Beautiful Kate (13 page)

She drew her hand across the sheet, wiping it as she backed toward the door. Unable to meet her eyes, I looked down at her body, at her beautiful breasts and pubis and legs, catching myself only when it was too late.

“I’m sorry, Kate! Oh Christ, I’m sorry.”

But she was already gone, running for her room. I heard the door slam and the lock crash into place. And then there was silence. Only silence. Hours of it.

For the rest of that morning and on into the afternoon I felt as if I had forgotten how to breathe, such was my sense of dread. And it was not that I was afraid Kate would tell Jason or Mother what I had done; she would never do that, I knew. Rather it was Kate herself I feared, the prospect of facing her across the Sunday dinner table and falling again within the firing range of her eyes, their cool green ignited now with feelings of disgust and disbelief and what other terrors I could only guess at, and dread.

So I stayed by myself. I showered for a good quarter of an hour, scrubbing my loathsome body until it stung. I put on clean clothes and I even straightened up the room and made my bed, an act of stunning irregularity for me. But finally there was nothing more to do and I left the room, hurrying past Kate’s still-locked door and going down the back stairs to the kitchen, where I gulped some orange juice and took two breakfast rolls with me out to the barn. There I climbed into the haymow and made my way up over the mountains of bales to the open doors under the roof beam, almost to the spot where Kate and I had slaughtered the sparrows four years before. And there I stayed, sweating and chewing on hay stems and staring down at the house and farmyard, waiting for Mother and Cliff and the kids to return from church, and then the inevitable call for dinner, which I knew I would have to show up for, much like one’s own execution.

So when the call finally came, delivered by little Sarah running about the farmyard, I reluctantly responded. Ironically, the occasion turned out to be an ordeal not for me but for Cliff. From the beginning Kate acted as if everything were the same as always, just another Sunday dinner in our lives. If anything, she seemed in a better mood than she normally was, smiling often and even laughing at Junior’s bitter complaints about the hardness of the church seats. And when our eyes met there was absolutely nothing in them to suggest that anything unusual had happened between us. But when it came to Cliff, that was another matter. Looking at him, her face would lighten with sardonic amusement, as if she were grateful that he was there and able to afford her so much fun.

“So how was Reverend Sunbeam today?” she asked. “Did he inspire you to new heights of Christian charity?”

Cliff was used to her taunting him about going to church. “As a matter of fact, he gave a good sermon,” he told her. “Reverend Sonnenberg has his moments, you know.”

“And it wouldn’t hurt you or Greg to hear him either,” Mother put in. “The two of you could use a little more Christian charity.”

“Oh, don’t I know it?” Kate said. “Poor Sunbeam must hate to waste his eloquence on such a paragon as Cliff when there are real lost souls like me and Greg around. But then that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? The bad just keep getting ‘badder’ and righteous keep getting ‘righteouser.’ The Lord’s will, I guess.”

Jason did not like contention at mealtime, unless he happened to be the cause of it. So he firmly suggested that Kate say nothing more until she had something good to say.

“But what I said
was
good,” she protested. “How can one talk about Cliff and Reverend Sunbeam without saying something good?”

“You’re trying our patience,” Jason told her.

“I know it, I know it,” she confessed. “Which just illustrates what I’m getting at. It’s sinners like me old Sunbeam should be working on—not Cliff and Mother. Why it’s like throwing pearls before Yasseen the jeweler. What Sunbeam should do instead is leave his pulpit and come out here Sunday mornings. That way, he could work on all
three
of us.”

She smiled impishly at Jason and he surprised us all by laughing—at himself—something only Kate could bring about, and then only rarely. But he quickly recovered and soon was staring gravely down the table at my mother.

“Isn’t it time for dessert?” he asked.

Though he could not afford servants, Jason never lacked for service. Mother and Sarah quickly leaped up to clear the table, followed by Kate at her languid best.

“And will you be having dessert too?” she asked Cliff. “Or are you already too sweet?”

Afterwards Cliff came to me about Kate’s performance at the dinner table.

“Why is she so hostile to me?” he asked. “What have I done? What have I said?”

“Nothing,” I told him. “You know how she is lately. She just gets on her high horse and you can’t get her off. Today was your turn, that’s all. Tomorrow it’ll be me.”

He was dubious. “I don’t know. It seems lately like I’m her target all the time. Jesus, you know as well as I do that I don’t give a damn about Sunbeam. I go so Mother won’t have to go alone with the kids, that’s all.”

“I know that. And so does Kate.”

“So why all the heat, then? Can you explain it?”

I told him that I could not, and he shook his head wonderingly.

“God, she looks great, though, doesn’t she? I wish she
would
go to church. She’d light up that place like a million candles.” But even that thought had its dark side for Cliff. “It seems the better looking she gets, the harder she is to know. I really don’t know her anymore. I honestly don’t.”

I mumbled a few words to the effect that she had become something of a stranger to me too. But even then, even after what had happened that morning, I still had only an embryonic understanding of what I meant by that. To me, she was still the same Kate as always, albeit a Kate with growing problems, not the least of which was a twin brother who was sexually out of control.

Later that afternoon, unbidden by Jason, I set out and walked the fence rows, ostensibly to check them for any breaks in the wire, when in reality all I did was mull over the problem of what had happened between Kate and me. And it did not take long for me to realize that the only way I could make sure such a thing never happened again was by changing
myself
. So I vowed to do just that. I vowed to give up my masturbating and to throw away all my
Playboys
. I vowed not to think about girls and sex almost every waking minute of every day. And especially I vowed never again to think of Kate in sexual terms, even if I were to see her naked again. And I do believe—I
still
believe—that if it had been up to me alone, the thing with Kate would never have gone past that first strange encounter in my room. Unfortunately it was not up to me, at least not in the main.

When I got back that afternoon I came upon her in the barn, brushing her mare. I tried to talk to her about what had happened, hoping to explain to her the physiology of it, that she had caught me at a time when I had already been hard for hours and that it wasn’t she—wasn’t her body—so much as the simple
contact
, the pressure, that had caused the thing to happen. But she would not let me speak. She did not want to hear anything about it, she said, not ever again. It had been her fault, not mine. We were to forget it ever happened.

So I left the barn, already beginning to feel as if some great stone had been rolled off my chest. We would forget about the incident. It would never happen again and in time it Would be as if it had never happened in the first place, much like the “touching” we had done as children. Within a few months, I told myself, the thing would probably seem unreal, an aberration we would remember only hazily, with a sense of puzzlement and even disbelief.

Thus did I resume the normal cadences of my life. I sailed through the rest of that day and the next two armored with a fool’s innocence, trying not to think about the incident at all. I studied hard for my exams and on Tuesday I ran third in the four-forty in a track meet against Joliet—the only white boy in the event—which left me feeling voluptuously weary and contented when I went to bed that night, alone again, since Tuesday was one of three nights that Cliff worked late at the Eskimo.

It was after eleven o’clock, Jason and Mother and the kids were already in bed asleep, and I was just lying there studying the ceiling shapes and contemplating masturbation—for the second time since my Sunday vows—when I heard Kate come upstairs. She was in her room for a short time and then the light went on in the bathroom and I lay there listening while she used the toilet and bathed and toweled herself. I heard her brush her teeth and then her hair. And finally the light went off and the door opened again—only this time it was the door to my room.

In the glow from the polelight, I watched as she came to my bed and sat down on the edge of it, so close to me I already had stopped breathing. She was wearing her yellow robe and she was trembling. And to this day I don’t know if I told her that she had to leave, that we could not do this thing, that it was wrong—I don’t know if I actually said any of that or if it was all only words uttered in the safe and soundless chambers of my mind. I do know, however, that in the long moments before she spoke, I made no move to get out of there, I made no move to save her life. I watched as she untied her robe and let it fall from her. And I listened.

“Please, Greg. Just hold me. Like Sunday.”

She was already slipping under the covers and her hand had found me by then, a touch I can feel even to this day, as if she had reconnected us in a way we had not known since birth, only now in a womb of fire. From the moment of that first touch, on through the whole long terrible summer, I was without will.

“Just hold me,” she said. “Hold me tight.”

The writing of this chapter has not come easy for me. My Bic is like a baseball bat in my fingers and I am forever getting up and walking over to the window as if I expected to find something outside that could distract me from this masochist’s debauch. And, shades of Santa Barbara, I have even begun to drink again (with a manly dedication, that is) in the beginning hitting Junior’s beer often enough to cause him to whine like an unemployed actor, and finally by pawning my Omega quartz (another of Ellen’s gifts) in order to buy scotch in the quantities I now require. The booze of course has made me a real sweetheart to live with, as Toni would tell you at the drop of a bottle.

Just yesterday she came waltzing in here in the afternoon, evidently tired of playing nursemaid to the still-mending Junior. I told her to get out because I was working, when in fact I was only drinking, as she could plainly see. And since alcohol to this point in our relationship has usually meant playtime, she was ready to play. All she had on was her bathrobe.

“Come on, give it up,” she advised me. “You’re no book writer, you’re a film writer. All you’ll wind up with is a stack of tablets that no one will even look at. No one reads anymore.”

“Is that so?”

She lay back on the bed, stretching, taunting me. “Yes, that’s so. We do more interesting things now. We don’t read about it—we
do
it.”

It was like red-flagging a bull, for throughout these last ragged days of writing, the one thing I have truly come to despise in me is my ancient and well-documented slavery to cunt in all its lovely shapes and sizes. I put down my glass.

“Get out of here, Toni.”

She looked up at the ceiling and shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. You’re the one who dragged me here to Siberia. So you’ve got to entertain me.”

I told her to go down and play with Junior.

Making a face, she got, up. “He stinks—have you noticed that? His breath
and
his body. Almost as bad as your old man.” She smiled now. “Your family stinks, Greg. You come from a stinking family.”

“I’m warning you.” Yes, I’m afraid I actually said that, old screenwriter that I am.

But all it elicited from Toni was a casual shaking of her head. “First, you’ve got to read some of it to me—say, the last two pages you’ve written.”

“I don’t have to read anything to anybody.”

“Why—you ashamed of it?”

I refilled my glass. “You could say that.”

“Of what? The writing or the story?”

I didn’t answer.

“What’s it about? Tell me. Your brother and sister?”

I told her that I was waiting for her to leave, and she smiled.

“Well, that’s just T.S. then, isn’t it? At least you could tell me the title. That’s it—you tell me the title and I’ll go.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Sure.” She playfully crossed her left breast.

“How about
Remembrance of Things Past
?”

She gave me a pitying look. “Sounds dull. Real dull.”

“Sparrows
, then. How about that?”

“It’s about
birds?
”

“Of a feather.”

“No one will read it.”

“Well, I’m at a loss then. I don’t have any other title.”

She was becoming impatient. “Come on. I won’t leave until I know.”