Belly (5 page)

How long was it before she changed? How long before the alcohol took hold of her, so she had to fight her own hands to keep
from pouring the wine or whiskey during four pregnancies? How long before her body changed from tight and thin and athletic
to soft and heavy and inert? And then how could he resist, who would even want him to resist the cream puff from Half Moon
with her big guitar and her small breasts? And then Nora’s little friend from summer camp, his second—he never told Nora,
of course—and then that woman from the track who kept her white straw hat on so she wouldn’t mess up her hair. There were
so many, and never did he think twice about it until Loretta. He thought twice about Loretta. Three times. Over and over,
from the moment he saw her, he thought about Loretta, he mulled it over. Because just from looking at her he could tell that
it wouldn’t be just once, not with a woman like that.

And even though Loretta was so beautiful, so vital, so much the anti-Myrna, oozing with confidence, all painted and perfumed
and well preserved, that first time, in the back room, he had to keep his eyes closed. In the self-imposed darkness he put
his lips to hers, like two rows of zipper teeth meeting, metal on metal, yes, sparks, enamel on enamel, and he felt so guilty.
He opened his eyes, he looked at Loretta pressed to the wall with her leg up and her shirt off and he said, “I’m in trouble
now.”

But Loretta was not here. It was Maybelline.

It was Maybelline who held him too tight and too long. “Time to take the convict home,” he said, swinging one leg over the
bed.

“Can’t you stay here?”

She lay back on the lacy pillows in her red bra and granny underwear. A long black treasure trail ran from her navel, all
those hairs pointing down there like arrows.

He was so bored he didn’t even want to say no.

“I gotta go,” he said. He stood and slipped on his jeans and buttoned them, stepped into his cowboy boots.

She tossed a teddy bear at his head and he thought, What is the bare minimum I have to do to get with this girl again, maybe
just once more?

She scooched over in her little bed to make room for him, and he curled himself around her, and he knew right then there would
be nothing between them, the way her hips pressed into his thighs instead of his stomach; their bodies just did not fit. But
he closed his eyes and pretended that he held someone else, anyone else, any of the women he had loved or lusted after, he
held her tight to him and ran his old-man hands along the soft skin of her inner arms until she was satisfied.

She put on the classic rock station as she drove him back to town. It was only 10:30 according to Maybelline’s Hello Kitty
watch, but he was so tired. He wondered what it would be like to come home at night with his fingertips stained from espresso,
smelling of coffee grounds instead of booze. There were things he missed about the bar business: his pockets stuffed with
wads of cash, smoky memories lingering on his shirt collar, meeting the sunrise most nights. He missed the mixing-in of vermouth
and bitters, the satisfaction of pouring a perfect head on a Guinness. He missed that moment when he had a specialty drink
ready and waiting for a regular: Loretta’s Cuba Libre, Phillip Sr.’s god-awful Miller High Life—the Champagne of beers—Carlson’s
boilermaker, and a Shirley Temple for his never-ending supply of much-older lady friends, a Black Russian for Clem the sign
painter, Stoli vanilla to start for Huck and Harmony the hippie couple, who made their way by the end of the night to prune
liqueur, Rob Roys for the Knippenbergs, and always a Manhattan for Mad Martha, the cleanest bum ever known to man. In the
winter sometimes, the graveyard shift guys from the Ball plant would stop in for a Bass.

He did not miss the vomit and the occasional brawl, the Skidmore students with sorry excuses for fake IDs indignant and threatening
to sue when the bouncer turned them away, his wife Myrna’s constant whining at the hours he kept, the impossible task of taxes
in a cash-based business, the regulars whose skin sagged perceptibly from week to week, the effects of alcohol visible as
they stumbled out to empty homes every night. August was the time he hated and cherished the most: fresh blood in the bar,
bets rolling in and then away, trying to keep afloat in the sea of crisp bills. Every August, he longed for September to come
and save him, and as soon as September arrived, he wished the summer would return. For twenty-four days a year, back then,
he owned the world.

Maybelline dropped him off and chirped, “Call me!” before she drove away. He had the card with her phone number and the lighter
and the too-sweet scent of her perfume stuck to his collar, and he thought then that he might sidestep all the unpleasantness
of starting over and just move in with her out there in Ballston Spa. Get free meals at Springway Diner. Split the gas for
her Hyundai. Three blow jobs a week and cheap rent. He’d be all right.

O
utside, in the tiny backyard, a girl swayed in the white rope hammock with a laptop computer on her legs. He couldn’t see
her face at first, just her long legs in tight jeans hugging her behind, long hair in a wild knot. All memories of Maybelline
were murdered by that body. He thought, I want to pull on that hair. He cleared his throat.

“You Ann’s friend?”

She turned.

What a dog. Her face really looked like a dog, like a basset hound, every feature too long, too sad. Her smile was a teardrop
of lips.

“So you’re Belly.” She dropped a foot out of the hammock to make it swing. She wore big black boots, shit kickers almost.
They made a dent in the soft ground and dry grass. “You’re awfully thin for your nickname.”

“I lost twenty pounds in prison,” he lied.

“The food was that bad?” she asked, her question hooking up and then falling at the end, as if she were a Brit.

“Better than you’d think. And a state-of-the-art gym.” He tried to flex his biceps, but they seemed to have shrunk on the
way home.

The Basset Hound stared at him. He dug his foot in the dirt.

“Thanks for letting me stay in your room.”

“It’s not my house,” he said. Then, “No problem.” He took out a cigarette and held the pack out to her, but she shook her
head. He was down to sixteen cigarettes, and they were now more than five bucks a pack. It was miserable math.

“I’m only here for three more days,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I’m at Skidmore for this journalism conference.”

“It’s fine,” he said.

“But I’d love to talk to you about your experience of the last four years before I leave.” She sounded so formal and faraway,
like a telemarketer.

“Sure.”

She stared at him a minute, as if she were waiting for him to ask her a question.

“I’m a journalist,” she said, as if that answered it.

She sat straight up in the hammock then, and he could see she was too tall for him, all stretched out like taffy. “Do you
think we could meet tomorrow for a cup of coffee? I’m buying.”

Her questions kept pulling on him. He took a long drag of his cigarette, blew a line of smoke straight toward her midriff,
toward her big silver belt buckle engraved with a hammer and sickle. “That depends,” and he gave her his famous half-turned
smile. “Will sex be involved?”

She didn’t laugh.

“So tomorrow,” she said, and she stood up, the whole giraffe of her with the basset hound head, and leaned in to shake his
hand. “Okay, then,” she said, and she shook his hand hard, like a man.

“You smell good,” he said. “You smell like vegetable soup.”

The Basset Hound went in and up to her room, and he looked at the three-story Queen Anne Victorian with the sloping side porch
and the attic lit up like a fiery heaven and he knew he’d never make it to the top.

E
ven before he left they were working on this ailing, aging house, tearing out the saggy oak slabs and setting down new pine
floorboards. They’d once painted it in what Nora termed “historically accurate colors,” a jarring pink with darker-pink shutters,
off-white windows, and teal trim, but now all the paint had faded, and the house craved cover for the patches of joint compound
and scarred-up siding. It looked like a candy house after a thunderstorm, what Hansel and Gretel found deep in the woods.
Tacked to the front, along the street, was a long front porch that nobody used anymore, not since he and Phillip Sr. had occupied
it two decades before. Their two chairs sat lonely next to the railing, waiting for ghosts to roost.

He climbed up the little side porch and pushed open the screen door.

“You missed dinner,” Nora said as he came into the kitchen. “Jesus, you reek. I can smell you from here. Go wash your mouth
out.”

“I love beer,” he said. “I love it.” Nora sat at the table with the baby asleep against her chest, leafing through a gardening
catalog.

“Drink all you want now, but you better be sober on Sunday.”

He opened the fridge and took out the last Piels. “No problem,” he said. “Anybody call?”

“Not for you.”

“Where is everybody?”

“Asleep, Belly, it’s eleven o’clock.”

“Jesus, you know, this is about the latest I’ve been up in years. We had lights out at ten.”

Nora said, “I’m sorry.” She squeezed his hand.

“Where’s the husband?”

“The restaurant.”

“He ever show up here?”

“He lives here.”

“I’m just saying, when is he home?”

Nora turned the pages of the catalog. “He gets home between three and four, sleeps till noon, and does it all over again the
next day. He works his ass off for us.”

“I see.”

“What? What do you see?”

“I just see, is all.”

“Oh, Jesus, Belly.” She slammed the catalog shut, and the baby made a low moan. She lowered her voice to say, “He keeps the
same hours you did. The restaurant business, remember? Remember what it’s like to work for a living?”

“I remember I stayed out much later than I had to,” Belly said, watching Nora’s tough face thaw just a little, a tiny tremor
at the corner of her mouth. He smiled at her.

“Good night, darling Nora,” he said.

She said, “Brush your goddamned teeth.”

The house was quiet. He grabbed his duffel bag and crept through the kitchen to the TV room, through the TV room to the dining
room, and up the stairs where the boys’ rooms were, and Nora’s bedroom, and the dark room where the Basset Hound was now undressing,
then up another creaky flight of stairs to the attic. The whole Schuylkill FCI was one floor, and he hadn’t climbed steps
in four years. His hips, legs, lower back all ached from the long bus ride, from walking, from fucking, from mounting these
crooked steps.

From the attic rose the old summer camp scent of mildew and musk. A twin bed was squeezed into the corner, under the rafters
and next to the eyebrow windows. How could he sleep here, he’d never be able to sleep here, it was too much like a cell. He
inspected all the items hiding in the tiny alcoves of the attic, the caves: an old spinning wheel, property of his great-grandmother
who once owned a sheep farm in Ireland; ugly pressed-wood furniture that must be left over from Phil’s bachelor days; a broken
lava lamp; a pile of canvases pressed against the wall. He leafed through them, big blobs of institutional green-gray with
little specks of red, his youngest daughter Eliza’s initials at the bottom. There were a few more realistic paintings, and
he recognized some from her high school career. Nude figures, which he lingered over for a moment, a portrait of his wife,
Myrna, in her younger days, against a black and glittering sky. He stopped at the last one. He recognized the face, the eyes,
her mother’s eyes, the wavy blond hair, Eliza’s sister, his lost daughter, no date. He turned it back to face the wall.

If he knew anything, he knew you were not supposed to have favorites, or if you did, you weren’t supposed to admit it. But
there were so many reasons to love the third one best. Nora was born with a glare, all her early words five letters with
w
’s—scowl and frown and growl. And after her came Ann, with those gray eyes, huge gray woman eyes in a four-and-a-half-year-old
blond head, gazing at her father with total indifference. And Eliza, the baby, a colicky baby at that, up and crying all the
time, eyes and nose and ears and mouth all running with waterfalls of want. They came into the world with their personalities
already formed—the angry one, the apathetic one, the sad one, and the one who seemed to feel nothing but joy. His perfect
little angel.

The third girl was born with her mother’s green eyes, open and sallow as a sickened sea. But she was all his, even as a baby,
a toddler, a little and then bigger kid, as a seven-year-old trailing six inches behind him at the track, twenty-four days
in August made just for the two of them, her begging him to bet only on the gray horses, him explaining to her day after day
how the odds worked, the higher the odds, the more the bet would pay. And he lost her like that, like a bet on the high odds,
his beautiful sixteen-year-old girl in her thrift-store dresses and the shabby pink grandma cardigan around her shoulders.
He shook his head and breathed through his mouth, fluttering his lips like a horse to expunge thoughts of her from his memory.

He pressed back behind the piles of junk, and there lay hidden the contents of his old above-the-bar apartment. His favorite
brown recliner. His neon Piels sign. The wall-sized poster of a white sandy beach with a palm tree. He had never owned much.
Even after his third daughter was gone and then Myrna left him and he and Ann and Eliza all crammed into the cramped two-bedroom
apartment, they had not collected
stuff.
Nora surely made up for it now, overflowing her house with toys and books and videos and those ridiculous little porcelain
figurines that sat in his mother’s old hutch in the dining room.

He unpacked his duffel bag and placed the contents into his grandfather’s old scuffed dresser. Humidity had seeped into the
wood, expanding it, and the drawers resisted as he pulled them out. One by one he unloaded his clothes, jeans and jeans and
jeans and white button-down shirts that he hung in the makeshift closet Nora had fixed—a metal bar wedged between two rafters.
His thick white socks and his collection of plaid boxer shorts. Always the same clothes, every day. His two good pairs of
trousers he put on a hanger, vowing never to wear them. He had honed his fashion style back when Loretta told him how sorry
he looked in dress pants, how they hung off him and made him look old. He thought of his style as vaguely rock star—the jeans
and cowboy boots and white shirts—but a fogey rock star, Rick Springfield maybe. Jackson Browne. Somebody over the hill, but
somebody who looked good over there, on his way down. He finished unpacking, and as he pressed the drawers shut, they squeaked,
and the sound echoed off the wooden beams and made him feel too small and too alone in this high, dark cave of a space.