Roger's Version (19 page)

“Yeah, I guess it’s all rather terrific,” she said, letting the book relax in her lap so its speckled pages reflected the light and became twin blank sheets. “You shouldn’t take it so hard, Nunc. We all gotta die, like Bryan, whatever his name is, Bryant says. If you don’t want to die, you should talk to Dale. He says nobody does, it just seems that way. Anyways I thought this faith stuff was your business.”

“Maybe it shouldn’t be a business,” I said, and the thought was enough of a Damascene revelation that I slightly swooned, lowering my face so that its skin and my pursed lips tingled with immersion in the clean explosive circles of Verna’s hair.

She jumped like a cat at the touch, perching far forward on
the bamboo chair and twisting to face me with amber eyes more widely spaced than, it seemed, a moment before. “So what’s next?” she asked. “ ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp,’ or are we going to fuck?”

“Fuck?” The word seemed an open portal, a superb sudden alteration in my house of narrow possibilities, of breathless darkness.

Her voice in the constriction of anger and fear had become reedier, more childishly lacking in timbre, than ever. “I know you have the hots for me,” she said, “but is it the hots for me really or for my mom? I know about you and her. You wanted to screw her and never brought it off, though a lot of other guys did.”

I took a breath and said reasonably, “I’m not sure she was exactly screwable then. It was a different world, Verna. Pre-Pill, pre-everything. We were children, and didn’t much like each other.”

In the years after our attic poker game, Edna had become more closed, ever less accessible to me in the coils of her own life, as we both matured in our different sections of greater Cleveland. From the age of fifteen on, she had boy friends, and sometimes, yes, I now remembered, she would tell me about them, would suddenly fling her secrets out at me, in those increasingly stilted, shorter and shorter stretches of summer when I would go stay with my father and Veronica, my corpulent and sugary-sweet stepmother—she, the trim vamp who had stolen him while I was asleep in my mother’s womb, had been quite swallowed now by a middle-aged simpleton big into church work and canasta. As if our blood tie had neutered me, had indeed put me into the skirt and sweater and bobby socks of another teen-aged girl, Edna would on a whim share her love life aloud, while we drove back sweaty from a tennis game at the club or sat with a pitcher of lemonade
and a pack of furtive Camels on the long side porch in Chagrin Falls: she would tell me how far she let each boy friend go, what items of clothing the various ones were entitled to remove, where they could caress and for how long, all as if the male sex were one big many-armed and -fingered machine for the administration of an elaborate massage, a kind of carwash from which her American body was to emerge a woman’s, with polished bumpers and cavernous trunk, a virgin vehicle fit for marriage and the legal propagation of the race. Edna was certainly a virgin when she married, as was I.

I could not quite make out whether Verna were offering herself unconditionally, or only if I disavowed any affection for Edna. She said sullenly, like a child in the wrong, “I don’t think you much like anybody, Uncle Roger.”

We were back on ground where I felt secure: argument and counter-argument. “Tell me whom
you
like, Verna. Tell me about these mysterious men who hassle you, who take you to the Domino.”

“They’re O.K. All they see when they look at me is a white ass, but that’s O.K. They respect me, for having an ass. You know: it’s something of value.”

“An asset, you might even say.”

“Ha ha.” Her voice croaked, and I recalled my impression, outside the door, that she had been crying.

“You have a mind, too, you know.”

“Big deal. Next thing you’ll tell me I have a soul. That’s Dale’s line. Everybody has a line. Oh, you really stupid intellectual men. Lemme start with these.” She reached down and removed her ballet slippers, one and then the other, much like her mother in that far-off game of strip poker. My face felt windburned, as if I were clinging to a rocky height. Her feet were small, shapelier than Edna’s, and pink along the sides, with rough golden heels.

“Tell me about Dale.” My voice was shrinking, had lost all connection with my diaphragm.

“He’s O.K., for a nerd.” She stood up, her feet wide apart, like a judo fighter’s, on the purple shag rug. “Come on, Nunc. Let’s tangle. I feel horny.”

I pretended I wasn’t hearing her. “Do you know where this lumberyard is where he works?”

“Sure. Back up the boulevard two blocks, then three blocks to the left, along the tracks. Come on, let’s just have a taste, you don’t have to ring my gong. Little Shitface is going to wake up any second anyways.”

I wondered if her language was designed to make her seem repulsive; for it was having that effect.

Her eyes were intense and stony and did not give me any relief, by moving from my own. “You got me all stirred up the first time you came in here, all those fuzzy shades of gray. You seemed so gray and broody, so evil. Why’djou think I flashed that tit?”

“You knew you were doing that?”

“C’mon, Nunc. You know about girls. Girls know everything. At least in that line they do.” The dimple in her left cheek had returned, and I thought gratefully that this might all be a form of mischief. But then Verna crossed her plump hands at her waist and, smoothly, bowing forward as if in abrupt obeisance, pulled her white jersey over her head, with a lovely tumble of hair. She straightened up, pushing hair back from her face. She was wearing a bra, but a very little one; it seemed a dirty overburdened sling, and in her eyes was a watery something like pleading. “Don’tcha wanta play with my boobs?” she asked, so slangy and slurred I wondered if before I had come she had taken a drug which was just now coming to bloom in her veins. “Lick ’em, suck ’em?” Her hands lifted them, one under each.

I stood my distance from her, thinking how powerful the
sexual impulse is, ever to leap the huge gap between the sexes. “Yes,” I admitted.

“Wouldn’t you like to fuck the bejesus out of me?”

The phrase seemed odd, forced. I felt what women must often feel: the irritating constraint of being inside someone else’s sexual fantasy. “Do you have to keep calling it ‘fuck’?”

The bra was beige and her shoulders had a ghost of tan and with the amber eyes and chestnut hair partly peroxided Verna seemed a portrait in sepia, in a deliberately limited palette, posed with a piece of the city off to her right like a poster. Her arms had gone limp at her sides in an awkward, defenseless manner. Her eyes went from watery to dreamy; her voice was a thin, croaky thread. “You’re a funny guy, Nunc. Don’t want to fuck, don’t want to die. What do you want to do?”

“I want to end this tutorial session.”

“But Nunc, what about us?” And she took a step forward and touched my arm, just below the shoulder, and I felt the question was sincere, girlish; she expected me to have an avuncular answer.

“You’re my niece,” I told her.

“But that just makes it friendlier. All that taboo stuff was just to avoid making pinheaded babies; but nobody makes babies any more.” She was reverting a bit to her wised-up persona, the fun girl.

“You did,” I pointed out.

“That was crazy. God, what a mistake.” I was powerfully aware, now that her breasts had slipped from her own mind, of their glowing amplitude in the little elastic bra, the weighty breadth of them, and the depth of the sallow hollow between, inviting a finger, a tongue, even a phallus with its ache.

“But a mistake you must live with, Verna.”

“Like you live with Esther.”

“You think she’s a mistake?”

“My mother thought so. She said it got you kicked out of the ministry. Getting laid by Esther.”

“Small loss on either side. Me and the ministry.”

“My mother didn’t think so. She thought you really had it, you know, the bug. Even as a little kid, you were terribly
good
. Your mother was real neurotic and selfish and you just put up with it. Also, she liked whatsername, the first—”

“Lillian.” Again, I had that sensation within my mind of skin, of some part of my soul that rarely saw the sun being stripped into view. “I’m sorry you don’t like Esther,” I said. “She liked you.”

“In a pig’s fart she did. She knew why I was there at Thanksgiving.”

“Why was that?”

“For, you know. Balance. You know fucking well why.”

In the other room, Paula cried. In the window, the short winter day was lowering; the heavenly wool, its promise of rain still undischarged, was turning black in foreshadow of night. Verna ignored the child’s yammer, that protest children make when awaking, wet and hungry and exiled from their dreams, into the raw world; instead she stayed standing at my side, her hand frozen on the tweed of my sleeve, her head of hair a luxuriant tangy mass I again wished to immerse my face in. I had, after all, for all my quick retreat from her perhaps mocking response, made the first move, the “pass.” Now we stood like a couple listening together, almost calm, waiting for punishing utterance, like that first couple our parents, welded together by guilt in the shadows of their leafy den. “That kid is out to get me,” Verna confided to my lapel. “I brought her black into Whitey’s world and I’m the only one around to blame.”

“Where is her father?”

“Who knows? He split. It’s not like it sounds; we agreed it would be best, I’d do better on my own, among whites.”

“And yet here you are, in a project half black.”

She flipped her head cockily. “Well, Nunc, it must be I like the jive. They dig me. Sorry you don’t.”

“Did I say that?”

“You sure did. You should have seen your face when I flashed both tits.”

The child was becoming unignorable; her yammering had become a yell. Verna slashed back the maroon curtain and fetched Paula from the other room. The child’s hair stood out from her sleep-creased cranky face in damp wisps. Verna—making some ironical point, squeezing down on her anger—held her tight against her, as if to make them one creature, pressing their faces side by side. I was struck by how nearly the same size their heads were, for all the disparity in height and weight and tint. Paula’s eyes, puffy from sleep, also looked lashless and slanted. “See, Nunc? Mother and child.”

“Lovely,” I said.

The child reached out her hand with its pale-tipped fingers, but, instead of asking, “Da?,” had the word for me today: “Man.” Pronouncing it made her voice comically deep.

“White man,” her mother amplified. “White man go bye-bye.”

“I must,” I said, and my desire to flee stumbled in reflex upon an aspect of the last time’s parting. “How’s your money holding out?” I asked Verna.

“But we didn’t fuck, Nunc. No charge. No fuckee, no tickee.”

I became confused, somehow startled that she would talk this way with the child in her arms. Her chest-slope of skin, above the skimpy bra, seemed to blaze with light. Of course, to her daughter this skin would not seem threatening: mother skin. “You’re making a false connection,” I said, as if to a student, even while fishing in my wallet for another loan.

“I know my assets,” she said, echoing me as witty students
will. “This must be advance payment. Girls like us don’t usually get advance payment.” She took the three twenties. The amount seemed stingy this time—we seemed to be progressing—so I added a fourth bill. Banks now automatically pay out cash in twenties; tens are going the way of the farthing.

“Man bye-bye,” Paula recited, solemn animal wisdom brimming in her dark blue eyes.

“Read around in that anthology,” I instructed, putting myself back into my two coats. “Try to find some stuff you like. I was just kidding about ‘Luck of Roaring Camp.’ Look at the Hemingway or some James Baldwin. Maybe I should bring a grammar handbook next time. Do you know what a predicate is? A participial phrase?”

Verna joggled the girl on her hip and in sympathy her breasts bounced. “Fuck next time, Nunc. There isn’t going to be a next time. I don’t know exactly what your creepy game is, but I don’t want to get involved. Don’t bother to come around here ever again, we won’t let you in. Right, Poopsie?” She jiggled the child and made a cross-eyed face an inch from her face, so that Paula laughed, her spitty little baby-laugh from deep inside.

I suspected that this comedic turning to the child was a cover-up for her careless use of “we.”
We won’t let you in
. No doubt, there were shadows behind Verna, a population of shadows. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “Use me. You want a high-school degree and a better life. I’ll help you make a start. You want to live in a project on welfare the rest of your life?”

Her face had gone stiff, in the manner of a child, for whom fury and panic are one emotion. “I don’t see what good passing some dumb non-test would do me and if I did I could pass it myself. If you come back here any more I’ll call up my mom and she’ll have the police after you.”

I had to smile at that. All this indignation and rejection of hers was a dance, the dance of the trapped. Was it Ortega y Gasset who said that once a man has gained a woman’s attention, anything he does, anything at all, to keep her attention furthers his cause? It seemed to me I had made good headway today. After closing the door, I hesitated long enough to hear Verna say to little Paula, in a level voice, “You stink, you know that? You really do.”

My chief concern, as I went down the familiar, echoing metal stairs, was how to pry Verna loose from this infant, so I could have the uninhibited use of her body in that deliciously shabby and warm apartment, in the room behind the maroon curtain, which I had never seen but could imagine: a secondhand crib, a mattress or futon on the floor for the mother, a cheap pine dresser enamelled some hideous girlish color like lilac or salmon, and the sadness of the scuffed walls relieved by rock posters and a few of Verna’s mediocre, painstaking watercolor studies of the corners of her cage.

As I stepped into the misty chill December dusk, the answer came to me: Esther’s day-care center. It existed to generate just such freedoms.

My Audi sat at the curb unharmed, though its little self-appointed guardian was nowhere to be seen. Several black women, wearing the grape-colored quilted long coats that have become a universal winter uniform in the city, sat on benches while their toddlers utilized the minimal amusements of the shatterproof playground, its cement pipes and rubber tires. It was not yet quite the time I usually returned from the Divinity School (if Esther asked why I had taken the car, I would say I had come back to the house for a bite of lunch, her delicious quiche, and to pick up a book I needed, on the Cappadocian Fathers, for a tutorial conference, and then had
driven back to save a minute, and also because I had left my sheepskin coat in my office and discovered the air to be turning colder); so I thought of detouring past Dale’s lumberyard, in order to satisfy my morbid curiosity and to help erase the pulsing mental afterimage of Verna pulling her stretchy white jersey upward and off in an explosion of glossy shoulder skin and heedless, stringy, semi-bleached, shampoo-scented curls.