Picturing Will (16 page)

For no particular reason, he opened the bottom drawer. Corky kept her diaphragm in there, and the box of checks and deposit slips from their joint checking account. A sunset shone through from the background of the checks, fuzzily out of focus, the way Wayne’s camera made everything hazy if he forgot to set the little button on the side for near, mid-distance, or far. There was also a ruffly pair of pink pants with a split crotch that she sometimes could be persuaded to put on when they made love. He had given her lace socks with red hearts sewn on the cuff and lace gloves made so her fingers would be exposed. She had worn those only a few times because she said that being naked and having her feet and hands wrapped in lace made her feel like a raccoon.

Wayne and Corky had been married for a year and a half, and she was beginning to put the pressure on about having children. She was years younger than he, so it was nonsense—and the doctor agreed that it was—to talk about the ticking of the biological clock at twenty-nine. On top of the night table was a brochure entitled “What Is Amniocentesis?” In matching brass frames someone had given them as a wedding present were pictures of her grandmother who lived in a nursing home in Wyoming, and Will, who had his hair slicked back. There was also a matchbook from the seafood restaurant where he and Corky sometimes ate on Saturdays. This week they’d have to skip it so they could take Will out a couple of times during the visit.

The next-door neighbors were playing Patsy Cline at the same time their TV was going. Through the slits in the venetian blinds he could see the bluish light flashing inside the house. He knew Patsy Cline wasn’t singing on TV because the neighbors played that record night and day. Corky envied Corinne (she was the Patsy Cline fan; her husband, Eddie, liked what he called “living girl singers”). Corinne had a maid who came once a week, and a two-month-old infant named Debbi, who had been born with so much hair that a little bow could be tied on top of her head. Ever since the child’s birth, by cesarean, Corky had taken them Sunday supper. The week before, the four of them had eaten together, with the baby in a plastic car seat on the center of the table and the Patsy Cline record playing, as they watched the kitchen TV. The show had been about treasure recovered from a sunken galleon. There were diamonds amid the bubbles. Mossy urns with snakes curled inside at the bottom of the sea. He knew that afterwards Corky would say how much she wanted a baby. He knew that Eddie regretted being a father. He felt sorry for Eddie because he could still remember quite distinctly the fatigue that came from living with a woman who was always exhausted, which was a quite separate issue from your own exhaustion. It was numbing, like trudging through wet sand. It seemed that you had married a ghost, a wife who would never again have color in her face, and whose skin had strangely paled to match the baby’s translucence. Will had screamed for the first six months of his life: first colic, then one allergic reaction after another when Jody had to stop nursing because her nipples were so badly cracked. Jody had made him get up half the time, in the middle of the night, to soothe Will, and he had cooed and cajoled with words that meant nothing to Will, rocked him, walked the floor. Other times he had stared in disbelief down his son’s pink throat. He still dreamed about Will’s gaping mouth, his wet, marble eyes, the pulse beating in his throat, his face turning purple. Many dawns Wayne had considered stuffing a diaper into his mouth, plugging the entrance to the cave of noise, or pinching him, holding him upside down, pushing a pillow into his face. He had never hurt him. Sometimes, except for holding him, he wouldn’t try to console him, but he had never yanked a leg too high when changing a diaper or given him the vile formula without first testing a drop on the inside of his wrist. The most horrible thing about a baby was that it robbed you of dignity. They were just like the Army officers who urged you to succeed by berating you so much that you would either triumph or be totally beaten down. In all those late-night moments with Will, he had felt the opposite of what he had been led to believe a dutiful father would feel. He had felt humiliated, weak, a coward, and, finally, expendable—the person who was only a stand-in for the child’s mother. When Wayne walked the floor with Will, it was the pacing of the prisoner in the courtyard; when he bounced Will on his knee, he was an idiot dandling a doll.

As Wayne smoked the last of his cigarettes another thought came into his mind. It was to get up and close the blinds and masturbate—not come, just get excited, then make himself wait until Corky came home. As he stubbed out the cigarette, though, an image of Will came clearly to mind: Will wailing as he lightly rubbed his gums where his teeth were beginning to come in. Remembering touching the little lumps in Will’s mouth made the life go out of his cock. Then he had an image of Corky turning away from him, which is what she most often did when Will visited because she was afraid they might be overheard.

Patsy Cline was singing “Sweet Dreams,” Wayne’s favorite, the one he never minded hearing. The baby was crying with all the lusty misery Patsy Cline tried to choke down as she sang the song. He looked at his watch and saw that it was quarter to nine. It would still be at least forty-five minutes until Corky got home. There was still time to do what he had put off doing all day: open the manila envelope from Jody, one of the mystery envelopes she sent every so often that contained souvenirs of her life. He went to the hall table, where Corky always put his mail without comment, got the envelope, walked into the living room, and sat on the floor and opened it. The envelope contained everything from flyers from the health food store detailing the advantages of various kinds of juicers to postcards she had received from friends on vacation. Between the lines, or because he began to recognize handwriting, or because some items were constant, he would eventually begin to piece things together: who was important, what was happening, even what Jody might be thinking. It was a form of flirtation, surely, but also an annoying and childish thing to do, like dropping something from a high window onto someone’s head and then ducking out of sight. He found a thank-you note from Jody’s father (he and her father had never gotten along); a 3-D postcard, mailed to her in New York City care of her lover, Mel Anthis, of King Kong with a screaming blonde in his big arms, and the message “You are safe with me,” signed simply J.D.O.; a letter from a fruit shipper saying that she had forgotten to enclose a check with her order for tangerines; notice of a bounced check from Midas Muffler; and one of Will’s drawings (which must have been done awhile ago, because Will’s recent drawings were much more realistic): two crayoned lines intersecting in the center of the piece of paper with four ovals on one side and on the other a Christmas tree that looked as though it had been made with a shaky cookie cutter. Above that was lettered
FOOTBALL
, and then, in an adult’s hand,
FIELD
. He had not known that Will was interested in football. It would be something to talk to him about—it was always awkward for a while, until he found out what Will’s interests were. In the bottom of the envelope, like the penny in the toe of a Christmas stocking, was a little slip of paper—a fortune-cookie fortune that said, “For the new year, you will have to wait until good luck.” He kept the drawing separate and stuffed the other things back in the envelope, which he threw away in the kitchen. Jody had been with Mel Anthis for years now. He wondered if she saw him exclusively and, if so, whether they would marry. It had been because of her that the pregnancy didn’t end up an abortion; it was her fault that a distraction, and a big responsibility, came into his life just when he might have been able to decide which direction his life should take, instead of which direction it must take. There was nothing to do but walk away from people like that. She was probably still a person whom so many people thought different things about because she was such a chameleon. That was why her mother kept her distance, and why so many people poured their hearts out, trying to get her attention. She would send him personal letters that she had not cared to open! A series of letters that added up to the realization that someone was flirting with Jody, although she would not even respond to the increasingly distraught messages. (Did she think it was funny that the vice principal of Will’s school sent her so many notes asking her to account for his absences, and eventually asking her if she realized the problems she was causing by not responding?) Jody was a person who would enclose a sales slip for a two-hundred-dollar pair of shoes and a notice of a bounced check in the same envelope. He had liked her nerve, at first—the way she felt that she didn’t have to explain anything to anyone, or that she would do it in her own time. It made sense that she started a business, because she could only work for herself and not for anyone else who would expect things of her and tell her what to do. She was always good at improvising, and at flattering people, so that they’d gladly lend a hand. What he had understood, though, years before, about her being mischievous had by now established itself as meanness—assuming that was what she intended by sending the envelopes. There was no way to be in collusion with a prankster. All that remained of being tied to Jody was Will. Instead of rolling out the red carpet, he would be carrying stacks of old newspapers to the edge of the driveway for the next day’s trash collection, cleaning the room Will would stay in, giving the illusion that there was space and time enough for Will to make an impression.

FOURTEEN

C
orky filled the sink and took a whore’s bath, squeezing the washcloth and rinsing it after cleaning her armpits and crotch. She let the water out of the basin and soaked the washcloth a final time under a stream of water from the faucet before wringing it out and hanging it on the towel rack. The sink emptied quietly. Something was wrong with the pipes leading to the bathtub; if you showered for more than a minute, it began to sound like someone was playing the bagpipes.

She opened the door, pausing to see whether the creaking hinges had awakened Wayne. The bedroom was quiet. She reached behind her and turned off the lights, then went on tiptoe down the hall. In the bathroom, she had not been tempted to look in the mirror. She knew that after a long day at the store her hair needed to be washed and her makeup would be smeared. The little bump she had first sensed when she was driving home had by now risen under her bottom lip until it came to a head, hard and tingling.

Some days it seemed to Corky that she and Wayne had been married for years, and other days it seemed that she was living with a stranger whose moods she couldn’t predict and whose emotions were never revealed by his actions—only by what he said. She thought he would be angry about her signing on to work Thursdays and Fridays, but when she came home he had embraced her—almost run to put his arms around her. He had pulled down the bedspread like a triumphant magician, eyes aglow, to reveal the secret of mismatched striped sheets, on which he would have her stretch out. Because he was so clearly delighted to see her and to have sex, she now thought that his silence over the last few days might have been because he was worrying over Will’s arrival. If he suffered because he did not see his son more often, she wasn’t aware of it, yet she didn’t think this indicated anything negative about her future with Wayne. She thought that if she and Wayne had a child of their own, Wayne would love the child and probably relax and be quite demonstrative. He and Will were always a little on guard and awkward when they were together, but she supposed that that was quite normal, given how infrequently they saw each other.

Corky caught herself doing what her mother had so often objected to: making everything all right in her mind. All through her adolescence there had been a running argument—no, only her mother’s harangues; it was never an argument—in which her mother urged Corky to expand her horizons (her mother’s term), to look around her at the damage being done to the environment, the inhumanity of man to man, the awful politics of the AMA, the streets filled with people in need, ignored by a society that did not provide enough affordable medical care, a society that created gas-guzzling cars that fell apart, and that provided its citizens with no reasonable candidates in presidential elections. Corky’s mother would have been pleased to have Jane Fonda as her daughter. Adele Davis’s books were her mother’s bible. Sometimes while she waited for dinner to cook, her mother would step into the pantry to toss a few darts at the Richard Nixon dartboard, a disc so pocked that Nixon was almost unrecognizable.

Corky’s father left when she was ten, after overturning every piece of furniture in the ground-floor apartment and dragging the mattress off the bed and throwing it over the porch rail. Corky and her mother were locked in the bathroom, and at the time her mother was shouting insults at her father, she had her hands over Corky’s ears. To this day, Corky could not wear a hat that was pulled over her ears or sleep on her side with an ear against the pillow. She slept on her back, like a corpse in the morgue, Wayne said. She could still remember her feeling of helplessness as her mother, who had a way of fixating on one thing, insisted, after her husband fled, that she and Corky get the mattress back into the apartment. Her mother became as insane as her father had been during his tirade, yelling at Corky even though Corky was a frail child who couldn’t lift her end of the mattress from the ground. None of the neighbors came out to help, but someone called the police. Her mother then fixated on her hatred of the police, insisting that there had been no shouting, and that she was simply airing the mattress. Into this scene walked Corky’s sister, Vera, eight years old, who had been at a Brownies meeting, sewing a crayon pouch. Vera had a way of being absent from the beginning of things and showing up at the very end. As an older girl, she would show up at the movies when the last show was ending. When Vera was sixteen she ran off with a construction worker named Ricky Lattanzi, and nine months later added twin boys to the family he had already provided her with (two girls, from his first marriage). By the time her mother found her sister, she was, as her mother said, “in deep,” so she never enacted the threats she had made in Vera’s absence: to commit her; to send her to a convent; at the very least to have the marriage annulled. During her mother’s long illness, years later, it was one of Ricky Lattanzi’s daughters who nursed her. That was also the only time she ever let Ricky Lattanzi into her apartment. On her deathbed she still maintained that Ricky was too old a man to be a suitable match for her daughter.