Falling Angels (17 page)

“What if I was?”

She draws away from him.

“Hey, hey, relax. You know your Uncle Rob, don’t you?” He strokes her cheek with the backs of his fingers. She feels the wedding band.

He kisses her again. And because the whole point of being
with him is to make him happy, she gives up. “Can we turn off the light?” she asks.

Ron immediately switches off the overhead. There’s still some light, though, coming from the parking lot. She sees the whites of Rob’s eyes. She sees his silhouette like any man’s. He begins to undress her.

Under the covers she is able to stop worrying about Ron. For once, Rob is quiet. No laughing or fooling around. It seems possible that in the dark Ron won’t realize what she and Rob are up to.

She is aware, obscurely, when there is bulk and movement on both sides of her. She is aware of skin pressed against her skin, back and front, of four hands on her.

But it takes a sound—a moan from one man and then from the other, as if an echo has passed through her—for her to get the picture.

“Oh, my God,” she says.

They try to hold on to her. She punches at them and pulls free and runs to the bathroom.

“Hey, come on. What’s the matter? Goddamnit, Sandy!”

She locks the door. Shaking, crying, she sits on the toilet.

The door handle rattles. One of them—how is she supposed to know which one?—tells her to open up. “I want to talk to you,” he says. She doesn’t answer. “Baby?” It must be Rob. “What’s the matter? Weren’t we having a great time? Come on. There’s nothing wrong if you’re all having a great time.”

“Go away!” she screams. She pulls off yards of toilet paper and weeps into it.

After a while she stops crying and looks at herself in the mirror above the sink. Nymphomaniac, she thinks leadenly. In the other room it is quiet. She lathers a washcloth and rubs at the streaks of mascara running down her face, wishing she’d grabbed her purse for the tube of cold cream she keeps in her
makeup bag. She combs her hair with her fingers, wraps a towel around herself, and with the intention of getting dressed in silence and taking a taxi home, opens the door.

They are sitting side by side on the bed, drinking beer. All over again she is astonished at how alike they are. The same hunch of the shoulders, the same pot bellies. The same blue bikini underwear. The one closest to her stands and starts walking over.

“I’m not coming out,” she says uncertainly, stepping back, glancing at his left hand and seeing the wedding band.

“Okay, I’ll come in,” he says. He closes the door, sits on the toilet and pulls her onto his lap.

“It’s just so disgusting,” she murmurs.

“Says who?”

“It just is.”

“You were having a great time.”

She pushes away from him. “No, I wasn’t.”

“Hey, I was there,” he laughs, holding her tightly. “Listen, it’s okay. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Everybody’s into swinging. Movie stars have been into it for years. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Jill St. John? The three of them get it on together all the time.”

“How do you know?”

“Everybody knows. It’s in the papers.”

She curls the grey hair behind his ear around her finger. She feels childish and on the verge of losing him.

“Ron thinks you’re a knockout,” he says.

She looks into his eyes. “Really?”

“Said you’re the cutest thing he’d ever seen.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

She slumps against him. “Is there any sherry left?” she asks.

That night she keeps turning on the light, climbing out of bed and staring at herself in the dresser mirror. Over the next two days she feels like she’s going to faint every time she thinks about
what she has done and wants to do again. She looks up nymphomania in Lou’s dictionary. “Excessive sexual desire by a female,” it says. She looks up swinger. “A lively, up-to-date person.”

On Wednesday night Rob is by himself. “Where’s Ron?” she asks.

“Aren’t I enough for you?” Rob laughs.

It turns out he isn’t. When they’re in bed, she feels a loss more overwhelming than the shame of feeling that loss, and she whispers,“I liked your brother.”

On Sunday, there his brother is, in the passenger seat. He has another bottle of sherry. She finds that faced with both brothers, out of bed, she needs it. In bed, however, lying between them, she is transported. One ejaculates in her vagina, and the other in the crook of her neck. Then they all polish off the sherry and fall asleep. She dreams that their father smells the semen in her hair, knows it means she’s a nymphomaniac and throws her down a snake pit. She wakes up in a sweat. And promptly falls back into a light sleep, in which she thinks she’s at home, lying in bed between her sisters like the three of them used to do when they were little. A heavenly peace settles over her. Then she wakes up again, realizes where she actually is and bursts into tears.

The man on her left wakes up and says,“Oh, for Pete’s sake.”

The man on the right says,“What’s the matter?”

She tries to tell them part of it, about not being a nymphomaniac after all, but they don’t understand what she’s talking about, so she gives up. With relief and for old times, and after a few minutes for everything that feels like a loss—Rapunzel, Jimmy, the Santa Claus man, their mother’s hair before it went white—she cries her heart out.

At the top of the street Lou has let the baby carriage go. She always does; it’s not much of a hill. But this time the carriage has raced too far ahead of her. And a car is coming.

“Stop!” she screams. She runs as hard as she can. She waves her arms. She can’t believe that the driver doesn’t see her or the carriage. The carriage is speeding up, heading for the intersection. Heading straight and stupid as an arrow.

Lou knows that the carriage and the car will reach the middle of the intersection at exactly the same instant. She screams. The car screams, braking. It hits the carriage, sends it flying. The baby pops out and lands near the curb.

Lou falls beside him. He’s on his back, crying. His face is as red as blood but not bleeding. She pulls off his hood and wool toque.

The driver comes rushing over. “Is it all right?” he says. He kneels down. “Jesus Christ, I didn’t even see you.”

You?
Does he think that Lou was holding on to the carriage? She glances at him. A guy their father’s age. “You should watch where you’re going,” she says angrily.

“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry. God.”

A red bump is on the back of the baby’s head. “Good lord,” the man says, then stands and hurries off.

“It’s okay, honey, it’s okay,” Lou says to the baby. She touches the bump. He cries louder. Gently she lifts him and rests him against her legs so that she can take off his jacket.

The man returns. “Wrap it in this,” he says, holding out a trench coat. “I’ll drive it to the hospital.”

“He’s okay,” she says. But she snatches the coat and folds it up to lay the baby on. Now she can pulls his pants off.

“That bump looks bad,” the man says.

“It’s not soft,” Lou says. She’s got some idea that soft means internal bleeding.

More people are around now. A couple of kids and a woman wearing red-checkered oven mitts. “They came out of nowhere,” the man says to the woman.

“Should I call an ambulance?” the woman asks.

“No!” Lou snaps. In a calmer voice she adds,“It’s only a bump.”

“Why are you taking all his clothes off?” the woman asks.

Because she is searching for another wound. The fatal one. She realizes she’s gone too far, removing his socks and diaper. “I’ve got to wrap him in this coat,” she answers firmly, as if it’s obvious he needs to be undressed for that. Although she takes care not to touch the back of his head, he struggles and begins to cry in long, shivery squeals. The weirdest sound. Lou feels like laughing. Pressing him to her chest, pressing where laughter will erupt from, she comes to her feet and orders one of the kids to pick up his clothes.

The man has turned the carriage upright. A wheel is bent. “I can put this in the trunk and drive you both to the hospital,” the man says, sounding a little reluctant, sounding worried now that she’ll say okay. Well, she’s way ahead of him. The minute he mentioned the word
hospital,
she saw some smart doctor, a Dr. Kildare type, bringing in the police.

“You better have him checked out just in case,” the woman says.

“I will,” Lou lies. “My father can drive him.” The little boy she told to pick up the clothes hands them to her, looking extremely concerned. “I once caught a bullfrog for fishing,” he confides. “And when I put the hook in it, it cried just like that.”

Before they reach his house, the baby stops crying. Inside, on the front hall floor, Lou unwraps the trench coat to check him for injuries again. Other than the bump, there is nothing. This strikes her as miraculous. The bump is huge and purple now, but she can touch it now without him squawking. She gets his bottle and moves it around in front of his face. His eyes follow it like radar, and since this is the only sign of intelligence she’s ever witnessed in him, she decides he hasn’t suffered brain damage.

Her story will be that she was out walking him when she slipped on a patch of ice and pulled over the carriage as she fell. She’ll say that she should never have been asked to walk him in
the first place, in these treacherous conditions. She’ll ask for an hourly raise. She’ll tie some gauze around her wrist.

He cries when she leaves him to heat his milk but stops on a dime when she puts the bottle in his hands. Wrapping him back up, she wonders where she can unload the trench coat for a few bucks. She carries him into the living room, sits on the chesterfield and starts to cry.

Until he’s finished the bottle, she cries and tells him she’s sorry. She wants to mean it. She wants to love him. She wants to love him and for him to know that she loves him. He’s just a little baby, she tells herself. But all she can feel is how heavy he is in her arms.

On the way there Norma pulls the car over three times to wipe fog from the windshield and from her glasses. When she finally figures out that the heater is sending out blasts of cold steam, she tries to turn it off. Their father won’t let her. He will I never admit that anything is the matter with his car.

She’s only wearing a thin spring jacket. That’s what he tossed at her on the way out the door. He made her hurry, as if they were late for an important appointment. As if this parking spot on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere would be taken.

She’s tired of these drives. Fed up, and that’s the truth. Keeping him company, thinking pure thoughts, praying and praying for him … none of it’s doing him any good. In fact, he seems more depressed than ever. As for learning how to drive, she’s sure she could have sailed through her test a month ago, but he won’t let her take the car to an exam centre. It’s nuts. What do you expect from a psychotic alcoholic? Lou asks.

Norma glances over at him. He’s staring at her arm with that sleepy expression he gets by the end of the six pack. But she thinks he’s had more than six, she thinks he was drinking at
home before they left. She leans against the steering wheel and wipes the windshield. Black clouds tumble up from the horizon, just as if a line of fires burns there. It makes her uncomfortable how his eyes fall on her after he’s been drinking. At least it means they can leave soon, though.

“Looks like a snowstorm’s coming,” she says so that he’ll say,“Let’s go.”

“Are you cold?” he asks in a sudden way.

“Yeah, freezing.”

He holds up a finger to wait and opens his door. Skidding on the ice, banging the hood for support, he makes it to the trunk and is a long time searching his pockets for his extra set of keys. She knows that he’s getting the blanket and that saying she doesn’t need it is useless. She is about to give him the keys in the ignition, when she hears his set drop on the ground and in a few seconds drop again. The simplest thing would be for her to open the trunk herself, but she can’t imagine taking over from him like that. She thinks of something else Lou said. The other night. They were in the kitchen, and their mother was calling from the t? room for some more “coffee,” and Lou, taking the whisky bottle out of the cupboard, said,“Considering our upbringing, it’s amazing one of us is normal.” There was no question she was referring to herself.

Their father opens the passenger door. His face is triumphant. “This’ll warm you up,” he says thickly, climbing in.

She sighs.

“Shhh,” he says.

He tosses the blanket over her legs and smooths it out.

She stiffens. And is instantly worried about offending him. But he goes on smoothing, very slowly and intently and ineffectively. His thoughts seem to have drifted. She looks out her window.

When his hand slips under the blanket, he continues to make smoothing motions, as though he doesn’t realize where
he’s strayed. His breathing quivers. She has stopped breathing.

He smooths her leg. Up her legs, up to her stomach.

Under her sweater.

She lets out her breath.

His hand is ice.

His head drops to her breasts.

“Don’t,” she whispers.

His hand roves all over her.

“Please,” she whispers. “Dad.”

His surprised, waking-up face lifts. She smells his beer breath. She shoves him away, and he flops back against his door.

She opens her door, climbs out. The blanket is wrapped around her left leg, and it hangs on as she runs. She can’t kick it off. She has to yank it free with both hands.

At the end of the road she stops running and looks back. The blanket, halfway between her and the car, has an animal’s shape. Something run-over. The car leans into the ditch. There is the blanket and the car and the fields.

Her heart beats in her ears, clangs like bells. Where their father touched her, she burns. She thinks that she must tear off her jacket and sweater and lay her flaming skin on the frozen ground. She covers her face with her hands and is lost for several minutes in a dark profoundness of disgust and incomprehension.

“Jimmy,” she says into her hands.