“Are you finished?”
“Yeah, I’m done.” Almost relieved, he walked out.
23
In the morning, while the television flashed the morning news, the camera gliding languorously over dead people in body bags on a street in Baghdad, Candace thought: Oh, god, oh, god, oh god.
She could almost remember the smell of that tight place, the darkness, and the thread of light through which came the sounds of the world beyond the narrow rectangle where her mother had put her. The smell of old shoes. They had been following her. And sometimes, she would wake in the night hearing footsteps.
She and Joe had stopped having sex. At first it seemed almost natural. There were always plenty of good excuses. Either she was too tired, or he was too tired. Once a month, he flew to California to check on Harold and the business, and he was always very tired and drained when he returned. The work was difficult; there was more competition; the customers wanted different things. She had the feeling he’d lost interest in his work. Making money used to be enough. Now, she wasn’t so sure.
They’d get into bed at night and turn away from each other, desperate for sleep. She found it difficult to relax. Her body felt strange, alien. Her hips, her tender breasts. She’d put on weight. It dragged her down. It made her feel unattractive. The last thing she wanted was to be touched. She felt somehow disconnected from the person she once was, as though all her colors were fading to gray. She felt, as the days went by, that she was gradually disappearing. She’d look at her husband’s broad back in the darkness and think: I’m lost.
She’d read numerous books on menopause; she knew, like some menacing criminal, it had taken her against her will and would do what it wanted. It would be a slow, tortuous descent, she thought. As a young woman, she’d had a kind of striking beauty, at least people had told her so, and now, quite suddenly, she did not. Her face had gone soft like an overripe peach. The corners of her lips turned down, as if in a frown, yet she was not frowning. Her eyes, like the windows of an abandoned house where something awful had happened, seemed coated with dust. A deep crevice had crept down the middle of her forehead, forking off into two symmetrical ruts on either side of her mouth. She supposed it was natural. It’s what happened in your fifties, it happened to everyone and it was happening to her.
Greta Travers had told her about a terrific plastic surgeon in Albany—Greta had already had her eyes done and was ten years younger than Candy. Candace had made an appointment eight weeks ago and the day had finally arrived. She hadn’t discussed it with Joe until that morning, when she asked him if he would drive her there. “Of course,” he said.
They took his Mercedes. Candace didn’t like to drive; Joe was always the one behind the wheel.
“What are you thinking of doing?” he asked.
“We’ll see,” she said. “Let’s see what he says.”
“For what it’s worth, I think it’s unnecessary.” He glanced at her. “You’re beautiful to me, you know that.”
She tried to smile; she didn’t believe him for a minute. If I’m so beautiful, what are you doing with Claire Squire? As if she didn’t know. She’d known for weeks. How stupid did he think she was? When she focused on it she became very angry, to the point where she could almost feel the anger, like spurs, kicking her insides. But, the truth was, she didn’t want to sleep with her husband, and maybe, somehow, he sensed it. Sex was the furthest thing from her mind. She wasn’t attracted to him, but perhaps that wasn’t fair, she wasn’t attracted to anyone.
She just wanted to be left alone.
Sometimes she thought of leaving him, but when she weighed all the aspects of divorce, splitting up the house, sharing custody of Willa, she doubted her ability to manage. Her husband had been having affairs since the beginning of their marriage, but somehow this one was different. For one thing, she knew the lover in question, Claire Squire, and she liked her. She considered her a friend.
Don’t shit where you eat, she wanted to tell him.
The doctor’s office was on Hackett Boulevard. It was a modern glass building. The waiting room was decorated in brown and gold, and the nurses were pleasant and friendly. It wasn’t the first time she’d had surgery. When she’d first met Joe, he’d convinced her to get her breasts enlarged. For her film career, he’d told her, offering to pay for the operation. As it had turned out, the film career fizzled after only two films. She was too nervous on the set. “It’s not for everyone, ” Joe had said, trying to comfort her that first day. When she’d felt her partner’s penis enter her anus, she’d felt like she was being split in half. It took every ounce of her physical energy to pretend that she liked it. The man behind her had a particularly large penis, and, even though she’d had two enemas the night before as instructed by the director, she could feel herself losing control. There were the hot lights, the members of the crew, it all blurred together as she started to cry, she couldn’t help it. She’d never felt so humiliated—all those people just standing there watching her taking it up the ass. She’d cried so hard her face had turned crimson; they had to cancel the shoot.
The nurse called her name and led her into a room. The doctor was Indian, a handsome man in expensive clothes. On his wrist a beautiful gold watch. She liked him immediately. Make me beautiful, she wanted to say. He took pictures of her, Polaroids that made her look like a criminal in a lineup. He looked closely at her face, observing the details, the various flaws. With his soft fingertips he outlined the soft tissue-paper skin around her eyes, explaining how he could help her. He ran his fingertips over her closed eyelids and it made her very sleepy. It was like a magic blessing and she thought if everyone would just leave her alone she might finally be able to get some sleep.
24
Teddy put the blame on his hands. For almost everything. He had a poor pencil grip, that’s what Mrs. Heath had told him. “Why didn’t they ever teach you how to hold a pencil?” she’d said, and he focused on the little hairs on her lip and the coffee stains on her teeth as she attempted to manipulate his hand. It was a rude dance, his hand under hers on the pencil, making crude marks. Like duck shit. He held his pencil like a retarded person. He held his pencil like a cave-man holding a weapon you might use to poke something. Poke.
It was hard to block out Mrs. Heath, although he tried. She’d lean over him, gliding her fingertip down the page, pointing out his myriad mistakes. She was not concerned about his feelings and on some occasions he would feel a blast of heat rising up his neck. He would give her a look, and she’d balk a little bit like she was afraid. She was like one of those little dogs you just want to kick across the room. Yap yap. Yap yap. The way she treated him, slowing down the way she spoke to a remedial decibel, like he was too stupid to understand when they both knew that he wasn’t. In class, they were reading The Odyssey, and his tutor had given him a tape so he could hear it, which made a big difference for him, all the words popping in his mind like bubbles, pop, and with his newfound confidence he had raised his hand, noting the look of surprise on her face, but she never called on him, not once. She’d almost smile, then turn her attention across the room and pick on someone else, someone reliable. If she really wanted his opinion, which she obviously did not, he would tell her that her precious Odyssey was like some kind of amazing fucking acid trip, and maybe the old bard Homer wasn’t blind at all—but some kind of acid-tripping fucking genius stumbling over his own sandal straps, who never imagined that all these totally lame high school students would be ruminating over his brilliance a thousand years later. From a purely pedagogical point of view—not to be confused with pathological or pedophile—which, he had to remind himself, often camouflaged themselves as such—he knew what Mrs. Heath wanted as a teacher. Mrs. Heath wanted to sprinkle their minds with grass seed and watch the blades spike up through the earth, flat and predictable as a golf course. She wanted dependable students, well fed but not necessarily nourished. But he was not in that category. Admittedly, he could not count on his pe
rceptions of letters and words, and he was not always accurate. He misused words most when he liked their sound. A sentence had a kind of music, and the word sounded right. The definitions were never as interesting as the sound they made coming out of your mouth. He rolled their flavors around on his tongue, tasting every nook and cranny, but he could not be trusted to deliver the right answer and she would never give him better than a C, no matter what genius work he produced. The way he saw it, his mind was a big unruly field of wild-flowers. One day he would shower the world with blossoms.
When he eventually got bored, he’d give in to distraction and notice other things. The windows. The big squares of perfect glass. The yellow shades quivering just a little. Everything came down to the body, that’s what he thought; it’s what his mother had taught him. How he felt sitting there in the chair, a prisoner. The joy he always felt, getting out. It’s why he liked certain buildings, certain modern houses. He would build them one day, it was his dream. There was a house he liked on the mountain. Sometimes he’d go there. It belonged to an architect who only used it in the summer. Teddy had figured out how to climb up onto the deck. The deck was suspended over the mountain with metal cables, and when you sat on the edge of it with your feet hanging over you felt as if you were flying. It was the sort of house he would have one day. He had made his decision; he was going to be an architect.
Ada raised her hand. She wanted to show them what she knew. Her cheeks brimming. She was like one of those fuckable blow-up dolls, any moment she might burst. He could smell her. She was a corn muffin. She was potatoes with butter. Pick me, pick me! The way her pink snow-cone tits pushed up against her shirt made him hard. The roll of flesh around her middle, cylindrical as a snake, revealing itself sinisterly whenever she moved. She had a kind of scowl on her mouth. The girls in his class were like members of an exclusive club. Keep out! His mind would drift upon them like smoke. Not ordinary smoke, but the wet mist that settled on the fields at night. He had compared all the breasts of the girls in the class and given Monica the highest marks, but it didn’t make him want to touch her, although he knew he would if she offered. The only one he wanted to touch was Willa Golding. She made his stomach ache. He would look at her and feel pain, loss. She was the blue woman by Modigliani with her legs in a triangle; she was the quince bush near the kitchen door, with its fiery orange fruit; she was the black teeth of the ocean. Ada was yesterday’s bread thrown to the ducks. Quack, quack! Mrs. Heath had paired them as study buddies, which he found mildly interesting— the smartest with the dumbest always made a happy pair, him being the smarter of course even though she thought it was the other way around. They’d go into town to the library, up on the balcony overlooking the old ballroom, up in the stacks with thousands of dusty old books that nobody ever read, and she’d take out her notebooks, her perfectly sharpened pencils. She had the most perfect handwriting he’d ever seen. He’d just look at her sitting there in her kilt, her not unpleasantly chubby thighs, her coconut white skin jiggly as pie filling, her slightly thick ankles, the quivering crucifix at her throat. She had devoted herself to Jesus, she’d told him, which turned him on somewhat, mainly because when she talked about Jesus she got a look on her face, like she was hot. He would sit there thinking: What would happen if I touched her? Would I singe my fingertips? She wore itchy wool crewneck sweaters, thick white socks, clunky Doc Marten’s. There were the usual onlookers, cotton-brained people with nowhere else to go, let out from the halfway house down on Housatonic Street. This numb nut in a red sweater, who’d sit in the corner, always the same book on his lap, the spine cracked, the yellowed pages never read. A few moments of freedom in the arcade of inquiry before strained beef and succotash.
“Are you even listening to me?” she’d say, exasperated by his apparent stupidity, to which he’d answer, gazing into her narrow black eyes, “I’m hanging on every word, gorgeous.”
After school, Willa took him home. She wanted to show him how she rode. She wanted to introduce him to Boy, her horse. He waited for her in the kitchen while she went up and changed. Her housekeeper was there, Argentina. She didn’t speak any English. She gave him a Coke and smiled and nodded while he drank it. Then her mother came in. Teddy thought she was nice. Her breasts were hard to miss. It embarrassed him; he couldn’t look her in the eye.
He went out with Willa to the barn. Her horse was big and black. It was a beautiful creature, he thought, stroking its side. “He likes you,” she said. He watched her tack up. She moved quickly, wrapping its ankles, putting in the bit; she knew her way around that horse. He sat up on the fence while she cantered around the ring, practicing jumps. Rudy came over to say hello. Teddy hadn’t seen him since that night at the Men’s Club. “You’re a good card player. I admire that.”
“Beginner’s luck.” Teddy shrugged.
“I underestimated you, you’re smart. You got to be real smart to play cards like that.”
He’d never been called smart by anyone, maybe just his mother but that didn’t count. “Thanks.”
“Hey, I got something for you,” Rudy said, reaching into his pocket. “Close your eyes and open your hand.”
“What is it?” He felt something drop into his palm.
“A little souvenir is all.”
Teddy looked: Dale’s tooth. He didn’t want it, but he stuck it in his pocket.
“You sure as hell earned it.” Rudy leaned on the fence and they both watched Willa on the horse. “You’re wasting your time, brother. She don’t need you, she’s got the horse.” He laughed, shaking his head. “Teenaged girls love horses.”
Teddy watched Willa sail over a jump.
“I got a remedy for what ails you,” Rudy said. “You interested?”
“Maybe.”
He told his mother he was going over to Marco’s to study, which is what he should have been doing. Instead, he went out with Rudy. “I’m taking you under my wing, son.” Rudy grinned at him, and handed him a can of beer. “Go ahead, enjoy yourself.”
The sun was setting in the back window of the truck. They drove over into New York State, down empty roads, through wide-open fields. They had the windows open and you could smell the earth. The long grass hissed at them as they rolled past. The late sun cut a glare across the glass. The air was fresh and clean. If his mother hadn’t told him about his father that morning, he might not have taken the trip with Rudy, but over breakfast she’d shown him a letter she’d gotten from a Mexican prison, confirming that a man named William McGrath, otherwise known as his father, Billy, had been an inmate there for ten years. He’d been released, his whereabouts were unknown. When he’d asked her what he’d gone in for, all she said was, “Drugs.”
“That was pretty stupid,” he’d said to her.
“Nothing about doing drugs is smart.”
“I didn’t mean the drugs. I meant getting caught.”
That got her. “You get yourself home after school today,” she’d told him. “I think you need to spend some time up in your room, thinking.”
Fuck that.
You couldn’t judge a man because he’d gone to prison. Rudy had gone to jail and he was all right. When he asked him about it, Rudy told Teddy that he’d made a mistake. “I’m not going to lie to you, it was fucked up. But I did my time and moved on.” Maybe his dad, wherever he was, had done the same. It came to Teddy that he was drawn to people like Rudy, people who lived hard and true; they didn’t waste time on the bullshit. It was how Teddy wanted to live. And whether she believed it or not, it was how his mother had raised him.
As darkness fell, they drove deeper into the country, so far out you didn’t see any houses, only a farm or two, and you could smell manure in the air. Then he pulled off into a field where other cars were parked. In the distance, he could see a huge bonfire and a group of men standing around it. Rudy parked and they got out and walked over. Some of them had brought beer and Rudy had taken his. They walked over to the fire and stood there looking down into a valley, w
here a shallow pit had been dug out of the field. There were flaming torches all around it, and people were standing behind the thin ropes, getting ready to watch. He and Rudy walked down to the pit and joined the crowd. There were cages of dogs, pit bulls, and some of the dogs looked sick and others were whimpering. Some of the dogs looked too weak to get up, their ribs poking through, their muzzles covered with blood.
“Look who’s here,” Rudy said. He nodded toward somebody over by the cages. It was Dale. “You better keep your distance. He’s got a real short fuse.”
“I’m not afraid of him.”
Dale had on black rubber gloves up to his elbows. His dog was in a cage, panting hard. It was an ugly dog, Teddy thought. Unlike Luther Grimm’s dog, Dale’s dog looked scrawny and weak. The men standing along the ropes were shouting now, placing their bets. A couple of women stood off to the side, smoking. There was a big crowd around the pit and the people had mean, hungry eyes. They had come to bet, they had come to win. Dogs were going to die. There was the smell of blood in the air. You could hear the howling, the whimpering. They saw Dale bring over his cage; his dog was going to fight. The second he opened the metal door, the dog went tearing into the pit after its opponent as everyone watched, their faces dumb with glee. The two dogs became a jumble in the dark, and then you could see that one dog had the other by the neck and blood was spurting out like a fountain. “Look at you.” Rudy grinned and shoved Teddy on the back. “You’re not scared, are you?”
Teddy shook his head, but he was.
“Those animals are bred to fight,” Rudy explained, as if it were all right. “They want to fight. It’s all they think about.”
“I don’t know.”
The people were shouting as the one dog maimed the other, and you could see the fur torn off and the raw flesh underneath and the organs inside busting out. The fight was over. Dale’s dog had lost. It cowered in on itself, whining miserably. Money went back and forth from hand to hand. Dale yanked the animal out of the pit as it yelped for mercy and Teddy could see Dale making a big show of his anger and knew he was going to make it pay. He kicked it along with his boot away from the group and doused it with lighter fluid, joking as he did it, wanting everyone to see, then flicked a match at it. The crowd watched as the dog caught fire and some people even laughed, watching it run around in the field, covered in flames.