Flesh and Blood

  “Honey, you've hardly eaten anything.”

  “I've lost my appetite.”

  “Come on,” his father said. “Don't be a prima donna. If you can't take a little straight talk, I don't know how you think you're gonna do in a classroom full of jungle bunnies.”

  Will stood. He looked down at his father, who sat surrounded by his wealth, chewing. His father wore green plaid pants. On the wallpaper, blue pagodas rose over country bridges and wading cranes. Will wanted only one thing—to be strange to his family. To disappear. For a moment he thought of looking calmly into his father's satisfied feeding and saying, 'I sleep with men.' He thought of kissing his father goodbye. He was filled with fury and shame and an uncertain desire that sizzled in his blood like a swarm of bees.

  “Billy,” his mother said. “Honey, sit down and finish your dinner.”

  Billy. At the sound of his old name, spoken in his mother's voice, Will left the room. He hadn't told them about his new name. He felt dizzy with his emotions. He heard his father say, “If you can't take a little frank talk, I wish you luck with the world.” Will's stomach lurched. He wasn't ready to disappear, not yet. He still didn't know what was true about him, and if he said too much he could never come back.

  Later that night, Zoe came to his room. She knocked so softly that he knew without having to ask. “Come in, Zo,” he said. His father would have pounded. His mother would have rapped, courteous but firm and measured, the sound of a body of intentions steady as hail. Only Zoe conveyed the impression that she could be ignored.

  She wore a torn orange T-shirt that advertised the Carlsbad Caverns, where she'd never been, and a gauzy skirt covered with red arabesques. A bell the size and shape of a woman's thumbnail hung from a black velvet ribbon she'd tied around her neck.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Come in, Zoe,” he said. The room still held artifacts. A Dylan poster, foil stars pasted to the ceiling. “Come on, sit here on the bed with me.”

  He thought, briefly, of Cody, who claimed to see the light of human emanations. Sometimes Will believed he could see a faint light that hovered around Zoe, though it didn't resemble the electrified fields Cody described. It was barely visible, a phosphorescence, as if some ghost of Zoe occasionally rose a quarter inch off the surface of her skin. Will wasn't mystical. He never thought with any seriousness about tricks of vision. But right now he admitted to himself that sometimes, when he looked at Zoe quickly, he seemed to surprise a pale flickering light that skittered over her when no one watched.

  She entered, smelling of patchouli, and sat on the edge of his bed. How had such a noisy, covetous family produced her?

  “What's up?” he said. He touched the black tangle of her hair. Only for Zoe did he feel this painful affection. He loved others but Zoe was the one he worried over, the one who inspired his fear. She was precarious; she came and went.

  “I'm glad you're home,” she said. “I've been missing you.”

  “Zo, I won't make it through a whole summer here,” Will said. “I think I'd better go back to Cambridge.”

  “Already?” she said.

  “God, Zoe, what do you do to your hair? You don't have spiders or anything in here, do you?”

  “It's so soon,” she said. “You haven't seen Bix or Larry or anybody.”

  “Things'll get worse. Dad and I will be slugging it out in another few days. Remember last summer?”

  “What would you do in Cambridge?” she said.

  “I can find a job, I don't care what it is. You can always get a job if you don't care what you do.”

  “Couldn't you stay for a while? A week?”

  “I think I'd better just go,” he said. “I'm not even going to unpack.”

  “Please?”

  “Come on.”

  She nodded. “I'm mostly being selfish,” she said. 'Tm afraid one day we'll just be, you know. Relatives.”

  'I'll always recognize you, Zo. I'll know you by your hair.”

  “I wish I could go, too,” she said.

  He took her hand. He wanted to say to her, I can't stay because I don't belong to the family anymore, but I can't find a way to leave it either. He wanted to tell her everything. But Zoe was still part of the house, and he needed this secret. He needed flight.

  “You'll be gone soon enough,” he said. “And you can come up and stay with me in Cambridge anytime, okay? I can always afford a train ticket for you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You want to smoke a joint?” he asked.

  “Mm-hm.”

  He took a joint from his jacket pocket, lit it, and handed it to her. She inhaled, gave it back to. him, brushed the hair out of her face, and something in the combined gestures showed him that she was grown. It had happened. She had a life of her own, a plan and a body of secrets. He watched her with a certain mute wonder. This, he realized, was where adults came from. They developed, suddenly, out of strange unhappy children like Zoe and himself. They would live into the next century.

  “Zo?” he said.

  “Mm-hm?”

  “Nothing.”

  What had he wanted to tell her? That he loved her and feared for her, that he wanted to save her from pain. That he was turning into someone else and she was, too. They sat quietly together, passing the joint. The foil stars, glued to the ceiling when he was twelve years old, shed their tiny light.

  1973/ Constantine worked seed into the soil and the soil answered him with red-leaf lettuce, with the curl of string beans and the sexual heaviness of bell peppers. He and Zoe worked the garden together, and there were times. He might find a perfect crookneck squash, just the length of his ring finger, shimmering under a leaf, or Zoe might stand up in the afternoon light with, her arms full of basil. There were times when he believed he had gotten where he'd wanted to go. But they passed. They always passed.

  There used to be a tumble. There used to be a queasy brightness.

  Now Mary wore gloves to bed at night; she arranged flowers on a little circle of pins. Susan had gone. She'd hardly glanced at him from under her veil as he'd led her down the aisle. She called sometimes, but she wasn't company anymore.

  And what had happened to his son? At twenty, he was a boy with little round eyeglasses, the kind worn by bitter old maids. A boy whose hair touched his thin shoulders with a nervous dryness, like an old woman's curtains. Sitting up at Harvard, getting pious about the meek of the earth who in the whole of their lives never worked as hard as Constantine did in a single week. He could tell a few stories about disadvantages. Try coming to this country with no money, knowing no English beyond 'hello' and 'please.' From 'hello' and 'please,' how many men could build what he'd built? So you're black. I'm sorry. Now tell me your real story.

  What had happened? Someone like Billy, a young man so well provided for, should be devouring the world. He should be striding through his life, able as a horse, smart as a wolf, squeezing the rich meek blood out of women's hearts. When Mary'd given birth to a son, Constantine had imagined himself taking handfuls of the future and stuffing them in his mouth. Daughters, even the best of them, disappeared into the lives of men. But a son carried you. His pleasures included you; you lived in your skin and you lived in his as well.

  Maybe, Constantine thought, I made mistakes. He knew he suffered from fits of passion, a violent largeness that refused to live in the small. He had always numbered his passions among his virtues. He'd had every reason to believe a boy needs discipline the way a tree needs pruning. Constantine's own father had cracked Constantine's head open on the stove, had pulled his arm so hard it slipped from the socket as easily as a bean popping out of its skin. The punishments had cauterized Constantine's will, made him into someone. The punishments had invented him, a strong ambitious man who'd survived enough damage to live fearlessly. But he did not love his father. He'd taken his first chance, and crossed the ocean to make a self so big his father couldn't touch him. Could it be, was it possible, that Billy was doing t
he same thing? Could the hair and the beads be his idea of accomplishments strange enough to protect him from his father? Life magazine said it was the Age of Aquarius. Life showed pictures of men with hair to their shoulders, standing cheerfully beside women who didn't worry about the vows. These guys had sex whenever they wanted to, swam naked, claimed to have no plans beyond the trees and the water, the women and children in their beds. There was a new permission. There was a lewd world being born right here inside the old one, another country with its own customs and language. Now it seemed that Billy was going there, just as Constantine had left Greece and come to America. He couldn't tell whether he wanted to call his son back or be taken along. Constantine was a husband and father, a steady if less than ardent lover, a hardworking man. He didn't see himself anywhere in the pages of Life.

  Her name was Magda, like one of the Gabor sisters. Constantine lost himself in her the way a coin gets lost through a storm drain. With Magda he felt himself falling and then shining up from the darkness, a prize, hidden and hard to reach. Magda was Hungarian, like the Gabor sisters, although her accent had been tamed and flattened by two decades in New Jersey. When he gave himself to her, when he inhabited her big white body, Constantine made the wild exultant sounds he'd always swallowed for Mary's benefit. At forty-one, Mary was an aging girl; Magda had been a woman most of her life. Constantine pushed hard into her big wet opening—she didn't want delicacy—and as he nailed her, as he thrust and thrust, her cries drowned his just as her body absorbed his own. She must have weighed a hundred and fifty pounds; he was only about one sixty-five himself. He hammered into her. He bit her breasts, pulled at her hair. She cried out, sometimes so loud she'd set his ears ringing, and afterward, when they lay sweating on the sheets, with the sound of a next-door radio leaking through the plaster, she'd put a pink-nailed hand on his chest and whisper, “Fantastic, baby. Fan fucking tastic.”

  The obviousness was part of what he loved. He was banging his partner's secretary in a motel room on his lunch hour. It was a tryst right out of the funny papers, and he felt as if he'd joined a club, a national fraternity with its own rites and history. He enjoyed not only the sex itself but the whole business of parking his Buick around the back, of picking up the key from a, smirking old desk clerk with crusty eyes and a half-dozen long hairs cemented to his bald head. He loved the daytime crackle of the neon sign (red Vacancy, three pink arrows); he loved the two pictures of blue daisies, identical, screwed to the wall over each double bed. He loved the fact that, at the age of forty-six, he got a hard-on every time he heard Tom Jones or Engelbert Humperdinck on the radio. They were like his brothers, singing their songs of desire and loss out into a world big enough to contain every surprise.

  Age of Aquarius. Goddamn right.

  “You're too much, baby,” Magda said, and the motel room seemed to agree with her. He was too much for this room, with its water-stained gypsum-board ceiling and matted shag carpet. He was too much for this woman, an overweight bleached blonde who shared a duplex with her mother and four cats. He patted her huge rippled flank, told her, “You're not bad yourself.” His desire for her astonished him. His dreams had always been of beauty, and now he got hard sitting at his desk in the mornings with the radio on, thinking of a great spill of belly, an ass like two white pumpkins. “It's not unusual to make love with anyone,” Tom Jones sang. Sometimes, at work, Constantine ducked into the bathroom and whacked off, thinking of Magda, a boat of flesh. At forty-seven, he was horny as a fifteen-year-old. He could have been his own son, the son he'd wanted. He smiled at himself in the bathroom mirror, pumping his cock over the sink, due for a proper workout at the Mayflower Motel in another two hours. The surprises weren't over yet. Age was a sad fiction, a story for the weak.

  His life with Mary receded, and he found that he could live more freely. Something softened. Something that had lived with him inside his skin, a prickly current of anger and disappointment, began to relax and in its place were only the hours, one and then another, work and a good hard fuck and more work and dinner and sleep. Mary lived her life alongside his. She tried new recipes (cheese fondue, quiche Lorraine), bought what she needed. As their battles and their love subsided, Constantine began to see a simplicity that had always been there, flowing under the daily strife. He began to see that it was enough to fuck and earn money, to talk on the phone to your beautiful daughter whenever she happened to call and to weed the garden with your youngest girl, to exclaim with her over the first radish. Try not to think too much about the boy. Constantine's lunch-hour sessions with Magda, who expected nothing of him beyond what he wanted to give her, seemed to have rescued him in some deep way he could not possibly have anticipated. He felt as if he were living a new and easier life, and all that remained of his old life, the single stubborn convention, was his habit of driving out to his houses at night to watch the inhabitants go about their ordinary business. He did it less often now, just once every couple of months. But still he went. Still he parked his car and listened, with a terrible yearning, as these mysterious men and women went about their nocturnal feedings and arguments, their lovemaking, their endless worrying about the fate they had made for their children. Still he sat in the silence of his Buick, smoking one cigarette after another, listening to the little neighborhood noises with the furious attention of a priest in the confessional, straining to hear the machinery of real good and evil humming under his parishoners' clumsy anecdotes about the failings of their flesh.

  1974/ Mary dressed in cream for the ceremony. She wore a cream-colored straw hat and a simple cream dress under a beige linen jacket. As she walked through the campus with her gloved hand on Constantine's elbow, as leaf shadows shifted on the grass around them, she knew she'd arrived at a moment that would hold for her, whatever else happened. Whatever mistakes she'd made, whatever humiliations suffered, she would always have this: herself walking beside her husband at Harvard as strange music drifted out of dormitory windows and children on their way to promising futures mugged for the cameras in cap and gown. She knew how her gold earrings gave back the light. From one of the windows, a pure tenor voice sang something about a wild world. Or a wide world.

  “Quite a place,” Constantine said.

  “Mm-hm,” she said, with a tick of annoyance. She didn't want to be appreciative. She wanted only to be with and of this place, to be exactly who she was right now, an attractive woman in a smart outfit come to see her son graduate from Harvard. Come to sit between her husband in a navy-blue suit and her daughter, the wife of a promising young Yale law student.

  “I made the reservations for lunch,” Constantine said. “At that place the Florios are so crazy about.”

  “Fine,” she said. She didn't want a conversation. She didn't want to dwell on her fear that Paul and Liz Florio's idea of a good restaurant would be expensive but wrong, a flashy place with elaborate, bad food; a place other families told jokes about as they drove past on their way to restaurants Mary and Constantine couldn't know about. She'd asked Billy where they should go for lunch after the ceremony but Billy was acting strange these days. All he'd been willing to say was, “Please, let's not make a big deal out of this. Let's just get a hamburger someplace. I don't want a Hallmark card scenario, not with everything that's going down in the world.” She hadn't known what to tell him, beyond the obvious: “You know, you're the first one in my family or your father's family to graduate from college. Ever.”

  “I know, Ma. I know.”

  Billy would be the only one. Susan was married and Zoe was Zoe. Constantine's people were still farmers in Greece, as far as anybody knew, and Mary's brothers' children would all be lucky to see thirty without doing time. She wanted to make Billy see that this ceremony was as important as a wedding or a funeral. Billy had lived his life under her protection. He couldn't imagine what he was escaping: all the long hopeless years, men crouched over rusty machines and women muttering into the soup. He didn't know how time hung in rooms. He believed life urged al
l its children toward good ends.

  “One o'clock,” Constantine said. “That's what you wanted, right?”

  “Hmm?”

  They turned into the Yard, where the commencement ceremony would be held. Rows of folding wooden chairs stood in mute, perfect order, and up ahead, on a platform, a suited man white-haired and hale as success itself discussed particulars of the microphone with a younger man in blue jeans.

  “For lunch,” Constantine said. “I made the reservation for one o'clock. That ought to give us plenty of time to find the place.”

  “Fine.”

  He sighed, and she could hear the phlegmy workings of his lungs. His body was prone to mucus; hers tended to parch. She believed that when they grew old, he'd be thick and viscous and hairy while she'd be thin and dry as a hickory stick. They'd grow deeper into their differences. She worried sometimes about growing old with Constantine but now, right now, she felt she was about to tear through her old caul of doubt into a solid, imperishable future that glittered among the leaves, that sparked and sang along the white drainpipes of these old brick buildings, where great men had once been young.

  Constantine said, “We should get over to Billy's place.”

  “In a minute,” she answered. “There's still time. I want to walk around the campus a little longer.”

  “Pretty, ain't it?” he said.

  Mary's forehead burned and a thin film of perspiration popped out along her upper lip. She loved Constantine for everything he felt about Harvard, his pride in its shaded walks and broad stairs, but he was a man who said 'ain't.' He'd earned the money, and he'd stood beside her, and he loved her, in his way. But he would take them this afternoon to the Florios' restaurant, Chez Something-or-other.

  “Let's go get Billy,” she said abruptly.

  “I thought you wanted to keep walking.”