Authors: Dale Peck
Sunday morning’s light sneaks in through a six-inch space between the curtains’ bottom and the windowsill. It finds me, a fugitive in my bed, awake and awaiting my father’s awakening so I can start my day. It’s early, he’s sleeping, snores penetrate the wall. They come from the living room; though I haven’t been up, I know what he looks like, stretched out on the couch: he wears the clothes he worked in yesterday, stained T-shirt and jeans, and his feet, still booted, are propped on the couch’s arm. His mouth is open, the skin of his jaw is slack and pale with gray stubble. His clothes smell of cigarettes, his breath stinks of beer.
Last night clings to me as well: cigarette smoke lingers in my clothes, and sand from the river is stuck between my toes. The skin over my stomach is tight with my dried semen, and the taste of someone else’s is in my mouth. If I weren’t afraid I’d wake my father, I’d eat something to get rid of it. It doesn’t taste bad or anything—it’s more like an itch, the light, feathery kind that
makes you think
someone’s
touching you, but when you look up, there’s no one there.
His name was Harry. He had money in oil, he said, and when we finished he gave me a fifty-dollar bill. It was the first time someone paid me, and when he pressed it in my hand, almost coyly, with a nod and a wink, I thought of it as money
he’d
earned. But during the night I realized I’d earned it, and as I lie here now and try to decide what that means, a second line of light, coming through the vertical slit between the curtains, illuminates the wadded bill on my dresser and turns it almost white.
I wait in bed until past noon, when my father turns on the TV, and then I cook us bacon and eggs, and eat with him in the living room. I thought food would do the trick, but Harry’s presence remains, as if he’d ejaculated seconds ago. My tongue wanders my mouth now, searching vainly for something trapped in my teeth and emitting all this flavor, a pepper seed or a clove or something, a cum clove. When my father speaks—he only said my name, he only said “John,” but that’s how it started—the word slams into my ears and pushes a response out of my mouth before I have time to think. “What?” I say. The sound of my voice startles me; it is clearly, undeniably, pissed off. I look at my father then, I’ve messed up and I know it, and fear begins to mix with Harry in my mouth.
My father’s nostrils flare. “Excuse me,” he says, “I didn’t mean to disturb you.” My swallow isn’t quite a gulp. “My tone was directed at my imagination,” I say quickly, “not you.” My
apology is too complicated for my father’s hangover, and his eyes narrow. “I sent you to prep school for this—so you can get mad at your ‘imagination’?” He puts quotes around the word, like imagination is something I have, he doesn’t. I stumble on that. For a moment I think I see what separates us; for a moment I want to embrace him. But what comes out of my mouth is “You sent me to school to make me smart, so don’t be surprised if I know a few things.” My father’s face relaxes into simple anger. “Yeah, I understand that,” he says, then stands and walks—to me? the kitchen? Me. He’s taken off his clothes since he got up, he wears only underwear now, and he stands so close to me that his torso is all I see. His body seems generic. Wispy chest hairs, a growing paunch: they could belong to any middle-aged man. “So, Mr. Prep School,” I hear, and I have to remind myself it’s my father talking, “what do you know about this?” He smacks my face. It’s the first—no, the second time he’s hit me since my mother died.
Spit rushes into my mouth then, and something, adrenaline, I suppose, makes my hands shake. The spit tastes like blood at first, but then I realize, No, it’s not blood, it’s Harry. I lick my lips to taste him more completely. I blink my eyes, and his torso replaces my father’s before me. I stand up. My father’s face, heaving as if he’d overexerted himself, threatens to drive away Harry’s, so I speak before it can. “I gave a blowjob last night,” I say. “Do you understand what that means?”
My father smacks me again. “His dick was small,” I say. “I was surprised. I used to think everyone’s looked like mine. And
yours.” My father punches me now, and I do taste blood, and feel it on my chin. “He laughed when he—when he came,” I tell my father. “It was strange, but it made me feel so good, the way he laughed, the way, I thought, the way
I’d
made
him
feel good.” Again my father punches me, hard enough to knock me to the chair. I glimpse his fist as it leaves my face. It’s smeared with blood, and the blood flashes in the afternoon light. I stand up quickly, determined to keep talking. To fight back. “But the taste,” I say, “it really surprised me.” I lick my lips again, searching for it, but before I find it my father smacks me from both sides, openhanded. He grabs the skin of my cheeks and rattles my head back and forth, and when he’s finished he throws me to the floor. My head hits first, I think, I’m disoriented for a minute, it seems like I’m hearing an echo and not actual words. Shut up, I hear, but the words are so faint they lack power.
There’s something wrong with my jaw, it’s hard to talk. “Herry,” I say. “His aye was Herry, allos lie yours.” But it doesn’t sound like my father’s name, not the way I
say
it, it sounds like my father’s voice when he’s drunk. “Shut up!” he shouts. I hear him clearly now, and the words, I realize, are filled not with anger but with pain, and I close my eyes then, and my mouth. I’ve won. My father kicks me in the stomach, and vomit fills my mouth, erasing even the memory of Harry’s taste. My father kicks my head. I try to open my eyes then—for some reason I want to see him one last time—but I can’t. I wish, suddenly, I wish I’d looked
at him
while I talked to him, instead of at someone who isn’t here. It takes me a long time to think this,
and when I have, I open my eyes, and my body isn’t in the same place it had been, it’s ten feet away, and it’s dark, and my father is gone. All I know is that I have to leave here, for good. The only thing I take with me is the money Harry gave me, and the knowledge of how I earned it, and what it cost.
Only later did I realize that I left before answering my fathers question. He asked me what I knew about “this”—the smack of his hand. I could have answered him. I could have said, “Not as much as my mother.” And in this case, not knowing is worth so much more than knowing.
I READ MY body now, not as often as I did then, when each bruise was a new book I couldn’t quite understand no matter how many times my hands returned to it. Sometimes I hurt myself now and I press on the spot until my mouth fills with an almost-forgotten taste, my head with almost-forgotten images. Sometimes I press my hands together. My right hand—it mostly recovered, though I still can’t close it all the way, can’t hold a pencil in it—my right hand, though weaker, is larger than my left. It’s as large as I remember my father’s hands to be. If you stick a pin in it, I hardly feel a thing, but sometimes it hurts for no reason at all. And what I want to know is, is this—my hand—is this how I am, or how my father was, or both of us, or is it just some clue, some reminder, that someone was here?
Over the years, my father has erected monuments to his prosperity. These are: a gazebo, built from South American hardwood buried in North Dakota granite; an unattached four-car garage, complete with heating and air conditioning; a new wing on the house that is longer, wider, and a story taller than the original building; and, most recently, a Lincoln Continental, which I don’t see as my taxi drops me off in our hedge-lined gravel driveway. I try to pay the driver, but she waves me away, saying she’s already got her money. Bea, my stepmother, kisses me at the door, dressed for gardening in old jeans and a halter top that exposes her thin, thin back and arms. A pair of dirty gloves flop over her belt, and her exposed skin is shiny with suntan lotion. She smells of sweat and cocoa butter.
She speaks as if distracted, waving a hand at nothing. “He’s been sleeping at her place in town. Did you notice the well?” She steps past me on the porch and points across the yard.
Near our forest’s edge squats a small brick cube topped by a wooden-shingled roof. “One hundred and twenty feet,” she says, already yards away from me on her way to the garden. “It’s amazing how deep you have to go to find water in Kansas.” She stops at the well, leans in, and her back muscles ripple as her arm works an invisible crank. I expect to see a bucket of water with a pewter dipper appear from the shadows, but instead plastic sprinkler heads pop from the ground and begin rotating slowly, their measured streams just overlapping at the edges. “His newest toy,” she calls over the sound of squirting jets, and then she watches the lawn until it begins to glow in the sun and water. “It’s yours if you want it, John.” “The well?” I call, confused. “The house,” she answers, and goes in the garden. She closes the gate of the rabbitproof fence behind her. Each of the sprinklers contains its own circular rainbow; they look like multicolored flowers, and I stare at Bea’s back through the mirage as she works in the half-grown patch of corn. Then the water stops, the rainbows disappear, and the sprinkler heads retreat into dampened earth. Across the lawn, I hear machinery humming as the well mines for more water.
“I DID IT all for love,” Barclay crooned Friday—yesterday—as he flounced across the small cluttered ruin of his apartment. “I lived for love and I shall die from love.” He smiled and rushed to a cracked mirror, checking his makeup
to see if any red splotches were visible on his smooth cheeks or the brown dome of his bald head. He learned how to apply foundation in the early sixties, “when a flawless skin meant everything.” I’ve never known his age; he’s at least as old as my parents, I think, but somewhere along the line the effects of illness overtook the effects of aging. On the day he dies, he’s said, he will awaken early to do his face, and then lie back and smile, and let us find him like that. “It will probably be you, dear John, won’t it? Coming in here in your nice white shirts and loose black jeans. No more spaghetti-string tank tops and shredded cutoffs for you. Ah, how I miss the old days!” He giggled like a child at himself, then poked a finger in the brown bags on the table. “And now you bring me all these yucko healthy groceries. What do we have today?” he said, his thrice-weekly soliloquy concluded. “The usual,” I said, and pulled out organic vegetables and whole-grain pasta and rice, vitamin supplements, soy milk, and unprocessed bread. “Yucko, yucko, yucko,” Barclay moaned. “Macro-bioto yucko,” and he grabbed a handful of radishes and tossed them in the air with his limp wrists. They fell to the floor like cherry bombs attached to tattered green parachutes. As I picked them up, Barclay rushed by me, his stick-thin legs poking from his embroidered paisley dressing gown. His feet stepped silently in vinyl imitation-gentleman’s slippers, and he indiscriminately crushed a radish with one of them. He slumped against a counter. “Oh, my delicate arches,” he said, pulling off a slipper and rubbing an already-swelling
bump on his left foot. “It used to be I could dance all night in high-heeled glass slippers—Cinderella meets the Rockettes, you know—and still be fresh enough to escort a gentleman home for some first-class Humpty-Dumpty before bedtime. But now”—he paused dramatically and faked a swoon—“I am undone by a tuber.” He rubbed his foot with one hand, then laughed. “Ooh,” he said. “Ow. I tickle myself. Ow!” “Radishes help digestion,” I said, leaning over to retrieve the pulpy red ball. Piles of rat droppings littered the floor. “Honey,” Barclay said, placing a lifeless hand on my shoulder. “I am
beyond
digestion.” He laughed hysterically for a second, then swish-limped to the other counter. He pulled several packages from a cabinet and threw them on the table. “The next time you go shopping,” he said, pointing, “just bring me these.” The table held plastic packages of dehydrated foods—soups and refined pastas mostly. He held one up at an odd angle next to his Cheshire smile. A line of spittle dribbled from his lips. Addressing an imaginary television audience, he said, “Just add water and serve.”
HENRY GRUNTS IN that way he has when I call, and then hollers “Martin!” without covering the telephone mouthpiece, so I receive the full brunt of his shout in my ear. “It’s your boyfriend!” Waiting for Martin to pick up, I smell garlic on my fingers from last night’s dinner. Sometime between the manicotti and the cannoli Martin had pressed a key to his
apartment in my hand; I clutched it so tightly on the train home to Brooklyn that its freshly cut edge bit into my palm, and I sucked a drop of blood to keep it from dripping on my clothes. When Martin comes to the phone, I hear him arguing with Henry in fierce whispers. “He’s not my boyfriend.” “What is he then? He’s not your lover.” “I don’t know,” Martin says. “Give me the phone.” His faint greeting is obscured by the sound of Henry’s retreating laughter. “So, what’re you thinking?” Martin asks, his voice full of sudden glee. “About what?” “Oh, about anything.” His voice lilts, and I imagine his eyes twinkling as they do when he thinks we share a confidence. “I don’t know,” I say. “I haven’t thought about it.” “About moving in,” Martin says quickly, but his voice is less exuberant. “I don’t know,” I say again. “What does Henry think about it?” Martin mistakes my question for jealousy. “Don’t worry about Henry. He’d have been gone long ago, if—” He cuts himself off. “Anyway, he’ll be gone before you move in.” Then he talks about the weather in the city, and his job, and about any other thing that seems to enter his head, as if I’ve been gone for months and not just a few hours. “There was this huge fire in a building down the street. What with the drought and all, they practically tapped the city dry putting it out. Whole building was gutted, and about two dozen families stranded.” “I know,” I say, cutting him off. “I read about it in the paper.” Then I tell him my stepmother needs my help in the garden. “When will I hear from you?” he asks, and I gather from his plaintive tone that he means, When will I hear
that you’re moving in with me? “My parents have offered me the house out here,” I say quickly, before he can ask another question. “But I don’t know what’s going to happen yet.”