Picturing Will (22 page)

“What are you two doing?” Wayne said, rubbing his eyes.

“We’re ghosts from the prehistoric world here to haunt you,” Zeke said, bobbing and weaving as though a basketball were in play. He approached an invisible hoop, retreated, feinted, submerged himself in the water. Will was starting to enjoy himself. What if Zeke really was a monster—a too-tall, lanky monster who was a
real
monster in spite of putting on a charade, a person whose spine had magnetic powers? Zeke went down, Will shot up; Zeke submerged himself entirely, Will rose up as though leading his team to victory, waving his arms.

“Be careful with him,” Corky hollered from the sidelines.

“He can swim,” Zeke said and, giddy, Will shouted that he could. Zeke was bobbing and weaving, the imaginary ball suspended for longer than would have been possible, the crowd growing restless. Will’s knees became Zeke’s earmuffs. His hands on top of his head became his helmet. Will’s shrieking became the roar of the crowd. Will was riding on Zeke’s slender shoulders and Zeke was a man with a purpose, a man in motion, a person about to reach the goal—which was the far side of the pool, the side near Wayne, in deep water.

Suddenly a car pulled into the driveway at high speed, the radio blaring. A sandy-haired man got out of the driver’s side, leaving his companion in her seat. She turned the music down. The man peered over the roof of the car for a few seconds, then started toward them. As he walked, the woman inside the car threw open her door. She extended one tanned leg. She had low, pointed-toe white boots, Wayne saw, as she swung her other leg out of the car. The car was a Mazda RX-7—the car Wayne thought was the sharpest thing next to a Jaguar. The man walked toward them hesitantly, pushing his sunglasses to the top of his head and squinting.

“Hi. What’s going on?” the man said.

“It’s a swimming party, is what,” Zeke said. Zeke didn’t like the way the man was walking toward them. If the man took them for rich folks, he might think it was a fine time to rob them and take off fast. There was something hostile about the way the man moved.

“What can we do for you?” Wayne said, standing. He, too, wondered what the man was doing there. The music coming from the man’s car was “We Are the World.” Cyndi Lauper’s voice cut through the air.

“Just wondering what was going on,” the man said. “I was going to take a dip, and I wasn’t expecting to find anybody.” He hesitated, looking at the women. At Zeke, who had turned his back on him and was bobbing, with Will, toward the other end of the pool. The man looked at Wayne and frowned. “Are you friends?” he said.

“Are we friends, or are we friendly, do you mean?” Wayne said.

“I mean: Who are you?” the man said. “This is my mother’s house.” Only when he spoke the last words did his voice take on an edge. But Wayne was relieved to know why the man had stopped. He hated it when he was stopped by a cop and had to watch the cop approach the car.

Wayne extended his hand. “I’m Wayne,” he said. “Your mother was kind enough to offer us the use of her pool for the day.”

The man shook his hand tentatively, still frowning.

“She’s in New York,” Wayne added. That was the thing to do: tell her son that she was in New York. So why was he still puzzled?

“Please. Go right ahead,” the man said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go in the house and call New York.”

Zeke stopped playing with Will.

“Sure,” Wayne said, sitting down. He was thinking that the pool was his for the day. She had said that it was theirs for the day.
It was theirs by right
. He watched the man walk toward the house. Tight-ass, he thought. Why make a federal case out of everything? He looked like his mother, but on him the high forehead only seemed conspicuous. His mother had a pretty widow’s peak, and nicely arched eyebrows. Her face looked very clear. Her son was a tight-ass who was balding.

Corky came over to Wayne. “Nothing to worry about,” Wayne said. “Why’s he making a big deal? If he wants to call Mama, let him call Mama.”

Theirs by right
.

He watched the man open the back door. He would be going to the phone in the Florida room, filled with white wicker and hanging plants with little red flowers that looked like open mouths with forked tongues spitting. The nursery Wayne worked for did not have those plants. He had looked for them, out of curiosity, to see what their name was. Who did her son think they were? Criminals?

Mine by right
, Wayne thought. Maybe she hadn’t known that Will would be at the pool, and Susan, but could she really care that there were five people instead of three? He had been upfront. He had let her know earlier that he was married. She wouldn’t have thought that he was going to have a swim without his wife, would she? And most couples had children, didn’t they?
Mine by right
, he thought again, but this time he was fueling himself in case there was any problem. He understood that it wasn’t exactly his by right. Corky sat on the towel next to Susan again, but their conversation was strained. They would not have a good time until the man came out of the house and gave them his blessing. What does he think—he’s the fucking pope, because the old lady’s got some bucks? Wayne thought.

In a few minutes, the man came out of the house. Now he was trying to appear casual. Wayne looked at the man walking toward him, his hands in his pockets. What kind of man was he that he’d leave his girlfriend in the car in the heat? His high forehead gleamed in the sunlight.

“Well,” the man said, shaking his head as if he had very much amused himself with his folly. “That’ll teach me not to reconfirm my plans with my mother, I guess.”

“Hey, stay and have a swim,” Wayne said. “Water’s great.”

“Honey!” the woman in the car called.

“No. Sorry to interrupt you. I guess we’ll be pushing on.”

I could have fucked your mother if I’d wanted to, Wayne thought. You unhappy to see me and my friends in the pool? What if I had fucked her?

The man bent to shake Wayne’s hand. Wayne was damned if he’d rise a second time. The man had wanted to know what he was doing there? He’d told him. He wanted to check? He checked. Furthermore, even if the pool wasn’t his by right, at least he was swimming there because the lady of the house was smitten with him. He could make the beast with two backs with the lady of the house as soon as she got home. Maybe on the floor of the Florida room, on the cold tile, with that ceiling fan going around and around. The room he had stood in as she wrote a check, asking: “Do you get tired of flowers? When you see so many, do you—does a person—get tired of flowers?”

The next time he saw her he would take her up on her offer of something “more substantial” when he finished work. Send Zeke back in the truck. Have his own car, then fuck her, fuck her for her pretty eyes and her high forehead and because she wanted him to, and now because she had a son who wouldn’t like that.

Corky and Susan were talking louder. The man was almost back in his car. See? Wayne thought. You get those big-buck guys, they leave you sitting in the sun like you were a piece of tumbleweed on the desert. You think rich people have good family lives? Her husband’s always in New York, and she wants to fuck the guy who’s planting bushes on the hillside, and her own son didn’t know she was in another city when he stopped by. You think that was his wife in the car? A wife with white boots who calls him honey?

Will wanted to know who the man in the flashy car was.

“Nobody important,” Wayne said, and tried to mean it.

“He should of stayed and gone swimming. We’re not lepers or anything,” Susan said, combing her black hair.

Wayne jumped into the pool and kicked water high in the air, wetting Corky and Susan at the side of the pool, making Susan yelp and Corky run for cover. He meant to bring back the spirit of fun. The man and his girlfriend had driven away. Let them have their sports car and let him have his keys to Mama’s house.
Mine by right
, Wayne had started to think again.

Will was giggling, sitting on top of Zeke’s shoulders. Watching them through the geyser of water he kicked up, Wayne was happy that Will was having a good time. In his heart, he always trusted that he could amuse him. If his friend was the temporary stand-in, so be it. Wayne stopped kicking and swam to where his feet could touch bottom. Then he peed, luxuriating in the scalding rush of urine around his legs, staring at the fixed point of Zeke standing in shallow water with Will balanced atop his shoulders. If it were his house and he had the keys, he could have gone inside to pee. As it was, the only thing to do was jump in the pool and do it in the water. A little urine wouldn’t hurt anyone, diluted by all the chlorine. And—like everyone who pees in a pool—he was convinced that he wasn’t the only one. Like everyone else, for the umpteenth time in his life, Wayne was just going with the flow.

NINETEEN

I
t did happen on the floor of the Florida room, after Wayne had two shots of Chivas on the rocks, drunk out of crystal glasses that acted as prisms as the day drew toward evening, throwing marbly bits of light on the wide white columns separating the sliding glass doors. A quilt had been pulled from the sofa. She was more drunk than he and informed him the quilt was versatile. That her husband liked things that were versatile. Her son, she said, was simply wrong about the date.

Elliott had had surgery. There was a scar low on her belly, on the right side. As she lay back, her earrings clattered on the tile floor: long silver-and-agate earrings. She told him what agate was. He was licking the stones, and she said, “Does the agate feel cold on your tongue?”

He didn’t ask where she got a name like Elliott. People who had money often named baby girls for their uncles, deceased. Or they gave babies an important surname they didn’t want lost when a woman took her husband’s name—they put it first, like a person with a sweet tooth who eats the dessert before the meal. As a baby, did they call her Ellie?

Jody was going to name the first, he was going to name the second, but there was no second.

Elliott said: “My husband likes me to wear freshwater pearls. Pearls are different colors, you know—not just white. They can be silver-gray. Many different colors. But the way a pearl feels—it isn’t hard, like a diamond. Some irritation causes pearls to form. Something deep inside that couldn’t be gotten rid of. He thinks of that, I know, when he tells me to wear pearls.”

“What does your husband do?” Wayne said, kneeling between her legs.

“Arbitrage,” she said. “He wears socks that come up to his knees. He sleeps in them, the way Mormons sleep in their undergarments.”

The ceiling fan.

“He pushes them down around his ankles when he’s in bed, but he keeps them on. He gets up at six o’clock. He has his back worked on by an acupuncturist. Little porcupine quills. He relaxes with a Magic Slate: making squiggles on a Magic Slate, then pulling up the top sheet, sloooowly, like someone removing a bandage with a lot of adhesive. Sometimes he gets up at five-thirty in the morning. All his socks are black.”

Wayne was not used to making love to women who talked. Her legs were the smoothest he had ever felt. There was not even hair on her thighs. He rubbed his hands down her legs, feeling the muscles under her slick, soft skin. She lived in Florida, but she was not tan. He leaned toward one nipple, licking around the areola, his eyes closed. A few tiny hairs surprised him, like seaweed when you were swimming. Her legs were hugging him tightly. He was not yet inside her, but his penis was hard, horizontal over her belly as he kissed between her breasts. Little kisses. Baby-step kisses. One two three. It took five little kisses to get from the left breast to the right. Her fingers gently touched the head of his penis.

“Amber takes a high polish,” she said. “It’s vegetable resin.”

“You’re teaching me things?” he said, inserting the tip of his penis. Pearls would be shot inside her. He pushed another inch deeper. She was smiling pleasantly, as if she had run into someone on the street whom she knew. When she came, she winced and looked unhappy, as if the person on the street had quite unexpectedly stepped on her foot.

He had his shirt on. As she rolled away, she tugged the material. His pants and his undershorts were on the wicker chair. He opened his mouth to breathe. She went into the bathroom and came back wearing a pale blue robe. The sash dangled down the front. A stain had seeped through, high up, over her thigh.

“Who’s your wife?” she said, as if no time had intervened between his asking about her husband and her reply.

“My third wife,” he said. Let her think him a three-time loser. Women liked wild cards.

“Oh?” she said, raising her eyebrows.

He walked over to her. She was standing behind a large teakwood bar with a blue glass top. She picked up a camera and pointed it at him. “Oh no you don’t,” he said, taking it out of her hand. “No souvenirs.” He put it back on top of the bar.

“A chaser of champagne, or beer?” she said.

Beer.

She took a beer out of the refrigerator under the bar. A small bottle of champagne, which she handed him. He undid the wire and took it off. It would make a good muzzle for a box turtle. He dropped it on the bar and turned the little bottle until the cork popped. The glass she held out was shaped like a tulip, and he poured slowly, stopping an inch from the top. Their last anniversary, he and Corky had had champagne. She clinked her glass to his bottle. Both swallowed. A warm rush went through his body and settled in his penis. He was standing behind a bar without any pants on, drinking with a woman whose husband slept in his socks. He took a long, cold drink of beer. It had a metallic taste—the taste that had lingered on his tongue after licking her earrings. She pushed her hair behind her ears, which made her look younger. She was probably fifty. The fan was turning.

She was running her hand through her hair. Pretty, the color she had painted her nails. As though you could dip your hands in fruit and keep the color. She had finished the champagne. He reached for the bottle and poured the rest into her glass. “Take one sip,” she said. The transparent tulip moved toward his lips. He took a sip. The beer had numbed his tongue; he could only taste fizz. The bubbles danced in his body for a while before sinking to prickle inside his penis.