Inappropriate Behavior: Stories (18 page)

After what seemed like hours, I finally made it to my corner and turned toward the house. Heather was sitting on the front porch steps when I came stiffly shuffling up the walkway like Frankenstein, still holding my head at the least painful angle, arms motionless at my sides.

“What does the other guy look like?” she said.

“Guys,” I said, choking on the word and trying again. “It was many guys.”

She picked up her cell phone and called the police, telling them I was home, that all was well, and thanks. Then she said, “The dog ran off. I went out to look for you, and I must have left the door cracked some. So I've been up all night looking for both of you, and in an hour I have to go to work.”

“Well, I didn't have a great night myself, exactly.”

“What happened?”

I told her, told it all, the beating and the old bum and the way he turned on me, my stolen watch and, as I reached slowly around to my hip, yes, . . . a stolen wallet as well, how it wasn't worth it, how in the old days this would have never happened to me, how the world was an evil pit and everyone in it a son of a bitch, including me, but the thing is, I
know
that, and I've
always
known it, and I will
forever
know it, about them
and
me, and that if she wanted to be good and happy and love anyone but me, if she wanted optimism as a way of life, then she could have it, but she wouldn't have it and me, because I was done with anything that even remotely smacked of the milk of human kindness, and that, to continue the allusion, we'd need to stick our courage to the post and never let this happen, to either of us, ever again, and that, in fact, it was a good thing that it happened to me and not to her, the way she's been carrying on lately with the smile and the good word and the unguarded nature. She sat there on the steps, listening quietly as I said it all, looking intently at my eyes, understanding, it seemed to me. When I got done she nodded, and we sat there without speaking for a moment.

“So,” I asked her. “Anything to say?”

“I'm pregnant,” she said. She stood from the porch step then, moved around me and down to the sidewalk, and began to call for the dog.

C
HARLIE'S
P
AGODA

First there'd be the drinking, then all the talk about Jesus, then around midnight the crying and repenting. I finally got enough of it and threw her out.

Her brother, Ray, and a couple of his goons came by the next morning to move all of her stuff out of the apartment. Ray was a linebacker—he'd done a hitch with the Rams, then stayed on in St. Louis to capitalize on his local celebrity by opening up a Christian fitness center, Bible verses painted on the mirrored walls, exaltation of man in God's image, that sort of thing. He has six of them now, all across the bistate region. After they were done packing, the three of them beat me up something awful, left me bleeding on the floor of my empty apartment.

I got out of the hospital the afternoon of my twenty-seventh birthday, still wearing my bloody and torn clothes. I was too depressed to go home, so I took a cab to the Grand Duck, the pub where I go for beer and shuffleboard, and where nine months ago, I'd met the beautiful, the hard-drinking, the theologically vigorous Molly.

We'd met the way a thousand couples in a thousand bars meet every night in a thousand towns, and with most of those couples it all turns out to be gibberish, much like that produced by those thousand monkeys at those famous thousand typewriters. But theoretically, of course, one of those monkeys will one day type out Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers, and there you have our story, Molly's and mine, after a fashion. Doomed from the start, so wrong for each other that, in a less muddleheaded age,
our parents would have certainly intervened, even if it meant blood in the streets to keep us apart.

And our monkey script, of course, had Fate written in—the night we met, I'd just been fired from a low-level marketing job at Ralston Purina. I'd never liked the job anyway—it was just the patch I'd landed in after college, and I figured I could take a little time to find another job just as bad. When she took me back to her apartment that night, Molly said, “We have to pray very hard about this.”

She sat on a hooked rug on the floor, legs crossed Indian-style beneath her in a gingham skirt I wanted to take off with my teeth. The room smelled of jasmine candles and the lights were low.

“I don't know,” I said. “Is this something—”

“Shush,” Molly said, eyes closed, holding out her hand to me. “Just pray.”

After about ten minutes of watching this beautiful girl sit absolutely still with her eyes closed, I moved down from the sofa to sit next to her on the floor. I put my hand to the hair on her neck and gently pushed it away, and I moved in to kiss her there. She let me but didn't respond, didn't speak for a moment, until she said, “Charlie.”

I stopped kissing but kept my face in her neck.

“Okay, Charlie,” she said. “We can do that now, but afterward we have to pray some more.”

So we did. Then we drank some and prayed some more and made love again, and I spent the night, and that next night we went back to the Duck, and then we came back to her place and drank some more and prayed and made love again, and I woke the next morning feeling great, even with my two-day hangover. It was a clean, buoyant hangover, a hopeful one, rather than the grungy, bottomless, desperate ones I'd had for so long. So this girl wanted to pray. So what? It didn't seem bad or weird, just different from my way of doing things. And Molly's piety was certainly not orthodox. She didn't make me wait till we got married
or anything—and she did things in bed I'd never even thought of before. As we kept seeing each other, we kept praying, but she didn't drag me to church, rarely went herself, in fact. And she was beautiful, and she liked a drink as much as I did. Who knows, I thought, maybe the praying was good for me. We had communed in word and in deed, in ritual and in act, in spirit and in flesh. And there was a way to look at Molly that didn't make her seem bat-shit crazy: most of the people my age were still clubbing, playing video games all night, and Tweeting till their fingers bled, paying no attention whatsoever to the deeper crevices and spiritual swells of human life on the planet. With Molly I saw there was this whole other side of things I'd left dumbly unexplored. I still didn't have a job, but I did have her. About a month after we started dating, the lease was up on her apartment, so we moved her into mine. She immediately put all of my furniture out on the street because of its bad feng shui.

This is when the reading started. A few days after she moved in, she came home with Cherilynn Fenster's
A Call to Nature: Finding God in the World of the Everyday
. We read and discussed. A week later, it was Michael Chen's
The American Buddhist: Paradoxical Love
. Then
Religions of the Mayan World
, by Dr. Walter Sloan, which we both found rather dry. More books followed more weeks and months, the books' subjects running further and further afield, until one night I asked her if we couldn't just see a movie, just go to the Duck, just go to bed. I'd been feeling restless lately, I guess. Molly had pretty much told me I didn't need to look for a job anymore—she was the general manager of two of Ray's fitness centers, and she made a nice check—and that instead I could spend my days praying and reading and annotating Biblical commentary and New Age memoirs to prepare for our discussions later. What I mainly did was drink, starting most days around noon, and when I prayed, it was usually for Molly in the bicycle shorts, Molly in the short red dress, Molly in the farm-girl jeans with the rip in the seat. It had been a long time since Molly in the farm-girl jeans, so
that night I asked her, “Couldn't we just skip it tonight? Go put on the farm-girl jeans.”

She set her vodka and tonic on the end table and said, “Charlie, you said yourself that you wanted to do this. I need it too, Charlie. The world gets so confusing to me sometimes.”

“Okay, Molly,” I said, finishing my drink.

“I'll do the farm girl later,” she said. “And you can be the upright revenuer looking for Daddy's filthy old still. I'll need to protect my Daddy—we're poor and the still is the only way Daddy can put any food on the table.” She slid over to my side of the couch. I could smell the heat on her neck, one of my favorite parts of her. “I'll try to distract you, but you're too upright for that, and soon I'll realize that behind my flirting and my coquettish gaze, I really do want a taste of you, you mean old revenuer with your high-flung city ways.” She put the back of her fingers to my chin and neck, then suddenly turned her fingertips on me with a gasp. “You see it, too—and now there's no escape from our passion. I'll take you to the bed I share with my three little sisters, and you'll deflower me there. Afterward, I'll want to leave with you. I'll tell you everything, the whereabouts of Daddy's still, the whole bit. It's the biggest bust of your career, and you'll be famous and go to Washington, DC, and work for J. Edgar Hoover himself, and introduce your little farm girl to the world of big-time politics. But first, we need to talk about Lyman Fullerton-Hupja's
Totems for the New Millennium
, so go get us another drink.”

It went on like this, more books, less farm girl, but still more and more booze. We took beer with the Bible, wine with the Torah, rum with voodoo, gin with the Celts. One night she came home with a bottle of saki and a copy of Kazumi Morikatsu's
The Maple and the Carp
. And as the months went on the talk became so much less theoretical, so much more personal. She began to confess her sins to me, and wanted mine as well, although since I hardly left the house anymore except for a rare outing to the Duck, the only sin I could really think
of was drinking too much. The one I didn't admit to was feeling like a kept man.

She had more, many more. She had lustful thoughts almost constantly, couldn't even pull into the parking lot at the gym without getting wet. The very smell of the place wobbled her knees. All day, every day, she plotted ways to entice one of the fine Christian exercisers into her private office. It took all of her self-control and love for me to keep her from it, she said. She went further back, all the way back, her childhood wrongs still weighing on her now as much as then, all the little awful things that kids do because they're kids and not because they're evil or bad, all the little lies and hurtful things and petty thefts she thought she needed to atone for, things she thought I could forgive. We started drinking even more, sleeping later, making love not at all. She felt too dirty, she said through the tears of repentance, felt she'd infect me with venality, her filthy mind, her ruined past.

The last night, the final straw, was when she showed up with a case of wine coolers and a copy of
The Third Annual Report of the Cyrrilean Council on Intergalactic Affairs
by someone calling herself Zulundi of Venus, a book Molly paid thirty-five dollars for that looked like it was run off this afternoon on someone's basement mimeograph. It was one thing that I would be expected to read this book and then try to formulate some sort of response that in some way connected the workings of the Intergalactic Council to Jesus and his everlasting love and our lives here in St. Louis, Missouri; I was a full-fledged exegete by now and could easily do that with any book. It was another thing that after this performance, I would be expected to listen to more confessions and wailing. But to have to drink wine coolers on top of all that was just too much. I put her and her book and her wine coolers, all three, in my car, and drove Molly to her brother's handsomely appointed mansion in Chesterfield, hoping never to see her again.

But, unfortunately, here she was at the Duck, a couple of days and one serious beating for me later, sitting on a stool at a table by the shuffleboard game, talking with her hands to a bearded lumberjack type I'd never seen before. Her green eyes reflected the light above the table, her blond hair in curls lit the rest of the room. She was crazy as hell. It occurred to me, only at that moment, that that's the only way I could have ever wound up with a girl who looked like her.

I went over.

“Your brother took stuff that wasn't even yours,” I said.

“Hi, Charlie,” she said.

“Yeah,” said the lumberjack. “Hi, Charlie.”

“He even took my clothes, then they really beat the hell out of me, Molly.”