The Dark Path (12 page)

“I feel awful about that. I've never hit a girl in my life.”

“I'm saying
I liked it
, David. And if it happens again, I'll like it again.”

I have no idea what to do with that comment. I wanted her to like my fucked-up, manly karate knuckles, but she is taking things up a notch. I look at her breasts, which are naked now to the air. She slithers off her black pants too, then taps her foot against her huge shoulder bag which is on the floor. “Guess what I brought?”

I panic, picturing leather masks and nipple clamps, possibly given to her by members of Megadeth. “I don't know.”

She steps out of her panties. “It's something you'll like.” Stripped now, she pulls from her bag her pink concierge vest and skirt. She shows them to me with her eyebrows raised. She is tall and skinny, with a jet-black pubic thatch.

“I'm not coy, like some girls.” She puts on her concierge outfit and arranges her breasts beneath the vest. “I'm confident and kinky.”

“Sure,” I say. “Yes. Me, too.”

I'm standing and she kneels in front of me. “I think you know what I'm about to do down here. Or should I be coy and
not
do it? If you want it, you should demand it, with no regard for my feelings.”

She seems to hate softness, romance, even civility.

“Um, please do it,” I say.

“That wasn't very demanding.”

“Please,
please
do it?”

She sighs. I am not demanding enough. But she does it anyway. As she does she takes my hands and guides them to her hair. I stroke her hair and she makes a displeased sound. I grab her hair roughly. Yes. This is what she wants. I yank her head just slightly toward me and she makes a thrilled sound. When I yank harder, she gives me a thumbs-up and picks up her pace.

Sabine begins staying over on Fridays, which are her nights off. She always comes to my place, saying I can't crash at her aunt and uncle's in Queens. She usually hangs out till Saturday evening, then goes to work at the hotel. When she clears out each Saturday, I call my Georgetown friend Daphne Lowell. Daphne is living in her hometown of Tapwood, Vermont. She teaches English at Tapwood Academy, the boarding school where her father is headmaster, and she proctors in a girls' dorm. Daphne is whip-smart and a great writer. I mail her my stories and she mails me her poems.

One night on the phone she says, “You're too good of a person.”

I'm sitting on my bedroom window ledge. I look at the grimy brick courtyard outside when I talk to Daphne, because her voice elevates all the junk in the courtyard, all the scuzzy cats and limp laundry on clotheslines.

“What do you mean?”

“You're too morally good in your stories. They're G-rated. Your writing needs more danger . . . more mess.”

I think sometimes about hopping a train north and busting into Daphne's bedroom at midnight and proposing. I wonder if that would be dangerous enough for her.

“David, stop writing bullshit. You're not an
Anne of Green Gables
guy. Write the raw truth.”

•   •   •

OVER THE WINTER
my father frequently crashes on my couch. He has started a company that sells automotive fleet maintenance software, and he has potential clients in the city. He drives down from Rochester to schmooze them, then he and I cook burgers at my place and cheer for the Knicks on TV. One morning I take him to Mass at Corpus Christi Church next door to my apartment.

I love this church. My Irish great-grandmother, my mother's Nana, worked as a cook here in the 1920s. Plus it's where the mystical monk and writer Thomas Merton was baptized. There are no night Masses, but the Sunday High Mass is solemn and beautiful. Most everything but the readings and sermon is in Latin, and there's Gregorian chant and incense and nothing nifty. It's a long Mass, which to my surprise makes my father impatient. Afterward he and I walk in Riverside Park.

“All that Latin bugs me,” my father says. “I had enough of that as a kid.”

We sit on a park bench and look at wan winter sunlight on the Hudson.

“Plus the prison inmates I'm dealing with in my outreach program would have no use for that service. It wouldn't be the truth to those guys.”

I nod. My father is advancing toward becoming a Catholic deacon and he keeps me up to date on his homiletics classes. Always a hands-on guy, he is struggling with the idea of having to serve liturgically upon ordination. He's willing to, but mostly he wants to lead out in the world. At his new company he wants to hire ex-cons and train them as computer programmers.

“I don't love the Latin either,” I tell him, “but sometimes the bells and incense help me find the Bottom.” It just slips out.

“The Bottom?” My father gives me a skeptical look.

“Never mind.”

“David, I've got another idea for your novel.”

I am now writing and workshopping a novel. It starts on Cape Cod and it involves a confused young man who runs away from his family and hits the road. So far I've shown my father only the upbeat opening chapters on Cape Cod before the narrator flees. My father—who loves Cape Cod and used to take our family on vacations there—has been pitching me plotlines. Since he is partially bankrolling my degree, I try sometimes to use his ideas.

“There could be a real-estate scandal,” he says now. “You know how I said the one character should be a Hyannis real-estate mogul? Someone could sabotage his properties. The saboteur hides mercaptan canisters in the air ducts of rental homes and the mercaptan drives away renters and ruins the mogul's business.”

“What's mercaptan?”

“The stuff that smells like rotten eggs that gets added to natural gas. Come on, David, you knew that.”

I did not know that. No one would know that. But my father has wild and baffling engineering knowledge. And I don't want to disappoint him.

“Okay, Dad. Maybe I'll work in the mercaptan.”

“Hey, how's Melvin?” he asks.

“Melvin is Melvin.”

I am still tutoring Melvin at the Learning Center. Since our first meeting Melvin and I have struck up a flimsy truce: I try to improve his writing and he tries not to hide in the ficus plants. But his hygiene gets worse with each passing month. He wears the same coffee-stained flamingo sweatshirt to every session and he smells like a gutter. The fact that he never speaks to others makes me think that he is friendless and lonely. So, despite his stench and manic manner, I try to help him. I try to build up the greater assembly.

In February Melvin comes to me with what he says is his most important English paper of the year. The topic is “Seminal Moments in Narrative” and each student has been assigned a novel to use as a source. Melvin has been assigned
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
He sits across from me at our table watching me read his essay.

“It's my best essay yet, right? It focuses on a violent act, which you told me is a smart thing to focus on . . . right?”

Melvin's Huck Finn essay begins:

HUCK FINN THE BOOK HAS SEMINAL MOMINTS, LIKE WHEN HUCK FINN. THE CHARACTER. RIPS UP THE LETTER TO MIS WATSON THAT WOULD CRIMINATE JIM. THE NEGRO SLAVE, HIS FRIEND. HUCK SAYS “THEN I'LL GO TO HELL!” AND RIPS UP LETTER AND IT'S SEMINAL, WHICH MEANS HUCK IS EXCITED. HE IS ENGORGED AND HIS JUICES ARE FLOWING.

I stop reading. “Melvin, you can't submit this to your teacher. Huck Finn is never engorged. His juices are never flowing.”

“Sure they are. They must be! This is a seminal scene, this letter-ripping business. My teacher said it was seminal.”

“It's seminal because it's a turning point. When Huck tears up the letter, he's choosing loyalty to Jim and to what he believes in. But it's not a sex scene.”

Melvin's face is livid. “I worked hard on this. And a scene can't be seminal without being sexual.
Seminal
is from
semen
. Give me my paper.”

He takes hold of his essay, which I hold on to for a second longer.

“I don't want you to fail, Melvin.”

He wrenches the paper away and hustles out.

•   •   •

ON NIGHTS WHEN
I don't have karate class, I practice it at the apartment. After moving the furniture aside in the living room, I spend hours punching and kicking. I have upended a spare bed mattress and placed it against the wall as an opponent. My favorite kick is the spinning back roundhouse. I do it best when I stand on my left leg, wheel around, and strike the mattress with my right heel.

Executing this kick thrills me. I practice it nonstop, somehow needing to. I get good enough that I tear big holes in the mattress. I start carrying the kick in me everywhere, the will of it. Karate is matching something in my spirit. Something fraught is bubbling up in me, gathering to a boil, though I don't know what it is. When I work on my novel, I try to write my way into this fraught place. Or to draw from it.

•   •   •

WEEKS LATER,
on a rare Monday night when she is staying over, Sabine sits on my bedroom floor with me. We're playing Scrabble and listening to her Black Flag mix tape, but we keep the volume low because on the other side of my closed door the Mormons are gathered. Sad Dog is doing a slide show for the others, recounting his two-year Mormon mission in South Korea.

I spell a seven-letter word and get lots of points. Sabine swats the board like she's pissed off and tiles go flying. Laughing, she shoves me on my back, lies on top of me and kisses me. Kissing turns to groping. We undress. Henry Rollins is singing “Can't Decide.”

Kissing her, I try to guide her onto the bed, but she pulls me to the floor. I kiss her belly, then head south to her lap.

“The most satisfying thing,” says Sad Dog out in the living room, “was calling on folks, giving door-to-door witness. The woman you see on this slide invited us in for tea.”

Sabine stirs her hips. “Don't stop.” She moans loudly. Then she grabs my T-shirt off the floor and shoves it in her mouth. She has never done this before.

“Doan dop,” she urges me through her gag.

I peek up from her lap, worried that she isn't getting air. Is this the raw truth that Daphne mentioned?

“Keeb goan!”

“This slide,” says Sad Dog, “shows us in Seoul with some pals from Provo.”

“Dayffd, reej ubbn joag me.”

“Reach up and
choke
you? I'm not going to choke you.”

“Fuggin do ib!”

I'm still in her lap, but I reach a hand up and comply tentatively.

“Ommuguh, so fuggin seggsy. Do ib harber.”

“This slide,” says Sad Dog, “shows a weird vegetable they like over there.”

“Harber, Dayffd. Joag me alldaway. Kiw me.”
Choke me all the way. Kill me
.

I get my face above Sabine's. The white cotton of my T-shirt swells out of her mouth.

“Um . . . you don't literally want . . . this is just dirty talk, right? Is this dirty talk?”

“Nod derby tok. Weewy do ib.”
Not dirty talk. Really do it
.

She shoves her hand between her thighs. “Pwee joag me alldaway.
Kiw me
.”

I shake my head. The want in her eyes is lethal. I keep shaking my head no, and she keeps begging, desperate to blast past herself, to somewhere beyond.

•   •   •

ONE APRIL NIGHT,
karate class goes late. My father is waiting at the apartment and we have plans to go out. He just made a big software sale and it's time to celebrate.

As soon as class gets out I hurry home and enter my apartment, still wearing my
gi
. “Dad? You here? Let me grab a quick shower, then we'll get dinner.”

“David. Come in here. Now.”

His tone means trouble. I find him in the living room. He's sitting on the couch and on his lap is my novel manuscript. The last time we were together I gave him the whole thing to read, and I've been hoping that he'll like it.

His eyes are set on mine, dead serious. “David . . . what in the hell is this?”

“It's my book. My novel.”

“How could you have written what's in here? How could you?”

I stare at the floor. I have woven into the novel the plotlines my father suggested, about real estate and mercaptan. But my workshop mates and teacher hated those parts.
Feels forced
, they jotted in the margins. Or
Not pulling its weight
or
This part sucks!

On the other hand my chapters about the narrator—the mogul's son who runs away from home—have caused buzz. When it comes to the scene where the narrator and the skinhead girl 69 on the floor of a grimy ska bar, everyone says I nailed it.

“I can't believe this.” My father sets the manuscript on the floor. “How will we ever show this to your mother or anyone we know?”

“
We
won't do anything, Dad, because it's
my
book.”

He widens his eyes, which alone is about enough to stop my heart. “Is that right.”

“Um . . . my classmates think that what I'm doing in this novel is . . . gutsy. One of them said that it was strange, but also strangely beautiful.”

“I'm not your classmates, I'm your father. And Schickler men don't—”

“Well, I'm not ‘Schickler men'! I'm—” I pick up my manuscript and clutch it against my stomach. “I'm just trying to be an artist, Dad. This is just art.”

“
The Old Man and the Sea
is art.” He stands and points at my pages. “That is pornography. Or rock and roll mixed with pornography, or I don't know what.”

“Dad . . . what about those guys in your prison outreach? You say they talk about having hurt people. You say that that's the truth to them. Well, this is like that. Not all stories are temperate or chaste.”

“Maybe. But you can't write what you're holding and still become a priest.”