The Dwelling: A Novel (40 page)

“Take these off,” she breathed, tugging at the waistband of his pants. He stood up and undid his jeans and pulled them down over his legs, stepping out of them in a much-practiced motion. His cock pressed up against the front of his underwear and she sat up and pulled them down. They slid on their own over his thighs to the floor. She put her mouth on him and he put his head back, sucking in breath. He pulled her closer, hands on her shoulders.

He pushed her away and grabbed her around the buttocks, lifting her up onto the bed, scrambling after her. He laughed joyfully and laid himself across her, parting her legs with one of his. He nuzzled his face into her neck and ran his other hand over her body, which was warm and soft and flat-bellied and
different.

“Mmmm,
mmmm,”
he said enthusiastically, smiling broadly, digging himself into her with mouth, hands, knees. She caught his mood and giggled back. He stroked her to silence and her breath was catching, so he leaned over her and pushed himself between her legs, the end of his cock finding the beginning of her and he was beyond thought by then.

“I really loved your last book,” she breathed into his ear.

There was a beat of time and she did not notice before he pushed himself into her and dropped himself over her, his weight held partly on his elbows, his mouth at her ear. He pressed into her again.

“Oh, baby,” he moaned.
“So did I.”

Richie was drunk enough to sleep poorly. He lapsed in and out of dreams. Once, between sobriety and sleep, he thought he heard someone in the house. A door, far away, opened and closed and shod footsteps echoed down a hall. Without opening his eyes, he mumbled in half sleep,
Who’s there?
and slept again. He dreamed then that he had left the stereo on and it played softly through the house.

He opened his eyes painfully to sunlight streaming right in his face. His first thought was
Fuck, I gotta move this bed
just before noticing the lump on the mattress beside him and remembering the night before. He grinned. Ashley. No, Amber.
Ashley.
He squinted back against the sun streaming in from the window that faced the front of the house and raised his head slightly to look around for the clock. His head pounded painfully with a hangover. He spotted the clock on his weight bench in the corner. It was just after eight
A
.
M
. He dropped his head to the pillow and let it pound. He took stock. Stomach wasn’t too bad. Couple of aspirin would take care of the head.
Not that bad. Had worse,
he thought.
Had worse last week, ha ha.
He looked over at the lump, which was all he could see given that it was covered with a sheet and blanket and facing away. The lump was lying on its side and a delicious-looking curve was in the middle. It was a very attractive-looking lump. He took stock a second time to see if he could get the juices going for a nice warm good-bye, but his thirty-five-year-old hungover body did not seem compliant with the old Richie Bramley regulations. He touched himself as an incentive, but his head pounded and it started to seem like a lot of trouble, so he reached over and shook the lump.
Ashley.

Ashley stirred, made an aggressive sound, and he paused for a second to let it sink in. Then he shook her again, gently. She rolled over, eyes closed, and readjusted herself.

Her face was young, unlined, lips soft and plump in sleep. She was quite pretty, so no real errors in judgment had been made. He hadn’t drunk that much. That was good.
Good for me.
He was trying to keep it manageable.

“Ashley,” he said, singsongy. “Asshhh-leee.” She pulled her arm out of the sheet and he caught a glimpse of her breasts, but remained unmoved. The spirit willing and all that. It was a moment more before she opened her eyes. There was a brief look of panic, and then her expression softened. “Hi,” she said sleepily.

“Hi.” She closed her eyes again and he put his hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, you gotta get up. You gotta go, baby.”

“Huh?” She opened her eyes again, keeping one shut, focusing on him. “What time is it?”

“After eight.” He kept his hand on her shoulder. She snuggled in close to him and he was annoyed. It wasn’t what he wanted. “Hey,” he repeated, a little louder, “you gotta go, honey. My kid’s coming.”

“Mmmm,” she answered, snuggling in. “I looove kids.”

At the thought of her being there when RJ showed horror prompted him. He sat up and looked apprehensively around the room, as if seeing it for the first time. His clothes were in a pile beside the bed. At the foot were a pair of red nylon panties.

He stood up, naked, and his head pounded newly with the surge of blood. He closed his eyes against the pain. He wandered out of the bedroom, calling behind him, “Rise and shine, baby,” and made his way to the can.

He lifted the seat of the toilet and began a long piss. On the wall behind the toilet, one of his buddies had tacked a
New Yorker
cartoon. It showed a ragged-looking man holding up a sign beside a busy street. “Will write for food,” the sign said. He stared at it throughout his piss.

Getting Ashley out and on her way proved to be harder than he’d thought. They ended up having another go at it and by the time she left it was nine. He locked the door after waving good-bye to her, and climbed back up the stairs feeling like shit.

The locked door bought him a couple of minutes when he woke up after ten to the sound of someone pounding on it. He jumped out of bed, knowing full well who it was. He threw on jeans and the shirt he had had on the night before. As an afterthought, he grabbed his ball cap and threw it on his head, taking the stairs two at a time. Before going back to sleep, he’d dropped a couple of aspirin, which had apparently had their work cut out for them: his head pounded with every step.

“Coming!” he yelled, from midway down the stairs.

Richie twisted the deadbolt open and threw open the door. Janis had her lips pursed. Behind her, Rick Jr, their thirteen-year-old son, stood awkwardly, half staring at the steps, half looking up at his father.

“Heeeey! Come on in, how’s my boy?” Janis came in and RJ came in with his bag, grinning shyly. He swung it a little, tossing it toward the stairs. It landed half on and half off the bottom stair with a
thlumpf!

“Hi, Dad,” he said.

Richie tugged on his ball cap, a nervous gesture that Janis caught. “I hope your Game Boy’s not in there,” she said.

“It didn’t break.”

She shook her head and sighed. “We wake you up?” she asked Richie.

“No,
oh, no.
I was upstairs in the attic—new office. Pounding keys,” he lied.

She nodded and looked around. Then she peeked around the corner of the hall into the living room. Richie followed her gaze. The living room was littered with empty beer bottles. On the floor beside the sofa was an ashtray overflowing with butts. The only one in the house. There were dirty glasses and spills here and there. The floor had ashes from cigarettes too far away from the ashtray or an empty bottle, and the stereo was surrounded by CDs and their empty cases.

“Party last night?” Janis said.

“Ah, just Steve and Dubs, Bev, Rob, those guys. Helped me unpack. Went kinda late so I left it all, caught some Zs, you know,” he said. His face reddened, and she crossed her arms over her chest and nodded disbelievingly.

They stood awkwardly without speaking for a beat of a few seconds, long enough for Richie to notice that the house smelled of beer and cigarettes.

“Well, I’m taking off,” Janis said, pulling her coat around herself. She pecked RJ on the cheek. “Hey, not too late, right?” And she looked meaningfully at Richie, before giving him a friendly kiss on his cheek.

“Not too late,” he said, winking.

“He’s got math homework that’s not done. You’re going to drop him off at school in the morning, right?” She used the same tone with Richie that she used when talking to her son.

“Absolutely. You don’t want a tour of the new Casa Bramley?”

Janis leaned forward far enough to take another peek into the living room. “I’ll wait until you’re settled in,” she said. She opened the door and said, “Love you, RJ, be good, and I’ll see you tomorrow. And we’re back on our regular schedule next week, right, Rich?” He walked to the door and waved good-bye, then shut it and gave it a little push.

Father and son grinned at each other. “Hey, give your dad a hug,” he said, when the door was shut. It was clumsy, a cross between a pat on the shoulder and a hug. RJ was getting so big, was as tall as his father, but without the breadth.

Richie opened his arms dramatically. “I bid you welcome to Casa Bramley, the soon-to-be-heritage home of the great Bramley clan. This fine hotel has several options for a distinguished visitor such as yourself: you can toss it on the couch down here,” he said, waving one arm like a product model, but with a manly little bow, “or you can sleep in my bed with me—no snoring, no stealing covers, no growing any bigger overnight—or
check it out.”
He nodded for RJ to follow him and the two of them slipped down the hall to where the house opened up into the back door mudroom. He pointed to a small door nestled into the space under the stairs.

“Behold,” he said, and he flung open the door, reached in and flicked on a light. RJ peered in. Under the stairs was a tiny empty room. He looked at his dad.

“Sleep on the floor?”

“Ahhh,” Richie said, waving a finger. “Many would believe that. But I give to you the secrets of the dark cave of Casa Bramley, soon-to-be-heritage, yadda yadda yadda—” and he stepped inside and pulled from out of the wall a small hidden bed, about the size of a small double.

It sprang out and hit the floor with the sound of springs and metal squeals. The thin mattress bounced and settled in the middle.

“Wow!”

Richie grinned. “Cool, huh? The futon fitted perfectly,” he said, smoothing down a lump that had formed in the center. “It’s bending a bit in the middle. We’ll just keep it down until I can get a proper mattress for one of these things. I just wanted it up there so I could show you.”

“This is
so
cool!” RJ said. He came in and pushed down on the bed, checking it out. “Is it safe? It looks kinda…old and stuff.”

“It
is
old. Came with the house, the house is old. But me and Wendy and Kurt and them were all on it yesterday. I was going to set the futon up in one of the upstairs bedrooms, but I figured you might like this better.” He smiled, his grin hurting his face, with delight that he had made his son happy. “Go ahead, try her out.”

RJ pulled himself up to the high bed with his hands, tentatively at first. When the whole thing didn’t collapse, he crawled closer to the middle and lay down, staring up at the ceiling. Staring back down at him was the bare hanging bulb.

“That light sucks,” he said, squinting, shielding his eyes with his hand.

“Problem solved. We’ll put the table I used to have beside the couch in the other place and put it beside the bed with a lamp. We can use my old desk lamp. I’ll get a good one for in here if you like. This can be your room,” he said ingenuously.

“Cool,”
RJ said.

They set RJ’s things in the room and found a lamp and the little table. It came barely up to the mattress, but would serve as a temporary measure. Richie showed his son through the rest of the house, avoiding the living room, dining room, the kitchen except for a quick look, once he caught RJ’s interest in the remains of the party, strewn about like fat brown bombs.

“Wow, you guys sure drank a lot of beer,” the boy said, impressed, when they were in the kitchen. Beside the refrigerator, halfheartedly stacked and lying about, were endless cases of beer, all empty.

“Lotta people,” Richie said shortly and steered the boy upstairs.

He loved the tub, said it was
cool,
especially the feet, but he’d rather shower. He said it seemed kind of weird that a bathtub would have something like that on the bottom. “It looks so…violent,” he said.

Richie was impressed. He shrugged, though, while they looked. He frowned. “If I was writing it,” he started, fading off the way he sometimes did, “I would say that having the feet of a vicious animal on the bottom of the tub would be symbolic of protection. A person’s naked when they’re bathing, right? You’re at your most vulnerable when you’re naked. No place to hang your side-arm.” He nudged RJ and they chuckled. “So the feet of the thing, in a way, would be symbolic. I bet it’s from Roman times or something like that, all that symbolism.”

RJ looked at his father, impressed. It was gratifying and Richie felt better than he had all morning; all weekend. “Come and see my office,” he said. “It’s upstairs.”

RJ liked the pull-down ladder from the attic. Richie showed him the pulleys and explained how it worked. The two of them examined the mechanism, RJ pulling it up and down, from the hallway, while they watched it work.

“I like stuff like that,” RJ said, blushing.

Richie gave him a sidelong look, tilting his head. He himself was not always handy with a tool; he would be surprised if his son was. “Yah?” he said. “You like carpenter stuff, is that what you mean?”

RJ shook his head, blushing furiously then. “The pulleys,” he said, watching how it moved. “I like seeing how things are put together. Big things. How the weight of that ladder and the hatch are held up by those little spools. It’s cool.” He shrugged and then said casually, but with a touch of importance, “I’m going to be an engineer.”

Richie raised his eyebrows. It was the first he had heard of that. “Oh, yeah? Not a writer like your old man?” As RJ had been growing up, Richie had paid careful attention to the work he brought home from school, and any indication that he had some of what his father had in his fingers. The boy was smart enough, and papers and essays, lately, had good, solid word-usage, but little of the flair that Richie remembered enjoying in school.

RJ shrugged, embarrassed. “Mom says it’s a good job.”