It Feels So Good When I Stop (15 page)

I located the source of the voice. Marie was standing on the back porch of 97 Opal Cove Road. She started banging a large metal watering jug with a gardening shovel. “Is this your fucking dog? ” I yelled.

“No, Tinker! No, Tinker! ”

Roy started to freak. He tried desperately to squirm his restrained body higher up the stroller’s seat. The Doberman lunged at his feet and clamped onto his pant leg. I wrested Roy free. Tinker pulled back empty-mouthed. He was not fucking around. If I didn’t do something, he was going to eat Roy.

“Tinker! ” Marie screamed.

“It’s okay, Roy,” I lied. “Go home! ” I screamed at Tinker. I lifted Roy—stroller and all—onto the hood of the Subaru.

Tinker attacked me before I could follow Roy to relative safety. The savage was locked onto my left desert boot at the Achilles tendon. He started whipping his head back and forth like a well-hooked tarpon. I sledgeham mered my fist wildly at his mouth. I was pounding the piss out of my own foot in the process. Tinker was trying to snap my ankle’s neck. I didn’t feel any of it. Roy was screaming.

“Off, Tinker! ” Marie ordered. I heard a series of low-pitched, hollow
gonk
s as she beat the dog’s upholstered rib cage with the watering can. She brought it down so hard on his head my boot came off. Tinker yelped and retreated through the hedges that separated two yards.

“He has my fucking shoe.” I was shaking.

“The baby!” Marie screamed. Roy was facing us, crying as the stroller rolled backward in slow motion toward the edge of the hood. I grabbed the exposed calf of his fat drumstick. Marie took hold of the stroller and lowered it to the driveway. Roy screamed louder.

“Oh, God, no,” she said. “He’s hurt.” She raised his pant leg. His skin was a bloody mess.

“Oh-fuck-oh-fuck-oh-fuck-oh-fuck-oh-fuck. Fuck me, Roy! Oh, fuck, no! ”

“Calm down! ” Marie took off her sweatshirt and used it to dab his leg. She was wearing a white tanktop. She had a detail from the
Apocalpyse Now
movie poster tattooed on her biceps.

I was close to crying. “He’s just a baby. He’s just a fucking baby.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay. I think it’s your blood.”

My hands were covered in it. I looked away. I saw my desert boot lying like a mountaineering accident at the edge of the driveway. “Are you sure? ”

“I’m pretty sure.”

I WAS AWAKENED in the early hours of the morning by the sound of someone tapping their keys on the pressed-steel storm door.

“Who the fuck? ” I said, like my old man trying to eat a single hot supper in peace. I got up and slid on my pants. The tight, quiet ache in my punctured heel spiked and burned as my foot passed through my pant leg. The tapping on the door grew more desperate. I flipped the porch light on and opened the door.

Marie was standing there with no coat on. I knew drunk when I saw it.

“Please help me,” she slurred.

“Are you hurt? ”

She dismissed me. “No, no, no. I just need sleep.” She reminded me of Judy Garland leaning into Steve Allen—or whoever the fuck it was—on TV. She tried to push me aside and enter the house. I held firm.

“No, no, no, no, no, come on. Don’t do that.”

“Just right there.” She pointed to the living room floor behind me. She crouched below my tollbooth arm and attempted to squeeze between me and the doorframe. I pinched her off.

“I’m sorry. You can’t.”

She raised her face close to mine. Her breath was a vodka aerosol. “I saved your baby.”

“I know, and I appreciate it. But you have to go home.”

“But I saved it. The baby. Let me see him.” She tried to get by me again.

“He’s not here.”

“Where is he? ”

“At his mother’s.”

“Then let’s go get him.”

“We can’t get him.”

“Why not? ” She wasn’t the worst kind of drunk, but a bad-enough one: she wanted to be reasoned with.

“He’s a baby. He’s asleep.”

“Fuck you, then. Thanks.” She said something I couldn’t understand. Her upper and lower halves raced each other back to her car, which was still running and nearly perpendicular to the sidewalk. She had only a few hundred yards to drive, and it was so early in the morning, the only person she could hurt was herself.

“Fuck it,” she hollered, then threw up on the hood.

I watched her for a few seconds trying to mop the hood of the car with her sleeve. “Fuck it,” I said. I grabbed a T-shirt and went after her.

Part 2

I HAD A one-nighter in college that turned into a one-weekender. Another friend-of-a-friend thing. Her name was Julie. On Sunday afternoon I could tell Julie was getting too attached. She kept saying—in a blushing, pleasantly surprised way—that she never did things like this. She also thought it was cute the way I had to sleep with socks on. So I made sure my Friday-night disclaimer was still fresh in her mind. She had just bounded in from the kitchen, back to her futon with a tuna salad sandwich on toasted seven-grain bread. She took
Court and Spark
out of the tape player. She said she understood that I was unavailable for anything more, but that she couldn’t say she wasn’t disappointed. She thought maybe the weekend had changed my mind. I told her I didn’t think it had. I felt shitty about the whole thing. I didn’t want to sleep over her place that night, but I did anyway.

I woke up in Marie’s bed. She was getting dressed in the early-morning gray. She parted the curtains. The room went Technicolor. I faked the tail end of sleep and watched her. She was about the same height as Jocelyn, but thicker in almost every way. She picked up some clothes off the floor like she was cleaning up a careless mistake. A tattoo snake rose up the back of her neck and buried its head in her short black bob.

My head was spinning and I was thirsty. I thought about what I was going to say to her. I finally sat up and lit a smoke. Marie kept looking the other way.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“How you feeling? ”

“Like shit.”

“I’m not great, but I’ll live.”

She stayed as far away from me as she could without leaving the room. She lit a smoke from the pack on her dresser and finally faced me. Her eyes were saddled and dark. “How exactly did you get here? ”

I told her.

She nodded. “Did I suck you off? ”

“You tried to, but—”

“But you stopped me.”

I nodded.

“Did we fuck? ”

“No.” I peeled back the covers to show I was still wearing my pants. “We made out, but nothing really happened.”

“I’m sorry.”

She was sorry? I wasn’t expecting an apology. “Don’t be, please. Nothing happened.” I got up and started to gather the rest of my clothes.

“It’s not fucking you I’m sorry about.”

“But we didn’t.”

“I don’t care if we did. I’m sorry for showing up at your door in the middle of the night wasted.”

“You weren’t that wasted,” I lied.

“When you can’t remember if you let a perfect stranger come in your mouth . . .” She was leaning against a desk. She put her head down. “I’m just sorry, that’s all.”

“Okay.” If that had been Jocelyn there on the other side of the room, I don’t know what she would have done to me. She sure as fuck wouldn’t have apologized.

 

“ ROY ’S GETTING really big,” I said.

Pamela grunted as she extracted him from the car seat. “Tell me about it.” She looked tired but, on the whole, the best I’d seen since before she’d had Roy. Maybe it was the clothes. She wasn’t wearing one of her usual frumpy Sears pantsuits.

I touched her turtleneck sweater. “Is that cashmere? ”

“Silk,” she said proudly.

“Nice.”

“I figured, what the hell, right? ”

Roy’s feet hit the sidewalk, and he ran directly into my arms. “Hey, buddy, remember me? ”

Pamela lit up. “Wow. He only goes to people he really knows.”

“That is so amazing.”

“It’s only because you and I have the same nose.”

“No, it’s more than that.”

“You think? ”

“You’re a natural. I told you so.”

“Natural what?” Roy tried to reprise the glasses-swiping game.

“Gentle, baby,” Pamela said. “Gen-tull.”

“It’s okay.” I folded my glasses and put them in my pocket. Roy was pissed off. He hollered.

“It’s okay, baby.” Pamela distracted him with the small flashlight on her key chain. “He’s at that age where he wants everything. And if you don’t give it to him, watch out.”

No shit.

“He bit my neck the other day, look.” She rolled back the foreskin of her turtleneck. There was a purple bruise over her carotid artery.

“Holy shit. He got you pretty good. What did you do to get that? ”

“I wouldn’t let him have a lightbulb.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“I know, right? ”

“Sounds rough.”

“It
is
rough. Really rough. But it’s easier, too, in some ways, if you know what I’m talking about.” She didn’t want to say too much in front of Roy. “Has he been around much? ”

“Who? James? ”

“No,” she said with the kind of sarcasm that has sunk many a sitcom pilot. “Yes, James.”

“A couple times, quick. Him and Dogshit.” Pamela shook her head at the mention of his name. “They stopped by and fixed something. Fuck if I know what.”

“Easy with the language,” Pamela said. “He’s starting to repeat things.”

“Sorry.” I turned to Roy. “Sorry, kid. Don’t do what I do.”

“You sound just like Dad,” Pamela said. Countless times I’ve heard my father say those very words—don’t do what I do—seconds before doing something like stick a screwdriver into a dark recess of a running car engine. “Him and Ma been down yet?” She sounded like she was privy to something I wasn’t.

“You fucking told them I’m here?”

“No, I did not. And watch your mouth, please.” Roy recognized the annoyed and imperative qualities in his mother’s voice. He stopped jiggling the keys and gave us his undivided attention. Pamela softened. “But you know how they are. Empty house. Neighbors gone for the winter. I wouldn’t be surprised if they drive down once a week to make sure nobody stole the paint off the shutters.”

She was right. “Or the sconces,” I added.

“Or the sconces.”

Our parents were mildly insane that way. It should have been much funnier than it was. Roy was smiling.

“What about ‘Show me the couch’? ” I said. It was a famous story in our family.

“Oh, Christ almighty.” Now it was Pamela who sounded like our father.

When Pamela was sixteen, she volunteered to hang out at our aunt Christie’s apartment in East Boston and sign for the new couch that Jordan’s Furniture was delivering sometime between nine in the morning and four in the afternoon. My aunt Christie was an air-traffic controller at Logan Airport and couldn’t miss work. Her apartment was on the top floor of a four-story walk-up.

My old man was not into the idea of Pamela’s being alone with three or four furniture movers, as it’s well documented how fond furniture movers are of squeezing unscheduled gang rapes into their busy days.

My old man walked Pamela through the correct answers, then quizzed her:

Old Man: And what are you going to say when the movers buzz up from the lobby?

Pamela: Who is it?

OM: And when they knock on Aunt Christie’s door, then what are you going to say?

P: Who is it?

OM: And after they identify themselves as the movers, and you see them through the peephole, what are you going to say before letting them in?

P: Just a minute, I’m naked?

OM: Don’t be a smart-ass. I’m serious here.

P: Show me the couch. I say, “Show me the couch.”

OM: Exactly. Show me the couch.

I took a smoke from my pack, and Pamela motioned wordlessly, like a blackjack player who wants the dealer to keep ’em comin’.