Ugly Behavior (6 page)

So they weren’t about to give him a second look. They could not
imagine anyone who looked like him working for them.

“It is a nice coat,” he said. “I don’t get many chances to wear
it.”

“Well, you should wear it more often,” she replied. “Hey, maybe
you could take me to the movies sometime. You could put that nice-looking
jacket on and take me to the movies.”

“I bet Tommy wouldn’t be too happy with that.” K.T. felt as if he
had said something quite bold, but she didn’t appear to react.

“Hey, you got a TV? Maybe there’s a movie on now. You got your
jacket and I got…” She held up her glass half full of juice. “Refreshments.”

K.T. stood up, giddy with an odd sort of excitement. He hadn’t
felt so playful with a woman since before his older sister left home. She lived
in Florida now, three kids, and they hadn’t spoken in years. He went to the
foot of the bed and started peeling away items from a pile of dirty clothes.
“Ta da!” he said, revealing a dusty TV screen.

“Turn it on and come sit by me,” she said, holding up her juice
glass again. With a flourish K.T. slapped the “on” button, grabbed the sports
jacket and slipped it on. It bunched at the shoulders, spoiling the gesture,
and he had to pull and tug to make it feel right. Then he threw himself onto
the bed beside her, thinking she would either run or laugh and in fact he
didn’t really care which, as long as she reacted to what he’d done in some way.

The TV came on in the middle of an old war picture. K.T.
recognized some of the actors—he was pretty sure they were all dead. More
and more this seemed to be the case for him: watching movies full of dead
actors. What was worse, he suspected anyone younger than he wouldn’t even know
these actors were all dead—the notion would never cross their minds. The
way they were in the movie would be the way these actors would be forever.

“I bet Silver Surfer would make a good movie-type hero,” she said,
close to his ear, almost whispering, slurring her words. “They should make a
movie about him. Mr. No-face.”

For just a brief moment he thought she was referring to him, that
in his playful rush his face had slipped off and was now lost within the
anxious clutter of the room. He pulled sweaty hands up to his mouth and nose
and felt around, then jerked them away in embarrassment. “Oh, yeah.” He
laughed. “He’d make a great one all right.”

She held the juice glass up to his lips. He was so close to her
now he could see inside the eyeholes of her mask. Her eyes looked red, heavy
and drugged. They would not fix on him. “Wait.” She pulled the glass away. She
took a small liquor bottle out of a big pocket in her dress, unscrewed it, and
poured some into the juice. “Just to freshen it,” she said, pressing it again
to his lips. The glass was hard and cold and the liquor made his own eyes
burn—she’d obviously been adding stuff from the bottle to the juice the
whole time she’d been here. He closed his eyes and let her pour it into him.
The edge of the glass bit like a hard cold kiss and then the warm fluid tongue
inside his mouth and her hard swollen belly pressed up against him, nose
filling with the perfume and the stench of her, and with his eyes closed he was
seeing the both of them inside his monitor, trapped inside the tube, falling
out of their clothes and then falling out of their faces until they were just
this liquid descent of electrons down the screen and off the edge into nothing.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” he murmured into her neck as he moved up to
kiss her, and feeling the fullness of her beneath him he couldn’t help thinking
of the sow with the frightened boy’s head and the babies sucking and feeding
and there’s nothing the little boy can do to escape. “Jesus,” he said again,
more softly now as if to pray that terrible image out of his head, and wondered
not for the first time if now and again he brushed against monsters.

She clung to him with a desperate strength that frightened him,
and when he finally opened his eyes to tell her that they should be more
careful about the baby, because he really was worried about the baby,
frightened for her baby, he could see that her mask had slipped, more of her
face was exposed, and the rows of circular cigarette burns like tiny ruined
mouths all around both of her eyes.

“Tommy says I’ve got to wear my mask,” she whispered huskily, and
refitted it to her face, and tried to draw him back into her, into her smell
and lips and eyes, into skin thin as desire, brief as a flash of phosphors on a
smoked screen, but all he could think about was how was she ever going to
market this, how was she going to sell this, how was she going to put the best
face on this, and, at least for the moment, this was no longer a place he was
prepared to go.

Hours later he could hear them across the courtyard of the mews
arguing, and if there had been screams he would have gone over there and
stopped them. He would have played the Silver Surfer in his mask that is no
mask, and he would have stopped whatever was going on.

But there weren’t any screams that night. Perhaps there had never
been any screams.

Instead he stood and waited in his doorway, listening to the
rhythmic rise and fall of their argument that might not be an argument,
studying the tree that had never been a tree, admiring the way the cool halogen
of the streetlights washed the rounded stones of cast concrete.

When he finally went back inside, he went first to the bathroom
where he washed his face a very long time, then shaved away at the rough
stubble of his beard until blood had welled in numerous nicks. The face that stared
out at him was both terrible and new, one he had never seen before, and most
likely would change to fit the given situation. It was the kind of face he had
always wanted, it was the kind of face that might win him jobs and women, but
he knew that at least for a few nights he would sleep with one eye open, a
knife ready in hand for peeling the image away at the first sign of rebellion.

On his web site the self-portraits had apparently disappeared for
good, broken and scattered into the ether. Just before dawn there was email,
and an attachment: a picture of a fattened, battered cat with his face, so
professionally done as to be seamless, so much of the cat in the line of his
jaw and the tilt of his head, so much of his own terror as the feline head shifts
to see the thing in fast pursuit.

A tickle like the sound of a truck rumbling in the distance, felt
in the chest, where bones join tissue and there are quantities of liquid for
lubrication. Something was coming. Something was clearly out there. Something
he didn’t want to know about.

He’d had the cold for weeks. Three, four weeks. It didn’t seem
right, didn’t seem natural. Weren’t colds two week affairs? His wife had told
him that at some time or other. He remembered the time last winter he’d been
moaning and groaning, thinking he was going to die, angry because she wouldn’t
take care of him, wouldn’t even sympathize, and she’d said, “Two weeks and
it’ll be gone. It’s just a cold. Drink your orange juice.”

Women had little sympathy for men. That had always been true. It
was a way at getting back at their ill treatment under a patriarchy, he
supposed. It was a man’s world, and women had little sympathy. He really
couldn’t fault them for that, but it felt bad just the same.

Suddenly his body exploded into a fit of coughing. His face felt
flushed. He could feel himself filling with fever. He could feel the tube of
his throat constrict as he coughed, twisting at its root, trying to rip itself
out of his body. Something was coming from a far distance. Something that
didn’t agree with him.

He spat something milky into the sink. His wife would have hated
that. “Men have such disgusting habits,” she used to say. He leaned over the
sink and looked at what he had coughed up. Men did that, too—periodically
they felt compelled to look at whatever came out of them. The globule in the
sink was creamy, yet somewhat solid, like a small bit of half-digested flesh.

He wondered if what he was suffering from was akin to what they
called “consumption” in the old days. He had no idea. But he was a man.
Naturally he felt consumed. Men had a lot of things on their minds.

Suddenly the cough racked him again. His head jerked as if he’d
been slapped. His wife had slapped him a couple of times, because of some dumb
thing he’d said to her. He’d never hit her. He had no use for men who hit their
wives.

But she should never have hit him.

Something was coming from a long distance away, something had come
from a long distance, and now it was filling his throat. He thought that he
would choke. He ran to the toilet bowl and coughed something up from his
throat. It felt large and soft as if it were one of his internal organs as it
passed his lips and plopped into the water.

He looked down. It was longish and pale, like an arm, and then it
dissolved into the water.

Where was she, anyway? He couldn’t remember. If it had been her
making these noises of distress she would have expected him to come help her.
But when he was the one who was sick, she hid herself. Marriage ought to be a
two-way street.

At least she could have fed him something. He was hungry. He
hadn’t eaten anything all day, and he’d had way too much to drink last night in
order to ease the pain in his throat and in other places he didn’t like to talk
about. He was hungry. Men had hungers. Where was she?

The next cough practically split him in two. It felt as if it had
originated miles away. Something rushed through him, then past him as if on its
way to an important destination. Where was she? He looked down at what he had brought
forth from such a long distance away, and saw a soft, liquid, barely
recognizable version of his wife’s face floating in the bowl, a soft tinge of
blood in the lips and cheeks. The image started to break up even as he
impulsively jerked the lever to flush it all away.

And then he remembered.

Cheryl woke up abruptly and rubbed her eyes as hard as she could.
Her father had held her head over the toilet bowl; he was going to drown her.
She was sure of it.

But then he had stopped all of a sudden, and she’d looked up into
his faraway face. The face had been dark, and although she knew it was her
father’s face she really couldn’t see it very well. Daddy? she’d said, but very
softly. She wasn’t even sure he could hear her. She wasn’t even sure she wanted
him to hear her.

He hadn’t said anything. He picked her up, threw her over his
shoulder, and carried her from the small bathroom to her bedroom at the end of
the dark hallway. There was a bend in the hallway where the stairs came up. He
was careful walking there; it would be easy to slip and drop her down the
stairs.

Maybe he wanted to slip, she thought. But he didn’t, this time.
He’d hit her head real hard against the door frame when he walked into the
hall; she’d sobbed once and held onto her cries, afraid he would get mad.
 
Looking at the big staircase falling off
into the dark helped her stop crying — it was so scary.

When they got to the end of the hallway he’d thrown her onto the
bed. She made herself really stiff trying not to cry, but that made her back
hurt when she hit the bed. She gasped once, then gasped again when he started
pouring water on her. Glasses full of water, hitting her face harder and
harder. Soaking into the bed. Soaking into her pajamas. Making everything wet,
everything dripping with it. She finally began to cry; she couldn’t help it.
They would think she’d wet the bed again—Mommy and Daddy; she’d be in
trouble.

He didn’t say a thing. After he finished wetting her bed he turned
and left.

Cheryl looked at her bed and reached out carefully with one hand.
It was damp. So were her pajamas. She stared at the one window in the room,
full of bright light, like water. She couldn’t decide if she had dreamed or
not.

Her father walked in. “Wet your bed again?” he said quietly.

Cheryl nodded her head and looked away.

“Well, that’s all right. You know what you need to do now.”

Cheryl got up and began stripping the bed. It was hard for her;
the covers were tucked in real tight and all the blankets and the quilt were
heavy, especially once they were wet, but she had to do it herself. That’s what
her daddy called “the deal.”

He stepped out of her way as she waddled over to the hamper. She
almost tripped at the last second, but then he grabbed her and set her upright.
“Thank you,” she said softly. He started to leave. “Daddy?” He turned around.
“Did you take me to the bathroom last night?”

He crouched down then, and she saw his face: all pink and
newly-shaven. He smiled with large thin lips and kissed her on the cheek. “No,
sure didn’t, Angel. You must have dreamed it.”

She watched his face go away as he stood up. She nodded and he
smiled again.

She got in trouble that day at school for staring out the window
too much and not doing her work. She couldn’t help it. Everything looked so
blurry outside, like the sun had come down and made all the plants, cars, and
buildings glow with a funny light. Or like she was seeing everything outside
through water, but it wasn’t raining. It was funny.