Little Children (20 page)

“It was okay. Just school, you know? You do the homework, you take the test.”

“So what went wrong with the bar exam?”

“I don’t know.”

“You could always take it again in the winter,” she told him. “I could help you study. I could grade your practice tests, and you could explain the answers to me. Sometimes it helps to talk things through.”

He was touched by the offer, impractical as it was, but he knew he was finished with the bar exam. He was never going to be a lawyer. He’d told Sarah he didn’t know what had gone wrong, but that wasn’t precisely true. He knew, he’d just never been able to put it into words. Something had happened to him over the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid’s day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can’t catch up with it, not even if you try.

“Mind if I suck your breast?” he asked.

In every way Todd could think of, the day had been a success, one of those rare occasions when your elaborate plan comes off without a hitch. He’d avoided the drudgery and humiliation of the bar exam and replaced it with a relaxing morning at the beach and an afternoon of uninhibited grown-up sex, a new milestone in his relationship with Sarah.

And yet the ride home was a somber journey, as if something had gone badly awry. But what? As far as Todd could determine, the only shadow on the whole experience had been cast by his cryptic half-remembered dream about the flashlights. Rather than offering some specific commentary about his romantic and professional dilemmas, the dream seemed to issue a more general—and somehow more disturbing—warning about the unpredictability of life, the impossibility of knowing or controlling your own feelings. You go to sleep happy, you wake up sad. You have no idea why, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Unlike Kathy, who no longer took much of an interest in the nuances of Todd’s emotions, Sarah seemed all too keenly aware of the shift in his mood. As she had in the morning, she reached across the console and took his hand; but this time the gesture felt more supportive than conspiratorial, as if he were a patient in a hospital, someone in need of cheering up.

“Remember that guy you were talking about? Your best friend from college?”

“Paul Berry.”

“Are you still friends?”

“We kind of drifted apart senior year. I started seeing Kathy, and the two of them didn’t really get along.”

“Did he ever become a lawyer?”

“Didn’t have the grades. He got into real estate in Westchester County just in time for the boom. Last I heard, he was driving a BMW and dating a TV reporter.”

Sarah checked her mirrors and changed lanes. She struck Todd as a trustworthy driver, neither too cautious nor too emotional. Kathy drove slowly, almost like an elderly person, but her whole personality changed the moment she felt that another driver was trying to take advantage of her, cutting her off at a tollbooth, or deliberately not allowing her to merge. In a split second, she transformed herself into a tailgating, bird-flipping demon, fully capable of pulling up beside the offender and loudly berating him or her through an open window, despite Todd’s frequent reminders that people had gotten themselves and their families killed for less.

“You don’t talk much about your friends,” Sarah observed.

“I don’t have many. There were a couple of guys from law school I was friendly with, but they’ve scattered. We exchange e-mails every once in a while, but that’s it. I think they’re embarrassed for me. They’re all working now, making real money, and I’m—”

“What about around here? Is there anyone you hang out with?”

“Just the cops on my football team. Most of the people I’ve met the past couple of years are women. I can’t just call them up and say, ‘Hey, let’s grab a beer.’”

She nodded and fell silent. A couple of times she opened her mouth, as if to ask a question, then stopped herself. Todd wasn’t surprised. He’d never had a girlfriend who knew how to be quiet in the car, especially if he seemed distracted or upset, or just not in the mood for conversation. It was some kind of female compulsion, this need to fill the air with talk, as if words could somehow paper over his feelings of sadness or discontent.

“It’s okay,” he said. “If you want to ask me something, go ahead and ask it.”

“I was just wondering about your frat.”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know. I never went out with a frat guy before. When I was in college, I thought they were all a bunch of sexist assholes and brainless party boys.”

“We probably were,” he said with a laugh. “I know Kathy thought so.”

“Did you like it?”

“Sophomore year I loved it. Junior year I put up with it. By the time I was a senior I was pretty much sick of the whole thing.”

“Was it like people think? Wild parties, date rapes, all that stuff? There was a frat at my school that got suspended after some townie high school girl drank herself into a coma at one of their parties. The Women’s Center used to hold these annual protests on fraternity row.”

“We weren’t like that,” he explained. “We were known around campus as the boring frat. A lot of our guys were science majors.”

“That’s so typical,” she said. “I had this whole stereotype of you as this arrogant frat boy with a hundred different girlfriends. I think it even kind of turned me on. Sleeping with the enemy or something.”

“There was this one weird thing that happened,” Todd said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Spring of junior year, this girl from the University of Connecticut came to one of our parties. Her friends left, but she stayed late, after everyone else had gone home. Pretty girl, a little bit chubby. Drunk as anything.”

“Oh God,” said Sarah. “I don’t know if I wanna hear this.”

“All right,” he said. “Forget it.”

She shot him a look.

“Come on, Todd. You can’t stop now.”

“I don’t want to upset you.”

“I’m a big girl. It’s not gonna
upset
me.”

“I mean, you can imagine what happened. At a certain point in the festivities, she just sort of volunteered to give everyone a blowjob. The whole frat.”

“She
volunteered
?”

“I swear, the whole thing was her idea.”

“Right.”

“I was there,” he said. “You weren’t.”

“She was drunk.”

“Everyone was drunk.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing. We talked her out of it. We told her it wasn’t a good idea.”

“Really?”

He gave her a look.
Yeah, right
.

“So did you—?”

“I didn’t want to. But she made me feel guilty, like I was insulting her if I didn’t.”

“I can’t believe you’re telling me this.”

“That’s not even the weird part.”

“What could be weirder than that?”

“She stayed the whole weekend.”

“Oh, God.”

“No, it wasn’t like that. She ended up sleeping in this one guy’s room, Bobby Gerard. Really nice guy. Total nerd. Never had a girlfriend before in his life.”

“And?”

“They’re married now. Three kids.”

“Come on.”

“I went to their wedding. So did a lot of our frat brothers.”

“Guys who were there that night?”

“Yup.”

“What was that like?”

“Like the whole thing never happened. Nobody joked about it or even referred to it indirectly. When people asked the bride and groom where they met, they just said, ‘At a frat party,’ as if it were the most normal thing in the world.”

“That’s creepy.”

“It was actually a nice wedding,” he said.

Kathy was in a talkative mood at the dinner table. She and Aaron had had a wonderful day. They had followed the usual routine, visiting a playground in the morning, swimming at the Town Pool in the afternoon. After that they’d come home and worked on the math cards.

“He’s getting really good,” she said. “He can put the numbers in the proper order all the way from one to twenty.”

“Really?”

“Almost.” She lowered her voice. “He had a little trouble with fourteen. But otherwise he did great.”

“Wow,” said Todd. “We’ve got a prodigy on our hands.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “I couldn’t do that until I was sophomore in high school.”

It took him several hours to understand his mistake. He and Kathy were lying in bed. She’d put Aaron to sleep in his own room, for once, apparently not so worried about keeping him close by after spending the whole day in his company. She was wearing excellent underwear, skimpy pink panties with a matching tank top, cut to show a lot of midriff. She read Stephen Ambrose for about five minutes, then clapped the book shut as if she had better things to do.

“I’m really encouraged,” she said.

“About what?”

She laughed, as if he were teasing her.

“The test, dummy. You seemed so relaxed at the train station. The last two times you were a complete wreck when you came home. You wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t play with Aaron. Tonight you’re like a different person.”

“I guess I’m getting used to it.”

To his surprise, her hand went straight to his cock.

“It’s been a long time,” she said, rubbing him through his boxers. “I know I’ve been a little uptight lately.”

“That’s okay,” he told her. “We’ve been under a lot of stress.”

She kissed him and he kissed her back. He felt himself stirring beneath her touch, but with a telltale soreness that reminded him that he’d already had sex twice that afternoon. He might be able to get hard again—it was already happening—but he wasn’t going to be able to come, at least not in a timely fashion. He reached for her wrist.

“You know what?” he said. “We better not.”

She released a groan.

“Why not?”

“I still gotta get through tomorrow. Better conserve my energy.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Can I get a rain check?”

“Absolutely.”

The following afternoon he made sure to look grim and exhausted when she pulled into the station. It wasn’t that hard. Day Two of the bar exam had been long, muggy, and aimless. Sarah had stayed home with Lucy—there was no way to arrange another day of baby-sitting on such short notice—so Todd was on his own, wandering around Boston like a tourist. He killed the morning on Newbury Street and the Common, then sat through a matinee in an empty theater after lunch. After that, he read a couple of magazines in a Starbucks before trudging back to North Station.

Kathy tried to hide her disappointment when he climbed into the car. She was subdued at dinner, watchful. When she asked him how the test went, he answered with a single word: “Terrible.”

In bed that night, she didn’t try to redeem her rain check. Instead she read for about an hour before putting down her book. She turned off her lamp, and rolled onto her side, facing away from him. After a long interlude of silence she flipped onto her back.

“Todd?”

“Hmm?”

“Tell me about Sarah.”

AS A SEVERELY LAPSED CATHOLIC, LARRY MOON DIDN’T ENJOY
waking up on Sunday morning, putting on nice clothes, and heading across town for eight-thirty mass at St. Rita’s. He much preferred the leisurely donuts-and-newspaper routine he’d inherited from his late father, a low-stress ritual that, oddly enough, seemed perfectly in keeping with the biblical injunction to make the Lord’s Day a day of rest. But his lawyer said go, so he went.

He’d met with Walt Rudman of Rudman & Bosch shortly after receiving written notification from his wife’s attorney that she was filing for divorce. A plump, silver-haired guy who actually wore striped suspenders, Rudman seemed less like a lawyer than an actor playing one on TV. He listened to Larry’s account of his marital woes with the sympathetic expression of an old friend.

“I don’t care about the money,” Larry told him. “I just don’t want to get cut off from my kids.”

“Do you have any reason to believe that your wife may try to limit your contact?”

“I’ve got a bad temper,” Larry admitted. “Sometimes I say things I should probably keep to myself.”

“To the children?”

“To their mother.”

“In their presence?”

Larry gave a contrite nod.

“Does this happen frequently?”

“Just a few times.”

“And you’ve been married how long?”

“Eight years. She gets on my nerves sometimes.” Larry sighed, trying to be fair. “Sometimes I get on hers, too.”

“It happens,” said Rudman. “Even in happy marriages.”

“I’ve got some anger management issues,” Larry admitted. “I’m fully aware of that.”

Rudman tapped his pink cheeks like he was applying aftershave.

“I hate to have to ask this, Mr. Moon, but it’s relevant to the situation. Have you ever been physically violent with your wife or children?”

“Absolutely not,” said Larry. “Never.”

“I’m relieved to hear it.” Rudman allowed himself a cautious smile. “So basically your wife’s main concern is with your occasional verbal indiscretions?”

“To be honest, that’s probably just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Larry filled Rudman in on the major tension in his marriage: The fact that he, a physically healthy thirty-three-year-old male, was retired, and collecting a disability pension from the police department. It drove Joan crazy, he explained. She thought he was stagnating, sinking into a swamp of laziness and self-pity. She wanted him to get a job, reengage with the world, get out of the house a little.

“Can you meet her halfway on this?” Rudman inquired. “It wouldn’t hurt to make a good faith effort to look for work in the next couple of weeks. Even a part-time position would be helpful. Candidly, a man your age, unemployed, the judge may not look favorably on that.”

“I’m not unemployed,” Larry pointed out. “I’m retired.”

“What about school?” said Rudman. “Maybe you can take some classes, learn a new skill.”

“I’d rather spend the time keeping an eye on my kids. You heard about Ronnie McGorvey, right?”

“I’m not familiar with the name.”

“The child molester.”

Rudman grimaced in recognition.

“I saw something in the paper. Or maybe on a telephone pole.”

“Scumbag’s right in our neighborhood,” said Larry. “That’s priority number one: keeping my kids safe from this pervert.”

“That’s completely understandable. I’d be nervous, too.” Rudman checked his watch. “Any other issues I should know about?”

“She wants me to go to church,” said Larry. “She thinks I should set a better example for the kids.”

“This is important to her?”

“Very,” said Larry. “She’s a big-time Catholic.”

“Why don’t you do it? At least for the next couple of months, until we work out the custodial arrangements.”

“But I’m an atheist,” Larry objected.

Rudman considered him from across the desk. Despite his pudgy, jovial face, he had a way of turning his eyes into steely slits that must have been quite effective with the jury.

“Do yourself a favor, Mr. Moon,” he advised. “Drop that word from your vocabulary for a little while. And go to church on Sunday.”

On the night they met, a little more than ten years earlier, neither Larry nor his soon-to-be-ex-wife would have won any prizes for being an especially observant Catholic. Had they hewn more closely to the precepts of the Church in which they’d been raised, Joanie probably wouldn’t have been competing in the Thursday Night Miss Nipples Contest at Kahlua’s, and Larry—along with his fellow bouncer, a huge taciturn guy known only as “Duke”—probably wouldn’t have been dousing the four finalists with buckets of extremely cold water. (Joanie received the somewhat disappointing honor of second runner-up, but that was only, as Larry explained to her after closing time over multiple shots of tequila, because he was just the water tosser and not one of the judges, who, in his humble opinion, needed to get their frigging eyes checked.)

And yet, despite their enthusiastic embrace of contraception and premarital sex (that very night!)—not to mention their theoretical willingness to terminate an unwanted pregnancy should such an unfortunate situation arise—both Larry and Joanie considered themselves to be good Catholics in some rock-bottom, immutable way that had less to do with religious practice than cultural identity. They were Catholics like they were Americans—it was their birthright, a form of citizenship that their parents had passed on to them and that they would pass on to their children, regardless of whether they toed the Vatican line on morally fraught issues like abortion and wet T-shirt contests.

Unlike Joanie, Larry had actually gone to Catholic school, attending the now-defunct St. Anthony’s through eighth grade—they still allowed the ancient, crazy nuns to teach in those days; it was a miracle he and his classmates could even read—and serving a brief stint as an altar boy, usually assisting Father MacManus, a young, virile priest who enjoyed a sweaty game of pickup basketball and eventually ran off with Dave Michalek’s hot mom, a deeply pious, ripely sexual woman who parted her lips and presented her tongue for communion in such excruciatingly slow motion that it always gave Larry a boner beneath his cassock (it apparently had the same effect on Father Mac, though the two of them never discussed the subject over Danishes and OJ after mass). After scandalizing the entire parish, the athletic ex-priest and the erstwhile Mrs. Michalek moved a few towns away, where they opened a video store called Mr. Movie, which did a great business until Blockbuster arrived and sent them into bankruptcy within a matter of months.

Although they’d started out in more or less the same place with regard to their Catholicism, Larry and Joanie had drifted far apart over the past decade. He could pinpoint the exact moment the theological rift had opened up between them. It was a Saturday morning early in their marriage, when they’d already been trying for well over a year to make a baby. On that particular morning, Joanie’s period was almost a week late, and both of them believed they’d finally been blessed by conception. They made love with unusual tenderness, in honor of the vast mystery of life, only to find blood on the sheets and themselves when they were finished. Joanie went to the bathroom to clean up; Larry could hear her sobbing behind the closed door. When she emerged, however—now wearing an old pair of flowered panties over a maxipad—her tears were dry.

“I’m sorry,” he said, stroking her hair when she lay back down beside him. “I thought we were home free.”

She rolled onto her side and stared at her husband with a brave expression.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Maybe God doesn’t want us to have children.”

Her remark stung Larry like a slap.

“What the hell does God care? All over the world, millions of people are having children. What’s He got against us?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “We can’t always know what He wants. We just have to accept it.”

“Maybe we should go to that fertility clinic John and Karen recommended. It could just be a mechanical problem, a blockage or whatever. Something they could fix with surgery.”

“Or it could be God’s will.”

“Listen,” he said. “Not everything is God’s will. If your VCR doesn’t work, it’s not because God doesn’t want you to watch a movie.”

“Don’t make fun of me, Larry.”

“I’m just saying, if your VCR’s broken, you don’t take it to a priest. You take it to the VCR guy.”

“We’re living creatures,” she pointed out. “We’re not VCRs.”

“Our bodies are machines,” he said. “Sometimes they just need to be tweaked a little.”

Joanie went to confession that afternoon, her first one in years, and to mass on Sunday. But on Monday she called the fertility clinic and made an appointment for a preliminary workup.

To their relief—though also to Larry’s lasting dismay—the problem was easily diagnosed: His sperm count was so low that conception was deemed “highly unlikely” through normal sexual intercourse. The doctor recommended in vitro fertilization, and Joanie didn’t object, despite the fact that a test-tube pregnancy was a highly dubious expression of “God’s will.”

“I wish I’d known this years ago,” he said as they left the clinic. “Woulda saved me a fortune in condoms.”

Joanie got pregnant on their first try, but miscarried early in the second trimester, a painful and horrible experience that she bore with a stoicism Larry found both admirable and a little worrisome.

“I’m leaving it in God’s hands,” she said. “It’s not something I can control.”

With some financial help from her parents, they tried a second round, and this one resulted in a successful, if difficult, pregnancy. Joanie was confined to bed rest for the last eight weeks of her term, a seemingly endless period of time she endured by saying the rosary and reading the Bible, as well as watching lots of TV (she had a weakness for the Home Shopping Network and reruns of
Taxi
). When the twins were born, her first words were addressed not to the doctor or the nurses who’d delivered the babies, or to the father of her children who’d held her hand and cheered her on through an eleven-hour labor, but to the Man Upstairs.

“Thank you, Jesus!” she’d gasped, as the two tiny infants were placed upon her breast. She sounded ecstatic, like a gospel singer from Alabama. “Thank you, Lord!”

Even at that sublime moment, Larry could barely hide his irritation.
What happened?
he wanted to ask her.
Did God change His mind? Did He suddenly decide it was okay for us to have children?

At the same time, his heart was so full of joy—the boys were healthy and beautiful, and he was going to teach them how to play football and baseball, and take them camping—that Larry almost wished that he shared his wife’s faith. He would have been more than happy to turn his gaze toward heaven and give thanks and praise to the all-knowing, all-powerful, sternly loving God of his childhood, if only he could have done so with a straight face.

He figured Joanie’s religious fervor would subside once she’d gotten her babies, but it only intensified. She turned into a fanatically regular churchgoer, and started badgering him to attend mass with her and take communion, partly for his own good, and partly because she wanted to present a united front to the twins. Figuring that an hour of hypocrisy a week was a small price to pay for domestic harmony, Larry went along with the program for about a year, until the fall of 1998, when his life got turned upside down and shaken hard.

In the winter of that year, his father was diagnosed with lung cancer. The cancer spread quickly, but killed him slowly—he died a miserable death, spared no pain and no humiliation, a hell-on-earth ending fit for a Hitler or a Jeffrey Dahmer, not for a good-humored guy who’d worked his ass off in his father-in-law’s auto parts store for thirty-seven years and got to enjoy maybe three months of retirement before the doctor read him his death sentence. Then, barely a month after they laid his father in the ground, Larry found himself standing in the food court of the Bellington Commons Mall, breathing hard and looking down at the gun-wielding criminal he’d just shot through the neck in a moment of adrenaline-filled terror, trying to absorb the fact that the “criminal” was a sweet-looking kid, and the gun in his hand a cheap toy, so fake-looking it was almost like some kind of cosmic joke.