The Death of All Things Seen (20 page)

They were headed back from the ice-cream parlor when Dave reached and wiped whipped cream off her upper lip. He put it to his own lips and tasted it. Did Jo taste that good, or was it the sundae? He had a cassette he had made for Sheryl – all love song tracks – power ballads. He loved Journey and REO. He wanted her opinion. What turned her on?

She liked the drives along roads with harvested corn: the land worked and prepared in the fall; the U-pick apple orchards; the fermented tang of rotting apples along the roadside; Dave getting out and taking an apple and giving it to her, polishing it with the sleeve of his denim jacket, getting in again and simply driving, the cassette playing, and his eyes drifting toward Jo, giving her the once over with an appraising smile. So it was built-up between them. It would define a life she would look back on.

On a third consecutive Friday, he picked her up and smelled a perfume she had on. She had worn it especially for him, and admitted it, so, after ice cream, on a circuitous road home with few cars he unzipped and, taking her wrist, placed her hand there until it grew into her hand. She felt such a racing feeling of sudden panic. He went for her chest. She had not taken the precaution of removing the tissue and was so mortified. Dave, in his way, paved over it, removing the tissue, saying it was like opening a present in the crepe of paper balled and hot against her heart.

It took a matter of weeks until she did it of her own volition, looking straight ahead. Dave shifted to accommodate it. There was the occasional oncoming traffic, the brim of baseball caps and deferential nods. She kept her eyes straight ahead with it in her hand, feeling its pulse. She had experienced nothing like it before, that it went on like this between two people and she had never known it, or never experienced it. It became her life.

When it was not enough, and she felt a sudden wetness below, with the pressure of Dave’s hand at the back of her neck, she disappeared into his lap, and, when it was done, Dave smoothed strands of hair around her ear with a tenderness she had never experienced.

It became something she looked forward to, taking him in her mouth.

It continued, Dave taking ‘Jo’ with him on errands, when Sheryl was already entrenched in a domestic future of what her life would be like with Dave, and it was okay, until there was eventual penetration. Dave wanted to be inside her. He made promises he could not keep and didn’t. For a time, during it, in the midst of his strength, the scent of him, the hotness he emanated, the pulse of it, she wanted to become pregnant, in the way she had heard girls speak of in school.

It was how she would usurp Sheryl and her full rack, aligning her life with a man who came so close to perfection. She had won a great prize. She had it in her head, a man arrived into her home, and, finding her preferable to her sister, chose her, like in bygone days of
Little House on the Prairie
, where a man might seek a woman early, because it took so much to survive, and where it wasn’t uncommon for a girl of sixteen or seventeen to be God-fearing and simultaneously sexually active in a marriage. She had anticipated the advance, the realignment of Dave’s heart and his appeal, with absolute sincerity, standing alongside her, like some adolescent pairing of American Gothic, this love that would not be denied.

These were the dreams of youth, the reach for the improbable when it wasn’t improbable, and all Dave had to do, really, was to assert his love for her. She would feel the thrill of vindication, big-breasted Sheryl beginning to snort like the pig she was!

What she remembered of that fall, her sophomore year, was the time alone with Dave, the way she learned to straddle him in the pickup, her back against the steering wheel, the slight tear when he entered that she would never really know again. She wore no panties, Dave running his tongue along her clavicle and down under her raised arm, into the cup of armpit, biting her hardening nipples, and, after it, semen running between her legs. She loved it more than anything and understood why the body was made the way it was, when she had known nothing of the experience before.

She remembered Dave staring across the harvested stalks of corn, the great bounty of what had been yielded from the land, lamenting that it was not as it was earlier in the country’s origin, when land was there for the taking. He would have built her a homestead and filled it with children and chickens, and so, in the lurch of want, she felt his seed again, if one could feel a life force finding and attaching itself in a great yearning and reach for life.

In compensation, in the brooding sense that this was not possible and that Dave was, in fact, a factory worker, she reached and touched his face and said she could imagine him before a plow, and, in saying it, touched him, so there was enough in him that he could take her again, but with more effort, his head against her sternum, in the place where there should have been cleavage.

It persisted, the way he took her, the hard grind of his teeth against hers, her head in the growth of hair on his chest afterward. This was a joy and a love that would not persist. All that came after would pale in comparison. She knew it then, the imminent danger of it.

On the way home, near the end, she could sense the malevolent grin of pumpkins everywhere. Sheryl was dressed as Dorothy and Dave as the Cowardly Lion, heading out to a Sadie Hawkins dance. It pained her, all that she could offer ignored or not acknowledged. She was Cinderella. She thought it, against her own better judgment. She felt it between her legs, the surge of something awakened, the great swoon of adolescence breeched, so it would never be the same again. She would have killed for him!

A week later, Sheryl and her mother were scooping out the innards of pumpkins and going about roasting seeds for Dad and Dave’s lunches. Dave was at the table, drinking milk, Jo sitting across from him, and wanting to be compared to Sheryl. There was a rise of ass on Sheryl that she had in common with her mother. It was there for comparison, the mother and daughter in the kitchen by a countertop. This was what was in the cards thirty years down the road, and it filled Joanne with a great sense of warmth that what she did for Dave was enough, and that he could not do without it, when it was otherwise. Dave was fucking both of them.

Before Christmas, she went a month without her period. They argued. She said she would keep it. Then she got her period. Right after it happened, Sheryl announced, while their father was on swing shift, that she and Dave had set a date for their marriage. Dave had bought an engagement ring.

Her mother relayed the message over the phone in the dark to the roar and hammer of machinery in the background that could be heard from the kitchen.

It had so ended without explanation, without even the kindness of an excuse, Dave continuing with the temerity to call her ‘Jo’, to push innocence on her after all they had been through. It made her suffer a great agony.

Joanne looked up, reconciling it again, how a chance had been lost so long ago at the very beginning. She had loved Dave.

She remembered the end, the Thanksgiving she had gone back to see Dad, Peter smashed out of his mind and pitching the car into a snow bank not far from the house, so Dave had to drive them to their motel, Peter in the back seat moaning, Joanne up front with Dave staring straight ahead like the night couldn’t end quickly enough.

He was then pulling down more money than Peter ever made. Maybe it was what had made him feel the way he did, insolent and proud, and, despite his impervious indifference, Joanne conceded at the time, she’d thought about what it might have been like to be with Dave, to swap out her life with Sheryl, to submit to him, to feel his bigness between her legs again in the comfort of a home, and in the morning, rising to cook breakfast in housecoat and slippers, knowing that their daughter wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans, and to have it not matter, for life to continue where nothing worked out exactly as planned, and that it would be just fine. What she had thought at the time, against her own judgment, was it seemed the best of all possible worlds.

N
ATE
TRIED
TO
book in early at The Drake. It wasn’t possible. There was a convention in town. The meeting with the lawyers was not until eleven. The concierge could, of course, store his luggage.

There was immediately, in looking around him, the tug of nostalgia. The hotel was redolent of a bygone era. The heavy cornices, the vases of flowers, sconces and oil paintings hung discreetly in alcoves. He glimpsed an ornate marble powder room glimpsed as a maid came out with a roll-cart of cleaning supplies.

This was the Chicago he remembered. He had booked into The Drake because this was where his father and mother had first met. To understand the past, Ursula had told him, it was best to go to the origin. He believed her, but he felt a gathering tiredness. It was hard carrying her memory with him.

He had not been up this early on a succession of days in a long time. He could very well have slept in advance of his meeting with the lawyers. Yes, he conceded, it had been unwise getting up so early, and yet he had wanted to be here with the pressing need that Ursula should see everything through his eyes, that she might know the extent of his existence. He was that alone in the world, or that contained, speaking to a dead woman. He was undecided. He suffered her loss more fully in being away from their home.

*

What he could tell Ursula was that, without The Drake, there would have been no Nate Feldman. That was a cosmic fact. In discussing his parents, he had always begun the inventory of his life with a quiet defense because there was blame to go around and he had never taken sides in the frigid affair that had been his parents’ marriage out in Winnetka.

What he remembered of his adolescent awakening was not the house in Winnetka. That was a part of his life, but more so the trips down South into a Southern Gothic tradition of WASP entitlement that better defined his mother. She had been sent North in the time of Southern ruin, in the days leading up to the rise of Martin Luther King, before Selma and the march on Montgomery. She had never settled right in Chicago. Of course, she had kept this desperation from his father during their brief courtship.

Of a lineage dating to the first holdings of plantations in Virginia, she had descended from those who had thought it a good idea to enslave another race for their own end and then laud their Bible with a divine right to what was done. Racist in the most absolute sense, she had asserted on more than one occasion while passing through the Chicago ghettoes that the complex racial politics of the city, if one looked deep enough, was connected to the Civil War, to the great tidal waves of unshackled Negroes, who, in rising out of the Deep South, had re-settled in the industrial rim of the Great Lakes, so it was eventually understood that this was what the prospect of freedom really looked like, that the killing fields of Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg had only dislodged and shifted a greater discontent into the North.

And yet in saying so, she had cared deeply for Negroes, or certain Negroes attached to the house, those who knew their place. She held scandalous opinions, arguing how freedom so suddenly earned brought on the reality of not actually having a job. There were many Negroes who never left the land or the houses, Negroes not so much moved by Lincoln and The Emancipation Proclamation. What she thought of race relations was that the North had just asked the wrong Negroes what they wanted. She believed it.

There was the divining sense, in so describing the full aspect of her character, that she had maintained an absolute commitment to a history that would define her the longer she stayed away from the South and the more her looks failed her.

Or, to put it another way, she would become a caricature of the South.

Nate’s memories of Virginia were of the godawful Southern drawl of genteel manners, the strange affectation of men with a peculiar aplomb for drink and silk neckerchiefs – men like his grandfather who held onto tobacco too long, the South becoming decidedly conservative as the mania for a healthy lifestyle took hold – people wanting to stay alive as long as possible at the expense of actually living when the obvious truth was, there were those who died, those who survived, and then those in between. It was by then a great hardship to find tobacco, the surviving crop that, beyond the abomination of cotton, could be the new scourge – the South, twice damned.

His father had explained it once in defense of his mother, the fierce pride of the South, how the South became more and more extreme and looked eventually to a distant past and their Bible so they truly believed the world was approximately 5,000 years old. When you began fighting science, when you went down that road of fanaticism, when you defied facts, you ended up believing God put the dinosaurs down on earth, alongside the first humans, so the world was configured like a passable episode of
The Flintstones
.

*

Against his better judgment, Nate ordered a whiskey at the bar in The Drake. He was looking for evidence of a past, of some sense of a presence. He knew the outline of his father’s history. He was telling it to a ghost, Ursula beside him in a small booth.

It began over drinks, his father’s courtship.
Teddy
is what his mother called his father when recalling the good times. She had been dining with a gentleman at The Drake.

His father described having been captivated by her advancing and then dismissive stare, watching her eyes follow him. There had been a brazen charge to the occasion, his father, drunk in the mediating company of fellow recruits in a carousel of what the war years then allowed – a fraternity of men in a trawl of bars, in advance of the hell that awaited them.

Nate looked to the sepia light of the bar. It was there if he looked closely. The afterlife of what happened was left, its essence. All he had to do was see it. As the story went, his father, struck by the loss of so much in life and determined that each opportunity must be seized, had begun walking back and forth against a great paned window, affecting a Nazi goose-step. Then he waited round front.