Crooked Little Heart (12 page)

T
HREE
weeks later, Veronica and Simone moved back to town. And magically, Rosie pointed out, Simone had become nearly as good a tennis player as Rosie: a thousand miles apart, rarely in contact, each girl had become a tournament-caliber player.

Simone had been taking lessons since she was six, because Veronica had been living with a tennis pro. Simone was a natural player; to no one’s surprise, she practiced little and did not particularly care if she won or lost. She was ranked number seven in the twelve-and-unders her first year of tournaments, one notch beneath Rosie. They were ranked number two in the doubles the first year they played together.

At eleven, she was, as James put it, as fresh and delectable as a newly opened bag of marshmallows. With tennis, Elizabeth hoped, Simone was learning to move with her wild side, her dark side, rather than be ruled by it. She flung herself around with an incredible physicality, throwing herself at everyone but mostly at boys, pushing and jabbing and grabbing things from them, her body in all ways saying, “Hey! Come play with me!”

When Simone was twelve, with breasts budding, all that energy went subterranean, much weakened in the body but still powerful in the spirit. This year, at fourteen, she regained her fierce athleticism. She had the champion’s blithe sense of assurance, the belief when she stepped out on the court that she would probably win. When she lost, she seemed fascinated, more than anything else. Rosie, on the other hand, stepped out onto the court filled with dread at the thought of losing, and when she won, she felt more often than not the purest relief that she had once again escaped the hunter.

J
AMES
was spellbound by Simone, by her husky voice, her insolence, her sexuality, but he kept—or at least tried to keep—a grip on himself.
The first time he saw her sunbathing in her bikini out in back with Rosie, Rosie still built like a beautiful boy, Simone already like a woman, Elizabeth saw his eyes narrow in cunning, a predator spotting his prey—a predator who seemed to be grasping that nothing could be done now, but maybe later.

He shook his head to clear it, shuddered.

“Don’t leer at Rosie’s friends, darling.”

James had the decency to hang his head.

“Men can be so embarrassing,” Elizabeth told Rae later. “Can you imagine lusting after a twelve-year-old boy?”

“No. I guess not. But only because I can’t imagine craving anyone who has never hated LBJ.”

There had been times since when Elizabeth had seen James have to pull his nose out of emotional confusion, like a cat will suddenly sit down and wash, when Simone appeared in one of her tiny outfits, bursting out of the top, her flanks glistening with dark tanning oil. Elizabeth sensed that he wanted to strut and flirt, that he was suffering the basic conflict of civilized man.

“This is how she affects us,” he explained. “We can’t help it. It’s automatic. This wave of feeling passes through us. We don’t act on it, but we think it. She’s a warm little sexual jewel.”

“This little fourteen-year-old girl can whip you all into slavering servitude? Leave you all looking like Luther?”

“Pretty much.”

“Doesn’t this embarrass you at all?”

“Now, now, Elizabeth,” he said primly, mocking her. “I’m hearing a lot of anger today.”

Perhaps, she considered, she was more aware of his admiration for Simone’s beauty because of those times before their marriage when he had been with other women. But why was she dredging this up again, after all these years? It made no sense. Still, she looked off into the middle distance sometimes, remembering how much it had hurt—how scared, how betrayed she had felt.

He had begun to tell her he loved her after they had been together a few months. She had not been able to say that she loved him, too. He said, “I love you”; she said, “Thanks.”

So finally, when she felt like she could say it she had called him at midnight to tell him, to say the words out loud. But a woman with an
English accent had answered, and Elizabeth had hung up. The same thing had happened a second time with another woman. Once again it had been late at night and this time someone had quickly hung up the phone. She was still drinking at the time, and when she’d accused him of faithlessness, he had used the drinking against her, insisting that she must have dialed wrong. But she knew she hadn’t. And the only time in the ensuing years when she had brought it up, as casually as possible, he had said that he honestly hadn’t slept with anyone else since falling in love with her. That she must have misdialed. Remember? he had asked. You were drunk. But she’d never been convinced. In any case, this was years ago; she had been sober and he had been faithful since their marriage, and there was no reason for her to be fixating on it again. Unless perhaps Simone’s flowering sexuality, which had captured her husband’s attention, was rubbing against that old abrasion.

Actually, everyone seemed to be ogling Simone. Even Rae joked in sexual terms about Simone, about how she had recently begun prancing about like an athletic stripper. Just tonight Rae had made a crack when she’d called, full of craving for Mike, shortly before Elizabeth began vacuuming the living room rug.

“Oh, you,” said Elizabeth. “I know just how it feels.”

“How? How do you know?”

“I quit drinking, remember? And smoking. I
know
from withdrawal.”

“I think if I call him, we could talk everything through, and he’d understand that I was worth fighting for.”

“And it would turn out that he was all well!”

“Yes, yes!” cried Rae.

“Oh, honey. This makes me think of something I read somewhere once—that certain kinds of people present themselves to us like huge erect penises. And we stand enthralled and cowed and afraid before them, while they throb and wave from side to side. Mike is like this, honey. You need some very primitive nurturing. You need the breast. But Mike can’t provide that. He can just come over and sway wienielike at you.”

“But I love that in a guy.”

“I know.”

“Well, all I can say is, it’s
Panic in Needle Park
over here right now.
Maybe I’ll stop by your house later, and we can all have sex with Simone.”

Elizabeth kneaded her forehead wearily. “You can’t tonight, as it turns out. They’re at the indoor courts.”

P
LAYING
tennis indoors under stark lights was like playing inside a spaceship. Sounds echoed and hid, boomed forth, then were vacuumed up by all that space. There were five boys and Rosie and Simone tonight, and Peter was doing ground-stroke drills with them as one group. All the kids were playing as hard as they could, raising each other’s levels of play by their sheer force of concentration. Rosie felt enveloped in a fierce dreamy vapor of belonging. They were one, the seven of them laughing at Peter’s jokes about the fat middle-aged ladies drop-shotting each other to death five courts away. The women belonged to Peter’s club, too, but they played here in a league one night a week. He waved affectionately to them and then called his kids by the ladies’ names if he thought they were slacking. “Get off your duff, Ruth Ann,” he had just said to Jason. Peter was up at the net hitting forehands at the kids as hard as he could. When the shopping cart full of balls was empty and the kids stopped to gather them up again, Rosie felt as if she were one of the popular girls. Everyone was working so hard, concentrating, laughing and sweet, even though Peter kept making little jokes, like why do mice have such small balls? Because not very many of them know how to dance.

Peter really poured himself into the practice, but out of nowhere it began to trouble Rosie that he was mocking the ladies. During the mornings when he gave them group lessons, he flirted and joked and complimented them; he actually sort of sucked up to them. She felt worried suddenly that he made fun of her and Simone, too, when they weren’t around, that he joked about them with other men and with these same boys. She thought of something James had said to her mother the other night at dinner. Elizabeth had been talking about Mike and how strange it was that he did so many good deeds in the world and then acted so stingy with Rae. And James said that lots of nurses and therapists and priests were secretly sadists; being so giving and helpful in the world helped them avoid the truth that they didn’t really give a shit about anyone but themselves. They
were takers, but they got to look and feel good about themselves because they were doing such compassionate work. James said that they were lifeless rocks in beautiful settings. That line had stuck with her.

P
ETER
and the kids played for almost three hours; then Peter bought them all sodas and, driving home, told them about his glory days at college, where he’d played doubles on the tennis team. Rosie suddenly understood that he must have believed for a while that he could really be someone, ranked in the world, living on his winnings, traveling all around to tournaments. But here he was, a pro at a cheesy little club in the suburbs, spending all day teaching ladies to play and then mocking them behind their backs—to
kids
.

On the trip home Simone sat in the way back, and although the van’s last seat was designed for two, she was squished between two sixteen-year-old boys. The handsomest one was named Jason, and Simone seemed to have a crush on him. She sounded wiggly, warm. Rosie tried not to listen, tried to hear instead what Peter and another boy in the front seat were talking about. She watched Peter’s handsome face in the rearview mirror, lit by streetlights they passed. He was reciting one of his stupid little poems: Jack and Jill went up the hill, each with a dollar and quarter; Jill came down with two dollars fifty—who says they went up for water? And she saw that he loved being with his best seven kids, so young and gifted and eager, driving along in his brand-new van, which still smelled of leather—and she saw that in the center of all this he was a rock, and her heart brimmed with grief for him.

E
LIZABETH
and James, lying in bed that night, both with books propped open on their chests, listened to the two girls downstairs trying to go to sleep in the living room. They had come in from practice, plopped down at the kitchen table with James and Elizabeth, eaten gigantic bowls of cereal, and then set up their sleeping bags on the dark green living room rug.

James was listening now, hoping for a classic Simone moment. Elizabeth started to ask him something, but he put his fingers to his lips and tilted his head toward the open bedroom door.

“Do you ever think about being crucified?” they heard Simone say.

“
God
, Simone.”

“But you know, think about Jesus. I was thinking about him yesterday. See? You’d just hang there like this—pooping all over yourself until you died, with people watching.”

“Oh God, Simone,” said Rosie. “That’s so disgusting.”

“Wait! This is really incredible—you need to tell everyone this. You should definitely tell Rae. You know how Jesus’s life from nineteen to thirty-three is missing? And no one knows where he was? Well, I found out. He was in Budapest.”

“What on earth was he doing there?”

“Learning Buddhism.”

Elizabeth and James began to laugh, with their hands clapped over their mouths. Elizabeth rolled closer to him and buried her face against his chest.

“I’m not going to marry a Christian, though,” Simone continued. “I want to marry a Mafia guy. They’re cute. But unfaithful.”

“I
’
M
going to go downstairs and tuck them in,” she told James, who shook his head.

“Just let them be. They’ll fall asleep soon.” Elizabeth glanced at the clock. It was nearly eleven.

“Hey, you two,” she called down. “Go to sleep!” The conversation in the living room stopped for a moment; then the girls dissolved into helpless giggling. When they were together, they could get lost in full-on absurdity, in the wonderful headiness of recognizing absurdity everywhere. It was like emotional surfing for them—the vigorous laughter right on the verge of tears, both riding the waves of pure intensity. And it was safe. Because when you played with such intensity, you had to do it with someone else; by yourself it led to total craziness, and you might not find your way back.

Finally the girls settled down. There was silence, except for the sound of James turning the pages of the book he was reading. “I’m going to go down and tuck the girls in,” Elizabeth said again, but as it turned out, they did not need her to. They were tucked in against each other. In the golden, old-fashioned light of the street lamp, they looked like girls in a daguerreotype. Their sleeping faces were lovely, so
terribly open that Elizabeth nearly moaned, wanting to put up a shield around them. Simone stirred and rubbed one cheek against her shoulder, like a deer rubbing its antlers, her lips in the pout of a sleeping toddler, not the saucy sulky lips of adolescence. Elizabeth looked up at the living room windows and went to pull the curtains. Images of teenage boys, Luther, Peter Billings, flickered through her head. She rolled her eyes at herself: What were you going to do, hire a bodyguard for your kid? Rosie cleared her throat and flung an arm over her head like a ballerina, then settled back in against Simone. They were so still in the lamplight, pure unconscious children, so free of the isometric tension of wanting to be noticed and wanting to be invisible, and Elizabeth watched them sleep for a while longer before going back upstairs.