It Feels So Good When I Stop (8 page)

“I’m glad.” I slipped back in at the foot of the bed and started kissing my way up her legs.

“I should get you a nice pen.”

“I’m not really a nice-pen guy,” I said from under the sheet. I opened her legs. “I like Papermates. Blue ones, black ones, red ones, it doesn’t matter.”

She shifted to accommodate me. “So, what you’re saying is a pen is a pen is a pen?”

“Is a pen.”

“I see. What about a new journal? Something leather-bound?”

“Kinky,” I said. She squeezed my head between her thighs. I could hear the ocean. “I’m not a journal guy, either.”

“You’re not a journal guy?”

“Nope.”

“I don’t believe you. Everyone keeps some kind of journal.”

“Not me.” She sat up, taking her pussy with her.

“Well, what are all those?” She stripped the sheet off my head.

“What are what?”

“Those.”

My bedside table was a yellow towel draped over two milk crates stacked one on the other. The bottom crate was packed with identical black-and-white-marbled notebooks.

“Those are some of my notebooks from college.” Two of them actually were aborted journals.

“They sure look like journals.”

“They’re not.”

Jocelyn wasn’t sold. “Why do you keep your college notebooks? You don’t strike me as a ‘keep my old notebooks’ kind of guy.”

“I don’t know.”

“And they’re so close to your bed, I just figured they were your journals.”

“They keep my table from moving.”

“Curious,” she said.

“Is it?”

“A little bit.” I pulled her back down by the hips. “If you want, I can stop, and we can critique them together right now.”

“No, that’s okay. Finish what you’re doing. I’ll just go through your shit sometime when you’re out.”

“Fine. And I’ll go through all of your shit.”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing right now?” She laughed once at her own joke, like a Joan Collins character getting serviced by a pool boy. She steered me by the head as I skimmed the surface of her deep end. She got into it. “I mean it,” she moaned. “You can read my journal, my diary, anything. I want us to know everything about each other.”

I got anxious. I thought, I don’t want to fucking read her journal, do I? Sure, I’m curious, but I don’t want her poking around through my stuff. I can move them into my closet the next time she goes to the can. Too obvious. She’ll notice they’re gone, and then she’ll never stop asking me questions. I can’t get rid of them until she goes back to New York. Fine. I won’t leave her alone long enough to do too much digging. That’s what I’ll do.

“Hey, Tiger,” she said. “Easy does it.”

I DIDN’T KNOW shit about taking care of kids.

“Don’t worry about it,” James said. “This is all you have to do: Push him up and down the street until he falls asleep. He should stay out cold for a couple hours.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“He will. And when he wakes up, feed him right the fuck away or he’ll go ballistic.” James held a stack of three identical Tupperware containers on top of a foil-covered baking pan. “There’s diced fruit in this one, and chopped chicken and carrots in this one. This one’s all Cheerios and Wheat Chex and shit.”

“What’s in the big pan?” James gave it to me. It was still warm.

“I don’t know. Pamela sent it for you.”

I removed the foil. Pamela was a good cook. The pan held a lasagna with a large divot taken out of it. “Weird,” I said. “She must have run out of noodles to make a whole one.”

“That’s my haulage fee,” James said.

I laughed. “Your haulage fee.”

James was in a rush. “Come on. I don’t have time to fuck around.”

“Fine.”

“So, feed him a bunch of this.” He handed me the Tupperware containers.

“How much?”

“I don’t know. Until he starts crying.”

“That seems kind of cruel.”

“Maybe, but it’s the only way to be sure he’s getting enough. He’ll definitely piss himself and probably shit. You’ll be able to tell because he makes ‘this’ face, and he’ll stink. You know how to change a kid?”

“Can’t it wait until you get back?”

“Don’t be an asshole.” He hung a mommy bag on my shoulder. “Everything’s in here. And when you do change him, make sure you put enough of that aloe oatmeal ointment on him. His ass is sensitive. So is his weld.”

“His weld?”

“Where your dick joins up with your bag.” James pinched at his weld. At least he didn’t pinch mine. “Suit him back up and you’re home free.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t fucking know. Let him run around until I get back.”

I asked James if it was cool if I swore in front of Roy.

“Don’t fuck around,” he said. “Your sister will have my nuts on a stick.” Pamela was a pretty easygoing person. But once you push her past her breaking point, you’d better head for the fucking hills.

 

ROY WAS NOT very good at walking. But he screamed whenever I picked him up and tried to help close the distance between him and the object of his capricious desire. In order to get him into the stroller, I tricked him into thinking the stroller was what he wanted. I lifted it by an umbrella-hook handle and dangled it like a SeaWorld herring in his line of sight.

“Roy? Look at this, Roy. Smooth,” I stroked the seat invitingly. I was a good deceiver. He fell for it. He locked on. “Come on, kid. Get in.” I set the stroller down on the driveway about ten feet from him, lit a cigarette, and killed some time watching him labor to get from A to B.

He was pretty cute. He was wearing green Wellington boots, baby Levi’s, a black longshoreman’s cap, and an Irish knit sweater under a miniature L.L. Bean tan hunter’s coat. His outfit was worth many times my own. When he finally reached the stroller, he screamed with a delight that was so sincere, I was actually kind of grateful to him. I hadn’t smiled and meant it since I got married.

JOCELYN AND I babysat for Roy one night after Christmas so that James and Pamela could go on a last-ditch date. We didn’t really do anything with regards to care-taking because Roy was asleep when we got there, and he stayed asleep the whole time. Jocelyn was in a good mood in spite of the holidays. We curled up on the couch and watched
Masterpiece Theater: A Scandal in Bohemia
. Jocelyn checked on Roy a few times and reported that he was just fine. She sank back into her dent on the couch. I could tell she liked playing house.

James and Pamela came home tipsy, laughing and hanging all over each other. It looked like they had a chance. James fixed us all a quick cinnamon schnapps nightcap before bed. “Here’s to burying last year,” he said.

“I’m all for that,” Pamela added.

“Here’s to the future,” Jocelyn said.

“It can’t come soon enough,” James said.

We all turned in for the night. Jocelyn and I made up the pullout couch in the TV room.

“I know I’ll make a good mother someday.”

She was waiting for me to say I’d make a good father. That wasn’t going to happen. But the night had been going along nicely. There was no reason to mess it up then. I did the best I could. “No doubt.”

She smiled.

 

TAKING CARE OF ROY behind Pamela’s back felt wrong for a lot of reasons. First of all, I definitely did not want to get caught. I knew if Pamela found out she’d rip both James and me new assholes. I figured there wasn’t much chance of her showing up out of the blue, though, because Plymouth was a good thirty miles from East Falmouth. And if James was supposed to be taking care of Roy, chances were good that Pamela was working or catching up on doing laundry or some other domestic shit. I also felt guilty for scheming with James of all people. It was like I’d signed on to be his star, blockbuster witness in the upcoming divorce proceedings. But I assuaged my guilt by noting that Roy, too, was my blood and he needed me. And wasn’t it as much James’s house as hers? I was also nervous something horrible would happen to Roy on my watch. I felt like Joel in
Risky Business
when he goes cruising in his old man’s Porsche without permission. If I accidentally drove Roy off the end of a pier, there’d be no gold-hearted hookers to raise the bread to fix him up without my sister knowing about it.

 

ROY WAS SLEEPING minutes after I’d tricked him into the stroller. I pushed him up and down the length of Opal Cove Road about a hundred times. I watched the ocean come and go in the gaps between houses—on my right in one direction, and on my left in the other. Taking care of a kid was easy enough so far. I started zoning out, thinking about Jocelyn crying.

I don’t know how long it took me to realize it was Roy who was whimpering. He had been taking the brunt of a growing wind, softening my way, like an icebreak er’s prow.

“Fuck me, kid. I’m sorry.” I crouched in front of him and cradled his cheeks. They felt like two packages of thawing ground beef. His eyes were watering, and his face twisted ugly as he teetered on the edge of crying. “No, no. It’s okay, Roy. I’ll take you back. Don’t cry.” I stretched the sleeves of his sweater until his hands disappeared. Then I breathed warmth into the wool tubes. I pivoted the stroller in the direction of my sister’s and added the sound of a racing car’s screeching tires to the maneuver. Roy giggled.

“Want to go zoom, Roy? Want to go zoom? Zoom-a-zooooooom!” I was baby-talking, and was prepared to continue doing so as long as it kept him from crying. I pushed the stroller with dangerous bursts of speed. Roy loved that so much that he bawled when I stopped to catch my breath. And then he wouldn’t stop crying, no matter how fast we went. I crouched back down in front of him so that we were face-to-face.

“Please, don’t cry,” I pleaded to his empathetic side. “Please, buddy.” He scratched my glasses off my face. He did it three times before I caught on to the game. He was a tough read because the things he wanted were so simple. I let him play with my glasses and walked back to my sister’s blind.

I had a headache. I sat on the front steps with a beer and a smoke. Roy was on the lawn, losing a wrestling match with his football. Watching him for the afternoon took it out of me, and apparently he was an easy kid. He brought the football to me.

“You know what’s really fucked up, kid? Getting married was my idea.” I booted the ball to the other side of the yard so he could chase it down. “I know. Hard to believe, right?”

James honked as he drove up. “How’s my sonny boy?” he called, rounding the Suburban’s long beak. Roy started to giggle and tried to stand up. “Everything go smooth? No problems?”

“No problems,” I said. James tossed Roy above his head and caught/swung him so that the kid’s path traced a J that skimmed the ground. They both laughed. It made me nervous watching Roy’s head jerk back on its pencil neck each time he reached the bottom of that J. I was ready for the ride to end.

“James, do you think—”

“Hang on. I have to piss like a friggin’ Clydesdale.” He set Roy—who clamored for more—down on the grass and blew by me, taking the porch three steps at a time. “You want to go get some clams?” he asked on the go. “My treat?” He sounded like a guy who’d just made a lot of money. “Big bowl of beef stew and a few pints of Guinness?” The toilet seat went up with such force, I could hear the chalky underside of the tank lid ring and grind against the tank’s unglazed coping. His piss stream broke the calm of the pond with a proud, throaty roar. “What do you say?” The raising of his diaphragm caused the pitch of his leak to momentarily modulate to a higher key.

I waited for him to finish before answering. “Maybe next time.” I took a pull off my beer. Roy was still wondering where the party went. “I’d kind of like to be alone.”

The toilet seat slammed down on the mug. James boomed back across the living room.

“I don’t fucking blame you.” Then, almost apologetically, “What do you think about watching the kid for me here and there?”