Braided Lives (55 page)

“Big deal. So she gets married with a belly. Her and everybody else.”

“She can’t get married. She told you she didn’t sleep with guys. She doesn’t do it with her boyfriend. So it can’t be passed off as his.”

“Don’t look at me. I ain’t claiming it either.”

All the guys laugh. I keep looking at Kemp. “I’m going to get her an operation, from that doctor in Dexter. But her folks don’t have money. We’re both in this place on scholarships. So if you want to know why I’m mad at you, I got a good reason, ‘cause I don’t know where to get that money.”

“Get lost,” Kemp says to his two friends. “Hang out in Ovid’s,” he pronounces it Oveed’s. “I’ll see you later.”

They obey him. I do not walk off. I am curious about what he is going to say. He does not say anything but takes my elbow in a firm but by no means rough grip and steers me across the street to the silver convertible I recognize. He opens the door on my side. “No dice,” I say. “No reason to make it two for two. I got enough problems.”

“Never used force on a female in my life. In my opinion, guys who got to do that, they don’t know their prick from a baseball bat. You’re safe with me, if you want to be safe.” He strolls around to climb in his side.

Standing there I surprise myself by grinning broadly. What is it? A little Francis, a little Dino. He moves with the grace of a man whose body is his only asset. Whatever he saw in me in the last five minutes I have also seen in him. I get in, thinking I am being both stupid and reckless. As he turns the ignition on, the car radio begins to play hard driving rock. The great boat of the car swings out into the street and lurches off. The music is loud; we do not talk.

In ten minutes we are on a country road. I must be out of my mind. Casually I reach into my purse and arrange my keys (the key to the coop that Alberta gave me, the keys to my parents’ house, the key to the room where PAF meets) between my knuckles. An empty Stroh’s Bohemian Ale bottle lies on the floor. I put my foot on it to roll it within grabbing distance.

He pulls up at a dead end on a bluff overlooking a wide bend of the river. The sun is setting and the scene would be pretty if I wasn’t scared. He broods on it. “What are you going to do for money?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve been trying to borrow some.”

“You could make it hustling.”

“Shit on that. I saw too much of that hard life when I was home. I won’t do that, even for her.”

“You could make a lot of money that way. Fast.”

“I don’t want to use myself that way. I’d rather steal the money than whore for it.”

He laughs. “You’d rather steal it. You think that’s easy to do?”

“No. But acceptable. Why?”

“Just curious.” He grins at me. His eyes are the color of my mother’s (flash of guilt, her lost teeth), of mine. His skin is darker. He has strong teeth but an incisor is discolored, probably from being struck. His hands rest on the wheel, lightly. “I like this place.”

“I’ve never been here.”

“Bet there’s a lot around here you never seen.”

“I bet you’re right.”

“I respect your coming to me. I respect that. You got guts.” He gives the wheel a chop with the side of his hand.

He thought I came down that street on purpose. “Guts or naïveté? What is it?”

“You still a little scared?”

“Why not?”

“You’re not going to pull that number your cousin did. Say you’re a virgin.”

“What has that got to do with it? You think because I balled one man, I got to ball every man who thinks he wants to? How would you like it if you had to ball any woman anytime she thought you ought to?”

“You only had one man?”

“Two.”

“Want to make it three?” He extends his arm along the back of the seat.

“My mind’s on money, not sex.”

“Like you say, you won’t hustle for money. But if I told you I’d help you get the money, you’d ball me.”

He’s not stupid. I draw my legs up and face him on the bench of the seat. I cannot help but smile. “What do you do? Who are you? Were you born in town? Is Kemp your first or last name?”

“The sun’s down. I like to get out in the country. When I was a kid, there was a lot more country here. Not so many fancy professors’ houses. More rabbits and pheasant. Even some deer. Ever had deer meat?”

“My uncle Floyd used to give it to us. He worked in the mines in Pennsylvania and when he was off work, he liked being in the woods.”

“I work in an optics factory. Ball-busting work. Gives you a headache so your scalp could break open like a cracked tomato. Buddy works there too and Ray. One good thing is we go through it together.”

“Buddy really hurt her. It was no joke. She was covered with bruises and her back was so sore she had to stay flat for two days.”

Kemp shrugs. “Buddy’s a horse’s ass. You give him something, he won’t let go of it.”

“You never did answer me your name. What do you think I’ll do if I know it?”

“I don’t want to ball you here. In the car. I want to take you back to my house. See, if you want to talk, we got to go to bed. Because otherwise we don’t have enough of a basis in common. Right?”

“Orville Wright. It’ll never get off the ground.”

“Sure it will. All you got to say is yes.”

“Otherwise will you take me back to town?”

“Right back where you live. Think I’d dump you here? One time I found a girl walking down the road, eleven thirty at night with her blouse tore. Some dude from the basketball team did it to her. Tore her blouse because she wouldn’t fuck him. So he just dumped her out of the car in the middle of Lodi township.”

“You going to tell me you rescued her?”

“Sure. Why not? Besides, she wasn’t my type. Too skinny. Flat all over. And she was shaking. I don’t like broads that scare easy.”

I don’t want to go back to the co-op where Stephanie is gloating about Howie and Donna is worrying about Peter. Besides, he feels so curiously down-home. If I had got involved with Kemp at fifteen, it would have been fatal; but at twenty, I suspect I can have him if I want and survive handily. “Who lives in your house?” I don’t want a gang bang set up on me.

“Just me. I’m on my own. You’ll be surprised. I live good.” He switches on the engine and the lights. Suddenly it is night.

“Could we eat first? I’m hungry. I usually am.”

“How about spaghetti and meatballs? At my place. I bet I cook better than you do.”

“No contest.” I sit back. Whatever crazy thing I am doing, I am doing it.

Kemp has a little house on a gravel road you get to by going way out West Liberty until you begin to see working farms. He has a bedroom and a combination living room-kitchen heated by a wood stove. Outside, the neatly split wood is stacked. It’s homey and certainly as clean as I keep my room back at the co-op.

Times blur. With Kemp few sharp scenes form. The first time was more awkward than the succeeding times, but our conversation always occurred in spurts.

Kemp is no reprise of my childhood delinquents, for country and city blend and collide in him. He grows tomatoes, lettuce and eggplants in his garden. The sweet and the hot peppers are around the corner from each other. He says the hot peppers are male and the sweet peppers are female, and if you put them in the same bed, the males get at the females and make them hot too. Between my first and second visits, we have a frost. He pulls up the tomato plants entire and hangs them from the rafters. The hot peppers he dries. The sweet ones fill the refrigerator. He chars them at the flame in the wood stove, then braises them in olive oil.

He is the first really good cook I have met. I think from an occasional pot of sumptuous rosemary chicken or manicotti that appears after he has been at home, that his mother taught him. He’s a bastard; Kemp was his father’s last name, a married truck driver. His father gave his mother money when Kemp was little but after the man went away to the army, they never heard from him again. His mother waited all through the war; then in 1946 when Kemp was eleven, she married a man who worked in the same plant. She was thirty then and she had three more children in rapid succession, lost a couple and finished with one more at thirty-eight. Kemp has two half brothers and two half sisters. We agree that connection through the mother is strong.

Because he was a boy and already beginning to run with the other guys and pull away from home when his siblings began to appear in an almost annual harvest, he did not feel stuck with them. He loves to appear laden with presents, playing Kemp the magnificent. He struts like a dark rooster, adored by everybody except his mother’s husband Jerry, who is awkward with him. Kemp doesn’t mind. “Julietta,” he says, his name for me since he finds Jill too Wasp, “I owe him a big one. He got me off the hook.” Because he feels he lives better than they do, he tastes a little guilt: hence the constant presents. “If she hadn’t of married that poor tired old horse, I’d still be handing over half of my paycheck, still paying on a mortgage from the year one for a house at least that old.” One of the presents he takes to his siblings this week are brother and sister kittens—Minouska’s offspring.

He is cock of the walk, he is king of his cronies, so he may indulge himself in cooking. He cooks and I wash dishes. He is as fussy as my mother that I get them clean, but he is better than my mother at teaching me to cook. She wanted my help without wanting to share her skills. Most of what he cooks is Italian, but if we eat out and he tastes something he likes, he attempts to reproduce it. Because he didn’t learn from books, he lacks the vocabulary I will acquire later. When he is telling me to do some assistant’s job, he will say, “You put it on the soft fry,” in teaching me how to saute onions instead of frying them to brown plastic shards. He calls it a soft fry because it leaves food soft.

Because he likes to eat well, because he likes to carry presents to his two half brothers and his two half sisters who lack too many things for the list ever to sustain a serious dent no matter how fervid his generosity, because his mother has a bad chronic cough, because nobody knows more how to enjoy what there is before him to enjoy, he supplements his income from the optics factory with thieving.

He has a good mind that has passed through public school with its ignorance of books or the world of culture never enduring abrasion. He has not read a book since he left school except for a try at
Tropic of Cancer
in a battered and imported paperback, because he was told it was dirty. Betsy, one of the whores who hang out at Ovid’s, gave it to him. Her clientele is university professors. Certainly she reads more contemporary fiction than anybody I ever found teaching in the department of English.

His intelligence finds its outlet not only in cooking but in stealing. For an amateur thief, he is careful and successful. His impulses play themselves out with women. I am one of three or four he is seeing. “A little of this, a little of that, it’s more fun,” he tells me, waiting to see if I will play jealous. I am not; I do not. A little of Kemp is just perfect, once or twice a week.

I am saddened that my adventures must be with men. If I walked into Ovid’s by myself, I could not stay. I would be harassed till I left. I could never sit in on conversations. If I came in alone, the whores would never chat with me. If I wandered the seedy Ann Arbor underworld he moves so grandly through, unpleasant and violent things would happen to me. Following after Kemp Tomaso Fuselli I walk through walls. Sometimes I am visible; sometimes I am invisible. In both modes I listen and watch and I am fed.

With Donna’s education in small snobberies and the university’s education in major snobberies, I have been forgetting something of myself I want to remember. Furthermore, in the world of the university, men who are drawn to me still know that a blond Wasp dressed by Peck and Peck would be more desirable. Here my Oriental eyes and glittering black hair mean less than my body. I feel myself my mother’s daughter in a strong new way, even as I worry about her when I am trying to sleep. Kemp’s friends define me as smart, but that does not make me asexual as it did in high school. My being smart redounds to Kemp’s credit. He shows me off like a new car.

What do I flee to in Kemp’s shack? Sex, you say? Nonsense. He is too involved in his own pleasure to be great in bed. If he manages to put off coming long enough, he is a delightful and sensual lover, but when he feels like coming, he comes. That tension makes it hard for me, since I never know if I let myself mount in excitement whether he will pull the plug. Then I am barely able to control a desire to bite off his head. I form the conviction that that is why the female praying mantis turns and attacks the male in midact. He has probably just prematurely come. To a woman who reaches orgasm in intercourse, all ejaculation before her climax is premature. He does not make me come any other way and at that point in my and our common history, I do not know I can ask for that.

But I like being in bed with Kemp because his personality doesn’t change. He doesn’t get deadly intent or infantile or weird. He makes me laugh in bed. My most intense pleasure with him is at table. What I like best is that although we talk a lot, here the intellect is not primary. I live among people who think that analyzing something is an action, who think that if they have dissected why they have done something that makes it permissible to do it again, who think that a label gives possession, that when they have identified a sharp-shinned hawk they know something of hawkness—wooing high in the air and sinking with talons locked, swooping on live prey and tasting the fresh blood spurt hot, feeling with each extended feather the warm and cold shift of the winds and the sculpture of the invisible masses of moving air. Dealing in words, I try to remember how far they go and where they leave off. Hungry for food for my brain, I try to remember all the other ways of knowing that coexist. Kemp is good for me, but I cannot persuade Donna or Stephanie.