Torch (10 page)

After Larry, Teresa dated a man named Killer and didn’t ask him how he got the name.
Killer
, it said on his arm in a cursive tattoo. He was a beautiful, skanky man with an incredibly thin and sinewy body. He liked her version of tuna casserole. He liked it so much they didn’t call it tuna casserole anymore, but Killer casserole. He was good in bed, the first man who could honestly make her come. She took him back to the
river too, on a trail that started behind the bar, worn by Joshua and Claire in the daytime. She went back at night, while the kids slept, feeling somewhat guilty to be leaving them alone in the apartment, but also gloriously free. She left a light on and she could see it just barely through the trees when she crawled up onto a big rock that sat near the bank of the river. Seeing the light made her feel reasonably assured that everyone was safe inside. Killer sat on the rock next to her and they smoked a joint and fucked and smoked another joint and she felt like maybe this was her life now, that he was her man, though in the light of day she knew this was not remotely true. He drank too much, smoked too much weed. He was a biker and he bought her a leather lace-up top for her birthday that she was supposed to wear when she rode on the back of his bike.

There was a long spell of nobody, and then she met Bruce.

Bruce Gunther, Bruce Gunther, Bruce Gunther. His name was like a cure that had taken her a century to find. She was twenty-seven and so was he. She’d noticed him at the laundromat, drinking a can of Coke. She saw him again at the Rest-A-While Villa, visiting his Aunt Jenny. “Hello,” he said. “Hello,” she said. His eyes were so pale and blue and kind; his hair so fine and blond, like a doll’s. He fixed the handle of her car so she didn’t have to use a screwdriver to open it anymore. He was a carpenter, an only child, and the year before she met him he’d broken up with a woman named Suzie Keillor, who worked at the school. Teresa wouldn’t let him meet her kids, wouldn’t even take him back to the river in the middle of the night. She’d become more careful again, wary of men, not wanting to get anyone’s hopes up, so she and Bruce kept their relationship a secret until they were truly in love. Finally, she invited him to dinner, to meet Claire and Joshua. He was not to touch her, or to act as if they were anything but friends. When he pulled up in his truck, the kids ran down the stairs to greet him. She stood on the landing, watching from above.

Instantly he began playing a game with them, teaching them a song. She finished making dinner, hearing her children shrieking with joy through the open window. He chased them around the bathhouse on the path they’d worn. He didn’t come up to the apartment to see her until she called them all in to eat. They sat on the couch, all four of them, Little Larry sitting across from them against the beige wall. The kids could hardly eat, so besotted they were with Bruce.

Afterward, when he stood to leave, the room became smaller with his standing. He shook their hands with a special handshake they’d made
up outside. He shook Claire’s hand, then Joshua’s hand, and then hers, but she grabbed him and kissed him instead.

The kids hopped and giggled, giggled and hopped.

“Bye,” she called ecstatically, as he descended the stairs.

There
, she thought,
there you are
.

She woke with the wet washcloth draped over her face. The bathroom was as warm as a sauna from the space heater humming on high. She realized that there had been a knock, and that’s why she’d woken. She sat up and looked at the closed door.

“Ter?” Bruce said from the other side.

She opened the door, reaching awkwardly for it, still sitting on the rug with her socks and bra on, her robe laid out beneath her. “I fell asleep,” she said when he came into the room, squinting at the light. “What time is it?”

“Four something.”

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” she asked, standing up.

“I am. I just had to pee.”

She examined her face in the mirror while he urinated. “I think I’ll take a bath,” she said. She took her bra off and felt a tight pulling sensation where the stitches strained against the weight of her breast. Slowly, she tugged the tape that held the gauze bandage in place, covering the stitches from her biopsy. “I can take this off now.”

“Here,” Bruce said. “Let me.” He stood in front of her and pulled the tape off more gently than she had, peeling it away bit by bit and then removing the gauze. There were pink lines on her skin from the elastic of the bra, and other, meaner-looking marks where the tape had been. The air felt cool and damp on her newly uncovered skin. There was a small bruise at the center, where the stitches were, and the skin yellowed as it circled out away from them. She got into the tub and ran the water without putting the stopper in the drain. She wetted the washcloth and patted the stitches with it, then turned the water off and leaned against the back of the empty tub. Bruce sat on the floor beside her and stroked her arm, kneading the muscles.

“Would you please stop?” she asked, sharply. “I can’t stand all this rubbing. I don’t want to be rubbed, okay? It’s like you’re my fucking massage therapist all of a sudden.”

He let go of her. He wore boxers and nothing else. The slit in the
front was gaping open, his soft penis in a nest of hair just inside. She looked away from him to the end of the tub, at her feet braced on either side of the faucet. “I want it to be the way it’s always been. That’s how I need you to treat me.”

She turned to Bruce. He’d been looking at her all the time, hadn’t taken his eyes off of her, and now she gazed back at him with the same intention. She would not look away. He would not look away. They were children playing a game of wills and then they were hostile enemies. She felt enraged by him and then mad with love. Their eyes did this, said this, shifting from one thing to the next like a baton being passed off.

He crouched over her, leaning into the tub and then bent to press his tongue against the stitches on her breast. Pain shot all the way back to her collarbone and then down through the channels of her body, going everywhere, growing enormous, filling her entirely, and also staying small, as if her whole being were centered on Bruce’s mouth. His tongue was a knife or a flame that opened her up.

She pulled him into the tub on top of her and wrapped her legs around him, moaning low and soft into his chest, and then she shifted and he was inside of her and she rocked against him. Her head knocked rhythmically against the rim of the tub and then she pushed herself up onto her elbows and they fucked that way until Bruce’s knees couldn’t take it anymore and they laughed and climbed out of the tub and tumbled onto the rug, where they fucked some more. Hard and soft and slow and fast. Not like she had cancer. Not in any way differently than they had fucked each other for the past twelve years. Joy filled them, then ecstacy. Out in the living room the dogs lifted their heads. Upstairs Claire and Joshua woke momentarily to roll and shift before falling back to sleep in their beds. Shadow jumped up onto the back of the couch and gazed out the window at the deer who came to the salt lick each night, and then she turned abruptly and listened intently as the cuckoo clock sounded five times.

Teresa and Bruce were asleep by then, their bodies intertwined on the bathroom rug, their eyes closed against the light overhead that they’d both been too tired to reach up and switch off. So bright it was, and yet they hardly seemed to notice it, the way it beat down on them without mercy.

W
HAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD
for me? What are my career interests? What do I look for in a spouse? Will I have children? How will I balance the demands of career and family?
Joshua sat staring at the questions on the blackboard and let Lisa Boudreaux—his so-called wife—do the work. She wrote the questions in her notebook and then took Joshua’s notebook and wrote them in his. Now they were supposed to discuss these questions, desk-to-desk, like all the other “married” couples around the room, making compromises like real couples did.

“What if one wants to be a farmer and the other a Broadway star?” Mr. Bradley had asked them, smiling, pretending to be confounded. “What if one hates snow and the other is a dog musher? What if Cindy likes to party and Jimmy wants to bake bread?” He paced, then stopped suddenly and looked at them with the expectant air of a TV talk show host. His own wife—his actual wife—was a teacher at the school too, in math. He set his stick of chalk down dramatically on the metal rim that ran the length of the board and then turned back to face them. “Welcome, ladies and gents, to ‘Life and Love and Work.’ ”

Joshua stared at his forearm. It was covered with an intricate blue pen drawing he’d made of a spider web. They’d just completed the unit called “Life and Personal Values.” When they were done with “Life and Love and Work,” they’d move on to “Life and Money,” a sort of light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel project, in which they’d each be given an imaginary five thousand dollars to invest in the stock market. The class itself was simply called “Life.” Everyone had to take it in the last semester of their senior year in order to graduate from Midden High School, even the kids in special ed.

“What do you want to be?” asked Lisa, once they’d arranged their
desks. Her pen had a pink feathery furry thing at the end of it, and she swished it contemplatively along her pale cheek.

“An astronaut,” he said, after thinking for a while.

Lisa wrote this down in her notebook. “I’ll be an astronaut too. We’ll make, like, a ton of money.” She took Joshua’s notebook and wrote
We are both astronauts!

“We could get on the same flights together or whatever,” she said. “We’ll be like this total
couple in space
.” She put her fluffy pen down and took a cherry Ricola from her purse and sucked on it while still holding it in her fingers. Together they glanced around the room. Joshua knew he’d gotten lucky. At least they were at the same level, socially. Not extremely popular, but not unpopular either. Many of the couples had not been so fortunate. People in drama and band and Knowledge Bowl had been paired up with heavyweights like Jordan Parker or Jessica Miller, who sat looking mortified. And Tom Halverson and Jason Kooda had had to agree to be married to each other, thanks to a shortage of girls.

“How many kids should we have?”

“Six.”

“No,” said Lisa, bobbing in her chair. “Like ten.” And then she wrote
ten
and underlined it twice.

He smiled at her. She was basically a cool, sweet, hot girl. Not perfect, but hot. Her body was one long noodle, tall and thin and flat, and all the clothes she wore accentuated that. It was not so unlikely that she was his wife. In seventh grade she’d been his girlfriend for two weeks, his longest relationship until he went out with Tammy Horner for six months last year. He and Lisa broke up because she thought they were getting too serious too fast during their afterschool, before track practice make-out sessions in the back of the dark band room where everyone went to make out, where Tammy Horner and Brian Hill had allegedly
gone all the way
a few months ago. Brian Hill was a pussy as far as Joshua was concerned, and nothing made him happier than the fact that Brian had been the biggest victim of “Life and Love and Work,” having been forced to draw a straw along with Tom Halverson and Jason Kooda and not only be married to someone who was not a girl, but in fact to someone who was Mr. Bradley.

“Okay, so seriously, we have to kick ass on this, Josh. I totally have to get an A.” Lisa opened the classified section of the
Star-Tribune
that they’d been given. They had to find a place to live that was financially
feasible in relation to their professions and number of children. Then they’d cut the ad out and paste it to a page and write all about why they chose that house and where it was located—they could say it was anywhere they wanted—and how much they paid in rent or mortgage and what percentage of their income that was, and how it met the needs of their family.

“I think we have to live in Florida, don’t we?” Lisa asked. “That’s where they take off.”

“Take off?”

“The astronauts—you know—the launching pad for the rockets is there.”

Joshua began to draw a spider with his pen onto his arm, onto the web. Without looking up he said, “We could live in Port St. Joe.”

“Where’s that?” asked Lisa, carefully ripping a jagged square out of the newspaper.

“Florida. I went on vacation there one time.”

Port St. Joe
, he wrote in his notebook and then took hers and wrote
Mr. and Mrs. Wood live happily ever after in Port St. Joe
.

“Hey, who said I was going to change my name?” Lisa asked, punching him in the arm. He grabbed her scrawny wrist and held on to it just hard enough that she couldn’t pull away. “Mr. Bradley! My husband’s abusing me,” she yelled. Her wrist was so soft, almost unreal. “
Mr. Bradley!
” she shrieked again, though he ignored her, engrossed in a conversation with Brian Hill. “I want a divorce,” she said, hitting Joshua with her free hand until he let her go.

Tammy Horner turned and rested her eyes on them for a moment and then turned away. Joshua’s heart lurched and then slowed and he cackled loud enough so she could hear, knowing that she would know the cackle was meant only for her. He had loved her once, but he hated her now. Sometimes he drew a pen tattoo of her name on his hand and then washed it off.

“So we live in Florida?” Lisa asked.

He nodded. In real life Lisa was engaged to Trent Fisher. He was older, twenty-six, a logger. Technically, since she wasn’t yet eighteen, every time they did it, it was statutory rape, but nobody cared. They’d been dating since she was in eighth grade. She wore his class ring wrapped with yarn so it would fit.

“Are you going to change your name to Fisher?” he asked.

“Probably,” she said hesitantly, readjusting the clip in her hair. “Why?”

“Just curious.”

He took the fluffy pen from her desk and examined it to see how the feather thing stayed attached. It smelled like a combination of perfume and bubble gum, which is what Lisa Boudreaux smelled like too.