” she said, peering around me now. I moved to stay in front of her, put my hands on her shoulders.

“But now he's fine?” I said.

“Well, he's in some pretty serious surgery right now, but just before they put him under, he said he'd gladly die for my honor. Isn't that love?”

“Oh, Lord,” I said.

“Can I see it, Charlie?”

I sighed. “Will you go if I let you see it?”

“I hear it's really quite fabulous.”

I stood aside, and Molly stumbled against me as she came through the door, stepping immediately into the tacky blood, tracking her size-six oxfords all through the front hall and toward the living room.

“Wow,” she said when she saw the patio set. “What brought you to this, Charlie?”

“You,” I said. “And Ray. I had nothing left in here.”

“It's so . . .
spare,
” Molly said with an inrush of breath. She felt her shoes stick to the carpet, looked down, and unstuck them with no apparent care for the reason they'd stuck. She moved toward the table, putting her hand on its plastic top, now gently gliding her fingers along the back of a chair, to the spinning tray, and then smoothly up the metal pole as high as she could reach and then back down again. She fingered the umbrella's green and white fringe. She held the handle that turned the crank that raised and lowered the umbrella. She spun the circular tray. “It's so beautiful.”

“Molly, you are insane. It's a patio set from Target.”

“Charlie, you should know by now that we don't always understand our own motives, or the ways beauty can enter our lives unannounced,” she said, turning to face me and leaning her backside against the tabletop, her heart-bending knees beneath the plaid hem of the skirt. “Is that why you hit me, Charlie? Because you think I'm insane?”

“I didn't hit you, Molly. Ridley tried to hit
me
, and I ducked, and
he
hit you.”

“Who's Ridley?”

“Oh, for fuck's sake.
Ridley
. The lumberjack. William James?”

“William James was a lumberjack?” She crinkled her nose.

“Ridley,” I said, fairly screaming now. “Ridley, earlier tonight, at the Duck. Fucking
Ridley!
”

“Why are you shouting?”

“Molly,” I said, “are you standing here tonight in my apartment, in Ray-Two's blood, telling me that you don't remember Ridley, that he tried to hit me and hit you instead—”

“You
hit me, Charlie,” Molly said. “But I understand
why
now. It's the same reason you emasculated Ray-Two. You're a very old man, Charlie. You have old ways and reasons. I mean, I know you're only twenty-seven—and happy birthday, by the way, I didn't get the chance to tell you that before you knocked me unconscious earlier—but your soul is thousands of years old, eons. See, you're a Hammurabian, basically, with some Shinto thrown in. That humanizes you. The thing is, Charlie, I see it all more clearly now. I understand where I fit in your spiritual and teleological structure. And I can accept that place, too, Charlie.”

“I think I'm going to be sick.”

“Oh, hold on,” she said, quickly moving from her perch on the tabletop toward the kitchen. “Do you have any big plastic garbage bags? We should wrap ourselves up in big plastic garbage bags and turn on the shower, full-blast hot. It's not sanctified or anything, but it's the thought that counts.”

“Get out.”

“You don't seem to have any big plastic garbage bags,” Molly said now from the kitchen, her blood-soled shoes squeaking on my crummy linoleum floor. “How about Saran Wrap?”

“Get out,” I said again.

“I can start the shower anyway,” she said. “We won't sweat as much, but still—”

“What are you doing here?” I said, moving at her now, tracking the blood myself, not caring, not knowing what I
did
care about. “You have ruined me, Molly. You threw away all my stuff, and then you drove me crazy, and then you got me beaten
up, and now I nearly killed a man, maimed him for life, and I'm going to go to prison for it, that's for sure, and here you are again. For
what?
What else can you possibly do to me?”

“Well, when I was at St. John's earlier tonight, I paid your hospital bill. That was where they took me when you knocked me out. That's where they took Ray-Two, too, if you want to visit him. I paid both of our hospital bills. They just wanted to make sure I didn't have a concussion.”

“I'll pay my own bills.”

“I didn't, by the way.”

“You didn't pay the bill?”

She came toward me in the hallway, holding her hands in front of her in her innocent way, then put them to my face. I could smell her perfume, her beer, her. She smiled slightly, cocked her head a bit, and said, “I didn't have a concussion.”

I kissed her. You had to know I would. And I can't explain it any more than you can. But I did it, and maybe it was because she did it, and she moved her hands on my tender face and directed my lips and tongue. I kissed her neck and chin, kissed her hard, with more than my lips and tongue, with all my teeth and my cheeks and my own chin, and because now she moved my mouth upward, to the eye, the swollen and bloody eye, and she had me kiss her there, she ground her eye into my mouth and chin, and I could taste the pain there, the heat of the bruise, and because then she was crying and I sucked her tears, and because her nose ran and I licked it clean, and because we moved from the hallway to the living room, to the pagoda, to the floor beneath the pagoda, and because when we got there we were naked, as if the hands of the gods had undressed us, our clothes were things that did not exist, had never been invented, because we were clean, even in the blood we were clean and unfallen, and because we were doomed, and because we need, we so desperately need, we're so fucking lost, and sad, and tired, and when you cut us we bleed, and because if we bleed enough we die, and how, in the face of that knowledge, can any consolation we can find be wrong?

T
HE
A
LTERNATIVE
H
ISTORY
C
LUB

1

I've seen him passing by in taxicabs and pausing at a fruit stand and waiting out a rainstorm in the covered doorway of Left Bank Books. I've seen him skulking into the boutiques and sneaking out of the back doors of art galleries and lurking in the darkness near the ATM. One night I saw him sitting at the back corner table, half concealed by a menu, in the Majestic Diner. I wasn't in there eating, just passing by on the sidewalk, and when I stopped and said to myself, That was him, and turned around, the table was empty. He knows how to disappear.

Although he's always different, always in disguise, and he's very old now, the eyes of David Ferrie give him away every time.

2

David Ferrie is a man of wide and varied interests. He is a pivotal figure in John F. Kennedy assassination lore, the go-between for the mob and the CIA and the far-right wing and the anti-Castro Cubans. He was a friend and mentor to Lee Harvey Oswald. He was the pilot who flew Louisiana mob boss Carlos Marcello back from exile in Guatemala. He was the guy Joe Pesci played in
JFK
.

3

“But honey, he was a bad man,” my father says. “If everything you say is true, he was a very bad man.”

“Popular notions of good and bad get a little fuzzy in the worlds where David Ferrie moved,” I say. “So do popular notions of truth.”

My brother says, “Isn't it funny how he was a fairy, and his name was Ferrie? His name was the same thing as what he was.”

My mother says, “I don't like that kind of talk,” but they ignore her, endlessly.

My father laughs, says, “Yeah, that's funny. I never thought of it. How come all these rabid anticommunists were fairies? You know, Ferrie, Hoover, Roy Cohn, Westmoreland.”

My brother says, “Westmoreland was gay?”

“I think so,” my father says. “Jill, wasn't Westmoreland gay?”

I refuse to answer. I go to my room to watch videos, either
The Men Who Killed Kennedy
or
Murder in Dallas: The Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy
. After a while, my mother comes up.

“Honey,” she says. “It's okay. They just can't understand. It's very important for you to pursue this. Think of what it could mean. To everyone. To the world. But until you have proof, I'd keep it between us.”

“I've told my therapist,” I say. “But he can't tell anyone.”

“Just be careful, Jilly,” she says. She puts her arm around me, and I nestle there next to her, warm. “Don't let everyone know your secrets.”

4

David Ferrie is a man of wide and varied interests. He's a pilot, a wonderful pilot—he can fly anything. He is a rabid anti-communist. He is a very serious amateur cancer researcher. He is an expert in light arms and reconnaissance. He is an outstanding magician, especially in the field of prestidigitation. He
is a constant reader. He is a hypnotist. He enjoys the sexual company of boys, yes, but it isn't as gross as my Dad makes it out to be. It's not like he likes eight- or ten-year-old boys. He likes older boys. And besides, Aristotle and Plato and all those guys, they liked boys, too. So what about that?