Authors: Jacqueline Briskin
“Lissie’s hardly a freak.”
“I didn’t say—”
“She’s extremely bright.”
“Now, Joss,” Malcolm said, turning to Sandra Binchow. “You’re right, Sandra, it’s a full-time job and I personally don’t know how Joscelyn manages everything. Thank God she gets one day off. Honora takes Lissie every Wednesday after school.”
At this invocation of the Big Boss’s wife, and her relationship, the Binchows both sipped their coffee with chastened expressions.
* * *
“God, Malcolm, after you brought up Honora, they tiptoed through dinner. I almost felt sorry for that bitch.”
“Christ, what else could I do?” he said morosely. “Your charming habit of insulting everybody I work for.”
The Binchows, pleading a weeknight early bedtime, had left less than five minutes ago. It was not yet ten and Malcolm was putting the
liquor away in the low cabinet while Joscelyn gathered the dirty glasses and crumpled cocktail napkins on a tray. Although she had been momentarily aggravated at the method of his solidarity against the Binchows, his unexpected alliance had erased her animosity, returning her to this morning’s sensuality.
“Malcolm, I was thanking you.” She came up behind him, massaging his tensed shoulder muscles. “What did you think of the new potato recipe?”
“Who could notice the food with that kid of yours giving everybody an ulcer? All that blathering you do with her—can’t you train her to stay in bed?”
Joscelyn moved away. “If she knew how she embarrassed you, she would never emerge from the covers.”
“Can’t I make a suggestion without you flying off the handle?”
“So Ken Binchow knows your kid’s ‘handicapped.’ Does that make you a rotten engineer?”
Malcolm took a long drink, his deep-set eyes appearing yet more sunken. “Deaf or not, she’s got to learn bedtime means bedtime. If you can’t do it, I will. She’s going to have to learn to toe the mark.”
“Quaint expression, toe the mark. Did you get it from your father?”
“Knowing who’s boss never hurt a kid.”
“It fucked
you
up for life. Malcolm, I’m warning you. You so much as touch her, I’ll . . .”
“You’ll what, bitch?”
Without thought, the response came to her. “Tell Curt and Honora.”
* * *
Among Malcolm’s never spelled out yet rigorously enforced husbandly privileges was the sole right to conclude their arguments—not necessarily in an unbenign manner. He might refer to a knock-down-drag-out by kissing her bruises and mumbling sheepishly, “Got a little rough, huhh?” However, let her bring up the bout—even with a humble apology—and he would reopen hostilities. Usually by the time Malcolm extended the olive branch she was too wild with relief for any further sparring. Filled with adoration and irrational hope for the future, she would melt against his strong, perfect, younger body.
Before this, though, Lissie had never been entangled with Malcolm’s violent episodes. Oh, certainly the child figured in their scrapping: Joscelyn might try to prove a flaw in Malcolm’s character by citing his avoidance of their child’s problem, or he, in order to highlight Joscelyn’s maternal inadequacy, would bring up one of Lissie’s small shows of will. Now for the first time Malcolm’s meanness had been directed specifically toward Lissie.
That night Joscelyn slept in the child’s room.
At breakfast she served Malcolm his eggs and poured his coffee, otherwise ignoring him. She sat talking to Lissie.
Malcolm sipped the steaming coffee. “This sure hits the spot,” he said in a false, buoyant tone—she could actually feel the waves of
conciliation flowing from him. “God, I had a load on last night.” He looked at her, waiting for her to pick up on his overture, as she always did.
She nodded coldly and continued enunciating. “. . . and—today—is—Wednesday. After—school—Lissie—goes—to—help—Auntie—Honora—with—her—gardening.”
Lissie wiggled, smiling. “Oo-noo.”
“She understands everything,” enthused Malcolm.
“Oo-noo,” Lissie repeated.
“Hoonoo,” Joscelyn said, “is exactly what I used to call Honora when I was a baby. And
I
had hearing.”
“Our kid’s got real brains.” Again that phonily upbeat tone.
He was afraid. After their fights Malcolm was tender, repentant, sometimes self-castigating, but never frightened. Abruptly it came to her that his fear was connected to last night’s threat to spill his home behavior to Curt and Honora. That she had the means to punish her husband came as a jolting shock to Joscelyn.
Intolerable
, she thought. It was intolerable for her to possess the power to degrade and diminish him.
“A genius from both sides,” she said, putting her hand on his sleeve.
He smiled at her. “I was thinking. Haven’t been to the school in ages.”
It flashed through Joscelyn’s mind that he had never visited, unless one counted sitting on the coarse grass to watch the annual fund-raising
show that Walt Disney put on. The negative thought vanished.
“Oh, Malcolm she’d adore it,” she said, beaming. “Whenever you can find the time.”
“Today,” he said.
“Today?”
“Why not?”
He called in sick.
* * *
At the nursery school, Joscelyn watched from the one-way window, chuckling for almost the entire three hours. The other two observing mothers in there were laughing, too. Lissie, her black hair whirling, alternated between clinging to her daddy and shoving the other kids away from him. “Malcolm’s a fabulous father,” said Marlene Leisen. And buxom Kyla Kent said, “Gorgeous, too. Like a black-haired Steve McQueen. Do you fend off poachers with a baseball bat or what?”
After school, the family Peck lunched alfresco at a cement table of a McDonald’s, Lissie’s favorite eatery.
She held up her hamburger. “Gur.”
“Yes, hamburger,” Malcolm said.
“Gur,” Lissie repeated louder.
The inordinately obese woman at the next table turned, peering with avid curiosity at Lissie. Malcolm, who usually looked in the opposite direction when the child’s speech attracted attention, stared down the fat lady until she went back to her malt.
They drove up to Bel Air, depositing a ketchup-smeared, happy, tired Lissie in
Honora’s arms.
Joscelyn expected Malcolm to drop her off at home and get back to Ivory. As he pulled into the drive, though, he turned off the ignition. “Alone at last,” he said meaningfully.
“Hey,” she said, her voice catching, “McDonald’s must’ve added Spanish fly to the ingredients between the sesame seed bun.”
* * *
“Go on, more, deeper,” he gasped.
She was kneeling, naked except for the thin platinum chain with the tiny diamond that nestled in the hollow of her exerting throat. He, panting on the redwood patio bench, sat fully dressed with his fly open.
Déjeuner sur l’Herbe
had struck powerful, erotic veins in both of them, and in memory of their Paris trip they had emerged onto the patio for love in the afternoon. A beige-painted, cement-block wall hid them from the alley and neighboring yards; the nearby houses were also bungalows, so nobody could look down on them; yet there was an aphrodisiac element of risk, of danger, doing it
en plein air
and Joscelyn, ashine with sexual sweat, sucked with electric bliss.
He gasped dementedly, and came.
When his breathing eased, he said, “Now I’ll do you.”
“Here?”
“Get on the table,” he commanded roughly.
Throwing off his tie, he began his lingual exploration, soon climbing atop her. Love concluded with a crescendo of rasping breaths and cries.
Afterward, they heard the neighbor’s back door slam.
“Jesus,” Malcolm said. “She was listening.”
“Oh, let the old bag eat her heart out,” Joscelyn said, her orgasmic flush deeper. “The other mothers at the clinic were swooning over you.”
“No kidding?”
“I could make my fortune, raffling you off—but I’m not about to.”
Chuckling, they went inside to shower together in the pink bathroom. They had never been more in tune.
* * *
Joscelyn could tell from the tension in Malcolm’s face, the sound of his cracking knuckles, that the Paloverde Oil people were on his back, so she went out of her way to please him, to run the house perfectly, not to let her incessant oral training extend into the hours he was at home, to hide herself and be all that he expected of a woman. Yet the following Saturday night, when they were having two tables of bridge—the men were on Malcolm’s project—his temper resurfaced, once again focusing on Lissie.
He was playing out a three no-trump hand when the child edged into the living room. Everyone exclaimed at her beauty, and Joscelyn jumped to her feet.
Malcolm forestalled her by dropping his cards facedown at her place. “It’s my turn with her.” He grinned. “You play out the hand.”
Joscelyn went down one, barely hearing the idiot advice on how she could have made it, so
intent was she on trying to hear sounds from the bedroom. Finally she mumbled, “Better go see what’s keeping my partner.”
The night-light was attached to an outlet at the baseboard, shining upward, casting black, iniquitous shadows of Malcolm as, using both hands, he forced Lissie’s stomach to the youth bed. The small, bare feet thrashed in impotent helplessness.
Rage coagulated with Joscelyn: for a moment she was too furious to speak, then she hissed, “Let her go!”
Sensing her presence, Lissie turned and raised her head. “Mah-mah,” she bawled.
“Shut the damn door,” Malcolm muttered.
Joscelyn slammed it, coming into the dim room. “You shit!”
“That’s the thanks I get for doing
your
job.”
“What job? Breaking her spirit?”
“If you were one damn bit of a mother, she wouldn’t come barging in every time we have company.”
“That’s what really fries you, isn’t it? That they’ll know that Mr. Perfect Project Manager has a deaf baby.”
“Shout a little louder, why don’t you?” he hissed, letting go of Lissie. Lissie sat up. “Now you’ve done it! All my time in here’s shot to hell!”
“Should I weep?” Joscelyn asked. “Or start a fund for you?”
The night-light caught the shine of his clenched knuckles. His arm shot out, catching on the bone between her inadequate breasts.
As his clouts went, the blow was strictly minor league. This, however, was the first time he had hit her in front of Lissie. Gazing from one parent to the other, she cowered back against the headboard of the youth bed.
Joscelyn swept her up, rocking her to and fro. “I warn you. If you ever, ever hurt my baby, I’m telling Curt.”
Malcolm drew a shuddering breath as he backed from the beruffled little room.
“Sorry, gang,” she heard him say. “The kid must’ve had a nightmare. Joscelyn’ll be right out.”
Ten minutes later, when a snuffling Lissie had dropped off abruptly into sleep, Joscelyn emerged. The Pecks smiled at one another across the Samsonite card table as if they were the happiest couple in all southern California.
* * *
That night proved to be a watershed dividing Malcolm’s paternal attitudes. The next few days he treated Lissie as if she were a guest in the house, friendly enough, but with a hint of reserve.
By the following week, he pretty much ignored her, refusing to look when she tried to attract his attention, not taking her small hand when she extended it.
“Malcolm, she’s just a baby. She doesn’t understand our fights.”
“Your idea, Joscelyn—you told me to lay off the kid. And it’s just as well. I’m up to my eyeballs earning a living.”
“Working and being a father aren’t
mutually exclusive.”
“You go all-out when you entertain, but you haven’t noticed who’s bringing in the bucks, have you?” (
Is this him or his father speaking?
Joscelyn thought.) “All you can do is whine about needing help with her. I warned you before she’d be a damn sight easier if you laid down a few guidelines.”
“She’s good, Malcolm, so very good.”
“Then you don’t need me to play nursemaid, do you?”
Lissie had become their battleground.
The child picked at her food, sucked her thumb, reverted to bedwetting. She often awoke sobbing.
The child psychologist on the John Tracy Clinic staff invited Joscelyn for a talk. A disarming warmth deepening the wrinkles of her tanned face, she said, “Mrs. Peck, I thought maybe you’d like to talk about any problems you might be having at home.”
“Problems?”
“You certainly know by now the strain of having a deaf child puts on family relationships.”
Joscelyn was consumed with the urge to unburden herself. But wouldn’t her psychological salvation come at the price of exposing Malcolm?
“No problems at all,” she said brightly. “Why? Is Lissie going through a phase?”
“She’s always been so outgoing, and the last month she’s pulled into herself. On your days you must have noticed. She doesn’t join in
with the others.”
Oh, my poor Lissie.
“She’s always hovered when I work.”
“Mrs. Peck, please, I’m not accusing you. But I feel it might be a good idea if you and Mr. Peck came in for a visit together.”
Fat chance.
“He’s tremendously tied up at work.”
“Yes, we see so little of him.”
“He was here not long ago, and Lissie clung to him, too. We were all laughing.”
Ho, ho, ho.
The psychologist sighed and said, “You know where I am if you need me, Mrs. Peck. And thank you for dropping by.”
On the last Sunday in July the Pecks were invited to early dinner at Honora and Curt’s. The only other guest was Senator George Murphy. Malcolm—never before in heady proximity to a star of this magnitude either from the film world or the political scene—was at his best, his conversation light, respectful, yet without the least hint of brown-nose.
While Curt barbecued the thick porterhouses, Lissie sidled up to the stranger, staring at him. The one-time actor was conceded by all who knew him, whatever their views on his talent and/or political persuasion, to be a kindly man.
“Hi, little honey. Ever been told you’re
very pretty?”