Roger's Version (25 page)

“Don’t
you
be grotesque. It’s inside me, not you. I can
feel
it wanting to live. There’s a movie they show, of how they crush the baby’s head.”

“Stop thinking baby. Think Verna. What do you want with another little tarbaby when the one you already have drives you crazy and is dragging your life down?”

There is a point in an argument, however heated, when the center slides away from the topic being ostensibly discussed, and the participants’ actual interest has slid to the heat itself, the back-and-forth of passion being generated. Verna’s flirtatiousness had increased; it clung to her hips like a sarong. Her voice had lowered, gone sultry. “Who says the baby’s a tarbaby?”

I was still shrill. “Whatever the color: that baby can be as white as snow and there’s no room for it in this world. Why let it in just to torture it?” I wished I had brought my pipe.

“You wanna know something, Nunc? I love having babies. Feeling it grow, and then that incredible thing of being split and there suddenly being two of you.”

I rested my forehead on my fingertips and thought no answer at all would be most impressive.

She sashayed closer to the chair. “You want to know something else?”

“I’m not sure.” My throat was drying.

“My mother wanted to have me aborted, but my daddy, ’cause he was pretty religious even before his cancer scare,
wouldn’t let her. That’s why I can’t get too mad at him for being such a prick about Poopsie and all. Without him I wouldn’t be here. I’d be nowhere, Nunc.”

Someone knocked on the door. The acoustics of her underfurnished room were such that the knock seemed enormous, and as hard as a gun held against our heads. Yet the knock actually had been gentle, insinuating.

“Verna?” The voice was a mellow baritone, with a sediment of gravel. “Verna you there honey?”

She and I had frozen, me in the chair and she standing, her thighs a few inches from its square padded arm. I was looking up at her and she down at me, her chin creased into chins; she smiled a sly motherly, dimple-making smile, to seal our conspiracy of silence.

The man at the door knocked again, more sharply, and then could be heard to shuffle his feet and softly whistle through his teeth to dramatize his patience. “Verna, you playing possum?”

Verna’s smile and her maternal gaze down at me did not alter; but her chubby short-nailed hands at the sides of her gray skirt bunched and lifted the cloth, lifted it, rustling so faintly only my ear could hear it, higher, up above her thighs. She was wearing no underpants. My mouth went utterly dry, as if raked by the dentist’s saliva vacuum.

“O.K. you Verna,” the voice said, to itself, and the back of its knuckles tapped an absent-minded little rhythm on the door. Her thighs were sallow shining curved columns; her pubic bush was broad, like her face, and darker than the hair of her head, and even curlier, so that arcs of reflected light glinted in it and random congruences of the circlets made little round windows through to the skin. The man at the door heaved a stagy sigh, and, though his footsteps were
stealthy, by the vibration of the walls we knew he was going away. She lowered her skirt and backed off, still smiling but her eyes solemn and hostile.

“What was that for?” I whispered.

“Oh,” she said in her normal, reedy voice. “Just something to do while we were killing the time. I thought it might interest you. You don’t have to whisper. He must have heard us talking and just did that to bug me.”

“Who was he?”

“A friend, I guess you’d have to say.”

“Is he the father?”

“I doubt it, actually.”

“Could Dale be the father?”

“Would that make it better? Could I keep it then?”

“I wouldn’t think so. But if he were, then you and he could decide together.”

“No way, Nunc. Like I told you in the first place, he and I don’t fuck. He’s not like you. He doesn’t think I’m nifty.”

“I do think you’re nifty, yes.” What she had displayed to me remained in my mind as a distinct creature, a sea urchin on the white ocean floor. When she lifted her skirt an aroma had wafted out, cousin to that musky crushed-peanut-shell scent from my deepest childhood, but with an origin beyond even that, back to the birth of life. Moisture was slowly returning to my oral cavity.

She moved about switchily, pleased with herself. “If I do get an abortion, Nunc, it’s not exactly free.”

“I thought they were, at a clinic. Isn’t the whole idea of a clinic to save teen-aged girls like you the embarrassment of telling your parents?”

“Yeah, but they like to charge something now, it’s part of Reaganomics. Anyway maybe I don’t want to go to a clinic and
stagger out an hour later. Maybe I’m terrified of operations and ought to go to a regular hospital. Also if I go through with it don’t you think I should get something for mental suffering?”

I sensibly asked, “Why should I bribe you to do something for your own good?”

“Because you want to fuck me. You want to lick my cunt.”

“Verna. Your language.”

She grinned girlishly. “It’s great, isn’t it? Mom could never have got herself to talk like that.”

I asked, to test the depth of her corruption, or to discover the price of a fetus, “How would three hundred suit you?”

Her lips came forward as if her tongue were fiddling with something caught between her teeth; a Fifties mannerism that made her look remarkably like her mother. After considering thus, she said, “I have to think about it. I’m not just kidding, Nunc, I feel it’s a sin to do it.”

“We all feel it’s a sin. But the world is mired in sin. In this mire we try to determine the lesser of available evils. We try to choose, and take the consequences. That’s what being a grown-up is.”

“Come on—you believe even little babies are bad?”

“Augustine did. John Calvin did. All the best Christian thinkers did. You have to; otherwise the world isn’t truly fallen, and there’s no need for Redemption, there’s no Christian story. Anyway, Verna, it’s your life, as you said. Your sweet body.”

The project was quiet around us, as if only we existed. Snow on the windowsill blew upward, sparkling. Though not much snow had fallen, January had been so cold that what had fallen remained, had failed to melt away, squeaking and shifting underfoot and blowing back and forth in a thousand little glittering pseudo-storms.

Verna seemed restless, captive. But where did she have to
go, on this bright morning, without a car, without a job? “My sweet body, huh?” she said.

“Should we be doing anything,” I carefully asked, my throat gone parched again, “about my finding you so nifty?”

She didn’t at first know what I meant; her eyes widened, then narrowed. “Oh, I don’t
know
,” she said at last. “You feel funny about fucking when you’re in a family way, like eating on a full stomach or something.” Her refusal, like most tentative positions, was lavishly overdetermined. “Anyways, I was going to do a watercolor. Dale said he wanted one to show somebody, and also he gave me this book to brush up on math with, for the equivalency tests. Also I promised my worker I’d swing by and get some AFDC forms, they keep changing the rules. You know,” she told me, her eyes widening again, “I could make an extra seventy-four dollars a month from AFDC, having another baby.”

“Verna,” I scolded. “What a way to make money. Making babies.”

“No worse than making it by having abortions.”

“I wouldn’t be paying you, I’d be compensating you.”

“That’s a pretty cute distinction.” She looked down at me again, in that way that creased her chin. “About you and me. Wouldn’t it feel funny, you being my nice uncle and all?” She touched the top of my head, that thick silvery hair of which I am vain. “You could kiss me, though. That would be friendly.”

I moved to push up out of her new armchair but she moved closer and said, “Don’t get up. Here,” and lifted her skirt again. Some boyfriend must have once told her she had a beautiful pussy. There was a tender pale valley, with the faintest blue buried veins, where her abdomen met each thigh, and I chose the one on the right; a few pubic hairs stood like sentinels on the edge of the woolly homeland, at the side of the mons Veneris Far above me Verna giggled. “That’s a tickly place.”

I kissed with more pressure, to reduce the tickliness. As I thought of moving my lips leftward she backed herself away and flipped down her charcoal skirt. I was pleased to notice below my own waist the beginning of an erection. Not every female can reach into your reptile brain; it’s a matter of pheromones, an obscure fit of neural notches. Nor does this reach have any relation to the lady’s societally admirable qualities; if anything, these dull the interlock. We mate not to please ourselves but the great genetic pool lapping all around us.

Verna was back in her girls-wanna-have-fun mood: “It’d be fun maybe at least to take off our clothes,” she said. “If you don’t reject me again.”

“I never reject you, do I?”

“All the time, Nunc. It’s devastating. You tease me.”

“Odd. I could have sworn you were teasing me.”

“I bet you wonder why I don’t have any underpants on.”

“I made my speculations, yes.”

“I like the feeling. When I walk out in the air it’s like I have this secret.”

“Among your many others.”

Her slant eyes narrowed and took up the challenge. “Not as many as you think. You think I’m really a slutty person.”

As she spoke and stared, a wall of glass materialized between us; the little links forged when my face nestled beside her belly were all broken, and I saw this common-minded delinquent girl as meaning less to me than a department-store mannequin. The sensation was a relief; as soon as her invitation to be naked together was delivered, I had been besieged by darting thoughts of AIDS, of herpes, of the man at the door returning with a strengthened fist, of the mountain of performance I should have to climb, of my rickety and undependable fifty-three-year-old
^*
flesh, of the mockery I would risk from this unstable teen-ager, of drunken and hilarious descriptions to dark strangers down at the Domino. “I think,” I solemnly corrected her, “you’re a person not doing the most she can with her life.”

“Well, fuck you, Nunc, that’s the last sniff of my pussy you’ll ever have. And I don’t need your money either. Like we were saying I have an asset.”

“Christ, don’t start doing that, you’ll really hit the skids. How are you and dope, anyway?”

“I never have a joint until after five o’clock. I only snort coke when somebody else has paid for it. It depends on the date I’m with.”

“Dear me, what a bad girl.”

“I’m a
good
girl, Nunc.”

We were drifting into patter. I was already looking into my wallet and planning the stop at the automatic teller on the way back to the Divinity School:
THANK YOU FOR USING OUR SERVICES AND HAVE A NICE DAY
. “Here’s eighty-five, it’s all the cash I have. Just as a little cushion for right now.
Do
go to the clinic, Verna. I’ll go with you if you insist. Would it help you to talk it over with Esther?”

“
Es
ther?”

“She’s another woman.”

“That snippy little snob, she doesn’t give me shit when I see her over at day-care.”

“She probably thinks you don’t want to talk to her. She’s shy, with most people.”

“Boy then I guess I know the wrong people.”

“What does that mean?”

“That’s for you to ask and me to know, Nunc.”

I did not dare ask if Dale had been talking. I wanted thoroughly to be away from this musty-stinking, dead-end project apartment and back at the Divinity School, amid the limestone, the ancient and rarely troubled books (the other day I opened up a squat two-volume edition of Tertullian, published by the Jesuits of Paris in 1675; the pages in over three centuries had never been cut): amid the majestic patience of the place.

Yet, so volatile and nonsensical was my relationship with my niece, we had an affectionate kiss, full on her warm unpainted lips, at the door, and no sooner did the door close than the image of her naked, treasure I had spurned, overwhelmed me like a giant wave one has misjudged, body-surfing.

I was going to do a watercolor. Dale said he wanted one to show somebody
. Esther looks and says, “Touching. Under all that brass, this little pot of violets. Such pale little violets.”

“Maybe she doesn’t have the right paint to make them purple,” says Dale loyally.

Both are naked. White, white their bodies, no fat on either, suspended like elongating globules in a tall beaker of the gray shadows and grime of our wintry city. She has agreed to come, in the cause of love, to his dingy student apartment near the university’s scientific buildings, those domed and antennaed structures supported by mysterious vast financial infusions from the Pentagon and the corporate giants. He lives in a block of three-deckers owned by the university but not yet consigned to development—a parking lot or new academic
facility. She has walked up the unpainted porch steps careful not to catch the pointy heels of her red leather boots in a rotten board. With beating heart she has picked her way through the crowd of rusty bicycles in the foyer and, above a bank of battered mailboxes with doubled and tripled name cards, rung
KOHLER/KIM
.

Who is Kim? One of those hardworking young Orientals who, by the twenty-first century, will have a grip upon all the levers of the world. Dale has briefly described him to her, his flat colorless face and straight black hair, his unexpected barks of humor. His first name, or his last, it is not quite clear, is Tong-myong. Dale has promised that jolly, brilliant Mr. Kim will not be here—he will be attending his hydrogeology seminar and then parking cars at the movie theatre—between two-thirty, when her stint at the day-care center ends, and the time two hours later when she must return to Malvin Lane to greet Richie and then Roger, home from their respective schools.

With gloveclad finger, Esther, my Esther—I can feel her heart beating! I can feel the watery sensation in her underpants—punches this button and waits with her hand on the brass door handle for his releasing buzz to sound. The extensive wear on the thumb latch, those thousands of thumbs, first working-class Irish thumbs and now student thumbs of all global races and God only knows what procession of weary aching thumbs between, reminds her of something: what? She remembers: those foot stands the old-fashioned shoeshine chairs used to have, oddly graceful, baroque curves lifting up this narrow metal mirror-image of a shoe sole and heel, the heel lower than the sole. Her father as he climbed in the business world had been a great man for shoeshines, and as a little girl she had more than once been made to wait beside one of those multiple thrones, once so common in the hotels and depots of Albany and Troy, with their smell of polish and cigar
butts and their waxy rags and brushes and their old black men chuckling and bobbing their heads as they snapped the rag; waiting at her father’s ever-shinier feet, little Esther was aware of rough men’s eyes on her and of her father’s voice more growly and dragged-out than when he talked at home and of how dirty the shoeshine man’s dark hands would be on her dress if they decided amid the growling and chuckling to touch her. The shoeshine man’s head wobbled as he applied the last vigorous swipes; his palms and the underside of his fingers were the color of pink silver polish such as Mama used with the maid once a month. On those strangely graceful foot stands, as on this thumb latch, the brass had been worn down to its golden core: atom by atom the world wears out.