Tiger, Tiger (30 page)
Poppa sat down and stared at his shadowy reflection in the full-length mirror. He started speaking again, softly and calmly this time. “You have talked of demons in this room. In this room, right? The other night I overheard you tell your mother that there was a voice coming from the air conditioner. Don’t be so quick to run to your mother next time. Listen: next time, just be still, and listen. You may find that it was only a garbage truck, a howling dog, or your own scream. It is only when the world goes deaf that it becomes unbearable. I have learned to embrace my nightmares. Your mother doesn’t dream at all. She told me that once. She has no dreams, not a single one.”
He was serious but so uncharacteristically calm that I thought it was my only chance to tell him about a mistake I’d just made: I’d bought jeans that were a size too small and had quickly outgrown them.
He sat on the edge of the bed, listening quietly in the gloaming of that wan reading lamp.
“I’ll show you,” I said, and rushed into the adjacent bedroom to get one of the pairs of jeans. I started to squeeze into them in front of Poppa, my eyes tearing up. “I thought I was three/four. I was sure. Anyway, I don’t have the receipts anymore . . .”
Poppa stood up. “You act like this is my fault! This is your own fault! Why did you buy the wrong size! You have no brain, like your mother, you have inherited her stupidity! You know what? From now on I will buy jeans for you in the city!”
“No, you’re not picking out my clothes! I’ll pick out jeans myself on Bergenline!”
“Why, so you can buy designer ones?”
“You have designer clothes! Your clothes are really expensive!”
“I have to look nice to go to work! You do not work! You do not do anything except make misery for me! Your full-time job! To make my life a living hell! To make your mother sick and put her in the hospital with your bad behavior!”
“You shut up!” I couldn’t stand it when he blamed me for my mother’s condition. “It’s you, you abusive pig!”
“You had better not talk to me like that! I will cut off your allowance! Then you will have to stay home!”
“I’ll starve first rather than stay home with you! I’d be in the hospital too if all I did was listen to you go on and on about how much you hate us.”
He put out his fist and I yelled, “Go ahead; I wish you’d kill me! I wish I’d never been born!” I meant it, too.
He turned away, closing his hands on the side of his face. “You are a brat, you hear me? You make your mother sick, you hear me? You ruined my life, goddamn you.”
I ran downstairs and locked myself in the bathroom. As soon as I heard him banging on the door, screaming, I grabbed the radiator cover and started shaking it. “Hey, hey, hey! Don’t break anything!” From the outside, he tugged on the doorknob. I kicked the radiator grill with my socked foot, feeling nothing. “You come out of there! Listen, I will give you the money! Just come out of there!” I opened the door and he stood outside. We locked eyes. He turned away, scowling, and went to his wallet.
“I am your bank,” he said, slowly counting the money, stopping every once in a while to glare at me. “You have no decency. No pride. No dignity. No class. No conscience. No feelings. No self-respect. You are a monster.”
I walked over to him and said, “Don’t throw it on the floor; just hand it to me.”
“You had better behave,” he muttered, his face turned as he gave me the money. “Now, leave me alone! Please! Get out of here! Looking at your face makes me sick!”
Late that night, I heard Poppa talking about me in the kitchen to my mother when he thought I was sleeping. I had been going to the bathroom, but as soon as I heard them, I slunk down the stairs.
She was lying on her sofa bed in the kitchen extension, while he worked on a pair of earrings at the table. “What did you tell them?” I heard her ask.
“Look, to anyone who asks, he is her uncle, your half brother. Tell her, too, so she knows.”
“What are they saying, exactly?”
“They say: ‘Louie, who is this man hanging around your daughter? Is he all right, this guy? You trust him?’ If it has reached the bars, it means they are spending too much time together. Why is this? I thought she was with the girlfriend, mostly, and the sons of those people.”
“They walk the dog together. People love to twist things.”
“Especially when it concerns me. People are so envious. Because I am well respected in this town. I have a lot of friends. Everybody knows me. I am popular. But now I notice the guy from the steak sandwich place giving me a strange look. I go there all the time. I am a good customer. Anyway, the point is, people are talking. She should cut down on going over to that house. Maybe, after a while, she should cut those people out of her life.”
“They’re the only friends she has, Louie.”
“I know. If not for that, I would have forbidden her from going so much. I thought it was a phase; she would outgrow it. However, it has turned into an obsession.”
“Well, what else has she got?”
“I do not understand it. What is the attraction? That crumbling house is no carnival. What can a girl her age possibly do there for all that time? He is nice, the old man, but he cannot be healthy for her. What do they talk about during those walks? He probably laments about his life before his accident, before his divorce. That kind of talk can depress a young girl. What can she possibly learn from it? And even though this man is not robust, not really well, what is going on inside his head? She is older now. More like a woman, less like a child.”
“What exactly are you implying?”
Poppa laughed. “There is no way a young girl could possibly have feelings for someone so decrepit. That would be abnormal. But for the old man to have feelings for her, carefully hidden, this is possible.”
“It’s nothing like that. It’s sweet and innocent.”
“Okay, okay.” Poppa put his hands up, then resumed his work on the earrings. “I believe you. I do not want to talk about this subject anymore. It sickens me. Anyway, the bottom line, you are the mother. You make her cut down on the time she spends over at that house.”
“There’s nothing I can do. You know I can’t control her. You’ll have to do it.”
“Me?” Poppa placed the earrings on the table and took off his loupe. “I have no power over her.”
“Well, neither do I. She broke my watch. She slammed it against the wall and broke the glass. I can’t remember what we were arguing about.”
“Sometimes I fear she will take the whole house down with me in it! I have seen movies! There are children who kill their own parents! She goes crazy, she starts to yell and she breaks things. I can barely speak to her. We never say two words to each other anymore. On the weekends, she does not even say good morning to me.”
“Why don’t you say good morning to her first?”
“She is out of control. She wants me to raise her allowance. So she can go spending money for pizza and hamburgers with that man! She can stay for dinner and eat the healthy food that I will cook for her.”
“Well, I think they eat at places like El Pollo Supremo and El Unico. That’s not unhealthy.”
“I cannot afford it!”
“Louie, start saying good morning to her. Someone has to make the first move. And on her next birthday, make sure you say happy birthday.”
“She did not say happy birthday to me this year! It was my birthday and she said nothing. For Christmas, she said nothing. I gave her a necklace, the one I made with the gold cross that has the diamond in the center. She did not even thank me.”
“She wears it.”
“She did not have one word of gratitude. I should call her the ghost because that is what she is like.”
“Well, she will die if you try separating her from Peter. She will just die. She won’t eat; I know it. She may run away from home. They are all she has.”
“Like a ghost moving through here, except when she talks, her voice is so loud. Walking around here like she owns everything. Leaving her bowl of cereal for me to pick up after. Like I am her slave or something. Leaving her papers and books scattered all over the table. I tell her to clean up her papers, or I will clean them for her. She starts to shout at me: ‘Don’t touch my papers, get away from my things!’ I did nothing to her. She is wild now. Completely wild.”
After I told Peter about the conversation I’d overheard, we both agreed that we needed to take extra precautions about being seen, which would be even more difficult now, considering that Peter couldn’t ride the motorcycle anymore. In addition to the chronic pain caused by his spinal injury, Peter thought he was developing arthritis. Inès suggested putting a
FOR SALE
sign on the Gold Wing and using the money to buy a car, and Peter kept saying he would do it, but never did. He kept hoping his pain would miraculously disappear and we would soon be riding again.
In addition to this problem our fights about him asking for sex every day or every other day without offering me pleasure in return and guilting me if I tried to say no, about taking Inès out on Sunday, about his insistent fantasies, became more frequent and violent. A few times Peter had even started choking me, which was a very strange sensation, my head flopping about as if it were made out of rubber, valleys of black dots exploding in front of my blurring eyes.
“I’m afraid one day I’ll get so angry I’ll kill you without meaning to,” he said, laying his head against my breast and sobbing after a particularly bad fight. “Then I’d have to kill myself because I can’t live without you. I love you so much, I never want to hurt you again! Don’t ever get me to that point again where an evil spirit can seize control of my body! Don’t bring me to that place I can’t get out of, when I’m seeing red and I just want to kill you because you make me so angry. You can be so cruel to me, you make me feel like nothing. I just want it to be like it was when you were a little girl, and sometimes I think if we’re both dead it could be like that again, and then I hate myself for thinking that because I love you and you’re so young and I’d kill myself first before I’d ever harm you. Sweetheart, you have your whole life to live and I’m falling apart. I can barely sleep, and sometimes I don’t even want to get up in the morning, and I think you’ll go on without me because you’re young and could have anyone while I’ll rot here in my room with my pictures and memories of you.” I knew it was that other part of Peter, the bad part, who had hurt me; the Peter who had been so abused that he couldn’t help lashing out.
“It won’t happen, Peter,” I said, holding him. “We’ll die first. You’ll kill me by choking me or pushing a pillow over my face, and then you’ll kill yourself. Like Romeo and Juliet. Then it’s like you said, it’ll be like it was, like a snow globe when you shake it and everything repeats on and on, it’ll be so beautiful.”
“I love you so much,” Peter said, as I stroked his face and hair. “It’s just that I can’t stand it when you hold that ax over my head, when you’re like my executioner, sharpening the blades. I could never go to jail. You know that.”
The ax was our secret. Occasionally when we fought I lost control and threatened to go to the police and tell them everything. It would have been a self-destructive act because I knew that if Peter ever got arrested, I’d feel so guilty that I’d have to kill myself. I could never betray the one person in the world who truly cared about me.
W
e finally found a place within walking distance where we could be alone, even hold hands and say the romantic things I craved. To get to our new haunt, we had to walk down a long aluminum staircase framed by an ornate wrought-iron gate located on Boulevard East. We’d stop at a nearby food cart for a lemonade and hot dog and then we’d descend 221 circling steps with the dog. Peter got so tired during our arduous trip that he’d plop down on a step, jokingly lolling out his tongue like Paws. Whenever he did this, it was up to me to give him a kiss for strength, as I’d done years ago. Paws, whose muzzle had gone gray, would be glad to rest with Peter while I waited impatiently. The steps were built for commuters to reach the ferry, but for us they were a portal into a private nook in the woods where we couldn’t be seen or heard. The Story could be as dirty as I wanted it with no one around to hear (the Story, unlike our sex life, never revolved around Peter’s fantasies; it was much more focused on Nina and her exploits), so it was well worth both the difficult journey down and the equally grueling return trip: a long, circuitous route through Weehawken. Often, when we got home, I’d rub baby lotion on his back and he’d rest on his heating pad while I read to him. “Mommy, take care of me,” he’d joke. I liked to feel that he needed me. If not for me, who would give him back rubs? Who would read for hours until her voice got hoarse, until he fell asleep in the crook of her shoulder? Who would go to El Unico to get food, as I always did when he hurt too much to leave his room?
The blow jobs and massages were part of this overall maintenance, in my mind. Peter often joked that he was like the Tin Man, needing the oil can of love and affection—as for me, being Peter’s caretaker gave purpose and direction to my life, where otherwise there was none. I fancied myself as Peter’s guardian angel. He said that I never looked so beautiful as when I tended to a pigeon whose wing had been broken; a peeping gosling separated from its mother; a turtle turned over on its shell attacked by ants.
I was just fourteen, but I often felt like I was forty. I took care of Peter as though he were my cub, a large, cumbersome, damaged, and worn-out bear cub, whose bawling baby face I would gather into my lap and whose tears I would sop up with tissues. His were the tears of a ravaged life as well as a life that had ravaged others. In our latest haunt, he revealed secrets he had never told anyone before; I tried to listen without judgment, as the Bible teaches. I tried to treat his stories as though they were part of our Story or a novel I’d read recently or a movie we’d rented together. Or a religious scene like Lot’s two daughters seducing him in a cave, perhaps, or Jacob wearing goatskin on his neck and hands to fool his blind father into blessing him. Life for me had already lost much of its pulp; the edges were collapsing into the center, and in that gap was the sympathy Peter had sought all his life and never got from anyone. Or perhaps “sympathy” was the wrong word; what he was telling me was more confirmation of what I already understood in biblical terms: the bad Peter, under the influence of the Devil, did horrible things. His honesty was evidence that the good Peter was finally triumphing over the bad one, because to me, that was the whole point of confession—to figure out where you’ve gone wrong and to stop sinning. One particular confession that kept coming back to haunt me was his story about hanging a cat as a boy. He had found the cat in the snow and brought him inside for warm milk and tuna, and the animal had scratched a bloody cut on his arm. He killed him because he couldn’t stand betrayal, not when everyone in his life had proven to be untrustworthy. I said over and over, “Did you really murder a cat?” He assured me that afterward he’d felt terribly guilty, but I was still deeply disturbed by this. There was another story, of how he’d shot his own hamster. When he was ten years old he had wanted to buy a B.B. gun for five dollars but couldn’t afford it, so he had sold himself to an older man who’d sodomized him in a hotel room. There was blood everywhere. He’d bought the B.B. gun and shot his pet dead and then threw out the gun.