Thy Neighbor (31 page)

I turned to Mrs. Bloom.

“That was your obit in the paper, the one you saw, and that was why it frightened you so much. You knew what it meant.”

Mrs. Bloom lowered her eyes. I raised my voice.

“You knew what he knew and you said nothing.”

I let that fall on her, watching her face. Did she know this line of thinking? Was it hers? Was it worn and glazed with living, like someone's name carved in a table? Or did it pinch like new?

I leaned closer.

“Is that what you're worried about?” I asked. “Is that the accusation you expect? Well, sorry, but it's not the news. It's not the reason.”

She looked up at me surprised, almost hopeful, as if the accustomed burden might actually fall away this easily.

I leaned back from her, sighing loudly.

“You're just like everybody else in this. You know that? And, God, are there a lot of everybody elses. You weren't kidding. Robin spread. She fucking metastasized. She had us all writhing and dying over our private crimes and our dreamed-up hidden loves for her, and all the time it was just the edge of it. We were all peripheral.”

I laughed nastily.

Gruber sneered in my direction, his eyes bulging with fury.

“How do you like that?” I slapped my thigh inanely for emphasis. “Surprise! You are not important.”

Mrs. Bloom flinched, but made no move to pull away.

“You wanna know why she was after me?” I croaked. “You really wanna know?” I leaned in again for the blow. “Because my father was fucking her.”

A large globule of my spit landed on Mrs. Bloom's chin, and a smaller one on her cheek. Immediately, her hands went up to her mouth, as I knew they would, but they could not stop the sound. Mrs. Bloom screamed into her hands, low and throaty, and the cry was strangely alien and menacing, like the cheers of a stadium full of people heard from half a mile away, or the clamor of an insect colony amplified on the sound track of a film.

“He was the one,” I shouted. “He's the one who gave her that disease you didn't want to know about. He's what you would have found if you'd bothered to look. He's what she was running away from—what she had to run away from—because nobody wanted to know enough to make her safe.”

There. I'd done it. I'd pounded in the last stake, Robin's coolie still, doing the small work delegated, and right on time. This is how it is in the hell of other people, I remember thinking. You have at each other, and then you eat. Tear each other to pieces with pettiness, and dull teeth.

Gruber barked and swung at me, landing an awkward openhanded thump on the far side of my head. Mrs. Bloom threw herself on his arm screaming “
No!
” as he supported her weight over the body. She pushed away from him with both hands and let herself fall onto Robin's chest, her face fitting neatly in the sleek exposed arc of the neck.

She stayed there, howling. Gruber sneered at me over the pile of them, threatening what would come. Even through his mindless rage and his pulp-faced stupidity, I could see that he was horrified and shocked by what I had said about my father. I could see all of his thwarted animal affection for that once lost little girl who was now lying dead at his feet—all that affection thrashing into the fundamental baseness of his nature, violent as water. But for the bodies between us—the particular bodies that they were, each with a call on him, one cold and one begging—he would have come at me like nothing tame.

I wish he had.

The history of places, Anita had said, and futures, passed as close as trains. Which is moving and which still? Which now and which then? Which real and which illusion? We were looking across time both ways now. There could be no more separation.

Over Gruber's shoulder, just barely cresting the gentle rise of our street, I could see two police cruisers rolling into the subdivision, dreamily silent and slow, their blue and red beacons swirling weakly in the thin morning light.

Mrs. Bloom had quieted. She was whispering into Robin's ear a long string of words that I could not hear. It sounded like pages rustling. Gruber had placed his opened hand on Mrs. Bloom's back, his massive palm and barreled fingers spanning her withered form.

And that is how I left them. I stood slowly, mechanically, turned and walked across the lawns that had separated two gunshots by thirteen years. The stage of our tragedy, as usual, overdone.

Does everyone have to die?

I always wondered that as a kid when Mom took me to the theater to see the plays we'd been reading together at home.
Hamlet
especially, but the Greeks, too. Everybody fucking dies. It's relentless. And when I said this to her afterward, when we were all shuffling out of the theater like people who'd been beaten about the head and shoulders with a work of art, I'd say, “Isn't it a bit unrealistic?” or “Why do you want to feel this way on a Saturday night?,” she'd always laugh at me a little meanly, and I knew she was thinking: What child of mine is this?

But I meant it. And I still do. It's too much. Why do we need it? Why do we seek it out even when life itself doesn't supply it? Can't we just enjoy simplicity? Kick back and do nothing extreme? Can't we just have parents who die in their sleep, and doctors, too? Can't we just have little girls who grow up smiling in their sundresses and throwing their arms around their fathers' necks? Can't we just have one major tragedy per acre in a generation? And otherwise, is it impossible to say, let's just have a boring mothers knitting, children doing homework, dads coming home sober from a hard day's work and eating dinner with the family kind of place. You know, a neighborhood?

They exist, don't they?

In theory.

Just not here.

Yeah. Just not here.

Gruber and Mrs. B. could deal with the cops, I figured. Send them over to me when they were done. They'd want to know why Robin had gone running into the house, and I'd tell them I didn't know. That's just how she was, I'd say, and shrug. Who knew why she did anything. Only she knew the real story, and she was dead. And Gruber and Mrs. B. were too tangled in their own dramas to wonder about mine. It was over. The details didn't matter anymore, if they ever had to anyone but Robin and me. What could I tell them anyway? I was just Monica's fuck buddy with a bunch of TVs that nobody knew about?

Ah, right. The TVs. Didn't want to be caught with those.

They were foremost in my mind suddenly, or I made them be, because, as usual, it was better than thinking about and sorting through the endgame on the other side of the street. Just click into self-preservation practical mode and get rid of the evidence. No, not the evidence. It wasn't evidence. It was garbage. I needed to take out the garbage.

On my way down to the basement I stopped again at the shelf at the top of the stairs. There was a black rubber mallet lying there. It was Dad's. It was one of his favorite tools. Came in handy for all kinds of things: pounding in dowels without leaving a mark, mercy killing chipmunks that got stuck in the glue traps in the garage meant for rats and mice, and, now, whirlwinding a tantrum over closed-circuit TVs. Perfect.

Now that's the kind of catharsis I can get behind.

No
Oresteia
in the world can beat the sound of solid-state smashing.

26

“. . . couldn't possibly matter less, darling, really.”

It was my mother's voice for sure. The sound quality was wretched, crackling and hissing through the dusty plastic pores of the speaker in my old handheld tape recorder. But I was absolutely sure. That was my mother's voice. Her arrogant, alto, elocutionary voice alive again in my ears.

After I pounded the entertainment center good and hard—there wasn't a salvageable circuit left—I did what Robin expected me to do. All the pieces in place. I went right upstairs to my bedroom, to the drawer in the far bedside table, the disused one, where all the other artifacts of boyhood lay untouched in a grave of junk. There it still was, under the reporter's notebook with the miniature pen shoved straight through the spiral binding, under the pile of medals with their threadbare ribbons still attached: gold, silver, bronze; tennis, hockey, track and field. There, just where I had left it so many years before, was the Sony microcassette recorder that Robin knew I would still have, a pair of ancient AA Rayovacs still wedged into it.

I went to the fridge for new batteries. For courage, I went to the case of Jameson in the garage. I inserted the tape, side A, and pressed play. For the first time in thirteen years, I heard my mother's voice.

Six words.

Pop.

That's all it took.

And I was shaking all over.

I stopped the tape.

I took a long drink, and then another.

I leaned down, fished my earbuds out of my gym bag, and plugged them into the receptacle on the side of the recorder. I rewound the tape to the beginning, lowered the volume, and pressed play again.

“. . . couldn't possibly matter less, darling, really.”

Another voice then, high and thin. A child's voice, startlingly sure and precise. Peevish, too.

Robin. It had to be.

“It matters to me.”

Mom, again, exasperated:

“Why on earth would he possibly matter to you? I don't see—”

A loud sigh.

“. . . Oh, honestly, I refuse to argue about something so immaterial, especially with you.”

Robin, shouting:

“Are you deaf? I just said it matters.”

A long pause.

Mom, beseechingly:

“Darling, would you?”

She must have been raising her glass.

“You've had enough. It's barely seven.”

“Don't chide,” she said exasperatedly.

“All right,” said Robin, more calmly. “But then you'll listen?”

“Yes, then I'll listen.”

With an abrupt click the recording stopped; then with another click and the shushing, scraping sound of the recorder being moved, perhaps into a pocket or under a book, it began again.

My mother, again, midspeech:

“. . . us, darling. Join us. Your paramour and I have just been going over your leavings.”

There were the distant sounds of someone—my father, presumably—coming into the house, and the sound of rustling paper closer to the mic. There was a long pause full of more rustling and shuffling, then my father's voice in the room. He sounded rigid, as usual, precise and distant, but underneath there was a strain of something else. Fear? Surprise? Brewing rage? I couldn't say.

“My leavings?” he said.

Mom, knowing she has the upper hand and enjoying it immensely.

“Yes, yes. Your compositions, dear.” More paper rustling. “Here.”

Nothing from Dad.

“You really are a dark one, Jimmy. I had no idea you were a poet”—snorting—“an execrable one, but—who knows—you might have given Lord Alfred Douglas a run for his money. Your very own love that dare not speak its name, and all that.”

A long silence
.
Excruciatingly long.

Finally, Dad, sighing hugely: “Oh, Christ . . . Christ.”

Mom: “I should say so.”

Another long silence.

Mom, enthusiastically, clapping her hands: “Let's begin at the beginning, shall we?”

Dad, woundedly
,
almost under his breath: “Why? . . . Why?”

Robin sobbing.

Mom: “You leave her out of this. She's said all she needs to. You do this with
me
now.
Me
. Your wife. Your equal. She does not have to defend herself any—more.”

Pause.

Dad, meekly: “I can't.”

“You will. If it takes all night. If it takes the rest of our lives, by God, you will.”

“Please, Diana. I beg you. Do not pursue this.”

“Pursue this? What? Are you completely out of your mind?”

“It's a mistake.”

“Oh”—laughing bitterly—“it's a lot more than a mistake, little man. Believe me.”

“No—this. This conversation is a mistake. Can't you ever just know when you're out—”

He faltered.

Mom, in disbelief: “Out what, precisely? I hardly know. Is there a word, a phrase for it? Outdegraded? Outshocked? Out of my pathological depth? Tell me. I'd really like to know. Which ‘out' am I?”

Dad, shouting: “Just out. Out, damn you. There is nothing to say. There is nothing clever you can say.”

“Do you think I'm trying to be clever? Do you really think that this is some kind of—of contest?”

Silence.

“My God. You do.”

Dad, almost whining: “You see? Already you have misunderstood everything.”

“I don't think so.”

“No, of course you don't. You never have. You never do.”

There was the banging, crashing sound of something being overturned, and the splintering of wood. The coffee table? A chair?

“Oh, fuck, Jimmy. For once in our dreary, clawing, petty life together this is not about who is more intelligent.”

Pause.

Faintly, a bottle being unscrewed, poured. Dad's first drink? The coroner's one of many? Or just a few very large ones? More shuffling of the tape recorder being moved again. Out of his line of sight? Or hers?

Dad, determined: “Listen, Di. Just listen to me. You do not want . . . you do not want to do this.”

Mom, reenergized: “Oh, but that's where you're wrong, dearest. After all this time, don't you know me any better than that? Why, I'm just now engaged.” Laughing. “This is my sweet spot. This is where I live.”

A huge sigh from Dad, the
humph
of him sitting down. Then, resignedly:

“Yes. This
is
where you live, isn't it?”

A pause. Dad resuming angrily: “Don't I know you well enough? Yes. I know. I know . . . The tidy life was never enough for you. No, not you . . . The four walls and the square meals and the ease of never having to worry about anything practical . . . because
I
was doing it . . . none of that was good enough for you. You wanted this. You wanted to see the guts on the table and everyone ruined.”

“Oh, come, come, Jimmy. You can do better than that. A transgression of this magnitude requires a more forceful deflection.”

“You little bitch.”

“Yes, that . . . and?”

Dad, in disbelief: “And? What are you saying, ‘and'?”

“The rest, love. The rest. We know what I am. We have that. But you? Where are you in this demonology? Surely you rate now. Perhaps not before, I agree—straight man, company man—but now, now that you are . . . sharing yourself. Well, you've graduated to a whole new circle of hell, wouldn't you say? Or is that unclear? If it's unclear I could—”

Dad, sobbing: “Oh, God, Diana . . . please.”

Mom, resuming, acidly: “Oh, all right then. Since you can't bring yourself to articulate. Let's see. How shall I put this for you? The tried-and-true ways of tearing up a marriage—is that it? . . . Yes, the usual thing, making a housemaid and whipping post out of your wife, cheating, whoring, lying, stealing—that—all that—just wasn't nearly the right kind of kinky for you. Not enough for me, you say? Ha! I'll give you not enough. You couldn't just be the husband who's absent and emotionally obtuse and fucking his secretary or the babysitter. You had to be the husband who's fucking the baby . . . I suppose I should count myself lucky that it wasn't
ours
.”

“Don't you even think of bringing Nick into this.”

Mom, hugely: “Oh, I wouldn't dream of it. Our son? I can barely remember who he is. You've managed that beautifully. I see him twice a year at holidays if I'm lucky, and in the summers he's practically a stranger—sullen, evasive, hostile to everything I've tried to teach him, banging around with that Alders creature, systematically erasing everything that's original and worthy in him. Yes, you've made a model man out of him. He'll be as bland as bread when you're through with him.”

“When
I'm
through with him? It's you who's done the number on him. Sending him away to school might just barely have saved him—might.
If
he survives you, and that is by no means a given, it will be a miracle if he can ever look a woman in the face, let alone take one to bed.”

A barking laugh from Mom, then:

“You really are something. By all means, blame me. Blame me for filling the void, when it was always, always you he wanted and adored. God help him, he thinks
you're
God. To this day. He really does.”

Dad, ignoring her: “Do you have any idea the effect you have on men? Do you? Because it's not what you think.”

Mom, appalled: “This—none of this—has anything to do with me. Do not—”

“No, really. Do you? It's quite—how did your father put it on our wedding day?—withering? Yes. ‘She can be a bit withering,' he said, ‘but you'll be all right, I expect.' Priceless . . . You'll be all right, I expect . . . Jesus, he knew.”

“Oh, my dear, is that our euphemism now? Withering? Is that the story line? The all-conquering member withers before the
terrible breasts of Boadicea
?”

Dad, bewildered: “What are you babbling about? Who are you playing for?”

“Oh, myself, as always. Myself. Someone has to do something to raise this beyond— God, I am standing in front of a man, for all intents and purposes, a man of resources and breeding and middle-class pretension, and we are talking about the faulty mechanics of his penis. Again. Why he can't get it up unless the victim is bald below the belt. Is there anything else? Is there ever anything else? Is there any stage of evolution beyond which a man's virility, and his harridan wife's fanged deflation of same, is not the great exoneration for all his troglodyte crimes? Forgive me if I had hoped to give this a loftier gloss, but the cliché is
kill
ing me.”

“Listen to yourself, Di. This is why— Oh, Jesus, are you incapable of responding to anything directly—as yourself—to me, as myself? We are not one of your poems. We don't scan. You can't cite your way out of this. This is real, people to people, life as it is. It doesn't shine.”

“Well, well, the night bard instructs.” A gurgling scream. “You make me sick. You think because your prick is hard and you can put pen to paper and scribble, that you can make this . . . this violation stand up and declare itself legitimate. No, you are right enough in that. It doesn't shine. It shames. Reading this, tasting it, sour and stinking as it comes up in my throat, I am ashamed of every word in the English language. You have accomplished that. How can you have? . . . Oh, that's why you did it, of course—to destroy the thing that you could never touch, the love and living drive in me that you could not approach because you are so incapable, so artless, so utterly without sensibility. You can't . . . Oh, it's so much worse than ignorance. You don't even stand under the same sky.”

“You arrogant—”

“You have deliberately, methodically—how else for you?—defiled what is beyond—no, more than that—what is
beyond
beyond you—what is so far outside your box-trap subsistence as to be only dimly available as some kind of
sore
on your procedure. The flannel man cannot feel awe in the presence of the sublime, and so he howls at his inadequacy.”

“Shut up. My God, shut up, you pompous bitch. Do you really still think that anyone cares about all that useless academic slush that's splashing around in your head? You're nobody. You have always been nobody. Same as me. A big, towering second-rate mind in a paddock full of idiots. If we'd stayed in New York you would have found that out very quickly,
dar
ling. You'd have been laughed out at the door. But here you could stew in all your thwarted ambition, talking down to all the animals. Well, that's over. No one's listening anymore, if they ever were. Well, no one, that is, except your ripe acolyte over here.”

Mom, showing her first signs of weariness: “And we're back to your excuses. The siren nymphet, too plump to resist. How original.”

“Yes, I know. My defense isn't worthy of you. My reasons are the same as everybody else's.”

“Every sick—”

“No, not sick. That
is
unworthy of you. You, of all people, should be able to grasp this, should be able to talk about it in a more sophisticated way. Do you think your feminist outrage is any less imaginative than my transgression?”

“Feminist? We're talking about the seduction of a child, Jimmy. What could it possibly matter the sex? Hers or mine, or yours, for that matter? She and I are not allies because we are women, and you are not the enemy—nor are you to be excused your . . . indiscriminate humping—because you are a man.”

“It was not indiscriminate, any more than your taking on the role of her tutor was indiscriminate. What did you see in her? . . . Hmm? . . . What? . . . Do you even know? . . . I'll tell you what. You saw sensitivity, intelligence, beauty, promise, safe harbor, the possibility of love without judgment. Isn't that right? Well, that is what I saw, too. That is what I hoped for. Maybe I sexualized it, yes, because I am a man—that is what we do—and maybe I tried to ennoble it with borrowed language because I was ashamed of my inability to express the enormity of what I felt, but how could anyone not see and adore, not want to touch and possess this marvelous, pure—”