How to Talk to a Widower (22 page)

“Fuck!” I say, and we pour out of the stall.

“Oh my God!” Laney says, shaking her foot in the air, hobbling erratically across the bathroom. “My foot is soaked.”

“I'm sorry.”

She looks at me and then sighs deeply. “Serves me right, I guess.” And just like that, the fight is out of her eyes, and she leans against the wall, looking sad and small and defeated, which of course, makes me feel like shit.

“Listen,” I say.

“Please, don't. This is already humiliating enough.” She pulls off her shoe, an expensive-looking sand-colored espadrille, and shuffles like a gimp over to the air dryer. “I really am going to leave him, you know.”

“Laney.” I take a step toward her, but she holds out her hand.

“Just go,” she says, and then hits the silver button and the noise of the air dryer fills the room like a jet engine.

         

Later in my car with Brooke, in a random parking lot, a simple kiss has grown legs and turned into something more, something sweaty and breathless that fogs up the windows of my Saab. Mouths open hungrily, lips crush against lips, tongues dance and slide over each other, faces are stroked, hands slide easily under shirts to feel the skin baking underneath, sounds are made, soft gasps and moans, the universal dialogue of escalation.

We end up in the darkness of my front hallway, pressed up against the wall kissing and grinding against each other, and the heat from our friction will melt the clothes to our bodies if we don't undress soon. It's just that I'm not sure where to go. I don't want to bring her downstairs to the guest room like Laney, but I'm scared of what it will mean to bring her up to my bedroom, breaking the hermetic seal on Hailey's last remaining sanctuary, bringing the bulldozers in to the last untouched rain forest, killing off entire species to make way for hotels and strip malls.

Hailey,
I think.
Hailey, Hailey, Hailey.
Just the sound of her name, two syllables, beating in me like a telltale heart.

But Brooke is sweet and sexy and somehow complete, and we had that moment back in the restaurant, that perfect kiss, where I felt loosely spinning things in me click into place, felt the planet stop rotating for just the tiniest fraction of a second to pay tribute,

Hailey, Hailey, Hailey …
and now her wet lips are shining in the ambient light from the kitchen, and her eyes are smoky, their lids half closed and fluttering under the weight of her desire,

Hailey, Hailey, Hailey
… and her skin glows like it's lit from within, and we're young and beautiful and we won't always be, but today we are, soft and hard in all the right places, and we owe it to the world to have sex the way it's meant to be had, and she tastes like cinnamon and sex and fuck it, this is what we're meant to do, what we're built for, and every molecule in our bodies is demanding it, and there's nowhere to be but here, nothing to do but this.

So I lead her up the stairs and into my bedroom, and shirts come off and the smooth skin of her belly is soft and hot against my lips, and her flesh against mine is electric, and I'm not thinking about Hailey, am not thinking about the last time we lay in this bed, the night before she got on that plane, how she finished on top, covering me like a blanket, her knees up beside my ribs, face flushed, smiling down at me through the hazy mist of our evaporating sex. How we were wrapped around and through each other, naked and sweating and thinking that it was just another beautiful day in happily ever after.
I had a wife. Her name was Hailey.

“What's wrong?” Brooke says, pulling back breathlessly to look at me.

“Nothing,” I say, but something has changed, some unknowable but vital element in our chemistry, and she can taste it.

“What is it?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you not want to do this?”

“I do.”

“Maybe it's too soon.”

“It isn't.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure.”

“Because we don't have to.”

“I know.”

And now it's officially arrived, the moment when you have discussed whether or not you are going to have sex too much to now go and have it, and I can feel levels falling, dials spinning furiously in reverse, molecules deflating as the air around us loses its charge.

“I'm sorry,” I say, rolling off her.

“You don't have to apologize,” she says.

We lie on our backs, side by side, staring into the darkness, and there's nothing but the sound of our breath slowing down as heart rates and hopes fall. The room still smells of sex and sweat, but those smells no longer belong to us and so they bother me.

“Just tell me if it's me,” she says.

“It has nothing to do with you,” I say. “I don't know why I'm being like this.”

She turns on her side to face me and puts a hand on my chest. “Please talk to me, Doug.”

But I don't want to talk, don't want to navigate my way through one of those painful postmortems that inevitably must follow aborted sex. I want everything to be okay between us, and I know it might be tomorrow, but nothing we say will make it okay tonight, so, that being the case, there doesn't seem to be a point to cutting ourselves more deeply. And since I'm not going to talk, there's nothing left to do but sort out the tangled heap of our clothing at the foot of the bed and drive in silence back to her Brady Bunch house.

She hugs me at her front door. “You'll call me?”

“Of course.”

“And just to reiterate, this had nothing to do with my telling you that I'd been raped.”

“Nothing at all.”

“So why won't you look at me?”

I look at her. She looks back at me, and we stay like that for a moment, until I have to look away from the raw emotion in her eyes. I lean forward to kiss her good night, and she kisses me back, but there's no heat anymore, just the tender acknowledgment of separation.

         

Later, as I pull back up my driveway, two dark eyes like polished stones suddenly materialize in the glow of my headlights, then the frantic zigzag of white cotton, and before I can brake there's a sickening crunch under my wheel, felt more than heard. I step out of the car to find the rabbit, stretched and broken on the crumbling blacktop of the driveway. The rabbit is still alive, lying on its side, its white belly still rising and falling with labored breath, one mangled front paw lightly scraping the driveway, still reflexively trying to run. Its coffee bean eyes are wide open, staring off into nothingness, whiskers vibrating. I stand beside the dying animal at a loss, feeling sick to my stomach and utterly helpless. I should kill it, put it out of its misery, but I don't have a gun, and I don't have it in me to bring out a baseball bat and bash its brains in. All I can do is keep it company in its final moments, crouching beside the rabbit in the chilly night and looking into its eyes, apologizing repeatedly in soothing tones. The rabbit doesn't look terribly traumatized, does not writhe in terror and pain, but simply lies there, accepting and composed, as if dying is just one in a list of things it has to get done today. And there's nothing for me to do but sit there watching as its breaths become shorter, more like gasps, and then its body starts to tremble, and then its eyes close, and then it dies.

I grab a heavy gardening shovel from the garage and bury the rabbit in a shallow, unmarked grave at the edge of the backyard. I'm carrying the shovel back to the garage when, without warning, a spasm of sourness rises up in me and I fall to my knees, vomiting prolifically into the hedges, until there's nothing left in me, until I'm inside out, and then I perform a few wrenching dry heaves that threaten to dislocate vital organs, and then I'm done, feeling light-headed and tasting acid. Inside I rinse my mouth out with whiskey and then head upstairs. The strewn comforter and rumpled linens on my bed are more than I can take right now, so I head into Russ's room, where Claire lies under the covers reading one of Hailey's pink novels. Her eyes are bloodshot, either because she was sleeping earlier or because she's been crying. “Hey,” she says, surprised to see me. “How was your date with Brooke? I've got a good feeling about that one.”

I nod slowly. Sadly. “Oh, shit,” Claire says.

“Yeah,” I say wearily, pulling back her blanket. She slides over to the wall to make room for me, and I pull off my shoes and slide in beside her.

“You're shivering,” she says, and I think of the rabbit in its death throes and wonder if I've been cursed, if I'll never stop shivering. But then Claire throws an arm over me and pulls me into a hug, and she's warm and smells of Noxzema and tears, and after a few seconds the shivering stops. Claire can be overbearing and intrusive and relentlessly superior, but when I've come apart, she's the only person who knows how to put me back together again.

“I screwed up,” I say.

“Of course you did,” she says, not unkindly. “But look at it this way: you actually had something to screw up. Baby steps, Doug. Baby steps.”

“You look like you've been crying.”

She shrugs. “Hormones.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Whatever.”

We take turns crying in the dark and talking each other down, we talk until we're no longer making any sense, until our tongues are rubber and our mouths have run dry and we've emptied ourselves of words. Then we lie silent and still in opposing fetal positions, yin and yang, regrouping in our makeshift womb. I can feel heavy oblivion seeping into me like warm molasses, and the last thing I see before Claire's light breathing lulls me into a black, dreamless sleep are the first pink stains of dawn, fanning out across the night sky like groping fingers.

33

“WHAT THE FUCK?” RUSS SAYS. I'M STILL MOSTLY
sleeping, so he clears his throat and says it again. “What the fuck?”

It feels like all anyone ever does these days is wake me up. If only they would let me sleep, maybe I'd wake up refreshed, with a newer, healthier perspective, ready to take on my life and solve its myriad problems. Maybe the whole problem is not that I'm sad, or screwed up, or self-destructive, but just mired in a state of perennial exhaustion.

“Go away,” Claire mutters, her voice barbed and frayed with sleep.

“I am trying to come up with an explanation for why the two of you would be sleeping here in my room like this, in the same bed,” Russ says, still standing in the doorway. “I am trying, and I am failing.”

“What time is it?” I say.

“It's just after eight a.m.”

“Good. Come back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow will definitely be too late.”

I roll over and open my eyes, trying to achieve some measure of focus. “What is it?”

“I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to be moving in ahead of schedule. Unless there's something twisted and wrong going on in here, in which case I'm going to have to leave town and join a cult and sell flowers at the bus station or something.”

I lift up the covers to show him that I'm still in my clothing from last night. “Praise Jesus,” Russ says.

“When are you moving in?” I say, rolling off the bed and onto the floor in a heap.

Russ looks at his watch. “Now's good.”

“Too loud,” Claire moans, rolling into the wall and banging her head.

“What happened?”

“Bit of a misunderstanding with the paterfamilias,” Russ says, coming into the room to lean on the edge of his desk. I haven't gotten around to replacing his chair yet, which is still lying in pieces on the front lawn.

“How bad?”

“Scale of one to ten?”

“Sure.”

He nods. “Fifty?”

“That sounds pretty bad.”

“You have no idea.”

“Well, I think you'd better tell me.”

“I will. After.”

“After what?”

Outside there's the sound of car doors slamming and then the doorbell being rung repeatedly. Claire groans and pulls a pillow over her head. Russ drops down in front of the window and peeks over the sill like a sniper. “After you get rid of Jimbo.”

I walk over to the window. I can't see Jim but I can hear him under the eave below, pounding on the door. “Russ, you get your ass out here! I'm going to fucking kill you!”

At the curb, leaning against her car, Angie watches her husband with a bemused expression on her face. As usual, she's dressed like a teenager, in tight, low-riding sweats and a cut-off tank top, exposing her remarkable cleavage, toned abs, and sculpted arms, all tanned to her customary honey glaze. When she sees me in the window, she offers a sexy little smile and wiggles her French-manicured fingers at me, exactly as if her husband isn't trying to break down the door directly below.

“Russ!” Jim screams, and now I can see the neighbors in driveways and in windows, watching as yet another drama unfolds on their formerly quiet block. “Get out here!”

“Will somebody please just shoot that motherfucker?” Claire whines, her voice muffled under the covers.

“Jim!” I yell down from the window.

He steps off the porch to look up at me. He's unshaven, in jeans, slippers, and a dirty T-shirt, and it's clear that whatever happened this morning has superseded his usual ablutions.

“I know he's up there, Doug!”

From his spot below the window, Russ shakes his head and waves his arms at me frantically. “He's here,” I say, and Russ throws his hands over his face in despair. “What's going on?”

“Just let me have him!” Jim shouts at me.

“I'm going to come down to talk to you,” I say.

“It's none of your business.”

“Suit yourself.” I step away from the window.

“Doug!” Jim screams.

“What the hell did you do?” I say to Russ.

“I stole some discs from his porn collection.”

I look at him. “He's mad because you stole some porn?”

“Well … ”

“Russ.”

“It was homemade.”

Claire's head pops up from under the covers. “What was on it?”

“Pretty much what you'd expect.”

“Do you have them here?”

“Claire!”

“I'm just asking.”

“Please don't help me,” I say. “So this disc—”

“Discs.”

“Discs. They're of Jim and Angie?”

“Yep.”

“You get off on watching your father have sex?” Claire says.

“Hell, no. Most of it is just Angie.”

“Angie alone?” Claire says.

“She has toys.”

“Where are the discs now?”

“The originals are back in his dresser.”

Downstairs, Jim begins pounding on the door again. Between Russ and Claire, we are going to have to get a new door. Something stronger, steel reinforced.

“You made copies?”

“So he wouldn't miss them.”

“Smart,” Claire says approvingly.

“Shut up, Claire. How many copies?”

“Enough.”

“Russ. I'm trying to help you out here.”

Russ sighs and runs his hands through his hair. “I have this Web site.”

“Oh … fuck.”

He shrugs. “My friends are all obsessed with Angie. They begged me. And Jimbo never would have even known about it if he hadn't been snooping around in my hard drive. Serves him right for violating my privacy.”

“You put naked videos of your father's wife on the internet and he invaded your privacy?”

“Two wrongs don't make a right.”

I shake my head. “Okay, come with me.”

“It's not safe for me out there.”

“I know. I need you to lock the door behind me.”

         

Outside, Jim is trying to climb up the drainpipe to Russ's room, which would be almost comical if it didn't look like he might actually make it. “Jim,” I call up to him. “Get down from there.”

“I'm going to kill that little shit,” he gasps, sweating profusely as he pulls himself up a bit higher, his feet scraping furiously against the brick wall before finding awkward toeholds on protruding mortar and pipe brackets. The muscles in his arms flex and extend under his taut skin, threatening to burst through. I turn to Angie for some help, but her plan seems to consist solely of leaning languidly against the car and looking good. It occurs to me that the notion of horny teenaged boys pleasuring themselves to naked videos of her is not something she's terribly upset about.

“The neighbors have probably already called the police,” I say to Jim's ass, which is now at eye level. “You really don't want to be breaking and entering when they get here.”

“It's my house,” he grunts, pulling himself up a little higher. Pretty soon he'll be in position to hoist himself up onto the lower roof over the front door, and from there it's an easy swing through Russ's open window.

“Angie,” I say. “Will you help me out here?”

“Come down, Jim, you're making an ass out of yourself,” she calls to him without conviction, then looks at me and shrugs. She has always adopted the attitude of an innocent bystander to the wreck of Jim's first family. Jim keeps shimmying his way up the pipe, sweating through his shirt, grunting as he goes, his ass crack smiling down at us from the back of his sagging jeans. He's about six feet off the ground now, and within striking distance of the roof.

“Get your ass down here, Jim,” I shout. “I mean it.”

He looks down scornfully at me. “Or what, Doug?”

“Or I'll bring you down.”

Jim's face breaks into a contemptuous sneer. “I would pay good money to see that,” he says. And I don't know where this bizarre situation was headed before he flashed me that you-and-what-army look, but the sneer pisses me off. The sneer leaves me no choice.

I climb up onto the porch railing, take a deep breath, and then, before I can chicken out, I jump at him. My plan is to throw my arms over his shoulders, but I don't get as much hang time as I'd anticipated, and I end up with a fistful of his sweat-soaked T-shirt, which tears loudly as I slide down his back, and at the last instant I manage to wrap my other arm around his waist and grab on. His legs instantly lose their purchase and swing off the wall, his slippers coming loose and falling to the ground, and only his grip on the drainpipe keeps us from tumbling backward off of it. “Fucker!” he screams, trying to shake me off, and I can feel the pipe shaking, the brackets straining to support our weight. “Get the fuck off me!”

“You get the fuck off of my house!” I grunt at him. Then the molded elbow of drainpipe he's holding snaps like a wishbone and we both fly backward off the wall in a clean arc. Jim lands hard on top of me, sandwiching me between him and the ground like luncheon meat, and I can actually feel my lungs implode as every last bit of air is wrung from them. Before I can even roll over, Jim pulls me to my feet and throws me back down again. “You son of a bitch!” he bellows, and all I can see are his bare feet on the grass, heading toward me, and then I'm flying through the air again, and then back on the ground with my face in the grass, tasting dirt, and if only the yard would stop spinning like an amusement park ride, if only my mouth would remember how to suck the air down to my lungs, I could defend myself. I did, after all, study karate as a teenager with Sensei Goldberg at the Y. Upper block, reverse punch, side kick to the knee, knife hand strike to the neck. I can bring the pain. But the world keeps spinning and all I see are detached, fragmentary images at skewed angles that won't stand still, the house, the sky, Angie running forward with a panicked look on her face, Jim bleeding from his nose (did I do that?), advancing on me again. And somewhere above me I can hear Claire's screaming voice,
Get the hell off of him, you bastard!
And I stagger to my feet just in time for Jim to grab me by my neck and throw me up against the wall of the house, and I hadn't realized that we were so close to the house, maybe we weren't, maybe he carried me there by my neck, and over his shoulder I can see Angie's face, can see her mouth moving, and this shouldn't be happening to me, because I'm the good guy, I'm the widower, I'm not supposed to get the shit kicked out of me in my own front yard in full view of the neighbors, and my legs momentarily go out from under me, and I teeter to the side, which causes Jim's first punch to miss me, his massive fist whistling hotly against the skin of my nose without meaningful impact. And I can see the windup of the next shot like it's happening in slow motion, can see the punch being born, can plot the arc of its trajectory, and this is the hand on which he wears his obnoxiously large college ring, big enough to kneel and kiss, like he's the pope of Rockland Community College, and yet my hands are not coming up to block, my head is not ducking, and I understand the punch is coming, solid and pure of purpose, that it will be a mother of a punch, with Jim's full weight behind it, a face-altering, bone-crushing punch, and still my hands hang limply by my side. And then, from the periphery, a dark shape, airborne, and then I'm on the ground again, and so is Jim, and so is Russ, who has jumped from the porch to tackle us, and now his fists are flying furiously, pummeling Jim, who rolls on the ground, arms wrapped around his head, and they are King Kong and Godzilla and I'm the blond chick stuck in the middle, and when I try to pull Russ off, his swinging fist hits me square on the side of my face, an inch under my eye, and dark spots appear across my field of vision and I sit down hard. Russ jumps off of Jim, and runs over to me, cursing and apologizing, and Angie jumps onto Jim, and everyone's been hit, everyone's down, and somehow the fight is over as quickly as it began, like a broken spell, and I'm just trying to breathe, and I can feel the welt like a hot slug forming under my skin where Russ's fist connected, can taste the warm blood in my mouth, and Russ is crying, and Angie is crying, and Jim is shaking, and there are sirens in the distance, and I'm just trying to breathe, and the yard is slowing down, and if I could just breathe I could start to sort this out, if I could just get my mouth to open and my lungs to inflate, if I could just get some oxygen into my blood, I could begin to sort this out, and the sirens grow louder, and Claire is in the yard now, Claire is down on her knees in my face, Claire is saying something, but I can't hear her over the sound of blood rushing in my ears like a waterfall, and then I'm lying on my side again, seeing past Claire's knees, past Russ's legs, past the tangled forms of Jim and Angie, over to the other side of the yard, and there's a brown rabbit there, sitting in the shadow of the arborvitaes that line the property, and he's looking right at me, this rabbit, staring at me, thinking shit about me, silently judging me, and I'm just trying to breathe. I'm just trying to breathe.