The First Bad Man

  “What are you doing?” she said, stepping back.

  “Nothing.”

  She took a few heavy breaths. “You’re thinking shit stuff.”

  “No I’m not,” I said quickly.

  “Yes you were. You were shitting on me. Shitting on my face or something.”

  While I totally wasn’t, in general terms I guessed I was. I guessed I had been shitting on her unceasingly for the last month. She was waiting for me to say something—to explain, to defend myself.

  “It wasn’t”—I was loath to say the word—“shit.”

  “Shit, piss, cum, whatever. It was all over my—” She gestured to her face, hair, bosom. “Right? Am I right?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She looked utterly betrayed, as betrayed as the most betrayed person in Shakespeare.

  “I thought you, of all people, would”—her voice dropped to a whisper—“know how to be nice.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Do you know how many times this has happened to me?” She pointed to her face as if she was actually covered in something.

  I thought of different numbers—seventy-three, forty-nine, fifty.

  “Always,” she said. “This always happens.”

  She turned away, and because she had no room of her own she went into the bathroom, locking the door behind her.

  The map of the world detached from the wall and slid noisily to the floor. I hung it back up slowly. Her feelings. I had hurt them. She had feelings and I had hurt them. I stared at the bathroom door, one hand against the wall to steady myself.

  RUTH-ANNE SAID TO JUST stick with it. To not worry if the song was working or not working—just sing it. I’d have a few chaste and hopeful days, but something always pulled me down again. Once I began dreaming Clee was in Phillip’s shower, mutual soaping, and when I woke up I pretended I was still asleep while I creamed. Another time I shoved his stiff member into her mouth for a second just to prove I was the boss of me and I could do it once without falling back under the spell, but it turned out I was not the boss of me, the spell was, and doing it once meant doing it fifteen more times over the next two days, swiftly followed by a bog of shame. And she knew—now she could somehow tell when I had recently creamed on her. She talked with Kate on the phone about how much more money she needed to get her own place; it wasn’t much.

  Sometimes I could only mumble, “Will you stay in our Lovers’ Story?” but it worked best if I really gave it my all, belting it out with full deep breaths, either mentally or in my car at full volume, “If you stay you won’t be sorry!” If she wasn’t home, I did it with some tai chi–like movements that seemed to bring the practice into my consciousness more deeply. Some work was being done on the sewer lines out front; they sawed the pavement with a deafening screech, and each time their yellow vehicle backed up it had to beep, beep, beep, beep. It took incredible concentration to mentally sing and maintain the rhythm of the song against the opposing rhythm of the beeps. I sang over the beeps three days in a row, five to seven hours a day, before finally marching out of the house. The yellow machine was quite formidable up close; its claw dwarfed me. And the man it belonged to, its master, was proportional to the claw. He was drinking Gatorade in big gulps; his head was tilted back and sweat was running down the sides of his enormous, meaty face. This was exactly the sort of man whose member I loved for Clee to suck.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know how much backing up you’ll be doing today? I live in that house. The beeping is very loud.”

  “A lot.” He looked behind himself. “Yeah, a lot of backing up today.”

  A cool breeze moved past and I knew how nice that must feel on his sweaty face, but that was all. I didn’t know how anything else would feel to him.

  “Sorry for the noise,” he added.

  “Don’t be,” I said. “I appreciate everything you’re doing.”

  He straightened up a little and I waited to see if his embarrassed dignity, so ripe with potential, would stir Clee. But no, nothing—the spell was broken. I had sung the song hard enough and often enough: now I never had to sing it again. I walked back to the house, noticing the neighbor’s orange tree for the first time. It almost didn’t look real. I breathed in the citrus, the ocean, the smog—I could smell everything. And see everything. My breath caught in my throat. I dropped down to the curb, bludgeoned by the vision of a middle-aged woman who couldn’t keep her hands off herself. Cars passed, some fast, some slowing down to stare and wonder.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  She didn’t attack me for the entire month of July. Or talk to me. Or look at me. I was the vulgar one, I had dirtied her, not the other way around. How had it come to this and how could I clear my name? I was ready to throw myself into penitent acts as soon as an opportunity arose, but none did. Instead the hours limped by and each working day she was a little closer to moving out of my house. This would probably be for the best, though the thought was gutting, absurdly so.

  On the last day of the month a blanket of heat descended in the middle of the night, waking every living thing and setting them against each other. I stared out the kitchen window into the moonless night, listening. An animal was being mauled in the backyard, possibly a coyote attacking a skunk—but not well, not deftly. After a few minutes Clee padded out from the living room and stood a few feet away from me. We listened to the squeals change as the animal approached death; the pitch had entered the human register, every exertion contained a familiar vowel. If words began to form then I would go out there and break it up. Words, even crudely formed ones, would change the game entirely. Of course they would be accidental—the way a tortured human might accidentally make sounds that were meaningful to a pig—but I would still have to step in. We both listened for a word. Maybe help, maybe a name, maybe Please no.

  But the thing died before any of that, an abrupt silence.

  “I don’t believe in abortion,” whispered Clee, shaking her head ruefully.

  It was an unusual way to think about it, but no matter: she was talking to me.

  “I think it should be illegal,” she added. “Do you?”

  I squinted into the dark corners of the yard. No, I didn’t. I had signed petitions making sure of that. But it seemed like she was referring to what we had done just now, or hadn’t done.

  “I’m definitely on the side of life,” I said, meaning not that I was pro-life, just that I was one of life’s fans. She nodded several times in full agreement. We walked back to our beds with a formal feeling, like two diplomats who had signed a treaty of historical import. I wasn’t forgiven, but the air in the house had changed. Tomorrow I’d ask for directions. Do you know where the nearest drugstore is? I saw her smiling with relief, as if I’d asked her to dance. Everything forgiven.

  TOMORROW BEGAN WITH A PHONE CALL. Suzanne was outraged.

  “I want no part in it. And I don’t feel guilty about that. Did I wake you up?”

  “No.” It was six A.M.

  “If she was keeping it, I would be mad but I would feel I had to participate. But according to Kate’s mom that’s not the plan. It’s just false stupidity. She’s doing it so she can feel like a trashy Christian girl, like Kate, like all of them.”

  There was a little tickle in my brain, like the feeling of being about to remember the word for something. I knew I would understand what she was talking about in just a second.

  “You have my permission to kick her out immediately—in fact, I insist on it. She needs a taste of reality. Who’s the father? She can live with him.”

  The father. Father Christmas? Feather, farther, fallow? Was there liquid running out of my ear? I looked in the mirror; no liquid. But it was interesting to watch my face as it happened. It gave a very large, theatrical performance of a person being stunned: the mouth fell open, the eyes widened and protruded, color vanished
. Somewhere a large soft mallet hit a giant cymbal.

  The word for the thing we were talking about was pregnant.

  Clee was pregnant.

  Were there many ways to get pregnant? Not really. Could you get pregnant from a water fountain? No. My ear was being so loud I could barely make out Suzanne asking if I knew who the father was; even my own reply was hard to hear.

  “No,” I yelled.

  “Kate didn’t know either. Is Clee there?”

  I cracked my door the tiniest bit. Clee was sitting up in her sleeping bag. Her face looked blotchy from crying or maybe just from being pregnant.

  “She’s here,” I whispered.

  “Well, please tell her she’s on her own. I’d tell her myself but she’s not answering my calls. Actually, you know what? Don’t talk to her. Just make sure she doesn’t leave. I’ll be there in an hour and a half.”

  She broke the contract. It didn’t cover this, of course it didn’t, why should it? What did I care? What contract? We didn’t have one. I pressed my face into the bed, smothering myself. Was it the plumber? Of course it couldn’t be the plumber; that was imaginary. But something unimaginary had happened, probably not just once, more likely many times, with many people. That’s who she was. Perfectly fine. Not my business. She could have as much unimaginary intercourse as she wanted. Of course, she would need to leave immediately; our contract was terminated. What contract? Where did they do it? In my bed? I would throw her garbage bags onto the street myself. I put on exercise clothes for swift movement.

  Suzanne’s Volvo rolled up silently; she must have cut the motor for the last block. I tried to give her a thumbs-up through the window but she didn’t see me. She was also wearing athletic clothes and she looked as if she had been battle-crying for the whole drive and now was ready for the kill. There was a sharp rap on the door, a metal beak or her keys. I rolled my shoulders back and came out of the bedroom, stone-faced.

  Clee was peeking through a crack in the living room curtains. She looked from her mother’s wrathful face to mine, from my exercise clothes to her mother’s. With her arms folded across her stomach she stepped back until she was against the wall with her garbage bags. Rap, rap, rap went the beak. Rap, rap. My eyes fell on Clee’s bare feet; one was on top of the other, protecting it. Rap, rap, rap. We both looked at the door. It was shaking a little. Suzanne began to pound.

  I swung it open. Not the big door, but the tiny one within it. It was just big enough to contain all of my features. I pressed them against its rectangle and looked down at Suzanne.

  “Is she still in there?” she mouthed, pointing at the windows conspiratorially.

  “I don’t think she wants to see you right now,” the door said.

  Suzanne blinked; her face sank with confusion. I pressed myself against the oak door. Stay oaken.

  “No one home. Keep out.”

  “Okay, Cheryl, ha ha. Very theatrical. Let me talk to Clee.”

  I looked at Clee. She shook her head no and gave me a tiny grateful smile. I redoubled my efforts, retripled them.

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “She doesn’t have a choice,” Suzanne snapped. The door handle rattled desperately.

  “Double dead bolt,” I said.

  She slammed her fist against the small iron grate that covered my face. That’s what the grate was there for. She examined her fist and then gazed at her parked car and Clee’s car behind it, her old car. For a moment she just looked like a mom, tired and worried with no graceful way to express herself.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said. “She’ll be okay. I’ll make sure.”

  She squinted at me; the rectangle was starting to cut into my face.

  “May I at least be granted permission to use the bathroom?” she asked coldly.

  I shut the tiny door for a moment.

  “She wants to use the bathroom.”

  Clee’s eyes were shining.

  “Let her in,” she said with careful magnanimity.

  I unlocked the door and swung it open. Suzanne hesitated, eyeing her daughter with a last-ditch harebrained scheme. Clee pointed to the bathroom. We listened to her pee and flush and wash her hands. She exited the house without looking at either of us; the Volvo rumbled away.

  Clee took a long swig of old Diet Pepsi and tossed the empty bottle in the general direction of the kitchen trash. It bounced on the linoleum a few times. I understood. She had temporarily forgiven me in the heat of the moment without really meaning it. With all the fuss I had forgotten to make my bed; I headed to go do that.

  “So,” Clee said loudly. I stopped. “I don’t really know a lot about health and stuff? But I figure you probably know what I should be eating. Like vitamins or whatever.”

  I turned and looked at her from my bedroom door. She was standing on the moon and if I responded I would be on the moon too, right next to her. With her and away from everything else. It looks so far away, but you can just reach your hand out and touch it.

  “Well,” I said slowly, “for starters you should take a prenatal vitamin. And how far along are you?” The phrase far along just fell out, as if it had been waiting in my mouth this whole time.

  “Eleven weeks, I think. I’m not totally sure.”

  “But you’re sure you want a baby.”

  “Oh no.” She laughed. “It’ll go up for adoption. Can you imagine? Me?”

  I laughed too. “I didn’t want to be rude, but . . .”

  She mimed cradling a baby, rocking it frantically with a manic grin.

  IN WEEK TWELVE IT WAS just a neural tube, a backbone without a back; the next week the top of the tube fattened into a head, with dark spots on either side that would become eyes. I read these developments aloud to her each week from Grobaby.com.

  “All clogged up? Those pesky pregnancy hormones are to blame. Time to fixate on fiber.” She was constipated, she admitted, starting this week. The website had an uncanny ability to predict what she was about to feel, as though her body was taking its cues from the weekly updates. With this in mind I often reiterated parts that seemed important. (“Paddle-like hands and feet emerge this week. Hands and feet: this week. They should be paddle-like.”) When I accidentally skipped a week the cells twiddled their thumbs, waiting for further instructions. She took the vitamins and ate my food but the idea of a prenatal checkup sickened her.

  “I’ll go when it’s closer,” she said, hunched over her sleeping bag. I dropped it for the moment. Talking to her this way felt like a role—not unlike “Woman Asks for Directions.” “Woman Takes Care of Pregnant Girl.”

  “I don’t want anyone from the medical establishment touching me,” she added a few hours later. “It has to be a home birth.”

  “You still have to get checked, though. What if there’s a problem?” Somehow I knew just the right thing to say, as if I had watched Dana say it in a video.

  “There won’t be a problem.”

  “Hopefully you’re right. Because sometimes it just never comes together—you think there’s a baby in there but it’s just unconnected bits and when you push it all comes out like chicken rice soup.”

  When Dr. Binwali showed us the fetus with the sonogram I was sure Clee would weep like every astronaut who has seen the earth from space, but she turned away from the screen.

  “I don’t want to know the gender.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, it’s too early to tell,” said the doctor. But her eyes held fast to the ceiling, avoiding the sight of her own splayed legs. She meant ever. She hoped to never see it.

  “Grandma might be curious to see the last bit of the tail,” he said, tapping the screen.

  Neither of us corrected him. We were rolling on rails now; the good people of the world glided around mothers and daughters, opening doors and carrying bags, and we let them.

  HER SHAPE S
HOULD HAVE LENT itself to a fertile appearance, but it was her biggish chin that I noticed now, and her burly way of moving. Together with the swollen stomach it created a peculiar picture, almost freakish. The more pregnant she became, the less like a woman she was. When we were out in public I tried to see if other people flinched or did a double take. But apparently I was the only one who could see this.

  “ ‘Week seventeen,’ ” I read, “ ‘This week your baby develops body fat (join the club!) and his or her own unique set of fingerprints.’ ” It was hard to tell if she was listening. “So, make fat and fingerprints this week,” I summarized. She pulled a snail off the coffee table and handed it to me. I dropped it into the covered bucket by the front door; Rick was collecting them.

  “ ‘Your baby weighs five point nine ounces and is about the size of an onion.’ ”

  “Just say ‘the baby,’ not ‘your baby.’ ”

  “The baby is the size of an onion. Do you want me to read ‘A Tip from Our Readers’?”

  She shrugged.

  “ ‘A Tip from Our Readers: No need to splurge on maternity wear, just borrow your husband’s button-down shirts!’ ”

  She looked down at her stomach. It looked like a beer belly peeking out under her tank top.

  “I have a shirt you could borrow.”

  Clee followed me to my closet. The clothes were all clean but collectively they had an oily, intimate smell that I had never noticed before. She began sliding hangers around. Suddenly she pulled out a long green corduroy dress and held it up.

  “It’s the lesbo dress,” she said.

  The dress I’d worn on the date with Mark Kwon, Kate’s dad. She’d found it awfully quickly. It was long sleeved with tiny buttons running the whole length of it, from the edge of the calf-skimming skirt to the high collar. Thirty or forty buttons.