Bedlam and Other Stories (20 page)

“He has all the instincts,” Erin said once, during the first week of November, I think. “All the natural manly instincts.”

Yes in the glue of that autumn, Robbie offered unpredictable rising bubbles. Certainly Erin seemed to be forever bringing him up. Talking about his dead Mom, his protective shell of flab, his talent. It was as if now that I'd looked in her journal she'd decided I should know exactly what it was she spent all her time writing. Thus the queer lull could become queerer still. Talk about Robbie's eruptions would end in one of our own. Erin would start going after me again about broken trust and I'd let my face do my dirty work. And then when Erin had slammed the bedroom door shut between us, when she'd thrown the lock, when through that barrier she'd shouted at me, “Why don't you go? Why don't you
do something
for once and
go
?”—when that hard place was reached, it always seemed that Robbie had come to stand in the hallway beside me. He might have started out by tearing apart something on the back lawn; in fact, by the middle of October it took only a single harsh word between Erin and myself to get him going. But before long his lumbering ostrich-step would echo up the stairwell. He'd slump into place, beside me but head and shoulders above me. Dully eyeing the bedroom doorknob.

Myself, I started to muscle him around. I never let Erin touch him, but it became a rare day when I didn't at least hook his collar, jerk him down to my eyes' level. God, the vapor in his look. Then what was he after, to come staggering more and more often between us? I never let Erin touch him. But I said some mean things to him, maybe a few obscenities even, trying to get a response.

No doubt we should have asked for help. There were any number of potential last straws. This smashed pitcher, that piece of upholstery gutted and scattered over the rug. But though Erin may have let the question dangle once or twice, I never picked it up. Certainly neither of us admitted anything directly. Instead we worked extra hours with plastic and putty to repair the holes Robbie had punched in our life. Instead we hid what we could from Mr. Challait and the maid. And most of all instead of asking for help we kept returning to the bedroom. Sometimes with disagreements still in our teeth, sometimes with no better excuse than the paper's being read and the mail's being late. Yes, these visits did slowly intensify. The morning we were to go pick up the Thanksgiving turkey, the maid had to ring our doorbell a half-dozen times. I can look at it clinically nowadays; I can say that Erin and I were learning about the timing of orgasms and so forth. A person with a technical way of looking at things would say we were getting better with each fuck. But the experience itself was brutal and way past analysis. Across acres of fields we'd discover low walls of human flesh. And these explorations were made room for more and more often, and we came up with all kinds of excuses for Mr. Challait. We assured him the broken windows were no bother. We never let him see how Robbie had trashed the darkroom downcellar. We pointed out that his son had some vendetta against the property, not against us, so that in fact Robbie was no more dangerous than a dog who needed to be housebroken. Finally, we would stand up to the father and insist that this was what he'd hired us for. We'd been brought here in the first place because the conventional thinkers had failed. For several long moments, the rich man would measure us with an impassive look. Eyes low-lidded, double-chin just visible. Then he'd nod. In the end nothing was allowed to stop us.

But no. No, that's a lousy way to put it. Maybe “nothing was allowed to stop us,” but Robbie and Erin and I never for a moment had the sense that we were
worth
stopping. Never for a moment, never for months. Scutwork, newspapers, and the mail. If I could make these three words into a dumb hit single and play it a million times a week, you might get the idea. Our calendar seemed a warehouse, stacked with empty boxes. The evenings were the worst. More and more I'd find myself out in one of those sticky inflatable plastic pillow-chairs, out on the front stoop. Looking beyond the chainlink fence, beyond the uncolored and half-dressed trees. I'd feel the restlessness of fall. School was underway; my father had packed the trunk for me and winked a sardonic, affable goodbye till Christmas. Or I would sense Erin's birthday, coming up or not long past. A chip-on-the-shoulder mystic at school had told me once that Erin was “classic Scorpio,” but I preferred to think about the other implications of someone's being born on Hallowe'en night. And then while picturing an infant girl surprised by masks and crepe paper, or while frightened boneless once again by the image of that grown man whose wink had gone to worms, then from my chilled and flaccid seat eventually I'd come to notice Robbie, who was taking another of his rackety naps on the sofa in the living room behind me, our Robbie, whose life between sleep and waking was the same slack cocoon of nightmare. My own tears would start to come. I'd have to run indoors, upstairs. Without turning on the bathroom light, with the colors of sundown burnishing the medicine-cabinet mirror, I stripped. Crying without end. I went on to the shower, crying face to the washcloth, as I had done morning after early morning a year ago in the shower stalls at the dorm. There no one would know about me.

I'm not so smart. I'm not so good in bed as it may have seemed till now. I'm not the kind of person who would marry a high-school friend out of honest loneliness or because I felt scared about the future. I'm only restless. No one at home half the time and always very restless.

Until the morning I left the bedroom door open. The lock unturned, the door itself ajar.

I'd ducked out in mid-foreplay, on the old child's pretext of needing a glass of water. I'd stopped the door with my heel and fallen on Erin too quick for her to notice.

In letters since, letters from friends, we've learned that this experience is common enough among people our age. The roommate comes back to the dorm a day earlier than expected; the parents decide to beat the snowstorm home from the party. And always my friends write that they were surprised by how quickly they returned to dry reality. But sex is fragile, the web of mood far more important than the muscle and mucus clutching beneath its spidery reach. After Robbie crashed into our bedroom, Erin and I both recovered fast—though I believe she had the edge on me. I felt her hipbones jerk out of rhythm while I was still lost in the dark acreage between us. “Robbie!”

He was on all fours, in pyjama bottoms. Apparently his first move once he'd got in the room had been to pull over Erin's vanity table. Now under his chest, his face, his crooked fingers, there lay scattered pieces of the broken vanity mirror. And over the beefy white arc of one shoulder was strung, of course, a camera. Also his mouth still hung open. From our angle his tongue was visible, reflected in a shard of broken mirror the size of a hunting knife.

“Did you leave the door unlocked?” Erin was asking me. She had the covers pinned up under her armpits already. “Did—did you?”

But before I could answer—something very strange. Robbie sang a snatch of a song we recognized. “It is
time
,” he sang roughly, “for you to
stop
all of your
sobbing
.” We'd never have thought he paid any attention when we listened to the radio. And then Robbie broke down himself. Suddenly weeping, he let his face sink onto the broken glass. His spine drooped, his big rear poked up sloppily, till he looked like an overstuffed old chair or sofa gone over onto its front. He cried like nothing we'd heard from him before. Till now his tears had come in mere childish squalls, pouts and sniffles and I-banged-my-tootsie: a distraction like his violence, but also in the same way finally of no harm. On this morning, however, Erin and I felt our naked shoulders prickle at the sound of full-grown grief. Great extended sobs, cracked all over, came as if dragged from beneath sediment that had coated the bottoms of his lungs for years. He rolled his forehead over the bits of mirror till one piece left a white scar across the floorboards. His noise made the windows buzz.

“Robbie,” Erin said in a different voice, “don't cry.”

“Quiet,” I said. “I know what he's thinking.”

And maybe I did, maybe, because otherwise there's no good reason for the way that sentence galvanized him. Robbie sat up. He went back on his haunches, showing us an impossible face, where tears mingled with blood from the new cuts on his forehead. Showing us also that beneath his elastic pyjama waistband, against his belly, he'd tucked what appeared to be a sizable pad of stiff construction paper.
What
? When he yanked the pad out from under his waistband, his eyes were enormous with decision. The paper actually rattled. What
was
it? Then in another moment he'd picked up one of the larger mirror shards, and clumsily Robbie began to hack apart what he'd smuggled into our bedroom under his belt; the contact sheets of his mad negatives.

“Stop!” He was weeping but giving orders. “Stop! Your! Sobbing!”

I realized that, for some time now, Erin had been squeezing my arm. My elbow burned already from the pressure. I shook free by thrusting that arm across her breasts, as if to protect her.

“Get out of here, Erin. I'll handle Robbie.”

In fact by the time I'd finished saying that my feet were on the floor. My solid calm voice, the solid cool floor.

“Tommy—” Erin's voice on the other hand was changing at practically every new syllable.

From the foot of the bed I picked up the robe I'd worn for my faked trip to the bathroom. Seemed like hours ago, and hours ago too I'd peeled off my rubber. It was pleasant to feel the inside of the robe's sleeves again tickling the insides of my arms.

“Tommy,” Erin said, “Look, look I know I've been teasing you, kind of testing you lately but please, look—”

I pressed the back of my arm against her breasts again. The mattresses I'd tumbled into so many months ago, tumbled into tricked by paint, were at last giving way. The truer stuff was making itself felt. And so I took my place beside Robbie. I enjoyed the swag of my genitals as I spread my knees against the floor and I felt my sinuses wince at the unwashed smell of his hair. Behind me Erin continued to natter. But I'd mixed it up with Erin before. I got one good deep breath before my chest was dented against Robbie's shoulder blade. He sat on his heels now, hunched forward again, hunched over his butcherwork. I went for the half nelson. Robbie slammed me onto the floor so quick I didn't notice when Erin left.

Perhaps that hadn't been her talking I'd heard a moment earlier. Perhaps it was only the clock-radio going off at the hour we'd set for waking up.

Look one way, there was the blunt camera he'd brought in with him; look the other, there was his outsize slice of mirror. I lay on my back on broken glass. But even as my awareness flooded with dread about getting cut where I couldn't see, I felt also how I was trapped. The front of my robe had opened and he'd straddled me. His weight on my intestines cut my breath to shreds while something loose inside his pyjamas tickled my diaphragm awfully. My left arm was helpless against one corner of the vanity table and my right, he ground into the floorboards beneath his knee. Smothered. Truly roped in for the first time. Even my face was covered, spattered with his blood and sniffling. I had to blink and I saw him go crazy in strobes, my view drawn up closer and closer in a flickering pus-colored montage. The red hood of his open mouth, the dented metal walls of his back teeth, the spit-sheen from the tunnel that led in still farther. And now Robbie moved. With another of those weeping groans, that noise which seemed kicked from under his deepest sediments, he brought nearer the length of glass in his hand. He brought it between our two faces and turned it slowly. My breath made the mirror darken.

“Robbie—” But what could I ever say to him?

I actually hit on a plan, then. I started to think I could buck up my middle hard enough to get him off me. And I was willing to believe the mirror wouldn't hit anything vital, I'd gotten that desperate, when over the unending grind of his sobs I heard the noise on the stairs. Erin banged into the room. I could see enough to tell her arms were full. And her robe too had opened; catching a glimpse of one thigh, I suffered an absurd pang of want. But the thigh moved, my wife moved, I couldn't see much besides the blur of a shape like a dump-bucket, and then with an explosion of water Robbie's weight was off me, his reflecting weapon was out of my face. I sat up wet and uncertain.

My deep breaths still tasted of his sickness. The renewed circulation of blood froze my elbows and the palms of my hands. Erin wasn't allowing anyone time to calm down.

Of course time itself was a different shape by now, every available fraction of a second cram-packed.

I discovered her behind me. I felt a knee or a touch at my back—or was it blood?
Had
my back got cut? In any case I whipped my head round—she was holding the living-room flower vase at waist level. Around it her body appeared drawn, nervy, and her robe was a single hard red. Even as I understood she'd used the vase to drench Robbie and me, she turned away from us and set the thing on the bed. She started to tug the covers straight around it. I'd just had my life saved, but here my perspective still felt unsettled, unrelieved, and my neck hurt from turning so fast to look at her. Now the sound of the bedclothes stretching—so pointlessly, with that mammoth urn in the way—was as bad as anything I'd heard since I'd left the door open.

“Robbie,” Erin began, “I know you're really just sitting back in your easy chair.” She was moving more than necessary; her robe bent back my arm-hairs. “I
know
we're supposed to get
all upset
over you, and you, you just go right on sitting back in your easy chair.”

I blinked vase-water off my eyelashes. Again the strobe effect. But now it was Erin who flickered, Erin's looks coming round in montage as she turned to confront Robbie. Her breath was short as if she'd been in here wrestling with us.