Swamp Foetus (19 page)

“If he was here—” said Jen. “If he could see, he’d want them there. Put another string of lights on, Paul, I can’t stand to see it dark—” Then it was as if all the air had suddenly been squeezed out of her. She gave a huge gagging heave and doubled over. Choking, with her arms wrapped around her stomach, she backed out of the room.

Paul picked up the ragdoll boy and tucked the limp little body under his jacket. They had stored the extra strings of lights in the hall closet. The box was on top of the checkered blanket that he and Bobby had shared, the night they had slept together under the Christmas tree. The blanket hadn’t been washed. He took it too.

He looped two strings of lights carelessly around the tree, shaking branches, knocking fragile glass ornaments away. Some of them shattered on the wooden floor. Paul crunched the eggshell-thin pieces under his feet. Finally he plugged the lights in and sat on the floor, squinting his eyes to make the colors of the lights run together, trying to see the last thing Bobby had seen. The tree, far above, towering and shimmering.

Bobby’s face had been marred. Streaks of dried blood were baked onto his chin, and the skin at the corners of his mouth had been charred black, and even the hairs of his eyelashes and his elegantly arching eyebrows had been burnt. But the look on his face, before the morticians with their sickly gardenia stench and their jars of orange puttylike makeup had turned it into the deathmask of a baby clown, had not been one of pain. It had been a look of wonder.

Paul wrapped himself in the blanket and curled under the tree, crushing a small present, toppling the tower of Tinkertoys. A shard of glass pierced his cheek. He didn’t bother to push it away. He reached up into the branches and found what he wanted, then put it between his teeth and bit down hard. The musky sweetness of licorice filled his mouth.

Jen had been sick until her stomach ached and her throat felt scraped with rusty razors, but she could not vomit out her grief; it ripped at her insides withjagged black teeth. Paul would help her. He had to help her, otherwise she would not survive: her mind would shrink from itself and dry up, her intelligence and her sanity would plummet into a void infinitely deeper and grayer than the void she had inhabited in the days after Bobby’s birth.

She came back into the living room just as the wall socket blew with a gunshot crack and a cloud of blue shock-smelling smoke drifted through the tree branches. The tree went dark again. For one everlasting second Jen saw the room in ice-clear detail—the thin pinkish fluid seeping from Paul’s mouth, the light cord now blackened like a real licorice whip, the burning ragdoll boy—and though she knew no one would hear her any more, she opened her mouth to scream as the tree began to topple.

(1986)

Once, I thought I knew something about love.

Once, I could stand on the roof of the tallest skyscraper in the city and look out across the shimmering candyscape of nighttime lights without thinking of what went on down in the black canyons between the buildings: the grand melodramatic murders, the willful and deliberate hurt, the commonplace pettiness. To live is to betray. But why do some have to do it with such pleasure?

Once, I could look in the mirror and see the skin of my throat not withered, the hollows of bone not gone blue and bruised around my eyes.

Once, I could part a woman’s legs and kiss the juncture like I was drinking from the mouth of a river, without seeing the skin of the inner thighs gone veined and livid, without smelling the salt scent and the blood mingled like copper and seawater.

Once, I thought I knew something about love.

Once, I thought I wanted to.

*

Leah met me in the bar at the Blue Shell. It was six o’clock, just before dinnertime, and my clothes were still streaked with the dill-cream soup and Dijon dressing we had served at lunch. The fresh dill for the soup had come on a truck that morning, in a crate, packed secure between baby carrots and dewy lettuces. I wondered how many highways it had to travel between here and its birthplace,

how many miles of open sky before the delivery man lugged it up to the twenty- first floor of the posh hotel. “The Blue Shell on Twenty-one” read the embossed silver matchbooks the busboys placed on every table, referring not to avenue number but to floors above street level. Way up here they kept it air-conditioned, carefully chilled . . . except in the heart of the kitchen, where no amount of circulated air could compete with the radiant heat of a Turbo Ten-Loaf bread oven. In addition to the residue of lunch, I felt sheathed in a layer of dry sweat like a dirty undershirt gone wash-gray with age.

The bar on ground floor was as cool as the rest of the hotel, though, and Leah was cool too. As cool as the coffee cream when I took it out of the refrigerator first thing every morning. For her appointment today she had dressed carefully, in the style affected by all the fashionable girls this year. Leah was one of the few who could get away with it: her calves were tight and slender enough for the clunky shoes and the gaudy, patterned hose, her figure spare enough for the sheath-snug, aggressively colored (or, for a very special occasion, jet black) dresses, the planes of her face sufficiently delicate to sport the modified beehive hairdo, swept up severely in front, but with a few long strands spiraling carefully down the back. “There was a long waiting line,” she told me, toying with the laces of her shoestring bodice. I imagined her sitting in one of the anonymous chairs at the clinic, hugging herself the way she did when she was defensive or less than comfortable— an unconscious gesture, I was sure. My cool Leah would never have chosen to do something that so exquisitely exposed her own vulnerability.

I was supposed to feel guilty. I was supposed to feel neglectful because I hadn’t been able to get anyone to work lunch for me; thus I had sent fragile Leah into a dangerous situation unprotected, into a situation of possible pain without the male stability she craved. Something in me cringed at the accusation, as if on cue. Until now I had only sipped at the boilermaker I’d ordered; now I drank deeply, and was vaguely surprised to see it come away from my lips half-drained. The taste was good, though, the sour tangy beer washing down and the sweet mash of the whiskey lingering. Bushmills. The kitchen staff drank free after getting off a shift, and the bar brands were damn tasty.

“They hurt me,” she said next. “I don’t see why I had to have a pelvic. Jilly didn’t have to have a pelvic when she went to her private doctor. They just tested her pee, and when they called her on the phone later, the nurse already had an appointment set up for her.”

“Jilly’s boyfriend designs software,” I told her. “Jilly can afford to see a private doctor.”

“Yes, but listen.” She spoke excitedly, mouthing her words around the various straws and skewers they’d put in her drink. She drank fruity, frothy stuff, drinks you couldn’t taste the alcohol in, drinks that more properly belonged on a dessert plate with a garnish of whipped cream. A dark red maraschino cherry bobbed against her lips. “Cleve went with me today. He says he’s got some money saved up from his last gallery show. If you help too, I’ll have enough. I can have the operation at a private doctor’s office—the clinic’s going to call and make me an appointment.” Her hand set her drink down on the bar, found mine, tightened over it.

I noticed the way she said operation before I thought of anything else. Casual, with no more pain in the twist of her mouth than if she were saying new dress or boyfriend or fuck. Like something she was used to having, that she couldn’t get used to the idea of not having whenever she wanted it. It wasn’t until my next swallow of whiskey that I registered the name she’d spoken.

“Cleve went with you?”

Again the casual twist of the lips, not quite a smile. “Yes, Cleve went. You couldn’t get off work. I didn’t feel like doing it alone.”

I remembered standing in the kitchen two days ago, slicing a carrot into rounds and then chopping the rounds into quarters. I kept my eyes fixed on the big wooden cutting block, on the knife slicing through the crisp orange meat of the carrot, but in the corner of my vision I could see Cleve twisting his battered old hat in his hands. Between his long fingers, the hat was like an odd scrap of felt. Cleve’s hands were large enough to fit easily around my throat; Cleve stood a head and a half taller than me, and his arms might have been strong enough to throw me half the length of the kitchen. But I knew he would let me kick his ass if I wanted to. If I was hurting so bad that I wanted to pound his head against the floor or punch him in the face until his blood ran, then he was prepared to let me. That was how deep his guilt went. And that was how bad he still wanted Leah.

“I can’t work for you Wednesday,” he’d told me. “Any other day I’d do it, you know that. I’ve got to see this gallery owner, it’s been set up for weeks.”

He wouldn’t meet my eyes. I thought he was just upset at the idea of me having to run the kitchen alone, having to make the thousand little decisions that go with the lunch rush while all the time I worried about Leah . . . imagining her getting off the bus at the last stop before the clinic, having to walk through blocks of the old industrial district. Other parts of the city were more dangerous, but to me the old factories and mills were the most frightening places. The places where abandoned machinery sat silent and brooding, and twenty-foot swaths of cobweb hung from the disused cogs and levers like dusty gray curtains. The places that everyone mostly stayed away from, mostly left alone with the superstitious reverence given all graveyards. But once in a while something would be found in the basement of a factory or tucked into the back room of a warehouse. A head, once, so badly decomposed that no one could ever put a face to it. The gnawed bones and dried tendons and other unpalatable parts of a wino, jealously guarded by a pack of feral dogs. This was where the free clinic was; this was where certain doctors set up their offices, and where desperate girls visited them.

And while Leah was making her way through this blasted landscape, while I was slicing goat cheese for the salads or making a delicate lemon sauce to go over the fresh fish of the day, Cleve would be ensconced in some art gallery far uptown. I pictured it like the interior of a temple: lavish brocade and beaded curtains, burning sachets of sandalwood and frankincense, carpet lush and rich enough to silence even the tread of Cleve’s steel-toed cowboy boots. There Cleve would be, kicking back in some cool dim vast room, trying to say the right things about the colorful paintings that came from some secret place in his brain, about the sculptures he shaped into being with the latent grace of his big hands. I liked the idea

of Cleve bullshitting some spotless hipper-than-thou gallery owner, someone who attended the right parties to see and be seen, someone who had never been to the old industrial district or any of the rough parts of town except for a quick slummy thrill, someone who never got mustard all over his shirt or scalded his hands in hot dishwater.

But Cleve hadn’t been bullshitting anyone except me.

Leah extricated her hand from mine and adjusted the hem of her skirt over her knee. Her fingernails were painted the cool blue of a blemishless autumn sky; her movements were guarded and deliberate. I caught the glimmer of her frosted eyelids, but in the semidarkness of the bar I could not see her eyes.

I took a long drink of my boilermaker. Warm rancid beer; the flat taste of whiskey settling spiderlike over my tongue.

One of Cleve’s passions was his collection of jazz and blues records, most of them the original pressings. No digital techno-juju or perfect plastic sound, just the old cardboard sleeves whose liner notes told the stories of entire lives. Just the battered vinyl wheels that could turn back time and rekindle desire, just the dark sorghum voices. Billie and Miles, Duke and Bird... and more obscure ones. “Titanic” Phil Alvin, Peg Leg Howell. I had given him a bunch of them, and he knew I loved them too. One night he willed them to me over a case of Dixie beer. (Cleve had made a special trip to New Orleans when the Dixie brewery finally closed, and there were still a few cases stashed in his studio closet; I had helped him drink another five or six.) “Jonny, if I got jumped by a goddamn kid gang on my way home—” he paused to light a Chesterfield “—or if I walked in front of a bus or something, you’d have to take’em, man.” He gestured around the room at a series of little jewel-box watercolors he was doing at the time. “My paintings could go their own way—shit, they can take care of themselves. But you have to take the records. You’re the only one who loves ’em enough.”

The records were Cleve’s sole big indulgence. The rest of his extra money went to buy paints and canvas and an occasional luxury like groceries. He never collected them out of any kind of anal retentiveness, and desire to possess and catalog. It was just the feel of good heavy vinyl in the hands, the fragrant dust that sifted from the corners of the dog-eared cardboard, the music that spun you back to some grand hotel ballroom where you danced beneath a crystal chandelier... or some smoky little dive renting space in the basement of a whorehouse. The records were magic rabbit holes that led to the past, to a place where there was still room for romance. And I loved them as much as Cleve did.

And right then, in that moment at the bar as Leah withdrew her hand from mine, I could have taken a hammer and smashed the records all to bits.

We walked the four blocks from the hotel to the train tunnel half-staggering, almost drunk off our one drink apiece. Leah had not eaten because of her appointment; I, after wracking my brain to concoct delicious menus day after day, could hardly eat at all. Forsaking a free dinner at the Blue Shell meant we would go to bed hungry. Our refrigerator at home was empty of all but the last parings of our life together: an old rind of cheese on the shelf, a vegetable or two that neither of us would ever cook withering in the drawer, a flask of vodka I had stashed in the freezer.

As we left the hotel behind, the street grew shabbier. The buildings along here were old row houses of brick and wood, once fashionable, now unrenovated and nearly worthless. Children and teenagers sat on some of the stoops, hardness aging their faces, their grim eyes urging us past. Most unnerving were the houses that stood vacant: I could not imagine what face would look out from the dirty darkness behind the windows. Leah pulled my arm around her. I felt her skin and muscles moving under the thin dress. I thought of that strength moving with me, around me, like snakes wrapped in cool velvet. We had not had sex in three weeks, had not made love in so much longer than that. Whenever I was not with either Cleve or Leah, I imagined them together, drowning in ecstasy, dying their little deaths into each other.