Frank might have made it suddenly through with an occasional housewife on his route who asked him in for coffee on a cold day, with hot fresh bread and solid sleep, with one child who waved and wasn’t afraid of him—Frank might have anchored himself to these minor satisfactions like a rock climber pulling from chink to chink, but what fouled Frank’s steady, dutiful climb through his life was prettiness. Nora cowered, but in the morning when she was still asleep, the cringing wouldn’t have been squeezing her face together yet, so Frank would wake up to her hair wide on the pillow, her lips full and parted, her small brown nipples hard from the cold when Frank took too much blanket. Now, you might suggest that Frank use Nora’s hair on the pillow as one more chink to lift himself through the rest of his day, that he, all right, love her; you might also suggest, since there were many mornings when Frank looked over to find her lips fuller than usual and purpling, her eyes webbed in blue veins and swollen to thin slits, her nostrils encrusted with red crystals clinging to the hairs inside, that he did not. Yet to imagine that because Frank pulverized his wife he didn’t love her would be to misunderstand prettiness—or at least Frank and prettiness. Surely Frank felt that ache next to her in the morning, that yearning for what, presumably, he already had, that drawing as if even in her sleep she’d gotten hold of string in his gut and was tugging from a point just under his rib cage and could at any time pull out a stream of his insides through a little hole she had drilled there. What was a man like Frank to do with prettiness? When he’d already entered it, married it, even? Frank, not a sophisticated or a subtle man, had done all he knew to do. There it was, always pulling and tugging on the pillow, and Frank didn’t like wanting something, especially wanting something he already had. What good was marrying the bitch, for God’s sake, if he still had to get her somehow, do something?
So Frank came up with his own private therapy. To hit her was to do something, and to punish her for making him feel funny in the morning, not as a man should. And if he hit her long enough and hard enough, the next day he didn’t feel funny or drawn or aching at all, because Nora no longer had a problem with prettiness.
If it were only Nora, Frank might have been able to keep this doing something under control. But there was the other prettiness, harder to suppress. There were her pictures, outside him, of places he couldn’t recognize, of faces that made him jealous. There were strange men in his house with high cheekbones and dark complexions and heads of hair like the one he was losing. They had wide-open eyes without any disappointment glazing over the pupils like cataracts. He began to suspect her of seeing someone else, someone dark and quiet and somehow terrible, until he looked hard at his own son.
That was the way the boy always looked, even when Frank beat him, or especially then, with that stoic set of his mouth, stupidly relaxed, with the wide cavern of his eyes, stupidly trusting. Unlike Nora, his son grew more beautiful with violence: his color rose, his lips deepened, his eyes drove farther to the back of his head. Frank tried hard to teach the boy fear, hatred, and dishonesty—anything unattractive—but Raphael simply seemed to take in the beatings of his childhood like so much information, like part of the way the world was put together that he had better understand early. Frank got the impression as the boy watched him step by step take down the leather strap and call him over that his son was grateful for the instructions he got on his father’s knee, the way other children were glad to learn about birds and flowers and trees. So Frank taught him about violence, and he taught him about beauty and about power: that is, by the frustrated look in his father’s eye, even after the most drastic afternoons, with Frank finally off at the kitchen table slumped and picking at his food and his son red but erect and standing in the opposite corner of the room, Raphael understood that his father had beaten him, but the son had won. They both knew that; Frank would beat him again for winning and so lose once more, and again after that, and again.
Frank lost always and everything, out of love. If Frank had cared nothing for beauty and promise, he would have left the boy alone. If Frank had cared nothing for his wife, he wouldn’t have staged a scene so carefully, so perfectly, to lose her. If he hadn’t loved her, he wouldn’t have known so well what to do to make her leave.
Raphael had told Gray of coming home from school one day to find the house in a shambles which, even for the Sarasolas, was impressive. Errol assumed that, as in most violent households, fighting was ritualized: we can break this, we don’t break this; we stay out of this room; we say these things, we do not say these other things, ever. In this case the rules had evidently been broken, along with a lot of furniture.
“You waiting for some professor to walk in off the street and discover you, Nora? ‘Oh, what genius, mad-ame! This one picture is worth a mil-lion dollars!’”
“Stop it, Frank,” said Nora. She would have been standing straight. She would have spoken quietly. She would have looked pretty today.
“Grow up, will you?” Frank went on. “When a kid brings home his scribbling, you put it on the wall, but at some point you gotta put the crayons away. It’s today, Nora. Today’s your graduation, Nora. You’re thirty-five fucking years old, with little lines around your eyes and your tits down to your elbows—kindergarten is over.”
“It’s not a good idea to do this, Frank,” said Nora. “Maybe you should stop now.” She might have warned him then almost kindly.
“I’ve humored you, Nora, but that picture’s pathetic, babe. That looks no way in hell like my face, darling. You just don’t have it.”
“I think, Frank, that it captures something—”
“Bull-fucking-shit, Nora!” Frank screamed. “That thing looks like some fantasy, some cartoon! You ever look at my face, Nora? Since you’re an artiste, you’re supposed to observe, right? Look at me, Nora. Look at the real fucking McCoy.”
For a moment the living room froze. Raphael remained where he’d come in by the door, searching the wreckage for the offending catalyst of this event. Somewhere behind a shattered lamp or crumpled chair he’d spotted it: Nora’s first portrait of her husband. True, it didn’t look too much like him. She’d made him thinner, shorn off the layers of wax, the heavy jowls, the width of his neck. She’d drilled his eyes out and cleaned the whites clear. He looked younger and not like a postman. He was focusing on something far away. He looked smart. He looked pretty.
Yet Nora did as she was instructed and looked at the real fucking McCoy. “I see you, Frank,” she said quietly, and walked upstairs.
There must have been some younger part of him, the Frank in the portrait, that wanted to bolt up the stairs and weep and throw himself over her suitcases. Instead, older Frank grabbed the portrait out of the shards of glass and flung it against the wall. The stretcher cracked, and the canvas folded; the eyes narrowed; the expression soured and twisted on the floor.
“What are you looking at?” he shot at Raphael. Raphael said nothing.
Hangers clattered one by one above the ceiling; drawers of the dresser opened and closed; bags bumped stair by stair down from the attic. Frank’s stomach churned from a bilious satisfaction: no more desire, no more hole under his rib cage. Frank could get up in the morning and decipher incomplete addresses and misspelled names and bad handwriting, wrestle with packages a quarter inch too big for the box—that was the story, Nora. But no, Nora had to live in her own little world, and Frank couldn’t take it anymore. Frank imagined this sounded very good. He would have to practice: “Her own little world. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Errol had to tear himself away from Frank. Frank Sarasola was not the hero of this story. Frank would have to be left in that house, the clapboard in need of paint, the porch screen door coming off its hinges, the front yard with only patches of crabgrass. Errol would have to leave Frank with the dishes piling and breaking in the kitchen, stains permeating the enamel on the counters, Frank getting tired of frozen fried chicken.
It must have been a strange moment, and Errol was attracted to constructing it: the
mother at the door with the bags announcing she was taking the car, the son right there, her son in the doorway; perhaps he’d even helped her carry the suitcases down the stairs; perhaps they loaded the car together. Frank and Nora not talking. Just Nora and her son, hurtling toward that moment when the key would turn in the ignition and one or both of them would never see that clapboard again, never pick at the flakes of paint while sitting in the porch chair, never listen to the door squeal and rattle on its one and a half hinges. One or both of them. The mother would take the son, or not. Take, or not. Or not.
The car packed, Nora ran a comb through her hair and didn’t cry. Deftly she and Raphael positioned themselves on the porch, the son careful not to be any closer to the house, to Frank, to her whole past life with the swollen lips and Frank’s peculiar hatred of his own desire, than she was. They faced each other equidistant from the broken porch door. A long time. Until Nora made a gesture toward him, but one which looked less like the kind of motion of enclosure that people make toward each other when they are about to take a long trip together than the gesture of despair and regret that a woman makes when she leaves by herself. So Raphael took a step toward the screen door; Nora was now nearer the stoop. Nearer the car. Nearer wherever she was going.
The boy shrugged. “How would you support us? Me?”
Nora shrugged back.
“How will you support yourself?”
Nora laughed a little. “Portrait painting.”
Raphael was Frank’s child, too. “Sure,” he said. “You mean you’ll waitress in a diner a couple towns away from here.”
“Farther,” Nora shot back.
He could have cried; he was only thirteen, and that would have been fine. He could have run to her. He could have held her and they would have gone together. But some people don’t do that. Frank didn’t do that. Raphael didn’t do that, not that afternoon and not once since then, Errol was sure.
“Maybe,” said Nora, her eyes flooded in a panic as she saw her son standing too straight against the doorway, searing black eyes dry and lips together and still and cheeks sucked in against his teeth. “Maybe we could work something out—later—”
“Don’t say that,” said Raphael coldly. “I’m supposed to sit here and wait for you? Mother?”
Nora took a step backward.
“I have school,” said Raphael. “I don’t want it interrupted. I want out of this ugly town, Mother. But if I go with you now, I’ll just end up in another one. Won’t I?”
“I thought Boston—”
“Come on! You know what the rents are like in Boston.”
“Are they bad—?”
Raphael stamped his foot. “Mother! Like Dad said, grow up.” Ah, thought Errol. He meant, Mother, you’re supposed to be saying this. You’re supposed to tell me about rents; you’re supposed to tell me why I can’t go with you. Why are you making me do this for you, come up with your excuses?
Nora looked down at the steps. “All right,” she said quietly. “I don’t have much money. I’ll come back for you when I have a job. Understand?”
“I understand, Mother. That I can live without you. That you can live without me. So, good luck with your little paintings, Mother. I’ll be fine.”
“Sweetheart,” she might have said after he closed the door in her face. “Everyone can live without everyone else.” And the sad thing is, she would have been right.
“Did she ever come back?” asked Errol.
“Raphael claims she might have, but she wouldn’t have been able to find him. That seems unlikely, though. Even in his situation a lot of people in town must have known where he was.”
“So Ralphie has illusions like the rest of us.”
“At least on this point. It’s rather encouraging.”
“Did he tell you much about the next few years? The hole he moved to?”
“Only what I told you. Why, are you interested?”
“Sure. I was a movie fiend as a kid.”
“Then I’ll find out more. He does seem almost proud of it.”
Errol waited, then, for the background research before he filmed the next reel.
10
By the time Gray turned the knob of the front door, Errol had strode quickly away from the window and was sitting in one of the armchairs on the opposite side of the den. He’d managed to find a book and pose himself as if in great concentration, loudly turning a page as she walked in.
Errol looked up to find Gray closing the door behind her with exaggerated care, the way preachers close their Bibles. It was a sentimental scene he wished desperately to deface. Had someone handed him a shaving-cream pie, Errol would have thrown it.
“What are you reading, Errol?” she asked vaguely.
With irritation he found himself holding Il-Ororen: Men without History. “Nothing important,” said Errol, throwing the book down. “Have a nice ride home with Ralphie?”
“He has an amazing car.” Her voice sounded different. Soft. “A Porsche.” Gray leaned against the wall and tilted her head back. “White, with black interior. Leather. He has windshield wipers for his headlights.” She laughed.
“You sound like a sixteen-year-old.”
“Yes, that car brings it out in me. But when I was really sixteen—let’s see, it was the end of the Depression—no one had Porsches, Errol.”
“So you’re reliving the youth you never had? And that explains it?”
Gray cocked her head. “Explains what?”
“Your perfectly normal behavior this evening.”
She looked at Errol with curiosity, but let the barb go by. “As I was saying, it will do 130. Without even breathing hard.”
“Please don’t tell me that you drove from Tom’s to here at 130 miles an hour. Please don’t.”
“All right, I won’t.”
Gray distractedly collected magazines on the table in front of him and looked down to find Errol’s heel rising rapidly up and down. Errol found he couldn’t make it stop. His leg shook the floor, and a vase on the coffee table rattled on its protective glass.
“We are either having a small earthquake,” she said carefully, “or you are annoyed.”
“Well,” said Errol.
“Yes?”
“I didn’t want to drive the coupe back for you, Gray. I’d planned to go home from the party.”
“That’s what you said, so—oh, you meant your own apartment. I’m sorry. You haven’t been there in a couple of months. I just assumed—”
“Don’t assume.”
“Fine.” She was impossible to perturb this evening. “Next time, though, be a little more demonstrative. I would have driven you home if I’d known that’s what you wanted. However, if you know ahead of time that you’re going to make yourself suffer in that cardboard box for the night, it might be better to take your own car.”
“Of course,” said Errol coldly. To keep his leg from shaking, Errol stood up and faced away.
Gray and Errol were accomplished partygoers. Like most things they did, parties were a team effort. Errol would pull Gray away from climbers; Gray would save Errol from divorcées. Gray would be eccentric and even insulting; she’d tell stories and try to draw lots of attention and then get it and be bored. Errol would be lower-key but surprise people with his sense of humor, though most of his jokes would be at his own expense. They were a pair.
But this evening at Tom Argon’s they had gone once more from pair to trio. As Errol walked into the dining room with Gray, there, squarely positioned by the rum balls and fudge pies—all Gray’s favorites—was the inevitable Mr. Sarasola. At each elbow Raphael had collected a beautiful woman: a tall underweight blonde with a fistful of carrot sticks, and—Errol cringed—Arabella. Both women were chattering away, the sharp shoulders on one side and the high, lightly freckled breasts on the other, both rising and falling with excitement, over a movie, a book—it obviously didn’t matter. Raphael himself stood between them, nodding his head once or twice and meticulously tak
ing apart a heart-shaped strawberry tart. While he did seem to be cocking an ear, most of his concentration was going into this tart. Most people at stand-up gatherings eat quickly and with embarrassment; Raphael ate slowly and with precision. Flake by flake he dissected the pastry. Delicately he edged his fingernail between the slices of strawberry to separate it into discrete cross sections. Lightly he swabbed the gelatinous corn-starch binding from around the fruit, taking the red filling drop by drop to his lip on the tip of his forefinger. Gradually he laid the specimen bare, nudging the raw red tissue out of its shell. At last, in the middle of the china lay four flaps of clean wet fruit. Raphael looked down at them with the satisfaction of a surgeon, as if he expected the slices, like ventricles, to beat on his plate.
Raphael looked up between the two women, his eyes flushing like torches; Errol stepped back from the heat. Color rose in the sallow cheeks. The lips filled and darkened, like fruit before fire.
“Mr. Sarasola,” said Gray.
He collected the slices on his plate and held them out to Gray. But he had licked them! Errol wanted to warn her, But it has his saliva on it! Gray walked forward and took the strawberry in her mouth. Her lips touched his fingers.
An hour passed, and Gray disappeared. Searching for her through Tom’s sprawling Tudor house, Errol felt inarticulate and short. When guests tried to talk to him he mumbled and wriggled away. Errol had to remind himself that he was an adult and he knew these people. Still, an odd little-brother feeling was overtaking him in every room. Errol felt lost and deserted and sad. How many times had she done this to him? Not Gray. His sister Kyle.
Four years older, pretty and popular, Kyle had naturally gathered groups. Wherever the brother and sister went, Kyle would have a band behind her after only a few hours. As young as ten, Kyle collected mostly boys, whom she would order about. They obeyed gratefully, and so did Errol. Kyle was physically strong, and up to sixteen was still able to beat boys her age at races and arm wrestling.