Flesh and Blood (23 page)

III

INSIDE

THE MUSIC

1983/
Magda wasn't a beauty, not in the magazine way that some guys went for. Those stick women with no hips or tits, a big cloud of hair like the end of a Q-Tip. Mary was that kind of beauty. She had those magazine fingernails, those thighs that didn't touch. Constantine had been there, with that. He knew exactly what kind of hunger lay on the other side of it. He knew about the primness of bedside tables. He knew about the sourceless, infinite anger that had no cure because it had no cause, nothing you could get to beyond the plain facts of a hard-working man and a woman whose beauty led her to expect more than the world could provide. He'd been there—maybe that was the difference between him and other men. He'd already had what most guys spent their lives reaching for. Maybe he knew something most men didn't. Maybe he'd pushed his way through to a kind of genius, a bigger and more fabulous vision that lay beyond the rules of ordinary beauty.

All right, then. If Mary was going to divorce him over Magda, if she was going to take the house he'd built plus a big greedy bite out of his income every month, if she was going to poison the kids' minds toward him . . . All right. He had an answer, and it was simple and it was true. There was a genius in his love for Magda. It wasn't a usual love, some poor shlunk leaving his wife for a little leopard of a blonde who'd leave
him
as soon as she got herself a better offer. This was something else, this love of his, and if you didn't get it, if you were still so unsure of yourself that you needed to parade around with prom queens, well, too bad for you.

At home, in his rented apartment, Constantine played his old records and thought about Magda. He played Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck. He played them in private because all the kids, even Susan, teased him about his taste in music, and these days he didn't like being teased. Okay, he'd never liked being teased, but these days he got furious over any joke made at his expense, any clever little remark that suggested he was a figure of fun. And getting mad in front of the kids just gave Mary more ammunition for the poison she was spreading against him. So he listened to his records alone, after work. Tom Jones sang,
It's not unusual to make love at any time.
He kept the records in a drawer, not hidden exactly, but out of sight, so that if one of the kids came over and looked through them they wouldn't start in on him. He'd had enough of that. These days, he just wanted to be loved.

He wanted to be loved. What was wrong with that?

He married Magda at St. Bartholomew's, the biggest Episcopal church in six counties. Fuck Catholicism with its curses and redemptions, its insistence on cheerful misery as the only virtue. Fuck the Greek Orthodox church of his childhood, with its veils and secrets and roadside shrines. Episcopalians understood that Christ came to earth as an advertisement for the flesh, to tell us it's all right to be human. It's all right to want things. It's all right to own, as long as you keep yourself humble by remembering that you'll turn it all in again anyway, when your time comes. So Constantine insisted on an Episcopal wedding, and Magda's old Catholic mother, reduced by arthritis to a life of television and sly, joking complaints, didn't put up anything he couldn't handle. If he could beat county inspectors and a squadron of crooked day laborers, he could overrule a sick, good-humored old Hungarian woman in a housecoat the color of stale bread. Besides, she wasn't a fool. She knew a good deal when she saw one.

Constantine and Magda put on the grandest wedding St. Bartholomew's had ever seen. For the wedding a thousand white gladioli were cut. A cake almost five feet high was baked and covered with white sugar roses, swans, and bells, and topped by a little porcelain bride and groom—porcelain, not plastic—with blurred, rapturous faces and identical tiny red mouths. For Magda's dress, forty yards of white lace was tatted by whoever, Belgian or French nuns, whoever it was that made lace, along with slighdy less than an acre of white silk and chiffon and white sequins and pearls no bigger than a sparrow's eyeball. Mary had told Constantine once about something called the forbidden stitch, some Chinese thing, a kind of embroidery so fine they had to ban women from doing it because they went blind over their needles. As Constantine stood at the altar he glanced at Billy. His best man, his only son and heir, built up now, bulkily petulant in a rented tux. Blood rose, hot, to Constantine's temples. He knew what Billy was but he couldn't say the word, not even, inside his own head. Here he stood in front of everybody with his brawny, girlish son and there in the first pew sat Zoe with the little black bastard, and beside her was Susan—perfect Susan, who barely spoke to him—and her cheerful kiss-ass husband and their son, his grandson, clear-faced, in a miniature dark blue suit. His grandson. At three, the kid could already write his name; he could throw a softball hard enough to sting your hand. He had a precocious air of gravity, a personal importance. Here was the future Constantine had worked for, this sturdy, affectionate boy with a Greek jaw and wide-set American eyes. This one thread, at least, was coming out of the tangle straight and true and strong. At the altar Constantine knew a soaring happiness, the old kind, born of a piercing consciousness of the world's shifting and inscrutable order. He had suffered, maybe he'd even failed in certain ways, but here he was at the head of an immense church, big and proud as a lion in his tux, and he said to himself, All right. He said, Let it happen, all of it. As if in response to his silent command the wedding march started up and Magda walked toward him down the red-carpeted aisle in her shimmering lunar garden of a dress. He found that . . . Okay, maybe this was a little strange, but he found that he liked the idea of seamstresses going blind to create this, this huge moment of stained glass and music and the staunch white rods of all those gladioli, bright and clean as torches in the colored dusk of the church. It had something to do with resurrection, with liberation from the world of the small. It seemed regrettable but right that this plenty he'd created, this magnificence, should take something out of the world. Some people found love and an immense comfort. Some women went blind, sewing. That was the way of things. Matter can't be created or destroyed, only rearranged. A little more here means a little less over there.

1984/
Mary went to the window and looked out at the ruins of Constantine's garden. It was her single concession to rage, to whatever she possessed of an urge to do harm. The house remained immaculate, the beds made and the floors swept, the top of the dining-room table rubbed to a rich, burnished life even though she ate her meals in the kitchen or on a tray in front of the TV. But she did nothing to Constantine's garden. She watched with a slightly irritated indifference as the tomatoes ripened and burst on the vines, as the beans withered and the basil turned brown. She watched the zucchini vines grow and strangle the rest of the garden, the zucchini themselves swollen grotesquely, big as waterlogged baseball bats, their flesh turned to wood, inedible. Then she watched the zucchini die, collapsing leadenly onto themselves, shriveling, until finally there was nothing left but dead leaves crisped by the first frosts and the inert carcasses of the squash themselves, long and flaccid and utterly dead. Mary covered the rosebushes, bedded the perennial flower bulbs with peat moss, pruned the deadwood off the pear tree. She took perfect care of every other living thing and did not touch, did not so much as step into, the little deceased shrine of Constantine's garden. Snow, when it came, dusted the blackened heads of lettuce, whatever had gone too foul for the rabbits to eat. Wind blew the bean poles down, and once, on a blustery day in early December, Mary looked out the window just in time to see a little snake of vine, with one perfect fan-shaped brown leaf, blowing away over the fence and into the restless, icy gray.

1986/
Jamal was eating the sky. He opened his mouth so wide he felt a small crackle of hinges deep in his jaw as he sucked it in, the fat heavy whiteness that blew and twisted around him. It turned to nothing on his tongue. He ran in a circle, eating a patch of the dense white falling sky, and he saw himself filling up with it, the cold and distance, the big arcing empty space.

“Jamal.” It was Cassandra, coming in blue glasses and a white jacket. Jamal sucked in a last mouthful. He looked mournfully at all the sky he wouldn't eat.

“Let's go, baby.” Cassandra came, big in her boots. “Everybody's ready.”

Jamal stood waiting. He'd eaten some of the white silence, but there was so much more.

“Pretty, huh?” Cassandra said. She put her big hand on his head. “If you like nature. Now, personally, I'm partial to a cocktail lounge or an apartment, someplace where you can control the light a little. Daytime's for the young. But come along, now, your grandma's about to bust out of her panty hose in there.”

Jamal reached up for her hand. Her hand was almost hot, knobby with rings. Flakes blew onto her white jacket, disappeared. As she led him back toward the house he opened his mouth, wide, and ate a little more.

“You turn to stone if you don't get out of Connecticut before nightfall,” Cassandra said. “Now wait a minute, that's not true. I've promised your grandmother I'd quit exaggerating around you, she worries about your sense of reality. So listen, I retract the statement. You do not turn to stone if you stay in Connecticut after dark. You just go on with your life, but in Connecticut.”

Jamal filled his mouth, made footprints. The house came, white, with white lines on its black shutters. Flakes fell past the yellow window squares.

“Here we are,” Cassandra called into the back door. Inside, it was warm and full of rules. His grandmother came from the kitchen, crouched in front of him.

“Here you are,” she said. She made her painful little smile. She was darker than Cassandra, more happy and worried. She and Cassandra had the same mouth.

“Look at you,” his grandmother said. “You were out there without your mittens.”

“Seized by an urge,” Cassandra said.

“His hands are freezing.” Grandma's face gathered in on itself. Worry was something she could taste.

“Come on into the kitchen, Jamal,” Cassandra said. “Let's warm up those little mitts of yours.”

“Honestly,” his grandmother said. “You can't go running out half dressed like this, it's
freezing
out there.”

“True, true,” Cassandra said. “Thank the lord for central heat.”

“Jamal, are you listening to me? You have to
think,
you can't just do whatever enters your mind.”

“Oh, Mary,” Cassandra said.

His grandmother's face stopped. She was angry, and she was deciding.

“Really,” she said. “I'm his grandmother.”

“And I'm his godmother. And I think every now and then a four-year-old boy runs out into the snow without his mittens on. It doesn't mean he's embarking on a life of crime.”

“Cassandra—”

Grandma looked down, then up. “All right,” she said. She was sucking a hard ball of anger and worry with a sweet-sour taste. “Let's get going, you two.”

Jamal let his grandmother take his hand and lead him into the room where the party used to be. Balloons still bobbed and josded on the ceiling. Half the cake stood whitely on the white table, circled by the melted stubs of candles. Ben sat in his chair at the head of the table, next to Aunt Susan. Their grandfather stood behind, looking hungrily at the room. He wanted to eat the house. Jamal wanted to eat everything outside the house. Ben ran his new orange truck over the cloth. He looked at Jamal with his hard eyes.

“You're still here,” Ben said.

Jamal nodded. Ben and their grandfather both looked at him and saw that he was small and dark and prone to vanishing. He saw them see him that way.

“Sure you're still here,” Grandpa said. “You wouldn't run away from your own birthday party, would you, buddy?”

“Everybody thought you were lost,” Ben said.

Aunt Susan touched Ben's hair. Then she came over and waited a quarter second before touching Jamal's hair. He felt her hand, waiting, and then he felt her touch.

“We lost track of you, sweetheart,” Aunt Susan said.

Jamal nodded. He'd been eating the frozen air. He'd been nowhere, and everywhere.

“We've got to hit the road,” his grandmother said. “I don't want to be driving in this after dark.”

She spoke to his grandfather, though she didn't look at him.

There were bad roads and darkness. There was something else, a patient appetite that waited.

“Mm-hm,” Aunt Susan said. “Jamal, honey, it was nice having you.”

Uncle Will came in from somewhere else. He was not in the room, and then he was.

“Hey,” he said. “We thought you'd decided to walk home.”

Jamal looked at the rug. It had people hidden in it. There was the fat Japanese woman with her arms out. There was the smiling devil. When he looked up again, Uncle Will was still there. He stood with Aunt Susan. Aunt Susan smiled in her dress that was like his grandmother's but brighter, with more buttons. Aunt Susan wore the gold bird at her breast, the bright silent bird with the sharp beak.

“Come on, gang,” his grandmother said. Jamal looked around, fearfully, for Cassandra. She was gone and then she was there, behind him. She had her shine and her smell. He reached up and touched his own hair, then reached for her hand. The room shone and sparked.

“Ta, everybody,” Cassandra said. There was the long work of coats and goodbyes. When the front door opened, snow blew in. Jamal watched it vanish into the boards. He thought of all he hadn't eaten. He held some of his presents: an orange truck like Ben's and a Star Trek spaceship. Uncle Will held the big stuffed bear that Jamal had wanted and that now embarrassed him, though he still wanted it and, in some uncertain way, despised it. The bear had blank black eyes, a pale orange tongue.

“Tell Zoe we hope she's feeling better,” Aunt Susan said.

“Of course I will,” Grandma said. She kissed Aunt Susan. Aunt Susan was like his grandmother but darker, more worried and smooth. The bird glittered on her breast. Jamal walked to the car between Cassandra and Uncle Will, his arms full of gifts. There were intricate waves of love and hatred, a low complicated buzz. When he looked back he saw Ben and Grandpa in the doorway, outlined in yellow, watching him go. Uncle Will drove, and Grandma sat in front. Jamal sat in back, with Cassandra.

“Well, that's over,” Uncle Will said.

“I thought it was fine,” Grandma said.

“Sure,” Uncle Will answered. “It was fine. It was a lovely little party.”

Jamal watched the flakes tap against the car windows. He watched trees go by, and other cars, and houses. He saw himself taking everything, reaching out the window and gathering up every house and tree as they drove through the blowing white. He saw himself taking them home and showing them to his mother.

“Tell it again,” he whispered to Cassandra.

“What?”

“You know.”

“The same one?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Honey, you are obsessed.”

“Tell it.”

“Okay. You were brand new, you were the tiniest little thing—”

“How tiny?”

“Hmm. You were just slightly smaller than one of those chickens in the window at Lee Chow's.”

“No.”

“We're not going to vary from this one inch, are we? Okay, you were as tiny as Mrs, García's puppy. The Mysteriously Unnamed.”

“Yes.”

“And we put you in the car and drove you all the way up to the Green River in Massachusetts.”

“It took a long time,” Jamal said.

“Yes, it did. Over two hours. There were rivers that were more conveniently located, but your mother had been to the Green River once and she'd seen that there was something magic about it, so when you were born nothing would do but that we baptize you up there.”

“Yes.”

“We drove more than two hours,” Cassandra said. “It was a pretty day in July, there were tiger lilies and black-eyed Susans growing alongside the road. I was wearing, if I do say so myself, a very fetching little christening outfit, white leather pants and a white tuxedo jacket and a pair of hiking boots because, honey, it was a
hike
to that magic river, your mother didn't choose one that was close to the road, no, she didn't.”

“We were riding in a blue car.”

“Yes, we were. A borrowed Toyota, nothing grand, but reliable. It was you and your mother and Will and me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And when we got there we parked the car and carried you all the way to the river.”

“How long?” Jamal said.

“Oh, let's see, what's the correct response here? Longer than walking from Canal Street all the way to Central Park.”

“That's right.”

“And we finally got there, and your Aunt Cassandra's hairdo was a little bit disarranged but she was a
trouper,
a very distant relation of Daniel Boone. And really, the river was beautiful. It was a big wide river with trees on both sides of it, and lord knows there was hardly anybody else there, because not many people would choose to walk that far just to see something that flows right out of their taps at home—”

“There were fish.”

“Mm-hm. Trout. You could see them. We all took our shoes off and waded in, that water was ice-cold, and Aunt Cassandra had a brief cranky moment from which she recovered admirably. The water was very clear and the bottom was covered with little round stones and it
was
really quite pretty, even if the temperature would've made an Eskimo nervous.”

“Momma was carrying me.”

“Yes, she was,” Cassandra said. “We carried you out into the water and said a few words, and Will and I promised to look after you, and then in spite of your Aunt Cassandra's objections Will poured a little of that frigid water over your head. Because it was, after all, a baptism.”

“I cried.”

“As any sensible person would. You cried all the way back to the car, and then the minute we were moving again, you fell asleep.”

“And that's the end,” Jamal said.

“More or less. That's how this tired old thing you see before you became a godmother. Honey, the world is full of nothing if not surprises.”

“That's the end,” Jamal said.

“Well, yes and then again no,” Cassandra answered.

Zoe was in the fever when they came home. She'd been out of it for a while, she'd been a woman in a room drinking a cup of chamomile tea, watching the snow tumble past her window, waiting for her son to return. Then the fever flared again and she was inside, she was only heat and sickness and odd sizzling thoughts that wanted to turn into dreams. The sickness was like a drug but it had a sharper edge, a meanness in it, and she fought to keep order, ordinary time in a room in the snow. It was New York, it was January. The faded roses on the armchair tried to move, to take on faces, but she said no and they remained roses, pink and purple, stationary. She was lying on her mattress watching the roses and then they were there, she'd been watching the roses too carefully to hear the door. Jamal climbed shyly and eagerly onto the mattress with her, emanating cold, his hair studded with perfect beads of clear water.

“Hey,” she whispered. “You're back.”

“I got a spaceship,” he said. He showed it to her, a gray saucer with a clear bubble on top. He swooped it in a wide arc and she could smell it, the hard new plastic odor, the unliving sweetness.

“Just like you wanted,” she said. She heard her voice, a watery thread that came from someplace near her but not in her. “Did you have a good time?”

“Yes,” he said, though she knew he wasn't telling the truth. How did they learn to lie, so early, even when no one asked them to?

Her mother sat on the edge of the mattress, put her hand to Zoe's forehead. “You're still burning up,” she said.

“I'm okay,” Zoe answered. “I felt better for a while, this just came back about a half hour ago.”

“I think you'd better go to the doctor,” Will said. “If you won't call him, I will.”

“No, I'm fine,” Zoe told him. “It's the flu, people get the flu. Jamal had it last week, didn't you, honey?”

He nodded. He was lost, contemplating the spaceship, and she lost herself with him. Lamplight shone on the gray surface of the deck, on the white word
Enterprise.
Outer space was bright, not dark. You could go anywhere.

Cassandra said, “I'm going to heat up some soup for Jamal. Hon, do you feel like you could eat a little, too?”

“No,” Zoe said. The deck of the ship was smooth and brilliant as granite, and briefly she believed that something fabulous lay hidden inside this simple toy. Then she didn't believe it, then she did again.

“I don't want any soup,” Jamal said.

“Okay, fine,” Cassandra answered. “I didn't want to risk my fingernails opening a can, anyway.”

“He should eat something,” Zoe's mother said. “Jamal, you haven't had anything all day but junk.”

“He's had birthday cake, ice cream, and a considerable quantity of snow,” Cassandra said. “Some days you feel like an all-white diet.”

“Just a few bites of soup, Jamal,” Zoe's mother said.

“No soup,” Jamal said, but Zoe's mother went into the kitchen to heat soup because she had decided. Zoe felt Jamal's little chaos of fears and desires, his hunger, his need to have no hunger, his love of the spaceship. She reminded herself: You're his mother. Don't get too lost with him.

Will knelt beside the mattress, stroked her hair. “I'm worried about you,” he said.

“Don't be,” she told him. “Flu, what's the big deal?”

“Three times since September.”

“I get it from Jamal, anybody who spends a lot of time with a child gets sick. He and I just trade germs back and forth.”

“I still wish you'd go to the doctor.”

“I don't need a doctor,” she said. “I stay in bed for a couple of days, and it goes away.”

Cassandra knelt beside Will. There they were in their nimbus of worry and love, their pride, their self-hatred, their complex dislike for each other. Cassandra said, “What I suspect you need is for all of us to go away and leave you the hell alone so you can get some sleep.”