Why did she put up with him? She was a nice girl — even in his fever for her he saw that — gentle, affectionate, undemanding, what his father would consider a lady. Lady Rosemary. His fucking lady. Ah, how he loved to mount her, plow the fields of hell with her — to the sun and back, the dark lady of his light. His hell, his heaven. He fought his war on her field of battle. It was, in his father’s words, the awful joy of combat. Why did she put up with him? This monster, who, in search of some enemy he had never seen, devastated her dark fields, blasting what he could to get at what he couldn’t. Demanding affection in return for his violence, jealous of his shadow, of hers, of her time away from him. Mournful, charmless, brutal, lustful, brandishing his wounds like armor. What an unlovable horror he was. He suspected, disturbed by the perception, that it was fear (not love) that kept her from breaking with him.
One day in bed, still occupying her, though already come and gone, he asked her what she wanted of him.
“That’s not a very flattering question,” she said.
He didn’t know how else to ask. “What I’m asking,” he said, “is if you love me.” The question, he knew (a woman’s question), courted loss.
He felt the chill of her silence, remembered as a child falling into an ice-covered pond, the surface, which seemed sufficient to his weight, cracking suddenly beneath him.
“I don’t know,” she said. “There are times …”
They came apart. “Then why do you continue to see me?”
“Do you want to stop?”
“You know I don’t.”
She was silent again, her face against his. He put his hand between her legs.
“You treat me as if I were a toy,” she said. “You wouldn’t if you really loved me.”
He groaned. “If you think that, why do you see me?”
“I think you think you love me. I like it that you want me — don’t you know? — that I make you happy.”
“And I don’t make you happy?”
“Sometimes.” She kissed his ear.
It was time for him to leave, though his prick — no respecter of schedules — had its own idea. He tore into her and in six short thrusts (like shooting tin cans off a fence) dispatched the burden of his pleasure.
“I love you,” he grumbled, leaving. All his nerves exposed. He bought a paper to see what new turn the war had taken in his absence. What new atrocity he had set in motion. Nothing new. On the subway he remembered her face, the hurt in her eyes as he left, and it struck him that this time what he feared most had come to pass — he had lost her. The sensation was like the hemorrhaging of an old wound. He put his head in his arms and, dry-eyed, dreamed the city in flames. His tears fell on it and the flames shot upward, burning out his eyes.
SIX
SOMETHING WARNS ME, some electronic voice in my head. Not to go out. Not to leave Parks’ house. If you can get by today, the voice says, tomorrow will be possible.
Parks and wife don’t look at each other. His eyes inside, hers on hands and feet. They talk through me as if I were a door between them. Parks moving around, looking for a place to be. We are all in his way. The tension in the air like bees.
He leaves after breakfast. Before he goes, he asks what my plans are. (He wants me to go with him.) I have no plans.
The television beauty whispers to me as I shave. Take it off, take it off, take it all off. I take it off for her, her mouth in the mirror leering obscenely. Your face is your past, she says. She keeps asking me things. What am I supposed to do? She wants me to do something to her.
Their baby, in another room, making scary sounds. “Boom,” she says. “Boom.” As if she were a bomb. “Boom boomboom.”
A siren outside. I hold on to the arms of the chair until it passes. She is talking. Her words like small rocks against a window. I remember Parks saying she had been a dancer. (“Carolyn, my wife, was serious about dancing when I met her.”) Had given it up to become a wife. Why cant a wife dance, Parks? So she blamed him, he said, wanted him to do something important to justify her. Wanted him to fail. Her hands dance as she talks.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking so many questions, but it’s been so long since Curt has had someone interesting to the house. Before he went out of his head about the war, his only friends were colleagues — I won’t mention any names — dull, without balls, who haven’t read a book since they got out of graduate school about two hundred years ago.”
“Two hundred years is a long time not to have read a book.”
Her eyes flutter. “It’s a very long time.” She gets up, says she ought to clean the house, but she hates cleaning.
When I close my eyes I can imagine them. His face screwed into her breasts. He tells her how American planes are napalming children.
“I don’t read books I don’t have to read,” I tell her.
“At least you don’t pretend to be something you’re not.”
“I do that, too.”
She nods, leaves, comes back. “It makes me nervous having someone else here. I’m used to being alone in the morning, Christopher. Could you find something to do — you know, something — till about one. I’m sorry to have to throw you out this way, but …”
“I won’t bother you,” I say. “If you’re cleaning, I’ll stay in one of the rooms you’re not working in.”
She pouts, taps her foot. “That isn’t what I mean. It’s just having another presence in the house the way I feel is … inhibiting. Please?” She cocks her head charmingly (she thinks), pleading.
“I’ll leave if you dance for me.”
“What?” Smiling, she hides her face.
“Parks told me you’re a dancer. I’d like to see you dance.”
“It’s polite of you to ask, but I’d be embarrassed to have anyone see me now. I’m badly out of practice. You don’t want to see an old housewife dance, do you?” Her laughter frightens her.
I tell her I’ve been looking forward to it, plead for a performance. C’mon, Mrs. Parks. C’mon. Show us why he married you. She says no, absolutely no. Then she says she will if I promise to baby-sit later while she “runs some errands.” “That’s your fee,” she says. Like a weather vane she dances. She is mother of the roof, wooden-winged, electronic wind in her feathers. Mad and colder tomorrow with chance of hail.
She goes on her errands while the baby is, as she says, down. Leaving me the house.
In their bedroom, the air-conditioning on, I make myself at home. (A month ago it would have been an opportunity to find out more about him. No time anymore to worry about him.)
What kind of life is it in this house, Parks? A handbill on the dresser: “Napalm Poetry Reading Sunday at Eight.” Someone had written underneath, “I’m tired of looking at burned children. Sick and tired of it.”
I ask my mother if anyone’s been looking for me.