Alison gasped softly, her bottom flexing in my grip as though to squeeze my hand, and looked up at me, her brown eyes swimmingly wide in a kind of awe, excitement, wonder. Her fingers tugged at my nipple. ‘That’s funny! I was just thinking the—!’
The bathroom door banged open behind us and my son came bounding out, calling my name – I let go of Alison and turned, squatting (my shirt jerked against her hand, a button ripped), just in time to catch him up. ‘Good night!’ he shouted, giving me a big kiss. There was a large white ‘SUPERLOVER’ emblazoned on his sweatshirt.
‘Good night is right, chum! You know what time it is?’
‘Daddy, do I look like Little Boy Blue?’
‘Well, you don’t look much like Red Ridinghood, do you?’
‘But Little Boy Blue’s a little boy!’
‘Not really. They just put that in the poem to make it sound better. He doesn’t like it either.’ Naomi, still holding on to the two ends of the towel through the skirt, rocked stiffly back and forth on her way back into the bathroom. ‘And you know, it wouldn’t hurt you to imitate Boy Blue and go crawl under—’
‘That’s a funny lady! Does she always walk that way?’
‘I don’t think so. She must have got wound up too tight.’
‘Daddy … ?’
‘Yes?’
‘Daddy, somebody’s broke all my soldiers!’
‘What—?’ Why did that startle me so? ‘Hey, don’t cry!’
‘They took all the heads off! All my best ones! From the Waterloo!’
‘Easy, pal! We’ll get new ones! Here, wipe your eyes with this …’ My mother-in-law was glaring impatiently down on us, her arms folded.
Alison ran her fingers into the hair above my nape. ‘I’ll see you in a few minutes,’ she murmured, and Mark smiled up at her through his tears.
‘Not you, mister!’ I said, getting to my feet and handing him over to his grandmother. ‘You’re off to bed!’
He blinked, surprised. ‘You look scary, Daddy!’ he exclaimed, backing away.
‘We’ve been playing monsters,’ I laughed, and made a face.
‘Can I play?’
‘Not yet. When you grow up.’ I winked at my mother-in-law, but she turned her head away, her lips pinched shut.
‘Oh gosh, help!’ Naomi called from the bathroom. ‘I’ve dropped part of it!’
I turned to touch Alison’s fingertips in farewell, but she was already at the head of the stairs. She waggled her hand behind her back and waved at someone down on the landing, and I heard my son’s door slam. The heads?
In the bathroom, Tania was sliding open the shower curtain which my mother-in-law had apparently drawn shut. ‘Like variations on a theme or something,’ she said, and Naomi, in some distress, replied: ‘Well, that’s exactly the problem! It seemed so unfair!’
‘Here, let me help.’ I knelt and reached up under her skirt to hold the towel against her buttocks, but it had dropped down in front and I accidentally stuck my finger in her vagina. ‘Oop, sorry, Naomi …’ I found the loose end. ‘Okay, now pull your skirt up, I’ve got it …’
She hiked her skirt and, gripping it with her elbows, straddled the toilet stiffly once more. ‘Ouch,’ she complained as she leaned low onto the watertank, keeping her rear high so the skirt wouldn’t fall back over it. ‘I think it’s getting hard!’
‘Heavens!’ exclaimed Tania, casting a professional eye upon the sight. ‘Red, green, brown, yellow – what have you been eating tonight, Naomi?’
‘Just what was out on the table.’
‘Look, there’s even a little piece of string!’
‘It’s a shame to wash it away,’ I said, dipping the dirty towel under the hot water faucet in the sink. ‘Maybe we ought to frame it and hang it on the wall.’ A monster: yes, I was: there was blood at the edge of my mouth.
Tania, smiling, knelt to her task, wrapped still in the bathtowel, which slowly loosened as she squeezed and kneaded the dress. My grandmother, rolling out pie dough, would tell me stories about the wilderness, about the desperate, almost compulsive struggle against it as though it were some kind of devil: ‘We had to domesticate it, now look what we got for it.’ I could still see her old hands, dusted with flour, gnarled around the handgrips of the wooden rolling pin, her thin wrinkled elbows pumping in and out as she talked. Once she’d told me the story of a man in love with his own reflection who went out ice-fishing one day and drowned himself. She’d said it was her cousin. Tania held the sudsy dress up to study it. ‘By the way, Naomi, where did you get this switchblade?’
‘Switchblade?’ I touched my throat: a tiny red toothmark.
‘It was in your shoulderbag.’
‘Golly, I don’t know – I don’t know half the things in that bag!’
‘My favorite Mexican ashtray, too!’ I scolded, turning away from the sink and clapping the hot towel against her backside. Naomi oohed gratefully. ‘And, say, what’s this about a valentine?’
‘Did I have a valentine in there, too?’
‘Somebody said it was from me.’
‘Did you give me a valentine?’
‘No, dummy, that’s just the point.’ I took the compress away: it seemed to be softening up. I rinsed the towel out and applied it again, molding it to the curves of her moony cheeks. ‘What I want to know is who was it from?’
‘Honest, I don’t understand a thing you’re saying. I don’t think I ever got a valentine in my whole life.’ She sighed tragically. ‘Except once, a long time ago. And then it was more like giving it than getting it.’ She shuddered at the recollection. Or maybe at the chill when I took the towel away for another rinse. ‘My mother let one of her men friends spank me. It wasn’t the only time, but this time she didn’t even pretend I’d done anything wrong. Mother said it was a valentine, for him or for me, I don’t know which she meant, but he could slap it until it was bright red, a little bright red heart. They laughed and laughed all the time they smacked it.’
‘That’s what I like,’ said Tania, ‘a happy ending.’ She had a painting by that name, the darkest, most depressing piece she’d ever done, her vision of the lust for survival. ‘A cartoon,’ she called it.
‘Well, it was so … so humiliating!’ Naomi’s bottom did seem to be blushing at the memory, but mainly it was the warmth that was turning it rosy. ‘And there were others – an old man, I remember, who used a thing he called his “stinger,” and another one—’
Tania laughed, pushing the dress under. ‘All these family stories! They remind me of my own father the day he gave me my first box of paints.’ She lifted her dress out of the water to examine it, her arms bubbly with pink suds up to the elbows. ‘ “Tatiana,” he said, “there are no lies in the world, so everything you paint will be true. But not everything will be beautiful.” ’ She glanced at me over her pale fleshy shoulder, then plunged her dress back into the ruddled suds once more.
‘Ow,’ said Naomi, trying to peer past her bunched-up skirt at her behind, ‘it feels all prickly now like when you skin your knees!’
‘It’s a little raw. I wonder if we still have any baby oil around … ?’ There was none in the medicine cabinet or on the shelves below the sink, but I found half a bottle at the back of the linen cupboard: thus life provides these little markers, I thought – then closed the door quickly. I’d nearly forgotten. How was I going to get that thing out of here? Should I even try? And what would I do with it? In my palm, the oil felt like sweat. I spread oil on one buttock, my mind racing through the house like a scanner (the clothes basket at the bottom of the chute? the loose floorboard in my mother-in-law’s room? the deep freeze?), then puddled out another palmful for the other one.
‘Actually, spankings and valentines go together,’ Tania remarked. ‘Saint Valentine was himself whipped before they beheaded him, and the Church has got a special kick out of beating lovers ever since.’
‘Beheaded—?’ gasped Naomi. Her buttocks clenched, and I thought of Alison, the
way her hips had flexed in my grip, and a wave of anxiety swept over me. It was as though something were rushing down upon me which I wasn’t ready for, and I remembered my own mother, hurtling down a ski slope toward a broad bulge of mud – we’d hit an unusual dry spell that winter, and the snow had got worn off in places; the rest of us could ski round the muddy patches, but my mother still hadn’t progressed beyond the snow plow. We could see her streaking down a ridge toward the big glistening mud patch, a sickly smile on her face, and there was nothing we could do. ‘Sit down! Sit down!’ my father had cried, but she just kept coming, her eyes getting bigger and bigger. And then suddenly she’d stopped. I didn’t remember the fall, I must have looked away, but it was terrible, and she was in the hospital for a long time afterward. It was not only our last ski trip. It was the last time we ever went anywhere as a family.
‘Well,’ said Tania with a sigh (of course, I could simply turn it over to the police – why did that seem so impossible?), ‘they had to chop something off …’
I rubbed the baby oil into those big cheeks, bigger than my own, thinking back on my son when he was tiny, his little bottom like two fat knuckles, narrow and pointed, his life still simple then, his memories wholly utilitarian and unfocused. Now … One of his drawings was stuck up on the wall over the clothes hamper. It was a picture of a castle with a war going on, blood and flags flying, bodies scattered like jacks. There was a big figure up on top that was presumably Daddy. He had a long thing hanging down between his legs which Mark said was for killing the bad guys, and he was throwing somebody off the ramparts. Mark said sometimes the picture made him laugh and sometimes it made him afraid, but he wouldn’t tell me who it was that was getting thrown off. ‘The only Saint Valentine story I remember,’ I said, dribbling a little more oil into my hand and spreading it into the creases of the thighs and the furrow between her cheeks (I could feel her muscles relax as I worked the oil in – her tummy sagged and her thighs gaped a little as though her pelvis had distended), ‘was how he restored the sight of a blind girl.’
‘That’s nice …’ she whispered. I oiled the surface of her anus in little circles as though polishing a button (perhaps, I was thinking, recalling my son’s question, it’s neither the hard part nor the empty part, but something in between), then pushed my fingertip in, twisting it gently; she groaned and squeezed her cheeks together in pleasure and gratitude as I pulled it out: ‘I – oh! – like stories like that …’
‘Yes, well, naturally both she and her father got converted, and so consequently got their heads chopped off, too, bright eyes and all.’
‘Yuck! Why’d you have to go and spoil it?’
‘Ah, well, who’s to judge him?’ Tania sighed. She was wearing pink suds now all the way to her armpits. ‘Probably, like all of us, he only wanted company …’
I capped the oil, set it aside, then gave Naomi’s buttocks one final vigorous rub, making them gleam rosily, buffing away their playing-card pallor. If I could get that thing out of the house, I thought, I could bury it in the garden. ‘You like that girl, don’t you, the one with the pretty hair … ?’ she asked softly, her voice jiggly from the massage.
‘How’s that?’
‘You were-her thi-hi-hinking about her ju-hust now, I-hi-hi could tell-ll-ll …’
‘Actually I was thinking about all those pee-hee-heople downstairs, and what they’re going to do-hoo-hoo to me if I don’t get back down there.’ This was a lie. I was thinking about Alison. She was all I’d been thinking about all night. Except for Ros of course. I spread the excess oil around the sides of Naomi’s hips and down her thighs, gave her cheeks a final slap, straightened up. And my wife. ‘There! that should—’
‘You want to make love to her, don’t you, Geoffrey?’
‘Gerry.’ I wrung out the towel, tossed it in the hamper, washed up.
‘Gerry …’ Naomi seemed to have grown fond of her position, or maybe she was falling asleep. Her voice was just a drowsy murmur. ‘How would your wife feel about it?’
I glanced at Tania in the mirror, her broad back to me like a stone tablet. A soft sympathetic stone tablet. ‘She wouldn’t like it.’ I wiped my hands, combed my fingers through my hair. ‘I’ll go get something for you to wear, Naomi.’
But when I opened the door, there was Howard kneeling down behind it, his eye where the keyhole had been – the package of paper panties hit the floor. He snatched at them. ‘I – I’m sorry, I, eh, just dropped – they slipped …’
‘Is that you, Howard?’ Tania called, and he popped erect as though on wires. She wrapped herself in the bathtowel, pulled the door open. ‘Well! look at you!’
He stood there in the doorway holding the package of panties in his chubby fist, weaving slightly, knees bent, a silly smile on his flushed blood-flecked face, one shirttail out, red silk tie dangling loose. ‘I just – hic! – brought these – this, you see. Dickie, eh …’ He thrust the package at me, but it had been opened and what reached me was only the cellophane wrapping: the panties lay in a soft heap at his feet. Tania picked them up, glanced at them curiously, then handed them to me with a wink. ‘Howard, Howard!’ she clucked, tucking in his shirttail. He giggled idiotically. ‘You’ve popped all your buttons!’
‘Here, Naomi, Howard’s – Naomi? Hey!’
She started up with a snort, blinking her eyes, her skirt slipping down her shiny bottom. ‘Oh …’ I could hear Tania asking her husband for his scout knife: ‘Which one’s the leather punch, Howard?’ Naomi smiled sleepily, leaned her head on my shoulder, looping her arms softly around my neck. ‘Can you help me,’ she yawned, ‘just one more time.’
‘You’re a big girl, Naomi, you can—’
‘Please, Geoffrey? I always split these things …’
I knelt with a sigh and, clumsily, one hand braced on my back, the other on the sink, she pushed her feet through the legholes. I could see it was going to be a tight fit. ‘Are these your size, Naomi?’
‘How should I know?’
Tania opened the linen cupboard. Maybe she was looking for some place to hide Howard’s knife. There was nothing I could do about it – the panties were caught halfway up Naomi’s thighs and had to be inched the rest of the way. ‘You’d think the oil would help,’ I complained, one eye on Tania.
‘Your wife, ahem, asked me to tell you, Gerald, she needs some things from the top shelf of the pantry and – burp! – can’t find the ladder.’ The ladder was in the pantry, but never mind, I understood. Naomi lifted her skirt out of the way, as I tugged at her flesh, pushed at the band. ‘I think we’re almost there, Naomi … easy now!’
‘Mmf! Whoo – thanks!’ she gasped, helping me at the crotch. Howard’s head was twitching from trying to look at Naomi and not look at her at the same time, making his thick fractured spectacles flutter with reflected light and his pink jowls wobble. ‘Now, just so I don’t have to bend over … !’
‘Also, eh, something about food stuck in the freezer, and the garbage was filling up and, well, she seemed …’
‘Yes, all right, Howard, tell her—’
‘You know, it’s funny,’ Naomi interrupted, ‘but these pants feel like they’ve already been worn by someone.’
Tania smiled; Howard was gone.
Naomi wriggled her hips to let the skirt drop. ‘Maybe I could do something to help, Geoffrey – I mean, if you want to see that girl. Like, you know, I could go talk to your wife for a while maybe, or get her to go to the basement with me and play darts or something …’
‘It’s too dangerous, Naomi,’ I said, wiping my hands. ‘She throws a wild dart. Anyway, I don’t see why you—’
‘Love!’ she said with a kind of sweet breathless tremor in her voice. ‘It should have a chance, wherever and whenever it appears. It’s so rare … and wonderful!’
Tania snorted. ‘Roger once told me he thought love was the most evil thing in the world – and seeing what he got out of it, you can hardly argue with him.’
‘Oh
golly—!’
‘Don’t bring up Roger, Tania, I’ve just got her all cleaned up.’
Tania smiled wanly, leaning back against the linen cupboard, wrapped in her towel like a desert mystic, the tip of my ascot peeking out between her feet. I glanced up at her face, but it told me nothing. ‘It was that day he came breaking into my studio. Once he’d calmed down, we had a long talk together. He knew what was happening to him …’
‘But that wasn’t love, that was something … something crazy!’
‘He told me he used to believe, before he met Ros, that love was a kind of literary invention, that people wouldn’t fall in love at all if they didn’t read about it first. He said he always thought that we learned our lines about love, as it were, from fairy tales, then went out in the world and acted them out, not even knowing why it was we had to do it. But he said he forgot all that when he met Ros, forgot everything. He said she left him completely stupid, an illiterate, a wolf-child, a man utterly without a past, she invented him where he stood – it was as if he’d been concussed, suffered some kind of spectacular fusing of his entire nervous system, reducing it to the simple synchronous activity and random explosions of a newborn child.’
‘I can understand that,’ said Naomi softly, staring at me. ‘It’s great …’
‘He was terrified, He said it wasn’t that he needed to possess her, it wasn’t even selfishness, not in the way one would think. And he didn’t feel protective, didn’t feel kind or generous toward her, didn’t especially want her to be happy or successful or feel fulfilled – it was something much more immediate than that, something much more frightening, it was something almost monstrous … !’
‘Oh my … !’ Naomi fled, holding her tummy, brushing past Vic’s girlfriend Eileen, who had just come in behind us, looking dazed still, one whole side of her face now swollen and turning blue.
‘You’d think, after such a colorful childhood,’ I said, wiping the sink, then tossing the towel in with the others (yet I, too, was thinking about love), ‘she’d be a bit more callused.’