What poor old O. claimed to have found so moving was Himself’s assumption that O. was still cherry. What moved me to feel sorry for Orin was that it seemed pretty obvious that that had nothing to do with what Himself was trying to talk about. It was the most open I’d ever heard of Himself being with anybody, and it seemed terribly sad to me, somehow, that he’d wasted it on Orin. I’d never once had a conversation nearly that open or intimate with Himself. My most intimate memory of Himself was the scratchiness of his jaw and the smell of his neck when I fell asleep at supper and he carried me upstairs to bed. His neck was thin but had a good meaty warm smell; I now for some reason associate it with the odor of Coach Schtitt’s pipe.
I tried briefly to picture Ortho Stice hoisting his bunk up and bolting it to the ceiling without waking Coyle. Our room’s door remained ajar from Mario’s exit with Coyle to find someone with a master key. Yardguard and Wagenknecht’s heads popped in briefly and urged me to come have a look at The Darkness’s ruined map and withdrew when they got no response. The second floor was pretty quiet; most of them were still dawdling at breakfast, awaiting some announcement on the weather and Québecois squads. Snow hit the windows with a gritty sound. The angle of the wind had made a kind of whistle out of one corner of the subdorm building, and the whistling came and went.
Then I heard John Wayne’s stride in the hall outside, light and even and easy on floors, the stride of a guy with stellar calf-development. I heard his low sigh. Then, though the door was too far behind me to see, for a moment or two I could somehow tell for sure that John Wayne’s head was inside the open door. I could feel it clearly, almost painfully. He was looking down at me lying there on the Lindisfarne carpet. There was none of the gathering tension of a person deciding whether or not to speak. I could feel my throat’s equipment move when I swallowed. John Wayne and I never had much to say to one another. There wasn’t even hostility between us. He ate dinner with us at HmH every so often because he and the Moms were tight. The Moms made little attempt to disguise her attachment to Wayne. Now his breathing behind me was light and very even. No waste, complete utilization of each breath.[382]
Of us three, it was Mario who had spent the most time with Himself, sometimes travelling with him for location-work. I had no idea what they spoke about together, or how openly. None of us had ever pressed Mario to say much about it. It occurred to me to wonder why this was so.
I decided to get up but then did not in fact get up. Orin was convinced that Himself was a virgin when he met the Moms in his late thirties. I find this pretty hard to believe. Orin will also grant that there’s no doubt Himself was faithful to the Moms right up to the end, that his attachment to Orin’s fiancee was not sexual. I had a sudden and lucid vision of the Moms and John Wayne locked in a sexual embrace of some kind. John Wayne had been involved with the Moms sexually since roughly the second month after his arrival. They were both expatriates. I hadn’t yet been able to identify a strong feeling one way or the other about the liaison, nor about Wayne himself, except for admiring his talent and total focus. I did not know whether Mario knew of the liaison, to say nothing of poor C.T.
It was impossible for me to imagine Himself and the Moms being explicitly sexual together. I bet most children have this difficulty where their parents are concerned. Sex between the Moms and C.T. I imagined as both frenetic and weary, with a kind of doomed timeless Faulknerian feel to it. I imagined the Moms’s eyes open and staring blankly at the ceiling the whole time. I imagined C.T. never once shutting up, talking around and around whatever was taking place between them. My coccyx had gone numb from the pressure of the floor through the thin carpet. Bain, graduate students, grammatical colleagues, Japanese fight-choreographers, the hairy-shouldered Ken N. Johnson, the Islamic M.D. Himself had found so especially torturing — these encounters were imaginable but somehow generic, mostly a matter of athleticism and flexibility, different configurations of limbs, the mood one more of cooperation than complicity or passion. I tended to imagine the Moms staring expressionlessly at ceilings throughout. The complicit passion would have come after, probably, with her need to be sure the encounter was hidden. Peterson-allusions notwithstanding, I wondered about some hazy connection between this passion for hiddenness and the fact that Himself had made so many films titled Cage, and that the amateur player he became so attached to was the veiled girl, Orin’s love. I wondered whether it was possible to lie supine and throw up without aspirating vomit or choking. The plumed spout of a whale. The tableau of John Wayne and my mother in my imagination was not very erotic. The image was complete and sharply focused but seemed stilted, as if composed. She reclines against four pillows, at an angle between seated and supine, staring upward, motionless and pale. Wayne, slim and brown-limbed, smoothly muscled, also completely motionless, lies over her, his untanned bottom in the air, his blank narrow face between her breasts, his eyes unblinking and his thin tongue outthrust like a stunned lizard’s. They stay just like that.
She wasn’t dumb — she figured it was likely that they’d let her loose just to see where she’d go.
She went home. She went to the House. She got one of the last trains before they closed the T, probably. It took forever to get from Comm. Ave. down to Enfield Marine in her clogs and skirt in the snow, and melt soaked the veil and made it adhere to the features below. She’d been close to removing the veil to get away from the outside-linebacker of a federal lady anyway. She looked now just like a linen-pale version of what she really looked like. But there was no one about in the snow. She figured if she could speak with Pat M. Pat M. might be prevailed upon to put her in quarantine with Clenette and Yolanda, not let in no law. She could tell Pat about the wheelchairs, try to convince her to dismantle the ramp. The visibility was so bad she didn’t see it til she cleared the Shed, the Middlesex County Sheriff’s car, fiercely snow-tired, lights going bluely, parked idling in the roadlet outside the ramp, wipers on Occasional, a uniform at the wheel absently feeling his face.
He says ‘I’m Mikey, alcoholic and addict and a sick fuck, you know what I’m saying?’
And they laugh and shout out ‘You definitely are’ as he stands there rocking the podium slightly, blurred a bit through the linen, smearing one side of his face with a laborer’s hand as he tries to think what to say. It’s another of these round-robin-speaker deals, each speaker picking the next from the smoky lunchtime crowd, jogging up to the fiberboard podium trying to think what to say, and how, for the five minutes each is allotted. The chairperson at the table up by the podium has a clock and a novelty-shop gong.
‘Well,’ he says, “well so I seen some of the old Mikey come back out yesterday, you know what I’m saying? Fucking scared me to see it. What it was, I was going to take my kid down to the lanes and bowl a couple. With my kid. Who he just got the cast off. So I’m all happy and whatnot, got the day off, see the kid. Quality sober time with the kid. So on and so forth. So I’m all on the happy wagon and like that, about seeing the kid, you know what I’m saying? So, what, so I call up my cunt of a sister. He’s living back with them, with Ma and my sister, so I’m calling up my sister to see can I come get the kid at such-and-such time and whatnot. Because you know how the judge said I got to get one of them’s fucking consent to even see my kid. You know what I’m saying? Because of the restraining order on the old Mikey, from before. I got to get their permission. And I, what, accept that, I say OK, so I’m calling up all accepting and on the happy wagon for my sister to consent, and she out of the goodness of her heart she makes me wait while she says she’s got to check it with Ma. And they consent, finally. And I, what, accept that, you know what I’m saying? And I say I was going to be there at such-and-such time and whatnot, and my sister says ain’t I even going to say thank you? Like with the attitude, you know what I’m saying? And I say ‘t the fuck, what, you want a fucking medal for letting me see my own kid? And the cunt hangs up on me. Oh. Fucking oh. Ever since the judge with the order, it’s with the attitude over there, the cunt and Ma both. So after she just hangs up on me a little of the old Mikey I think starts to come out and I go over there and yes all right I got to be honest I do I park on the grass of their fucking lawn, and I go up and go up and I see her and I’m like Fuck you you cunt, and Ma’s in the hall behind her in the door, I go Fucking hang up on me why don’t you, you should go for some fucking counselling you know what I’m saying? And they don’t neither one of them like that verbal comment too much, right? The cunt almost starts laughing and goes, like, I’m telling her to go for counseling?’