Jernigan (10 page)

“Waste not, want not,” I said.

“Believe me, I know how all this sounds,” she said. “But it’s actually more moral than going out and buying chicken or something. Do you know how those chickens
live
that you get at the store? You know how they
die?”

I didn’t, exactly, but I nodded yes so I wouldn’t have to hear about it. Of course she was right, although you had to wonder if all those millions of miserable chicken lives outweighed a single ruined human life, ending in a drunken human death by automobile. Apples and oranges, probably.

Walking past the cages again, I gave the deathbound bunnies a crisp salute, thinking of the old
morituri te salutamus
, although in fact I had it all fucked up, since I was doing the saluting and they were doing the moriturying, at least right now. Good and popped on that moonshine myself.

4

But the next morning, hauling myself up the steps of the train with a headache going above and behind my right ear, I’d lost what zest I’d had for all this. It was clear this morning that I had gotten myself involved with another crazy woman: this time, a crazy woman who shot rabbits in her basement. And who would shoot me if I now tried to extricate myself. Who would shoot my son. Shoot herself. Through inattention, through indifference, through—shall we for once just cut the crap?—through deliberately looking away from a father’s responsibilities, I had first let Danny become involved with this crazy woman and her damaged daughter, and had then allowed myself to be pulled into their delusional world.

I nestled between two men in charcoal pinstripe suits, each reading the
Times
C section. The theme was Home: today, therefore, was Thursday. Like
The Mickey Mouse Club
. Tuesday, Guest Star Day; Wednesday, Anything Can Happen. I opened up
Northanger Abbey
.

At work, a nice hello from Miranda, Kelsey’s pretty secretary,
except these days you have to call them assistants, with whom it would never go beyond occasional eye contact. Imagine Jernigan making eye contact: that should give you an idea of this Miranda. Three pink While You Were Out slips on my desk. All business calls; not one saying Martha. Everybody was going to have a normal day here at work.

Except that it turned out to be a disastrous day. I mean, to the extent you could take things at work seriously. Although you do. Especially when people are that angry with you. What happened was this. The week before—I’ll try to keep this brief; a bunch of work stuff is too dreary even for
Life of Jernigan
—the week before, I had apparently misplaced a decimal point or something while figuring up the cost of ripping out the internal walls in four floors of some building in NoHo. (Not even my listing, for Christ’s sake. I did the numbers as a favor to Coleman, since I’d had a little down time. A lot of down time. But again, whole other story.) With my rough and very much mistaken estimate in hand, the client had gone to his people, and the estimate prompted them to move some money they wouldn’t otherwise have moved. I mean, basically, who gives a shit. But at any rate, today was the day this whole thing came out. So. Big meeting with Coleman and Kelsey and our lawyer. Another big meeting, with the client and his lawyer and Coleman and Kelsey and our lawyer. I sat there like a bad boy, cursing Uncle Fred in my heart. As I had, pretty much every day, for ten years. With his fucking friend Coleman in the fucking real estate business. With his fucking
helpfulness
. The last meeting of the day was a one-on-one with Kelsey. During which I basically told him mistakes happen and what can you do. Which didn’t seem to fly all that well. I left his office thinking
Ten years of this shit
. Hey, like they say. Day at a time.

I had planned to take the 5:46, go over to Heritage Circle and mow the front lawn before it got dark. Even this late in the year, the front part grew like a son of a bitch. Watered by a martyr’s blood, I suppose. That isn’t funny. The back didn’t worry me so much: only three neighbors could see it anyhow, and then only if they stuck their neighbor noses right up against the chain-link fence, interwoven with green plastic ribbon. Well, I didn’t make the 5:46. I ran like a bastard through Penn Station and just barely caught the 8:37. That late a
train, at least you could get a window: this was the kind of thing you were reduced to thinking was a big fucking deal. I thought about Uncle Fred saying, “What the hey, do it for a year. The worst that can happen is teaching will start to look good to you, and you’ll go back with some money in the bank. Besides, it could be a goof.”

When we came up out of the tunnel and into New Jersey, night had fallen, and all the salmon-pink highway lights were on. I glanced around the compartment. All the men looked like me. Human basset hounds in wrinkled suits. Except they were drunk, lucky bastards, from their after-work stop-off at Charley O’s or something. Ties loosened, breathing through their mouths.

Once I was off the train and safe in my own car, I put the seat all the way back and just lay there, as if in a dentist’s chair, in the station parking lot. Only a few other cars left, in all that expanse. I closed my eyes and pictured the empty house, eggshell walls. Put the seat back up straight, finally, got the car going and went left on Hamilton Avenue. Instead of taking the right, which was how you got to Heritage Circle. Heading for Martha, however crazy she was.

“Hey
, stranger,” she said, opening the door. “It was getting so late I didn’t know whether to expect you.” Thanksgiving smell in the kitchen—sage and onion?—and Martha’s breasts swelling under a forest-green reindeer sweater. One of her thrift-shop jobs, I imagined. It must have been her idea of an autumn thing to wear, and I found myself touched by the way she did the best she could. “Danny’s in watching television,” she said. “And Clarissa’s upstairs sulking. We didn’t wait supper, but there’s some macaroni and cheese left. Or if you’d rather, I just finished a stew for tomorrow night. It’s actually better if it sits for a day, but.”

“Macaroni and cheese,” I said. Not ordering it up, but in wonderment.

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Danny insisted,” she said. “Apparently they had something on tv about Mom Food. You just going to stand out there?”

“Macaroni and cheese, please,” I said. “But could I have something else first?” Jernigan, being oh so winning.

These were still the days when, if we could, we’d spend a couple of hours in bed. I mean, a good part of why I was there in the first
place was just the weird novelty of having sex again. Something I’d pretty much given up on. Embarrassing as hell even to think about it now, but we’d gotten into this business where she was pretending to be a one-woman harem, working permutations on her name to match what we were doing. Martha>Marty>Martina>Tina. Sullen Marty was the boy, meaning I was to turn her over; bossy Martina was the lesbian, meaning I was to go down on her; reluctant Tina meant straight missionary, her arms at her sides. Whatever
that
was about. One afternoon we had experimented with Mr. T (Marty>Mr. T), which was her fucking me with a finger. When she got the second knuckle in I squirmed away, and her growls gave way to giggling. “Okay, okay,” she said. “We had to
try
it, right?” Meaning
she
had had to try it.

Tonight was particularly intense.

“So what’s it like, Mr. Jernigan?” she said when I absolutely couldn’t do any more. “Having your own little private cathouse at your disposal? Is it nice for you?” Dabbling a finger in the sweat on my chest.

“Oh
yeah,” I said. “Though I do sometimes wonder where it all leaves Martha, you know?” As polite a way as I could think of to say that I was no longer sure that some of this might not be a little over the edge. Apparently Peter Jernigan had come to believe in edges.

“Oh, fuck Martha,” she said. “She’s a drudge and a drag. Who cares, you know? The world is full of unhappy women.”

5

Eleven-thirty or so I finally got up and had macaroni-and-cheese dinner. Then still more bed, a good big glass of moonshine, and off to sleep.

Three in the morning I was back awake. Got up and crept down the hall to the kitchen. A line of light glowed at the bottom of Clarissa’s door, faraway music rasped and clattered. My son was here. And all was well. Or so I was willing to think. In the refrigerator I found
tomorrow’s stew. In a copper stewpot, yet: before opting out of the money economy, old Martha hadn’t done
too
badly for herself. I lifted the lid, dripping with condescension, condensation I should say, and went and got a wooden spoon out of the dish drainer. I stood there eating and eating. Rabbit stew, with still-firm quarters of potato, still-firm logs of parsnip. The stew part was gray and thick, and not at all disgusting.

IV

1

By October neither Danny nor I had spent a night in our own house for over a month.

“Has it occurred to you,” Martha said, “that this is getting silly?”

“I’m not complaining,” I said. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, in shirt and trousers, pulling a sock over my right foot. Martha was lying face-down, cheek against my left thigh, pulling down the sock I’d just put on my left foot. I wasn’t complaining, true, but this wasn’t the time for her to be proving she was still seductive. I was already
going to miss the 7:48, and I’d be lucky to get the 8:04. Although I was probably misreading simple playfulness.

She caressed my bare left foot with both hands, burrowed her head into my clothed crotch and kissed, rolled over onto her back and then sat up. “I don’t mean us being together,” she said. “I mean you and Danny shuttling back and forth with your clothes and everything. At least you’re not rousting him out of bed at the crack of dawn anymore to drive him over to your house for the bus.” She cocked her head, stuck out her tongue, crossed her eyes and made crazy-circles around her ears with her index fingers.

“I still think I was right about that.” I picked up the other sock from the floor and pulled it back on. “I don’t think you’re taking into consideration how weird this whole arrangement is,” I said. “Somebody’s going to start burning fucking crosses on the lawn.” This was Peter Jernigan talking, taker of twenty-three acid trips (I had kept count) and sworn enemy of convention.

“Well if anybody’s freaking out,” she said, “I haven’t heard about it. Nobody here even knows anybody.”

“Isn’t it pretty to think so,” I said.

“Why pretty?” she said. Oh well.

“Dear Peter,” she said. “If we could only get you to quit worrying about what people are going to
do
to you.”

“And live the rational life?”

“I like it when you’re angry sometimes,” she said, rubbing the small of my back, “I’m not saying stay home and fuck me”—she slipped a hand down into the back of my trousers and fingered my coccyx through my shirttail and jockey shorts—“because I know you have to go to work. But just think if you didn’t have to.”

“The unlived life,” I said, raising an Uncle Fred forefinger, “is not worth examining.” Neatly turned, I thought. Sailed by.

“But it’s so stupid,” she said. “You said yourself it was like being in high school.”

“Right,” I said. “Builds character. Teaches citizenship.”

She worked her hand inside the jockey shorts and poked with a nailed finger. “Mr. T says think straight.”

“Hey,” I said. She reached in further, up to her elbow, hand all the way between my legs and up the front of me. “Hmm,” I said.

“But promise you’ll always wear a business suit,” she said in my ear, undoing my belt with her other hand. “I like reaching around in baggy pants.”

“If I quit my job,” I said, lying back and letting her, “even my
jeans
are going to be baggy.” I was alluding, obscurely, to starvation.

“I would never let you go hungry,” she said, somehow understanding.

A knock on the door. “Dad?”

“He went to
work
for Christ’s sake,” I called. “You think the breadwinner can lollygag around the house all day?”

“You want me to come back later?” said Danny.

Martha nodded yes.

“Nah, hold on,” I called. “Be with you in a second.” Martha shook her head and silently booed me. “He’s got to catch the bus,” I whispered, standing up and zipping my trousers. “Back in a trice.”

“Drat,” she said.

Down in the living room, Danny had spread out the tablecloth I’d forgotten to put back over the tv the night before, and was sitting on it in full lotus position, the soles of his sneakers turned to the ceiling.

“Sbantib shantib,”
I said. “ ’S’up?”

“Listen,” he said, uncurling. “Do you mind if I use the house after school for something?”

“For
something?”

“Well, like, for band practice?”

“What band?” I said. Thinking of gold braid and tubas.

“It isn’t really like a
band
band,” he said. “I was just talking to this kid that plays bass? And he doesn’t like the band that he’s in and we were just going to get together and jam or something.”

“Great,” I said. “I’m glad. Sure. By all means.”

“And Clarissa can maybe sing,” he said, looking away. “Or I was thinking maybe about starting her on drums if we can’t get a real drummer.”

“Well,” I said, determined to encourage, “at least you could have her shake a tambourine or something.”

“Do you think it’d be okay if we turned up kind of loud? I mean not real loud, but it would sound better if we could have it a little loud.”

“Okay by me,” I said. “You might want to keep the windows shut so old Mr. Howard doesn’t call the cops on you.” (Cop with holster sitting at the kitchen table:
This is a normal thing to you?)
“He doesn’t strike me as a heavy metal kind of guy.”

“It’s not
metal
, Dad. You know, it isn’t anything yet. Dustin’s into the Smiths and stuff.” Whoever the fuck the Smiths were. “I mean it probably won’t even work out or anything. I never even
played
with this kid, okay?”