He could not remember the names of all the women he had fucked. For a while he could. Now he couldn’t. And if things kept going the way they were, there was sure to be more amnesia. Though he hadn’t even wanted to fuck the girl in the Mazda — the girl who said “Honey” with an edge in her voice — it would be an interesting idea to have Corky keep her shoes on, her high heels, which she could wear as she crouched over him.
He had planted rhododendron bushes on Elliott’s hillside. Maybe she would look at them and think of him, and of the turning fan, the phone that rang and was answered on the second ring by the answering machine, the ice cubes clattering into the bin.
He could hear them clattering again, as he came. So much fucking always gave him a headache, so that what he heard was partly the imagined avalanche, and partly the sound he made, a groan uttered as much from pounding pain as pleasure.
This was what he was doing as Corky took care of Will. Exhaling. Kneeling on a bed with a woman below him who turned over, her arm bent, thrown across her eyes. He kissed her elbow. He kissed her only there, then stood and waited to see if she would look at him. When she did not, he turned and started toward the other room to gather his clothes. When he got there, he went behind the bar and helped himself to another beer, tossing the cap on top of the bar. While the refrigerator door was still open, he took one of the little bottles of champagne and put it in his jacket pocket. He felt sure that she would not hug him goodbye. That even if he decided to go into the bedroom to bend over and kiss her, she would not feel the bottle.
He was right. He went back to the doorway. The fan was turning. She had rolled onto her stomach. He went to the bed and kissed the top of her head, tousled her hair. He also kissed her spine, at the small of her back. Then he went away, having had a premonition from the first that this was the way he would depart.
He left the front door open. When she saw the open door, she would have to think of him.
The bottle was a little ice pack. He could remember Jody telling him, when Will was an infant, that if you stand in cool water, it cools your whole body. That in the winter, if you cover your head, you will be warmer, because so much heat is lost through the head. She kept the blue stocking cap pulled down low, to Will’s eyebrows. Around every body there were invisible currents of air — hot air or cold air — spreading out, dissipating.
He stopped for a minute and looked at the pool. He went closer and saw that a bee was floating, struggling for its life. The water was quite still. If the bee made it to a long green leaf a foot in front of it, it might have a chance. He thought about pushing the leaf farther away, but didn’t. He looked back at the open door and wondered what insects would enter the house.
A man who had picked the wrong woman three times was the only kind of man who would leave three women.
He looked at the leaf. A maple leaf, very still in the water.
He went to his car and got in, taking the cool bottle of champagne from his jacket pocket, dropping it on the passenger’s seat.
There were moments in life — rare moments, but they happened in every life — when you knew clearly what you did and did not want, and why. You could know the minute you took off in a car that you would not have to test-drive anything else, that this was the one for you. Apparently, all women could tell in a split second if a dress was right or wrong for them. You could know that because the butter on the popcorn you got in the movies was rancid, you would never be able to stand the taste of popcorn again. Wayne could remember the moment, as a small boy, when he had put his washcloth on top of the soap dish, thinking: This is ridiculous. I can wash my body with my hands. I will never again use a washrag.
Today was another one of those moments. Alone in the car, he knew that whatever Corky wanted, and no matter what price he had to pay for refusing her, he did not ever again want to look into a rearview mirror to check the expression on his child’s face as he drove along. A child who would die if he rolled up the windows and left the car in the noonday sun. A child who would be limp when he was lifted out. Whose little mouth he would suck up into his own, breathing. Breathing.
Such things happened. They didn’t make the papers, but they happened time and again. Children dead in their cribs. Suffocated in cars. Born to nuns and thrown in the garbage. Snatched into the tiger’s cage at the zoo, or pulled underwater by an alligator, which was eventually hunted down and split open, the dead child inside.
All of those things would be horrible, but worst of all would be transporting a sleeping child, slumped in its seat, buckled in as if things were so safely arranged that if the car became a rocket and shot into orbit, the child would not even suffer whiplash. You could pull over and check a million times, if you let yourself. The motion of the car would put the child to sleep. The child, asleep, might be dead. He would never again sing or talk in the car — talk to himself like a madman — to try to keep a child awake. He would never again break into a sweat as he pulled off the highway to check for that tiny expulsion of breath from the child’s nostrils as its head lolled to the side. He would never again fumble with straps, thinking he had only seconds, only to have the child open his eyes, quizzically, wondering why Daddy was frantic. Was Daddy suddenly digging like an animal getting ready for winter, in mid-July? Was Daddy playing a game? Was the baby’s navel, which Daddy’s fingers seemed to be tickling, the nut, and was Daddy a silly squirrel?
You were always seen as being out of control with children. At the shoreline, not realizing that your voice would carry so well, you would shout too loudly. Heads turned. On the roller coaster you acted insane, clutching the child with both hands, so you felt unsafe yourself as the speeding car swooped down. You squeezed the child too hard, hurting him.
Never. Not ever again. Better that the needle go into your own heart and pierce it than prick the womb in which a fetus lay curled.
The note Corky had left on the kitchen table said that they had gone to watch a movie on Corinne and Eddie’s VCR. It gave him time to sit in the kitchen chair quietly. To concentrate on breathing evenly.
He had left her stretched across the bed, the fan turning, the door open.
He pushed the bottle of champagne on top of the clutter on the second shelf of the refrigerator. He could lie so spontaneously about where it came from that he didn’t even need to bother thinking about that.
Part of the exhaustion he felt must have been because of the fucking, and drinking, and fucking again.
He had planted rhododendrons on her hillside.
He closed his eyes and imagined a bee buzzing in Elliott’s bedroom. A bee, above her naked body, carried like a leaf, airborne, blown by the currents of the ceiling fan.
Maybe she would smile when she saw the open door. She liked it that he was cocky. That he had stood there, in the Florida room, letting her know with his eyes that he realized she wanted something more than to give him a check to take back to the landscaping service.
Deciding to take his time about getting Corky, he took a quick shower, then dried off, went back into the room and pulled a beer out of the refrigerator and threw the twist-off cap in the trash. Cardboard was in there. Corky had bought Will a set of jacks and a ball.
When he went next door and shouted hello as he opened the screen door, Corky’s voice and Eddie’s hollered back.