The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (18 page)

Q
said, “Sex is the boat you row all your life. The one with mismatched oars. Sex is a boat chained to the harbor. You call it ardor. You call it lust. There's an anchor that's turned to rust. The anchor—here's the important part—is
invisible
. You think you're going someplace but you don't move. Sex is the boat you row, but pleasure—now that's something else. Pleasure is a tiny stream of fish running underneath the boat. A flash of silver fish too fast to see, flying not just up your cooch but other places too, places you didn't know exist. Oh my girl. It's time to jump from that poor boat, to cease and desist. Judy, you're a beauty. You're a smart enough kid. But you're the Helen-flipping-Keller of pleasure. If you come with me, I'll treat you to a kind of pleasure you've never known, beyond your bones, behind your mind. I'm warning you it will take a long time. You want to get out of your rowboat? You want to get in the water and see if you float? I'll pick you up at six. Get ready to be fixed. I have to warn you of one thing, though—it's gonna hurt a little.”

H
e winced when he had an orgasm, embarrassed, swallowed his sounds, turned his head. Poor Sam. How badly he wanted to be bad. It was his hidden desire, his vain and tender secret, but she knew. He couldn't cry out in pleasure. He couldn't smoke cigarettes. He couldn't take his whiskey straight. The guy had manners. He had manners and faith, when all he wanted in his secret heart was to be tough and greedy and rude, to
take take take,
to live in risk, to moan, to live like it didn't matter when it ended, it could end tomorrow for all he cared,
screw it, drop my ashes in the Sargasso
. He wore a leather jacket. He wore his hair long, until someone called him “Princess,” and then he cut it. The way she figured it, he was bad in one way only: he had married her. Was it enough for him? It had to be enough. Badness is the marrow in a bone; he simply didn't have the strength to crack it open. But he could knock her up, could marry her, he could look at the sweet, wounded faces of his aunt and uncle, he could look at their faces and shrug, he could do only that much, so he did, and then he got his accounting certificate.

Their wedding had been at town hall, in a strange room with a checkerboard linoleum floor that went up the walls, concluding at waist level. The upper walls were the green of a chalk-board. They'd been out of high school for a month. She wore shoes that pinched and pink gloss on her lips. The room was hot. She looked at a poster announcing the dangers of marijuana and she wanted, more than anything in the world, marijuana. Another poster celebrated the history of the postal service. The ceiling had been painted yellow. The room didn't make sense, but that wasn't the job of the room. Sense was theirs for the making. What is a wedding but a declaration of sense? It is the possibility that good sense will bring peace. It is the possibility that you'll learn to stay still, stop fiddling, stop running, stop wondering what would happen if you just got on a bus and kept paying and paying and paying. This is what a wedding means; the marriage, of course, is something else. “All set?” They nodded like scolded children. In a box in Sam's back pocket, jammed into a single ring slot, were two plain bands. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. High school had just ended; for a little longer three o'clock would feel like freedom, like being released, returned to yourself. They smoothed their hair. She made one final complaint about her ill-fitting shoes. Then, under fluorescent lights, standing before a half-deaf justice of the peace, before her father, before Sam's aunt and uncle, on a day of low clouds that threatened but did not produce rain, they signed the papers and spoke the vows and were henceforth man and wife. No one said, “You can kiss the bride,” but they kissed anyhow, chastely. He did not look like the same boy who had fucked her in his tiny bedroom while his aunt puttered and hummed in the next room. He did not look like the boy who had, with a raging cry (Jesus! did he not know his aunt was next door? did he not care?—this startled even Judith, who prided herself on not being easily startled)—reached down and tore the condom off his prick, tossed it in the air,
slapped
it across the room like it was a bee that'd been bothering them, and said, hotly, into her ear, “I want it like this.” At town hall, on his wedding day, he had the clean, composed face of a church boy, patient eyes, combed hair, and an ugly tie he'd borrowed from his uncle.

The wedding took place in Copper Junction, where she'd grown up, and the reception afterward was in the backyard of her house. Her father tended a charcoal grill, wore an apron for the first time in his life. Sam's uncle erected a volleyball net. His Aunt Constance, pale-faced, in a new lilac dress, moved tentatively, haltingly, like a person getting over a stomach virus, like she couldn't turn her head too fast or she'd puke. She hovered around the food table, shooed bugs, made sure the paper napkins didn't fly away. The kabobs tasted like gasoline. Someone made a pumpkin pie even though it was the wrong season; it remained largely uneaten, as if in deference to certain laws. Endless cans of beer. That feeling of an ice-cold can from the cooler, dripping with water, the pinkness of the palm, the first sighing sip—this was the way she would remember the day. A sudden chill, a fine blurring of relief and discomfort. Hops. A deep swallow, another, a longing she thought might have dissolved but of course didn't. She felt stupid for holding that kind of idea. What inner thing truly dissolves? Why would some civic procedure, of all things, fix her? She was stupid, but she could forgive herself. That was another thing about weddings: forgiveness was encoded into them. A foil banner—
CONGRATS
! in shimmering red—brought down by the breeze. Later, as the wind picked up, it moved end-over-end through the yard, a serpent eating its tail, until it got caught in the brambles at the side of the road.

Someone had put pots of flowers around the yard and strung Christmas lights across the eaves of the porch. Someone had vacuumed the house, washed the windows, placed a rose-scented candle on the back of the toilet, poured bleach down the drain of the kitchen sink. Who had done this? It wasn't her mother, because her mother wasn't a person who would do these things and also because her mother wasn't there. The last time they heard from Grace it was a Santa Fe postcard with a Seattle postmark. Santa Fe, Seattle. She'd written
All is well, missing you,
a few other things, but these weren't the point. That image of the cactus, that cool blue postmark, these were the real message.
Who knows where I am? Not you. Not me.

“Toast! Toast!”

Her father, a little drunk: “May you be found dead at the ripe ol' age of ninety-nine, shot by a jealous spouse!” It was not clear to whom he was referring.

The next morning they left. There were no tin cans trailing, no soapy sentiments on the windows. “Get us out of here,” she instructed. Once on the highway, she screamed, grabbed his thigh, and they laughed until they couldn't sustain it anymore.

“I'm happy,” Sam announced. “I'm as happy as I've ever been.”

It was a sweet thing. Why couldn't it stay that way? For a moment she was pleased, proud to have bestowed upon him this happiness, but then the foul thing in her brain said:
He said it wrong. He's as happy as he'll
ever be—
he just doesn't know it yet.

Everything they owned was in the backseat of the car, its trunk, or lashed to the roof. They were supposed to go to the city, find an apartment and jobs. That was the plan, which wasn't really a plan at all. They would simply arrive, figure it out as they went, adventurers, buoyed by faith, by the residue of the fortune that brought them together. But they never got to the city. She said she needed to pee, but also she needed to stop and think.
Here,
she said,
pull over. Now!
He pulled off the road. It was Beetle, but it could have been anyplace. They found a gas station and she sat on its scummy toilet and held her stomach. She was not showing yet, but the skin around her belly button felt harder, hotter. The stink of the room, urine and mildew and lashing floral sanitizer, filled the cavities of her head. She thought,
You are as good as dead and never has your life had more meaning.
She thought,
Poor baby.
Meaning the germ in her uterus; meaning all of them, all the unborn, for whom bad smells and sorrow and sense are waiting.
Poor baby, poor embryo,
but she didn't wholly mean it. She was envious too of the unborn thing she carried, desperately envious of this embryo who would become a baby who would become a person who possibly would bypass—correct?—human horror. Cure cancer. Be president. It was possible, right? That was the grand, fuzzy, pathetic hope of any pregnancy, hers too, already, she wasn't immune, even if the thing was nothing yet, a paper clip unbending, who knew what it could accomplish? It felt delicious to pee. Pregnancy made of urination a vitally pure, shivering pleasure. There was no toilet paper, so she wagged her ass over the seat to dry. The mirror above the sink was not really a mirror but a piece of metal, like a baking sheet, defaced by keys and knives over the years, clouded by dirty exhalation after dirty exhalation, rendering her image vague and indistinct, dark spots where the eyes were, veil of hair.

The city was where Q and his horde of monsters lived. The city was where she'd vomited lo mein and been tied to the bedpost (“It'll be fun! We'll let you go as soon as you say the word”), where that guy called Hester held his face above hers and let a bead of saliva descend. He sucked it back into his mouth at the last second, laughed like a hysterical child. That saliva, white and whorled, suspended above her cringing face, had been like a proof of the failure of her life to come.

Please? Now? Uncle?
She didn't know the word to make it stop.

Could she go back to the city? She'd thought so. Her instincts told her to return. But she had to remember not to trust her instincts. That was the lesson, right? Do not say yes. Do not follow. When that thing leaps up inside of you and says
Go Go Go for the love of all that is holy!
—you stay.

You stay.

She left the bathroom, squinted at the brightness of the day, opened her mouth to the light as if to take in some nutrient. Sam was waiting in the car. His good posture irritated her. He looked like a church boy, dutiful and head-bowing, though he claimed not to believe in anything. Fucking her loudly in the presence of his aunt, refusing the condom, these things could not change his nature. His face contained belief even when he denied it, an openness, an uncanny patience—she couldn't locate it in any particular feature, but in aggregate his face said:
Jesus Be Praised,
or some nonsense. “God can suck my asshole,” he'd once said, but she wasn't buying it. How badly he wanted to be bad; how badly he wanted to scorn the very conventions that constituted his essence. Poor boy. Poor love. He was bound to his goodness.

They were married. They were on their way to the city. She was carrying someone who would become, impossibly, their child, a blood relative to both. She was walking back to the car, and Sam saw her coming and grinned, and inside her came a violent thrusting sensation, like a knee to the ribs, though the baby wasn't bigger than her pinkie yet and still kneeless. She stopped walking. It was the day after her wedding. A feeling like a knee thrusting, a breath trapped in her throat, and then Q's face, clear and up-close, the pores, the meticulous beard, the cleft in his chin where once, when he was passed out on the bed, she'd placed a grain of rice.

Sam rolled down the window. “You coming, baby?”

Sam, her good boy, her hope, her little lark in his double-tied shoes, what would the city do to him? And what would happen to a child there? It was hard to imagine being there and doing ordinary things, such as making tuna fish or smearing cream on their baby's butt.

“Let me drive,” she said.

He moved to the passenger seat.

But she did not go back to the highway. Instead she followed signs to the town center. They came upon a church, a bank, an optician's, a library, a funeral parlor, a park where some men were installing a swing set. It was not unlike the towns where they'd come from. A giant flag hung limply above a building that must have been town hall. Finally she drove back to the gas station. She bought them Cokes. They stood in the sunlight. She told him she wanted to stay here, in Beetle, and she hoped he might too.

T
he man waited in the living room while she got him some water. Ice cubes clinked against the glass. He drank with his eyes closed, the skin at his throat bobbing delicately, nostrils warbling. He was like a desert dweller, a sunstroked prophet. She could see now the presence of some zealous, irrational hope he'd been carrying around. He chewed each cube, smiled. His lips were chapped. He was not unattractive.

He said, “Holy shit. Pardon me, but that water. From those pipes. Pardon me. That water is exactly the same.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“I'd forgotten how good it tastes.”

“Does it?”

He smelled the empty cup. He shivered. Then he handed it back to her.

“Amazing,” he declared.

She didn't know how to respond.

He said, “I have a deviated septum. It means my nose doesn't work so well.” He sniffed. “I think the room smells the same, but I can't be sure. I smell—what is that?”

“Cigarettes.”

“Behind that. Something else.”

“We had pork chops last night.”

He frowned. “I don't think they have a name for what I mean,” he said.

They looked at each other for a moment; then, after a deep breath, as if gathering strength, he said, “This place. It's yours? I mean—you own it? Or do you rent?” He waited for her answer with the clear, suspicious gaze of a child at a magic show. She said they bought it. He wanted to know from whom. The bank, she said. He nodded, exhaled. “You never met the former owner? A woman?”

“No.”

“Goldie, her name would have been. Or Maureen Lynn. You know someone by one of those names?”

When she said no again he appeared confused—furrowed his brow—but then relief passed across his face. He said this name again, now louder, mockingly—“Goldie!”—as if it were far from the realm of the possible. Then he spun in a circle in order to examine the room, its water-stained ceiling, fireplace, splintery floors. No photographs. No bric-a-brac save a single ceramic figure on the mantel, a girl in petticoats holding a shepherd's crook, which had been her father's odd gift to Diana when the child was born. Two windows faced the woods. Another looked to a clearing where Sam tried to grow turnips and squash, and where, on hot days, Diana sat in her plastic pool. The man went to the window, touched the glass, squinted at the clearing, turned away. Beanbag chair. Stained yellow couch. Struggling ivy in a macramé holder. Bobo, the panda bear, propped in a child-sized rocker. Crayons in a spaghetti sauce jar. Monopoly, Operation. A home. A homey mismatched flavor. It was not her room any more than her face was her face; that is to say, it was deeply hers, only hers, and only an accident. One of Diana's drawings, a girl with purple wings and a crown of feathers, taped to the wall. Draped over the arm of the couch was a checkered afghan made by Sam's aunt. It held the smell of their feet in its fibers.

The man's eyes moved from wall to wall, thing to thing. He touched the stone of the fireplace, touched it in three different places, three different stones, clinically, solemnly, the way a doctor moves a stethoscope around a patient's chest. Then he pulled his hand away, said, “I need to catch my breath.”

She motioned to the couch and he sat, leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands.

He said, “I feel stranger than I usually feel.”

“You want some more water?”

“I can't drink that water.”

“I've got juice.”

“Sometimes my mother gave me juice in a teacup so delicate I could've bitten through it. No. Thank you. I just need to catch my breath.”

She stood in front of him. She didn't know what to do with her hands. She felt guilty, as if she had perpetrated his discomfort.

She said, “Are you hungry?”

He seemed not to hear.

“A different couch. Ours was stiffer. I used to sit here and eat olives. From a bowl. With a spoon. Like how you'd eat cereal. And you know what else I liked? It's disgusting. Bananas and sour cream.”

She said she'd never tried it.

“This cottage. This place.” His eyes widened. “Upstairs? The room with the slanting ceilings? That's mine.”

“It's my daughter's room.”

“A girl…? He whistled a few sad notes. “Okay. A girl. Yes,” as if granting permission. Then: “What's her name?”

She told him.

“Man, I loved that room. That big closet. I used to sleep in that closet sometimes. I used to sleep in the fetal position and imagine it was wartime and I was hiding from the Gestapo.” He frowned. “Bananas and sour cream. That seems pretty nasty, right?”

She shrugged. “My daughter eats bacon and peanut butter.”

“Kids,” he said. Then, wistfully, “Diana.”

“Right.” She wasn't sure if she should have said the girl's name.

“My stepfather was German, you know. I can't imagine a girl sleeping in that room. It always struck me as a boy's room.”

Next he told her that his mother had collected crappy art from tag sales, whatever was left in the grass at closing time. He pointed to where her paintings had hung, a farmland scene, a blooming cactus. Tacky shit. He recalled a braided rug on the hearth (he tapped his toes on the floor as he described it), and a swiveling armchair of avocado green. The mantel was full of photographs, mostly of her, his mom, arty shots, black-and-white, pretentious. A partial nude he always hid if a friend came over, but that didn't happen much. A crappy model ship.

Her mind tried to furnish this room with other people's junk.

“Sounds nice,” she said. She didn't know what he wanted to hear.

“No.” He shook his head. “It was not nice at all.”

Sometimes she watched television all day. Sometimes she watched television with her hands down the front of her pants, like a man. Sometimes she masturbated with the vibrating handle of her husband's drill. She stole cigarettes from the convenience store where she worked. She had the crazy instinct to tell him this. He would take in whatever she said, absorb it, how a spill is blotted by a towel. Then he'd leave and she'd never see him again. Instead she sat down in her chair, crossed her legs.

“I never realized how pretty the church is,” he was saying. “The park, too. Back then it was just a tire hanging from a tree.”

“There's a new public pool by the high school.”

“A pool. Man. We never had a pool. We swam behind the old mill.”

“They still do that.”

“Goddamn Beetle. It puts the P.U. in upstate New York.” He leaned back in the couch, extended his arms, so that his elbow rested on the cushion tops. He clasped his hands over the crown of his head.

He is making himself at home,
she thought.

“The barbershop,” he said. “The bank. Dot's Ice Cream. Dot's flipping Ice Cream. Richard's Eyeglasses.”

“He died a few years ago. It's Lenny's Eyewear now.”

He said, “The Come & Go. Oh God, the Come & Go.”

“I work there.”

“No you don't.”

“Part-time.”

He frowned, said, “I loved that place.”

They were silent.

“You know what's funny? I've been riding the bus so long, even sitting here, perfectly still, it feels like motion. I was on that bus for days. I sat next to this guy who hummed the same song for four hundred miles.” Here he paused, grimaced. “You'll have to forgive me. I seem to be on a talking jag. It's like all these words were sitting in a net in the back of my throat and someone just cut it open.”

“I love buses,” she heard herself say.

“Yeah? Buses are hell. But it's a known fact women can withstand pain far better than men.”

Once, a couple years ago, she'd walked the mile to the bus station. She had no suitcase, only a few loose bills. It was a lovely afternoon. When she got to the station she felt confused—what had she wanted? She looked around. A row of maroon lockers reminded her of high school. Against another wall sat a few chairs with attached desktops, also like school, except bolted to these desktops were miniature televisions. The station was empty. She had nowhere to go. A man at the counter was picking at his fingernails. He looked up expectantly. What did she do? She peed. She strode into the restroom like it alone had been her destination, and then walked home again.

“My mother,” he said. “Take my mother for example. Childbirth, back pain, my old stepdaddy with his bad breath. She gave birth to a stillborn right in her bedroom and didn't utter a word of complaint and was back to cleaning the kitchen the next day. Can you believe that?”

Judith didn't respond. She was disturbed by the way he said “daddy”—a certain inauthentic, Southern-sounding sing-sing. She was disturbed, too, by “stillborn.” It hit her later, flashed like neon, all that symmetry and paradox, and she felt a bit sick. That was her bedroom now. A dead baby was born in that room? Maybe she shouldn't have let him in. Maybe it was better to sit alone in your wicker chair and wait for your daughter and husband and to watch the soaps. On
Frosted Glass
Lanie was about to have a baby that wasn't Guy's, and he was planning to murder her once it was weaned.

“Your husband—is he a nice man?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Is he—”

She said, “Don't worry about my husband.”

He raised his hands in surrender.

For a few moments they were quiet.

The rain picked up. A long roll of thunder.

He said, “Please forgive me if I say too much, or the wrong things. I've been alone for a very long time.”

She said, “I can understand that.”

She was too easily tempted. She was too excited by his unnaturalness, his pout, his unwashed clothes. By—something else. His quality of displacement. By her awareness—it came on fast—that she wanted him to stay awhile.

She asked him if he was ready to see the rest of the house.

He lowered his head again. He said, into his palms, “I'm afraid.”

“Just a house.”

“I think I expected it to be—like, neutral. How stupid. Nothing is neutral, right? Nothing in your childhood anyway. Least of all the house you grew up in. Why in hell would I have thought it'd have become neutral?” He looked up. His eyes were the blue-gray of shale. He wagged his head. “Time. Time. It's all jammed together. It doesn't exist. That's what no one gets. Time collapsed a long time ago. It's dead.”

“You're a philosopher.”

“Be kind. Don't make fun of me.”

She didn't understand what he wanted from her.

She said, “I'm not kind.”

“I know.” His eyes were damp. “I could tell when you opened the door.”

She felt, strangely, a rush of pride.

She said, “You want a cigarette?”

He took one, but just examined it between his fingers. Then he told her his name, Pax, which was absurd.