Dirty Love (35 page)

“And none of these motherfuckers are ever getting that from me, baby.” Both of them were laughing now. Tracy’s eyes seemed faraway but sincere, and Devon could see this was Tracy’s code. It was good to have a code.

And was it that party when she caught Luke? Or the one over the line in New Hampshire? That brick house in pine trees behind an apartment complex where old people lived? Luke didn’t even bother to lock the door, and when Devon walked in looking for him, she didn’t know what she was seeing at first, Luke standing at the toilet with his pants around his knees holding a hairy pumpkin in both hands, his dick going in and out of it, the pumpkin a plump face and fine brown hair, Megan Monroe.

Devon had yanked the door shut so hard a mirror in the hall shook on its nail. She was pushing through dancing bodies holding Solo cups and smoking joints and cigarettes till she was outside walking in the cold without her coat down the driveway through the pine trees in the dark.

Something hurt and something didn’t. His face just before he jerked it toward her, his eyes closed, his mouth half-open, his sickness getting healed and it didn’t matter who the doctor was, and that’s what hurt. Her power was in every girl, in every girl’s open mouth.

Devon crossed her arms. She felt like crying, but she felt free of something, too, boring Luke McDonough and his constant need for her to be just one thing. She knew she’d never loved him, but had she ever even
liked
him?

Ahead was the building of old people’s apartments. Every window had curtains over it, the shades pulled, lamplight shining through the cracks. She wanted to keep walking, but her coat was back in the party and so was her ride with Bobby and Trina, and three hours later she was drunk in the backseat of Bobby’s car and every time Luke touched her shoulder or knee she’d pull away till he stopped doing it, and then for a few months Luke and Megan Monroe were a couple and maybe he’d texted his friends about what Devon Brandt had done to him whenever he wanted, or maybe, though she doubted it even then, Devon had become beautiful all of a sudden because only fifteen minutes into any party and a handsome boy was talking to her, one of the boys the other boys wanted to be, the LAX boys, the hockey boys, the big smart ones who lifted weights and talked about law school and business school and their bright shining tomorrows, and they always wanted to get her alone, and drunk or straight or half-drunk, Devon would wander down a hallway with one, or out onto a deck with another, or go on a beer run in a car with someone else, and it took a while, maybe a year, maybe more, before it came to her that those first steps with him or him or him were steps into her hope that
this
would be something—no,
this
would—that one’s cute half-smile, his eyes on her chin because he was too shy to look up, or that other one’s straight white teeth, his smile because he liked whatever it was she’d just said to him, and she would go and it was never any different, the talking going quiet, the hand on her waist, the kiss that didn’t lead to more kisses but to what they really wanted. Once or twice, maybe four times, she’d turn and start to walk away, but their voices—so hungry, so insistent, some confused and actually hurt, others with a raised tone, a little dangerous—it was easier to just trade his tongue in her mouth for what was behind his zipper.
It’s not even sex. Sex is when you give them
this
.

But then other girls began to treat her differently. If she walked by a group of them standing at their open lockers, or at the mall huddled outside H&M or Forever 21, or gathered around a keg in a loud basement under blue light, they’d glance over at her as coldly as if she’d just betrayed each one of them. It was like every girl had been sworn to some kind of secret at birth and now Devon Brandt was going around and telling each boy she met just what it was.

But Devon had never felt joined to these other girls in the first place. They had only begun to notice and respect her once all the boys began to notice her too. And these two things just did not go together.

One night in winter. There was ice in the streets, and Christmas was over but lights were still strung around the windows and doors and hedges, most of them unplugged, and Devon was standing with the others under the streetlight on the sidewalk in front of Bobby’s house when Belinda Miles ran up and slapped her across the face. “Stay the fuck away from Victor! You hear me?! I’ll fucking
kill
you!”

Bobby grabbed her and pulled her back, and Luke was laughing, four or five others too, girls and guys, though Trina was staring at Devon from under the streetlight. She wore a fake fur coat with a fake fur hood, her made-up face inside it all shadow. The next day Devon got a text from her.

People are talking.

So.

U cant do shit with hooked up guys.

I didn’t know about Vic.

For real?

He told me they broke up.

It’d been the week between Christmas and New Year’s, every night a party, and they were parked in Victor’s F-150 behind the beer store in Lafayette Square. Victor sat behind the wheel holding the cash he’d collected from everyone. He was Puerto Rican and had a fake ID and always smelled like a cologne nobody else ever wore, sweet and spicy. It made Devon think of palm trees and swimming pools. He was also quiet and polite, and he sat there telling her that nobody at school was as
bonita
as she was. His truck’s windows were fogged up. A car’s headlights swept through them, then away. He ran one finger along her cheek.

“What about Belinda?”

“We’re all done with that.”

Then they were kissing and then he was no longer quiet or polite, his hand on the back of her head, his moans so loud she was embarrassed for him. After, she stayed in the truck while he went inside for the beer. She wiped at her mouth. She wanted something to drink. She wanted to go back to when he was calling her the most
bonita
girl in school, and she wanted to stay there, in that moment, just a little while longer.

Victor dropped two thirty-packs into the snow in the bed of his truck, and he climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine without looking at her.

Devon said, “I need a beer.”

“You can wait.” And he said it without a smile. No sweet calm in him, just some kind of regret and it was all her fault.

T: You need a boyfriend, D.

Just before winter break, Devon saw a boy walking across the plowed student parking lot under the cold sun. He was holding the handle of a guitar case covered with decals and bumper stickers, and the only one Devon could read was:
Kill Your TV
. He was skinny and wore skinny jeans and a ratty dungaree jacket, his hair longer than hers, and there was something about how he moved through the lot of cars starting up and pulling away like they weren’t even there, the way he stepped over the guardrail and walked in his sneakers over frozen snow into the bare woods, his hair, his guitar, the way he could turn his back on them all so easily.

Devon was smoking a Merit up against the brick wall waiting for Trina, who had her own car now, and when she walked up, all shiny hair and tired eyes and breasts in a sweater, Devon said, “Who’s that kid?”

She pointed to the boy with the guitar disappearing into the woods. Trina shrugged. “Who cares? Sick Something, I know that. Who’d fucking want to be called
Sick
?”

A buzz against Devon’s hip. Old Zeppelin in her head. She leans the vacuum handle against the bureau and wedges her fingers into her front pocket and holds her iEverything close to her sweating face.

Sick: If u say so D.

Like it’s still two years ago and she’s blowing smoke out the side of her mouth and watching him and his guitar case get lost in the bare trunks and bare branches and all she wants to do is meet that kid.

If u say so D.

He doesn’t believe her. She stands there staring at his words. He doesn’t believe her, and he doesn’t hurt anymore that he doesn’t believe her, and she wants to write something, but what? She lifts her thumbs. They hover over the glass like snake heads. A new song, that old man Plant young again and in tight bell-bottoms, his shirt open, his blond hair curly long, and he’s singing slow that he’s working from seven to eleven every night, so tired there’s no blood left in him, and it was Sick who gave her these headphones, Sick who showed her how music all day in her head could save her. Her thumbs drop to the glass, and she’s going to type
U don’t believe me but u should.
Just that. But her iEverything buzzes in her palm like an egg hatching, and there, in the upper right corner, is a new one she opens, Sick’s falling away:

Is this u? Cuz this is me, the man who can’t stop seeing your face in his head.

An electric guitar is piercing her and it’s all wrong now and she’ll fix it in a second, she will, her insides rising up past the gray music for the bright news in her hand, her thumbs going to work.

T
HE RAIN’S BEEN COMING DOWN
for five straight days, and Francis stands at the French doors staring out at it. The ground is saturated. In the center of his yard a brown pool is dimpled with what keeps falling, and he worries about Beth’s flowers. What if they drown? That’s possible, isn’t it? For a plant to get too much of a good thing? His right knee hurts. It always does in weather like this. Ever since the front of his car had cracked the house’s foundation and the firefighters had to use the Jaws of Life to pry the steering column off his crushed knee. The poor woman inside that house had been baking pies. Thank God he was out for all of it. Beth at home after the hospital, how fortunate he was to have a nurse for a wife all those weeks he lay in bed on his back.

His insurance from the school paid for visiting help, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She switched her shifts to overnights so she could be home with him, and how efficient she was. She brought him meals just before he became hungry, his water glass always full, his urinal clean and empty, and when Francis had to use the bedpan she helped to turn him on his side just an inch shy of the pain that could fire up from his new knee and fractured calf bone and pinned ankle till she could wedge the pan under him. She knew to leave without a word, and that first time she cleaned him, his stench in the air, Francis’s face had burned. But when she was done she held the bedpan as if it did not hold what it did, and she’d leaned down and kissed his forehead and said, “I’ve done this more times than you’ve taught classes, honey.”

It was a side of her he’d never quite seen before, skilled warmth tied to total competence in all she did for him. It left him feeling both grateful and unworthy, which increased over the weeks of his convalescence when she just did not do what he feared she ultimately would: shame him for having gotten drunk, for crashing his car, for endangering the lives of whoever could have been on that boulevard or in that house on Thanksgiving Eve. Instead she treated him as if he’d already shamed himself and she didn’t have to; she treated him as an injured and afflicted man she did not want to lose.

“I’m too young to be a widow, Francis.” Those were her only words of admonishment, and they came that first day in the hospital when he opened his eyes to see his right leg in a sling suspended from a metal frame over his bed, an IV tube taped to his left arm. Beth’s eyes were dry, but her face looked soft with a pain she would not show him.

George was there too, his tie loosened above the vest of his three-piece suit. He’d been gaining weight over the years, and his cheeks looked pink and shaved too closely. He held up a thick blue hardcover.

“It’s
The Big Book
, knucklehead. Read it.”

And Francis did. One horrible story of drunken loss after another. But the only power he needed to surrender himself to was his unabated fear and remorse. There were his eyes opening to that jarring bump over the curb, the looming corner of that house, the splintering pain of his convalescence—no more.

Never.

Ever again.

The week after February vacation, his crutch snug under his arm, he relieved his sub at the school. She was a dutiful and officious young woman less than a year out of college, and she looked disappointed to give him back the reins. He patted her shoulder and told her he’d be more than happy to write her a letter of recommendation. He was more than happy in many ways.

There was the light-shouldered feeling he’d come close to his own execution but had somehow been given a reprieve he did not deserve but would take anyway. He would also take the daily rides to and from school, his driver’s license revoked until the following Thanksgiving. Usually it was Beth and occasionally George. For a week or two it was Rita Flaherty or the new young science teacher who drove a Mustang and called him Mr. B. Toward the end of that school year, though, it was his sister-in-law Evelyn who drove him in her own matching Seville.

Those first few mornings and afternoons, sitting beside her in the leather comfort of the passenger seat as Evelyn drove, Francis would chat about whatever came up for he was surprised to find he felt shy around George’s wife. For thirty-two years, he would only see her at restaurant dinners or perhaps a wedding or funeral, usually through the smeared prism of his weekend drunks. As Evelyn accelerated up the highway, Francis’s crutch on the backseat where she’d laid it, he was twenty-one again, home from the war, living in George’s house while Evelyn served him meatloaf and scrutinized him more than once as he played a game with little Charlie or held the baby, and in Evelyn’s quiet presence behind the wheel Francis felt caught, though why should he? He
was
caught. Everything was known and he was paying for it dearly. But in the midafternoon light, as she drove and he prattled on about one thing or another, mainly his various students and their varying troubles, he would glance over at his sister-in-law and take her in.

She was five years older than he but looked younger. She’d never been a smoker or a drinker, and except for some looseness around her eyes and under her chin, there’d been few changes in her face over the past three decades. Her hair had just begun to thin, and it was freshly styled and still auburn, the gray either colored or removed, Francis did not know. She wore a skirt and blouse, a silk scarf pinned across one shoulder, one of George’s gold gifts around her wrists and hanging from her ears, for rarely did she leave her house looking any different. But what he’d failed to ever notice is that Evelyn
listened
to people. On those rides that spring and a few times that fall, she certainly listened to
him.