The Natural Order of Things (5 page)

“Why don’t we try something kinky tonight?” she asks.

“Kinky?”

“Maybe you could do something rough. Something really dirty.”

He squirms. “Like what?”

“Spank me,” she says. “Slap me. Hard.”

“For godsake, Maggie …” He tries to think of a plausible excuse. In twenty years of marriage, she has never shown any interest in naughty games, experimentation, sin. Like him, she is a devout Catholic and shuns perversion. “But Frank is in the next room.”

She giggles, pinches his beer belly. “Oh, he’s sound asleep by now. He won’t hear us.”

“Aw, baloney. He stays up all night long, studying the playbook, strategizing, figuring out a way to win the big game.”

“Strategizing? You make him sound like Julius Caesar.”

“Yeah, well, he’s just as smart as the rich kids at that school. Smarter probably. He has real-life experience, which is something they don’t have.”

She rolls away from him and stares at the ceiling, her face drawn and sleepless. “That’s right, McSweeney, change the subject. I know you hate me. I’m a mess, I’m disgusting. The thought of making love to me turns your stomach, doesn’t it?” She sits up, resting on one elbow. “Well, let me tell you something. It isn’t
natural
for a man to neglect his wife.”

Though he half-heartedly denies the terrible accusations she levels against him, McSweeney can no longer pretend to be aroused by her thick shanks and enormous, jiggling thighs. She ceased to be a woman who could make him howl with yearning and deep desire. Marriage has turned her into a shapeless, fleshy hermaphrodite, a doting mother who treats him like a troubled child. He has contemplated leaving her, but like most men who are out of money and out of options, he is afraid to take action. Sooner or later he will need to do something; he cannot continue on this way, but his problems are so profound that rather than try to solve them, he finds it much easier to lock them away in a safe and lonely place where there is little chance of anyone getting at them. After twenty years of concealment, there is no telling how crowded with secrets his soul has become. Maybe he should discuss these things with the priests, get them out in the open, but he can’t think about that right now. It’s been a long day.

Maggie taps him on the shoulder, and her voice floats across the bed, soft and lilting as a lullaby: “Wake up, McSweeney, wake up. Look, it’s the new ad …”

He cracks open an eye and sees a collage of nonsensical images flickering across the TV screen, continuous quick cuts of scantily clad girls and bare-chested boys, their bodies painted black and white, dancing, gyrating, limbs interlocking in the golden sunlight of an autumn day. A football game. The referee blows his whistle. The players take their positions on the line of scrimmage. Long silky legs come into focus. The camera pans up to reveal a tall cheerleader—
the
cheerleader!—sauntering down the sideline, a gentle breeze sweeping through her dark hair. With libidinous and curious fingers, she fondles a bottle of beer and pours a sparkling stream of ale into her eager mouth. The quarterback, dumbfounded by her beauty, drops the football and is immediately crushed between two stampeding linebackers. The crowd goes wild.

McSweeney’s legs tremble. The cheerleader, while certainly no more attractive than a hundred other anonymous models who parade across the idiot box on a daily basis, nevertheless manages to radiate sex with every improbable and exaggerated curve of her surgically-altered body and reminds him that he, like all men, is a prisoner of his pecker, condemned by a pitiless dictator, and sentenced to a lifetime of captivity with little hope for parole. In the deep purple fog of flickering TV light, he touches his wife’s plump, pale breasts and, closing his eyes tight, dreams of the beautiful model, God how he dreams of her, and within minutes he is panting and thrusting his hips like he really means it.

Something comes over him.

After work one rainy night, Malachy McSweeney scurries behind the brewery and crawls inside a cardboard box where he waits for Cloggy Collins to lock up. One hour later, as the rain intensifies and pounds the sagging rooftop of his impromptu shelter, he sees the lights go out. Shivering in the wet and the cold and fumbling with his keys, McSweeney cautiously emerges from his cocoon and creeps toward the building. Though he refuses to dwell on the possibility of getting caught, it does occur to him that his boss might still be sitting at his desk, waiting for him in the dark with a model perched on his lap and a bottle of beer in his hand, a tire iron, a loaded gun.

“You sick, sorry fuck!” he imagines Cloggy saying. “There ain’t no work, not for crazy people, not for head cases, not for
perverts
!”

McSweeney feels short of breath and begins to pant. The world seems like a different place now—less predictable, more chaotic—and as he eases open the loading dock door and sidles through the brewery, he whispers, “I could do your job, Cloggy, I could do your job …”

His eyes rolling with fear, he enters Cloggy’s office and waits for something to happen. No one is inside. The place reeks of smoke and sweat, and though he cringes at its meaning, the ripe earthy odor of freshly spilled semen. He eases past wobbling stacks of yellow paper that clutter Cloggy’s desk and almost knocks over a coffee pot. In the far corner, buried under a mountain of greasy rags, a dozen cardboard women stare into space like girls heavily drugged and imprisoned in a faraway brothel, a bevy of tragic beauty queens captured by a cigar-chomping ogre and forced to pleasure him whenever he demands it. McSweeney’s mission has suddenly become one of great urgency: he must rescue these lovely maidens and deliver them from a life of degradation and servitude. He
grabs a slew of girls and smuggles them out to the trunk of his car where he stacks them one on top of the other like slices of meat on a sex sandwich.

“You’re safe now,” he assures them. “Safe …”

He brings the models back to his house where, for several nights after the exhilarating heist, he performs what soon becomes a sacred ritual. When he is sure Maggie has fallen asleep and his son has gone to his room to study the playbook, he hurries down the stairs, always careful to avoid the creaking step or two, and there in the exquisite solitude of the basement, he lights three candles, always three, the magic number, and places the models in various spots around the room. Before joining them, he sprays cologne behind his ears and around his shaggy genitals. He pours a tall beer, smokes a fat joint, and drifts away, upward and outside of himself to another plane of existence where he is no longer a daydreaming working class stiff from a dying industrial city but a randy high school athlete at a wild party, a sophisticated playboy in a downtown nightclub, a movie mogul auditioning nubile starlets for his next summer blockbuster, a vampire summoning voluptuous succubi from his underground lair.

Usually these harmless adventures leave him satisfied and spent, but occasionally, as he stretches naked and perspiring on the couch and listens to the frightening boom of the igniting furnace and catches the foul scent of mildew permeating from the cracks in the cinderblock walls, he suspects that Maggie might be right. Maybe he
is
inept, and maybe he is something far more terrible than that.

Once, while preparing for his midnight rendezvous, he sniffs something rancid and discovers behind a wilted houseplant a heap of gnawed chicken bones. He doesn’t remember leaving them there. At such times his mystical visions turn sour, and he imagines things, truly devilish things—the state hospital, padded rooms filled with pleading patients, probing doctors, sturdy and determined nurses brandishing enormous dripping needles—but he tries to assure himself that all married men carry on sordid double lives. Some pop pills, some have illegitimate children, some dress in women’s clothing. What difference does it make?

Monogamy is an aberration. No man can belong exclusively to one woman, and it is generally understood that married men, when alone at night, do any number of things that they pretend to frown upon in the light of day.

The ritual continues without variation until Halloween, the eve of the Holy War, and before descending to his sybaritic playground, McSweeney sits at the kitchen table, waiting for his son to come home from school, and puzzles over how he could have sired such a creature, the great muscled Minotaur who, with his freakish physique and arrogant swagger, makes lesser mortals stare in fascination and quiver with dread. Since Maggie is incapable of cheating on him, he believes a mistake was made at the hospital, that two infants were switched at birth. Somewhere in the world a beautiful couple is mystified by their child’s inconceivable homeliness and lack of coordination, an affluent couple who expect perfection from nature because they themselves are perfect—refined, urbane, totally unaccustomed to the horrors of mediocrity: the self-loathing, the hopelessness, the terrible despair. Little do they know that two trolls are raising their son, but soon they will come looking for him and demand restitution, not from the hospital for making such
an incredibly obvious and unconscionable error, but from the McSweeneys for bungling the job of raising the boy and not helping him achieve his full potential.

At four o’clock the changeling comes bounding up the back steps and into the kitchen. McSweeney crushes out his cigarette, sits up straight, tries not to slouch. It’s important that he speak to the boy, man to man. The football team cannot afford to lose another game.

“There he is, number 17 himself! The future Heisman Trophy winner.”

Maggie leaps from her chair and says, “Let me have those things.” She takes the boy’s varsity jacket and book bag and hangs them in the closet.

McSweeney, compelled to do the Jesuit’s bidding, tries to sound nonchalant, relaxed, but his words feel forced and artificial. It seems he has spoken them before, has rehearsed every line.

“How’d it go today, Frank? Teachers weren’t too tough on you, were they? They cut you a little slack, I hope. Remember, son, those people owe you, they owe you big time. This is national exposure we’re talking about. Enrollment is up, salaries are up …”

“Would you please give it a rest,” says Maggie.

He laughs at her, more maliciously than he intended.

She pulls a hot tray from the oven. “Frank, a reporter from the school newspaper called. Says he’s putting a big story together. He wants to ask you a few questions, take a few pictures.”

When McSweeney realizes the cookies are intended for Frank, he panics. “Jesus, Maggie, he doesn’t need to eat a bunch of garbage before the big game.”

“Oh, he can have a few. They won’t kill him.”

“His body is a fine-tuned machine, and you’re tampering with it. All that butter, oil, sugar. It’s poison.” He searches his pockets for a book of matches, another cigarette.

She slams the tray down on the table.

“What do you take me for, Malachy? Do you think I’m some kind of idiot? Do you really think I would poison our son? Do you think I would feed him anything that might harm his body? I know he’s a
fine-tuned machine
. How do you think he got that way? The power of prayer? No! For the past four years I’ve scrimped and saved to buy only the finest ingredients, only the best. Whole wheat, flax seed oil, spirulina, green tea, organic raisins, egg whites from free range chickens …”

McSweeney watches Frank walk over to the closet and grab his book bag and jacket. Beyond a few simple hellos and goodbyes, father and son are incommunicative. Both have an innate suspicion of sentimentality and can never find the appropriate words to match their feelings. An occasional handshake is the extent of the physical contact between them. McSweeney, however, wants to learn more about the rarefied social circles of the Jesuit school, the parties Frank is always attending, the study groups, the meetings with teachers and coaches. For a minute he actually considers following his son through the streets and alleys, creeping up to a window and peering through the parted sashes to spy on him. He needs to see what life is like for a high school quarterback. Is it as glorious as people say? Do the cheerleaders really fawn over him? Or are girls today just as cold and unapproachable as they were when McSweeney was a boy of seventeen? He badly wants to ask his son these questions. He must have the answers.

“Frank …” he begins, but the words die in his throat.

“Just remembered, Dad,” says the boy. “I have to go back to school to submit a term paper. And then I’m off to a friend’s house. Gotta study the playbook, you know.”

McSweeney tries to smile. “Glad to hear it, son. You study your ass off. I’m counting on you. We all are.”

Maggie pushes a plastic container of warm cookies into Frank’s hands. “Go on, go on, take them. They’re
good
for you. Prickly pear cactus, dragon fruit, wheat grass, soy lecithin granules, mountain bilberry, a handful of walnuts …”

Shortly before the clock strikes midnight, McSweeney searches through his son’s closet and finds the unique ceremonial garb he so desperately needs. In the basement, he sets up the models in a semi-circle, drapes them with costume jewelry, douses them in cheap perfume, and as he whispers the forbidden incantation—one so obscene in its description of sodomy that he feels nervous just saying the words—he catches a shining vision of himself in the mirror, a man transformed by a football helmet, immense shoulder pads, and a mesh jersey of black and white. It’s not the official team uniform, of course, not the one the players wear on game day; no, those things are kept under lock and key in the new stadium; it’s only the grass-stained equipment his son uses for scrimmages, but even this scratched and beaten gear works wonders and makes McSweeney feel twenty-five years younger.

He sucks in his gut, stands erect. With a winning smile, he listens to the musical clatter of cleats against the tile floor and endures the discomfort of his engorged penis pressing against the athletic supporter. Invigorated by this image of pure brawn, he lifts one of the girls, brings her close to his facemask, inhales her divine aroma, a singular bouquet that can never be fully appreciated by the uninitiated. The smell of cardboard reminds most people of parcels shipped through the mail, merchandise delivered, gifts received. They care only about the contents of a box—books and beer and blow-up dolls—and recklessly discard the most significant details of everyday life.