Pike's Folly (3 page)

Nothing honest came to mind, so he just smiled agreeably until Celia finally said, “I am occupied every night next week,” and marched down the steps, adding at the foot of the drive, “Don't forget, Stuart, you have an obligation to the rest of the community.”

“Okay,” he said, waving cheerfully from the top step.

“You, as an artist,
you
should understand this.”

“I do, I do.” Closing the door.

“We all share the same respons—”

“Yep.” Back inside the foyer, he told himself,
I did not just shut
the door in that woman's face,
then slipped off his robe and joined Marlene in the bathroom just off the kitchen. She'd covered herself with a blue beach towel but took it off when she saw that the coast was clear. “Is that hard-on for me or for Celia Shriver?” she asked.

“Don't be ridiculous,” he said.

They kissed, then went to the kitchen, where she poured them both a full glass of Chardonnay. Marlene poured wine like it was Coca-Cola, and Stuart had to make sure to pace himself correctly—one glass for every two of hers—or else he'd never be able to have sex after dinner.

Two glasses later—he'd lost track of how many she'd had— he pulled himself up from the living room sofa, where he'd been trying to read the uncorrected proofs of a first novel his agent had sent him (“Write more like
this,
” he'd said over the phone), and set about preparing a Lean Cuisine for dinner. Marlene was in the kitchen, paying bills at the table.

“Hey, do you want to go to Martha's Vineyard next May?” she asked after some time had passed.

She was getting that dopey look in her eyes; somehow she'd refilled her glass without his noticing. He didn't answer, just grumbled noncommittally as he pulled the Asian-style chicken out of the microwave and set it steaming on the counter. Wanting to be helpful, she got up and watched him slice through the TV dinner's cellophane wrapper with a pair of safety scissors. “This one's for you,” he said, spooning the chicken over a desiccated lump of rice.

Marlene took the plate but didn't go back to the table. It was rude, she felt, to start before her husband, particularly since he'd gone to the trouble of making dinner. “Carla and Bill are renting a beach house, and they asked us to come along. It's a whole week, though, and I know you'll have a lot of work to do.”

“Hardly.”

They watched as the second round of Lean Cuisine quaked under the auburn glow of the microwave. The spicy smell of the food cooking was making them both hungry.

Marlene set her plate down on the range-top and edged his legs apart with her knee. “It might be fun. We could get naked on the beach.” Her fingers crept down his back, pricking at the waxy hair under his balls. “There's a nude beach somewhere, I think. Right where the Kennedy plane crashed.”

He laughed gruffly. “I have no interest in going to a nude beach.”

She looked surprised. “Why not?”

“Because it's not sexy. There's nothing remotely erotic about it. You go to the beach, take off your clothes and wander around with a bunch of other naked people. Big deal. It's like going to the grocery store to buy groceries.” He stared into the microwave, where the cellophane wrapper seemed to respirate as it swelled, shriveled, swelled and shriveled again. “I don't like nudists. There's too much bullshit philosophy involved. Back to nature and all that.”

“Oysters are erotic. They have oysters on Martha's Vineyard.”

“They have oysters in Providence. Oysters per se signify nothing.”

She smiled, listening to him speak; he was teasing her, and she knew it.

“Besides,” he said, “my editor has a summer house on the Vineyard. Or maybe it's Nantucket. Anyway, I don't want to risk it.” The microwave dinged; he hit the button to give it another thirty seconds.

“I think it'd be fun,” she said tentatively. “Knowing me, I'd probably bail out at the last minute. I wish that I could just turn off my brain and let myself go.” Tired of waiting, she picked some chicken from her plate, blew on it, then popped it into her mouth, thinking as she chewed. “I wonder if you can have sex and masturbate and stuff like that.”

“At a nude beach? I doubt it.” He stopped the microwave and took out his serving. Slicing the wrapper, he arranged the chicken over the rice and mushed it up, quelling an urge to touch the hot fork to her skin. “Come on, let's eat,” he said.

They dined in silence. It was dark outside, and something was going on at the church down the street.

After a few bites, Marlene pushed her plate aside and stared down at her breasts. Her nipples appeared slightly yellow, and she wondered if this made her more attractive or less. Her stare became a reverie; it felt good to see her breasts, just as it felt good to see her husband across the table with a paper napkin in his lap. “I started reading your book again yesterday,” she said.

He didn't look up. “What on earth for?”

“Because you were gone, and I missed you.”

“Marlene, my book isn't a substitute for me.”

“I know, but it's a nice reminder. I'd forgotten all about the scene at the funeral home. I love that scene.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you said you'd forgotten all about it.”

She laughed to hide her embarrassment. “I mean, I forgot about the
details.
You know what I mean.”

His shoulders, which had been tense, slumped. “I know . . . I'm just being an asshole. I wrote that book a long time ago, Marlene. Words came easier to me then. I wish it wasn't so hard now. I guess that our minds just go soft after awhile.” He paused. Sometimes he felt that these conversations would be a whole lot easier if he and Marlene weren't naked.

After dinner, they went up to bed and watched TV until eleven. During the commercials, he told her about his day at work. “I suppose it's hard not to admire Nate's spontaneity,” he said. “The guy never seems to worry about anything.”

She could tell from his tone of voice that something was bothering him. “We can be like that, too. We can be spontaneous,” she said.

“No, we can't. We're boring.”

“We're not boring! Look at us. Does this look like a boring couple to you?”

He glanced at their naked bodies, which in truth he was getting tired of seeing. “In a way, yeah,” he said.

She sat up in bed. “Then let's make it exciting again. Let's do something dangerous.”

“Like what?”

“Like . . . let's have sex in the backyard.”

He laughed. “Oh, shut up.”

“I mean it. Come on, right now.”

She took his hand and started to rise, but he pulled her back down. “No. Next brilliant suggestion,” he said.

Still high on the idea, she said, “All right, maybe not that. But let's just stick our necks out. For one minute, Stuart. It'll be fun.”

“No, it won't.”

No longer kidding, she said, “I'll go by myself.”

“Oh, no.” His grip tightened on her arm. “You're gonna get yourself in a lot of trouble.”

“Come with me, then. You can protect me.”

He sighed. Marlene's single-mindedness could be impressive at times. “All right . . . for
one
second. Not even that. A half-second.”

Still unsure of himself, he followed her out of bed and down the stairs to the first floor. From behind, Marlene's body looked pale and shapeless, and he remembered how much he enjoyed pressing himself against her fleshy bottom, his erection fitting snugly in the crevice of her buttocks. This sense-memory helped to block out some of the doubts that were pervasive inside his head.

At the back door, they spoke in whispers:

“Should we leave it open?”

“Yes, but bring a key just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

“Just to be safe. The wind might blow the door shut.”

“But if we leave it unlocked—”

“Let's not get into an argument about it. Here—”

“Is there something wrong? Are you mad about something, baby? 'Cause we can—”

“No, let's just do it. But one second, and then we—”

“Shhh . . .”

Easing the door open, she placed one foot on the wet brick patio, then continued a few steps away from the house. Stuart followed but stopped where the light from a street lamp fell at his feet. He didn't feel safe out here. The area behind the house was enclosed by a six-foot-high fence that ran along the perimeter of the yard. Above the fence, the second and third floors of the neighbor's house lurked behind a thicket of bare trees. The rain had lessened somewhat; he could feel it on his back and chest.

Marlene walked purposefully to the edge of the lawn, then returned, smiling, radiant. “Where'd you put the keys?” she asked.

He nodded toward a window ledge near the door. “They're right there,” he said, adding for his own sake, “they're not going anywhere.”

Out in the church parking lot, a car door opened and closed, and both Stuart and Marlene watched as a man in a long raincoat trod up the steps to the rectory entrance. She called out to him, “I'm naked!” but then, just as impulsively, scurried across the patio and into the house. Stuart didn't move, just stood in the gray glow of the streetlamp, letting the rain patter on his head, the same as it fell on the yard, the deck furniture, the unraked leaves. The wind blew sidelong across his body as he watched the man in the parking lot go into the church. He could feel the whole world looking at his penis, and he braved this prickly sensation for a full five seconds before sauntering across the wet brick patio and going inside.

An hour later, they were both still awake. The halogen track lighting over the bed cast ultraviolet rings across the stippled white-plaster ceiling; it all seemed a bit harsh for 12:23 in the morning, but with the booze wearing off—along with the shock of what they'd done—they craved a certain midday orderliness, the comfort of seeing definite shapes instead of blurs: the nightstand, the TV on top of the dresser, the closet door half open.

“Maybe we should've waited till later,” Marlene said. She was sitting up in bed with three navy-blue pillows wedged between her back and the headboard. Her eyes had narrowed to anxious slits. “The Taylors still had their lights on. What do you think the chances are that someone saw us?”

Stuart didn't answer. He was trying to remember the past hour, but already it seemed like something that hadn't really happened, none of the sensory information—the wet leaves on the ground, the prick of the cold night air under his arms and between his legs—available to him except as mere description: the word “cold” but not the sense of it, the word “naked” but not the fact.

Marlene flung off the comforter and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Damn it! This always happens. I always spoil things for myself. Maybe I should've had another glass of wine first.”

“No more drinking, Marlene. Not if you're going to act like this.”

His cautious interjections went unheard as she crossed to the dresser and began laying out clothes for work. “I'm tired of being such a scaredy-cat. I want to do everything, honey— streaking, public masturbation, you name it.”

“All very much against the law,” he warned.

She turned and beamed at him. “Nothing bad will happen to us as long as we're together. Trust me, Stuart.”

As much as he wanted to believe her, he couldn't. “I admire your confidence,” he said.

“I'm
not
confident,” she insisted. “Not like you. My God, you
wrote
and
published
a
book.
That's amazing! I haven't done anything amazing.” She looked down, and he followed her gaze to the floor. “I think . . . I want to start flashing people. I dunno.”

She finished setting out her clothes, climbed into bed and, with the reluctance of a performer not wanting to leave the stage, turned off the lights. They kissed and held each other, but the spell was broken; neither felt like having sex. Ten minutes later, the sound of loud, masculine snoring from her side of the bed startled him.

Lying next to her—it was three in the morning, and he'd still not fallen asleep—he considered the smallness of the world, the connective fibers that existed for no other reason than to render a person self-conscious. This state in particular—the smallest, most insular one in the country—was a pressure cooker for self-consciousness. Everybody knew everybody else. Even Nathaniel Pike and Gregg Reese went to the same parties. In a growing panic—at 3:00 a.m., then at four and still unable to sleep—he remembered what Celia Shriver had said to him that afternoon:

You think you can keep a secret in Rhode Island?

Four-thirty, now . . . resisting the urge to go outside and do it again . . .

4

Allison Reese and her boyfriend, Heath, were arguing. It was one in the afternoon, and neither had gotten dressed or even out of bed. Heath's bedroom, one of two rooms in his East Providence basement apartment, was cozy and cluttered, with film canisters and videotapes piled on the floor, giant posters from gore and exploitation flicks covering every inch of wall space, their corners curled where the tape had dried and come loose. Heath's prized possession was a high-definition, wide-screen Panasonic television, which he'd bought for three thousand dollars. Three thousand dollars wasn't remotely in his price range, but he'd done it anyway, and in the weeks since, he'd joined the Panasonic online mailing list, sent in the lifetime warranty and read the sixty-eight-page owner's manual from cover to cover. He wanted to be a good parent to his TV.

With the DVD player on pause, Allison sat up in bed and blocked his view of the screen. “I don't see what's misogynous about it, just because it shows one woman sexually dominating another in front of a man. I mean, that's like saying sexuality is misogynous. What's misogynous about Marguerite Duras, or Anaïs Nin?”

“I'm not saying it's
bad,
I'm just saying it's misogynous,” Heath replied. The film they'd been watching was
Ilsa: The
Wicked Warden,
which showed a female warden sticking pins into a woman's breasts, another being suffocated to death in front of her sister, still another lying on a torture table while a prison guard injected acid into her vagina—all fairly typical of the 1970s women-in-prison genre but not, perhaps, the best choice for Thanksgiving Day entertainment. “I'm not making a value judgment about it,” he continued. “I think misogyny is a perfectly valid form of artistic expression. Look at Philip Roth.”

Allison, who'd never read anything by Roth, said, “There's a big difference between something like that and
Ilsa: The Wicked
Warden.
”

“Not necessarily. A Roth novel can be as fucked up as any sexploitation film. What you're reacting to is the difference between two art forms. Film is more visceral than print. There are things people will tolerate in a book that they'd never stand for in a movie.”

“Whatever.” She turned off the TV with the remote. “I think the whole idea of misogyny is misogynous, anyway. It's patronizing.”

“Being misogynous?”

“No, always saying, ‘Oh, that's misogynous,' just because you think I don't know how to stand up for myself.”

He reached across the bed and took the remote out of her hands. “You know that's not what I think. I just don't want you to be offended by the film.”

“I'm
not.
” She rolled out of bed, threw on one of Heath's shirts and went into the tiny bathroom off the kitchen. Her muscles had tensed up during the movie, and she now found herself unable to pee. Flushing the toilet anyway, she washed her hands under a trickle of water and returned to the kitchen to make coffee. Heath had put on a Beach Boys CD, one of his several bootlegs from the legendary
Smile
sessions of late '66, early '67. Heath was a
Smile
fanatic, and his collection of memorabilia from that particular era in the band's history was extensive. Each bootleg was slightly different, and the same songs often had different titles—“Friday Night” was also “I'm in Great Shape,” or “The Woodshop Song,” even “I'll Be Around,” depending on which reference work you consulted. As for the songs themselves, most were just brief, elliptical patterns— “feels,” as Brian Wilson called them—more like backing tracks than finished compositions, as if all the rhythmic and harmonic sequences had been laid down without the melody. Part of
Smile
's appeal was that, as a record, it only partially existed; various parts of it were lost, destroyed, never recorded, still sitting in a vault somewhere. Unlike the other relics of the sixties—
Sgt.
Pepper,
even the Beach Boys' own
Pet Sounds
—
Smile
's power came from its very inscrutability, the fact that it didn't exist in any definitive form. Much of what remained of the sessions sounded trite and sophomoric, hardly the stuff of myth.
Smile
was certainly not up to the refined level of Brian Wilson's other, better-known efforts like “California Girls” and “I Get Around.” But at the same time, it
was
a masterpiece, because what he'd managed to capture on tape, however fleetingly, was the sound of his own mind coming apart. Even the titles suggested a young and once-brilliant Wilson struggling with his exhausted imagination: “I Love to Say Dada,” “Do You Like Worms,” “Tune X,” “I Don't Know.”
Smile
's drama was real, not a fabrication. Heard over and over, those chants and ostinatos came to mimic the obsessive ruminations of a confused, broken man. It was music worth obsessing about: “Heroes and Villains,” “Surf 's Up,” “Child Is Father of the Man.” The most beautiful music ever.

To Allison, it sounded like noise. “Something else, please,” she called across the room.

Heath turned off the music. “What do you want to hear?”

Focused on her task, she spooned three dark heaps of ground coffee into the basket filter of Heath's never-before-washed coffeemaker. “Actually, nothing right now. I'm still thinking about that movie.” Starting the coffee, she pulled up a stool and sat down. Her feet were dirty from picking up dust and bits of uncooked rice from the floor. “I wonder why they don't make movies like that anymore. I mean, it's just
porn.
What's the big deal?”

“It's not porn, Allison.” He moved in on her; this was a subject that he took
very
seriously, and his unshaven face—which Allison had once likened to a banana, an image she hadn't been able to shake since—regarded her with pity and concern. “Porn is its own thing. I'm not interested in porn. I'm interested in transgressive cinema.”

She smiled at him. “No, I know you are, honey.” Her eyes went dreamy as she appraised his body; his long, dyed-blond hair, black at the roots; the impressive musculature he'd built up from years of lugging camera equipment around and that now seemed wrong for his personality. She'd never dated a boy like Heath before. Two, maybe three nights a week, she stayed with him in East Providence, their dates consisting mostly of takeout pizza, one or two rounds of lovemaking (at twenty-one, Allison's sexual proclivities were still rooted in adolescence: candlewax and flavored condoms) interspersed with late-night screenings of
Zabriskie Point, I Am Curious (Yellow), I Am Curious (Blue), Salon Kitty, The Naked Ape, Last House on Dead End
Street, Guyana: Cult of the Damned,
any number of Umberto Lenzi films,
Jungle Holocaust, Farewell Uncle Tom,
the uncut
Lolita,
the uncut
Caligula,
the European-only version of
Salo or
the 120 Days of Sodom,
all preselected from his ever-growing library of rare and imported videos, DVDs, and even 16mm, which he showed against a baby-blue bedspread hung over the wall. For her part, Allison did her best not to draw any conclusions about her boyfriend's sanity based on his cinematic preferences: banned films, films involving rape and torture and child molestation, films at the very least rated NC-17 but generally not rated all. She was beyond drawing conclusions about anything. Besides, she didn't want to look like a wimp.

Ever since college—as expected, she'd graduated with honors in Comparative Literature, with a minor in Postfeminist Theory—she'd been crafting a new persona for herself. Though she still kept in touch with her former housemates, she now considered almost everything about the Ivy League experience distasteful. During those four years at Harvard, she'd gotten laid exactly once and not since her first semester. The drugs were good on campus, and easy to find, but the only place she liked to get high was the aquarium—
check out the fishes, whoa
—and the only clubs in town usually played too much eighties retro for her taste. Freed from the bonds of academia, she wanted to explore life a little, maybe get arrested, try heroin once, have a “lesbian experience,” read James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, wear slinky black dresses instead of sweaters and jeans, high-heeled sandals instead of shapeless brown loafers, Poison instead of patchouli.

When she'd first met Heath back in June—the Wild Colonial wasn't his usual hangout, but it was Bloomsday, and every year the bar undertook a daylong reading of
Ulysses
in the back room—some of those transformations were already in place. She'd taken to wearing her sandy blond hair long, her bangs trimmed in the front. If she was beautiful, she preferred not to think of herself as such.
Striking,
perhaps, or
disarming,
both of which qualified her looks in terms that she could understand. At bars, she displayed proof of her education the way some women flashed the pepper spray on their key chain: both as a warning and, to the right man, a challenge. If you didn't “get it,” you didn't
get
it. Wherever she went, she carried a tattered copy of
The Golden Notebook
in the pocket of her blood-red sweater-coat. This, like everything else, was a test. The man she was looking for had to be smart, older (Heath was twenty-six), left wing and politically active, an artist, kind of cute, pot-friendly, acid-friendly, vegan-friendly but not militant about it. Heath was all of these things.

Best of all, he wasn't a Rhode Islander. Allison was tired of guys from Cranston, Warwick, East Providence. Heath had a vibe that set him apart from those losers. He'd left home, moved on with his life. He hardly even talked about his parents, who were both still down in North Carolina, where he'd grown up. Allison couldn't imagine making such a clean break from her past. Her family had always been a tight-knit crew, and not even her parents' divorce three years ago had done much to change that. Allison's mother, Renee, had since moved to an expensive flat in London, where Allison had spent recent summers. Her parents continued to get along, though seeing each other only occasionally. Renee, who'd turned into a bit of a fag hag in Europe, still called long-distance every few weeks, trying to fix Gregg up with one of the many pretty boys in her coterie. It was no big deal; these were modern times, and there was nothing anyone could do about it anyway.

Not surprisingly, the person most affected by the divorce was Allison. She'd begun to suspect something about herself recently that she could hardly believe, given that it contradicted everything she'd always regarded as fair and decent and open-minded. The truth was, she
didn't like
gay men. Being charitable, they made her uncomfortable; that's how she sold it to herself, by easing into the semantics of her own prejudice as a swimmer might enter cold water an inch at a time. Phrasing it thus, she acknowledged the problem was her own—the fact that all of the gay men she'd encountered in college had seemed like such stereotypes was a reflection of her own personal shortcomings, and not any fault of the men themselves.

“What should I wear tonight?” Heath asked, his arms around her waist while he nuzzled her in the kitchen.

The coffee was ready; Allison lifted the carafe and poured herself a cup. “Wear whatever you want. My father doesn't care. He'll probably wear a suit, but that's just his personality.”

“Then I'll wear a suit.”

“Don't.”
She glared at him. “If you wear a suit, you have to get a haircut. That's the rule.”

Climbing down from the stool, she took her coffee into the other room and said, peering out the high basement windows, “Maybe we should stay at my house tonight. We'll probably be too drunk to drive back after dinner.”

“Is your dad a big drinker?” Heath asked, helping himself to the half-cup of coffee she'd left for him in the carafe.

“No, but
we
are.” Taking off her shirt, she went to the closet and browsed through the three or four outfits she kept at his place. “Let's bring some pot, too. I want to get stoned.”

An hour later, they'd both showered, dressed and walked up the broken cement steps to the parking lot behind the apartment. Allison drove them across the Washington Bridge to Fox Point, then down along the boulevard and past the mental hospital to where she and her father lived in a three-story brick and shingle Tudor, set off from the road by a tall hedge and a circular driveway. The BMW was parked in front of the house, along with a car she didn't recognize. Pulling up behind it, she turned to Heath and made a face. “I hope we're not having turkey.”

Once inside the house, she led him through the smell of turkey cooking into a lamp-lit sun parlor, where her father and another man were sitting over drinks and appetizers. The other man was Nathaniel Pike; Allison hadn't expected to see him here.

“Honey.” Gregg Reese got up from his wicker chaise lounge and kissed his daughter on the cheek. The drink in his hand looked like a Scotch on the rocks. “Was the drive down easy?”

“Dad, it's five minutes.” She smiled tightly at their guest. “Mr. Pike, this is my boyfriend, Heath. Heath . . .”

The man leaned out of his seat to shake the boy's hand. “Nathaniel Pike,” he said.

Heath's face burned as he heard himself saying hello. It seemed an unlikely combination—Nathaniel Pike and Gregg Reese. Reese was the kind of middle-aged man that others referred to as “youthful-looking.” His short, grayish-blond hair stood on end, wet-gelled to a punkish bristle, and his frosty blue eyes were set in deep dark sockets like lights inside a cave. As the public face of the Reese Foundation, he rarely appeared as anything other than rigidly uncomfortable in front of a camera, and he carried the same stiff, reading-the-cue-cards demeanor to his private life. The other man was a goof, a wasteful libertine. Every town, Heath supposed, had its Nathaniel Pike: the archetypal kook who resurfaced every few months, jabbering his opinions to local reporters about the issues of the day. Both Pike and Reese were so wealthy that the money seemed abstract—inexhaustible and therefore beyond reckoning. But to a basement dweller like Heath, who tended to regard the enlightened upper class with some suspicion, Nathaniel Pike was infinitely hipper than Gregg Reese.