You Were Wrong (8 page)

SIX

“HAVE YOU EVER TRIED
being a man?” Karl asked. “It’s difficult.”

“Join the club.”

“Which club?”

“The club of people for whom things are difficult.”

“What are you doing back there?”

“Sobering up.”

They were in his same old car again, he in front, driving, she in back, lying with her face in the torn and sandy seat. This was a piece-of-shit car, let it be said.

“You’re making that hole bigger!”

“Watch the road! God, what a terrible week!”

“What?”

“I said it’s been a hard week!”

“You brought it on yourself.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Come up here.”

“I can’t.”

He stopped the car. They were on a road somewhere between one town and another, one of a thousand identical roads that were cracked on their sides, the cracks filled in with swamp grass and sand. A summer heat had come down. It buzzed in the brush nearby. He went around to the passenger side, yanked open the rusted back door, and grabbed a hand of hers that happened, in a series of random movements she was making to try to find a comfortable position on the seat, to have been stretched out above her head.

“What are you doing?”

“Pulling you out of the car.”

“Get off.”

“Get out of my car.”

“You kicking me out of your car?”

“No, sit in the front, this is ridiculous.”

“Man!” She crawled out and rested on her hands and knees amid the cracked asphalt and sand. “I am drunk off my ass.”

“Why?”

“Can’t tell you.”

Having abandoned the car in the road, they stood on the lawn. The house loomed above them. He owned it now, according to the state, or his memory.

She cried and made an angry face. “You killed him.”

“You lied.”

“Killing’s worse.”

They went in. Larchmont Jones lay as if resting on the floor, a face-sized dark red pool beside and connected to his face. Karl stared down into the pool and saw his own face. Sylvia said, “Careful, you’ll fall in love and get stuck to the floor.”

He had never seen the man with eyes closed. The lids had fluttered at times when he searched for a word, and the fluttering had functioned then as a hand held out to stay speech, a
Shut up
uttered by the eyelids; what is a pool cue to the skull when compared with an adult male’s effectively telling a child every day for years,
My life counts for more than yours
?

He was not resting. Karl’s mother had been the nap-taker of the house, always on the living room couch. Her naps were both naps and performances of naps, giving her the rest she required and saying,
This is all very tiring
, leaving the men of the house to figure out what
this
and
all
might mean. Sleep could mean so much. One could sleep and be awake, like Karl, who did not know or thought he did not know how his mother had spent all her non-sleep time. The old man’s open-mouthed gray-blue face looked pained. It would not, at least, he hoped, look
wry
again, but if you zoomed in on the dried lips and off-black hole of the mouth you could find yourself coming up against some difficult concepts.

Sylvia screamed. He eased her into the living room. He sat down on the couch on which his mom had napped, and into which he’d vomited a little yesterday after he’d met Sylvia. It smelled of disinfectant now; Jones had cleaned it with rolled-up sleeves before Karl killed him. She sat on the comfy chair across the coffee table from the couch, as before, five feet of dull domestic space between them. They looked at each other’s eyes. Their eyes dug canals of looking in the air. The canals were fingers that touched.

“What do we do?”

“Bury him.”

“No.”

“Call the cops.”

“No.”

“Come here.”

She came. She curled into his lap and they slept.

“Honeysuckle Rose” woke them up—tempo and ear feel,
sprightly
; piano style,
mediocre
.

She scrambled off of him and stood in the middle of the room, knees and elbows bent, torso straight and taut, neck a balanced pedestal for head. Sand clung to her black shirt and black jeans. She’d had black cowboy boots and had kicked them off somewhere, was sockless. Her feet gripped the Persian rug. Her skin gripped the air, or the music in the air. Her white cowboy hat was gone. “Every honeybee fills with jealousy when they see you out with me,” which demoralized Karl. He had started liking having killed Jones. It had begun to give him a more resolute position from which to face the world—more Karlness to his Karl; it had also brought him back Sylvia. But now with “Honeysuckle Rose” the vagueness of being him had returned and he was stuck on the couch again and he wanted to kill Larchmont Jones again but he knew he’d missed his chance.

Night came down on Long Island. The windows went black. He said, “Do you think that’s him playing?”

She looked at him with incredulity. The song stopped at “…you just have to touch my cup.” She left, got as far as the dining room, came back. She dragged him off the couch and pushed him toward the rec room. They stopped at the dining room table, sat down, and put their heads in their hands. The house was quiet. They lifted up their heads. She jerked hers toward the rec room. Karl went in.

“Oh,” Jones said, sitting on the piano stool, “it’s you.”

“Who were you expecting?”

“My daughter.”

Karl pulled Sylvia, who was behind him, into the room.

“Hello, Sylvia.”

“Hello, Monty.”

“You can call me Dad.”

“No, I can’t.”

His left eye, the one on the side of his head where his stepson had hit him, drooped. His cravat, which had been disheveled when he lay on the floor, was restored to order. He seemed his jaunty self, perhaps a shade pensive. “These jazz songs are really so enjoyable. They’re not easier, necessarily, than the classic European pieces, but they provide levity. That nocturne seems to have depressed me. Come in, kids. Ignore the blurriness of the room. My children together in my house, I’ve long dreamt of this. Could you clean up in here while I go to bed?”

“Clean up?”

“Wipe the blood up off the floor and clean and dress the wound on the side of my head where you hit me with the fucking pool cue, yes.”

He slumped over and would have fallen to the floor had she not caught him. She took his legs and Karl took his arms and they carried him up to his room, Sylvia shouting “Support his head!” on the stairs.

“Please,” Karl said, when they’d cleaned his wound and bandaged him and tucked him into bed, “tell me we don’t have the same mother.”

“Murder you’ll commit but incest is a bridge too far?”

“Yes!”

She took his hand in hers—her throwaway gestures left exhilaratingly little Karl in Karl—and said, “Come help me wash my shirt, it’s got blood on it,” and led him to the master bath.

He said, “This is
his
bathroom.”

“I need the nicest possible bathroom right now.”

She unbuttoned the Miss Popular Hybrid shirt, revealing a translucent indigo bra.

“What are you doing?”

“I told you, I need to wash my shirt. Fill the sink up with cold water.”

“You’re giving me orders now?”

“Does he have any laundry soap in here?”

“How should I know?”

“Look around!”

“Why should I?”

“Because you’re helping me, bro, just like I helped you lug
him
up the stairs.”

“Don’t call me
bro
.”

Karl bent down to look for detergent in the cabinet beneath the marble, scallop-shaped sink. It was really nice in this bathroom, he liked it in here now: pale blue walls, soft light that articulated objects clearly and flattered the face, and floating above him in their dark bra, Sylvia Vetch’s breasts, which did not overstep the modesty of nature in their size, but, in shape, and buoyancy, outran even the great statuary with which he had occupied himself for a period in his youth.

“Is there any down there?”

“No, but look at these beautiful plumbing fixtures.”

“Don’t start adoring plumbing. My breasts, by the way, don’t get dirtied or damaged by contact with your looking, you don’t need to try to hide it, I like it.”

He grew hot from hair to shoes. Because he had seen Peter Paul Rubens’s painting of the blameless Susanna being looked at by the lascivious elders of her local synagogue, Karl knew what skin looked like that was loath to be looked at, and so he said, “You bluster.”

“What?”

“You stand there inviting me to look at you in your bra but you’ve got like an anorak of toughness on over your real self to conceal it from view.”

She opened her mouth but did not speak. Her arms fell to her sides. She turned her head away from him. He looked at the irregularly shaped dot of red on her high, pale cheek, just beneath her livid lower eyelid. He wanted to know everything about the world this square inch of skin could reveal to him.

“Go find the soap.”

“Did you know I’d be in the house when you came here yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“You knew of my existence.”

“And you really, truly didn’t know of mine?”

“No.”

“That was my first shock with you the other day was your complete nonrecognition of me, your utter inability to figure out who I was, when I’d seen you from afar at least a dozen times.”

“So you really grew up right over in Centraldale? Were you poor?”

“Not really, but my dad thought so. When he started making serious money, my mom and me were like the poverty he had to leave behind. I was the dingy old fridge and she was the dingy old oven in the dark little Centraldale house and we wouldn’t look right in the new big Seacrest place so he got new ones—a nice new out-of-it middle-class wife and kid who were untainted by ever having had to struggle to keep it together.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say.”

“He tried to keep the families a secret from each other—I didn’t know he’d remarried till months after the wedding—but I mean come on, how could you not know? I guess how psychologically damaged you are makes you a mental retard?”

“Probably.”