Flesh and Blood

  And, okay, there was a thing or two about Magda. Why couldn't she be more of a lady? Nothing prissy or shrill, he wasn't looking for some jeweled dowager who was all tired smiles and hard, untouchable hair. But a lady. A rare thing, electric, with perfumed mysteries and hard-won wisdom and an aura of rich, honey-colored sex. Constantine listened to Frank Sinatra singing “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and thought, Yes. That's it. The lady is a tramp. She's tough but elegant and she makes most other women look like wilted gardenias. Magda was almost that, so close to it that sometimes Constantine felt elated just walking with her into an expensive store or restaurant. He felt like a colorful guy, his own man, who'd left a prim beautiful woman, a life of days and nights, and married into adventure. A guy brave enough for an abundant bosom and the music of a foreign accent, thrills in bed most men his age only fantasized about. He could drift along on that for a minute or two before he fell back again into uncertainty, an obscure but stinging embarrassment. Magda was fifty pounds or more past voluptuous, and she made a low sniffing noise when she ate, something adenoidal, as if when she chewed her sinuses fell out of alignment with her jaw and needed to be gently snorted back into place.

  Sometimes he loved her for being big and strange. Sometimes he bitterly regretted all the beauty he was missing, the way a pair of slender shoulders could look in an evening gown.

  He didn't mean to make her unhappy. He didn't mean to insult her. Right, he lost control sometimes. That was part of who he was. He always apologized afterward. Was it just unforgivable, what he called her at the Heart Fund dinner? A pig, all right, he'd been drunk. Yeah, he'd made snuffling noises, like a pig rooting in a trough. Joking, he'd been joking.

  “What is it you want?” She'd tottered drunkenly through the front door, stumbled on the first stair, torn her dress, sunk slowly to the marble, holding the torn fabric in both hands and looking at it as if her skin had ripped open.

  “I want to go to bed.” He'd stood on the pure white marble tiles, none too sober himself, a little unsure about how he'd gotten them both home in the car.

  “A pig. You think I'm a pig.” She'd looked into the hole in her dress. She'd knelt on the hard floor.

  “Joke, can't you take a joke? I had a few too many, call the cops.”

  “You did this to make a joke out of me. That's why.” Her eyes were smudged, her hair squashed. Kneeling among the stiff folds of her dress, she'd looked like a giant, withered aquatic plant.

  “I don't know what you're talking about.” He'd started for the stairs. Let her bust her gut, he was too drunk and tired to care.

  “This. All this.” She'd flung her big arms out, fat but strong. She'd waved her hands in the air. “All this.”

  “I'm going to bed.”

  “You did this to humiliate me. You married me and built this house so you could take me to parties and call me a pig.”

  “You're crazy, is what you are.”

  But he'd thought, There's some kind of crazy truth here. Somebody insane spitting out the truth because she'd lost track of what wasn't possible.

  He was just drunk. They both were.

  “I'm your pig,” she'd said. “This is my stall.”

  He'd stepped around her, started up the stairs. “It's called a sty,” he'd said. “Why don't you learn to speak goddamned English?”

  “You bastard. You bastard.”

  It had struck him funny, her calling him a bastard. Hey, he'd been drunk. And he'd known it came from the movies. She'd seen some glamour girl collapse at the foot of a big curved staircase and call her husband a bastard. She'd even lost her accent when she said it. So he'd laughed. And gone to bed.

  He'd spent the next three days on his knees. She saved things like that. She stored them up. No apology, however tearful, and no gift, however lavish, seemed to restore the balance. She lived in an atmosphere of grudge and injury, a small invisible house she erected inside the larger house. She lived there alone. Three days worth of steady apology hadn't quite undone it. Or a new Cartier watch. It had faded, finally, the way things do, though when Magda came home with a new dress or a pair of shoes she still sometimes said, “Look what your pig bought now.” He just smiled. It was already on its way toward becoming a kind of endearment, one of those sweet-sour sparrings that went on among couples.

  At night, every now and then, he drove to one of his new tracts. At night they looked a little more normal. The occasional paint job of chartreuse or lemon yellow didn't stand out as much; the lawns decorated with pagodas or shrines to the Virgin Mother were softened by darkness. On his drives through the new tracts he smelled strange cooking, heard music that was barely recognizable as music at all. He did not hate or love these people. He only watched them until he grew tired, and then he drove home again.

  One night, late, after ten, he parked his car and sat in it for a while before he realized that a little boy had been sitting on the curb across the street from him. The boy was so dark he blended with the night. It was a cool October night but he sat on the curb in shorts and a skimpy little undershirt, shivering, with his legs drawn up to his chest. He couldn't have been more than five or six.

  Constantine rolled down his window. “Hey,” he said.

  The boy looked at him, did not speak. He wasn't black. Indian, maybe. But dark.

  “Hey,” Constantine said. “Shouldn't you be at home?”

  The boy continued looking at him with mute incomprehension. Maybe he didn't speak English.

  Constantine got out of his car. He walked across the street and stood before the boy.

  “I'm talking to you,” he said. “Understand? Do you know what I'm saying?”

  The boy nodded solemnly.

  “Do you live around here?” Constantine asked.

  The boy nodded again.

  “Don't your parents want to know where you are?”

  This time, the boy did not nod. He just sat, watching Constantine.

  “Go home,” Constantine said. “It's late. It's cold out here.”

  The boy didn't move. A peculiar spice, pepper mixed up with something that reminded Constantine of a wet dog, drifted through the air. From far away, he thought he could hear a snatch of that Negro music that wasn't music at all, just a bunch of guys shouting insults at white people while somebody banged a drum in the background.

  “Go home,” he said again. The boy looked at him with puzzled kindness, as if Constantine was asking for an obscure favor the boy was willing but unable to grant.

  Finally, Constantine got back into his car and started the engine. He put his face out through the open window and said, “I'll give you a ride home, if you want.”

  The boy continued shivering, continued staring.

  “All right, if that's the way you want it,” Constantine said.

  He stepped on the accelerator and drove away. He wondered if he should call somebody, but decided against it. Who could know about people like this? Maybe they let their children run around all night, alone, without enough clothes on. Maybe that was one of those foreign traditions you needed to respect, the kind of thing Billy always carried on about. What did he call it? Something-centric. Don't be something-centric. Fine. When Constantine turned the corner he drove through a surge of music, those rhythmic Negro shouts, coming from a house that had been painted pink and brown, like a giant cake. At this distance he couldn't make out the words—probably telling other black guys to shoot cops, rape their wives, burn the whole world down. He was probably lucky the kid on the curb didn't pull out a gun and shoot him. He kept driving, out of the tract, out of the music, and he told himself he wouldn't go there at night anymore. When he got home he parked for a while in front of his own house, and found that he didn't feel like getting out of the car right away. He lit a last cigarette, sat in the car until he saw Magda, large and furious, pass by the bedroom window in her nightgown, carrying the German newspaper she insisted on subscribing to and eating what appeared to be a salami sandwich.

  There was work
and love, a kind of love. You ignored the little glitches.

  And then there was Zoe. He couldn't let himself think too much about that.

  He never asked how she got it. He didn't want to know. She looked okay, she didn't look any different, and half the time he almost forgot about it altogether. It wasn't always fatal. They were working on a cure. He did have her out to the house more often, and she was usually willing to come. To help with the garden, he said, and she hardly ever refused. He knew how much she missed a garden, stuck in the city like that. Sometimes she came out alone on the train, sometimes she brought the kid. What could you do about that? He wasn't bad, quiet, could entertain himself. Constantine wondered when he'd start listening to that murderous music, when he'd come home from school with a gun. He tried not to think too much about that, either. He and Zoe worked in the garden together all spring and summer and into the fall. It was a beautiful garden, sheltered behind a low grassy rise that fell away to the Atlantic. He'd had two tons of topsoil trucked in because you couldn't grow shit this close to the ocean. The garden thrived, partly because of the topsoil and partly because he sprayed it with chemical pesticides and fertilizers when Zoe wasn't around. She didn't approve of that, so why tell her? Let her believe the lettuce and beans and tomatoes were springing up all glossy and perfect because they were tended with love. It did something to him, working in the garden with her like that. It made him feel he'd done the right thing with his life. He had this garden for his sick daughter. He had this view of the ocean for her.

  There was only one bad moment with Zoe, on an afternoon in September, when she picked a ripe tomato off one of the vines.

  “Beautiful, isn't it?” she said. She crouched in the dirt, held it cupped in her palm, close to her breast, the way she'd hold a bird.

  “You used to hate tomatoes,” Constantine said.

  “I grew up.”

  “Yeah. Hey, we've got a nice crop coming in here.” He knelt beside his daughter. She wore jeans that were too big for her and an old striped T-shirt with the sleeves raggedly cut away, just the kind of clothes he hated to see her in, but right then she looked beautiful, as if every second of her life, every condition in which he'd ever seen her, had been leading to this, Zoe kneeling pale and calm in this garden in September with the Atlantic rolling just beyond and a ripe tomato cupped in her hands. Constantine's little girl. The youngest, the unplanned one, the one he'd insisted on naming after his grandmother, where Mary would have named her Joan or Barbara. He reached out a finger, flicked a speck of dirt from her cheek. He felt how big his finger was, how rough against her skin.

  “Lately I feel like I don't want to eat anything I didn't help grow myself,” she said. “The food in stores looks strange and, I don't know. Dangerous. You don't know where it's been.”

  She laughed. She raised the tomato to her mouth, and Constantine had an urge to yell, 'Don't, it's poisoned.' Which was ridiculous. It was no more poisoned than most of what people ate, and probably less. But as he watched her bite into the tomato, a chill shot through his heart.

  “Mmm,” she said. “This is one of the best tomatoes I've ever tasted.”

  He was full of terror, an icy dread that swayed inside his chest like something swinging on a cord. He could have taken her in his arms, begged her forgiveness. Then he pulled himself together. Forgiveness for what? For loving her, for being the best father he knew how to be? Next spring, he'd rent a house at the beach, big enough for everybody. A vacation house, not just his and Magda's place, maybe up on Cape Cod. She could bring the kid, let him blow off a little steam.

  “Try it,” she said. She held the tomato out to him, balanced on her thin white hand.

  “Thanks, darling,” he said. He accepted the tomato from her. He took a ravenous bite.

  1993/ Jamal lived in him. Ben thought about Jamal's eyes and lips, the dense crackle of his hair. When he thought about Jamal he was filled with an abject, weighted sensation like nothing he had known before, a hot wet ball of feeling, impenetrable, hissing with fear and hope and shame though the ball itself was not made of those emotions. It turned thickly inside his belly. It frightened him. It wasn't love, not what he'd imagined of love. It more closely resembled what he'd imagined as cancer, the cancer that got Mrs. Marshall next door, a ball of crazy cells that, as his mother said, had eaten her up. Like cancer it was him and not him. It ate him and replaced what it ate with more of itself.

  1993/ Connie wanted Ben to do what she told him to. She stood on the dock, pretty and mean, netted with watery light, hands fisted on her hips. She had an athlete’s belief in discipline, the powers of orderly motion.

  “Bring her about,” she shouted.

  Alone in the boat, thirty feet from the dock, Ben could feel how it wanted to stutter and stall. How it wanted to fail. It had taken less than two days for him to understand the boat’s laziness, its bent toward a slumbering life spent nudging the dock. It needed to be bullied, it needed to be coaxed. It was a lapdog. He’d imagined wolfish strides over brilliant ink-blue water. Cleaving with one perfect claw.

  “This thing’s a sow,” he called.

  “Bring her about,” Connie answered. The Sunfish’s sail luffed, then filled, caught the light, and briefly Ben loved the boat for its modest but insistent little life. Even a lapdog had moments of animal certainty, a remorseless grace.

  “Good,” Connie called. “Now tack over to the buoy.”

  He tacked to the buoy, came about, tacked back again. He leaned over the calm water, working the boom. In a boat, he found that he knew what to do. He could almost feel what the boat needed. He had an instinct for sailing, an automatic intelligence about the ways canvas could answer wind.

  “Back to the buoy again,” Connie shouted. He came about, tacked easily back toward the buoy. He glanced at the dock, the jumble of gray-shingled houses, the pale crescent of bay beach. There was Jamal, on the beach, waiting his turn. Jamal stood on the sand, skinny in loose white jeans, his brown hands wrapped around the back of his neck. He looked out at the water, at Ben in the boat. Ben forced himself to think about the wind bellying the sail. He forced himself to think about Connie, getting ready to shout her next order.

  Then it was Jamal’s turn. Ben stood on the dock, watching. Jamal had no talent for sailing, though even in his helplessness he had a dancer’s precision of movement, a defiant authority. The sail shuddered, lost the wind. Connie cupped her strong stubby hands around her mouth, hollered at Jamal to bring her about. In the boat, Jamal looked serene and doomed as a young prince. Sun ignited the smooth honey-colored muscles of his back, the black wire of his hair.

  “Bring her about” Connie shouted. Jamal tried. When the line slipped out of his hands he smiled in the shy and knowing way he had. The whole world was funny, and touching, and odd.

  “Your cousin doesn’t catch on as fast as you do,” Connie said.

  “He’s just not as worried about doing what people tell him to,” Ben said.

  “That’s a nice way of putting it. Jamal. Come about.”

  “He’ll do whatever he wants to do,” Ben told her.

  “Not while I’m being paid good money to teach him how to sail.”

  “Good luck,” Ben said.

  After the lesson, as Connie was instructing Ben and Jamal about tying up the sail, their grandfather got out of his car and stood at the landward end of the dock, looking at the water and nodding as if the bay and the sky were turning out exactly as he’d intended them to. Ben left Connie and Jamal to finish tying up the sail, ran into the roil of his grandfather’s approval.

  “So, are you turning into a sailor?” his grandfather asked.

  Ben knew the answer. “I want to try a bigger boat,” he said.

  “I’m sure you do.” His grandfather’s face clenched with pleasure. His grandfather’s face was fissured and creviced, eroded in spots and powerfully massed elsewhere. He seemed, at times, to be transcending the human and becoming geological. He carried with him a mount
ain’s sense of silent will and design, a life so old it’s been scoured clean. Granite smooth as a newly swept floor, no trees, just bright patches of moss anchored to the rock. In his grandfather’s presence Ben inhaled more deeply, as he would in mountain air.

  “I know how to sail,” Ben said. “I already know how, and this Sunfish is a pig.”

  The old man put a hand on Ben’s shoulder. His fingers were thick as rope. “Finish up your lessons,” he said. “Then we’ll see about a bigger boat.”

  “I want to get out of the bay,” Ben said. “I want to get onto the ocean.”

  “After two days of lessons.” His grandfather smiled, squeezed Ben’s shoulder. Wind picked up and then smoothed the steel-colored strands of his hair.

  “I can do it,” Ben said.

  “I believe you, buddy. You can do anything.”

  Connie and Jamal, finished with the boat, came up the dock. Walking side by side, they looked complete/two beings so opposite they belonged together, the sturdy, dictatorial blond girl and the coffee-colored boy whose strength lay in silence and in never considering retreat. They looked like enemies whose battles had been going on so long they could no longer live apart.

  “So, how’re they doing, Connie?” Grandpa called.

  She hesitated, smiling. Ben realized that she disliked Jamal not for being an unpromising sailor but for being what he was. For being small and dark and unembarrassed.

  “They’re doing fine, Mr. Stassos,” Connie said.

  “This one here says he wants a bigger boat,” his grandfather said. He clapped Ben’s shoulder with the palm of his hand. “Thinks he knows how to sail already.”

  Connie’s eyes deepened. A welter of pale freckles disappeared into the top of her bathing suit.

  Ben told himself to want that. He thought of the stories he could tell Andrew and Trevor, at home.