But then it was also an unlikely place, unlikely indeed, to which my father’s adultery had brought me originally. Unlikely past, unlikely present. I knew about my Fudds’ carrying on of course — He & Dee were no mystery, no, not to an old Tormented Teen snooper like myself, a muckraker to rival your stepfather, really; I began with a phone number scribbled on the stub of a train ticket, and in no time I was eavesdropping on the conversation between Fudds and a certain powerful Old Boy who lent them his Duxbury hideaway (a man, I might mention, not without some power and fame even yet) for fucking. But what I’m trying to get at today, well. This isn’t simply about fucking, my baby, about fucking and finding the clues; rather it’s about the unlikely place I’ve been brought to now — a reflection, you see, of what I was brought to then — because briefly I found myself with quite another father, then, quite a different breed of man; and I liked it.
I liked it, Tormented Teen guerrilla that I was, that I am; I dug up my father’s dirty secrets because I wanted to do damage, I wanted to chart every one of my family’s soft spots — but then those very same secrets revealed my dad to be doing the damage himself: he liked it, he was the guerrilla. He even began to play roof-ball (is there roof-ball where you are, my baby? the tatty old tennis ball careening from gable to gable crazily before dropping back towards the players, towards a score?). After dinner he’d play roof-ball with my brother, my sister — even with me, a fellow family monster, a hesitant secret sharer … and he was tall enough to be a formidable opponent, on those spring evenings before the humidity wore him down. My sweet uncomplicated child, can you understand? can you suss out the subtle business at work here, the complex and unlikely challenge to the world that I saw in my high-hairlined Fudds, thanks to the complex and unlikely project by which I came of age … My other parent, don’t you know, never appeared in such a heroic light: your mother’s mother, my baby, only went on bending between her roses, her peonies, her gladiolas, her foxgloves (even now she goes on, honestly), all in a humming, loam-spotted oblivion. My father, on the other hand, looked as though he could fly, he could bounce from gable to gable all summer long (o, metaphor!); and it only added that much more to the thrill, don’t you see, because I was the only one who knew — a little more than kin, and less than kind (o, allusion!). I liked it, my baby, I quite reveled in my father’s cheating and the new breed of cat it made of him, of me: two smiling sphinxes who shared the same riddle — and so, don’t you see, I was let down badly, hurt worse than I knew, to hear him declare, one evening in the height of the June-wedding season, that he was tired.
Too tired, he declared, as I stood before him tossing and catching the dirty little ball we’d been playing with for weeks now …
Too tired, he sighed, and he put up the closely printed wall of the Wall Street Journaclass="underline" too tired, and (soggily rattling the ice in his glass) he’d love another gin & tonic, with a little more gin in it this time …
Now, my baby (and anyone else who might be on the other side of the screen [aw, come on, as your stepfather would say]) — now, would it be an exaggeration, would it be rather a sensational exaggeration, if your mother were to say that she went to the family liquor cabinet, that evening, and came back in a Rampage? if she were to say that she fetched her father his damn triple-gin & tonic and then after that, for months to come (interesting word!), she didn’t drink with a man she didn’t fuck? if she were to say that the next conversation she had of any length and substance was the time towards the end of The Rampage, The Rampage! when she deliberately tried to hurt Dee as hard as she could, by letting the girl know, in no uncertain terms, how much the Steyes family likes to fuck?
“Aw, darling,” Kit said. Bette’s agonies unwound like a shell, in slow spirals, and yet they felt like too much too fast. He was still wondering who would groan on the phone. He stood to put in toast and set the kettle on a burner. What he was reading, Kit reminded himself, was the kind of life’s partner he’d asked for. A know-it-all with depth, with reach.
My baby, tiny and dead though you are, well. I’m sure you realize that I first searched out another clue or two, Teen Detective, in order to confirm my suspicions that dear old Fudds’ affair had indeed ended; you realize, I’m sure, that I couldn’t simply leave that laceration alone. I first made certain that my father no longer went traipsing off on his dubious overnight “presentations” (in Duxbury, mon pere?); and after that while I can’t recall, here before this gray grid, just when I moved into my angry little studio on Dana Street, nonetheless the answer is yes, I mean the answer to the question your mother was just asking …
Yes! I went directly to my Rampage! Yes, in that candid moment over my father’s gin-&-Journal I understood that the man was no longer a campeñero, that he was in fact just another tin-star dictator with blood on his hands and a happy banana …
Examples, God knows I have examples. I have irrefutable evidence that nine-tenths of what I said and did in those days was all about me and my father. Yes, the answer’s yes, and our mother could regale you with ugly evidence indeed, with incidents draped in transparent Freudian slips (o, games), incidents that go from backstage at a bar where Aerosmith had a gig to upstairs in the Parker House with a prominent State House Old Boy. This weekend, thanks to my little talk with Dee down in Providence, honest hindsight at last revealed that throughout this entire incident-packed period (interesting word!), I was after my father — whether after fucking him or killing him, or both … well. Hoo boy, as your stepfather would say (o, yoo hoo, my prince! yoo hoo! [but the truth is he won’t be home for hours, my baby; I’ve got plenty of time left to Delete])
The truth is, even at my most outrageous, my most Rampageous, I was just another rebel rich girl, wasn’t I? Even out on the astral plane you’ve come across the type, haven’t you? Bright but lacerated nucleii, aren’t we, grubby little handfuls struggling for greater mass against the fracturing effects of shame … My weekend journey to find you, and then my sitting here to put you into words, these are both mysteries, don’t you know — but I do wonder whether, in the end, there exist any mysteries about personality at all, these days. I do wonder if we haven’t had the mystery charted and graphed out of us, these days: nailed like Natasha into Tolstoyan immutability.
Kit followed her more with his spine than his head. He trusted his spine, and the soggy beehive hanging from it.
He trusted, as well, better sensations: the warmth of tea, full-bodied herbal stuff Bette bought in Central Square, and toast. With the sardines back at the office, it was better nourishment than he’d had in weeks. More than that, Kit thought he understood. He believed he’d figured out this “my baby” business. He wasn’t reading about adultery, or not his wife’s anyway. She hadn’t had an abortion over the weekend either.
When I at last caught up with Dee, don’t you know, she too seemed no mystery; rather she seemed the natural end result of a progression already sketched on the air at the time of our last conversation — sketched so plainly (o, history without mystery) that nothing had changed, for Dee, even though she’d rushed out of our last conversation in tears. I mean, here she was in hospital fatigues, working the Sunday shift in Emergency Trauma at Good Samaritan, in hospital fatigues and an unpretentious wedding diamond, with her hair in a sensible bob … She knew her likes and dislikes and their funding, my baby; she showed no trace of how hard I’d once tried to hurt her.