Slut Lullabies (19 page)

She and the girls go to visit Sloane every day. The girls still do not know the exact nature of his illness, nor do any of Victoria's friends who might have contact with her children. Only the people at work know—they do not move in the same circles, so they are safe. She thinks that perhaps she will not tell them until Violet is eighteen, which will be in eight years. Tamara would be twenty-four, and still too young to be afflicted. Rose says that she should have them tested now, even if she does not share the results with them until later, but she cannot bring herself to do this. Not with so much financial worry still hanging over her head. Not yet.

When Sloane has been gone for five weeks, she and the girls walk in to find him being fed rum raisin ice cream by a nurse. He jumps up when they walk in. He says, “You've come at a bad time. Bad girl, bad girl!” He chases Victoria until she is trapped between his body and the door, and he spanks her bottom hard, swatting and yelling, “Bad girl,” while the nurse cries, “Mr. Fenton, stop it, please!” Victoria giggles all the way home in the car, but the girls are inconsolable, weeping and angry at her for her laughter.

At La Petite Ecole, Victoria tells Rose to refuse all collect calls from her husband. Rose sits at her desk saying “No” and hanging up the phone every five minutes. Finally, Victoria gets on and says, “Sloane, I will not be visiting you again this week. You'd better shape up.” She hangs up and walks away from Rose's desk.

Sloane does not call again, but the nurse calls to say that perhaps it was the rum in the ice cream that made him act so peculiar. It was ordered by mistake, and perhaps it interacted with his medication. Victoria nods at the telephone and says nothing. Finally the nurse says, “Mrs. Fenton, are you there?” “Yes,” she says. “Of course. Where else would I be?”

The money is running out quickly. She goes to see Dr. Fairley to see how much time he thinks Sloane may have left. They sit in the office across from each other while Dr. Fairley says things like, “Three months to a year,” as though these figures are approximately the same. Victoria nods, determined not to call him any names or make a spectacle of herself the way she has often done in this office lately. She tries for a smile and fails. She says, “I should start another school. I should call it The Marie Antoinette School of Economics. I should write a book about my life, or at least go on Oprah. Tell me, do talk shows pay?”

Dr. Fairley leans across the desk and says, “There's only one thing to do, you know.”

She begins to cry. “Sure, sure. Put our house on the market, take Violet out of Latin School, and move into the Robert Taylor projects. I think we could be happy there, don't you?”

“No,” he says. “Bump him off.”

Victoria looks up to smile, to acknowledge the joke, but Dr. Fairley is not smiling. He says, “Just a little something in some cookies you'd bring him at the home. I'd be the one doing the autopsy. He doesn't have long now anyway. It would be a blessing for you both.”

Victoria feels a chill go up her chest. “That would never work. I'd be at the police station in five minutes flat crying, ‘I killed my husband, waaaa!' But I appreciate your concern.”

Dr. Fairley shrugs, as though he was not all that invested in the idea. “Well, if you ever change your mind,” he says. “You're still a relatively young woman, and still very attractive. There's no reason this should ruin your life.”

Victoria takes a cab back to the school and tells Rose in hushed tones about her conversation with the doctor. “Do you think I should do it?” she asks.

Rose glances at the picture of her husband that she keeps on her desk. He is an older man, born in Italy, attractive in a Mediterranean kind of way. Rose herself seems much, much younger. Victoria is not sure exactly how old she is, but assumes that she is a few years older than Sloane, that she must have been a child bride. She has never met the husband.

“No,” Rose says. “I guess I really don't think so.”

The smell of a hospital in the 1960s—ammonia and urine, antiseptic filth. Victoria wanders through the hallways searching for his room. Each doorway holds a new horror: women with wide-spread legs and flaming red vaginas that smell as old as the hospital walls, gum-mouthed old men pissing into metal pans while eating fruitcake. She runs through the hallways until there is only one more door.

Inside, her father lolls, legless and emasculated, viscous and weak. He grabs her hand in the doorway, an impossibly long grasp, and his hand is full of onion sweat. He says, “Vicky, you were always my girl. I knew you'd marry a big shot. I knew you'd go far.” She tries to wrench her hand away, but his fingers form a vise grip, moving to her shoulders. He whispers, “One last kiss for your dear old dad.”

Victoria runs from the room and is instantly in her old house, her mother's house in Hyde Park. She runs from room to room until she sees her mother naked on the claw-footed bed, her stepfather astride her. Her mother says, “I don't really love him, Vicky, but you kids have got to eat.” The stepfather pumps away, his glasses still on. He chuckles as he thrusts and says, “Silly girl, you'll learn to love me.”

Tamara and Violet in the other room are frantic now, crying at the sound of Victoria's terrified scream. They rush into her room, jumping on her bed and throwing their arms around her as though she were the plush piece of wire the baby monkeys clung to in starvation in that barbaric experiment that spawned such animal rights activism. She puts her arms around them, stroking their damp hair, saying, “Don't worry, pretties, Mommy just had a bad dream.” Violet nuzzles up against her, saying, “I miss Daddy,” her mouth a hungry bird open for some scrap of comfort, some piece of feed. Victoria withdraws her arms, but the girls cling on, monkeys dying on a barren, wire vine. She wonders where her milk has gone.

The phone call comes at 7:00 AM, eight months later. Victoria calls Rose at home to say that she will not be coming in to work, and Rose on the other end grows somber. “I'm sorry,” she says. “It's a hard decision. We had to decide the same thing for my mother, though. She was Catholic, and it was hard to say what she'd have wanted. But in the end, we didn't want her to suffer any more than she already had.”

Victoria stares at the magnets on her refrigerator, snapshots of her children in Halloween costumes, of herself and Sloane dressed in formal wear. She cannot quite make sense of what Rose is saying.
It takes a long time to make peace with such a decision
. Victoria thinks it strange, this sad tone, so like Dr. Fairley's earlier—this strange conspiracy of behaving as though they have not all been waiting for this event like children await summer vacation. She suddenly thinks she remembers that Rose's mother
did
die sometime about a year ago, or maybe it was two. She does not remember what she died of, but Rose missed two days of work. Victoria had to answer the phones herself and kept losing things on the computer. When Rose came back, she seemed her usual self. Victoria assumed that the woman was old, that it was her time. Perhaps even a relief.

She says, “I guess I'll have to have the girls sent home from camp in time for the wake.”

Rose says, “Call when you know the funeral arrangements, and I'll tell the rest of the staff. Don't worry, everything will be under control until you're ready to come back.”

Victoria hangs up, thinking of Rose's family at a funeral. Don't Italian widows throw themselves on the casket as it's lowered into the ground? She cannot picture Rose doing this. Perhaps when the husband dies, she will have to show up at the cemetery just in case.

Victoria drives to the hospital alone. She leaves Ned watching TV and eating like he does all day every day.
Beavis and Butt-Head
, perhaps. She thinks of Ned laughing with his mouth full while she signs the forms Dr. Fairley hands her. “You're doing the right thing,” Dr. Fairley says. “I knew Sloane. He wouldn't want to be kept alive this way.” Victoria nods, crying. She thinks,
Have I seen this man once in the last year and a half that I haven't had tears streaming down my face?
She thinks,
I got that bloody insurance policy out just in time
. She thinks,
Christ, I am my mother
.

Hospitals are barbaric. They give you options no one can truly want. Victoria looks away, says, “No thank you, I don't want to be there.” As an afterthought, one that may make her seem less a calculating bitch and more a distraught soon-to-be widow, she adds, “I'd like to remember him the way he was.”

It is almost enough to make her laugh.

April

Camden was atoning. Sometimes, during the ten, twelve-hour stretches he spent wandering around Amsterdam without uttering a word to anyone, he felt like a monk on a vow of silence. Dutch sifted through his ears like background noise, easy not to notice at all. He played games with himself: passing his student ID to the ticket seller at the Anne Frank House or negotiating vegetable purchases at the Boerenmarkt, all without verbal exchange. Alone at home, he gratefully turned the TV to Dutch shows.
Over de Rooien
, a program where people had to do stupid things in public and find strangers to participate, was his favorite since you didn't need to understand what anyone said to follow slapstick. His mother had enrolled him in a weekly Dutch course, and to his relief they were allowed to speak only Dutch in class. Most of the students—techies over on jobs from the States and England—formed clinging friendships; Camden watched them transform from a conglomeration of nerdy strangers into giggling cliques. A decade younger than the others, he remained on the outside. They didn't even invite him, a legal child at home, for drinks after class. Camden didn't mind. Part of his atonement for what he'd done to Aimee—his deliberate abstinence from girls altogether—entailed steering away from any pack mentality.

Camden's mother, Ginny, had a fetish for handicapped women. Lisle, the Dutch poet with whom he and Ginny were now living, had been in a wheelchair for eight years due to a riding injury. Before Lisle, Ginny had dated: an epileptic, a deaf woman (or a “beautiful human being who happens to be deaf”), two bipolars—one of whom was suicidal—and another woman in a wheelchair, from spina bifida. Lisle was the first of the girlfriends to be obese. Her spine rested so straight against the back of the chair that her breasts shot out like life-threatening torpedoes; her thighs spread on the seat. She had a breathtaking face.

At one time, in New Zealand, where Lisle had lived for reasons Camden had yet to ascertain, Lisle had been an artist's model to earn money. There were pictures of her nude, chatting with older men and other beautiful women, pasted in a big scrapbook she kept in the floor-to-ceiling bookcase by the fireplace. Camden could not quite believe it was her—maybe a sister or something?—but he avoided the scrapbook anyway, worried he'd do the unspeakable: get a hard-on over Lisle's twenty-year-old, nubile self; that he'd progress to imagining her now, nude and twisting around on the bed with Ginny, even her orgasmic yelps political and abrasive. Since he had first witnessed a female orgasm four months prior, it was difficult to keep from transposing the image onto every female he encountered, but in Lisle's case, he managed with ease, as long as he avoided the scrapbook.

Ginny and Lisle liked parading it around for guests, though. Not because they were proud of how hot Lisle used to be, but as an illustration of her earlier, oppressed self—the duped woman who used her body as a form of economic exchange; the innocent girl who became an “objectified object” of the “male gaze.” Lisle orated on this subject frequently to her poetry group, which met at the apartment every other Wednesday. Camden's mother, who was not a poet, scurried around serving coffee and cakes, and though the members of the group all spoke and wrote in English, they lapsed into Dutch when Ginny entered the room. Ginny didn't seem to mind; she liked assisting people. She often quipped that she would make the ideal personal assistant to a movie star. Lisle had published little poetry, but Camden doubted even movie stars could compete with Lisle's ego and sense of entitlement. While the handicapped girlfriends in the past had accepted Ginny's ministering with gratitude, Lisle seemed to punish Ginny for her normalcy, rejecting her efforts to help, driving her toward a more marginalized existence—as though being gay weren't enough. Camden once overheard his mother and Lisle arguing about a club Ginny didn't want to go to, and when he looked the name up under “gay” in his guidebook, he discovered the bar was S&M oriented. For days, he studied Ginny for bruises, but she looked fine, healthy if thinner.

He did not ask his mother what the hell they were doing in Amsterdam when it seemed clear already that things weren't working out. He had long since given up on finding logic in what women bore for what they believed was love.

In order to relocate to Amsterdam, Ginny had pulled Camden out of school in Illinois three months before the end of his junior year. He'd left over the protests of school counselors, teachers, his grandparents, and most of the girls at Oak Park/River Forest High School, who aspired to sleep with him either again or for the first time. Camden and Ginny settled into the trendy Jordaan district during a time of year when the weather in Amsterdam was nonstop rain. While his friends back home were breaking out spring shorts that hung low on their hips, Camden and Ginny trolled Amsterdam museums in wet wool coats, fighting nonstop sore throats. Before Camden even unpacked his clothes at the Jordaan apartment, three ex-girlfriends' e-mails had arrived.
It's 65 degrees today,
one wrote
. Hugh threw a party while his parents were in Saint Martin, and got arrested having sex with some skeeze in the master bedroom because in the throes of passion, ha ha, they didn't hear the cops burst in
, wrote another.
We're watching the Cubs' opening from Hugh's brother's roof in Wrigleyville
, wrote a third. Each typed at the end, before her name,
I miss you, I miss you, I miss you
. Camden did not write back.