Flesh and Blood (12 page)

He went into what would have been the kitchen, and Billy sat on a pillow. Then he stood up again and walked to the window. Headlights shone in the street now. The neon was lit. In an apartment across the street Billy could see the blue-gray flicker of television, and he knew a sharp, sudden envy. Someone was living the most ordinary and unsurprising of lives. Someone was sitting on his own sofa, popping a beer and watching the seven o'clock news. Billy resolved that he would drink a little tea, tell Cody it had been fine to meet him, and leave. He'd return to the order of his days, the simplicity of his skin.

Cody brought out two mugs of tea and stood with them in the light of the candles. He let Billy come to him. “Long life,” Cody said, raising his mug. The tea smelled bitter. Billy let the steam wash over his face but did not drink.

“Burdock root,” Cody said.

“What?”

“It's burdock-root tea. At first you hate it because you've lived on sugar all your life. Drink it, it's good for calming all needless anxieties.”

Carefully, Billy tipped the mug to his lips. The tea did in fact have a foul taste, like water that had pooled on a forest floor. Cody laughed.

“You have to give it a chance,” he said. He opened a box that sat on a wooden table, took out a plastic bag full of dull green-brown dope, and rolled a joint quickly, with the skill and focus of a baker. The box was elaborately carved, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. When Cody lit the joint, his face took the light of the match like a painting revealed on the wall of a cave. Cody's face was pocked, extravagantly lined. In repose, all his handsomeness fell away from him.

He gave the joint to Billy. Billy sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, felt with gratitude the familiar sweet burning. When he passed the joint back to Cody, Cody put his hand, gently, on Billy's chest.

“I can feel your heart,” he said. “Child, what are you so afraid of?”

“I'm not afraid,” Billy said. He let Cody take his hit, got the joint back, filled his lungs again.

“Well, if you
were
afraid, you'd have no reason to be,” Cody said. “This is just love, Mr. Will. This is just what you nose around for every day of your life. It only means good things about you.”

“I think—” Billy said. “Listen, I should go.” He gave the joint back to Cody.

“So soon?”

“Yeah. Well, I could say something really ridiculous like I just remembered I was supposed to meet someone, but really—” He hoped to be loved for his honesty. He was a good and kindly boy who still knew the limits of what should be allowed. Cody, a sweet fatherly man, would love him for everything he decided not to do. The air was full of shade and unsteady light.

“Listen, really—” Billy said, and his voice sounded remote, as if it were coming from another boy who stood in another room. He watched Cody put the joint in the ashtray and move closer to him. He felt Cody's hand settle, gently, on his shoulders. There was the woody smell. There were the faint clickings. Billy wanted and didn't want.

“All's well, child,” Cody said. “Don't you worry. This is goodness here, every bit of it.”

Cody's hands moved down Billy's spine and then Billy was on the other side of something. Then something was happening and even if Billy pulled away and ran from the apartment it would still have happened. He was on the other side and with a terrible sense of relief he let Cody unbutton his shirt. He felt, briefly, as calm and entitled as a child being undressed for bed.

“Lovely,” Cody whispered. “You're a lovely boy and that's a fine thing, to be thin and pretty like you are.”

Billy let the word roll around in him. Pretty. He put his fingers on the top button of Cody's shirt and with a rush of exhilaration he opened it. There was a new patch of Cody's skin, brown, speckled with black hair. Billy could not believe he had permission to do this. Blood hammered in his skull and a part of him floated up and watched, exultant, terrified, as his hands moved down the buttons of Cody's shirt. Cody's shirt hung open. Billy could see the soft muscles of his chest, the furred mound of his stomach. Billy careened between squeamish desire and a hot, howling embarrassment.

“Come here,” Cody said. “Come over here.” He led Billy to a mattress covered with pillows, and there he took Billy's shirt off with steady, almost clinical certainty, as if he, Cody, was a doctor and the shirt was doing Billy some slow undetectable harm. “Now lie down,” Cody said.

“I—;”

“Shh.” Cody put a thick brown finger to his lips. Billy obeyed. All he had to do was not say no. Candlelight moved across the tapestries like a breeze. He felt Cody unlacing his shoes. Suddenly, Billy needed to speak. Suddenly he believed that if he didn't hear his own voice in the room he'd lose himself. He'd disappear into the nowhere that hovered around the edges of the world.

“Listen, Cody,” he said, and his voice was small in the dusky air. “I don't think I want to do this, I mean, I think I'd better go.”

“You don't want to go,” Cody said. “That's just your voice talking.”

Billy was filled with rage. He could have kicked Cody—Cody's intent, lined face was bent over the toe of his shoe—and jumped up screaming, 'Don't tell me what I want.'

He didn't move. His own rage rose hotly to the surface of his skin and then turned into something else, something unfamiliar. Anger and desire and fear were so intertwined in him he couldn't tell one from the other. He lay quietly under the combined weight of them as Cody, with a soft grunt of effort, took his boots off and set them on the floor. As Billy watched his boots being set aside like that he thought, quickly and not fearfully, of his own death.

“I—” he said, and he said no more than that. As urgently as he had needed to speak he now needed to be quiet, to slip in among the pillows and tapestries and the jar of peacock feathers that winked in the semi-dark. He joined the room and anything could happen to him. Everything was all right.

Tenderly, but with the same clinical sureness, Cody opened the buttons of Billy's pants and pulled them off. Billy lay in his socks and boxer shorts, breathing. He had a hard-on and he was still embarrassed but now in an abstract way—he was embarrassed and pleased and he watched a line of pale green elephants bisect the fabric overhead. He had joined the room. Anything could happen. He saw his pants and his shirt puddled on the floor and they were the clothes of someone else, someone he'd invented.

Cody took Billy's shorts off. Cody whispered, “Lovely.” Billy was breathing. He was naked except for his socks. He was someone to whom the word
lovely
applied. Cody removed his own clothes. Billy raised his head and watched with a queasy, prickling interest as Cody shrugged away his shirt, kicked off his shoes, stepped out of his bell-bottoms. He wore no underwear. He stood furrily naked, erect. His arms were thin; he had a belly. Cody knelt on the mattress and rubbed Billy's chest with the palms of his hands. Billy didn't look at him. He looked back up at the ceiling, where the elephants marched trunk to tail, and he felt Cody's lips on his belly. Briefly, he panicked. His heart fluttered. This can't happen. This can't. But he held still and it was allowed. It did happen. Cody's lips, ticklish with their stubble, moved down and then they had taken Billy inside. Billy's stomach heaved. He worried about teeth. He didn't look anywhere but up. Cody's mouth moved. Billy said to himself, This is happening. He felt powerful and ridiculous. He remembered the forearm of the waiter who'd given him his coffee an hour ago. The waiter had been handsome in a pallid, dissatisfied way. His forearms had been pale and hairless, ropy with little muscles that jumped. Billy looked at Cody's bare shoulders, the top of Cody's windblown head. Cody's head moved and there was the sensation, strong but remote, edged with vertigo, nothing like the familiar thrills Billy summoned in himself, quickly, with his own hand. Cody's hair was black, disordered, innocent. The waiter had seemed hurt by his own beauty. He'd been sullen. The muscles in his arms had jumped as he poured the coffee. Billy saw that he could think of the waiter's arm and say to himself the word
beautiful
There was permission and he said the word, silently. The arm became beautiful and then the man did, an unhappy stranger with a shadow of mustache. A man who was naked sometimes, who would have slim hips and a sullen way of standing, with his arms folded over his bare chest. Billy thought of the waiter's sculpted unhappiness. He watched the top of Cody's head. Yes. Bix had put his blood on Billy's face. The waiter's buttocks would be small and precise. Yes. He thought of Bix—the quiet rage of him, the crazy light in his eyes—and he thought of the waiter's small innocent buttocks and he thought of himself lifted by strong arms and then with a single exclamation of surprise, he came.

That was it. It was over.

Immediately, it turned to nothing. It had been so much and now it was nothing, just dull shame and the desire to be elsewhere. Cody wiped his mouth, smiled. He patted Billy's stomach and reached with his other hand into the ashtray for the joint.

“Mmm,” he said, relighting the joint. “Delicious.”

Billy didn't speak. He saw that he was alone in a room with a lustful, crazy old man.

“It's all right,” Cody said, offering him the joint. “You're all right, everything's fine.”

“I have to go,” Billy said. He did not accept the joint.

“I know.”

Billy got himself off the mattress, put his clothes back on. Cody watched. Billy could feel him watching. He didn't want to look back at Cody but when he was dressed he had to and what he saw was a thin homely man sitting cross-legged, smoking the last of a joint, with a round belly and the purple stub of a penis protruding from a splotch of dark hair. Billy couldn't believe it. This ugliness, this sad flesh.

“Bye,” he said.

“Goodbye. Don't worry.”

“I'm not.”

“I'll be here another two days,” Cody said.

“I probably won't be seeing you. I mean, I have a lot of studying—”

“I know. Have a good trip. Please torture yourself as little as possible.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“Go. Go in peace, child.”

Billy nodded. He knew he could go now, and be forgiven. All his desire had evaporated. This episode didn't have to mean anything beyond simple curiosity, the open-mindedness all adventurers brought with them into a new world. Then he walked up to Cody—three steps—and put a kiss on Cody's lips. Neither of them spoke, Billy turned to leave. He felt a drop of moisture on his lower lip, Cody's saliva or his own cum. He could hear his boots clopping on the floorboards. He closed the door behind him, strode down the bare hallway, took the stairs two at a time. He crossed the malignant little lobby, with its varnished yellow wood and its rows of smudged chrome mailboxes, opened the glass door and walked out into the altered Cambridge night. It was April, the air had a living smell, though there would still be fitful little furies of snow in the weeks to come. Will took a breath, and another. He was out of the room but he wasn't out of it. He carried it. He had kissed another man, and he knew, abruptly, who he would be. As he turned onto Brattle he touched his own lips, curiously. A wild roil of happiness and terror caught up with him and took him so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that he stopped and stood, just stood, before his reflection in the window of a bookstore. He was exultant and full of dread. He had kissed another man. He let himself be inhabited by this new thing, this possibility. A leaf of newspaper scraped across his feet and in the electric lights of Cambridge he said his new name, quietly, to himself, in a tone of tenderness and surprise, as if he were speaking to a strange brother who'd been away for years and had suddenly returned, unannounced, to stand before him radiant and fierce and crazy as an angel, full of an angel's wised-up, immaculate sorrow.

1971/
It refused to happen. Susan thought it should have by now but nothing took hold. No tiny hooks caught on other hooks and began the long process of tangling themselves into hands, feet, the first stirrings of a silent red slumber. She charted her days carefully; she always knew. There were times when she thought, That's it. That was the little puncture. Now it's going to start. But nothing started. She was alone inside herself.

She didn't want to wait much longer. She wanted a family of her own. When she and Todd had a child they would be separate, complete; they would be respected. They would no longer visit their families on holidays.

Aside from the baby—a temporary problem—her life was good. Good enough. She didn't mind her job, typing and filing in the admissions office. She didn't mind Yale, though it did not open to her. Privately, she called it the fortress. She and Todd and everyone they knew lived within the fieldstone and lawns of the campus itself. Next to the campus a cluster of stores and inexpensive restaurants had grown up around a green and an ancient church. That was what offered itself; that was where you could go. Beyond the stores and cafes it was broken glass, black men and women, the dim dirty glow of the Greyhound terminal. Susan kept her circles small. She never complained. She made friends with the other girls in her department, young Yale wives like herself. She loved her boss, Mr. Morst, a reedy jovial man who smelled somehow like an overheated vacuum cleaner and had no aspect of sexuality, none. Mr. Morst made only modest demands. Please refile these folders, please type up these forms. He knew Susan and the other girls wouldn't be around for long, just as he knew that if this job began to displease them they could get other, equally meaningless jobs tomorrow. After the riot of confused, contradictory desires Susan had known in school this island life, this life of simple undemanding tasks, felt sometimes like a guilty pleasure. She did exactly what was needed, neither more nor less. The hours passed like boxcars, steadily, with a mechanical rhythm and order that possessed something of a cross-country train's measured, stately grandeur. Todd worked hard at his classes, and did as well as he'd expected to. There were no surprises. Law school became an increasing certainty, either at Yale or at Harvard. The days kept arriving. But nothing grew inside Susan, and she wanted it to. Until that happened, until the baby began to manifest itself, her days would be made of waiting. She typed student records onto forms, and always typed exactly on the line. She shopped, and cooked, and cleaned the apartment, and drank coffee with Ellie and Beth and Linda, the other girls at work. The others were trying to avoid pregnancy until their husbands graduated, until they knew whether their adult lives would be lived in New York or California or somewhere on the plains.

“I'm going to be raising a family for the next twenty years,” Beth said over coffee during the midmorning break. “I don't mind if my life's a little breezy for another year or two.”

Ellie added, “My mom made me promise to wait till I'm twenty-three. She says a girl any younger than that can't raise a child because she's still a child herself.”

“I guess,” Susan said. “But you know, I have this feeling that somebody's waiting for me. I mean, my baby is.”

“How's that?”

She sighed, and her breath rippled across the surface of her coffee. “Oh, don't pay me any attention,” she said. “I don't know what I'm saying half the time. It's just that I have this, I don't know, feeling. It's like my baby already exists, and he's just waiting for me to catch up with him so he can get started on his life.”

“Or her,” Linda said.

“But I feel like the first one will be a he. I feel sure about it. That's what I mean. I keep thinking this is already a person, right now, and I'm just holding things up. Like if I wait too long this person will just disappear.”

“It's better to have a baby after you're settled,” Beth said. “You don't know where you and Todd'll be this time next year. If you got pregnant now, I mean right now, tonight, you could be moving to some remote place with a three-month-old.”

“Todd isn't applying to law schools in any remote places,” Susan said, and she felt a furtive glow of satisfaction. Of the four girls, she had married the boy whose future seemed least subject to question. Beth's husband, Arnie, had switched his major suddenly, from engineering to journalism. Linda's Bob had failed two of his classes. These girls needed to protect themselves, to measure their lives as best they could, because they might be blown anywhere.

Linda said, “I bet when you've got a three-month-old, the supermarket feels like a remote place.”

“Oh, everybody makes too much of a fuss,” Susan said. “My mother had my brother and me before she was twenty-one, and no money, and she did just fine.”

Again, Beth and Ellie glanced at each other. “Well, I'm not my mother,” Ellie said. Susan knew she was the outsider, the one banded against. After she left the job she wouldn't know these girls anymore.

“I'd better get back to work.” She sighed. “Terrible calamities will happen if I don't get my folders filed by noon today.”

“Right,” Beth said with exaggerated patience. As they left the employees' lounge Linda's skirt caught on her nylons and showed the rippled white heft of her thighs. Susan saw, with a brief and terrible clarity, how Linda's future would fall. Linda's husband wouldn't make enough money. Linda would get fat—it was already starting—and stay at home with her children as her husband's orbits grew wider and wider around a house like the ones Susan's father built, a house made of wire brads and false wood.

Her father's houses were waiting for people who didn't do well enough.

Susan knew Linda had been cheerful and unremarkable in high school, a friend of the more popular girls because she carried no hint of danger. She knew Ellie had offered willingness as apology for her flat bust and her lack of chin. Susan saw these things automatically, the way a jeweler can't help seeing the relative value of a stone. She tried not to pass judgments but she saw what she saw and could not seem to see in any other way. To punish herself she remembered Rosemary, crowned and weeping on the football field. She reminded herself, Don't start feeling too superior. You were only a princess, you didn't win. But the more she thought about that, the more obdurately her mind seemed to insist on Linda's plainness, Beth's lack of spark, Ellie's habit of wearing too much rouge and eyeliner.

When she got home, she found Todd at his desk. He was turning into someone. She watched it happen. He'd bought himself new glasses, with licorice-colored rims. A certain boyishness had evaporated—his old, transparent need to be loved—and in its place was a newer need to work. Susan thought of his studies as devourings. He worked through his books with an implacable hunger. Somewhere, buried, was repose and satisfaction, the golden moment, but to get there he had to eat his way through miles of printed pages. He had to write his way to it, to answer every question fully and correctly, to so thoroughly understand the concepts that the concepts themselves were remade in his stern, laboring image.

“Hi,” she said from the doorway.

“Hi.” He looked up, smiled, pushed his glasses higher on his nose. His forearms were heavy and powerful, lush with bright blond hair.

She went to him, rubbed his shoulders. “How's it going?” she asked.

“Okay,” he said. “International finance is a monster.”

“I'm sure.” Now that he was an upperclassman, the subjects he studied were vast and remote as the rumors of mountain ranges in Asia. During the first two years, Susan had kept track. She could imagine twentieth-century literature; she could imagine cellular biology. But now he studied invisible laws of commerce, the history of ideas. She watched him grow denser, older, with what he knew. She thought about babies, who would need her to teach them goodness. Who would require goodness of her, every hour.

“How was your day?” he asked.

“Fine. Same as always. I'm going to put dinner together.”

“Okay.”

She gave his shoulders a final squeeze, and went into the kitchen. The apartment was snug and unremarkable. It was their first home together but Susan couldn't seem to make it mean anything. It was so obviously temporary, like her job. She kept it clean, bought flowers occasionally. Every morning, she knew what she would fix for dinner that night. Each day spawned the next and at odd hopeful moments she felt something struggling to come through her, a gentle but insistent pushing on the fabric of her skin.

The telephone rang while she was rinsing lettuce.

“Hello?”

“Hi, honey.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Am I calling at a bad time?”

“No. I'm just starting dinner. How are you?”

“Oh, we're okay.”

Susan heard it, and knew. She knew, from the buzz that lingered on the wire.

“What's happened?” she asked. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing big. Billy just called from school and told me he's not coming home for Christmas, it's no big deal.”

“Where's he going?”

“Some friend of his. Someone with a cabin somewhere. Vermont. A cabin in Vermont.”

“Well, that sounds like fun,” Susan said. “Mom, Billy's got his own life now. He's not necessarily going to be coming home every holiday.”

“Oh, I know that. Don't you think I know that? He's got to do his own thing. I want him to.”

“But?” Susan said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“But what? I know you're not happy about this.”

“Well, honey, of course I'm not
happy
about it. What mother doesn't want her children to come home for Christmas?”

Susan held the headpiece to her ear with her shoulder and started tearing up lettuce for the salad. “It's something else,” she said. “What is it?”

“Oh, honey, you know.”

“Tell me.”

“You and I know perfectly well that Billy doesn't want to come home for Christmas because of your father. I knew this would happen. I've been expecting it. Do you remember last Christmas?”

“I'll never forget it.”

Susan heard her mother take a breath. She heard the thickness in her mother's throat,

“Your father's driving Billy away,” her mother said. “It makes me so darn mad.”

“No one's driving Billy away, Mom. He's in college, his life is changing. He'll be back.”

“Sometimes I could murder your father. I mean, why is he so stubborn? Do you have any idea? I watch him pick these fights and I beg him to stop but he won't. He won't stop. He can't stop, he's like a bull.”

“Well, Mom.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean, well, you married him, didn't you?”

“What kind of thing is that to say? I married a boy, twenty-two years ago. People change. You don't know that yet. Not that I think Todd will change. Todd is different.”

“I don't believe anybody changes that much,” Susan said. “If Dad can be a bully now, he must have been a bully then.”

“He's not a bully. Honey, I never said he was a bully. I said he was like a
bull”

“Oh, come off it. He can be terrible. He's—”

“Honey, I love your father. Your father is my whole life.”

“I didn't say you didn't love him.”

“I'd do anything for your father.”

“Mom, listen—”

“So, tell me. How's Todd?”

“Todd's fine. Working hard, as always.”

“That's great,” her mother said. “He's a real workhorse, that Todd. And what about you, honey? That job of yours isn't getting you down, is it?”

“No, the job's fine. Listen, it'll be okay, about Billy. He'll grow up and he and Dad will work things out.”

“Oh, I know. I know that. These are just growing pains, every boy goes through it. I'm going to let you get back to your dinner, Todd must be starving.”

“Okay. Mom?”

“Mm-hm?”

“Nothing. Daddy's not home now, is he?”

“Your father? Oh no, he's still working. You know him. He and Todd are two of a kind, a pair of workhorses. When you come home for Christmas, don't let him bring any books with him.”

“I'll see what I can do.”

“I can't wait to see you, honey. Christmas can't come soon enough. Give Todd my love.”

“Okay. Bye, Mom.”

“Bye. Nice talking to you, sweetheart.”

Susan hung up and stood for a while. She waited for time to pass. She would not cry, not tonight. She finished tearing up the lettuce, got a tomato from the refrigerator. She waited, and returned to her life, its regular motions, the unhaunted brightness of her temporary kitchen. This is my life, she thought, and I'm standing right here in the middle of it. She sliced the tomato. She didn't think of anything.

That night, she and Todd made love. She knew he was exhausted. He'd happily have given her one brief dry kiss and slipped away. But it was one of her nights. She ran her palms down his broad back, kissed him lingeringly, and he understood. He cupped her breasts, worked his mouth along the nape of her neck. He moved up under her nightgown, touched her gently between the legs. She moaned over his simple probing. Marriage had diminished and deepened the mystery. She'd seen him on the toilet. She'd known him rank and sour. She'd caught him looking so empty and stupid and self-satisfied that she'd thought, This is the end of my interest. He can't return from this. But at the same time his flesh expanded with familiarity. His particulars—the cross-stitch of fine hairs on his abdomen, the single thick vein that slumbered along his biceps—had become hers as well, so that the sight of them inspired a wash of mournful tenderness she'd neither known nor imagined, a careening sensation of possibility and loss. She believed, now, that no one was ever sure about love. Love arrived obliquely, at angles, but even when it lay dormant a boundary had been crossed, a sanctity relinquished. All her certainty, the sameness of her days, was infiltrated now with the fear that something might happen to Todd. If he was hurt or grew ill, if he died, some part of her would be set free but another part, a part that weighed more, that had more of Susan about it, would be silenced forever.

“Oh,” she whispered. There it was, the tip, pushing against her, pushing itself in. Todd was tired. This would be especially short. She ran her hands up and down the muscles of his back. The strength of him still impressed her. The flesh that lay under his skin was so knotted, so continually tense. She imagined Todd living in a state of ongoing physical pain that only released its hold when he slept and when he made love. She believed a body so large and muscled must hurt, and as she touched him she thought of smoothing him out, untangling him.