“Can we talk about it now?” he said.
I plucked my shoulder harness safety belt like a cello string and thought about switching on the radio instead of answering his question. The Jeep was a noisy ride, especially with the top off. I thought about pretending that I hadn’t heard him. The radio would make it even harder to converse.
“Their deaths, you mean?”
“Well, yes, but I really meant … David.”
I knew what he meant all right. I plucked my seat belt one more time and then decided to quit being childish. It was beginning to look as if he already had one teenager; he didn’t need me acting like one, too. “Yes,” I said, sighed, and stared out the gaping “window” beside me, the open space that exposed the passenger to the elements from head to toe. Rocks pinged against the Jeep’s belly, and leaves brushed my bare arm. I worried vaguely about scratches to my skin and the car’s.
“You first,” I said.
“Only if you promise to tell me why you’re so upset.”
I thought that was a stupid thing to say, but I didn’t say so.
“Oh, I will … as soon as I figure it out. You’ll be the second to know.”
He smiled over at me in an understanding sort of way, so I felt I owed it to him to capitulate a little more.
“I’m deflating you, I know that, and I’m sorry about it.” It seemed like a nice thing to say, conciliatory, decent, even if I didn’t mean it. “You probably wish I were as astonished and excited and fascinated by this boy as you are, and instead, I’m being a bitch.”
“You’re not,” he said loyally.
I appreciated the effort.
“We don’t even know you’re his father, Geof.”
“You’re right.”
He could be conciliatory, too, even when he didn’t mean it.
“So talk,” I said as he turned right out of our private road onto the two-lane blacktop highway that would take us into Port Frederick, detouring around a dead raccoon on the shoulder of the road. To avoid looking at that, I glanced out the mirror on my side of the car and saw something that made me jerk as if somebody had forced a cattle prod to my side: a black motorcycle was pulling out of the trees at the side of the highway. I stared at the mirror as the rider waited until one car passed him, and then he roared out onto the highway behind it, following us.
“Do you see him!”
“Oh, yes.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. He’s got a right to be on the road, same as we do.”
“But he’s been waiting for us! He’s following us!”
“Let’s talk about his mother—”
“But, Geof—!”
“He’s not hiding, Jenny. He wants us to notice him. So now we’ve seen him, so now we just keep driving on into town. Come on. Relax. We were going to talk, remember? And I was going to start first. Judy Baker Mayer. I just barely remember her, isn’t that lousy? But the thing is, she was easy. It’s a rotten thing to say, and I’m a son of a bitch to say it, but that was her reputation and she damn well earned it.”
Easy? I thought, trying to lean back and relax, trying to listen and concentrate, trying to keep my eyes on the motorcycle rider in my sideview mirror. What a laugh! This is hard.
“They were a couple forever,” Geof was saying, his illegitimate, hateful, vengeful teenage son riding one car behind us with some mysterious intent in his strange little mind. “They started going together when they were in junior high school, and he was always crazy about her. Blind crazy. Judy cheated on him from the time she was, I’ll swear, thirteen. Well, maybe fourteen. Everybody knew it, and everybody knew that Ron didn’t know it, and it was like this big joke with all of us.”
Ha, I thought, staring at the boy. Ha, ha.
“It doesn’t sound so funny now,” Geof admitted. He was driving easily, his left fingers guiding the steering wheel at the bottom, his right fingers loosely on the gearshift knob. He looked like a man who hadn’t a concern in the world beyond shifting into third gear to make the sharp turns in the highway. He glanced into his rearview and sideview mirrors frequently, but he would have anyway on this road.
My vision was glued to my side mirror.
Aren’t teenagers just a riot, I thought, remembering how it had been. Even as a lowly freshman, I had heard about Judy Baker, because we’d idolized the upper-class boys and girls and we’d gossiped about them as if they were movie stars. If Judy Baker had been a movie star, we’d have said she was the one who got the part by sleeping with the casting director. I didn’t remember Ron Mayer well enough to know what part we’d have assigned to him: maybe the Ashley Wilkes role in Gone with the Wind, only stouter and less cultivated but that same kind of nice, boring, devoted husband role. It was difficult to picture Judy as Scarlett. Geof as Rhett Butler was easier to imagine.
“She wasn’t very cute,” Geof said, echoing my own unworthy thoughts. “And she wasn’t popular, at least not with the other girls, and she sure as hell wasn’t very smart. But she was going steady with Ron, and everybody liked Ron. He was just this nice guy, decent looking, real practical, I think he was good at math, and I remember he built neat stuff in shop—”
“Neat stuff?” I had to smile at that.
Geof seemed eager to return my smile. “I’m regressing. Next thing, I’ll be saying groovy. So here was Ron, he played football, never got in any kind of trouble, sort of hung out on the fringe of the popular crowd, and he dragged Judy in with him, and then she slept with everybody and his brother.”
“Maybe he knew.”
Geof’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “Christ. Maybe he did. Wouldn’t that be something? No, I don’t believe it. He was a simple kind of guy. I don’t mean stupid, I just mean … simple, not complicated, not layered, not devious. He’d never have been able to look us in the eye and slap us on the back if he’d known a thing like that. And she always said that he didn’t know.”
“Judy told you that?”
“And other guys.”
“How many, do you think?”
“How many boys are there on a football team?”
“Geof! You’re serious?”
“No.” He laughed a little. “I don’t know how many.”
“One, at least.” I glanced at him.
He seemed to be looking for a hint of humor hi my eyes, seemed to find it, and when he did, he grinned shamefacedly. “Yeah, at least one. But I can also think of a few friends of mine.”
“Yeah, well, boys lie.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t. Look, Jenny, things look different now, on this side of the women’s movement, but back in those days, you’d have thought I was a model of restraint, because for all those years we were in school together, I hadn’t screwed her yet.” He glanced at me again. “And it wasn’t for lack of opportunity. She was after me from the time we were eighth-graders—”
“What a compliment,” I said sarcastically.
“Ah, Jenny.”
He raised his right hand from his gearshift knob and turned it over, palm up, like a dog presenting its stomach to be scratched. I grasped it, squeezed once, and released it.
“Anyway, she didn’t let up until we finally did it.”
“The deed.”
“The deed, indeed.”
“The Wild Thing.”
“It was a classic. Back of my car, can you believe that? On somebody’s side street. Wham, bam. I hope at least I said thank you, ma’am. I don’t remember much about it except that we were probably high, must have been a party going on at somebody’s house, and I think maybe I walked out to my car, and there she was, and I guess I had more hormones than self-restraint, and … there it was.”
“Geof.” The math of the situation had just sunk in on me. “If David is seventeen, and you’re forty, you had to be … Wha? … forty minus seventeen plus nine months … twenty-two? Not exactly an innocent boy.”
“I think I was actually closer to twenty-one at the time, but yeah, o
kay, that’s how old we all were, and there wasn’t a whole lot of innocence going around. Those were still the wild days.” He glanced at me. “You know that You were there. Before AIDS. Some of us had already been to college. But we still got together for parties, you know how it is during semester breaks, summer, Christmas. It was one of those times when it happened.”
“How’d you feel about it?”
“Then?” He shook his head. “I forgot about it, that’s how I felt. I don’t know, I probably felt guilty because of Ron and because I’d kept away from her all those years, and it seemed kind of weak to cave in like that. But I’ve got to tell you the truth, Jenny, I was a horny young bastard, like everybody else, and I probably didn’t have what you would call a crisis of conscience over it. I was probably half proud of it. Sorry.”
“No birth control?”
“I guess not.” He laughed, but then he looked in the side mirror, saw the boy, and got a hit of instant reality. “This is too fucking weird, Jenny. Talking about this, seeing him back there. My life has turned into the Twilight Zone.”
Our lives.
The “zone” we were actually nearing was a commercial one of fast-food restaurants and strip malls on the edge of town.
A second car, a Toyota, came between us and our teenage tracker. He weaved out and passed it, then squeezed back in behind the Pontiac that was right behind us.
“I told you, he’s not much good at undercover surveillance, is he?”
“He’s not hiding,” Geof said tersely. “He wants us to know he’s there. When I used to have to tail cars, the only time I followed within sight of them was when I was so pissed at them that I didn’t care if they saw me or I was trying to provoke them.”
“So is he angry or provocative?”
“Maybe he’ll show us.”
“Great,” I muttered and slunk down in my seat.
For the next couple of miles, we drove in silence, and I gazed at the scenery to avoid staring obsessively at the side mirror. There wasn’t much to see that I hadn’t already observed hundreds of times before, starting clear back in my childhood. Geof and I both had seen it all grow and change. For a couple of centuries, the ones when we didn’t live here, Port Frederick was a fishing village, long on hard work and short on charm. It was only hi the last half of this century that it developed into a full-fledged place on the map. To the natives, even the old-line wealthy ones, it was Poor Fred, but now there was also a Rich Fred—Nouveau Riche Fred, according to the snobs—with malls, a fancy new harbor, suburban developments, all contributing to the feeling I sometimes got of being a visitor to my own hometown. Our destination was in part of Rich Fred, where the streets had names like Sovereign, Prince, Gloucester, and Duke of York. When those streets signs went up, some people opined as to how maybe the Tories had won the war after all.
Nearer town, I said, “Did you ever?”
“What?”
“Use birth control.”
“Hell, no. I was practically still a teenage boy, Jenny—emotionally, I probably still was a teenager—and it was back then.” We reached the first stop sign on our route, and he braked. We waited for drivers at the other three corners to go first. Suddenly, as we sat there, as the motorcycle idled behind us, Geof slammed his right palm against the steering wheel, and he exclaimed, “Goddamn!”
I jumped in my seat, whirled to look behind me. “What?”
“My God, Jenny! How could I have had a child, a son, and not know it? Shouldn’t I have known it at least at some intuitive level? Shouldn’t I have had a gut feeling about it? Didn’t it even occur to me to count backward nine months when Judy had her baby? Everybody knew she was pregnant, that’s why she and Ron got married before his college graduation. I don’t think Judy ever did go to college. Hell, what did I do? I just screwed her and walked away, that’s what. You’re right to ask, What did I feel? Did I feel anything? For her? About that night? Didn’t it even cross my mind that she could get pregnant? It’s driving me crazy, Jenny. I don’t understand how something so important, something so attached to me, could happen and I wouldn’t have a clue about it.”
The car behind us honked, urging us through the intersection.
Geof waved to thank the driver, to apologize.
“You want to know the truth?” he said as he let out the clutch, stepped on the gas, changed gears. “It gives me the creeps! Not David, I don’t mean him. I mean her, Judy, knowing it all this time. And that scrapbook! Hell, it’s spooky. Don’t you think it’s spooky?”
I nodded and glanced in the mirror again: Yes, indeed.
“She knew!” Geof repeated. “Judy knew, and Ron didn’t, and their son didn’t, and I sure didn’t. But she had this knowledge, this incredible secret she kept from all three of us.”
When he said three, I thought he meant himself, Ron Mayer, and me. Then I realized he meant only the two men and the boy.
Four of us, I thought. Don’t forget me.
We were approaching the entrance to Royal Estates, where King Terrace was. All those years they’d lived there, I thought as Geof put on his left-turn indicator, maybe we’d all stopped at the four-way intersection at the same time without recognizing one another. Or maybe Judy had recognized us—that was an unpleasant thought—maybe she’d pulled out in front of me sometime when I was driving into town and she was leaving her subdivision, and maybe she’d known who I was: Geof Bushfield’s wife. And all the times that we were driving by here, there was a little boy growing up at 3582 King Terrace …
When we turned into the entrance to the subdivision, the car behind us drove on past and so did the motorcycle behind it.
“He’s gone,” I said and breathed more easily in the muggy twilight atmosphere of Royal Estates. “Geof, if she had such a crush on you, why didn’t she go after you to marry her?”
“Maybe I disappointed her.”
“In the sack? Fat chance.” I could be loyal, too.
“Thank you, but it wasn’t the sack, it was a back seat, and I doubt I was the most considerate and tender lover she ever had.” He sounded sad when he spoke again. “I wonder if she had any of those.”
“Maybe Ron,” I said shortly, and then I rendered a harsh judgment: “Anyway, you wouldn’t have wanted to know she was pregnant.”
“I’m afraid you’re right.”
He turned onto King Terrace, which was a lane of two-story homes all built on variations of modern Colonial: They were all two stories high, finished in clapboard siding, with all the right additions—long porches, columns, painted shutters on their windows, brass hardware, electric “gaslights,” bicycles in their circle driveways, and lawns that were chemically lush and green. There was another section of Port Frederick that looked much like that, too, but it came by its Colonial appearance authentically, because its houses really had been around for a couple of hundred years. This subdivision was modeled on that older, more established part of town, and if I had my dates right, this had all gone up about fifteen to twenty years ago. It was actually quite attractive in a Stepford kind of way, now that the trees had grown tall and once you got past the unfortunate street names. It suddenly came back to me that the Ron Mayer I’d read about in the newspaper had been a home builder; I wondered if he’d had a hand in this suburb.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to know, but I think I resent it anyway.”
“What?”
He’d been talking; I hadn’t been listening.
“Isn’t that bizarre, Jenny? I’m relieved, and I’m damned glad she didn’t put me through it, but I still resent it! I’m nuts. And that scrapbook! I know I keep harping on it, but it gives me the fucking willies. It’s like something out of a Stephen King novel, you know?” Suddenly, he laughed. “I’m confused, Jenny. Can you tell?”
I stopped searching for house numbers and looked at him.
He pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car to finish saying his piece: “This may sound crazy, but I feel—Jesus, this is going to sou
nd stupid and egomaniacal—but I feel violated. Can you believe that? What a laugh. I take advantage of her when she was probably high or drunk, plus I screw over her boyfriend who was always a decent guy to me, I get her pregnant, they raise my kid, and I’m the one who claims he feels violated!” He seemed bewildered, embarrassed, … and excited. His gaze shifted so that he was looking over my shoulder. “This is the house.”
I turned around in my seat and saw one of the Colonials, painted blue-gray with dark blue trim. It didn’t look like a house that would have a battered old BMW motorcycle parked in its driveway.
“Women’s groups ought to take me out and lynch me.”
“Possibly,” I said, but I turned around again, and this time I put my hand on top of his, which was resting on the telephone he’d had installed when he bought the Jeep. He drove a city car with a police band radio for work; this car was for play, but he’d put in the phone to “be a good boy, and keep in touch with the station” if they needed him. Or if I did. It never rang unless it was the dispatcher or me calling him, because he wouldn’t give out the number to anybody else. He seemed to resent it as an intrusion on his personal space/time, as the physicists say, so I hardly ever dialed him on it, but it comforted me to know he could call for help if he ever needed to.
“It’s not that I blame her,” he continued. “I don’t. Do you believe that?”
“Sure,” I said and tried smiling at him.
“Okay.” He switched off the engine. I heard a lawn mower down the block and a radio playing rock and roll music. It was quite a ways away, but I thought it was Jimi Hendrix. I was sweating, and my legs were stuck to the car seat, and I wanted to get out and walk around for a while. “It’s your turn to talk now.”
I felt my heart shift into third gear.
“No. We’re here. Let’s do this first.”
“He’s back,” Geof said quietly.
Sure enough, when I turned my head slowly to look down the street, there was a battered black motorcycle idling at the curb, its driver sitting astride it, looking our way.
Geof turned the key in the ignition and the car started again.