Black and Blue (30 page)

“That was fun,” I said.

“You made enough noise up there.”

“I think the mimosas really loosened things up. I wish Cindy could have had one.”

We were driving right into the sun, the car threading its way in and out of the cars coming from the strip malls onto the strip, corrugated boxes and brown bags in the backseats, everyone cool and dry with the air-conditioning up all the way. High summer was coming on fast, and high summer was much the same here as anywhere else, punishing heat, sweat wet on the seat of your pants.
Mike’s hand was damp as he reached across and squeezed mine. No jones for him. Still no jones. But, Jesus God, it was good to have at least one person in the world who knew who I really was.

“You haven’t asked me the $64,000 question,” I finally said.

“What’s that?”

“The question everyone’s supposed to ask. The question we always asked at work about some woman who came into the ER all cut up. Why didn’t you leave? How could you stay?”

“You did leave. I know why you stayed. You stayed because of Robert.”

“Why did I leave?”

“Because of Robert, too. You must think I’m stupid.”

“I think you’re amazing,” I said. A truck roared past us, shook the car as though there was a summer storm. “I had an abortion just before I left.” The truck was so loud I didn’t know if he had heard me. I could barely hear myself.

He was quiet for a long time, looking out at the road. Finally he said, “Did you say that so that I’ll know, or because you think that if you tell me enough bad things I’ll go away?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Why don’t you come over for dinner?”

I shook my head. The sun glinted off his glasses and I couldn’t see his eyes. “Not tonight,” I said.

“Is there some point when you’ll tell me either to take a hike or—whatever?”

“Whatever,” I said, as we pulled up to the apartment complex. His eyes were dark, hurt the way Robert’s eyes were sometimes, with no attempt to hide it. “Frances,” he said.

“Beth. I’m still Beth.”

“Frances. Beth. I’ll call you whatever you want. I don’t care. I don’t care about anything. You want to tell me you’re a serial killer? Go ahead. I don’t care.”

“Don’t take a hike,” I said.

“That’s a good sign, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, and went inside.

I
n the middle of the night I woke to the smell of smoke and moved out of bed and into Robert’s room as fast as I could until I remembered that he was camping with Bennie, that he was not there, that his room was empty, his bed made, his school books scattered across the spread. I sniffed the air, my head up like a wild animal, followed the smell down the stairs, toward the kitchen, wondering whether I’d left the stove on, whether an electric line was smoldering somewhere in the cheap Sheetrock walls. The crowbar was still downstairs, in a corner by the door, and I picked it up, heavy and cold in my hand, as I saw the tip of a cigarette glowing in the living room. Marlboros. How in the world had I missed the familiar smell?

The way he looked at the crowbar in my hand made me flush. “Oh, what, Fran?” Bobby said, looking up from the frayed green tweedy armchair that I’d moved from one end of the living room to the other at least a half dozen times, trying to find a place where it wouldn’t look so bad. “What, you’re going to hit me over the head with a piece of pipe?” He shook his head. “Jesus Christ, sometimes I think you’re brain damaged. Sit down.”

After the first momentary taste of adrenaline, metallic and bitter in my mouth, I didn’t feel much. Certainly not surprise. It seemed perfectly natural, Bobby sitting there. Made for each other, together forever: me and Bobby, Bobby and me. He was in
front of me and the kitchen was to one side, and I could feel the phone on the wall where I couldn’t reach it. Like always, he read my mind. “The phone’s not working,” he said, flicking ashes onto an old magazine on the coffee table. “Besides, what the hell are you going to tell the cops? There’s a strange man who’s in my place, who happens to be my husband. Yeah, what’s he doing, lady? Oh, officer, he’s smoking a cigarette? Hell, we’ll be right over.” He dragged in, deeply. “The response time here is about twelve minutes, anyhow. Sit down.”

“I’m staying right where I am.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said.

He looked good, Bobby. He always had. His jeans were pressed, and I wondered who was pressing them now. His polo shirt was tight and his pectoral muscles and his abs looked like an anatomical drawing. His arms were big, the muscles thick and rounded. He’d been working out hard, and suddenly I could picture him perfectly, in the basement of the house, my house, doing his concentration curls and his crunches, getting bigger and bigger, angrier and angrier, picking up my panties and my bottles of perfume, waiting, waiting. Around his neck I saw a glint of metal, and nestled in the
V
of the polo shirt, glowing from amid the fur on his chest, the old medal his father had worn. It looked different, somehow, and then I realized that it was flanked by two halves of a jagged heart, the half he’d kept himself and the one I’d worn and left in the jewelry box on our dresser in Brooklyn. He looked handsome, Bobby, tasty and dangerous, just like Clarice Blessing had said that day in the ER. Tasty and dangerous. I figured he’d come to kill me.

“How you been, Frances Ann? You got yourself a real dump here. The whole place is maybe a third the size of our house. I was
gonna sell it, but your name is on the deed and the lawyer said I couldn’t sell it without your permission. Jesus Christ. I needed your permission to sell my own house.

“I had to tell him a story, about how you were in Florida. That’s a laugh, right? Even before I knew you were in Florida I said you were in Florida. I had to make up more fucking stories to cover your ass, Fran. First you were real busy, then your mother was sick, then you were in Florida because my twenty years were almost up and we were gonna move down here.” He lit one cigarette from the end of another. He’d smoked when we first started going out, but he’d quit after Robert was born. He put the dead butt out on the floor and ground it out with the front of his foot. He was wearing the soft black leather loafers he always got at the Italian leather-goods place on Avenue X. They were so shiny, in the dark. Bobby always shined his own shoes. “I don’t know why the hell anybody comes down here,” he added. “I wouldn’t retire here on a bet.” Two hearts that beat as one: Fran and Bobby, Bobby and Fran. Our wedding song had been “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” That was one way of putting it.

I was shivering in my thin nightgown and I wondered if he could see through it in the light from the streetlamps that oozed through the half-open blinds. He said something but his voice was so low that I couldn’t make it out, his head down, the cigarette in his mouth. Then he looked up and his eyes were shining, black, like the shoes, and I could tell he was repeating what he’d just said.

“You took my son. My son. My child. You took my son away from me. What, were you nuts? Were you crazy, you didn’t think I’d come after you? With my boy with you, filling him full of
garbage? And for what? Because I made a mistake and came at you a little bit. Jesus, I should have broken both your legs, you bitch, so you couldn’t’ve run.

“You had every fucking thing you could want. ‘Why are you letting her work, Bob?’ the other guys would say, but I let it go, figured if it made you happy, so be it. You had your house. My mother took care of your kid when you were at work, when you were late. All you had to do was pick up the phone. She’d say, how come she doesn’t invite me over, Bob? I’d say, Ma, you got to give her a little space. Always standing up for you. Being the nice guy. Taking the kid to the park. Telling my friends to mind their own business. She’s not too friendly, Bob, they’d say, and I’d tell them, well, she’s just quiet. Knowing it was a lie, because you could be plenty nice when you wanted to. But you didn’t want to be.

“You think it was such a goddamn picnic living with you, Fran, you always out of the house bandaging people up or whatever, give me your tired, your poor, but God forbid my husband needs a break. Sitting at the kitchen table pretending to listen to me, your skinny little Irish lips getting tighter and tighter when I talk, like you got something sour in your mouth. My mother’s a bitch, my friends are crude. You tell my boy I’m a bigot, Fran? You’re telling my son things when you don’t know shit.

“You want to hear something fucking sad? I loved you. I really fucking loved you, Frances. But nothing was ever right, nothing was ever good enough. You wanted to do what you wanted to do, go off with your sister, go off to the hospital, go off with your dyke girlfriends, just go off, go off, instead of being home, where you belonged. And even when you stayed home you looked at me and you looked scared all the time, like something bad’s gonna happen.
What the hell do you think that’s like, to look at your wife and see that she’s always looking back at you, sideways, sneaky, like you’re a grenade that’s gonna go off in her hand. Half the time I only came at you to wipe that goddamned look off your face.”

It was the first time in a long time it had been like this, the two of us really alone, without Robert a wall or a floor or a room away, so that I didn’t have to think about protecting him, about keeping my voice down. I don’t know why I didn’t scream then. Maybe I was making the same mistake I’d always made, that sooner or later he’d see sense, that I’d see behind his eyes the Bobby who used to kiss my knuckles, one at a time, when my hands were chapped from washing them with Lubriderm at the hospital. “You had no right to hurt me, Bobby,” I said.

“Hurt you? Hurt you? What the hell do you think you did to me? I used to come home, the house is all dark, I’m beating off in bed right next to my wife because she’s sound asleep. My boy won’t look me in the eye because she’s been telling him shit—”

“I never said anything—”

“DON’T YOU FUCKING INTERRUPT ME!” My back was against the wall at the foot of the stairs, and I kept hoping that the walls were thin enough that somebody would hear. But they always did hear, other people, always had heard and did nothing, left us alone.

“I come home one night and my wife and my son are gone, but everything’s still there so they couldn’t have gone too far, and I go to see your sister, and your mother, and that big dyke you worked with at the hospital. And she has the nerve to say to me, you been beating on her all this time, haven’t you? And I say, you been diddling
her all this time, too. She shut the fucking door in my face and called the cops. The cops!” Bobby threw back his head and laughed. I could see that his hair was going silver at the temples. He looked good. Handsome. I couldn’t stop shivering.

“It took me a while, I gotta give you that. Your sister, now, she is one tough bitch. No matter what I tried on her she wouldn’t give you up. I had her so she wouldn’t even pick up the phone, but she wouldn’t give you up no matter what I did. That woman, what’s-her-name, the one who’s always on television with the snotty voice, you can’t get near her, but some of her people are pussies, pure and simple. Jesus, talk about folding. The one who drove you down here, with the dogs, she was easy to shake up. And the guy in New York, when I threatened to have the New York City Police Department all over him like a cheap suit. That scared them, you could tell. They would have given you up sooner or later.”

He took a drag on his cigarette and smiled. What a smile Bobby had always had. It changed his whole face. This one made him look so scary I almost looked away. “I didn’t even need to wait,” he said. “I got this little box on the phone, caller ID. All these scared little cunts in the city buy ’em, like it’s somehow gonna help them when the bad man calls. You can scramble the numbers up so they don’t come through, but my good luck is, I know a guy in the department, he can unscramble them. That little box sat there for a long time, Frannie, but I didn’t take the damn thing off, and look what happened. Here I am. Because my son is loyal. A loyal boy. He calls his father and I write down the number and”—he waved his cigarette around the dark living room—“here I am. In Shitsville. Home of a woman who had everything a
woman could want and left it all in a mess. In a big fucking mess for me to clean up.”

“Bobby—”

“Ah, shit, Frances, don’t bother. I don’t want to hear your bullshit. Even when I was good you looked at me like I was gonna be bad any minute. You looked at me like you were just waiting.” He laughed again. “I didn’t want to keep you waiting, Fran. Not like you kept me waiting, a whole year, to see my boy.”

“He’s not here,” I said.

“You don’t think I know that? You don’t think I know exactly where he is, and where he goes to school? That’s why I waited, Fran. I could have been here two days after he called me. But I waited another week, and you know why? Because I’m a good father. I’m a goddamned good father. I waited so I wouldn’t fuck up the school year. So he could finish at that piece-of-shit public school where you put him. Don’t they all hate you, Fran, that you’re getting special treatment for your kid because you’re fucking the teacher?”

“I—”

“Never mind the lying. I’m so fucking tired of your lying. Lie, lie, lie.” He sighed heavily. “Frannie, Frannie, Fran. I know where you been working, Fran, and for who. I even know how much money you make. I know your phone number here. You got a loose window in the back. The screen flips right out, and the pane is so flimsy it takes maybe a minute to get it out with a glass cutter. If I told you once, I told you a hundred times you’re bad with security, Fran. Any animal could get in here. Anyone. My boy isn’t safe here.”

“We’re not going back, Bobby.”

“I wouldn’t have you back on a bet, you bitch.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “You know what the worst part about this whole thing is? I loved you so much, Frances Ann. Sometimes I used to fall asleep, after I had a couple of drinks, and I’d have dreams, but they weren’t made-up dreams, crazy shit. They were like movies of real stuff, like home movies. Like that time we went to the beach when Robert was a baby and we put up that big umbrella so he wouldn’t get burned, and I took all those pictures with the Instamatic, you sitting there next to that little box you kept him in. I was holding him, jumping the waves, and I looked back at you and you had that little smile you had sometimes, real sweet, real nice. I woke up and the burning in my gut was so bad I thought I was dying.