And then I saw them.
Saw Bash, who was completely naked, which made an impression on me. My father was modest. I had never seen him or even AJ without clothes. I had never seen a man naked, not even his buttocks. Bash was so broad that I couldn’t see anything of Lynne’s body except her face over his shoulder. Her face looked very serious. Stern, a mean teacher face. She bit her lip, whispered in his ear. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.” Yet she looked as if it were hurting, as if she yearned for him to stop. Bash made no noise at all. He barely seemed to be breathing. He tried to kiss her, but Lynne twisted her face to the side. “No, no. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Dammit. You-Let me show you-” She made some adjustment in the dark. Whatever they were doing-and I knew, yet I didn’t know-she was better at it, I could tell. She had done it before and Bash hadn’t. She was like AJ, trying to teach me basketball. I remember the others teasing Lynne about a student teacher who had given her rides home from cheerleader practice and it began to make sense. I was at that age where so much begins making sense, where stray facts and memories lingered in some waiting room of the brain until context came and took them by the hand.
Lynne hissed: “Yes. Yes. That’s it. You can do it, Bash. You can do it.”
“I am doing it,” he said in wonder. He rose up. He looked like a merman, swimming along the tops of the waves.
I backed away, not even trying to close the door. I got into my father’s bed and pulled the covers over my head. Now I really couldn’t sleep. So that was sex. I knew, but I didn’t know. My father had done that with my mother. Had Teensy done it? But she didn’t have kids, so, no. Grown-ups everywhere did that thing. Did this make Lynne and Bash grown-ups? Lynne wasn’t much taller than I was. She was the cheerleader who was always at the top of the pyramid. But she had looked and sounded like a woman. Whereas Bash had a grown-up man’s body and a boy’s face. Would they get married? Would I get to go to the wedding? Would I be their flower girl? I didn’t want to be a flower girl. Or maybe I did.
Teensy came over on Sunday afternoon to check on us. The house was immaculate by then, every trace of the party swept away. It was too clean and Teensy stalked around, smelling a rat. But all she found was my mess-the empty bag of peanut M &Ms, the jug of soda. Plus, I had a full-on stomachache that I couldn’t conceal. I confessed to everything-the bad food, the horror movies, sleeping in my father’s bed. I said AJ had no idea what I was up to, that he had stayed in, as instructed, listening to records and watching television.
“What did he have for dinner?” Teensy asked.
I was a lawyer’s daughter. I saw how she was trying to box me in.
“I didn’t notice.”
“Did he offer to fix you anything? There were hot dogs and some frozen pizzas.”
“He probably did, but I wasn’t hungry.”
“After eating a pound of candy? I guess not, you fool.” She sat on my bed, felt my forehead. Teensy didn’t really believe in illness. Absent a fever or vomit, a child was not allowed to stay in bed on Teensy’s watch. But I must have looked ragged that day because she took pity on me, left me in my own bed, even brought in the little b &w television from her room, the one that we watched on a tray on those rare occasions we were allowed to stay home from school.
I dozed off and on in front of the television. I always did. My father did that, too. Still does. He’d rather fall asleep in his chair, the television droning as he reads, than go to bed. It was a Sunday, so a movie was on, but it was just adults talking. People whispered, told secrets. With my eyes closed, I saw Bash and Lynne again. Saw Bash, the freckled merman, riding the waves, his head thrown back as if he were about to sing. Milk and honey, milk and honey, milk and honey.
“Teensy,” I croaked from my bed. “Could I have some graham crackers?”
“No, but you can have some saltines and flat Coca-Cola.” Teensy believed those two things to be medicinal.
I sat up in bed, licking the salt from the Premium saltines. I had seen two people having sex. It was big news, enormous news, but I had no one to tell. Teensy would want to know about the party, and I owed it to AJ not to reveal that. A pound of M &Ms buys a steadfast silence. It didn’t occur to me that the others-AJ, Noel, Ariel, Davey-had not seen what I saw, might not know what I know. I had no real friends at school, not the kind that I could share such secrets with. Strangely, the person I wanted to tell was my father. I wondered if he knew that people did it when they weren’t trying to have a baby because I’m pretty sure he had told me that was the only reason to have sex. But maybe Lynne and Bash wanted to have a baby. Then again, they couldn’t drive yet and I absolutely knew you had to have a driver’s license before you had a baby. My dad had sex twice, I thought, once for AJ and once for me. I bet he was glad he didn’t have to have it anymore. It looked messy and painful.
I was a spy. I was every spy that ever was. I was Velma on Scooby-Doo. I was Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, Trixie Belden, the Hardy Boys. I was Harriet the Spy, although I had not met her yet, but I would, soon enough. They were waiting for me, another member of their clan of spies, snoops, and truth tellers. I opened drawers, searched medicine cabinets and pigeonholes, pressed my ear to walls, looked through keyholes. I thought I knew everything. I thought I was entitled to know everything, that the world was conspiring to keep me in the dark.
JANUARY 13
“Do you like this? Do you?”
Lu tries to make clear exactly how she feels about the fingers digging into her scalp, pulling her hair, but the sensation keeps changing, the pain keeps moving. She is on her stomach and the natural instinct should be to crawl away, futile as that might be, but strong hands grab her waist and flip her, so now she is facing him as he enters her and she gasps-she’s lying on a sisal rug, rough on bare flesh under any circumstances.
Then she sees Bash’s face and she starts to laugh. After all these years, she can’t quite get over the fact that he looks like Huckleberry Finn, with his freckles and chipped tooth and never-quite-combed hair.
“When you laugh like that, it’s hard to keep going,” Bash says, and he pushes harder.
“Oh-no-it’s”-she needs a breath or two for each syllable-“it’s-per-fect. Don’t. Stop.”
“I never do.”
He doesn’t. Bash at fifty-three is as priapic as a teenager, always ready, inexhaustible. Well, always ready for Lu, whom he sees once or twice a month in this sterile “corporate” apartment in Bethesda. She’s not sure he’s always ready for his wife of seven years, a hard number who lives in Capitol Hill in what Lu assumes is a drop-dead gorgeous town house. She has never been invited there. AJ, who has, dismissed it as “showy,” which told her nothing. But is it in good taste? she had yearned to ask her brother. Or just a little tacky? She knows the wife is drop-dead gorgeous and not the least bit tacky. Bash brought her to Gabe’s funeral, although his flirtation with Lu had begun a few months earlier. It was probably only the timing of Gabe’s death that kept Lu from becoming an adulteress; she was well on her way to sleeping with Bash when Gabe died. One might think that a husband’s sudden death would shake a woman up, force her to wonder if the universe was sending her a message about the affair she was considering in her head.
One would be wrong. Lu tried to resist Bash, but he had picked up a scent on Lu and pursued her relentlessly. He knew before she did that she was a woman who would revel in a truly secret affair, one that was all about sex, sex that pushed past some boundaries. Lu had been a late bloomer-a virgin until college, married in her twenties to her third-ever real boyfriend. In blue jeans and T-shirt, hair under a baseball cap, she could still pass for a boy from the back. Which explained why she didn’t wear such things. It had been a bizarre kind of relief when the flirtation-e-mails, phone calls, odd little gifts left anonymously at her office-finally ended and they settled into a straight sex thing. The flirtation had been the real betrayal of Gabe. The sex-that’s merely the betrayal of Lucinda, Bash’s wife. But that’s not Lu’s problem. Is it?