Elders (32 page)

“I noticed,” she said. “You want fifteen minutes? Thirty minutes? How much time?”

“You mean with a harlot, right?”

The woman paused. For the first time she really took McLeod in, up and down. He felt conscious of his close-cropped hair, probably too close-cropped, his freckled face, forced smile, overformal attire.

“Where are you from?” the woman said.

“The United States.”

“I’ll give you fifteen minutes for fifty American dollars.”

“I only have twenty. I have a hundred reais, though.” Elder McLeod produced the fold of bills from his pocket and passed it across the little counter. The woman stood up and took the money and stuffed it in the back pocket of her short jean skirt. “Okay,” she said. “Follow me.”

“You?” McLeod said.

“I’m your harlot,” she said.

Elder McLeod followed the woman into one of the middle stalls, a dim-lit, oversize cubicle of a room: three cement walls and the fourth, a curtained partition, which the woman stopped to Velcro shut. She took McLeod’s hand and led him to the edge of a small bed, sat him down on it, then stepped back and peeled off her tank top with both hands. She did it in one fluid motion, more efficient than seductive, but Elder McLeod still thought: I can never unwatch this, even if I want to. I can never undo this, worlds without end.

The woman unclasped a pink bra and let it fall away. She caught it, placed it with the tank top on the small lamp table beside the bed. The room could fit little else: the table, the bed. The lamp shed a harsh yellow light that cast half-moon shadows beneath the woman’s pendulous breasts. The breasts contoured down just so at the nipple, McLeod noticed. The woman slid her jean skirt and underwear down together. She stepped out of them. Her naked hair at eye level.

“Aren’t you going to undress?”

The woman looked down at him like a puzzled god.

“But I don’t …” McLeod said. “How do you say?” He pointed at himself. “I don’t have anything to cover me …”

“Ah,” the woman said, and she took two steps toward the lamp table and opened a small drawer, giving her back to McLeod. He tried to undress in that interval, tearing at buttons, belt, zipper. By the time the woman faced him again, an opened condom in her hand, he had his dress pants down at his ankles. He sat hunched over his erection, half covering it with his hands, but then he noticed her noticing—her puzzled expression deepened—and he allowed himself to be totally exposed.

“How old are you?” the woman asked.

“Twenty,” McLeod said. “Twenty-one.”

She gestured with the condom. “Do you want me to do it?”

“Please.”

McLeod felt the sudden urge to look at the floor, but he resisted it, holding to the woman’s eyes instead. He imagined he saw a trace of amusement on her face, but it slid away quickly.

“It’s okay,” the woman said. “Here.” She sat down beside him on the bed and rolled the condom down. The feel of another’s fingers on his penis offset the strange chilling sensation of the condom, if only for a moment. He felt greasy and ridiculous. He felt embarrassed. The woman took him by the hand again and led him to the center of the bed, waddling on her knees. She turned to him. “Do you know which way you like?” He hesitated. “Here,” she said. She lay on her back, breasts spread to either side, and pulled him over her, and took him into her. “Okay?” She moved her pelvis against him to demonstrate.

“I …” McLeod started to say.
I know that much
. He felt flooded with embarrassment now; he burned with it. No other sensation anywhere in his body could compete with it, and soon he began to soften. He shut his eyes and for several seconds tried to block out all thoughts, all sounds. The woman said, “Is that okay?” He opened his eyes and saw her watching him, wondering, adjusting her rhythm to heighten his. After a moment more she said, “Are you close?”

For the second time that night Elder McLeod’s mind emptied of all but strategy, a desire to salvage his situation, a desire for
less bad
. He had always imagined that sex would be easier than masturbation, easier to get where he needed to go, but now he felt himself ebbing inside the prostitute. He hated himself for it. He redoubled his movements, flexing the arms he braced on. The woman wore a dutiful expression on her face, dutiful yet somehow concerned, which only made things worse.

“Close?” she said again.

Elder McLeod shut his eyes and conjured up images in a panic—women on billboards, newsstands—nothing—women in Passos’s magazine—nothing—women in the drive-through—the absurdity of that, the sudden absurdity of everything, his whole life—until only the thought of Josefina, the thought of
her
under him, only that could sustain him through the last desperate moments. He grunted, pleasure-pain shot through him, and he collapsed on top of the woman. Her body tensed.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, but he didn’t move. She wriggled partway out from under him, half sitting up in bed now, and he came face-front with her breasts, pendulous and full, the undersides still in shadow. The nipples turned down just slightly, he noticed
again. These were the first breasts presented for his touch. The body of a total stranger.

“You done?” she said, trying to guide him off her. “Was that okay for you?” She gripped McLeod’s shoulders with either hand, pushing gently, but she stopped as soon as his shoulders began to jog. She tensed again. “Why are you laughing?”

“I’m not …”

The woman paused. “You’re crying?”

He wandered the streets
of Carinha for the rest of the night, the city reduced to a sort of miniature: the blacked-out storefronts along the main street, the occasional cars, their tail-lights blurring orange-red, the wan yellow halos of streetlamps on the sidewalks, and the moon, always the moon overhead. The glowing disk grew larger as the night wore on, sinking into a haze of thin, disconsolate clouds. The cloud cover broke for minutes at a time and the streets became ghostly in the darkened light, the city all but abandoned at this hour. Elder McLeod had expected many people about, even at three, three thirty in the morning—he had imagined a great licentious nocturnal host, shadowy but real, bristling—but instead he saw only a handful of people, and most of them asleep. He passed forms wrapped in patchworks of dark coarse blankets, like mummies. One of them lay under a bus-stop bench, another in a recessed store entry, another on a bench in the park downtown. McLeod sat on the bench opposite this last bundle, to rest, feeling unafraid for several minutes until he saw the sepulchral form roll over. McLeod got up and lurched away as if he were alive among the dead, but only barely: he felt numb, emptied out—of chemicals, of everything. He tried not to think of what he’d done. He tried not to think at all, tried not to know anything, and for a stretch of an hour, two hours, he largely succeeded. He only knew that he didn’t want to go back to the apartment, back to Elder Passos and the life of a missionary.

He drifted away from downtown into the residential neighborhoods, stopping again to rest on an unoccupied bus-stop bench. It must have been four in the morning. The slab of concrete felt cool underneath him, chilly. The chill deepened and broke through his thin layer of dress pants and gathered in the undersides of his thighs. Elder McLeod couldn’t have rested, really, if he’d wanted to. Alone on a bench in the middle of the night, not sleeping—for fear of what?—but not wanting to go home either. Trapped, liminal, purgatorial. And his mind waking up now, returning in spite of himself to another cold, restless bench. He returned to Joseph of Egypt and the Sunday school lessons he’d received as an early teenager, and to the times he snuck to the woods behind his house where his neighbor, an older boy of fourteen, kept a zip-locked stash of
Playboy
s. The young McLeod must have repaired to the tiny clearing in the pine boughs too often, or often enough to arouse suspicion, for one Saturday afternoon his father followed after him at an unseen distance.

McLeod remembered sitting cross-legged in the clearing, flipping breathlessly through the pages, freezing at every rustle, every soughing crack, and pushing down the erection that never seemed to leave him now, that never stopped clenching his stomach like a fist. He remembered his father crashing through the trees like a warrior god, catching him with the magazine in one hand, his penis in the other, but just holding it, just pinning it down, not knowing what else to do with it. “What great wickedness is
this
?” his father shouted, an allusion to Joseph with Potiphar’s wife that McLeod recognized, even then. He had learned the verse in Sunday school and, later, alone, in puberty’s thrall, had fleshed out the story in his mind: the indentured Joseph serving Potiphar’s
wife, who drops her robe one day—her naked breasts, stomach, legs—and commands,
Lie with me
. Joseph stumbles back at the sight of her, at the suggestion.
How can I do this great wickedness?
Joseph says as McLeod’s father rips the magazine out of his hand. His father stands over him now,
looms
, holding the magazine away from his body like a beshitted diaper. “Young man, you had better …” he says, but his stern voice falters as McLeod struggles to cover himself up, to get himself back into his jeans. He can’t get his pants up fast enough, and suddenly he’s crying. “Get out of here,” McLeod shouts, “get the goddamn fuck
out
of here!” He finally manages to fold the erection into his pants and stands up, crying in earnest now. “Dad, just—just
leave
 …”

But something has changed in his father’s bearing. All of a sudden he leans down to hug McLeod, the offending
Playboy
still in his hand. McLeod punches the embrace away. He punches his father for the first and last time in his life, a glancing ineffectual blow to the chest. Then he tears out of the woods with his father calling after, “Seth, wait! Seth!” and the pine boughs whipping his face. He keeps running, running, the breath burning his throat, until he reaches Memorial Park at the center of town, the park with the pond where he and his father used to feed the ducks in springtime, but now it was fall. He spends a sleepless night on a park bench, his heart catching, again, at every rustling branch, every windy moan.

In the morning, more tired than he’d ever been, McLeod returned to his house. His father had stayed up too, all night, worrying about him, angry, he would tell McLeod later, but angry at himself more than anything. He must have been watching at the big bay window as McLeod appeared at the edge of their property.
He must have seen him while he was yet a great ways off, like the father of the prodigal son, for he ran out into the front yard and fell on McLeod’s neck and kissed him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so sorry. I love you, Seth. I’ll always love you.”

McLeod had never felt his father so close to him before, so urgent. His voice was strange, and his embrace too. They stood in the wet morning grass like that, not moving at all.

In time the rows of teeth on top of property walls started casting their silhouettes more sharply against the night. Elder McLeod watched the dark drain from the sky in the reverse order that it had filled it up the night before: from the bottom first, then the sides, then the top. At the first pink underblush on the clouds he stood up from the bus-stop bench and started walking again. He repassed the storefronts along the main street, passed by Maurilho’s street completely, made a giant buttonhook of a detour around the drive-through. McLeod didn’t fear temptation so much as reminder, though of course the detour itself reminded him. The very fact that he tried not to think of what he had done betrayed a certain hubris. He was Jonah again, trying to hide from the God he doubted. Trying to hide himself from himself.

McLeod turned toward home, and it loomed up even faster than the drive-through had. So be it, he thought. So be it. He opened the front gate, crossed the courtyard, then opened the front door, not caring if Passos heard him. Elder McLeod stepped into the front room at exactly five thirty, though he, watchless, thought it must have been closer to five. The room was dark. The air through the open window was warm.