Flesh and Blood (15 page)

Cassandra said, “We were just discussing the ins and outs of the business.”

Trancas glanced at Zoe. Trancas's face was clouded with embarrassment and a defiant anger that resembled pride but was not pride.

“Right,” she said. “The business.”

“My only advice to you, dear,” Cassandra said, “is don't undersell. Not at your age. You could get twenty dollars for taking off your
shirt,
don't suck cock for less than fifty. If somebody tries to tell you he can get a blow job for half that much up the block, he's talking about getting it from some tired old thing who can barely walk unassisted and who needs her glasses to find a hard-on. Tell him to go right ahead and get himself a bargain, if that's what he's after. Now, if you're willing to fuck 'em, charge a hundred, at least. Don't flinch when you name your price. Don't bargain. And if you
do
fuck, make them all wear condoms. You don't know
where
some of those cocks have been.”

“Okay,” Trancas said.

“And, baby,” Miss Cinnamon said, “I was telling your friend here, carry protection. You get yourself some Mace, and a pretty little knife you can slip down in your boot.”

“Right,” Trancas said.

“We're the voices of experience, dear,” Cassandra said. “Listen to your aunts.”

“Okay,” Trancas said, and her face briefly shed its habitual expression of ardent mistrust.

They stood for a moment in silence, the four of them. Zoe was filled with a queasy mixture of love and fear unlike any emotion she could remember. She felt herself leaving her old life, the dinners and furniture, the calm green emptiness of the back yard. As a little girl she'd imagined living in the woods, but she knew she couldn't do that, not really. She couldn't build a nest in a tree, eat mushrooms and berries. Even if she'd had the courage to try it, someone would have come for her. She'd have been sent to one of the places that received girls who believed they could escape a life of rooms, and kept there until she'd renounced her wishes.

These were woods no one could stop her from living in. This was a destiny a girl was allowed to make for herself, this immense promiscuous city that harbored the strangest children.

She said to Cassandra, “Could I take you to tea sometime?”

Cassandra blinked, started to smile. “Excuse me? Tea?”

“Or, you know. A cup of coffee. I'd just like to talk to you. You're my aunt, right?”

Cassandra paused, considering. She smiled at Miss Cinnamon. Zoe felt as if she were talking to two wealthy, celebrated women. They had that private entitlement. They had that lofty, sneering grace.

“Tea,” he said to Miss Cinnamon, and he pronounced the word as if it was both funny and frightening. Then he got a pen from the bartender and wrote his number on a napkin.

“You should know,” he said as he handed the napkin to Zoe, “that your Aunt Cassandra will kill you if you ever, under any circumstances, call this number before three in the afternoon. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Zoe said. “I understand.”

Miss Cinnamon said, “There is nothing more evil than a drag queen getting woken up before she's ready. Believe me, baby, you don't want to mess with
that.”

1972/
Will and Inez and Charlotte dropped acid together one last time, declared their devotion, and all went back to their parents' houses for the summer. When Will's parents picked him up at the train station in Garden City and took him home, he was surprised to see that the town looked both ridiculous and deeply familiar, familiar in an almost otherworldly sense. He might have been a hypnotist's subject on the verge of remembering a past life. He might have been traveling in another country where he knew supernaturally that the driver would take the next left turn, and that a gabled yellow house would appear from behind the scrubby blackness of a mulberry tree. He'd been prepared for his feeling of bored irritation at the sight of the unaltered lawns and the prim, prosperous houses. He'd imagined exactly his own sense of weighdessness as his father drove with both hands on the wheel and his mother talked about the new swimming trunks she'd bought for him on sale. What he hadn't expected was the sense of comfort, of almost surreal location. He'd never expected to feel, as his father's Buick turned the familiar corner, that he had in any sense come home. When he got out of the car he stood on the lawn staring at the house his father's money had built, grand in its suburban way, a big rambling folly with mansard roofs and bay windows, clean as bone in the summer light. There were no books inside, except the paperback bestsellers his mother read on summer vacations. There was no object, no dish or furnishing, older than Will. But there was familiar food. There was sanctuary. His father commanded the house from a position of profound and eternal ownership, and Will remained his father's servant in some way that was all the more powerful for being nameless.

“Penny for your thoughts,” his mother said.

“Huh? Oh, sorry.”

“I made chicken salad. Are you hungry?”

“I guess so. Sure.”

“Come on in, then. It's so good to have you home.”

He stayed less than two days. His flight was decided the first night. His father asked over dinner, “So, what do you think about a major?”

“I think I want to teach,” Will said.

It was a lie. He was surprised to hear himself telling it. He didn't want to teach. Teaching was monotonous, thankless, underpaid. He wanted to study architecture. He wanted to build.

His mother, thinner and more prone to smiling silences than he remembered, ran her fingernail along the rim of her plate. Iridescent flecks, hard little rainbows of electric light, flashed and faded in the prismed chandelier.

“Teach,” his father said. He pronounced the word with disdainful neutrality. He made a little brick of sound. Will's father had grown larger. His flesh had the puffed, padded quality of fat loaded onto a man born to be thin. Will suspected his father had gained precisely the amount of weight his mother had lost.

“Yeah. Teach.”

Zoe sat across from Will in her carnival colors, her patchy hobo-girl clothes and her tinkling gypsy jewelry. She smiled helplessly at him.

“Teach what?” his father asked.

“Kids,” Will said. Everything he said surprised him. He'd declared English literature originally, then switched to linguistics, and had now more or less settled on taking the courses he would need to apply to architecture schools after he graduated. He'd signed up to study Palladio and Frank Lloyd Wright in the fall. He'd be learning about the conduction of electricity through a room. But he needed a different life to show his father. He needed a self that didn't touch him.

He said, “I think I'd like to teach the kids everybody's written off. Like, maybe work with Head Start.”

“I think you'd be very good with children,” his mother said. “You'd be a wonderful teacher.”

“You need to go to Harvard for that?” his father said. “You could teach pickaninnies with two years of junior college.”

“Don't use a word like that when I'm here,” Will told him.

“Sorry. Nee-groes. Colored children. I don't get it. Where does the fancy education come in?”

“No, you answer one for me, Dad. Where does all this hate come from? What's the point? What does it get you?”

“Now, don't start, you two,” his mother said. Her fingernail made its faint scratching, a clean dry sound, on the china.

“What hate?” his father said. “I don't hate anybody, unless they give me a reason to. What I want to know is, why are you going to Harvard, to goddamn
Harvard,
if all you want to do is teach Neee-gro children?”

“That's it,” Will said. He took his napkin from his lap and threw it onto his plate. “Mom, dinner was delicious.”

“Honey, you've hardly eaten anything.”

“I've lost my appetite.”

“Come on,” his father said. “Don't be a prima donna. If you can't take a little straight talk, I don't know how you think you're gonna do in a classroom full of jungle bunnies.”

Will stood. He looked down at his father, who sat surrounded by his wealth, chewing. His father wore green plaid pants. On the wallpaper, blue pagodas rose over country bridges and wading cranes. Will wanted only one thing—to be strange to his family. To disappear. For a moment he thought of looking calmly into his father's satisfied feeding and saying, 'I sleep with men.' He thought of kissing his father goodbye. He was filled with fury and shame and an uncertain desire that sizzled in his blood like a swarm of bees.

“Billy,” his mother said. “Honey, sit down and finish your dinner.”

Billy. At the sound of his old name, spoken in his mother's voice, Will left the room. He hadn't told them about his new name. He felt dizzy with his emotions. He heard his father say, “If you can't take a little frank talk, I wish you luck with the world.” Will's stomach lurched. He wasn't ready to disappear, not yet. He still didn't know what was true about him, and if he said too much he could never come back.

Later that night, Zoe came to his room. She knocked so softly that he knew without having to ask. “Come in, Zo,” he said. His father would have pounded. His mother would have rapped, courteous but firm and measured, the sound of a body of intentions steady as hail. Only Zoe conveyed the impression that she could be ignored.

She wore a torn orange T-shirt that advertised the Carlsbad Caverns, where she'd never been, and a gauzy skirt covered with red arabesques. A bell the size and shape of a woman's thumbnail hung from a black velvet ribbon she'd tied around her neck.

“Hi,” she said.

“Come in, Zoe,” he said. The room still held artifacts. A Dylan poster, foil stars pasted to the ceiling. “Come on, sit here on the bed with me.”

He thought, briefly, of Cody, who claimed to see the light of human emanations. Sometimes Will believed he could see a faint light that hovered around Zoe, though it didn't resemble the electrified fields Cody described. It was barely visible, a phosphorescence, as if some ghost of Zoe occasionally rose a quarter inch off the surface of her skin. Will wasn't mystical. He never thought with any seriousness about tricks of vision. But right now he admitted to himself that sometimes, when he looked at Zoe quickly, he seemed to surprise a pale flickering light that skittered over her when no one watched.

She entered, smelling of patchouli, and sat on the edge of his bed. How had such a noisy, covetous family produced her?

“What's up?” he said. He touched the black tangle of her hair. Only for Zoe did he feel this painful affection. He loved others but Zoe was the one he worried over, the one who inspired his fear. She was precarious; she came and went.

“I'm glad you're home,” she said. “I've been missing you.”

“Zo, I won't make it through a whole summer here,” Will said. “I think I'd better go back to Cambridge.”

“Already?” she said.

“God, Zoe, what do you do to your hair? You don't have spiders or anything in here, do you?”

“It's so soon,” she said. “You haven't seen Bix or Larry or anybody.”

“Things'll get worse. Dad and I will be slugging it out in another few days. Remember last summer?”

“What would you do in Cambridge?” she said.

“I can find a job, I don't care what it is. You can always get a job if you don't care what you do.”

“Couldn't you stay for a while? A week?”

“I think I'd better just go,” he said. “I'm not even going to unpack.”

“Please?”

“Come on.”

She nodded. “I'm mostly being selfish,” she said. 'Tm afraid one day we'll just be, you know. Relatives.”

'I'll always recognize you, Zo. I'll know you by your hair.”

“I wish I could go, too,” she said.

He took her hand. He wanted to say to her, I can't stay because I don't belong to the family anymore, but I can't find a way to leave it either. He wanted to tell her everything. But Zoe was still part of the house, and he needed this secret. He needed flight.

“You'll be gone soon enough,” he said. “And you can come up and stay with me in Cambridge anytime, okay? I can always afford a train ticket for you. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

“You want to smoke a joint?” he asked.

“Mm-hm.”

He took a joint from his jacket pocket, lit it, and handed it to her. She inhaled, gave it back to. him, brushed the hair out of her face, and something in the combined gestures showed him that she was grown. It had happened. She had a life of her own, a plan and a body of secrets. He watched her with a certain mute wonder. This, he realized, was where adults came from. They developed, suddenly, out of strange unhappy children like Zoe and himself. They would live into the next century.

“Zo?” he said.

“Mm-hm?”

“Nothing.”

What had he wanted to tell her? That he loved her and feared for her, that he wanted to save her from pain. That he was turning into someone else and she was, too. They sat quietly together, passing the joint. The foil stars, glued to the ceiling when he was twelve years old, shed their tiny light.

1973/
Constantine worked seed into the soil and the soil answered him with red-leaf lettuce, with the curl of string beans and the sexual heaviness of bell peppers. He and Zoe worked the garden together, and there were times. He might find a perfect crookneck squash, just the length of his ring finger, shimmering under a leaf, or Zoe might stand up in the afternoon light with, her arms full of basil. There were times when he believed he had gotten where he'd wanted to go. But they passed. They always passed.

There used to be a tumble. There used to be a queasy brightness.

Now Mary wore gloves to bed at night; she arranged flowers on a little circle of pins. Susan had gone. She'd hardly glanced at him from under her veil as he'd led her down the aisle. She called sometimes, but she wasn't company anymore.

And what had happened to his son? At twenty, he was a boy with little round eyeglasses, the kind worn by bitter old maids. A boy whose hair touched his thin shoulders with a nervous dryness, like an old woman's curtains. Sitting up at Harvard, getting pious about the meek of the earth who in the whole of their lives never worked as hard as Constantine did in a single week. He could tell a few stories about disadvantages. Try coming to this country with no money, knowing no English beyond 'hello' and 'please.' From 'hello' and 'please,' how many men could build what he'd built? So you're black. I'm sorry. Now tell me your real story.

What had happened? Someone like Billy, a young man so well provided for, should be devouring the world. He should be striding through his life, able as a horse, smart as a wolf, squeezing the rich meek blood out of women's hearts. When Mary'd given birth to a son, Constantine had imagined himself taking handfuls of the future and stuffing them in his mouth. Daughters, even the best of them, disappeared into the lives of men. But a son carried you. His pleasures included you; you lived in your skin and you lived in his as well.

Maybe, Constantine thought, I made mistakes. He knew he suffered from fits of passion, a violent largeness that refused to live in the small. He had always numbered his passions among his virtues. He'd had every reason to believe a boy needs discipline the way a tree needs pruning. Constantine's own father had cracked Constantine's head open on the stove, had pulled his arm so hard it slipped from the socket as easily as a bean popping out of its skin. The punishments had cauterized Constantine's will, made him into someone. The punishments had invented him, a strong ambitious man who'd survived enough damage to live fearlessly. But he did not love his father. He'd taken his first chance, and crossed the ocean to make a self so big his father couldn't touch him. Could it be, was it possible, that Billy was doing the same thing? Could the hair and the beads be his idea of accomplishments strange enough to protect him from his father?
Life
magazine said it was the Age of Aquarius.
Life
showed pictures of men with hair to their shoulders, standing cheerfully beside women who didn't worry about the vows. These guys had sex whenever they wanted to, swam naked, claimed to have no plans beyond the trees and the water, the women and children in their beds. There was a new permission. There was a lewd world being born right here inside the old one, another country with its own customs and language. Now it seemed that Billy was going there, just as Constantine had left Greece and come to America. He couldn't tell whether he wanted to call his son back or be taken along. Constantine was a husband and father, a steady if less than ardent lover, a hardworking man. He didn't see himself anywhere in the pages of
Life.

Her name was Magda, like one of the Gabor sisters. Constantine lost himself in her the way a coin gets lost through a storm drain. With Magda he felt himself falling and then shining up from the darkness, a prize, hidden and hard to reach. Magda was Hungarian, like the Gabor sisters, although her accent had been tamed and flattened by two decades in New Jersey. When he gave himself to her, when he inhabited her big white body, Constantine made the wild exultant sounds he'd always swallowed for Mary's benefit. At forty-one, Mary was an aging girl; Magda had been a woman most of her life. Constantine pushed hard into her big wet opening—she didn't want delicacy—and as he nailed her, as he thrust and thrust, her cries drowned his just as her body absorbed his own. She must have weighed a hundred and fifty pounds; he was only about one sixty-five himself. He hammered into her. He bit her breasts, pulled at her hair. She cried out, sometimes so loud she'd set his ears ringing, and afterward, when they lay sweating on the sheets, with the sound of a next-door radio leaking through the plaster, she'd put a pink-nailed hand on his chest and whisper, “Fantastic, baby. Fan fucking tastic.”

The obviousness was part of what he loved. He was banging his partner's secretary in a motel room on his lunch hour. It was a tryst right out of the funny papers, and he felt as if he'd joined a club, a national fraternity with its own rites and history. He enjoyed not only the sex itself but the whole business of parking his Buick around the back, of picking up the key from a, smirking old desk clerk with crusty eyes and a half-dozen long hairs cemented to his bald head. He loved the daytime crackle of the neon sign (red
Vacancy
, three pink arrows); he loved the two pictures of blue daisies, identical, screwed to the wall over each double bed. He loved the fact that, at the age of forty-six, he got a hard-on every time he heard Tom Jones or Engelbert Humperdinck on the radio. They were like his brothers, singing their songs of desire and loss out into a world big enough to contain every surprise.

Age of Aquarius. Goddamn right.

“You're too much, baby,” Magda said, and the motel room seemed to agree with her. He was too much for this room, with its water-stained gypsum-board ceiling and matted shag carpet. He was too much for this woman, an overweight bleached blonde who shared a duplex with her mother and four cats. He patted her huge rippled flank, told her, “You're not bad yourself.” His desire for her astonished him. His dreams had always been of beauty, and now he got hard sitting at his desk in the mornings with the radio on, thinking of a great spill of belly, an ass like two white pumpkins.
“It's not unusual to make love with anyone,”
Tom Jones sang. Sometimes, at work, Constantine ducked into the bathroom and whacked off, thinking of Magda, a boat of flesh. At forty-seven, he was horny as a fifteen-year-old. He could have been his own son, the son he'd wanted. He smiled at himself in the bathroom mirror, pumping his cock over the sink, due for a proper workout at the Mayflower Motel in another two hours. The surprises weren't over yet. Age was a sad fiction, a story for the weak.

His life with Mary receded, and he found that he could live more freely. Something softened. Something that had lived with him inside his skin, a prickly current of anger and disappointment, began to relax and in its place were only the hours, one and then another, work and a good hard fuck and more work and dinner and sleep. Mary lived her life alongside his. She tried new recipes (cheese fondue, quiche Lorraine), bought what she needed. As their battles and their love subsided, Constantine began to see a simplicity that had always been there, flowing under the daily strife. He began to see that it was enough to fuck and earn money, to talk on the phone to your beautiful daughter whenever she happened to call and to weed the garden with your youngest girl, to exclaim with her over the first radish. Try not to think too much about the boy. Constantine's lunch-hour sessions with Magda, who expected nothing of him beyond what he wanted to give her, seemed to have rescued him in some deep way he could not possibly have anticipated. He felt as if he were living a new and easier life, and all that remained of his old life, the single stubborn convention, was his habit of driving out to his houses at night to watch the inhabitants go about their ordinary business. He did it less often now, just once every couple of months. But still he went. Still he parked his car and listened, with a terrible yearning, as these mysterious men and women went about their nocturnal feedings and arguments, their lovemaking, their endless worrying about the fate they had made for their children. Still he sat in the silence of his Buick, smoking one cigarette after another, listening to the little neighborhood noises with the furious attention of a priest in the confessional, straining to hear the machinery of real good and evil humming under his parishoners' clumsy anecdotes about the failings of their flesh.