Aloft (34 page)

"There's no cab available," she tells me, through the screen.

"One's going to come, but not for an hour."

"Thanks. I'll wait out front."

"You don't have to do that, Jerry. I don't despise you, you know."

"I know."

"Besides, you can help me pack up some things."

"Pack up?"

"My lease is up this month, and I don't want to live here anymore."

I can't believe it's been a year, though at times it's seemed like ten. "What are you going to do?" I ask, stepping inside the kitchen. It's dark and cramped but still smells good, of mint and lemons. She's lust made supersweet iced tea (her sole ad-diction, in every season) and unconsciously pours me a glass, the small automation of which would be enough to break my heart, if there weren't the uncertainty of where she might now go.

"I've looked at a couple places. They need experienced RNs pretty much everywhere, especially in the South and the West."

"You like Long Island."

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"I thought I did. But why should I? I certainly don't like the crowds, or the roads. The people aren't very nice. I don't like to boat or fish. I'm starting to think it's the worst of all worlds, pushy, suburban, built-up, only shopping to do."

"But this is our world."

"Maybe yours, Jerry. I don't know. Kelly told me about Port-land."

"In Maine?"

"Oregon. She said it's a nice small city, with friendly people, mild weather, mossy and woodsy. I checked. I could pack my clothes and throw a garage sale for the rest and get on a plane next week."

"You don't know a soul out there."

"Maybe that's better."

"Everybody is white."

"Everybody is white everywhere."

"But you have
family
here."

This stops her, for a moment, because of course she doesn't have anyone around in terms of blood relations, which has never seemed to bother her, but I think really has.

"I wish Theresa had stayed and visited," she says.

"It's my fault. She wanted to, but I told her I needed to see you alone."

"You said at Richie's she was in trouble. You never told me any details. Or was it just another Jerry story?"

"Maybe it was," I say, thinking how present matters (and the larger scheme, too) demand less complication, and not more.

"But you should talk to her anyway."

"I will. How is Jack? I thought I saw him last week in that big black truck of his, driving out of the Lion's Den."

"That bar in Huntington?"

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"I was meeting Kelly for lunch. I was parking, and I waved, and I thought he saw me, but he just drove off. Sort of wildly, in fact. He almost got into an accident."

"He's been out of whack, of late. Things haven't been so hot at Battle Brothers. You should really call him, too. But only if you want to."

"Of course I want to, Jerry!" she says, with due exasperation.

"Don't you think it makes me unhappy, not to see them as much as I'm used to?"

"No one's keeping you away. I've never not asked you to come to something. Maybe I should have made sure I wasn't there."

"That would have helped."

"Okay, I got it. But Jack really needs you, I'm sure of it. He talks less and less to me. The last time he came by he was sort of drunk, so he said a few things, we yakked, it was pretty decent stuff. Maybe alarming, but decent. Otherwise it's pretty much hello and goodbye. Soon he's not even going to grunt at me, it'll just be all nods."

"What do you want him to say?" she says, though not in an accusatory tone.

"Maybe he could tell me how the business is falling apart. Or he could lie, give me a big cotton candy story. I don't care. Maybe he could tell me what those spoiled brats of his are up to, or what
objet
Eunice just bought for the house. He could tell me about my yard, which is what he did last time. Now, that was nice."

"Why am I not surprised to hear nothing about what you told or asked him?"

"That's not my job! And even if it were, what do I have to talk about? Nothing's ever different in my life, except for you and me, which he definitely does not want to discuss. He's the A L O F T

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one who's young and in the thick of it. I had my turn of trouble. Or so I thought."

"You're always saying that, Jerry. Like you already had a lifetime of it with what happened to Daisy."

"I think that counts for a damn big share."

"Of course it does," she says, sitting down next to me at the half-sized corner breakfast table, close enough that our wrists almost touch. "But somehow you think nobody else has ever had similar difficulties."

"That's not true. And hey, I've never whined or gone on about it, have I?"

"No," Rita agrees. "You haven't mentioned Daisy more than a dozen times since I've known you, and maybe just once or twice referred to
that.
But everything you do—or don't want to do, more like—has an origin in what happened to Daisy, which at this point is really what happened to
you."

"It did happen to me!"

"But it's never ceased for you, Jerry. You look to spread the burden all the time. Everybody is a potential codependant, though with you they hardly know it. You're sneaky, that way.

When I wanted to have a baby, what did you say to me?"

"That was a long time ago, sweetie. Who can remember?"

"I'll refresh your memory. It was my thirty-seventh birthday, and we were having dinner at The Blue Schooner."

"Gee, that was a fancy place. Huge shrimps in the shrimp cocktail."

"Of course you remember that."

"Okay. I don't know. Probably something about my being too old and tired to raise another kid."

"Not quite," she says icily. "You said /was too old and tired."

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"Not a chance. I'm not that stupid."

"Actually you were trying to be helpful. It was your way of saying I should be enjoying my youth instead. Traveling a lot and dancing and staying out late. The thing was that I was already raising Jack and Theresa, which I was happy for and never felt bad about or regretted. I loved those kids even if they didn't quite love me."

"They loved you, and they love you now."

"Oh, I know, I know. The thing that makes me crazy is that I knew then that you weren't thinking of me, of my potentially lost youth. You just naturally wanted to ensure you had me available to go places with."

"Look, if you had insisted on having a baby, I would have agreed."

"Right! You might have said okay but you would have pissed and moaned all through the pregnancy and after the baby arrived been a total grouch every time it peeped. I should have left you then, because I really did want a baby, but for some reason I'll never understand I thought I would only have it with you. I'm a total bimbo fool."

"Don't say that."

"It's the truth."

"Maybe you loved me a little, too."

"Maybe."

"I'll make it up to you."

"What, Jerry, you're offering to knock me up?"

"Sure. Right now, if you want."

Rita laughs, though wearily, like it's the thousandth time from me she's heard it all. "Well you know how old I am, Jerry.

And you're sixty."

"Nearly sixty."

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27S

"Nearly sixty. Together that's a lot of mileage on my eggs, and your sperm."

"A woman older than you just had a kid, she was, like, fifty-seven. They can work miracles now with the hormone drugs."

"That's a crime, not a miracle. Anyway, ours would definitely come out with three heads."

"As long as it's happy."

"Do you think that's remotely possible?"

"I think it's very possible."

Rita quietly sips her iced tea, as do I, the window fan around the corner in the living room sounding like a monk droning on in the misty, craggy-hilled distance. It's his only song, and he's telling me to keep still, to shut my mouth, to be bodiless and pure, to not spoil this moment with the usual spoutings of ruinous want and craving, my lifelong mode of consumption, to sit before this lovely woman of epic-scaled decency whom I desperately love and let the bloom just simply tilt there before me, leave it be in the light, undisturbed, unplucked. And if ever I could manage such a thing (if there be Mercy), it should by all rights be at the present moment, when I'm as conscious as I'll ever be of what Rita means (and not solely to me). But what do I do but corral her shoulder and supple neck and deeply kiss her, kiss her, like I've been imagining I would do for the last dim colorless half year, taste the soft pad of her lips, her perennially lemony breath, while in parallel process steeling myself for the next second's indubitable turn, the repulsed insulted shove-off.

What happens, though, is exactly not that, for while she's not pressing into me she's also not quite pulling back, and when I sneak a peek through my bliss-shut eyes I see that she's closed hers extra tight, like someone who's about to get a flu shot, and maybe her heart's thinking is that she'll endure this unpleasant
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but soon invaluable inoculation, the little sickness that wards off the permanently crippling disease.

"Oh, Jerry, what are we doing?"

"We're making love."

"I don't think so."

"Give it a chance."

"I don't want to."

But she lets me kiss her again, and I don't have to be loony to think that she's kissing me the tiniest bit in return, reversing the flow, and then just like that we're standing back in the living room, her arms hanging straight down in a fast-diminishing wish of neutrality, with me holding on to her sides just north of where her hips jut out, my favorite spot no doubt because it was the first patch of her I ever touched; and who but all regular fellows like me (and the occasional Sapphist gal, too) can understand the achy bottoming-out feeling in your variety meats as I glean the gauzy cotton dress for the stringy banding of her panty, this bare narrow line of everyperson's dreams.

Rita turns her face away and buries it in my neck, as if she can't bear to meet my eyes out of shame and self-disbelief, such that I can almost hear her mind going
Idiot I am he such a
slime,
and so it occurs to me that I should hug her as tightly and chastely as I know how, which I do, and in mid-clutch she sort of cracks, literally, her spine aligning with the sudden gravity, and I pretty much carry her to the sofa before I ease her up onto it, hands cupping her thighs, head in her throat, rubbing my face in the heat-heavy spot of her wishbone, the tiny redolent dugout I've tasted thousands of times. And if I could remake myself into just that shape and size it's right here I think I would forever reside.

After a while she says, breathless, "The taxi's going to come."

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"I'm on it," I answer, stumbling back into the kitchen. I pull a $20 bill from my wallet and flag it with a stickup note
(Sorry
buddy.!!)
and close it in the door.

"Let's stop now," she says, when I return.

"All right," I say, but already I'm all over her, making her lie back, her dress nicely crumpling, and after another while she's all over me, roughly, almost angrily, like a woman possessed. I know she's missed me some, too, because she's liberally using her mouth, the diverse songs of which of course I preternaturally love but which always ultimately lend for me a somewhat sorrowful undertone to the production (besides the depraved one instilled early on by my nun-based education), and I pull her up to kiss her and we wrestle out of our clothes. Soon we're in the familiar saddling of our bodies, girl on top but not yet conjoined, hers still amazingly youthful if definitely fleshier than I recall, thicker around the middle and the upper arms and thighs, while I, looking down at myself, am this odd-sectioned hide of pale and tan, flabby and skinny except for my gut, the only remotely vital thing being my thing itself, darkly hued, though only decently angled, in truth looking a bit like something trapped under plastic wrap, reduced for quick sale. Rita maybe senses this, for she grasps it like an old airplane stick, arcing us into a slow and steady climb, and I can't help but wonder aloud, "How was he?"

"Richard?"

"Yeah."

"What are you asking?"

I nod. "You know."

"Jesus, Jerry."

"I can ask."

"No, you can't."

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"But you can tell me."

"Richard was twice the gentleman you are," she says, a spite-ful cast in her eyes.

"And?"

"Okay," she says, gripping down hard. "Maybe only half the man."

I'm pretty sure she's lying, but it doesn't matter in the least, for this is an instance when it really is the thought that counts, and it shows, for suddenly I feel as if I'm giant, as if I have a one-and-only axis, ruddering me blindly to a star, and I whisper, "Do you want to?"

"A-hum," she barely whispers back. She kneels up and lifts herself, her breast sway more pronounced than I remember, showing a bit more travel, which is no awful thing at all. I take a heft of each as she guides us toward the cloistered inlet, our trusty craft hugging the shore, and it's no surprise I feel like I'm encapsulated in the moment, in this module of my dreams, knowing it's of little use or consequence to be still doggedly working the controls. For Rita is the one who's in command, suspending us now in an eddy, for which I'm actually glad, for even at my age I don't know if I can withstand that first quick plunge (it's been a long time, dammit), and it's telling that I wouldn't mind if we simply stayed in this most intimate conti-guity, just hugging, which perhaps reveals the truth of what they say happens even to guys like me, that you go soft first and foremost in the mind, long before the rigging ever fails.

Rita stares me in the eyes. She doesn't want to know whether it'll be another story this time around, because of course in fact it won't be, and rather than some set of hard questions for me is what basic thing she sees she needs that I, in my chronic lack of empathy and wisdom, still somehow manage to provide; I fear A L O F T